Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  As time went on and Paddy made more and more Rumanian friends, he began to hear about the handover of Transylvania from the other side. Ever since the boundaries of the modern nation-state had come into existence, Rumanians had always made up the majority of the population. As far as they were concerned, justice had finally been done. Paddy’s position was based on his feelings of loyalty and friendship – and he hated to betray anyone’s feelings – so when he came to write about it, having friends on both sides, he was diplomatic. ‘I am the only person I know’, he wrote, ‘who has feelings of equal warmth for both these embattled claimants.’23 These tensions had little impact on him at the time, and did not seem to affect what he saw as the easy relations his Hungarian hosts had with the Rumanian peasants who still worked for them.

  It was also this summer, in the hours spent in country-house libraries, that Paddy began his first explorations into what would be a lifetime’s passion: the early history of languages and peoples as they drifted across a frontierless, uncharted Europe, and but for the Romans, unchronicled. He inquired into the Cumans and the Petchenegs, the Magyars and Vlachs, and began to tease out the claims and counterclaims of their descendants, the modern-day Hungarians and Rumanians. He brooded on the thousand-year gap between the withdrawal of the Romans from Transylvania in 271 AD, and the next recorded mention of the Vlach people in Transylvania in the eleventh century: that there was no trace of them for a millennium was probably the result of the Mongol invasions, which destroyed everything in their path. Words too were nomads, migrating from one language and grafting themselves on to another. Strings of words moved down rivers or valleys, while different dialects grew up on opposite banks or adjacent hillsides. Invaders came burning and plundering, tribes crossed and criss-crossed the land with their flocks, bringing more verbal cross-fertilization; and everything he read was used to build up the three-dimensional panorama of Europe he was acquiring, both in memory and imagination.

  He was beginning to feel rather guilty about accepting so much hospitality for so long, from people whom he often met for the first time when he appeared on their doorstep. If in some ways this life chimed with his idea of the wandering scholar, it also seemed like a luxurious interlude of protracted sponging. For his hosts, there was nothing unusual in having people to stay for days or even weeks at a time. Food was locally produced, the servants lived on the estate, and thus one extra guest was no great strain on the household – though Paddy was perhaps more inconvenient than some. He burnt holes in the sheets with his cigarettes, drank a lot, and the clothes and books he borrowed were left lying about, to be soaked with rain or slept on by dogs. Perhaps people did sometimes wonder when he was going to leave. Yet whatever his faults, he had one gift so enchanting that it made up for all his shortcomings. He was genuinely fascinated by his hosts, and wanted to hear everything they could tell him about their families, their history and their way of life.

  The greatest blessing a guest can bring to his host is the right kind of curiosity, and it bubbled out of Paddy like a natural spring. At this age, everything he came across was worth knowing – ‘I was un-boreable, like an unsinkable battleship,’ he wrote.24 Above all, Paddy did not see the people he stayed with as casual acquaintances or meal tickets; to him they were true friends, people he thought of and cared about. In years to come, as he travelled between Rumania and London by train in the late thirties, he would spin out the journey to stop off and visit them. No wonder he could remember them so vividly several decades after that enchanted summer.

  One has also to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days. His children might take a certain pride in their ancient lineage, but they had also made it clear that the world had moved on and they planned to move with it. Then a scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. He is polite, cheerful, and he cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped this part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.

  Paddy was just as good at getting on with the younger generation, welcoming every suggestion. Whether they wanted to ski, ride, swim, sing, hunt or play tennis, whether they wanted to go to a nightclub in town or dance at a village wedding, whether they were going to visit a distant cousin in a legendary castle or an old aunt round the corner, he was ready and eager to join in. No wonder they urged him to stay a few more days, and he was easily persuaded. Not just his interest and enthusiasm engaged them. In Paddy’s company everyone felt livelier, funnier and more entertaining, and the gift never deserted him. Decades later one of his oldest friends remarked, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if Paddy came in pill-form, so you could take one whenever you felt depressed.’25

