Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Supper was finished but they ladled me out the last of the lentils while one of the fishermen poured oil in the frying pan, laid a couple of mackerel across it and, in due course, whisked them out sizzling by their tails and put them in the tin plate the lentils had that instant vacated. I must have been coming to; these delicious fish were demolished at speed. What were they called? Skoumbri, one fisherman said; no, no, cried the others: skumria. There was some friendly teasing about this, for the shepherds were Bulgars and the fishermen were Greeks, members of the Greek community scattered all over southern Bulgaria. I was surprised to see these irreconcilables in each other’s company. One of them apologized, saying they had finished the slivo and wine. I dug a contribution out of my rucksack: two bottles of raki from Tirnovo, one safe in a wooden flask, the other mercifully intact. In spite of an occasional shudder and a rattle of teeth, my spirits, as the food and drink piled up, began to rise. The circulating raki ignited a mood of nautico-pastoral wassail and by the time the second bottle was broached the wind-battered and weather-chipped faces were wide-mouthed in song.

  A goatskin, which I had taken to be a vessel for milking the ewes, turned out to be a bagpipe. But when the old man puffed it full, the drone through the horn trumpet died in a wail that called forth an answering howl from the white dog, briskly silenced by a back-handed cuff. A crease in the cracked parchment had split. I patched it up, to everyone’s applause, with a criss-cross of adhesive tape. As the sound swelled again one of the fishermen began a burlesque Turkish belly dance, called the kütchek. He had learned it, he said, in Tzarigrad, the Bulgarian for Constantinople, the town of the Emperors. It was very convincing, even to the loud crack that accompanied each spasmodic wrench of the haunch and the midriff, produced by the abrupt parting of the stiff interlocked forefingers of both hands as they were held, palms joined, above his head.

  The comic effect was enhanced by the fierce and piratical looks of Dimitri the dancer. ‘He needs a charchaff,’ one of the shepherds cried. He wrapped a cheesecloth round the lower part of Dimitri’s face. The rolling of his smoke-reddened eyes above this yashmak turned him into a mixture of houri and virago. Meanwhile Costa, another sailor, advanced into the firelight with the same rotating motion as Dimitri. Uninhibited laughter broke out. A third fisherman tied a two-foot length of rope into a ring, made Costa step into it, then lifted it to the level of his thighs and made him stretch his legs apart. When the rope was taut he inserted a heavy log which he turned over several times, till the log in the twisted rope could be made to lift or drop like the beam of a siege engine. The comic impropriety of this vision brought the house down. (I wonder whether Aristophanes knew of this device? It would have been handy for the Lysistrata . . .) A mock pursuit of the veiled Dimitri began, with Costa moving by leaps: the ithyphallic gait of a pasha-like grasshopper bent on rape. To drive this fierce aspect home, he pulled out one of the shepherds’ knives and held it between his teeth.

  The bagpipe howled with growing stridency and the spectators jovially clapped out the time. Dimitri oscillated with lumbering skittishness; the uncouth chase brought the sweat to Costa’s brow, while monstrously enlarged shadows of their evolutions loomed about the cave. Finally a long scream of the pipe propelled him, with his legs splayed and knees bent, round and round his partner in mock-lecherous leaps. Cheerfully goaded by the onlookers the bagpiper blew faster and faster until the panting pibroch mercifully ended at last with the diminishing wail of an ox under the knife: my running repair had come unstuck. Laughing and out of breath, Costa collapsed with mock melodrama. The raki travelled round the cave in a hubbub of laughter, and the flames threw a beltane chiaroscuro over hilarious masks.

  Another bottle was miraculously discovered. Panayi, the fourth of the fishermen, lifted a long object from the boat. When he rejoined us on the floor, the unwinding of the cloth revealed an instrument halfway between a lute and a mandolin. Ivory and mother-of-pearl inlaid the sounding board, and ivory and ebony ribbed its gleaming bowl; but the great length and slenderness of the neck which slanted from his cross-legged lap, while he screwed the pegs into tune and plucked the eight wires with a hen’s quill, gave it the air of a court minstrel’s instrument from a Persian painting: an incongruously delicate and skilfully wrought thing for this rough den.

