Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I felt terrible. I had often been drunk, and high spirits had led to rash doings; but never to this hoggish catalepsy.

  Bicycle Polo

  from Between the Woods and the Water

  When in Budapest in the spring of 1934, Paddy had been invited to stay with Count and Countess Józsi Wenckheim at their house, O’Kygos, near the city of Békéscsaba on the Great Hungarian Plain.

  I was halted next day by the Körös. There was no bridge in sight, so I followed a bank teeming with rabbits until an old fisherman, pale as a ghost and dressed all in white, sculled me to the other side. The people in the inn looked different and I pricked my ears at the sound of a Slav language. They were Slovaks who had come here centuries ago, hundreds of miles from their old abode, to settle in the empty region when the Turks were driven out, devout Lutherans of the Augsburg Confession, unlike the Protestants of Debrecen who were Calvinists to a man.

  The distance was getting longer than I had reckoned. For once, I sighed for a lift; I didn’t want to be late, and just as the wish took shape, a cloud of dust appeared on the path and then a governess-cart with a fleece-capped driver and two nuns. One of the sisters made room with a smile and a clatter of beads. We drove several miles and the town of Békéscsaba hovered far away to the right, with the twin steeples of the Catholic cathedral and the great tea-cosy of the Protestants’ green copper dome glimmering beyond the tall maize-stalks. Both had vanished again when they put me down at my turning. The nuns were rather impressed when I told them my destination, and so was I.

  Lászlo’s elder brother Józsi (Joseph), head of that numerous family, and his wife Denise were the only two of all my benefactors on the Great Plain I had met before. It had been at a large, rather grand luncheon at their house on the slopes of Buda and when they had heard I was heading for the south-east, they had asked me to stay. Another brother, Pal, a diplomatist with the urbane and polished air of a Hungarian Norpois, said, ‘Do go! Józsi’s a great swell in those parts. It’s a strange house, but we’re very fond of it.’

  Once through the great gates, I was lost for a moment. A forest of huge exotic trees mingled with the oaks and the limes and the chestnuts. Magnolias and tulip trees were on the point of breaking open, the branches of biblical cedars swept in low fans, all of them ringing with the songs of thrushes and blackbirds and positively slumbrous with the cooing of a thousand doves, and the house in the middle, when the trees fell back, looked more extraordinary with every step. It was a vast ochre-coloured pile, built, on the site of an older building perhaps, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Blois, Amboise and Azay-le-Rideau (which I only knew from photographs) immediately floated into mind. There were pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flags flying and flights of covered stairs ending in colonnades of flattened arches.

  Great wings formed a courtyard and, from a terrace leading to a ceremonial door, branching and balustraded steps descended in a sweep. As I was crossing this place d’armes, several people were coming down the steps, and one of them was Count Józsi, Forewarned by Lászlo, he spotted me at once. He waved a greeting and cried, ‘You are just what we need! Come along!’ I followed him and the others across the yard to a shed. ‘Have you ever played bike-polo?’ he asked, catching me by the elbow. I had played a version of it at school with walking sticks and a tennis-ball on the hard tennis-courts; it was thought rather disreputable. But here they had real polo-sticks cut down to the right size and a proper polo ball and the shed was full of battered but sturdy machines. Józsi was my captain, and a famous player of the real game called Bethlen had the rival team; two other guests and two footmen and a groom were the rest of the players. The game was quick, reckless and full of collisions, but there was nothing to match the joy of hitting the ball properly: it made a loud smack and gave one a tempting glimmer of what the real thing might be like. I couldn’t make out why all shins weren’t barked to the bone; nor why, as one of the goals backed on the house, none of the windows were broken. The other side won but we scored four goals, and when the iron Maltese Cats were back in their stands, we limped back to the steps, where Countess Denise and her sister Cecile and some others had been leaning on the balustrade like ladies gazing down into the lists.

  What luck those nuns turning up, I thought a bit later, lapping down whisky and soda out of a heavy glass! Someone took me along a tall passage to my room and I found one of the young polo-playing footmen there, spick and span once more, but looking puzzled as he tried in vain to lay out the stuff from my rucksack in a convincing array. We were reciprocally tongue-tied, but I laughed and so did he: knocking one another off bicycles breaks down barriers. I got into a huge bath.

