Now for a burst of speed that drove me due north, across a hot plain pronged at random with swing-wells, each with a sprinkled population of men and women breaking up their baked fields. They had wooden ploughs and adzes, scraping, planting and irrigating in allotments and tobacco fields: a thirsty and, somehow, distressing scene of Georgic diligence. In the distance there were occasional patches of eerie green. Were they swamps, a mirage, or the rice fields I had heard about? Hard work in hot plains fills one with confused sentiments of malaise: joy that one isn’t hard at it oneself, guilt about this joy. Visually plains are only tolerable if they are absolutely barren, like deserts, tundras, or steppes, just fit for grazing; though it is hard to deny splendour to an ocean of wheat. But these visions of pettifogging and grinding prosperity strike the observer with sorrow, and hamstring its practitioners. They are never much good at anything else.
But the redeeming and beautiful line of the mountains sailed across the northern horizon. I pounded towards it, heading for the notch that marked the pass between the Sredna Gora on the west and the Karadja Dagh on the east. Finally, to hoist myself faster out of the plain, I followed a track that led up the side of the Sredna Gora, and, after finishing most of Nadejda’s supplies, slept in an abandoned shepherd’s lean-to of branches. It was higher and colder than I thought. I woke up to watch the dawn, as I lay luxuriously smoking one of the precious cigarettes. To the north spread a deep green valley about a dozen miles wide, and on the other side of it soared the tall golden brown range of the Great Balkan. A new world! After a drink and a wash at an icy spring trickling into a broken trough hollowed from a tree trunk, bright with green weed and surrounded by an almost fossilized humus of droppings, I struck downhill munching the last of Nadejda’s apples. The cloud shadows sliding along the flanks of the Stara Planina were buckled by the scarps and the ravines. I reached the other side by late morning and crossed a river, reduced by the drought to a winding thread of pebbles which carried me to the town of Karlovo.
It was built up a gentle staircase of rock above the river in layers of wooden roofs and coloured walls – white, green, ochre and red with an overflow of treetops and a crown of pinnacles, and beyond it, the wooded slope of the mountain. Cobbled lanes climbed into it among willow-shaded brooks, and houses enclosed in tree-filled courtyards with tall wooden gates. The lanes turned into staircases sagging in the middle from long use. They were lined with climbing tiers of shops where saddlers, smiths, tinkers and carpenters were at work, and primitive hatters with blocked sheepskin kalpacks lined up in the sun on truncated wooden columns. Next came white groves of moccasins, overlapping in pyramids and hanging in garlands: Turkish slippers, loose and easily shed for devotions, or for lying on divans; then after that, crimson shelves of fezzes.
These sloping lanes converged on a raft-like square with a large mosque on one side standing among its minarets. Turks in turban and fez were everywhere, and trousered women with their heads and torsos obscured in black ferejes that left only their eyes visible: top-heavy figures balancing baskets and pots on their heads or bearing yokes across their shoulders from which hung swaying bronze water-cauldrons.
It was the first time I had seen a gathering of more than half a dozen of this astonishing race. The evidence of their vanished empire had been steadily thickening for the last few hundred miles and I gazed at them with wonder. They were the westernmost remnants, the last descendants of those shamanist tribes of Central Asia, kinsmen of the all-destroying Mongols, who had surged westwards, turned Muslim, founded the Sultanate of Rum and then conquered the Roman Empire of the East, and finally, by capturing Constantinople, inflicted the greatest disaster on Europe since the sack of Rome by the Goths a thousand years earlier. Their empire spread deep into Asia and Africa and covered three quarters of the Mediterranean shore. It stretched to the Pillars of Hercules and reached north to Poland and Russia and westward to Vienna; one extraordinary sortie had even plunged as far west as Ratisbon, only a day’s march from Munich. When we remember that the Moors of Spain were only halted at Tours, on the Loire, it seems, at moments, something of a fluke that St Peter’s and Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey are not today three celebrated mosques, kindred fanes to Haghia Sophia in Constantinople.
The capture of the city fell on a Tuesday and that day of the week is still deemed a day of ill-omen by the descendants of their Orthodox subjects: an inauspicious one on which to start a journey or launch an enterprise. Could the unluckiness of green throughout Europe (but not in Asia, where it symbolizes descent from the Prophet) spring from the colour of the Turks’ conquering banners? I have often wondered. If one blesses the names of Charles Martel and Sobiesky for rescuing western Christendom from Islam, one must execrate the memory of the Fourth Crusade, and the greed and Christian sectarian bias that sacked Constantinople, destroyed the Byzantine Empire and called down the doom of Christendom’s eastern half. It is as vain to blame the Turks for spreading westwards over the wreckage as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for flood damage.
Their armies advanced across Europe. It must have been a daunting sight: Anatolian infantry, wild Asian troops of horse, Bedouin cavalry, mounted archers from eastern deserts, contingents of Albanians, Tartars and Tcherkesses, Negroes from Africa and, under their strange emblems and their fan-plumed helmets, the Janissaries. These last were mostly Christians abducted as children, converted into fanatic Muslims and drilled into merciless warriors: a corps whose martial music, furnished by beating the sides of their giant bronze soup-cauldrons, blended strangely with long horns and kettledrums. Then came half-mad dervishes, endless strings of camels and gigantic dragon-mouthed cannon, and, rocking overhead, the banners of the pashas – the number of horse-tails fitting their different degrees – and, everywhere, under spiked brass half-moons, the baleful green flags. At their head, in early centuries, would be the Sultan himself, a ruthless or magnanimous paladin. Later on, when the names of Bajazet the Thunderbolt, Mohammed the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim the Grim were retreating into myth, the standard of the Grand Vizier, the Seraskier or a three-tailed pasha led the host, while the Sultan himself, who, until his accession, perhaps had lived all his life in a cage,[1] would be far away in the kiosks and arbours of the Grand Seraglio: checkmating plots, spending his days with his wives and concubines and minions, cultivating tulips, writing quatrains in Turkish and Persian and Arabic, or – passions so absorbing that by default of attention to anything else they nearly ruined the empire – amassing ambergris or sables. The Sultan was not only the Emperor but the Caliph as well. When his distant followers stormed a Christian fortress, they were engaged in a holy war. If a warrior fell in battle and his giant white turban – one of those vast pleated globes depicted by Bellini and Pisanello – rolled away, an unshorn tassel of hair would uncoil from his razored scalp, giving purchase for the twining forefinger of a celestial hand, which would twirl him aloft and set him down among the cool streams and the doe-eyed girls in paradise.
Many of their descendants in the square had a wild and uncouth look. They were all, like their Bulgarian neighbours, herdsmen and cultivators and they were clad in patched and pleated trousers, faded turbans and discoloured fezzes. Their general air – rather contradictorily – was one of inbred tiredness. Sitting cross-legged in the sunny loggia that ran along one wall of the mosque, they conversed quietly together, sipped their thimbles of minute coffee or bubbled away at their nargilehs or busied themselves at ritual ablutions. When a newcomer joined them and touched his heart, his lips and his forehead, the soft generous murmurs of answering salaams were accompanied by the same triple flutter of hands, ending with the palm laid across the bosom and an inclination of the head: an unperfunctory-seeming greeting of infinite grace and repose. I received this flattering salute when I asked the hodja – an old man with watery eyes of the palest blue, a white spade-beard and a gentle smile, a beautifully laundered turban bound flat round his fez – if I could look inside the mosque. We padded unshod into the carpeted and whitewashed penumbra. There, under the dome’s hollow, was the niche of the mihrab pointing towards Mecca and the flight of steps leading to the little platform of the mimbar, where at the appropriate times he would read aloud from the Koran. There was nothing else. After pointing these out, he left me to myself. Soon, after a slow sequence of ritual bows and tilting forward from his knees to touch the carpet with his brow, he recovered in a single rocking motion, and remained seated cross-legged and absorbed in prayer. From time to time he raised his hands, palms uppermost, on either side of his body for a few seconds, as though he were offering a light and invisible gift; then folded them again in his lap where the pleats of his voluminous trousers fanned out from the scarlet edge of his sash. I left him there, and with his permission climbed the minaret.
From the little walled parapet, hot as a flat iron and blinding after the shadowy mosque, I could gaze across the wooden roofs and the treetops of the town. Beyond them uncoiled the valleys and the long swelling cordilleras of the Sredna Gora and the Karadja Dagh. When I stepped down again from the dark helix into the mosque, the hodja was still sitting there, gazing into the air with his upturned palms still lifted. I tiptoed outside.
After a siesta under some mulberry trees, I walked to a deep cold cataract tumbling down the rocks’ face – the source of the willow-shaded streams that thread their cool veins through the little town – and arrived back, just as I hoped, a few moments before sunset. For there, halved at the waist by the parapet with his hands raised level on either side of his face, fittingly outlined across the reddening sky, the hodja was standing in mid-air; and soon the slow, wailing, high-pitched Arabian syllables of the first affirmation of the muezzin’s call wavered across the evening air and fell silent. After a long pause, they were repeated. Another hush followed; and then the second and longer clause sailed slowly into the sky and stopped.
The long intervals of silence were like the spreading of rings across a pool; the last vibrations must die away and the surface of the sky be still again before the next phrase, of which each word is a pebble dropped into the void, can launch its new sequence of circles. The muezzin was shifting along his little walled platform to another point of the compass and the next sentence; when it reached the ear, his wail had sunk a little to a different key. He completed his circle and the final summing-up slowly spelled itself forth until a longer pause lengthened into ultimate silence. The last hoop of prayer had expanded to infinity. The famous words faded from the air and from these infidel mountains. The parapet – which swelled three quarters of the way up the pale shaft of the minaret, then tapered to a lance-tip topped by an upturned crescent – was empty; the invisible muezzin was already halfway down his dark spiral. The sun had dipped below the last blue stage-wings of the Stara Planina and the Sredna Gora, and under the mulberry trees the flit and swoop of the swallows filled my ears with a noise like the swish of scissors round one’s head in a barber’s shop.
• • •
I was woken next day by the same high-pitched intoning of prayer, the light this time striking the minaret on the opposite flank. How odd, I thought, as I set off, that the relics of the Turks in Europe, to which, after all, they brought nothing but calamity, should be distinguished by so much charm and grace: the architecture of houses, the carved wooden ceilings, the baroque plaster work, the wells and fountains, the pillared loggias and above all, these globes and these elegantly ascending pinnacles that ennoble the skyline of the meanest hamlet. The latter, in big towns, sometimes crowd as plentifully as an asparagus bed; and what about those colonies of shallow cupolas swelling from the roofs of hammams and round the cloisters of tekkes and madressehs? Their architects understood the use of shade and space and trees and the manipulation of water for purposes of ease and repose and pleasure to the eye. It is impossible too to think without delight of those slender, almost semicircular bridges with which the Seljuks and the Ottomans have spanned unnumbered rivers and torrent beds from the Balkans to the Taurus mountains. They float from flank to flank of ravines – away from the plane trees and oleanders and the darting wagtails – as airily as rainbows.
