WHEN THE evening train from Budapest arrived, I had been hanging about the station platform at Lökösháza since noon and by the time I had climbed in and the red-white-and-green Hungarian flag had disappeared, night had fallen.
This borderland was the most resented frontier in Europe and recent conversations in Hungary had cloaked it with an added shadow of menace. Well, I thought, at least I have nothing to declare...I sat up with a jerk in the corner of the empty carriage: what about that automatic pistol? Seeing myself being led to a cell, I dug the little unwanted weapon out of the bottom of my rucksack and undid the flap of the leather case; the smallness, the lightness and the mother-of-pearl-plated stock made it look like a toy. Should I steal away from these bare wooden seats and hide it in the first-class upholstery next door? Or slip it behind the cistern in the lavatory? Or simply chuck it out into No-Man’s-Land? In the end I hid it in a thick fold in the bottom corner of my greatcoat, fixed it there with three safety-pins, put the guilty garment on the rack and sat underneath with pounding heart as the train crawled through the moonlight.
In a few miles we reached the border and the blue-yellow-and-red flag of the Rumanian frontier post. Above the desk inside hung a photograph of King Carol in a white-plumed helmet, a steel breast-plate and a white cloak with a cross on the shoulder. Another frame showed Prince Michael, a nice-looking boy in a white jersey with large, soft eyes and thick, neatly brushed hair; he had also been a king during a three years’ abdication by his father. It was a relief and rather an anticlimax when the yawning official stamped my passport without a single glance at my stuff. The battered document still shows the date: Curtici 27 April 1934, the sixth frontier of my journey.
I thought I had been the only passenger, but a party of bearded and spectacled rabbis in long black overcoats and wide hats had climbed out of the end-carriage; they were attended by students with elf-locks corkscrewing down their wax-pale cheeks and the dark-clad gathering on the platform looked as strange under the moon as a confabulation of rooks. Three were dressed differently from the others; they wore soft-legged Russian boots and black caftans and the foxes’ brushes coiled round their low-crowned beaver hats exactly matched the beard of one of them: a costume I came across several times later in northern Moldavia and Bukovina; and, later on still, among votaries hastening down the steep lanes of Jerusalem to the Wailing Wall. They were talking Yiddish and I somehow picked up the notion that the ones with the foxes’ brushes were Southern Poles from Cracow or Przemysl, perhaps belonging to the zealot sect of the Hasidim; and I think they were all bound for some important meeting in Bucharest. When they got in again, the train went off into the night, the officials vanished and soon I was alone in the ragged streets of Decebal: the place was named after the last king of Dacia before it was conquered by the Romans.
Only dogs were about. Three of them barred the way, snarling and showing their gums and giving tongue through bared teeth, vicious as dingoes in the bright glare of the moon, their shadows crossing and traversing as they retreated down the dust of the main shuttered lane.
* * *
After the bare frontier date, a mist descends, and the next night’s entry in my diary is almost as short: ‘27 April, Pankota—stayed with Imre Engelhardt, owner of the Apollo Cinema.’ I have just found it on a map—Pîncota in Rumanian—but the cinema and its owner have slipped away beyond recall. He must have been one of Maria Theresa’s settlers from south-west Germany; all of them are loosely styled Swabians.
When the fog lifts, the landscape shows little change from the Great Plain I thought I had left, except for wooded hills in the distance. It was a geometrical interlock of chocolate-coloured ploughland with stripes of barley, wheat, oats, rye and maize with some tobacco and the sudden mustard flare of charlock. Clumps of trees broke it up and every few miles russet and sulphur-coloured belfries rose from shingle roofs. Each village had a rustic baroque church for the Catholics and another for the Uniats, and sometimes, though not so much hereabouts, a third for Calvinists or Lutherans; for though the Counter-Reformation had triumphed in Austria, lively and varied crops survived in Hungary and Transylvania. These churches were outwardly the same, but once indoors, the Stations of the Cross or a roodscreen encrusted with icons or the austerity of the Ten Commandments in Magyar above a Communion table gave their allegiance away at once. There were storks’ nests and sweep-wells and flocks and cattle and Gypsies on the move. I began to like buffaloes the more I saw of them; their great liquid eyes, which seemed to lose the resentment I thought I had discerned on the banks of the Tisza, now looked aswim with pathos. But there was an important difference in the people. After the last weeks of blunt Magyar faces, the features were different—or was it merely imagination and recent reading that lent them a more Latin look? I fell in with a party carrying sickles and scythes and slung babies. Their ample white homespun tunics were caught in with belts as wide as girths and sometimes covered in iron studs, and, except for those who were barefoot, they were shod in the familiar canoe-tipped moccasins and rawhide thongs. Their rank sheepskin jackets were put on smooth side out and their hats—bulbous cones of black or white fleece over a foot high—gave them a wild and rakish look. They could all understand my hard-won fragments of Magyar; but I soon felt that the language they spoke to each other would be much easier to learn. A man was om, a woman, femeie; and ochi, nas, mâna and foaie were eyes, nose, hand and leaf. They were a little puzzled at first by my pointing at everything in sight with gestures of enquiry. Dog? Ox? Cow? Horse? Câine, bou, vaca, cal! It was marvellous: homo, femina, nasus, manus, folium, canis, bos, vacca and caballus thronged through my brain in a delirious troop. Câmp was a field and fag a beech-tree (‘...quatit ungula campum!’...‘sub tegmine fagi...!’). How odd to find this Latin speech marooned so far from its kindred! The Black Sea hemmed it in to the east and Slavonic to north and south, while the west was barred by the Finno-Ugrian dactyls of the Magyars.
