# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 3

Chapter III
Mulatni
Gypsies—Women— Wine—Csárdás
“YOU know, my dear brother,” said Karoly the Gypsy to me, “there is a word in Hungarian called mulatni which means to enjoy oneself with Gypsies; this evening you will have some mulatni to make your sluggish northern blood run faster.” We were seated in the shade of a café garden in the little town of Siofok. A few yards away stretched the blue waters of Lake Balaton glittering here and there under the fierce August sun.
“Mulatni” I mused, “must be a disturbing force, for it awakens in my mind thoughts of energy whereas I feel footsore and weary.”
I arrived by train at early dawn at Nagy Kanisza, the frontier town of Hungary, and still half-asleep started off with my rucksack on my back and my fiddle under my arm to trudge along the dusty roads. It was lonely and fatiguing work wandering hour after hour without a soul to talk to. Occasionally a motor dashed along, choking me with its dust, and I had not even the satisfaction of making its owner hear my curses. Modern civilization is unkind to the vagabond and even the Hungarian countryside is not ideal for troubadours. It is curious how self-centred we become when language communication is ​cut off. My knowledge of Hungarian was limited to three words which I had been taught by a girl in a third-class carriage from Rakek; two of the words were Kezét Csókolom, which, I understand, 1s a polite address in Magyar and I found them useful; the third was the word Szeretlek, which my girl acquaintance told me referred to love. These words were singularly inappropriate when I asked various peasants the way. They would bow when I said: Kezét Csókolom, but when I launched into German, French and even Italian they would shrug their shoulders.
At last, however, I saw the blue waters of Lake Balaton in the distance and I felt like the companions of Xenophon when they cried: “The sea! The sea!” The cool waters were an oasis to the footsore traveller. Lake Balaton is called the Hungarian Sea and the Magyar feels intensely proud of its broad expanse. On its shores I passed many cosy towns, all of them bearing the name of the lake as prefix—Balaton György, Balaton Komávirás, and Balaton Boglar. At the town of Siófok I determined to halt and rest for a day or two. And so later in the evening I found myself seated with my Gypsy friend, Karoly Arpád, the leader or Primás of the Gypsy orchestra in the open-air café.
Karoly Arpád is one of the well-known Gypsy violinists of Hungary and has played in Paris and in London. In the winter months he plays in a big restaurant in the town of Szeged, but in the summer he migrates with his band to the numerous little watering-places studded on the shores of Lake Balaton. With Arpád were six other Gypsies all of very different type but universally swarthy in complexion: one came from Odessa and had the high cheek-bones of the Mongolian; another came from Jugo-Slavia, but the most interesting among them was a Roumanian Gypsy cellist called Zsika.
​Zsika, who was even swarthier than the rest, fascinated me by his mobile expression; his skin was of that beautiful copper colour that we see among negroes: his teeth were brilliantly white and his hair was black and curly. He made me think of Liszt’s Gypsy protégé Jozsi at once: he was charming in manner and witty, but as dandified as Beau Brummell. He had spent all his money on beautifying himself and he had the most roving eye I had ever seen. Not a girl would pass by but he would preen himself and strut about like a Chanticleer. When playing his ’cello in the band he would lard on the expression and cast such languishing glances at some fair-haired maiden sitting at a table with her mamma, that the girl would blush and try to conceal her confusion from her strict parent.
In the cool of the evening I went bathing with Zsika, but it was an embarrassing experience for me. When I go down to the strand I go for the purpose of bathing and swimming; not so Zsika. For him bathing was an excuse for flirtation and legitimate promiscuity with the opposite sex. The atmosphere for him was charged with the mystery of woman’s presence, hand-pressing, whispered temptations, appointments for the night hours, promises of sensual joys to come.
The shore was thronged with revellers in the sunshine and bathing. Men, women and children of every age; fat old grandmothers, buxom German housewives in thin and tight bathing-costume; old spectacled grandfathers, lean and querulous with spindle-shanks; pot-bellied bourgeois, hairy men of the Esau type leering at painted and powdered cocottes; young Adonises bronzed and curly-haired wearing the inevitable Rudolph Valentino expression ; fair-haired North German maidens looking like sex-hungry Brünhildes; black-haired, pale-faced Magyar women with fiery eyes.