Against all this one must set the fact that the Turks were the only people in Bulgaria, apart from the collaborating Tchorbaji landowners, who had the right or the means, in these subject territories, to build anything more aspiring than a hovel; also that these formulae were adapted from the Byzantine style that they discovered in their newly conquered empire. Byzantine architects and masons, indeed, designed a number of the great mosques; but nevertheless, a separate Turkish style does exist in its own right. The suavity and the ceremony that dignifies their greetings, even among these ragged and dusty survivors, may, like the buildings and gardens and fountains, owe much to their early neighbours; for, when they first arrived from the steppes and slowed down and took root in Asia Minor, these neighbours were, apart from faraway China, the most civilized nations in the world: the Greeks, the Persians and the Arabs. All this is so; but one must rejoice that the Turks had the wisdom to follow these models and later, when they were not ordering the bastinado, the bowstring and the gallows (or, as late as 1876, the Bulgarian atrocities that horrified Gladstone and – no doubt to the Turks’ sincere astonishment – the whole world) they were laying out gardens and fountains, decreeing pleasure domes and plotting the fall of a shadow. The Ottoman Empire has joined the eastern Roman Empire which it destroyed; but a posthumous and perhaps deceptive glow of charm and elegance pervades its mementoes. How apt are these shady gardens for drinking coffee and for meditation, for listening to stringed instruments or the tales of the Forty Vizirs and the loves of Leila and Majnoon!
One of these mementoes lay just outside the town: a cypress-shaded Turkish cemetery with a forest of turbaned monoliths, and among them, tearing with the point of his sickle at the weeds which had been hardy enough to outlive the summer, the hodja himself. He straightened up with his fluttering salute and a wrinkled smile and we stood happily tongue-tied among the stones. Some of the marble pillars were only a foot high and topped by a sculptured fez, some of them nearly as tall as a man, all of them swelling as they ascended. The lower and older ones, chipped, split, tilted askew and leaning at all angles, were crowned with extravagant carved headgear. (The fez, imposed by Mahmoud II in the 1820s and abolished by Atatürk inside the frontiers of Turkey in the 1920s, had exactly a century’s official life.) They expanded like giant pumpkins and vegetable marrows, intricately pleated round a cone, and sometimes a helmet’s point pricked through the bulbous folds; others were coil upon stone coil of twisted linen; yet others, jutting fluted cylinders adorned with broken aigrettes. What pashas and agas and beys, what swaggering bimbashis, what miralais with mandarin whiskers, could have worn these portentous headpieces? I would have known if I had understood Turkish, for their moss-covered biographies, in Arabic script and enclosed in tapering baroque cartouches, were incised on the stelae below. The hodja haltingly read out a few of them: Osman, Selim, Mehmet, Abdul-Aziz, Djem, Mustapha, Omar, Ferid . . . Each inscription ended with the same two melodious words, at which, each time he uttered them, the hodja’s voice reverently fell. There is something haunting, almost Hawaian, about the airy vowels. I only learnt years later, what they mean: it is ‘murmur a fàtiha’. The fàtiha is the first sura of the Koran: ‘Glory be to Allah, the lord of all the worlds.’ It is almost as frequent a prayer as the alliterative syllables from the same sura without which little, in Islam, begins or ends: ‘Bismillah ar rahman ar raheem’: ‘in the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful, whose pity is without bounds’.
• • •
Below, the Tunja river meandered eastwards at the bottom of a wide valley. The path I followed on the flank of the Great Balkan range, high above the main road and the river, heaved its way along from dry torrent-bed to buttress, down into the next torrent-bed and out again, in a series of scallops. The side of the Balkans sloped upwards on my left, occasionally showing perpendicular cliffs, then subsided again. Shepherds leaned on their crooks grazing their tinkling flocks across the thorny slant of the middle distance. I waited to see whether they were wearing sheepskin kalpacks or the turban and fez – for both wore the same broad scarlet sashes discernible from afar – and then shouted ‘Dobro utro’ or ‘Salaam aleikum!’ accordingly. It is the duty of strangers to greet first. After a few seconds, back would come their answering hail. Some of the hamlets far below were clustered round the alert perpendicular of a minaret. After one of these affable long-distance exchanges with a Turk pasturing his flock about a furlong up the slope, my interlocutor began shouting something. Thinking that he was asking, in the usual way, where I was going, I shouted back: ‘za Tzarigrad’ ‘and then ‘Istanbul’. He waved the information aside and continued to shout, pointing westwards up the mountainside with his crook. Something unusual was happening there.
An indistinct blur darkened the air above a notch in the skyline: a wide blur that seemed almost solid in the centre. It thinned out round the edges in a fringe of numberless moving specks as though the wind were blowing across a vast heap of dust or soot or feathers just out of sight. The shoulder of mountain passed, this moving mass, continually renewed from beyond the skyline, dipped out of silhouette on our side of the range and began to expand and to declare itself as more comparable to feathers than to dust or to soot; it became predominantly whiter. The vanguard spread wider still as it sank lower and grew larger, rocking and fluctuating and heading for exactly the stretch of mountainside where we were standing so raptly at gaze. It was a slow airborne horde, enormous and awe-inspiring, composed of myriads of birds, their leaders becoming distinguishable now as they sailed towards us on almost motionless wings, and at last, as they outlined themselves once more against the sky, identifiable. Storks! Soon a ragged party of skirmishers was floating immediately above, straight as the keels of canoes from the tips of their bills to the ends of their legs that streamed behind each one of them like a wake, balanced between the almost motionless span of their great wings, the sunlight falling golden between the comparative transparency of their feathers and the dark bobbin-shaped outline of their craned throats. Only their outstretched feathers flickered. The broad black edge of their wings stretched from the tips to where they joined the body in a dark senatorial stripe. The leaders were soon beyond us. A few solitary birds followed, and then all at once we were under a high shifting roof of wings, a flotilla that was thickening into an armada, until our ears were full of the sound of rustling and rushing with a flutter now and then when a bird changed position in a slow wingbeat or two, and of the strange massed creaking, as of many delicate hinges, of a myriad slender joints. They benighted the air. A ragged shadow dappled the mountainside all round us. A number of birds flew below the main stream of their companions, cruising along in their shade, others alone or in small parties were flung out on either side like system-less outriders. One of the low fliers subsided to the mountainside through the fluctuating penumbra under an inward slanting V of wings, and suddenly earthbound, took one or two awkward steps on its bent scarlet stilts, its wings still outstretched like a tightrope-walker’s pole. After shaking its beaked head once or twice, it levered itself into the air and rose again with slow and effortless beats to the sliding pavilion of feathers overhead. Looking back, the specks were still showering over the skyline as plentifully as ever, then sinking a little way down the mountainside like a steady waterfall and out again almost at once and over the valley in a sinuous and unbroken curve. The leaders, and soon the first units of the main horde, had now sunk just below the level of our line of sight: we could see the sunlight on the backs and wings of their followers as their line lengthened. Their irregular drawn-out mass, rocking and tilting and disturbed by living eddies and with a whirlpool flutter and ruffle round the outskirts, moved beyond the great empty gulf of air between the 6,000-foot watershed of the Shipka Balkan, which they had just crossed, and the lesser heights of the Karadja Dagh. Soon their leaders were dwindling to specks, then all of them began to cohere in a dark blur, high above their long irregular shadow, which followed them a mile below their flight like the shadows of a navy on the sea bed. Gradually the supply began to dwindle; the rope of birds grew thinner, the loose-knit parties smaller, until at last there was nothing but a straggling rearguard gliding eastwards. Several minutes later, when the last of them had winged away over the wide valley of the Tunja, an ultimate stork passed overhead beating a slow and solitary path: Make haste! one felt like crying. They had soon become a long slow swerve effortlessly navigating the invisible currents of the sky, growing dimmer and dimmer until at last they vanished from our straining eyes, leagues away down the Balkan corridor.
The Turkish shepherd shrugged his shoulders and raised his arms and then let them drop in an ample outward sweep that seemed to say, ‘Well, there we are. They’ve gone’, but shouted nothing, as though, like me, he felt too overcome for speech. Perhaps, like me, he was saddened in the thought that these beautiful and auspicious birds, the companions of the spring and the summer, were abandoning Europe.
I wondered where they were coming from. Judging by the direction, it would be Transylvania and Hungary, perhaps from Poland. They settle in summer as far north as the Baltic. The storks of Eastern Europe, western Russia and the Ukraine usually congregate more to the north and the east of the line these had been following. The Dobrudja is their meeting place. Then they follow the Black Sea coast to Constantinople, across the Bosphorus and along the shores of the Levant to Egypt, keeping in sight of land all the way. (Unlike the cranes: these, undaunted by the open sea, fly across the Greek archipelago and Crete and the empty expanse of the Libyan Sea until they strike the desert.) When the storks reach Egypt, some of them head south-east to the Arabian oases, but most of them continue southward, heading for the Equator and often beyond. A minority of them spread westwards as far as Lake Chad and the Cameroons: some have been found, on their return to Europe, with arrowheads embedded in them of a kind only made by the tribes of those regions. Here they must encounter the eastern-spreading fringe of their West Europe relations – from Alsace-Lorraine and Spain and Portugal – who cross into Africa at Gibraltar and fly southwards across Morocco and the Sahara. As all the storks of Europe cross by one of these two narrows – the Bosphorus and the Pillars of Hercules – the two bird communities might be conveniently classified as the Byzantine and the Herculean.
I don’t know the exact date of the passing I had just witnessed, but it must have been well on in September. Nothing had indicated a change of season: no hint that the autumn equinox was not far off. Everything in that charred landscape still spoke of summer; everything, that is, except a slight truce from the wringing heat of solstice and a scarcely perceptible advance of sunset. Everyone had been remarking on the phenomenally long sojourn of the storks this year. The birds too must have been deluded by the amazing summer into thinking that warm days would never cease. What subconscious intimations of the shift of the earth’s axis had told them that it was time to go? A drop in temperature, moisture in the air, an assembly of vapours, the warning formation of a distant cumulus, or a faint breeze from an ominous quarter? A syndrome of hints: Worthies away! The scene begins to cloud!
