H>a í Jamťřthat aSSaÜ deClÍnÍng -ÄÍSÄ2 to blame. These anaent wrongs must have lost much of ,k bitterness in the baleful light of modern tunls wheľSol^ dence to survive .s an heirloom of luminous architect Stľ" It took me a fat* time to realize that the Vltava aúľL 250 A TIME OF GIFTS Moldau were the Czech and the German names for the same river. It flows through the capital as majestically as the Tiber and the Seine through their offspring cities; like them, it is adorned with midstream islands and crossed by noble bridges. Among crowding churches and a mist of trees, two armoured barbicans prick their steeples like gauntlets grasping either end of a blade and between them flies one of the great medieval bridges of Europe. Built by Charles IV, it is a rival to Avignon and Regensburg and Cahors and a stone epitome of the city's past. Sixteen tunnelling spans carry it over the flood. Each arc springs from a massive pier and the supporting cutwaters advance into the rush of the current like a line of forts. High overhead and every few yards along either balustrade stand saints pr groups of saints and as one gazes along the curve of the bridge, the teams unite in a flying population; a backward glance through one of the barbicans reveals the facade of a church where yet another holy flock starts up from a score of ledges. At the middle of one side and higher than the rest, stands St JohwinesKepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 139) - he is said to have refused, under torture, to betray a confessional secret of Queen Sophia. When the henchmen of Wen-ceslas IV carried him here and hurled him into the Vltava, his drowned body, which was later retrieved and entombed in the Cathedral, floated downstream under a ring of stars.* It was getting dark when we crossed the bridge. Leaning on the balustrade, we gazed upstream and past an eyot towards the river's source; it rises in the Bohemian forest somewhere north of Linz. Then, looking over the other side, we pieced together the river's itinerary downstream. If we had launched a paper boat at the quay she would have joined the Elbe in twenty miles and entered Saxony. Then, floating under the bridges of Dresden and Magdeburg, she would have crossed the plains of Old Prussia with Brandenburg to starboard and Anhalt to port and finally, battling on between Hanover and Holstein, she would have picked her * Other versions exist There are several instances of defenestration in Czech history, and it has continued into modern times. The Martyrdom of St Johannes is the only case of deponücation, but it must be part of the same Tarpeian tendency. PRAGUE UNDER SNO-ff way between the ocean liners in the Hambure Mh„„ , ^ the North Sea in the Bight of Heligoland. ^ aad sttud: We shall never get to Constantinople like this T1™ r to be moving on; so does the reader. But I can'f ' ľľ°W aa^kt two. """"a01 for a page or Prague seemed - it still seems, after many rival riH«. one of the most beautiful places in the world KT~notODly Strang^ Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, temSXX *J? the milder impulses of munificence and leanúnľS?.T md by vivre, had flung up an unusual array o^SS* d°UCeur de monuments. The.dty, however, was scatteredJSf ET**** reticent, less easily decipherable clues. There w~t ' more every detail seemed the tip of a phalanx ASSET* ?" This recurring and slightly sinister feeling ^ľfSKS'T conviction that Prague, of ail my halts todudi J V * ** was the place which the word Mi tUJop,,tjj thlrT* *?* fitted most aptly. History Pr«^heavü?uC it BS "ŕ"?* miles_notth of the Danube and three hÄSTíŽ rfí" Í!?**1 seemed, somehow, out of reach; far withdrawn ta?*^* jectural hinterland of a world the Romans nevertr.™/r*t ** difference between regions separated by this anrwLS. a there is.) Ever since their names w JfiTrecľZt? * *** Bohemia had been the westernmost point of Sock S?!ľ & for the two greatest masses of population in *£££?£"** mutually ill-disposed volumes of Slavs and t!££Z í" "S which I knew nothing. Haunted by these enoZľľLT01* rf very familiarity of much of the JchiSture^aS £*"* ^ more remote Yet the town was as m^tSy^TľT western world, and of the traditions of which Z V? * *' justly vain, as Cologne, or Urbino, or Toulouse ortlľ * m0St indeed, Durham, which - on a giant scalľZtľ- ^3nCa " or' with a hundred additions ^ iľ^^StSTS"^ about Prague often later on and when 5 £?« ^f' anger and the guilt which the fate of EasZ F^ľ T**** implanted in the West, coloured my55ÍS^ ^ to set against the conjectured metamorphosis andI dSSfrlS 152 A TIME OF GIFTS events seem both more immediate and more difficult to grasp. Nothing can surprise one in the reported vicissitudes of a total stranger. It is the distant dramas of friends that are the hardest to conjure up. I was glad Hans had given me The Good Sotdier Švejk to read, but I only realized its importance later on. After Don Quixote, Svejk is the other fictitious figure who has succeeded in representing - under one aspect and in special circumstances - a whole nation. His station in life and his character have more in common with Sancho Panza than with his master, but the author's ironic skill leaves it doubtful whether ruse or innocence or merely a natural resilience under persecution, are the saving talisman of his hero. Jaroslav Hajek was a poet, an anti-clerical eccentric and a vagabond full of random learning and his adventures paralleled the picaresque wanderings of his creation. In and out of jail, once locked up as insane and once for bigamy, he was an incessant drinker and his excesses killed him in the end. He had a passion for hoaxes and learned journals. Until he was found out, his description of imaginary fauna in the Animal World attained wild heights of extravagance; and his fake suicide, when he jumped off die Charles Bridge, at the point where St John Nepomuk was thrown in, set all Prague by the ears. Some of Hasek's