  When it was in tune, the player showered an intricate pattern of minims and crotchets into the falling hush of the grotto and then plaited a flowering wreath of chords in different keys which cohered, after a short halt, in a tune whose slow, heavily stressed and almost lurching beat fell between metallic cascades of short notes and defined a rhythm that slid insidiously into the bloodstream until even the musician himself, stooping over the strings or gazing into the flames with large grey eyes, seemed to be mesmerized by his own music.

  Panayi the lutenist was a tall and muscular man and the slender bouzouki looked frail in his great hands. He and the older man began a song that sounded like a lament. It was full of repeated phrases and Oriental modulations, and at moments it was designedly strained and grating. Oddly placed pauses syncopated the run of the words. The older man marked the beat by slapping the side of a gourd with his star-backed hand, steadying it with the stump of the other.

  The night moved into a different gear. Linked at arm’s length by a hand on each other’s shoulder, Costa and Dimitri were standing side by side; their feet were together and each unsmiling face hung, chin on breast, like that of a gallows-bird. This initial immobility thawed into movement as slight as the bending and straightening of the knee; the feet, flat on the ground with heels together, opened at an angle, then closed and opened once more. Both right feet were then lifted and slowly swung backward and forward. A left-foot jump brought their torsos seesawing forward in a right angle to balance a simultaneous kick on the ground behind them with their right. Then the dancers swept forward for an accelerated pace or two, braked and halted with their right bent legs, from the knee down, lifted parallel to the ground and sweeping in slow scything movements and falling again. An unhurried flick sent both right feet soaring, and their hands smote together under their knees in a sudden clap; then they were almost on their knees, hands on each other’s shoulders again, gliding sideways, then rolling forward in a gait resembling a sleepwalking hornpipe.

  Nothing could have been less carefree or orgiastic than the perverse mood of their evolutions: the subtle and complex beauty of this peculiar dancing, coming, as it did, hotfoot on the straightforward bumpkin commotion of the first performance, was as much of a surprise as would be the discovery, in a collection of folk verse, of a contorted metaphysical jungle of conceits, tropes, assonances, internal rhymes, abstruse allusions and concealed acrostics. At the end of the dance, Dimitri joined us by the fire and swelled the accompaniment with his own voice and another gourd. The next dance, on which Costa now embarked solo, was, though akin to its forerunner, odder still. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same hanging head with a cigarette in the centre of his lips as he gazed at the ground with eyes nearly closed and rotated on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back. Soon his arms lifted above his head and slowly soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face, like a vulture rocking on a slow breeze, with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the steps evolved. The downward gaze, the precise placing of the feet, the sudden twirl of the body, the sinking on alternate knees, the sweep of an outstretched leg in three quarters of a circle with the arms outflung in two radii for balance—these steps and passes and, above all, the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the trodden fish scales and the goats’ droppings, a lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracing the conclusions of Pythagoras about the square of the hypotenuse.

  But more striking still was the tragic and doomed aura that invested this dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer. Absorption lifted him so far from the others in the cave that he might have
been alone in a distant room, raptly applying ritual and undeviating devices to abstruse and nearly insoluble conundrums or exorcizing a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The voices and hands had fallen silent, isolating the wiry jangle of the strings.

  On a rock, lifted there to clear the floor, the round, low, heavy table was perched. Revolving past it, Costa leaned forward: suddenly the table levitated itself into the air, sailed past us, and pivoted at right angles to Costa’s head in a series of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held here only by his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a magic carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of smoke and soon travelling so fast that the four glasses on it, the chapfallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and spoons, the earthenware saucepan that had held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerels with their heads and tails hanging over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved, for a few swift revolutions, into a circular blur; then it redefined itself, when the pace dwindled into a slowly revolving still life.

  As the dancer sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table-top; when he soared into the dark, only the underside glowed. He quickened his pace and reduced the circumference of the circles by spinning faster and faster in the same place, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto: cries which rose to an uproar. His head was flung back; muscles and veins corrugated his streaming features and his balancing arms were outflung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself melted into a vast disc twice its own diameter and spinning at such a speed in the cave’s centre that it should by rights have scattered the still life that it bore into the nether shadows.

