Читать книгу On the Shores of the Mediterranean - Eric Newby - Страница 15

One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, one of them a mauve Panther which to my untutored eye looked like an overblown Bugatti. These disgorged a merry throng: gentlemen in wing collars and Panama hats, ladies in white felt and pill-box hats, and yards of beads. Liza Minnelli arrived bowler-hatless in non-period black, which suited her. Denise, Lady Kilmarnock, a partner in the firm which was promoting all this, was splendid in a shocking pink turban and was the life and soul of the party. I had a new shirt for the occasion. My wife had a new white beret. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist of the Daily Mail, also had a new shirt. Calmest of all was Jennifer, society columnist of Harpers and Queen. The best organized of all the recorders of this and succeeding scenes, she had done her homework on her fellow travellers. She had no need to go scurrying around finding out who was who. Meanwhile the Coldstream Guards’ band played away like anything.

At 11.44 on the dot, having settled into a coach called Zena, used on the Bournemouth Belle from 1929 to 1946, we pulled out to the accompaniment of an enormous fanfare of trumpets. The interior was exquisite, the result of taking the whole thing to pieces and rebuilding it (in Lancashire) and the work of such people as cabinet-makers skilled in marquetry, and upholsterers.

Soon we were tucking into a delicious collation: watercress soup; salmon with tarragon cream, carrot and fennel; iceberg and mint leaf salad; tomatoes stuffed with mushrooms; and ‘Henley Pudding’, sort of mousse; with the glasses and cutlery, designed in France, which you can buy if you have enough of the necessary, setting up a magic tinkling.

Meanwhile, we were wondering who among this glittering throng was the Duchess of Westminster, Princess Esra Jah of Hyderabad, Rod Stewart, Sir Peter and Lady Parker (head of British Rail and designated ‘Folkestone only’), the grandson of George Mortimer, inventor of the Pullman Car, and Mrs Wheeler and son, the second people to book for this trip, back in 1978, all of whom were reputed to be on the train. As a result, although I had a pre-1914 Baedeker which would have given us a blow by blow account of the route to Folkestone, there was not much chance to use it or glimpse anything more than an occasional oast-house from the window.

At 14.00 we left Folkestone (and the Parkers, who had been given a good old grilling by the press as to why Sir Peter’s British Rail trains weren’t like this one) on a Sealink ferry, preserved from the common herd in the Verandah Deck Saloon which was reserved for VSOE passengers, but not protected from the media, who had been totally pre-empted by teams of Japanese television cameramen who had recorded the journey, travelling with the train all the way to Venice on a trial run and also following it with a fleet of helicopters.

Ninety minutes later, at Boulogne, we had our first sight of the European section of the train, seventeen coaches in the dark blue and gold livery of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens decorated with bronze cyphers, drawn up on the quay side. There were greetings from the Mayor, or was it the President of the Chamber of Commerce?

Eleven sleepers, each with sixteen or eighteen compartments, restaurant cars, a bar car with a grand piano in it, staff and baggage cars, had all been restored at Bremen and Slyke near Ostend with what must have been a goodly slice of the £11,000,000 it had cost to get the two trains on the rails. These sleepers were Lx, L denoting luxury, the cars associated in people’s minds with the old Simplon – Orient. They had been everywhere, on the Rome Express, the Berlin – Naples, the Aegean Express and Taurus, the Nord Express to Riga before the war. We were in Wagon-Lit 3525, built at La Rochelle in 1929, decorated by René Prou, master of wagon-lit design, stored at Lourdes during the Second World War, last used on the Simplon – Orient and Rome Expresses between 1949 and 1961. Our luggage, which we hadn’t seen since Victoria, was already in the compartment. At 17.44, to the accompaniment of a band of serenading musicians, the train pulled out for Paris.

Changing for dinner in Lx 3525 – the decree was that ladies would dress and dinner jackets would be worn – was a feat of acrobatics, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the Atlantic liner (some of these compartments got smaller during conversion) and I got the bottom fly button of my trousers done up through the top buttonhole.

Down in the bar car it was like an Arabian night; everyone was dressed to the nines, with feathers and bandeaux. The champagne was flowing from those expensive Indian-club-shaped bottles. There we met an American husband and wife who owned their own parlour and sleeping cars back home in California where they hitched them on to trains and rode out to Kentucky or wherever the spirit moved them.

Dinner, which cost £20 ($28) a head (lunch and drinks on the train in England were included in the fare), was served while we were in the outskirts of Paris. It was cooked and presented by the chef, Michel Ranvier, late of the three-stars-in-Michelin Troisgros restaurant at Roanne. Memorable was the Foie Gras de Canard Entier Cuit Tout Naturelle, the little lobsters served à Vinaigrette d’Huile d’Olive, and the Jambonnette de Poulette au Vin Jaune et Morilles.