By late afternoon, these linguistic exchanges brought us to the little town of Ineu—‘Borosjenö’ on my pre-war map—where a market day was ending. The place was full of lowing, bleating and squealing, carts were being loaded, pens broken up and hurdles stacked. Women and girls were busy with long goads keeping troops of poultry together. Kerchiefs of different colours were knotted under their chins and pleated skirts, with embroidered aprons back and front, sprang from girdles woven in patterns of red and yellow. A few of them had scarlet boots to the knee like figures out of the Russian ballet.
* * *
My goal was a house belonging to a friend called Tibor—I had met him with his namesake in Budapest—who had asked me to stay at an approximate date which was just about now: suddenly, hobnobbing with some farmers under an acacia tree, one foot on the step of a smart trap with a grey pony swishing its tail, here he was: jolly, baronial, rubicund, Jäger-hatted and plumed, an ex-Horse Gunner in the same troop as the other Tibor. His face lit in welcome and two plum brandies appeared on a tray as though by magic, and when they were swallowed we bowled off to the hills, Tibor ceremoniously lifting his green hat in answer to the doffed cones as we went.
* * *
All through the afternoon the hills had been growing in height and now they rolled into the distance behind a steep and solitary hemisphere clad to the summit with vineyards. We turned into the tall gates at the foot of it and a long sweep of grass brought us to a Palladian façade just as night was falling. Two herons rose as we approached; the shadows were full of the scent of lilac. Beyond the french windows, a coifed and barefoot maid with a spill was lighting lamps down a long room and, with each new pool of light, Biedermeier furniture took shape and chairs and sofas where only a few strands of the original fabric still lingered; there were faded plum-coloured curtains and a grand piano laden with framed photographs and old family albums with brass clasps; antlers branched, a stuffed lynx pricked its ears, ancestors with swords and furred tunics dimly postured. A white stove soared between bookcases, bear-skins spread underfoot: and, as at Kövecsespuszta,[1] a sideboard carried an array of silver cigarette-cases with the arms and monograms of friends who had bestowed them for standing godfather or being best man at a wedding or second in a duel. There was a polished shellcase from some Silesian battle, a congeries of thimble-sized goblets, a scimitar with a turquoise-encrusted scabbard, folded newspapers—Az Ujság and Pesti Hírlap sent from Budapest, and the Wiener Salonblatt, an Austrian Tatler full of pictures of shooting parties, equestrian events and smart balls far away, posted from Vienna. Among the silver frames was a daguerreotype of the Empress Elizabeth—Queen, rather, in this lost province of the former Kingdom—another of the Regent dressed as admiral of a vanished fleet, and a third of Archduke Otto in the pelts and the plumes of a Hungarian magnate. Red, green and blue, the squat volumes of the Almanach de Gotha were ready to pounce. A glittering folio volume, sumptuously bound in green leather, almost covered a small table and its name, Az ember tragediája, was embossed in gold: The Tragedy of Man, by Imre Madács. It is a long nineteenth-century dramatic poem of philosophic and contemplative temper, and no Hungarian house, even the least bookish—like English houses with the vellum-bound Omar Khayyám illustrated by Edmund Dulac—seemed complete without it. Finally, a rack in the corner was filled with long Turkish pipes. This catalogue of detail composes an archetype of which every other country-house I saw in Transylvania seemed to be a variation.
At the other end, beyond the double doors of a room which was half-study and half-gunroom, more antlers proliferated; figures moved in the lamplight and the voices of guests sounded, and I hastened upstairs to wash and get some of the dust off before meeting them. As they all play a part in the following weeks and their houses follow each other like stepping stones I will wait till we reach them rather than introduce them now.
* * *
Next morning revealed the front of a late eighteenth-century building. Between the wings, four wide-spaced Tuscan columns advanced and ascended both floors to form a splendid loggia. White louvred shutters continued the line of windows on either side, each leaf touching its neighbour on the facade when they were open while indoors the light poured across the floors; closed, with their slats ajar when the sun became too hot, they striped the wide polished beams underfoot with bars of light and dark. There was a wheel with a handle which cranked out an enormous slant of white awning and, looking out, one might have been on the deck of a schooner painted by Tissot with tree-tops for waves. Beyond, the vine-clad hemispherical hill of Mokra soared like a volcanic island against snowy heaps of cloud and a pale sky. The smells of lilac, box and lavender drifted in, goldfinches moved about the branches, and now and then house-martins from the nests clustering along the pediment strayed indoors and flew in desperate circles or swept clean through the house and out the other side.
In the middle of this airy expanse I came on Tibor recumbent on a Madame Recamier sofa with a sheet tied round his neck, smoking an after-breakfast cigar while his valet lathered his chin. “Gyula will be ready for you in a minute,” he said, sending a perfect smoke ring towards the coffered ceiling; and soon I was lying swathed under Gyula’s razor, imitatively wreathed in a fragrant cloud of smoke. Strolling up and down and sitting on the sill against a background of birds, Tibor told me anecdotes of the War and Gypsies and cabaret-girls, spacing out his adventures in Paris, Brussels and Constantinople with amusing and improper stories. As we went downstairs, chins tingling with eau-de-cologne, he wondered what there would be for luncheon; and, across the courtyard below, we caught sight of the cook sitting in the shade outside her kitchen in a whirl of feathers. “Good!” he said. “Margit’s plucking a chicken”; and we set off to inspect the fields and the crops in an open carriage behind the coachman’s black ostrich-feather and fluttering ribands. “This is the life,” I thought as we bowled along under the leaves.