  Slowly the speed slackened. The table was looping through the smoke five feet from the floor. Soon it was sliding from its orbit and rotating back to its launching rock, unhurriedly alighting there at last with all its impedimenta undisturbed. Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it resettled in its place, he retrieved the cigarette he had left burning on the edge of a plate. Dancing slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, he tapped away the long ash and replaced the cigarette in his mouth. Gyrating, sinking and rising again, he unwound the dance to its sober initial steps; then, straight as a wand and poised on tiptoe at his motionless starting point, he broke off and sauntered with lowered lids to the re-established table. Picking up his raki glass he took a meditative sip and, poker-faced in the clamour, slowly subsided.

  I could catch a loose word here and there in the flow of Romaic as they talked among themselves. How was I to find out, with my clumsy rudiments of Bulgarian, the origin of these dances, the roots of their unique and absolute oddity? Panayi was swaddling his instrument for the night: its incendiary work was done but its message still twanged and hovered in our veins. Dimitri had dropped asleep for a moment, lying with his head on his arm. The one-handed elder clapped the raki bottle to his eye, as an admiral would a spyglass, to see if any was left. Costa the dancer smoked and smiled with the easy air of a geometrician who has proved what had to be proved; Quod erat demonstrandum, the silent smile seemed to say under the peak of the old cap tilted rakishly forward to shield his eyes from the flames.

  The cave dwellers, after a final gulp of raki, began to settle for the night. I was to sleep at the sailors’ end of the cave. Costa and Dimitri hospitably spread new leaves close to the fire, rolled up a coat as a pillow, piled blanket on blanket and laid the old shepherd’s cloak on top of me. ‘Kryo?’ they asked. ‘Studeno?’ ‘Cold?’—they had learned four or five words of English on their travels. Only an occasional tremor at wide intervals reminded me of my earlier mishaps; later impressions had snowed them under. There was nothing guarded or apathetic about these particular Greeks; the trance-like melancholy of their steps had evaporated with the last fumes of the dances and the music; their identical grey eyes were filled with humour, alertness and friendly warmth. I thought I had divined an extra feeling in their welcome and in their horny handshakes earlier on, and I had interpreted it as a late symptom of Greek feelings towards Lord Byron’s countrymen. I was right. Dimitri said as much. Uttering the words ‘Lordos Veeron!’ he raised his bunched fingers in a gesture of approval.

  Sleep was long in coming. There was much to think about, especially Greece and the Greeks, which were drawing nearer every day. An occasional clank from the fifty goats at the farther end broke the deepening silence. A few yards off, beyond the twelve adjacent snores, I could hear the gasp of the Black Sea. The light ebbed from the walls and from the stalactites as the fire shrank to a feathery glow. Through a gap in the wall, three quarters of Orion blazed an icy slanting lozenge.

  A slight clatter roused me as I was on the brink of sleep. It was the spectral, tiptoe figure, confident that everyone was asleep (ah! but they weren’t!), of the dog with the black monocle, tidily licking the last of the lentils and fish gills out of the saucepan.

  Rumania—Travels in a Land before Darkness Fell

  Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 12 May 1990

  The passage is set in Rumania in the mid to late 1930s. It was written after Paddy revisited Rumania in 1990, following the fall of the Ceauşescus. In it he recalls pre-war life at Baleni, the estate in Moldavia belonging to his friend Balasha Cantacuzène, and Helene (‘Pomme’) and Constantin Donici, Balasha’s sister and brother-in-law. This is where Paddy lived during the months leading up to the declaration of war.

  Seen through the windows of the night plane, Bucharest glimmered into being as dimly as a candlelit city under siege. The Revolution which had astonished the world was only a month old, and I wondered, as we landed, how much these amazing events had changed it; and for private reasons, I wondered too how different the whole country would be from the Rumania I had lived in for a couple of years before the war. We must go back a bit. In fact, more than half a century.

