A Time of Gifts (34 page)

My next call, only a few doors away, was a similar haunt of sawdust and spilt liquor and spit, but, this time, KRCvMA was daubed over the window. All was Slav within. The tow-haired Slovaks drinking there were dressed in conical fleece hats and patched sheepskin-jerkins with the matted wool turned inwards. They were shod in canoe-shaped cowhide moccasins. Their shanks, cross-gartered with uncured thongs, were bulbously swaddled in felt that would only be unwrapped in the spring. Swamp-and-conifer men they looked, with faces tundrablank and eyes as blue and as vague as unmapped lakes which the plum-brandy was misting over. But they might just as well have been swallowing hydromel a thousand years earlier, before setting off to track the cloven spoor of the aurochs across a frozen Trans-Carpathian bog.

Liquor distilled from peach and plum, charcoal-smoke, paprika, garlic, poppy seed—these hints to the nostril and the tongue were joined by signals that addressed themselves to the ear, softly at first and soon more insistently: the flutter of light hammers over the wires of a zither, glissandos on violin strings that dropped and swooped in a mesh of unfamiliar patterns, and, once, the liquid notes of a harp. They were harbingers of a deviant and intoxicating new music that would only break loose in full strength on the Hungarian side of the Danube.

In the outskirts of the town these hints abounded: I felt myself drawn there like a pin to a magnet. Half-lost in lanes full of humble grocers' shops and harness-makers and corn-chandlers and smithies, I caught a first glimpse of Gypsies. Women with chocolate-coloured babies were begging among the pony-carts and a brown Carpathian bear, led by a dancing-master dark as sin, lumbered pigeon-toed over the cobbles. Every few seconds, his leader jangled a tambourine to put the animal through his paces; then he laid a wooden flute to his lips and blew an ascending trill of minims. Sinuous and beautiful fortune-tellers, stagily coifed and ear-ringed and flounced in tiers of yellow and magenta and apple-green, perfunctorily shuffled their cards and proffered them in dog-eared fans as they strolled through the crowds, laying soft-voiced and unrelenting siege to every stranger they met. Sinking flush with the landscape, the town quickly fell to pieces and gave way to an ambiguous fringe of huts and wagons and fires and winter flies where a tangle of brown children scampered and wrestled in the mud among the skirmishing and coupling dogs. I was soon sighted. This far-off glimpse launched a pattering of small feet and a swarm of snot-caked half-naked Mowglis who pummelled each other for precedence as they raced on their quarry. Clambering over each other, they patted and pulled and wheedled in Hungarian and reviled each other in Romany. An old blacksmith, bronze-hued as an Inca, egged them on under the semblance of rebuke in a stream of words from beyond the Himalayas. (His anvil, with a row of horse-nails laid out, was stapled to a tree-stump and one brown foot worked the bellows of a little forge.) I gave a small coin to the nearest. This wrought the onslaught of his rivals to a frenzy and their shrill litanies rose to such a pitch that I scattered my small change like danegeld and retreated. At last, when they saw there was nothing left, they trotted back to the huts, exchanging blows and recriminations. All except one, that is, a hardy chestnut-coloured boy about five years old wearing nothing at all except a black trilby that must have been his father's. It was so big for him that, though he constantly wriggled his head from side to side as
he plucked and pleaded, the hat remained stationary. But there was nothing left. Suddenly giving up, he pelted downhill to join the others.

Pincers in hand, the old blacksmith had watched all this with the mare's near-fore hoof cupped in his lap while her colt tugged thirstily. A hush had spread among the wagons and the twinkling fires when I last looked back. The Gypsies were settling down to their evening hedgehog and dusk was beginning to fall.

