No one had warned me that it takes ten days, at least, to buy a Russian bicycle in Budapest: though this may be reduced to five days should you happen to have a celebrated Hungarian friend who can put in a passionate plea on your behalf.
First you find your bicycle, which is easy. Soon I saw what I wanted, hanging high in the window of a vast city-centre state store called Szivarvany. Model 153-421 was conspicuously marked 4,800 forints, then approximately $60. All the non-Soviet models cost at least 20,000 forints, an out-of-the-question investment since this machine was to be left with a Rumanian friend. Inside, hundreds of 153–421s were stacked along one wall in an alarmingly unassembled state; one would need an honours degree in engineering to get them on the road. In sign language I pleaded with a grumpy, undersized young man to sell me the assembled display model. He responded, naturally enough, in Hungarian, which language isolates its users to a unique extent from their fellow-Europeans. Yet his expression and tone conveyed a clear message: in this unreformed state store no rule could possibly be bent for the sake of a mere customer. Despairingly I sought an English-speaker, or even a German- or French-speaker. In any Rumanian city multi-linguists would at once have swarmed, excitedly eager to help the foreigner. In Budapest it is otherwise.
Next I tried to coax the young man into himself assembling a bicycle for me. He looked scandalised and dismissed the notion with a series of graphic gestures. Then he handed me a large twenty-four-page booklet in Russian, amply illustrated with twenty-six diagrams; the first showed a naked man standing beside my bicycle-to-be, measuring his legs against the wheels. Now came my graphic gestures, conveying horror and despair. The young man shrugged impatiently and produced a formidable document – five foolscap pages, hideously resembling an income tax return form. Presenting me with this sheaf, his manner suggested that now my problem was solved.
Page one was headed, in capitals: ELVESZETT JOTALLASI JEGYET CSAK AZ ELADAS NAPJANAK HITELT ERDEMLO IGAZOLASA (pl. DATUMMAL ES BELYEGZOVEL ELLATOTT SZAMLA, ELADASI JEGYZEK) ESETEN POTOLUNK! I wondered if the exclamation mark indicated that this was vital information needing at once to be absorbed by potential buyers of model 153–421.
Briskly the young man turned to another page, borrowed a pen and underlined VALLALAT BELYEGZOJE and ADOIGAZGATASI AZONOSITOSZAMA. I looked at him reproachfully, then took out my Angol–Magyar, Magyar—Angol utiszotar. It listed none of those words; the nearest was azonos (‘identical’) which shed no light on anything. At last the young man smiled; Hungarians appreciate, as well they might, even the feeblest of efforts to cope with their language. He then noticed a street plan in my shirt pocket. Spreading it on the counter, he indicated Egressy ut., wrote ‘17–21’ in the margin, then turned to another page of the sheaf and there underlined XIV Egressy ut, 17–21. Semi-hysterically I giggled as the filler dropped. Of course! My purchase must be taken, with the sheaf, booklet and my receipt, to an establishment on the far side of Pest where some genius would assemble it. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die (almost) while wheeling model 153–421 through Budapest’s traffic.
That however, was tomorrow’s challenge; it was then too late to seek Egressy ut. So model 153–421 spent the night on the first-floor balcony of my friends’ flat; he was light enough, I noted with relief, to be easily carried upstairs – an important attribute, since many Rumanian blocs are liftless.
My three-mile walk to Egressy ut. was memorable. Hungarians tend to use Budapest’s long wide straight streets as racing-tracks; seventy miles per hour is acceptable, which in a city indicates some sort of mass death-wish. Even the trams and trolley-buses compete at lethal speeds, swaying along as though drunk, while the metro elevators whizz up and down like something in a cartoon film. To the unnerved visitor, it seems that Budapest’s drivers display all the most unpleasant Hungarian qualities: aggression, ruthlessness, self-centredness. On my first day in the city, a young woman carrying a toddler was knocked down beside me when using a zebra crossing while the green light was on; a car swooped round the corner, ignoring the lights as too many Hungarian drivers do, and the victim had to be taken to hospital with a broken leg and a concussed child. The driver fled the scene but I was assured he would almost certainly be caught, through cooperation between public and police. My own leg might have been broken en route to Egressy ut. when a car parked by the pavement abruptly reversed with never a backward glance; I leaped to safety just in time.
No. 17–21 Egressy ut. was a strange left-over from the Communist era – at least I hope it was strange, not the sort of establishment Hungarians still have to combat on a daily basis. In a dreary barn-sized office men and women sat at metal desks, surrounded by tightly-packed filing cabinets, behind a bisecting counter. They looked pallid and embittered – as would we all, given such a work-place. On the public’s side of the counter the queue occupied sagging plastic-covered settees. Their problems were, it seemed, car-related, and for fifty minutes I watched men (only men) with furrowed brows laboriously filling in multi-paged documents which were then – often after much argument – lavishly rubber-stamped and filed away. How, I wondered, was I going to negotiate those bureaucratic shoals sans interpreter? But in fact the sheaf from Szivarvany, plus model 153–421, needed no verbal input from me. An elderly woman clerk, with glinting purple-copper hair such as one used to see on celluloid dolls, simply indicated where I was to sign another document guaranteeing that I could collect my property ten days hence.
I stared, appalled, at this rubber-stamped date – then smiled ingratiatingly at the woman and boldly wrote in another, three days hence. The woman ground her teeth and struck out my date. Ten days or nothing, her expression said. And there was no charge; assembly was free and she wasn’t interested in (or didn’t understand?) my clumsy wordless hinting at a bribe. A dungaree-clad man then materialised at my elbow and wheeled model 153-421 away, beckoning me to follow. Scepticism took over when I saw my purchase joining hundreds – yes, hundreds – of unassembled clones. Ten days? More likely a month! I filled in the label presented by Dungarees, tied it to the handlebars as requested, was given yet another document – to be shown prior to collection – and went on my way, sorrowfully.
My host, however, was not so easily cowed by the esoteric bicycle-buying rituals of his native city. Next morning he accompanied me to Egressy ut., where I was promoted to being a famous Irish writer who had to leave Budapest three days hence and could not leave without her bicycle.
Three days later, at the appointed hour – 11 a.m. precisely – a meticulously assembled model 153-421 was secured to the roof of my friend’s car and eventually we were dropped off at Nyiregyhaza, some forty miles from the Rumanian border. Naming model 153–421 was easy; he had to be ‘Luke’, in honour of my celebrated Hungarian friend, John Lukacs.
