In Saxon Hands

Not far from Schäßburg, bisected lengthwise by the main road south, lies the village of Keisd. Its Romanian name is ‘Saschiz’, derived from the Hungarian ‘Szászkézd’, meaning ‘Saxon hand’ and suggesting that the village and the surrounding countryside had traditionally been in the hands of Saxons.

My grandfather was born here in 1897. His mother had returned to her parents’ home to give birth, as was customary in those days, since there was at least one woman there who had been through it before.

My grandfather, however, spent his entire life regretting that he was not a native of Schäßburg.

At daybreak I set out from Schäßburg for Keisd with a recklessly light pack and every intention of being back by late afternoon. Since the main road was heavily trafficked even by Romanian standards, and made an unnecessarily wide detour on its way to my destination, I thought it both more practical and more appealing to tackle a few hills, cross some stretches of woodland and save myself a considerable distance rather than follow the road.

I left town without a map, and digital navigation was out of the question, since one mobile dead zone followed another. But my legendary sense of direction, which had once enabled me to find my car again in Bologna, would guide me here as surely as a migratory bird to the equator. Besides, the sun was shining and all I had to do was walk southeast.

At the edge of Schäßburg, a narrow road branched off uphill but in such a perfectly promising direction that I simply had to follow it. The climb was steep, so steep that the road wound upwards in hairpin bends. As I stopped to catch my breath on one of them, a horse-drawn wagon piled several metres high with hay very nearly ran me over. Perhaps the driver hadn’t seen me. Perhaps he simply didn’t care.

Before long, tarmac gave way to gravel, gravel to pebbles, pebbles to clay. I passed corrugated-iron shacks, little orchards, henhouses and, indeed, two more cemeteries, which for once I left unexplored. At last I reached the summit, already deep in the woods.

Here I had a second encounter, this time with a pedestrian. He wore a jacket and pullover with tracksuit bottoms—the national costume of the Romanians—and was therefore evidently on his way to important business.

Where was I going? he asked.

‘To Saschiz,’ I said.

‘Sahskiez?’ he corrected me. But that was a long way! A good twenty kilometres! How was I planning to manage it?

‘Non preoccuparti!’ I reassured him. ‘I’ll be there by lunchtime!’

He looked at me as one looks at a man already given up for lost, but immediately made the best of the situation:

‘Fumezi? Dă-mi țigările tale!—Do you smoke? Give me your cigarettes!’

When I said no, his interest evaporated. A wave of the hand dismissed me as he walked on; whether it conveyed a blessing or the hope that the devil might take me was impossible to tell.

The path now led through fairly dense woodland, where the sunlight reached me too seldom to check my direction. When one of those rare rays fell upon my right ear, I realised it was time to correct my course. But the woods were even thicker to my right, so I opted instead for a more comfortable, wider track that I soon came upon. It led sharply downhill and, unfortunately, northwards as well. It seemed simply impossible to travel east in these parts.

Soon houses appeared. A delightful industrial estate lay gleaming before me beside the main road to Székelyudvarhely, about four kilometres beyond my starting point. From which I had just walked eight kilometres through the forest.

The time I had lost relieved me of my resolve not to hitchhike. The motorists couldn’t have cared less, but before long I heard a horse snorting behind me. The wagon it was pulling was empty—apart from a fur coat in which the driver lived, and from which a hand waved to me as the vehicle rolled past with the utmost deliberation. I hesitated at first, but when the hand repeated its gesture, I took a short run-up and jumped aboard.

There was nothing in the back of the wagon but the driver’s shadow. That was exactly where I sat. I was close enough to hear the man if he felt like talking, while at the same time preserving my status as cargo. But the chauffeur was not in a talkative mood. He merely asked whether I was heading for Bucharest or the Black Sea coast, since we wouldn’t quite manage either of those today. Then he fell silent again for a good hour, while the creaking, jolting vehicle and the sun, already high in the sky, rocked me into a heat-dulled half-sleep.

At the entrance to Keisd, a shout startled me awake. The driver seemed to be greeting somebody, but did not stop. Only as we approached the village square did he call out, ‘Saschiz, Saschiz!’ and stretch his arm out from the wagon, his hand flapping about.

I thanked him politely in German, jumped down and waved as though the driver could see me in his rear-view mirror. But he was already rattling on southeast, towards the sun, while I had to get my bearings. To my left and behind me the road raised its dust; to my right, above the rooftops, the ruins of a castle perched in the woods on a ridge. Ahead of me, however, rose a mighty provider of shade, taller than any tree: a church tower of colossal proportions. Ancient, free-standing and immense, it stood there blocking out the sun. The church that went with the tower lay a few metres behind it, enclosed by massive walls. To protect the devout villagers, to give the menacing Ottomans a—of course! This was a fortified church!

The entrance, a black wooden gate studded with nails, was closed. A sign announced that it would open shortly.

Perfect. I would use the waiting time to look for my grandfather’s birthplace. Back in Germany I had made enquiries about which houses had once belonged, or still belonged, to people with my surname. But the main street had borne several names over the years, and the house numbers had changed more than once. What in 1900 had been number 12 in X Street might now be number 280 on the main road. Besides, my name is hardly uncommon in Transylvania. There were therefore at least three candidates. Clearly the best thing was to walk the entire length of the main street, up and down, and photograph everything that might conceivably be the right address.

