Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Nadja had found twelfth-century reference to it, ignoring Diana but mentioning a fire-spirit, akin, I judged, to the Northern Surt. She thought it might symbolize repulse of Phocaean invaders. We knew that the day, sacred throughout pre-Christian Europe, was when the dead, jealous, wistful, dejected, mingled with the living, lamenting lost times.

‘Erich, you should arm yourself with salt. It keeps them at bay.’

While thinking the Custom of very questionable interest, certainly squalid, probably tedious, she was now determined we should witness it. ‘It might confirm your belief in ghosts.’

I had no such belief and distrusted the usefulness of salt but always felt that small communities, uncouth survivals, stubborn beliefs were owed respect, struggling against bigness, conformism, the majority. Heresy is often honourable. Dwellers in la Terre Gaste, clutching survival on the margin of trained hygienic Europe, dismissed as brittle, interbred halfwits, existing on grubs and bark, still revering limping smiths as magicians, were too few for attentions from police, tax officials, the census. They had managed to skirt conscription, lycée , Occupation and Libération , spoke some dialect barely French. They, too, resisted.

Their hamlets were reachable only on steep, very rough tracks, so that we started early with full knapsacks, ready for hills. Swathes of mist soon surrendered to diffused but sharpening light, the landscapes widening into tints sombre, elemental, littered as if with props; ruined mill, burnt-out shack, illegible signpost, all, Nadja observed with some appreciation, suitably discouraging. We wore shabbiest clothes, she without ornaments, myself unshaven ‘Viking guise’, she said, to avoid special notice. We had to risk choice between several tracks, none recently trodden, pocked by coneywarrens, periodically vanishing beneath scrub and myrtle. The most arduous climb began only after three hours’ trudging. Dull peaks gradually enclosed us, mist dripping on granite slabs and scarps, bare save for rare pine or fir. At a dry well, a flat boulder, we took wine, a roll. The air, breath of Africa, was fresher than the humidity below, the plain yellowy tinged with brown, blue thread of sea, patches of walnut. Few birds were evident in this high wilderness, though once a linnet’s red patch surprised us.

The expedition was tonic after the anodyne, almost palm-court harmonies of our garden. Nadja rejoiced in the likely infrequency of Latvians. Not until late in the toilsome afternoon, ourselves moist, hard-breathing, did we hear voices, distinct in the thinned atmosphere, from somewhere above in the stony desiccation, now watched by untethered goats with sophisticated aloofness, clustered in committee at a dry stone hut, the slope providing its back wall. Our enjoyment was undiminished, an exorcism of theme park and casino, neon lights, skinhead violence, the culture of Mon Repos and Winter Palace. Rock, sky, cloud, unseen presences were pleasantly intoxicating: primitive grandeur with hint of danger. We were midgets surrounded by heights, stunted bushes, sour grass, a precipitous drop.

We were nearing a circular mount, man-made, Nadja was certain, for burials, housing the ghosts I was, apparently, so anxious to inspect.

Vision – a word usually accompanying rhetoric or pomposity – was momentarily viable in an instant prolonged only by mystics, poets, drunks, a gleam from isolation, distance, prehistory, though swiftly revoked by the sight of clothes hanging before scattered hill-caves, then by a cackle, not quite bird or animal, but disapproving, then by deepened silence. Expectation widened Nadja’s luminous eyes, and, exhilarated by the climb, we chattered about lost explorers, untraced disappearances, feeling younger, venturesome, daring.

Lower reaches still glistened, but we were in shadows cast by peaks vaguely magisterial, like Wotans at the start of the world, and given moods by short glints of sunlight. Imaginable as gypsum-white, with lidless calcified eyes.

The track rounded a jutting shoulder of cliff, meeting the sweet drift of pig-dung, then of stale vegetation and tobacco, coarse as sacking. The voices were close, from a lane of misshapen stone and wood shacks, turf-roofed, the far end filled with a crowd of some hundred, impoverished, shambling, like decayed boxers, many shoeless, with bare legs cross-gartered with blackish cord.

Our approach was watched incuriously, no sentinel dogs leaping at us with angry teeth. Glad of our shabbiness, I noticed several other outsiders, distinct only by polished heads, spectacles, cameras.

Nadja, at ease, raised a hand, diffident but appeasing, and unhurriedly we became part of the crowd, the smells, the strangeness. Sexes were largely indeterminate save for beards, men and women in ragged jeans and nautical-style kerseys, short yet heavy limbed, perhaps syphilitic, with genes of forgotten cast-offs. Many were lame or missing an eye, an arm, though as if connected not with military mutilés but with the Wotans. Faces prematurely aged, slightly scorched, necks goitrous, heads too large.

Shadows brought early twilight, shapes were unfinished as if in some fifth season, static, held in the gallows-grin of a clan undeniably withstanding the present. I was shocked by realizing that some, loutish, wizened, were children, listless, without promise of harlequin grace, without curiosity. No torrent of being would thrill these folk. Whatever the Custom would reveal, they would not pour themselves into the ecstasies of rock-youth, would bawl no New Europe, were ignorant of Aldous and Timothy, Chef and Red Danny, would breed laboriously, like badgers, be extinguished without publicity or protest. Meanwhile, their feebleness yet defied Paris, Brussels, Club Med.

Muttering, nudging, they eventually began lining both sides of the unlit, unpaved lane, beneath the dark, massive overhang from which thinner shadows stretched like claws. Air was thickened by smoke from low roofs and the proximity of more animals. Summer seemed to have recoiled.

Custom had apparently resumed, or perhaps begun, like an ill-managed rehearsal, haphazard, with tedious intervals, caterers on strike. A hoarse outburst greeted a hermaphroditic apparition, its breasts plainly artificial, draped in dirty green folds, mincing between the dim avenue of onlookers, waving an old toasting-fork before going rigid, motionless, staring inwards. Another figure was visible, in conic hat, mute, waiting, an axe at its feet, red even in this bad light. Others filtered from alleys and doorways in white Arabic surcoats, sashed, shabby. They stalked up and down, their gestures stylized but comprehensible only to the natives. One performer, in damaged, once-gilt crown, a knobbed truncheon protruding from his groin, adopted a limp, to a lugubrious chant that slowly petered out to a grumble while he was grabbed and held aloft by several others. We remembered later the Pope, the US flag, likewise forbidden to touch ground, at particular ceremonies.

More characters were pacing around the axe in perfunctory circles, unsteadily, like inexpert comedians feigning intoxication, reminiscent of the Meinnenberg wedding. Torches of tar and broom suddenly flared, during which the axe vanished, leaving the caste mournful, bereft, until, miming despair, beginning another shuffle. Various props were upheld: a halter, dented fireman’s helmet, a twig painted with red blobs, perhaps berries, precaution against witches or spirits. The dance, if dance it were, was oddly furtive, without music, weighted by the ponderous heads and legs, though clearly satisfying the threadbare villagers. One actor, slouching alone, was strapped to a leather hump that the others would surreptitiously touch, then bow to the still statuesque figure with toasting-fork, mock trident. One face was unearthly: sunken, barely detectable eyes, parched skin, so loose that it seemed carelessly hung on the skull.