Between the Woods and the Water (20 page)

István's blue eye was alight as he translated the last bit. Then without exchanging another word we struck out for the shore as fast as crocodiles and, tearing at poplar twigs and clumps of willow-herb, bounded up the bank. Gathering armfuls of sheaves, the girls ran into the next field, then halted at the illusory bastion of a hay-rick and waved their sickles in mock defiance. The leafy disguise and our mincing gait as we danced across the stubble unloosed more hilarity. They dropped their sickles when we were almost on them and showered us with the sheaves; then ran to the back of the rick. But, one-armed though we were, we caught them there and all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter.

* * *

“
Herrgott!
” I heard István suddenly exclaim—much later on, and a few yards round the curve of the rick—smiting his brow with his hand. “Oh God! The Bishop! The Gräfin! They're coming to dinner, and look at the sun!”

It was well down the sky and evening was gathering. The ricks and the poplars and the serried rows of sheaves and haycocks were laying bars of shadow over the mown field and a party of birds was
flying home across the forest. István's hay-entangled hair was comically at variance with his look of consternation and we all laughed. Extracting strands of hay and the clinging barley, we tidied Safta and Ileana's plaits disordered by all this rough and tumble, and set off hand in hand with them for the river, István and I on tiptoe. “Poor feet,” they murmured. After goodbyes we dived in and started the long swim back, turning many times to wave and call to those marvellous girls and they waved and answered until they were out of earshot and then, after a bend in the river, out of sight as well.

The current was faster than we thought. Close to the bank it ran sluggishly but rushes and cress and duckweed were a hindrance, so either way our rate was much slower than our buoyant journey downstream. Swallows skimmed under the branches; a shepherd and some returning harvesters looked at us with amazement. After long toil, and trusting to nightfall, we got out and ran through thickening dusk and at last, thank God, found everything as we had left it. We dressed and saddled up, then cantered three miles home through the lit outskirts of the village and into the woods again, stooping under the low branches, racing each other the last half-mile until we hammered over the bridge and under the archway and leapt to the ground with pounding hearts, scattering the pigeons. We washed, changed and brushed our hair at high speed and were soon climbing the steps to the loggia.

Dinner was laid at one end, and the guests, sitting or decorously standing glass in hand, were gathered at the other. The thin and jewelled fingers of the iron-grey shingled Gräfin were crossed in her lap and the purple sash of the Bishop glowed in the lamplight.

“Ah, there you are,” István's mother said. We weren't late at all; and in a few moments István was kissing the Gräfin's hand in his polished and easy style, and then the Bishop's ring. When we were settled at table, I couldn't keep my mind on the conversation: the afternoon's aura still compassed me about; my feet tingled from the prick of the stubble and it was hard to keep a private smile off
my face. The Gräfin unfolded her napkin and shook it loose with a twinkle of sapphires.

“Well, István,” she said, in the affectionate and rallying tone an aunt might use to a favourite nephew. “What have you been up to?” I avoided looking in his direction. If our eyes had crossed, we would have been done for.

We went back to the fields two days later, but there was nobody there. All had been harvested and even the sheaves had gone. We never saw Safta and Ileana again and felt sad.

* * *

The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly. Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and, finally, wonderful melons and raspberries. The scarlet blaze of paprika—there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder—was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before, when—it was impossible to imagine it!—snow covered all. Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow. They snored among sheaves and hay-cocks and a mantle of flies covered them while the flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved.

Behind the thick walls and the closed afternoon shutters of the
kastély, sleep reigned fitfully too, but resurrection came soon. The barley was already in and István was busy with his reapers and the last of the wheat. (In Hungary, the harvest began on the 29th of June, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, but it was a bit earlier hereabouts.) When we set off, István's mother called from an upper window, “Do take your hat!” She sent it skimming down and he dropped his rein, caught it in flight and clapped it on, “You're getting as black as a Gypsy.” After the long weeks of sickles and scythes and whetstones, it was threshing time. Old machines were toiling away and filling the valleys with their throbbing, driven by engines with flapping belts and tall Puffing Billy chimneys expanding in a zigzag at the top. Up in the mountains, horses harnessed to wooden sledges and rollers for shelling the grain trotted round and round on circles of cobble. Winnowing followed, when clouds of skied grain sparkled and fell and then sparkled again as the next wooden shovelful transfigured the afternoon with chaff. The sacks, carried off in ox-carts, were safe in the barns at last. If the waggoners were Rumanians, instead of crying “stânga!” or “dreaptă!” in their native tongue when they wanted their oxen to turn left or right (or “jobb!” or “bal!” in Magyar if they were Hungarians) they would shout “heiss!” and “tcha!” I had first noticed these arcane cries when buffaloes were being coaxed or goaded along. István thought that the Turks had first brought these animals here, probably from Egypt, though they must originally have come from India. But the words are neither Turkish, Arabic, Romany, Hindi nor Urdu.

July brought a scattering of younger Transylvanians and their relations in search of refuge along the river valley from the heat of Budapest, which summer had turned into one of the great tropical cities of the world. There were parties and picnics and bathing, and tennis at István's till it was too dark to see the ball, on a court sunk among thick trees like a shady well; and feasting and singing round pianos in those long disintegrating drawing-rooms, and sometimes dancing to a gramophone. A few of the records were
only a year or two out of date, many much older:
Night and Day, Stormy Weather, Blue Skies, Lazybones, Love for Sale, Saint Louis Blues, Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise
. In case of need, István was revealed as a proficient pianist—“but only for this sort of stuff,” he said, vamping, syncopating, honky-tonking and glissandoing away like mad; then, spinning completely round on the piano-stool, he ended with a lightning thumbnail sweep of the whole keyboard from bass to treble.