compatriots disliked his fictional hero and disapproved of the author. In the rather conventional climate of the new Republic, Svejk seemed an unpresentable travesty of the national character. They needn't have worried. The forces that Svejk had to contend with were tame compared to the mortal dangers of today. But it is the inspiration of his raffish and irrefragable shade that has come to the rescue. In this late attempt to recapture the town, I seem to have cleared the streets. They are as empty as the thoroughfares in an architectural print. Nothing but a few historical phantoms survive; a muffled drum, a figure from a book and an echo of Ut-raquists rioting a few squares away - the milling citizens, the rushing traffic vanish and the voices of the bilingual dry sink to a PRAGUE UNDER SNOW 153 whisper. I can just remember a chestnut-woman in a kerchief stamping beside a brazier to keep warm and a hurrying Franciscan with a dozen loaves under his arm. Three cab-drivers nursing their tall whips and drinking schnapps in the outside-bar of a wine cellar materialize for a moment above the sawdust, their noses scarlet from the cold or drink or both, and evaporate again, red noses last, like rear lamps fading through a fog. What did Hans and I talk about in the cask-lined cave beyond? The vanished Habsburgs for sure, whose monuments and dwelling-places we had been exploring all day. My Austrian itinerary had infected me long ago with the sad charm of the dynasty. I felt that this comforting grotto, with its beams and shields and leaded windows and the lamplight our glasses refracted on the oak in bright and flickering discs, might be the last of a-long string of such refuges. We were drinking Franconian wine from the other side of the Bohemian-Bavarian border. In what glasses? The bowls, correctly, were colourless. But by the Rhine or the Mosel, as we know, the stems would have ascended in bubbles of amber or green, and tapered like pagodas. Perhaps these stalks were ruby alternating with fluted crystal, for these, with gentian blue and underwater green and the yellow of celandines, are the colours for which the Prague glass-makers have always been famous ... We had gazed with wonder at the astronomical instruments of Emperor Rudolf H. A celestial globe of mythological figures to metal fretwork turned in a giant foliated egg-cup of brass. Chased astrolabes gleamed among telescopes and quadrants and compasses. Armiilary spheres flashed concentrically, hoops within hoops ... More of a Spanish Habsburg than an Austrian, Rudolf made Prague his capital and filled it with treasures; and, until the horrors of the Thirty Years War began, Prague was a Renaissance dty.Deeply versed in astronomical studies, he invited TychoBrahe to his Court and the great astronomer arrived, noseless from a duel in Denmark, and lived there until he died of the plague in 1601. Kepler, promptly summoned to continue Brabe's work on the planets, remained there till the Emperor's death. He collected wild animals and assembled a court of mannerist painters. The fantasies of Arcimboldi, which sank into oblivion until they were un- 254 * TIME OF GIFTS earthed again three centuries later, were his discovery. Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-platonic magic, astrology and alchemy. His addiction to arcane practices certainly darkened his scientific bent. But Wallenstein, who was one of the ablest men in Europe, was similarly flawed. In fact, an obsession with the supernatural seems to have pervaded the city. A whole wing of the Italianate palace which Wallenstein inhabited with such mysterious splendour was given over to the secret arts; and when Wallenstein inherited Kepler from Rudolf, the astronomer took part in these sessions with an ironic shrug," As well as astrology, an addiction to alchemy had sprung up, and an interest in the Cabala. The town became a magnet for charlatans. The flowing robes and the long white beard of lohn Dee, the English mathematician and wizard, created a great impression in Central Europe. He made the rounds of credulous Bohemian and Polish noblemen and raised spirits by incantation in castle after castle. He arrived in Central Europe after being * The Waldstdn Palace (as 1 learnt that it was more correctly called) was still owned by the family, and it harboured, among more usual heirlooms, the stuffed charger which had carried Wallenstein at Lätzen. An eighteenth-century descendant befriended Casanova, who spent his last thirteen years as librarian composing his memoirs in Waldstein's Bohemian castle. Another descendant was the friend to whom Beethoven dedicated the Waldstein Sonata. He was the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years War. Suspected by the Emperor of intriguing with the Swedes before actually changing sides - and perhaps planning, it was rumoured, to seize the Bohemian crown - he fled to a snow-bound castle near the Bavarian border. Four soldiers of fortune from the British Isles - Gordon, Leslie, Devereux and Colonel Butler of Butlers Irish regiment of Dragoons - cut down Wallen-stein's henchmen over the dinner table. Then they sought out the great duke and Devereux ran htm through with a pike. By far the best and most exciting book on the whole period is C. V. Wedgwood's Thirty Years' War. Dame Veronica delivers an adverse verdict on the last part of Wallenstein's career; ruthlessness and megalomania and increasing trust in astrology had dimmed his earlier genius. He was tall, thin and pale with reddish hair and eyes of a remarkable brilliance. PRAGUE UNDER SNOW 255 stripped of his fellowship at Cambridge.