The Great Hungarian Plain
Carts drawn by horses and oxen easily outnumbered the motor-cars. Gypsies were on the move in long, jolting waggons that made all their gear clatter … By the approach of evening, all trace of the capital and the western hills had vanished. We were in the middle of a limitless space.
Between the Woods and the Water
THE HILL OF BUDA WAS THE LAST HIGH GROUND I WOULD SEE for days. Beyond the terminal suburbs of Pest, the concrete net enwrapping the city – bursting in places, the further I went, to spill out scrappy woods and fields, suburbs bleeding into satellite towns, satellite towns into villages, past tower blocks and warehouse zones, into fields consumed by weeds and seemingly devoid of life – nothing stretched but flatness.
This was the start of the Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain. Most Hungarians called it Puszta, deriving from ‘empty’ or ‘bereft’, and it comprised the westernmost of the thrilling-sounding Eurasian steppes across which the colonising Magyar tribes had swept. In previous centuries, this vast swathe of grassland and freshwater marsh was known as the haunt of betyárs, Robin Hood–style outlaws escaping the yoke of feudalism; Paddy had glimpsed a shadow of that outlaw sensibility when he camped with a tribe of wandering Gypsies, complete with dancing bear. Since then, much of the grassland had been turned over to agriculture; Communist collectivisation programmes had forced the Roma to abandon their nomadic way of life. Towns had nibbled at the emptiness, and here and there could be seen the orange twist of a gas flare’s flame, desultory smatterings of light industry.
My predecessor had crossed these miles on a chestnut horse called Malek, on loan from a benefactor in Budapest. A horse would have suited me nicely as well, but the artists and ruin bar–frequenters I’d befriended had none to offer. Someone had warned me the Puszta would be mind- numbingly dull: a monotony of yellow horizons, stubbled by villages and crisscrossed by highways, sort of a Hungarian version of the American Midwest. The thought of so much emptiness produced a similar trepidation to what I’d felt overlooking the featureless spread of Slovakia from Bratislava’s castle: an itinerant’s fear of being exposed, without the comfort of valleys or woods in which to sneak unnoticed. Amid the parched, unmoving fields, under the cloudless wasteland of the sky, I had the impression at first of walking into a desert.
In Szolnok, one of my first small oases, I stayed with an incongruous family of Buddhist soap-makers. They lived in cheerfully slovenly style with a kitchen piled with dirty plates, and served me a curious meal of fried bread and tiramisu. The town initially looked little more than a nexus of railways and superstores – Tesco seemed to have won whatever war it was fighting here – but at its centre lay pleasant streets of Austro-Hungarian municipal buildings, pastel-shaded architecture in comfortable disrepair. I could imagine well-to-do farmers coming to settle their paperwork. There was a sleepy, indolent air. The political hive of Budapest, with its conflicts and divisions, already felt several decades distant.
After Szolnok, scrubby fields stretched to the south. The land grew wider, emptier: there was a feeling of multiplying space, as if the volume of the sky had increased, an adjustment of scale that was slightly alarming. It was like a telescope suddenly zooming out and I saw myself as a moving speck in a milky yellow vastness. But as my mind acclimatised, the trepidation I had felt was replaced by intrigue. The Puszta was monotonous, certainly, a purgatorial threshold, but under the surface domestication of roads and infrastructure the ghost of the steppe remained, its emptiness a physical presence, bubbling up between settlements.
Summer was truly upon me now and the texture of the air had changed: not scalded hot by sudden sun but warm in the way a lake stays warm after days of sunshine. The paths were dry enough for my boots to kick up thick grey dust, and dust devils corkscrewed ahead, always collapsing into nothing by the time I reached them. The sky was baked pale blue, the colour of distressed plastic. I wouldn’t see a cloud for ten days; after a while this flawlessness started to feel unnatural, as if the workings of nature had stopped, the weather as featureless and unchanging as the landscape.
Following a dyke along the Tirsza river I met a group of farmers lounging by propped-up bicycles, machetes and scythes scattered about, seemingly the only living things in the landscape. Cracked faces peered from under tattered baseball caps, eyes squeezed into permanent squints, like extras in a cowboy film. They motioned me to Mesterszállás with forceful jabbings of the thumb – ‘húsz kilométerre’, ‘twenty kilometres’ – gave courteous nods goodbye, and when I looked back five minutes later they were still staring after me. Nothing disturbed the silence of the land but the crunch of my boots in the dust and the tweedle of skylarks. In late afternoon the horizon’s flatness was broken by the steeple that announced my destination, where I’d been offered a place to rest; the faster I walked towards it the more it kept its distance, hovering always on the skyline as if unsure of my intentions, finally creeping up to me with extreme shyness.
