Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  It seemed Malancrav was used to wandering foreigners. I found the house with the help of a sassy girl in her twenties who’d just come back from a waitressing job in Germany, and who happened to be in the village shop when I asked about the Trust. As we walked through the village together, she greeted everyone who passed with ‘This is my new man.’ When I, too, grunted in amusement, she looked alarmed. ‘You can speak Romanian?’

  ‘I can’t really speak, but I can understand.’

  I wished I hadn’t said anything as we walked on in silence.

  She handed me over to a pretty teenager who had the house key. After Atel, I knew what to expect in terms of interior layout: the cart-gate and the main door, the end-on gable, the yard rising to orchards, the outhouses and barns. Inside, the house was stripped back and austere, with all the comfort of a museum, but there was a spirituality in its simplicity; a coat of varnish would have been frivolous. Simple wood floors and furniture, an oak table and dresser, and on the wall the same Lutheran line as above the church in Atel, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, in stern Gothic lettering. The only concession to modernity was the bathroom.

  The teenager returned an hour later, once I’d made the place more homely by draping my damp clothes all over the furniture. This time she was with a friend and bearing a dinner of salad and chicken soup cooked by her mother over the road, which I ate while the two of them stayed in the kitchen giggling furiously. If I hadn’t had a teenage daughter of my own I might have thought they were laughing at me, all by myself at the oak table with my beatific grin and surrounded by my smelly socks. Perhaps they thought I was Prince Charles.

  When they’d gone I sat in the window and watched the evening cow parade, which I’d come to recognize as a key feature of daily life in Transylvanian villages. Cows in these parts were credited with intelligence and responsibility, and once given the command to go, they took themselves up to the pastures in the morning and brought themselves down again in the evening, like members of the family going to work. For me, their return helped to pick out the houses which were still occupied, because gates would open and owners would step out over the threshold into the street and wait, chatting to their neighbours. Some of the returning cows would put on little cameos, like the one that found its gate shut and had to bellow to be let in, or the buffalo that browsed a neighbour’s flowerbed and found itself under attack from the neighbour’s dog. Many would be welcomed home by a slap on the rump and a clip around the ankles with a birch switch, as the householders bid good evening over their shoulders to the rest of the street. I could almost envisage some kind of verbal exchange once the gate was shut behind them.

  ‘Did you have a nice day in the fields, dear?’

  ‘Forget the small talk and for God’s sake get your hands on my udders.’

  Next morning I left before sunrise, but one of Malancrav’s pigs had departed this world before me and the gutters were running red with its blood. A funereal mist shrouded the valley, but as the sun climbed so it initiated a slow striptease, revealing some parts, and leaving others veiled in wisps and wreaths. Those parts it illuminated looked pretty delectable, the low sun picking out overnight dew on the cobwebs, turning them into lacy hedgerow lingerie, much to the irritation of the scowling spiders sitting spotlit at their centre.

  A man on an old bicycle came bouncing down the hill, his scythe strapped to his back, greeting me as I stood aside to let him pass. I daresay he’d have been pleased to see the change in the weather, because there’d have been no haymaking work during the previous days of rain. I followed his tracks upwards into woodland, but concluded eventually that he’d been cycling along the ridge, looking for a way down, whereas I just needed to keep heading east, up hill and down dale. So I retraced my steps for a while and resorted to the compass again.

  It was rougher walking that day, and I spent a lot of the morning getting wet and dry again as I passed from meadows that were still in the shade to meadows that had spent some time in the sun. Perhaps because of the rougher terrain, I came across a couple of horsemen, too. The first was a large, swarthy man seated bareback on an equally broad-shouldered beast, on the outskirts of the village of Cris. The rider was having a shouted exchange with a cowherd up in the hills a good three-quarter mile away. He released a couple of words at a time, elongating the vowels, letting them roll up in the hill in the still air. Then he’d wait for the reply to come barrelling down again. With the distortions of this long-distance talking I couldn’t pinpoint the language, and the two men may well have been gypsies, but I could tell that all was not well. The horseman looked grumpy at the outcome. I’d guess it was a kind of ‘Where did you put my wallet?’-type conversation, where the answer is invariably ‘I haven’t touched your blessed wallet.’ The sort of conversation I usually have when I too am riding out of town.

