8. THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD

THE FRIEND who had driven me through the eastern suburbs of Vienna drew up under the barbican of Fischamend: “Shall we drive on?” he asked. “Just a bit further?” Unawares, we had gone too far already. The road ran straight and due east beside the Danube. It was very tempting; all horsepower corrupts. But rather reluctantly, I fished out my rucksack, waved to the driver on his return journey to Vienna and set off.

Trees lined the road in a diminishing vista. The magpies that flew to and fro in the thin yellow sunshine were beyond all joy-and-sorrow computation and all other thoughts were chased away, as I approached the little town of Petronell, by wondering what a distant object could be that was growing steadily larger as I advanced. It turned out to be a Roman triumphal gateway standing in the middle of a field like a provincial version of the Arch of Titus; alone, enormous and astonishing. The vault sprang from massive piers and the marble facings had long fallen away, laying bare a battered and voluminous core of brick and rubble. Rooks crowded all over it and hopped among the half-buried fragments that scattered the furrows. Visible for miles, the arch of Carnuntum must have amazed the Marcomanni and the Quadi on the opposite bank. Marcus Aurelius wintered here three years, striding cloaked across the ploughland amid the hovering pensées, alternately writing his meditations and subduing the barbarians on the other side of the Danube. His most famous victory—fought in a deep canyon and celestially reinforced by thunder and hail—was known as the Miracle of the Thundering Legions. It is commemorated on the Antonine Column in Rome.

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.

My next call, only a few doors away, was a similar haunt of sawdust and spilt liquor and spit, but, this time, KRCvMA was daubed over the window. All was Slav within. The tow-haired Slovaks drinking there were dressed in conical fleece hats and patched sheepskin-jerkins with the matted wool turned inwards. They were shod in canoe-shaped cowhide moccasins. Their shanks, cross-gartered with uncured thongs, were bulbously swaddled in felt that would only be unwrapped in the spring. Swamp-and-conifer men they looked, with faces tundrablank and eyes as blue and as vague as unmapped lakes which the plum-brandy was misting over. But they might just as well have been swallowing hydromel a thousand years earlier, before setting off to track the cloven spoor of the aurochs across a frozen Trans-Carpathian bog.

Liquor distilled from peach and plum, charcoal-smoke, paprika, garlic, poppy seed—these hints to the nostril and the tongue were joined by signals that addressed themselves to the ear, softly at first and soon more insistently: the flutter of light hammers over the wires of a zither, glissandos on violin strings that dropped and swooped in a mesh of unfamiliar patterns, and, once, the liquid notes of a harp. They were harbingers of a deviant and intoxicating new music that would only break loose in full strength on the Hungarian side of the Danube.

In the outskirts of the town these hints abounded: I felt myself drawn there like a pin to a magnet. Half-lost in lanes full of humble grocers’ shops and harness-makers and corn-chandlers and smithies, I caught a first glimpse of Gypsies. Women with chocolate-coloured babies were begging among the pony-carts and a brown Carpathian bear, led by a dancing-master dark as sin, lumbered pigeon-toed over the cobbles. Every few seconds, his leader jangled a tambourine to put the animal through his paces; then he laid a wooden flute to his lips and blew an ascending trill of minims. Sinuous and beautiful fortune-tellers, stagily coifed and ear-ringed and flounced in tiers of yellow and magenta and apple-green, perfunctorily shuffled their cards and proffered them in dog-eared fans as they strolled through the crowds, laying soft-voiced and unrelenting siege to every stranger they met. Sinking flush with the landscape, the town quickly fell to pieces and gave way to an ambiguous fringe of huts and wagons and fires and winter flies where a tangle of brown children scampered and wrestled in the mud among the skirmishing and coupling dogs. I was soon sighted. This far-off glimpse launched a pattering of small feet and a swarm of snot-caked half-naked Mowglis who pummelled each other for precedence as they raced on their quarry. Clambering over each other, they patted and pulled and wheedled in Hungarian and reviled each other in Romany. An old blacksmith, bronze-hued as an Inca, egged them on under the semblance of rebuke in a stream of words from beyond the Himalayas. (His anvil, with a row of horse-nails laid out, was stapled to a tree-stump and one brown foot worked the bellows of a little forge.) I gave a small coin to the nearest. This wrought the onslaught of his rivals to a frenzy and their shrill litanies rose to such a pitch that I scattered my small change like danegeld and retreated. At last, when they saw there was nothing left, they trotted back to the huts, exchanging blows and recriminations. All except one, that is, a hardy chestnut-coloured boy about five years old wearing nothing at all except a black trilby that must have been his father’s. It was so big for him that, though he constantly wriggled his head from side to side as he plucked and pleaded, the hat remained stationary. But there was nothing left. Suddenly giving up, he pelted downhill to join the others.