But the great attraction at Borosjenö was Ria, who presided over everything. ‘Housekeeper’ is too portentous and misleading a name for that charming and amusing face and the youthful figure that gave the lie to her prematurely grey hair cut in a shingle. She was Polish, the daughter of a music publisher in Cracow whom some misfortune had overtaken. I wondered if there had been a romance between her and Tibor, perhaps. If so, it was over; but they were great friends, and she was hostess in his bachelor household. She spoke beautiful French and Polish, German and Hungarian, with a bit of Rumanian as well. Inspecting my tangled wardrobe as I handed things over to be washed or mended, she asked how many handkerchiefs I had got. All lost except two. “Et quels torchons,” she said, holding them up. “Regarde-moi ça! Il faut que je m’occupe de toi!” and she did. She bought a dozen handkerchiefs of homespun linen in the country town of Arad, embroidered my initials on them, tied them neatly with a red ribbon and plonked them in my hands like a packet of sandwiches: “Au moins tu auras de quoi te moucher.” She had a delightful voice and we spent hours singing at the picture-laden piano: French and German and a few Polish songs; I could join her in one of these, which I learnt like a parrot; and, all of a sudden as I write, the cheerful tune and the words come back.[2] She was very amusing and perhaps more sophisticated than Tibor. When she drove to see neighbours in the pony-trap or the carriage, I went too and I was soon abreast of a dozen comic biographies. Everyone loved her, and so did I.
* * *
The tempo of my journey had slowed up, all sense of time dissolved, and it is only now, half a century too late, that I have sudden retrospective qualms about accepting so much hospitality, and they are not very severe. The industrial revolution had left these regions untouched and the rhythm of life had remained many decades behind the pace of the West—a hundred years, perhaps, when stays in the country were as long and as leisurely as they are in English and Russian novels of the time; and, in this lost province, where the hospitable Hungarians felt cut off from life, visitors from the West were greeted with embraces. I hoped it was so, for the next three months of leisurely sojourns across the marches and the southern parts of Transylvania turned that spring and early summer into a complete exception to the rest of these travels. A blessed and happy spell descended.
* * *
Transylvania[3] is nearly three times the size of Wales and to the Hungarians the loss of the province seemed the hardest to bear of all her post-war disasters. Hungary’s position in the Dual Monarchy had inextricably involved her in the fortunes of Austria, and then, by chain reaction, of Germany too and finally, in 1918, in the chaos of defeat. But, of the ensuing disasters—the brief Soviet republic of Béla Kun, the conquest by the Rumanians that put an end to it and the White Terror that followed—none seemed so catastrophic as the dismemberment of the country at the Treaty of Trianon. The losses to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were bitter but in comparison simple, the cuts clean and the losses quite literally peripheral. It was the opposite in Transylvania; justice to both sides was and is impossible; and the impossibility resides in the dense mass of Transylvanian Hungarians, isolated two hundred miles east of their fellow-countrymen by a still greater surrounding mass of Rumanians. Short of making this enormous Magyar enclave a detached outpost of Hungary—embedded, as it would have had to have been, in a hostile Rumania like the later experiment of East Pakistan, and perhaps with the same fate—there was no solution. Apart from this, the Rumanians of Transylvania out-numbered the Hungarians by the best part of a million, so mutatis mutandis, it would have been equally impossible to frame reasonable frontiers for a victorious Hungary which would have been fair to the Rumanians. Who was to suffer the unavoidable injustice—loss of their Transylvanian kinsmen for Hungary, perpetuation of the status quo for the Rumanians—merely depended on who lost the War. Hungary was involved in the losing side, and the result was inevitable: frontiers were destroyed which, except for the Turkish period, had remained intact for nearly a thousand years and two-thirds of her territory were shared out among the winners; and ever since, the Hungarian flag had remained metaphorically and literally at half mast.
The Hungarians based their claim to Transylvania on historical priority rather than ethnic preponderance, the Rumanians on both. The Rumanians claimed descent from a mixture of ancient Dacians (whose kingdom lay exactly here) with the Romans who conquered and colonised the country under Trajan, in ad 107; alternatively, they descended—for theories change—from Dacians who had been Romanised by the occupation which lasted until ad 271, when the overwhelming flood of the Goths compelled the Emperor Aurelian to withdraw his troops to the south of the Danube. During the hundred and sixty-four years between Trajan and Aurelian, a Daco-Roman, Latin-speaking population, comparable to the Gallo-Romans of Gaul, had taken shape, and when Aurelian’s troops withdrew, they remained there (rather like, in the West, the Latin-speaking local successors to the legions when they were recalled to Rome) and bequeathed their language to their descendants. They attribute a Slavonic element in Rumanian to the later spread of the Slavs over the whole of Eastern Europe, a linguistic contribution that could be likened in the West to the Teutonic elements in the language of northern Gaul when the Franks crossed the Rhine and spread. The Daco-Romans, then, would have been the bottom layer of the racial and linguistic make-up of the country. Invaders swept across it, with their eyes on prizes farther west; some lingered for a time; but they vanished one by one. Meanwhile, all through these unchronicled Dark Ages, the Daco-Romans, living as nomad shepherds—rough nobles, perhaps, with their pastoral liegemen—grazed their flocks here until the Magyars, turning eastwards again after their occupation of the Great Hungarian Plain, invaded Transylvania and subjugated them: a subjugation which lasted, according to this theory of history, until the liberating Treaty of Trianon.
