Between the Woods and the Water (9 page)

Those long un-desert-like stretches have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek's hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as though they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved. Malek's alert and good-tempered ears, his tireless and untiring gait and the well-being he radiated, meant that we infected each other's mood, as horse and rider often do.

I had taken too northerly a path in the dark and the unseen town of Cegléd lay to the south-west. We stopped and ate in the shade by the Zagyva river. Later, a change in the cultivation, a sudden increase in the trees and the number of wagtails told of the
closeness of another river; and soon, through the willows and the enormous spreading poplars, there it was: the wide Tisza, the second river in Hungary, flowing sedately south between low banks and a flutter of reeds. Some rough boats were beached under the trees and a fisherman near the other bank toiled with a throw-net, gathering it into the boat again and again and casting it over the current in a sequence of momentary clouds.

I had been thinking about the Caliph's elephant as we trotted downstream; then, among the feathery calamus rushes, loomed a vision as unexpected and almost as arresting. Just visible above the surface of a backwater, a wide, black, porous-looking snout emerged, its flaring nostrils weighted with a heavy ring. Sweeping back from a matted clump on the brow grew enormous, crinkled and flattened horns. Dark, liquid eyes gazed with torpid resentment straight into mine. Not far off, another huge and ungainly creature, similarly equipped and plastered with mud, was lazily swishing a tasselled tail. I had passed many ox-carts on the road, but nobody had mentioned water-buffaloes and they were an awe-inspiring surprise. I saw them often after that, especially in Transylvania, wallowing in slime or yoked two and two and drawing heavy loads with unbelievable slowness and ill-will.

Stopping at a bridge that would have taken us on to Törökszentmiklos—the name commemorated the Turks, for a change, and St. Michael as well—we followed the right bank, heading for Szolnok. Soon the carts and the cattle and a pony-trap and a couple of men on horseback coming in the opposite direction hinted that a market-day was ending. Then we were in the dusty outskirts of a town and I soon found the house I was after.

Dr. Imre Hunyor, a rubicund and cheerful man, had been warned of the invasion. We headed at once for a neighbour with a stable and a paddock—the vet, I am almost sure—and put Malek in his kind hands. When we left, two red setters followed us with an eager look. A dachshund joined them. Two sheepdogs arrived. When a whole litter of nearly full-grown puppies came bounding clumsily with an expectant air, the doctor and I halted and exchanged
puzzled glances. Meanwhile, two nondescript animals were coming along the lane with alert and friendly mien, and then three more, and they all gazed up as though awaiting a sign. “I wonder,” Dr. Hunyor said, “if it could be
that
?” He was pointing at the saddle-bags on my arm. Still too big to fit inside, the salami with its red, white and green girdle had been sticking out under the sun all day and the evening breeze wafted its message over the puszta, until even I, inured as I was by gradual degrees, began to notice something. The dogs were wagging their tails; one or two started to bound in the air with fitful barks. Resigned to loss, I was about to toss the sausage in their midst when the doctor stayed my hand. “Nein, nein!” he said. “Es würde einen Bürgerkrieg lancieren!” It would start a civil war! So I got out my knife, sliced it into fragrant discs and set them spinning. The dogs scattered in delirium and in a moment it was all over.

* * *

The first volume of this story tells of a thick green manuscript book I bought in Bratislava and used as a notebook and a journal and finally, five years later, at the outbreak of war, left behind by mistake in a friend's country-house in Rumania where I was living.
[6]
A few years ago, after decades of separation, I miraculously got it back, with its green binding a bit frayed and faded, but intact. The pencilled journal in it is a great help, but not the unintermittent stand-by it should be. I started it in Slovakia with a long entry for each day; but in towns, thanks to morning headaches perhaps, it was sometimes neglected: and it didn't always pick up at once when the journey was resumed. The same happened in Budapest and the earlier parts of the ensuing travels. Szolnok, for instance, just has the names of the town and the cheery doctor who put me up: the delicious, boiling hot, scarlet and orange carp soup bursting with paprika we had for dinner is remembered but
unrecorded; the rest has gone. Next day mentions ‘Baron Schossberger' and ‘Pusztatenyö,' a small place about a dozen miles to the south-east. Szolnok itself has left only a shadowy recollection. I remember trotting across the Tisza bridge because I halted half-way over to watch a string of rafts coming downstream between great crowds of poplars that grew tall enough along the banks to give the illusion of a pale flickering forest. The rafts disappeared under the bridge, emerged the other side, then dwindled along the current with their burdens of timber, heading for the Danube. Soon after, I reached a low country-house (where kind Dr. Hunyor had already telephoned) and saw Malek put in a loose-box during luncheon. The place belonged to a friend of Tibor v. Thuroczy, brother-in-law of Pips Schey, who had been so kind to me in Slovakia; Baron Schossberger came of a Jewish banking family in Budapest. Tall, brisk and piercing-eyed, he was a passionate farmer and he proudly stroked a newly-arrived threshing-machine as we headed for the house.

