I KNEW that István and his family meant it when they suggested that I should stay all summer, but I had swerved so widely from my austere programme that the more I enjoyed these miraculous weeks the harder my conscience began to smite. So I wrote to London with rough dates and addresses for the despatch of cash: this parasitic castle-life had left my funds comparatively intact, but I would be needing some soon. Meanwhile, the valley cast a strong counter-spell and random notions suggesting delay kept dropping out of the air. “If you stayed on,” István said one morning, “we could go and shoot chamois”; then, later, there would be stags; and, later still, bears. When I said I had never shot anything larger than a rabbit he said, “I’ll teach you.” And then, what about fox-hunting with Baron Wesselenyi’s pack? I could manage that, except that I had no money. István smiled.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “neither have I. Nobody has.”
The topic was interrupted by the gathering of a party, twelve-strong and in two carriages, to catch crayfish in a mountain stream, and István and I were to go on ahead. We found the stream: it tumbled out of rocks and bracken in a clearing full of wood-pigeons where all the foxes in Transylvania, and their vixens too, could have been decadently gloved in magenta. The rest of the party arrived, and every boulder and clump of water-weed in the brook seemed to harbour our quarry; the baskets were soon full and we could hear the snapping of their fringed tails as we climbed downhill again. We had left our horses at a water-mill where the carriages had joined them, and now all the horses were grazing unsaddled and unharnessed in a sloping field; a fire was alight already and bottles were cooling in the mill-stream.
The most active of the party had been a pretty and funny girl in a red skirt called Angéla (hard ‘g’ and stress on the second syllable) who lived a few miles upstream from István and a little inland from the river. She was a few years older than I, and married, but not happily. We had caught a glimpse of each other at Count Jenö’s, and danced with improvised abandon on the noisy evening when Dinah and the Gypsy songs had tangled in mid-air; and I couldn’t stop dogging her footsteps. During the hunt, she leaped barefoot about the rocks as nimbly as an ibex, hair flying. As it turned out, she was just as rash and impulsive as I was supposed to be, and prompted, I think, by amused affection on her side and rapt infatuation on mine, a lighthearted affinity had sprung up in a flash. The feast went on late, and abetted by woods and nightfall and the remote part of the forest we had wandered to, all barriers broke down; and we weren’t sure where we were until at last we heard our Christian names being called, and ran to the assembly point where horses were being saddled and traces run through. On the return journey they had to brake hard on the steep grass rides and the lamps slotted on either side of the carriages shed a joggling beam on the tree-trunks.
All had marvellously changed of a sudden and thanks to Angéla’s high spirits everything was gay and comic as well; during the next two nights and days, all unentwined moments seemed a waste. By a stroke of luck, Angéla’s family were in Budapest, but for many reasons, meetings were not easy and we cursed the intervening woods. István was an old friend and of course he saw at once how things were and came to the rescue with an irresistible plan: he would borrow a motor-car from a friend beyond Deva and the three of us would set out on a secret journey to the interior of Transylvania.
I collected my stuff and made my farewells; for after the jaunt I would strike south. The die was cast. The car arrived, the two of us set off, and in a few miles, Angéla jumped in at the appointed place and we drove east rejoicing.
The borrowed vehicle was an old-fashioned, well-polished blue touring car with room for all three in front. It had a canvas hood with a celluloid window in the back and a scarlet rubber bulb which, after a moment’s pressure, reluctantly sent a raucous moo out of a convoluted brass trumpet which echoed down the canyons and gave warning to all the livestock on the road—except buffaloes, when we would follow Count Jenö’s nautical maxim. The roads were not good: the car pitched about the ruts and the potholes like a boat in a choppy sea and the dust of our progress alongside the Maros formed a ghostly cylinder. Hovering in our wake, it rose and enfolded us at every stop and we arrived in the old princely capital of Transylvania like three phantoms.
* * *
The trouble over names, which vexes all these pages, boils over here. The Dacian Apulon became the Latin Apulum, and the place was full of traces of the old Roman colony. But both of these words were silenced when the hushed and muffling spread of the Slavs stifled the old names of Eastern Europe forever. They renamed it Bălgrad—‘the white town’ (one of many), perhaps because of its pale walls—and this white motif caught on. The Saxons called it Weissenburg and later Karlsburg, in honour of the Emperor Charles VI, who built the great eighteenth-century fortress here. The Hungarians had already adopted the notion of whiteness, but another crept in too: the word ‘Julius,’ after a mid-tenth-century Hungarian prince who had visited Constantinople and been baptised there. Gyulaféhervár, they called it, ‘the white city of Gyula.’ The Rumanians stuck to Bălgrad, then adopted the mediaeval Latin name of Alba Iulia.
I wished Count Jenö and the Countess had been with us! She would have told us about Michael the Brave, the Prince of Wallachia who conquered Transylvania in the seventeenth century; and how, by seizing Moldavia as well, he briefly placed the three principalities under one sceptre and, for a single stormy year, anticipated the modern Rumanian kingdom. (It was in commemoration of this that King Ferdinand and Queen Marie were crowned here after the post-war transfer of sovereignty.) When the Count was out of earshot, she would probably have told us how prolonged misrule had culminated in 1784 in a Rumanian jacquerie of fire and slaughter and many horrors, ended by the breaking on the wheel of two of the leaders before the castle gate. Count Jenö, meanwhile, would have led us off to the cathedral, as István did. The old Romanesque building had been badly damaged by the Tatars and magnificently built up again in the late gothic style by John Hunyadi; we were among pointed arches once more. The whole city was steeped in Transylvanian history; it had become particularly famous in the era following the defeat at Mohács. The Great Hungarian Plain had been reduced to a Turkish pashalik and the north-western remnant beyond the Danube was claimed by the Emperor Charles V’s brother, King Ferdinand. Transylvania, the remaining third of the mangled kingdom, survived as the stronghold of a rival monarch, King John Zápolya; and when he died the resolute Queen Dowager, Isabella of Poland, kept the shrinking eastern part of the realm together; her son, John Sigismund, was the last Hungarian king-elect. Then nothing of it remained but Transylvania, and, when the young king died, these eastern dominions, a huge isolated province now, became a Principality which only managed to fend off Habsburg claims by accepting a shadowy vassaldom to the Ottoman Empire. Then, for more than a century, an extraordinary procession of Transylvanian princes followed each other until the Reconquest put an end to it in 1711, and Transylvania was once more part of Hungary; reassembled and redeemed, indeed, but a Habsburg kingdom.
Queen Isabella and John Sigismund were entombed under the vaults, as were John Hunyadi and his son Lászlo, who was beheaded in Buda; also the Apafi and the Bocskay princes, and the assassinated Cardinal Martinuzzi. The fine bishop’s palace, a peaceful warren of ochre-coloured walls, and the shade of the chestnut trees, turned this part of the city into a Transylvanian Barchester. (Later, in the eighteenth century, the Bishop Count Batthyány gave the town a magnificent library of precious books, including one of the earliest manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied.) The great Gabriel Bethlen had been another benefactor and founded an Academy.[1] Married to the sister of the Elector of Brandenburg, he was one of the most active of this succession of princes, a powerful westward-looking Protestant leader in the Thirty Years’ War, and an ally of the Elector Palatine, the Winter Queen and Gustavus Adolphus.
