-V T7ä*n ynw« EIGHT 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, 'lust 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 1 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 Car-nuntum 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 pensees, 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 Antoníne 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 medieval pitched-battles between Bohemia and Hungary and the THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD 223 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 it 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 224 A TIME OF GIFTS '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 comer-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 ßew 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. Í^SiM THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD 225 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 Press-burg, as he stilt firmly called it, just as ex-Hungarians stubbornly clung to Pozony* - 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 rumblings 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 *The word is pronounced as though it were French and spelt Pôjogne, wich a heavy stress on the first syllable. Íl6 A TIME OF GIFTS was occupied by the Turks, the city was the capital of the un-conquered 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.'* 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 * 'East of Vienna, the Orient begins.* THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD 227 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.* 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-Einnish 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 for ever 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 Arpád 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 * 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. 228 A TIME OF GIFTS 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 Arpád 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-chousands 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 THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD 229 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-hall 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, KRCMA 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 tundra-blank 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 230 A TIME OF GIFTS 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 dogeared 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-stuinp and one brown foot worked the bellows of a little forge.) I THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD gave a small coin to the nearest. This wrought the on T his rivals to a frenzy and their shrill litanies rose to such t that I scattered my small change like danegeld and retread A t last, when they saw there was nothing left, they trotted b it t tlie huts, exchanging blows and recriminations. AU exce T ° that is, a hardy chestnut-coloured boy about five years <,)<( J* °.1>e' nothing at all except a black trilby that must have been"^8 father's, ft was so big for him that, though he constantly wriüeled 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. s g Pincers in hand, the old blacksmith had watched all thi with the mare's near-fore hoof cupped in his lap while her colt tusoed thirstily. A hush had spread among the wagons and the twinklrna 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 Tewish coffee houses. Feeling I Was ;n jt. heart of things, I would sit rapt there for hours. It was as bio 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 accordion-pleated angles through the smoky air overhead. Conversing and arguing and contracting business round an archipelago of tables, the dark-dad customers thronged the place to bursting point. (Those marble squares did duty as improvised offices in thousands of cafes 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 ZJZ k TIME OF GIFTS meaning. But it eluded me every time; for the dialect - or the language, rather - though rooted in medieval 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* * These days marked the resumption of an old obsession with alphabets. The back pages of a surviving notebook are full of Old Testa- THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD I longed to attend a religious service, but without the m -a *" of some initiate friend, didn't dare. This diffidences *ľ ?* many years later by Dr Egon Wellesz' book on ByLrľľ ^ song. In apostolic times, he writes, the Psalms föS ,ľ l?" bone of the Christian liturgy, chanted just as theľZ t great temples of Jerusalem and Antioch. The same m ™ u common ancestor of the Jewish service, the chants rfT r í Orthodox Church and Gregorian plainsong; of the fast u *** pcrcgünus, which appropriately accompanies the chant ^fľ exitu Israel, is considered the closest. Spurred by thk I into the magnificent Carolean Portuguese-Dutch W Ventured Artillery Row. By good luck, a visiting Sephardk cST* * virtuosity was singing, and I thought, perhaps rather sľn • i that I could detect a point of union between the thrľ V' A i singing. It was like singling out familiar notes faintly «íwiľ the breeze from the other side of a dense forest of tinJ Th a comparably moving occasion many years later W ^eWas about north-western Greece, I made friends with the RaHťf V™8 nina, and he invited me to attend the Feast of Purirn The 'u once ment names laboriously transliterated into Hebrew h complete with their diacritics.