​But for the Magyar women the rest were the same as I had seen on the Lido at Venice. The Magyar women gave the exotic touch to the scene. I should describe the type as follows:
A small pale-faced girl: her hair coal black, her head small and delicately shaped as though it had been modelled by an artist; her nose small and slightly aquiline; her forehead so full and open that it gave a virile and Valkyrie quality to her face; her eyebrows so thick that they seemed to form an uninterrupted straight line across her face. Her whole person was in proportion, but inclined to slenderness. The slenderness, however, was relieved by the rather full hips and by the strong easy swing when she walked. Everything else faded into insignificance when we came to her eyes: her features might not be as classical as those of the Roumanian and in figure she might not be as plastic as the Swede, but her eyes hypnotized you. They flashed sparks from their jet blackness when she became roused; at other times they burned with luminous serenity. In a sense she was like the Italian, but not so perfectly proportioned. She is more disturbing, for there is a mysterious wildness hidden in those eyes that beckon men on. I saw many girls of this type and they filled me with impossible yearnings. Zsika seemed to divine my thoughts, for he introduced me to one who was the wife of a Gypsy friend of his. He told me she had been his love, but he was now tired of her and had fallen a victim to a fair-haired Polish girl from Warsaw.
The dark girl, whose name was Anna, was the embodiment of the type I just described, save that she was if anything more virile. We bathed together and I challenged her to a swimming race with dire results, for she beat me easily. She had a queer contemptuous manner as though she considered men of no consequence ​whatsoever. Her body as she lay in the sun, in spite of the bountiful curves of hips and thighs, had the firm consistency of the athlete, and I thought of her as a young Hermes. She was not complimentary to me at first and as I walked about in my bathing-suit I felt the sense of shame of the respectable middle-aged bourgeois who has to parade in tights in front of a beauty chorus. When she saw me walk down with Zsika she burst out laughing and said, “There goes Black and White!” In her Gypsy mind there was something aggressively indecent about my whiteness compared to the tawny body of Zsika.
Anna had no physical repulsion against me in spite of my whiteness, for she soon gave me proofs of her interest. At first she catechized me severely on my past life; she wanted to know was I married, how many loves I had, and how many children. The conversation, I might remark, was carried on by both sides in bad German, for Anna knew only a few words of the Gypsy language. Soon we became so interested in our experiences that we forgot all about Zsika; when we looked round he had disappeared. Anna then broke out into a furious invective against him: she cursed him to me and said he was always playing her false. Yes, she had been his mistress more than any woman and had given him everything—why, for months on end he had lived at her expense. Finally she burst out crying.
I was perturbed because we were in a public place and her cries attracted a certain amount of attention to me, for people, I suppose, imagined that I was the cause. But Hungary, unlike Northern Europe, is a delightfully discreet place; scenes of passion break out very often in restaurants and violent words are exchanged, but nobody pays any attention to it. I suppose they feel ​grateful in their minds that their own turn has not yet come, and so they go on with their own conversation and leave the enraged couple to themselves.
I had not been brought up in Hungary and my mind was full of the complexes of suburbia. I blushed and trembled as I tried to pacify my pretty partner, who looked like one of those savage fiends who waylay men in the Arabian Nights. I could not understand why all this scene of passion should have taken place, for Zsika had said to me: “She used to be my love, but I’ve left her and there is no bad feeling on either side.”
Suddenly her anger and tears ceased and she took my arm saying—“Let us go to a Kávébáz.”
After three or four glasses of palinka or brandy she became wildly talkative and told me her story. She was the daughter of a Magyar father and a gypsy mother. At the age of fifteen she ran away from home and joined a travelling troupe as a dancer. After some years of vagabond life she married a cimbalom-player in Budapest with whom she was still living: “He is in old man,” she said, “and cynical; he knows that I have the devil of youth in me and, poor man, he wants a quiet life. He lets me have lovers now and then, but I must keep them secret. If he finds me out he beats me, but I like it for I fly at his face and scratch his eyes out. To-night you must come back with me and I shall dance some Gypsy rhythms for you.”
