1

Vlad the Engraver1

He joined the train at

Pspkladny2, which, with its
trainscape, looks as if it had
been designed by Delvaux; and
with its name, looks as if a
leprechaun had run amok when
Hungarian town names were
distributed...
There is an imposing station hall,
an impressive array of sidings;

and here, with a precise and

well-rehearsed ritual, every day
Romanian diesel trains are
decoupled from their colourful
and purring rolling stock; and
more sleek and futuristic-looking
electrically powered Hungarian
trains, with their caressing
pantographs and speedy
demeanour, are substituted.
The whole procedure takes
about thirteen minutes; and the
yellow and red Romanian train
makes several trips to
geometrical points just out of

sight where it changes lines by

means of points; before
eventually chugging back along
one of the exterior lines and
disappearing, like the last note
of some great Baroque
contrapuntal motet, into the
obscure and enigmatic
distance...
To the south and east is the
pulsating promise of
Transylvania formerly part of
Hungarian territory, as
Hungarians never tire of telling
you; while in the other direction

come a series of small

conurbations which gradually
lead you to the agreeable
surprise of the continental chic
of Budapest...
Serious, bearded, respectablelooking, he sat across the aisle
from me with his studiousseeming girlfriend in pastel
orange. Not a grey study, but a
study in brown barna, as they
have it in Hungarian and there
he was, huddled in his own
secret world.

For his graphical activity had

caught my attention. He was
working with minute attention,
poring over a simple, perforated
A5 sketchbook, the sort used to
make shopping lists. He seemed
to be covering the page with
some kind of elaborate mandala,
done with a very fine felt-tipped
pen.
I wanted to view his work more
closely; but no opportunity to do
so, or to talk, presented itself,
until the first border check, as
the train left Hungarian territory;

and we waited there, for twenty

minutes, under the sweltering
sun.
I asked to borrow his rubber; and
refuting my initial impression
of hermeticism he launched
into a volley of colloquial
English: a shade wooden and
stilted, perhaps; but clear and
communicative enough.
He was by training a geological
engineer; and his girlfriend was
a Budapest recruitment
consultant working for a British

firm: both hailed from

Transylvania. They had the
slightly dusky, shuttered in
beauty of their people.
We talked for a while about
artistic styles: Dali and Magritte
who might have influenced him;
and Drer and Hieronymus
Bosch before them... In carefully
chosen words, I tried to remind
him of The Garden of Earthly
Delights...

For his drawing showed a single,

surreal, almost Martian, fantastic
organic growth: part flower, part
sinew, part plant. Behind it
lurked somewhat effaced
banderoles upon which one
might decipher enigmatic
scribbles: which might have
been Mayan scrolls, or the
Rosetta Stone. Or the tri-lingual
inscription of Darius at Behistun.
He told me that he also worked
in acrylics and watercolour
tempera and oils had not yet
been attempted and that he

could produce similar effects on

the computer screen: with Adobe
Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
Talk turned, naturally enough, to
the British referendum vote. The
Hungarians, he said, were
dismayed: they stood to lose an
important ally in Europe, an
important bulwark against rightwing populist groups such as
Fidesz. On their own, they were
not powerful enough...
We made our farewells at
Oradea, and the pair continued

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to Cluj. He took away with him

my English recommendations for
his art study: Redon, John Piper,
Nicholson, Graham Sutherland,
Lucien Freud and Mervyn Peake.
And finally, after a long struggle,
I remembered the Welsh poet
and painter, David Jones, and
added him to my favourites
list...
From an Oradea bistro, gallically
dubbed Cyrano, the poignancy
of our long talk on Europeanness seemed modulated into
another key. Close by was the

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catholic cathedral, where the

previous night, a Canadian
organist had played Bach,
Sweelinck and Mendelssohn;
further down the street a historic
art nouveau hotel was being
renovated; and a few hundred
yards beyond that were the
opera and the Astoria. It was as
if the Austro-Hungarian empire
had never been away; and as if
we still had the 1913 Europe,
before that fateful shot was fired
at Sarajevo and of which there
are now such extraordinary
echoes resounding their way into
our modern, twenty-first century,

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so that (just like the twentyseventh of June, 1914) the

twenty-second of June, 2016 now
might seem Europes last really
secure, last really twentiethcentury day...
We must pray, of course, that
this analysis is wrong.
*
The quadrilingual waitress
brought me a draft lager and a
penne arrabiata which might
have been found in a similar
unpretentious, medium-sized
main street establishment in any
one of the twenty-eight member

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states of the European

Community.
I remembered the old joke: But
what if the English had been the
cooks, and the Italians were the
politicians, and the Irish were
the lovers..? or something like
that.
Certainly one wouldnt want the
English as the cooks or the
politicians, in the present
cirumstances...

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My train companion had talked

of Vlad the Impaler, and I had
made the comparison with Isis.
Free movement and enlightened
ideals will always brood a
minority of villains everywhere,
we agreed...
(But of course I know that the
problem I had alluded to goes
deeper, far, far deeper, than
that...)
*
So engraved on our hearts, I
suggest, should be the unwitting
and insouciant witness of this

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young artist, and of maybe sixty

million other idealistic and
educated people like him, the
sort you meet on trains, the sort
you encounter in the Place de la
Bourse or the Latin Quarter or on
Facebook; the sort who are
educated, clever, multi-lingual,
maybe secular (but its not a
problem) and above all
humanitarian, caring, and
sincere...
They deeply care about their
continent; and they are
solicitous for the future, not just

16

of their kith and clan, but of us

all...
Greece, two thousand years ago
launched an ideal of fellowship,
of scholarship, of travel, of
concern...and of sharing which
just will not go away.
No piffling misunderstanding, in
a green and usually pleasant
land just temporarily, I think,
cut off now from the Continent
by fog is ever going to get
seriously dilute or efface this
overarching vision, this ideal of

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peace, this dove feather going

back to that stormy flight around
the primeval seas near the Ark.
From Aldhelm to Kenneth Clark;
from Charlemagne to Niall
Ferguson; from Sappho to Rodin.
Nothing and nobody will take it
away.

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1 Opening Image: John Piper, Middle Mill, Pembrokeshire

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Piper_(artist)]
2 Final image: Paul Delvaux, Le train bleu: sold by Sothebys in February 2015 for more
than 3.5 million