Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  During those difficult days there were only three types of people: those who had been in jail, those who were in jail, and those who were about to be in jail. Paloczi-Horvath escaped. He didn’t want to be in jail again, and once over the Austrian border he got on a train for England with hundreds of others. Thereafter he joined the ranks of postcard-writers whose cards make a colourful collage on the Terror House wall in 60 Andrássy Avenue. All he could do was look on from a distance and send his friends and family his best wishes, written on the back of a card showing a red double-decker bus and sunny skies.

  The Terror House apart, I could still detect a frisson of communism in the Budapest air. Buildings were still pockmarked with gunfire if you looked above street level. Streets were still underlit at night, heavy with the dust of history, and shops still fought shy of overly ostentatious window displays. Men with bushy eyebrows still stared distrustfully out from the hatches of pavement kiosks, wordlessly handing you your change, and there was still that burly leather-jacketed individual at the railway station who stood alone, scanning the passengers with the sort of intimidatory self-confidence that could only be born out of some secret power.

  Of course a great deal has changed. The Liberty statue may have stayed, but four hundred streets have been renamed in two decades, and most of communism’s mighty statuary has either been destroyed or is rusting away ignominiously in a field to the south-west of the city. Some of the street-renaming and statue-felling went hand in hand: the Stalin statue in Dózsa György út was pulled down on the first day of the 1956 Revolution, leaving just his boots in place, and for years afterwards Dózsa György út became known as ‘Boots Square’.

  Those very boots are now out at that south-western field, aka Statue Park, along with figures of Marx, Engels and dozens of others. Here they still strain every sinew in exhortation, addressing imaginary crowds across a scrubby patch of land. They raise massive clenched fists on muscular forearms in mid-exaltation, shouting across each other. Where once they’d addressed hundreds of thousands of Party faithfuls, now their only regular audience was composed of uninterested rabbits. Yet their power hadn’t quite left them: one (unidentifiable) figure in this stertorous silence was wrapped in green plastic, still too potent, even in bronze, to be released back into the community.

  While the size and frozen dynamism of many of the bigger pieces still had an unmistakable power, I found others on a more human scale, leaders whose names I didn’t recognize but who were now marooned on the turf, behind whom I could creep up and mutter things like ‘Ah well, better luck next time.’

  By the exit stood a little gift shop where you could buy a mug with the legend ‘coffee & communism = coffunism’, a tin containing the ‘last breath of communism’, and a selection of revolutionary socks. I decided against carrying the last breath of communism with me, fearful of letting it escape by mistake in deepest Romania, with unpredictable consequences. And on my way out I caught the eye of Lenin, who stood over the entrance. Unlike all the others inside, he didn’t look stern or demanding. In fact, if he hadn’t been made of metal, I’d have said there was a twinkle in his eye. I got the distinct impression that it had all been a bit of a joke, really, this communism lark, and that he’d been surprised that so many people had taken him so seriously.

  14

  On Laguna to the Drava

  Five days later I was on horseback, moving southwards across Hungary towards the Croatian border. I’d like to say I was flying along on a fleet-footed mare, but my rising trot was off-kilter to lessen the impact on assorted sores in sensitive places, and the reluctant Laguna, despite her water-friendly name, was goosestepping erratically to avoid stepping in puddles. We did not make a graceful pair.

  I’m no horseman, but Patrick Leigh Fermor had left Budapest on horseback to cross the Hungarian plain on a horse supplied by yet another of his aristocratic contacts, so I’d wanted to do the same. And I’m pleased to say that my puddle-swerving people-carrier also had noble connections.

  After making enquiries in all the right places, I’d come west from Budapest by train to meet up with Count József Hunyady on the shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary’s inland sea. The count was another of that younger set of aristocrats who’d returned to Budapest in the 1990s, and there he’d met and married a fellow returnee of equal pedigree – Countess Katalin Almásy – and the two had set up home back where the Hunyadys had once been big landowners. There they’d restarted the family vineyard, opened an upmarket B&B, and helped establish a longdistance riding business that took advantage of 150 miles of green corridor that stretched between Balaton and the Drava river. It wasn’t exactly along the banks of the Danube, but it would have to do.

