Between the Woods and the Water (6 page)

Later, in Rilke's
Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke
, I came on an evocation of these old Turkish campaigns which suddenly brought all the chronicles to life. The poem commemorates a vague, perhaps imaginary, kinsman of the poet, a young cornet and standard-bearer in a regiment of horse in 1663. Billeted for a night in a Hungarian frontier castle beyond the Raab, he is woken by frenzied neighing and trumpets sounding boot-and-saddle; there is a roar of burning. The enemy have surrounded and set light to the castle. Tearing himself from the arms of the young châtelaine, he is only just in time to seize the smouldering Colour and rush down the stone steps; the flag bursts into a great flame as he charges into the turbaned ranks and he is lost to sight at last under a sixteen-fold flash of scimitars.

* * *

I explored the Vár—the fortress of Buda, that is—with Micky and Tim, the huge black Alsatian, and began to get the hang of this lofty quarter and the old houses there, the lanes, the churches and the steep streets; they sank like trenches between silent walls where branches and creepers showered over the coping. On a bus trip a mile of two north to Roman Aquincum, we were joined by a beautiful girl of about fourteen called Harry, part-Croatian and part-Polish as well as Hungarian. Tim bounded about among the sarcophagi and broken walls and the ruined amphitheatre and dug for bones in the Temple of the Unconquered Sun; and in the museum we gazed at one of those disturbing bas-reliefs of Mithras in a Phrygian cap, plunging a dagger into the bull's throat. (The god always wears an expression of unbearable anguish as though the throat were his own; a hound leaps up to drink the blood and, down below, a furtive scorpion wages scrotal war.) A favourite of the legions, he was worshipped all along the frontier and there was hardly a camp between Carlisle and the Black Sea without one of his shrines.

This last gasp of the Alpine range was also the last bastion of Roman Pannonia, for the Empire stopped at the river's bank. The Iberian cavalry stationed here must have peered across with misgiving: beyond the vague settlements of Celts, or Quadi, or Sarmatians, the grim plain ran away to infinity. Gepids, Vandals and finally the Huns replaced them in turn, until Rome itself collapsed and the Dark Ages set in. The Avars came next.
Deserta Avororum!
Their name hung bleakly over the waste for dim unchronicled centuries until Charlemagne scattered them, and, without knowing it, cleared a space for the westernmost settlements of the Bulgars. The new state bombinated briefly in the vacuum, until—
at last!
—the hour struck for the Magyars. After centuries of shadowy Asian wandering, they streamed out of the wings and settled on centre stage forever.

Except for the old quarter along the opposite bank, modern Pest only really came into existence in the last century. It spread
insatiably across the plain and I could see great Oxford Streets, like the Andrássy út and the Rákóczi út, slicing their canyons through the boom city; the quiet citadel my side of the water had long ago been outstripped. Precariously linked by boat or, briefly each year, by the ice, Buda and Pest, the names as well as the places, were joined to each other only in the 1840s. One was often told that the tremendous Széchényi chain-bridge was built by two Scotsmen, the Brothers Clark.

Apart from a few old streets and squares, the smart Dunapalota Hotel and the cheerful and pleasure-loving waterfront—especially the Patisserie Gerbaud, a dashing Gunters-like meeting-place by the statue of the poet Vörösmarty—I liked Pest much less than my own side of the town, but I never tired of surveying it from the Fisher Bastion. This vantage point by the Coronation Church commanded steep descending layers plumed all the way down with trees, then a sweep of the Danube, crossed by half a dozen bridges. St. Margaret's Island expanded upstream and the Houses of Parliament loomed from the opposite shore. Built at the turn of the century and aswarm with statues, this frantic and marvellous pile was a tall, steep-roofed gothic nave escorted for a prodigious length by mediaeval pinnacles touched with gilding and adorned by crockets; and it was crowned, at the point where its transepts intersected, by the kind of ribbed and egg-shaped dome that might more predictably have dominated the roofs of a Renaissance town in Tuscany, except that the dome itself was topped by a sharp and bristling gothic spire. Architectural dash could scarcely go further.

Flights of steps, arched and roofed-in like slanting cloisters, zigzagged downhill from this eyrie and I always seemed to be out of breath from toiling up them or rushing down full-tilt and haring across the Széchényi Bridge, late for some appointment in Pest; in one particular case, for luncheon at 7 Joszef tér, just the other side.