It took hours, due to one of the gas stoves in a kitchen going wrong, but who cared, we were not going on anywhere afterwards.

There was a red carpet down at the Gare d’Austerlitz, but no nobs to see us off, the present administrators of the country disapproving of conspicuous consumption and no one else wanting to be associated with the venture.

Then on through the night with a pianist, Monsieur Dars, at the grand piano in the bar, belting Scott Joplin and such as we roared down the line to Switzerland. The piano was such an impediment to navigation that sometimes I wished we’d brought a chain saw with us.

At 04.22 we arrived at Vallorbe, 266 miles from Paris, a station in the strange no-man’s-land between France and Switzerland, where as always a man plodded past groaning ‘VALLORBE … VALLORBE’, while another tapped the axles with a hammer, as in Anna Karenina.

I was asleep when they put the croissants on the train at Lausanne at 05.21, all the way along the shores of Lake Geneva and all the way up the Rhone Valley; waking in the entrance to the Simplon tunnel for the 12½-mile run under the Lepontine Alps, between Monte Leone and the Helsenhorn, where the previous week one of the Japanese camera crew had been nearly decapitated, putting his head out of the window in the middle of it.

We ate the croissants and drank coffee running along the shores of Lago Maggiore. Cork and cedar trees rose above the early mist on the Borromean Islands and the place names on the map – Stresa and Locarno – were those of long-forgotten treaties made before the war. It was going to be a lovely day. At Milan, at 10.00, the papers came on board with pictures of a frigate burning in the Falkland Islands.

Lunch on the train, £15 ($21) a head if you had to pay for it, was tagliatelle with butter, small chickens in a delicious sauce, smoked salmon, Parma ham, strawberry tart, the most delicious lemon cake and more of the Laurent-Perrier champagne on which everyone had been over-indulging themselves. Then, three hours out of Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, sinking, stinking city in the Lagoon.

We arrived at Santa Lucia Station at 14.44 to be greeted on the platform when we descended by the station master, the massed concierges of the Cipriani, the Gritti and the Danieli, the assembled staff of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express and the Gondolieri Chorus.

Miss Minnelli left in another little black number decorated with bugle beads. She told me she had enjoyed the trip. We never saw her again. Boats took us away up the Grand Canal, a vision in the sunshine, to stay at the Cipriani for free. It was all over.

Leaving Venice some considerable time later, this time in a van by the causeway across the Lagoon, turning right at Mestre on the old main road to Trieste, we crossed the plains of the Veneto and Venezia Giulia. For much of the way the road, as are most of the other main roads in northern Italy, is lined with developments, factories and furniture showrooms mostly, whose owners now choose what were previously remote rural locations for them, so that for long periods of time it is impossible to see the country on either side at all.

It is country which when one can see it is of endless flatness, through which the irrigation ditches stretch away to what seems like infinity between the high embankments, just as they do in the Po Delta. In summer, in the heat of the day, when the mirage is operating, this country sometimes looks more like a jelly than terra firma. In it, in summer, the farmhouses and villages stand like islands isolated in seas of ripening corn and grapes. (In winter they stand in seas of freezing mud.) In autumn, in late September or October, the contadini in their wide-brimmed straw hats, at this season engaged in the vendemmia, take shelter beneath the vines, around half past nine or so, by which time it is already hot, to eat their merenda, just as we do in the vineyards around I Castagni.

The rivers that flow down through the plain from the Alps into the lagoons and marshes that fringe the coast are the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo, which first sees the light of day as the Soča, bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps in Yugoslavia, each of them in full, sometimes dangerous, flood in spring when the mountain snows melt. In the hot weather long reaches of them are often nothing more than arid wildernesses of shingle with a few livid green stagnant pools among them. Rivers that were practically unheard-of in the outside world until the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Italians and Austro-Hungarians died fighting one another on their banks.

Having crossed the Isonzo, the most eastward of these rivers, we arrived in the late afternoon in Monfalcone, a rather sad shipbuilding and industrial town on the shores of the Gulf of Panzano, an inlet at the head of the Gulf of Trieste, sad-looking because it was more or less destroyed in the First World War and then rebuilt in the early twenties at a time when domestic as well as public architecture was rather sad anyway.

The only old building of note is the castle, and even that is not exciting as castles go, although the view from it is magnificent, over what is actually only a small part of the vast plain which extends uninterruptedly for some 300 miles from the Julian Alps to the Maritime and the Cottian Alps in which the Po rises on the French frontier beyond Turin, with the shining lagoons reaching into it from the sea and with towers and campanili rising into the air above it, of which that of the cathedral of Aquileia, the Roman city sacked by Attila, is the most easily identifiable.

