The region I was crossing bore an illusion of no change, but insidious forces had been at work. All trace of summer haze had been driven from the sky, and the glare was tempered to a thin lemon-coloured clarity, with frailer shadows. The distant ranges to the south were chiselled and veined with valleys and the spread of the Balkans, stretching northward and then veering east of my track, was distinct to the smallest rock. On some of these uplands, red patches of flames and trailing smoke showed where shepherds were setting fire to the undergrowth to strip the ground for next year’s grazing. The sky was seldom without a cloud: cauliflowers sailing overhead, towing their shadows twisted and bent by the ravines, like ships’ anchors, across the whale-shaped undulations, or hovering in the high mountain passes as lightly as ostrich feathers, or slanting along the horizons in pampas plumes. The setting sun turned each of these into the tail of a giant retriever. Whenever the slopes slanted nearly horizontally to the eye, the rain had fledged them with a green froth of tender herb. Young blades sprouted in the dark earth, which was scattered with cyclamen and autumn crocus. But the leaves were still green and undiminished in the branches; only a faint tinge of gold in the vines gave the season away (where they had been sprinkled with copper sulphate, entire hillsides were now the colour of verdigris): these and the walnut trees that were beginning to show their steely grey limbs, and the poplars by the stream beds, which were to shed their green-gold leaves from their roots upward till they were tall spectres with a last bright puff at the tip like a candle’s flame.
Many of the vines were still loaded with unplucked grapes. When I swooped down into a valley and the pale ribbons of smoke announced – before the chimneys and tiles and thatch had come into view – that I was approaching a village, I ate these grapes in quantities, with wonderful apples and pears. Women were filling their aprons with quinces for slatko, which they offered their guests in little spoonfuls. There were plenty of crab apple trees and wild pears, small, hard and with just enough sharpness to leave a faint prickle on the gums. Quantities of walnuts had appeared in the villages and I ate them with honey out of a spoon and filled my pockets, shelling and crunching them as I went. On the outskirts of one of the villages, I came across a peculiar bee garden where the hives were tall cones of mud, like the huts of certain tribes in the Cameroons. Sometimes on the thorn bushes and on the ground of these hamlet approaches there were bright blankets spread out to dry, covering an acre or so with stripes and zigzags in amazing colours. The calm scenery was dotted sparsely by figures, lopping, pruning, gathering, burning, yoking buffaloes, driving donkeys, or calling to their flocks and their dogs.
The second equinox of my journey was over and this new northward leap across country which I had never planned to see, after the first purifying rains, seemed a long, limpid and peaceful reprieve among the far-tinkling flocks. Quietness dropped from the sky. The swallows had not yet left; they gyrated and now flew low in the villages; but in the hills, crossing and recrossing the path or standing on the dark furrows, magpies abounded. These, and the crows and the rooks, with an occasional owl, were the birds I most often saw or heard for the rest of the journey. Often, sitting or lying under a tree, I was startled out of my torpor by a whirring clatter and a huge grasshopper with bright eyes and twirling feelers would land on my knee. Night fell earlier now – these changes, although they are a continual creeping process, suddenly dawn on one and become, for a time, fixtures, like turning round in Grandmother’s Steps – but the stages of late afternoon and sunset and twilight were spun out into a longer and more elaborate ceremony thanks to the new presence of the clouds: gold, zinc, scarlet and crimson over the westward roll of the Great Balkan towards Plevna – leagues of gold wire, shoals and lagoons, berserk flights of cherubim, burning fleets and the slow-motion destruction of Sodom.
To avoid the tedium of the main northward road, I followed tracks in the foothills to the east of it, or struck across open country. On the second evening, I found myself climbing and descending under just such a sunset along a narrow track on the slant of the mountain with a friendly black dog. It was no good telling him to go home. This happened several times on this journey; short of company, they sometimes attached themselves for hours. An amazing sunset faded and a grey twilight deepened, and just before it became completely dark, a turn in this hill track confronted us with an enormous full moon. It loomed in a shock of white out of the steep hillside and if I had been on four legs, I would probably have let out a long howl of surprise like the black dog at my side. He galloped forward and then stopped, barking in his tracks as though to drive it away. But in a few minutes, as the path sank into a hollow, the moon sank with the hills. The dog grew quieter, only to burst out afresh when a dip in the landscape once more laid the moon bare. He rushed forward, followed by his enormous black shadow, frightening it below the skyline, as the answering slope blotted the moon out again, and then bolted back to me with wagging tail, gazing up for approval. During half an hour the moon rose and set a dozen times in this sharply altering landscape, each time with the same effect on the dog. When the moon was free in the upper sky at last, it took some time for my companion’s frenzied barks to sink to a disapproving growl. By this time the path led down into a wide wooded ravine through which curled a shining stream. We followed its windings through a glimmering leafy world. A mile or two along the stream’s course we came on a clearing surrounded by linden trees, and on one side of it, a small derelict mosque surrounded by blackberry bushes. I picked and swallowed here for half an hour accompanied by intermittent moonward wails.
The mosque must have been half ruined for many years. The dome and the walls were almost intact but most of the plaster had fallen away and the minaret was broken diagonally near its base, exposing to the moon the twist of the stairs round their central pillar like the volutes of a smashed ammonite’s fossil. It seemed a strange place for a mosque, so far away from any village. Perhaps it was a tomb or the hermitage of a solitary dervish a couple of centuries ago. Once more there was a tantalizing marble slab embedded on the wall, inscribed with many lines of Arabian characters. A rusty horseshoe, wisps of hay on the moonlit floor, an old tin plate, a pile of faggots and the black smoke-marks on the walls suggested that the place sometimes sheltered mounted travellers for the night. It was a perfect lair for a band of haiduks, those Robin Hood-like bandits who played such a part in Bulgarian life under the Turks. I explored the small clearing. Half a dozen moss-grown monoliths, each topped with a turban and one broken in half with its pleated capital prone in the grass, were nearly swallowed up in bracken and weed and the brambles of the blackberries. A large flat stone jutted into the gleaming stream.
This wonderful place seemed to be miles from a village, so I slept there. I built a large fire inside with the welcome faggots and a few-half burnt logs that I discovered tucked away in the remains of the mihrab, and shared a Hungarian sausage and half a loaf with the dog – who, passant, sejant then couchant, settled by the fire as though he had never lived anywhere else – and then finished up with some pears and walnuts; setting out, afterwards, for the big stone by the stream to smoke. On the way there, we almost trod on an owl which must have been standing in the grass. It sailed into the trees without a sound. By the brook I put off going to sleep from cigarette to cigarette as the moon followed its journey through the sparse clouds. The place was holy and enchanted. This spell was only faintly disturbed by the black dog, mercifully inured by now to the phenomenon overhead, whizzing into the undergrowth with hackles like a clothes brush at the faintest rustle of nocturnal stirring, always returning panting, empty-jawed, and with tongue hanging out through the semblance of a smile, to fling himself down on the bank with a lunatic upward gaze of appeal for advice or approbation which pats on his pacified scruff seemed only partly to satisfy. The curl of his tail remained a dark symbol of interrogation. After sitting under these silver leaves and listening to the water running by for most of the moon’s journey, we returned to the mosque. Lying beside the crackling faggots with my head on the familiar billet of my rucksack and the dog stretched crusaderishly at my feet, soon deep in a sleep that no phantom quarry disturbed, I felt another access of one of the great and recurring delights of these travels: the awareness that nobody in the world knew where I was, and in this case not even I with any certainty. My hand outstretched over the bright thorns sent a giant shadow-hand clean across the flickering firelight in the hollow of the dome, ringed with concentric circles like the grooves on an oil-jar to the summit just above. The owl hooted from a tree nearby.
The dog had vanished when I woke. It was just as well since, if he had accompanied me any further, he might have lost his way back: but I was sorry. At that very moment he was probably bounding home. Outside the mosque a brilliant dawn was spreading down the valley, sweeping away the morning dew like the hounds of Hippolyta. A flock grazed across the meadow the other side of the stream, and the tufted ruin caught the morning light in a bright positive print of the dark and silvery negative of a few hours ago. Spreading long shadows on the damp grass, the almost level sunbeams revealed something that the deceptive glimmer of the night had hidden: a confetti of mushrooms, all round the mosque and in the field beyond, huddling in groups. I filled a big red bandanna with them before setting off.