• • •
It was a great surprise, in the town of Kazanlik, after a long day’s trudge, to be led by a boy in a café, with an insistence that was not to be withstood and as though it had been prearranged, to the house of a compatriot. Really, an Englishman, I asked the boy? Da, da Gospodin! Anglitchanin! And he was quite right, for there, under the trees in his garden, at the head of a table, with spectacles and thick white hair, sat my unmistakeable countryman, Mr Barnaby Crane. I displayed becoming confusion about bursting in on him at a meal. ‘Don’t be soft, lad,’ Mr Crane said jovially. ‘Sit down and have some supper’; so I did as I was told. Mr Crane, who was from the North Country, had settled and married in Bulgaria countless years before and sunk deep roots. So deep, indeed, that I noticed several times during the evening that his discourse, scanned by the leisurely click of the green tasselled string of amber beads in his right hand, was halted by the search for a word which would have come more readily to his lips in Bulgarian. His memories of England, dormant for many years and silted over by the decades of his Balkan sojourn, were becoming dim and effaced. Mild homesickness pervaded the Laurentian scenes of his youth: horse-buses in Manchester bristling with billycock hats, Sunday rambles by bicycle against a skyline of Satanic mills. He had come to Bulgaria in connection with the beginnings of the textile industry and was now, as he deserved to be, a loved and respected figure in Kazanlik. I felt, when we said goodbye, that he would never see Lancashire again. The Stara Planina and Karadja Dagh had stolen his heart away.
• • •
The entire valley is covered with rose bushes, hundreds of thousands of them, all despoiled now by the long summer and the fingers of rose-harvesters; for Kazanlik is one of the chief places in the world for attar of roses, that powerful distillation of rose oil which was so highly prized in the courts and harems of the Orient, especially in India and Persia. The deep crimson, yellow-centred Damascus rose, famous for the sweetness and pungency of its scent, is the favourite flower for attar, and armies of men and women toil in the valley gathering the petals, culling them soon after dawn, before the high sun can drain them of the dew and the perfume which the night hours have been storing up. Then in Kazanlik, these showers of petals are poured into enormous vats, the oil is collected and the grey slush of petals, stripped of colour and scent, is thrown away. The precious remainder, then, like Calvados in autumn in Normandy, is distilled through a battery of alembics and so concentrated in the essence which finally emerges that it takes over three thousand pounds of rose petals to produce a single pound of attar. The valuable elixir is then bottled in tiny gilt and cut-glass phials, a mere thread of attar to each, and sold, understandably, for enormous prices. The smell is captious, overpowering and a little cloying. The perfumes of Arabia that, in spite of their power, failed to chase the reek of Duncan’s blood from the hands of Lady Macbeth, were probably exactly this. At the height of the rose harvest, everything in Kazanlik smells of it. The valley is aswoon, and the petals, bursting out of their sacks on the carts and wagons in which they are piled, scatter the dusty roads with crimson like the lurching retreat to his cavern of a mortally wounded ogre.
Ahead to the north lay the Shipka Balkan, and I was soon climbing through woods of walnut and oak and beech, empty except for an occasional swineherd and a swarm of razor-thin pigs: dark hairy creatures rootling for the beech nuts and acorns which crackled underfoot. The trees died out and the bald and ragged side of the mountain soared steeply, scaled by the road which led to the pass in a succession of long loops that I bisected with scrambling short cuts, reaching, in the afternoon, a wooded ledge of the mountains, where, before my unbelieving eyes, stood a lesser version of the Cathedral of St Basil in Red Square: a cluster of tall and tapering onion domes covered with a glittering and fish-like reticulation of green and gold scales. On these twirling pinnacles gleamed a Russian cross with its three crossbars (the shortest and highest symbolizing the INRI label, and the lowest, placed diagonally against the shaft, the footrest). The monastic buildings gathered about this strange fane were dotted with solitary figures or little groups in those attitudes of rather sad listlessness that accompany penurious and unwanted leisure. Most of them were middle-aged or old; many walked with sticks; their features differed from the Bulgarian cast, and the snatches of Slav conversation contained a greater range of modulation and flexibility than is detectable in the vernacular. Their patched and threadbare clothes were worn with an attempt at self-respecting trimness. The only clerical figure among these lay monastics was a tall benevolent Rasputin with his habit caught in by a wide buckled belt and his fair bobbed hair hatted with a tall velvet cone adorned over the brow by a triple cross.
They were veterans and invalids, about two hundred of them. They had subsisted here, on a pittance from their ex-enemies, ever since the disintegration of the Imperial Russian armies after the Bolshevik Revolution. One of them, an ex-artillery lieutenant who had served in Kolchak’s[2] counter-revolutionary army, conducted me round the buildings. The church and monastery were built after the Russian victory over the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. My guide, who spoke perfect French with a captivating Russian accent, explained the campaign over a map as though he had fought in it himself. He described the advance of the Russian armies across the Danube, drew with a stick the dispositions of Generals Skobeloff, Gourko, Prince Mirsky, and the Czarevitch – later Alexander III – and of Suleiman, Osman and Vessil Pashas. He recounted the siege and fall of Plevna, and, above all, after a murderous stalemate of many months, the terrible slaughter in the midwinter snows on the Shipka pass immediately above us. The words of Skobeloff’s despatch at the end of the action, ‘Na Shipke vseo spokoino’ – ‘All quiet over Shipka’ – became famous, and the phrase, to Russians and Bulgars alike – for Bulgarian volunteer battalions had played a brave part in the action – came to epitomize the whole war, which, at the Treaty of San Stefano after the Russian armies advanced to the walls of Constantinople, secured the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turks.
After looking at the rather new and ugly interior of the church, and at ikons from Russia studded with brilliants, we joined a group of veterans sitting round a samovar in a long grey room decorated with pictures of Czar Nicholas II, of Kolchak and Denikin, and of Moscow and St Petersburg, the Nevsky Prospekt under snow, the battles of Plevna and Shipka and the Crossing of the Beresina. The conversation, in varying kinds of French for my benefit, revolved around their old regiments and past wars and especially those desperate White Russian campaigns in which they had nearly all taken part. The overt assumption of their drift was that the present phase was a transient one and the Soviet regime a tempor-ary madness rife with the germs of its own dissolution. Another turn of the wheel would place Grand Duke Cyril[3] on the throne and set the double eagle fluttering once more over Peterhof and Tzarskoe Selo and the Winter Palace and translate them all, by magic, to honourable retirement in their homes in Kiev, Tamboff, Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. Deep sighs punctuated this talk, and sudden giveaway silences. Autumnal sadness filled the long room.
• • •
I met nobody else on the remainder of the road to the top except a few carts. Sturdy horses drew them and the shafts on either side of them were bridged by curious curved swingletrees which arched over the horses’ withers in wooden semicircles. A treacherous nail in my right boot soon began to inflict pain; by the time I reached the pass, which is really not a pass at all as there is scarcely a dip in the line of the watershed, this had become so tormenting that I sat down under the huge lion that commemorates the battle and did my best with stones and a jackknife to locate and flatten this excruciating spike; one of my toes was raw and bleeding. This was unsuccessful, however, as when I tried my boot on again, the invisible nail felt not only longer and sharper, but, when I attempted to walk on it, red hot.
The famous battle had raged all round this windy saddle. Somewhere nearby a skilled geographer would have been able to put his forefinger on some sharp stone on the precise edge of the watershed and know that, should a raindrop strike it and divide in half, the northern half-drop would in time flow into the Danube and eventually into the Black Sea, while its fellow, heading south downhill, would reach the Tunja and then the Maritza and at last drift through the wide Hebrus’s mouth and become part of the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas.
The approach of dusk was beginning to blur the detail of the hollow worlds that glimmered with steadily waning light on either side of the pass. The descending night and the plight of my foot prompted a twinge of concern. I hobbled on through the twilight with my ears pricked for the welcome rumble of a cart. At last, an empty cart with two peasants on the bench bore down. It was driving in the right direction. The driver reined back in answer to my supplicating wave, and I asked if he was heading for Gabrovo. He was. I explained that I had a bad foot and demonstrated it by limping stagily for a few paces: could he give me a lift? The kalpacked rustic looked me up and down and then said: ‘Kolko ban?’ Astonished, I asked him what he meant, though I understood perfectly well: ‘how much money?’ He repeated the question, grinning and rubbing the thumb and forefinger of an extended hand together, as though fumbling a dream banknote. Thinking he was joking, I said, ‘Edin million’, and joyfully prepared to climb in. But I was stopped by the hand that held the whip and the question was repeated. I had plainly misinterpreted the grin. He proposed to give me a lift to Gabrovo for the equivalent of ten shillings. As I had only one pound left, I urged poverty, lameness and strangeness in these parts. The colloquy was curtailed by a negative click of the tongue and backward tilt of the head, and with a crack of his whip off he clattered into the night. Before I had recovered from astonishment at conduct so unprecedented on any of the roads of Europe, my ear was struck by the noise of another cart approaching. All was not lost! But a few minutes later the sound of wheels was dying away again after an almost identical exchange with another surly wagoner. (This passion to make money out of chance trivialities, like giving a pedestrian a lift in an empty cart, is a phenomenon I met several times in Bulgaria, but nowhere else in Europe, before or afterwards. One hears of cases in Italy. Such conduct in Greece, especially if it involved a stranger, let alone a lame and benighted one, would call down life-long shame.)
There was no question of spending the night in the pass, as a fast and biting wind was sweeping across it. There was neither shelter nor cover. It was as bleak as a desert. After walking a couple of miles I espied with joy a wayside house in the rising moonshine. My approach unleashed a frenzy of barking from a white sheepdog. As I reached the front door, the line of light went out under the shutters. I knocked on the door and the shutter, explaining myself in Bulgarian as lame as my foot. ‘I am an English traveller, my foot is bad. There is a big cold wind (gulemo studeno). May I come in please?’ I could hear whispers indoors where there had been talk before; then there was silence, except for the barking and snarling of this slavering hell-hound only a few precarious feet away. The repetition of my dismal litany gradually lost all conviction. At last when all hope had drained away, I lurched on northwards and downhill, swearing, comminating and shouting aloud, blinded with tears of fury and frustration. None of Nadejda’s phrases seemed adequate to the occasion. This cursing and gesticulating figure might well have struck terror. But bewilderment was my chief emotion. What passion of xenophobia, predatoriness or timidity lurked in this horrible mountain range? Did they think I was a bandit or a murderer masquerading as a wandering foreign student and talking pidgin Bulgarian to corroborate his disguise? Or a djinn, an afreet, a demon, a werewolf or a vampire, ravening in the same odd livery, or some other of the many wicked supernatural denizens that infest the Balkan darkness?