Cyclists bring out the worst in status-conscious Rumanians. If in middle age you can afford only a bicycle, and are tanned Gypsy brown and shabbily dressed, you must be a total failure and are likely to be treated as such – not of course in the villages, but in tourist hotels or even shoddy urban cafés and restaurants. (Methods of transport are graded thus on the status scale: motor cars, motor vans, horse-carts, ox-carts, bicycles, donkey-carts.) As most tourist hotels excluded Luke, I sometimes had to sit shivering outside in the wind and rain while waiting for the local with whom I had an appointment. I could have left Luke locked, but that would not have deterred fiddling small boys from possibly doing irreparable damage to his delicate gears.
Apart from this easily endured loss of status, Rumania provides excellent cycling territory. There are only a few snags: broken glass; worn-out concrete roads; new concrete roads; Austro-Hungarian pave roads; main roads (so described on the map) that prove to be uncycleable tracks; hot liquid tar; temporarily (I hope) debilitating agricultural sprays; anti-cyclist truck drivers in urban areas and – the only serious problem – sheepdogs trained to kill intruders in rural areas.
The broken glass sets up a conflict between self-preservation and tyre-preservation; oddly enough, the latter instinct dominates in a country where tyres cannot be replaced. For some reason, perhaps understood by psychologists, the breaking of glass obviously relieves the inner tensions of millions of Rumanians. How else explain the shimmering proliferation of broken bottles by the wayside on every main road? To avoid this hazard cyclists must suddenly veer out from the verge and only good fortune protects one from the traffic coming up behind.
Worn-out concrete roads may sound like a mere triviality but then don’t feel so as one judders over miles of large uneven stones that have outlasted the concrete. Even new concrete roads have blocks so ill-aligned that every five yards there is a violent bump, and the regularity of this unpleasant sensation becomes peculiarly irritating. The pave roads are something else again; where these have emerged from under the post-Trianon Rumanian roads they remain as good as new, a memorial to the efficiency of the Magyar administration but a literal pain in the arse for cyclists. A few such roads, designed for horse-traffic only, are now being used by heavy trucks but show no sign of disintegrating. These are hand-built works of art, rather than engineering feats.
The long-since-defunct main roads are no threat to cyclists, but some bridges have so drastically wasted away that a motor car would inevitably end up in the river for lack of warning signs.
Hot liquid tar is a common hazard in springtime, when main roads are being ‘repaired’ by work-forces of astounding laziness and incompetence. An excess of boiling, too-thin tar is slopped into pot-holes, topped with a shovelful of chips and left to stream over the rest of the surface – a tyre-endangering menace. One has no choice but to get off that road, not always easy or safe on a mountainside. An alternative form of incompetence is to pile mounds of chips into mega-pot-holes, thus unwittingly creating the sort of traffic-slowing obstacles known in other countries as ‘ramps’.
My most memorable encounter with poisonous spray happened near Tirgu Neamt, where the occupants of three stationary Gypsy wagons frantically signalled me to stop; they had the air of people waiting at a level-crossing barrier. Foolishly I pedalled on, having been so often warned against Gypsy hold-ups, and soon I had reason to regret my mistrust. A biplane was spraying the whole area and after a few miles I could scarcely breathe and had to dismount – dizzy and nauseated, with a pounding heart. Slowly I continued, wheeling Luke, and on at last emerging from that zone saw another queue of carts – both Gypsies’ and villagers’. This was my only experience of aerial spraying; usually giant tanks lumber over the fields, discharging their lethal load to the detriment of the local wildlife. Near Gheorgheni, where intensive spraying had a dire effect on my eyes and throat, several swallows collided with me, then dropped to the ground. I stopped to examine them; they were not yet dead, but stunned and gasping oddly.
Rumania’s truck-drivers relieve their boredom by gambling with cyclists’ lives. Habitually their juggernauts roared past within inches of me and a grinning passenger always stared back to observe whether or not I had survived.
And then there are the sheepdogs, a major threat to cyclists between the Balkans and the Khyber Pass; but more of them anon.
At 6.30 on a cloudless spring morning I left Cluj and for an hour was struggling through the noxious fumes of Ceausescu-land. Then I turned onto a rough non-motor road and by 8.15 the tranquil green slopes of central Transylvania surrounded me. Outside a tall ancient flour-mill, on a loud little river, many horses and donkeys stood breakfasting from nose-bags while their loads of wheat or maize were being ground, and old men and women in peasant dress sat against the mill wall chatting animatedly – until I appeared, when they all fell silent and stared, uncertain about responding to my greeting. Soon after, I overtook a wide ox-wagon with the family cow tied to the back and her calf and three pigs standing behind the elderly driver and a small boy. Doubtless his parents were employed in Ceausescu-land. All over the countryside, many couples working in the fields were accompanied by a pre-school grandchild.
There are few state farms in this area and not too many collectives. I noticed throughout the country that within the past year state farm buildings had been repaired and repainted, presumably to foster the illusion that the government is capable of running them efficiently. But machinery continued to rust in overcrowded repair depots and peasants continued to plough and harrow – man and wife working a pair of oxen – as the Dacians were doing when the Romans arrived.
In the little market town of Mociu an animal fair had just ended and the road was thronged with carts and wagons drawn by horses, donkeys, buffaloes or oxen and often carrying calves, sheep, foals, pigs. One minute furry donkey was having difficulty pulling a tiny cart with pram-like wheels from which an immense piebald sow, reclining on a pile of golden straw, regally surveyed the world – looking uncannily like Queen Victoria in middle age. Hereabouts both horses and buffaloes were in excellent condition, but the bony filthy cattle grazing the long acre reminded me of Irish cattle at winter’s end in our pre-EEC era.
In Transylvania the size of the village schools – all handsome pre-Trianon two-storey buildings – proves how much denser was the pre-Communist rural population. Some schools are quite magnificent, with attractive decorative plasterwork under the eaves and handsome pillars supporting long wrought-iron balconies. Other public buildings are to match: finely proportioned town halls, hospitals, local government offices, army barracks. Their like is never seen in Moldavia or Wallachia.
It often seems that pigs far outnumber humans in modern Transylvania. Beyond Mociu I stopped for lunch before beginning a very long, gradual climb – typical of this region – and sat opposite a yard where thirteen piebald bonhams, only a few days old, were romping like puppies while Mamma rooted. When I crossed the road to converse with them, as is my dotty wont, a muscular hound – hitherto unobserved – leaped to the end of his chain with such vigour that he almost strangled himself. Pignapping would not have been a good idea.
