Between the Woods and the Water (28 page)

A wide ledge ran round the house, and this and the inside walls were whitewashed. There was a fireplace with a semi-conical chimney; golden maize-cobs were stacked with the symmetry of a honeycomb and the stripped husks for firing lay heaped in a corner. It was very clean and trim for a place that was only used at times like this, for in winter snow covered everything. The only wall decoration was a hanging oil-dip twinkling before an icon of the Virgin and Child, haloed in frills of gilt tin.

These brothers were friendly, shy, self-reliant men with a lean, sweated look and hazel eyes so used to gazing half-shut at the sun and the wind that the wrinkles at the corners expanded over their tanned cheeks in small white fans. They wore moccasins and their white homespun tunics, caught in with wide belts, expanded to the volume of kilts. Their father was identical in feature and garb, except that his hair was white and that he was still jerkined in a fleece
cojoc
and hatted in a conical fleece
caciula
. He sat on the ledge, his hands crossed on the helve of an axe. The face of Radu's wife was sad in repose, gay in motion, and strikingly beautiful; she and another woman span as they went about their tasks. Their worn, heavily carved distaffs were stuck in sashes of black braid.
Elaborate detail but sober colours marked their attire: headkerchiefs and aprons of faded blue over white and many-pleated skirts, and intricately worked oblongs of the same faded hue which panelled their wide sleeves. Their torsos were enclosed in dashing-looking soft leather hauberks, shiny with wear and lacing up the side. When one of them started a new thread, Radu's wife licked the tip of her thumb and forefinger like a bank-teller, pulled some wool from the yarn which, drawn tapering to her other hand, span with the twirl of her spindle; all as unconsciously as knitting. She sang a
doina
to herself as she moved about the yard, each verse beginning “Foaie verde!”—“Green leaf”—or “Frunze verde!”—“Green frond.” These green-leaf invocations always struck me as a sort of woodland salute to beech, ash, oak, pine and thorn, as if the trees and their foliage held some mysterious and beneficent power.

There was nothing to drink but water, so we all had a swig out of the flask, sitting about the ledge on stools, and I ate
mamaliga
for the first time—polenta or frumenty, that is, made out of ground maize, the staple of country people in these parts; I had been warned against it, but perversely found it rather good. Radu pointed to the gun on the wall and said we could have a hare for supper if I stayed on for another day. We ended with soft white sheep's cheese: there was a tang of curds and whey in the yard, and dripping cotton bags hung from shady branches like snow-white pumpkins. The old man—one hand cupped, the other clenched—was busy at some task: clinks of metal were followed by a whiff like singeing cloth, caused by a piece of dried fungus which he had ignited by holding it against a flint and striking it with a magnet-shaped piece of steel; then, blowing on the smouldering fragment, he laid it on top of the rubbed tobacco leaves in the bowl of a primitive, reed-stemmed pipe. It was the first time I had come across this stone-age device, called a
tchakmak
farther south.

I would have picked up a mass of lore about wolves if I had known more of the language: there were two or three pelts about the house. They sometimes carried off lambs and sheep, but there
was little to fear at the moment; they were in the depths of the woods with their cubs; winter, when hunger and cold drove them down into the valleys, was the dangerous time. Mostly by gestures, he told me a pack had attacked some Gypsies in the snow the year before and left nothing but their boots and a few splinters of bone. What did they sound like? He put back his head and gave a long howl that was full of uncanny menace, and of anguish, too; (and he mimicked the stags' belling which would begin in a couple of months: a dark, primordial, throaty roar, which I heard next year in a High Moldavian ravine: the kind of sound ancient Cretans must have heard with dread from the entrance to the maze). Foxes, lynxes, wild cats, wild boars and brown bears were the other chief denizens of these woods.

It was getting dark and everyone was beginning to yawn, so I pulled on everything I had and lay outside under a tree. Radu brought out a heavy embroidered blanket, part of his wife's dowry, saying it would be cold later. Indoors, lit by the sanctuary lamp, she had crossed herself several times from right to left in the Orthodox way, thumb, index and middle finger joined to show the Oneness of the Trinity, and kissed the two haloed faces on the icon goodnight.