  For the last and longest of Paddy’s Transylvanian sojourns, he was a guest of Elemér von Klobusitzky (‘István’ in Between the Woods and the Water) whom he had met with the Telekis at Kápolnás. Elemér had run away from home to join a Hussar regiment during the war, fought against the Communist regime of Béla Kún, and escaped from one of the execution squads organized by Számuely, Béla Kún’s terror man. He joined the counter-revolution at Szeged, and Paddy hints that he may have been involved in the ‘White Terror’ that followed the downfall of the Communists. Yet the fact that he was able to live in Hungary after the war, under his own name, implies that he was not involved in any atrocities. He was a brilliant rider, a crack shot, and a skilful ‘cocktail pianist’ who could thump out the latest tunes with brio.

  Elemér was then in his thirties, looking after his family’s shrinking estate at Guraszáda. He, his sister Ilona and his elderly parents lived in an ancient house that looked to Paddy like ‘a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead’ overlooking the river Maros. Elemér missed the musketeerish life he had led, but at the same time he was deeply committed to maintaining what remained of the fields and forests that his family had held since the mid-nineteenth century. He unleashed his considerable energies in riding and hunting, and like Paddy, he was always reluctant to go to bed: it was more fun to sit out on the terrace, drinking and rolling cigarettes and talking through the night.

  Hungarian passion burst into Paddy’s life a week or two after his arrival in Transylvania. A party of Elemér’s friends met for a picnic of crayfish, which they gathered in abundance from under the rocks and waterweeds of a fast-running stream high up in the mountains. There were about a dozen crayfish-catchers, of whom the most active was a vivacious, dark-haired Serbian woman in a red dress called Xenia Csernovits. She was married to a Hungarian, Mihaly Betheg, and lived in Budapest; but that summer, feeling profoundly depressed and miserable, she had come to spend some time on her own at her childhood home which lay three miles upstream from Elemér’s house, near the village of Zám.fn1

  They made love in the woods that afternoon, after the crayfish feast. After dinner at Elemér’s she sang lieder by Schubert, Wolf and Richard Strauss in what Paddy called ‘a slight, clear, ravishing voice’. He begged her to sing again and again. Paddy was in love: ‘It was one of those rare times, remembered with wonder ever after, when fortune, which so often besets these paths with hopeless hazards, suddenly and gratuitously relents and all seems leagued in a benevolent conspiracy.’ She was alone in her house, and an amused Elemér was happy to oblige whenever Paddy asked him for the loan of a horse at odd hours after dark. He learnt

  where to tie up a horse without attracting attention, which
track to follow without alerting a dog, where to tread on tiptoe past the cottage where two old servants lived, and which French window would be ajar … The moon seemed to fill the whole silent house and when our own voices stopped we could hear frogs from a nearby pool, a few crickets and an occasional owl’s hoot. A stream sounded from the thickest of the woods and the branches were full of undeserved nightingales.26

  Paddy went over this passage several times. ‘Those passages dealing with sentiment can be jolly tricky,’ he confided years later to his publisher, ‘half caddish, half milksop. I must get it absolutely right.’27 They did not see each other much in daylight, for Xenia had to be careful.

  One passage in Between the Woods and the Water often leaves readers wondering what exactly happened. Returning from a lunch with neighbours, Paddy and Elemér were so hot that they unsaddled their horses, stripped off and dived into the water. They had swum a fair way downstream when they were surprised by two laughing peasant girls, who threatened to find their clothes and run off. Elemér shouted back that he and Paddy would come out and catch them. ‘“You wouldn’t dare,” came the answer. “Not like that, naked as frogs.”’28 After a few more taunts, Paddy and Elemér scrambled out of the river and gave chase, hopping over the stubbly fields in bare feet in pursuit. The girls squealed with delight and threw sheaves of wheat at them, and brandished sickles – but not very seriously. Paddy and Elemér caught up with them, and soon all four were frolicking about in a hayrick. Then, all passion spent, they fell asleep. Elemér woke with a start some hours later, remembering there was company coming to dinner, and it was a rush to get back to Guraszáda in time. According to Paddy there was nothing half-hearted, nor interrupted, about the sex they enjoyed that afternoon; but were Rumanian peasant girls really so spontaneous and easy-going? It was accepted at that time, so a Hungarian friend of Paddy’s has commented, that female house servants and migrant harvest-workers were, if asked, expected to oblige young gentlemen of the estate.29