-There ate everyday words con^T,^' as well, for the ancient script was also used in the Yiddbhv T on shop-fronts and in the newspapers I saw in cafes. (The emacu words, similarly transliterated on later pages from the ohT ^u Ladino of the Constantinople and Salonica Jews.) Next from the final stages of this journey, come Cyrillic and AraT^A "h letters were still used among the unreformed Turks in Bui K a^ Greek Thrace. There are struggles with obsolete Clagoutfcľnľlľ W attempts at the twisted pothooks and hangers of the Arméni h scattered the Balkans like little colonies of toucans. The b *T logue ends with a flood of Greek. The magic of all these letters 1 "T depended on their inscrutability: when I learnt a bit of Bui" • Cyrillic lost some of its mana. But Arabic and Hebrew retain trf^"3"' the last. Even today, a toothpaste advertisement in Atabk s * the Thousand and One Nights, a message in Hebrew over h window - 'Umbrellas Repaired on the Spot*, or 'Daniel Kisch K S Ji°P Würste und Salami' - is heavy with glamour. The symbols & hint of the Kabala, an echo of Joshua's ram's horns and a h- * from the Song of Songs. wrusper 134 A TIME OF GIFTS 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 novels 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 tights 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. THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD 23; Postcards of male and female film stars were stuck in the frames of the looking-glasses, and scattered among them snapshots of Mas-zaryk. 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 diag-onal 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 eyelash. 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 2j6 A TIME OF GIFTS 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 quest-tions and perplexities I came home with and amused by my reactions, especially to the Schlossberg. When I asked him about the Czechs and Austrians, he handed me an English translation of Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk - or Schweik, as it was spelt in this edition - which had just come out.* 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, 1 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 dash of beads, each with a hand across the crown of her head to * Superseded by Sir Cecil Parrotťs fine translation a few years ago. THE EDGE OF THE SLAV WORLD I37 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, wiiich the Wolfs-tal 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. Rood 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 238 A TIME OF GIFTS 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 Marchfield - 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 for ever. 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. THE EDCE OF THE SLAV WORLD 239 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 NINE Prague under Snow But next evening, when I should have been finding somewhere to sleep after the first day's march in Hungary, Hans and I were unfolding our napkins under the pink lampshades of the dining-car while the night train to Prague whirled us full tilt in the opposite direction. Hans, who had taken my Central European education in hand, said it would he a shame to go gallivanting further east without seeing the old capital of Bohemia. I couldn't possibly afford the trip but he had abolished all doubts by a smile and a raised hand enjoining silence. I had been gaining skill, when involved in doings above my station, at accepting this tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb. The banknote I flourished in restaurants, like Groucho Marx's dollar-bill on a length of elastic, grew more tattered with each airing. I strove to make my protests sound sincere, but they were always brushed aside with amiable firmness. Falling asleep after dinner, we woke for a moment in the small hours as the train came to a halt in a vast and silent station. The infinitesimal specks of snow that hovered in the beam of the station lamps were falling so slowly that they hardly seemed to move. A goods train at another platform indicated the sudden accessibility of Warsaw. PRAHA - BRNO - BRESLAU -LODZ - WARZAVA. The words were stencilled across the trucks; the momentary vision of a sledded Polack jingled across my mind's eye. When the train began to move, the word BRNO slid away in the opposite direction then BRNO! BRNO! BRNOf The dense syllable flashed past the window ať decreasing intervals and we fell asleep again and plunged on through the Moravian dark and into Bohemia. At breakfast time, we climbed down into the awakening capital. Stripped of the customary approach on foot, Prague remains distinct from all the other towns of this journey. Memory en- PRAGUE UNDER SNOW 2+1 ľaTeľnneTÍil.T^ " ^^ and the W >**• of a m iSS * ,aVe **? *"* 0Ut of a *» th™«h a» clouding wonders. Floating downhill, memory scoops new hollows. Churches, echoing marble concavities dim as cisterns in this cloudy weather, celebrate the Counter-Reformation. Plinths round the floor of rotundas hoist stone evangelists aloft. With robes spiralling in ecstasy and mitres like half-open shears, they hover half-way up the twin pillars from whose acanthus-tops the dome-bearing semicircles fly. In one of these churches, where the Tridentine fervour had been dulled by two centuries of triumph, there were saints of a less emphatic cast. The figure of St John the Divine - imberb, quizzically smiling, quill in hand and at ease in a dressing-gown 248 A TIME OF GIFTS with his hair flowing loose like an undress-wig, he might be setting down the first line of Candide instead of the Apocalypse; perhaps the sculptor has confused his Enlightenments. Seen from a foun tain-square of the Hradčany, the green copper domes, where each snow-laden segment is pierced with a scrolled lunette, might belong to great Rome itself. The pinnacles on all the cupolas are tipped with monstrances shooting rays like golden fireworks; and when these and the gold balls on the tips of the other finials are touched by a rare sunbeam, the air glitters for a moment with a host of flying baubles. A first glance, then, reveals a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars. It celebrates the Habsburg max-riage-cfaims to the crown of Bohemia and reaffirms the questionable supersession of the old elective rights of the Bohemians; and alongside the Emperor's temporal ascendancy, this architecture symbolizes the triumph of the Pope's Imperial champion over the Hussites and the Protestants. Some of the churches bear witness to the energy of the Jesuits. They are stone emblems of their fierce zeal in the religious conflict. (Bohemia had been a Protestant country at the outbreak of the Thirty Years \Par. It was Catholic once more at its close and as free of heresy as Languedoc after the Albigensian crusade, or the sea-shore of oyster-response at the end of "The Walrus and the Carpenter".)* But in spite of this scene, a renewed scrutiny of the warren below reveals an earlier and a medieval city where squat towers jut. A russet-scaled labyrinth of late medieval roofs embeds the baroque splendours. Barn-like slants of tiles open their rows of flat dormers like gills - a medieval ventilation device for the breeze to dry laundry after those rare washing-days. Robust buildings join each other over arcades that are stayed by the slant of heavy buttresses. Coloured houses erupt at street corners in the cupola-topped cylinders and octagons that I had first admired in Swabia 'These were bad decades for religious toleration in Europe. They include the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, the expulsions beyond the Shannon and Cromwell's resolute attempts to stamp out the Catholic Church in Ireland. PRAGUE UNDER SNOT and the facades and the gables arP a. . 1 *** and scrolls and steps, ^Jo^lrZ^/^ Priiaw* solemnly round the walls; and giant ^ľ *?fT?* Process they are half hnmured and tryfng^ Lw Íh °°k M *"»&■ a meet is untouched by reLiouľIS?, Way °Ut ^v square has been a ceremonies lZ Ä?"? *** *»*«*« carved chalicés, erased from str ÍXSfcí th T ^^ the Hussites - who claimed «^m^tal^^T*** °f - were replaced by the Virgin's sľa tni ľfľ u ^for the lai^ Catholicism. StJs^X^^^T^^ « the score from the belfries of the older cÍuľcL^nľ.ľ^' *« * the riverside barbicans, flattened intľshaíotSľ ' SteCples of metal scales and set about with spikel3k v g^K encased * Thee are armourers' r^^^toť^TT^ enguies meant to lame or hamstring^SLľíJíľ^"* ^ Streets rise abruptly; lanes turn thľ , "Valry "*•» "ark. the cobbles are síeep ™ľgTbriLTwľľ ľ * ** «* toboggans out of control. ktn^Z^^^ "« sooty banks, deep and crisp te'Z^&ŽtŠF*'* weather was over.) ""even, töe real Wenceslas These spires and towers recalled the earlier P™,,» f >. ™ ceslases and the Ottokats and thľra« oľfnľT ^7^" sprung from the fairy-tale marriage 71 ££ %?** ^ Plough-boy encountered on the lS?5 £ÍTZ ?V have always looked back with longing to th7rdRňľo/Í,P ^ sovereign and of his descendants and Vr. ľh g™?, """^ evolent Charles IV - a golden aľe wh to-^J"*"*01 and ^ of rulers and ^«b/^SíSíS"* ""a*? "**»* crown and nobles and comľonľ^d ptľnľalľl*?"