Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Although academic historians may frown on its lack of gritty social realism, Leigh Fermor’s realisation of the sunlit curtain call of the Central European aristocracy has not lost its power to dazzle and beguile. It conjures up a world of great houses standing in magnificent parks, with limitless estates extending beyond the soaring limes and spreading oaks; young men with high foreheads and distinctive noses, dressed for hunting or polo, or for dinner beneath sparkling, many-tiered chandeliers; young women in sumptuous satin and imported couture, shading pale complexions under their parasols; ballrooms alight with precious stones and polished boots, pulsing to the waltz, the galop, the csárdás, heels clicking, medalled chests bowing, bosoms heaving, intrigues swirling.

  The seductiveness of this portrait – real or not – is intensified by our awareness that this whole world was about to crash. Within a few years the counts and countesses who had entertained the young Englishman would be scattered to the four winds. The castles and manor houses and shooting lodges would be ransacked and left to fall into ruin, or bombed and blasted, or commandeered in the pursuit of war, while the estates were marched over by successive armies.

  One of the most beguiling episodes in Between the Woods and the Water unfolds at a leisurely pace in the Mureş valley in western Transylvania, where forests of oak, beech and ash roll down over the hills to where the broad river winds its way between wavering lines of willows and fields of maize. It is high summer, 1934. Not so far away the first of the convulsions that will tear Europe apart is being felt. Occasional rumbles reach the manor house where the Englishman is staying, but his head is too filled with old history to pay much attention to the ugly new history being made across a border or two. He is only 19, after all, an age for romance and seizing the pleasures of the moment.

  He is there at the invitation of a new friend whom he calls István: ‘Cultivated, tall, fine-looking, with a hawk’s nose, a high forehead and wide clear blue eyes like a francolin’s, he was a brilliant shot, horseman and steeplechaser, and a virtuoso in all he took up.’ Nothing out of the ordinary there. Together they explore the woods, help bring in the harvest, catch crayfish in mountain streams, meet witches and gypsies, visit neighbours, organise picnics and dances, romp in a hayrick with a pair of peasant girls after swimming naked across the river, and talk through the night as the moon wanes, the stars shoot, and the nightingales sing.

  With István’s connivance, the Englishman pursues a heady love affair with Angéla, who lives nearby – ‘she was a few years older than I, and married, but not happily’. The three of them borrow a car and embark upon a Transylvanian tour to Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia in Romanian – Leigh Fermor generally uses the Hungarian names out of deference to his Hungarian hosts), Koloszvár (Cluj), Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş), the Saxon towns and villages, through Szekler land. The Englishman is intoxicated by this medieval landscape of valleys, streams, canyons, endless woods, Roman salt mines, vineyards, hop fields, stately citadels and churches and crooked gabled inns; and by its dense tangle of peoples and history.

  The idyll comes to an end at a railway station where the girl, recalled unwillingly to the real world, threads button-holes of roses and tiger lilies into her lover’s shirt before boarding the train that takes her out of his life for ever. The friends watch the train disappear until all they can see is ‘a feather of smoke among the Maros trees’.

  The Countess Gemma Teleki did not know the book, but she recognised the description of István at once. His real name was Elemér Klobusicky. ‘Oh, yes, everyone knew Elemér. He was in everyone’s house. Good family, good manners, very good company. He played bridge and tennis, he rode horses. He was amusing, everyone liked him. He married after the war, I think, and was living in Budapest.’

  I asked her about Leigh Fermor’s previous stop, at Zam (also in the Mureş valley), where his hostess was called Xénia. The Countess’s memory was sharp. ‘I don’t remember that name, but I remember her. She was often very much excited …’ the Countess tapped her head and gave me a toothless grin ‘… but very pretty.’ There was something else about her, something that happened later. The Countess shook her head as the memory swirled and faded.

  I decided to make an excursion along the Mureş valley to see what had happened to the places where Leigh Fermor had stayed. His first stop was Kápolnás (Cǎpálnaş), the country residence of Count Jeno Teleki – ‘a tall, spreading, easy-going middle-aged man, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a remarkably intelligent, slightly ugly and very amusing face’ – happiest among his books and his enormous collection of butterflies and moths. The Countess recognised him at once, and smiled at the description in the book. ‘We were at Sáromberke so we did not see those Telekis often,’ she said. ‘They were a long way away and a different branch of the family. But I remember him well. He was big and loved his food, but not as much as his … butterflies, I think you say in English.’

  The Teleki mansion at Kápolnás, photographed 1990

  Once grand, now decrepit, gates led to a large, rectangular, mediocre house which rose from a wilderness of wildly over-grown shrubs and rampant undergrowth. Yews were advancing up the stone steps of the double staircase that led to the balustraded terrace. In front of it was a still, scummy pool beside which stood a stone stag, antlers intact, eyes and nose missing. A notice at the gate stated that the place was a psychiatric institution. Some of the inmates, in pyjamas and rough sweaters, wandered between the weed-choked box hedges, muttering and twitching.

