In any other light I’d have driven right past the church, tucked as it was amongst the spruce trees. But suddenly it was in front of me, and I wasn’t the only visitor. I parked the car and walked into the bright halo, towards the sound of hammering. My footsteps crunched on the hard-packed snow as I pushed open the heavy wooden door. At the head of the nave were an elderly couple, and a coffin. She – in layered black skirts and embroidered peremitkah headdress – was crumpled upon it. He circled it and her, driving home the last nails, sealing its lid. In a pinewood pew stood another man – younger, perhaps a son, also dressed in black – who held a wilted bunch of flowers upside down.
The moment was sad and dark yet all around it spread fields of gold: rumpled golden altar cloths, iridescent cross, a lustrous shining sanctuary. Beneath Christ Pantocrator, the all-powerful judge of humanity, the church shimmered with light. It lit the naive iconostasis, glistened off the falling hammerhead, caught the tears on the old man’s cheek. In that brief moment, I imagined generations of miners stepping forward, kneeling with humility, shaking out their hair around the altar. Never had I seen the like, and never would I see it again for outside the sun dropped behind a far peak and deep shadows fell across the earth. The golden light was sucked out of the day and the building revealed its true colours: dismal ash grey and weathered brown.
As I watched, the two men lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it past me into the dusk. The old couple did not meet my eyes, did not speak, but once the coffin had been slipped into their pale van the younger man turned to me.
‘Mein Bruder,’ he said. My brother.
‘No priest?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘All gone. Every person gone.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He answered with the barest hint of a shrug then turned and opened the driver’s door. His parents were already inside the van. I had no idea how the brother had met his end – war? Mining accident? Drug overdose? – but when the engine coughed into life, I had the presence of mind to spring forward, and tap on the frosted glass.
‘Ist das die goldene Kirche?’ I asked, gesturing at the sombre church. ‘Die geheime goldene Kirche?’
‘Da da,’ replied the young man in Ukrainian. ‘But all gold gone. All stolen.’ He wound up the window and added, ‘Good night.’
I followed their tail lights downhill to another no-name town. I found a room in a no-name hotel and lay on the bed. In my head I watched the sun go down once again over fields of gold. I pitched the cold tonic across the room, and missed the bin.
Tomorrow I’ll leave the bloodlands, I told myself, assuming I survived the night. Tomorrow I’ll be in Hungary, with eyes sharp and emotions in check. I’ll record my journey with clarity and cool objectivity, I imagined.
As I tried to convince myself of that impossibility, there came to mind a last story from the heartbroken borderland, about a boy and his mother. Years ago the two of them had tended a smallholding in the contested fragment of territory, near to where met the frontiers of Western Europe and Greater Russia.
‘One morning at the end of the Second World War the son left home to work in the field across the river,’ a storyteller had told me ten years earlier in a Tiraspol cafe. ‘In the evening when he rowed back he found barbed wire and Soviet soldiers on the beach. The guards told him that the river was now a border. They wouldn’t let him come ashore, wouldn’t let him go home, and he had to find a place to live on the far bank. Every day he toiled in the field, calling across the water to his mother, until the soldiers ordered him to stop. The old woman then started to sing songs to him, sharing the news from home: who had married, who had had a baby, who had died.’
‘In time the boy grew into a man, stopped farming the land and married. He trained to be a train driver, with a single, secret objective in mind,’ the storyteller had recalled, taking my hand across the cafe table. ‘Twenty-eight years after the border had torn his world apart, he drove a train across the river-bridge, stopped at his old village station and finally, at last, embraced his mother again.’
‘Is that true?’ I’d asked her, already reaching for my notebook, starting to jot down key phrases.
‘It is a story,’ the woman had replied, covering her mouth and laughing, laughing at the bittersweet tragedy. ‘It’s just a story.’
HUNGARY
25
Not Quite Spring
I knew the road of old, running south out of the Carpathians onto the Great Hungarian Plain. The mountains fell away behind me as the sun warmed the valleys ahead. Oaks and hornbeams clung to the slopes. Smoky hazelnut trees pirouetted in the breeze. Carpets of green inwrought with snow and flecked with lilac-cupped crocuses spread across the meadows. A river of viridescent verges, the Tisza, meandered through the fields, its oxbows glittering like twists of silver. I drank in the early spring as if it were an elixir, giving me life and revitalising my spirit. Already my return to Hungary felt like a homecoming, although in ways I hadn’t begun to imagine.
‘Na, Kind,’ said Alajos, grasping me in his carpenter’s arms. ‘Du bist zu Hause.’
Kid, you are home.
Thirty years ago he had welcomed me to Tokaj with the same embrace, wearing leis of dried paprika. He and his wife Panni had flung strings of garlic around my neck like garlands of flowers. Great sacks of cabbages, boxes of oranges and bags of sweet peppers, their skins as translucent as the skins of Klimt’s women, had been stacked around the house. At the time of my first visit their son Sandor had just opened a grocery shop next door. I knew of Panni’s death but the shop?
‘Gone,’ replied Alajos, gesturing towards town. ‘Now we have Aldi.’
He stroked his white bristles with the stubs of his fingers, the tips severed long ago by a power saw, and limped ahead, ushering me through the coiling vines to the front door. He had aged of course, growing more stooped and grey, the skin under his eyes crosshatched with wrinkles, but inside the house was still as colourful as a painter’s palette: red plaid curtains, blue twined carpets, a tablecloth edged in lace and embroidered with yellow blossoms. After Panni’s passing, their three daughters – Lara, Lili and Szonja – had moved in to care for Alajos. Now they fussed him into a chair, scolded him for going out without his cane and brought us a dusty bottle of Crimean champagne, bought three decades before and set aside for the day of my return.
‘I’ve worked up quite a thirst waiting for you to come back,’ he said, wrestling with the cork, lacking the strength to dislodge it. Without a word, Lara eased the bottle out of his hands and opened it. As she poured our glasses, he said, with playful pessimism, ‘The alcohol will help me to forget that life is worse than yesterday…’
‘…but better than tomorrow?’ I teased.
He lifted his glass. A ribbon of the national colours – green, white and red – was still stitched into his lapel but I noticed that the psoriasis had spread over his hands. He was over ninety now and I treasured him as friend, exemplar and a key source of stories in my first book.
‘Remember what I told you: Hungary placed its faith in the losers of every war since the sixteenth century. This twenty-first century will be no exception.’ Alajos said in toast: ‘To a once hopeful Hungary. Long may we mourn her death.’
Unlike him, the ancient champagne hadn’t aged well.