* * *

Bratislava was full of secrets. It was the outpost of a whole congeries of towns where far-wanderers had come to a halt, and the Jews, the most ancient and famous of them, were numerous enough to give a pronounced character to the town. In Vienna, I had caught fleeting glimpses of the inhabitants of the Leopoldstadt quarter, but always from a distance. Here, very early on, I singled out one of the many Jewish coffee houses. Feeling I was in the heart of things, I would sit rapt there for hours. It was as big as a station and enclosed like an aquarium with glass walls. Moisture dripped across the panes and logs roared up a stove-chimney of black tin pipes that zigzagged with accordeon-pleated angles through the smoky air overhead. Conversing and arguing and contracting business round an archipelago of tables, the dark-clad customers thronged the place to bursting point. (Those marble squares did duty as improvised offices in thousands of cafés all through Central Europe and the Balkans and the Levant.) The minor hubbub of Magyar and Slovak was outnumbered by voices speaking German, pronounced in the Austrian way or with the invariable Hungarian stress on the initial syllable. But quite often the talk was in Yiddish, and the German strain in the language always made me think that I was going to catch the ghost of a meaning. But it eluded me every time; for the dialect—or the language, rather—though rooted in mediaeval Franconian German, is complicated by queer syntax and a host of changes and diminutives.
Strange gutturals, Slav accretions and many words and formations remembered from the Hebrew have contributed to its idiosyncrasy. The up-and-down, rather nasal lilt makes it more odd than harmonious to an outsider but it is linguistically of enormous interest: a vernacular in which the history of the Jews of northern Europe and the centuries of their ebb and flow between the Rhine and Russia are all embedded. (Two years later, in London, when I felt I knew German a little better, I went twice to the Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel; but I found the dialogue on the stage more fugitive than ever.) There were rabbis in the café now and then, easily singled out by their long beards and beaver hats and by black overcoats down to their heels. Occasionally they were accompanied by Talmudic students of about my age, some even younger, who wore small skullcaps or black low-crowned hats with the wide brims turned up, and queer elf-locks trained into corkscrews which hung beside their ears. In spite of these, pallor and abstraction stamped some of these faces with the beauty of young saints. They had a lost look about them as if they were permanently startled when they were away from their desks. Their eyes—bright blue, or as dark as midnight oil—were expanded to the innocent width of the eyes of gazelles. Sometimes they had a nearly blind expression; years of peering at texts seemed to have put their gaze out of focus for a wider field. I had visions of them, candle-lit behind sealed and cobwebbed windows, with the thick lenses of their spectacles gleaming close to the page as they re-unravelled Holy Writ: texts that had been commented on, recensed, annotated and bickered over in Babylon, Cordova, Kairouan, Vilna, Troyes and Mainz and Narbonne by fourteen centuries of scholiasts. Mists of dark or red fluff blurred a few of those chins that no razor touched, and their cheeks were as pale as the wax that lit the page while the dense black lettering swallowed up their youth and their lives.
[4]

I longed to attend a religious service, but without the guidance of some initiate friend, didn't dare. This diffidence was broken many years later by Dr. Egon Wellesz' book on Byzantine plainsong. In apostolic times, he writes, the Psalms formed the backbone of the Christian liturgy, chanted just as they were in the great temples of Jerusalem and Antioch. The same music is the common ancestor of the Jewish service, the chants of the Greek Orthodox Church and Gregorian plainsong; of the last, the
cantus peregrinus
, which appropriately accompanies the chanting of
In exitu Israel
, is considered the closest. Spurred by this, I ventured into the magnificent Carolean Portuguese-Dutch Synagogue in Artillery Row. By good luck, a visiting Sephardic choir of great virtuosity was singing, and I thought, perhaps rather sanguinely, that I could detect a point of union between the three kinds of singing. It was like singling out familiar notes faintly carried by the breeze from the other side of a dense forest of time. There was a comparably moving occasion many years later. Wandering about north-western Greece, I made friends with the rabbi of Yannina, and he invited me to attend the Feast of Purim. The old, once crowded Sephardic Jewish quarter inside Ali Pasha's tremendous walls was already falling to ruin. The rabbi had assembled the little group which was all that had survived the German occupation and come safe home. Cross-legged on the low-railed platform and slowly turning the two
staves of the scroll, he intoned the book of Esther—describing the heroine's intercession with King Ahasuerus and the deliverance of the Jews from the plot of Haman—to an almost empty synagogue.