The Hungarian version of history agrees with the Rumanian as far as Aurelian. According to Hungarians—basing their theory on the only text which touches on the matter[4]—the removal of the colonists, and not only of the troops and the administration, was complete. If a few Dacians remained, they are presumed to have been dispersed and obliterated by the Goths and their habitat overlaid by the subsequent Slav expansion: the only population the Magyars found there in the ninth century would have been a scattering of Slavs, who were soon absorbed; the region was described as ‘deserted’ by the first chronicler. To fill the void, the Magyars installed their warlike kinsmen, the Szelkers, in the Carpathians (unless they had preceded them) where they still form the bulk of the Hungarian population. Then they summoned the ‘Saxons’ from the lower Rhine; and it is only after this, in the early thirteenth century (the Hungarians urge), that the Rumanians enter the scene; not as descendants of the Daco-Romans surviving in unbroken incumbency, but as immigrant groups of the famous Vlach population of Macedonia and the Balkans, who spoke a low-Latin language from their long subjection to the Empire. They had wandered north with their flocks, the Hungarians say, perhaps driven there by the Cumans, and perhaps not, and probably in company with the wild Pechenegs. They made their way into southern Transylvania and settled among the Carpathian peaks, where—so this theory continues—they were steadily reinforced by new Vlach arrivals; until finally they outnumbered the Magyars of the region—and the Szeklers, and the Saxons—by an enormous margin.
The speech of the Rumanians and of the Vlachs of the Balkans must spring from the same source. They are too alike for it to be otherwise; few of the Romance languages are so closely related and it is only surprising that the centuries and the distance which separate them have not prised them further apart. Until a hundred and fifty years ago both national groups were loosely called Vlachs, or Wallachs, by the rest of the world (but never by the Rumanians themselves), and this surely points to a common origin. Where? Outside Transylvania, the Hungarians say: they only entered as late immigrants; inside it, the Rumanians insist, only spreading south as later emigrants... It is at this point that an inexpert newcomer to the problem begins tentatively to wonder: could the answer not lie somewhere between the two? Vlachs were scattered all over south-east Europe; might there not also have been some in Transylvania when the Magyars invaded, as well as the wandering Slavs?[5] Similarly, could these putative Vlachs in Transylvania not have been part of a wider scattering, and not necessarily the radiating nucleus of the entire race, as the Rumanians uphold? Both parties would answer No: Hungarians insist on a vacuum, Rumanians on a hot-bed. It need hardly be said that controversialists on both sides, quoting or challenging the sources and adducing linguistics, archaeology, geography, place names, religion and a whole supporting array of circumstantial evidence, can explain away all opposing arguments with convincing and long-practised ease.
In the Rumanian view, the Koutzo-Vlachs, the ‘Macedo-Rumans’ of the Balkans, would be some of the scattered descendants of the inhabitants of two new ‘Dacias’—the colonies Aurelian founded for the population he had evacuated to Moesia (modern Serbia and Bulgaria) along the south bank of the Danube. One interesting figure glimmers for a moment among these transplanted Dacians a hundred years after Aurelian’s evacuation south of the Danube: the remarkable St. Nicetas of Remesiana (now Bela Palanka, in Serbia) who is the author not only of the Te Deum—which was wrongly attributed until early this century to SS. Ambrose and Augustine—but also of a clause in the Apostles’ Creed. He was a friend of Paulinus of Nola who wrote an ode to him in sapphics when he visited him in south Italy; this sets him at only one remove from Ausonius and Roman Bordeaux. Then the dark swallows up this twilight beacon.
* * *
If only we knew what happened at Aurelian’s withdrawal! But, apart from Vopiscus’s shadowy sentences, we don’t; not a thing: the silence and darkness lasted a thousand years. We know that the Roman withdrawal took place in ad 271 (over a century before the Romans left Britain), but after that—apart from Gelu—the earliest mentions of Latin-speaking inhabitants of Transylvania occur in 1222 and 1231, when there is mention of ‘the region of the Vlachs’ and ‘the forest of the Pechenegs and the Vlachs.’ They emerge—or re-emerge—from the shadows while the Valois and the Plantagenet dynasties were at their height, only twenty years after the Crusaders had captured Constantinople and a bare six after Magna Carta. It is baffling, and hardly credible, that so little is known about their contemporaries in Transylvania. Some blame the Mongol invasion the century before for this astounding blank. The Mongols destroyed everything; not only castles and churches and abbeys but, it seems, every single document they may have contained. One longs for news from the buried ruins of some stronghold miraculously untouched since Batu Khan set fire to it, the trove, perhaps, of some Transylvanian forester digging out a fox or a badger and suddenly tumbling through the creepers and the roots into a dry vault full of iron chests abrim with parchments...
