Nothing much beats the satisfaction of finishing a really good read. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken
Road, (of which I wrote earlier) is simply the best book I have read in quite a long time. Always a keen observer of the human condition, Fermor’s
open, generous spirit made wide allowances for the foibles of others. The Broken Road takes him from Bulgaria,
into Romania, back to Bulgaria, and then on to Mount Athos by way of
Constantinople. These Orthodox lands held
a lasting fascination for Fermor, and indeed, he was to live the greater part of his
long life there, first in Romania until the war, and then in Greece.
With an ear for languages, Fermor would--with seeming
effortlessness--quickly immerse himself into local life. I was curious to see how he would react to the
pervasive Orthodoxy in his midst. Fermor expressed interest in most anything, and the foreignness of Orthodoxy held an attraction for the inquisitive young man. He remained
appreciative, though not uncritical, of our Liturgy, the church’s iconography
and the assortment of saints and scoundrels he met along the way. He never addressed Orthodoxy systematically,
but always as something of a backdrop to the story he was telling, which is the
better course anyway.
One of my favorite episodes is the experience at the Savoi-Ritz
in Bucharest, though the references to Orthodoxy here are so slight as to be easily
missed. After trudging north from
Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the glittering Romanian capital proved to be an eye-opener for the
nineteen-year old. The pre-Ceausescu
Bucharest was not known as the “Little Paris of the East” without good reason. Fermor traveled on a shoestring, but in
Buchares he did not try for a room in the disreputable outskirts, but instead
chose a lodging just over the line into the barely reputable district. A wooden sign over the door painted “Savoi-Ritz” attracted his attention. Madame
Tania, an elderly, hawk-nosed, French-speaking Bessarabian woman showed him to
a surprising well-furnished room upstairs.
Fermor, “hell-bent on the bright lights of the town centre,” quickly
washed and combed through his hair, then asked for directions. The proprietress seemed hurt
that he was leaving so soon, remonstrating “on
s’amuse bien ici!” Fermor insisted
on attaining the Calea Victoriei, however, so she did not press the point.
After a night on the town, Fermor returned to the Savoi-Ritz
at 2:00 am. Madame Tania let him in and
invited him to join them in the kitchen for a glass of wine “as everyone was
having supper.” In the “cozy kitchen
with an ikon in the corner and a chicken and potatoes in a dish,” Fermor found
four “rather pretty girls” in dressing gowns or kimonos, setting around the
table. The young man suddenly realized
his own naivete, as he had stumbled into a maison
de passé instead of a regular hotel.
Madame Tania reassured him that they did, on occasion, take in regular
travelers. Her recounting of his error
provoked good-hearted laughter all around the table, and Fermor ended-up
spending the rest of the night listening to their relaxed after-work banter,
and to the stories they had to tell. After
his arrival, a fifth girl “clattered down the steps on wooden patterns, shook
hands, sat down, flung her dark shock of hair back, crossed herself and set to [eating].” On the morrow, these good-hearted souls would
mend and iron his best change of clothes so that he would be more presentable
on the Calea Victoriei the following night.
Fermor thought to ask them about the strange men who seemed
to have a monopoly on Bucharest taxicabs.
The women howled with laughter. Madame
Tania explained.
They
belonged to a religious sect widespread in Bessarabia and southern Russia….After
marriage and one or two children…the men castrated themselves, hence the
beardlessness, the high voice and the expanse, and the general eunuch-like
style….(One of their tenets…was the belief that Czar Paul, the murdered son of
Catherine the Great, would one day return again as the Messiah.) ‘They are bad-tempered men,’ Tania was
saying, ‘always cross. I’m not
surprised.’ A smile hovered on her
face. ‘Of course, we don’t see much of
them here…’
