A Time of Gifts (35 page)

At last, with a sigh, I began to assemble my gear, making ready to plunge into Hungary. I climbed to the castle for a final chance to spy out the land.

Two nuns were gazing over the blowy void. They stood on the terrace exactly where an engraver would have placed them to balance his composition and give the castle scale. One, with a voluminous sleeve and a dynamically pointing forefinger outstretched,
was explaining the vast landscape while her static companion listened in wonder. Their survey ended, they passed me, stooping into the wind with a rustle of their habits and a clash of beads, each with a hand across the crown of her head to steady the starch of her coif and her swirling veils. Their glances were lowered in the custody of the eyes that their rule enjoins. As they vanished downhill through a tall gateway of late gothic ashlars, I hoped they had found the more conventional of the two descending flights. Except for a throng of jackdaws perching in the chinks and sliding about noisily in the wind, I was alone.

In the west, a narrow vista of the Marchfeld, which the Wolfsthal enclosed between the two tower-crowned headlands of the Porta Hungarica, brought the uncoiling Danube on the scene. It flowed under the great bridge; Hungary replaced Austria on its southern strand; then the plains to the south and the east spread the water in a shallow fan. These sudden lowlands, the antechamber to the puszta, had seduced the river into breaking loose. Flood and marsh expanded and streams wandered away in branching coils which an invisible tilt of the plain always guided back to their allegiance; and at each return, as though to atone for their truancy, the deserting streams brought a straggle of new tributaries with them. The flat islands of meadow and pasture retreated into the distance with the ampleness of counties. Snow striped the landscape still and the patches of grass between the stripes were beginning to revive again in sweeps of green. Brooks divided field from field and the trees that marked their windings were feathery with a purplish haze of buds. Spinneys of mist surrounded the barns and the manor-houses, and the copper domes of faraway parishes flashed back the light above these changing woods. The ice had all but thawed. The gleam beyond the film of rushes on the river had grown scarce. But the retreat of the racing cloud-shadows turned the streams from lead to steel and from steel to bright silver.

On the south side, so far downstream that they were hard to discern, a blur of low mountains marked the end of all this watery disintegration. On my side, as I climbed among the burnt-out
fortifications and looked inland, I could follow the advance of another range, the Little Carpathians, of which I was standing on the smallest and southernmost spur. They flowed eastwards, rising gently out of the plain, the merest wave of the land at first. Then they slowly turned, as the shallow buttresses ascended, into the great range itself, steepening like a warning roll of thunder to soar into the distance, snow-covered and out of sight beyond the furthest ceiling of cloud. The invisible watershed shares its snowfalls with the Polish slopes and the tremendous Carpathian barrier, forested hiding-place of boars and wolves and bears, climbs and sweeps for hundreds of miles beyond the reach of even memory's eye. It towers above southern Poland and the Ukraine and the whole length of Rumania in a thousand-mile-long boomerang-shaped curve until it retreats west again, subsides and finally drops into the lower Danube at the Iron Gates for its underwater meeting with the Great Balkan Range.

From the foot of the castle's north-western tower, a ravine sauntered towards Moravia. Then, as I rotated the beam of my glance westward, the valley-framed fragment of the Marchfeld—penultimate glimpse of Maria Theresa's kind world—wheeled back into view. The western edge of the plain melted into the Leitha mountains of Lower Austria and the glimmering Neusiedlersee. This was the Burgenland, taken from Hungary two decades earlier to compensate Austria for the loss of the South Tyrol. It was once the most southern region of the vanished kingdom of Great Moravia, the last connecting filament which still united the North and the South Slavs when the Magyars sundered them forever.

Craning from these ramparts and peering beyond the long and winding lake that was just out of sight, a giant with a telescope could have spotted the Italianate palace of the Eszterházys at Eisenstadt. He could also have picked out the chapel and the private theatre and the tiled roof under which Haydn had lived and composed for thirty years. A few miles further on, this giant would have pin-pointed the dairy-farm where Liszt was born—his father was a steward in the same music-loving family. A group of local
noblemen subscribed for the young composer to study in Paris. Later on, they presented him with a sword of honour to cut a dash with in the courts of the West. It was just a thousand years since their pagan ancestors, who could only count up to seven, had drawn rein here. I liked to think of those country dynasts, with their theatres and their sword of honour and their passion for music. The memory of the two great composers hallowed the region and seemed to scatter the southern skyline with notes.