The castle stands on the very edge of what the Italians call Il Carso, the Yugoslavs call the Kras and German-speakers the Karst, a wilderness of limestone here rising in a steep escarpment abruptly above the town and the plain, like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean, scarred by quarrying, utterly bare except for a few plantations of conifers and innumerable electric pylons which protrude from it like harpoons. Having fought and negotiated so ferociously either to obtain or retain it, it would be comical, if it was not tragic, to see how the Italians have treated what they are always going on about as their patrimony.

Much of the Carso is bare rock, but parts of it are covered with ash, rowan, hawthorn shrubs and holm oaks, the last vestigial remains of the primeval forest that provided some of the wooden piles on which, miraculously, Venice still stands, although now plantations of conifers are rapidly changing its appearance.

Here, among what in some places look like torrents of rock, the making of the fields, before the coming of the bulldozer, was the back-breaking work of generations of men and women and their children. Here, you can still see piles of pale, rain-washed stones, as much as ten feet high and sixty feet long, like great burial cairns, all hand-picked from this wilderness to make a field of red earth perhaps three feet deep and thirty yards long in which vines, corn, turnips or potatoes could be grown.

It is a place of extremes. In winter the fearful wind called by the Slovenes the Kraška Burja, by the Italians the Bora, sweeps over the plateau from the north-east, sometimes attaining a velocity of up to 130 mph and in the past upsetting heavily laden ox-carts and even halting trains on the railway line from Trieste to Ljubljana, although it now rarely blows with such ferocity, possibly because the plateau is being protected by the reafforestation.

The early part of the year is particularly beautiful. The grass is fresh and green and carpeted with snowdrops, daffodils and lilies of the valley, and the hillsides are covered with narcissus.

In summer a huge, brooding silence envelops the Carso, a silence accentuated by the endless shrilling of cicadas that seems eventually to become part of the silence itself. The woods have a sinister, claustrophobic feeling about them and one has the sensation of being watched, and one is being watched anywhere close to the Yugoslav – Italian frontier, across which, walking in the woods, it is easy to stray.

Here in the Carso, ten minutes after the most violent rainstorm, there is no water to be seen; it has all gurgled away through fissures in the rock. For the Kras is hollow. Beneath it there is a whole subterranean world, only a minute part of it explored, of vast caverns, dark, secret rivers and black, icy lakes. From the air it looks as if it has been subjected to intense artillery bombardment, as it was when it was a major battlefield in the First World War. Its entire surface is pitted with craters but these are natural phenomena. The largest are called, in Slovene, kolisevke, basins with vertical sides as much as 300 feet deep and a quarter of a mile wide, huge caves whose roofs have collapsed. A smaller variety, doline, are blocked-up swallow holes that once led underground, funnel-shaped depressions anything from six to sixty feet deep and up to three hundred feet in diameter which contain the best earth and are cultivated as sunken fields.

One of the principal rivers is the Reka, which, as the Timavo, by which name it is still known to Italians, was as famous in classical antiquity as the Nile or the Euphrates and was written about by Virgil, Martial, Ausonius, and Strabo, who said that it contained specks of gold.

At Škocjan, a village that stands on a natural bridge of rock between two precipices, the Timavo plunges beneath one of them into a cave as high as a twenty-storey building, and emerges on the other side of the village in a dolina, five hundred feet deep and a third of a mile wide, eventually to disappear from view in the Lake of the Dead, four miles under a mountain.

It has been established, by someone who dropped fluorescein into it, of which one part can be detected in up to twenty million times its volume in water, that the Timavo then flows into the subterranean Lake of Trebiciano, which is at the bottom of a thousand-foot shaft in what is a sort of no-man’s-land beyond the municipal rubbish tips of Trieste, on its way to enter the Adriatic near Monfalcone twelve miles away, in Italy at San Giovanni Timavo. There it emerges from the base of a cliff in an arcadian place which remains arcadian only because it is the property of the Trieste waterworks, beside a church built on the site of a Roman temple itself built to hallow the spot. After its twenty-mile journey underground, it bubbles up in a series of pools, partly hidden from view by the willows that bend over them, before flowing over a series of weirs into the sea in the Gulf of Panzano, where its mouth is now disfigured by an enormous marina. Here, the Argonauts are supposed to have landed. Here, though strictly forbidden, because it belongs to the waterworks, we had a lovely picnic on the grass.

Down below in the caverns of the Carso there are strange creatures: Troglocaris Schmidti, a cave crab with a round belly which swims canted over to one side as though its ballast has shifted, and which sometimes, if it takes a wrong turning, gets sucked up into the Yugoslav drinking-water system; and, most remarkable of all, Proteus anguineus, a weird, stick-like member of the salamander family with four legs, that somehow survived the ice age in the temperate cavern air. Amphibious, breathing either through lungs or gills, according to which element it is in, quite blind, although born with embryonic eyes that later disappear, in its native habitat it lives for fifty years, and in captivity enjoys a diet of worms and mince meat. There is also a variety of blind spiders, scorpions and centipedes, all said to be either light brown or to have no colour at all.