The earlier of the Rákóczi princes were also champions of the Reformation. To strengthen the cause by the dynastic support of England and the Palatinate—and perhaps of Bohemia regained—Sigismund, brother of George Rákóczi II, married the Winter Queen’s daughter, Henrietta. So, for much of this strange period, Transylvania was not only a fortress of Hungarian liberties, but a refuge for the various Protestant sects that took root there; it was also a sort of golden age for the humanities. The Saxon part of the population followed Luther, the Hungarians adopted the Calvinism which was in the ascendant just over the border at Debrecen, while Unitarians of various kinds prospered; all of them out of anti-Habsburg feeling and in reaction to Jesuit intransigence. The princes contrived to impose a remarkable degree of tolerance between the jarring churches. Sectarian fervour fell short of the passionate feelings that prevailed in Poland and Austria, and, even today, confessional rivalry was less acute. (István—though his personal leanings were strongly towards Catholicism—had been christened a Protestant like his father while his sister Ilona, like their mother, was Catholic. This arrangement with the children of mixed marriages was not uncommon in these parts.)
* * *
Down a side turning a few miles further north, much was afoot. The path to the village ahead was noisy with farmyard sounds and when we had breasted the livestock and a barrage of dust clouds, costumes from a score of villages crowded in. Booths were laden with studded leather belts, sheepskin jackets, blouses, kerchiefs and black and white conical fleece hats; there were girths, bits, stirrups, harness, knives, sickles, scythes and festoons of brass and iron sheep-bells bright from the forge; also, icons framed in tinsel for the Orthodox and bunches of rosaries for Catholics; strings of garlic and onions, incendiary green and red spikes of paprika; ashen helves, rakes, hay-forks, crooks, staves, troughs, churns, yokes, flails, carved flutes and wooden cutlery like those the Gypsies whittled in István’s courtyard. Pots and jugs and large pitchers for carrying on the shoulder or the head were assembled by the hundred, rows of shoes stood alternately at attention and at ease, and clusters of canoe-toed rawhide moccasins were strung up by their thongs. I bought Angéla a pocket-knife and an orange kerchief for the dust and she gave me a yard or two of red and yellow braid for a sash, three inches wide and shorn from a great cartwheel coil. We drank tzuica out of noggins with tall narrow necks at trestle tables under the acacia trees, striving to hear each other speak; but the animals, the shouting of wares, the bargaining, the fiddles, the shrill reeds, the tambourine and flute of a bear-leader and the siege of Gypsy beggars formed so solid a barrier that we bawled in each other’s ears in vain, then sat beaming and tongue-tied in the variegated light. Jews in black were sprinkled among the white tunics and the bright colours of the peasants. There were Gypsies everywhere: women like tattered mendicant rainbows; suckling infants, though too young for speech, were pitilessly grasping perishers already and the men were wilder-looking than any I had ever seen: dark as quadroons, with tousled beards, matted blue-black locks falling to their shoulders and eyes like maneaters. Drunks lurched in unsteady couples and snored under their carts. Towering hay-wains were drawn up all round with racks expanding in dizzy quadrilaterals: on one of them a nomadic hen, part of a brood roosting overhead, was rashly laying an egg. Carts tilted their shafts in the air in a tangle of diagonals and hundreds of horses of the sturdy Transylvanian breed fidgeted and whinnied and snorted on the outskirts of the village. The place might have been a Tatar camp; and beyond the thatched roofs and the leaves, the western mountain-mass of the old principality ascended in steps to a jagged skyline.
* * *
“What a pity we’ve so little time!”
Driving us deeper into the tilting central plateau, István waved towards the overlap of ranges and told us of the wonders we were missing. There were old Roman salt-mines, worked to this day by convicts, which tunnelled into the heart of the mountains, twisting and zigzagging as they went, and sending echoes from wall to wall until they died away in the distance. One gallery flung the echo back sixteen times; renewed shouts deeper inside set the whole interior of the massif ringing with mad thunder. Every stream and river that branched away offered new marvels: deep limestone clefts, measureless caverns elaborated with arches and arcades and freak natural windows: unseen brooks that roared in the darkness and caverns where the stalactites and stalagmites strove towards each other or clenched indissolubly in wasp-waisted pillars; castles soared and old villages sacked by the Mongols still fell to pieces among gloomy forests where the Rumanian shepherds called to each other and to their flocks with metal-bound horns of linden-wood several yards long, like those that boom across Alpine meadows and the pastures of Tibet.
The wide main street of Turda—or Torda—reminded me of Honiton. “They’re all cobblers and tanners and potters,” said István, “and lots of them are Socinians.” Angéla asked what Socinians were and, for once, I was able to enlarge: I had looked them up in Count Jenö’s library. They were a sect of Unitarians which had sprung up in this part of the world and were named after a Sienese family of theologians, the Sozzini; they took their name, in these particular regions, from one Fausto Sossini, an adventurous nephew of the founder, who wandered to Transylvania from the court of Isabella dei Medici and settled at Kolozsvár in 1578, where his doctrines sank deep heterodox roots. Then he strolled on to Cracow.
“Yes,” said Angéla, “but what do they believe in?”
“Well,” István said doubtfully, “they don’t believe in the Trinity for a start.”
“Oh?” After half a second’s doctrinal pondering she said, “Silly asses,” and István and I laughed.
We strayed into the Calvinist church. The old building was as severe as a conventicle, with the Decalogue inscribed in Magyar over the Communion table. As in an English parish church, the numbers of last Sunday’s hymns were framed in wood on a pillar by the tall pulpit. The only decorative things were the fine baroque pews: they were painted light green and picked out in gold, as though the pastors were determined the Catholics shouldn’t have it all their own way. Three middle-aged sisters, with faces like pippins under their coifs, were polishing the pews with vigour, tidying prayer books and hymnals on the ledges and banging the dust out of hassocks.
* * *
We were storming and bucketing through the land of Canaan. Rows of beehives, brought up for the summer, were aligned by the edge of the woods. The slopes were striped with vines and scattered with sheaves and ricks, and chaff from threshing mingled with the dust. Flocks and herds were beginning to throw longer shadows when we reached a high point with an entire town spread below; and, getting out under the walls of a vigilant eighteenth-century citadel, we gazed across an untidy fall of roofs. At the bottom bridges spanned a riverbend to an older part of the city the other side. It was Cluj to the Rumanians, Klausenburg to the early Saxon settlers who founded or re-founded it, but, inexpugnably and immutably to the Hungarians, Kolozsvár.[2] Dropping towards the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk. Even the Armenians, who had settled here a couple of centuries ago, sent out a chime and only the synagogues were silent.
As we climbed back into the motor-car, a swarm of small Gypsies rushed on us from caves and shanties, crowded on the running board and the bonnet and entangled us in cries and supplication and a mesh of arms like brown tendrils, which we could only unloose by flinging coins beyond their heads like confetti. Set free in a second, the car slid downhill and across one of the bridges and into the old city.
* * *
Our journey was a secret. The town wasn’t as perilous as it would have been in the winter season, with its parties and theatres and the opera in full blast, but we weren’t supposed to be there, Angéla least of all. István revelled in the clandestine atmosphere and so did we; it gave a stimulating, comic-opera touch to our journey; so we left the conspicuous motor outside our quarters and stole about the town like footpads. István went ahead and peered round corners for fear of bumping into acquaintances; and, sure enough, he suddenly whispered, “About turn!” and shepherded us into an ironmonger’s and colourman’s shop where, backs to the door, we stooped intently over a selection of mousetraps until the danger was past. It was someone he had been at school with in Vienna.
The old city was full of town-houses and palaces, most of them empty now, with their owners away for the harvest. Thanks to this, István had telephoned and borrowed a set of handsome vaulted rooms in one of them, not far from the house where Matthias Corvinus was born.