After an hour’s tormenting crawl through the windy moonlight, I spied a gleam of light in a wide hollow to the left of the road. The wind dropped as my track, sinking below the trajectory of its flight, dipped into a quiet dell full of beech trees. At the end, on the edge of the spinney, tall dark pyres smouldered and an aromatic tang of woodsmoke hung on the air. Light radiated from the doorway of a hut. It was cleverly woven of branches, a leafy cave, and inside it, three satanic figures, their rags showing a dusty black by the light of an oil dip, were sitting cross-legged on a carpet of leaves and playing cards with an upturned sieve for a table. They were charcoal burners. How different was the welcome here! All three leapt up, led me to a place in their midst, helped me off with my blood-filled boot, washed the damaged foot with slivovitz and wrapped it in a clean handkerchief, then plied me with slivo for internal use and then with bread and cheese. Finally, after commiserating over my reverses, they made me a leaf-bed of freshly cut branches and bade me goodnight as they rolled over to sleep. One of them blew out the light and went out into the moonbeams to see to the stoking and the damping down, among the white-gashed sapling stumps of the ravished wood, of their three great smouldering cones.
One of these Samaritans located the nail in my boot next morning and cunningly hammered it flat by using an adze blade as a combination of last and anvil. Axe blows rang through the glade, interrupted every so often by the report of a falling tree trunk. Billhooks lopped off the branches, and the dismembered limbs were packed into place on the dark cones and heaped over with ashes; sinister fumaroles of smoke leaked through the charcoal like a brittle volcano’s surface about to erupt at a score of places. Clambering up the sides of these smoking pyres and poking at them with forks and staves, my black benefactors bore the aspect of stokers in hell. We waved goodbye and I climbed out of the glade up to the road and, after a long day of unwinding downhill, reached Gabrovo.
• • •
A long day of unwinding downhill. This is easily written and rightly succinct; because, unlike the southern flank of the Great Balkan range and the climb from Kazanlik, of which each detail remains clear, I can remember nothing whatever about it.
This brings up the whole question of piecing together things which have happened a number of years ago – twenty-nine in fact – and I ought to have tackled the whole question earlier on.
Bad luck dogged my notes and my sketches all through this journey. The first lot of diaries and papers was stolen in Munich. I started a fresh lot immediately, in German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads, and kept them up, at least the notebooks, until the end of the journey that these pages cover, and later on, in Greece. The sketches – rightly, as they were never much good – became scarcer and died out. The notebooks I had with me five years later, when the outbreak of war overtook me in High Moldavia, in the north of Rumania.
For the previous four years, this had been my base in Eastern Europe, and I had spent half my time there and half in the Greek islands, varied by one rather dull year’s return to England, and by sojourns of varying length in Paris, the Île de France and Provence, and by the slow return train journeys across Europe (made slower still by halts to visit old friends in Vienna, Hungary and Transylvania). Obviously, I had little grasp of what the war entailed and still less prophetic flair, for when I set off for England in September 1939 to join the army, I left all my books and papers in this house in Moldavia. I had planned to return there when the war was over. But when the war ended, this house, like most of the places in this narrative, was out of bounds beyond the Iron Curtain. It had been smitten by fire and earthquake and its inhabitants scattered, imprisoned and driven from their homes – but, alas, not over the frontiers of Rumania into the free world.
The only tangible data that remain from my actual journey are two tattered maps and a thin pencil-line marking my itinerary, punctuated by a cross-bar for every overnight sojourn. These are largely, but not entirely, unnecessary, as during this walk I pored so often over the various stages of the journey and repeated the place-names that spanned it so often that I can reel them off, even today, almost without a break. The only other contemporary document to survive is the passport trustingly issued in Munich to replace the one which had been stolen. It fixes the date of each frontier crossing. This sparse calendar is augmented by the memory of my whereabouts on important days like Christmas, Easter, famous local saints’ days publicly celebrated, and private anniversaries like family birthdays; still further by remembering where I was when I heard the news of some striking political event: the verdict of the Reichstag fire trial,[4] the June purge,[5] the February Revolution[6] in Vienna, the murder of Dollfuss.[7] (It was a record year for assassinations.) In a year when something new was happening to me nearly every day, either geographically, psychologically and often both, these sparse data help to narrow the field yet closer. Undated events can usually be located, by deduction, to within a week of the day when they must have occurred, sometimes even less.
All these dispersed fragments cohere in a jigsaw which is far from complete; but, by driving my memory back, by coercing and focussing it on one particular gap, I find that the missing pieces often slide to the surface and dovetail. Perhaps the fact that I have already recorded this particular tract of the past in a notebook, even though the records are lost, has helped to fix much of it several strata deep. Tones of voice, moods, lighting, details of landscape or costume, streets, castles, mountain ranges, warts, eyelashes, gold teeth, scars, smells, the arrangement of a room, a line of a song, the taste of food or drink tried for the first time, the name of the book left open on a bench, a paper headline or, quite often, some irrelevant object on sale in a shop window that I neither admired nor coveted, a bowler-hatted or trilby-shaded face under a lamp-post or in a bar that I never met or conversed with or wanted to, but merely observed – how distinct from the galaxy of Baudelairian passing strangers I longed to know, like the figure in A une passante! – come running or lounging or sidling out of the cobwebby dark that has been harbouring them for close on three decades. But there are some gaps that no feat of concentration can fill: the missing piece is lost for good.
There are plenty of these gaps. Gabrovo is one. I remember that it is a textile manufacturing town on a small scale – did somebody call it ‘the Bulgarian Manchester?’ – but I can’t remember (though there must have been several there) a single factory chimney; or indeed, anything about it at all, except – and this is why it is odd: how did I get there, and who led me? – that I was leaning at dusk over a half-door, rather like that of a stable, and the top half was open. It was in a back street sloping down to a tree-reflecting river, with the mountains, which I had just crossed, piling up behind. Here I leaned, talking to the occupant of the room. She lay in bed, in the further corner of the room, under a patchwork quilt, propped up on several pillows in a long-sleeved white cotton nightgown with a wide collar, her long fingers stroking a tabby cat that dozed on her lap. She was an English woman married to a Bulgarian, and, like Mr Barnaby Crane, from the North, but this time from Yorkshire, as her most soft voice soon made clear. She was recovering from some infectious disease: hence my relegation to the threshold. Was it measles? Or scarlet fever? I can’t remember, any more than I can remember who brought me there. She was called Betty and was in her early twenties; her cheeks were hollow from illness and her eyes were the palest blue, her fair hair was long and straight. She was as pale as a water sprite or an etiolated Rossetti heroine. How very peculiar it seemed, in the depths of the Balkans, to be listening to these charming, faint Yorkshire syllables through the twilight. We talked for hours, and exchanged brief autobiographies. She was a farmer’s daughter from a remote farm in the Dales, so far from everywhere that in bad weather they were sometimes snowed up and out of communication with the outside world for a week or a fortnight on end. She seemed eager for talk. ‘You get a bit lonely like, only talking Bulgarian for months on end, and I haven’t learnt it properly yet.’ Her father sounded a splendid chap: everyone was fond of him for miles around: a great one for racing whippets, expeditions on foot to Wensleydale and Swaledale and Fountains Abbey with other children. I have forgotten how she met her husband (who was away for a few days in Sofia). I think he had been studying the textile industry in the nearest town. Her father was opposed to the marriage at first, but he gave in in the end; and here they were. She liked the Bulgarians; though, she said, they were a funny race: terribly superstitious. An animal terror of illness of any kind haunted them, not only infectious ones.
She had fallen ill twice since settling in Gabrovo, and had felt an outcast both times: shunned, feared and sent to Coventry. ‘They’re a daft lot.’ Her laugh, coming faint and tired through the half-light, was very attractive, and her conversation, especially about the rainy and misty world she came from, sent sudden waves of homesickness rolling through the darkening room. One by one the details of this interior faded from view: the bookcase with Black Beauty, Pears Encyclopaedia, Jock of the Bushveld, Chatterbox, Precious Bane, Angel Pavement and Rupert Brooke’s collected verse; the upright piano, the sewing machine, the framed print of York Minster, the patchwork quilt and the sleeping tabby cat, until all that remained was the pallor of her nightgown and face and hair and the sound of our voices. It was quite dark when somebody came to lead me back to the lights of Gabrovo. I could just discern the valedictory flutter of a white-sleeved arm raised as she waved goodbye. I returned to the town under the wheeling bats and oblivion closes the scene.
• • •
The same forgetfulness covers the next day’s journey and the little town of Dranovo; a blurred pencilled cross on the tattered map, drawn there nearly three decades ago, indicates that I must have spent a night there. The view suddenly clears again in the late afternoon of what must have been the next day as I rounded a turn under a steep cliff. Between this sharp drop in the roll of the mountains and a tall monolithic pinnacle of rock on the other side of a road, and enclosing the view like something seen through a giant keyhole, the town of Tirnovo a couple of miles ahead was wedged. It rose from a canyon like an emanation, a sharp flight of houses hovering in ascending waves along the lip of a precipice which swung airily away and then back again in three quarters of a circle. The rock face, as the town gained height, fell beneath it into a chasm of organ-fluted rock, all stressed and heavy with shadow, to the sinuous bend of the river Yantra. The tiled roofs of this winged insurrection of houses were plumed by belfries and trees, and the highest rocks at the farthest point of this all-but amphitheatre, after the town had died away, were scattered with churches. The airy town jutted with oriental balconies craning on diagonal beams above the gulf, and hundreds of windowpanes threw back the evening sun in tiers of square flaming sequins, as though fires were raging within.
I understood Nadejda’s enthusiasm at once. My own grew with every advancing step and overflowed into excitement when I found myself climbing the long, narrow staircase of a main street winding endlessly upwards. Vines, heavy with grapes, coiled over the doorways and under the jut of the wide eaves and leaned out across the flags and the cobbles on trellises. The lanes that branched off to the right on the valley side, where the almost Tudor-looking upper storeys of timber and plaster thrust forward as though striving to merge balconies with the opposite houses, ended like rocky diving-boards in the sky. Moccasins, scarlet sashes and sheepskin hats crowded the steps and intermingled with flocks, donkeys and mules, climbing and descending the steep thoroughfare like the traffic of Jacob’s ladder. An enormous priest with a spiralling beard was in difficulties with his horse; he clutched his umbrella and the reins, and the slithering and rearing of his mount on the slippery stones had jolted his cylinder hat awry and shaken his bun loose down his back in a long flapperish coil, nearly capsizing the tray of earthenware yaourt jars balanced on the head of a passing dairyman.
At one point all this coming and going of humans and livestock was effectively dammed by a long wagon slanting across the street outside a wine shop. This cart was a sort of rough wooden trough on wheels and inside it two men, naked to the thighs, were treading and stamping in a tangled slush of grapes. Others were constantly tipping in fresh loads and catching the streams of juice that gushed from a tap in tin cans which they carried indoors and poured into the waiting barrels and jars. A little further on, men in blood-stained aprons were busy with knives and cleavers on the carcase of a pig whose death throes, not long before, must have deafened the neighbourhood. A rather sinister little boy, squatting among the scarlet cobbles and the cats and the flies, had been given the intestines as a task or a toy. With cheeks expanded, he was inflating one: each puff blew up another sinuous length of gut until the whole thing was buoyantly uncoiled like the serpent in the band of an old-fashioned village choir. From the side lanes nearly horizontal stripes of mealy evening sunlight slashed across all this hubbub. There are moments (and this was one) when hill towns in the Balkans seem as remote as Tibet.
