Between the Woods and the Water (24 page)

Many years later, climbing the marvellous covered stairway that leads to the first platform of the Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon, I stopped half-way and tried to remember what this steep ascent called to mind; and, in a moment, I was back a couple of decades and climbing a windy staircase under beams and shingle and a steep wooden roof in Transylvania. The Saxon steps lifted us to the town's grassy summit, whose battlements in the sky encompassed leaning gravestones, tall trees and an old gothic church. A roof as steep as a barn's, with all the semicircular scales discoloured by lichen, rose from the mottled walls; and indoors airy space ascended to a mediaeval web of vaults. There were pointed arches once again and lancets, trefoils and cusps, and in the chancel, traces of fresco three-quarters flaked away, a crucifixion or a transfiguration, perhaps: the exact memory has dropped away too. Armorial tombstones were piled at random under the bell-sallies, and the organ must have broken down, for somebody practising on a harmonium rumbled and wheezed in the gallery. The theme of the Danube School altarpiece has dimmed as well. ‘A marvellous mixture of rough stone,' my diary says, ‘faded brick and plaster, scalloped doorways, age piled on age, all first rate and all with that untouched, musty feeling one treasures.' I thought it was a Catholic church at first, but the absence of sanctuary lamps and the Stations of the Cross hinted otherwise. So it was Lutheran, and
much less bleak and stripped than Calvinist and Unitarian interiors. There were other hints. Pews, as opposed to chairs, seemed a distinguishing mark of the Reform.

We sat in one of these and Angéla idly picked a prayer-book from the ledge and opened it haphazard. “Oh look!” The dog-eared pages had fallen open at a passage marked with a skeleton leaf where the faded black-letter spelled out a prayer of intercession for ‘unser wohlbeliebter Kaiser Franz-Josef.' But there was no mention of Elizabeth, his beautiful Queen-Empress. She must already have been assassinated at the landing-stage in Geneva; and no mention of their son, Crown Prince Rudolph who, after shooting all those bears in the mountains which we could just see through the diamond-panes, had kept the last round for himself at Mayerling. There was no date, only the owner's name in faded ink. We wondered later whether it could have been published after his next heir, the Hungary-hating Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, had been murdered at Sarajevo. (1898, 1889 and 1914—mark these grim dates.) Nor, as far as I can remember, could we find the name of Archduke Charles, Franz-Josef's successor and last Emperor of all. But for this, the closing date for the Prayer Book might have fallen just before the Emperor's lonely death in 1916, when the requiems and the salutes and the tolling bells must have been drowned among the unceremonial gunfire of half a dozen battle-fronts: salvoes which two years later were to bring the diadem of the Caesars and the apostolic crown of Hungary and the sceptres and the crowns of Bohemia and Croatia—indeed a whole Empire—tumbling among the ruins. “Poor old man,” Angéla said, putting the prayer book back on its ledge.

Beyond the gravestones outside, the highest of the three town walls looped downhill with battlements spaced out between jutting towers, several of which were choked with storks' nests. Swags of elderflower burst over the crenellations and we peered down and watched the swifts flying in and out of holes in the masonry. The level sward outside the west door of the church dropped in green waves of mingled forest and churchyard where the names of
weavers, brewers, vintners, carpenters, merchants, and pastors—some of them ending in a Latin ‘us,' like those of sixteenth-century humanists—were incised on generations of headstones and obelisks in obsolete German spelling. Under a scurry of clouds and suspended above hills and fields and a twisting river-bed, maintenance and decay were at grips in one of the most captivating churchyards in the world.

The organist had come down to see who we were. He pointed out a sturdy tower at the bottom. “You see that?” he said, polishing steel-rimmed spectacles and putting them on. “Three hundred years ago, a Turkish army marched up the valley, bent on sacking the town. It was commanded by a merciless general called Ali Pasha,
ein schrecklicher Mann
! Some Schässburgers had barricaded themselves in the tower and one of them aimed his arquebus at him, and—
boom!
—down he came.” A looping parabola with his forefinger showed that somersaulting fall. “He was on an elephant.”

“?”

“Yes.” His spectacles flashed like window panes. “An elephant. The citizens fell on the attackers, the Turks fled, the town was saved.”

