Between the Woods and the Water (13 page)

[9]
Surname and Christian name are reversed in Hungary.

W
HEN THE
evening train from Budapest arrived, I had been hanging about the station platform at Lökösháza since noon and by the time I had climbed in and the red-white-and-green Hungarian flag had disappeared, night had fallen.

This borderland was the most resented frontier in Europe and recent conversations in Hungary had cloaked it with an added shadow of menace. Well, I thought, at least I have nothing to declare...I sat up with a jerk in the corner of the empty carriage: what about that automatic pistol? Seeing myself being led to a cell, I dug the little unwanted weapon out of the bottom of my rucksack and undid the flap of the leather case; the smallness, the lightness and the mother-of-pearl-plated stock made it look like a toy. Should I steal away from these bare wooden seats and hide it in the first-class upholstery next door? Or slip it behind the cistern in the lavatory? Or simply chuck it out into No-Man's-Land? In the end I hid it in a thick fold in the bottom corner of my greatcoat, fixed it there with three safety-pins, put the guilty garment on the rack and sat underneath with pounding heart as the train crawled through the moonlight.

In a few miles we reached the border and the blue-yellow-and-red flag of the Rumanian frontier post. Above the desk inside hung a photograph of King Carol in a white-plumed helmet, a steel breast-plate and a white cloak with a cross on the shoulder. Another frame showed Prince Michael, a nice-looking boy in a white jersey with large, soft eyes and thick, neatly brushed hair; he had also been a king during a three years' abdication by his father. It was a relief and rather an anticlimax when the yawning official
stamped my passport without a single glance at my stuff. The battered document still shows the date:
Curtici 27 April 1934
, the sixth frontier of my journey.

I thought I had been the only passenger, but a party of bearded and spectacled rabbis in long black overcoats and wide hats had climbed out of the end-carriage; they were attended by students with elf-locks corkscrewing down their wax-pale cheeks and the dark-clad gathering on the platform looked as strange under the moon as a confabulation of rooks. Three were dressed differently from the others; they wore soft-legged Russian boots and black caftans and the foxes' brushes coiled round their low-crowned beaver hats exactly matched the beard of one of them: a costume I came across several times later in northern Moldavia and Bukovina; and, later on still, among votaries hastening down the steep lanes of Jerusalem to the Wailing Wall. They were talking Yiddish and I somehow picked up the notion that the ones with the foxes' brushes were Southern Poles from Cracow or Przemysl, perhaps belonging to the zealot sect of the Hasidim; and I think they were all bound for some important meeting in Bucharest. When they got in again, the train went off into the night, the officials vanished and soon I was alone in the ragged streets of Decebal: the place was named after the last king of Dacia before it was conquered by the Romans.

Only dogs were about. Three of them barred the way, snarling and showing their gums and giving tongue through bared teeth, vicious as dingoes in the bright glare of the moon, their shadows crossing and traversing as they retreated down the dust of the main shuttered lane.

* * *

After the bare frontier date, a mist descends, and the next night's entry in my diary is almost as short: ‘
27 April, Pankota
—stayed with Imre Engelhardt, owner of the Apollo Cinema.' I have just found it on a map—Pîncota in Rumanian—but the cinema and
its owner have slipped away beyond recall. He must have been one of Maria Theresa's settlers from south-west Germany; all of them are loosely styled Swabians.