* * *

But these shepherds were not Orthodox, though their rites and nearly all their doctrines were sprung from the great Byzan-tine branch of Eastern Christendom. They were Uniats—‘Greco-Catholics,' as they called them locally—who, by their ancestors' submission to an Act of Union—hence the Uniat name—were no longer spiritual subjects of the Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople, or of the Rumanian Primate, but of the Pope. The Rumanians everywhere enter Christian history as members of the Orthodox, or Eastern Church; but, as we know, Transylvanians in the Middle Ages were subjects of the Hungarian crown. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Turkish wars reduced eastern Hungary to the famous vassal Principality of Transylvania. Eager to separate their Orthodox subjects from their co-religionist kinsmen the other side of the mountains—impelled also by Protestant vernacular zeal—the Rákóczi princes succeeded, by various means, in ending the Slavonic Mass of their subjects (which the Rumanians had retained from their early days under Bulgarian spiritual sovereignty), and imposing a Rumanian translation; not to encourage nationalism—just the reverse, in fact—but to widen the gulf between the liturgy of their Rumanian subjects and the Slavonic (and, recently, Greek) rite of their Eastern kinsmen; they hoped to set the Orthodox world of the Slavs and the Greeks at a further remove. Half a century later, when the Turkish eclipse made way for direct Habsburg rule, the Protestant cause waned and the Catholic waxed; and in 1699, a mixture of coercion and blandishment, backed by the astuteness of the Jesuits of Emperor Leopold, brought about a great triumph for the Counter-Reformation in the East: ecclesiastical dominion, that is, over many of the Rumanian Orthodox in Transylvania. By accepting the Union, the neophytes (or apostates) had to accept four points: the
Filioque
clause in the Creed; wafers instead of bread in the Communion service; the doctrine of Purgatory (which, like Limbo, is unknown in the East); and, most important of all, the supremacy of the Pope. All the other points of difference—the marriage of priests, a bearded clergy, the cult of icons, different vestments, rituals and usages—remained unchanged. This Act severed all official links between the Transylvanian hierarchy and the hierarchy of Wallachia and Moldavia; but distrust lingered in the Uniat rank-and-file and, for nearly a century, very many village priests slipped away and had themselves privily ordained by Orthodox bishops.

But in the end, these changes had the opposite of the wished effect. The new Mass kindled a sudden interest in the Rumanian language, and in Rumanian letters and origins as well. The publication of vernacular religious books in Transylvania, which the Princes inexpediently fostered, competed with those beyond the
mountains and forged an intellectual bond. Also, after the Union, gifted Transylvanian sons of the Uniat manse were sent to study in Rome, where the spiral carvings of Trajan's Column—Roman soldiers at grips with Dacian warriors dressed very like modern Rumanian mountaineers—filled them with exciting convictions of joint Roman and Dacian descent, and these gave body to traditions which, in a more nebulous form, had long been in the air. Thousands of Rumanian children were called Traian and Aurel after their first and last Roman Emperors and convictions about Dacian descent had sunk deep roots. Among Rumanians on both sides of the mountains, these ideas fostered a national spirit and irredentist claims which the past hundred years have plentifully granted. The Rumanian ethnic cause owes much to the Uniat Church, and the debt, for reasons comparable in worldliness to those which first established the Union, has been repaid by state abolition and compulsory return to the Orthodox fold. Not a decision prompted by religious fervour.

Thinking of all this, my mind flew back to those happy mornings among the books and microscopes of Count Jenö's library.
The Double Procession of the Holy Ghost
...! This tintack which split Christendom was just the kind of thing to excite the Count's historical curiosity. We had been talking about how, in the Byzantine East, the Holy Ghost proceeded only from the Father (“I don't quite know what they
mean
, mind you,” the Count had confessed) while, in the Catholic West he proceeded from the Father
and
the Son—ex Patre
Filioque
procedit. When did this Western clause—not mentioned in the first seven Councils (the only ones valid in the East)—first crop up? Reference-books soon heaped up round us on the library table. “Here we are!” the Count exclaimed after a while, reading out: “Clause interpolated in the Creed at the Third Council of Toledo (never heard of it!) in 589, when King Reccared of Aragon renounced the Arian heresy!” The Count looked up excitedly “Toledo!
King Recarred!
He was a Goth! Probably from these parts, his grandparents, I mean—Ulfilas's lot, gone West!” He read on skipping elliptically from page to page in
a Jingle-ish way...“Clause not yet adopted at Rome...omitted from manuscripts of the Creed...inclusion perhaps a copyist's mistake!
H'm
... Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes...but only adopted among the Franks... Here we are!
Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!
” He paused and rubbed his hands. “I wish I'd been there!” He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. “Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne—a Frank, of course!—but
approves
of the doctrine. H'm. Sounds like cold feet... But the next Pope adopts it...ninth century already. Then comes Photios, the great Eastern Patriarch and general fury, mutual anathema, and the final breach in 1054...” He looked up. “I've always wanted to know about it. I didna ken, I didna ken,” he said; then, closing the book, “Weel, I ken noo.”