But, from a different point of view, the advantage of this void to the rival controversialists is enormous. Theories can be evolved in a void, as it were, and the occasional fragments of hard fact—linguistic, geographical, ethnological or religious—need not fit into any jigsaw; indeed, they are unable to do so, because all the other pieces are missing; and within certain loose bounds they can be arranged in whatever pattern suits the speaker best. The interpretations are as different as the work of two palaeontologists, one of whom would reconstruct a dinosaur and the other a mastodon from the same handful of bone-fragments. ‘Let us assume’ turns in a few pages into ‘We may assume,’ which, in a few more, is ‘As we have shown’; and, after a few more pages yet, the shy initial hypothesis has hardened into a brazen established landmark, all the time with not an atom of new evidence being adduced. Advantageous points are coaxed into opulent bloom, awkward ones discreetly pruned into non-being. Obscurity reigns. It is a dim region where suggestio falsi and suppressio veri, those twin villains of historical conflict, stalk about the shadows with dark-lantern and bow-string.
These ancient ambiguities would be a field for learned conjecture merely, were it not for the bitter rivalries that haunted them in later times and haunt them still. Historic priority, could it be proved, would be vital evidence in a suit of contested ownership; and earlier in this century, before ethnic considerations were the overriding factors they have since become, it was more important still: possession by conquest, backed by historical continuity and stiffened by treaties, was still a valid and respectable consideration. The colonial empires of Great Britain and France flourished unchallenged and Russia was in firm possession, as she still is, of the colossal Asian annexations of the Tsars. In such an atmosphere, all objectivity of research liable to unearth evidence damaging to the researcher’s side must seem tainted with treason.
Obviously, I knew very little of all this at the time, but it was impossible not to pick up an inkling; and later, when I stayed for long stretches in ‘old’ Rumania—Regat, or ‘the Kingdom,’ as it was always referred to in Transylvania—I more or less got the hang of the Rumanian approach, but not in very strong doses—it would be hard to think of less chauvinistic people than the family and friends I settled among in Moldavia—and I read all that came my way on both sides. The opposing cases were skilfully and persuasively argued; in each the chains of logic seemed faultless; all objections were faced and demolished; and when I turned from one argument to its rival the same thing would happen, leaving me stranded between the two. I am the only person I know who has feelings of equal warmth for both these embattled claimants and I wish with fervour they could become friends. Would the discovery of those imaginary scrolls in the ruins solve matters? My unsatisfactory position between the two makes me useless to both.
Among the Hungarian landowners in Transylvania there was an added bitterness. Agrarian reforms had expropriated and redistributed the bulk of their estates among the peasants. However just this measure may have been, nobody likes losing land and cries of outrage went up. They could not know it, but these cries were substantially no different from the lamentations one could hear in the country-houses of Rumanian boyars, whose estates had been similarly dismantled. These boyars, what is more, were resentfully convinced that their own Rumanian government gave more favourable treatment to the new and unwilling Hungarian subjects, in order to curry favour with them. On later visits, when I told this to Hungarian Transylvanians, unshakably convinced that they were the special victims of discrimination, they were amazed and disbelieving. They seethed at the inequity of the regime and the venality of the new officials from Regat. Tales of bribery abounded, and their attitude to the new state and to its officials from beyond the Carpathian watershed resembled the distrust and disdain of post-American Civil War plantation owners for the carpetbaggers from the north. Indeed, there were unprepossessing aspects: lack of tact and scruple was backed, perhaps, by promptings of revenge for Hungarian absolutism in the past. The Hungarians over the centuries had handled their alien subjects—and all their own compatriots below a certain rank—with great clumsiness; disdain, oppression, blind feudalism, exclusion from any voice in their counsels, rigorous Magyarisation—no blemish was missing. (In case their iniquities should breed complacency in an English breast, their feelings towards the helot population most compellingly recall the English attitude that Swift satirises in post-Cromwellian Ireland.) Trouble heaped up; it broke out now and then in murderous revolts followed by pitiless retribution. Had a reversal of the positions placed the Hungarians under Rumanian suzerainty for these grim centuries, there is no reason to think that the shifted yoke would have been lighter to bear: Rumanian rulers were as illiberal and oppressive to their own subjects as the Hungarians to theirs. They were fierce times in Eastern Europe; and they still are.[6]
But there were few traces of all this in everyday life. For better or for worse, landlords and peasants had known each other for many generations, whereas the officials from the Regat were newcomers to both of them; and, on the spot, a certain warmth of feeling had managed to outlive the changes of frontier and ownership and the conflicts of the past. “I remember old Count ——,” I heard a Rumanian shepherd say later on, “with all his horses and carriages! It was a fine sight. And look at him now, poor old man!” Comparable feelings often prevailed the other way about and, in my scanty experience, squires who were thunderous over their wine about the iniquities of the state would take care to exempt the locals who had been given their acres. Their ancient feudal relationship may have evaporated but hardy symbols still survived in doffed hats, kissed hands and ceremonious forms of address, and this gave a strange, almost a disembodied feeling of remoteness to this Transylvanian life. Most of the minor landowners had been obliged by circumstances to become Rumanian citizens; but very few of them had ever been to Bucharest. They looked on it as a faraway Babylon of dust and bribery and wickedness and vowed never to set foot there if they could help it, or even cross the former eastern frontier. Pining for the crown of St. Stephen, they had no eyes or ears or heart for anything but their mutilated kingdom to the west.
Finally it remains to be said that hardly a trace of this distress was detectable to a stranger. (In my particular case, the chief thing to survive is the memory of unlimited kindness.) Estates, much reduced, existed still, and at moments it almost seemed as though nothing had changed. Charm and douceur de vivre were still afloat among the faded decor indoors, and outside, everything conspired to delight. Islanded in the rustic Rumanian multitude, different in race and religion and with the phantoms of their lost ascendancy still about them, the prevailing atmosphere surrounding these kastély-dwellers conjured up that of the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish in Waterford or Galway, with all their sadness and their magic. Homesick for the past, seeing nobody but their own congeners on the neighbouring estates and the peasants who worked there, they lived in a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream and many sentences ended in a sigh.