My glance, having completed its circle, veered over the Hungarian border again and followed the eastward rush of the clouds. I should be on the march there next day.

Or so I thought.

 

[1]
The word is pronounced as though it were French and spelt Pôjogne, with a heavy stress on the first syllable.

[2]
‘East of Vienna, the Orient begins.'

[3]
But by no means at once. Even in the Mani, the southern tip of Europe where I am writing these pages, there are traces of their progress: the names of hill villages a couple of miles from my table, incomprehensible here, would be understood at once on the banks of the Don.

[4]
These days marked the resumption of an old obsession with alphabets. The back pages of a surviving notebook are full of Old Testament names laboriously transliterated into Hebrew characters, complete with their diacritics. There are everyday words copied down as well, for the ancient script was also used in the Yiddish vernacular on shop-fronts and in the newspapers I saw in cafés. (There are even words, similarly transliterated on later pages, from the old Spanish Ladino of the Constantinople and Salonica Jews.) Next, symptoms from the final stages of this journey, come Cyrillic and Arabic: Arab letters were still used among the unreformed Turks in Bulgaria and in Greek Thrace. There are struggles with obsolete Glagolitic and bold attempts at the twisted pothooks and hangers of the Armenians who scattered the Balkans like little colonies of toucans. The brief catalogue ends with a flood of Greek. The magic of all these letters largely depended on their inscrutability: when I learnt a bit of Bulgarian, Cyrillic lost some of its
mana
. But Arabic and Hebrew retain theirs to the last. Even today, a toothpaste advertisement in Arabic suggests the
Thousand and One Nights
, a message in Hebrew over a shop window—‘Umbrellas Repaired on the Spot,' or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Würste und Salami'—is heavy with glamour. The symbols carry a hint of the Kabala, an echo of Joshua's ram's horns and a whisper from the Song of Songs.

[5]
Superseded by Sir Cecil Parrott's fine translation a few years ago.

B
UT NEXT
evening, when I should have been finding somewhere to sleep after the first day's march in Hungary, Hans and I were unfolding our napkins under the pink lampshades of the dining-car while the night train to Prague whirled us full tilt in the opposite direction. Hans, who had taken my Central European education in hand, said it would be a shame to go gallivanting further east without seeing the old capital of Bohemia. I couldn't possibly afford the trip but he had abolished all doubts by a smile and a raised hand enjoining silence. I had been gaining skill, when involved in doings above my station, at accepting this tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb. The banknote I flourished in restaurants, like Groucho Marx's dollar-bill on a length of elastic, grew more tattered with each airing. I strove to make my protests sound sincere, but they were always brushed aside with amiable firmness.

Falling asleep after dinner, we woke for a moment in the small hours as the train came to a halt in a vast and silent station. The infinitesimal specks of snow that hovered in the beam of the station lamps were falling so slowly that they hardly seemed to move. A goods train at another platform indicated the sudden accessibility of Warsaw. PRAHA—BRNO—BRESLAU—LODZ—WARZAVA. The words were stencilled across the trucks; the momentary vision of a sledded Polack jingled across my mind's eye. When the train began to move, the word BRNO slid away in the opposite direction. Then BRNO! BRNO! BRNO! The dense syllable flashed past the window at decreasing intervals and we fell asleep again and plunged on through the Moravian dark and into Bohemia.

At breakfast time, we climbed down into the awakening capital.

* * *

Stripped of the customary approach on foot, Prague remains distinct from all the other towns of this journey. Memory encircles it with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine. I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream. The trajectory had carried Hans and me back into the middle of winter. All the detail—the uprush of the crockets, the processions of statues along the coping of bridges and the levitated palaces—were outlined with snow; and, the higher the buildings climbed, the more densely the woods enfolded the ancient town. Dark with nests, skeleton trees lifted the citadel and the cathedral above the tops of an invading forest and filled the sky with cawing and croaking.

