I have dreams about a place I’ve never been. Every year I get so close, wandering the Carpathians, drinking palinka, using my terrible Hungarian to chat with irredentists, patting Napsugar (“Sunshine,” my favorite sweet faced cow), kissing my godchildren. I never leave those now-my-own hills and low villages, except to cross the Puszta and rejoice in Budapest’s many bridges and sweet wine.
Yes, at home in the hills of Portland I dream about my Szekely self and hear the sound of bees in the hills above Karacsonyfalva, and sometimes I walk the streets of Kolozsvar and remember the marriage of brutal handsomeness and soft brown eyes in a long ago love…but more often I dream of this city of history and the smell of the Bosphorus. How do I know what the Bosphorus smells like? I don’t in daylight, but under my great-grandmother’s quilt, the black cat curled at my hip, in the darkest, softest hour of the night the smell comes to me in old familiarity, like the lilacs surrounding my childhood fort or the scent of my mother’s hair.
I must visit this place, I know that. And what I really imagine, though maybe now that I’m over the threshold of young adulthood and gaining fast on my middle years it’s a foolish dream, what I long to do is follow the path of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1933 Fermor walked from Holland to (then called) Constantinople. Some of the terrain he covered is as familiar to me as my daughter’s nape. Some I only dream about. I’m more than entranced by this idea of walking, dependent upon kindnesses and charity. (Well, he was a rich British boy and got an allowance, but that’s nothing my professional expenses couldn’t cover.) Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and a little daunted by doing this alone. Maybe it’s because I am still raising my teenaged children, and can’t imagine the time commitment until they are older. Maybe it’s folly. But when I am truthful with myself that’s how I imagine arriving in Budapest…more than twelve months of dust and experience in the soles of my shoes, backwards into history in a way. Moving in the opposite direction from the Ottoman incursion. I might have to veer off to Belgrade, and hear the noontime bells in the place where they began.
Or I could join my friend Zsolt and his merry schoolchildren as they ride their bikes from Kolozsvar to Istanbul. That might be more endurable.
Perhaps the goal I should set for myself is this: If I haven’t walked the Fermor path by the time I’m 45 (random number, arrived at by thinking about the aging process of knees) I’ll take the train from Bucharest and get off two stops early, and then walk the rest of the way.