* * *
Ria had countless French books and I borrowed them freely. Tibor was no reader but his forerunners must have been, for the library was well stocked, chiefly with works in Hungarian and German. Abandoning hope with Magyar, I longed to plunge deeper in German and began by reading all the rhyming couplets under the marvellous drawings of Max und Moritz and Hans Huckebein in a large volume of Wilhelm Busch. Elated by this and aiming higher, I moved on to Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig and made a slow start, looking up every other word and seeking Ria’s help when I got stuck. But I did manage to finish it in a couple of weeks, and considering that I had only started German five months before, this seemed a big jump forward. I spent the mornings between the library and an outdoor table, poring over Central European history—Hungarian and Transylvanian in particular—in Meyers Konversationslexikon; and then moved on to the Béla Kun period in the rather lurid books of Jean and Jérome Tharaud—La Fin des Habsburgs, Quand Israel est Roi. These two French brothers, one of whom became an Academician, were great favourites in these parts. Though everyone knew a great deal about the past of Central Europe, their knowledge stopped dead at the crests of the Carpathians. Rumanian history—the history, that is, of Wallachia and Moldavia, the two principalities the other side of the mountains which eventually united under a single prince and then became the Kingdom of Rumania—was beyond their scope; it was invariably dismissed with mention of die wilde Wallachei—‘wild Wallachia’ (a quotation, perhaps: who from?)—as though it lay in the heart of the Mongolian steppe.
Straying from this theme, but not very far, I discovered that the French for ‘gelding’ was hongre—the Hungarians were thought to have introduced the practice into Europe—while the German word is Wallach, which suggests a Rumanian origin, each of the countries concerned taking a step further east. My delight in finding that the word ‘hussar’ was Magyar—husz, twenty, conjuring up a squadron twenty-strong—was shortlived, for more recent lexicographers derive it, via Serbian, from the Italian corsaro, a pirate, freely substituting a keel for hooves. There had been attempts in the past to derive ‘ogre’ from ‘Hungarian’—or rather from their ancestors the Ugrians; but the word really comes from Orcus, the Roman underworld god. But at least the derivation of ‘cravat’ from ‘Croatia,’ which had been a vassal-kingdom of Hungary, seemed secure; the word had been implanted into France by the flowing neckwear of Louis XIV’s mercenary Croatian cavalry. The word ‘coach’ is a reminder of the Hungarian town of Kocs, presumably because such a vehicle was first built there.
* * *
These mornings were soon over. Storks presided over them and cuckoos sounded from different woods as long as the light lasted. Three days in a row were singled out by the arrival of birds I had never seen before: the first, with dazzling yellow and black plumage and a short haunting tune, was a golden oriole; next day was marked by the blue-green-yellow flash of bee-eaters; and the third by two hoopoes walking in the grass and spreading and closing their Red Indian head-dresses, then fluttering aloft and chasing each other among the leaves, their wings turning them into little flying zebras until they settled again.
Tibor’s sister and some friends arrived from Vienna and there was much festivity and dressing up and picnics and finally a midnight feast on the very summit of the vine-clad hill. A bonfire was lit: a carriage disgorged four Gypsies—a violin, a viola, a czembalom and a double-bass—who assembled under a tree. The amber-coloured wine we drank as we leant on our elbows round the flames was pressed from grapes which had ripened on the very slopes that dropped away all round. The vine-dressers climbed up, forming an outer ring, and when we had run dry they fetched fresh supplies from their cottages, filling all glasses until a cockcrow from an invisible farmyard spread an infectious summons through the dark; other cocks awoke; then the end of the Great Plain glimmered into being underneath us and everything except the Gypsies began to grow pale. Their strings and their voices kept us company all the way downhill, then through the gates and along the grass path through the trees. Our footprints showed grey in the dew; and when we reached the pillars along the front of the house, the sound of startled nests and birds waking up and the flapping of a stork from the pediment showed it was too late to go to bed.
These were the daily waking sounds. Soon they were joined every morning by the swish of scythes right up to the house-walls and the voices of the mowers singing to themselves; when one of them broke off for a minute, there was the clang of a whetstone along a blade. The scent of hay filled the house, haymakers peopled the landscape and spread their windrows in stripes of silver across the pale stubble. My room gave on a field where a big rick was going up, the layers ascending and radiating clockwise round the tall centre pole. Women with pitchforks knee-deep in a cart tossed up the hay while the men on the tapering cone fixed it like the whorls on an ammonite. The waggons creaking along the lanes were piled so high that wisps of hay entwined with dead poppies and wild flowers were caught up in all the low branches.
I spent much of the day with Tibor in the fields and walked in the hills for miles, picking up fragments of Rumanian. But I gave up keeping my diary for a while on the principle, I suppose, that these static intervals were irrelevant in a record of travel. I wish I had been less proud: these gaps make it easy to lose count of days and even weeks; but odd items and a few sketches scattered at the back help me reconstruct them and one of these fixes this particular lapse of time beyond question. Tibor, as though on a sudden cheerful inspiration, had said he would drive me to Arad—he remembered he had some things to do there—and then on to my next halting place, where we were all to meet later on. After tea a touring-car, only used for journeys out of carriage range, was brought out to the front with some solemnity. Tibor was a little mysterious about our trip.