  The other horseback communication was directed at me. I was halfway down the road from Cris to Sighisoara, leaving the Saxon villages behind me, when two horsemen appeared on a ridge to my right, and started to hulloo downwards. I felt pretty sure that they were asking for information about their route, and I felt bad that I couldn’t understand them. I’d asked for, and received, so much help myself in the last few days that I would have liked to have returned the favour, particularly now that I really did know where I was. But my ear couldn’t make sense of those elongated vowels, so in the end all I could do was wave and shout cheerful greetings in English in the hope they’d realize I was a foreigner.

  Not long afterwards a farmer came down the road in his beaten-up old Dacia and offered me a lift to Sighisoara, so in the end I made my exit from the Saxon villages at 30 miles per hour.

  21

  Transylvanian High Society

  A couple of days later I was back in the tender care of the aristocracy, in the shape of the familiar welcoming figure of Tibor Kalnoky, the Transylvanian count who had so impressed me on my first-ever visit to Romania. Tibor was an urbane, sophisticated European aristocrat in his early forties who had flawless manners and spoke flawless English as well as German, French, Hungarian and Romanian. His family pedigree dated back to the twelfth century, and his great-uncle Gustav had been prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His charm, integrity and family history had been one of the catalysts for my journey.

  After the Saxon villages, I’d only lingered long enough in Sighioara to let my boots dry. It was a handsome place, for sure, particularly the medieval section atop Castle Hill, where it was ringed with towers erected by various guilds, amongst them the tinsmiths’ tower, the butchers’ tower, the farriers’ tower, the tailors’ tower and the shoemakers’ tower – this last a peaked fairytale effort which was now the home of the local radio station. Cobbled and ribboned with flags, with music echoing down the streets, Castle Hill was officially a UNESCO World Heritage site, a sort of Mont-St-Michel of Transylvania, with a daily migration of tourists that started as soon as the sun warmed the cobbles.

  It was also the birthplace of Vlad epe, aka Vlad the Impaler, definitely not a cobble-warming sort of a chap, although the building that claimed to be his birthplace was actually built a year too late. Vlad had been the model for Dracula, but the town seemed equivocal about cashing in on the whole Vlad thing. Dracula souvenirs didn’t leap out from every street corner, there were no themed tours, and it wasn’t easy to get marinaded on Dracula cocktails. This may have been because in Romanian eyes the fifteenth-century prince was, contrary to his literary reputation elsewhere, a bit of a national hero, thanks to his military successes against the Turks.

  The Impaler part of his name derives from his trademark method of torture and execution of his enemies. He’d have his men insert the sharp end of the stake into the victim’s anus and, sometimes with the assistance of a couple of horses, haul it all the way up the body to emerge at the mouth. Death was always slow. Even visiting ambassadors were risking their lives, because a perceived insult could result in their hats being nailed to their heads in such a
way that they’d never be doffing them again.

  By all accounts Vlad divided his panache for spectacular execution even-handedly between would-be invaders and fellow-countrymen, male and female, boy and girl. One legend has him leaving a gold cup in the street and returning to pick it up the next day; so fearful were the locals of his wrath that no one had dared to touch it. In many ways he was the Saddam Hussein of his day.

  Certainly the Ottomans got to know him pretty well, and there were stories of whole armies turning back when they came upon rank upon rank of stakes on which were impaled thousands of rotting carcasses of fellow-soldiers who had previously attempted to unseat him. When he was finally defeated, he was decapitated and his head was sent to Constantinople, where the Turks had it preserved in honey and put on display to demonstrate that he was properly dead.