The village calendar was starred with feasts and saints' days and weddings. Gypsies throve, the sound of their instruments was always within earshot and the village squares were suddenly ringed with great circular wreaths of dancers in wonderful clothes with their hands on each others' shoulders, a couple of hundred or more: and the triple punctuating stamp of the
horă
and the
sârbă
, falling all together, would veil all their bravery for a mo-ment in dust-clouds. (I learnt all these dances later on.) It was at night that they impinged most insistently, especially on the eve of a wedding, when the groom and his paranymphs went through the slow stages of a mock abduction. If the rhythms of
High Hat, The Continental
or
Get Along, Little Dogie
flagged for a moment among the faded looking-glasses and sconces and portraits in the kastély, staccato cries, high-pitched and muted by distance, as the bride was hoisted aloft, would come sailing up from the village below and through the long windows. “
Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!
”
[21]
The dancing was spurred on late into the night by the new apricot brandy, and the fiddles and zithers and clarinets and double-basses were heckled by the distant yelping of wild rustic epithalamia; then strings, hammers and the shrill reeds would be drowned once more by
Dinah
, and our own hullabaloo under the chandeliers.

“
Hai, pe loc, pe loc, pe loc!
” the dancers below were stamping in unison. “
Să răsară busuioc!
” (“Stamp on the ground, let the basil shoot up!”)

“
Foiae verde, spic de griu, măi!
” A wailing
doină
of real Gypsies mounted through the glimmer, followed by a reedy twirl on the clarinet; but the green leaf and the wheat-ear of the local song hadn't a chance:

[1]
The only followers of the Latin Rite in this part of Rumania were the Hungarians and the Swabians. The surrounding population were mostly Uniats, I think: Catholics of the Oriental Rite, that is, whose Orthodox liturgy had been sung in Rumanian since the late seventeenth century, after the Greek period which followed the original Church Slavonic.

[2]
The problem was solved twenty years later at the Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy. It is the eleventh verse of Psalm 91 and, as it is sung every night at Compline, I must have heard it the night before.

[3]
The Rumanian, thus the official name is
Mures
, (pronounced ‘Mooresh'), but as chance willed that I only heard its Magyar form of
Maros
(pronounced ‘Marosh') during this part of the journey, I find it unnatural to put it down differently. From now on there are often two or three names for geographical features, so confusions are bound to occur and I apologise for them in advance.

[4]
S, avars, in.

[5]
A ‘Ban,' a Persian word first brought to these regions by the Avars, was a military governor and his jurisdiction was a Banat, a term later applied to some frontier provinces of Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia; but the unqualified ‘Banat' has always meant this particular region. Rather oddly, a Ban never ruled over it.

[6]
The memory of Count Jenö's prepossession cropped up at luncheon with Arthur Koestler in an Athens taverna about twenty years ago. Immediately alert, Koestler said it had interested him too, but he didn't know as much about it as he would like. A year or two later
The Thirteenth Tribe
appeared, causing a stir among Jewish historians. Could this taverna conversation have been the impulse that prompted him to take it up again? It is too late to ask him.

[7]
Bruce Chatwin, for whom nomads and their history hold fewer and fewer secrets, tells me that this is borne out by finds from 400
bc
, dug up in a Turkic
kurgan
(barrow) at Katanda in the Altai kept intact by the permafrost, of a nomad chief clad in a patchwork jerkin of lozenges, 4” x 3”, dyed orange, blue, yellow and red, skinned off small mammals—jerboas, perhaps, that bound about the steppe.

[8]
It is haunted by the sacrifice of the master mason's wife, like the Bridge of Arta in Epirus and Curtea de Arges, in Wallachia. All three are the theme of old ballads.

[9]
Hunedoara.

[10]
An exact replica of this castle stands among poplars on a lake-island in the City Park of Budapest. It was put up in honour of Hunyadi for the 1898 celebrations of a thousand years of Hungarian history, and it was the memory of this fleeting glimpse which, for a moment, had given the Transylvanian original its almost fictional look.

[11]
Some experts, including David Rosenthal, its most recent translator, are convinced that the great Catalan epic of chivalry,
Tirant lo Blanc
, was based on the feats of Hunyadi. Written a few decades after the hero's death, it was one of the favourite books of Cervantes; and if, as some think,
lo Blanc
—‘the White'—is really ‘the Vlach' (V and B being interchangeable), the theory of his Rumanian paternity is strengthened.

[12]
It was added to further by Gábor Bethlen, the celebrated Thirty Years' War commander.

[13]
His brother Jean, the last Prime Minister, had been assassinated by the Iron Guard six months before. “A horrible lot of people,” Count Jenö succinctly said; then: “What a pity! Duca was the best politician in the country.”

[14]
He was a close friend of Adam v. Trott and was involved, later on, in the Stauffenberg Conspiracy, though it seems he had scruples about actual assassination. See Tatiana Metternich's autobiography
Tatiana
in England,
Under Five Passports
in the United States and
The Berlin Diaries 1940-45
of ‘Missie' Vassiltchikov (Chatto, 1986).