A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I set off under the flickering poplar-leaves and I hadn’t gone far before three villagers on horseback came trotting towards me upstream, one in loose white clothes and the others in black, with a chestnut foal scampering alongside. When we came level, we exchanged greetings and up went their three hats in a triple flourish. I knew the answer to the ritual question—‘Where do you come from?’—which always came first; it was: ‘Angolországbol!’ (England-from! Magyar is a language of suffixes.) And to the next question—‘Whither?’—the answer came equally pat: ‘Konstantinópolybá!,’ Constantinopleward. They smiled tolerantly. They hadn’t the dimmest notion of the whereabouts of either. In dumb show, and with a questioning twiddle of the wrist, I asked where they were bound for. “Komárombá!” they answered. Then straight as ninepins in their saddles, they put me in God’s care and unlidded in concert once more. Touching their horses they headed Komárom-wards in a slow and stylish canter that lifted a long feather of dust along the towpath. The foal, taken by surprise, galloped anxiously to catch up until all four were out of sight many furlongs upstream. I wished I had had a hat to lift. These Hungarian salutes were magnificently ceremonious and hidalgo-like. (Komárom was an old town a few miles upstream at the mouth of the Váh. It disembogued in the Danube about thirty miles south of the point where Baron Pips and I had watched the rafts floating by. There was a bridge over the river there and some famous fortifications that the Hungarians defended through a long Austrian siege in 1848.)

  The last sign of human habitation was a riverside hamlet called Cvenke,[3] where crowds of rooks were noisily gathering for the night. Thereafter, the feeling of remoteness and solitude grew more pronounced with every step. It was getting darker too, but no colder: although it was the end of March, the air was as warm and as still as an evening in summer. Frog-time had come. Each pace, once more, unloosed a score of ragged parabolas and splashes. Flights of waterfowl detonated like spring-guns loosing off a whirr of missiles across the water. It was a world of scales and webbed feet and feathers and wet whiskers. Hundreds of new nests were joining the old ones in the damp green maze and soon there would be thousands of eggs and then wings beyond counting.

  The meaning of the twin messages of the temperature and the wilderness took a moment or two to impinge. Then I understood, with sudden elation, that my first and longed-for night in the open had arrived. I found a hollow lined with leaves among the willow-trunks about three yards from the water and after a supper of Kövecses-remains and a new loaf from my baker friend and watercress from a stream, I stuck a candle on a stone to fill in my diary. It burned without a tremor. Then I lay, gazing upwards and smoking with my rucksack for a pillow, wrapped in my greatcoat in case of cold later on.

  The sky had changed. Flashing like a lozenge of icicle fragments, Orion had reigned unchallenged all winter. Now it was already far down in the west and leading a retinue of constellations into decline and some of its wintry glitter had gone. The lower tip was growing dim in the vapour and dust that overhang horizons and soon the Pleiades were following the famous stars downhill. All the trees and reeds and flag-leaves and the river and the hills on the other bank glimmered insubstantially in the starlight. The fidgeting of moorhens and coots and of voles and water-rats doing the breast-stroke through the stems grew less frequent and every half-minute or so two bitterns—one quite near, the other perhaps a mile away—sounded across the vague amphibian world: loneliest of muffled cries, plainly to be heard above the shrill rise and fall of millions of frogs. This endless population, stretching upstream and down for leagues, made the night seem restlessly alive and expectant. I lay deep in one of those protracted moments of rapture which scatter this journey like asterisks. A little more, I felt, and I would have gone up like a rocket. The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