No one had offered me a horse, but the emptiness of the Puszta was scattered with benefactors nonetheless; friends of friends I had met in Budapest, or strangers who had somehow heard of my journey through the mysterious channels of the internet. In Mesterszállás, I’d received instructions from a woman I was never to meet to call at the Városháza, where someone called Edit was expecting me. The Városháza was the village hall, a low stone building snared in ivy, and Edit was a cat-faced woman who led me unquestioningly to a house nearby. She showed me into a dormitory furnished in dark wood and a bed with crisp white sheets; we were mutually tongue-tied, but she made it known I was a guest of the village.
Spindly trees bordered the garden, black against the pinkening sky. Dogs trotted along the pavements on important private assignments. The evening was hazy with wood smoke, and from cigarette smoke drifting along behind cyclists returning, with impressive slowness, from the fields. It felt like the village was heaving a great sigh after no great exertion.
Farmers in padded coats were drinking pálinka in the only bar. Magyar pop blared from the speakers, and a fat man with a white moustache was manhandling the barmaid in a dance; when she’d managed to get away he plonked himself down at my table, his face flushed with bonhomie, and talked without pause for the next half-hour. The Magyar pop inexplicably changed to earsplitting thrash metal. Three younger drunks in camouflage gear were pretending to have a fistfight at the bar, handing out boisterous stage slaps and testicular bootings. My companion downed his beer, and then the beer he’d bought me, and went back to shuffling like a happy bear. When I left, his drunkenness had passed its exuberant peak and plunged him into despondency; I tried wishing him goodnight but he only moaned in despair, burying his face in his thick hands.
I had a recollection of something someone had told me in Budapest: ‘Sírva vígad a Magyar – Hungarians rejoice in crying. It means a kind of sweet pain. One eye might be smiling, but the other is weeping. You get together with friends, you drink pálinka so you don’t feel the weight. Nationalities have souls, just like people do. This is one way to explain our country’s soul.’
The next day’s halt wasn’t far and I meandered slowly. Every so often on this journey I would find myself displaced, filled with incomprehension as to how I came to be there. The narrative of my walk fractured into component parts that had no chronology, that didn’t connect at all. The white winter was so far away it might have happened years before, the rain of the Rhine was further still, and Holland was just a brown smudge beyond my memory. None of it bore any relation to the cracked fields around me now, the sweat dripping off the end of my nose or smearing up my glasses.
That sense of disembodiment followed me all day. I stopped frequently to sit and smoke, hiding from the sky in the meagre shadows of hazel trees bordering the fields. Insects had woken in the heat: scuffling red beetles that were either mating, or fighting, or both; bronze-coloured millipedes clambering in the dust. Cars were infrequent interruptions to the silence I had grown used to, gathering like physical manifestations of sound, entities formed from pure momentum. Tossed untidily along the verge were the skeletons of deer, the tattered remains of foxes and hares, and once the long, lithe body of a polecat: one hooked fang in a mouth of blood, red beetles working in its fur.
The town of Mezőtúr assembled itself on the horizon. A haywain clattered down the road, pulled by two dappled horses with crimson pompoms bouncing round their necks to ward off the evil eye; it was the first horse-drawn transport I’d seen, and it made the sight of the town infinitely more exciting. A large, potato-headed man was waiting by the petrol station, flanked by four beaming teenage girls. ‘I am Péter Hollosvolgyi,’ he announced in carefully enunciated English. ‘Don’t worry, even Hungarians find it hard to pronounce. These girls are Heti, Beti, Nora and Petra. We are delighted to welcome you to Mezőtúr.’
The connection had come via Esztergom: Sámuel’s cousin was a teacher at the local Teleki Blanka Gimnázium, and had arranged for me to stay the night at the school. In return I was to give a presentation to the students in the morning; Heti, Beti, Nora and Petra had volunteered as my guides and helpers in the meantime. They strolled with me around the sights in the dying hours of daylight, dutifully pointing out the usual statues of patriotic heroes: the revolutionary Kossuth, the national poet Petőfi. They seemed to know every face in town and greeted the adults with ‘csókolom’, ‘I kiss’, which Paddy had heard in Transylvania. It derived from the antiquated ‘I kiss your hand’, a throwback to feudal courtesy – the Magyar equivalent of forelock-tugging – that had stubbornly outlasted Communism’s levelling attempts.