  To my embarrassment, the porter insisted on escorting me inside and intruding on a meeting of the hospital staff that was taking place in a downstairs room. One of them, presumably the director, turned on me. ‘No tourist,’ he shouted, shooing me out. He saw my camera. ‘No photograph. Is not permitted.’

  Xénia’s kastély at Zam had been turned into another psychiatric establishment. This time I was turned away at the gates by a stern female janitor in a blue uniform. I wandered along a high, spiked boundary fence, trying without success to secure a view of the building through the trees. From Zam I went upstream to look for István’s kastély. The map in Between the Woods and the Water suggested it should be in or near Guraszáda (Gurasada), but I explored the village in vain. Eventually I accosted a young woman who was tidying the graveyard of the little church. ‘Kastély kaput,’ she said, pointing to a slope above the village. I saw at once what I had missed before – not a grand mansion, in fact not a building at all, but trees: cypresses, wellingtonias, catalpas, copper beeches, horse chestnuts, limes; trees planted long ago when members of the Hungarian nobility were brought up to admire and imitate the English park of Capability Brown.

  Entrance to Guraszáda, photographed 1990

  I set off through the back streets to find it. I had Leigh Fermor’s book open on the seat beside me, and knew at once when I reached it: ‘A flattened arch through massive ochre walls gave on a courtyard where gigantic chestnuts still dropped their petals and the pigeons on the cobbles underneath would suddenly take off with a sound like the wind.’ I drove in and stopped in the shade of the chestnuts, where the cobbles were edged with weeds. On one side of the courtyard a flight of fan-shaped stone steps led up to a pair of flaking green doors. An arcade ran along one side of the building, with a door at the end giving access on to a loggia. There was a fanlight over the door, the green and purple panes noted by Leigh Fermor still intact. Below the loggia extended a thicket of bamboos, their slender stems and sharp leaves swaying and rustling in the breeze.

  A stout matron appeared, addressed some words of Romanian to me, and waddled off. Shortly afterwards another woman arrived. She was middle-aged and friendly, and spoke some English. She said the house was in the hands of the Ministry of Agriculture and been used for some kind of research work, although not recently. She acted as caretaker and had a key. Inside, the rooms were bare, except for a few chairs and a desk. The plaster was crumbling and the ceilings were stained with damp. Every surface was pale with a thick
layer of dust. There was nothing obvious to recall the family that had lived here so long; except, possibly, the armorial escutcheon mentioned by Leigh Fermor – a bow with an upward-pointing arrow – which I forgot to look for until it was too late.

  Weeds had taken over the courtyard where sheepdogs and their puppies had welcomed István and his English guest. The stables and barns were abandoned, and the coach-house where the carriages and sleighs once stood was now an empty recess. There was, however, still a storks’ nest stuck precariously on the roof, and the chestnuts still cast cool shade, and the house martins swished from sunshine to shadow and back.

  The caretaker showed me a path leading from the courtyard down the slope to the park. She knew the Latin names of the trees: taxodium, catalpa, quercus, taxus baccata, carpinus. Seen from below, the bamboos formed a pale green sea, over which the tiled roof of the house and the pillared loggia gazed protectively. We came to an avenue of beeches whose branches met overhead, excluding the sunlight and creating a cool, ecclesiastical space. It led to the family grave, which had been overwhelmed by vegetation. My guide told me that it had been smashed and defiled when the Communists took over. They had held a party, she said, dancing on the graves of their feudal oppressors. The story had a familiar mythic ring.

  She herself knew nothing about the family apart from their name. She and her husband had come to live in a modern house on the edge of the park long after the Klobusickys had gone for good. She gave me an excellent lunch of grilled chicken and beer and freshly picked raspberries, and we talked of the usual things: Ceauşescu, prices, democracy. I asked her if anyone else had ever come, asking the same questions as me. There was one, she said, another Englishman, a few years before. He was tall, white-haired, older than me. He told her that he had stayed here a long time ago, that his friend was the son of the house. She had left him with his memories.

  That all happened in the summer of 1990. Later I learned some more as a result of writing an article for the Financial Times about the Leigh Fermor connection. Some months after it appeared I received a long letter from the writer, in blue ink and not easy to decipher. He disclosed that the ‘Xénia’ of the kastély at Zam and the ‘Angéla’ with whom he had wandered hand in hand through Transylvania were one and the same. She had, he said, left Zam at the end of the war and been forced to share a small flat in Budapest with ‘a fiendish woman’ whom she had eventually killed with a carving knife. According to Leigh Fermor’s account, she was acquitted at her trial on the grounds of provocation.

  As for István/Elemér, he had also moved to Budapest where he made a living translating English books, living in a flat in a ‘workers’ suburb’. Leigh Fermor kept in touch, visiting three or four times over the years. On the last occasion István was in hospital after having a stroke. He didn’t recognise his visitor, but when Leigh Fermor mentioned that he was going back to his home in Greece, István said he must be sure to look up his old friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

  ‘What a sad story about Countess Gemma Teleki,’ he said towards the end of the letter. ‘I never went to Sáromberke, alas.’ He was close, as it is only a few miles from Marosvásárhely: a long, low, handsome house in pale apricot stucco – with white reliefs over doors and windows and a mellow mansard roof with sleepy eyelid windows – standing back from the road behind a formal garden intersected by gravel paths and the inevitable box hedges.

