A Time of Gifts (42 page)

* * *

“
Co tady devláte?
”—‘I awoke with a start'—my diary says—‘someone was shaking me by the collar and shouting. As soon as I was fully awake, I made out two men in uniform. One of them, with an old-fashioned bull's-eye lantern on his belt, was keeping me covered with a rifle and his fixed bayonet was nearly touching my chest. Completely at a loss, I asked what was happening; but they spoke no German and only a word or two of Hungarian, so we were stuck. They made me get up and marched me along the path, one of them holding my arm in a ju-jitsu grip while the other, having slung his rifle, now carried an enormous automatic pistol. It was rather a comic scene; some mistake somewhere. Whenever I opened my mouth I was told to shut up, so I did, at least for a bit. After a while our little Svvejk-like procession reached a wooden hut
and I was put in a chair, still covered by the huge firearm. The pistol's owner had a bristling moustache; he fixed me with a bilious and bloodshot eye while the other began to search me from top to toe. He emptied every pocket and made me take my puttees and boots off. It was more and more mysterious. By the lamp in the hut I saw they were wearing the grey uniform of the Frontier Guard, which I had seen just before crossing to Bratislava. When he had finished with me, he untied the cord of my rucksack and turned it upside down so that everything tumbled on the floor in a disorderly heap. Then he began to unfold, or open and examine, every single item, feeling in the pockets of pyjamas and looking down the backs of books, even this wretched journal. This went on for some time until at last, as though realizing there was nothing to interest him, he knelt back in the middle of the floor, which was now littered with my ransacked belongings, and scratched his head in a mystified and baffled manner. The man with the pistol had also become a bit less fierce, and the two talked sadly, casting dubious glances at me from time to time. One of them picked up my passport, the only object that had attracted no notice during the search. When it emerged that I was English, it seemed to make a great difference. The man with the moustache laid down his automatic and I was offered a cigarette. We had been smoking for a minute or two when a third frontier-watchman turned up, a fat man who spoke German. He asked me what I was up to. I said I was on a walking tour across Europe. He kept looking from the photograph in the passport to me and back again, asked me my age and checked that it was nineteen. Suddenly he came to a decision: he smacked his hand hard on the table and burst out laughing. The others cheered up too. He told me I had been mistaken for a notorious saccharine smuggler called Cverny Josef'—Black Joseph—‘Fekete Jozi,' on the Magyar shore—who plied his trade from Cvenke across the Danube into Hungary; the taxes on saccharine are so high there that it is an easy way of making a lot of money. I immediately thought of poor Konrad! But he'd promised me he was only going to take part on the business
side.
[4]
Apparently Black Jo hides among the trees and the reeds on this deserted reach of the river until a boat rows across from the other side in the dark to pick him up; so it had been rather a surprise to capture him—or someone like him—on a night with a full moon; the trouble was, Jo was over fifty... We all laughed and the two men apologised for their brusque treatment. In the end, they said they would fix quarters for me. I'd have much rather slept out but didn't want to hurt their feelings. We walked a mile or two inland across the water-meadows and the moon was beginning to go down when we reached a little farm. I am in the stable now on a soft heap of straw with a hurricane lamp and catching up with the rest of the night's doings before I forget them.

‘
Next day
. The farm people were from Silesia. He was big and tough and she very handsome, with jet black hair. There was a stuffed otter on the wall—plenty of them lodge in the Danube's banks. They gave me a lovely breakfast with coffee and black bread and two boiled eggs and some hard white cheese sprinkled with red paprika, and a swig of
barack
. Also, some things wrapped up to eat on the way. I'm beginning to feel like Elijah, fed by ravens.

‘Dew covered the grass and a thin mist veiled the river, but both were soon gone. The path still followed a grassy ridge banked against flooding. I could see for miles, all last night's scenery: strange and unbelievable then, calm and beautiful now, rather like the woods and the polders seen from a dyke-road in Holland. Poplars, willows and aspens sheltered the path—a blessing, as it's been the hottest day of the year—and the branches made a criss-cross of shade. I met nobody till I came on some Gypsy boys who spend their time hunting weasels, stoats, rats, field-mice and other humble fauna. The way they go about this is very unsporting. They find their holes in the banks, pour a bucket of water in the highest one and the animals come scuttling half-drowned out of exits lower down and the boys catch them and wring their necks. When I
passed them they waved bunches of dismal and draggled little corpses at me, wanting me to buy some, as they eat them and expect you to do the same—they eat anything. Baron Pips told me that when his farm people bury a horse that has died of old age or disease, Gypsies are sure to dig it up and eat it in the middle of the night...'

