‘But this is a four-by-four, an off-road vehicle.’
She looked at him as if she’d just eaten sliced lemons.
‘Is Dacia, not Land Rover. One big mistake, is axle broken.’
She sold him a hiking map and pointed to the rough area where the castle should be.
‘Is not on maps,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘For one things, is not called Castel Almásy. Before was Castel Lup. Local peoples, they call it Castel Lup. Always Castel Lup on old maps.’
‘Meaning?’
She raised her eyebrows, as though the name should have been obvious.
‘Wolf Castle,’ she said.
Ethan thought she was about to sell him a string of garlic and some wooden stakes before making the sign of the cross and running off. But she stood her ground, and if she was trembling inside, she gave no sign of it.
‘You have to ask local peoples,’ she said. ‘They know tracks. But is very hard to find in winter because is snows. Look…’ and she ran her hand across a vast expanse of the map, ‘…all this is Apuseni Mountains. Is all forest from Mount Vladeasa in west’ — she pointed — ‘to here’ — she stabbed her finger further east. ‘It is Trascau Mountains here. All forests, all mountains, all caves. You find wolfs, you find bears. Maybe sleeping, maybe not. Seasons changing, some animals is waking in winter. Wolfs is hungry, sleepy, angry.’
He drove out of Oradea on the E60, in an effort to get into the Vladeasa Mountains from the north. These were not high mountains. The highest — Vladeasa itself — was around six thousand feet, much lower than any of the peaks in the Alps. But Ethan was not going mountaineering.
A drive of over forty miles took him through a long defile between mountains. Mist had formed on their lower slopes and, above it, clouds lay battening on the peaks. The countryside was white with snow, and dark green where the branches of tall trees peaked through. There was little sign of habitation anywhere. Roadside shrines added colour to the winter gloom, their frescoes bright in the still air. Twice he caught sight of a tall church steeple. Some cars and a bus passed him, headed for Oradea. And he passed a number of carts drawn by horses or donkeys, trotting in the opposite direction.
The Dacia’s heating struggled to spread a little comfort through the interior. He’d bought a padded jacket and heavy trousers at a shop near the tourist office, but sitting still allowed the frost outside to work its way inside him.
He came to Huedin, a small town on a crossroads. This was the gateway to the Apusenis. It was a grim place, its buildings mainly erected in the communist era under the rule of the dictator, Ceaucescu. Gaunt and forbidding, they belied the rural character of the place, making ugly the countryside into which they seemed to have been set down by a malign hand.
He took a right turn, heading south towards Sancraiu, a Székely village. This was hilly country, but everywhere Ethan looked he could see the forest-covered mountains climbing and soaring to greater heights.
Entering Sancraiu, he imagined he was driving through a carefully contrived theme park, ‘Hungarian World’ (for this was little Hungary) or ‘Medieval Transylvania’. Had it not been for the straggling telephone wires and the infrequent but more blatant satellite dishes on the sides of houses on both sides of the narrow road, he might have thought himself lost, not in space, but in time. The village had changed little in centuries, and the people wore an ancient air, their rustic clothing crying out, not merely poverty, but tenacity.
The houses, many of them painted blue, huddled among trees, thin wisps of smoke rising from their chimneys, grey merging with the grey sky above. There were two churches, one with a white steeple, the other with a white tower topped by a steep red steeple. Romanian orthodoxy swamped in a sea of Hungarian Reform, holding on in spite of everything. Ethan shuddered. He knew next to nothing about these people, beyond what little he’d read in a tourist brochure at the hotel. He pulled in to the kerb and stopped the car. As he did so, he saw their eyes on him, old men and women, young men in black leather jackets, young women in headscarves, their eyes bright and questioning.
He got out, feeling like someone who has landed in the Spice Islands after long journeying, knowing he is exotic, the object of fear or hatred or scorn, perhaps all these and more. No one smiled, no one welcomed him. It was not the tourist season, he had not brought skis; in short, he was an anomaly, an intrusion, a man from behind the glistening veil that lay between these people and the world outside.
It had started to snow minutes before he got to the village, and now heavy flakes were shimmering from the slate-coloured sky. On the hills and on the mountain peaks, the clouds pressed down like cushions of damp wool.
The woman in the tourist office had told him he’d have to leave the Dacia here in Sancraiu and hire a cart with a horse or two horses to take him into the mountains, all the way to Castel Lup, or as near as he could get. Looking round, he saw indifference on the faces of the villagers. He couldn’t even be sure of finding someone who spoke English. He’d been told they spoke Hungarian here.
There were no shops, at least not in any sense he recognised. Some of the houses had carved wooden fences and elaborate gateways. People passed in and out of the gates, but no one approached him. He saw two women standing watching him, then whispering to one another. He thought it might not be advisable to approach them.
Then, from a house opposite appeared a young woman, maybe between eighteen and twenty years old, dressed in brighter clothes than the crones staring at him. She came straight to him, a smile on her face, and stood on the road about three feet off.
‘Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekér?’ she asked.
Ethan just stared at her.
She giggled and put a hand to her mouth. Then, lowering it, she spoke again.
‘Bészel romanul?’
He still had no idea what she’d said, but he rather thought she’d been teasing him with the long expression she’d tried him with at first. She was quite pretty, but there was a mischievous look in her eyes that made her prettiness positively dangerous. He thought she might be making fun of him.
‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, without the slightest surprise. ‘I would have tried English next, but first I wanted to know if you speak Hungarian, and if not, Romanian. English would have been my third choice. I also speak a little German, some Ukrainian, and of course my father teaches me a little Russian. I thought you looked lost. Tourists don’t come to Sancraiu much at this time of year. There are ski parties, but they aren’t expected for some weeks yet. Perhaps you are not a tourist.’
He shook his head.
‘And you need help. You have probably taken the wrong road. But this isn’t a good place to talk. It’s very cold, and it’s going to get colder. It’s four hours to sunset. Let’s get inside.’
14
Ilona
She led him to a little house that served the village as a bar, a public meeting place, and a general goods store. The shelves were stacked with bags of flour, bottles of oil, loaves of white bread, and other basics. A group of old men stood at the bar, their chins unshaven, their eyes rheumy as they glided over Ethan, labelling him as another outsider they all had to put up with to earn someone in the village welcome foreign currency.
She sat him at a table and fetched two glasses of red wine. She took off the thick jacket she’d been wearing outside. In the bar, it was very hot.
‘How come you speak such good English?’ he asked.
‘University of Bucharest. I’m in my final year. I’ve been studying English for four years now. I stayed in England last year, in Brighton. I’m on vacation now, until just after the New Year.’