High above Mociu, on sweeping-to-the-sky grassy hillsides, grazed thousands of sheep, the faint music of their bells a perfect accompaniment to the visual beauty all around. The topography reminded me of the Andean puna in miniature. One can cycle along the ridge crests for several level miles, with wide shallow depressions stretching away on either side and, in the middle distance, fold after fold of mountains encircling the horizon – some forested, some sadly eroded with gashes of bare earth on their green flanks. And then comes the long descent, usually to a fertile valley scattered with red-roofed villages, each overlooked by two or three ochre-painted churches – certainly Orthodox and Calvinist and possibly Roman Catholic as well.
Passing through the once-beautiful but now hideously industrialised town of Turda, en route for Tirgu Mures, I observed the essence of contemporary Rumania neatly concentrated in one incident. On a long narrow bridge over the Mures, a few hundred brown and white sheep, with half as many lambs again – the majority new-born – were causing a traffic jam of interesting proportions and attitudes. This flock was in direct confrontation with one of those colossal truck-trailers that carry cranes from one high-rise site to another. The truck, having been brought to a standstill half-way across the bridge, was almost completely blocking it: but the sheep had to pass over on their way to the path to the river bank. From my roadside vantage-point, in front of the truck, I could see behind it a queue of seven long Gypsy wagons and a dozen vans and cars. On my side, too, the traffic was building up. And we were all accumulating unwholesome deposits as nine very tall nearby chimneys, belonging to three factories, poured clouds of stifling smoke (grey-black: orange-brown: purplish) over everything.
The three shepherds wearing ankle-length fleece cloaks, carried intricately carved six-foot crooks. The two white sheepdogs wore spiked anti-wolf collars and their terror of motor traffic rendered them useless. The drivers’ reactions interested me; all engines were switched off and, instead of showing their breed’s usual ill-temper when there is a hold-up, they peered out anxiously and sympathetically as the shepherds coped with the chaos – which was considerable, as panicky lambs tottered off in all the wrong directions, looking like bits of fluff beside the ginormous wheels of the trailer.
Finally one shepherd caught the flock leader, who was unhelpfully trying to retreat up the mountainside whence they had come, and dragged him through the narrow space between trailer and bridge: whereupon the rest began hesitantly to follow, apart from the numerous frantic mums of missing and vociferous lambs, who pursued them under various trucks, carts and vans. This blockage lasted more than twenty minutes; only when the shepherds signalled that every last lamb was safely down on the river bank did any vehicle move. Most Rumanians remain close to their rural background and shepherds hold an honoured place in traditional society. They are also among the richest people in modern Rumania; as Communism never impinged on them, for obvious reasons, capitalism flourished in the mountains while elsewhere falling into ruin.
Beyond Tirgu Mures I was soon in the Szekelyfold, where even now Rumanians are few (and unwelcome). I knew I had arrived when everything became bilingual – e.g., the first village on my route was ‘Murgesti’ in Rumanian and ‘Nyaradszentbenedek’ in Hungarian. On principle I support the Magyars’ right to use their own place-names, not only in the Szekely counties of Harghita and Covasna but all over Transylvania. However, the Rumanians do have more than one reason for insisting on the use of the Rumanian version, too. Budapest propagandists – and their allies in Rumania – still claim that the Hungarian language remains totally forbidden in Transylvania. Yet the age of many Szekelyfold signposts, and street-name plaques in Harghita’s towns, proves that even before 1989 this was not so in practice, whatever the law may have said.
Over the county border a few changes are immediately discernible though the villages’ general layout remains recognisably Transylvanian. Some ancient barns-cum-stables are as big as three-storey houses, with twelve-foot-high double doors and three different-sized wicket gates to fit horses, cattle and sheep. (Pigs always have separate accommodation.) The dwellings are more varied in design and the carved and painted homestead gates (many new) are spectacular examples of folk art triumphant. There are conspicuously more very old wooden houses, with splendidly carved pillars supporting narrow balconies under wide eaves. Some are in a state of disrepair rarely seen elsewhere in Transylvania, apart from those tragic, abandoned Saxon villages which have been taken over by Gypsies. Harghita’s delapidated dwellings also tend to be Gypsy-occupied; the Gypsies moved in when the owners fled to Hungary during the 1980s – illegally, which meant they couldn’t sell their homes. (Now, I was told, they cannot reclaim them; this, if true, is cruelly unjust.) Most houses are dated on the gable end facing the road and the numerous sturdy homes built during the 1930s and early 1940s are evidence that the Szekelys were not then being successfully discriminated against, pace present-day propaganda.
A minor but perhaps not trivial difference is that most Szekely geese and hens are confined in wicker coops on the broad grass verges, cloths being spread over the top when the sun gets hot. However, the goslings and chicks can leave the coops to forage; they will always return when summoned. This seemed to me a sign of greater efficiency among the Szekelys, but some Rumanians deduce from it greater suspiciousness and tight-fistedness. Rumanian villagers don’t bother too much about straying feathered livestock, assuming it will all even out in the end. But the Szekelys – assert the Rumanians – fiercely protect their property and have been known to kill a neighbour in a quarrel over a missing gosling or chick. Conversely, the Magyars and Szekelys infer that the Rumanians are too lazy and improvident to tend their livestock responsibly. (And talking of responsibility, why do ganders, like cobs, continue to take an interest in their offspring until adulthood, whereas cocks are devoid of any family feeling?)
The Szekelyfold is quite densely populated but one afternoon, near Praid, I turned into uninhabited – because too steep – mountains. Gradually the little road climbed, twisting through narrow valleys between beech-scarved mountains, their lower slopes pastureland. Only sheep bells, and the rushing of a boulderous young river, broke the silence. Then a sign officiously told me that for eleven kilometres (some seven miles) the road would climb very steeply to the Borzont Pass. I dislike such signs; it’s much more fun to round hairpin bend after hairpin bend, never knowing when the pass will appear and using one’s orographical lore as the basis for guessing games. Moreover, late in the day, information about severe gradients can be disheartening, if one has already cycled seventy-odd miles.
Dismounting, I plodded upwards. Soon the beech woods were mixed with spruce firs, then replaced by them – and long snow-drifts gleamed in the shadows between those mighty trunks. Towards sunset I began to worry; this was impossible camping terrain. Probably I would have to walk on in darkness to the pass, which presumably would offer a levelish site. But soon a derelict concrete cowshed appeared, covering a flat ledge by the river, and I half-carried Luke down the rough slope. The shed was uninviting, its floor strewn with broken glass and malodorous discarded garments; gloomily I cleared a space and spread my flea-bag on the damp mildewed straw.