Arad was about the size of Guildford and, unlike the countryside, I had the impression there of hearing more Magyar than Rumanian in the streets. There were many Hungarian names over the shops and many Jewish and a multitude of ordinary German ones that belonged to Swabian settlers. The place was made famous in Hungarian history by the Austrian execution of thirteen Hungarian generals at the end of Kossuth’s great rising against Habsburg rule in 1848. (I had just been reading about it.) There was little time to see much, however; Tibor’s task was a protracted visit to a tall, dark and very pretty girl called Ilona, a great favourite of his, who lived in a discreet and leafy street leading down to the river Mures. She had summoned a friend called Izabella who was equally pretty in a different way, for my sake, I think. She had very fair hair and dark blue eyes and spoke no word of anything but Hungarian, but this didn’t matter at all. (I wonder if her extreme fairness came from a dash of Slovak blood: I had seen similarly blond descendants of northern settlers in the neighbourhood of my penultimate Hungarian halt at O’Kigyos: not very far away as the crow flies.) Anyway, here she is, pressed like a petal in the back pages of my journal, carefully drawn, with her head leaning on her forearm and gazing out under arched brows, and, by a stroke of luck, looking nearly as pretty in the sketch as she did in real life. ‘Iza, Arad. May 16 1934’ is pencilled in at the top.
* * *
Back again north of Arad, the wavy line of hills next morning had drawn back a few miles and the low, ranch-like manor house of Tövicsegháza, for which I’ve searched the map in vain, lay among cornfields under a clump of elms.
The moment we were shown into the billiard room, Tibor spotted a double-barrelled gun which was propped across the window-sill. He quickly broke it open and two cartridges jumped out of the breech. “Look at that! I ask you!” he said, laughing and putting them on a shelf with a sigh. “Polnische Wirtschaft! There’s Polish housekeeping for you!” Jasš, pronounced ‘Yash,’ our host, came in at that moment and said he always kept it loaded and handy for the rooks, “Otherwise they wouldn’t leave an ear of the young wheat for miles.”
In these circles, it was considered a boorish oversight to withhold from newcomers certain details about anyone they were about to meet. No English circumspection or studied vagueness hampered these utterances, still less the fear of seeming worldly or impressed by the boast of heraldry and the pomp of power. “Jasš?” someone had said. “He comes from an excellent family in southern Poland, eight thousand acres, not far from Cracow. His great-grandfather was Austrian Ambassador to St. Petersburg and their Turk’s head crest was granted after capturing three Tatar standards in the Ukraine.”
“His wife Clara? From an old, old, old...uralte”—here the speaker’s eyelids would almost close as though in a dream at the thought of such antiquity—“family in the High Tatra mountains. They live in one of the most ancient castles in Hungary—Slovakia now, more’s the pity! Counts since the reign of King Mátyás. They carry a double chevron dansetty between three salamanders quartered with five pikes hauriant; arms parlant, you know, after the river that rushes by, and the fish that swim in it.” (When armorial fauna were mentioned, for a moment the room or the lawn would seem to fill with fork-tailed lions looking warily backwards with blue claws and fangs; unicorns, mouldywarps, cockatrices, griffins, wyverns, firedrakes and little dragons covered with stripes; hawks and eagles were let loose and the air filled with corbies and martlets and swans with gold chains about their necks in spirals.)
Only after dealing with these essentials were minor points like character, looks or capacity allowed to crop up. In spite of some territorial difficulties, the Hungarians had an undoubted sympathy for the Poles; what a relief to find an exception to the usual East European hatred of neighbours! These feelings were rooted long ago in shared enmity to the Germans, the Turks and the Muscovites and had been signally marked in the late sixteenth century when the Poles elected Stephen Báthory, the Hungarian Prince of Transylvania, to the Polish throne. He routed all their enemies, captured a score of Russian towns and drove Ivan the Terrible out of the Kingdom.
Jaš was slender and fair-haired with a high-bridged nose, hair cut en brosse, bright blue eyes behind very thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and an air of vagueness and goodwill. Ideas about archaeology, history, religion and physics seethed in his mind and he was said to be full of expert theories (prone to break down in practice) on economics, rotation of crops, the training of animals, winter fodder, forestry, bee-keeping, sheep dip, and how best to fatten ducks for the spring market. He welcomed eccentric notions and we had not been there five minutes before he asked us what we thought of the idea that the earth might be hollow, with a small sun at the centre and a much larger moon circling it whose shadow was the cause of night and day. Millions of stars about the size of Vienna or Warsaw rotating solar-centrically at different distances and speeds? That morning’s post had brought him a trilingual pamphlet from the inventor of this theory and his pale eyes were alight behind their lenses. “Die Welt ist eine Hohlkugel!” he read out from the cover; “Le monde est une boule creuse! Ze vorld iss a hollow ball, my dear!” he explained, laying a hand on my forearm; then, turning the pages with emotion, he read out the most telling passages. Tibor, as we said goodbye, gave me the ghost of a wink.
* * *
Practice may have fallen short of theory in other matters, but Jasš was a phenomenal shot. The gun was soon loaded again and every so often, in mid-sentence and seemingly without aiming, he would fire out of the window and into the air, often single-handed and with hardly a break in his discourse; and a second later, like a heavy parcel, down on the lawn crashed a bird from the enormous rookery that overshadowed the house. I was sorry; all that wheeling and cawing brought homesick thoughts to mind. Haphazard bangs punctuated every hour of daylight.
