Between the Woods and the Water (25 page)

We climbed in and started off. When István pressed the scarlet bulb, the brass trumpet let out its melancholy delayed-action moo. “Not quite right for the Third Honvéd Hussars!” Angéla said. We sloughed Făgăras,-Fogaras-Fogarasch like a snake-skin and were soon scorching along the road we had come by until we passed the Agnetheln turning and broke new ground.

The rain-scoured landscape and the flocks of clouds rushing across the sky had made us lower the hood. On our left the huge mass of the mountains heaved itself up in a succession of steep folds. Wooded gorges pierced the foothills and the higher slopes were darkened by scarves of forest until the bare rock emerged in a confusion of rugged humps and peaks. High above, we knew, a score of small lakes and tarns gazed up at the sky and we thought
we could discern a glint of snow here and there, but it was too late in the year; it must have been a chance discolouring of the rock. On our right hand the trees which followed the course of the Olt river
[8]
swayed towards us and veered away many times, half keeping us company until the river twisted due south and coiled away between the chasm that led to the Red Tower Pass. (Once through this great cleft, it broke into the Regat—the pre-war Rumanian kingdom—and began its hundred-and-fifty-mile journey through the southern foothills and across the Wallachian plain, giving its name, on the way, to the whole province of Oltenia; then it flowed into the Danube like every stream in this vast blind-alley of the Carpathians.) A few miles before we lost it, István pointed across the river to a point where a thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey, the oldest gothic building in Transylvania, stood in ruins. “King Matthias suppressed it,” he said, “because of the immorality of the monks.”

“Oh?” Angéla and I said together. “What immorality?”

“I'm not sure,” István answered, then added cheerfully, “everything, I expect”; and the sinful precincts, one with Sodom and the Agapemone, fell behind us stubbornly mouldering in the fields.

Another momentous landmark followed: the battlefield where Michael the Brave of Wallachia had beaten the army of Cardinal Andreas Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, cousin of the Sigismund whose victories against the Turks had ended in abdication and madness. After the battle, some turncoat Szeklers presented Prince Michael with the Cardinal's mangled head: a sad finish to the great house of Báthory. Their uncle Stephen—Transylvanian Prince, then King of Poland—had prised the armies of Ivan the Terrible out of captured Lithuanian cities and driven him back into Muscovy.

The gentle hills rolling to the north were scattered with Saxon thorpes; then all the villages were filled with Rumanian sounds once again. István charioted us with skill and speed, braking in
plenty of time in the village streets for geese to hiss their way across; then shooting forward again. Stretches of road soared up and down like a switchback, swooping into hollows and breasting uphill into new vistas while Angéla lit cigarettes for us all and handed them left and right.

When we approached the outskirts of Hermannstadt—Sibiu—Nagy-Szeben (the last name, of course, is the one he used) István groaned aloud. In the Szekler capital the day before we had clean forgotten to look at the Teleki library; now, in this ancient Saxon town, there was no time to look at anything at all. Churches rose in plenty and fabulous old buildings beckoned; above all, there was the Bruckenthal Palace where the library was packed with manuscripts and incunabula; there was a gallery with room after room of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters. As a tease, István enlarged on these splendours, “Memling, Frans Hals, Rubens...” he said, his hand leaving the steering wheel with an airy flourish.

Angéla said, “You read that in a book.”

“... Titian, Magnasco, Lorenzo Lotto...” he went on; then he described the charm of the inns, the wonders of local Saxon cooking, their skill with sucking pigs and ducks and trout, sighed, “
No time! No time!
” and drove on down cobbled lanes and across market-places and great flagged squares. We might have been in Austria or Bavaria. Once more, the names over the shops were all Saxon. Zoological and heraldic inn-signs hung from stanchions along massive, shady arcades and no rustic discretion hampered the baroque buildings all round us. Tall casements rose between louvred shutters with twirling hinges; there were triangular and bow-topped pediments and houses plastered yellow and ochre and saffron and green and peach and mauve, and at either end of the serrated roof-trees elliptic mouldings elaborated the crow-steps of the gables; these were pierced by lunettes adorned with flourishes and scrolls, and the serried juts of dormer-windows broke up the steep slants of rose-coloured tile. It was the perfect urban counterpart to the rustic masonry of the villages. Half-timbered buildings appeared, stalwart towers barred with string courses were faced
with the gilded numbers of clock-dials, crowned with onion-domes of tile or sulphur-green copper and finally topped with spikes fitted with weathercock pennants. All the upper storeys were buoyed on a froth of unpollarded mulberries and chestnut trees. Angéla had never been there before either, and our excitement and frustration ran deep; and as the motor-car threaded its way through a maze of stalls and cart-horses, a new thought smote: as far as my journey went, these houses and streets and towers were the last outposts of an architectural world I was leaving for good.