* * *

There was a lull in the air. Holy Saturday, with its lamps out and shrines empty and the distant tolling over the fields, cast a spell of catalepsy and suspense. It was a time of sealed tombs and sleeping sentries with the Protagonist of the week's drama deep underground harrowing Hell... There was not a fisherman on the river, not a peasant in the fields, nothing but those little vole-catchers and skimming wagtails, the waterbirds and the massed larks and the frogs, whose steady diurnal croak, though universal, seemed milder than the full-moon brekekekexing the night before. A thrown stick could silence an acre for several seconds. The flecks of dust on the current and the spinning fluff suggested midsummer. I ate my bread and cheese on the shady side of a rick and fell asleep. (Hay-ricks are conical hereabouts, cleverly stacked round a centre pole and when most of the hay has been sliced away for fodder, the sun catches the shorn planes as if lopsided obelisks had been erected in the fields.) I awoke later than I had intended. The woods, full of rooks and wood-pigeons, were sending long shadows over the grass. I drank at a brook, sloshed some water on my face and tidied up. Civilization lay ahead.

Far away on the other bank I could see my destination; it had been growing steadily in size since my first glimpse that morning. A cliff loomed over a long sweep of the river and on this ledge was perched a white fane that resembled St. Peter's in Rome. A light circle of pillars lifted a gleaming dome into the sky. It was dramatic, mysterious, as improbable as a mirage and unmistakable as
a landmark for many miles across the desert of liquid and solid. The Basilica of Esztergom, I knew, was the Metropolitan Cathedral of all Hungary, the largest religious building in the Kingdom and the archiepiscopal See of the Cardinal-Prince-Archbishop: the Hungarian equivalent, that is, of Rheims, Canterbury, Toledo, Armagh and old Cracow. The Basilica, though spectacular and splendid, is not old: little in that part of Hungary was spared the ravages of the Tartars and the Turks; after the Reconquest everything had to begin again. But the town—the Latin Strigonium and the German Gran—is one of the oldest in the country. Ever since the first Apostolic King of Christian Hungary—the conquering Árpáds' descendant, St. Stephen himself—was born and crowned in Esztergom, history has been accumulating here and entwining itself with myth. From my footpath, the Basilica was the only building in sight. The monasteries, the churches, the palaces and the libraries that encrust the steep little town were all in baulk. The great pile, with its twin cupola-topped belfries, its ring of pillars and its great nacreous dome, hovered above water and timber and fen as though upheld, like a celestial city in a painting, by a flurry of untiring wings.

* * *

The air was full of hints and signs. There was a flicker and a swishing along the river like the breezy snip-snap of barbers' scissors before they swoop and slice. It was the skimming and twirling of newly arrived swifts. A curve in the stream was re-arranging the landscape as I advanced, revealing some of the roofs of Esztergom and turning the Basilica to a new angle as though it were on a pivot. The rolling wooded range of the Bakony Forest had advanced north from the heart of Transdanubia, and the corresponding promontory on the northern shore—the last low foothills of the Matra mountains, whose other extremity subsides in the north eastern tip of Hungary—jutted into the water under the little
town of Parkan. Reaching for each other, the two headlands coerced the rambling flood yet once more into a narrower and swifter flow and then spanned the ruffle with an iron bridge. Spidery at first, the structure grew more solid as the distance dwindled. (Twenty miles east of this bridge, the Danube reaches a most important point in its career: wheeling round the ultimate headland of the Bakony Forest and heading due south for the first time on its journey, it strings itself through Budapest like a thread through a bead and drops across the map of Europe plumb for a hundred and eighty miles, cutting Hungary clean in half. Then, reinforced by the Drava, it turns east again, invades Yugoslavia, swallows up the Sava under the battlements of Belgrade, and sweeps on imperturbably to storm the Iron Gates.)

In an hour, I had climbed the cliff-path into the main street of Parkan. A little later my passport was stamped at the frontier post at the Czechoslovakian end of the bridge. The red, white and green barrier of the frontier post at the far end marked the beginning of Hungary. I lingered in the middle of the bridge, meditatively poised in no man's air.

