enda lettere #25
non est volentis
Welcome to enda lettere, a newsletter about literature and landscapes. Last week I packed my rucksack and took the train to the Western border of my home country, and started walking to greet the Sun in the East. Read more about what I saw below.
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“I found it impossible to tear myself from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now: a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear but because, within arm’s reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels. The river below, meanwhile, was carrying the immediate past downstream and I was hung poised in mid-air between the two.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor. A Time of Gifts
“So, what did you decide?” the man asks me over the phone. “Are you setting out tomorrow? The weather has remained quite chilly, mind you,” he adds and I can’t decide whether he is trying to dissuade me. “Yes, I will be there. I must get going, or nothing will happen,” I reply. He will see me at the train station and then give me a ride to the parking lot of Írottkő or Geschriebenstein, the highest peak of the Western borderlands of my native Hungary, a modest coda to the rhythm of the low mountains of the Wechsel, Semmering, and Rosalia in Austria.
Suspended between yesteryear, the immediate past, and a feeble future to be born under my feet, I shall walk the National Blue Trail of Hungary (Országos Kéktúra). Born out of an initiative to create a network of color-coded long-distance hiking trails across the post-Trianon Treaty remainder of the country, it is the only continuous “colored trail” which had been planned to end—and with its waning and waxing length of around 1,160 kilometers, it was the first of its kind in Europe. Ever since 1938, the year of the first St Stephen Peregrination (Szent István Vándorlás), the first, ceremonious walk of the entire length of the route, thousands of avid ramblers have walked this trail that snakes and loops like ancient calligraphy through the hills of Hungary. So many steps and wishes and curiosity, all those individual destinies shaped and shattered by the various oppressive political regimes of the 20th century have created a secular pilgrimage: the Blue Trail is our collective past in a walk. But we never walk towards a future.
It is deceptively innocent, so well-walked, lovingly maintained, revered, and yet, I worry that only tenebrous marvels lay in store for me. The mind recoils at the thought of such heavy ambivalence. I would love to close my eyes and not look at the frayed and tattered fabric of this society, torn by politics and repressed trauma of the 20th century. And I still must go and see all of it, etch those marvels into my mind, and for 6 weeks, I must think with my body first and let the soul linger.
“Back then, when my family bought the cottage, snow lay until late April, mid-May on the slopes of the Wechsel. Average annual precipitation in the region used to be around 1,200-1,500 millimeters. And now…around 500 millimeters last year. 58 millimeters in the first three months this year. The forest is dying, you will see the clear-cut patches. Spruce cannot tolerate these dry spells. Chestnut either, the ancient trees have roots reaching so deep rainwater can’t get through to them, that’s why you’ll see the younger trees thriving, but the centennials perishing,” the man rattles off the climate disaster facts. His family has been living in the region for hundreds of years, and he is proud of his intimate knowledge of the landscape.
I thought the Dreikönigenhaus in Trier was a kind of anomaly, the kind one is quite flustered to find amusing, but the Sgraffito House in Kőszeg (and a Medieval Starbucks in Oxford) seem to aim for establishing a pattern. A Renaissance beauty of a building, it signals wealth and sophistication, and an international flair—very much the intention of its former proprietors, the Salamon and Baumann families, wealthy tradesmen of the town. Today, the building serves as a pizzeria and library. Talk about mixed-use property.
But I go weak at the knees for another reason. The inscription from Romans 9:16 has gotten a kind of mysterious mantra: in its density, it is a perfect sentence that makes my breath hitch whenever I contemplate it. I feel vaguely anxious, for I could not pinpoint wherein lies the complete beauty of this sentence, and Zen scholars would just dismiss this need to analyse with a wave of their hand: it is no use. But sometimes we do will and at other times we do run, but ultimately, it matters so little.
This sentence (and the Sgraffito House itself) features in Géza Ottlik’s modern masterpiece School at the Frontier, a story of oppression and a meditation on objective truth. Essentially, in the face of aggression, those two stances, “willing” and “running” described in Romans 9:16 are manifested (like a fight or flight reflex), none of them constructive, but that is not even a criterium set by the aggressor. Certainly not in the story. School at the Frontier has been a catalysator for contemporary Hungarian literature but is one of those nigh untranslatable works which make our linguistic isolation felt in new and ever more painful ways.
What is to be said about a landmark novel and its author, a beautiful man, always dapper in his tweed jackets, and white shirts, a fan of tennis, an internationally recognized expert of bridge, ever the world citizen, even in the darkest years of state Socialism? That a tweed jacket can be a moral stance under certain circumstances? Because it can, it is.
“The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service, a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor. A Time of Gifts
There is an unphotographable sadness in the squalor of old granges left to decay.
The hoopoes play in the dust in the white glow of high noon. The air has a slow burn, as I leave the forest behind. An abandoned crop silo and several decaying service buildings rise on the horizon. Dogs bark somewhere, but I can’t see them. Once there was a grand manor house here. Once this hamlet had its own school and hundreds of workers. Now the last remains of civilisation in this post-apocalyptic scenery are shacks and stunted allotments huddled around the now functionless barns of Kincsédpuszta.
Once these mechanized crofts were the high-performing vanguards of agriculture. Now only impoverished families try to turn things around and make work what decades of slow rot and collectivisation had destroyed. It is not their choice to stay and toil. Arable farming is like a genetic program, like an instinct that leaves no individual choice. The people of Kincsédpuszta know no pastime, no education, no easy way out. They hold out among the ruins because it is their duty. Everything outside the croft is fiction to them.
I assume the trail would lead me through this place and I boldly walk toward the silo. Here is a mistake one should never make in places with names like -puszta and -major. There is no fence, and the barking grows louder. A mangy, aggressive dog snarls at me, and in an idiotic gesture to stop it I ssssssshhhhh back at it. A thick silence muffles the sound of the hoopoe’s wings and I walk into the endless farmland.
Wine press houses cum bungalows are worth a separate photography project. Lovingly renovated from the 1960s onwards, they represent true post-modern folk art in the Hungarian countryside. Here is a striking exemplar in the soft embrace of an orchard, complete with terrazzo, a cheerful chimney, and a barred window. Peaceful and deserted throughout the week, small vineyards come alive on Fridays, when the proprietors make an appearance to toil and tinker on their plots. The world is almost idyllic up in the smallholders’ vineyards, high above town, and a childish glee overcomes me as I walk on towards the village of Gérce. Do the owners feel the same joy at the sight of their manicured gardens, freshly pruned trees in bloom, and the vista? Or is it just my inexorable desire to spend the afternoon in such places and secretly pitch my tent in someone’s garden to spend the night? Some questions never have answers.
“That’s it for today?” the man in jeans and a well-worn windbreaker asks. I shake my head ‘no’. “Where do you plan to finish today?” he presses on. “I don’t know yet,” I reply, bracing for the inevitable follow-up question. “But you go alone, all the way?” “Yes, I do, I prefer it that way.” And then he looks me squarely in the eye. “Freedom is a lonely thing innit?” he nods. “I know what you mean tho, I go it alone, too. One can just, y’know, think through a lot of things, meet strangers on the road, stuff like that. It’s more peaceful.” And with that, we say our goodbyes and go our separate ways, but his words stay with me.
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That concludes week 1 for me on the trail. On Instagram I publish a different set of pictures and stories, so take a peek if you can bear with more Blue Trail content throughout the week.
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