I was sitting outside, supping off bread and Budapest salami, when a vehicle approached – the first on that road – and stopped nearby. Prudently I retreated into the shed, ever conscious of Luke’s being worth four months’ wages. Through the river’s rushing came the sound of tools being vigorously deployed and twenty minutes later three oil-smeared young men made their way down to wash on the bank. As they returned they noticed me – the shed was too small for total concealment – and hesitated, but didn’t greet me before continuing upwards. Listening hopefully for the sound of their engine, I heard instead escalating merriment; it seemed much tuica was flowing with a picnic supper. Reluctantly I decided to push on in search of solitude. My Rumanian friends often exclaimed, ‘But aren’t you afraid to sleep out alone?’ To which the reply is, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of if you are alone, if no one knows you’re there.’ If however three hard-drinking men know you’re there, a move is indicated.
That apparent inconvenience proved a boon; within half an hour I had come to a cosy wooden foresters’ stable perched on another ledge on the far side of the fordable (with some difficulty) river. Clearly this had not been used since the previous summer; the six-inch-deep carpet of horse-dung was bone dry and provided a warm, sweet-smelling, resilient mattress. After dark the river sounded much louder, as I lay gazing through the doorless entrance at two towering spruce firs, symmetrically framed against a brilliantly starry sky. That was a perfect ending to a cyclist’s day.
At 5.30 the blue-grey dawn light showed a frost-bound world. An unfamiliar bird observed my cursory washing in the icy river – thrush-sized, with a golden back, red wings and a strident call of short, sharp whistles. After more bread and salami I climbed on, up and up, through dense forest, the snow becoming thicker with every bend of the road. I had been lucky; between that stable and the pass there was no other shelter and no level ground.
To mark my crossing of the pass, soon after 8 a.m., the wind rose and the sky quickly clouded over. Like too many Carpathian passes, this one has been ruined by an extensive ‘Leisure Development’. Why? At almost 4,000 feet the Borzont Pass permits ‘leisure activities’ during only three or four months each year. So why obliterate its natural beauty, which could be enjoyed by travellers all the year round? Last season’s litter had survived in inordinate quantities – enough to give the whole area the flavour of a municipal dump. (Incidentally, Szekely villages are litter-free, well-swept and even weeded along the verges; the Magyars and Szekelys have not allowed their self-respect to be undermined by Rumania’s general malaise.)
Over the pass, the drops on my right were melodramatic. On such precipitous slopes, how can the mighty spruce firs get a grip? These slopes plunge down and down to invisible, inviolate ravines – among the few remaining refuges for many European mammals. Some people find such densely forested mountains too eerie – or oppressive, or monotonous. But for me there is an enjoyable, mysterious melancholy about them, recalling the delicious childhood frisson associated with scarey fairy-tales. I rejoice that their permanently twilit depths are protected by gradients that make logging impossible, or too costly.
Just below the pass I met five elk-sized browny-grey deer, led by one of the famous superbly antlered Carpathian stags. On noticing me, they stopped to stare hard – but didn’t much like what they saw and bounded away, white scuts flickering.
The weather now cheated me of my ‘reward’ for the climb, a six-mile freewheel to the village of Borzont. A vicious wind and drenching rain induced misery and when my hands became too numb safely to operate the brakes I had to walk. In any event the appalling surface would have cancelled out the reward factor; freewheeling between pot-holes too deep to be ignored is not much fun. In Rumania each county is responsible for its own road maintenance and on entering Harghita it is at once apparent – since the county is not exceptionally poor – that the authorities have chosen to deprive it of its rights.
A fortnight later, going from Gheorgheni to Odorheiul Secuiesc, I crossed this same range by a slightly lower and even more beautiful road – under a cloudless sky, with a cool cross-breeze. Again there was no traffic – not even horse-traffic – for hours on end. Here the dark forest alternated with miles of bright hilly pastures, yellowed by cowslips and dotted with lone spruce saplings or pale young larch groves. The numerous shepherds’ summer huts, as yet unoccupied, were mostly new-built but in the traditional style. During a pause to relish this sunny solitude I saw, approaching me up a grassy slope, what I at first mistook for a small deer. The enormous hare either didn’t notice me or disdained humans. Slowly he walked up the slope, passing so close that I could have touched him. His fur was a white–russet mix – a glorious colour, from which I deduced that Carpathian hares turn white during winter. Crossing the road, he leaped up a steep bank into the forest just as a slightly smaller version (his wife?) appeared below me and followed him, also passing within touching distance. Usually one sees hares gracefully racing, and their awkwardness when walking is unexpected. Later I saw several others, though none so close.
Having descended, I refuelled. (Bread and salami; that yard-long Budapest sausage had by then dwindled to a few inches.) From my seat under an aromatic pine I was overlooking the widening valley’s first dwelling, a solitary old two-storey farmhouse, stoutly built of tree trunks and stone. It stood – semi-encircled by an apple orchard in full bloom, a mass of soft pinkness – beyond a dandelion-glowing meadow through which flowed a stream, in three wide loops, reflecting the blue of the sky. In the near distance new snow dazzled from a range of gently curving mountains. Behind the shingle-roofed barn – considerably bigger than the house – grazed four brown and white cows and a black mare wearing a deep-toned bell. The nearby half-acre sheep-fold had eight-foot-high anti-wolf pine fencing, bound with bark. A dozen adolescent lambs grazed in the orchard, tended by two smallish cross-bred sheepdogs. Faulty their pedigrees may have been, but when an alien lamb strayed in, from another fold far down the road, both pursued it conscientiously, silently guiding it back to the break in its fence. At intervals a woman emerged from the house – headscarved, wearing a voluminous peasant skirt and wellies. She drew water from the stream, brought logs from the barn, searched for eggs, carried pails to the pigs, hung out washing. Long after my picnic was finished I loitered, reluctant to break the spell put on me by this most lovely place.
By mid afternoon I was in Zetea, one of the Szekelyfold’s most attractive little towns – all hilly laneways, and flower-filled nooks and crannies, and magnificantly decorated gateways. But alas! I could buy no bread; it was a Saturday afternoon and in both Hungary and Rumania – to celebrate the death of Communism – everything closes at noon on Saturday until Monday morning, including cafés and petrol stations. Only the bars remain open, and on Sundays the churches. The effect is a curious Christmas Day-like stillness, plus frustration for motorists who may urgently need petrol or cyclists who may crave a loaf or a cup of coffee. When/if the free market takes off, this of course will change. Now many Rumanians regard their weekly opportunity to drink nonstop for thirty-six hours as the greatest if not the only benefit of the revolution/coup. (If that’s an exaggeration, it’s a slight one.)