It was a bewildering and captivating town. The charm and the kindness of Hans's parents and his brothers were a marvellous enhancement of it, for an articulate enthusiasm for life stamped them all; and, in borrowed evening plumage that night, among the candle-lit faces of an animated dinner party, I first understood how fast was the prevailing pace. Hans we know. Heinz, the eldest brother, a professor of political theory at the University, looked more like a poet or a musician than a don and the ideas he showered about him were stamped with inspiration. Paul, the youngest and a few years older than me, was touched by the same grace. Those candles, rekindled now for a moment, also reveal their kind parents, and Heinz's dark and beautiful wife. There is also a remarkable relation-in-law of hers, a man of great age and originality, called Pappi, or Haupt zu Pappenheim. His talk, rooted in a picaresque life all over the world, emerged in a headlong rush of omniscience and humour. (My seventeenth-century obsession connected the name at once with the great cavalry commander in the Thirty Years War, one who had sought out Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen, as Rupert had sought out Cromwell at Marston Moor,
to be struck down at the same moment as the King in another part of the field. His relation's discourse had some of the same dash.)

Much later the scene shifted from these candles to a cave-like nightclub where silhouettes floated past on a tide of cigarette smoke, and the talk—abetted by syphon-hiss and cork-pop, and encouraged rather than hindered by the blues and the muted cymbals and the wailing saxophone—flowed unstaunchably on. It culminated in marvellously abstruse and inventive theories, launched by Heinz, about Rilke and Werfel and the interrelation of Kafka's
Castle
—as yet unread by me—and the actual citadel that dominated the capital. When we emerged, the great pile itself was still wrapped in the dark, but only just.

* * *

As I followed Hans's zigzag and switchback course all over the steep city, it occurred to me that hangovers are not always harmful. If they fall short of the double-vision which turns Salisbury Cathedral into Cologne, they invest scenery with a lustre which is unknown to total abstainers. Once we were under the lancets of St. Vitus's Cathedral, a second conviction began to form. Prague was the recapitulation and the summing-up of all I had gazed at since stepping ashore in Holland, and more; for that slender nave and the airy clerestory owed spiritual allegiance far beyond the Teutonic heartland, and the Slav world. They might have sprung up in France under the early Valois or in Plantagenet England.

The last of the congregation were emerging to a fickle momentary sunlight. Indoors the aftermath of incense, as one might say with a lisp, still floated among the clustered piers. Ensconced in their distant stalls, an antiphonal rearguard of canons was intoning Nones.

Under the diapered soffits and sanctuary lamps of a chantry, a casket like a brocaded ark of the covenant enclosed the remains of a saint. Floating wicks and rows of candles lit up his effigy overhead: they revealed a mild mediaeval sovereign holding a spear in
his hand and leaning on his shield. It was Good King Wenceslas, no less. The confrontation was like a meeting with Jack the Giant Killer or Old King Cole... English carolsingers, Hans told me as we knelt in a convenient pew, had promoted him in rank. The sainted Czech prince—ancestor of a long line of Bohemian kings, however—was murdered in 934. And there he lay, hallowed by his countrymen for the last thousand years.

Outside, except for the baroque top to the presiding belfry, the cathedral itself might have been an elaborate gothic reliquary. From the massed upward thrust of its buttresses to the stickle-back ridge of its high-pitched roof it was spiked with a forest of perpendiculars. Up the corner of the transepts, stairs in fretted polygonal cylinders spiralled and counter-spiralled, and flying buttresses enmeshed the whole fabric in a radiating web of slants. Borne up in its flight by a row of cusped and trefoiled half-arches, each of them carried a steep procession of pinnacles and every moulding was a ledge for snow, as though the masonry were perpetually unloosing volleys of snowfeathered shafts among the rooks and the bruise-coloured and quick-silver clouds.