Another intimation of the old order came when they took me to a small museum in the school grounds. Alongside the famous Mezőtúr pottery, dog-headed drinking jars and intricately embroidered cotton were a pair of tall leather boots and a lidded, long-stemmed bamboo pipe. Paddy had described the drovers here as ‘tough, tousled and weather-beaten fellows in knee-boots’ who ‘smoked queer-looking pipes with lidded metal bowls and six-inch stems of reed or bamboo’. Could the artefacts displayed – stripped of human meaning now, the boots unworn, the pipe unsmoked – be the same ones he had seen on the feet, and clenched between the teeth, of riotous drunks in the local inn? The mulatság – ‘the high spirits, that is, the rapture and the melancholy’ – into which those peasants had descended was certainly the same ‘sweet pain’ I’d seen in the bar the night before. The costumes may have changed, but the Puszta’s highs and lows – in spirit and topography – had remained the same.
I was given my own small room in the school dormitory. The students seemed unfazed by the presence of a pungent, bearded foreigner, and I whiled away the hour before bed playing chess with Heti. The girls had been given the task of organising my breakfast; I requested bread and cheese, coffee, maybe a piece of fruit. In the morning the table was heaped with a loaf of bread, two cheeses, a large salami, a packet of ham, a jar of instant coffee, two chocolate bars, a packet of biscuits, assorted yoghurts, four oranges, a bunch of bananas, an onion and a leek. The girls spectated proudly as I tried to make a dent in this pile, refusing to eat any themselves, and when I could manage no more they crammed the leftovers into every available space in my rucksack. Stuffed and dazed, still half asleep, I was led to the assembly hall to explain, to two hundred puzzled students, what I was doing there.
When I left Mezőtúr, I was turning my back on the last hospitable oasis for a week. There were no more benefactors until the Romanian borderlands; days of solitude and silence lay ahead. This was the point on Paddy’s journey that he began to get passed along from aristocrat to aristocrat, rounding off his days’ wanderings with hot baths, dinners and bicycle polo, ‘strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps’. On my post-aristocratic walk, this was the point at which I started to look, and feel, like a tramp myself. The constant sweat, and drying of sweat, created Rorschach patterns on my clothes, discoloured from the effects of dust and sun. My forearms and neck tanned purplish-brown, and my beard, untrimmed for weeks, took on an alarming aspect. Sometimes I became aware of a cloying, homeless stench I didn’t recognise as my own. There was something transcendental about it; my body was starting to smell like another person’s.
From Mezőtúr I followed rivers dribbling south and east: first the Hortobágy-Berettyó, more a dried-up drainage canal, and then the reluctant, green-brown sluggishness of the Körös. The earth was baked so hard it wasn’t much different from tarmac. Occasionally I passed a farm, to be met by the predictable fury of dogs, and just as often an abandoned cottage with furniture smashed to kindling, wall-paper sloughing from the walls, dusty clothes piled on the floor. In one, as I wandered through the rooms, I picked up a framed photograph of a woman and a little girl standing neck deep in water, beaming happily. It was as if the family had left one afternoon, thirty or forty years ago, and never returned. Was their story connected to the land upheavals of collectivisation, urbanisation, the economic hollowing-out of the countryside? There was no one around to tell. It only added to the Puszta’s sense of peculiar desolation.
I reached Gyoma, where Paddy had delivered his borrowed horse. Since then the village had merged, Budapest-like, with neighbouring Endrőd to form Gyomaendrőd; but that was where comparisons with the capital city ended. Chickens drifted in the lanes like inflated plastic bags, competing for pecking space with guinea fowl, little speckled zeppelins with giblet heads. Two workmen stood gazing at a puddle, the effluvium of some infrastructural flood, with expressions of fathomless depression. Having no horse to return, I crossed the bridge to the river’s northern bank where an entanglement of forest seemed to offer the perfect place for my first night of camping.