* * *

The Schlossberg, the rock which dominates the town with its colossal gutted castle, had a bad name, and I hadn't climbed many of the steps of the lane before understanding why. One side of the path dropped among trees and rocks, but on the other, each of the hovels which clung to the mountain was a harlot's nest. Dressed in their shifts with overcoats over their shoulders or glittering in brightly-coloured and threadbare satin, the inmates leaned conversationally akimbo against their door-jambs, or peered out with their elbows propped on the half-doors of their cells and asked passers-by for a light for their cigarettes. Most of them were handsome and seasoned viragos, often with peroxided hair as lifeless as straw and paint was laid on their cheeks with a doll-maker's boldness. There were a few monsters and a number of beldames. Here and there a pretty newcomer resembled a dropped plant about to be trodden flat. Many sat indoors on their pallets, looking humble and forlorn, while Hungarian peasants and Czech and Slovak soldiers from the garrison clumped past in ascending and descending streams. During the day, except for the polyglot murmur of invitation, it was rather a silent place. But it grew noisier after dark when shadows brought confidence and the plum-brandy began to bite home. It was only lit by cigarette ends and by an indoor glow that silhouetted the girls on their thresholds. Pink lights revealed the detail of each small interior: a hastily tidied bed, a tin basin and a jug, some lustral gear and a shelf displaying a bottle of solution, pox-foiling and gentian-hued; a couple of dresses hung on a nail. There would be a crucifix, or an oleograph of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption, and perhaps a print of St. Wenceslas, St. John Nepomuk or St. Martin of Tours. Postcards of male and female film stars were stuck in the frames of the looking-glasses,
and scattered among them snapshots of Maszaryk, Admiral Horthy and Archduke Otto declared the allegiance of the inmates. A saucepan of water simmered over charcoal; there was little else. The continuity of these twinkling hollows was only broken when one of the incumbents charmed a stooping soldier under her lintel. Then a dowsed lamp and the closing of a flimsy door, or a curtain strung from nail to nail, masked their hasty embraces from the passers-by. This staircase of a hundred harlots was trodden hollow by decades of hobnails, and the lights, slanting across the night like a phosphorescent diagonal in a honeycomb, ended in the dark. One felt, but could not see, the huge battlemented ruin above. At the lower end, the diffused lights of the city cataracted downhill.

This was the first quarter of its kind I had seen. Without knowing quite how I had arrived, I found myself wandering there again and again, as an auditor more than an actor. The tacit principle to flinch at nothing on this journey quailed here. These girls, after all, were not their Viennese sisters, who could slow up a bishop with the lift of an eye lash. And even without this embargo, the retribution that I thought inevitable—no nose before the year was out—would have kept me safely out of doors. The lure was more complicated. Recoil, guilt, sympathy, attraction,
romantisme du bordel
and
nostalgie de la boue
wove a heady and sinister garland. It conjured up the abominations in the books of the Prophets and the stews of Babylon and Corinth and scenes from Lucian, Juvenal, Petronius and Villon. It was aesthetically astonishing too, a Jacob's ladder tilted between the rooftops and the sky, crowded with shuffling ghosts and with angels long fallen and moulting. I could never tire of it.

Loitering there one evening, and suddenly late for dinner, I began running downhill and nearly collided in the shadows with a figure that was burlier than the rest of us and planted like a celebrity in the centre of a dim and respectful ring. When the bystanders drew to one side, it turned out to be the brown Carpathian bear, unsteadily upright in their midst. His swart companion was
at hand, and as I sped zigzagging among my fellow-spectres, I could hear the chink of a tambourine, the first choreographic trill of the wooden flute and the clapping hands and the cries of the girls.

A few minutes later, safe in the brightly-lit anticlimax of the central streets, the stairs and their denizens and the secret pandemic spell that reigned there were as bereft of substance as figments from a dream in the small hours, and as remote. It was always the same.

* * *

Hans's rooms, after all these mild forays, were a charmed refuge of books and drinks and talk. He was illuminating on the questions and perplexities I came home with and amused by my reactions, especially to the Schlossberg. When I asked him about the Czechs and the Austrians, he handed me an English translation of Hasvek's
Good Soldier Svvejk
—or Schweik, as it was spelt in this edition—which had just come out.
[5]
It was exactly what I needed. (Thinking of Czechoslovakia, I was to remember it much later on, when the horrors of occupation from the West were followed by long-drawn-out and still continuing afflictions from the East; both of them still unguessed at then, in spite of the gathering omens.) It was rather broadminded of Hans, as the drift of the book is resolutely anti-Austrian. Though he was a dutiful citizen of the successor state, his heart, I felt, still lay with the order of things that had surrounded his early childhood. How could it be otherwise?