Visit to Castle Cséjthe
Cachtice, Czechoslovakia, April 18, 1992
An edited journal, pp. 390-396
Journals are improvisatory writing and contain errors of fact & omission. Please keep that in mind as you read.
The morning started off in somewhat of a post-liqueur blur as we prepared to meet the Rádai's for the trip to Erzsébet's castle -- only two hours or so, Zoltán had said, so there would be plenty of time on this virtually cloudless Saturday. Stevie and Lila rushed through breakfast at Hotel Eben's unremarkable guest café while I fiddled with trying to pay for our rooms. We had discovered the previous evening that not only do they hold onto your passport, they also require return of the room key every time you depart the premises. Various discussions and arguments ensued on the morning in question, and I got neither coffee nor breakfast, but did manage to depart with the room key.
After much juggling and jostling, we fit the five of us -- Zoltán and I in the front, Stevie, Eva and Lila lined up in the back -- into the 1.1-liter Fiat Uno, together with cameras and other necessities in the trunk.
Our trip took us across the Erzsébet bridge, and west on the motorway to the little town of Komárom, crossing the border (easily), and following the valley of the Vah River through Nové Zámky, Nitra, Trnava, Piestany, Nové Meso, Trencin, and -- after getting lost and turned around by varying advice no less than six times -- finding our way to the tiny town of Cactice, called Cséjthe in Hungarian.
Zoltán lamented that the entire area we had traversed had once been Hungarian, and after its borders were shrunk after the World War (first), the area remained culturally Hungarian but lost to them. The signs for many miles into the area remained in Hungarian; castles came into view one after another in the valley as we searched and got lost, were redirected through road construction, and depended on Zoltán's fractured Czech to keep us going.
We finally found Cachtice, and (again after two tries, one mile out of the way) found the road (with a red-and-green sign marked "Hrad" -- castle) to Erzsébet's domain.
The winding road provoked many oh's and ooh's from the oh-and-ooh-prone Eva, and we eventually came up a bumpy dirt road to the castle itself. The day was so bright and sunny that the castle of horrors looked gentle, benign, and quite beautiful, with trees and flowers growing through the fallen stones and over the long-dissolved bones of the Countess's victims.
I scrambled everywhere, taking pictures, before discovering the entrance to the remaining tower, where she had spent her last days. It required crawling through a small hole over sharp stones, but the view inside made the scrapes and bruises insignificant: the tower (now floorless) rose up to long windows, narrow slits, which once looked out over the vast valley. The roof opened to the sky, but the feeling of impregnable power still infused the crumbling walls. Nothing had been restored at Cachtice, and only sets of heavy creosoted beams and occasional patches of mortar prevented the structure from tumbling into an unrecognizable mountain of rock.
Tunnels and passageways were still to be found everywhere, lending a sense of furtiveness that must have been a part of every tiny feudal kingdom of the day, but, particularly in the back, on the side hidden by the trees and unaccustomed to the sun's intrusion, one tunnel looked particularly ominous with animal tracks and the twisted tendrils of tree roots searching for the ghostly liquid from who-knows-what young woman of the long past.
Sadly, it was not possible to stay at Cachtice, in part because other occasional tourists had left the physical evidence of their visit, but mostly because Zoltán and Eva were certainly unprepared for such an occurrence (even though I had expressed my interest to them in a letter).
I must admit that (perhaps because of our guests and the other young hikers) I felt none of the evil I might have expected from Erzsébet's legacy, and I certainly felt absolutely nothing of her presence at the castle. The cool, bright spring afternoon had exiled her to places solitary, leaving me with only the shell of her prison (and home) as a guide to who she was and how she must have ruled at Cachtice.
Some hikers were looking curiously at this active photographer, so I stopped for a moment to explain as best I could (only one had even the slightest grasp of English) how I came to Cachtice and why Erzsébet was of interest to me. Their cool curiosity turned to excited smiles, and I gave them my card with the standing offer to all we have met to join us in Vermont should they come to America.
By that time, everyone (but me) was ready to go, so I toured the castle one more time, then reluctantly departed.
I do not yet find myself musically inspired by the visit to Erzsébet's castle, but I hope that once I review her biography (and perhaps talk to a few other people, including McNally), I may get some insight that will bring together all the ideas into a shape for a musical drama.
Many sightseers were on their way up the road (and gave us curious looks) as we drove down. The museum was closed, alas, so we drove quietly and slowly out of town, away from the seat of once-great power and terror, into Trencin for dinner. As the trip winding through the Vah Valley had taken us over four hours, we decided to ride down to Ostrava...