Gergő had helped me choose the tent back in Budapest. It weighed just a couple of kilograms and packed down to the size of a sleeping bag, but even this modest extra weight had added to my daily aches over the past few days. The increased pain was worth it, though, for the freedom of crashing where I pleased; the tent was a happy medium between a stranger’s hospitality and sleeping in a ditch. On that first evening I picked my way through knotted vines and old man’s beard, under an overspilling nest of wasps dropping like slow hail, until I came to a crescent beach framed by fallen trees. The tent went up authoritatively, magically transforming my status from potential rough sleeper to temporary resident. Having established this claim to the land, I sat on a trunk jutting over the river and murdered mosquitoes. The Körös turned molten at dusk, a murky golden soup lit with magnesium-bright flecks from the dying sun. Clumps of twigs floated past like knots of hair.
It was the first of many such times in the months ahead. That undecided hour between evening and night was always a process of adjustment, a gradual settling of nerves in potentially ominous surroundings. Pigeons whooped in the trees, pheasants clattered melodramatically, and deer crashed through dry leaves with unexpected violence. From inside the tent the rustling of small beasts in the under-growth, magnified by the silence of night, could sound as big as horses. Noises carried from nearby villages were louder than seemed possible: the evening outrages of dogs, the bells of churches, the yells of children, each marking the end of the day with their own form of music. I hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet – sudden noises could still make the blood jump in my veins – but I slept well that night, with no disturbed dreams. It seemed as good a sign as any that I was accepted in the landscape.
The next day’s walk was virtually indistinguishable from the day before. Once again the land was yellow, the sky blue, the dust grey, and heat haze made the horizon roll like jelly. Infrequent columns of farmers passed, mounted on tool-laden bicycles, each nodding ‘szervusz’, ‘szia’, ‘halló’, trailing his own plume of dust. Sometimes I came upon a pink-fleshed, shirtless fisherman by an amputated snip of river, disconnected serpentines created by waterway regulation, and once a walnut-faced man with missing teeth emerged from woodland to seize my hand; when I told him where I was from he bellowed ‘Angol!’ into the trees, where presumably concealed spectators were watching. ‘My answer “Angol,”’ Paddy wrote of a similar encounter, ‘induced a look of polite vagueness; an Angle meant as little to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor.’
Körösladany was the next stop, and trudging through the beginnings of the village I was suddenly exhausted with the role I had to play: the eccentric stranger, announcing his friendly intentions with a smile, a clumsy sentence or two, a round of handshakes. A couple of glances from the locals, half-challenging and half-shy, were enough to drive me straight towards the dark bolt-hole of the church, a medieval impulse for sanctuary from the surveilling world. It was as cold as a fridge inside, and the varnished wood and silent stone were wonderfully familiar. Best of all, it was totally empty; I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. I stayed there a long time, clawing back my mood. The sweat dried on my skin and the aches subsided. When I left, I felt as though something had been rebalanced.
Later I worked it out: that church had once been the private chapel of the family of Count Johann Meran, another of Paddy’s noble connections. The schoolhouse lying off the park – ‘a long ochre-coloured late eighteenth-century building’ – was the family kastély, while the park was part of their estate. Now children were playing there and Roma were laying out picnics on the lawn. Körösladany no longer felt so unfamiliar.
At dusk I crashed through tinder-dry woods to camp south of the Körös. Bells tolled from the Meran church, bats flickered after mosquitoes. I woke at dawn to see a polecat leaning in through the mesh of my inner tent, its little clawed hands outstretched, like someone gazing through a shop window. I clapped, and it didn’t move. I poked its belly, and it still didn’t move. On its snub, two-tone face was a similar expression to the one I’d seen on those of yesterday’s locals.
The Körös branched into the Sebes-Körös, and the SebesKörös into the Holt-Sebes-Körös – the Swift-Körös and the Dead-Swift-Körös – and I followed these confusingly titled rivers all day through the dull-coloured world. Beyond the occasional hello I had spoken to no one in two days and silence was becoming addictive: when I reached Vésztő that evening, solitude was wrapped around me like a protective blanket. Vésztő gave the impression of having been dropped from a great height; for such a small town it was too spread out, its houses haphazardly scattered, like the debris of a messy landing. Plaster was peeling from walls held up by scaffolding, and even the newly constructed houses looked derelict. There was nothing in the shop apart from sweet, loaf-sized sponge cakes; I bought one knowing it would be horrible and hurried out of town, setting my sights on the distant trees of the Körös-Maros National Park.