  Countess Denise and Count Józsi were first cousins and earlier generations had been similarly related. ‘We are more intermarried than the Ptolemies,’ she told me at dinner. ‘We all ought to be insane.’ She and Cecile had dark hair and beautiful features and shared the rather sad expression of the rest of the family; but it likewise dissolved in friendly warmth when they smiled. Her husband’s distinguished face, under brushed-back greying hair, had the same characteristic. (In a fit of melancholy when he was very young he had fired a bullet through his breast, just missing his heart.) He looked very handsome in an old claret-coloured smoking jacket. Diirer’s family came from the neighbouring town of Gyula, the Countess said; the Hungarian Ajtós—‘doorkeeper’—was translated into the old German Thürer—then into Dürer when the family migrated and set up as gold- and silversmiths in Nuremberg. Afterwards in the drawing room, my footman friend approached Count Józsi carrying an amazing pipe with a cherry-wood stem over a yard long and an amber mouthpiece. The meerschaum bowl at the end was already alight, and, resting this comfortably on the crook of his ankle, the Count was soon embowered in smoke. Seeing that another guest and I were fascinated by it, he called for two more of these calumets and a few minutes later in they came, already glowing; before they were offered, the mouthpieces were dipped in water. The delicious smoke seemed the acme of oriental luxury, for these pipes were the direct and unique descendants of those long chibooks that all Levant travellers describe and all the old prints depict; the Turks of the Ottoman Empire used them as an alternative to the narghileh. (That sinuous affair, the Turkish hookah, still survived all over the Balkans and before summer was out I was puffing away at them, half-pasha and half-caterpillar, in many a Bulgarian khan. But Hungary was the only country in the world where the chibook still lingered. In Turkey itself, as I discovered that winter, it had vanished completely, like the khanjar and the yataghan.)

  Ybl, the architect of the castle, had given himself free rein with armorial detail. Heraldic beasts abounded, casques, crowns and mantelling ran riot and the family’s emblazoned swords and eagles’ wings were echoed on flags and bed-curtains and counterpanes. The spirits of Sir Walter Scott and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to preside over the place and as I had been steeped in both of them from my earliest years, anything to do with castles, sieges, scutcheons, tournaments and crusades still quickened the pulse, so the corroborative detail of the castle was close to heart’s desire.

  Wheatfields scattered with poppies enclosed the wooded gardens and the castle, and when we got back from a ride through them next morning, my hostess’s sister Cecile looked at her watch and cried out, ‘I’ll be late for Budapest!’ We accompanied her to a field where a small aeroplane was waiting; she climbed in and waved, the pilot swung the propeller, the grass flattened like hair under a drier and they were gone. Then Szigi, the son of the house, took me up the tower and we looked out over an infinity of crops with shadows of clouds floating serenely across them. He was going to Ampleforth in a few terms, he said: what was it like? I told him I thought it was a very good school and that the monks umpired matches with white coats over their habits, and he seemed satisfied with these scant items. Exploring the library, I was fascinated by a remote shelf full of volumes of early nineteenth-ce
ntury debates in the Hungarian Diet; not by the contents—humdrum stuff about land-tenure, irrigation, the extension or limitation of the franchise and so on—but because they were all in Latin, and I was amazed to learn that in Parliament until 1839, and even in the county courts, no other language was either spoken or written.

  The bicycle polo after tea was even rougher than the day before. One chukka ended in a complete pile-up and as we were extricating ourselves, our hostess called from the balustrade.

  A carriage with two horses and a coachman in a feathered and ribboned hat was drawing up at the foot of the steps. Dropping his stick, our host went over to help the single passenger out, and when he had alighted, bowed. This tall, slightly stooping newcomer, with white hair and beard of an Elizabethan or Edwardian cut, a green Alpine hat and a loden cape, was Archduke Joseph. Living on a nearby estate, he belonged to a branch of the Habsburgs which had become Hungarian and during the troubled period after Hungary’s defeat and revolution, he had briefly been Palatine of the kingdom—a sort of regent, that is—until the victorious Allies dislodged him. Our hostess had been coming down the stairs as the Archduke was slowly climbing them, calling in a quavering voice, ‘Kezeit csókólóm kedves Denise grófnö!’—‘I kiss your hand, dear Countess Denise’;—and when he stooped to do so, she curtseyed, and, diagonally and simultaneously, they both sank about nine inches on the wide steps and recovered again as though in slow motion. When we had been led up steaming and dishevelled and presented, we leaped back into the saddle and pedalled and slashed away till it was too dark to see.