The plateau of the eastern Kras through which the Timavo flows, mostly underground, was and is still the birthplace of some of the finest horses the world has ever seen. The rough ground and the excellent grass which grows on it combine to produce a race of horses of exceptional strength and speed with thick shanks, supple knees and particularly well-formed, strong hoofs.

Here, the ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, bred their horses for war and the great chariot races. In the oak woods near Škocjan the Thracians erected a temple to Dionysus, protector of horses. At Lipiča, among the same sort of oak woods only a few miles away, there is a mews and stud founded in 1580 by the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Maximilian II. He introduced the Spanish horse into Austria and for 339 years, until the end of the Empire in 1919, horses from Lipiča were supplied to the Imperial Spanish Riding School at Vienna, the only great riding school to survive both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars: and for more than 240 years this breed of white horses, sired by Arab-Berbers brought from Andalucia, horses from Polesine in the Po Valley and, in the eighteenth century, from Germany and Denmark, performed the evolutions of the haute école in the great white baroque Winter Riding School in the Josefs-Platz, more like a ballroom than a manège, that is the masterpiece of the architect Fischer von Erlach.

These are the horses, Lipizzas, or Lippizaners, white as marble when grown, compact, broad-chested, with thick necks, long backs, thick, long manes, and with protuberant and intelligent eyes – fully grown they are between fifteen and sixteen hands – that when you see them moving with a high knee action in a natural, spirited trot, which at Vienna would be later schooled into what is known as the Spanish Walk, remind you of the horses on a Greek urn, or else of Verrocchio’s statue of the horse being ridden by the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, next door to the little restaurant, the Bandierette, where we had our dinner before leaving for London on the Simplon Express.

The stallions at Lipiča are descended from one of six hereditary branches of the male line: Pluto, descended from the Danish stallion born in 1765; Conversano, from the brown Napolitan born in 1767; Napolitano, from a bay of that name born in 1790; Favory, a dun Lipiča born at Kladrub, another imperial stud between Prague and Brunn, in 1779; Maestoso, a grey born in 1819 at Mezohëgyes in Hungary of a Spanish dam sired by a Lipiča; and Siglavy, a grey Arab born in 1810, also at Mezohëgyes. Originally there were eighteen dynasties of dams at Lipiča. Several are now extinct. At Lipiča a horse takes its name from his forefather, followed by that of its dam – Siglavy-Almerina, Pluto-Theodorasta, and so on.

Lipiča no longer supplies horses to the Spanish Riding School. The Austrian horses now all come from Piber, near Graz in Styria, and the stud at Lipiča has become a sort of tourist attraction, although it still supplies horses to the state stables and they are exported all over the world as circus and saddle horses. In the Balkans, at least until recently, they were much used for heavy agricultural work.

Some years ago there were rumours that the stud was to be closed down and that all the horses were to be sold to a sausage factory which has its premises conveniently close by, but nothing came of it.

‘You have been here before,’ any reader who has got this far may well say. It is true I have been, many times, in this part of the world, in the Carso. This is the country, part of Slovenia, itself one of the republics that make up Yugoslavia, in which my wife was born; its inhabitants proud, prickly people with long memories, some of them endowed with second sight, musical, very fond of singing, passionate lovers of flowers, part of a tiny nation conquered by Charlemagne in the seventh century, which, although it struggled successfully to preserve its language, never attained independence. Many of them are now scattered to the far ends of the earth, principally in Australia and South America.

This was the place she meant when, tried beyond endurance by some domestic row, she used to cry, majestically, ‘I shall return to my country and my people!’

Actually, she never did carry out this threat. Instead we returned there together year after year, usually with our children, to stay in her parents’ house.

Over this disputed territory – about twenty miles deep and altogether about the size of Long Island – which has always been one of the principal ways of access for the people of Middle Europe to the Mediterranean, have flown, among others, the flags of Bonaparte’s Illyria, of Austria-Hungary and, more recently, those of both Italy and Yugoslavia, which now have it divided unequally and uneasily between them.

To Italians, the Carso is, as it always has been, the frontier between Latin civilization and what they regard as Slavonic barbarism. It is a very old habit for them to think of it as such. This was the region held by the Tenth Legion and called by the Roman Senate ‘The Impassable Confine’. In their brief modern tenure of it, which lasted about twenty-five years, they succeeded in extending their hold over it, but at great cost. Between 1915 and 1917, fighting against the Austro-Hungarians, in the twelve battles of the Isonzo, in the small area between Monte Michele north of Monfalcone and the Adriatic, they lost 175,000 men, a quarter of their losses in the entire war.

To the Austrians it was Der Karst, or Das Küstenland, now not much more than a nostalgic memory of a time when Trieste was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s principal port on the Mediterranean. To the Yugoslav nation it is the Kras, what they failed by a hair’s-breadth to seize at the end of the Second World War, which would have given them a prestigious outlet on the Mediterranean, and which became a danger point in their relationship with the West. To the Slovenes it is also the Kras, but to them a place where for some 1300 years they have wrested a hard-earned living from its inhospitable terrain.