* (One wonders how the Winter Queen, arriving a few decades later, reacted to this odd atmosphere; we have mentioned, earlier on, her contacts in Heidelberg with the early Rosicrucians.) The Jews, who had been settled in Prague since the tenth century, fell victims in the eighteenth to a similar figure called Hayan. He was a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, a Cabalist and a votary of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi; he convinced the trusting Ashkenazim. With Elijah's guidance, he proclaimed in private seances that he could summon God, raise the dead, and create new worlds. Our wanderings had ended under a dock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the tíme in Hebrew alphabetic numbers. The russet-coloured synagogue, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe; yet it was built on the site of a still older fane which was burnt down in a riot, in which three thousand Jews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1589. (The proximity of the Christian festival to the Feast of the Passover, coupled with the myth of ritual murder, made Easter week a dangerous time.) The cemetery hard by was one of the most remarkable places in the city. Thousands of tombstones in tiers, dating from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, were huddled under the elder branches. The moss had been scoured from the Hebrew letters and the tops of many slabs bore the carved emblems of the tribes whose members they commemorated: grapes for Israel, a pitcher for Levi, hands raised in a gesture of benediction for Aaron. The emblems on the other stones resembled the arms parlant which symbolize some family names in heraldry: a stag for Hirsch, a carp for Karpeles, a cock for Hahn, a lion for Low; and so on. A sarcophagus marked the resting place of the most famous bearer of •The cause of his downfall was a public demonstration of the device by which Trygaeus, the hero of The PMce of Aristophanes flew to the crest of Olympus to beg the Gods to end the Pel-oponnesun War. As this vehicle was a giant dung-beetle from Mount Etna which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent, the exhibition may well have caused a stir. I would like to have seen it 256 A TIME OF GIFTS the name of low. He was Rabbi Jehuda ben Bezabel, the famous scholar and miracle-worker who died in 1609. His tomb is the most important memento of Prague's involvement with the supernatural, for it was the Rabbi low -who constructed the many-legended robot-figure of the Golem, which he could secretly endow with life by opening its mouth and inserting slips of paper on which magic formulae were inscribed. My last afternoon was spent high above the river in the library of Heinz Ziegler's flat. I had had my eye on those book-covered walls for a couple of days and this was my chance. I was in pursuit of links between Bohemia and England, and for a specific reason: I had taken my disappointment over the topography of The Winter's Tale very hard, and it still rankled: Shakespeare must surely have known more about Bohemia than to give it a coast ... So I stubbornly muttered as I whirled through the pages. He needn't have known much about Peter Payne, the Yorkshire lollaid from Houghton-on-the-Hill who became one of the great Hussite leaders. But he was full of knowledge about my second Anglo-Bohemian figure. Cardinal Beaufort He was not only John of Gaunt's son and Bolingbroke's brother and Bishop of Winchester, but one of the chief characters in the first and second parts of Henry VI. Before completing his cathedral and being buried there, Beaufort took part in a crusade against the Hussites and slashed his way across Bohemia at the head of a thousand English archers. A third connection, John of Bohemia, must have been equally well known, for he was the blind king who fell in the charge against the Black Prince's 'battle' at Crécy. (His putative crest and motto - the three silver feathers and Ich ďien - were once thought - wrongly, it appears - to be the origin of the Prince of Wales's badge.) This remarkable man, famous for his Italian wars and his campaigns against the Lithuanian heathen, was married to the last of the Přemysl princesses and one of his children was the great Charles IV, the builder of bridges and universities and, almost incidentally, Holy Roman Emperor as well; and here the connecting thread with England suddenly thickens; for another child was Princess Anne of Bohemia, who became Queen of Eng- PRACUE UNDER SNOW 2S7 land by marrying the Black Prince's son, Richard of Bordea»v» But my last discovery clinched all. Sir Philip Sidney's brief na.« across the sixteenth century glowed like the track of a comet £ seemed unable to travel in a foreign country without beina offerJ the crown or the hand of the sovereign's daughter, and his tw» sojourns in Bohemia - once after his Viennese wim- jľľ Wotton and a second time at the head of Elizabeth's embassvT congratulate Rudolf n on his accession - must have lit up th Bohemian Kingdom, for even the most parochial of his dist t fellow countrymen, with a flare of reality.t Ten years younc than Sidney, Shakespeare was only twenty-three and quite m. known when his fellow poet was fatally wounded at ZutDhp But Sidney's sister was married to Lord Pembroke and Pembrolr? Players were the most famous acting company in London- thľv roust have been friends of the playwright Their son Wfflrľm Herbert could not-as some critics used rashly to maintain have been Mr W.H., but when the posthumous First Folio was mil! lished, he and his brother were the dedicatees; their cordial hnfe« with the poet are carefully stressed by the publishers. Shakespeare *She died young and her tomb is in Westminster Abbev It i h successor, the French Princess Isabelle, who, in Richard II ov«fL the gardeners talking of the King's fall as they bind up the dZlv apricocfcs. She was only eleven when Richard was murdered fc»*i France as a Queen Dowager, she married her cousin, the poet Chi ďOrléans, who was later captured at Agincourt by Henry V anJhu prisoner in England for a quarter of a century. She was only XÍZ when she died. ' "",cieen t Edmund Campion was also in Prague at the time, teachim. at