• • •
A difficulty crops up here. The distance on my map from Tirnovo to Rustchuk could easily be covered on foot in under a week. There are, in fact, only five pencil crosses on this journey indicating where I slept. Perhaps I forgot to enter some. Yet according to two of the bare dozen only exactly ascertainable dates on this journey – the assassination of King Alexander and a customs stamp on the Bulgarian frontier – the journey took thirteen days. There is nothing unusual here; there was no hurry, and in Transylvania I had taken a great deal longer sometimes to travel far less. But in Transylvania there had been every reason for dawdling – exciting company, libraries, horses, friends and sentimental involvements, and every room with its furniture and books and the view out of the windows, and every face and every name, including those of neighbours and servants, horses and dogs, I can remember as if I had seen them three minutes ago. But not here. Why was I so slow? Perhaps something tremendous occurred to hold me up, which will burst on me in an illuminating thunderclap the moment these pages are irrevocably out of my hands. But for the moment, concentrate as I may, all is dim, except a few lucid alcoves of memory scooped out of these nebulous kilometres. But in the case of these surviving cartouches of memory, such as those of the last few pages where each detail, like a torch held up to a bas-relief in a cave, suddenly juts, I can still taste the blackberries and recapture the owl’s note and the texture of that black dog’s coat. Indeed considering how often since, and at the expense of a thousand others, I have thought of those eventless hours, prompted by an affinity of wood or out of the blue in the middle of a dinner or waiting for a train, the space allotted them here is a great feat of compression.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the vagueness of the following days lies in the contours of the country. Unlike the sharp southern descent, all Bulgaria north of the Balkan watershed descends in a succession of waving ledges that tilt gradually down to the Danube’s bed in plateau after plateau, each wide step of the shallow staircase becoming tamer until the lowest merges imperceptibly with the diligent lowlands; and with each downward tread the line of the watershed falls further south: no diamond peaks at hand to incite the mind, hills and recollection growing blunter pace by pace, and both merging at last in the tabula rasa of the plain.
The moonlit ruin might have had some crucial significance in a fairy tale and so might the next surviving apparition, the last of the wonderful Ottoman bridges on this journey, flying over the water – probably over the same flow that turned the mill-wheel, further downstream – in a steep semicircular loop of cobwebbed grey masonry. The mood of folktales pervades the blur of these days. The imminence of a village was often announced by meeting a crippled and toothless crone picking up firewood and bent in two under a vast burden of sticks, identical with folk-tale figures who, had I been the third feckless son and shouldering her burden, might have granted me three wishes and made my fortune. But our exchange was confined to ‘dobro vetcher, gospoja’,[1] on my side, or ‘dobro den’ on theirs.
Another moment: an ikon of St Irene behind glass in the recess of a wayside store ikon-stand, and a bird hovering and fluttering before pecking with loud taps as though bent on breaking and entering. It may, I think now though I wouldn’t have known then, have been a wheatear, for each upward beat showed a brilliant white flash of tail and body which the downstroke of its more sober-coloured wings obscured. The old candle-end inside must have looked like a bit of bread or a slug. It was ten minutes before this pecking and fluttering siege was raised and the besieger sheared off empty-beaked. The next lantern slide to drop into its slot is a village dairy, where I was finishing a small earthenware dish of my favourite food in Bulgaria: yaourt. (It seems in retrospect that I almost lived on this stuff, sprinkling sugar on the dimpled crust and then spooning away. I had yet to learn how to squeeze lemon on top until the sugar is soaked, in the manner of some cunning Athenians. I was further still from the delicious Cretan method: pouring in a circular helping of honey from a rotating spoon-tip and then scattering the chryselephantine whorls with fragments of peeled walnut. It is indescribably good.) Bulgarians are held to be the best yaourt-makers in the Balkan peninsula; in fact, their skill as dairymen is second only to their mastery of market gardening. Oddly, though, the word ‘yaourt’ is never used in Bulgaria; they call it kissolo mleko, ‘sour milk’.
A party of six settled at the next table, all countrymen in homespun, rawhide footgear and sashes, but two in broad-brimmed hats of plaited osier, the others in cloth caps. They seemed of a finer grain than the ordinary Bulgarian peasant and quiet-voiced, eyes wide with different but friendly openness, untroubled smiles and good-humoured wrinkles round their eyes and the corners of their mouths. An indefinable presiding charm emanated from them. Anyone would have felt calm and happy in their neighbourhood. Appropriately, as I divined – more from their giveaway gear than the unfamiliar words of their eavesdropped discourse – they were a party of itinerant beekeepers travelling up and down the region and tidying up the hives for the winter. I wondered how they dealt with those curious cones of mud I had seen; they looked proof against apiarists. A fallout of the manna of their calling, as gentle as pollen, touched me with grace – a change in this fiery kingdom with its ‘talk of peace that always turned to slaughter’ (in the words of the poet Kapetanakis); to think of them, armed with nothing more harmful than a smoke-gun, going about their Georgic business; dealing with nothing but bees, and wax for sculptors and cobblers and candles, and honey for everyone; mobled in muslin, calm-browed comb-setters and swarm-handlers of the scattered thorps.
• • •
I usually got up at dawn or soon afterwards on this journey, except when I struck lucky by staying with someone, or in circumstances of unusual comfort; but not always. Occasionally I would lie in bed on squalid pallets reading till noon, and once all day until dinner time. Not that there was anything to complain of in my quarters in the little town of Boritza, where I had taken a room for the night in a sort of loft above a wheelwright’s. Looking through a trapdoor and down a ladder almost beside my bed, I could see the bald patch on the crown of the wheelwright’s head as, ankle deep in shavings and surrounded by a disorder of herbs, spokes, felloes and swingletrees, he hammered and planed or sawed his way through planks with a square and biblical-looking saw in which the blade was strung with thongs between a square wooden frame, or chipped and sliced at a block with a hammer-backed adze or thumped with a mallet. All his tools had a look of Nazarene antiquity. The sunbeams falling across this scattered gear danced with sawdust and the smell of the freshly sawn wood floated up the steps, a scent only bettered by a baker’s shop when they are shovelling the loaves out of the oven. Hoofs and wheels clattered and creaked over the cobbles under my window, and beyond them, a chorus of frogs.
But these impressions only penetrated intermittently: I was halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, which I had started the evening before and read all through the night: my first introduction to Dostoevsky, in a French yellow-back translation by Le Comte Prozor. Helplessly spellbound, I postponed getting up from half-hour to half-hour, in spite of the bright autumn morning outside. But at about eleven o’clock, the light lost its brilliance on the page. Clouds had collected and soon the sky dissolved. A steady downpour started. This lets me off, I thought with delight, settling down more comfortably to the doings of Alyosha, and only descending the staircase at two, rather shamefaced to seem so idle a lodger. I sat on in an eating-house all the afternoon, brushing away the lazy autumn flies that loitered across the print, only dimly aware of the steady patter of the rain, interrupted every now and then by the friendly bewilderment of the owner, who sat swishing the flies from his brow at the other window. ‘You read a lot,’ he would observe hourly – ‘mnogo [much].’ ‘Da,’ I answered faultlessly. The only other people there between meals were two frowning policemen who sat for an hour at the next table in silence with their rifles between their knees, fixing me with unsettling scrutiny. My heart sank. At last one got up, saluted, and asked me politely if I could spare two of those English cigarettes I had been smoking, for him and his pal. I bestowed several on them with relief. (I had recklessly bought two packets of Player’s Navy Cut in Tirnovo.) I had thought the police might have been tipped off by someone in Tirnovo to dog my footsteps, having heard Vasil’s suspicions about my being a spion at umpteenth hand. The book carried me all through supper until closing time and by candlelight until half-past three in the morning, when I finished it at last, exhausted and excited.
Dostoevsky ever since, and even the mention of his name, evokes a momentary impression of rain and fresh-sawn wood.
• • •
The following days were raining off and on the whole time, soaking the lowlands and an ever-thickening crop of villages. I stuck to the main road, watching occasional cars pass, and, more temptingly, buses, with РУССЕ plastered across the front – Russe, the Bulgarian name for Rustchuk. There was little else but carts, all with their semicircular yokes, and, inevitably, Gypsies, the many-flounced dresses of the women flapping round their ankles with the wet and their long hair glued to their cheeks. All were barefoot, with several babies in the backs of the wagons, stark naked among the pots and the half-woven baskets and the tent poles. At one point I found myself trudging through the middle of some large-scale army manoeuvres: platoons labouring through the downpour under enormous packs of matted cowhide with their bedding strapped round them. Horse-drawn cannons creaked past along the straight, flat road, and at one moment a troop of cavalry wheeled, trotted and then galloped across the road and away over the plain, scabbards dancing up and down against the flanks of strong and shaggy horses. They were rather impressive, reminiscent of those full-page drawings of the Balkan Wars in bound volumes of the Illustrated London News. The soldiers were now in winter uniform. I, too, had changed into my long-folded breeches and puttees – and even into my overcoat – out of commission for months except as a covering at night.