In 1990 I had noticed the national predilection for excessive drinking, but then it was curbed by an acute shortage of booze. In 1991 alcohol in various – when state-manufactured – artificial forms was more plentiful than food. Moreover, beer cost only twelve lei a litre and state-produced ‘tuica’ (made from who knows what) only seventy lei a bottle. The drunkenness seen every day everywhere is both alarming and depressing, a measure of the emptiness of life for people whose inner resources have long since been atrophied by Marxist brainwashing. Youths of sixteen or seventeen are already settling into the boozing pattern of relaxation, for lack of anything else to do, and too often are egged on by their seniors. Luckily alcohol rarely makes the Rumanians aggressive; they waver quietly home to bed, frequently vomiting en route, or fall by the wayside and sleep it off, ignored by passers-by. (Their vomiting is probably a safety-mechanism: Nature rejecting chemicals unsuitable for human ingestion.) The occasional drunken brawls tend to be more verbal than physical, which interestingly reinforces the theory that Rumanians, unlike Hungarians, are temperamentally ‘a gentle people’ – though capable, as history records, of the most savage violence when provoked to it by cynical leaders.
In the space of one typical day I saw: a) two workers in a collective potato field at 10.45 a.m., sprawling senseless with an empty tuica bottle on its side between them; b) an elderly man struggling beneath his bicycle, entangled amidst shrubs, on one of Tirgu Neamt’s main streets; c) a state farm tractor ahead of me behaving erratically, then stopping in the middle of the road and the driver getting out, crouching in the ditch and, as I passed, sticking his fingers down his throat and vomiting – hoping to be able to drive straight afterwards.
Near the village of Kukullokemenyfalva I became involved in a mini-drama on a level road between fields of state farm winter wheat. What I saw ahead of me there could be described comically but was a potential tragedy for the victim, a hefty boar so insecurely carted by two elderly men (both stocious) that he had half-fallen from the cart and was about to be strangled by his halter. The two horses, doubtless used to such crises, were standing steady. As I rode to the rescue the two old buffers were ineffectually heaving at their squealing pig, who sounded as though he knew his last hour had almost come. The men then collapsed onto the road and each began to abuse the other, while simultaneously they were attempting to help one another to regain the perpendicular. Had the boar not been in such danger I would have left them to it. But something had to be done about him and his rescue was simple enough; he wanted nothing more than to be given a leg-up onto the cart. Helping the humans – firstly to stand, secondly to get aboard – was less simple. They were not blind drunk; now they noticed Luke’s ostentatious Cyrillic lettering and, instead of receiving polite words of gratitude, I was exposed to an anti-Russian diatribe. But at last I won, despite their persistent swigging from an earthenware tuica flask while I was struggling to hoist them onto the cart. As soon as they were aboard – lying on the straw, both clutching the flask – the horses moved on, without direction. Rumanian horses are – and need to be – very clever. One often sees them drawing apparently empty wagons and unilaterally negotiating complicated motor traffic junctions while their owners slumber on the wagon floor. In 1991 a sound, well-bred three-year-old cost about 80,000 lei, almost as much as a Dacia.
Most drunken scenes lacked any comic element. One Sunday morning, in Gheorgheni’s only (and non-tourist) restaurant, I noticed a strange pair of boozers. One was a blue-eyed Gypsy, aged fortyish, with a jolly ruddy face, drooping black moustaches and short tangled beard. He wore the Gypsies’ distinctive wide-brimmed black hat and greasy sheepskin jacket; his gross beer-belly wouldn’t allow his blue jeans to come much above his crutch. The other was a little bald man, his skull ghoulishly obvious beneath tight brown Gypsy skin; a small bunch of woolly grey hair behind each ear gave him the look of a debauched elf. He was a deaf mute, who made pathetic shrill croaking noises, like a bullfrog – some of which his companion seemed to understand. At 9 a.m. both were drinking beer and cognac.
Ten hours later, when I returned for supper, they were at the same table – its cloth murky with cigarette ash and sloshed drinks – now on wine and tuica. One of the waitresses, in whose flat I was staying, told me they were weekend ‘regulars’. They had just finished a meal – ‘To try to get sober,’ explained my friend, ‘before Josef’s wife comes for him.’ Then the elfin one stood up, swaying, and tried to cross the almost empty restaurant to the toalet, clinging to chairs as he went. But midway he crashed, gashing his cheek-bone on the sharp corner of a tin table. As he lay sobbing hoarsely Josef stumbled to help and with the edge of his jacket mopped up the blood. But unfortunately the crashing sound brought to the scene the restaurant Director, reputedly a loyal Ceausescu man planted in the town to spy on Szekelys. He certainly behaved as such, ordering the elfin one to be dumped on the street, though the evening was cold and very wet. Meekly Josef staggered back to his table and ordered another bottle of wine, making no protest as two kitchen lackeys threw out his friend – still sobbing and bleeding.
‘He will be safe,’ the waitress reassured me, ‘Josef’s wife will find him.’
As I reached the street the elfin one, who seemed to have passed out, was being lifted into a covered wagon by two Gypsy youths.
Back in the restaurant, fat tears were silently sliding down Josef’s cheeks. Then his wife arrived – a woman once beautiful – wearing a raincoat made of fertilizer sacks. She was followed by three small filthy tattered children; the other six were old enough to fend for themselves. After a low-key argument Josef stuffed the wine bottle into his pocket and allowed himself to be led to the door. On the street, voices were raised and soon he returned, accompanied by his wife but not by the children. This time he sat at the table next to mine and ordered a beer and two glasses of tuica. His wife at first refused hers but then, having again failed to persuade him to leave, tossed it down and looked as if she could do with another. As I supped, she continued to admonish him gently, inexplicable remnants of love showing on her worn face. But they were still there when I left.
Sometimes I stopped for a drink where Luke could be wheeled into a state-run beer-hall, in which places one pays as much for the deposit on a half-litre glass mug as for the beer itself. (Is this a measure of the all-pervasiveness of dishonesty? Or of the scarcity of drinking vessels in the average home? Or of the habit of sustaining the ego by cheating the state?) These sordid institutions are patronised by people who only want to get drunk a.s.a.p. and an overwhelming stench of urine comes from the pee-hole in the middle of the floor, designed to prevent drunken men from exposing themselves outside the door and thus shocking the local womenfolk. Once upon a time women shunned these places, but no longer; I often had female company, of a not very edifying sort. Even in the forenoon there were usually a few men eager to grope at me, while hiccupping in my face; already they were too far gone to see that I was old enough to be their mother. (Or, in some cases, grandmother.) What Rumania needs is a Father Matthew, he who rescued Ireland from a similar situation in the mid-nineteenth century.