a Jesuit seminary. The two had long meetings and they liked and spected each other. Once, in honour of a state occasion CaZi™ wrote a long tragedy on the theme of Saul and the city produced it « vast expense; it was produced with great magnificence and although it lasted six hours, Rudolf ordered a special repeat performance In England four years later, secretly ministering to harried recusan« under the new penal laws, Campion was captured and after the aZ tomary tortures and a rushed trial, condemned to die at Tyburn Ife endured the barbarous penalty with the courage of a saint 258 A TIME OP GIFTS must have known everything about Sir Philip Sidney. It became plainer every minute that Bohemia can have held no secrets for him. This was the point I had reached when Heinz came into die room. He was amused by the earthwork of books which the search had flung np on the carpet, and I explained my perplexity. After a thoughtful pause, he said: 'Wait a moment!' He shut his eyes for a few seconds - they were grey with a hazel ring round the pupil -tapped his forehead slowly once or twice with a frowning effort of memory, opened them again and took down a book. Tes, I thought so!' he said in an eager and cheerful voice as he turned the pages, 'Bohemia did have a coast hne once' -1 lumped up - 1>ut not for long..,' He read out the relevant passages: 'Ottokar II... Yes, thafs it ... Victory over Béla II of Hungary in 1260 ... enlarged the frontiers of Bohemia ... Kingdom expands over all Austria ... yes, yes, yes ... southern porder extended to both sides of the istrian peninsula, including a long stretch of the north Dalmatian shore .. .1 Failed to become Emperor, perhaps owing to anti-Slav prejudice among the Electors ... Yes, yes ... Defeated and slain by Rudolf of Habsburg at Diirnkrut in 1273, when the country shrank once more to its old frontiers ...' He shut the book. 'There you are!' he said kindly. 'A coast of Bohemia for you! But only for thirteen years.' It was a moment of jubilation! There was no time to go into detail, but it looked as though my problems were solved. (The lack of time was a boon; for, once again, disappointment lay in wait None of the historical characters, even by the boldest feat of literary juggling, could be made to fit. Worse, I discovered that when Shakespeare took the story of The Winter's Tale from Robert Greene's Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time, he light-heartedly _ switched the names of Sicily and Bohemia! It was total defeat I felt as though the poet himself had reached from the clouds to checkmate me by castling the pieces in a single unorthodox move. I understood at last what I should have divined at the outset punctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn't care a fig,_ for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town - Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights - the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and PRAGUE UNDER SNOW parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and GkmrJ* dure borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace« two T^' ture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and faManA T~ mountan* rather taller than the Cotswolds andfuU 5? ^ and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need bľľ aľ"^ teeming with foundering ships and mermaids) * "* °Ceaa But it was an instant of seeming triumph in which Hein ., bis wife and Pan! and Hans al! foined. Heinz w J^Sf* glasses of celebration from a decanter cut in a nail-hiľnl ^ bold as the facade of the Czernin palace It waí Ä" * drink as well, for the night train was takin» H.ľ a Valedlcto^ silver and purplish clouds anTaX^ľp £*»£? ^ the dty had leapt simultaneously ^N^olh ttT * and Pinnacles and the snowWred do^X bvT night, their presence was reaffirmed bv the ritv^Ti. y the bells. Picked out by the embankment%£ 2Sn£ľľ ? lamps of the traffic, the river was aľnUCÄTyíľ* crossed by the many-beaded necklaces 072 b^ JÍŠ below, between clusters of baroque lamp-brackets th» „ ^5 statues dhnly postured along!* haluSÍS ne Sfi Bridge. The hghts grew scarcer as they climbed the títadeítl dupersed round the steep dark wastes where the rooks had^ sembled for the night in the invading woods It wasľíS v TEN Slovakia: A Step Forward at Last My original scheme, on leaving Bratislava, had been to cross the Danube, strike south-east to die Hungarian frontier and then follow the right bank to the old town of Györ. This itinerary, which would have led across those beginnings of the puszta I had spied out from the castle, was the traditional entrance to Hungary. But the plan had been changed at the last moment by friends of Hans. Gerti v. Thuroczy, who was married to one of the breezy Hungarian country-gentlemen I mentioned two chapters ago, suggested I should change my route and stay with her brother, Philipp Schey, on the way. The Barons Schey v. Koromla, to give them their full style, were an extremely civilized Austrian-Jewish family - friends of artists, poets, writers and composers and with kinsmen and ramifications in half a dozen countries - that had played an important part in the life of Central and Western Europe. They had once been very rich, but, like everyone else, they were less so now. I had met Pips Schey (as he was universally called) but only for a moment. He was a fascinating and many-legended figure and he lived about forty miles east of Bratislava. Telephones bad rung and I was expected in two days. So I headed north-east instead of south. I was still on the wrong side of the Danube and getting further from the river with every step and deeper into Slovakia. My new plan was to make a wide Slovakian loop, strike the Danube again about a hundred miles downstream and cross into Hungary by the Parkan-Esztet-gom bridge. Meanwhile, an important change has come over the raw material of these pages.. Recently - after I had set down all