Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  In those days Rumania sounded remote, and Moldavia, the northern of the two old principalities which in the nineteenth century were united in the eventual kingdom of Rumania, remoter still. Bucharest, in Wallachia, had become the booming centre of the young kingdom, and the charming Moldavian capital of Jassy, the town dwelling-place of the great boyars of the north, lapsed into elegant decay.

  Deep in history, Moldavia was by far the stranger. Wooded and undulating, it steepened to the pine-clad Carpathians in the west and north—towards Hungary, Transylvania, Slovakia, Poland and the Bukovina—with the Wallachian plains to the south, and, south-east, the thousand bird-haunted square miles of the Danube delta. Then came the Black Sea; and in the east, the steppe flowed away towards Bessarabia and the Ukraine. The low regions were hot and dusty in summer, and dotted with flocks, rustling with wheat and maize and flickering with mirages; it was deep in snow in winter, and filled with the rumour of wolves. Here and there, at long carriage- and sleigh-drives from each other, shaded by tall trees and rookeries and backed by coach houses, stables, smithies and barns and cottages, the long Moldavian manor houses, close to their counterparts in the novels of Turgenev, were scattered like a dispersed fleet of white ships.

  Plaster flaked from the columns and pediments, and indoors, room opened into room in vistas of Louis Philippe and Second Empire furniture. Benevolent or wicked voivodes gazed from the walls in half-Byzantine, half-Slavonic panoplies of fur hats, aigrettes, furred robes and pearls. There would be a western relation or two with powdered hair, boyar descendants with epaulettes and sabres, some touching girls in crinolines holding flowers and pigeons and, in this particular house, a handsome great-grandfather called Prince George Cantacuzène, in a Byronic Greek general’s costume and scimitar, taking the surrender of the Pasha of Monemvasia.

  At nightfall, as Niculina, spill in hand, lit the wicks of a succession of shaded kerosene lamps, the light caught the chipped gold of an ikon’s halo, a samovar and cups and tea-time raisin-bread called cozonac, glass cases with the lumpy seals of parchments, the family’s two-headed eagle, tall china stoves, the prisms of chandeliers, stags’ antlers, the glass eye of a huge bear’s pelt from the Carpathians, and thousands of books in several languages. The voices would be talking French rather than Rumanian. The results of this foible (the legacy, as in Russia and Poland, of several generations) were like the conversations on the first page of War and Peace, but less silly. Their themes were country ones, crops, timber to be felled, horses to be bought, sold or shod, and impending shoots: pheasant, waterfowl, bustard, deer, wolves, wild boar and bears. Although most of these country-dwellers were half-ruined, life was rich in tales of past extravagance, eccentricity, comedy and intrigue, with a duel here and there; but literature was the presiding theme; in spite of hard times, books still arrived from Paris and London.

  It would be impossible to fit these two sisters into any category. Sent to school in France and England and finished and brought out all over the place, they were good, beautiful, courageous, gifted, imaginative, immersed in literature and the arts, kind, funny and unconventional; everybody loved them, and so did I. The husband of one ran the estate and their daughter looked like Millais’ Ophelia. An indefinable charm pervaded the house, its inhabitants and all connected with it.

  Most of a large estate had been lopped away in the agrarian reform. There was little cash about, people were paid in kind by a sort of sharing system; so, in a way, were the owners; and, on the spot, there was enough to go round. Elderly pensioners hovered in the middle distance and an ancient staff would come into being at moments of need.

