Between the Woods and the Water (15 page)

But there were few traces of all this in everyday life. For better or for worse, landlords and peasants had known each other for many generations, whereas the officials from the Regat were newcomers to both of them; and, on the spot, a certain warmth of feeling had managed to outlive the changes of frontier and ownership and the conflicts of the past. “I remember old Count ——,” I heard a Rumanian shepherd say later on, “with all his horses and carriages! It was a fine sight. And look at him now, poor old man!” Comparable feelings often prevailed the other way about and, in my scanty experience, squires who were thunderous over their wine about the iniquities of the state would take care to exempt the locals who had been given their acres. Their ancient feudal relationship may have evaporated but hardy symbols still survived in doffed hats, kissed hands and ceremonious forms of address, and this gave a strange, almost a disembodied feeling of remoteness to this Transylvanian life. Most of the minor landowners had been obliged by circumstances to become Rumanian citizens; but very few of them had ever been to Bucharest. They looked on it as a faraway Babylon of dust and bribery and wickedness and vowed never to set foot there if they could help it, or even cross the former eastern frontier. Pining for the crown of St. Stephen, they had no eyes or ears or heart for anything but their mutilated kingdom to the west.

Finally it remains to be said that hardly a trace of this distress was detectable to a stranger. (In my particular case, the chief thing to survive is the memory of unlimited kindness.) Estates, much reduced, existed still, and at moments it almost seemed as though nothing had changed. Charm and
douceur de vivre
were still afloat among the faded decor indoors, and outside, everything conspired to delight. Islanded in the rustic Rumanian multitude, different in race and religion and with the phantoms of their lost ascendancy still about them, the prevailing atmosphere surrounding these kastély-dwellers conjured up that of the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish in Waterford or Galway, with all their sadness and their magic. Homesick for the past, seeing nobody but their own
congeners on the neighbouring estates and the peasants who worked there, they lived in a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream and many sentences ended in a sigh.

* * *

Ria had countless French books and I borrowed them freely. Tibor was no reader but his forerunners must have been, for the library was well stocked, chiefly with works in Hungarian and German. Abandoning hope with Magyar, I longed to plunge deeper in German and began by reading all the rhyming couplets under the marvellous drawings of
Max und Moritz
and
Hans Huckebein
in a large volume of Wilhelm Busch. Elated by this and aiming higher, I moved on to Thomas Mann's
Tod in Venedig
and made a slow start, looking up every other word and seeking Ria's help when I got stuck. But I did manage to finish it in a couple of weeks, and considering that I had only started German five months before, this seemed a big jump forward. I spent the mornings between the library and an outdoor table, poring over Central European history—Hungarian and Transylvanian in particular—in
Meyers Konversationslexikon
; and then moved on to the Béla Kun period in the rather lurid books of Jean and Jérome Tharaud—
La Fin des Habsburgs, Quand Israel est Roi
. These two French brothers, one of whom became an Academician, were great favourites in these parts. Though everyone knew a great deal about the past of Central Europe, their knowledge stopped dead at the crests of the Carpathians. Rumanian history—the history, that is, of Wallachia and Moldavia, the two principalities the other side of the mountains which eventually united under a single prince and then became the Kingdom of Rumania—was beyond their scope; it was invariably dismissed with mention of
die wilde Wallachei
—‘wild Wallachia' (a quotation, perhaps: who from?)—as though it lay in the heart of the Mongolian steppe.

Straying from this theme, but not very far, I discovered that the French for ‘gelding' was
hongre
—the Hungarians were thought to
have introduced the practice into Europe—while the German word is
Wallach
, which suggests a Rumanian origin, each of the countries concerned taking a step further east. My delight in finding that the word ‘hussar' was Magyar—
husz
, twenty, conjuring up a squadron twenty-strong—was shortlived, for more recent lexicographers derive it,
via
Serbian, from the Italian
corsaro
, a pirate, freely substituting a keel for hooves. There had been attempts in the past to derive ‘ogre' from ‘Hungarian'—or rather from their ancestors the Ugrians; but the word really comes from Orcus, the Roman underworld god. But at least the derivation of ‘cravat' from ‘Croatia,' which had been a vassal-kingdom of Hungary, seemed secure; the word had been implanted into France by the flowing neckwear of Louis XIV's mercenary Croatian cavalry. The word ‘coach' is a reminder of the Hungarian town of Kocs, presumably because such a vehicle was first built there.