I could remember of these ancient travels -1 made a journey down the whole length of the Danube, starting in the Black Forest and ending at the Delta; and SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST ,*, in Romania, in a romantic and improbable way too complicated to recount I recovered a diary I had left in a country house there in 1939- I must have bought the manuscript book in Bratislava. It is a thick, battered, stiffly-bound cloth-backed volume containing 520 closely-written pages in pencil. After a long initial passage the narrative breaks off for a month or two, then starts up again in notes, stops once more, and blossoms out again in proper diarv form. And so it goes on, sporadically recording my travels in all the countries between Bratislava and Constantinople, whence it moves to Mount Athos and stops. In the back of die book is a helpful list of overnight sojourns; there are rudimentary vocabularies in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Turkish and Modern Greek and a long list of names and addresses. As I read these, faces I had forgotten for many years began to come back to me: a vintner on the banks of the Tisza, an innkeeper in the Banat, a student in Berkovitza, a girl in Salonica, a Pomak hodja in die Rhodope mountains ... There are one or two sketches of the details of buildings and costumes, some verses, the words of a few folk-sonas and the alphabetical jottings I mentioned two chapters back. The stained covers are still warped from their unvarying position in my rucksack and the book seemed - it still seems - positively to smell of that old journey. It was an exciting trove; a disturbing one too. There were some discrepancies of time and place between the diary and what I had already written but they didn't matter as they could be put right The trouble was that I had imagined - as one always does with lost property - that the contents were better than they mre« Perhaps that earlier loss in Munich wasn't as serious as it had seemed at the time. But, with all its drawbacks, the text did have one virtue: it was dashed down at full speed. I know it is dangerous to change key, but I can't resist using a few passages of this old diary here and there. I have not interfered with the text except for cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities. It begins on the day I set out from Bratislava. 'March 19th 1934. '... The sky was a lovely blue with big white clouds, and I aÓ2 A TIME OF GIFTS walked along a twisting avenue of elm trees. The grass is a brilliant green and Spring has begun! looking back, I could see all the chimney pots of Pressburg and the grey castle on the mountain and hear the bells over the fields. I wandered on, smoking contentedly, and at noon sat on a log and looked at the sun shining on the little Carpathian mountains to the left of the road as I ate my brioches, speck and a banana. A troop of Czechoslovak cavalry were exercising in a field nearby. Their horses were lovely long-legged creatures, about sixteen hands, with undocked tails and uncobbed manes. The soldiers rode very well. Their shaven heads made them look tough and Kossack-like. 'I felt very drowsy sitting in the sun. My path ran through a hazel-wood where young roedeer bounced nimbly away, their white rumps twinkling in the undergrowth, later, I must have been wandering along in a sort of trance, as by four o'clock I had no idea where I was, and whenever I stopped peasants and asked the way to Baron Schey's at Kovecsespuszta, they gesticulated helplessly, saying "Magyar' or "Slovenski", and I realized the difficulty I was going to have about languages. I must learn some Hungarian! I was miles off my way, close to a little town called Senec and about as far from Kövecses as Kövecses is from Pressburg. A country postman speaking a little German said I should head for Samorin, about twenty kilometres off; so I set out along a dismal track over an absolutely flat plain with a few white farmhouses dotted about. Occasionally I came on an old bent woman gathering catkins and pussy-willows. (Next Sunday's Palm Sunday.) They must be frightfully devout people. I've never seen anything like the reverence with which they knelt on the earth before wayside crucifixes, crossing themselves and laying sprigs of palm on the ledge. At last I came to a tributary of the Danube winding through water meadows and shaded by willows. It's called the Kleine Donau, or in Magyar, Kish* Duna. I walked till I came to a ferry, and shouted across. An old man showed up and got in the boat and pulled it over by »Kis, little. SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST 26) tugging at a taut rope stretched shoulder-high. 1 was on the edge of that marshy country, full of rivers and brooks, that I looked down on from the castle before we went to Prague. 'On the other side, I was walking through utterly flat fields again. The sun was setting in a soft pink sky with a few strands of lighted cloud. Thi gold bar of heaven! Everything was quiet and windless and high above the green fields larks were fluttering. I watched them soaring about the sky, hovering and sinking and ascending. It was lovely and it made me think of Spring in England. 