  I was lent something more presentable than my canvas trousers and gym shoes for dinner. The Archduke joined in the chibook smoking afterwards and the memory of those aromatic fumes still enclouds the last night and the last house on the Great Plain.

  Carpathian Uplands

  from Between the Woods and the Water

  I got to Tomeşti at nightfall, where I found another pre-arranged haven under the roof of Herr Robert v. Winckler; he was a tall, thin, scholarly man, living alone with his books and his guns on the steep edge of the forest. He and his library were a treasure-house of relevant knowledge, and the stairs, on the way to bed, were forested with horns, anders, fowling-pieces and wolf-traps. There were the skins of two enormous wolves on the landing, a stuffed lynx on the wall, a row of boars’ tushes and a bear’s skin on my bedroom floor; and the last thing I remember before blowing out the candle is the double reflection of the wick in its glass eyes. The depth of the flared embrasures showed the thickness of the walls, and the logs stacked to the ceiling beside the massive tiled stove told how cold it must have been in winter. It was hard, in the summer moonlight, to imagine the onslaught of the wind along the canyons, the icicleportcullises and the silent obliterating flakes that would place all these buildings under siege.

  Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvár, the Great Plain, the Tatra mountains, Bukovina, Galicia, Podolia, Lodomeria, Moravia, Bohemia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia and, above all, the Carpathians themselves—how closely the geography of Austria-Hungary and its neighbours approximated to the fictional world of earlier generations! Graustark, Ruritania, Borduria, Syldavia and a score of imaginary kingdoms, usurped by tyrants and sundered by fights for the throne, leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them with walnut-juice or lurk under the battlements and melt the chatelaines’ hearts with their strings. There are mad noblemen and rioting jacqueries; robbers too, half-marauder and half-Robin Hood, straddling quite across the way with their grievous crab-tree cudgels. I had read about betyárs on the Alföld; now haidouks and pandours had begun to impinge. Fur-hatted and looped with pearls, the great boyars of the Rumanian principalities surged up the other side of the watershed, ghostly hospodars with their nearly mythical princesses trooped in tall branched crowns round the walls of fortress-monasteries in frescoed processions; and beyond them to the north stretched icebound rivers and steppes and bogs where herds of elk moved at a shambling trot, and, once upon a time, the great aurochs, extinct now except on heraldic shields; wastes unfolded north-east to which unstable troops of Cossacks laid claim, or destructive settlements of Tatars; further still, a kingdom of sledded Polacks retreated into the shadows, and then a region of snowfalls where the Teutonic Knights cut the pagans of Lithuania to bits on the frozen Baltic, surviving still in the East Prussian world of scars and spikes; and beyond them, all the Russias . . . But to the south, closer than these and getting closer with every step, the valleys and woods of the Danube had been the theatre for momentous battles between Christendom and Islam: the armies of the Sultan moving upstream under green banners and preposterous turbans, while kings, voivodes and cardinals (the contusion of whose maces absolved them from bloodshed) and all the paladins of the West—their greyhounds curvetting beside them, sunbeams catching gold-inlay under their ostrich-plumes and spirals and stripes on their lances like Uccello’s in the Battle of San Romano—cantered light-heartedly downstream to their doom.