  Long-distance horseback travel has all but vanished from modern Europe since Leigh Fermor’s day, now that roads are given over to cars and now that wayside hotels have turned their paddocks into swimming pools and stables into spas. But horses are to Hungary what paprika is to goulash, and have been ever since Attila the Hun and the Magyar tribesmen arrived on horseback from the Asian steppes. This is, after all, the nation that invented ‘Hussar!’, the flamboyant cavalryman and drinking cry which derives from the word huszadik, meaning twentieth; traditionally every twentieth man in the village was pressed into military service for the empire.

  These days the cavalrymen are gone, although Hungarian schoolchildren are still encouraged to ‘sit up straight like a Hussar’. Hungarian horsemen still go through the motions for tourists, particularly the herdsmen or csikós of the puszta, the Hungarian plain, whose horseback skills date back to when they were semi-nomadic outlaws making a living from rustling other people’s livestock and then evading their pursuers. On the flatness of the puszta, with very little cover, that usually involved training their horses to lie down at the crack of a giant whip.

  The climax of these tourist shows is usually the Puszta Five, named after a romantic painting by an Austrian artist in which the rider stands on the backs of two horses, holding the reins to a further three, ostensibly as an express way of delivering the post. But the Puszta Five is a fantasy: five horses don’t go faster than one, and the painting didn’t explain where the post itself was meant to go, unless it was under the herdsman’s hat.

  Happily, I didn’t have to do any virtuoso manoeuvres on Laguna. My experience of horses is that they are dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle, and are principally used by well-to-do mothers as a diversionary tactic to stop their teenage daughters discovering boys and getting pregnant. But knowing that I wanted a horseback element to this journey, I’d taken four riding lessons in London before setting out, at a cost that made me blanch. The riding school declared that I would need around twenty lessons to get to the level required for a journey of several days with galloping included, but that was just avarice disguised as health and safety. By the end of my four lessons I can’t say I was confident, but I knew the basics I had to do in order to survive.

  Count József had picked me up from the station in an ageing white Opel with a child seat in the back. A mild-mannered, unassuming, reticent, academic-looking man in his mid-forties, he spoke English and German to his guests, French to his wife, Italian to his daughter and Hungarian to his neighbours. He knew the Leigh Fermor books well, he said, and although there was a Hunyady mentioned in them, it was not his branch of the family. It was János Hunyadi, the fifteenth-century warrior hero who’d routed the Turks outside Belgrade and was proclaimed the saviour of Christendom. His son, Matthias Corvinus, had presided over a real purple patch in Hungarian history, creating the Hussars, with and without exclamation marks, along the way.

  To his credit, József didn’t claim any reflected Hunyady glory, and had no lordly airs or graces. His family had been big landowners whose life in the 1930s had been busy with guests and horses. The original eighteenth-century family manor house, the size of a decent French chateau, was now a sanatorium for the mentally ill, and the security guard at the gateway gave no sign of r
ecognizing the count as we drew up alongside. I’d been anticipating a passage in The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) in which Peter Esterhazy described revisiting his family’s castle and encountering grey gatekeepers who did so little work that dust sifted from their faces when they looked up. When Esterhazy had made his identity known ‘all three of them sprung to attention as if possessed, clicking their heels like in some film and staring at me with their chins slightly raised … the most senior among them kept repeating, with tears in his eyes: “Your Excellency, Your dear, dear Excellency”. And he stroked the top of my head.’