Pincers in hand, the old blacksmith had watched all this with the mare’s near-fore hoof cupped in his lap while her colt tugged thirstily. A hush had spread among the wagons and the twinkling fires when I last looked back. The Gypsies were settling down to their evening hedgehog and dusk was beginning to fall.

* * *

Bratislava was full of secrets. It was the outpost of a whole congeries of towns where far-wanderers had come to a halt, and the Jews, the most ancient and famous of them, were numerous enough to give a pronounced character to the town. In Vienna, I had caught fleeting glimpses of the inhabitants of the Leopoldstadt quarter, but always from a distance. Here, very early on, I singled out one of the many Jewish coffee houses. Feeling I was in the heart of things, I would sit rapt there for hours. It was as big as a station and enclosed like an aquarium with glass walls. Moisture dripped across the panes and logs roared up a stove-chimney of black tin pipes that zigzagged with accordeon-pleated angles through the smoky air overhead. Conversing and arguing and contracting business round an archipelago of tables, the dark-clad customers thronged the place to bursting point. (Those marble squares did duty as improvised offices in thousands of cafés all through Central Europe and the Balkans and the Levant.) The minor hubbub of Magyar and Slovak was outnumbered by voices speaking German, pronounced in the Austrian way or with the invariable Hungarian stress on the initial syllable. But quite often the talk was in Yiddish, and the German strain in the language always made me think that I was going to catch the ghost of a meaning. But it eluded me every time; for the dialect—or the language, rather—though rooted in mediaeval Franconian German, is complicated by queer syntax and a host of changes and diminutives. Strange gutturals, Slav accretions and many words and formations remembered from the Hebrew have contributed to its idiosyncrasy. The up-and-down, rather nasal lilt makes it more odd than harmonious to an outsider but it is linguistically of enormous interest: a vernacular in which the history of the Jews of northern Europe and the centuries of their ebb and flow between the Rhine and Russia are all embedded. (Two years later, in London, when I felt I knew German a little better, I went twice to the Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel; but I found the dialogue on the stage more fugitive than ever.) There were rabbis in the café now and then, easily singled out by their long beards and beaver hats and by black overcoats down to their heels. Occasionally they were accompanied by Talmudic students of about my age, some even younger, who wore small skullcaps or black low-crowned hats with the wide brims turned up, and queer elf-locks trained into corkscrews which hung beside their ears. In spite of these, pallor and abstraction stamped some of these faces with the beauty of young saints. They had a lost look about them as if they were permanently startled when they were away from their desks. Their eyes—bright blue, or as dark as midnight oil—were expanded to the innocent width of the eyes of gazelles. Sometimes they had a nearly blind expression; years of peering at texts seemed to have put their gaze out of focus for a wider field. I had visions of them, candle-lit behind sealed and cobwebbed windows, with the thick lenses of their spectacles gleaming close to the page as they re-unravelled Holy Writ: texts that had been commented on, recensed, annotated and bickered over in Babylon, Cordova, Kairouan, Vilna, Troyes and Mainz and Narbonne by fourteen centuries of scholiasts. Mists of dark or red fluff blurred a few of those chins that no razor touched, and their cheeks were as pale as the wax that lit the page while the dense black lettering swallowed up their youth and their lives.[4]

I longed to attend a religious service, but without the guidance of some initiate friend, didn’t dare. This diffidence was broken many years later by Dr. Egon Wellesz’ book on Byzantine plainsong. In apostolic times, he writes, the Psalms formed the backbone of the Christian liturgy, chanted just as they were in the great temples of Jerusalem and Antioch. The same music is the common ancestor of the Jewish service, the chants of the Greek Orthodox Church and Gregorian plainsong; of the last, the cantus peregrinus, which appropriately accompanies the chanting of In exitu Israel, is considered the closest. Spurred by this, I ventured into the magnificent Carolean Portuguese-Dutch Synagogue in Artillery Row. By good luck, a visiting Sephardic choir of great virtuosity was singing, and I thought, perhaps rather sanguinely, that I could detect a point of union between the three kinds of singing. It was like singling out familiar notes faintly carried by the breeze from the other side of a dense forest of time. There was a comparably moving occasion many years later. Wandering about north-western Greece, I made friends with the rabbi of Yannina, and he invited me to attend the Feast of Purim. The old, once crowded Sephardic Jewish quarter inside Ali Pasha’s tremendous walls was already falling to ruin. The rabbi had assembled the little group which was all that had survived the German occupation and come safe home. Cross-legged on the low-railed platform and slowly turning the two staves of the scroll, he intoned the book of Esther—describing the heroine’s intercession with King Ahasuerus and the deliverance of the Jews from the plot of Haman—to an almost empty synagogue.