Hardly were the words out of his mouth when a wind wrapped itself round the tall wooded cone. There had been a warning rush and a flutter. Then all at once the branches were banging about, hitting each other like boxers, and dust and pollen flew from the boughs in a twisting yellow cloud. Grass flattened twirling and forking into channels, every poplar in the valley shuddered from root to tip like a Malay kris and the loosened hay-ricks moulted in spirals. Husks, chaff, straw, petals, young twigs, last year's leaves and nosegays scattered out of the jam-jars on the graves were rushing up the slope in a gale which tossed the dishevelled birds about the air. The clouds had darkened, a volley of drops fell and we and the organist sheltered from the downpour under a clump of chestnuts. It stopped just as abruptly and we found ourselves, as a rainbow formed and dissolved again in a momentary foxes' wedding,
looking down, as though through a magnifying glass, at a world of hills and meadows and the flash of a river and an upheaval of distant ranges. Outraged cawing and twittering filled the branches and the air was adrift with the scent of pollen, roses, hay and wet earth.

* * *

Uplands of holt and hanger soon put this pinnacle out of sight as we drove south through vineyards and hop fields. It was a solemn sweep of country with snug hamlets tucked among woods by the banks of rivers. When we asked what they were called, the villagers always gave a Saxon name—Schaas, Trappold, Henndorf, Niederhausen. (Experts find a kinship between the layout of these settlements and villages in mediaeval Franconia, when that region stretched far across Germany to the west and the north; and it seems that kinship between the Transylvanian Saxon dialect and the speech of the Franks of the Mosel bears this out.) They were built in a rustic farmyard style with flattened cart entrances, shingled lych-gates, hipped roofs and rows of gables that gave on the village street. The masonry was sound, made to last and adorned here and there with a discreet and rather daring frill of baroque. At the heart of each village, sturdy churches reared squat, four-sided steeples with a tough, defensive look. We pulled up in the little market-town of Agnetheln near a church as massive as a small bastille. Pierced by arrow-slits, the walls rose sheer, then expanded in machicolations; and, above these, rows of short uprights like squat pillars formed galleries that hoisted pyramids of steeple. They were as full of purpose as bits of armour and the uprights between steeple and coping gave the triangular roofs a look of helmets with nasal pieces and eye-slits. All the churches were similarly casqued.

We were looking at the one in front of us from our bench outside an inn. At the next table a wheelwright, curly with shavings and with sawdust on sandy eyebrows, had just left his workshop
for a drink. He sat with one arm round a lint-haired daughter who stood between his knees and silently drank us in through limpid blue eyes. “What do you think of it?” he asked us in German.

“Ein feste Burg,” István appositely replied. A safe stronghold.

“It had to be,” the wheelwright commented, and I wondered why. None of the churches since crossing the Hungarian and the Rumanian frontiers had worn this fierce look; but then, none had been so old. Yet there had never been sectarian strife in these parts on the scale of France, Ireland, Northern Europe and the Empire during the Thirty Years' War. Had it been to protect them from the Turks? The wheelwright shrugged. Yes, against the Turks; but there had been worse than they.

“Who?”

He and István answered in unison.

“
Tataren
!”

I understood, or thought I did: the armoured churches must have sprung up after the onslaught of the Tatars of Batu Khan; those Mongols, that is, who had laid the Kingdom in ashes, burnt churches and castles, massacred many thousands and led whole populations captive. The devastation of Batu and his sudden return to Karakorum, when the death of Kublai's heir had put the Mongol succession at hazard, took place in 1241. What a mercy they never came back!

“Never came back?” The wheelwright's glass of wine stopped half-way to his lips and returned to the oak; and I realised, as I listened to him and to István, what gaps yawned in the past three months' mugging up in country-house libraries. The last Turco-Tatar raid didn't get as far as most of its predecessors, but it had taken place as recently as 1788; and in the vast period between 1241 and 1788, smaller raids by the Tatars and other marauding bands had been endemic. Most of them came from the Tatar settlements on the Budjak steppe in southern Bessarabia. (They must have been an offshoot of the Nogai, or Krim Tatars. After Tamerlane had destroyed the Golden Horde, the remainder, under the Girai descendants of Jenghiz Khan—probably more Turkic than
Mongol by now—had founded an independent Khanate in the Crimea, and another in Kazan.) These raiders would ride across Moldavia, penetrate the Buzău Pass at the south-east corner of the Carpathians—‘the Tatar Pass,' as the locals called it—and sweep down on the prosperous Burzenland; (this region near the old Saxon town of Kronstadt
[7]
was the fief originally bestowed on the Teutonic knights).