When the fog lifts, the landscape shows little change from the Great Plain I thought I had left, except for wooded hills in the distance. It was a geometrical interlock of chocolate-coloured ploughland with stripes of barley, wheat, oats, rye and maize with some tobacco and the sudden mustard flare of charlock. Clumps of trees broke it up and every few miles russet and sulphur-coloured belfries rose from shingle roofs. Each village had a rustic baroque church for the Catholics and another for the Uniats, and sometimes, though not so much hereabouts, a third for Calvinists or Lutherans; for though the Counter-Reformation had triumphed in Austria, lively and varied crops survived in Hungary and Transylvania. These churches were outwardly the same, but once indoors, the Stations of the Cross or a roodscreen encrusted with icons or the austerity of the Ten Commandments in Magyar above a Communion table gave their allegiance away at once. There were storks' nests and sweep-wells and flocks and cattle and Gypsies on the move. I began to like buffaloes the more I saw of them; their great liquid eyes, which seemed to lose the resentment I thought I had discerned on the banks of the Tisza, now looked aswim with pathos. But there was an important difference in the people. After the last weeks of blunt Magyar faces, the features were different—or was it merely imagination and recent reading that lent them a more Latin look? I fell in with a party carrying sickles and scythes and slung babies. Their ample white homespun tunics were caught in with belts as wide as girths and sometimes covered in iron studs, and, except for those who were barefoot, they were shod in the familiar canoe-tipped moccasins and rawhide thongs. Their rank sheepskin jackets were put on smooth side out and their hats—bulbous cones of black or white fleece over a foot high—gave them a wild and rakish look. They could all understand my hard-won fragments of Magyar; but I soon felt that the language they spoke to each other would be much easier to learn. A man was
om
,
a woman,
femeie
; and
ochi, nas, mâna
and
foaie
were eyes, nose, hand and leaf. They were a little puzzled at first by my pointing at everything in sight with gestures of enquiry. Dog? Ox? Cow? Horse?
Câine, bou, vaca, cal!
It was marvellous:
homo, femina, nasus, manus, folium, canis, bos, vacca
and
caballus
thronged through my brain in a delirious troop.
Câmp
was a field and
fag
a beech-tree (‘...quatit ungula campum!'...‘sub tegmine fagi...!'). How odd to find this Latin speech marooned so far from its kindred! The Black Sea hemmed it in to the east and Slavonic to north and south, while the west was barred by the Finno-Ugrian dactyls of the Magyars.

By late afternoon, these linguistic exchanges brought us to the little town of Ineu—‘Borosjenö' on my pre-war map—where a market day was ending. The place was full of lowing, bleating and squealing, carts were being loaded, pens broken up and hurdles stacked. Women and girls were busy with long goads keeping troops of poultry together. Kerchiefs of different colours were knotted under their chins and pleated skirts, with embroidered aprons back and front, sprang from girdles woven in patterns of red and yellow. A few of them had scarlet boots to the knee like figures out of the Russian ballet.

* * *

My goal was a house belonging to a friend called Tibor—I had met him with his namesake in Budapest—who had asked me to stay at an approximate date which was just about now: suddenly, hobnobbing with some farmers under an acacia tree, one foot on the step of a smart trap with a grey pony swishing its tail, here he was: jolly, baronial, rubicund, Jäger-hatted and plumed, an ex-Horse Gunner in the same troop as the other Tibor. His face lit in welcome and two plum brandies appeared on a tray as though by magic, and when they were swallowed we bowled off to the hills, Tibor ceremoniously lifting his green hat in answer to the doffed cones as we went.

* * *

All through the afternoon the hills had been growing in height and now they rolled into the distance behind a steep and solitary hemisphere clad to the summit with vineyards. We turned into the tall gates at the foot of it and a long sweep of grass brought us to a Palladian façade just as night was falling. Two herons rose as we approached; the shadows were full of the scent of lilac. Beyond the french windows, a coifed and barefoot maid with a spill was lighting lamps down a long room and, with each new pool of light, Biedermeier furniture took shape and chairs and sofas where only a few strands of the original fabric still lingered; there were faded plum-coloured curtains and a grand piano laden with framed photographs and old family albums with brass clasps; antlers branched, a stuffed lynx pricked its ears, ancestors with swords and furred tunics dimly postured. A white stove soared between bookcases, bear-skins spread underfoot: and, as at Kövecsespuszta,
[1]
a sideboard carried an array of silver cigarette-cases with the arms and monograms of friends who had bestowed them for standing godfather or being best man at a wedding or second in a duel. There was a polished shellcase from some Silesian battle, a congeries of thimble-sized goblets, a scimitar with a turquoise-encrusted scabbard, folded newspapers—
Az Ujság
and
Pesti Hírlap
sent from Budapest, and the
Wiener Salonblatt
, an Austrian
Tatler
full of pictures of shooting parties, equestrian events and smart balls far away, posted from Vienna. Among the silver frames was a daguerreotype of the Empress Elizabeth—Queen, rather, in this lost province of the former Kingdom—another of the Regent dressed as admiral of a vanished fleet, and a third of Archduke Otto in the pelts and the plumes of a Hungarian magnate. Red, green and blue, the squat volumes of the
Almanach de Gotha
were ready to pounce. A glittering folio volume, sumptuously bound in green leather, almost covered a small table and its name,
Az ember tragediája
, was embossed in
gold:
The Tragedy of Man
, by Imre Madács. It is a long nineteenth-century dramatic poem of philosophic and contemplative temper, and no Hungarian house, even the least bookish—like English houses with the vellum-bound Omar Khayyám illustrated by Edmund Dulac—seemed complete without it. Finally, a rack in the corner was filled with long Turkish pipes. This catalogue of detail composes an archetype of which every other country-house I saw in Transylvania seemed to be a variation.