I was now rather disturbed in mind by my companion; she was too exotic for my taste. Man is a simple animal; he loves to imagine the charm of lurid vices and his fantasy dwells on dangerous types. But bring him up near one of those shimmering, fatal beauties and he immediately longs for his calm fireside and his red carpet slippers. As the Circe spoke to me the thrill of magic casements opening on faery lands forlorn burnt ​within me, but I kept repeating to myself, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”:
My Don Quixote nature urged me to be a paladin and accompany the fair lady, for is not life made up of glittering exploits in lands unknown? Besides, a vagabond does not deserve the name if he is not willing to taste the pleasure of the moment. But then my sensible Sancho Panza personality would tug at my coat-tails, saying: “Why do you run your head into risks? You are a stranger in a foreign country and that girl with her Gypsy tricks will leave you high and dry and penniless if she doesn’t drag up a thug to give you a bastonading into the bargain.” It was all very well to argue with myself but the girl decided, for she took my arm and ordered me to bring her to the open-air restaurant where we were to have: Mulatni.
It was Sunday and all the tables beneath the trees were crowded with noisy people. The Gypsy band was on a small wooden platform under a tree. As soon as we entered, Karoly Arpád struck up a tune called “Hullamszó Balaton” in our honour and Anna started to sing it at the top of her voice.
Soon afterwards she told me to go up and play with the band. Arpád handed me his fiddle and I started off with the famous Magyar tune “Cserebogir ” and the orchestra followed me, filling in the harmonies. When I had played in rapid succession the famous nota of Czinka Panna and the “Repülj Fecském,” or song of the bird by Reményi, I suddenly began to play Emer’s “Farewell,” one of the most beautiful Irish melodies. Once I played it through by myself and the orchestra ​made no attempt to accompany me, but when I repeated the melody they all came in with the rough-and-ready improvised harmony. This gift of being able to improvise a harmony on any melody is one of the most uncanny qualities of the Gypsy, for none of the players with the exception of the Primás could read music.
Our next event was to have dinner with the Gypsy band and a noisy group we were. Meals in Hungary have one peculiarity: every dish must be seasoned with Paprika, a very aromatic pepper. The commonest dish of all is Gulyds, a kind of meat stew with a rich sauce. Afterwards we partook of a sweet called csorge fank or fritters, accompanied by Tokay wine.
The Gypsies told me that it was the national hero Rákoczi, Prince of Transylvania, who gave fame to this golden wine which is known in Hungary as the wine of kings and the king of wines. It is right that we should take our Tokay with the sweets, for it is not a dinner wine like claret or Burgundy. To me it seemed sacrilege to drink the golden liquid while seated at the table. It should be drunk when wandering beneath trees listening to the music, so that the sense of taste should linger like long-drawn double notes vibrated on the violin. In Tokay there is a bouquet that is as subtle on the tongue as Oloroso Sherry and when you have quaffed it the fragrance seems to possess overtones that resound like a note echoing on the piano-strings through all their harmonics. Legends are told of a monastery in Hungary containing a cave where Tokay was stored and such was its reputation that no one was allowed to approach save in Court dress bearing a silver candlestick. It is also said that Pope Pius IV at the Council of Trent was presented with a barrel of the wine by a Bishop as the most priceless gift that could be given, and the Pontiff exclaimed after tasting it—​“Summum Pontificem talia vina decent”: such wines are fit for his Holiness. I am sure that it was Tokay that Pope Leo X used to drink when Raphael came to tell him stories, and after the hunting expeditions the Papal servants would draw out the golden beakers full of nectar.
Tokay is the wine of Hungary and symbolizes the generosity of the Magvar race. Like the people it is sincere and no artificial doctoring clogs its taste. It is the wine to drink when the Tzigan tunes his fiddle and the dark girl by your side waits for the rhythmic impulse of the csárdás. It is the wine which leads us to the magic Mulatni when all the cares of the world fall away from us.
After a few glasses of Tokay the whole scene became transformed and the trees with their illuminations were a fairy wood. The music and the wine became intoxicants supplementing one another and casting before our eyes an iridescent veil through which we viewed the world. In the distance I heard the cymbals of the Corybantic dancers in Thrace as they cried out to the God of Wine and Rhythm. Music and wine gradually were producing the final orgy—woe to Pentheus, the enemy of the Bacchantes, if he approached too near the ivy-crowned band.
The music dashed on in fierce rhythmic intensity until suddenly the csárdás commenced. There is something solemn and terrible about this dance, for it sweeps down on a concourse of people like some fierce storm scattering everything to the winds.