After 1918 it was annexed by Italy, and Slovene villages began to have their names printed together with their Italian equivalents on signposts and on Italian maps, as they still do on Italian maps even though many of them are now in Yugoslavia. Under Mussolini, the teaching of Slovene was forbidden and Slovene schoolteachers were replaced by Italians, the Slovene teachers being sent to Italy. There, those who spoke no Italian – most spoke German as a second language (the Slovenes, as members of the Empire, fought in the Austrian army in the First War) – experienced the same difficulty in communicating with their pupils, until they had learned the language, as did monoglot Neapolitans sent to teach Italian to Slovene children, which was what happened to my Slovene father-in-law.

That afternoon we crossed out of Italy at the frontier post at the hamlet near Trieste called Fernetti and into Yugoslavia at Fernetič, which is the name for the same place on the Yugoslav side.

Although it is fairly easy to find frontier officials equally disagreeable to deal with as the Yugoslavian officials on the shores of the Mediterranean, it is difficult to find any more disagreeable to deal with. If nothing else, they make one realize the difference in the tempo of life in Yugoslavia and Italy, now the length of a cricket pitch away. To watch a Yugoslav frontier official examining your passport is like watching one of those fascinating slow motion films, taken over a period of weeks, which shows a plant breaking through the earth, burgeoning and gradually flowering before one’s eyes. Wriggling among the contents of our luggage, the fingers of the customs official were like pale grubs. Thus we entered for the umpteenth time the country in which my wife was born, and to which she had so often threatened to return for ever.

As her mother was now very recently dead – her father had died some years previously – we had decided that this time, before going to stay with other members of her family, we would vary what had been for some thirty-five years an immutable itinerary, and visit first of all a distant kinswoman of hers who had invited us to spend the night in the village in which she lived in the eastern part of the Kras. Here, as in other places in the Mediterranean lands, kinsmen, and kinswomen particularly, recognize kinship to a point at which, in England – but not perhaps in Wales or Scotland – they would long since have ceased to be acknowledged as still existent. Here, everywhere you turn, are to be found kinsmen and kinswomen extending outwards in ever-increasing circles, like ripples on a pond when you throw a stone into it until, in the end, rather like the family of Queen Victoria which covers over two pages of small print in Whitaker’s Almanack, almost everyone is your kin.

This village could have been the prototype of any village in the Kras. Its stone houses, huddled together as if for mutual protection, had walls feet thick, most of them hidden away in walled courtyards behind heavy oak doors under high, carved stone archways. These courtyards, havens in which the owners and their animals shelter from the rigours of the climate and modern Yugoslavia outside, are full of flowers in summer, something about which Slovenes are quite dotty. (My mother-in-law once, at the age of eighty, brazenly took cuttings inside one of the temperate houses in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew which did very well in her garden in the Kras.) Overlooking the courtyard, at the upper storey, a wooden balcony runs the whole length of the front of the house with an outside staircase leading up to it, and this balcony and the staircase leading up to it are also full of flowers – asters, dahlias, pansies and geraniums, mostly displayed, as are the ones in the courtyard, in old tin cans with their lids cut off.

The bedrooms look out on to the balcony. The old-fashioned ones are furnished with big dark wooden or iron beds some of which weigh up to three or four hundred pounds. They stand on scrubbed wooden floors and the walls are hung with photographs of immediate ancestors that look as if they have been taken as well as framed by the local undertakers. Younger married people now have flashier furniture, wardrobes and beds with veneer and lots of mirrors, but the women, young or old, unless they are Party members, will have hung a print of the Virgin above the bed as an insurance against misfortune and, perhaps, excessive high jinks.

In the centre of the village is the church, with a white bell tower rising above it to one side and sometimes with the bell rope swinging in the breeze under an arch at the foot of it.

Nothing that the Government or the Party could do after the war, when Yugoslavia became officially communist, to stop the people, particularly the women, in these villages from going to church, was even remotely successful. In the years from 1945 onwards, when priests were forbidden to wear vestments and say mass, they went to the church just the same and simply stood inside it in a silent gesture of defiance and disapproval. When transport to distant places of pilgrimage to which they were accustomed to go was denied them, they set off for them on foot.

Wanda’s kinswoman worked as a waitress in a gostilna, a village inn. Its courtyard was shielded from the sun by a trellis of vines so thick that those sitting beneath it were in perpetual twilight. Under it men were playing cards, slapping them down on the tables and making a great deal of noise. One of the characteristics of the Slovene language, at least up here on the Kras, is that those who speak it often sound as if they are engaged in a violent quarrel when, in fact, they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. Also under the vines there was a bowling alley made of rolled earth. In such a place the only woman on view is usually the waitress. The gostilna is like a London club, a man’s world.