  I can see them all: Ionitza, the lantern-jawed cook; Ifrim Podubniak, the rather threadbare butler, never quite sober; white-coiffed Niculina, called la femme électrique, whose speed and alacrity made up for the non-existent current; she was in love with Mihai Pintili; he and Mihai Caval chopped logs and did odd jobs; and ‘Saxon’ Fifi, who was bedridden, slowly dwindled in a distant wing; there was Mustafa from the Dobrudja; Ivan, the Russian plumber who had taken part in the Potemkin mutiny, and Pan Stanislas the coachman, once a groom on a Tarnowski estate near Crakow, who had done his military service in the 2nd Schwarzenberg Dragoons, when Galicia was still Austrian. A shepherd called Petre played a long wooden flute, Ifrim’s father carved me a three-stringed rebeck out of a walnut tree blown down in a storm; Anton, an accomplished violinist with a kicked-in face, played and sang when called upon, backed by half a dozen fellow gypsies settled in the village. There was one crone there who knew how to cast spells and break them by incantations; another, by magic, could deliver whole villages from rats. After sheep-shearing a claca, fifty girls and crones, bristling with distaffs would gather in a barn to spin; hilarious days with a lot of food, drink, singing and story-telling.

  Snow reached the windowsills and lasted till spring. There were cloudy rides under a sky full of rooks; otherwise, it was an indoor life of painting, writing, reading, talk, and lamp-lit evenings with Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Proust and Gide handy; there was Les Enfants terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and L’Aiglon read aloud; all these were early debarbarizing steps in beguiling and unknown territory.

  Melting snows were the signal for wider explorations, while hay was reaped and ricks went up; the wheat harvest followed, and threshing and winnowing, then the vintage. The country people were tough, hardy and very likeable men in sheepskin jerkins and conical fleece hats, the women in coifs. I got to know everyone for miles. I felt half-Moldavian by adoption and tried to pick up their dialect and turns of phrase and their songs.

  During the next year or two, this was my sheet anchor. There were journeys all over Rumania: a leisurely expedition with horses across north Bessarabia was particularly romantic (now it is entirely annexed by Russia and confusingly renamed ‘Republic of Moldavia’)—and I can still see the long trestle-tables spread under the oak branches, all set about with jugs of wine and kvass; and there were journeys by canoe in the vast whispering labyrinth where the Danube falls to pieces.

  The summer days of 1939, while the peace of Europe disintegrated, were without a flaw. Two of the English guests staying there—Henry Nevile, who had just left school, and I—tore ourselves away in early September to join the army. As we all waved goodbye in the Gara de Nord in Bucharest (‘Back in a few months!’) we none of us realized how great and how lasting the break would be.

  Back in England—at the Guards Depot and Aldershot and Matlock—reading between the lines of letters, I got an idea of the anguish they must have been feeling, especially when Paris fell and England was under siege. My friends were deeply averse to many recent trends in Rumania and all their sympathy was with the Western Allies.

  After half a millennium of disasters, most of them due to the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, Rumania for the last half-century had seemed to be on a hopeful path. Hard lessons had been learnt and, with constitutional progress, many of the blemishes, which the Rumanians themselves were always pointing out, would have dropped away. Seen from today, the life I have touched on, especially in Moldavia, sounds like a golden age. Wrongly, of course: graft throve in the capital, King Carol’s opportunist rule and the threats and violence of the Iron Guard were clouding the scene: and, before the year 1941 was out, the country, unbelievably, was allied to Germany. Soon her armies were advancing into Russia (which had just annexed Bessarabia and half of the Bukovina), and Hitler had handed the north of Transylvania over to Hungary. Letters had stopped; silence and darkness followed.

  After a final retreat, with appalling losses, Rumania switched to the advancing Russians and soon, at the end of the war, like the rest of Eastern Europe—with fewer than 1,000 Communists out of a population of 18,000,000—a mixture of coercion and fraud turned her into a Communist state. Meanwhile, the pre-war company I had kept had put me on a blacklist; for good, it seemed. But, with the coming of peace, letters crept guardedly to and fro and the blanks were gradually filled in.

  The sisters had
been nurses during the war; the land was confiscated; and on a grim morning in the late 1940s, a truck drove up with police and a commissar. They were allowed a suitcase each, and a quarter of an hour to pack. (The Cantacuzènes had been there for many generations.) Villagers in tears filled their arms with loaves, cheeses, eggs and poultry; then the truck drove them away for ever. The painter-sister and a male cousin tried to escape down to the Black Sea to Constantinople in a rowing boat, but they were betrayed and imprisoned. (Her cousin was lucky not to have been sent, like several of their relations, to die in the Danube-Black Sea canal. Never completed, this horrible trench was a dustbin for ‘elements of putrid background’—this was the official term; it is said to have killed off 100,000 undesirables.) After their eviction, their family were taken 200 kilometres from where they belonged and put in a garret in a Carpathian foothilltown.