* * *

The masonry of the piers below sent green Ophelia-like tresses of waterweed swaying down the current. Upstream, the water broke up the reflected turquoise of a sky full of dishevelled cirrus clouds. Pink and crimson threads were dispersed in conflicting drifts and then frozen in motionless turmoil; it was all the stranger as there had not been a breath of wind all day. Swifts were still skimming through the air and a heron flew across the river from wood to wood. A number of large and mysterious birds were floating high overhead and at first I thought they were herons too, but they carried their necks extended instead of coiled between their shoulders, and they were white. They were larger and more slender and less hurried than swans: the spread of wings scarcely moved as they
revolved on the air-currents. There were about a dozen, snow-plumed except for black flight-feathers which ran along the inner edge of their wing like a senatorial stripe of mourning. They were storks! When they circled lower, the long beaks and the legs that trailed in the slipstream showed red as sealing wax. An old shepherd was leaning on the ramp close by and gazing up at them too. When some of the great birds floated lower, the draught of their feathers brushed our upturned faces, and he said something in Magyar—“Nét, góbyuk!” and smiled. He hadn't a tooth in his head. Two of the birds glided upstream. One dropped on a haystack and fluttered to regain its balance. The second landed underneath in the meadow—becoming, as it folded its wings, a white bobbin with red lacquer stilts and bill—and paced to the water's edge. The others, meanwhile, were alighting on the tiles of the two little bridgehead towns and advancing with ungainly steps along the roofs to inspect the dishevelled nests that cumbered many of the chimneys. Two of them were even attempting, in defiance of the bells which were tolling there, to land in one of the Cathedral belfries—they remembered the harmless hazard from former incumbency. The bell-hampers were choked with tangles of last year's twigs.

Touching my arm, the shepherd pointed downstream at something in the dark-shadowed east high above the river and just discernible across the failing sky. Ragged and flocculent, fading to grey, scattered with specks of pink from the declining sun, varying in width as random fragments were dropping away and re-cohering and agitated with motion as though its whole length were turning on a single thread, a thick white line of crowding storks stretched from one side of the heavens to the other. Mounting Africa along the Nile, they had followed the coasts of Palestine and Asia Minor and entered Europe over the Bosphorus. Then, persevering along the Black Sea shore to the delta of the Danube, they had steered their flight along that shining highway until they had come to the great bend a few miles downstream. Defecting from the river, their journey was now following a westerly as well as a northern bias;
they were bound for Poland, perhaps, and shedding contingents as they went at hundreds of remembered haunts. We gazed at them in wonder. It was a long time before the rearguard of that great sky-procession had vanished north. Before nightfall the whole armada would subside in a wood or settle all over some Slovakian hamlet—astonishing the villagers and delighting them, for storks are birds of good omen—like a giant snow storm; taking to the air again at first light. (Six months and hundreds of miles later, I halted on the southern slopes of the Great Balkan Range, and watched the same great migration in reverse. They were making for the Black Sea, retracing their spring journey before wintering beyond the Sahara.)

There was much going on: in the air and the sky, on the river, along the banks; almost too much. I was determined to linger, suspended there in a void, and let a few more hundred thousand tons of liquid rush under the girders before stepping across the remaining yards into Hungary. I might have been in the royal box opposite the milling
dramatis personae
as the curtain was going up.

A solitary bell, forerunner of the peals and scales that would come tumbling into the moonlight later on, had been joined by several others, but their summoning notes failed to hasten the ebb and flow under the trees: though the crowd, strolling and hobnobbing all along the waterfront, showed a slight tendency to veer towards a road that led uphill. There were hundreds of peasants from neighbouring villages. The men were mostly in black and white, but a burly figure in bandman's rig toiled through the crowd stooping under a big drum and the slanting sunbeams picked out a trombone here and a bassoon there, and three colleagues equipped with French horns who were drifting the same way. The clothes of the women and the girls, with their many-pleated skirts and their different-coloured bodices and aprons and kerchiefs, were enlivened here and there by clusters of ribbons and stiff bright panels of embroidery on billowing sleeves. As usual the brightest colours were at play in the flaring and flouncing of Gypsy women: violet and magenta and orange and yellow and
shrill green. The hues were sprinkled like the flowers of an Indian temple-garland broken and scattered among the tamer European blooms. No rustic gathering was to be without them for the rest of the journey. On the plank of a rough cart outside an inn, a brown bear was seated as though he were about to pick up the reins; his dark-skinned master climbed beside him and they drove away. Creeping through the crowd and the village carts and pony-traps and the groups of horsemen, an anachronistic charabanc halted and discharged two nuns and a troop of schoolgirls and honked its way slowly offstage. A trio of tall Dominicans in shovel hats, as easy as magpies to pick out by their black and white markings, were gathered under a chestnut tree.