There was much evidence of his reign. In the great market square, a magnificent equestrian statue showed the king in full armour, surrounded by his knights and commanders, while armfuls of crescented and horse-tailed banners were piled as trophies at his feet. Only Matthias Rex was incised on the plinth—no need of Hungariae when it was set up—and Rumanians as well as Hungarians could rightly feel pride of kinship. Most of the names associated with the place were straight out of the novels of Jókai, and we had a quick look at the baroque arcades and books and treasures in the splendid Bánffy palace. I wonder whether I am right in remembering that Liszt gave recitals there? I think Don Giovanni was sung in Hungarian in the triple-named city even earlier than in Budapest. We entered the great Catholic church of St. Michael—a Gothic building which had looked enormous from the citadel—just as everyone was streaming out from Vespers, and the dusk indoors, lit only by flickering racks of tapers, looked vaster still, and umbrageously splendid; the clustered piers of the nave soared with no hindering capitals to halt the upward flight of the eye, then tilted over to join each other, form lancets and lose themselves in a brackeny network of liernes and groined vaulting and shadow.
An hotel at the end of the main square, called the New York—a great meeting place in the winter season—drew my companions like a magnet. István said the barman had invented an amazing cocktail—only surpassed by the one called ‘Flying’ in the Vier Jahreszeiten bar in Munich—which it would be criminal to miss. He stalked in, waved the all-clear from the top of some steps, and we settled in a strategic corner while the demon-barman went mad with his shaker. There was nobody else in the bar; it was getting late and the muffled lilt of the waltz from Die Fledermaus hinted that everyone was in the dining-room. We sipped with misgiving and delight among a Regency neo-Roman décor of cream and ox-blood and gilding: Corinthian capitals spread their acanthus leaves and trophies of quivers, and hunting horns, lyres and violins were caught up with festoons between the pilasters. Our talk, as we sipped, ran on secrecy and disguise. “Perhaps I should pretend to have toothache,” Angéla said, after the second cocktail, and wrapped the new kerchief round her head in a concealing bandage; “or,” holding it stretched across her face below the eyes, “wear a yashmak. Or simply cover the whole thing up.” She wrapped her head in the kerchief and tied it in a bow on top like a Christmas pudding. The barman imperturbably set down a third round of glasses and then vanished just as Angéla re-emerged, shaking her hair loose, to find the drinks there as though by magic. I suggested the helmet of darkness of Perseus. István thought Siegfried’s Tarnhelm would be better still; then she could not only become invisible but turn into someone else: King Carol, Greta Garbo, Horthy, Mussolini and Groucho Marx were suggested, then the Prince of Wales, Jack Dempsey, Queen Marie and Charlie Chaplin; Laurel and Hardy, perhaps; one of the two; she would have to choose, but she insisted on both.
This led to talk of seeing double; the drinks were beginning to work. We left, walking with care and suitable stealth, and on air; then dived into a hooded carriage that would have been a sleigh in winter and clip-clopped to a discreet Gypsy restaurant outside the town, returning to our fine vaulted quarters fired with paprika and glissandoes.
* * *
How exhilarating it was next morning to be woken by the discord of reciprocally schismatic bells while the half-shuttered July sunlight scattered stripes across the counterpane! Furred and frogged, the magnates on the walls of the breakfast room surveyed us with their hands serenely crossed on the hilts of their scimitars. We looked at them in turn and admired the many tiers of emblazoned bindings. Heralded by fumes, a very old retainer in a baize apron brought coffee and croissants from a distant part of the house and talked to us as we spread and dipped and sipped; and his tidings from the night before unloosed a long moment of gloom: Dollfuss had been assassinated by the Nazis. But, as with the June purge a month earlier, our mood was such that the gloom didn’t last much longer than breakfast: it all seemed such a long way to the west. But it was only five months since I had seen the small Chancellor leading that dismal procession in Vienna, after the February troubles. I hadn’t even heard of Cluj or Klausenburg or Kolozsvár then. But Transylvania had been a familiar name as long as I could remember. It was the very essence and symbol of remote, leafy, half-mythical strangeness; and, on the spot, it seemed remoter still, and more fraught with charms. Under their sway, we were impervious to omens, and the spell of comedy, adventure and delight that surrounded our journey would have needed something still more drastic and closer at hand to break it.
Our euphoria was complete. It followed us all day along dark canyons and tilted woods and steep grazings and down into a valley where the serpentine haze of willows and poplars marked the windings of the Maros once again; and soon a subtle change came over the towns and villages, not in the landscape—that was changing all the time—but in the inhabitants.
There had been plenty of Hungarian spoken in the few Transylvanian towns I had seen, and, among the Swabians of Arad, German too; but in the villages and the country, Rumanian had been almost universal. Now all at once the drovers watering their horses at the wooden troughs, the peasants in the fields, the shepherds nursing their crooks under the trees and the fishermen flinging their nets over the river were all speaking Magyar. We were among Szeklers, the Hungarians of Transylvania, half a million and more, who inhabit a great enclave of the eastern and southern Carpathians. It was this geographical position, isolated in a sea of Rumanians, which placed the ethnological problem beyond solution.
Some say the Szeklers are the oldest established inhabitants of the province; the Rumanians, as we know, fiercely contest this. The Szeklers were wrongly thought, in earlier times—like the Magyars themselves, indeed, but very much later—to have descended from the Huns. Others held that when Charlemagne swept the Avars from the Great Plain some of them might have landed up in these mountains. Or, it was wondered, could they be the offspring of the bellicose Kabars, a splinter-tribe that had joined the Magyars—later forming part of the vanguard of Arpad’s host—during their cloudy sojourn in the Khazar empire? The most recent theory, I think, supports their Magyar beginnings: somehow they became separated from the main tribes when they moved west from Bessarabia with the Pechenegs at their heels; they must have made their way straight through the nearest passes to their present habitat, while the others pursued their more roundabout paths to the Great Plain. If this were so, the expanding Magyars, when they moved eastwards again and into Transylvania, would have found their Szekler kinsmen already settled. There is convincing evidence that the early Hungarian kings established or confirmed them along the Carpathian border as permanent frontiersmen, on the watch for the inroads of later barbarians; and there is nothing incompatible in the two last theories. At any rate, all through the Dark and Middle Ages they were the wardens and the light-horsemen of the eastern march, and in battle, when the main Hungarian cavalry took the field in full armour, they stuck to the fleet Parthian tactics of their nomad past. The Hungarians, the Szeklers and the Saxons were largely self-governing under the Hungarian crown, and many of the Szeklers, even if they were moccasin-shod and still signed their names with their thumbs, were ennobled en masse; all three nations—or rather, their leaders and nobles—had a voice in the councils of Transylvania.[3]
* * *
The motor-car crept through the waggons and the cattle of the metropolis of the Szeklers and, by the sounds in our ears, we might have been in the heart of a Hungarian country town. Târgu-Mures,—still Márosvasarhély to its inhabitants—was in the throes of yet another market-day. I thought I discerned, without any prompting, a different cast of feature—something simultaneously blunter and more angular about brow and cheek and chin—that corresponded to the change of language. There was a difference of costume, too, though the actual details have slipped away. Rawhide shoes and thongs were common to all, with the fleece headgear and the low-crowned black felt hat. But all along my itinerary the chief difference between country Hungarians and Rumanians had been the wide-skirted tunic or shirt, caught in by a wide belt, which the Rumanians wore outside their trousers. Both dressed in white homespun linen, but the Hungarians’ shirts always buttoned tightly at the throat; their trousers were unusually wide from the waist down and sometimes pleated, which almost gave them the look of long skirts. Gatya Hosen, István called them; these were often replaced by loose black breeches and shiny knee-boots. But here the peasants, almost to a man, wore narrow white homespun trews like tights stitched together out of felt. Across the Hungarian plain and in Transylvania, the women’s clothes had been varying all the time. Each village and valley enjoined a different assembly of colours and styles: braids, tunics, lace, ribands, goffering, ruffs, sashes, caps, kerchiefs, coifs and plaits free or coiled: a whole array of details announced whether they were betrothed, brides, married, spinsters or widows. Sometimes coifs framed these heads like spathe and spadix; among Saxons, they shot up in stiff scarlet cylinders. There were bodices, flowing or panelled sleeves, embroidery, gold coins at brow or throat or both, aprons front and back, a varying number of petticoats and skirts jutting at the hips like farthingales, and occasionally these were accompanied by coloured Russian boots. This village finery gave all gatherings a festal air, especially as the level of beauty among Hungarian and Rumanian girls was very high. Populations were inclined to remain aloof; but the more they overlapped and mingled—Magyar, Rumanian, Serb, Slovak, Saxon, Swabian and sometimes Armenian and perhaps some Ruthenes in the north—the more striking they looked.[4] Their everyday dress was a sober version of their gala outfits; but these exploded on feast-days and at weddings in ravishing displays. Clothes were still emblematic, and not only among peasants: an expert in Rumanian and Hungarian symbols, looking at the passers-by in a market-place—a couple of soldiers, a captain in the Ros, iori, an Ursuline prioress, a sister of St. Vincent de Paul, a Poor Clare, an Hasidic rabbi, an Armenian deacon, an Orthodox nun, a Uniat archimandrite, a Calvinist pastor, an Augustinian canon, a Benedictine, a Minorite friar, a Magyar nobleman, an ostrich-feathered coachman, a shrill-voiced Russian cab-driver, a bear-leading Gypsy with his spoon-carving fellow-tribesmen, a wool-carder, a blacksmith, a drover, a chimney-sweep, a woodman or a waggoner, and above all, women from a dozen villages and ploughmen and shepherds from widely scattered valleys and highlands—would have been able to reel off their provenances as swiftly as a herald glancing along the flags and surcoats of a fourteenth-century battle.