  Sadly, none of this happened for us. Maybe it was the ageing car and the child seat, or maybe the self-effacing count didn’t even drop his name into the conversation. However, he was persuasive enough to get us through the gate, despite the gatekeeper’s anxiety that the director of the sanatorium was due and our presence would get him into trouble. We could go up the drive, he said, but not get out of the car. So we sat for a while in the white Opel in front of Hunyady’s decaying family pile. It was half burned down, and its once-formal gardens were overgrown and full of wandering lost souls in nylon track-suits, rocking, jerking, mouthing and staring into space. Seeing the car and the people in it, one of them came and stared at us from right up close to the windscreen, clutching a transistor radio to his ear.

  As we left, Count József explained how his family had started to lose their property in the land reforms of the 1920s, and the manor house had finally been expropriated in 1944. From then on his father had led a wildly improbable and romantic life, despite a very difficult start being pulled out of the rubble from beside the body of his dead mother during the bombing of Budapest. In 1945 he’d been spirited away to relatives in Austria where he’d found work as a farmhand and primitive accommodation in a ruined castle, eventually becoming a showjumper and member of the Austrian Olympic team. From Austria he’d gone to Egypt to be the tutor to the Albanian royal family, who were living there in exile. In the 1950s he’d arrived in England, in pursuit of an English girl he’d met in Egypt, and became a stablehand in racing stables in Newmarket. A couple of years later he was in France, buying and selling racehorses, where he met an Italian girl, fell in love and moved to run a racehorse stable in Italy, where József was born and grew up.

  An extraordinary life-itinerary like this was by no means unusual amongst former aristocracy, for whom the world became a post-war pinball machine. They came careering out of Eastern Europe pursued by the Russian bear, bounced from nation to nation, profession to profession, until finally many of them disappeared from sight into the world’s furthest pockets. Only a few hit the trigger of 1989, to come rocketing back into the jaws of their own land and collect a hereditary bonus. Count József was one of them.

  ‘I’d had no exposure at all to Hungary for a very long time,’ he declared, once he’d completed his father’s whirlwind CV. ‘I don’t even remember him talking about it. He had no desire for his children to go back. That chapter was finished in his life, he’d started again. He didn’t even find it useful for us to remain in contact with the wider family.’

  But then, after 1989, word started to spread of people getting their property back, and József, who by this time was working for a wine-importing company in Italy, visited the land of his ancestry for the first time. The feeling of affinity was instantaneous. ‘I liked it very much. I was conservation-minded, and I saw how unspoiled it was, how affordable. I saw the potential.’

  At the time, post-communist land restitution in Hungary was based on a voucher system. The state’s defunct co-operative farms had been divided in half, with one half distributed to their former employees and the other half auctioned off to local villagers. Ex-landowning families like the Hunyadys who could prove their lineage were given vouchers which they then used in these local auctions.

  With vouchers to the value of £13,000 plus his own personal savings, József had painstakingly assembled around 2,000 acres of land, section by section, auction by auction. Few other former landowners had his dedication. Mostly they came back briefly, claimed what they could and then sold it to the highest bidder before returning as quickly as they could to their bright, shiny new lives overseas, thus confirming the locals’ low opinion of the aristocracy as money-grubbing wasters who only had their own interests at heart.

  But József persisted, despite the lack of interest of the rest of his family and the suspicion of his neighbours. Amongst his new acquisitions was an old farm complex just outside the small town of Keleviz. Here he rebuilt the old farmhouse into Lehner Manor, and although it was diminutive compared to the property his family had lost, nevertheless its lofty ceilings, tribe of dogs, books, oil paintings and Biedermeier furniture all contributed to a sense of old-fashioned country living. There were riding boots by the back door, saddles on the banister and stables across the fields. Between the Woods and the Water was on his bookshelf, next to biographies of Lenin, poetry anthologies, bird books and a treatise on the consequences of American economic policy; the reverential way he talked about Leigh Fermor suggested that he saw the books as a record of how life had once been lived and a (partial) blueprint of how it should be.