But massive church architecture was no defence against a determined attack. At the approach of raiders, the villagers took to the woods and drove their horses and cattle up into the roomy caves of the Carpathians. The whole range is a stalactitic warren; and there they would hide until it was safe to come out and inspect the cinders. Finally, a century or so after the building of the churches, more serious steps were taken: great fortified walls were flung up round them and there they still stand, astonishing circles of stone tiered inside with wooden shelters and reached by ladders that ascend like boxes in a rustic opera house. Each one was the quarters of a different family and in times of trouble they would stock them with salt meat and hams and cheeses against a sudden siege. These defensive rings are amazing, even in a border region that bristles with castles. The raids have left few other traces, except perhaps genetically: people say that the former frequency of rape has stamped some of the villagers of the region with a Mongol look. Others think it may be a passing heirloom of the Cumans before they settled and evaporated on the Great Hungarian Plain.

István looked at his watch and jumped up. A fatherly whisper sent the little girl dashing off to the yard behind his workshop, and, when we were in the motor, she leaned in panting and put a nosegay of roses and tiger-lilies in Angéla's lap.

* * *

No mechanical vehicle except ours desecrated the quiet of these byeways. For miles we met only cattle and a cart or two drawn by the sturdy local horses. Another village with a spiked church loomed and fell back, and ahead of us, rearing like a wave, the enormous mass of the Carpathians climbed into the sky. It was the highest stretch of the Transylvanian Alps, and the highest peaks are only overtopped by the crests of the High Tatra, far away south of Cracow on the borders of Slovakia and Poland; over three hundred miles north-west, for an eagle bent on a change of peaks. They are also called the Făgărass mountains, the old chronicler's wild forested region of the Vlachs and the Pechenegs, it had often been a domain of the Princes of Wallachia; like the ranges we saw to the north-east from the Szekler country, it was full of bears and wolves; and the old eponymous town and castle lay at its feet. I had expected a daunting perpendicular stronghold, but, apart from the donjon inside, it turned out to be a massive rectangle of ochre and brick-colour, almost a quarter of a mile square and slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion jutting at each corner. Medallions with indecipherable scutcheons crumbled over a great gate. It was an illustration for Vauban or the middle-distance for a stately battle-painter and crying aloud for a forest of beleaguering tents and cannon-smoke and counter-marching perpendicular groves of packed lances, all seen beneath the foreground hoofs of a frantic dappled charger, pawing the air under a cuirassed seventeenth-century captain, sombre and imperturbable in his moustache and feathered hat, baton on sashed hip. Most suitably, it was the famous Bethlen Gábor who gave the the fortifications their final shape, and its best-known besiegers were the janisseries of Achmet Balibeg against a desperate garrison of five hundred Magyars and Szeklers. I feel that the Ali Pasha, who laid siege to it in 1661, must have been (though I can find no corroboration) the one who came to grief on his elephant at Segesvár.

The moment we had struck the highroad after those hushed Saxon lanes we had run over a nail and had to change a wheel. Once in Făgăras,—Fogaras to István and Angéla—we waited in a
garden restaurant by the fortress while it was mended and Angéla went to telephone. István was a little perplexed. Our leisurely mornings and late starts—my and Angéla's fault—had set our programme back. He had wanted to drive on east to the important old Saxon town of Kronstadt near the Tatars' Pass, to feast and look at the Black Church there and spend the night. But too little time was left; we would have to think of turning westwards. Then Angéla came back from the telephone with a worried look. The subterfuges and stratagems on which our journey depended were in danger of breakdown; the only remedy was to head westwards, and by train, that very day; eventually she would be travelling much further than either of us could accompany her. István explained the change of plan. A branch line ran through the town, but the journey would involve two changes and long waits and we were appalled by the prospect of these static vigils and the break up of our trio and the anticlimax. While we were talking, a Gypsy mechanic was strapping the mended tyre into its recess at the back of the front mudguard. István's eyes lit up at the sight, as though inspiration had descended. “We'll stick to our old plan,” he said, “but make it a day earlier.” Angéla wondered whether we would be cutting it too fine. “You wait and see,” István said, emptying his glass. “To horse!”