**« feelings gained strength during the Cz^ľLS míac\The* hundred years of Habsburg ascendingJSf ÄSľ ^ between unconvinced absolutism and hLraľ™ 1 ^"ted it was abetted by linguistic pressures^2mSyTflSS^ t íli 'í ÍeS that 3SS3Q ****** «*Ä ^Z no to blame. These ancient wrongs must have lost miľľ^ buterne, in the baieful hght of modern Z, wheľ ht olt' dence to sumve * an heirloom of luminous architectural Stv It took me a little time to realize that the Vltava SÍL 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 or 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 Johannes Nepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 1393 - 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 tlie 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 deponticatJon, but it must be part of the same Tarpeian tendency. PRAGUE UNDER SNOW 251 way between the ocean liners in the Hamburg estuarv anA * 1 the North Sea in the Bight of Heligoland. Y d Stmck We shall never get to Constantinople like this. I know I n„ h* to be moving on; so does the reader. But I can't - nnr fn, S two, "uc !0r a Page or Prague seemed-it still seems, after many rival cities not l one of the most beautiful places in the world, but one f a strangest Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, tempered in the end by the milder impulses of munificence and learning and douceur A vivre, had flung up an unusual array of grand and uneriiamaS monuments. The aty, however, was scattered with darker^ reticent, less easily decipherable clues. There were moments'«ľ™ every detail seemed the tip of a phalanx of inexplicable phantom This recurring and slightly sinister feeling was fortified bvX conviction that Prague, of all my halts including Vienna ■>< if was the place which the word Mitteleuropa, and all that it im„r fitted most aptly. History pressed heavilyupon it Builta 2,2 miles north of the Danube and three hundred east of the Rh" > seemed, somehow, out of reach; far withdrawn into ťh^' jectural hinterland of a world the Romans never knew (Is th """ difference between regions separated by this ancient test? I twt there is.) Ever since their names were first recorded, Praguľand Bohemia had been the westernmost point of interlock and confliri for the two greatest masses of population in Europe: the amTand mutually ill-disposed volumes of Slavs and Teutons- nations tf which I knew nothing. Haunted by these enormous shadows the very familiarity of much of the architecture made Prague seem more remote. Yet the town was as indisputably a part of th western world, and of the traditions of which the West & most justly vain, as Cologne, or Urbino, or Toulouse or Salamanca indeed, Durham, which - on a giant scale, mutatis mutandis"»™! with a hundred additions - it fleetingly resembled. (I thought about Prague often later on and when evil times came, sympathy anger and the guilt which the fate of Eastern Europe has justly implanted in the West, coloured my cogitations. Brief acquain-tance in happier times had left me with the vision of an actual dtv to set against the conjectured metamorphosis and this nude later 252 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 Soldier 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 Hašek 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 Woríd attained wild heights of extravagance; and his fake suicide, when he jumped off the 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 die new Republic, Švejk 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 city sink to a PRAGUE UNDER SNOW 253 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 IT. A celestial globe of mythological figures in metal fretwork turned in a giant foliated egg-cup of brass. Chased astrolabes gleamed among telescopes and quadrants and compasses. Armillary 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 dry.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 Brahe'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 A 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 arls; 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 [ohn 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 Waldstein Palace (as I 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 Lützen. 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 Butler's Irish regiment of Dragoons - cut down Wallen-stein's henchmen over the dinner table. Then they sought out the great duke and Devereux ran him 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 careen nithlessness 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 15- 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 Tew 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 clock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the time 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 lews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1J89. (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 hon for Low; and so on. A sarcophagus marked the resting place of the most famous bearer of »The cause of bis downfall was a public demonstration of the device by which Trygaeus, the hero of The Peace of Aristophanes, flew to the crest of Olympus to beg the Gods to end the Pel-oponnesian 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 oat. 