'Soon, as the sky began to fade into twilight, I reached a little place called Nagy-Magyar,* 3 collection of white-washed houses thatched with long reeds, unkempt and desolate, with roads of ratted mud and no pavements or garden fences. The whole vil-■age teemed with swarthy black-haired children in coloured blankets. There were dark-skinned hags with strands of greasy hair hanging out of their headdoths and tall, dark, loose-limbed and shifty-eyed young men. Ztgeunervolk! Hungarian Gipsies, like the ones I saw in Pozony. Amazing! östlich von Wien fängt der Orient ani 'I found the Burgomaster's house, I don't know how, with all these people surging about He was a splendid man, a typical Hungarian with a handsome hatchet-face, speaking German hi the Hungarian way with the accent always on the first syllable and half the a's turning to o. He at once said he would put me up, and we talked all the evening by the fire, smoking his very strong Hungarian tobacco and drinking golden wine. Wine is sor (pronounced shor); tobacco, dokányi; a light or matches, gyufa; "Good night", "jo ftszoUt kiva'nofe", and "I kiss your hand", "kezeit csofcolom!" I know this because the old crone who brought in our supper said this and did it in a ceremonious and stately way. I was nonplussed, but it seems its usual, even to a tramp like me, if he is a stranger and a guest (Only one word of Slovak so far: selo s village, like the Russian mJ™l^ toü"rVÜla8!(whichm««'«,BigHungarian-)inanv Sni ^r Viľ"?*"** Pba! CaUed m& Me*y* »«* distal off. but it can't be the same. Ifsrather confusing. ^^ 266 K TIME OF GIFTS overflowed in neat piles on the floor. Trie surviving area of wall was filled by antlers and roebuck horns, a couple of portraits and a Rembrandt etching. There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars with a cutter made out of a deer's slot and, beside them, a number of silver cigarette cases laid in a neat row, each of them embossed with a different gold monogram. (This, I noticed later on, was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary. They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and so on.) There were shaded lamps and leather armchairs beside a huge open stove, a basket of logs and a spaniel asleep in front of it. Tm on the last volume,' Baron Pips said, lifting up a French paper-bound book. It was Le Temps Rarouvé and an ivory paper-knife marked the place three quarters of the way through. 1 started the first volume in October and I've been reading it au winter.' He put it back on the table by his chair. T feel so involved in them all, I don't know what I'll do when I've finished. Have you ever tried it?' As one can guess from the tone of my diary, I had only just heard of Proust, but always mentioned in tones of such respect that I was flattered by his question. I took the first volume to bed that night; but it was too dense a wood. When I tried again in Rumania next year, the wood lighteried and turned into a forest whose spell has been growing ever since: so, in spite of this hesitant start, Baron Pips was my true initiator. Perhaps because of this, some perverse process of the subconscious for a long time associated him in my mind's eye with the figure of Swann. Beyond one or two haphazard points in common, the resemblance was not close. Certainly not physically, if Swann is to be identified with photographs of Charles Haas in Mr Painter's book. Nevertheless the confusion persisted for years. He was fifty-two years old and tall and slim and his extraordinary good looks were marked by a kind of radiant distinction. I remember them all the more lucidly - the rather pale, high forehead, the chiselled lines of brow and nose and jaw, the clear blue eyes and the straight silver hair - from making a careful sketch a SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST 2fa couple of days later. There was a cast of wisdom and kinriW i„ his face and something about the mouth which suggested an artS or a musician, and his features often lit up with humour ľľí amusement. He wore a very old tweed shooting jacket, soft leather breeches of the kind I had envied in Austria, and thick ribbS green stockings, and his slippers replaced some muddy bro^-T! had seen in the haU. From his demeanour and the excels of his English I think a stranger in a railway carriage would h taken him for an Englishman but of a half-patrician, half-scholarW kind which even then seemed threatened with extinction I k„™ that his life had been full of movement and adventures ouiľ apart from his two marriages, the first to a charming and 'hiohlv suitable member of a similar dynasty, the other to a famous act™* in Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin. There existed*! the time we met, a great attachment between him and a beauriV, I and poetic-looking white Russian I had met in Bratislava I S on her way from Kövecses.* ™* On the evening I arrived. Sari laid dinner on a folding table in the library. When it was cleared away, we went back to the arm chairs and the books with our brandy glasses and, undeterred bva clock striking midnight somewhere in the house, talked Jhi nearly one o'clockt These days at Kövecses were a sojourn of great delight and an * They were married soon after. 11 learnt later on that the eponymous hero (though not the »fori of Wassermann's two-volume novel Christian Wahnschaffe - ■wJ^a: Illusion' in translation - was based on Baron Pips as a youna man and hastened to read it. It's an extraordinary book, written befi>rľľiľ' first World War; rather turgid and very melodramatic. The £Lta a young patrician of dazzling looks, brilliant talents and great wealth Through idealism and some not very clearly expounded philosoohv he gradually divests himself of all his friends, his moneyand)? goods in order to live a life of Franciscan poverty and unworldlin«, among the poor and the criminals and the whores of a great riľľ There is a touch of resemblance, I think; with the exception that ft* saintly fictional figure is without a flicker of the humour of his liviT prototype. uvm* 270 A TIME OF GIFTS walking to our rooms late at night, he stopped in the passage and said 1 feel I ought to set out like a kind of Don Quixote,* then added with a sad laugh, 'but of course I won't.