The people rose hurriedly from the tables and rushed into the open space; each man seized his partner and hurried her along. Every face was tense with emotion and I hardly recognized Anna; she was as wild as a mænad, and without a word she rose from her seat ​beside me and ran to meet a young man who beckoned to her from a neighbouring table. They joined the frenzied throng. Every man placed his hands lightly upon the shoulders of every woman and she rested her hands upon his shoulders. The men worked their legs faster and faster; the women moved their shoulders as though goaded by witches; the air resounded with shouts and in the background the tinkling of the fiddles in furious speed and the groaning, inexorable double bass drove us into the never-ending maze of rhythm.
There was no class distinction about this dance of the Bacchant—lord and peasant, bourgeois and Gypsy, crabbed age and youth—all were materials to be fused in the crucible of the God of the Dance. It was a dance of temperament and gathered force from its own momentum.
I was the solitary person who stood without the scene and yet every nerve in my body tingled as though the dancers had communicated to me their fire, but only part of my personality was affected. Instead of being swept off my feet by the rhythm, my mind began to associate this scene with others in my wandering life.
In the forefront of my mind was the giddiness, the swaying fury and the torrential music which abolished all thought. But then in the distance the dance became associated with Magyar heroism and I realized that only an unconquerable people could possess such victorious rhythms that bewitch and hypnotize. Then in a maze I saw Anna the Gypsy girl swaying like a bacchante; she was dressed in a blue and yellow muslin frock which gave her a curious snake-like appearance; her pale face was flushed and her whole body seemed to quiver as though she were possessed by a demon.
Irresistibly my thoughts passed beyond her to a former scene in a tavern at Seville where I had watched ​the dance of Lola, a Spanish Gypsy friend of mine. The men were formed up in a semi-circle, beating their hands, stamping their feet in time to the droning guitars. Then when the Corybantic noise had awakened the sleeping Dionysiac spirit, the girl would suddenly begin to dance as though moved by a secret spring. Hers was not the vulgar danse du ventre of the exportation gypsy, but a strange ancient ritual—the survival of the classic Oriental dance of the Gypsies.
Anna and Lola, the Hungarian and the Spanish woman, became the same person—the symbol of the strange mystical rhythm which has become the leaven in so many peoples of Europe, whether it be Russia, Hungary or Spain. But there was something else in the dancing of Anna which was not Gypsy but Magyar. The csárdás owed its origin in the nineteenth century to the tavern Or csárda as it is called in Hungarian, and it is essentially the dance of the peasant on the Puszta. Though the Gypsy called up the spirit of the dance, it was the peasant who imparted to it its virile intensity.
At times Anna became the strong-backed Magyar daughter of the people. There was a masculine vigour in her movement that made me think of the mothers of warriors. “No,” said I to myself, “I must see the peasants dance the csárdás under the light of the moon on the plains, for then it will become the supreme symbol of the people.”
On and on surged the frantic dance and the Gypsies did not slacken their furious fiddling and the dancers swayed as though they were dervishes. Until at last the band snapped a rough chord.
Silence.
The dancers sank back in exhaustion.
The Primás immediately began to play a slow lament to bring the people back to normal life and lull the ​Dionysian god to sleep. The end was like the peripeteia or “fall” of Greek drama according to Aristotelian principles, where the people, after witnessing the deeds of horror which must purge their emotions, were led back to calm serenity once more by the dramatist. ŒEdipus had disappeared down the grove of Death and the chorus sang their final hymn on the inscrutable ways of the gods.
When Anna came back to my table she had recovered her former perverse, contemptuous expression. I have often wondered how Gypsies changed their expressions so suddenly. I had seen her as a bacchante, but now she resembled an idol in her passivity. She took great pleasure in telling me lurid tales about Gypsies in Hungary, for she wanted to make my flesh creep. “The nomad Gypsies of to-day are a tatterdemalion crew,” she said, “and the police are pitiless in their methods against them. They are a very dangerous lot for a stranger to fall amongst and I shall tell you about some murders that took place recently. In one case a Gypsy brought a girl out into a wood, and murdered her. Do not think that his motive was simple rape: no, he was also a sadist; he murdered her in order to suck her blood!” All this was to encourage me in my wanderings! According to Anna, it was natural that such crimes should take place, for the nomadic Gypsies in Hungary were degenerates; in many cases the father had intercourse with his own daughter, the mother with her son. Such talk of rapes, sadism, and even cannibalism, made me think of the old authors of Gypsy folk-lore such as Grellmann and Predari, who described the gruesome legends current formerly among the peasants concerning the Gypsies. In Hungary there is still an immense amount of superstition prevalent among the peasantry, and the Gypsy fortune-tellers and witches ​with their Shamanism play on these beliefs. Anna was more of a peasant girl than a Gypsy and she believed those stories.