On one of these drizzly stretches, I fell in with a fellow wayfarer heading north like me, a young barber from Pazardjik called Ivancho, threadbare and urban and with a face like a hare’s. Where was I from? Anglitchanin? Tchudesno! – ‘Wonderful!’ This revelation was followed by a burst of talk that needed no answer. It was uttered at such speed that I could scarcely understand a word – at the same time eager, confidential and ear-piercing, and without the faintest trace of punctuation, accompanied by many gestures and with a fixed smile and those hare’s eyes projecting and rolling, as though loose in their sockets. It continued for mile after mile till my head began to swim and ache. I tried to detach myself and draw on inner resources, merely muttering Da or Nè when a pause occurred. But these were not always the right answers and my companion would begin again, catching me by the elbow and prodding me with his forefinger with redoubled urgency and a crab-like veer of his fast and tripping gait that always edged me across the road and nearly into the field, till I darted round the other side and into the middle again, only to be seized once more and harangued off the road on the other side with the same smiling urgency and with eyes peering mesmerically so that it seemed impossible to deflect them. Sometimes he was walking backwards in front, almost dancing along the road in reverse, the unstaunchable flow gushing unbroken from his smiling and gabbling lips. Once I turned round in a circle and he danced briskly round in a wider circle still talking faster and faster. I tried to counter-attack by resolutely bawling Stormy Weather, but it was too slow. He dived in between the bars, so I shifted to the Lincolnshire Poacher, Lillibulero, On a Friday Morn when we set Sail, and Maurice Chevalier’s Valentine, over and over again. Whenever he tried to hammer in a wedge of speech or when I paused for breath, I made more noise marching ahead with exaggerated resolution, faster and faster, glaring straight ahead. When I fell silent after a terrific crescendo to see if I had won, there was an outbreak of claps and high-pitched laughter and the tide of speech swept on. I was routed. After another hour, I stopped in my tracks, flourished my hands to the sky, shouting ‘Please! Please, Ivancho! Molya! Molya!’ At one moment I believe I actually seized and shook him by the shoulders, but laughter and a million syllables was the only response. I stumbled on like a sleepwalker or a condemned man with sunk head and closed eyes, but the piercing spate broke over me unhindered. My head was splitting and I sighed for the tomb and the silence of eternity. People had often teased me for gasbag tendencies, especially when a bit drunk. If only they could see this retribution!
There was only one hope. Ivancho belonged to some kind of pan-Bulgarian barbers’ guild – he had showed me a dog-eared card with a snapshot glued to it – and in two nearby villages that we had passed before I realized how it worked, he had entered a barber’s shop, displayed his card and emerged with a handful of leva. In the next village we came to, I took discreetly to my heels and ran full tilt along the road. Looking back, I saw him emerge, catch sight of my diminishing figure, and set off in pursuit. But I had a good start and the distance widened. I pounded on like a stag with a lightening heart and finally, when the road stretched bare behind me, slowed down, free at last. But a few minutes later a northward-bound car slowed down and Ivancho, with a forefinger wagging in playful admonition, leapt from the running-board.
There was nothing for it. All the evening, and all through dinner, the torment continued till at last I lurched to bed, but not to sleep for any time. Fortunately, though, owing to lack of room, different roofs were sheltering us. After a few nightmare-ridden hours, I got up in the dark, paid, and slipped out before breakfast, and away. But I had not gone a furlong before a waiting shadow detached itself from a tree. A cheerful voice, refreshed by sleep, wished me good morning, and a friendly hand fluttered to my shoulder. Day broke slowly.
Stunned and battered, I saw my chance early in the afternoon. We were sheltering from the rain, drinking Russian tea an inch deep in sugar in the kretchma of a large village. How pungently the memory of those kretchmas sticks: the cubicle of wooden railing in the corner, where the bottles were lined on shelves, tin tables, rickety chairs, perhaps a hobbled ram in a corner and half a dozen live fowls trussed together by their feet, stertorous hawking and trajectories of spit, a Slavonic hubbub, the padding of swaddled feet across the puddles, wagoners drinking whip in hand and the smell of slivo, coffee, sweet tea, rank tobacco, damp homespun, sweat, charcoal, dogs, stable and cowshed. I rather liked them! There was always so much going on. A battered bus was drawn up outside, and the driver-conductor was drinking with some cronies at another table. I left the table with the excuse of the lavatory, and, outside, made a pleading gesture towards the conductor through the glass top of a door. He joined me, and I haltingly explained my case. He had heard and seen the social amenities rattling about my table; perhaps he could tell from my eyes that he was talking to a soul in hell.
Back in the main room I made the treacherous suggestion to Ivancho that we should take the bus to Rustchuk and get out of the rain: I would pay for the journey. Would he please buy the tickets, I said, handing over the money, as my Bulgarian was so bad? He assented eagerly and volubly. There was a hitch at the bus door: he insisted I should get in first. We struggled and the driver shouted impatiently. I managed to shove him in and the driver pulled the lever that slammed the door, and moved off. I could see Ivancho gesticulating and shouting but all in vain. He shot me a harrowing glance from his hare-eyes, I waved, and the rain swallowed them up. In a few minutes, I took a side-path through a field of damp sunflowers. Taking no chances, I followed a wide loop far from the dangers of the main road. The guilt implanted by Ivancho’s reproachful glance almost managed to mar the ensuing feelings of relief and liberation, but not quite. Not even the bitter wind from the east, as steady as an express train, could do that.
One of the rare attacks of gloom and doubt that now and then tempered the zest and excitement of these travels, smote that night. Though some of it was caused by remorse about my slightly discreditable escape from the racking eternity of Ivancho’s company, the falling depression had been hammered home by the unbroken downpour, lashed into a spiteful anti-human fury by the unrelenting north-east wind that felt as though it was blowing without let or hindrance, as it probably was, direct from Siberia. (After all, now that the barrier of the Balkans lay away to the south, there was no windbreak this side of the Urals to thwart its onrush.) The angry rain-bearing blast had cursed every step of my plod down the glutinous byways till long after dark.
And what about being suspected of being a spy? This general dejection prompted me to turn and rend the Bulgarians in general and in vacuo. All their obvious qualities, their courage and scrupulous honesty, their frugality, their doggedness and diligence and the passion for literacy (I had been told again and again that Bulgaria, of all the Balkan countries, was the one with the lowest percentage of illiteracy) – all this was forgotten or discounted, and with it, their hospitality and their odd and beautiful songs and their gift for music and, in many cases, a certain attractive, rather melancholy seriousness. Gatcho, whom I really liked, and Nadejda, whom I adored (anyway, she was half Greek, I would have argued), were set on one side as exceptions, and with them, on lower thrones, the many Bulgarians I had liked or who had been amusing or kind, or both. Stripped of all this, how heavy, boorish and sometimes bloodthirsty they seemed (though I didn’t, in my romantic idea of the Balkans, mind this last characteristic, which is common to all Bulgaria’s neighbours, as much as I should, and their political role as Europe’s villains had a certain dark glamour). I made no allowances for the stunting and stifling damage of barbarous occupation for half a millennium, gave no pat on the back for the compensating break with mediaeval feudalism – reproach rather, for lack of its relics and traditions; similarly, no pity for their exclusion from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, nor congratulations because there had been no Bastille to besiege or Industrial Revolution to undergo. Instead I reproached them for their unilluminated literalness: a bread without yeast, a jokerless pack. Perhaps unjustly, this last accusation is the only one that still seems to me, out of all this railing in the dark, to have some substance.