The reader may think I am lingering too long over these pages. I think so too, and I know why: when we reached our destination in an hour or two, we would have come full cycle. It wasn't only an architectural world, but the whole sequence of these enchanted Transylvanian months that would come to a stop. I was about to turn south, away from all my friends, and the dactylic ring of Magyar would die away. Then there was István; I would miss him bitterly; and the loss of Angéla—who is little more than a darting luminous phantom in these pages—would be a break I could hardly bear to think of; and I can't help putting off the moment for a paragraph or two.

* * *

I must, anyway. Over-confident after our resistance to the Sibiu-Szeben-Hermannstadt temptations, we found we had time to spare. We halted and stretched our legs and lay on the grass and smoked a couple of cigarettes and I rashly made them laugh by telling them about Sir Francis Drake and the game of bowls. But no sooner had we struck the old highway beside the Maros—a few miles south of the Apulon-Apulum-Bălgrad-Weissenburg-Karlsburg-Gyulaféhervár-Alba Iulia turning—than fate began to scatter our route with troubles. New since our passage there two days earlier, an untimely road-gang with a steam-roller and red flags had roped off potholes which had remained untouched for
years. Maddened by frustration, István foiled them at last by cutting a bold semi-circular cantle across a stubble field. Next we were held up by a collusion of sleep-walking buffaloes with a gigantic threshing-machine crawling along a stretch of road with woods on one side and on the other a sharp drop to a water-meadow; and finally, a mile or so short of the last station before our destination, there was a puncture, the second that day; caused perhaps by a broken bottle left in the stubble a month ago by some snoring haymaker. We leaped into action and just as we were tightening the last screws on the freshly patched-up spare wheel, the hoot of a train reached us from behind. Then we saw the familiar smoke-plume appearing along the valley and heard the puffing and the clatter, and there it was; and just as we were chucking the old wheel in the back it passed us and disappeared sedately round a bend. We leaped aboard as nimbly as firemen and István seized the wheel.

Swing-wells and fields of maize and tobacco shot behind and the dust rose all about us in expanding clouds. The windscreen was one of the old-fashioned kind that divide lengthways, and when István twisted a milled brass knob at the side, the lower edge of the top half lifted outwards and the wind of our pace roared through us. All at once we were shooting through thousands and thousands of sunflowers; then, far ahead, the guard's van came in sight. The train was slowing up for Simeria, the last halt before our target; and, just as it was moving on again we drew alongside. As it picked up speed, we were neck and neck; the passengers peered out in amazement and we felt like Cherokees or Assiniboines galloping round a prairie train in feathers and bisons' horns: we ought to have been shooting them full of tufted arrows while they blazed back at us with their Winchester repeaters... István was crouched over the wheel, shirt-sleeves rolled up, grinning fiercely like a cinder-eyed demon of speed with ribbed black-mackintosh wings; and as we pulled ahead, he let out a joyful howl; we joined in, and the train hooted as though in capitulation. Angéla was hugging herself, shoulders hunched and teeth bared with excitement,
hair flying out straight in the slipstream. Sometimes, launched by troughs in the road, we seemed to take to the air; another puncture would have done for us. Then, as the train dropped further behind, we sailed into familiar territory. The tall hill of Deva, crowned with its ruined fortress, haunted by the bricked-up victim of the ancient legend, heaved into sight, with the Hátszeg mountains beyond, where Vajdahunyád lay. The Maros meandered downstream in its mist of poplars, flowing towards Gurasada and the unknown village of Saftă and Ileană, and Xenia's Zám, and then on to Kápolnás for Soborsin and Count Jenö and Tinka; Konopy and Maria Radna; and Arad, where Iza lived; and to the north of this, the roofs that sheltered Georgina and Jasš and Clara and Tibor and Ria were scattered about among dales and hills.