Later, as Malek and I tittuped past a sleepy railway-halt called Pusztapo, the scene clears a bit; its name has stuck only because of its oddity. Hamlets like this were hardly more than a row of thatched cottages on either side of the dusty way. Sometimes I would stop and buy some oats; when the word
kocsma
over a door or painted in white on a window-pane indicated a tavern, I would dismount and sit on the bench among the budding hollyhocks over a small glass of a fierce country schnapps called
seprü
, or
cseresznye
, when made of cherries. Sometimes, blinking in the sun and the dust, a waggoner or two might be on the same bench and, though we were incommunicado, I was among friends at once because of the prevalent sympathy for horses: Malek's fine looks won all hearts, and everyone stroked him. “Nagyon szép!” they would murmur, “Very beautiful” or “Az egy szép ló,” “He's a fine horse...” (Sketchy vocabularies are jotted in the journal here and there:
zab
, oats;
ló
, horse;
lovagolok
, I ride;
lovagolni fogok
, I will ride;
lovagolni fogok holnap Mezötúrra
, I will ride to Mezötúr tomorrow.
Gyönyörü!
excellent or first class, it continues, and
Rettenetes!
, terrible! and so on.) Sitting with the reins loose in my hands under the transparent leaves of the acacias, I felt like a lone cowboy venturing among little-known tribes and the Gypsies and the shepherds with their tomahawk-staves supplied corroborative detail.

When a village fell behind, we were alone once more in a flat and now familiar landscape, half desert and half sown, with its flocks and its herdsmen and its solitary sweep-wells and its cloud-processions along the horizon. In the late afternoon we were picking our way through another enormous herd of cattle with those long straight horns. Soon Gypsy hovels appeared and a straggle of kilns and sheds and thousands of bricks set out to dry and a rambling overgrown churchyard; then solider houses multiplied and we were on the outskirts of the substantial country-town of Mezötúr.

Smaller than Szolnok, it was a place of some consequence nevertheless. (Between two coffee-houses in the main street with
kávéház
helpfully inscribed across their fronts, another shop-window full of cosmetics and lotions and pictures of women with lowered lids stroking their soft complexions had a mysterious superscription:
Szépség Szálón
. After a few seconds' delay, like the working of a slow calculating machine, ‘Beauty Parlour' came to the surface...) Many of the shops had Jewish names, German in origin but spelt in the Hungarian way. Others were simple Hungarian words—Kis, Nagy, Fehér, Fekete—which may have been translations of Klein, Gross, Weiss and Schwarz, changed during Magyarising drives in the past.
[7]
A grocer called Csillag—Stern?—set me on the right track for stabling. There were plenty of horses about and many country carts; old and battered four-wheelers with their hoods down waited patiently under the leaves or trundled about in the dusty evening light. Down a back lane at the stables I fell in with an ex-student called Miklos Lederer. He had just
been apprenticed to a chemist; when Malek had been watered and fed, he helped me carry all the tack to a room in the house where he had taken digs. Half Hungarian and half Swabian, he too spoke German. Like everyone else at this time of the day, we strolled about the town, while busy swallows whisked by; there was something indefinably oriental in the atmosphere of the place. (I only discovered later on that south of varying parallels of latitude the
corso
—this universal evening promenade—was a phenomenon that stretched all the way from Portugal to the Great Wall of China.) We shared a paprika chicken in an eating-house and had coffee out of doors. Then noise and music enticed us into a much humbler
vendéglö
full of shepherds and drovers. They were tough, tousled and weather-beaten fellows in knee-boots or raw-hide moccasins lashed on with thongs, and they wore small black hats and smoked queer-looking pipes with lidded metal bowls and six-inch stems of reed or bamboo; the collars of the smarter ones, worn with no tie, were buttoned with apoplectic tightness. The instruments of the Gypsies were a violin, a 'cello, a double-bass, a czembalom and, most improbably, an ornate harp, chipped and gilded and six feet high between the knees of a very dark harpist; his sweeps across the strings added a liquid ripple to the languor and the sudden fury of the tunes. Some of the customers were groggy already: spilt liquor, glassy eyes and benign smiles abounded. Like all country people venturing into towns, new arrivals were shy and awkward at first, but this soon dissolved. One rowdy tableful, riotously calling for wilder music and for stronger wine, was close to collapse. “They will be in tears soon,” Miklos said with a smile, and he was right. But they were not tears of sorrow; it was a sort of ecstasy that damped those wrinkled eye-sockets. I learnt about
mulatság
for the first time—the high spirits, that is, the rapture and the melancholy and sometimes the breakage that the stringed instruments of Gypsies, abetted by constant fluid intake, can bring about. I loved this despised music too, and when we got up to go after a couple of hours, felt touched by the same maudlin delectation. A lot of wine had passed our lips.