A cloud slightly dimmed all these details. I had only the equivalent in leva of a few shillings in my pocket, and my boots, though no longer the instruments of torture they had been in the Shipka pass, were coming to bits. I had written from Plovdiv giving Tirnovo as the next address for money to be sent from England, several pounds this time, as I had not sent an address since Sofia. I used to try and let these weekly pounds mount up as long as possible, in order to get them all in one dollop, rather than hang about each time in some town chosen at random on the map in the hopes that it would coincide with my vaguely forecast itinerary. Better by far to wait till the registered envelope on the ledge of the poste restante yielded three or four of those brown pound notes – this had seemed, before setting out, the most sensible way of transferring these small sums, and so it proved. (Not once during this entire journey, did any ever go astray.) The thin calligraphic and richly crinkling white tissue of a fiver was a larger sum that had to be changed all at once and evaporated all the quicker, so it was better to spin out each note as far as it would go before turning another into guilders, marks, schillings, pengos, leis or levas – but not in the banks of Rumania or Bulgaria; for the black market rate, which any grocer or baker or street corner money changer would supply, was almost double the official one. It was a charitable bank clerk who, seeing me gullibly on the brink of a huge financial blunder, first whispered this secret to me across the counter. For somebody travelling as modestly as I was – I enjoyed smoking but could (how improbable it now seems) do without it painlessly, and drink (equally enjoyed and equally dispensable and equally incredibly so today) – life cost almost nothing. It was getting too late to sleep out of doors much longer – no more rolling up under a tree or a bridge – but the humble quarters I haunted were anything but dear, and how often I seemed to end up under some friendly roof scot free! The pound, before the war, was worth three times its value nowadays, perhaps more. Add to this the amazing cheapness of life in the Balkans then – a normal traveller could live comfortably on three or four shillings a day and one could eat a monster meal of many courses for sixpence – and it will be seen that my plight, living at a cost not far removed from that of a mediaeval palmer, was not nearly as much to be pitied as it sounds. Getting by on a pound a week had been something of a pinch in Western and Central Europe, even at my low level; but here, a strange and very relative sort of plenty showered over me, a queer cornucopia.
But it was on the point, at this very moment, of drying up. Only about two shillings remained, and so recent had been my letter asking for more, that the delay of Bulgarian postage threatened a lean wait. But it was not only this looming shortage and the state of my boots that weighed on me tonight. I kept thinking of Plovdiv and the kindness and fun of Nadejda. There had been something a bit sad about Mr Crane’s expatriate contentment. The churlishness of the inhabitants and the wagoners of the Shipka pass, trivial enough, had left a taint of gloom behind and something rueful and lowering had infected the soft-voiced charm of the White Russians in the monastery. The twilight talk with the ailing Yorkshire woman in Gabrovo was weighted with unavowed distress. The defection of the storks, more than anything, spelled a season’s end. The days were still bright and summery but there was a thread of autumnal pallor in their gold. The sum of all these minor considerations united into a general depression and robbed my step, as I climbed that romantic thoroughfare, of some of its wonted lightness.
I bought half a loaf of warm bread at a baker’s and went into a grocer’s shop to buy a slice of that delicious white goat’s cheese they call siriné, and another of the yellow kind called kashkaval. (I suppose it is the same as the Italian caciocavallo – ‘horseback cheese’, though whether the Bulgar word is a slavicization of the Italian, or the other way about, I don’t know. Instinct says the former, but it is often wrong.) My plan was to carry this hoard off to some quiet corner, slice up a couple of onions in my rucksack with my huge dagger, sprinkle them with red pepper from a twist of peppercorn, and then sleep somewhere in the lee of one of the spurs outside the town, establishing a sort of rocky lair until my ship came home. The lights of the town were beginning to twinkle in every window, the sun had set, and the prospect of this St Jerome-like hermitage loomed rather bleakly, especially compared to the gleaming interior of the grocer’s: the barrels of anchovies, the hanging flitches, the lamplight refracting a battery of bottles, the dried figs impaled on skewers of bamboo, the kegs and crates and jars and the pyramids of wares from Germany and Austria, the scarlet bacon slicer with its flashing disc of blade, the huge cheeses and the cubistic mounds of halva. It glowed like Aladdin’s cave.
But the shop was empty. A boy of about my own age who had been sitting reading a book on the doorstep got up and followed me in. Where was I from? Whither bound? Cheerful alacrity and a friendly glance accompanied these questions. When we got bogged down linguistically, which happened as soon as my shallow hoard of Bulgarian gave out, we shifted to German, which he spoke well, with a queer Slav accent. We were soon perched on the edge of barrels, clinking slivo glasses and exchanging autobiographies. Gatcho was the grocer’s son, and he was looking after the shop while his father was at some ex-officers’ anniversary celebration, a reunion of old comrades from the Balkan wars. Gatcho, rather prosaically, was on holiday in his home town from the Höhere Handelsschule in Varna; he had gone there after finishing his studies at the Tirnovo gymnasium, to prepare himself for a job in a thriving export-import business in Sofia owned by his great-uncle. This meant, perhaps, travel, seeing somewhere, anywhere, outside Bulgaria: Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Paris perhaps. Did I know these towns? Cologne, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam? It was my moment, and I waded in. Within an hour, my kit was dumped in his brother’s room (who was away doing his military service in Berkovitza, der arme Kerl)[8] and half an hour later I was sitting in a lamp-lit room behind the shop with Gatcho and his two little sisters, attacking a delicious stew cooked by Gatcho’s bulky and cheerful mother and learning about Bulgarian poetry, Hristo Boteff, the national bard, and Ivan Vasoff (‘The Bulgarian Wordsworth’). Everything had changed. No more thoughts of the cold hill’s side.
I had struck lucky by going into the grocer’s shop. There was a bed, and, as often as not, a meal with Gatcho’s family. Also, one of his uncles was the best cobbler in Tirnovo. Gatcho carried off my battered and disintegrating boots and next day they were delivered back, scot free, looking brand new, the heels armed with miniature horseshoes, the soles a-glitter with businesslike studs that struck sparks from the worn cobbles and flagstones of Tirnovo. But they were better saved for the highways and mountains: gym shoes were the wear for these vertiginous lanes. Gatcho’s brother’s little room with an ikon to St Nicholas in the corner was a godsend. I lay there on the bed reading for hours every day, or squatting or lying prone – there was just room for it – on the minute balcony, propped on my elbows, and laboriously bringing my journal up to date.
Those battered stiff-covered notebooks an inch thick in which I scribbled away so industriously – how I wish I had them at this very moment, to equip these sentences of memory with the sharp edge of immediate recording. But fragments remain nevertheless: the recession of the surrounding mountains and the twists of the river below and, closer by, the swoop of walls piling up one side, the sharp subsidence of housetops on the other, falling away below with the abruptness of the storeys of a house of cards. The tiles of many of them were bushy with empty nests waiting, like summer villas on modish coasts, for the spring return of their tenants. (Had they settled by now, I remember thinking, or were they still labouring southwards with the Equator already behind them, peering down at the forests and the great lazy rivers, swerving to avoid a hut-sprinkled clearing that recalled the whirr of arrows, pushing on till a disposition of roofs, the remembered geometry of woods and habitations and streams, and the final corroboration, on closer scrutiny, of last winter’s nests, told them that they were home? How long had the birds been shuttling like this between the two? How many stork-generations? The town had been inhabited a long time. It had been the imperial capital of the second Bulgarian empire in the twelfth century, but a town had thriven there much earlier. What about that horseman carved in relief on the rock face outside the town, dating probably from Alexandrian times? There must have been dwellings for them to perch on then; only twelve hundred eggs ago and more in the direct line. In its European stage alone, a dozen religions had ousted each other, a score of empires had soared and crumbled and a hundred wars been waged under the itinerary of these unheeding migrants. A formidable tenure! Gatcho’s indoctrination about the history of his town had not been falling on deaf ears.)
Gatcho turned out to be a kind and a timely friend. He was a moody person, cheerful, excited and extrovert one moment, silent and brooding the next to a degree that rather intimidated his family; but not, fortunately, with me. There was a relaxed and holiday feeling about Tirnovo. I was woken up on the first morning by the trundling of empty barrels downhill with a noise like thunder. Peering from the balcony, I was just in time to see one break loose from its trundle and bounce from step to step like a runaway animal, frightening donkeys, capsizing fruit stalls and only just dodged in time by the citizens, and making a din that sounded like the fall of Jericho.
This further reminder of the vintage season was followed up by a bicycle trip to a farm a few miles away belonging to yet another relation of Gatcho’s, for the wine pressing. The place was an old Turkish tchiflik, the dwelling of some vanished bey, surrounded by fields and vineyards and shaded by tremendous plane trees and a cool line of water-betokening poplars. Tufts of down from the withered thistles drifted in the air and skimmed across the surface of the stream. About fifty people were assembled here, and in the centre three men, like the ones I had seen the night before, unmoccasined, unthonged and unswaddled, were treading bare-legged and spattered round a tremendous shallow tub. Everyone took his turn, and the feeling of the grapes exploding and squelching underfoot – a feeling which I experienced again, whenever I got a chance, several times in Greece and Crete – was amazing. The stuff seethed round our ankles and almost up to the knees. It was a festive gathering. The new grape-must was started and gallons of the old were swallowed from demijohns. Kebabs smoked on their long skewers, and the treaders with hands on each other’s shoulders thumped the dust, soggy now with dropped grapes and spilt wine, in an unsteady and purple-shanked dance to the tune of a violin and a curious oval, thick-necked stringed instrument roughly hewn out of a single piece of wood, like a Neolithic fiddle, held beneath the chin or propped upright before the player’s body, and scraped by a short semicircular bow. (They called it a tzigulka or a gadulka; it was kin to the Montenegrin gûzla, as I later learnt, and a poor relation of the Cretan lyra.) Finally everyone settled on red and yellow rugs spread underneath a giant plane tree whose lower limbs were a-dangle, where they swung close to the ground, with the wooden flasks and knapsacks of the guests, for more eating and drinking and singing. Everything smelt of crushed grapes and was sticky to touch; flies, wasps and menacing brown and orange hornets abounded, but even this zooming tangle failed to blight the hilarity of the gathering or to ruffle the heavy slumbers that followed, as, one by one, we slanted wilting from our cross-legged session and snored where we lay.