Turning the pages of a Uniat missal belonging to his wife, he alighted on a directive preceding the Uniat liturgy: “‘In the Mass, the words
and from the Son
, concerning the procession of the Holy Ghost, are not included in the Creed. At the Council of Florence in 1439, the Church in no way demanded this addition from the Orientals, but only their adherence to this dogma of the faith.' Adhere, but don't utter!” he exclaimed. “
A dogma that need not speak its name!
” I said that it sounded a shadowy form of allegiance. “Please remember,” the Count said gravely, “you are speaking of the Holy Ghost.”

Among the Orthodox, Uniats have always borne a faint stigma of desertion, and among the rank and file of Catholics in Transylvania they seemed somehow—and rather unfairly—neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. The switch of fealty was certainly prompted less by spiritual conviction than by
raison d'état
: Counter-Reformation expansion and zeal on one side, and on the other, the chance of flight from a harsh to a slightly less harsh form of oppression. Later generations clung to their faith with staunch rustic tenacity as they still do in the Ukraine, and nobility and pathos haunt their story.

The first Uniats of all, however, were neither the Transylvanians
nor the Ruthenes, but later members of the Palaeologue dynasty: Michael VIII very briefly, and finally, the last two Emperors of the East. Our thoughts must wing back to the last years of Byzantium, where the Turks were closing in for the final scene. It was the hope of succour from the West that in 1437 sent John VIII Palaeologue and his court and clergy on the extraordinary journey to Florence which Benozzo Gozzoli has commemorated on the walls of the Medici Palace. During the discussions in Santa Maria Maggiore, two of the Eastern prelates were given cardinals' hats; but at home, chiefly stirred up by the
Filioque
question, Byzantium was in a ferment. Nevertheless, willy-nilly, and in the teeth of Orthodox protest, the Emperor accepted the Western demands. Gibbon describes the culminating moment with the Emperor enthroned on one side of the Duomo and the Pope on the other. ‘I had almost forgot,' he writes, ‘another popular and Orthodox protestor: a favourite hound, who usually lay quiet on the foot-cloth of the Emperor's throne; but who barked most furiously while the Act of Union was reading, without being silenced by the soothing or the lashes of the royal attendants.' Then the Emperor had to return and face his booing subjects at Byzantium. But, except for some brave Genoese, no help came and John's brother Constantine XI, still a Uniat—though a reluctant one, it would seem—fell fighting in the mêlée when the Turks stormed and captured the city. ‘The distress and fall of the last Constantine,' Gibbon says, ‘are more glorious than the long prosperity of the Byzantine Caesars.'

But it was the first Gibbon quotation which had fired
Count Jenö. “Just fancy! A dog in church! I wonder what he was called? What breed he was? One of those Arabian greyhounds, I bet...” After a pause, he said, “It reminds me of a similar occasion: The Vatican Council on Papal Infallibility in 1870! Endless sessions and lobbying, you know, and nothing but rows—Schwarzenberg, Dupanloup, Manning and the rest of them. But they pushed it through at last. When it was being ceremonially read out in Saint Peter's, a terrible storm broke out—clouds black as soot! forked lightning! rain, hail and thunder, you couldn't hear a word!” Count Jenö, an easy-going but devout Catholic, beamed among his moths and his specimen-cases. He loved this kind of thing. “Not a word! Much worse than the Emperor's dog! What's more, the Franco-Prussian war broke out next day, and all the French and German cardinals rushed north on the new railway—in different first-class carriages, of course—and cut each other stone dead when they got out to smoke and stretch their legs on the platform at Domodossola...”