It is a curious fact that the Hungarian Gypsy musician will believe any terrible story of his humbler nomadic brethren, for he thinks himself a race apart from the general Romanies of the world.
I wanted to go to bed, but Anna insisted that I should accompany her back to her room. “Come now, you promised me; my husband is not here and I have a bottle of pálinka.” Being of a weak nature and thinking it uncavalier to refuse a lady, I went to her lodgings. She had the first floor of a small house, poorly furnished but tidy. We were let in by a villainous-looking old hag, who must have belonged to the 1417 band of Gypsies. The furniture of Anna’s room was poor, but in compensation the walls were hung with embroideries such as we find among the Magyar peasants. There were no chairs, but only a big bed in one corner of the room piled high with huge feather eiderdowns. On the floor were several bright-coloured rugs and on these we squatted in Oriental fashion.
I do not like pálinka at the best of times, for it tastes like very rough and fiery brandy; but Anna’s spirit was as bad as Irish poteen. After a few glasses I felt as if I'd been drugged and I became singularly listless and apathetic. She on her side seemed to increase in vivacity and began to taunt me for being so sleepy and dull.
“Ah, you North Europeans; alcohol sends you to sleep when you should be passionate lovers.”
At that moment I was feeling the exact antithesis to the perfect lover, for I had been thrilled by too many emotions in that day of Mulatni and I was jaded. Besides, there was something sinister about Anna which fas-​cinated and vet repelled me. In the back of my mind I watched myself coldly and critically as though I were gazing at a grotesque, middle-aged Adonis being wooed by an unrepentant Venus.
Anna then said: “I shall dance for you.” She started to undress with rapidity. Her blue and yellow muslin frock, her petticoat and underclothes slipped off as though someone had pulled aside a curtain.
My impulse was to turn away, but in her nakedness she advanced towards me and started to dance, humming a tune at the same time.
I bethought me of my violin which I had left in the corner of the room. I seized it and started to play a Hungarian Gypsy rhapsody. On she danced as I played.
Now I felt secure, for as I played my thoughts and emotions all centred in the music and her white body became a distant figure like a Tanagra statuette set on a pedestal at the end of a shadowy hall. The music too seemed to sublimate her dancing and take away all traces of self-consciousness.
She was the model and I was the painter, for why should not one paint in sound as well as in colour?
She became the eternal Gypsy with reminiscences of Russia, of Spain, of Hungary in her movements as she passed from the slow improvisation to the presto finale. Who knows how long we should have continued this performance if suddenly we had not heard a knock on the outside door? Anna gave a gasp and stood still listening intently. The old woman crept noiselessly into the room and whispered in her ear; Anna turned to me excitedly : “It 1s my husband; I thought he was at Budapest—what shall I do? Quick, get away from here.”
I felt in my dazed mind all the sensations of the rat ​caught in a trap, but not for long, for the old woman pushed me into another room and pointed to a window. Grasping my fiddle-case I climbed on to the ledge and found that luckily there was not much of a drop to the ground. As I stood there I had a last fleeting vision of Anna amid a cloud of frills and flounces and then I jumped down into the street.
As I hurried back to my lodgings by devious routes I mentally thanked Anna’s husband for his consideration in knocking at the door of his own house. If he had followed the English husband’s plan and carried a latch-key, the law of husbands would have claimed another victim.
Next morning I remembered with considerable trepidation what happened to the Second Kalandar in the Arabian Nights when the Genii brought back the objects he had forgotten in the Princess’s apartment, and I half-expected to see Anna’s husband appear in my room carrying some incriminating handkerchief or button which I had forgotten.
I thought it best to leave Siófok for Budapest.
I have not seen Anna since.