  The moment the veto was lifted I went back to Rumania in 1965, with a short-term visa. Mixing with foreigners incurred severe punishment, but harbouring them indoors was much worse; so the visit had to be made by stealth, at night, and on the back of a motorbike borrowed by the Ophelia niece, who was working as a draughtswoman in Bucharest. We found them in their attic. In spite of the interval, the fine looks of my friends, the thoughtful clear glance and the humour were all intact; it was as though we had parted a few months ago, instead of twenty-six years. Their horrible vicissitudes were narrated with detachment and speed: time was short and there were only brief pauses for sleep on a couple of chairs. The rest of our forty-eight hours—we dared risk no more—were filled with pre-war memories, the lives of all our friends, and a great deal of laughter. It was a miraculous reunion. The sisters now eked out their state pittance by teaching French, English and painting.

  Other Rumanian meetings came later, when they were eventually allowed abroad for two or three weeks now and then. There were joyful visits to friends in England and France and Greece. Early thoughts of leaving Rumania lapsed in the end, they resisted the idea partly from feeling it was too late in the day; also, they said that Rumania, after all, was where they belonged; secretly, perhaps, they shrank from being a burden to anyone. One by one the same dread illness carried them away. Nobility of character marked them all. They wrote many and brilliant letters and contact was unbroken. For some people under alien regimes, life is lived vicariously, pen in hand.

  It took until the 1960s to find out what happened to my old Hungarian friends in Transylvania. They had all been evicted with special ruthlessness, ‘István’-Elemér told me by letter: they had left for Hungary. (I found him at last in a workman’s flat in Budapest, grinding away at the translation of engineering manuals from English to Magyar.)

  A few years ago, I retraced my 1934 Transylvanian route, and the first halt was Ineu, where Tibor, my old horse-gunner friend, had lived. A new road had sliced off half of the park, there was a cheerless office and a noticeboard at the gate, so I left the car out of sight, and with some misgiving, shinned over the wall and dropped in. The place had a forlorn and unkempt look, and after all these years the house with its Palladian pillars seemed much smaller. But who were the figures drifting to and fro? People were wandering aimlessly about, standing inactive or sitting on the grass, all of them alone.

  I spoke to one and I saw by the blank response that he was a lunatic; indeed, they all were. So with no one among these poor souls to stop me, I went indoors. The rooms had all been divided up; it was impossible to get one’s bearings. Upstairs, things were clearer, and I found my old room. Eight beds filled it now, three of them occupied by vaguely smiling patients, so I sat down on an empty one for a think. A rosy-cheeked woman with a broom came in and asked who I was looking for. She brightened at Tibor’s name: her people had all been in service with the family since her great-grandfather’s time and she had stayed on as a cleaning woman. ‘Yes, they all left—Tibor, Gabor, Iris, all of them, but they are all dead now. They were good people.’ We talked about them for about an hour, and I stole away.

  When I got to my old Teleki haven the other side of the river, it too seemed to have shrunk; an exactly similar, mad scarecrow population was adrift there too. I longed to know what had happened to Count Teleki’s study and his books and his huge collection of moths. I drove on, feeling intensely depressed.

  Further up the Mureş I went to see what had happened at ‘István’- Elemer’s. The house, Gurasada, was inhabited by an engaging Rumanian married couple running an experimental bamboo plantation. Their eyes lit up when they heard Elemér’s name. They had never met him, but his fame lingered in the valley like a myth. ‘We never asked to live in his house,’ they observed sadly. Everyone else in the area had vanished. They gave me a bottle of tzvica for him, distilled from his own plums.