In the middle of the village I found a house that had been strongly recommended to me by fellow genealogists. A certain Sara Theil was supposed to live there, very elderly, admittedly, but blessed with an excellent memory and surely able to tell me all manner of fascinating things. Yet however persistently I knocked, nobody answered.

Only on my way back to the church did I notice the air of abandonment hanging over Keisd. Almost every third house was badly damaged, some little more than heaps of crumbling stone, and many had lost their roofs. Yet all of them still had a gate, and every gate was locked, as though there might still be something worth taking from the ruins.

There were shops here and there, but the only one open was the off-licence. Outside stood a wooden barrel serving as a table for a group of Romanians enjoying their second schnapps breakfast. They eyed me with mild suspicion, quite unlike the people in tourist-filled Schäßburg, and only looked away when I emerged from the shop carrying a plastic bottle of water. Naturally they knew exactly what was really in it. Clearly, I was one of them.

By now the church was under siege. For a change, not by Ottomans. No, this was worse. A coach from Swabia had disgorged a swarm of pensioners, who had gathered in a little bunch outside the gate beneath the tower, presumably to economise on shade until they were granted admission.

At the entrance a girl was selling tickets and homemade honey. As I bought both, she asked me in fluent German, though strongly coloured by the local såxesch dialect, whether I was the stranger walking through Keisd taking photographs of the houses.

‘Securitate!’ I said, meaning ‘Sure, certainly!’

Delighted with my own joke and with the outstanding efficiency of the Keisd intelligence service, I explained to the girl what had brought me here and what I was looking for. This was more than the child could handle. She reached for the telephone and alerted her mother, who hurried over, looking rather worried. She too spoke German and turned out to be standing in for the actual churchwarden, who, as luck would have it, was away at a school reunion in Germany.

Within moments, my attempts at explanation had attracted a good dozen people who had seeped unseen into the nave and now stood around me in a circle. Elderly though they all were, they seemed perfectly prepared to tighten the noose of bodies surrounding me, should the need arise, until the village reeve arrived with the headsman—or, if I was lucky, the police. While the Swabians from the coach were as indifferent to me as they were to the church—all they cared about was the price of admission and when there would be something to eat—the Saxons listened intently as the acting churchwarden interrogated me about my origins and intentions. Since they all understood German, suspicion and noose quickly dissolved into delighted astonishment and handshakes.

Another telephone call was made, and I was informed that, in order to answer my more detailed questions, they had just summoned the village’s collective memory: an elderly gentleman who was already on his way. In the meantime, I was welcome to look around the church.

Still marvelling at the efficiency of Transylvanian telecommunications, I found myself admiring the skill of the Transylvanian carpenters as I explored the church. Around the base of the wood-panelled pulpit ran a band of lettering inlaid into the wood. From a distance I thought I could once again make out a very familiar name; closer inspection revealed that ancestors of mine had been at work here too. Several of the craftsmen involved in making the pulpit bore my surname. As their reward they had been allowed to immortalise themselves upon it, though only in letterforms open to more than one interpretation.

A deep male voice, borne on a hint of garlic, drifted up from behind me and entered through my ear all the way to my nose: the memory had arrived. It belonged to a sprightly man, probably over seventy, wearing blue work overalls and a pressed, spotless white shirt. He immediately seemed like an old acquaintance, for he too spoke my grandfather’s dialect.

Herr Binder, as he introduced himself—a namesake (and presumably a distant relative) of my great-grandmother—quickly proved to be an extraordinarily friendly walking encyclopaedia of Keisd’s local and family history. Despite his age and the already considerable heat of the day, he insisted on showing me almost the entire village, providing an account of the former and present owners of nearly every building, until at last we arrived outside his own home. It was one of the few well-kept houses in Keisd, for the old gentleman spent most of the year in his Transylvanian homeland, fleeing to a centrally heated flat in Germany only during the coldest months. One could not afford to be away in summer, he said, for it led to losses. Lately the Gypsies had even begun cutting down fruit-bearing trees, using them for food, building material and fuel all at once, whereas in the past they had merely sneaked onto the property to pick the fruit. Wherever nobody kept an eye on their possessions, anything that was not nailed down would be removed or appropriated in no time. Empty buildings would be occupied and rapidly reduced to ruins, since the nomadic occupants did not hesitate to burn the roof timbers for warmth in winter before moving on to the house next door.

We turned back towards the church, but then branched off to the left in the direction of the forest’s edge. Herr Binder pointed out a little spring known as the ‘Fir Spring’ and assured me several times that I could drink from it without worry. The water was delicious and drinking it had no consequences.

It would have been sensible to refill my bottle, which had long since run dry, then and there. But spellbound by Binder’s stories, I gave no thought to practicalities.

The strain of our walk was now plainly showing on the old gentleman. Since my next destination was the cemetery, I took my leave of my exceedingly helpful companion with as much tact as ceremony and trudged uphill through the midday heat of late summer towards yet another burial ground, curious to see whether I would find any relatives there, and if so, which ones.

The ‘yield’ was far smaller than in Schäßburg. Here the Binders (naturally), Ehrmanns, Dörners, Fritschs and Thellmanns were clearly in the majority, but there was also a grave bearing the name Theil.

I stood there for a long time.

Now I understood why nobody had answered at Sara’s house. We had missed each other by only a few months.