When I awoke among the coiling roots, I couldn’t make out where I was. All had changed. Long shadows were streaming down the glade. Men, shod and hosed once more, but with their gait and their manoeuvring hindered by a giveaway clumsiness, were exhorting beasts in the middle distance and loading them with wineskins like the damp and bloated phantoms of goats, squelching and bald, for they were inside-out, with the lashed stumps of their legs distended in rigid gestures. There were many moths. Gatcho was shaking my shoulder. If we didn’t get back to Tirnovo, we would be late for a students’ party. We found our bikes and wobbled back to the town through the dusty and twilit vineyards.
This particular season, once more, seemed to be crowded with holidays and parties and religious feasts, which kept us up late and beset the mornings with headaches. Gatcho demonstrated a way of finding out if the next day was going to be a feast day, by a method about as reliable as predicting a stranger’s arrival by tea leaves. He found my sheepskin kalpack among the heaped-up chattels on my bed; some dormant sense of ridicule had prevented me from wearing it for the last week or two, possibly some teasing comment of Nadejda’s. He pounced on it with glee, crying, ‘Let’s see whether tomorrow is a prazdnik’ – a feast – then lifted it above his head and flung it on the floor, which it struck with a dull thud. His brows knitted with vexation. He repeated it several times. If the hat hit the boards fair and square, he explained, it would give a loud report like the explosion of a paper bag. ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘All’s well. Prazdnik tomorrow.’ And so it was.
In the small hours of one of these celebrations, we found ourselves with half a dozen of the blades of Tirnovo in a hut on the outskirts of the town, smoking hashish. The dried and powdered leaves were packed into the tube of a cigarette paper from which deft fingers had laboriously prodded the tobacco. Lit, and then solemnly passed from hand to hand until the clouds of smoke enveloped us with a sweetish vegetable reek, it brought on a faint dizziness and a gregarious onslaught of helpless laughter. The slightest word or gesture was enough to send us off into fresh paroxysms until we fought for breath and our cheeks were wet with tears. Bulgaria, it appeared, was one of the richest natural hashish gardens in the world. Cannabis indica thrives in embarrassing abundance. Its cultivation, which is scarcely necessary, and its smoking, my companions explained between puffs, were strictly forbidden: ‘Mnogo zabraneno. Ha! Ha! Ha!’ But the ban seemed about as effective as legislation against cow parsley or nettles. Regular smokers were few. It only came into play as an occasional lark. I longed for the opportunity to say ‘the party went with a bhang!’ The lack of opportunity to say so, however, didn’t stop me saying it, and dissolving in transports of hilarity at my own wit.
This sojourn in Tirnovo, already enjoyable enough, took a still better turn with the arrival of the money. There, at the poste restante counter after a couple of days, was the anxiously awaited registered letter in its blue-crossed canvas oblong and – how far away it seemed in space and time and mood! – its Holland Park postmark; and inside, better still, the exciting accumulation of pound notes, still new and crisp. The repayment of some of Gatcho’s hospitality, a clear route to the Black Sea, a new shirt, a couple of pairs of socks, another notebook, papers, pencils, a rubber, cigarettes, tobacco, and a cake of soap to replace the thin wafer I had been husbanding, a new toothbrush, meals, wine, slivo – luxury in fact. I walked back to Gatcho’s father’s grocery on air.
Thanks to all the festivities, three days had passed and the churches which were the pretext for this wide northern sweep in my itinerary were still unseen. Stocking up with cheese, salami and sardines from the rich paternal counter, we set off in the late morning. The ridge on which the town was built continued climbing until the houses thinned out and dropped away, and swept in a curve to the hill where all the churches I had descried from the road before reaching Tirnovo were gathered. The remains of battlemented walls girt this almost inviolable rock and a Turkish bridge connected it to the ridge. From the windy raft of the hilltop, the rock face fell steeply into the valley, in some places as straight as a curtain. At one point on the rim of this precipice captives and malefactors used to be hurled, and from here one could see the round solitary tower in which Baldwin of Flanders, one of the four Frankish emperors of Constantinople during that strange Western rule that followed the capture of Byzantium at the Fourth Crusade, taken prisoner by the Bulgarian czar, had languished for many years and died.
The czars of the second Bulgarian empire, the Asens (possibly of Vlach origin), whose stone mementoes covered this rocky hill, were a fierce and drastic dynasty. Imitators and rivals of Byzantium, these Peters and Ivans and Androniks and Kaloyans are as hard to imagine or to bring to life – so scarce are the records and so formal the chronicles that commemorate their treacheries, magnanimities, massacres and conquests – as the frescoed figures that smothered the walls of all the churches and monasteries, many half ruinous now, with which they so prodigally scattered the surrounding heights. Only one of these monasteries was still inhabited, and this one by a little community of nuns. One of them, a pale pretty girl in a black habit and a black pillbox hat covered with a black kerchief knotted under the chin, timidly offered us coffee and a spoonful of jam in a whitewashed guest room.
We wandered from church to church. In some of them, every available inch of wall was a painted bible scene or a martyrdom. We saw pale kings and princes too, and pale warriors, splendidly dressed in the robes and the armour of those dim courts and scarcely conjecturable wars. Yet the deeds of one of these shadowy twelfth-century czars, Peter Asen II, who spread the frontiers of the Bulgarian state westwards from the shores of the Black Sea clean across the Balkan peninsula to the Adriatic and in the south as far as the Aegean, have left a legacy of unease in Bulgaria, a dream of vanished empire, which has haunted the minds of Bulgarians ever since. This irredentism is, with the Orthodox Church, the only thing to survive from ancient Bulgaria throughout the all-destroying catalepsy of Turkish occupation. This blow, scattering the crowns and sceptres, the czars and princesses and the furred and brocaded boyars, fell on Tirnovo in 1393, sixty years before the capture of Byzantium extinguished the Christian empires and kingdoms of eastern Europe for several centuries. Bulgaria was the first to be subdued by the Turks and almost the last to be liberated.
How the Bulgars hated the Byzantines, just as their descendants abominate the modern Greeks today – and how abundantly the hatred is returned! With what relish, in the Church of the Forty Martyrs, Gatcho translated the inscriptions commemorating the victory of Ivan Asen over the Byzantine host and the capture of Theodore Comnene! The hatred is epitomized on either side by the act of one Byzantine emperor, Basil the Bulgar-slayer, who totally blinded a captured Bulgarian army of ten thousand men, leaving a single eye to each hundredth soldier so that the rest might grope their way home to the czar: a spectacle so atrocious that the czar, when the pathetic procession arrived, died of grief and shock. This dark mediaeval deed is still a source of sombre pride to fierce rustic enemies of Bulgaria in Greece and, to judge by history, the Bulgars have been attempting to redress the balance ever since. For one reason or another, the Bulgars have always detested all their neighbours. They have their hate to keep them warm.
For hours we loitered in the vaulted and painted interiors, gazing at the resplendent walls and craning our necks to peer into the pictorial vaults and cupolas and domes. In one of them Gatcho pointed out a column inserted there by its Asen founder, adorned by an inscription of the Khan Omurtag, an early ruler of Bulgaria in the ninth century. It came from a time before Czar Boris adopted Christianity and made it the religion of the state: a venerable relic of the years when the Bulgars, an Asiatic horde of pagan, shamanistic, fur-hatted mongoloid horsemen from beyond the Volga, first irrupted into the country, conquered and ruled it and, after bestowing their name upon it, were swallowed up by the milder Slavs who had settled there two or three centuries earlier. The rough sounds of their Asiatic tongue, probably akin to the Ugro-Finnish-Turanian branch of the Ural-Altaic, were drowned by the softer Slavonic syllables of the surrounding population and finally lost. The Bulgarian race had emerged with the Czar Krum of the first Bulgarian empire, still of the harsh conquering stock, and his shaggy hierarchy of landowning boyars. Half a century later Czar Boris became a Christian, and the great ruler Simeon I extended and consolidated the empire, and the never-ending strife with Byzantium began.
The Bulgarian conversion was to leave a lasting stamp on eastern Christendom and the whole Slav world except Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia and Croatia, which received the Christian message via the Catholic West with Latin as the liturgical tongue. But the Christianity that SS Cyril and Methodius brought to Bulgaria – and their adaptation of Greek letters to accommodate muffled Slav vowels (and the j and the sh and the sht sounds, unknown to the Greeks) – gave birth to the Cyrillic script which became the alphabet of Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, and, until it was reformed in the last century, even of Latin (though Orthodox) Rumania. Thus Old Slavonic, a strictly liturgical language closer to Bulgarian than to any other branch of the Slav language group, became the religious lingua franca of all Slav Orthodox (until nationalism replaced it piecemeal with local vernaculars), just as Latin became the universal liturgical language of western Christendom.
Examples of this beautiful lettering, in blurred and disintegrating calligraphy, accompanied the pictures of the kings and saints on the surrounding pillars and walls in complex epigraphs, and was inscribed on their giveaway scrolls, fulfilling the role of caption balloons in comic strips by setting forth their key utterances in the hands of stylites and martyrs. As we disentangled them, and as Gatcho unfolded their significances in his urgent German, the prophets and paladins and anchorites and holy athletes and headsmen stared back at us through ten thousand unblinking eyes. Odd to think of this battered casket a few years before Crécy. Then it was new and the interior still spun with a web of scaffolding, ladders and sunbeams, in which the spider-like monks were suspended under the half-blank arcs and hemispheres, pounding cinnabar for a burning fiery furnace or the destruction of Sodom and mixing whites of egg for the yet more spidery hands of their celestial sitters, all raised in benediction or warning or rebuke. Fresh from the quarry, the flagstones underneath them would have been littered with eggshells as if a multitude of chickens had just hatched out before legging it.
The dim light of this vaulted world of interlocking haloes grew dimmer still. Far too dim, in fact, for that hour of the afternoon. The sky outlined in the archway at the end of our last church had turned a peculiar colour. We saw, as we emerged, that it was covered by an electric blue-green lid from horizon to horizon. Shadows were dulled and the air was heavy and windless, but along the canyon below – and it looked almost level with our high vantage point in the amphitheatre of hills – a threatening and solid line of clouds was trooping towards us on its own private breeze like a procession of purple boxing gloves, swelling, as they approached, to the size of bagpipes, wineskins, cattle, a herd of elephants, a school of whales until the sky was filled overhead as though by the huge, sagging roof of a dark and many-poled marquee on the point of collapse.