The theatre of these ill-tempered and gloomy thoughts only exacerbated them, thanks to my masochistic passion for ungracious living – a passion which is still not quite extinct. Back on the main road, I had made a dive through the soaking darkness, like an outlaw claiming sanctuary, towards the first lighted window on the edge of the first village. (It might have been signposted Dolni Pasarel – I remember this name, and its neighbour Gorni Pasarel, the Upper and the Lower Village, but which one was it? I daren’t risk it.) I had sloshed through a yard full of pigsties and offered, perhaps, out of wetness and fatigue, rather rudely, to pay for a night’s lodging. It was accepted with a touch of ill-grace, probably because no payment was needed or asked for; and here I was in the most primitive village house I had so far seen. Through the rain all the houses had looked curiously squat, as though they were sinking into the ground under shocks of bedraggled, thatch-like, ill-kempt fringes. They were socketed in the earth for about a third of their height, so that on entering one went down several steps into a single, semi-troglodytic and windowless room, with a damp earthen floor and a ledge all round. The walls were of wattle, whitewashed outside but with the uncovered mortar and straw and wicker bare and bulging within. The low ceiling was of bamboo laid across heavy beams, cocooned in cobwebs and black and oily with decades of soot. No chimney was visible: standing, one’s head disappeared in a pendant layer of smoke from which one stooped again red-eyed and coughing: a limitation which imposed a more bear-like gait than usual on the room’s seven denizens. (For the hundredth time, in rustic dwellings in Eastern Europe, the thought of the lack of privacy arose. Nobody is ever alone, whether engendering, giving birth or dying; dark nocturnal tussles and Neolithic midwifery and death rattles and dirges are all, at the very least, within earshot.) We had swallowed a fasting supper of boiled spinach, cheese like concrete, and water, in semi-silence, a silence probably cast – a fresh cause for later guilt – by my scowling mood, and then retired.
Lying on the ledge in this shadowy room, with the wind and rain outside competing with the stertorous polyphony indoors – a chorus which was startlingly varied every so often by a change of key or by one of the seven sleepers abruptly falling silent – I could just discern, by the ikon’s glimmer and the diminishing glow of the logs, in front of which my boots and coat and festooned puttees were steaming, a few, detached landmarks on the ledge and the floor: a jutting whisker, a gaping mouth, the upturned cowhide canoe-tip of a moccasin at the end of a rawhide, cross-gartered and outflung leg. There can have been little change since Omurtag’s day. It was the world of Gurth and Wamba, a Saxon swineherd’s hut just after curfew. It can’t have been later than ten, and here I was fumbling for the track of a flea, or possibly two, under my damp shirt, and as far from sleep as I was from any familiar geographical or psychological landmark. (I have only said so little about vermin in this narrative because Balkan travellers enlarge on them so exhaustively. They wrecked many nights.) But the trouble wasn’t this, or even the related thought of all these weeks without a bath, apart from an occasional slosh in ponds and streams; or the weather, or the petty vexations of the road, or the fug and the claustrophobia.
Nor again, was it the dissimilarity of my habitat from Chenonceaux or Chatsworth, or the anguish which at certain seasons among the ruins of Luxor, in the Atlas passes or on the very slopes of the Parthenon, suddenly halts more sophisticated travellers than I was, catches them by the throat and mists their eyes with a faraway look: the thought of missing the young peas, new potatoes in early summer, and raspberries and cream, or – at this time of the year – partridges, before all their brief spans are over; or, less compellingly, because their seven-month lease is not so sharp a reminder of the fleetingness of time, oysters.
My dejection was not as specific as this, but, in one way, it was akin, and it was incurred by two things. One of these is easy to explain. It is this: ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all. With the exception of a minute handful of physical and mental types, surroundings and landscapes and atmospheres and orders of conversation, I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship. I seemed to be unequipped with the saving instrument that enabled everyone else to segregate from random circumstances whatever would stimulate, entertain and reward them intellectually, concentrate on these and discard the rest. My trouble was that practically everything, not only the most disparate, contradictory and mutually exclusive things and people, but many others that everyone else found repellent, painful, unrewarding and above all tedious, filled me with the same wild fascination. I think it was the confusion brought about by all these indiscriminate and concurrent and totally undisciplined enthusiasms that had landed me in the soup so often. They would boil over; the sack followed. (Like many young I also suffered intermittently from the conviction, which puzzling reverses fail for a long time to dispel, that had they time and inclination they could confute philosophers, command armies, rule countries, compose operas, paint and sculpt better than Michelangelo, beat the record up Everest, write a sonnet sequence in a fortnight that would make experts reassess Shakespeare, and then, after discovering the cure for cancer and winning the Grand National steeplechase, break out into metres and thoughts that would fix the mould of poetry for several generations.)
This calamity-ridden anti-boredom was extremely active before I started this journey. The moment the Channel was crossed, it had broken into a gallop and unbelievably without mishap: so far, at any rate. It would be impossible to exaggerate the passionate excitement and delight that infected every second. My mouth was as unexactingly agape as the seal’s to the flung bloater. There was hardly anything detectable by the five senses which was not sharpened and transformed, and which, strangely and miraculously, did not increase in intensity of enjoyment with familiarity and repetition. In spite of countless rustic sojourns, this half-subterranean abode, instead of seeming as it did tonight, a den of squalor and doom, could have been as thick in marvels as Aladdin’s cave. I might, judging by my response to phenomena for most of these thousands of miles, have been a serious drug addict. This euphoria is bound, thanks to the time lag, to be one of the things that elude this narrative. But it intensified tastes, transformed smells, studded faces and landscapes with illusory lights and facets, gave extra resonances to sounds, complicated surfaces, shapes, textures and consistencies, and stepped up the voltage to a degree that must sometimes have given the impression of a screw loose.
The corollary of this was a nightmarish gloom of an equally exaggerated pitch, usually arriving without warning, but fortunately not often, and for the last months, more seldom still. The blow had fallen tonight. I lay and scratched in the dark, loathing my surroundings. What a godforsaken place. Even if I spoke the language properly, instead of a voluble smattering, what would there be to talk about with the noisily hibernating rustics swathed all over this stifling hell-hole? Crops? Wars? Pig-raising? Vegetable marrows? Werewolves? Vampires? Surely I’d heard enough about them during the last few months? Brittle alternative fantasies, and very conventional ones, began to glow and proliferate in the shadows, each with the wavering shape, the shimmering colours and the lifespan of a soap bubble: Oxford or Cambridge now harbouring so many schoolfellows and friends, where an effortless virtuosity in Greek, Latin, history and literature went hand in hand with a marvellous time on the lines of Sinister Street. Heidelberg for a term or two, surrounded by stained glass windows, lidded mugs, conifers and scarred Junkers with names like distant cannon fire? Perhaps, but more beckoningly than these, the Sorbonne, talking half the night with dashing and brilliant companions all about how to bring out books of verse, and beautiful girl students at café tables under trees or in studios modelled on illustrations? A hunting scene would wobble briefly towards the ceiling and pop inaudibly.
I noticed that I had transformed such scenes into a curious hybrid. The protagonist of these fleeting and absurd success stories was a sort of super-me ten years older or more, with the worldly poise of a Moss Bros advertisement (a young commodore on leave?) but also with a European and cosmopolitan polish: lolling at ease under tiers of gilt-backed books softly lit from below, just out of a bath, deep in an armchair by a fire, lifting a heavy cut-glass tumbler of whisky and soda. He would appear again – it was half-past ten in this dark cottage now – at the end of dinner in a thin film of cigar smoke, amazing old and young with acumen and omniscience and wit in a constellation of candle flames and brandy glasses – balloons within balloons – pausing on the way down a staircase into a candelabra-forested ballroom beside a cool and shadowy beauty, while, from below, volleys of longing glances sailed towards her along a hundred radii, bouncing off like arrows from a buckler into the bright air. With lowered lids, silent, expert and aloof, they began to float rather than to dance; the longing glances wound themselves like numberless threads on the slow revolving spindle of the two dancers, until at last they gyrated anti-clockwise towards the French windows, and the unwound threads dropped loose again as they glided out of sight among the trees. By this time the semi-stranger had become so insufferably suave that he had lost all identity with his part-owner and inventor; to such an extent that I was left behind, part of the jealous press of faces against the panes. I had noticed, anyway, with some surprise as they vanished, that he was a foot taller than me, with black hair, a narrow moustache and a mole on his left temple. I revenged myself by annihilating him.
There was much thought of these unmet women. At moments like now of revulsion against Balkan rawness, the dominant abstract figure would, by reaction – like the abolished alter ego before he got out of hand – tend towards urbanity and sophistication, her clothes slightly rustling when in motion. All were beautiful and all romantic; at one end was a rather wild girl, interested at the very least in literature or painting or one of the arts, knowing about as much – not a very hard task – or, ideally, slightly less than me. At the other end was someone of the same order who knew a great deal more; much calmer and more worldly-wise, probably several years older, the one in the ascendant at the moment, but with enough in common with the other to be the same person separated by a number of years; both had a similar laugh.