From the terrace of the inn, long, stone-walled expanses of rock with a bit of earth in them masquerading as fields, and interspersed with windbreaks of young trees, swept up to the foot of the mountains, the Nanos, and the Javornik. The Nanos with its bare, high summit covered, as it often is, with what looked like a wig of white cloud; the Javornik, to the south of the gap through which the road and railway run eastwards to Ljubljana, covered with dense forest which still harbours within its fastnesses red deer, wild boar, wolves and what are some of the last European brown bear.

Marija, Wanda’s soi-disante kinswoman, was a widow of indeterminate age, good-looking, if not positively sexy, in a black, widow’s-weedy sort of way. She took us into the building and sat us down at a table in a pale, austere room of which the only other occupants were four fierce-looking young men in blue overalls, who looked as if they might be off duty from a filling station and were playing the same game that was being played on the terrace, a form of whist, slamming the cards down on the table as if they were practising to cut it in quarters with a karate chop, making the rafters ring with cries of what was either rage or triumph.

In one corner there was a big white-tiled wood-burning stove with a long, silver-painted metal pipe extending up from it and across the width of the room and then out into the open air through a hole in the outer wall, which would ensure that the room was always stiflingly hot in winter, however cold it was outside. Old-fashioned lace curtains effectively obstructed what would have been the same view from the windows that one could enjoy outside on the terrace, and the walls, which had been stencilled with a pale apple-green pattern on a white background, rollers being used for this purpose, were hung with the stuffed heads of various sorts of small game, game that were now completely extinct a few miles away over the border in Italy. (It is a paradox that the enthusiasm of the communist apparat for the chase organized on capitalist lines, to the exclusion of the hoi polloi, has led in many communist countries to a positive proliferation of species that in many capitalist countries in Europe have long since become extinct.)

There was also an astonishing profusion of what can only be described as Victorian potted plants, aspidistras, castor oil plants and such, all standing on rather wobbly whatnots. It was all terribly melancholy and over everything hung a faint but palpable, slightly acid smell, compounded of Slavonic cooking, cigarettes, drainage and other elements, difficult to identify, let alone describe, but once inhaled never forgotten. It was a room that was the prototype of a room in a village inn anywhere between the one in which we were now sitting near the eastern shores of the Adriatic, and the Volga.

Here in the Kras, in spite of the heat and the vines heavy with black grapes, not more than twenty miles from its shores, one felt the Mediterranean world receding, could sense that people were no longer looking to it either for sustenance or inspiration, but to Middle Europe.

Having seated us at the table Marija hurried away and after a bit returned carrying a tray on which there was a litre bottle of red wine, a plate of the local ham called pršut, so thinly sliced that it was almost transparent, and a kind of flat, crusty bread called pogača, which she proceeded to cut up, meanwhile making pantomime gestures of eating and drinking to me, reinforcing them with little cries in Italian, which she had somehow got it into her head I was unfamiliar with, of ‘Bere! Mangiare!’, using an infinitive form commonly reserved for cretins, monoglot soldiers of invading armies and infants still at the breast. The pogača was hot from the wood oven, which was outside in the back yard. The pršut was delicious, a rare delicacy. The smoking of this sort of ham is usually carried out in late autumn or in winter and the process of preparing it is only commenced at the time of the full moon. At any other time an inferior product will result. Like many other peasant communities around the Mediterranean, and also elsewhere, the inhabitants of the Kras are still to a great extent governed by the moon in their everyday life. No one used to be surprised, for instance, when one of the apparently robust wooden bedsteads, bought by a newly married couple, disintegrated if it was purchased at the time of the new moon. No other fate could be expected for it. But that was in the past. Now, in the 1980s, bedsteads disintegrated whatever phase the moon was in.

To prepare this ham it was first kept in salt for a week, then it was put in what looked a bit like an old-fashioned letter press for another week, the pressure being increased daily. It was then hung in a chimney to smoke over a fire of ash wood and after that it was hung for anything from seven months to a year in a dry place, having been previously sprinkled with pepper as a protection against flies which, together with dampness, were its principal enemies. By the time a pršut reached Trieste, a good one was about as expensive as smoked salmon.

The wine was Teran, the product of a close circle of about a dozen villages north of the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana, between the Nanos range and the present frontier with Italy. It is a deep purple colour, almost black, with a taste that some people, when they first try it, compare to that of rusty old nuts and bolts. It is best either with hot food, or else with the pršut and the pogača. It is not a wine to drink by itself. It improves on acquaintanceship.

Meanwhile, we ate and drank, while Marija constantly refilled the glasses, particularly my glass, which somehow became empty quicker than Wanda’s, all the time going on and on to Wanda in Slovene about births and deaths and marriages and who had emigrated where, only pausing to go out and get another bottle.