Already I was becoming adept at scoping out camping places. Trees were good, and rivers were good, and hills were good – but the Puszta had no hills – and the woodland ahead offered both trees and water. Unfortunately the trees turned out to lie behind a swathe of bog, and my first attempt to find a path ended in sodden feet. My second attempt took me halfway before my boots sank in slime, and when I tried backing out they sank that way as well. I made a panicked sideways leap, which landed me, to my surprise, on a concrete beam. Another beam lay a short jump away. I’d discovered a line of stepping stones, a secret pathway.
Beyond that protective moat lay an aspen forest. I sprawled contentedly under the trees, relieved to be invisible again. But as I was putting up my tent I heard crashing feet: instinctively I hid my face, shrinking low against the ground, and three men with hunting rifles passed within thirty feet, looking neither left nor right, before vanishing into the trees. I stayed dead still. I couldn’t retreat deeper into the woods without crackling through dry leaves; all I could do was wait, and hope they didn’t come back. Ten minutes later they did come back, crossing the wood from another direction; they passed even closer that time, but still they didn’t see me. It was inexplicable; perhaps I really was invisible. I stayed motionless until dark, when I was sure I wouldn’t be found, and once inside the tent was struck by the ludicrousness of the situation. What on earth was I doing sneaking around a wood in Hungary, hiding from the local population? The Puszta was sending me weird. I felt as if I was slipping between the gaps.
In the morning, slightly shamed by my instinct to hide from the locals rather than meet them, I returned to Vésztő and sought out coffee in the roughest-looking bar I could find. Inside was a strangely beautiful scene: glasses sparkled in the sunlight, and blue cigarette smoke hung in aurora borealis–like veils. It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, and seven old men in a variety of headgear – fishing hats, baseball caps, a beret and a service cap that looked like something a Second World War tank commander might have worn – were already on their second or third glasses. My arrival silenced the room. I requested coffee, a mistake soon remedied by a man called Sándor, who cancelled my coffee and ordered me pálinka instead. The clear spirit was solemnly poured from a battered plastic bottle, and beer arrived as back-up. Sándor clearly believed in starting the day as he meant to go on.
We swapped cigarettes, that time-honoured ritual for familiarisation with strangers, and attempted conversation in a mix of Magyar, English, German and Russian. What was I doing here? ‘Gyalog,’ I said, ‘on foot’, a word I remembered because it sounded a bit like ‘dialogue’. ‘Gyalog? Gyalog?’ he cried in delight. Where did I stay last night? I gestured vaguely out of the window. ‘Lány?’ he enquired, ‘girl?’ I nodded to keep him happy and he bellowed his approval. Encouraged, I made my way through the rest of my Magyar vocabulary, which consisted mostly of geographical features: falu, ‘village’, erdő, ‘forest’, hegy, ‘hill’. Apart from the latter they went down well, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d pronounced the word for ‘hill’ wrong, or if, this being the Puszta, it wasn’t part of his verbal landscape.
The other denizens of the room were enjoying our interaction immensely. They took it in turns to order drinks and slide them down the bar. After a while we were joined by a character who could only have been the town fool – in communities like this, a role as important as the mayor or the local policeman – who cackled and chortled, hopped and jigged, while his friends alternately laughed along and shook their heads sadly. With his long oily hair, knee-high boots and greasy jerkin he could have come from any time in the last few hundred years, and his hat caused hilarity because it looked like an even filthier version of mine; much amusement was derived from swapping them back and forth. Outside the window the early-morning sunbeams were replaced by the white light of midday. I was on my fourth pálinka and another round of beers was coming. I didn’t know how to get away. Sándor clung to my arm and implored me not to leave. When I finally departed, huge disappointment overcame him; he shook my hand resignedly, as if I was making a terrible mistake, and when I turned to wave he was staring dully at his glass, all humour drained. I felt quite guilty.
I followed the road, morning-drunk, the sun high in the sky. Once the alcohol wore off the track was interminable, stretching ahead without deviation to a horizon with as little imagination as itself. My hangover started early. But it wasn’t far to Doboz, a village shaded by rustling trees, where the air itself seemed to be cooled by the cooing of doves. In one of these now-dilapidated houses Paddy had been given a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle for warding off Romanians, but I had no clues which house it was. The only candidate I saw was an enormous crumbling structure something between a mansion and a barn, although I couldn’t tell if it had once stored grain or aristocrats.
