A Walk in the Woods

Darting from grave to grave in a cemetery at midday, camera at the ready, in blazing sunshine and nearly thirty degrees of heat, without a hat, having eaten nothing and had scarcely anything to drink, produces a peculiar state of mind. At first it feels like a state of flow. You move as if on autopilot, time disappears, you forget where you are, and your circulation gives out.

Or very nearly.

I had long since passed through the preliminary stage, mild confusion. Any companion would have noticed, but I had none. There was nobody at all in the cemetery apart from me, and even if Keisd’s Secret Service had been watching from afar, nobody intervened. No doubt they had already realised that the only person endangered by the lunatic on the cemetery hill was the lunatic himself.

I had completely forgotten to check the time, put the return journey out of my mind, and my sense of thirst had fainted some time ago. Only when the camera battery was utterly exhausted did I notice that my own wasn’t doing much better.

It must have been around two in the afternoon when the realisation seeped sluggishly into my consciousness that I was twenty kilometres from my hotel, in a village without a railway station.

A rusty grille barred the off-licence where I had bought water that morning. The village lay dusty, shimmering in the heat and seemingly deserted. Even the dogs were silent.

Not so the road along which I now marched northwards, back towards Schäßburg. It was the only route south and led to places considerably livelier than Keisd: Brașov, Bucharest, then Sofia, Thessaloniki or Istanbul, depending on one’s choice. Lorries came thundering from those places and raced back towards them at top speed every few minutes, with no regard for the quiet countryside or the drowsy village. Pedestrians had not been catered for on this stretch, nor did anyone brake for animals. The blast of air from the first thirty-ton lorry, which roared past mere inches from me, almost pushed me into the ditch. Soon another followed, then one coming the other way. Not one of them would stop if I stuck out my thumb. It would have to be a different finger, but in that case it would be better if the lorry didn’t stop.

I couldn’t go on like this.

A little tarmac road to my left offered an escape, back into nature. It ran downhill to a stream, crossed by a small bridge, then climbed gently again into a wide expanse of grassland. Far beyond lay a forest. It was beautiful here, beautifully deserted. My morning detour was already forgotten, and once more I was lured by the peace and quiet and the prospect of a shortcut. There were no electricity pylons, no fences, no signs; you might say it was entirely devoid of people. But was it devoid of animals?

As I followed the stream, the hillside grew much steeper than it had looked from a distance. A track branched off to the left towards the edge of the forest, while a narrow footpath followed the water. That was the one I had to stick to. Anything but the forest and the hill!

For the forest was coming closer. More and more of it crept down the hillside towards the stream, which was winding ever farther to the left. The vegetation along the bank was thickening too, as though the greenery were about to join hands across the water. It was clear now: I had to get to the other bank, and quickly. Through the undergrowth I could make out a level meadow on the far side. It lay beyond the stream like an unfinished jigsaw, mottled beige with grazing sheep. But not a single lamb set any alarm bells ringing in my head.

At last I found an opening. The stream was a little wider here and therefore shallower. With luck, the water wouldn’t reach any particularly sensitive parts. But what about my feet? Would it be wiser to wade through barefoot, or avoid risking an injury and carry on in wet shoes?

I was spared the decision, because a growl came from the opposite bank. Loud, furious, even a little like a grunt.

Were there orcs in Transylvania?

No idea. These were dogs. Sheepdogs the size of domestic pigs, in exceptionally foul moods, with shaggy grey coats. They had taken up position directly opposite me, and the impressive rows of teeth on display left no doubt that they would under no circumstances tolerate my presence in the pasture entrusted to their care.

Vlad and Dracul, as I christened them on the spot, growled and slobbered their way closer to the water’s edge. How averse to water were the two of them?

I felt around in the deepest pockets of my trousers for the pepper spray I had so fervently hoped never to need, found it—and left it where it was. Best not to arouse the two beasts‘ curiosity! They might think I was pulling out a treat before they settled down to the main course.

Relieved to have been prevented from taking off my shoes, I discovered that with a sufficient rush of adrenaline it is perfectly possible to walk backwards uphill. I didn’t dare turn my back on Vlad and Dracul, for fear of exciting their instincts any further. At the same time I had to avoid staring at them in too obvious a panic. Well aware that four eyes were fixed firmly on me, I pretended that my excursion to the stream had been a mistake and that I was delighted to be back on the right path—which, unfortunately, was still the left one.