Rumanian motor vehicles shed a prodigious number of ‘pieces’; every main road has its complement. This propensity may seem irrelevant to cyclists, but not so. On my way down from the Toaca Pass I was travelling fast, on the outskirts of the little town of Pluton, when the cab roof of an approaching truck fell off and missed me by a few feet. (I can’t believe that roofs fly off cabs anywhere else in the world, though I’ve seen more than my share of unstable vehicles.) I braked so hard that I too fell off, as the sheet of metal landed a yard away; yet the driver and his mate ignored me when they stopped to replace the roof, which they did with a speed suggesting much practice.
Good fortune often attended me (compensation for 1990?) in the Carpathians, most notably on the Rotunda Pass where occurred a truly preternatural coincidence. I had been warned that there is no road, though the map claims there is, but I reckoned the centuries-old track would allow a cyclist across, albeit on foot.
Not far beyond the village of Sant, where I had become enmeshed in a riotous Moldavian wedding the day before, my walk started on a benign spring morning of warm sunshine, loud bird-song and dazzling wild flowers. At first however I was in shadow; for miles the track followed the young Somes river, here just another turbulently flooded stream between steep forested mountains. In this narrow valley all was as it has been forever, sans dwellings, pastures, logging scars. And the Somes, never more than a few yards away, became ever whiter and louder as we ascended.
Then, rounding a sharp bend under an overhang, I saw a major snag immediately ahead. The terrain required a crossing of the Somes, but if this was a fording point it didn’t look like one to me. Yet it was; beyond the seething waters the track continued, now at last leaving the river to climb high around the shoulder of the opposite mountain. Obviously people did cross here, though perhaps not often with bicycles.
The torrent was no more than ten yards wide. I removed the panniers, found a stout staff nearby, stripped naked and took the panniers over one at a time. The power of the waist-deep, icy water was formidable and the river-bed unstable, as is the way of mountain streams. I dreaded taking Luke across without the staff, but both hands would be needed to retain him. Then, as I stood holding him, summoning my courage, a wagon appeared around the nearby corner – its passengers three elderly men. They jerked their horse to a stop and for a surreal moment the naked Irishwoman and the Moldavian peasants were paralysed by shock of different kinds. Theirs was shock/horror, mine shock/relief. Mercifully, I had planned to transport my clothes on my head when fording with Luke. Swiftly I bent and pulled on my long shirt. Then, cautiously, the wagon advanced. Not much sign language was needed. Averting their eyes from my lower limbs and adjacent areas, the men hauled Luke aboard while I hauled on my trousers before joining him. The horse shared my reservations about the fractious infant Somes and plunged in only after considerable coaxing. On the far side my rescuers tentatively intimated that I might continue upwards with them but looked hugely relieved when I declined their invitation.
Before continuing, I stoked up on bread and slanina and wondered as I munched – could I have got Luke across? Or would the Somes have stolen him? We’ll never know … I still think of the appearance of that wagon at that moment as magical, part of a Carpathian fairy-tale. Until I reached the motor road, four hours later, there was no other trace of humanity.
Hereabouts conifers are mingled with birch, poplar, sycamore maple, an occasional yew. Beyond deep invisible valleys white swathes of wild pear blossom draped some slopes and new-leaved beeches glowed in the noon sun – pale green fires amidst the dark surrounding pines. Buzzards glided in wide circles, jays and woodpeckers were noisy and busy. The remains of a few ancient wayside stone fountains – still providing sweet spring water – indicated that in former times this was a commonly-used route. Now the roughness of the track necessitated my walking down as well as up.
An army barracks stands at the junction with the main road and two young conscripts, who had watched the last stage of my descent, asked incredulously, ‘You came from Sant?’ And then, ‘What do Irish people eat? How has Ireland old women so strong?’ I replied that at present I was doing nicely on bread and slanina.
That was a record-breaking day, when I crossed two of the Carpathians’ highest passes – the second the 4,200-foot Prislop Pass between Bukovina and Maramures. This was the route taken by the Transylvanian boyar, Bogdan, in the mid-fourteenth century, when he migrated east with his followers to found the principality of Moldavia. Here we were on one of Rumania’s best-kept roads and it was possible to pedal most of the way up. However, despite surprisingly little traffic, and awesome views of mighty snowy massifs, a slight sense of anticlimax was inevitable after the blessed solitude of the Rotunda.
On my return to Harghita, across the legendary Bicaz Pass, I did not pedal up; for much of the way the gradient is sixteen per cent.
Finding the village of Ivo took time. (It really is called just that; I haven’t forgotten the other twenty letters.) I was seeking Ivo because there lives a remarkable peasant, one Miklos Arpad, to whom I had an introduction from a Magyar friend. Miklos is remarkable on two scores; he has spent years collecting personal memories of the Second World War from the older generation all over Harghita and he has sired twelve children. The latter achievement, I gathered, made him a figure of fun among his neighbours. In traditional Harghita, families of five or six are usual enough; but a round dozen – and Miklos is rumoured to be aiming for a score – is generally seen as reckless. (Other, more earthy adjectives are also applied; and comparisons with the Gypsies are inevitably drawn.)
Charcoal-dark clouds were massing to the west as I turned off the main road where a small faded signpost said ‘Ivo’. A rough, steep, muddy track took me onto a long ridge-top – then forked. The sun was still shining as I looked both ways, over a serene landscape of pasture and ploughed fields backed by low forested mountains. Choosing the left fork – it looked more used – I jolted past a few comely farmhouses but had covered scarcely a mile when the rain came, driven by a gusty gale that made cycling in a cape on a deeply-rutted track seem unduly hazardous. So I walked the next five miles as the track continued to climb, gradually, towards the distant dark blue bulk of Mount Harghita. This was a densely populated, non-collectivised ridge.
By the time I reached Ivo at 1 p.m. the track was ankle-deep in racing brown water. Northern Rumania’s rain storms are – or were in the spring of 1991 – monsoon-like deluges which a few months later brought tragedy to much of Moldavia. All Ivo’s inhabitants were, naturally, indoors. So I sought a young Arpad in the village school – a newish, bungalowish building. The plump middle-aged teacher looked scarcely less alarmed than her pupils when a weird figure in a hooded cape appeared suddenly out of the storm. Uneasily she accepted and read my note, in Hungarian, explaining that I was a writer from Irorszag eager to meet Miklos Arpad. Then she summoned a sullen-looking twelve-year-old – Miklos’s first-born – who hesitantly emerged from the mass of cowering pupils and was ordered to lead me to his home. His evident hostility was a trifle disconcerting but doubtless based on fear.