  The ‘Dracula’ name actually belonged more properly to his father, Vlad Dracul, where dracul meant ‘of the order of the dragon’, although it has since come to mean ‘devil’. The exact back-story didn’t really matter to the author of Dracula, Irish writer Bram Stoker, who probably mixed a lot of Vlad the Impaler with a bit of the legend of Elizabeth Báthony, a sixteenth-century countess who abducted and tortured hundreds of young girls and was supposed to have bathed in their blood in an attempt to preserve her youth. Either way, the resulting book is a piece of great storytelling set in a land which no one knew anything about, where there were certainly no vampire bats and whose natives were very unlikely to object.

  Bram Stoker wasn’t the only one to take advantage of Transylvania’s perceived exoticism. Jules Verne, whose Danube book appears earlier in these pages, took a similar approach with his The Castle in the Carpathians, using Transylvania as the setting for an unashamedly Gothic tale where an evil baron incarcerates a beautiful opera-singing countess in his remote castle, keeping the villagers and shepherds away with ghostly special effects. The Transylvania of his book is a place of gloomy forests, ruined castles, mountains with tumbled rocks, and shepherds who can forecast the weather from feeling the wool of their sheep. It’s a place which, according to a line in the book, ‘lends itself so naturally to all sorts of supernatural imaginings’, largely because nobody amongst the readership knew any better.

  Modern Transylvania still has something of the Transylvania in these storybooks – the forests, the castles, the mountains and the shepherds – but its aristocracy doesn’t sleep in coffins. Count Kalnoky carried none of the threat of his fictional predecessors, although there was a certain air of mystery about him, driving as he did through semi-medieval landscapes in an immaculate Range Rover with diplomatic numberplates, on account of being a Knight of the Order of Malta. He was more Da Vinci Code than Dracula, and it wasn’t so long ago that he’d first come to work in Romania as a mere marketing executive in a pharmaceutical company, albeit an executive with a title.

  The count’s return was almost happenstance. The family had first fled westwards into Hungary in 1939, escaping fascism, and from there they had been driven further west still by communism, eventually ending up in the United States. Some time later they’d returned to Europe, and Tibor was born in Germany, where his father had risen through the ranks of IBM to head the computer giant for the whole of Eastern Europe. In 1987, with the tide turning against communist ideology, the twenty-year-old veterinary student persuaded his father that the time had come to revisit secretly the family heritage in the Hungarian-speaking region of Transylvania. They’d travelled discreetly and with little or no expectations, but were exhilarated to find ‘very, very nice villages’, with equally nice villagers attached.

  ‘My father was recognized as soon as we set foot in Miklósvár. By the time we came out of the church, half the village was assembled outside. We couldn’t communicate with them – in those days we no longer spoke Hungarian – but it was a very, very emotional moment. And then someone said that a convoy of cars was coming. There were no cars in rural areas in those days, so it had to be the Securitate.’ They escaped by driving through the forest, and to their credit the villagers never gave them away, despite days of questioning. Even decades of anti-gentry propaganda hadn’t erased ancient respect.

  After that the young count resolved to return and to fight to get back the family’s two manor houses and half a dozen village houses. He went to Budapest to learn Hungarian, and then a large pharmaceutical company keen to expand into emerging Eastern Europe offered him a post in Bucharest. From there he began the legal process of seeking restitution, suing the state for eight long years, a process he finally won in 1999: ‘Just a year before Romania passed a law which would have given everything back anyway.’

  The properties he recovered were in a bad state, particularly the two manor houses, which had been used as Party headquarters and then community halls. It would take many years, great determination and considerable funds to bring these buildings back to what they once were. Without revenue from land – ‘to keep one square metre of manor house, you need one hectare of forest’ – Kalnoky decided to seek income from tourism. He restored some village houses in Miklósvár and opened them as oak-beamed guesthouses, with oil lamps and wood-fired heating, antique furniture and hand-embroidered textiles, as well as the latest in low-voltage lighting and some of the only bidets in Transylvania.