‘Marija says we must drink,’ Wanda said, I thought illogically. Usually she spends her time telling me not to.

‘I am drinking. It’s you who’s not drinking. Anyway, why doesn’t she drink?’

‘Here, it is not the custom for widows …’

‘It’s not the custom for anyone to drink like this, even where I come from. You’d think she wanted to keep me here in pickle.’

‘Bere! Bere!’ (‘Drink! Drink!’) said Marija, who was already refilling my glass. From the yard outside came the sounds of what later proved to be a free-range chicken being slaughtered.

‘That’s our dinner,’ Wanda said. ‘Now they’re going to pluck it, draw it, truss it, put it in a pot on top of the stove with butter and rosemary. It’s going to be hours before we eat dinner.’

‘How many hours?’

‘Three hours.’

‘It’s only seven o’clock now. It’ll be ten. By then I’ll be dead at this rate. Why didn’t you tell her we’d be happy with something simpler? An omelette or just more pršut, more pogača.’

‘I did but she wouldn’t listen. Now she wants to give you some žganje to keep you going.’

‘Why don’t you stop her? What’s come over you?’

‘She will be very upset if you don’t drink. She will say that you do not like her drinks. Tonight you must drink. It is the custom.’

‘Bere! Bere!’ cried Marija, this by-now-to-me-terrible woman, bringing a clean glass and more than half filling it with žganje, then waving her arms as if she was performing a conjuring trick or conducting some vast alcoholic orchestra. What Wanda said was true. The more I drank the more she seemed to warm to me.

Žganje is the equivalent of Italian grappa or French marc, spirit distilled from the skins, pips and stalks left over after the grapes have been pressed and the wine made, but here, in the sticks, home-made and much stronger than what is normally sold commercially because it has been distilled more often. On top of what I had already drunk it was murderous.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve either got to go to bed until it’s time for dinner, or go for a walk or something. I just can’t go on like this.’

‘You can’t, we’re going to sit with the deads.’

‘You mean a wake? What they had for your mother?’

‘I don’t know what you call it in English. In Italian it’s veglia. You sit with the deads.’

‘I know you sit with the deads,’ I said. ‘We did it with your mother.’

‘Yes, that’s right, wake for the deads. A very old lady, ninety-three, called Nunča Pahorča, Marija’s aunt, died this morning. She was very nice. She’s being buried tomorrow.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m half tight. If you think I’m going to sit by some dead dear old lady for three hours until dinner’s ready you’ve got it all wrong. Besides, we had enough of this funeral thing in Naples.’

‘It’s better than sitting here getting dronker,’ she said. ‘And I was only joking about the chicken. It was being killed for someone else. Ours is nearly ready. And you know it doesn’t matter about being a bit dronk, others will be dronk also. We shall only stay a few minutes.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, before she brings any more žganje. Otherwise it’ll be a double funeral and I don’t fancy sharing a vault with a nice old lady of ninety-three.’

The house in which the remains of Nunča Pahorča were on exhibition was very small, for she had been a widow for twenty years and had moved to it when her husband died when she herself was well over seventy. Nunča means ‘aunt’ in the dialect spoken nearer the Adriatic, where she had once lived, but where she now lived she would have been known as Teta Pahorča.

The heavy old bed in which she had died only a few hours before had been taken to pieces and removed temporarily to a shed in her vegetable garden, where it now stood together with a bedside table on which there were a number of bottles containing various liniments that were sovereign remedies against aches and pains, the sort that have labels with gloomy likenesses of their moustached and bearded inventors and their scrawly, illegible signatures printed on them. Now, washed and changed by a couple of the women of the village who knew how to do these things, she lay dressed from head to foot in her best black, from the black lace mantilla which covered the snow-white hair of which she had been so proud to her black felt boots, on her best linen sheets which were part of her marriage trousseau and which she had kept for more than seventy years for this purpose, in a plastic coffin with simulated metal handles, lined with pink ruched nylon, her now waxen features decently composed but no longer with any human attributes, her hands crossed and holding a candle and a rosary that had been placed in them. The walls of the room had been hung with black cloth by the undertaker’s men; a tall candle burned at each of the four corners of the coffin, and at the foot of it, on a table, there were sprigs of box and a receptacle containing holy water.

The room was full of people. Most had come to pay their respects, take a sprig of the box, dip it in the holy water, sprinkle it over the corpse, stay a little while to pray or talk to relatives and friends about the virtues of the deceased, and have a drink, after which they left to get back to their televisions, and be replaced by other mourners. Some of the men, of whom I was one, were, as Wanda had forecast, a bit ‘dronk’.