Next to a huge church in the market-place, a Gypsy presided over nests of baskets. Angéla bought one, and when she had filled it with bottles and other good things at the shops and stalls, we crept through the throng in bottom gear, and, once away from the town, drove a few miles and climbed till we reached the edge of a steep mown field above the river. The engine, as we drew up, disturbed a heron. It rose above the trees below and flew away over the fields.
“How quickly they get up in the air!” Angéla said. “No fuss, like swans.”
“Ah!” István said, “that’s because they have air-pockets in their bones,” and we watched it growing smaller in the distance.
We picnicked under an oak. The mountains that rumbled away to the north and the east were a mass of canyons and forests: full of bears, István told us. Crown Prince Rudolph and his circle—or was it the insatiable Franz Ferdinand?—had shot sixty during his various sojourns there. István, when we asked him if any were left, said, “It’s teeming with them.” He too had stalked in those never-ending conifers. There were wolves too. The cubs would be growing up just about now.
Finding we had run out of cigarettes, István shook off his postprandial torpor and drove back to the town. We wandered down to the river and bathed and dawdled there, lying on the grass, dallying and embracing and then watching the dragonflies darting through sunbeams which the willow branches caught and split into threads while our sleepy lashes re-fragmented them in prismatic sheaves. We got back to the oak tree at the very moment the car came snorting uphill. István told us he had run into an old fellow-hussar and couldn’t get away, and we teased him about being so popular. He said he wished he’d been down to bathe; then murmured to me, “Not much point, though, now the reaping’s finished.”
* * *
We gave a lift to an old woman who was gingerly carrying a large covered pudding-basin. I asked her, through István, if she were a Szekler, and she said, “No, just a Magyar.” Her face, mobled in a widow’s coif under an enormously wide hat of plaited straw, was like an axe. When Angéla asked what was inside the basin so carefully poised on her knees, she said: “Feel,” and lifted a corner of the cloth. Angéla knelt on the seat, faced backwards, slipped her hand in and gave a small gasp of surprise. The old woman laughed toothlessly and they both told me to try, so I did and discovered with a start a mass of fluffy warm moving bodies which became audible when the cloth was taken off. The basin was full of newly-hatched ducklings and when she got out she offered us a few in thanks for the lift, but dashed indoors and came back with three glasses of szilvorium instead.
It was getting late. We left the river, struck south and followed a vile road upstream beside another river—the Kokel?[5]—then south again through pastures and stubble fields where gleaners were stooping among low sunbeams and shadows. It was a pacific Samuel Palmer land of hills and woods and fields patterned with sheaves; pyramid-hayricks threw spears of shadow downhill; cattle and flocks were going home haloed in dust. Once more, there was something different about the landscape and villages, it was hard to say what. Tiles were taking the place of thatch; walls, with a gabled farmhouse along one flank, enclosed wide yards, and gateways pierced them with flattened arches tall enough for laden carts to drive through. Order and trimness prevailed.
Beyond the mountains to the north and east, clouds had been arranging themselves in a disturbing array, flocculent and still at first, then fidgety with summer lightning. The electricity dancing about among these heaps of vapour turned them blue-green and silver and mauve and in a shudder and a split second they would become transparent or bulbous or as thin as stage wings: scenic effects like magnesium, as though an atmospheric clown or a harlequin were loose in the hills. This restless sequence of scene-shifts began with nightfall; then the rising of the eighth full moon of this journey made an hallucination of the sky and up into the middle of it, straight ahead, a vertiginous triangle of steep roofs, spikes, tree-tops and battlemented cliffs rose like a citadel in an illuminated psalter.
“Look!” István and Angéla exclaimed. “Segesvár!” A Rumanian would have cried “Sighis, oara!”; but a descendant of the builders of that high place would have said “Schässburg!”
* * *
Like Transylvania in the West, the Magyar and Rumanian names of the province—Erdély and Ardeal—both mean something to do with forests. But the German name is Siebenburgen, and the word conjures up seven fortresses, each with three names; I shrink from inflicting the full twenty-one.
What happened was this. When the early Kings of Hungary, notably Géza II in the twelfth century, found this region—according to the Hungarian chronicles—deserted, they summoned colonies of ‘Saxon’ settlers from the Middle and Lower Rhine, some from Flanders, and others, it is said, from the Mosel, and even a few Walloons. They tilled the land and built the towns, often, as here, on ancient Dacian sites; these are the Burgen in question, and in time the growing constellations of their farms and villages dovetailed with the regions of the Szeklers and Hungarians and Rumanians. A century later, threatened by the westward sweep of the Cumans, Andrew II summoned the Crusading order of the Teutonic Knights from the Holy Land; he granted them a stretch of country round Kronstadt; but when the Knights sought to make it independent and then present it to the Pope, the King drove them out. Moving north they settled along the Vistula and founded the warlike state which later turned into East Prussia; and soon they were breaking lances beside the Masurian lakes and harrying Lithuanians among the Baltic floes.
On the spot, meanwhile, their peaceful ‘Saxon’ forerunners flourished. And there they had remained, over two hundred thousand of them, and they soon became the most advanced community in Transylvania. They cultivated the land round their walled farmhouses and their manifold crafts brought prosperity. Gothic churches rose, steeples soared, vaulted cellars burrowed the rocks and battlements girded them about. Their spoken dialect strayed a little from that of their countrymen in the West, but no further than a regional dialect should; and later, when the Reformation found its way to the Carpathians, feelings of tribal solidarity prompted them to adopt Luther’s teaching. (It was a recoil, too, from the Socinian dogma, which had begun to affect the Hungarian Calvinists.) To a remarkable degree, these settlements followed the line of evolution of the German towns and villages in the West: the same burgher and artisan way of life prevailed, very different in style from Magyar dash and vainglory and the self-sufficient stubbornness of the Szeklers and the smouldering pastoral diligence of the Rumanians. Seemly, and in tune with the sober assiduity and substance of the inhabitants, a solid and sometimes splendid provincial baroque architecture sprang up; theologians and teachers emerged; and I wonder if I was right (on later visits) to compare them to Puritan settlers in the New World? Anyway, the blue eyes, flaxen hair and Teutonic speech that I met in those arcades and market-places could just as well have belonged a thousand miles to the west. Nobody has ever confused them with later Germanic settlers in re-conquered Hungary—the Arad Swabians, for instance. It seemed a miracle that they and their towns and hamlets and their skills and their language should have weathered the past eight centuries of commotion with so little damage. They are called ‘Transylvanian Saxons’—‘Sassen,’ in dialect. Nobody quite knows why, for they had nothing to do with Saxony. Could it have been the loose regional word for ‘German’ at some stage of the Middle Ages; in the time of the Saxon emperors, perhaps—Henry the Fowler, the Ottos, or Henry the Saint? Or later, under Richard Coeur de Lion’s brother-in-law, Henry the Lion?
