A Time of Gifts (41 page)

In these parts, SS. Cyril and Methodius, whose names are as inseparably joined as Swan is to Edgar, still enjoy great fame. In
The Good Soldier Svvejk
, the hero's peculiar conduct lands him temporarily in a Prague lunatic asylum where he is surrounded by raving megalomaniacs. ‘A chap can pass himself off as God Almighty there,' he said, ‘or the Virgin Mary, the Pope, the King of England, His Imperial Majesty or St. Wenceslas... One of them even pretended to be SS. Cyril and Methodius, just to get double rations.'

* * *

The dry paths had turned my boots and puttees white with dust. The empty sky was the clear blue of a bird's egg and I was walking in my shirt sleeves for the first time. Slower and slower however: a nail in one of my boots had mutinied. I limped into the thatched and white-washed village of Köbölkut as it was getting dark. There was a crowd of villagers in the street and I drifted into the church with them and wedged myself into the standing congregation.

The women all had kerchiefs tied under the chin. The men, shod in knee-boots, or in raw-hide moccasins cross-gartered halfway up their shanks, had wide felt hats in their hands, or cones of fleece. Over the shoulders of a couple of shepherds were flung heavy white capes of stiff homespun frieze. In spite of the heat and the crush, one of them was wrapped in a cloak of matted and uncured sheepskin, shaggy-side out, that reached down to the flagstones. Things had become much wilder in the last hundred miles.
The faces had a knobbly, untamed look: they were peasants and countrymen to the backbone.

The candles, spiked on a triangular grid, lit up these rustic masks and populated the nave behind them with a crowd of shadows. At a pause in the plainsong one of the tapers was put out. I realized, all at once, that it was Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae were being sung, and very well. The verses of the penitential psalms were answering each other across the choir and the slow recapitulations and rephrasings of the responsories were unfolding the story of the Betrayal. So compelling was the atmosphere that the grim events might have been taking place that night. The sung words crept step by step through the phases of the drama. Every so often, another candle was lifted from its pricket on the triangle and blown out. It was pitch dark out of doors and with the extinction of each flame the interior shadows came closer. It heightened the chiaroscuro of these rough country faces and stressed the rapt gleam in innumerable eyes; and the church, as it grew hotter, was filled by the smell of melting wax and sheepskin and curds and sweat and massed breath. There was a ghost of old incense in the background and a reek of singeing as the wicks, snuffed one after the other, expired in ascending skeins of smoke. “Seniores populi consilium fecerunt,” the voices sang, “ut Jesum dolo tenerent et occiderent”; and a vision sprang up of evil and leering elders whispering in a corner through toothless gums and with beards wagging as they plotted treachery and murder. “Cum gladiis et fustibus exierunt tamquam ad latronem...” Something in the half-lit faces and the flickering eyes gave a sinister immediacy to the words. They conjured up hot dark shadows under a town wall and the hoarse shouts of a lynch-mob; there was a flicker of lanterns, oafish stumbling in the steep olive groves and wild and wheeling shadows of torches through tree trunks: a scuffle, words, blows, a flash, lights dropped and trampled, a garment snatched, someone running off under the branches. For a moment, we—the congregation—became the roughs with the blades and the cudgels. Fast and ugly deeds were following each other in the ambiguity
of the timbered slope. It was a split-second intimation! By the time the last of the candles was borne away, it was so dark that hardly a feature could be singled out. The feeling of shifted rôles had evaporated; and we poured out into the dust. Lights began to kindle in the windows of the village and a hint of moonrise shone at the other end of the plain.

* * *

I was looking for a barn for the night and a cobbler's shop—or, linguistically more easily, a smithy—to get my boot-nail knocked in. But as Smith—
Kovács
—is the commonest Hungarian surname, just as it is in English, there was immediate confusion: which Kovács? János? Zoltán? Imre? Géza? At last a voice in a doorway said: “Was wollen Sie?” It was a red-haired Jewish baker and he not only hammered in the nail but put me up for the night as well. ‘We made a bed of straw and blankets on the stone floor of the dark bakery,' my diary records, ‘and here I am, writing this by candlelight. Maundy Thursday is “Green Thursday” in German,
Gründonnerstag
. I wonder why? Good Friday is
Karfreitag
.'