  An old addict, I had been re-reading Saki just before setting out. Many pages are haunted by ‘those mysterious regions between Vienna Woods and the Black Sea,’ and here I was, as deep in that maze of forests and canyons as it was possible to get. The timbered slopes outside the windows, and thoughts of the snow and the winter solstice, brought these stories to mind, especially the ones about wolves, the villains and the presiding daemons of East European winter. The terrible arrival of The Interlopers, in the last monosyllabic paragraph of the story, might have taken place a few miles away; and another, The Wolves of Czernogratz, with the howling crescendo of the same dread monsters, conjured up a thousand castles to the north and the west; and I had always been struck by the broken traveller in The Unbearable Bassington, ‘a man whom wolves had sniffed at.’ István was one, my host another, Gróf K a third; Transylvania was full of them. All the castles were haunted, and earthly packs of wolves were reinforced after dark by solitary werewolves; vampires were on the move; witches stirred and soared; the legends and fairy stories of a dozen nations piled up and the region teemed with everything that Goethe told the New World it was better without: ‘Useless memories and vain strifes . . . knights, robbers and ghost stories . . . Ritter und Räuber und Gespenstergeschichten . . .’ In the end, I stayed three nights, listening to stories of wolves and forests and reading in the library, and some of it must have found its way into the bloodstream. M. Herriot has left a consoling message for cases like this: ‘La culture, c’est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié.’

  A scramble through valleys and foothills, bearing south-west to avoid the Lugoj road, and a night’s sleep under an oak tree, brought me dog-tired and long after dark on the second day to a brick-kiln on the Caransebeş road, where I curled up and fell asleep just as the moon was coming up.

  Ada Kaleh

  from Between the Woods and the Water

  Paddy reached the island of Ada Kaleh, which lay in a bend in the Danube near the Hungarian, Rumanian and Yugoslav borders a few miles downstream from Orşova, in August 1934. The island no longer exists. It was flooded by the building of the Iron Gates dam in 1971, and now lies fathoms deep below the waters of an artificial lake.

  After the bridge at Turnu-Severin, the doctor travelled on to Craiova and I caught a bus back to Orşova, picked up my stuff, bought a ticket for the next day’s boat, then walked a couple of miles downstream again and found a fisherman to scull me out to the little wooded island I had had my eye on ever since rejoining the Danube.

  I had heard much talk of Ada Kaleh in recent weeks, and read all I could find. The name means ‘island fortress’ in Turkish. It was about a mile long, shaped like a shuttle, bending slightly with the curve of the current and lying a little closer to the Carpathian than the Balkan shore. It has been ca
lled Erythia, Rushafa and then Continusa, and, according to Apollonius Rhodius, the Argonauts dropped anchor here on their way back from Colchis. How did Jason steer the Argo through the Iron Gates? And then the Kazan? Medea probably lifted the vessel clear of the spikes by magic. Some say the Argo reached the Adriatic by overland portage, others that she crossed it and continued up the Po, mysteriously ending in North Africa. Writers have tentatively suggested that the first wild olive to be planted in Attica might have come from here. But it was later history that had invested the little island with fame.

  The inhabitants were Turkish, probably descendants of the soldiers of one of the earlier Sultans who invaded the Balkans, Murad I, or Bayazid I, perhaps. Left behind by the retreating Turks, the island lingered on as an outlying fragment of the Ottoman Empire until the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The Austrians held some vague suzerainty over it, but the island seems to have been forgotten until it was granted to Rumania at the Treaty of Versailles; and the Rumanians had left the inhabitants undisturbed. The first thing I saw after landing was a rustic coffee-shop under a vine-trellis where old men sat cross-legged in a circle with sickles and adzes and pruning hooks scattered about them. I was as elated when bidden to join them as if I had suddenly been seated on a magic carpet. Bulky scarlet sashes a foot wide gathered in the many pleats of their black and dark blue baggy trousers. Some wore ordinary jackets, others navy blue boleros with convoluted black embroidery and faded plum-coloured fezzes with ragged turbans loosely knotted about them; all except the hodja’s. Here, snow-white folds were neatly arranged round a lower and less tapering fez with a short stalk in the middle. Something about the line of brow, the swoop of nose and the jut of the ears made them indefinably different from any of the people I had seen on my journey so far. The four or five hundred islanders belonged to a few families which had intermarried for centuries, and one or two had the vague and absent look, the wandering glance and the erratic levity that sometimes come with ancient and inbred stock. In spite of their patched and threadbare clothes, their style and their manners were full of dignity. On encountering a stranger, they touched heart, lips and brow with the right hand, then laid it on their breast with an inclination of the head and a murmured formula of welcome. It was a gesture of extreme grace, like the punctilio of broken-down grandees. An atmosphere of prehistoric survival hung in the air as though the island were the refuge of an otherwise extinct species long ago swept away.