My hostess at the Schloss
[4]
in lower Austria where I made such a fool of myself on my nineteenth birthday belonged to a Trieste
family of Greek origin. She had written to friends and relations in Budapest. One of them was the former Prime Minister, Count Paul Teleki, and he belonged to a famous, rather romantic Transylvanian family. One recent but fairly distant member, exploring Ethiopia, had discovered Lake Rudolf and named it after the ill-fated Archduke; and the volcano at its southern tip was called Mount Teleki (but perhaps no longer). Mine—Count Paul—was a famous geographer too. He had mapped the whole Japanese archipelago and, across the table, he told us stories of travel among the Turks and the Arabs when he was helping to draw the frontiers of Mesopotamia. He broke off for lively descriptions of Abdul Hamid and Slatin Pasha, that strange Anglo-Austrian for years the prisoner and running-footman of the Mahdi. The Count's alert, pointed face behind horn-rimmed spectacles, lit by a quick, witty and enthusiastic manner, had an almost Chinese look. It is hard to think of anyone kinder. As Chief Scout of Hungary, he took my travel plans to heart, spread maps, indicated passes and routes, traced rivers, suggested alternative approaches and enlivened everything as he did so with anecdotes and asides. He had been Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister for a little less than a year, resigning to return to his geographical work when Horthy sent soldiers to stop the return of King Karl. He asked me back a couple of times and all his family were kind to me in various ways; and when I left, he recommended me to his relations in Transylvania. He even gave me a letter to an old Turkish pasha living on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus which suddenly made my journey's end seem something more than an abstraction.
[5]

As Annamaria, the pretty girl I made friends with at the ball, was studying art history, she knew every picture-gallery and museum
by heart; thanks to her I haunted them all. It must have been she who pointed out (but where?) a remarkable and untypical wrestling match by Courbet; and she acted as Open Sesame to a private house with a long room which was empty except for half a dozen tremendous El Grecos. I met a lot of people and the tempo of life quickened. One exploratory foray into high life led to the drawing room of an ex-reigning beauty equally famous for her looks and her exalted rank. Afterwards, when Berta asked what I thought, I said that she was wonderful looking; but wasn't she a shade precious? Berta laughed; “When we were nurses in the War,” she said, “Ella insisted on working only in the blind wards, saying ‘I have to, you see! In the others they all fall in love with me and I mustn't add to those poor boys' sufferings.'”

Every day Tibor used to drive out to some military stables beyond Pest to exercise a favourite charger. One morning he asked me if I would like to come: he had got hold of another horse, so we trotted and cantered round the track and went over a few easy jumps; then we headed for a paddock where I watched him put his horse through the most arcane and mysterious paces in a silence as rapt and with a skill almost as perfect as those experts in the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. I think the outing was a mild vetting and I must have scraped through, for on the way back he said they might be able to fix up a mount for some of my eastward journey, which would pass the estate of a friend who had plenty of horses—perhaps she would lend me one for two or three days. “It's the right way to see the plain.” I was so excited by the prospect I hardly dared to speak.

* * *

Trivial things light fuses in the memory. A flower-woman on the Danube Quay was always calling “Virágot! Szép virágot!”—“Flowers, lovely flowers!” (the plural of
virág
, a flower)—whenever I passed her. Two years later, reading
Ulysses
for the first time, I came on the words ‘Nagyságos uram Lipóti Virág,' which is Magyar,
more or less, for ‘Leopold Bloom Esq.' In the book, Bloom was a Jewish immigrant from Hungary;
Virág
is a typical Magyarisation of
Blum
; and the spelling must have changed to ‘Bloom' when the author re-settled his protagonist in Dublin. I feel sure that Joyce, as quick at languages as Borrow, must have picked up some Hungarian when he was teaching at the Berlitz School. Pre-war Trieste was still an Austro-Hungarian city with plenty of Hungarians to instruct him. (A few of them live there still.) He was sometimes thought, but probably wrongly, to have coached Admiral Horthy in English, when the future ruler was last
k. und k
. Commander of the Naval Station at Pola; and at the same time, I have just discovered, he made considerable progress in demotic Greek.
[6]
This enthralling port, which I visited for the first time three years ago, keeps cropping up in these pages. Literary ghosts abound there: not only James Joyce and the Burtons, but also Italo Svevo. Perhaps d'Annunzio's phantom biplane zooms inaudibly overhead on the way to Fiume while the shade of Rilke glides Duino-wards along the Adriatic shore, where they caught a last glimpse of Waring.