Next morning we talked in the sun outside the shop. There was a bench under a tree. My host was from a Carpathian village where quite a number of Jews, including his family, belonged to the Hasidim, a sect which sprang up two centuries ago in the province of Podolia—Russian then, Polish later—the other side of the Carpathians. The sect represented a break with Talmudic scholasticism and a plunge into mystic thought—the Cloud of Unknowing
versus
the Tree of Knowledge—and the belief of the Hasidim in a kind of all-englobing divine presence (a concept more familiar to Christians than to Jews) was condemned by the orthodox, in particular by a famous scholar and rabbi in the Lithuanian town of Vilna. But in spite of its heterodoxy and the anathema of the Gaons, the sect multiplied. It prospered especially in Podolia, Volhynia and the Ukraine and their tenets soon began to spread from these flat and Cossack-harried provinces and found
their way south through the mountain passes. The baker himself was not a zealot: the face under the carroty hair was plump, shrewd and twinkling. I said I enjoyed reading the Bible. “So do I,” he said; then he added with a smile, “Especially the first part.” It took me a further couple of seconds to get the point.

The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service, a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell.

When the low hills dropped, furrows fledged with young wheat-blades ran symmetrically into the distance under scores of larks. The footpath wandered through whitewashed farms and the yards of low manor-houses and later through spinneys filled with violets and primroses. Streams unwound under the willow branches, dwindling and expanding again into pools that were covered with watercress and duckweed and giant kingcups. The tadpole season was over and the water-lily leaves were rafts for little frogs. On a gregarious impulse, the shrill chorus would stop suddenly for a few seconds and then strike up again, and my advance touched off a mass of semicircular frog-trajectories and plops while herons cruised low and settled among the rushes balanced watchfully on one leg. On a bank tufted with sedge and reeds among mossy swamps a flock of sheep were tearing at the rough grass and black pigs snouted after last year's acorns. The herdsman lay smoking under an oak tree in his sheepskin and there was no one else but scarecrows for miles. A fox trotted across a clearing in a wood. The overhead blaze had reduced me to shirt sleeves again and I was darkening like a piece of furniture. About four in the afternoon I got to the little village of Karva. The lane ended at the foot of a bank, and when I climbed it, there below—once again, long before I had expected it—the Danube was sweeping along.

Close to the bank, where reeds and willow-herb grew thick, the water gave off a gaseous tang of stagnation; but the ripples and the creases in midstream showed the speed of its flow. The plains which had expanded from Bratislava, with all their deviations and marshes and loops and islands, had yielded a few miles upstream to the enclosing advance of the hills. All strays had been gathered in and the higher ground on my bank was answered on the Hungarian shore by the undulations of the Bakony Forest; and, at long last, I was face to face with Hungary. It was only a river's width away. For a few miles it flowed unswerving between an escort of reflected woods and slid into the distance in either direction like a never-ending Champs Elysées of water.

I set off under the flickering poplar-leaves and I hadn't gone far before three villagers on horseback came trotting towards me upstream, one in loose white clothes and the others in black, with a chestnut foal scampering alongside. When we came level, we exchanged greetings and up went their three hats in a triple flourish. I knew the answer to the ritual question—‘Where do you come from?'—which always came first; it was: ‘
Angolországbol!
' (England-from! Magyar is a language of suffixes.) And to the next question—‘Whither?'—the answer came equally pat: ‘
Konstantinópolybá!
,' Constantinopleward. They smiled tolerantly. They hadn't the dimmest notion of the whereabouts of either. In dumb show, and with a questioning twiddle of the wrist, I asked where they were bound for. “Komárombá!” they answered. Then straight as ninepins in their saddles, they put me in God's care and unlidded in concert once more. Touching their horses they headed Komárom-wards in a slow and stylish canter that lifted a long feather of dust along the towpath. The foal, taken by surprise, galloped anxiously to catch up until all four were out of sight many furlongs upstream. I wished I had had a hat to lift. These Hungarian salutes were magnificently ceremonious and hidalgo-like. (Komárom was an old town a few miles upstream at the mouth of the Váh. It disembogued in the Danube about thirty miles south of the point where Baron Pips and I had watched the rafts floating
by. There was a bridge over the river there and some famous fortifications that the Hungarians defended through a long Austrian siege in 1848.)