* * *

These mornings were soon over. Storks presided over them and cuckoos sounded from different woods as long as the light lasted. Three days in a row were singled out by the arrival of birds I had never seen before: the first, with dazzling yellow and black plumage and a short haunting tune, was a golden oriole; next day was marked by the blue-green-yellow flash of bee-eaters; and the third by two hoopoes walking in the grass and spreading and closing their Red Indian head-dresses, then fluttering aloft and chasing each other among the leaves, their wings turning them into little flying zebras until they settled again.

Tibor's sister and some friends arrived from Vienna and there was much festivity and dressing up and picnics and finally a midnight feast on the very summit of the vine-clad hill. A bonfire was lit: a carriage disgorged four Gypsies—a violin, a viola, a czembalom and a double-bass—who assembled under a tree. The amber-coloured wine we drank as we leant on our elbows round the flames was pressed from grapes which had ripened on the very
slopes that dropped away all round. The vine-dressers climbed up, forming an outer ring, and when we had run dry they fetched fresh supplies from their cottages, filling all glasses until a cockcrow from an invisible farmyard spread an infectious summons through the dark; other cocks awoke; then the end of the Great Plain glimmered into being underneath us and everything except the Gypsies began to grow pale. Their strings and their voices kept us company all the way downhill, then through the gates and along the grass path through the trees. Our footprints showed grey in the dew; and when we reached the pillars along the front of the house, the sound of startled nests and birds waking up and the flapping of a stork from the pediment showed it was too late to go to bed.

These were the daily waking sounds. Soon they were joined every morning by the swish of scythes right up to the house-walls and the voices of the mowers singing to themselves; when one of them broke off for a minute, there was the clang of a whetstone along a blade. The scent of hay filled the house, haymakers peopled the landscape and spread their windrows in stripes of silver across the pale stubble. My room gave on a field where a big rick was going up, the layers ascending and radiating clockwise round the tall centre pole. Women with pitchforks knee-deep in a cart tossed up the hay while the men on the tapering cone fixed it like the whorls on an ammonite. The waggons creaking along the lanes were piled so high that wisps of hay entwined with dead poppies and wild flowers were caught up in all the low branches.

I spent much of the day with Tibor in the fields and walked in the hills for miles, picking up fragments of Rumanian. But I gave up keeping my diary for a while on the principle, I suppose, that these static intervals were irrelevant in a record of travel. I wish I had been less proud: these gaps make it easy to lose count of days and even weeks; but odd items and a few sketches scattered at the back help me reconstruct them and one of these fixes this particular lapse of time beyond question. Tibor, as though on a sudden cheerful inspiration, had said he would drive me to Arad—he
remembered he had some things to do there—and then on to my next halting place, where we were all to meet later on. After tea a touring-car, only used for journeys out of carriage range, was brought out to the front with some solemnity. Tibor was a little mysterious about our trip.

Arad was about the size of Guildford and, unlike the countryside, I had the impression there of hearing more Magyar than Rumanian in the streets. There were many Hungarian names over the shops and many Jewish and a multitude of ordinary German ones that belonged to Swabian settlers. The place was made famous in Hungarian history by the Austrian execution of thirteen Hungarian generals at the end of Kossuth's great rising against Habsburg rule in 1848. (I had just been reading about it.) There was little time to see much, however; Tibor's task was a protracted visit to a tall, dark and very pretty girl called Ilona, a great favourite of his, who lived in a discreet and leafy street leading down to the river Mures. She had summoned a friend called Izabella who was equally pretty in a different way, for my sake, I think. She had very fair hair and dark blue eyes and spoke no word of anything but Hungarian, but this didn't matter at all. (I wonder if her extreme fairness came from a dash of Slovak blood: I had seen similarly blond descendants of northern settlers in the neighbourhood of my penultimate Hungarian halt at O'Kigyos: not very far away as the crow flies.) Anyway, here she is, pressed like a petal in the back pages of my journal, carefully drawn, with her head leaning on her forearm and gazing out under arched brows, and, by a stroke of luck, looking nearly as pretty in the sketch as she did in real life. ‘Iza, Arad. May 16 1934' is pencilled in at the top.