* Austria was a rich mjne for reminiscence. The familiar figures of Franz Josef and the Empress Elizabeth led to Pauline Met-ternich, Frau Schratt, the tragedy of Mayerling, the axioms of Taaffe, the misadventures of Bay Middleton. An entire mythology unfolded and I felt glad that Vienna had recently become a real background, in my mind, both for these shadows and for the newer dramatis personae I was meeting at one remove: Hofmanns-thal, Schnitzler, Kokoschka, Musil and Freud and a galaxy of composers whose importance I didn't really take in till years after. (I wished I had gone to the Opera! I might have broken into an unknown field of delights a decade earlier than I did.) Hölderlin, Rilke, Stefan George and Hofmannsthal were the poets I remember him taking down from the bookshelves when I asked how they sounded. Apropos of Lewis Carroll and Lear and nonsense poetry in general, he introduced me to Christian Morgenstern.* I developed an immediate passion for the characters in bis poems and for the vague and hallucinating world they inhabit: a world in which unprincipled architects steal and make off with the empty spaces between the uprights of a railing; where unclassified creatures, followed by their young, stalk on the scene on theii multiple noses; and where the legs of two boys, side by side in the cold, begin to freeze, one boy centigrade, the other fahrenheit... An inventor, in one poem, after building a smell-organ, composes music for it - triplets of eucalyptus, tuberose and alpine flowers .are followed by hellebore scherzos; and later on, the same inventor creates a giant wicker trap into which he lures a mouse by playing the violin, in order to set it free in the solitudes of a distant forest Dreamland. We were sitting in front of the house in the shade of two ancient and enormous poplars and Baron Pips, to illustrate the reckless frequency of French words in pre-war Austrian conversations, told me that when he was a small boy, he had overheard the Emperor saying to a Princess Dietrichstein at a garden-party at * He died in 1914. SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST 271 Bad Ischl "Das ist ja incroyabh, Fürstin* Ihr Wagen scheint »am tntnmvobk zu sehx't Similar surroundings were the scenľof another tale. Friedrich-August, the last King of SaonvTfa? easy-going and proverbially good-natured man, loathed all coiS functions and especially the midsummer garden party at Dres-den. Once, in liquefaction after a heat-wave afternoon, he was escaping, his duty done, to a cool drink in his study when hi spotted at the other side of the park under a tree, two aged aS dismal-Iookmg professors he had forgotten to greet. Hatmo to hurt anyone's feelings he toiled all the way over to them and shook their hands limply. But the afternoon's output had been too much for him: he just managed to croak Tia, ihr beide' - TPell vou two' -and tottered away again.* I loved diese stories. Another, prompted by a mention of Fred-erick the Great, cropped up while we were walking through the woods at the other end of the demesne. As Pve never heardTread it anywhere else, here it is. w learning that one of his officers had fought with great bravery the King recommended him for an immediate award of the Pour Ú WriU Cross; the Prussian equivalent of the V.C., which he had just founded. The ribbon was sent off at once. A few days later when the officer turned up at the King's headquarters with dispatches, Frederick glanced at his neck and asked him whv he wasn't wearing it. There had been a terrible mistake, the officer explained. The award had gone to a cousin in his regiment with »he same rank and name. A look of deepening horror spread over the King s face, and when he had finished, the King jumped to his feet and drove him out, crying -Weg! Geh' weg! Du hast kein Gluck!' - 'Away! Go away! You've no luck!' Terhaps he said it in French,' Baron Pips said after a pause -He hated talking German.' These walks carried us far afield. All trace of winter had van ished and the snow with it, except for a dwindling line here and there under a hedge or in the lee of a wall where the sun never t Iťs incToyabU, Princess! Your carriage seems quite introuvabk.' * He abdicated in 1919. 271 A TIME OF GIFTS reached. Otherwise, the season had leaped forward into spring. The grass, recovered from the lank pallor of its first re-emergence, was bright green, and the banks and the roots of the trees were thick with wild violets. Green lizards, freshly woken from their winter torpor, scuttled electrically and froze in postures of alert petrifaction. The hazel-spinneys and the elms and the poplars and the willows and aspens along the streams were all putting out new leaves. The universal white had vanished and an unseen Europe was coming to the surface. The scores of larks and the returning migrants reminded me that I had hardly seen any birds except rooks, ravens and magpies, and an occasional robin or a wren, for a quarter of a year. There was a fidgeting of wagtails and the twittering that accompanied all the building and nest-repair was almost an uproar. The peasants in the fields lifted fleece caps and black hats with friendly greetings and Baron Pips would answer with a wave of an old green felt with a cord round it, and the ritual response in Slovak or Hungarian. The Váh * the wide, swift river that' formed one of the estate boundaries, rose two hundred miles to the north-east, near the Polish frontier. The sides were banked high against the danger of floods when the thaw came to the Tatra mountains. The weather had changed so much, we could lie on the grass there, talking and smoking cigars and basking under a cloudless sky like the lizards, watching the water flow past on its way to the Danube. One afternoon, carrying guns so beautifully balanced that they seemed as light as feathers -'relics of former splendour,* Baron Pips had said, filling his pockets with cartridges in the hall -wewent out after rabbits. We returned through a vast warren as evening was coming on. They were scampering about and sitting in groups and casting shadows across the fields. -I said, although I was carrying three of them, that they looked so cheerful and decorative it was a shame to shoot them. After a moment, I heard Baron Pips laugh quietly and asked why. He said: *You sound just like Count Sternberg.' He was an ancient and rather simple-minded Austrian nobleman, he explained. When he was on his death-bed his confessor said the time had come to make a general confession. The Count, after * w*aag in German, Vár in Magyar. SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST i?j racking his brains for a while, said he couldn't remember anything to confess. 