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 Lollard 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 dien - 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 2„ land by marrying the Black Prince's son, Richard of Bordeaux* But my last discovery clinched all. Sir Philip Sidney's brief passage across the sixteenth century glowed like the track of a comet: he seemed unable to travel in 3 foreign country without being offered the crown or the hand of the sovereign's daughter, and his two sojourns in Bohemia - once after his Viennese winter with Wotton and a second time at the head of Elizabeth's embassy to congratulate Rudolf II on his accession - must have lit up the Bohemian Kingdom, for even the most parochial of his distant fellow countrymen, with a flare of reality, t Ten years younger than Sidney, Shakespeare was only twenty-three and quite unknown when his fellow poet was fatally wounded at Zutphen But Sidney's sister was married to Lord Pembroke and Pembroke's Players were the most famous acting company in London: they must have been friends of the playwright. Their son William Herbert could not - as some critics used rashly to maintain - have been Mr W.H., but when the posthumous First Folio was published, he and his brother were the dedicatees; their cordial links with the poet are carefully stressed by the publishers. Shakespeare •She died young and her tomb is in Westminster Abbey. It is her successor, the French Princess Isabelle, who, in Richard il, overhears the gardeners talking of the King's fall as they bind up the dangling apricocks. She was only eleven when Richard was murdered. Back in France as a Queen Dowager, she married her cousin, the poet Charles d'Orléans, who was later captured at Agincourt by Henry V and held prisoner in England for a quarter of a century. She was only nineteen when she died. t Edmund Campion was also in Prague at the time, teaching at a Jesuit seminary. The two had long meetings and they Ijfced an(j te, spected each other. Once, in honour of a state occasion, Campion wrote a long tragedy on the theme of Saul and the city produced it at 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 recusants under the new penal laws, Campion was captured and after the customary tortures and a rushed trial, condemned to die at Tyburn. He endured the barbarous penalty with the courage of a saint 258 A TIME OF 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 the room. He was amused by the earthwork of books which the search had flung up 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. 'Yes, I thought so!' he said in an eager and cheerful voice as he turned the pages, "Bohemia did have a coast line once' - I jumped up - 'but not for long...' He read out the relevant passages: 'Ottokar II... Yes, that's it ... Victory over Béla II of Hungary in 1260 .. ■ enlarged the frontiers of Bohemia ... Kingdom expands over all Austria ... yes, yes, yes ... southern border extended to both sides of the Istrian peninsula, including a long stretch of the north Dalmatian shore ...! 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 U73, 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 Tne Winter's Tale from Robert Greene's Pandosto, or tfiŕ 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 P«AGUB UNDER SNOW -~ «""UK SNOW parkland on the Warwickshire xn 259 shire borders, that is; flSSrffr ""J*** «* Ghmces J ture of Cockayne- J^S^^i **« « two, f^ mountains rather taller than the fľľ í íaUylmd **» «S and caves, haunted by bearľarT Co*™Ms «* M of torrS! The windows of the flat looked j„ Towards the end of my «Ä ľľ ^ ÍV*10'6 of *«**. silver and purphsh clouds uľÄduľun S* "í "*"* «C the city had leapt simultaneously o S N^lľ * ?* lamPs «* and pinnacles and the snow-coveredI J™ ' h°Ush the towers night their presence was SdttK "í™* * ^ bells. Picked out by the «SK^J^** «* «*» of lamps of the traffic, the river Jíí, v ľ^1«* crossed by the many-beaded nSLc«773? W rf ***-below, between dusters of b» L , \ ^ Directly statues dimly postured ^Sf* *« grouped Bridge. The lights grew scarce astnľySľd í í ?"*• dispersed round the steep dark wast« J£ľ í dtadel *>* sembied for the nWlt ta P to™^£« J rooks had as- of Prague which has had to last .efS^eSÄ^ TEN Slovakia: A Step Forward at Last My original scheme, on leaving Bratislava, had been to cross the Danube, strike south-east to the 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 t 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 had 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 Parfcan-Eszter-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 - I 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 jg, in Rumania, in a romantic and improbable way too complicated M 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 120 closely-written pages in pencil. After a long initial passage, the narrative breaks off for a month or two, then starts up ag3U1 ^ 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 the 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 Sanat, a student in Berkovitza, a girl in Salonica, a Pomak hodja in the Rhodone 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 were. 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 19tí! 1934. '... The sky was a lovely blue with big white clouds, and 2Ó1 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. Then-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. 1 felt very drowsy sitting in the sun. My path ran through a hazel-wood where young roedeer bounced nimbly away, theii 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 "Slovenskí", 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 1 set out along a dismal track over an absolutely Sat 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 2