  I had only driven a few miles in my hired Dacia car when a harvester asked for a lift. My slipshod vestiges of Rumanian at once gave me away as a foreigner and he looked bewildered and alarmed. He was about sixty, with hazel eyes in a bony face. Eventually I said, ‘How are things here now?’ He looked at me searchingly once or twice and then, after a long pause, said, ‘You don’t know who I am and I don’t know who you are. Well, they are very bad! Foarte rău! We haven’t got enough to eat, it’s getting worse, we’re worked to death, we live like slaves and it’s all for nothing. We’re done for.’ When I said it might get better, he answered: ‘It gets worse every year, every day, and it will never end! What do they care? We don’t own anything, nothing’s ours, no land, nothing, not even the ploughs or the tools we work with.’ He lifted the sickle in his lap. ‘Do you think this belongs to me? Nothing does.’

  A fierce diatribe of resentment and hatred came pouring out. ‘And nobody dares to say a word! If we do —’ He left the phrase unfinished but lifted his arms and smacked his wrists together, indicating handcuffs. ‘Inside! There are thousands locked up! Thousands and thousands!’ We said goodbye outside his village. The next passengers were two workmen. When I asked the same question, automatically by now, there was a long and embarrassed pause. One of them said hesitantly: ‘Things are very good.’ The other agreed on similar note. ‘Da! da!Foarte bine!,’ and that was that. . . I gave about fifteen lifts a day and when solitary passengers knew it was safe, they couldn’t wait to blow off steam; if there were two or more, they were correspondingly evasive.

  All that is, except for two well-fed young men with trilbies and briefcases who waved me down rather masterfully and, without a word, settled in the back and started talking to each other. I addressed them and when nationalities were cleared up, they answered my questions with fulsome praise of the country’s prosperity. We were driving through a village where two queues stretched half-way down the street. ‘What about all that?’ I asked, ‘I never saw them before the war.’ One of them answered: ‘Rumania’s a poor country.’ I said that it used to be very rich and they fell silent for the rest of the trip. Later, in my hotel in Deva, a plain-clothes policeman asked me long and maladroitly what my business was and when had I last been in Rumania? Where had I picked up the language? Then he riffled through my passport for half an hour and went away.

  ‘It will never end . . .’ The harvester’s words kept coming to mind during the next few years. Everything confirmed them and they never sounded truer than this winter for, excepting Rumania, the whole of Eastern Europe, from the Berlin Wall to the first tremors in inert Bulgaria, was casting loose. There were isolated symptoms—the suppressed but unprecedented demonstrations in Braşov and the solitary voice of Doina Cornea—then suddenly came the stiffening protest and the outbreak in Timişoara, the gunfire, the tanks and the punitive slaughter; the flare-up of the revolution in Bucharest, followed by the end of the Ceauşescus with the whole world looking on, and the Securitate still firing from the roofs and regrouping in newly engineered catacombs.

  It came clean out of the blue, and it was a fiercer and longer struggle than the revolts in all the rest of Europe put together and nothing more astonishing had happened there for forty y
ears. Rumania’s slowness to revolt had recently been attributed, by one or two writers, to lack of courage, which I knew to be wrong.

  Everything, from the deeds of the late and post-medieval princes to the subsequent peasant revolts and the stubborn opposition, at Mărăşeşti, to Mackensen’s advance in the First World War, pointed the other way; and during 1944 it was confirmed from an odd source. I was part of an Anglo-Cretan commando hiding in the mountains with a captive German general who had commanded a division on the Kuban front; we were talking of Germany’s allies, and he said the Italians weren’t such poor soldiers as we and the Greeks seemed to think. We listed Germany’s other European allies, and he dismissed them one after the other as useless. ‘Which ones then, General?’ ‘Why, the Rumanians, of course! They were totally fearless in attack, and if they had to hold a point in defence, they were like gun-dogs! Sometimes till they were all killed.’

  I remembered this, too, on the flight to Rumania.

  Rumania—The Last Day of Peace

  from Introduction to Matila Ghyka, The World Mine Oyster (Heinemann, 1961)