I had always known the name of this region from hearing as a child, when the Pied Piper of Hamelin was read aloud, how the children of Hamelin were piped into a mountain chasm to re-emerge in the Carpathians:
In Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterranean prison
Into which they had been trepanned
Long time ago, in a mighty band,
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why they don’t understand.
The very cleft, the Almasch cave from which they emerged at the other end, is still pointed out. It is a bat-haunted cavern about forty leagues due east of Schässburg as the crow flies. The story defining the children as Brunswickers would make them specifically Saxons.[6]
It was too far from Angéla’s and István’s haunts for danger of chance meetings, so we strolled instead of skulking about the high-perched streets of the citadel. We gazed down at the moonlit landscape and up at the metalled and shingled spires and watched the hands of an old clock over an archway where a jerky figurine emerged and struck the hour. The town blazed with moonlight but beyond the glimmer of the distant ranges, the eastern sky was still restless with summer lightning. We put up at an inn with gables and leaded windows in a square lifted high above the roofs and the triple cincture of the town wall and dined at a heavy oak table in the Gastzimmer. The glasses held a cool local wine that washed down trout caught that afternoon, and every sight and sound—the voices, the wine-glasses, the stone mugs and the furniture shining with the polish of a couple of centuries—brought it closer to a Weinstube by the Rhine or the Necker. When István retired, Angéla and I sat on in the great smokey room holding hands, deeply aware that it was the last night but one of our journey. There are times when hours are more precious than diamonds. The gable-windows upstairs surveyed a vision of great unreality. The moon had triumphed over the mute fireworks to the east and the north and all the dimensions had been re-shuffled. We leant on the sill and when Angéla turned her head, her face was bisected for a moment, one half silver, the other caught by the gold glow of lamplight indoors.
* * *
“Petöfi was killed somewhere in the fields over there,” István had said. Tsar Nicholas I had sent an army to help the eighteen-year-old Franz-Josef when the Hungarians, rising in revolt under Kossuth, fought a war of independence which they very nearly won. The conflict moved to Transylvania. Segesvár was one of the last battles of the campaign. Petöfi, a devoted admirer of Shakespeare and Byron, was an attractive, passionate, bohemian figure and, many think, Hungary’s greatest poet. He was twenty-six when he fell after fighting with reckless bravery all through the war.
But, in Rumanian annals, Sighis, oara is singled out, in the middle of the fifteenth century, by a strange and perplexing figure; except for one foible, he would have entered history as a hero. Vlad III of Wallachia, sprung from the great Basarab dynasty, was the great-grandson of Radu the Black, grandson of the warrior prince Mircea the Old and son of Vlad the Dragon—so called, it is thought, because the Emperor Sigismund, his overlord, ally and enemy, had hung the Order of the Dragon round his neck. Given as a hostage to the Sultan when he was a boy, the third Vlad mounted the Wallachian throne later on and fought against the Turks with energy and skill. Chastisement for his success lay with the Sultan, Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. But the march of this punitive army was suddenly halted by an unspeakably terrible scene: a wide valley, that is, populated by many thousands of Turkish and Bulgarian corpses from the year before, transfixed on a forest of spikes and rotting in mid-air, with the Sultan’s general ceremoniously robed on the tallest spike of all. The Sultan, whose aquiline features and snowy globular turban we know from Bellini’s painting and the engraving by Pisanello, had been brought up on blood, like a falcon: he recoiled in horror—some say in respect for the ruthlessness of his rebellious vassal—and burst into tears. For Vlad’s lifelong foible was impaling. Many contemporary woodcuts show the Prince feasting in Carpathian glens, like a shrike in his larder, among groves of skewered foes.
In Rumania he has always been known as Vlad Tsepesh—‘the Impaler’—but to foreigners, with his father, Vlad the Dragon (‘Vlad Dracul’) in mind, he was ‘the son of the Dragon.’ (‘Dragon’ in Rumanian is Dracu and the final ‘l’ is ‘the.’ Hence the outland ‘Drakola,’ ‘Drakule’ and the like, a word never heard on Rumanian lips, indeed, an improperly formed one based on the just-possible ‘Draculea,’ i.e. ‘Dragon’s son.’)
It was the alien and dragonish trisyllable, coupled with a vague bloodthirsty aura, which gave Bram Stoker the idea for a vampire ‘Count Dracula,’ flying through the night in a white tie and tails and burying his fangs in his victims’ throats; and in recent decades, only Tarzan has outstripped him in film popularity. The fact that Transylvania is a region of castles, forests, counts and vampires, and that some confused strands of local history have managed to tangle themselves into the novel’s local colour, has always (for me) set it beyond charm’s reach. People who should know better exploit the confusion between the two figures and when ‘Dracula’s Castle’ is pointed out to a charabanc-load of tourists, I suspect that it is not the historical figure that appears before their minds’ eye—the Prince in his plumed head-dress: the exorbitant glance, the sweeping moustache, the bear’s fur and clasps and stars, the long hair and flanged mace and the palissade of cumbered stakes—but a natty Count in an opera-hat, a satin-lined cape and a queer look about his incisors; someone who might equally well be advertising after-shave lotion, teaching the tango or sawing a boxed lady in half at a matinée.
Back to Sighis, oaraa! Back to Segesvár! Above all, here, back to Schässburg!
* * *
Many years later, climbing the marvellous covered stairway that leads to the first platform of the Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon, I stopped half-way and tried to remember what this steep ascent called to mind; and, in a moment, I was back a couple of decades and climbing a windy staircase under beams and shingle and a steep wooden roof in Transylvania. The Saxon steps lifted us to the town’s grassy summit, whose battlements in the sky encompassed leaning gravestones, tall trees and an old gothic church. A roof as steep as a barn’s, with all the semicircular scales discoloured by lichen, rose from the mottled walls; and indoors airy space ascended to a mediaeval web of vaults. There were pointed arches once again and lancets, trefoils and cusps, and in the chancel, traces of fresco three-quarters flaked away, a crucifixion or a transfiguration, perhaps: the exact memory has dropped away too. Armorial tombstones were piled at random under the bell-sallies, and the organ must have broken down, for somebody practising on a harmonium rumbled and wheezed in the gallery. The theme of the Danube School altarpiece has dimmed as well. ‘A marvellous mixture of rough stone,’ my diary says, ‘faded brick and plaster, scalloped doorways, age piled on age, all first rate and all with that untouched, musty feeling one treasures.’ I thought it was a Catholic church at first, but the absence of sanctuary lamps and the Stations of the Cross hinted otherwise. So it was Lutheran, and much less bleak and stripped than Calvinist and Unitarian interiors. There were other hints. Pews, as opposed to chairs, seemed a distinguishing mark of the Reform.