  The dimness of those dropping constellations was not all the fault of the vapours that haunt horizons. A rival pallor was spreading at the other end of the sky, and very fast. Behind a flutter of hills a rim of blood-red lunar segment was rising. It expanded to its full diameter and then dwindled; and when the circumference was complete a tremendous crimson moon was casting loose. It changed to orange and then to yellow as it climbed and diminished until all the colour had ebbed away and left it to soar with the aloof and airy effulgence of silver. During the last hour’s walking, twilight and darkness had masked the behaviour of the hills. Now the moon revealed that they had receded once more and left the Danube free to break loose. It was a week after the spring equinox and only a few hours short of the full moon, and as this is one of the few reaches where the river flows due east, the line of the moon’s reflection lay amidstream where the current runs fastest and shivered and flashed there like quicksilver. The reefs and shoals and islands and the unravelling loops of water which had lain hidden till now were all laid bare. Wastes of fen spread from either shore and when the surfaces were broken by undergrowth or sedge or trees, they gleamed like fragments of flawed looking-glass. All was changed. The thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods. This frosty radiance played tricks with levels and distances until I was surrounded by a dimensionless and inconcrete fiction which was growing paler every second. While the light was seeking out more and more liquid surfaces for reflection, the sky, where the moon was now sailing towards its zenith, seemed to have become an expanse of silvery powder too fine for the grain to be descried. Silence transcended the bitterns’ notes and the industry of the frogs. Stillness and infinity were linked in a feeling of tension which, I felt sure, presaged hours of gazing watchfulness. But I was wrong. In a little while my eyes were closing under a shallow tide of sleep.

  * * *

  “Co tady devláte?”—‘I awoke with a start’—my diary says—‘someone was shaking me by the collar and shouting. As soon as I was fully awake, I made out two men in uniform. One of them, with an old-fashioned bull’s-eye lantern on his belt, was keeping me covered with a rifle and his fixed bayonet was nearly touching my chest. Completely at a loss, I asked what was happening; but they spoke no German and only a word or two of Hungarian, so we were stuck. They made me get up and marched me along the path, one of them holding my arm in a ju-jitsu grip while the other, having slung his rifle, now carried an enormous automatic pistol. It was rather a comic scene; some mistake somewhere. Whenever I opened my mouth I was told to shut up, so I did, at least for a bit. After a while our little Svvejk-like procession reached a wooden hut and I was put in a chair, still covered by the huge firearm. The pistol’s owner had a bristling moustache; he fixed me with a bilious and bloodshot eye while the other began to search me from top to toe. He emptied every pocket and made me take my puttees and boots off. It was more and more mysterious. By the lamp in the hut I saw they were wearing the grey uniform of the Frontier Guard, which I had seen just before crossing to Bratislava. When he had finished with me, he untied the cord of my rucksack and turned it upside down so that everything tumbled on the floor in a disorderly heap. Then he began to unfold, or open and examine, every single item, feeling in the pockets of pyjamas and looking down the backs of books, even this wretched journal. This went on for some time until at last, as though realizing there was nothing to interest him, he knelt back in the middle of the floor, which was now littered with my ransacked belongings, and scratched his head in a mystified and baffled manner. The man with the pistol had also become a bit less fierce, and the two talked sadly, casting dubious glances at me from time to time. One of them picked up my passport, the only object that had attracted no notice during the search. When it emerged that I was English, it seemed to make a
great difference. The man with the moustache laid down his automatic and I was offered a cigarette. We had been smoking for a minute or two when a third frontier-watchman turned up, a fat man who spoke German. He asked me what I was up to. I said I was on a walking tour across Europe. He kept looking from the photograph in the passport to me and back again, asked me my age and checked that it was nineteen. Suddenly he came to a decision: he smacked his hand hard on the table and burst out laughing. The others cheered up too. He told me I had been mistaken for a notorious saccharine smuggler called Cverny Josef’—Black Joseph—‘Fekete Jozi,’ on the Magyar shore—who plied his trade from Cvenke across the Danube into Hungary; the taxes on saccharine are so high there that it is an easy way of making a lot of money. I immediately thought of poor Konrad! But he’d promised me he was only going to take part on the business side.[4] Apparently Black Jo hides among the trees and the reeds on this deserted reach of the river until a boat rows across from the other side in the dark to pick him up; so it had been rather a surprise to capture him—or someone like him—on a night with a full moon; the trouble was, Jo was over fifty... We all laughed and the two men apologised for their brusque treatment. In the end, they said they would fix quarters for me. I’d have much rather slept out but didn’t want to hurt their feelings. We walked a mile or two inland across the water-meadows and the moon was beginning to go down when we reached a little farm. I am in the stable now on a soft heap of straw with a hurricane lamp and catching up with the rest of the night’s doings before I forget them.