As the night advanced these or similar thoughts replaced the initial gloom, and the excitement of this wholly imaginary relationship with somebody whose face I never saw, was too great: too great and too anxious; for it was no longer any good smiling dismissively in the dark and trying to go to sleep; the accumulation of data had lifted the situation clean out of hypothesis and installed it somewhere very close to reality. (And as it turned out, not wrongly, as six months later, long after the end of this book, it miraculously happened.)
The inevitable dismantlement was swift and painless. As dawn approached, the frontiers of Western Europe, which had merged in a confusion of homesickness and so tortuously prompted the familiar thoughts of the last hours, and marked them with their geographic setting, were back in their places, the capitals disentangled, the provincial cities with their bridges and embankments shining in the water. There, most of them still unknown, they waited at the other side of the night. The distance seemed enormous. Would this Scythian wind, which was still slashing the wattle walls with rain, cross the intervening plains and ranges, and with a thousand scattered creaks, set all the weathercocks of the West on the move?
Earlier on, these westward thoughts had raised another, a more general and far more disturbing problem, one which only assailed me at moments of depression and low resistance: what on earth was I up to? An embarrassing question, and one which I will try to answer between here and the last page. But now all had changed. Depression had vanished; the interior of the hut, pitch dark except for the twinkling light suspended in the corner, was harmonious and severe; or was that a line of watery daybreak surrounding the door? There was a faint stir among the sleepers and it would soon be time to get back to the road to Rustchuk.
• • •
It seemed, when I got there next evening, rather an exciting town, with its bright shops and electric lights, the multitude of cafés, the fiacres with their ribbed hoods raised, even a taxi or two, and, at the bottom of lamp-lit streets, the Danube with its landing stages, warehouses, cranes and anchored craft, including three gunboats which were the hard core of the Bulgarian navy.
All this, to my unjaded eyes, supplied the little riverine port with an almost metropolitan aura. I have heard from other travellers that it is considered an ugly, charmless place. Nothing pre-Turkish and very little before the nineteenth century. But not to me. Parts of it had a dilapidated Victorian feeling; better still, thanks to the great river on which it was built, a slight, but distinct and rather seductive alloy of Mitteleuropa tempered its Balkan consistency. There was even a bookshop and newsagents with foreign newspapers, mostly German and Austrian: Neue Freie Presse, Frankfurter Zeitung, Hannoverscher Anzeiger, Berliner Tageblatt, then the Pesti Hirlap – no good to me, alas – Le Matin, and, yes, The Times and The Continental and the Daily Mail. I wondered who these real and putative readers could be. Better still, a pile of unbought back numbers. I bought an armful of these, and, after an immense Viennese coffee, read through the whole fortnight-old drama of the assassination of King Alexander and Barthou. Nobody seemed to challenge Bulgarian claims. Gatcho would be pleased. Then, as the puddle of rainwater grew larger round my boots under the table, I sat back coughing happily over one of those nearly black Austrian cigars, savouring the lights, the dryness and the water, and the pleasant mixture of bustle and leisure. I felt like a seasoned traveller in the Balkans, Central Europe or Russia from the stories and novels of Saki. I gazed out at the bright street outside, liquescent and broken up like a pointilliste painting by the light-refracting raindrops that splashed and wriggled down the windowpanes, savouring the expanse of heavy marble-topped tables (that wonderful surface for covert drawing with a pencil, or, better still, a fountain pen) and, near the door, the flimsy architecture of ribboned chocolate boxes, so often and inexplicably surmounted by a celluloid baby or a powdered marchioness in satin panniers – for this was a Evropaiski establishment, reluctant to serve Turkish coffee and ready to faint should anyone suggest a nargileh. I had taken to these at once, and spent hours gurgling in their toils, mumbling quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (I had it nearly all by heart from a pocket edition sent by my mother) in humbler latticed cafés. But this one, alongside the elaborate tiers of western cakes and the puffed, shiny and cream-filled, poppy-seed and caraway-sprinkled crescents and Struwwelpeterish pretzels, was not so European as to exclude an array of oriental sweetmeats, notably kadaif, like a dish of sweet shredded wheat, and, far better, baklava. I had several times peered into warm vaults in the small hours to see pastry-cooks cross-legged in a ring on large, flour-dusted wooden platforms, stretching almost transparent membranes of pastry several yards in circumference, before folding them, layer on layer, each interval anointed with honey or syrup and chopped almonds and walnuts, into flat pans the size of Trojan shields and then, after a deft circular trimming with long knives, sliding them with long poles into dragon-breathed ovens. They emerge in crumbly brown discs, to be sliced up with trowels into delicious dripping shapes with the consistency, but not the taste, of millefeuilles. These triumphs of taste and sensory delight spread all through the Balkans and Levant, and though they are known as Turkish, they are probably, like so much that the Ottomans inherited from their forerunners, Byzantine in origin. I feel that they were known to logothetes and sebastocrators long before a pasha ever buried his teeth in them. They are invariably sliced up by intersecting strokes into a lozengy pattern; in fact, they have given their name, in demotic Greek among rustic joiners, to all forms of trelliswork. A Balkan businessman, slipping away from his office for a moment in the late morning, is far more likely to be heading for a quick baklava than a drink.
Idly I inspected the circular electric light plugs that were sprinkled at random over the café walls, or gathered here and there in huddling constellations, and the number of prongs and loose ends of flex projecting from the plaster like whiskers: proud emblems of victory, all through the Balkan peninsula, over the bad old days of oil and wax. (The abandoned riot and borborygmus of exposed piping, and the unhealed scars of its entries and exits, through the rooms of every plumbed house, even if it had been rusting there since the reign of Czar Ferdinand, tell similar tidings of modernity.) Here, too, overhead, hung the opaque white globular lampshades – in the smarter cafés they were clouded alabaster bowls hanging from three metal chains – darkly blurred at the bottom by a decade’s worth of dead flies. I had spent unnumbered happy hours reading and writing in these havens during the last few months and was well versed in their details and degrees. I looked for another invariable adjunct: an enlarged Victorian photograph of the founder, and there it was, with high unaccustomed collar and lacquered moustaches with a Kaiserish twist, also the hanging portraits of Queen Joanna and – sad, primly moustached and sympathetic in a white uniform with his hands resting on his sword hilt – Czar Boris.[2] (It always came as a surprise when knowing Bulgarians reminded me that their royal house – Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – is, in the male line, the same as ours. Czar Boris was immensely popular, and rightly so by all accounts.)
Two card games were in full swing, and each card in its turn was flung like a gauntlet: dominoes were shuffled and dice rattled, the cards smacked from spike to spike, and waiters summoned by brisk salvoes of masterful claps. It was clearly the hub of Rustchuk café life, the resort of merchants and the smarter retailers, of doctors, lawyers and chemists and officers. There was a table full of young naval officers with hanging, gold-mounted dirks and there was a vladika with a silver-topped pontifical staff and a gold pectoral ornament, his raven habit a-billow, delivering a homily to – I learnt – the mayor and the town clerk; his white beard gushed from his ears, his nostrils, his cheeks and almost out of his eyes, which fulminated under a mobile and hoary brow. As he underlined the flow of his rhetoric with a huge and eloquent forefinger, I could almost see the words that rolled from his mouth, in line upon line of Cyrillic script illuminated on the vellum of a missal’s page. I was filled with admiration, as I had been in contemplation of the high clergy in Sofia and Rila, by the enormous height of this prelate. Later on, in Greece, I formed the idea that Orthodox bishops might be promoted by height; metropolitans are all tall, archbishops taller still and patriarchs, enormous. A friend deeply versed in these matters thinks the height comes later, in spiritual stature: preferment pulls them out like telescopes. Their long hair and all those voluminous beards seem to represent strength, as with Samson, turning them into hairy athletes of God; the opposite of the monastic humility that the shorn jowls and the stubbly scalps of the West portend. It must be on this principle that even the clergy of the Catholic Mirdites of northern Albania all grow beards. For these beards in the Greek Orthodox world suggest majority and divine majesty like the cloud that enveloped Zeus on Tenedos.