Clara, the child of those hoary battlements in the High Tatra, had a wild look and her hair was seldom combed. She loved horses and her life revolved round two beautiful black creatures which a dour and one-eyed groom called Antal kept sleek and trim—“unlike me,” as she truthfully said, skimming into the saddle. She was as light as a jockey, rode beautifully and sailed over tremendous fences. Jasš had given it up—“no time”—so we went for far-flung rides in the cool of the evening.
During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious—Spritzer they called it in German, and, in Magyar, hoszú lépés, ‘a long step,’ one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. It was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars, it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jasš liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one night to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts.
On my last afternoon, Clara and I lay about talking on a bank at the end of the lawn. Indoors, Jasš was playing complicated fugues rather well, breaking off for a few seconds now and then and rushing back to the piano after a bang and a thud, so there was a perturbed circling of rooks above the house. All along the lawn, the chestnut candles had begun to shed their blossom and occasional discs of pink showed among the white petals which scattered the grass. At the end of this vista we could see the two horses, unsaddled a few minutes earlier, rolling in ecstasy before finding their feet again with a snort and a shake, then grazing and idly swishing their tails against the gnats. In the morning, with the bangs of the rook-rifle growing fainter, one of them carried me to my next halt.
* * *
Ötvenes was the last of this particular concatenation of friends and houses and, like all the others, I had met the inhabitants that first evening at Tibor’s. The family were Swabians who had settled here when these territories were regained from the Turks, and the spread of their acres had soon enrolled them into the dominant stratum. Can the preceding centuries of conflict be compared to the long process of the Reconquista in Spain, with Ottomans instead of Moors? The earlier campaigns, with the victories of Hunyadi and Báthory and Zrinyi, bear a distinct affinity: but the energies of later Transylvanian heroes were spent in making the Principality, for a time at least, and under Turkish vassaldom, a bastion of Magyar liberties against the Habsburgs. Shrewd connubial skill in marrying the Hungarian royal heiress, and then declaring the crown hereditary instead of elective, had enabled the dynasty to swallow up Hungary; and when the Emperor’s armies at last advanced downstream, the Imperialists had come to look on the liberated Hungarians as a conquered race. Hence the foreign settlements and the quantities of non-Hungarian names that suddenly scattered the redeemed lands. Strangers were summoned from abroad; during the last three centuries the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary became cosmopolitan, and in nothing so much as in the commanders of their armies; but their offspring had been assimilated long ago. As though to illustrate this, two brothers who came over from a nearby estate bore the famous Genoese name of Pallavicini. Were they descended from the margrave who murdered Cardinal Martinuzzi, the saviour of Transylvania, half-Venetian himself? I had just been reading about him, but didn’t dare to ask. Another guest, a tall princess, married to an erudite naturalist landowner called Béla Lipthay, from Lovrin in the Banat, was a descendant (not direct, I hope) of Pope Innocent IX of the famous house of Odescalchi, lords of Bracciano.[7]
Georgina, the daughter of the house, looked like a fair-haired Englishwoman on safari, and she was as good a horsewoman as Clara. Separated from a long-absent Czech husband, she was striving without much hope for an annulment in order to marry an even better horseman than either. He was sun-scorched, lean, delightful and stone deaf. Full of misgivings, her kind-hearted parents, and especially her mother, took the hazards of my journey very seriously. A son of hers had been in Brazil for fifteen years and if I had let her, she would have stuffed the whole of his wardrobe in my rucksack.
I can remember every detail of this house, and of all the others; and the inhabitants, the servants, the dogs and the horses and the scenery are all intact. Perhaps being a stranger in this remote society knocked down some of the customary barriers, for I became an intimate of their lives, and feelings ran deeper and lasted much longer than anything warranted by the swift flight of these weeks in the marches of Transylvania. This particularly joyful sojourn was made even more so by the arrival of Ria for the last few days. We watched the building of an enormous rick and cantered through the woods on a paper-chase; and on my last day we discovered some rockets in a woodshed and sent them all up after dinner.
Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all. But in this charming and cheerful household, the tragedy that smote in the middle of that grim time had nothing to do with conflict: a fire sprang up in the night and the whole family and the combustible manor house that contained it were turned to ashes.
[1] See A Time of Gifts, p. 279.
[2] ‘Pojekai, Hanka, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu...’ etc.
[3] Properly speaking, the region only begins about thirty miles east of the point I had reached. But the narrow tract between this and the post-war Hungarian–Rumanian frontier—the one I had just crossed—seems to have no specific name and, talking loosely, people often wrongly lump it in with Transylvania: it seems a handy name for all the territory which Hungary had lost to Rumania in 1920, and I sometimes find myself following this lax but convenient usage.
[4] The late Roman historian Flavius Vopiscus in the Augustan Scriptors.
[5] A Hungarian source, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla (1234–70), records a tradition that the invading Hungarians had to overcome the resistance of a certain Gelu, leader of the Vlacho-Slav tribes in central Transylvania, before he could subdue the region.
[6] All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain,
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation...
—the lines would often come to mind.
[7] According to Sir Walter Scott (or Macaulay quoting him; I’ve searched both in vain and will probably come on the passage the day after this book is out), Bracciano, by its reedy lake, was the best example of a mediaeval fortress he had ever seen: clustering cylindrical towers soar into the sky of Latium and spread narcissistic machicolated corollas high above their still reflections many fathoms below.