* * *

Back again north of Arad, the wavy line of hills next morning had drawn back a few miles and the low, ranch-like manor house of Tövicsegháza, for which I've searched the map in vain, lay among cornfields under a clump of elms.

The moment we were shown into the billiard room, Tibor spotted a double-barrelled gun which was propped across the window-sill. He quickly broke it open and two cartridges jumped out of the breech. “Look at that! I ask you!” he said, laughing and putting them on a shelf with a sigh. “Polnische Wirtschaft! There's Polish housekeeping for you!” JasÅ¡, pronounced ‘Yash,' our host, came in at that moment and said he always kept it loaded and handy for the rooks, “Otherwise they wouldn't leave an ear of the young wheat for miles.”

In these circles, it was considered a boorish oversight to withhold from newcomers certain details about anyone they were about to meet. No English circumspection or studied vagueness hampered these utterances, still less the fear of seeming worldly or impressed by the boast of heraldry and the pomp of power. “JasÅ¡?” someone had said. “He comes from an excellent family in southern Poland, eight thousand acres, not far from Cracow. His great-grandfather was Austrian Ambassador to St. Petersburg and their Turk's head crest was granted after capturing three Tatar standards in the Ukraine.”

“His wife Clara? From an old, old, old...
uralte
”—here the speaker's eyelids would almost close as though in a dream at the thought of such antiquity—“family in the High Tatra mountains. They live in one of the most ancient castles in Hungary—Slovakia now, more's the pity! Counts since the reign of King Mátyás. They carry a double chevron dansetty between three salamanders quartered with five pikes hauriant; arms parlant, you know, after the river that rushes by, and the fish that swim in it.” (When armorial fauna were mentioned, for a moment the room or the lawn would seem to fill with fork-tailed lions looking warily backwards with blue claws and fangs; unicorns, mouldywarps, cockatrices, griffins, wyverns, firedrakes and little dragons covered with stripes; hawks and eagles were let loose and the air filled with corbies and martlets and swans with gold chains about their necks in spirals.)

Only after dealing with these essentials were minor points like character, looks or capacity allowed to crop up. In spite of some
territorial difficulties, the Hungarians had an undoubted sympathy for the Poles; what a relief to find an exception to the usual East European hatred of neighbours! These feelings were rooted long ago in shared enmity to the Germans, the Turks and the Muscovites and had been signally marked in the late sixteenth century when the Poles elected Stephen Báthory, the Hungarian Prince of Transylvania, to the Polish throne. He routed all their enemies, captured a score of Russian towns and drove Ivan the Terrible out of the Kingdom.

Jaš was slender and fair-haired with a high-bridged nose, hair cut
en brosse
, bright blue eyes behind very thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and an air of vagueness and goodwill. Ideas about archaeology, history, religion and physics seethed in his mind and he was said to be full of expert theories (prone to break down in practice) on economics, rotation of crops, the training of animals, winter fodder, forestry, bee-keeping, sheep dip, and how best to fatten ducks for the spring market. He welcomed eccentric notions and we had not been there five minutes before he asked us what we thought of the idea that the earth might be hollow, with a small sun at the centre and a much larger moon circling it whose shadow was the cause of night and day. Millions of stars about the size of Vienna or Warsaw rotating solar-centrically at different distances and speeds? That morning's post had brought him a trilingual pamphlet from the inventor of this theory and his pale eyes were alight behind their lenses. “Die Welt ist eine Hohlkugel!” he read out from the cover; “Le monde est une boule creuse! Ze vorld iss a hollow ball, my dear!” he explained, laying a hand on my forearm; then, turning the pages with emotion, he read out the most telling passages. Tibor, as we said goodbye, gave me the ghost of a wink.