My illusion that soon I could get dry and warm was quickly dispelled. For half a mile Gyorgy led me through the deluge on a continuation of the track – now level but a morass – past a line of neat houses, each in a spacious garden. My gloom deepened as we left the last house behind and began a steep climb up a wooded mountain. Keeping my balance on the skiddy mud, while pushing a heavily laden Luke, was difficult. (Unfortunately I had that morning been presented with several stout volumes of Transylvanian history by a Szekelyvarhely friend.) Gyorgy didn’t offer to help, but at last I requested him to push from behind. Twenty horrible minutes later he stopped and pointed left, to an almost perpendicular side track. Getting Luke up that was a truly desperate struggle. When the next stage proved to be a pathlet up a cliff face – the way blocked by trees and undergrowth – I almost gave up. Gyorgy somewhat sulkily transported the panniers one at a time, clutching at saplings as he went. But this was not an option for me, carrying Luke, and twice I was nearly there when I helplessly slid down again. Then at last I made it to a grassy field and through sheets of rain could dimly see the Arpad compound, high above, surrounded by a wooden fence. Replacing the panniers, I tacked up, skidding often and by now shivering – sweat-sodden beneath my cape and rain-drenched from the waist down. The muddy slope from the gate to the house was impossibly steep; I left Luke under wide stable eaves.
And after all that, Miklos was not at home. A few hours previously he had left for Harghita’s capital, Csikszereda, to try to establish his legal claim to those ten hectares of forest which had been owned by his forefathers for generations. (The legal sharks then were – and probably still are – having profitable fun with land distribution. As peasants don’t have deeds, they must depend on aged witnesses who can remember who owned what before 1948.)
Anna had accepted my arrival calmly; Miklos’s hobby brings the occasional researcher to this outpost of agriculture – the last house before Mount Harghita, across which there isn’t even a pathlet. When I entered the hot, steamy kitchen she was standing over a huge wooden tub of laundry balanced on two stools in front of an iron range, using a chunk of home-made soap on the staggering quantity of dirty garments produced by a well-kept family of fourteen. A small, sturdy, fresh-faced woman, she had thick chestnut hair, wide-set dark brown eyes, high cheekbones, good teeth. As she scrubbed and rinsed and wrung, I noticed her powerful arms. She looked not a day older than her twenty-nine years (she married at sixteen) and radiated a sort of contentment rare among urban mothers of one.
Having done her hostessly duty by fetching slippers, and a blanket as dressing-gown, and hanging my clothes above the range, and fixing me a seat on the log-box, Anna didn’t pause to entertain me but got back to her tub. There was no time not to work, yet there was always time for any child who needed attention.
Rumanian primary schools close early and as all the scholars arrived home, at intervals of a few minutes, the situation began to seem unreal – the door opening again and again and again to admit yet another small boy with a convict haircut, big dark eyes in a little pale face and a happy smile. (The two daughters were among those not yet at school.) As each entered mother and son exchanged greetings lovingly and politely while the juniors welcomed the seniors with joyous shouts and squeals and were briefly cuddled and kissed. (There was no changing into dry clothes, a logistical feat beyond any mother of twelve.) When all had assembled, controlled chaos ensued; each knew his chore and set about it efficiently without any direction from Anna. In the large porch stood nine empty buckets; water had to be fetched from a stream fifteen minutes’ walk away, down a steep hill – the two older boys’ task. Meanwhile another filled the log-box and another changed the baby – at thirteen months she was almost but not quite day-dry – and two others carefully carried in from the porch a heavy cauldron which Anna lifted onto the range. This contained a delicious meal: large cabbage leaves enfolding herb-flavoured rice and strips of tender mutton, served with thick creamy yoghurt. Such a dish takes time to prepare and had been cooked during the forenoon; now it only needed heating up. While awaiting it, the ravenous boys helped themselves, between chores, to chunks torn from a mountain of cartwheel loaves in the dresser cupboard. Another corner cupboard held a meagre but cherished display of ‘best’ china and glass from which an attractive old pottery plate was taken for my benefit and carefully washed. Everyone else ate off chipped enamel, being fed in shifts at the small table.
A vast four-poster bed occupied one corner of the square, high-ceilinged kitchen and slept the four older boys; the baby and toddler shared their parents’ room over the kitchen; the other six slept in a downstairs room, also leading off the porch, and I slept in the hay-loft above them. Anna’s unfussy reception put me at ease; she took it for granted that I would be happy to wait for refreshment until the family meal was ready and equally happy to sleep in a loft. Only the pottery plate, and a delicate china cup instead of a mug, set me apart. A peculiarly stimulating and fragrant herbal tea, unfamiliar to me, was served in the cup; the older boys were allowed it, the rest drank water. As dusk fell Gyorgy lit the lantern hanging low over the table, then lit another to illuminate washing-up, done by Anna and two boys in the porch.
Throughout that afternoon and evening I was repeatedly impressed, in all sorts of little ways, by this family’s good manners – not only between mother and children but among the children. Miklos must be as remarkable as Anna, to have helped her foster such a harmonious domestic atmosphere. The alternative, of course, would be unendurable; egos have to be restrained when there are fourteen of them around. But to achieve this, while treating each child as an individual, is an unusual feat in any society.
Early next morning the octet were dispatched to school, all neat and clean, and Anna set about preparing that day’s mega-meal. As Miklos was not due home for a week I left soon after, feeling grateful, in a way I could not express, for what had been an extraordinarily moving – and enlightening – interlude. This was, emotionally, the best balanced family I visited in Rumania, though among the most materially deprived. Certainly the Arpads would benefit from the conveniences of an urban bloc: running water, electricity, central heating, a gas cooker, a bathroom. Yet Anna was emphatic that she would not wish to exchange her quiverful for mod. cons. And this affection-ruled though spartan home seemed to me to offer a better start in life than the standard bloc family. Filling one’s quiver so amply at the end of the twentieth century is not commendable. But – current social responsibilities apart – large families do provide some advantages. Not least are the cultivation of good manners (i.e., consideration for others) and an easy acceptance of a share of responsibility for running the communal show. Is it a coincidence that both those qualities have dwindled where family sizes have dwindled?
By the end of May many flocks were moving up to their summer pastures and in Harghita I noticed more goats than elsewhere, mingled with the sheep. Shepherds rarely returned my greetings; usually they stared blankly for a moment, then strode on. They and their flocks and their dogs seem to form a social unit that has nothing to do with the motor-road world. Often I paused to enjoy the assured professionalism of men and dogs as flocks of 1,000 or more were guided by one or two shepherds, and three or four dogs, across broken, complicated terrain where they must not graze until the appointed hours – noon and sunset. It pleased me to see so many young shepherds. They are far from being a dying breed though should Rumania ever join the EEC, and be forced to ‘rationalise’ sheep-raising, they will certainly become an endangered species.