  The project had worked well. Miklósvár was in the heart of Székely country, that warlike Hungarian tribe whom King Géza had settled in the eastern Carpathians. Their villages were more low-slung and had less architectural flourish than in the Saxon lands, but their lifestyle had the same compelling simplicity, and here at least whole communities were largely intact. A population of 700,000 was still in place, in defiance of Ceauescu, and, in defiance of anything digital or even mechanical, still operating a horse-and-cart economy in a landscape with bears in the forests and wolves in the hills.

  Miklósvár was a particularly good example. Here there had never been any recorded crime, and tradition still had the upper hand. This was a place where the old wives’ tales came true, where you literally didn’t count your chickens until they were hatched, and you made sure you made hay while the sun shone. In fact you made a cartload of hay for every leg of a cow, and two extra cartloads for every leg of a horse. And given that those two beasts were the prize possessions of most families in Miklósvár, everyone and his auntie seemed to be out scything hay in the days that I was there.

  On my previous visit I’d drunk palinka with woodcutters up in the forests, sitting on their horsedrawn sleds. I’d been wolf-tracking in the snow, knowing that the wolf population worried the farmers. And I’d discussed the bear problem with the local women who worked in Count Kalnoky’s kitchen, where they prepared the pork stews, dumplings and smoked cheeses.

  This time their opinion was that the problem was getting worse, and an American girl had already been killed by a bear earlier in the year. There’d also been a ‘wolf child’ found, a feral boy who’d spent years living with wild animals, Mowgli-style, and had forgotten how to speak. Stories like these could have belonged to Bram Stoker, and I found myself listening to them with sympathy, but without fear, now that my wilderness walking was done.

  The count’s social connections and the uniqueness of his home-stays had the reputation for attracting an interesting mix to his dinner table, because although the accommodation was spread out through the village, all guests converged on the main house to eat together at the end of the day. Diplomats were fairly frequent visitors, and there was even the occasional heir to the throne in the shape of Prince Charles, who had become something of a friend, and who was relying on the count to assist in the restoration of his Saxon houses. The count called these his ‘Agatha Christie’ dinners, partly because of the gathering of different social stereotypes in an isolated closed community, and partly because usually most of the guests were British. They certainly were on this occasion, and I found it disconcerting to step straight into British society after having forged my own solitary path across fairly
wild country. But, sadly, there were no royals or diplomats amongst them, nor even any feckless curates, chancers, penniless aristocrats, or doctors with histories of alcoholism, as Agatha Christie would have had it.

  This new social environment threw up a new difficulty for me: I had to make sure I still had a supply of sufficiently clean clothes to look presentable as I went from one titled household to the next. For his journey, Patrick Leigh Fermor had carried two pairs of dark flannel trousers, a ‘decent-looking’ tweed jacket, several shirts, two ties, a pair of pyjamas and a soldier’s greatcoat. I was travelling a lot lighter, but I still had a clean shirt and clean trousers for special occasions somewhere at the bottom of my rucksack. Fortunately, at my next stop, the Mikes estate at Zabola, everyone was wearing jeans.

  This was still Székely land, and the Mikes and the Kalnoky estates were relatively near neighbours. The difference was that while Kalnoky’s guests were effectively accommodated within the village, those at Zabola were hosted behind private gates within the massive estate grounds, so it was a taste of life as it must once have been.

  The estate’s parkland and mature woodland had been planned by a celebrated French garden designer to cradle the main manor house, which dated from the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century a huge lantern had been added to the roof and a tower-like portico bolted to the front, commensurate with the family’s growing wealth and importance. Eventually a whole new villa, just as big but not quite as decorative, had to be built a short distance from the manor to accommodate all the guests. The two buildings were then connected by an underground tunnel so that guests could make their way across to the main house without exposing their formal dining dress to inclement weather.