  ‘Next day. The farm people were from Silesia. He was big and tough and she very handsome, with jet black hair. There was a stuffed otter on the wall—plenty of them lodge in the Danube’s banks. They gave me a lovely breakfast with coffee and black bread and two boiled eggs and some hard white cheese sprinkled with red paprika, and a swig of barack. Also, some things wrapped up to eat on the way. I’m beginning to feel like Elijah, fed by ravens.

  ‘Dew covered the grass and a thin mist veiled the river, but both were soon gone. The path still followed a grassy ridge banked against flooding. I could see for miles, all last night’s scenery: strange and unbelievable then, calm and beautiful now, rather like the woods and the polders seen from a dyke-road in Holland. Poplars, willows and aspens sheltered the path—a blessing, as it’s been the hottest day of the year—and the branches made a criss-cross of shade. I met nobody till I came on some Gypsy boys who spend their time hunting weasels, stoats, rats, field-mice and other humble fauna. The way they go about this is very unsporting. They find their holes in the banks, pour a bucket of water in the highest one and the animals come scuttling half-drowned out of exits lower down and the boys catch them and wring their necks. When I passed them they waved bunches of dismal and draggled little corpses at me, wanting me to buy some, as they eat them and expect you to do the same—they eat anything. Baron Pips told me that when his farm people bury a horse that has died of old age or disease, Gypsies are sure to dig it up and eat it in the middle of the night...’

  * * *

  There was a lull in the air. Holy Saturday, with its lamps out and shrines empty and the distant tolling over the fields, cast a spell of catalepsy and suspense. It was a time of sealed tombs and sleeping sentries with the Protagonist of the week’s drama deep underground harrowing Hell... There was not a fisherman on the river, not a peasant in the fields, nothing but those little vole-catchers and skimming wagtails, the waterbirds and the massed larks and the frogs, whose steady diurnal croak, though universal, seemed milder than the full-moon brekekekexing the night before. A thrown stick could silence an acre for several seconds. The flecks of dust on the current and the spinning fluff suggested midsummer. I ate my bread and cheese on the shady side of a rick and fell asleep. (Hay-ricks are conical hereabouts, cleverly stacked round a centre pole and when most of the hay has been sliced away for fodder, the sun catches the shorn planes as if lopsided obelisks had been erected in the fields.) I awoke later than I had intended. The woods, full of rooks and wood-pigeons, were sending long shadows over the grass. I drank at a brook, sloshed some water on my face and tidied up. Civilization lay ahead.

  Far away on the other bank I could see my destination; it had been growing steadily in size since my first glimpse that morning. A cliff loomed over a long sweep of the river and on this ledge was perched a white fane that resembled St. Peter’s in Rome. A light circle of pillars lifted a gleaming dome into the sky. It was dramatic, mysterious, as improbable as a mirage and unmistakable as a landmark for many miles across the desert of liquid and solid. The Basilica of Esztergom, I knew, was the Metropolitan Cathedral of all Hungary, the largest religious building in the Kingdom and the archiepiscopal See of the Cardinal-Prince-Archbishop: the Hungarian equivalent, that is, of Rheims, Canterbury, Toledo, Armagh and old Cracow. The Basilica, though spectacular and splendid, is not old: little in that part of Hungary was spared the ravages of the Tartars and the Turks; after the Reconquest everything had to begin again. But the town—the Latin Strigonium and the German Gran—is one of the oldest in the country. Ever since the first Apostolic King of Christian Hungary—the conquering Árpáds’ descendant, St. Stephen himself—was born and crowned in Esztergom, history has been accumulating here and entwining itself with myth. From my footpath, the Basilica was the only building in sight. The monasteries, the churches, the palaces and the libraries that encrust the steep little town were all in baulk. The great pile, with its twin cupola-topped belfries, its ring of pillars and its great nacreous dome, hovered above water and timber and fen as though upheld, like a celestial city in a painting, by a flurry of untiring wings.