  The Countess Gemma Teleki’s house at Sáromberke

  In 1934 the mistress of Sáromberke, Gemma Teleki, was 26. She was a Teleki by birth, her father acknowledged as the pre-eminent authority on the breeding of horses in a country where there were many experts on the subject. ‘It was his passion,’ she told me. ‘He wrote a book which he called Horses. He went to Cambridge, you know. It was he who taught me to speak English. He used a book called Brush Up Your English. He was a good teacher, very kind.’

  She laughed throatily, smoothing the wisps of hair away from her ears. ‘He read many English books to me. His favourite was Three Men In A Boat. When he was coming to an amusing episode he would begin to laugh. Then I would laugh as well. You know, my daughters say I speak Oxford English because I say spectacles instead of glasses. Or perhaps it should be Cambridge English.’

  Her husband was Count Károlyi Teleki – ‘Many Telekis married other Telekis,’ she explained, ‘because there were so many to choose from.’ But the marriage, like Angéla’s, was not happy. They divorced, and he lived at Sáromberke for a while with his second wife before leaving for Hungary and, subsequently, Canada. The Countess Gemma chose to stay, to be with her mother and father, sharing a cramped flat in the Teleki Library in Târgu Mureş. At some point, I wasn’t sure when, her three children went abroad as well.

  To be Hungarian aristocrats in post-war Romania was to present easy targets for official bullying. For several years the Countess and her parents remained cooped up inside the library, denied passports to leave and cut off from the rest of the family. After the deaths of her mother and father, the Countess moved into a basement room in Lupeni Street, not far from the library. She had a friend with a small market garden out of town, where she would drive each morning to collect the flowers before setting up her barrow. I visited her several times, both there and in her dark room which was crammed with books and mementoes and boxes of photographs and letters. She had no television, radio or telephone, and spent much of her spare time reading, and writing letters to her friends and children and grandchildren.

  Perhaps tactlessly, I asked the Countess to come with me to Sáromberke to show me around and tell me the history. She refused politely; there was too much sadness associated with it, she said, so I went on my own. The house had been converted into some sort of college for agricultural students. Its fabric was visibly decayed, the outbuildings were full of rubbish, the box hedging had been smothered in bindweed.

  A couple of miles up the road from Sáromberke was another, much grander, Teleki mansion, Gernyeszeg (Gorneşti), a great pile in cream-painted brick built around a deep, rectangular courtyard, with a mighty central clocktower roofed in red copper or zinc. The drive crosses high above a moat on a stone bridge and leads to a vaulted corridor giving access to the interior of the kastély.

  Gernyeszeg

  A sign at the gate stated that it was a sanatorium for children with tuberculosis. The moat had pretty much drained away, leaving a couple of shrunken pools bright green with pondweed and algae. A stone statue lay face down at the water’s edge. The parquet floor of the vaulted corridor was buckled and ridged. Damp stained the walls and ceiling. Beyond the courtyard the gardens had gone completely to ruin. But the trees – limes, copper beeches, cedars of Lebanon, oaks, sycamores – were magnificent, seeming to proclaim a lofty disdain for the dereliction around them. Facing the house along the road, rising like a green rampart, was a line of seven enormous willows. Pigeons flapped among the branches and cawing rooks fought over nesting sites.

  As I strolled through the park I understood all too well why the Countess had preferred to stay away from these decaying, unwanted leftovers from an age that now seemed incredibly distant. But I never heard one word of complaint from her about her fate.

  ‘I learned many things from my father,’ she said proudly. ‘He taught me always to remember what was good, and to ignore the bad things. There have been many sad events and difficult times, but what is the use of thinking about them? Many times my children have asked me to leave here, but how could I learn to live in Vienna or Canada or America? I am an old woman. I was born here and I have always lived here. My life is here. I am close to where my children were born and where I had so much happiness with my father and mother.’

  In her cheap dress and battered shoes, alone in a dark, damp room, she remained every inch a Hungarian noblewoman. But – uniquely among the Hungarians I met – she bore no grudge over the fate of Transylvania. ‘Yes, I am Hungarian,’ she said. ‘I was born a Hungarian countess and I shall die one. But now this is Romania. W
e do not like it, but we must accept it. That is what my father taught me.’

  The last time I saw her, she gave me some apricots and a tiny arrangement of dried flowers. I asked her if there was anything she wanted. She said: ‘I would like some gardening magazines. English gardening magazines. The English are the best gardeners in the world.’

  When I got home I posted her a bundle of issues of The Garden, the Royal Horticultural Society’s magazine, but I never heard if she received them.

  Gemma Teleki died in 2000, aged 92, without leaving Târgu Mureş. Two or three years before she died, she gave an interview to Hungarian television which astonished people by its fluency and the clarity of her memory, and touched them with her dignity and generosity of spirit. Patrick Leigh Fermor called hers a sad story, but – although there was certainly much sadness in it – it struck me more as uplifting. I still think of her as one of the most impressive people I’ve ever encountered.