Between the Woods and the Water Read online

  Very many of these people talked English; when an exception cropped up, German was used, sometimes, I think for historical reasons, rather reluctantly; but it was the universal second language. The automatic use of Du, even to strangers if they were friends of friends, was very surprising. Sie, it seemed, meant relegation to the outer darkness and people had been known to fight with swords about the matter. (The fact that duels were still frequent in Hungary—not mere student encounters, but fierce set-to’s with sabres—gave a Prisoner of Zenda touch to a fantastic and, no doubt, wildly inaccurate picture which was fast taking shape in my mind.) Their easy ways, like the Austrians’, had a stiffening of old-fashioned punctilio. (I liked the kissing of women’s hands, but the formal kissing of the hands of men by household staff or by peasants seemed strange. It was the custom all over Eastern Europe and after a while it seemed not servile so much as antiquated, a hoary ritual surviving, like fealty, from feudal times, which, of course, is exactly what it was.) These particular Hungarians cared a lot about dress. Tigers for turnout, they were well-groomed in what used to be thought the English style; but they didn’t give a damn about my rough-and-ready outfit. The best I could manage was a tweed coat and some grey canvas trousers, which, with a clean shirt and a blue tie, looked almost presentable; but the footgear let me down—this was always gym or tennis shoes, whichever looked cleaner. But it didn’t matter.

  After a lifetime of educational croppers and bad school reports, my luck seemed suddenly to have changed. Ever since my halt in Munich, letters with exhortations to kindness from my Baltic-Russian friends there,[2] and then from the friends they had written to, had been flying eastwards, and they unloosed cornucopias of warm and boundless hospitality when I caught up with them. I was full of gratitude to my benefactors and I loved them, but I don’t think I ever actually wondered why I struck so lucky. If their friends had asked them to help, I suppose they couldn’t quite wash their hands of me; but the main reason for their hospitality was a general kind feeling towards the young and the broke. The accident of nationality may also have been a help, particularly then: I think Hungarians had a definite soft spot for England. Absorption and enjoyment are catching and my attitude to life resembled a sea-lion’s to the flung bloater. They were amused by accounts of the journey: some said they wished they had done the same; and they were impressed that I only took lifts in really bad weather. Nobody else was travelling like this in those days, so the expedition had the value of rarity: it is almost past belief, but only once during the whole journey did I meet another soul who had set out in the same way.

  A couple of months earlier, on the road between Ulm and Augsburg, I had dived out of a snowstorm into a lonely Gasthaus and the only other customer taking refuge there was a strange-looking boy of about my age, dressed in a black corduroy jacket and a scarlet waistcoat with brass buttons, who was banging the snow off an already very battered top-hat with his forearm; back askew on his head, it gave him a look of Sam Weller. He told me, as we threw schnapps down our throats, that he was wearing the traditional costume of a Hamburg chimney-sweep’s apprentice. Emblematic of a secret sweeps’ guild which stretched all over Europe, it ensured a welcome from his colleagues everywhere; his circular brushes and his slotted bamboo staves were strapped to the bottom of his rucksack, just in case. While he explained that he was heading south to Innsbruck and the Brenner and then down into Italy, he unfolded his map on the table and his finger traced Bolzano, Trento, the Adige, Lake Garda, Verona, Mantua, Modena, Bologna and the Apennine passes leading to Florence; and as he uttered the glorious names, he waved his hand in the air as though Italy lay all about us. “Kommst du nicht mit?”

  Why not? It was tempting, and he was an amusing chap. Then I thought of the registered envelope I hoped was waiting in Munich and of all the mysteries of Eastern Europe that I would miss. “Schade!” he said: what a shame. Warmed by another schnapps or two, we helped each other on with our burdens and he set off for the Tyrol and Rome and the land where the lemon-trees bloomed (Dahin!) and waved his top-hat as he grew fainter through the snowfall. We both shouted godspeed against the noise of the wind and wondering whether I had done the right thing I plodded on, eyelashes clogged with flakes, towards Bavaria and Constantinople.

  * * *

  The house in the Uri utca was full of helpful books. Above all, there were the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Meyers Konversationslexikon, both of them firm standbys throughout the journey, and I found a wide window-seat to pile them on. There was a book on learning Hungarian and I made a fumbling assault on it, though my vocabulary never got beyond a hundred words or so, most of them nouns.

  Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family, “Just,” one of my new friends told me, “as English belongs to the Indo-European.” He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.

  “How close?”

  “Oh, very!”

  “What, like Italian and Spanish?”

  “Well no, not quite as close as that...”

  “How close then?”

  Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “About like English and Persian.”

  But it seems that one can get one step nearer with the languages of the Ostiaks and the Voguls. Reckoned only in thousands, these small groups of kindly skin-clad folk dwell in the fens and the tundras between the Upper Urals and the Ob river in Western Siberia. They inhabit half-underground huts and birch-bark shelters and, up to their waists in snow, hunt the woods for bears, which, simultaneously gods and quarry, they also worship; and when the ice melts, they fish and set traps and graze their reindeer across the moss, at pains to segregate them from the enormous neighbouring herds of their distant cousins, the Samoyeds. It was no help, at first, to learn that Magyar, whose resonance is fast, incisive and distinct, is an agglutinative language—the word merely conjures up the sound of mumbling through a mouth full of toffee. It means that the words are never inflected as they are in Europe, and that changes of sense are conveyed by a concatenation of syllables stuck on behind the first; all the vowel sounds imitate their leader, and the invariable ictus on the leading syllable sets up a kind of dactylic or anapaestic canter which, to a new ear, gives Magyar a wild and most unfamiliar ring. So, when at the dance I was listening to the vernacular sentences of my monocled and stork-loving Esztergom friend while he poured whisky out of a cut-glass decanter, and then to his marvellous-looking partner—as, with a deft languor, she took a cigarette out of a gold and shagreen case that snapped shut with an emerald, and answered him through the smoke—it was impossible not to wonder among what unconjecturable scenery of marshland and desert and woods, when the Magyar tongue was beginning to shake itself loose from the primitive Ugrian magma, these sounds could first have been uttered.

  On a printed page the fierce-looking sentences let slip no hint of their drift. Those tangles of S’s and Z’s! Gazing at the peppery strings of diaereses and the tempests of acute accents all swaying one way like wind-blown corn, I wondered if I would ever be able to extort a meaning.

  My first effort was discouraging. There was a snug kávéház, a coffee-house (if only all Magyar were as easy as this!) less than a minute’s walk away in Holy Trinity Square (I could just manage Szent Háromság Tér, Saint Three-ship Place) and I was spending a morning of showery weather there with books and writing things. The coffee-house windows surveyed ancient palaces and the tall restored gothic steeple of the Coronation Church, and just in front, a plinth sprang from the cobbles and lifted a bronze horseman called Andreas Hadik into the raindrops; he was a commander in the Seven Years War who had dodged the armies of Frederick the Grea
t, swooped on Berlin with a cavalcade of hussars, looted the place at lightning speed and galloped away again. At the next table, the only other person in the coffee-house was a frail, white-haired man reading the Pesti Hirláp. I couldn’t take my eyes off the headline. It ran: O boldog Angolország! I knew that the last word meant ‘England,’ and the rest was obvious: it could only mean ‘O bulldog England!,’ ‘O English bulldog!’ or something of the kind. The photograph below showed the Prince of Wales in a golfing pullover with a bold lozenge pattern and a tweed cap; but, very puzzlingly, the dog under his arm, which simultaneously stole the picture and turned it into an enigma, was a fox-terrier; they must have muddled the breeds. I couldn’t resist asking the reader in German if I had understood the words correctly. He laughed, and answered in English. No, it was nothing to do with dogs; ‘boldog’ is ‘happy’; ‘O fortunate England!’ was what the caption meant, and the gist of the article was England’s good luck in having so promising a Crown Prince. Hungary was a kingdom too, my neighbour ruefully added, but they only had a regent. The Apostolic crown was empty.