We sat in one of these and Angéla idly picked a prayer-book from the ledge and opened it haphazard. “Oh look!” The dog-eared pages had fallen open at a passage marked with a skeleton leaf where the faded black-letter spelled out a prayer of intercession for ‘unser wohlbeliebter Kaiser Franz-Josef.’ But there was no mention of Elizabeth, his beautiful Queen-Empress. She must already have been assassinated at the landing-stage in Geneva; and no mention of their son, Crown Prince Rudolph who, after shooting all those bears in the mountains which we could just see through the diamond-panes, had kept the last round for himself at Mayerling. There was no date, only the owner’s name in faded ink. We wondered later whether it could have been published after his next heir, the Hungary-hating Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, had been murdered at Sarajevo. (1898, 1889 and 1914—mark these grim dates.) Nor, as far as I can remember, could we find the name of Archduke Charles, Franz-Josef’s successor and last Emperor of all. But for this, the closing date for the Prayer Book might have fallen just before the Emperor’s lonely death in 1916, when the requiems and the salutes and the tolling bells must have been drowned among the unceremonial gunfire of half a dozen battle-fronts: salvoes which two years later were to bring the diadem of the Caesars and the apostolic crown of Hungary and the sceptres and the crowns of Bohemia and Croatia—indeed a whole Empire—tumbling among the ruins. “Poor old man,” Angéla said, putting the prayer book back on its ledge.
Beyond the gravestones outside, the highest of the three town walls looped downhill with battlements spaced out between jutting towers, several of which were choked with storks’ nests. Swags of elderflower burst over the crenellations and we peered down and watched the swifts flying in and out of holes in the masonry. The level sward outside the west door of the church dropped in green waves of mingled forest and churchyard where the names of weavers, brewers, vintners, carpenters, merchants, and pastors—some of them ending in a Latin ‘us,’ like those of sixteenth-century humanists—were incised on generations of headstones and obelisks in obsolete German spelling. Under a scurry of clouds and suspended above hills and fields and a twisting river-bed, maintenance and decay were at grips in one of the most captivating churchyards in the world.
The organist had come down to see who we were. He pointed out a sturdy tower at the bottom. “You see that?” he said, polishing steel-rimmed spectacles and putting them on. “Three hundred years ago, a Turkish army marched up the valley, bent on sacking the town. It was commanded by a merciless general called Ali Pasha, ein schrecklicher Mann! Some Schässburgers had barricaded themselves in the tower and one of them aimed his arquebus at him, and—boom!—down he came.” A looping parabola with his forefinger showed that somersaulting fall. “He was on an elephant.”
“?”
“Yes.” His spectacles flashed like window panes. “An elephant. The citizens fell on the attackers, the Turks fled, the town was saved.”
Hardly were the words out of his mouth when a wind wrapped itself round the tall wooded cone. There had been a warning rush and a flutter. Then all at once the branches were banging about, hitting each other like boxers, and dust and pollen flew from the boughs in a twisting yellow cloud. Grass flattened twirling and forking into channels, every poplar in the valley shuddered from root to tip like a Malay kris and the loosened hay-ricks moulted in spirals. Husks, chaff, straw, petals, young twigs, last year’s leaves and nosegays scattered out of the jam-jars on the graves were rushing up the slope in a gale which tossed the dishevelled birds about the air. The clouds had darkened, a volley of drops fell and we and the organist sheltered from the downpour under a clump of chestnuts. It stopped just as abruptly and we found ourselves, as a rainbow formed and dissolved again in a momentary foxes’ wedding, looking down, as though through a magnifying glass, at a world of hills and meadows and the flash of a river and an upheaval of distant ranges. Outraged cawing and twittering filled the branches and the air was adrift with the scent of pollen, roses, hay and wet earth.
* * *
Uplands of holt and hanger soon put this pinnacle out of sight as we drove south through vineyards and hop fields. It was a solemn sweep of country with snug hamlets tucked among woods by the banks of rivers. When we asked what they were called, the villagers always gave a Saxon name—Schaas, Trappold, Henndorf, Niederhausen. (Experts find a kinship between the layout of these settlements and villages in mediaeval Franconia, when that region stretched far across Germany to the west and the north; and it seems that kinship between the Transylvanian Saxon dialect and the speech of the Franks of the Mosel bears this out.) They were built in a rustic farmyard style with flattened cart entrances, shingled lych-gates, hipped roofs and rows of gables that gave on the village street. The masonry was sound, made to last and adorned here and there with a discreet and rather daring frill of baroque. At the heart of each village, sturdy churches reared squat, four-sided steeples with a tough, defensive look. We pulled up in the little market-town of Agnetheln near a church as massive as a small bastille. Pierced by arrow-slits, the walls rose sheer, then expanded in machicolations; and, above these, rows of short uprights like squat pillars formed galleries that hoisted pyramids of steeple. They were as full of purpose as bits of armour and the uprights between steeple and coping gave the triangular roofs a look of helmets with nasal pieces and eye-slits. All the churches were similarly casqued.
We were looking at the one in front of us from our bench outside an inn. At the next table a wheelwright, curly with shavings and with sawdust on sandy eyebrows, had just left his workshop for a drink. He sat with one arm round a lint-haired daughter who stood between his knees and silently drank us in through limpid blue eyes. “What do you think of it?” he asked us in German.
“Ein feste Burg,” István appositely replied. A safe stronghold.
“It had to be,” the wheelwright commented, and I wondered why. None of the churches since crossing the Hungarian and the Rumanian frontiers had worn this fierce look; but then, none had been so old. Yet there had never been sectarian strife in these parts on the scale of France, Ireland, Northern Europe and the Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. Had it been to protect them from the Turks? The wheelwright shrugged. Yes, against the Turks; but there had been worse than they.
“Who?”
He and István answered in unison.
“Tataren!”
I understood, or thought I did: the armoured churches must have sprung up after the onslaught of the Tatars of Batu Khan; those Mongols, that is, who had laid the Kingdom in ashes, burnt churches and castles, massacred many thousands and led whole populations captive. The devastation of Batu and his sudden return to Karakorum, when the death of Kublai’s heir had put the Mongol succession at hazard, took place in 1241. What a mercy they never came back!
“Never came back?” The wheelwright’s glass of wine stopped half-way to his lips and returned to the oak; and I realised, as I listened to him and to István, what gaps yawned in the past three months’ mugging up in country-house libraries. The last Turco-Tatar raid didn’t get as far as most of its predecessors, but it had taken place as recently as 1788; and in the vast period between 1241 and 1788, smaller raids by the Tatars and other marauding bands had been endemic. Most of them came from the Tatar settlements on the Budjak steppe in southern Bessarabia. (They must have been an offshoot of the Nogai, or Krim Tatars. After Tamerlane had destroyed the Golden Horde, the remainder, under the Girai descendants of Jenghiz Khan—probably more Turkic than Mongol by now—had founded an independent Khanate in the Crimea, and another in Kazan.) These raiders would ride across Moldavia, penetrate the Buzău Pass at the south-east corner of the Carpathians—‘the Tatar Pass,’ as the locals called it—and sweep down on the prosperous Burzenland; (this region near the old Saxon town of Kronstadt[7] was the fief originally bestowed on the Teutonic knights).
But massive church architecture was no defence against a determined attack. At the approach of raiders, the villagers took to the woods and drove their horses and cattle up into the roomy caves of the Carpathians. The whole range is a stalactitic warren; and there they would hide until it was safe to come out and inspect the cinders. Finally, a century or so after the building of the churches, more serious steps were taken: great fortified walls were flung up round them and there they still stand, astonishing circles of stone tiered inside with wooden shelters and reached by ladders that ascend like boxes in a rustic opera house. Each one was the quarters of a different family and in times of trouble they would stock them with salt meat and hams and cheeses against a sudden siege. These defensive rings are amazing, even in a border region that bristles with castles. The raids have left few other traces, except perhaps genetically: people say that the former frequency of rape has stamped some of the villagers of the region with a Mongol look. Others think it may be a passing heirloom of the Cumans before they settled and evaporated on the Great Hungarian Plain.