  Xenia would soon have to return to Budapest; and when the lovers had no more than a few days left together, Elemér came to the rescue. He borrowed a car, and he and Paddy met Xenia at a discreet rendezvous and headed north. In Between the Woods and the Water Paddy describes the drive through Alba Iulia, Turda, and Cluj, where they came down to breakfast to hear that Chancellor Dollfuss had been assassinated.fn2

  Or perhaps not. ‘Paddy told me the whole drive through Transylvania was invented,’ said Rudolf Fischer; ‘what is more, inspired by and based on a book I had given him.’30 Fischer also suggested the pseudonym Angéla, though in old age Xenia was quite happy to let it be known that Paddy had been her lover. Xenia wrote to Paddy after reading Between the Woods and the Water in Hungarian – translated by her nephew, Miklós Vajda. She told Paddy she had worked in a textile factory for twenty-six years. She had also been arraigned for murder, having in a fit of rage killed a woman with whom she shared a flat in post-war Budapest. ‘My black hair is now white. I am seventy-six years old. I am homesick … your book brought me home.’31

  Elemér tried to persuade him to stay on, tempting him with the delights of the hunting season: chamois, stags and – if he stayed on for the winter – bears. Yet Paddy felt he had already lingered at Guraszáda too long. Feeling very lonely for the first time in weeks he walked on towards Tomeşti, where he was expected by Herr Robert v. Winckler – a tall, thin, scholarly man, living alone with his books on the edge of a forest. Paddy was not long in his company, but it made a lasting impression. Winckler was the main ingredient in the composite portrait of the Polymath in A Time of Gifts.fn3

  By now it was high summer. For two days Paddy scrambled through valleys and foothills, heading south-west towards Caransebeş to avoid the main road to Lugoj. He missed the company of Xenia and Elemér, but being on the march again brought solace, and he was pleased to find that his strength and endurance returned quickly after the weeks of soft living.

  In Between the Woods and the Water, Paddy extended and elaborated the bare facts of his south-easterly walk through the forests and canyons of the southern Carpathians. Time and place are blurred, new scenes are added. Line breaks become mysterious: sometimes they signal a change of tone, sometimes they seem to indicate a shift in time. The result is a passage that, over several pages, recreates with astonishing intensity the feeling of being alone in the mountains: the sense of release, of time expanding, all cords cut, and a heightened awareness of the natural world.

  He kept to the west of the main mass of the mountains, trying not to lose height, guided by the position of the sun, and his watch and compass. Paddy saw no one for two days and nights in the wilderness – rising with the dawn, wrapping himself in his greatcoat at sundown, and sleeping fitfully through the cold night with a million stars for company. He carried plenty of food and drank from the streams, which harboured clumps of watercress. Early one morning he stumbled upon a huge golden eagle, preening its feathers on a ledge overlooking a ravine in the mountains. He watched it a long time before it spread its enormous wings and launched into the void.

  At some point in his walk across the Carpathians he spent the night in a wooden house with a tin roof that belonged to the Jewish manager of a timber company. This burly man was dressed in working clothes but his brother the Rabbi, who had come on a visit with his two sons, wore long black robes, while the boys had corkscrew curls. Speaking Yiddish among themselves, they talked to Paddy in German: of Hitler and Israel, about Jewry in England, and he persuaded them to recite from the scriptures in Hebrew. At the same time, he was aware that an unbridgeable gulf lay between them. The two young bespectacled Talmudic students were already dedicated to a lifetime of rigorous study: ‘Their pale faces, in the lamplight, looked as though they had never been out of a shuttered room.’ They in turn could not imagine why anyone would want to walk across Europe, out of interest and just for fun: it was a ‘goyim naches’ – a goyish fancy, an outlandish idea, which made no sense to a practical, God-fearing Jew.32