The dogs’ professionalism came too close for comfort as I crossed a nameless (on all my three maps) pass between the small town of Darmanesti and the large village of Sinmartin. This is surely one of Europe’s most beautiful roads, partly because it hasn’t been repaired since 1918 and is no longer usable by wheeled traffic – even two-wheeled, so again I had to push Luke uphill for over twenty miles. Carpathian slopes go on and on; a few days previously I had freewheeled non-stop for twenty-eight miles from the Frumoasa Pass.
That morning a truck-bedevilled main road took me from Comanesti – its charms long since stifled by Ceausescu-land – to the oil-spoiled town of Darmanesti in a once-lovely valley where many tall thin chimneys belch black smoke visible ten miles away. So much stinking oil leaks across the streets that I skidded and came off while rounding one corner. However, that desecration was soon out of sight and it seemed the gates of Paradise were nigh: but not yet. I winced when a hairpin bend brought into view one of those would-be-posh tourist developments known as ‘hans’. This brash construction overlooks the monumental concrete barrier of a hydro-electric dam holding back the waters of a five-mile-long artificial lake. The notion of using such a concrete monstrosity as tourist bait is peculiarly Communist. Averting my eyes I pedalled faster – and soon could pedal no more. The motorable road had abruptly ended and Paradise begun.
For a few hours the gradient was easy and several antique traffic signs confirmed that this highway, unlike the Rotunda track, had once been a paid-up motor road. At the base of dripping cliffs, festooned with creepers, orchids flourished – the commonest an indefinable colour, neither blue nor purple. A swift wide unpolluted river, coming from places Ceausescu couldn’t reach, sparkled and was companionably noisy. All day the sun shone warm though a strong wind blew. At one point, as I approached a semicircle of high mountains, all beech-covered, the sinuous, rhythmic movement of those myriad trees was like a slow-motion dance, directed by the wind – a mesmerisingly beautiful sight. Mostly however the forest was mixed and bird-thronged. Then the valley became a chill, permanently shadowed gorge where a series of waterfalls leaped whitely down the rock-walls with a roaring rush.
Beyond that gorge the forest thinned, the valley widened and on strips of scrubby riverside grassland a few small herds of cattle, unattended and having no visible base, grazed and made music with their bells – which have varying sizes and sounds for the different age-groups. Then the serious climb began, up a range of grass mountains where only scattered stands of conifers remain. On mile after mile of open, sloping pasture I could see distant shepherds’ huts and the moving dots of their flocks.
By 5 o’clock it was cold and I donned my padded jacket. Soon after, to my astonishment, the surface improved enough for slow cycling across a wide level saddle. Happily bumping along, I wondered if this reprieve would last beyond the saddle. Then ferocious barking alerted me. I tried to speed up but the four powerful converging dogs – two coming from each side – were racing like greyhounds. They attacked without hesitation, tearing my jacket sleeve, wrenching two spokes from Luke’s back wheel and causing me to fall into the ditch on my right elbow – which still occasionally reminds me of the episode. An agitated young shepherd called them off just in time. Apart from the very real risk of being savaged to death, rabies is quite common in Rumania and had I not been wearing a jacket – had one of them even slightly broken my skin – I would have felt obliged to go home at once.
Somewhat shaken, I resumed pushing the disabled Luke after a swig from my emergency supply of tuica. On the next steep mountain the road became even rougher – and more beautiful, as snowy crests glimmered above the blue evening shadows filling the deep valley on my left.
An hour later I camped on the pass, another broad grassy saddle strewn with gentians. It was not yet dog-infested, I suppose because it was so cold. Even at the beginning of June, in the freak weather of ’91, it was too frosty at that height to sleep out. But I left the tent open, to enjoy the glittering stars.
The descent next morning provided a much tougher challenge than the climb. That gradient was bizarre – it’s anybody’s guess what ‘percentage’ – and the surface rivalled the worst of Madagascar’s roads. An hour of hauling Luke over chasms, and braking him hard while trying to avoid another fractured foot on the round loose stones, left me trembling with exhaustion in the wondrously lovely valley that gently descends to Sinmartin. Too soon we were out of the mountains, on the main road to Sepsiszentgyorgy, where giant pylons stride aggressively across wheat or onion fields five miles long.
It is not unsuitable that Sepsiszentgyorgy sounds like a disease. I found it a depressed and depressing little city where I lingered only long enough to have Luke’s spokes repaired, a job efficiently done by an elderly mechanic whose ingenuity had been finely honed by long years of austerity. His daughter spoke some English and advised me never to try to escape from sheepdogs; one should always, she said, stand quite still.
I took this advice when dealing with the next threat, which came after I had said ‘Viszontlatasna!’ (farewell) to Harghita and was returning to Moldavia, now crossing the Bicaz Pass from the west. Half-way up, when it had been deluging coldly for an hour, I came on hundreds of sheep huddling in the thin forest, being semi-sheltered from the sleet. (Already many had died all over Moldavia and Transylvania, having been shorn at the normal time in an abnormal season.) Here I was ready when five great white woolly dogs leaped from the embankment to the road and encircled me, barking and snarling. I froze while they stood poised to attack, some five yards away; their terrifying noise must surely bring the shepherd quickly to my rescue. Not so, however. They then began to advance, in little jerky movements, their snarling becoming almost hysterical. At that moment I was as scared as I have ever been on my travels. I thought very fast. Should I try to remove the panniers and deter them by swinging Luke in a circle? I felt weak with relief when a dishevelled woman (the shepherd’s wife?) appeared on the embankment, a cigarette hanging from one corner of her mouth and wearing a peevish expression. As usual, the pack at once obeyed her screamed orders. But their withdrawal was reluctant and they continued to growl loudly and walk along the top of the embankment, parallel with me, until I was off their territory – which is of course wherever the flock happens to be. As I passed a nearby hut I observed the shepherd lying on a fleece by the doorway in – undoubtedly – a drunken stupor.
After the previous encounter I had been told that many of these dogs are trained to kill; hence, in populated areas, one often sees them being led, or tied to a wagon, or securely chained in a yard. Such attack forces are essential to defend the remote high pastures where shepherds would be helpless against a gang of rustlers – and motorised gangs from Soviet Moldavia are reputed to be common, now that the border is open. However, Man’s Best Friend seems like something else when multiplied by five and closely surrounding one in a meaningful frenzy.