Many of the newspapers in their stiff racks were German and their readers conversed together in Austrian accents. The Armenian readers argued in Armenian, and the Sephardim ravelled their way in Ladino Spanish. All, as dealers or local agents, were connected in some way, I imagine, with the Danube trade. A sort of trance overcame me in these places. It seemed impossible to wrench myself from the lulling influences of this slowly developing continuum, the tentative permutations and exfoliations, the conjectural biographies and the hidden rapports implicit in the almost eventless flux. It had once or twice taken as long as half a day – worse than Horace’s river-gazing yokel leaning over a bridge – but I had to find a hotel. The wrench was made.
• • •
‘You look like a drowned rat!’
Already pretty wet, I had rashly set out coatless in a lull in the rain and had been caught in a cloudburst. The words were uttered with friendly concern, in German, and a few moments later, the time to fetch a towel, my head was being briskly rubbed, to an accompaniment of commiseration, with half-scolding clicks of the tongue.
I had determined to stay the night somewhere that was a bit grander than my usual squalid style, and have a bath at last, the first place I alighted on. The Czar Ferdinand? Christo Boteff? The Bulgaria? The Balkan? I found a small hotel, not far from the river, but the name has vanished. A nice-looking woman in a clean starched apron was sewing in a wicker chair in a small office room with a postcard of Archduke Otto on the wall. She switched her enquiries into German. Where had I come from? It had been raining all day. What I needed was a hot bath. She would light one at once. ‘Just look at you!’
This was a rare event; the furore which demands for a bath usually aroused, were more than it was worth. This was marvellous. I had left my rucksack at the café while I hunted for a hotel, and she said the hot water would be piping hot by the time I got back with it. I set off jubilantly through the soaking streets. I soon had to wipe the smile off my face. The rucksack had gone. I had left it by a hatstand near the door. Nobody had seen it disappear, though it had attracted notice when I first splashed in with it. All enquiries were in vain, and finally the proprietor insisted on coming to the police station with me; details were given, my address recorded, general pessimism expressed, and I went back to the hotel in a gloomy frame of mind.
It was the worst thing that could have happened. I had my passport and money, the loss of the clothes would be a nuisance, the sketchbook, in which the entries had been growing scarcer, was more easily written off than it would have been a few months earlier. But it was the ten months of notes that mattered. Why on earth hadn’t I posted them back to England? They weighed little enough. Why hadn’t I handed the rucksack over to the clerk in the café? Why hadn’t I . . . the numerous alternatives were infuriating and distressing. In a way, my whole life had seemed to revolve round these stiff-covered exercise books; keeping them up to date had acquired the charm and mystery of a secret religion, solemnized daily, and sometimes several times a day; and the books themselves had become cult objects containing the detailed log of every day’s travel, flowery descriptions, conversations, rough notes and elaborate essays, verses, ‘thoughts’, addresses, sketches of costumes, buildings, tools, weapons, saddlery, patterns, sketch maps, plans, glossaries, first steps in German, Hungarian, Rumanian and Bulgarian, fragments of Romany and Yiddish, the words of lots of songs, attempts at verse translations from French and Latin, limericks, private puzzles and word games – all the telling but temporarily unemployable data put by for a rainy day (but almost never used), all the scribbled by-products that solitude and leisure and paper and pencil throw up. I used to gloat over these volumes, spread them out on beds, weigh them alternately in my hand and stroke their mottled bindings. The loss of the other rucksack in Munich had seemed irreplaceable at the time, but then only a month’s alluvium of notes had had time to silt up. How fiercely at first I had guarded its replacement! This second loss was an amputation.
My reappearance at the hotel must have been even more woebegone than the first. The white-aproned woman at once saw that something was badly wrong. She understood this at once. ‘Never mind. You’re sure to get it back.’ She insisted that I was shivering and, feeling sorry for myself, I willingly fell in with her solicitude. She produced a bottle of Austrian schnapps and made me swallow a couple of glasses, while I moaned with obsessive despair about my lost books. How I would have enjoyed the waiting bath at another time! It was filled from one of those tall Central European cylinders of hammered bronze, and a special fire had to be kindled for each bather. When I padded to my room – towel-swathed, clothes in one hand – I couldn’t believe my eyes: there was a bedside lamp! Usually there was only a bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. But here was a majestic reflected mahogany wardrobe, and a great Biedermeier bed with – never found in my usual humble hotels and khans – gleaming clean sheets, the top one buttoned, Mitteleuropa fashion, on to a bright red eiderdown. On the wall hung oleographs of an Alp at dawn and Lake Maggiore with the Borromeo Islands (stirring childhood memories for me) and a lute-playing love-scene from Orlando Furioso. Laid out across the eiderdown was an old-fashioned white nightshirt. I donned it, and slipped in. The soles of my feet met the surface of a giant earthenware hot water bottle. It was unbelievable! All passion spent, I lay back, stripped of possessions, in a floating condition of melancholy peace. There was a touch of the relief and impotence that might overcome an outlaw in the prison infirmary apprehended after a long chase over the moors. But only a touch; the rest belonged to the Arabian Nights.
I was roused from it by the pressure of a tray: ‘Sit up, drink it while it’s hot.’ She was off again. There was some delicious soup, a jug of wine and a hot roll wrapped in a napkin, butter, pepper, salt. In five minutes this wonderful woman was back with some eggs scrambled in butter and a pear. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap. ‘I went to the police while you were in your bath,’ she said, ‘and told them you were a famous English author, in spite of your youth; weltberühmt like John Galsworthy, only younger. They’ll try their best.’
My benefactress (she was called Rosa) was the head maid in the hotel, in fact at present the only one, and really the manageress too. The place had seen better days, the owners took no interest in it; she did her best. It was often empty, as it was at the moment (except for me) so she’d been able to put me in the best room. Otherwise, it was rather a sad, echoing place. These bare passages! No carpets! All the repairs that needed doing! ‘Ayi, mayi!’ she sighed, pulling her sewing in her lap. ‘If only they’d let me do it up! You’d see!’
Rosa was from Rustchuk, but had gone as a maid with the family of a tobacco representative to Vienna at the age of seventeen and stayed on when they returned, doing various jobs in service in Austrian families, ending as lady’s maid for a number of years to the wife of a Viennese banker. She had married an Austrian who drank heavily and eventually died, not before – I gathered by implication rather than statement – he had spent nearly everything. She had returned to Bulgaria only a year ago, when her employer had also died in America, where she had been planning to join her. She had travelled all over Central Europe with her mistress, and had even been to Milan and Paris. The easy manners, the style, the efficiency, the unfussy neatness were all explained. She was about forty, rather plump, with her hair in a neat round coil at the back of a fine head with an expression of slight severity in repose, disarmingly open when she talked, when her whole face was lit by amusement and interest.
She was a born storyteller. Before a couple of hours had past, I knew the names of her employers and of all their sons and daughters and friends and the exact atmosphere of their house in the Ringstrasse and their Styrian country house, and the various characters in the servants’ hall, and the details of a fascinating network of quarrels, love affairs, flirtations and crises in both regions. She was full of confidence and kindness. I could have watched her deft sewing and listened to her fascinating tales for ever. Many of them were so funny that I could hear the hotel reverberate with my laughter. She told them with just the right amount of burlesque and mimicry. She had been very fond of these people, especially her mistress, who sounded delightful; but her sense of the absurd presented them, inevitably, in comic roles. After an hour or so, she rolled up her work, straightened the sheets and tucked me in with a matron-like competence. I begged her to go on telling me these stories. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘bedtime now. Don’t forget to turn off the light.’ She went out with the piled tray, shutting the door with a long-practised half hook, half flick behind her with one foot, a shoulder skilfully applied as a buffer to stay it from slamming. I was still so engrossed in the adventures and tribulations of Hansi, Max, Friedrich, Konrad, Teresa and Liselotte, and wondering what the sequels would be, that I didn’t think about the day’s disaster till I was nearly asleep. She gave me a bound volume of Max and Moritz to look at. Perfect.