  The Apostolic Crown...I had heard much about it. Reproduced on buildings, coins, flags, cap-badges and buttons and on the top of all public notices, it was seldom out of sight. Until it should be needed for some future coronation—but whose? and when?—the crown itself was guarded in the Royal Palace. Over the centuries the shrewd marriage policy of the Habsburgs had absorbed most of the neighbouring kingdoms and finally Hungary; and the last sovereigns had been King Karl and Queen Zita, who were also, of course, Austria’s last Emperor and Empress. After the loss of both these thrones at the end of the Great War, and the breakdown of their brief and illicit return to Hungary, the lingering hopes of the dynasty had faded; and now the exiled King was dead. In photographs his son Archduke Otto, the present claimant, was usually dressed as a Hungarian magnate; but these pictures were seen more often in his native Austria than here. Nevertheless, the state was constitutionally a kingdom still, under the regency of Admiral Horthy. The beautiful Empress Elizabeth, their last queen but one, who had been assassinated in Switzerland in 1898 by an anarchist, was still their favourite. Framed on desks and tables and grand pianos, there she was, in nineteenth-century coronation robes, reading under a tree, clearing terrific fences in Northamptonshire or Meath or pensively at gaze, stroking her enormous wolfhound, Shadow. She had loved Hungary and the Hungarians, learnt Magyar and rushed to Hungary’s defence in all discussions; above all, she flung herself with fearlessness and skill into all their equestrian pursuits. Her love was returned with interest and still declared, thirty-six years after her assassination, with all the ardour of Burke for Marie Antoinette.

  Now only the crown was left. It was Hungary’s most sacred object. Vicissitudes beset it and unconjecturable journeys and adventures lay ahead. Wrought in battered gold, with its culminating cross askew, it was the actual diadem Pope Sylvester II sent to St. Stephen when he was crowned first King of Hungary in AD 1000. But the later addition of enamel plaques, gold chains and pendant gems give it an unquestionably Byzantine look, fitter for a mosaic sovereign by the Bosphorus or at Ravenna, one would think, than for a canopied monarch of the West. No wonder: the gold-and-enamelled circlet was the gift of a Byzantine emperor to a later sovereign, who promptly clasped it round the Pope’s original gift to his ancestor, and the gleaming hybrid is an apt symbol of the early Hungarian kingdom, for blandishments from the East as well as the West had flickered over the great Hungarian Plain with the ambivalence of a mirage.

  * * *

  Except for those dank cellars on the Vár, wandering about the steep and exhilarating city unearthed scarce marks of the long sojourn of the Turks: a few Ottoman fragments, the tomb of a dervish on the Hill of Roses, some hammam-cupolas scattered about; later, a mosque here and there in the provinces. There had been two centuries and a half for the Town to recover in; long enough, perhaps, to surround the Turkish interlude with romance and to remind the Magyars that, genealogically speaking, if one goes far enough back into Asian prehistory, the races are distant cousins. But it was hard, during my explorations, to imagine the skyline—the clustering domes, the minarets and the fluttering crescents—which Charles of Lorraine and his reconquering companions must have gazed at when they laid siege to Buda in 1686.

  Foreign soldiers flocked to the Hungarian wars, and among them more than one Stuart on the wrong side of the blanket, starting with the sixteen-year-old Duke of Berwick, James II’s son with Marlborough’s sister Arabella. He astonished the besieging army by his wild valour in the assault on Buda: and two years after it fell, his first cousin St. Albans—Charles II’s eighteen-year-old son with Nell Gwyn—fought bravely at the storming of Belgrade. Little is known about them in England, but these faraway campaigns invariably assembled stirring and eccentric figures from the British Isles: every kind of adventurer, Wild Geese, clan chieftains, recusant Catholics, Jacobite exiles and soldiers of fortune trailing the puissant pike rushed to the double-eagle banner, for these wars held all the glamour of the Crusades. Sir Philip Sidney, travelling about Hungary as an ambassador on leave, was in a different category; but otherwise the earliest English arrival I could find was Sir Richard Grenville, fighting on land against Suleiman the Magnificent twenty-five years before the Revenge. The next was Thomas Arundell—a great favourite of Elizabeth’s in spite of his religion. He won great glory in the Imperial service and at the storming of Esztergom in 1595 he forced the water-tower and captured the enemy’s banner with his own hand: a deed which prompted Rudolf II to make him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. When he got home his joyful flaunting of the title irritated the English nobility; it put his father, Sir Matthew, a mere knight, beside himself; and it infuriated the Queen (‘...my dogs shall wear no collar but my own...’); she sent him to the Fleet prison for a spell. Perhaps it was to stop all this foreign nonsense that James I made him Lord Arundell of Wardour.[3]

  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. Gep
ids, 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.