On the other side of Doboz I found the Körös river again – the original Körös, stripped of its modifiers – which had become wider, slower, fringed by driftwood-strewn mudflats. Reeds concealed a pungent beach whining with leggy mosquitoes, and here I erected my tent on a bed of mouldable river mud and waited for the day to die. I was in limbo again. The hangover didn’t help. I hadn’t washed for almost a week and had eaten practically nothing but bread, cheese and salami. It took a long time to relax to the sudden pop-clunk of plastic bottles as the temperature dropped, releasing mysterious pressures, and during the night a wind blew up; my dreams were of flash floods sweeping my tent away.
I was coming to my last Hungarian town: the Romanian border lay two days distant. The closer I got, the more I experienced jolts of apprehension. I’d been in Hungary for over a month, long enough to absorb certain of its attitudes, and many Hungarians still considered Romania enemy territory.
‘My days on the Slovakian bank of the Danube, where many of the inhabitants were Hungarians, had given me the first hint of Hungarian irredentist convictions,’ wrote Paddy. ‘The bias against the Slovaks was strong; but, since the loss of Transylvania at the Treaty of Trianon, the very mention of Romania made them boil over.’ Once again, nothing had changed. ‘They are all robbers and crooks! You can’t trust them. They’ll take everything you’ve got,’ he was warned in 1934, and those words might have been spoken by people I met in 2012; even the Buddhist soap-makers of Szolnok had told me to beware, and Sándor had practically spat in disgust when I said that’s where I was heading. Hungarians had confidently told me I’d be savaged by dogs, robbed by bandits, tricked by Gypsies, menaced by bears, that the people were shifty and dishonest, the land polluted, the villages drab; and even though I knew these were partial, tribal views, the cultural osmosis had done its work. The prejudices of the cultures I walked through affected me like the seasons or the cooking, and I found it impossible to inure myself against them.
Perhaps subconsciously trying to delay the horrors of what lay ahead, I stayed two nights in Békéscsaba, the capital of Békés County. It was a rather shocking return to urbanity, with neoclassical buildings framing tree-lined boulevards, dotted with espresso bars and cafés that didn’t serve pálinka first thing in the morning. The city was large enough to support a caste of alternative kids with facial piercings and styled hair, a specialisation of appearances that only becomes possible above a certain population size. On one street was a monument of a guillotine severing a block of stone. The blade was inscribed with ‘Trianon’; Hungary lay on one side, and Transylvania the other. Soon I would be crossing into the severed block.
I had benefactors here. The first was Adrienne, a pretty young woman who worked in a dog shelter. In the apartment she shared with her parents I washed the filth from my body, turning the water in the plughole grey, and had my first proper meal in days: cherry soup and stuffed cabbage leaves smothered in sour cream. Her mother worked in a tanning salon – catering mainly for prostitutes, she said – and her father was employed at the dog shelter, having lost his construction job in the economic freeze. They entreated me to cycle out and visit them at work the next morning.
I borrowed a bicycle and did just that. The shelter was an hour’s ride east – a road sign for Bucharest caused another brief wobble of fear – and in many ways it resembled hell: four hundred baying dogs, with the stench of four hundred dogs and the piss-stained bedding of four hundred dogs, the shit of four hundred dogs and, by far the worst, the dinner of four hundred dogs, bad meat boiling in a blackened tub the size of a jacuzzi. The fug was overwhelmingly awful, but Adrienne bounced through the canine squalor as if she was at a picnic.
Luckily I had an excuse not to linger: the night before, her father had helped me identify Póstelek, the most likely match for the kastély where Paddy had stayed. It was a short cycle away and arriving by bike was appropriate: this was where my predecessor had played bicycle-polo on the lawn, before leisurely evenings of smoking a chibook – a relative of the Turkish narghile pipe – in the immaculate company of Count Józsi and Archduke Joseph. Conjuring up such rose-tinted scenes was quite an effort now. I had gone from dogs to ruins. The house was so comprehensively gutted it might have been destroyed eight centuries ago rather than eight decades. Its ‘pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flags flying and flights of covered stairs’ had been reduced to rubbly heaps, like digestive biscuit crumbs. It was as broken as a building can be, smashed to smithereens. There was something extraordinary about the thoroughness with which this world – in all its comfortable wealth and self-assurance – had been annihilated.