Below us, along the twisting course of the Yantra, the motionless trees began to twirl like shaken mops. Raging puffs of dust swelled to the height of elm trees, tiny figures far below scuttled for shelter and suddenly, with a roar, the wind smote us as though it would send us spinning backwards into the frescoes and tear to bits the ancient church in whose porch we were sheltering. With a hiss the dusty, ruin-cumbered hill all round was instantaneously leopard-spotted with giant black raindrops, a rash which in another second cohered in a universal moving glitter, then into a hundred dancing puddles and sudden rushing khaki rivers. In a few moments the raindrops turned to hail: the pellets as big as blackcurrants and gooseberries which bounded and ricocheted among the rocks and rattled on the Slavo-Byzantine tiles overhead with a din like machine-gun fire. Then they vanished and a steady curtain of perpendicular rain spirited us into a submarine region. ‘Regen,’ Gatcho had uttered in an awed voice, when the first drops had fallen, and ‘Hagel!’ with the hail; truthfully enough; and, as the first lightning flash forked through the watery air with a simultaneous splitting crash of thunder which boomed and volleyed along the gorges and grumbled echoing in the church behind us, ‘Donner und blitzen!’
I suppose it must have rained once or twice that summer and autumn, but I can’t remember it. My impression remains one of endless dry weather and burning sunlight, almost of drought; certainly nothing to compare with this apocalyptic storm. Deafened by those salvoes of thunderclaps, we sat under the twelfth-century archway of the church porch peering into the grey downpour, listening to the swish of its descent, the gurgling of the runnels everywhere, and the clash of pebbles. Each flash of lightning brought us a shuddering vision of the town, the valleys and the mountains in a strangely focussed close-up that defied distance and dimension. We felt isolated and marooned among the ruins of this hilltop, as though the rest of the world were drowned; or rather, we decided, finishing our picnic, passing the wine bottle to and fro and lighting our cigarettes as we peered into the untimely twilight of falling water, as though we were deep sea divers exploring a submerged cathedral or a cave of coral on a pinnacle of the ocean’s floor – or did the domes and cupolas compose a diving bell? – while fleets above our head were smashing each other to bits at point-blank range: Lepanto, Trafalgar, Navarino, Jutland. We imagined, the slow blur sliding past us into the chasm, a flagship foundering heavy with cannon and treasure and drowned men – some of them, if the battle were early enough, still chained to their benches among a geometric chaos of oars – her spiral journey plumed with twining gyres of silver bubbles and froth.
Or suppose this hill were Mount Ararat, as in the many frescoed floods on narthex walls, and the rest of the world were lost in this second flood, and only this sacred summit, with its two denizens spared – the waterline halting at the battlement’s foot? Yes, but what about the repopulation afterwards? After a pause for this baleful thought to take root, we turned to each other simultaneously and said with an identical note of accusation, ‘Schade, dass du nicht ein Mädel bist.’[9] The fact that neither of us was a girl condemned the race to extinction. What about mermaids, Gatcho suggested, uncorking a second bottle with a pop; suppose a beautiful shoal should slither ashore with their harps and settle all round us in a watery harem? Ah, but how to tackle them, lay siege to those scaly and inviolate loins? Surely there were some with double tails, like divided skirts? Were they viviparous or oviparous? And what would the offspring be? Human to the knee? Then laminations to the calf and, with our granddaughters, to the ankle. But given long life and unfaltering vigour – surely this would not be denied us – there was hope. Perhaps some great-granddaughter would approach our twin death-beds on cautious fin-tips and proudly display to our old eyes the longed-for toenails on their squealing burdens, a boy for Gatcho and a girl for me, or vice versa: and we would breathe our last in the knowledge that we had set mankind on its feet again: a beautiful amphibian brood of subnereids and crypto-tritons with nothing to betray an aquatic streak except, perhaps, a giveaway but not unbecoming greenish light in their blond locks: skilled cliff-scalers, anglers and harpists, living – as no ark had rescued the world’s animals or its tree-dwelling birds – on a healthy diet of gulls’ eggs and their own distant kinsfolk of the deep.
With as little warning as its outbreak, the storm stopped. The lash of the falling water was hushed, and the veil lifted. The clouds, threadbare and empty now, fell to pieces and fluttered away in tatters across a laundered and peaceful sky of turquoise. All was changed, the sharp faceted mountain ranges had taken a long stride forwards, the roofs and walls of the town below flashed the slanting sunlight back, the windowpanes kindled, and diaphanous belfries rose. Washed clean by the long downpour, hundreds of temporary brooks swished downhill to join the swollen Yantra. The summer’s monochrome had gone under a winding garland of steam. These curling vapours turned the clumps of trees, for a quickly dwindling moment, into Mesozoic spinneys. Dun-coloured slants of ploughland were deep chocolate now, the vineyards a stormy green, the rocks and loose stones that the rains had scattered were multicoloured nuggets and polyhedra and pyramids of gleaming mineral. The bushes and flowers and herbs had shaken off a long trance: a confusion of scents, stifled since spring by the dry months, roved the air. The trees were made of metal, the glittering leaves were wired to them with silver, and across the canyon, like a Hispano-mauresque archway in a circle which was all but complete, hung a rainbow of sufficient solidity and brilliance to make the boldest and least circumspect of painters flinch.
Perhaps it was an illusion that the stripping of the rain had altered the resonance of these ravines and sharpened their echo. The revival of each sound – a bell round the neck of a goat or hung in a tower, a bleat, a bray or the voice of a herdsman ricocheting up from the chasm – sent up a clearer note. As we returned, a prismatic property in the air, like a million suspended needlepoints of water, cast a deceptive spell of transparency on this post-diluvian landscape, peopling the gleaming slopes with diamond donkeys and goats chipped out of crystal. The lane to the perspicuous town was a circling turmoil of glass dogs, drunk on mixed smells.
• • •
As in Plovdiv, the social hub of Tirnovo was an open-air restaurant-bar and dance-floor combined, a circle of cement surrounded by tables and tired acacias on a jut of the cliff on which the town was built, so that from the railing at the edge one could peer down at the lower world through swooping layers of kestrels and swifts and pigeons. But, unlike the more metropolitan Plovdiv, there were seldom any girls. A few shopkeepers and countrymen who had come into market were here, but mainly the dashing young men of the town, the older students of the gymnasium and groups of young officers in their white Russian shirts, red-banded caps and spurs, nursing their tasselled and twirly-hilted sabres, as they sat over their minute coffees or their slivo, listening to trim military tangoes and foxtrots. I used to write my diary here in the late afternoon, or to read, sometimes haltingly piecing out the text of Vasil Levsky or Ivan Vasoff[10] while Gatcho slowly read their poems aloud, or expounding to him my very immature ideas on English literature. The only authors he had heard of were the same ones who seemed to have gained a unique foothold throughout Central Europe, in German translation or Tauchnitz: Dickens, Wilde and H. G. Wells, then, after a gap, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Charles Morgan and, rather surprisingly, Rosamond Lehmann. Their bugbear, because of Arms and the Man, was Bernard Shaw.
Suddenly, one evening, the mild hum of talk was interrupted by a shot from the entrance. We saw the nearest tables rise and cluster excitedly round a paper-seller who was bearing his wares ecstatically. The band stopped and everybody joined the group. A student I knew was reading out loud from the columns under the giant headlines in tones of breathless glee. Intent, beaming faces surrounded him, and now and then one or other of his listeners interrupted him with a cheer or an incredulous admiring laugh until hushed by the rest so that the reading might continue. Mouths were agog, eyes opened wider and the glow expanded unmistakeably as the eager cataract of syllables flowed on. What had happened? I could only pick up a word here and there: Serbski Kral, attentat, Marseilles, Frantzuski, Trianon, Malko Entente, Makedonski again and again. When the page was finished, a great cheer went up and everybody was talking and laughing and stamping, hugging and kissing their neighbours and thumping each other between the shoulder blades. At last I managed to ask Gatcho what had happened. His face shining with delight and grinning widely, he said, ‘Man hat den serbischen König getötet! Heute! In Frankreich! Und es war ein Bulgare, der hat ihn umgebracht!’ ‘They’ve killed the Serbian King! Today, in France! And it was a Bulgar that did him in!’
In disjointed fragments when I could extract him from the hubbub, I learnt that King Alexander of Yugoslavia[11] had arrived in Marseilles that morning on a state visit to France. Louis Barthou, the Foreign Minister and thus, ex officio, his partner in the Little Entente[12] and the Treaties of Trianon and Neuilly, which had reduced the frontiers of Bulgaria after the war, had received him. During the ceremonial procession from the quay an assassin had sprung from the crowd toward the open car and emptied his revolver into the two passengers, killing them both. And as though this were not good news enough, the assassin was a Bulgarian, a Macedonian; it is true that he was killed by the police on the spot, but what a deed! (There was a rumour in the papers later that the assassin was not a Bulgarian at all, but a member of the Ustasha, the westward-looking and Catholic separatist group in Croatia, bitterly opposed to the inclusion of their province in the new and more backward Balkan kingdom of Yugoslavia – a rumour which reduced the Bulgarians to fury; after all, one of them told me with indignation, the assassin had svoboda ili smert tattooed on his arm – Liberty or Death, the old motto of the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee. His name was Vlado Chernozemski and he came from Strumitza – Croatian indeed!) Gatcho’s disjointed account was silenced by the singing of Shumi Maritza, the fierce national anthem of Bulgaria. They bawled out the chorus till the veins stood out on their brows: ‘Marsh! Marsh! S’generala nash! V boi da letim, vrag da pobedim – dim – dim – dim. Marsh’[13] – and so da capo.
The tables round the concrete disc were filled with outbreaks of cheering laughter, excited talk and shouts for more slivo. Was this the sort of atmosphere that reigned in Belgrade, I wondered, when the pro-Karageorgevitch party assassinated Alexander Obrenovitch[14] and Queen Draga and threw their bodies out of the palace window; or, for that matter, when Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess Hohenberg in Sarajevo? The tinkle of a thrown slivo glass on the dance-floor evoked a cheer. Soon they were whizzing and smashing all over it. Tumblers and wineglasses followed until a full carafe sailing through the air and exploding in the centre with a crash and a dark star of spilt wine brought everyone to their feet and sent them jostling on to the floor, their forearms flying round each other’s shoulders until a giant hora, with which the musicians tried to keep pace, was whirling them round in a ring. Even the officers’ corner was deserted, a tangle of abandoned sabres; their spurred boots were crossing and stamping with the rest, grinding the fragments of glass to smaller fragments as the dance revolved. The tables were empty except for an old priest smiling benignly in the serene spiralling nest of his beard and beating time with his umbrella, and for me, discordantly skulking long-faced at the bar. Somebody had written on the wall in bold capitals, the stick of chalk grasped in the middle to make the letters larger, ‘The Serbian King is dead!’
