A Time of Gifts (33 page)

The Marchfeld—the moss-land and swamp on the other shore—was another region that history has singled out for slaughter: wars between Romans and the Germanic tribes at first, dim clashes of Ostrogoths, Huns, Avars and the Magyars later on, then great mediaeval pitched-battles between Bohemia and Hungary and the Empire. Archduke Charles, charging flag in hand through the reeds, won the first allied victory over Napoleon at Aspern, a few miles upstream and the field of Wagram was only just out of sight.

In the late afternoon I knocked on the gate of Schloss Deutsch-Altenburg—a wooded castle on the Danube's bank. Friends in Vienna had asked the owner to put me up for the night and old Graf Ludwigstorff, after a kind welcome, handed me over to his pretty daughter Maritschi. We gazed at the Roman tombstones in the museum and the marble and bronze busts. There were fragments of a marble maenad and a complete shrine of Mithras, companion to all the others that scattered the Roman frontier from Hadrian's Wall to the Black Sea.

Snowdrops were out along the tow-path. We played ducks and drakes, sending the pebbles skimming among the floating ice until it was too dark to see them. Then, stepping through the driftwood, we got back in time for tea. The windows were only separated from the river by a clump of trees, and any lingering pangs for lost Vienna soon dissolved in the friendly lamplight.

* * *

I was through the barbican in the old walled town of Hainburg early next day. Castled hills rose from the shore, and soon, under the ruins of Theben, the battle-haunted fens came to an end on the other side of the river. Below this steep rock, the March—which is the Czech Morava—flowed into the Danube from the north, marking the Czechoslovak border. The Wolfstal, the narrow trough between the two spurs that rose on either side of the Danube, was the immemorial sally-port that led to Hungary and
the wild east: the last bastion to be stormed by Asian invaders before laying siege to Vienna.

I was excited by the thought that the frontiers of Austria and Czechoslovakia and Hungary were about to converge. Though separated from by the river, I was opposite Czechoslovakian territory already; I planned to wheel left into the Republic and attack Hungary later on from the flank. In reality I was even closer than that: I was wandering across a field when a man in uniform began shouting from the dyke-road overhead. Where the devil did I think I was going? It was the Austrian frontier post. “You were walking straight into Czechoslovakia!” the official said reproachfully as he stamped my passport. I left the eagles and the red-white-red road barrier behind. The next frontier, after a stretch of no man's land, was closed by a barrier of red, white and blue. Another rubber-stamp was smacked down by a broad-faced Czechoslovak official with the Lion of Bohemia on his cap. ‘My fourth country,' I thought exultantly.

In a little while I got to an enormous bridge. Its great frame, the masts and trees and old buildings congregated at the further bridgehead and the steep ascending city above them had been visible for miles. It was the old city of Pressburg, re-baptized with the Slav name of Bratislava when it became part of the new Czechoslovak Republic. The climbing roofs were dominated by a hill and the symmetry of the huge gaunt castle and the height of its corner-towers gave it the look of an upside-down table.

I reached the middle of the bridge at the same moment as a chain of barges and leaned over to watch them nose their way upstream through the flotsam. The ice-fragments were beginning to get furry at the edges. Colliding with them softly, the vessels disappeared under the bridge one by one and emerged the other side in the wake of a sturdy tug. It flew the Yugoslav colours and the name
Beograd
was painted along the sooty bows in Cyrillic and Latin characters. The long-drawn-out wail of the siren gave way to the coughing staccato of the engine. The funnel puffed out a non-stop sequence of smoke balloons that lingered on the still air as the
procession grew smaller in the distance, in a slowly-dissolving dotted line. The barges toiled against the current, sunk to their gunwales under a tarpaulined cargo. But in a day or two—I thought with sudden envy—they would be stealing into the Wachau and waking the two-noted echo of Dürnstein.

* * *

Listening to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slovak and Magyar the other side, I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all; it was a relief to hear some German as well. I managed to find my way to the Bank where my friend Hans Ziegler held minor sway and ask if the Herr Doktor was in his office; and that evening I was safe under a roof which was to be my haven for days.