* * *

The Schlossberg, the rock which dominates the town with its colossal gutted castle, had a bad name, and I hadn’t climbed many of the steps of the lane before understanding why. One side of the path dropped among trees and rocks, but on the other, each of the hovels which clung to the mountain was a harlot’s nest. Dressed in their shifts with overcoats over their shoulders or glittering in brightly-coloured and threadbare satin, the inmates leaned conversationally akimbo against their door-jambs, or peered out with their elbows propped on the half-doors of their cells and asked passers-by for a light for their cigarettes. Most of them were handsome and seasoned viragos, often with peroxided hair as lifeless as straw and paint was laid on their cheeks with a doll-maker’s boldness. There were a few monsters and a number of beldames. Here and there a pretty newcomer resembled a dropped plant about to be trodden flat. Many sat indoors on their pallets, looking humble and forlorn, while Hungarian peasants and Czech and Slovak soldiers from the garrison clumped past in ascending and descending streams. During the day, except for the polyglot murmur of invitation, it was rather a silent place. But it grew noisier after dark when shadows brought confidence and the plum-brandy began to bite home. It was only lit by cigarette ends and by an indoor glow that silhouetted the girls on their thresholds. Pink lights revealed the detail of each small interior: a hastily tidied bed, a tin basin and a jug, some lustral gear and a shelf displaying a bottle of solution, pox-foiling and gentian-hued; a couple of dresses hung on a nail. There would be a crucifix, or an oleograph of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption, and perhaps a print of St. Wenceslas, St. John Nepomuk or St. Martin of Tours. Postcards of male and female film stars were stuck in the frames of the looking-glasses, and scattered among them snapshots of Maszaryk, Admiral Horthy and Archduke Otto declared the allegiance of the inmates. A saucepan of water simmered over charcoal; there was little else. The continuity of these twinkling hollows was only broken when one of the incumbents charmed a stooping soldier under her lintel. Then a dowsed lamp and the closing of a flimsy door, or a curtain strung from nail to nail, masked their hasty embraces from the passers-by. This staircase of a hundred harlots was trodden hollow by decades of hobnails, and the lights, slanting across the night like a phosphorescent diagonal in a honeycomb, ended in the dark. One felt, but could not see, the huge battlemented ruin above. At the lower end, the diffused lights of the city cataracted downhill.

This was the first quarter of its kind I had seen. Without knowing quite how I had arrived, I found myself wandering there again and again, as an auditor more than an actor. The tacit principle to flinch at nothing on this journey quailed here. These girls, after all, were not their Viennese sisters, who could slow up a bishop with the lift of an eye lash. And even without this embargo, the retribution that I thought inevitable—no nose before the year was out—would have kept me safely out of doors. The lure was more complicated. Recoil, guilt, sympathy, attraction, romantisme du bordel and nostalgie de la boue wove a heady and sinister garland. It conjured up the abominations in the books of the Prophets and the stews of Babylon and Corinth and scenes from Lucian, Juvenal, Petronius and Villon. It was aesthetically astonishing too, a Jacob’s ladder tilted between the rooftops and the sky, crowded with shuffling ghosts and with angels long fallen and moulting. I could never tire of it.

Loitering there one evening, and suddenly late for dinner, I began running downhill and nearly collided in the shadows with a figure that was burlier than the rest of us and planted like a celebrity in the centre of a dim and respectful ring. When the bystanders drew to one side, it turned out to be the brown Carpathian bear, unsteadily upright in their midst. His swart companion was at hand, and as I sped zigzagging among my fellow-spectres, I could hear the chink of a tambourine, the first choreographic trill of the wooden flute and the clapping hands and the cries of the girls.

A few minutes later, safe in the brightly-lit anticlimax of the central streets, the stairs and their denizens and the secret pandemic spell that reigned there were as bereft of substance as figments from a dream in the small hours, and as remote. It was always the same.

* * *

Hans’s rooms, after all these mild forays, were a charmed refuge of books and drinks and talk. He was illuminating on the questions and perplexities I came home with and amused by my reactions, especially to the Schlossberg. When I asked him about the Czechs and the Austrians, he handed me an English translation of Hasvek’s Good Soldier Svvejk—or Schweik, as it was spelt in this edition—which had just come out.[5] It was exactly what I needed. (Thinking of Czechoslovakia, I was to remember it much later on, when the horrors of occupation from the West were followed by long-drawn-out and still continuing afflictions from the East; both of them still unguessed at then, in spite of the gathering omens.) It was rather broadminded of Hans, as the drift of the book is resolutely anti-Austrian. Though he was a dutiful citizen of the successor state, his heart, I felt, still lay with the order of things that had surrounded his early childhood. How could it be otherwise?

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.