Later I saw Gatcho lurching between the tables arm in arm with half a dozen other students; they were whisking off the tablecloths with a cascade of whatever glass or cutlery had survived and tying them round their heads like turbans, singing a song that held all the youth of Bulgaria, that year, in its grip. ‘Piem! Peem! Pushim!’ they bawled, ‘Damadjani sushim! Da jiveyet tarikatite!’ ‘Let’s drink and sing and smoke till the demijohn is empty! That’s the way the lads do it!’ The manager, concerned at the breakage, was hustling towards them, but a still graver diversion made him change course. One of a party of peasants had found a fully-laid table by the balcony. Grasping it by two legs, he had lifted it above his head. The manager dashed forward, but he was too late. With a shout and to massed clapping and cheers, the peasant hurled it over the edge, where it turned over and over in a falling nebula of knives, forks, spoons, jugs, glasses, cruets, sliced sausage and anchovy and rolls till it hit the rock face a long way below and bounded disintegrating into the ravine.
• • •
A few days later I was heading north across the rolling autumnal hills between Tirnovo and the Danube, not due east to the Black Sea as I had planned. Roughly working out my eastward route on the map with Gatcho in Tirnovo, I had seen the tempting line of the Danube to the north, and, beyond it, the irresistibly beckoning triple cartographic circle of Bucharest. Again, this loop was hundreds of miles off my itinerary and, quite literally, diametrically opposed to my goal of Constantinople; but why not? Gatcho was against it: he was going back to Varna in a week or so; why not come too and stay in his rooms there, and then push off south to Turkey? But I could do this, I argued, after I had left Bucharest, and had walked south again across the Dobrudja. The real reason was his hatred of Bulgaria’s northern neighbours. The Rumanians were a terrible lot, he said: liars, robbers, thieves, villains, immoral. I said they couldn’t be as bad as all that. ‘They stole the Dobrudja,’ he said with a contorted frown. ‘All the land between the Danube delta and the Black Sea. It’s pure Bulgarian.’ I said that I wanted only to see what they were like, on their own ground, not as I had seen them, through Hungarian eyes, in Transylvania. ‘They stole that too!’ he cried. I wasn’t a political observer, I went on; races, language, what people were like, that was what I was after: churches, songs, books, what they wore and ate and looked like, what the hell! Surely he, who was interested in foreign literature and the republic of the arts and wanted to see the outside world too – just like me – could understand that? Monasteries, temples, paintings, I went on, mountain ranges, art, history. ‘This is history!’ he interjected hotly, and scored an important point.
We sat in silence. I had to gain lost ground. ‘Suppose the King of Rumania was murdered,’ I asked, ‘would you have cheered and danced as you did last night about King Alexander of Yugoslavia?’ Gatcho laughed. ‘Of course I would. And I’d have rung the church bells too.’ Things were building up my way. ‘And’, I said, with the insidious quietness of somebody laying a trap, ‘the King of Greece?’ Gatcho laughed snortingly. ‘There isn’t one. Not at the moment. You ought to know that. But of course I would.’ The trap had fallen apart. ‘I know why you are asking all these questions. England is France’s ally. You’re on the side of France, on the side of the Little Entente.’ I protested hotly that I loved France, that we all needed her if we weren’t all to be barbarians, but that I didn’t care a damn about France’s policy in the Balkans, or England’s either; surely one isn’t necessarily committed to one’s country’s policy? ‘Oh yes, one is,’ Gatcho replied. ‘It’s all right for you in England, with your huge Empire. You’ve never been invaded or conquered. Thanks to being an island.’ ‘Yes we have!’ ‘Oh? When?’ I gave the date rather lamely. ‘Nine centuries ago! There you are!’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you hate all your neighbours, Greece, Rumania and Yugoslavia anyway. What about Turkey?’ They were the worst of the lot, he said, the ones who ruined Bulgaria in the first place. Nearly six centuries of occupation. Indeed, this enormous span, stretching from Chaucer to Dickens and embracing almost half of the country’s history since it emerged as a nation, was a sombre thought. ‘But we’ve beaten them once, in the First Balkan War.’ ‘With the help of the Rumanians, the Serbs and the Greeks,’ I put in; he brushed these ex-alliances aside, ‘and we could beat them again. Why, we nearly took Constantinople!’ After a pause for brooding I asked him if there was any foreign country that he did like. After another long pause, he said, ‘Russland.’
I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been at Gatcho’s exemption of Russia from his general aversion, in spite of his dislike of Communism, which was intense. There was no hope of solution to Bulgaria’s irredentist problems there. Indeed, although he had no sympathy for the present regime in Germany, he would sometimes wonder in a speculative tone whether, in terms of what he called realpolitik, Bulgaria should look Germany-wards for rectification. (This is, of course, exactly what Bulgaria did a few years later; and for a short-lived year or two, as Germany’s ally, Bulgaria was suddenly swollen by huge slices sawn off her neighbours.) But, quite apart from political leanings, there existed throughout mystical Bulgaria a deep-seated, instinctive, almost fondness for the idea of Russia. As the champions of Slav Orthodoxy in the past, she had been a counterweight to the hated Greek ecclesiastical supremacy at Constantinople under the Turks. It was the Russia of Alexander II that delivered them from their long slavery and, as it were, created modern Bulgaria; and Bulgarian and Russian, of all the Slav languages, were the two which were closest kin. The present Soviet Union’s bitter hostility to the Russia of the Czars which had showered down all these benefits was, in some curious fashion, no bar to this deep-rooted sympathy. Except among communists, where the ambiguity would not arise, political aversion and racial attraction coexisted in the teeth of all ordinary logic; the great Slav lodestone made Bulgaria react and deviate from the true north in the same way that allowance must be made on a compass for the magnetic. It was a case of le coeur a ses raisons. This instinctive bias, however, was no bar to Bulgaria siding in the First World War, impelled by short-sighted opportunism, against her old benefactors, and with calamitous results for the country. (The same reasons again placed them on the wrong side in World War II, and the results were worse still; though the final disaster would perhaps have come – as it did, alas, to the other Eastern European countries – regardless of which camp they were in.) Bulgarians have a perverse genius for fighting on the wrong side. If they had been guided more by their hearts and less by their political heads, which usually seem to have lacked principle and astuteness in equal degrees, their history might have been a happier one.
I said nothing of all this – all, that is, that could be said at that date – because a rather strained silence had fallen, like angels flying overhead. Gatcho was leaning in the café with his hands in his pockets, a frown on his stubborn handsome face, his eyes fixed on the table and his black hair falling on his forehead. The same glance-avoiding awkwardness had haunted the rest of the day. But it thawed in the evening. I asked him if it had been prompted by anything I had done or said. No, he answered, nothing at all. It was merely one of the black moods under which I had seen his family writhing. He apologized with real distress. Later as we were discussing Gatcho’s companions and contemporaries who had been our messmates for the last days, ‘What do you think of Vasil?’ he asked, mentioning the last of them all. ‘I don’t like him much,’ I admitted. ‘Nor do I,’ Gatcho said. ‘And he doesn’t like you either.’ ‘Why?’ ‘He thinks you’re a spy.’
My first reaction to this was a loud and incredulous laugh. Gatcho joined in. ‘He must have got the idea from seeing you always poring over the map,’ he said, pointing to the tattered Freytag’s Reisekarte open on the table in front of us. ‘But surely I don’t look like a spy,’ I protested. ‘Ah!’ Gatcho answered, ‘they never do.’ I wondered if Vasil’s idea had started the same suspicion in Gatcho, and began to think that I had noticed a hint of withdrawal in our companions during the last day or two, a trace of coldness. ‘Of course I don’t,’ he said with vehemence, ‘nor do any of the others.’ Then after a pause and most unhelpfully, he added, ‘Anyway, why shouldn’t you be?’ Seeing that I was beginning to work myself into a state of outrage, distress and puzzled disclaimer, he put his hand on my shoulder and shouted for some more wine. It was my turn to fence myself round with injured sulkiness and to return to the theme with fresh, though dwindling exasperation, which I really felt, between songs, for the rest of the evening.
It was the first of many times, since an incident on the Czechoslovak border, that I had struck the hazard that every now and then, and more especially in time of trouble, plagues travellers in the Balkans, not excluding Greece. The anger it arouses in the accused is all the more hopeless by its impotence. Fortunately, the charge seems to evaporate with the same frivolous ease that it arises, blowing away like an idle speculation. It takes some time to perfect the weary sigh and the pitying smile which is the correct completion of the gambit. But at first, even after its retraction, it always leaves a disagreeable trace behind, like the itch after the removal of a sting. Gatcho was truly upset because I was so obviously so. When I set off next day, he made me promise again and again to stay with him in Varna on the way south.
[1] From the early seventeenth century, for some two hundred years, brothers of the Ottoman sultans were confined in palace quarters known as the kafes, or ‘cage’, to ensure their loyalty. If a sultan died childless, his brother might emerge to the sultanate from this confinement, often unfit to rule.
[2] Admiral Kolchak (1874–1920), supreme leader of the White Russian forces from 1918 until his execution by the Bolsheviks in 1920.
[3] Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich (1876–1938), grandson of Czar Alexander II, and controversial claimant to the Russian throne from 1924 until his death.
[4] The Reichstag Fire Trial (21 September–23 December 1933). The fire that broke out in the Berlin Reichstag on 27 February 1933 was blamed on both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. To Hitler’s fury, the High Court convicted only a single suspect, the (possibly insane) Marinus van der Lubbe.
[5] The June Purge (30 June–2 July 1934), the so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in which Hitler eliminated the SR Brownshirts, as well as more liberal opponents.
[6] The so-called February Uprising in Austria (12–15 February 1934) saw factional fighting between socialist and conservative militia, at its fiercest in Vienna.
[7] Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934), dictatorial Chancellor of Austria from 1932 until his assassination by Nazis on 25 July 1934. PLF had glimpsed him in procession in Vienna earlier in the year: a tiny man in a morning coat, ‘hurrying to keep up’.
[8] The poor fellow.
[9] ‘What a shame you’re not a girl.’
[10] Vasil Levsky (1837–73) and Ivan Vasoff (1850–1921) were celebrated Bulgarian revolutionaries against Ottoman rule.
[11] King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was shot by a Bulgarian revolutionary named Vlado Chernozemski, who was instantly cut down by a policeman’s sabre, then beaten to death by the crowd. Barthou died of wounds, a few hours later.
[12] The Little Entente, created in 1921–2, saw an alliance between Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the future Yugoslavia, backed by France, as a check to potential Hungarian or German aggression. The Treaty of Neuilly (1919) had drastically reduced the borders of Bulgaria, in favour of Greece, Serbia and Rumania.
[13] ‘March! March with our general! Fly to war and crush the foe!’
[14] King Alexander I Obrenovitch of Serbia and his unpopular queen were assassinated by an army faction in 1903. He was replaced as king by Prince Peter, head of the royal house of Karageorgevitch, which had a long-standing feud with the Obrenovitch dynasty.