• • •
I woke up to see a large policeman beside my bed. My rucksack. It had been found! A thief had been apprehended with it hastening along the Dobrudja road. He knew no details. When I got up, would I please come to the station and sign certain documents and make a statement. ‘Not now, he’s ill,’ Rosa said from behind him. ‘There you are, you see?’ she said to me triumphantly. The policeman went out and came back lugging the familiar burden that I had carted round so many months. I was to check the contents. The last-minute dread was allayed in a moment: there all the notebooks were, tucked down the sides to take up less room. The thief, whoever he was, must have been in too much of a hurry to jettison them. I extracted them with excitement and relief. The policeman saluted and left. While I exulted over this recovered hoard, Rosa was ransacking the rest, flinging out one dirty and crumpled trophy after another with clicks of horror and holding a grimy shirt or fetid sock full of holes between finger and thumb with cries of ‘Pfui!’ and ‘I ask you!’ ‘Ich frage Sie!’ The things at the bottom, which I hadn’t seen for weeks, emerged in a cascade of walnut shells, half rotten apples, dried herbs for making tea, an aluminium egg with salt in one end, red pepper in the other, an onion or two, dismembered garlic cloves (never used), pencil stubs, india rubbers, dust, crumbs, broken cigarettes and tobacco leaves; also, a marvellous trove, a bent but smokeable packet of Nadejda’s cigarettes. She finally swept out in a resolute manner with a great bundle.
The contents were slightly varied all the time by a slow process of discard and acquaintance. But now, I think, they were roughly the following. One pair of pyjamas, two grey flannel shirts, a couple of blue short-sleeved ones, two white cotton shirts that could be worn with a tie at a pinch, two pairs of grey canvas trousers, one kept for best, some socks, one dark blue tie and one red one mostly used as a belt, a thick soft white pullover with a high neck, and quantities of different and brightly coloured handkerchiefs, starting with red and white spotted ones that navvies carry their dinner in. The great sartorial treasure among all this was a thin, light, beautifully cut grey tweed jacket. It had been fished out of a wardrobe and bestowed on me in Transylvania by a compassionate Hungarian lady whose grandson had been in the Argentine for ten years (‘He’s getting so rich, he’ll never miss it’). It had been made by a very good Budapest tailor and I felt different the moment I put it on, ready for anything almost. With the best pair of trousers properly ironed, I could become almost presentable, though I wished I had a very thin blue suit to cut a dash with in smart urban circles, on the rare occasions that I ventured into them. All this was let down at the lowest level by the ghastly canvas shoes I had bought in Orșova, to which, apart from a pair of gym shoes, my heavy boots were the only alternative footgear.
My outfit was completed by the bad-weather stuff I had been wearing: the brown leather jacket, which had become wonderfully weathered and soft, the comfortable breeches which had also borne the strain well, already a year old when I set out, their strapping, too light at first, long indistinguishable from the rest; and a wide, rather dashing leather belt with a brass buckle that I was very attached to. Those studded boots, the heroes of this walk, resoled and patched, could go on for ever. The puttees probably had a slightly silly and pseudo-military look, but they were wonderful for weather like this, and gave one a feeling of untiring solidity. There was the private soldier’s greatcoat hanging on the door, proof against anything. I had always been meaning to get it dyed. (But what colour?) Lastly, in the corner, leant the heavy, beautifully balanced Hungarian walking-stick, given me on the Alföld, carved all over with a twisting pattern of oak leaves: a bit showy, but better than the lost ashplant from Sloane Square that I had set out with, encrusted by shiny aluminium Stocknägel, those little figurative plaques that stationers in all German and Austrian towns supply to Wanderer. It would have become a glittering and embarrassing wand by now, of which I would have been thoroughly sick but sentimentally unable to discard. I had a great fetishistic regard for its supplanter. The only other article of wearing I owned was the old, rather soft silver medal, the size of a penny, that Nadejda had found at the bottom of the chest and tied round my neck with a leather bootlace. It had a sailing ship tossing in a storm on one side, and on the other an equestrian saint driving his spear through a dragon: St George or St Dimitri. (It was impossible to tell which – they are distinguishable in Byzantine iconography only by the colours of their steeds: a grey for one, a roan for the other.)
Other chattels dug out by Rosa strewed the table: the prazdnik-divining kalpack, a roll of red-patterned braid belt from Arad, a shepherd’s flute from Transylvania, unplayable by me except for two blurred and doubtful notes, a broken Austrian tobacco pipe with a perched chamois, and a Bulgarian one with a thin earthenware bowl and a bamboo stem like a short calumet that I had self-consciously puffed at for a week or two, a Maria Theresa thaler, a carved round wooden flask for slivo, a couple of penknives and the Bulgarian dagger in its sheath, a small compass, sketchbooks, writing materials (pencils from HH to BB), and the two wonderful Freytag’s Viennese maps of Eastern Europe. (One, in shreds, is in front of me at this very second, the sole survivor of this random hoard. I had not noticed at the time that they must have been just pre-war, as Bosnia and Herzegovina were included in the Austrian frontier. Bulgaria’s frontiers, too, showed one of their brief bulges.) Then apart from the notebooks, there were one or two pocket dictionaries, and some maps that I got rid of when finished. On top of these now was Crime et châtiment. I think that’s the lot. All this was fairly bulky. That wonderful Bavarian rucksack not only held a lot, but, with its padded frame and its wide straps, seemed light. No need to stoop. Anyway, one of the rewards of this kind of travel was the tremendous health it brought with it. I felt sweated and sunburnt to the bone, thin, muscular, tingling with strength and energy and capable of absolutely anything, a sense of such well-being and vigour that even vast smoking and lack of sleep seemed to have no effect at all.
This being so, I felt a fraud wallowing in bed, and told Rosa. But why not? She said it was still raining, and it was nice for her to have something to do for a change. While she was wrestling with the washing, I luxuriated in the recovery of my effects and scribbled away in the notebook; and when she’d finished, she brought in a dress she was cutting out, and worked at it on the table, more fascinating stories coming out as she snipped and sliced the cloth with huge scissors. I think she liked having company in this rather forlorn building, and I revelled in this marvellous return to nursery spoiling, and the delight of Rosa’s conversation and kindness as a just-wrecked traveller might in an unexpected oasis. She had to go out after lunch and I began Crime and Punishment against a patter of rain and an occasional siren from the Danube. Sitting up I could see the river grey and cheerless in the rain, but magnificent nevertheless, with strings of barges and log rafts floating downstream. It seemed to have widened enormously since I had last seen it at Lom Palanka a century ago, though the Jiu and the Olt were the only two big rivers which had joined since then, both from the Rumanian shore. On the far side lay the Rumanian town of Giurgiu and the flat plain with a few scattered trees. I had seen the great river so many times since that first narrow river at Ulm that I felt I had a share in it.
Feeling restless, I got up and wandered down to the quays by the warehouses and then back into the town. I was intrigued by the number of Armenian names over the shops, not only because I have always liked them, but for a special reason. Michael Arlen[3] was born here, under the name of Dikran Kouyoumjian. I asked in an Armenian ship’s chandlers if they knew anything about him. ‘Yes – yes – yes – let me see,’ the old chandler murmured, ‘Kouyoumjian . . . of course! There used to be some! But not for many, many years . . .’ Yes, he had heard one was a great writer in Europe, yes, yes . . .
The Sephardic Jews were another minority group in Rustchuk. They had prospered in Ottoman times, and the Turks, I think, used to do much of their business through them; they were thought more reliable than the disaffected Bulgars; like the Jews of Plovdiv, they spoke Spanish and had every reason to be grateful to the Turks, as the Ottoman Empire, and Tuscany, were about the only places which welcomed them after they were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. The most distinguished member of this little community is Elias Canetti, the author of Crowds and Power and Auto-da-Fé; but he, like Rosa, had gravitated to Vienna at the age of six, and became Viennese. (I met him two months before writing this, staying under the same friendly roof in the island of Euboea that is sheltering me at this very moment. We talked of Rustchuk, but very understandably my memories were fresher than his.)
A film poster arrested these strollings: a badly painted picture of a fair-haired girl in a man’s tailcoat with a cigarette and a top hat at a dashing angle. Underneath, the huge capitals said ‘THE BLUE ANGEL’ with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings. It was the first night, and starting in an hour. I rushed home and overrode Rosa’s objections. There was no time to waste. I was rather impressed by my authoritative tone. She blushed with pleasure at the plan, cooked an omelette at high speed, and changed. I put on my beautifully ironed coat and we set off. The film had been out several years. I knew all the songs and all about it, but strangely, considering my passion for the star, whose only competition was Greta Garbo, I had missed it. Rosa had seen it on a trip to Frankfurt-am-Main when it was first released, but longed to see it again. We were just in time.