  In spring 1934, I was on my way on foot to Constantinople, living on £ I a week and sleeping rough, but soon after my nineteenth birthday a letter of introduction in Hungary changed all this; I was lent a horse to cross the great plain: cowsheds and barns gave way to country houses and castles, and by the time I got to Transylvania—across the Rumanian border, that is, and entering the country, from a Rumanian point of view, through the back door—the Spartan trudge had turned into a stroll from one schloss to another.

  The people I stayed with there were Hungarians still. After the First World War, Transylvania, formerly part of Hungary, had been granted to Rumania; but for Hungarians both sides of the border, the loss seemed mortal. (During these travels, I think I was absorbed in everything but politics. My reason for liking the Hungarians was their welcoming kindness, their dash and their spirit, and similar subjective grounds, later on, inspired an equal fondness for the Rumanians.)

  Most of the Transylvanian Hungarians—two million of them—were concentrated far to the east, whereas my new friends belonged to the scattered Hungarian landowners who had lived for many generations in the western and densely Rumanian parts. But, different in race and religion from the folk who surrounded them, too attached to their old homes or too poor now to uproot and start again in Hungary, they were akin to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and their houses had a touch of their sadness and much of their charm. Blessedly, life was a hundred years behind the times.

  My first stopping place, north of Arad, was the house of Baron Tibor Solymosy, a jolly bachelor and ex-horse-gunner, and it stood pillared and Palladian like the Haymarket Theatre in a sea of vineyards. The stay turned into a sort of initiation and it ended, with gypsy musicians and a party of neighbours, on the crest of a vineclad hill in a party that lasted till dawn. After that, I was passed on from house to house like a bad penny. The next was a sort of hacienda among huge trees, the home of an eccentric Pole and his Hungarian wife, Klara Zay, an unkempt but brilliant horsewoman. (Horses played a great role. The roads destroyed cars, so short journeys were all in b
attered victorias, or on horseback.) Ötvenes, the next, was the scene of woodland paper chases and fireworks after dinner. Lilac was ending, but there were wild hollyhocks and red and white peonies and fledgling storks nesting on many of the chimneys.

  South of the river Mureş, many days sped by at Capalnas, where Count Jenö Teleki lived with his famous collection of oriental moths. The last and longest sojourn was with Elemér v. Klobusicky—‘István’ in earlier writings—an original and high-spirited ex-hussar just old enough to have fought in the war: weeks strewn with strange adventures which ended in a rackety midsummer jaunt with a wild and enterprising girl re-named Angéla, all over Transylvania. In a vast borrowed car, the three of us explored the old cities of Alba Iulia and Cluj and the important Magyar town of Tîrgu Mureş, the centre of the land of the Szeklers, who had settled there in the tenth century. Careering on, we struck south to Sighişoara, the castellated and tapering stronghold of Vlad the Impaler. Next day we all parted, and, very sadly, I was on my own again.

  It was August by now. Slogging south along the flanks of the Retezat mountains, I stayed with some Rumanian shepherds in a high shieling; hardy, self-reliant men who lived in a world of steep woods, vast flocks and wolves and bears. After a halt with some learned Hasidic Jews who were running a logging business on the lower slopes, I crossed the Danube into Bulgaria, sleeping in barns and ditches once again; and I got to Constantinople on New Year’s Day, 1935.

  But before that year was out, I was back in Rumania at a place called Baleni, and for a long time. It belonged to two Rumanian sisters a few years older than I; we had met in Athens where one of them was a painter, and a light-hearted affinity sprang up. I wanted to start writing, we pooled forces, and after a summer and autumn painting and writing in a Peloponnesian watermill, the question arose: where now? An answer soon surfaced: ‘We’ve got this tumble-down house in Moldavia. Why not there?’ After a journey by sea to Constantza and north from Galatz by train, we got out at a small station where a carriage with an old Polish coachman was waiting: an hour’s drive brought us to Baleni. It was a large, rambling, one-storeyed white house with a village and trees and a courtyard full of friendly dogs, with the wintry dales of Moldavia rolling away all round. To the east, beyond the Prut and the Dniestr, Russia began.