The same peculiar cultural amnesia I had observed at Štrkovec made it hard to find out exactly what had happened. Adrienne’s father vaguely supposed the house had been destroyed in the war, while other people thought it had been an accidental fire. No one mentioned Communism, which was certainly the cause, if not of the destruction itself, then of the decades of subsequent neglect that had atomised the building. When I crossed into Romania I would see this again and again: the dereliction of these country houses was deliberate and systematic, part of the ritualised disgracing of the dispossessed ruling class.
In Póstelek’s once-famous arboretum – its magnolias and tulip trees growing wild above the weeds – I thought back to the first ruins I’d seen on this walk, squatting in the crumbling castles of the Rhine. Those citadels of knightly power were destroyed centuries earlier, as kings extended their dominance over lesser rulers. The twentieth-century despoilment of the kastélys of Hungarian nobles was a fundamentally similar process: an autocratic national government exerting control over the local power bases of landed gentry. Communism was only an extension of the centralising process begun by monarchs in medieval times; as with much else in the East, it had simply taken place a few centuries later here.
It was tempting to return with my tent to camp in the grounds that night, but an unusual offer had come my way. In Budapest I’d received an email from a place called the Panorama Wellness Hotel, offering a night’s accommodation; its owner had somehow heard I was passing through Békéscsaba. So after leaving Póstelek I found myself in an otherwise empty hotel behind a petrol station, in a room with an en suite shower and cable television. My arrival was expected, but the staff spoke no English and I was unable to discover the whereabouts of my host. I imagined he or she would knock on the door at any moment – or join me in the restaurant downstairs, where I was served goulash and chocolate pie – but I finished my meal alone. The next morning the waiter brought me something called a ‘peasant’s omelette’ and photographed me eating it from a dozen different angles. My mysterious benefactor never appeared. Full of grease and paprika, I set out for my last day’s walk on the Great Hungarian Plain.
It was one straight path to the border beside the railway line. The land was green suddenly, with rustling yellow reeds. On the horizon, distant hills were visible for the first time in days; with a rush of excitement, and a jangling of small fears, I knew I was looking at Romania.
Several hours down the track, I was stopped by a car containing two stubble-headed country cops in sagging boiler suits. They were the Rendőrség – it was a last reminder of the perverse uniqueness of Magyar that the word for ‘police’ sounds nothing like ‘police’ – and they wanted to see my passport. When I explained I was walking to Romania, they waggled chubby fingers. ‘Nem. Tren,’ they said, pointing to the tracks. Paddy had been told the same in 1934; despite all that had happened since, the border still wasn’t crossable on foot.
In Lőkösháza I boarded a train to carry me to Curtici, the first town over the border. It rattled through frontier nowhereland, the landscape identically derelict on both sides of the divide, fields and farms and abandoned houses, with clouds advancing across the sky like columns of infantry. The Rendőrség checked my passport again; the Romanian Poliție did the same half an hour later. I was still in EU territory, but was the end of the passport-free Schengen zone.
Bracing myself for instant attack from bandits, Gypsies, dogs and bears, I stepped onto the platform. A sleepy mongrel lying in the sunshine lifted its head and dropped it again, making no attempt to attack me at all. A group of rather courteous policemen pointed out the road to Pâncota, showing no surprise that I wanted to walk, as if it wasn’t much business of theirs. These were encouraging signs.
On foot, small differences were immediately apparent. The first change was in the rooftops, which were steeper, narrower, witchier looking, with a preponderance of slightly creepy turrets and dragon-scale tiles. The architecture had assumed a folkier, more whimsical aspect, and the guttering was embellished with peculiar armoured decorations. More spectacularly, there appeared palatial concrete edifices crowned in outrageous adornments of tin, glittering arabesques like fantasy pagodas; the opulence of the roofs contrasted starkly with the mansions below, which were all rebar and bare cement, their windows plastic wrapped. These were the famous ‘Gypsy palaces’, more status symbol than home, kept permanently under construction to avoid paying taxes.
No less striking was the shift in language. From the assembled men in berets and women in shawls and heavy boots, I caught snatches of a Latinate tongue, and its lilting, southern-sounding cadence brought a rush of familiarity that was quite unexpected. Magyar had been impenetrably alien. Here, I could actually guess at the meaning of things.