'Come, come, CountI* the priest said, 'you must have committed some sins in your life. Do think again.* After a long and bewildered silence, the Count said, rather reluctantly, Habe Hasen geschossen' - 'I've shot hares' - and expired. Just after sunset, six or seven log-rafts, bound for the Danube and the Balkans, floated by. The trunks had been felled in the Slovakian forests, then lashed together and laden with timber in neat criss-cross stacks. A hut was built on the stern of each of them and the fires for the raftsmen's suppers cast red reflections in the river. The lumberjacks in their leather knee-boots were turning into silhouettes in the failing light They wished us good evening as they passed, and waved their fur caps. We waved back and Baron Pips called: 'God has brought you.' Except for the fires and their reflections, the rafts had melted into the dark by the time they slid out of sight among the distant trees. One evening, after my temporary setback with Proust - though I enjoyed the passages that Baron Pips read out when he was particularly struck; for instance, the opinions of Charlus as he crossed Paris during an air-raid -1 discovered a hoard of children's books and took them to bed. There were both Alices, several Coloured Fairy Books, Struwwelpeter in the original, which Fd never seen, and the illustrated couplets of Wilhelm Busch: Max und Moritz, Hans Huckebein and so on. There was plenty of French: Becassine, I remember, and the innumerable volumes öf the Bibliotheqtie Rose. All these books were inscribed in childish writing with the names 'Minka' and 'Alix*, and here and there the same hands had brushed in the outlines of the black-and-white illustrations with bold swirls of water-colour. They were my host's two beautiful daughters,* both by his first marriage, and already familiar from the photographs on his desk in the library. I Was only to discover years later and long after the War, when we met in France and became friends, that I had an odd link with these girls - the addiction, that is, to saying things backwards. This habit is first engendered, I suspect, by the sight of the words TAM HTA8 rumpled across the bathroom floor when learning * Minka Strauss and Alix de Rothschild. 274 A TIME OF GIFTS to read, and then by deciphering 3t?AD and TMAHUAT23Ä while gazing out of the windows of restaurants and cafes. At first single words are formed, .then whole sentences and, by the time they are spoken fast enough to sound like an unknown language, this useless accomplishment has become an obsession. When I had tun out of material for recitation on the march I would often find myself, almost without knowing it, reciting, say, the 'Ode to a Nightingale' in this perverse way: Ym traeh sehca dna a ysword ssenbmun sniap Ynx esnes, sa hguoht fo kcolmeh I dab knurd Ro deitpme cmos Ilud etalpo ot eht sniard Eno etunim tsap dna Ehtelsdraw dah knus, and so on. For the initiated, these utterances have an arcane and unearthly beauty. Awayl Awayl For I wilt fiy to theel becomes Yawat Yawal Rof I lliw yrf ot eehtl and the transposition of Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways, IP Hguorht suorudrev smoolg dna gnldniw yssom syaw. It seems almost to surpass the original in forest mystery. I would have remembered most of the details of these days, even without the re-discovery of my diary, but not all. The leaving-present of a pocket-volume of Hölderlin would have outlasted oblivion, and the old leather cigar-case filled with Regalia Media cigars, but not the two-ounce tin of Capstan pipe tobacco* that '* The diary lays a lot of stress on cigar- and pipe-smoking; I had forgotten the latter. I think they were both slightly self-conscious symbols of emancipation and maturity. I always seem to be 'puffing away thoughtfully' or 'enjoying a quiet pipe', in diese pages. SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST 175 Baron Pips had discovered in a cupboard; nor the contents of the lunch parcel Sari had made up. Her name would have stuck, but not Anna's, the old housemaid, although I remember her face clearly. Baron Pips kept me company across the fields till we said goodbye outside the little viUage of Kissujfalu. I looked back when I reached iL He waved when he saw I'd taken the right path, then turned and disappeared into his woods with the spaniel trottinii behind. 6 'Pips Schey?' someone, a vague relation-in-law, said to me, years later in Paris. *What a charming man! Magical company! And wonderful looking. But he never did anything, you know.' Well, he did in my case, as I have more than hinted. Though we never met again, we corresponded for years. He married soon afterwards, and, when things began to go wrong in Austria and Czechoshv vakia, they left Kövecses and settled at Ascona, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, just north of the Swiss-Italian frontier. He died in 1957 in his younger daughter's country house in Normandy - about twenty miles, in fact, from Cabourg, which is the main candidate for the Proustian town of Balbec. The literary coincidence completes a fortuitous literary circle in my mind. I wish we had met again. I thought of him often, and I still do. I felt so buoyed up by these days, that even the vague specu-lation as to how I might have struck him failed to damp my elation: precocious, immature, restless, voluble, prone to show off, unreliably bookish perhaps ... it didn't seem to matter a damn. My journey had taken on a new dimension and all prospects glowed.