Following the example of Captain Speke as he travelled along the Nile, we occasionally indulge ourselves in a zigzag route, leaving the river for a trip in some other direction, to join it later at a point only a mile or two downstream. Amedeo suggests a diversion to Szeged, because he once met a certain Klára, who came from Szeged and wore striped stockings.
The dusty puszta is the gloomy Magyar landscape described by Ady: its Hungarian life, he said, as grey as the dust. The road runs along the southern border of the low-lying plain, as endless as the sea, wrote Petöfi, the bard of little Kumania, of its storks and will-o’-the-wisps on the far horizon. In this empty, uncaring landscape, life flows negligently by, moving towards infinite distance like a herd of cattle. The only thing that happens is that time passes. The years, says one of Petőfi’s poems, flash by like a flock of birds after a gunshot.
To cross the Tisza, the slothful Hungarian Nile, as Mikszáth calls it, on a dark, dull evening, is slightly unpleasant, like leaving a land where one feels at home and entering a foreign country. Obedient to the authority of the book, I am anxious to seek out Yellow Island, at the meeting of the Tisza and the Maros, and the hostelry in which, according to Kálmán Mikszáth, “one ate the tastiest fish soup in the world,” but literature, it seems, does not belong to the falsifiable, which is to say the true, sciences. It is therefore open to question whether, as claimed by the Antiquarius, the Tisza is composed of two thirds water and one third fish, pike and carp, so plentiful as to cost scarce a ducat a thousand.
In his picture of the city written for the monumental work produced under the patronage of the Archduke Rudolph, The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy Described and Illustrated, Mikszáth, the amiable narrator, says that “as among nearly all peoples who live in the plains, at Szeged also there is less poetry than in the mountains.” It seems that even in love the inhabitant of Szeged has little verve, and would be inclined to select his father one from among the girls with a decent amount of money, or at least with shoulders strong enough to carry heavy sacks.
The town is shabby, with the air of a station yard. Its history, writes its stern bard, “swarms with catastrophes of every sort and kind,” both historical and natural. Maybe so many calamities are a punishment for the rebellious spirit of the citizens, and their deep-rooted democratic tradition. Even the wealthy burghers sympathized with Dózsa, the great leader of the peasants’ revolt, so that the nobles, having won the struggle, and captured and tortured Dózsa, cut off his head and sent it as a warning gift to Blasius Pálfy, chief magistrate of Szeged. Violence seems at home in these parts. In 1527, from the windows of the noble palace of Ladislaus Szilágyi, a volley of musketry struck the false Czar Ivan (or Iova), the “terrible black man” who with his bandits had terrorized the area between the Temes and the Tisza. Ivan, whose real name was Franz Fekete, is one of those false Czars who abound in Slav history. He was one of those bandit-usurpers who are stirred in the first place by a thirst for plunder; thanks to their abilities, but without intending to, they rise to the point of playing a real political role, and in the end are pursued back to their brigandish origins and destroyed like weeds.
Having arbitrarily proclaimed himself a descendant of the family of the Serbian despots, Franz Fekete gathered an army of five – some say ten – thousand men, mostly peasants, with which he proceeded to ravage the country. Six hundred soldiers formed his bodyguard, his “janissaries”, as he called them, probably in a delirium of grandeur and to compare himself with the Sultan of Constantinople, Suleiman the Magnificent, who had won the Battle of Mohács and conquered Hungary.
During that period, following the catastrophe of Mohács, the crown of Hungary was disputed between the Emperor Ferdinand of Hapsburg, who lived in Vienna, and the Voivode of Transylvania, John Zápolya, who at certain times enjoyed the support of the Turks, then masters of the country. The rivalry between these two powers enabled the false Czar, allied now to one and now to the other, to enter the “great world” and the Machiavellianism of high politics.
Who knows whether the Terrible Black Man realized what was happening to him, or the part which history was summoning him to play, or whether he thought to the last only of plunder and pillage. Without knowing or wanting it, maybe he started on the way to becoming a double personality, one of those characters gradually transformed by the mask which they adopt. The learned Stojacskovics has him down as the seventh Despot of Serbia, whereas Schwicker, the old historian of the Banat, questions this appraisal and places him simply among the bandits. Defeated and wounded at Szeged, he escaped into the woods, but was pursued and annihilated, along with his last followers. His head was sent to Zápolya, whose residence was in Ofen, the ancient Buda.
Death evidently suits Szeged. In Dóm ter, the cathedral square, is a marble pantheon with the busts and effigies of illustrious men along three sides. The encyclopaedist Apáczai Cserie János is depicted by a skull, with a jacket and collar but missing two teeth, and in skeletal fingers holding a book, the Magyar Encyclopaedia for the year MDCLIII. Is learning therefore like death, the lethal stiffening of existence and of its flow? In the Serbian church, not far from the cathedral, not even the Virgin bestows liberation, or the womanly, maternal intercession that melts the ice of the heart. The brow of this Balkan Madonna is crowned, but the crown pierces her flesh and the blood runs down onto the head of the Babe at her breast, soiling His lips. This grim, sorrowing deity scarcely evokes the litanies of May or the invocation of the morning star.