The remainder, women mostly, old and young, although there were one or two elderly men among them, sat on hard upright chairs round the coffin, dressed in their best clothes, the women reciting the rosary, counting the decades of the Aves, the Ave Marias, on their beads, sometimes at the conclusion of a whole fifteen of them stopping to recount some edifying anecdotes about Nunča Pahorča who had always been very devout, sometimes to the distraction of her husband. They talked about how she had never missed going to mass and benediction and how she used to tick off the acolytes for picking their noses or otherwise misbehaving themselves during the celebration while the priest’s back was turned. And once they sang a Slovene song, which was one of her favourites, and which began:

Tam cĕz jezero	There, over the lake,
dol na gmajničo	Down in the meadows
je prelepi dom	Is the most beautiful place
moje zibelke …	Where my cradle was …

After which they wept a bit, had another little drink and began reciting the rosary once more. Long after midnight, by which time we had finished dinner, we went back with Marija for a second visit, and found that they were still at it and showed no signs of giving up.

The dinner was memorable, although like a relieving force for a beleaguered garrison it only arrived in the nick of time to save me. The chicken, which had spent its life scratching among the grit in the back yard, was flavoured with rosemary and full of delicious natural juices. With it we had ajdova polenta, like Italian polenta but grey not yellow, made from the seeds of a white flower which grows all over the Kras in summertime, and really meant to be eaten with golaž, goulash, which was also on the menu that evening. Many of the dishes served in this part of the world have Austro-Hungarian origins. With it we ate radič, a bitter, delicious green salad, and fižol, cooked, dried red haricot beans, with olive oil and vinegar. Last of all, as a great treat, we were given cespljevi cmoki, dumplings made with flour, potatoes and egg, like Italian gnocchi, each dumpling stuffed with a plum, sprinkled with sugar and then eaten with a sauce of melted butter and fried breadcrumbs. After all this, and more Teran, and more žganje, we went to bed.

The next morning, after having attended the funeral of Nunča Pahorča, following the coffin to the cemetery on foot, feeling decidedly unwell, in a procession which included almost all those inhabitants of the village able to walk, and seeing the red earth thud down on it as it lay alongside her husband’s in the grave, we went away, crossing the ridge of the Javornik mountains which here formed the pre-1939 frontier between Yugoslavia and Italy, where the now empty casemates of the two not very friendly nations still face one another across vestiges of what had once been fields of barbed wire.

Then we drove along the far shore of the Cerkniško Jezero, which was staging one of its customary disappearing acts – hay was being harvested from the bottom of it – to Planina, a village in the pass between the Nanos and the Javornik which carries the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana.

A rather unusual lake, the Cerkniško Jezero, normally a sheet of water seven miles long and six feet deep, at certain seasons, of which this was one, disappears without warning, together with its inhabitants which include fish with horns and a freshwater jellyfish. Besides these fishy inhabitants, and in winter enormous numbers of waterfowl, it also has a ghostly population of skeleton warriors armed with lances and axes and mounted on skeleton horses. From time to time they rise from beneath the surface and, preceded by flocks of skeletal birds, circuit the lake making the night hideous with the clattering of their bones and weapons.

At Planina, the Pivka, another underground river, emerges in a deep valley, having been joined, also underground, by the Rak, a river which has its origins beneath the Cerkniško Jezero. In the valley at Planina the now-augmented Pivka is joined by a third river which also emerges from underground at this point, the Malenska, after which, still called the Pivka, it flows through watermeadows of extraordinary beauty until, eventually, it sinks for what is the last time in its career beneath the Ljubljanski Mountain near Ljubljana, beyond which it joins the Sava and eventually the Danube, flowing with it into the Black Sea.

Across the river from Planina, standing on the edge of the forest from which the red deer come down into the park from the Javornik, is the Haasberg, a castle, a country house really, of the Princes of Windisch-Graetz, a family reputed to have owned ninety-nine castles in Austria-Hungary before 1914, a figure that makes one suspect that this is legend because anyone having ninety-nine castles could surely not have resisted the temptation to acquire one more and make it a round hundred. Nevertheless, when the Italians annexed a large slice of what had been until 1918 Slovene territory in Austria-Hungary, the Windisch-Graetz still had sufficient influence to have the new frontier moved sufficiently far to the east, a matter of yards, for the house itself to be on Italian soil. The stones marking the boundaries can still be seen in the park behind the house.

The Haasberg was burned by the Yugoslav partisans in 1944 when it was an Italian headquarters. Now it is an empty shell. The watermills that stand one above the other in the valley of the Malenska are ruined; the church in the park unused, occupied by thirteen members of the family lying in stone sarcophagi. (The fourteenth sarcophagus lies empty with its lid drawn to one side, waiting for an occupant who will now, presumably, never come.) Very old retainers, one of whom was pottering about the dilapidated barns and outbuildings in a battered green hat, recall what to them was a happier age before the Second World War.

Whatever the Carso or the Kras may be, this sad and beautiful place has nothing at all to do with the Mediterranean and never has done. Here, if anywhere, you can say that the Mediterranean world ends and that of Middle Europe begins.