When we reached Deva station, the train was just coming into sight again. We seized Angéla's bag and started off over the tracks. The station master waved for us to stop, then, recognising István, turned it into a salute; and when the train drew up, we were serenely waiting for it under the acacias, which were as immutable a part of a Rumanian platform as the three gold rings and the scarlet top of the station-master's cap. Leaning down from her carriage window, she threaded crimson button-holes into our shirts from the bunch of roses and tiger lilies. Our farewells had been made and I can still feel the dust on her smooth cheek. When the flag and the whistle unloosed the train, she kept waving, then took off the kerchief knotted round her throat and flourished that instead and we gesticulated frantically back. As it gathered speed, the long kerchief floated level until the train, looking very small under the slant of the woods, dwindled and vanished; then it was only a feather of smoke among the Maros trees. Angéla was about to pass all of our old haunts and all the stepping-stones of my particular journey—half a lifetime ago, it seemed—crossing the frontiers at Curtici and Lökösháza. After that, the railway line over the Great Plain—Malek's and my itinerary in reverse—would set her down, an hour before midnight, at the East Station in Budapest.

[1]
A detail about the Academy which would have meant nothing to me then, but much now: for a year the Professor of Philosophy at Bethlen's Academy was the Silesian poet, Martin Opitz (1597–1639), ‘the Father of German Poetry,' one of a pleiad of seventeenth-century poets which includes Simon Dach, Paul Fleming, Scheffler, Gryphius and Grimmelshausen (‘Komm, Trost der Nacht, O Nachtigall'), author of
Simplicissimus
, the great picaresque novel of the Thirty Years' War; and Weckherlin, who became Latin secretary to Cromwell immediately before Milton and wrote a remarkable sonnet on Buckingham's murder. They have all been imaginatively evoked by Gunther Grass in
The Meeting at Telgte
.

[2]
The Rumanian name has been lengthened in recent time by hyphenation with the ancient name of Napoca, which is how the Dacians styled their home. The ‘zs' of Kolozsvár is a French ‘j.'

[3]
‘Nation' has a special sense in this context: it means the noble legislating minority. Hungarian serfs, not being part of it, were no more represented than the similarly placed ancestors of the Rumanian majority. It was position in the hierarchy not ‘nationality' that counted. There were Rumanian nobles who had a voice, but they invariably became absorbed into the Hungarian nobility and were lost.

[4]
At that time, Hungarian girls seemed to have cornered the international cabaret world; every night-club I can remember was full of them. Many sought their fortunes abroad and I remember from a nineteenth-century Russian novel that the word
Vengerka
—‘a Hungarian girl'—had an earthy and professional sense.

[5]
Târnava? Kukullo? So the map seems to say.

[6]
A friend from Kronstadt-Bras, ov-Brassó tells me that there is no Pied Piper tradition on the spot. Browning probably got it from the Grimm brothers who may have picked it up from some inventive Transylvanian Saxon studying in Germany. They loved concocting tall stories about their remote homeland: in Bonn and Jena and Heidelberg, it must have sounded as wild and faraway as Tartary. Perhaps the original legend in the West is confusedly linked with the Children's Crusade. Two contingents set off from Germany, as well as the main body from Vendôme; but they all perished, or were sold into slavery. Hamelin itself is full of Pied Piper reminders.

[7]
Bras, ov or Brassó, and recently, but no longer (and most inappropriately for this old Gothic city), Stalin. Fashions change.

[8]
Latin Aluta, German Alt, Hungarian Olt, the same as the Rumanian, for once.

L
APUȘNIC
! I have found the forgotten name at last, a hastily pencilled blur on a back page of my diary; and here it is again, minute, spidery, faded and scarcely legible, lost in a millipede's nest of contour-lines and cross-hatching, and further defaced by one of the folds on my tattered 1902 map of Transylvania: twenty-odd miles from Deva, beside a small tributary running down between wooded bluffs to the south bank of the Maros; and a recent exchange of letters with István (who now lives in Budapest) has made it triply sure. This was where we handed the motor-car back to its owner, and the re-discovery of the name provides a landmark and a starting point. I had largely abandoned my diary during these lotus-eating weeks and, after setting out, failed to resume it for a number of crucial days; but luckily a few scribbled and remembered names are backed up by a collection of clear visions, and with these and the map the next stages of the journey drop into place, though one or two of them, like undated lantern slides loose in a box, may have got out of sequence.