  At dinner with his wife Katalin, who was tall, raw-boned and seemed rather tense, we discussed how one of her distant relatives had entered popular mythology as the hero of The English Patient. The film’s portrait of Count László de Almásy as a badly burned war hero trying to make sense of his life turned out to have been very overromanticized. In reality the count had been a spy who’d worked for anyone who’d paid him, and given that he was rampantly homosexual, he would have had no interest whatever in Kristin Scott Thomas.

  ‘Oh, I can understand that,’ I muttered. ‘But to have no interest in Juliette Binoche, now that’s criminal.’

  Somewhere outside, an owl hooted. József saw me flinch and smiled thinly.

  ‘It makes strange sounds. Sometimes I don’t know if it is my daughter in great pain.’

  Katalin, too, looked uncomfortable. ‘Here it is dreadful in winter,’ she murmured. ‘You can’t go outside for more than twenty minutes, it gets so cold. I’d so much rather be in Budapest.’

  The stables where I first met Laguna were attached to a nearby manor house that had been converted into a sock factory during the communist era and was now tenanted by a nature conservation organization. The count was president of this Green Corridor Association, which looked after the horses and paid the guides. My guide was Tamas, an elfin-faced, ponytailed young man riding a frisky and elegant Arab stallion called Sandor, of whom he was very proud. Tamas was composed, not particularly expressive and probably a touch solitary in character, communicating better with his horses than with people. When I expressed my doubts about Laguna, who seemed stout and small, he leapt to the horse’s defence. Laguna was half Lipizzaner, he said, and very tough, despite her seventeen years, which in horse terms is practically buspass. He did, however, give me his riding crop, and made sure he was standing in front of Laguna when he did so.

  ‘She knows you’ve got it. So now you won’t have to use it,’ he said.

  We’d started at the lakeshore at a bird-ringing station where a stunningly beautiful girl with graceful long fingers kept a daylight vigil over a filigree net that snaked out into the shallows through a corridor of reeds. When she wasn’t picking frantic little feathered bundles out of her net and clipping tiny tags around their legs, cooing reassuring words, she sat on the doorstep of a little stone house by the water’s edge and sang sad songs to a stork called Gunter, who patrolled up and down outside. She’d nursed the fledgling Gunter back to health after he’d been injured by gunshot, and now the stork was very protective of her in return, and more than willing to attack any man or beast who approached the cottage threshold. Something in his small storkly brain had clearly latched on to the fact that his mistress was both attractive and potentially vulnerable, and it was his duty to play the part of the protective male.

/>   The first bridlepath we followed led away from the lakeshore through verges of hollyhocks and cornflowers into small woodlands of dappled acacia, oak and pine. Tamas, who wasn’t generally talkative unless it was on the subject of horses, confessed to feeling ‘quite secondhand’, by which I assumed he meant hungover, so he said we wouldn’t be going fast. ‘You will have time to create a partnership with your horse.’

  Personally, I’d been thinking along the lines of a dictatorship, but Laguna was sublimely indifferent to my presence, stomping along in Sandor’s wake, which gave me plenty of opportunity to think about getting my riding right in between ducking overhanging branches. It was all very well spending an hour in the saddle in Richmond Park, but five days on the hoof was a different prospect, so I ran myself through the key points, trying to direct my weight right down into my heels and timing my rising trot to Laguna’s short stride. On the occasions I got it wrong and came crashing down on to her back I mentally apologized to the poor creature. Tamas had warned me that when he unsaddled the horses in the evenings he would be looking for sores and breaks in the skin. If Laguna looked to be suffering through my inept riding, we would have a serious problem on our hands.

  Alongside us, amongst the trees, lurked the occasional fencepost, wild vine and overgrown cemetery, indicating where forest villages had once stood. The communists hadn’t liked forest dwellers because they’d been too independent-minded, self-sustaining and hard to control, so they’d forced them to move out into bigger villages on proper roads where they’d be integrated into the mainstream.