One night in Budapest I’d gone drinking with a man called Sean, an American translator who spoke Magyar and Romanian fluently. He’d talked of Hungarian psychology and why it was that Magyar-speaking people felt exceptional, isolated in the middle of Europe, under threat on all sides. It was partly explained, he thought, by the uniqueness of the language. ‘If you look at Romanians, they’re actually very open to new ideas and influences. They feel themselves part of Europe because they have a linguistic link with Italian, Spanish and French, and they can understand a lot of the Slavic languages too. Magyar is utterly unlike any neighbouring language, so Hungary has no sense of connection or shared culture. I think that might explain why the country is so inward looking. Why Hungarians have this fear of the outside world.’
As I left for the blue hills, curiously watched by old men and women with faces so wrinkled they looked as if they’d been creased and smoothed, creased and smoothed for a hundred years, I thought of something else Sean had said about Romania: ‘People have faces there.’ I knew now what he meant.
I followed a newly surfaced road with infrequent traffic. The late-afternoon light was intense and rain swept the horizon, streaking the sky like brushstrokes on canvas, but none fell near me. Naïvely painted Christs were nailed to crucifixes of hammered tin, and grubby sheep waddled the fields, another difference from Hungary; this was a transition from a farming to a shepherding culture. A Dacia, Romania’s national car, slowed to offer me a lift. A horse and cart jangled past. A disproportionate number of dead dogs lay along the roadside.
I kept walking until I was too footsore to continue. In a village called Sântana I was directed to a pension that looked boarded up, with only a couple of dogs yapping from the balcony to alert me to inhabitation. After ten minutes of knocking and waiting, the door swung open to reveal a smiling man who introduced himself as Kitos; he led me upstairs to a cheap yet surprisingly pleasant room with a view over tiled roofs, blossoming fruit trees, dogs and chickens squabbling in a yard. Rubbing his arms in a mime of cold, he went out and returned with an electric heater that filled the room with the smell of burning hair.
By the time I came downstairs, the lower floor had become a bar and Kitos had morphed from manager to barman. He poured me two shots of homemade țuică – the Romanian version of pálinka – powerful moonshine from the inevitable battered plastic bottle. On the television a handball game was in progress between Romania and Hungary, and when the Hungarians scored Kitos delivered a matey attack on another man at the bar, a guy with most of his teeth knocked out so he literally sported fangs. ‘Magyar man,’ Kitos explained, pummelling this ethnic enemy in a mock-aggressive way, then linking fingers together to symbolise their friendship.
I ended up at the only table on a salvaged car back seat, while Kitos delivered more beer and liberally handed out țuică. My new drinking buddies were one very brown man, one very white man and one very red man; the hands of the very red man so huge, his fingers so thick and strong, that I felt embarrassed to display my own puny specimens on the table. A deck of Romanian cards was produced, suits I’d never seen before, and a complicated game ensued.
The red-faced man talked and talked, desperate to communicate something. He scrawled on a sheet of paper and I dimly understood that he was giving me a lesson in Romanian history. The name ‘Decebal’ I recognised, the last king of the Dacians, the civilisation that had ruled these lands before the Romans came. Then he leapt forward to 1848 and a picture of a tree, then 1947, ‘Mihai’, who I guessed was King Michael I, the word ‘abdicat’ with a scrawl of a train, an aeroplane, then ‘comunişti’ and a symbol that – with elaborate mimes – represented the act of fucking. I was more or less following him – King Michael abdicated in 1947, left the country by various means of transport, then the Communists came along and proceeded to fuck everybody – but after that the plot became confused. He had scrawled over the words so much that written communication was hopeless, so he launched into a series of charades that grew less and less comprehensible: a very realistic impression of a bear (Russia?), water being drawn from a well (irrigation? resource exploitation?), then a cow, a Chinese person, a fat man getting drunk, and finally, I deciphered, Napoleon’s penis. This went down a storm at the table: a pun on the word pulă, ‘dick’, to make Na-pula-eon. I was glad I’d kind of understood the joke, but integrating it into the wider historical narrative was tricky. This wasn’t greatly improving my understanding of Romanian history, although I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the culture.
I woke with an aching head on a cold, bright morning. Cockerels were crowing in the yard and my breath steamed in the air. Downstairs Kitos served me coffee, brushing aside the coins I offered with gentle firmness. Another card game was in progress with the deck from the night before, and cigarette smoke was already billowing over the table.