While I edged ever closer to the forest, walking along a slope, Vlad and Dracul had open ground ahead of them. And unfortunately they weren’t stupid. Whenever I found a possible place to cross, they occupied my intended landing zone. This happened several times, until the stream reached the forest and it was time for the greater coward to give in.

In this case, giving in meant scrambling up a fairly steep slope between conifers in a direction that led away from my destination. The only good things about it were the shade of the trees, which was gradually growing longer, and the fact that at the time I knew nothing of the little railway station less than five hundred metres beyond Vlad and Dracul’s pasture. Otherwise I might have been annoyed.

At the top of the hill the forest thinned out. The sun was in the west, where I wanted to go. That made navigation easier: whenever I was so dazzled that I couldn’t see a thing, I knew I was heading in the right direction. Unfortunately the path was now growing steadily narrower between shrubs and bushes, and soon I was so hemmed in by undergrowth and thorny hedges that visibility was practically nil. A pungent smell of sun-warmed bushes, grasses, nettles and old wood surrounded me, while the sun stabbed and dazzled me from straight ahead. What was that in the undergrowth to my left? Were those blackberries growing there? Or what?

Wait a moment.

Weren’t berries precisely the sort of thing that attracted—bears?

Especially here, in Trans… bloody hell!

What did I actually know about bears? Don’t run away, was the first thing that came to mind. Instead, make your presence known. Sing, dance, jump about, like at a Montessori school. The safest course was to convince the bear it was dealing with a lunatic best avoided.

Fine. That business of giving advance warning wasn’t going to work while the bushes were so dense that with practically every step I might accidentally kick a crouching bear in the backside without seeing it.

What a delightful prospect! How the bear would appreciate being kicked while slurping up berries! An excellent way of announcing my presence. If that happened, I wouldn’t need to play dead. I’d drop dead on the spot, just to be on the safe side.

Now clutching the pepper spray like a handrail on a bus, I picked my way through the thorns in tiny steps. They caught at my shirt and trousers, enthusiastically assisted from below by thistles on excellent terms with the brambles. Everything pricked, pinched, tugged at me and held me back.

Which way was the wind blowing, anyway?

If I could smell bear (what did a bear smell like, for that matter?), that would mean the bear couldn’t smell me—at least that much I’d learnt from Karl May. But if I couldn’t smell bear, I was at that very moment being served up to it on a platter of scent. For a brief instant my adrenaline-flooded brain allowed in the sober thought that there might not be any bears in these woods at all. Didn’t they all live much farther south, near Brașov, where they ate Americans trying to take selfies with them?

A root in front of my foot put an end to these deliberations. As I fell, the hand searching for something to grab hold of set off the pepper spray. The full jet caught me sideways, and the canister rolled away as I landed in a thorn bush.

My face, hands and forearms scratched bloody with burning welts, I lay there coughing and gasping, disoriented for a while, before noticing that the spray was gone. Half-blind, supporting myself on my palms, I searched the ground around me, but found nothing except nettles, into which I plunged both hands, my eyes streaming, and which brushed against my face as I recoiled.

Anger, pain, thirst, heat, exhaustion and a touch of panic finally combined to produce the right decision: to hell with the path, you have to get out of this undergrowth, out of the forest, no matter where. And if you can’t make it back to Schäßburg, there’ll be some village or other where you can find people, water and help.

Without checking my direction and without the slightest regard for improbable bears, I trudged towards the first trees I could see above the line of bushes. Sure enough, the undergrowth grew sparser and soon ended. Once in the forest I went downhill in as straight a line as possible, swerving only when more bushes appeared. The sun was now low and bathed the trees in almost horizontal rays of gold, whose beauty was entirely lost on me. All that mattered now was what the sun couldn’t illuminate, what offered no obstacle! A good half-hour passed before the edge of the forest came into view. A field separated it from a distant road, with a village beyond.

“Vânători,” read the peeling sign on the station shack, for it certainly couldn’t be called a building. The platform itself was nothing but an elongated lump of concrete, the rails red with rust. And yet there were people here, apparently waiting for a train. Some made an effort not to stare at me; others failed. I looked as though I had just been scourged, was sticky with sweat and dirt, and could scarcely stand upright.

The train arrived shortly after six and took twelve minutes to reach the station buffet at Schäßburg. A small group of Romanians sat around a bistro table, drinking their way into Saturday evening. They would tell their grandchildren the story of the blood-smeared stranger who, trembling slightly, put fifty lei on the counter, took a one-litre bottle of water from the fridge, drained it in one go and disappeared into the setting sun.