Hans and I had made friends in Vienna. He was nine years older than I. His family lived in Prague and, like many Austrians at the break-up of the Empire, they had found themselves citizens of the new-born Republic, tied there beyond uprooting by old commitments; in this case, by a family bank. Hans helped to run the branch of an associate establishment in Bratislava—or Pressburg, as he still firmly called it, just as ex-Hungarians stubbornly clung to Pozony
[1]
—and felt rather cut off from life. Vienna was his true home. Apart from this, England was his favourite. He had many friends there and happy memories of college lawns and country sojourns. His fondness for architecture coincided with my early fumblings in the same direction; and it was from him, I am certain, that I first heard the great names of Fischer von Erlach and Hildebrandt and the Asam family. “Come and stay on your way to Hungary and cheer me up,” he had said. “I get so bored there.”

To my uncritical eye Bratislava didn't seem too bad. Anyway, Hans's humorous gift turned the society of the place into a comic
and entertaining scene. Whenever he had a free moment, we explored the surviving relics of the town, plunging through arched barbicans and along twisting lanes in our search; journeys which ended with cakes stuffed with nuts and poppy-seeds in a wonderful Biedermeier café called the Konditorei Maier, or sipping stronger stuff in a little vaulted bar hard by. At certain hours, all that was dashing in the town assembled there like forest creatures gathering at their water-hole.

Hans wasn't alone in his critical feelings about Bratislava. Most of the people we saw would have agreed—a few worldly-wise Austrians, that is, some breezy Hungarian squires from nearby estates, the amusing Jewish manager of the brewery, a Canon of the Cathedral chapter expert in Magyar history, and the local eccentrics and a few of the local beauties. “You should have seen it before the War!” —this was the general burden of those who were old enough to remember. The great days of the city were long past. During the centuries when all Hungary south of the Danube was occupied by the Turks, the city was the capital of the unconquered remainder of the Kingdom on the north side of the river: the modern province of Slovakia, that is to say. The Kings of Hungary were crowned here in the gothic Cathedral from 1536 to 1784: Habsburgs by then, thanks to the able marriage policy of the dynasty, by which the Hungarian crown had become an appanage of the Austrian ruling house. When the Turks were flung back, the accumulated splendours of the city flowed downstream. The palaces remained, but their incumbents settled in rival mansions that sprang up on the slopes of reconquered Buda. In 1811, as though immolating itself in protest, the great royal castle—the upturned table on the hill—caught fire and burned to a cinder. It was never rebuilt, and the enormous gutted shell, which still looked intact from a distance, sulked on its hilltop as a memento of fled splendour. For its old Hungarian overlords the city's recent change of nationality and name and nature seemed the ultimate sorrow.

* * *

‘Östlich von Wien fängt der Orient an.'
[2]
I had picked up this phrase of Metternich's somewhere, and it kept reminding me that the crescent moon of the Turks had fluttered along the southern bank of the river for nearly two centuries. But there was another feeling in the air as well, unconnected with the vanished Ottomans, which was new and hard to define. Perhaps it had something to do with the three names of the city and the trilingual public notices and street names: the juxtaposition of tongues made me feel I had crossed more than a political frontier. A different cast had streamed on stage and the whole plot had changed.

Except for balalaika-players in night-clubs, the Slovak and the occasional Czech in the streets were the first Slav sounds I had ever heard. I learnt all I could about how they had come here but even so, there was something mysterious about that vast advent. It was so quiet: a sudden Dark Ages outflow, in the twilight regions between the Vistula and the Pripet Marshes, from a staunchless spring of tribes. The noisy upheavals of the Germanic races and their famous
Drang
westwards must have muffled other sounds while the Slavs flowed south through the Carpathians. The settlements of the Czechs and the Slovaks were no more than early landmarks in this voluminous flux. On it went: over the fallen fences of the Roman Empire; past the flat territories of the Avars; across the great rivers and through the Balkan passes and into the dilapidated provinces of the Empire of the East: silently soaking in, spreading like liquid across blotting paper with the speed of a game of Grandmother's Steps. Chroniclers only noticed them every century or so and at intervals of several hundred miles. They filled up Eastern Europe until their spread through the barbarous void was at last absorbed by the greater numbers and the ancient and ailing realm of Byzantium.
[3]
Their eastward expansion and hegemony only stopped at the Behring Straits.