On the way back, transported by the film, half depressed and half elated, we passed the rucksack café. I said, ‘Come on, a drink!’ She said, ‘No, no, no. Please! Out of the question. This isn’t Vienna. It’s where all the Hochbürgertum of Rustchuk go.’ I insisted. It was the first time I’d seen Rosa anything but completely self-possessed. She sat very straight with her hands deep in her overcoat pockets, looking better and more quietly dressed, I thought, than anyone else. We drank three brandies and were the last to leave, and returned to the hotel singing the songs out of the film. I thought I would try out on her my ridiculous trick of singing backwards: Falling in Love Again was my favourite standby; I’d never tried in German. I worked it over in my head as she talked and then said: ‘It’s much better like this. Listen:
Chi nib nov Fpok sib Ssuf
Fua Ebeil tlletsegnie
Nned sad tsi eniem Tlew!’
Rosa was puzzled. We stopped under a lamp. English or French or Russian: she knew what they sounded like. Was it Swedish? Finnish? Latvian? I told her. ‘Sing it again, very slowly, please,’ she said. I did so and she listened intently. When I’d reached sthcin again, on a languorous note, she let out a great laugh, gave me a pitying look, tapped her temple with a forefinger, and said, in a purposely exaggerated Austrian accent: ‘I fear you’re completely cracked.’ (She said, ‘Leider, ganz deppert.’) ‘Now once more at the ordinary tempo . . .’
• • •
When I had sat down, been offered a cigarette and a Turkish coffee and signed for the receipt of the rucksack and its contents in the chief of police’s office, I tried to find out what had happened. He was plainly embarrassed that such a thing had occurred in Bulgaria, and apologized elaborately. There were bad people everywhere . . . It was all a mistake . . . His hands fluttered into the air. Rosa’s line about my being a MAN OF LETTERS seemed to have borne fruit, to judge by the confused deference. In the middle of these puzzling explanations, there was a sound of people passing through the outside room and the officer broke off to tell them to shut the door. In the middle of the outer room was an unmistakeably familiar face. No mistaking those hare’s eyes and red hair! I had felt stricken with guilt about my treacherous conduct on the Rustchuk road ever since. I waved and shouted a hearty and insincere greeting: ‘How goes it, Ivancho?’
‘Do you know him?’ the officer asked in a bewildered voice. I told him we were old friends, and got up to greet him. Never too late to mend. I saw he was wearing handcuffs. The whole thing slipped into place.
I imagined, thinking with unaccustomed speed, that he must have seen me going into the café or through the window of the café, and the whereabouts of the rucksack, and when I had left, nipped indoors and carried it off. No wonder he was less voluble than usual now!
He looked terrible, pale green in the face and with a bad cut on one lip and what looked like the beginning of a black eye. I had heard about automatic police roughness, not in Bulgaria only but in nearly every country hereabouts. His appearance was so utterly woebegone, and there was something rather sinister about his silence. I remembered that I had long ago come to the conclusion that he was off his head. The rucksack was safely mine again and I was having a marvellous time. I also felt that I had so often been in the soup and that he was up to the neck in it, that my presence in the ranks of established authority had a trace of farce; especially of an authority that mistreated its prisoners. In the space of a second I found myself on his side.
I pretended for once to speak even worse Bulgarian than I really did. I took up the officer’s words about a mistake. There’d been a strashni mistake; a terrible one! I pointed in bewilderment to Ivancho’s handcuffs and looked from face to face with outrage. The officer and the two policemen with Ivancho looked equally bewildered. I kept saying he must have been going to the wrong hotel with it, forgotten the name, and frowned meaningly at Ivancho hoping he would take the cue. Then, saying it was a shame I couldn’t speak better Bulgarian, I left, after a friendly and ostentatious slap on Ivancho’s shoulder, and told them all to wait till I got back with someone who could explain better.
Rosa had just finished ironing. All my possessions stood in a crisp pile. She listened intently while I unfolded the curious tale, and put on her coat. She thought it silly to interfere. After all, he had stolen it. But as I seemed so keen . . . She knew the chief of police and said she would talk to him first, and then come and collect me. I settled in a café a couple of streets away. She was back in an hour. ‘Well,’ she said smiling, ‘it’s all right. I said you only spoke very little more German than Bulgarian, that he was a friend and that you had asked him to pick up the rucksack and that he had started out for the wrong hotel when he was picked up. I felt a bit of a fool – I’d been so urgent about their finding it the night before last. Your friend caught on to the idea and said the correct things – far too much. I pretended to be in as much of a muddle as any of them. I’m not sure how convinced the police were but they are certainly confused. I told them again how famous you are and I think they are glad to be rid of the whole business.’
‘Do you think they’ll let him go?’
‘Oh, he’s out already. I said I’d take him back to the hotel.’ Seeing my look of consternation, she laughed. ‘It’s all right. I got rid of him. I told him you had left. He’s on his way back to Pazardjik.’ She paused. ‘You are quite right about his being mad. When I told him I knew all about what had really happened, he looked at me in real astonishment. He was convinced, so I didn’t press the matter. He’s perfectly happy.’ We both laughed. She was amazing.
I was catching the boat across the Danube that evening. The weather had cleared up. After packing my rucksack with all my reborn possessions, I paid my bill at the hotel. Rosa had tempered the wind to the shorn lamb to an almost indecently small total. We drove out in one of the Sherlock Holmes carriages to a tavern on a low cliff above the river in a clump of moulting poplars and Spanish chestnuts. Outside was a small concrete dance-floor, now choked with mud and leaves. It was shut for the season, but the driver went to fetch the owner from some nearby cottages, and we ate looking down at the Danube and the flat extent of the Wallachian plain beyond. The wind was shredding the clouds and sending shafts of sunlight and cloud shadows racing like a shifting map on the beautiful and sad prospect of the river and the woods. These gusts drew spirals of leaves past the plate glass window of the empty tavern. All the emotions of the morning and, once again, the imminence of departure, acted as a brake on talk at first, but it didn’t matter. I felt I’d known Rosa for ages. But after a couple of glasses of slivo which Rosa tipped down very fast and with a grimace as though it were some awful medicine, and long before we had got through those jugs of wine, mostly swallowed by me, we were talking and I was laughing more than ever. Afterwards we found and collected lots of chestnuts, which were bursting out of their felt-lined spiny caskets all over the soaking grass, and sat on a log, looking upstream and wondering how many days the Austrian share of the water flowing past below had taken since Passau, Linz, Krems, Vienna and Bratislava, and for that matter, from its source in the Black Forest?
It was getting late, so we shouted for the driver. He stumbled up from the cottages, jumped on to his perch, cracked his whip, and set off at full tilt. We sang Austrian songs most of the way. The coachman pulled a bottle out of his pocket and waved it behind his back. ‘Just as well you’re going,’ Rosa said, ‘or I’d be in an alcoholic’s home.’ Wien was followed by Adieu mein kleiner Gardeoffizier, In einer kleinen Konditorei, Sag beim Abschied leise Servus, the Kaiserjägermarsch, Ich bin von K. u. K. Infanterieregiment, Gute Nacht, Wien and Zu Mantua in Banden der treue Hofer war.[4] ‘Do sing Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss[5] backwards,’ she said as we clattered into Rustchuk. The boat looked as if it were moving. I paid the driver as we pounded along, and we exchanged farewells as it drew up. It was nearly dark.
We only got to the quay just in time. They waited a moment, complaining bitterly, while I clambered on board, and the coachman threw my rucksack over the widening gap. ‘Don’t lose it again!’ Rosa shouted laughing. She stood and waved and smiled, the other hand in the wide pocket of her blue overcoat, and I waved back until the little ship was amid-stream and we couldn’t see each other waving farewell. There was a greenish sky upstream as we dropped anchor on the Rumanian shore.
[1] ‘Good evening, ma’am.’
[2] Czar Boris III married Joanna, daughter of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and succeeded to the Bulgarian throne in 1918. He died in 1943, perhaps poisoned by Hitler for his reluctance to enter the war in support of the Axis.
[3] Michael Arlen (1895–1956), author of The Green Hat and other romances, much celebrated in 1920s London, where he lived. PLF had loved his novels at school.
[4] ‘Vienna’, followed by ‘Farewell my little Guards officer’; ‘In a little café’; ‘When you part, say softly Goodbye’; ‘Kaiser’s Hunting March’; ‘I belong to the Imperial and Royal (kaiserlich und königlich) infantry regiment’; ‘In Mantua was the loyal Hofer captured’.
[5] ‘I’m head over heels . . .’