István looked at his watch and jumped up. A fatherly whisper sent the little girl dashing off to the yard behind his workshop, and, when we were in the motor, she leaned in panting and put a nosegay of roses and tiger-lilies in Angéla’s lap.
* * *
No mechanical vehicle except ours desecrated the quiet of these byeways. For miles we met only cattle and a cart or two drawn by the sturdy local horses. Another village with a spiked church loomed and fell back, and ahead of us, rearing like a wave, the enormous mass of the Carpathians climbed into the sky. It was the highest stretch of the Transylvanian Alps, and the highest peaks are only overtopped by the crests of the High Tatra, far away south of Cracow on the borders of Slovakia and Poland; over three hundred miles north-west, for an eagle bent on a change of peaks. They are also called the Făgărass mountains, the old chronicler’s wild forested region of the Vlachs and the Pechenegs, it had often been a domain of the Princes of Wallachia; like the ranges we saw to the north-east from the Szekler country, it was full of bears and wolves; and the old eponymous town and castle lay at its feet. I had expected a daunting perpendicular stronghold, but, apart from the donjon inside, it turned out to be a massive rectangle of ochre and brick-colour, almost a quarter of a mile square and slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion jutting at each corner. Medallions with indecipherable scutcheons crumbled over a great gate. It was an illustration for Vauban or the middle-distance for a stately battle-painter and crying aloud for a forest of beleaguering tents and cannon-smoke and counter-marching perpendicular groves of packed lances, all seen beneath the foreground hoofs of a frantic dappled charger, pawing the air under a cuirassed seventeenth-century captain, sombre and imperturbable in his moustache and feathered hat, baton on sashed hip. Most suitably, it was the famous Bethlen Gábor who gave the the fortifications their final shape, and its best-known besiegers were the janisseries of Achmet Balibeg against a desperate garrison of five hundred Magyars and Szeklers. I feel that the Ali Pasha, who laid siege to it in 1661, must have been (though I can find no corroboration) the one who came to grief on his elephant at Segesvár.
The moment we had struck the highroad after those hushed Saxon lanes we had run over a nail and had to change a wheel. Once in Făgăras,—Fogaras to István and Angéla—we waited in a garden restaurant by the fortress while it was mended and Angéla went to telephone. István was a little perplexed. Our leisurely mornings and late starts—my and Angéla’s fault—had set our programme back. He had wanted to drive on east to the important old Saxon town of Kronstadt near the Tatars’ Pass, to feast and look at the Black Church there and spend the night. But too little time was left; we would have to think of turning westwards. Then Angéla came back from the telephone with a worried look. The subterfuges and stratagems on which our journey depended were in danger of breakdown; the only remedy was to head westwards, and by train, that very day; eventually she would be travelling much further than either of us could accompany her. István explained the change of plan. A branch line ran through the town, but the journey would involve two changes and long waits and we were appalled by the prospect of these static vigils and the break up of our trio and the anticlimax. While we were talking, a Gypsy mechanic was strapping the mended tyre into its recess at the back of the front mudguard. István’s eyes lit up at the sight, as though inspiration had descended. “We’ll stick to our old plan,” he said, “but make it a day earlier.” Angéla wondered whether we would be cutting it too fine. “You wait and see,” István said, emptying his glass. “To horse!”
We climbed in and started off. When István pressed the scarlet bulb, the brass trumpet let out its melancholy delayed-action moo. “Not quite right for the Third Honvéd Hussars!” Angéla said. We sloughed Făgăras,-Fogaras-Fogarasch like a snake-skin and were soon scorching along the road we had come by until we passed the Agnetheln turning and broke new ground.
The rain-scoured landscape and the flocks of clouds rushing across the sky had made us lower the hood. On our left the huge mass of the mountains heaved itself up in a succession of steep folds. Wooded gorges pierced the foothills and the higher slopes were darkened by scarves of forest until the bare rock emerged in a confusion of rugged humps and peaks. High above, we knew, a score of small lakes and tarns gazed up at the sky and we thought we could discern a glint of snow here and there, but it was too late in the year; it must have been a chance discolouring of the rock. On our right hand the trees which followed the course of the Olt river[8] swayed towards us and veered away many times, half keeping us company until the river twisted due south and coiled away between the chasm that led to the Red Tower Pass. (Once through this great cleft, it broke into the Regat—the pre-war Rumanian kingdom—and began its hundred-and-fifty-mile journey through the southern foothills and across the Wallachian plain, giving its name, on the way, to the whole province of Oltenia; then it flowed into the Danube like every stream in this vast blind-alley of the Carpathians.) A few miles before we lost it, István pointed across the river to a point where a thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey, the oldest gothic building in Transylvania, stood in ruins. “King Matthias suppressed it,” he said, “because of the immorality of the monks.”
“Oh?” Angéla and I said together. “What immorality?”
“I’m not sure,” István answered, then added cheerfully, “everything, I expect”; and the sinful precincts, one with Sodom and the Agapemone, fell behind us stubbornly mouldering in the fields.
Another momentous landmark followed: the battlefield where Michael the Brave of Wallachia had beaten the army of Cardinal Andreas Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, cousin of the Sigismund whose victories against the Turks had ended in abdication and madness. After the battle, some turncoat Szeklers presented Prince Michael with the Cardinal’s mangled head: a sad finish to the great house of Báthory. Their uncle Stephen—Transylvanian Prince, then King of Poland—had prised the armies of Ivan the Terrible out of captured Lithuanian cities and driven him back into Muscovy.
The gentle hills rolling to the north were scattered with Saxon thorpes; then all the villages were filled with Rumanian sounds once again. István charioted us with skill and speed, braking in plenty of time in the village streets for geese to hiss their way across; then shooting forward again. Stretches of road soared up and down like a switchback, swooping into hollows and breasting uphill into new vistas while Angéla lit cigarettes for us all and handed them left and right.
When we approached the outskirts of Hermannstadt—Sibiu—Nagy-Szeben (the last name, of course, is the one he used) István groaned aloud. In the Szekler capital the day before we had clean forgotten to look at the Teleki library; now, in this ancient Saxon town, there was no time to look at anything at all. Churches rose in plenty and fabulous old buildings beckoned; above all, there was the Bruckenthal Palace where the library was packed with manuscripts and incunabula; there was a gallery with room after room of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters. As a tease, István enlarged on these splendours, “Memling, Frans Hals, Rubens...” he said, his hand leaving the steering wheel with an airy flourish.
Angéla said, “You read that in a book.”
“... Titian, Magnasco, Lorenzo Lotto...” he went on; then he described the charm of the inns, the wonders of local Saxon cooking, their skill with sucking pigs and ducks and trout, sighed, “No time! No time!” and drove on down cobbled lanes and across market-places and great flagged squares. We might have been in Austria or Bavaria. Once more, the names over the shops were all Saxon. Zoological and heraldic inn-signs hung from stanchions along massive, shady arcades and no rustic discretion hampered the baroque buildings all round us. Tall casements rose between louvred shutters with twirling hinges; there were triangular and bow-topped pediments and houses plastered yellow and ochre and saffron and green and peach and mauve, and at either end of the serrated roof-trees elliptic mouldings elaborated the crow-steps of the gables; these were pierced by lunettes adorned with flourishes and scrolls, and the serried juts of dormer-windows broke up the steep slants of rose-coloured tile. It was the perfect urban counterpart to the rustic masonry of the villages. Half-timbered buildings appeared, stalwart towers barred with string courses were faced with the gilded numbers of clock-dials, crowned with onion-domes of tile or sulphur-green copper and finally topped with spikes fitted with weathercock pennants. All the upper storeys were buoyed on a froth of unpollarded mulberries and chestnut trees. Angéla had never been there before either, and our excitement and frustration ran deep; and as the motor-car threaded its way through a maze of stalls and cart-horses, a new thought smote: as far as my journey went, these houses and streets and towers were the last outposts of an architectural world I was leaving for good.
