3 May. Bistritz.

Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.

Bram Stoker, Dracula

As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides, lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens shone mauve; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath of a plague and have escaped it.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

In a 1928 letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf described Rebecca West as “hard as nails, very distrustful, and no beauty… a cross between a charwoman and a gipsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes, very shabby, rather dirty nails, immense vitality, bad taste, suspicion of intellectuals, and great intelligence.” Reviewing Woolf’s Orlando in the New York Herald Tribune later that year, West called the novel “a poetic masterpiece of the first rank.” West’s own Balkan travelogue quoted above is equally deserving of such a title: she and her husband travel “to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood,” to reveal “the past side by side with the present it created.” One more quote demonstrate better than anything I could write her ability in achieving the latter goal:

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, ‘In your lifetime, have you known peace?’ wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word ‘Yes,’ if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, ‘No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.’

Anyway, start reading Dracula today.