At the other end, beyond the double doors of a room which was half-study and half-gunroom, more antlers proliferated; figures moved in the lamplight and the voices of guests sounded, and I hastened upstairs to wash and get some of the dust off before meeting them. As they all play a part in the following weeks and their houses follow each other like stepping stones I will wait till we reach them rather than introduce them now.

* * *

Next morning revealed the front of a late eighteenth-century building. Between the wings, four wide-spaced Tuscan columns advanced and ascended both floors to form a splendid loggia. White louvred shutters continued the line of windows on either side, each leaf touching its neighbour on the facade when they were open while indoors the light poured across the floors; closed, with their slats ajar when the sun became too hot, they striped the wide polished beams underfoot with bars of light and dark. There was a wheel with a handle which cranked out an enormous slant of white awning and, looking out, one might have been on the deck of a schooner painted by Tissot with tree-tops for waves. Beyond, the vine-clad hemispherical hill of Mokra soared like a volcanic island against snowy heaps of cloud and a pale sky. The smells of lilac, box and lavender drifted in, goldfinches moved about the branches, and now and then house-martins from the nests clustering along the pediment strayed indoors and flew in desperate circles or swept clean through the house and out the other side.

In the middle of this airy expanse I came on Tibor recumbent on a Madame Recamier sofa with a sheet tied round his neck, smoking an after-breakfast cigar while his valet lathered his chin. “Gyula will be ready for you in a minute,” he said, sending a perfect smoke ring towards the coffered ceiling; and soon I was lying swathed under Gyula's razor, imitatively wreathed in a fragrant cloud of smoke. Strolling up and down and sitting on the sill against a background of birds, Tibor told me anecdotes of the War and Gypsies and cabaret-girls, spacing out his adventures in Paris, Brussels and Constantinople with amusing and improper stories. As we went downstairs, chins tingling with eau-de-cologne, he wondered what there would be for luncheon; and, across the courtyard below, we caught sight of the cook sitting in the shade outside her kitchen in a whirl of feathers. “Good!” he said. “Margit's plucking a chicken”; and we set off to inspect the fields and the crops in an open carriage behind the coachman's black ostrich-feather and fluttering ribands. “This is the life,” I thought as we bowled along under the leaves.

But the great attraction at Borosjenö was Ria, who presided over everything. ‘Housekeeper' is too portentous and misleading a name for that charming and amusing face and the youthful figure that gave the lie to her prematurely grey hair cut in a shingle. She was Polish, the daughter of a music publisher in Cracow whom some misfortune had overtaken. I wondered if there had been a romance between her and Tibor, perhaps. If so, it was over; but they were great friends, and she was hostess in his bachelor household. She spoke beautiful French and Polish, German and Hungarian, with a bit of Rumanian as well. Inspecting my tangled wardrobe as I handed things over to be washed or mended, she asked how many handkerchiefs I had got. All lost except two. “Et quels torchons,” she said, holding them up. “Regarde-moi ça! Il faut que je m'occupe de toi!” and she did. She bought a dozen handkerchiefs of homespun linen in the country town of Arad, embroidered my initials on them, tied them neatly with a red ribbon and plonked them in my hands like a packet of sandwiches: “Au moins tu auras de quoi te moucher.” She had a delightful voice and we spent
hours singing at the picture-laden piano: French and German and a few Polish songs; I could join her in one of these, which I learnt like a parrot; and, all of a sudden as I write, the cheerful tune and the words come back.
[2]
She was very amusing and perhaps more sophisticated than Tibor. When she drove to see neighbours in the pony-trap or the carriage, I went too and I was soon abreast of a dozen comic biographies. Everyone loved her, and so did I.