I wonder how much Cuman and how much Jazygian blood mingled with Hungarian in the veins of all these revellers?

* * *

Next day the clouds that usually lingered on the skyline looked like closing overhead. A menacing canopy formed and I felt a drop on my neck; Malek quivered and his ears twitched inquisitively and the dark stars that sprang up all round in the dust soon spread and cohered in a wet pockmarked stippling as the rain swept down. It didn't last long. The sun broke through and a rainbow hooped the middle distance. The clouds scattered again, Malek's glistening coat and my shirt were soon dry, and a cool, damp breath of wind and fresh rainy hues transformed the fields and the trees. I wish I had seen the
fatamorgana
which haunts the Great Plain in the summer months; but beyond the thin wet-looking lines that bright sunlight sometimes lays across distant surfaces, there was no sign of it. I had read and heard of the Alföld dust-devils. Maelstroms of dust and straw and dead leaves twirl in the wind and climb to enormous heights and then revolve across the plain at great speed, seeming to mop and mow like rushing phantoms as they go; but autumn is the time for them and I only saw these portents much later, on the Baragan, that desolate expanse of steppe across the river from the Dobrudja in the Danube's penultimate loop.

A wood lay ahead and, all of a sudden, out of the silence a cuckoo began calling. It grew louder as we approached and so clear that the horse's ears twitched again. The strange flat scene, the rainbow and the sudden cuckoo—a sound, like the nightingale, which everyone considers their private property—brought on an abrupt and unexpected onslaught of homesickness. Why was I ranging this beautiful landscape instead of familiar woods and hills in England, a thousand miles west? When we got under the branches, a collusion of tree-trunks stressed and expanded this mood: the place might have been an English spinney. Hazel, elder,
dog-roses and cow-parsley grew in a clearing and raindrops lay in the hollows of leaves. There were old man's beard and deadly nightshade and brambles that another couple of months would cover with blackberries; a blackbird, pecking in the dead leaves, flew up and perched among branches aslant with sunbeams. There were two goldfinches, a thrush and a blackcap. Taken unawares, I sat under a tree and ate bread and cheese sprinkled with paprika and then an apple and smoked cigarette after cigarette listening to the cuckoo, the blackbird's song and the thrush's encore while Malek cropped the grass a yard away. The birds were all dominated by the cuckoo; it sounded as though he were perched just overhead, and I could still hear him when the wood was far behind.

Poppies scattered the green crops, the smell of hay, clover and lucerne floated in the air, and tawny-maned horses grazed. I wished the journey would never end. But the next halt, beyond another green line of trees, was the last, and in spite of dawdling over this final equestrian stage, too short a ride. Following a railway line, I was soon crossing a bridge over a fast-flowing river and then riding into Gyoma. The agent of Malek's owner had a friend there to whom I was to surrender him. I thought that the return journey to that leafy, half-glimpsed château near Budapest might be a difficult business; but when I said so, the friend brushed the suggestion aside. Nothing would be easier; he would put Malek in charge of someone going to the capital next day—according to a signpost, it was only 166 kilometres to Budapest—and he would be home in a few hours. I handed him over with a heavy heart.