There was no ambiguity about the events that split the Slav world in two. The Magyars, at the end of their journey from faraway pastures a thousand miles north-east of the Caspian, broke through the Carpathian passes in 895. Although they had been some centuries on the way, it was a demon-king entrance—the flames and the thunder were accompanied by shouts from saddle to saddle in the Ugro-Finnish branch of the Ural-Altaic languages—and everything went down before it. The desert tract east of the Danube, abruptly cleared of the newly arrived Bulgars and the last of the shadowy Avars, became the Great Hungarian Plain at last; and the Slav kingdom of Great Moravia, the vital link between the northern and the southern Slavs, broke up forever under the newcomers' hoofs. Their arrival had followed the well-known pattern of barbarian invasions. Indeed, the analogy between the Huns of Attila and the Magyars of Árpád was close enough for the West to misname not only the new arrivals, but the land where they took root. But, after a few decades of spirited havoc all over western and southern Europe, the pattern changed. Within a century, the conquests of these heathen horsemen had turned into one of the most powerful and resplendent of the western states, a realm with enormous frontiers and a saint for a king. From the very first, the kingdom included all the lands of the Slovaks and the frontier remained unchanged for the ten centuries that separate Árpád from President Wilson. A few years ago, they had been detached from the crown of St. Stephen and given to the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. If the transferred province had contained only Slovaks, it would have been painful to the Hungarians, but ethnologically just. Unfortunately it contained a wide strip of land to the north of the Danube whose inhabitants were Magyars: a fierce amputation for Hungary, a double-edged gift for Czechoslovakia, and rife with future trouble. The German-speakers were descendants of the Teutonic citizens who had helped to populate most of the cities of Central Europe.

Few readers can know as little about these new regions as I did. But, as they were to be the background for the next few hundred
miles of travel, I felt more involved in them every day. All at once I was surrounded by fresh clues—the moulding on a window, the cut of a beard, overheard syllables, an unfamiliar shape of a horse or a hat, a shift of accent, the taste of a new drink, the occasional unfamiliar lettering—and the accumulating fragments were beginning to cohere like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Meanwhile, further afield, the shift of mountains and plains and rivers and the evidence of enormous movements of races gave me the feeling of travelling across a relief map where the initiative lay wholly with the mineral world. It evicted with drought and ice, beckoned with water and grazing, decoyed with mirages and tilted and shifted populations, like the hundreds-and-thousands in a glass-topped balancing game; steering languages, breaking them up into tribes and dialects, assembling and confronting kingdoms, grouping civilizations, channelling beliefs, guiding armies and blocking the way to philosophies and styles of art and finally giving them a relenting shove through the steeper passes. These thoughts invested everything with drama. As I listened to the muffled vowels of the Slovaks and the traffic-jams of consonants and the explosive spurts of dentals and sibilants, my mind's eye automatically suspended an imaginary backcloth of the Slav heartlands behind the speakers: three reeds on a horizontal line, the map-makers' symbol for a swamp, infinitely multiplied; spruce and poplar forests, stilt houses and fish-traps, frozen plains and lakes where the ice-holes were black with waterfowl. Then, at the astonishing sound of Magyar—a dactylic canter where the ictus of every initial syllable set off a troop of identical vowels with their accents all swerving one way like wheat-ears in the wind—the scene changed. For some reason I surveyed this from above—prompted, perhaps, by a subconscious hint from
Sohrab and Rustam
?—as though I were a crane migrating across Asia. League upon league of burnt-up pasture unfurled. The glaciers of the Urals or the Altai hung on the skyline and threads of smoke rose up from collapsible cities of concertina-walled black-felt pavilions while a whole nation of ponies grazed. Everything seemed to corroborate these inklings.
Wandering in the back-lanes on the second day I was there, I went into a lively drinking-hell with the Magyar word VENDEGLÖ painted in large letters across the front pane and bumped into a trio of Hungarian farmers. Enmeshed in smoke and the fumes of plum-brandy with paprika-pods sizzling on the charcoal, they were hiccupping festive dactyls to each other and unsteadily clinking their tenth thimblefuls of palinka: vigorous, angular-faced, dark-clad and dark-glanced men with black moustaches tipped down at the corners of their mouths. Their white shirts were buttoned at the throat. They wore low-crowned black hats with narrow brims and high boots of shiny black leather with a Hessian notch at the knee. Hunnish whips were looped about their wrists. They might have just dismounted after sacking the palace of the Moravian kral.