  * * *

  The air was full of hints and signs. There was a flicker and a swishing along the river like the breezy snip-snap of barbers’ scissors before they swoop and slice. It was the skimming and twirling of newly arrived swifts. A curve in the stream was re-arranging the landscape as I advanced, revealing some of the roofs of Esztergom and turning the Basilica to a new angle as though it were on a pivot. The rolling wooded range of the Bakony Forest had advanced north from the heart of Transdanubia, and the corresponding promontory on the northern shore—the last low foothills of the Matra mountains, whose other extremity subsides in the north eastern tip of Hungary—jutted into the water under the little town of Parkan. Reaching for each other, the two headlands coerced the rambling flood yet once more into a narrower and swifter flow and then spanned the ruffle with an iron bridge. Spidery at first, the structure grew more solid as the distance dwindled. (Twenty miles east of this bridge, the Danube reaches a most important point in its career: wheeling round the ultimate headland of the Bakony Forest and heading due south for the first time on its journey, it strings itself through Budapest like a thread through a bead and drops across the map of Europe plumb for a hundred and eighty miles, cutting Hungary clean in half. Then, reinforced by the Drava, it turns east again, invades Yugoslavia, swallows up the Sava under the battlements of Belgrade, and sweeps on imperturbably to storm the Iron Gates.)

  In an hour, I had climbed the cliff-path into the main street of Parkan. A little later my passport was stamped at the frontier post at the Czechoslovakian end of the bridge. The red, white and green barrier of the frontier post at the far end marked the beginning of Hungary. I lingered in the middle of the bridge, meditatively poised in no man’s air.

  * * *

  The masonry of the piers below sent green Ophelia-like tresses of waterweed swaying down the current. Upstream, the water broke up the reflected turquoise of a sky full of dishevelled cirrus clouds. Pink and crimson threads were dispersed in conflicting drifts and then frozen in motionless turmoil; it was all the stranger as there had not been a breath of wind all day. Swifts were still skimming through the air and a heron flew across the river from wood to wood. A number of large and mysterious birds were floating high overhead and at first I thought they were herons too, but they carried their necks extended instead of coiled between their shoulders
, and they were white. They were larger and more slender and less hurried than swans: the spread of wings scarcely moved as they revolved on the air-currents. There were about a dozen, snow-plumed except for black flight-feathers which ran along the inner edge of their wing like a senatorial stripe of mourning. They were storks! When they circled lower, the long beaks and the legs that trailed in the slipstream showed red as sealing wax. An old shepherd was leaning on the ramp close by and gazing up at them too. When some of the great birds floated lower, the draught of their feathers brushed our upturned faces, and he said something in Magyar—“Nét, góbyuk!” and smiled. He hadn’t a tooth in his head. Two of the birds glided upstream. One dropped on a haystack and fluttered to regain its balance. The second landed underneath in the meadow—becoming, as it folded its wings, a white bobbin with red lacquer stilts and bill—and paced to the water’s edge. The others, meanwhile, were alighting on the tiles of the two little bridgehead towns and advancing with ungainly steps along the roofs to inspect the dishevelled nests that cumbered many of the chimneys. Two of them were even attempting, in defiance of the bells which were tolling there, to land in one of the Cathedral belfries—they remembered the harmless hazard from former incumbency. The bell-hampers were choked with tangles of last year’s twigs.

  Touching my arm, the shepherd pointed downstream at something in the dark-shadowed east high above the river and just discernible across the failing sky. Ragged and flocculent, fading to grey, scattered with specks of pink from the declining sun, varying in width as random fragments were dropping away and re-cohering and agitated with motion as though its whole length were turning on a single thread, a thick white line of crowding storks stretched from one side of the heavens to the other. Mounting Africa along the Nile, they had followed the coasts of Palestine and Asia Minor and entered Europe over the Bosphorus. Then, persevering along the Black Sea shore to the delta of the Danube, they had steered their flight along that shining highway until they had come to the great bend a few miles downstream. Defecting from the river, their journey was now following a westerly as well as a northern bias; they were bound for Poland, perhaps, and shedding contingents as they went at hundreds of remembered haunts. We gazed at them in wonder. It was a long time before the rearguard of that great sky-procession had vanished north. Before nightfall the whole armada would subside in a wood or settle all over some Slovakian hamlet—astonishing the villagers and delighting them, for storks are birds of good omen—like a giant snow storm; taking to the air again at first light. (Six months and hundreds of miles later, I halted on the southern slopes of the Great Balkan Range, and watched the same great migration in reverse. They were making for the Black Sea, retracing their spring journey before wintering beyond the Sahara.)