  He spent a few days near Băile Herculane, the Baths of Hercules, in the last friendly house on the north side of the Danube that belonged to Heinz Schramm. No one he had met over the course of the summer had ever set foot in Bulgaria, and they thought he was mad. Bulgaria, as everyone knew, had been under Ottoman rule for longer than any other country in Europe, and was a rough and backward place. Paddy was keen to move on, but reluctant to leave too: the days of castles, libraries, good wine and hot baths were almost over. It was three or four days before he said goodbye, and set off southwards.

  For several miles of its length the Danube forms a spectacular natural frontier between Rumania and Serbia as the great river, swollen by thousands of streams pouring off the mountains, is forced through a steep and jagged gorge. Only the most skilful pilots could navigate the currents and eddies created by the Danube as it roared through this narrow defile, the most dangerous point being the Kazan, or Cauldron, west of Orşova.

  There was one other place Paddy wanted to explore before plunging into Bulgaria: Ada Kaleh, an island four kilometres long by a kilometre wide, some three miles downstream from Orşova. The majority of its inhabitants were Turkish: its name in Turkish meaning ‘island fortress’, it was a tiny fragment of the Ottoman empire that had somehow survived with its language, religion and customs intact. In a little coffee shop he was welcomed by old men in fezzes, who touched their heart, lips and brow in welcome. He wandered in the maze of cobbled lanes where whitewashed houses were adorned with wooden balconies and vine-covered trellis, tobacco leaves were hung out to dry ‘like kippers’, and veiled women carried firewood and fed their chickens. He heard the call of the muezzin, watched the men at prayer. It was his first glimpse into an Islamic world.

  5

  Bulgaria to Mount Athos

  Paddy entered Bulgaria on 14 August, and felt he had crossed a cultural divide.fn1 To the north lay a Romanized, western culture that looked towards Paris and Vienna; while on the south bank, the town of
Lom was part of the Balkans, the Orthodox and Ottoman east. The speed with which it had happened was both exciting and disturbing, and the evidence was everywhere: ‘in the domes and minarets and the smoky tang of kebabs cooking on spits, in the jutting wooden houses and the Byzantine allegiance of the churches, in the black cylindrical hats, the flowing habits, the long hair and beards of the priests, and in the Cyrillic alphabet on the shop fronts which gave a fleeting impression of Russia.’ There were no women in the streets, only men. ‘Rough-hewn and tough, shod and swaddled in the same cowhide footgear as the Rumanians, they padded the dusty cobbles like bears.’1

  He began walking south towards Sofia. Soon he was in the huge, rolling, ochre-coloured folds of the Stara Planina, otherwise known as the Great Balkan range, which marches right across the country from Serbia to the Black Sea. Over the four-day trek he joined a caravan of peasants with their bullock wagons; they invited him to spend the night beside their campfire, and took him as far as Petrochan. Beyond Petrochan the road unfurled ‘like a gypsy’s ribbon’.2 He listened to a herdsman playing his flute, and the tinkling bells of the flocks of black and white sheep and goats.

  After spending his first night in Sofia in a verminous lodging house, he got in touch with Rachel Floyd, an English girl he had met on the steamer to Lom. Paddy was immediately scooped up by her hosts, the British Consul Boyd Tollinton and his wife Judith, and was surprised to find what comfort he took in being among his own countrymen again. He spent five or six days with the Tollintons, through whom he met several of the French, British and Americans living and working in Sofia. He also went exploring with Rachel, bought a dagger and a fur kalpak, began reading Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert and the poems of Rilke, and played cricket with Boyd Tollinton: ‘I made five. Out middle stump, amazing incongruousness of scene, diversity of nations. Bulgarian onlookers realizing that it is true that the English are not quite right in the head.’3