The reader may think I am lingering too long over these pages. I think so too, and I know why: when we reached our destination in an hour or two, we would have come full cycle. It wasn’t only an architectural world, but the whole sequence of these enchanted Transylvanian months that would come to a stop. I was about to turn south, away from all my friends, and the dactylic ring of Magyar would die away. Then there was István; I would miss him bitterly; and the loss of Angéla—who is little more than a darting luminous phantom in these pages—would be a break I could hardly bear to think of; and I can’t help putting off the moment for a paragraph or two.
* * *
I must, anyway. Over-confident after our resistance to the Sibiu-Szeben-Hermannstadt temptations, we found we had time to spare. We halted and stretched our legs and lay on the grass and smoked a couple of cigarettes and I rashly made them laugh by telling them about Sir Francis Drake and the game of bowls. But no sooner had we struck the old highway beside the Maros—a few miles south of the Apulon-Apulum-Bălgrad-Weissenburg-Karlsburg-Gyulaféhervár-Alba Iulia turning—than fate began to scatter our route with troubles. New since our passage there two days earlier, an untimely road-gang with a steam-roller and red flags had roped off potholes which had remained untouched for years. Maddened by frustration, István foiled them at last by cutting a bold semi-circular cantle across a stubble field. Next we were held up by a collusion of sleep-walking buffaloes with a gigantic threshing-machine crawling along a stretch of road with woods on one side and on the other a sharp drop to a water-meadow; and finally, a mile or so short of the last station before our destination, there was a puncture, the second that day; caused perhaps by a broken bottle left in the stubble a month ago by some snoring haymaker. We leaped into action and just as we were tightening the last screws on the freshly patched-up spare wheel, the hoot of a train reached us from behind. Then we saw the familiar smoke-plume appearing along the valley and heard the puffing and the clatter, and there it was; and just as we were chucking the old wheel in the back it passed us and disappeared sedately round a bend. We leaped aboard as nimbly as firemen and István seized the wheel.
Swing-wells and fields of maize and tobacco shot behind and the dust rose all about us in expanding clouds. The windscreen was one of the old-fashioned kind that divide lengthways, and when István twisted a milled brass knob at the side, the lower edge of the top half lifted outwards and the wind of our pace roared through us. All at once we were shooting through thousands and thousands of sunflowers; then, far ahead, the guard’s van came in sight. The train was slowing up for Simeria, the last halt before our target; and, just as it was moving on again we drew alongside. As it picked up speed, we were neck and neck; the passengers peered out in amazement and we felt like Cherokees or Assiniboines galloping round a prairie train in feathers and bisons’ horns: we ought to have been shooting them full of tufted arrows while they blazed back at us with their Winchester repeaters... István was crouched over the wheel, shirt-sleeves rolled up, grinning fiercely like a cinder-eyed demon of speed with ribbed black-mackintosh wings; and as we pulled ahead, he let out a joyful howl; we joined in, and the train hooted as though in capitulation. Angéla was hugging herself, shoulders hunched and teeth bared with excitement, hair flying out straight in the slipstream. Sometimes, launched by troughs in the road, we seemed to take to the air; another puncture would have done for us. Then, as the train dropped further behind, we sailed into familiar territory. The tall hill of Deva, crowned with its ruined fortress, haunted by the bricked-up victim of the ancient legend, heaved into sight, with the Hátszeg mountains beyond, where Vajdahunyád lay. The Maros meandered downstream in its mist of poplars, flowing towards Gurasada and the unknown village of Saftă and Ileană, and Xenia’s Zám, and then on to Kápolnás for Soborsin and Count Jenö and Tinka; Konopy and Maria Radna; and Arad, where Iza lived; and to the north of this, the roofs that sheltered Georgina and Jasš and Clara and Tibor and Ria were scattered about among dales and hills.
When we reached Deva station, the train was just coming into sight again. We seized Angéla’s bag and started off over the tracks. The station master waved for us to stop, then, recognising István, turned it into a salute; and when the train drew up, we were serenely waiting for it under the acacias, which were as immutable a part of a Rumanian platform as the three gold rings and the scarlet top of the station-master’s cap. Leaning down from her carriage window, she threaded crimson button-holes into our shirts from the bunch of roses and tiger lilies. Our farewells had been made and I can still feel the dust on her smooth cheek. When the flag and the whistle unloosed the train, she kept waving, then took off the kerchief knotted round her throat and flourished that instead and we gesticulated frantically back. As it gathered speed, the long kerchief floated level until the train, looking very small under the slant of the woods, dwindled and vanished; then it was only a feather of smoke among the Maros trees. Angéla was about to pass all of our old haunts and all the stepping-stones of my particular journey—half a lifetime ago, it seemed—crossing the frontiers at Curtici and Lökösháza. After that, the railway line over the Great Plain—Malek’s and my itinerary in reverse—would set her down, an hour before midnight, at the East Station in Budapest.
[1] A detail about the Academy which would have meant nothing to me then, but much now: for a year the Professor of Philosophy at Bethlen’s Academy was the Silesian poet, Martin Opitz (1597–1639), ‘the Father of German Poetry,’ one of a pleiad of seventeenth-century poets which includes Simon Dach, Paul Fleming, Scheffler, Gryphius and Grimmelshausen (‘Komm, Trost der Nacht, O Nachtigall’), author of Simplicissimus, the great picaresque novel of the Thirty Years’ War; and Weckherlin, who became Latin secretary to Cromwell immediately before Milton and wrote a remarkable sonnet on Buckingham’s murder. They have all been imaginatively evoked by Gunther Grass in The Meeting at Telgte.
[2] The Rumanian name has been lengthened in recent time by hyphenation with the ancient name of Napoca, which is how the Dacians styled their home. The ‘zs’ of Kolozsvár is a French ‘j.’
[3] ‘Nation’ has a special sense in this context: it means the noble legislating minority. Hungarian serfs, not being part of it, were no more represented than the similarly placed ancestors of the Rumanian majority. It was position in the hierarchy not ‘nationality’ that counted. There were Rumanian nobles who had a voice, but they invariably became absorbed into the Hungarian nobility and were lost.
[4] At that time, Hungarian girls seemed to have cornered the international cabaret world; every night-club I can remember was full of them. Many sought their fortunes abroad and I remember from a nineteenth-century Russian novel that the word Vengerka—‘a Hungarian girl’—had an earthy and professional sense.
[5] Târnava? Kukullo? So the map seems to say.
[6] A friend from Kronstadt-Bras, ov-Brassó tells me that there is no Pied Piper tradition on the spot. Browning probably got it from the Grimm brothers who may have picked it up from some inventive Transylvanian Saxon studying in Germany. They loved concocting tall stories about their remote homeland: in Bonn and Jena and Heidelberg, it must have sounded as wild and faraway as Tartary. Perhaps the original legend in the West is confusedly linked with the Children’s Crusade. Two contingents set off from Germany, as well as the main body from Vendôme; but they all perished, or were sold into slavery. Hamelin itself is full of Pied Piper reminders.
[7] Bras, ov or Brassó, and recently, but no longer (and most inappropriately for this old Gothic city), Stalin. Fashions change.
[8] Latin Aluta, German Alt, Hungarian Olt, the same as the Rumanian, for once.