The last sign of human habitation was a riverside hamlet called Cvenke,
[3]
where crowds of rooks were noisily gathering for the night. Thereafter, the feeling of remoteness and solitude grew more pronounced with every step. It was getting darker too, but no colder: although it was the end of March, the air was as warm and as still as an evening in summer. Frog-time had come. Each pace, once more, unloosed a score of ragged parabolas and splashes. Flights of waterfowl detonated like spring-guns loosing off a whirr of missiles across the water. It was a world of scales and webbed feet and feathers and wet whiskers. Hundreds of new nests were joining the old ones in the damp green maze and soon there would be thousands of eggs and then wings beyond counting.

The meaning of the twin messages of the temperature and the wilderness took a moment or two to impinge. Then I understood, with sudden elation, that my first and longed-for night in the open had arrived. I found a hollow lined with leaves among the willow-trunks about three yards from the water and after a supper of Kövecses-remains and a new loaf from my baker friend and watercress from a stream, I stuck a candle on a stone to fill in my diary. It burned without a tremor. Then I lay, gazing upwards and smoking with my rucksack for a pillow, wrapped in my greatcoat in case of cold later on.

The sky had changed. Flashing like a lozenge of icicle fragments, Orion had reigned unchallenged all winter. Now it was already far down in the west and leading a retinue of constellations
into decline and some of its wintry glitter had gone. The lower tip was growing dim in the vapour and dust that overhang horizons and soon the Pleiades were following the famous stars downhill. All the trees and reeds and flag-leaves and the river and the hills on the other bank glimmered insubstantially in the starlight. The fidgeting of moorhens and coots and of voles and water-rats doing the breast-stroke through the stems grew less frequent and every half-minute or so two bitterns—one quite near, the other perhaps a mile away—sounded across the vague amphibian world: loneliest of muffled cries, plainly to be heard above the shrill rise and fall of millions of frogs. This endless population, stretching upstream and down for leagues, made the night seem restlessly alive and expectant. I lay deep in one of those protracted moments of rapture which scatter this journey like asterisks. A little more, I felt, and I would have gone up like a rocket. The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

The dimness of those dropping constellations was not all the fault of the vapours that haunt horizons. A rival pallor was spreading at the other end of the sky, and very fast. Behind a flutter of hills a rim of blood-red lunar segment was rising. It expanded to its full diameter and then dwindled; and when the circumference was complete a tremendous crimson moon was casting loose. It changed to orange and then to yellow as it climbed and diminished until all the colour had ebbed away and left it to soar with the aloof and airy effulgence of silver. During the last hour's walking, twilight and darkness had masked the behaviour of the hills. Now the moon revealed that they had receded once more and left the Danube free to break loose. It was a week after the spring equinox and only a few hours short of the full moon, and as this is one of the few reaches where the river flows due east, the line of the moon's reflection lay amidstream where the current runs fastest
and shivered and flashed there like quicksilver. The reefs and shoals and islands and the unravelling loops of water which had lain hidden till now were all laid bare. Wastes of fen spread from either shore and when the surfaces were broken by undergrowth or sedge or trees, they gleamed like fragments of flawed looking-glass. All was changed. The thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods. This frosty radiance played tricks with levels and distances until I was surrounded by a dimensionless and inconcrete fiction which was growing paler every second. While the light was seeking out more and more liquid surfaces for reflection, the sky, where the moon was now sailing towards its zenith, seemed to have become an expanse of silvery powder too fine for the grain to be descried. Silence transcended the bitterns' notes and the industry of the frogs. Stillness and infinity were linked in a feeling of tension which, I felt sure, presaged hours of gazing watchfulness. But I was wrong. In a little while my eyes were closing under a shallow tide of sleep.