It was hard to believe I had only been in Budapest ten days. After a final party, long after midnight, I climbed the steps of Buda with Annamaria and we sat on a wall and gazed down at the bridges looped across the Danube in sparkling necklaces. I asked her yet again to repeat a song which had been running in my head ever since the ball. Some Hungarian music is almost as different to a stranger as the language and nearly as hard. I found the song impossible to get by heart. It tells of a swallow flying low over a field of ripening wheat. She began,

and went on to the end. But it was no good. The tune escaped yet again, and it is still just out of reach.

[1]
See
A Time of Gifts
, p. 207.

[2]
See
A Time of Gifts
, pp. 111–112.

[3]
This Holy Roman honour surfaced again generations later when his remarkable and equally courageous descendant, Isabel Arundell, wife of Sir Richard Burton the explorer, cut a dash in Trieste by using her rank as geborene Gräfin—quite in conformity with Austrian custom—when Burton was Consul there. She was running a sort of local RSPCA, and, as the town was Austrian still, it was probably a shrewd move. Her other pursuits were swimming, riding and fencing with her husband. It is a pity she burnt his papers.

[4]
Pottenbrunn, near St. Pölten. See
A Time of Gifts
, p. 188.

[5]
Count Teleki became Prime Minister again at the approach of war, in the hopes of rescuing something from the tightening toils of Hungary's horrible predicament. Profoundly pro-British at heart, but forced by the imperatives of the situation into the postures he would least willingly have chosen, he committed suicide in Spring 1941 rather than condone Germany's attack on Yugoslavia across Hungarian territory after Hungary had signed a pact of friendship with the Yugoslavs.

[6]
See his notebooks, published in Manto Aravantinou's
Ta Ellinika tou James Joyce
(Hermes Press, Athens, 1977).

M
ALEK
, a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail, one white sock, a blaze and more than a touch of Arab to his brow, was waiting by a clump of acacias on the Cegléd road. The boy who had ridden him over told Berta he had been newly shod and he would be no trouble except for a short stretch near his stable. We stowed my things in the saddle-bags and tied my rolled greatcoat across the pommel. Berta drove off with Micky and Tim to drop the boy home and I hadn't trotted more than half-an-hour along the same road before they were back. We picnicked under an oak then set off in opposite directions, they for Pest, I for Constantinople, looking back and waving until we were all out of sight.

It was the thirteenth of April. The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows. The Great Hungarian Plain—the Alföld, in Magyar—is the westernmost steppe in Europe, a last outpost of the Pontic and Caspian wastes. Influenced by pictures of the wilder Hortobágy a hundred miles further east, I was disappointed at first to see ploughland and fields green with young wheat and a taller crop with pointed pale green leaves which turned out to be Indian corn; there were rows of tobacco plants, then orchards and farms set about with trees, and the plain between these tracts of husbandry was dotted with herds. Sheep and swine and troops of cattle grazed across the middle distance, with a village every few miles. The one I had been warned about was Alberti-Irsa;
[1]
this was the difficult
stretch. Malek tried to turn down a track which led to a gateway and outbuildings and barns, with a glimpse beyond them of a château half-hidden among trees, where his own stable beckoned. When I insisted on going straight on, there were aggrieved backward glances; I knew other horses were at grass there but his passionate whinny went unanswered—perhaps the groom had led them out of earshot—and after a brief tug of wills we were clip-clopping along as briskly as before.

Carts drawn by horses and oxen easily outnumbered the motor-cars. Gypsies were on the move in long, jolting waggons that made all their gear clatter. Branching off the road to the left, I followed lesser tracks where the farmsteads and cottages soon began to scatter the country more thinly. A few, thatched with reed and maize-trash and fenced about with woven sticks, had a dishevelled look, but most were clean and trim with thick walls newly whitewashed, for Easter perhaps, and painted all round with coloured dados. A handily planted tree like a prehistoric dresser had pots and pans stuck on its lopped branches and a family of white hens and a speckled cock roosted in another. Shallow platforms lifted the houses above the plain and women busy with household tasks sat there and gossiped. On one of them a length of cloth, with a red and white pattern suddenly dividing in two, stretched over a long loom and a kerchiefed crone sent a shuttle flying through the taut warps; shifting them through each other with a clack of the treadle, she beat the new weft home with the comb-like reed, and stopped and looked up at my greeting and answered with “Isten áldjs” (God bless you). Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked “Német?” (German?). My answer “Angol” induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as little to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. As the other side of the house was noisy with mooing, she shouted through the windows and in a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped it slowly and thought: I'm drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.