* * *
I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love’s labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: “UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal.” But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.
One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.
The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o’clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches’ eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinée idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stop-watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves’ pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.
I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn’t found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey’s end.
* * *
The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart’s desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind’s eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp’s pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.
My own gun had fired its last shot, and I wanted to change to a darker-hued explosive. A new Mass was soon banged down on the board. In harmony with its colour, it struck a darker note at once, a long Wagnerian chord of black-letter semibreves: Nacht und Nebel! Rolling Bavarian acres formed in the inscape of the mind, fanning out in vistas of poles planted pyramidally with the hops gadding over them heavy with poppy-sombre flowers.
The peasants and farmers and the Munich artisans that filled the tables were much nicer than the civic swallowers overhead. Compared to the trim, drilled figures of the few soldiers there, the Storm Troopers looked like brown-paper parcels badly tied with string. There was even a sailor with two black silk streamers falling over his collar from the back of his cap, round the front of which, in gold letters, was written Unterseeboot. What was this Hanseatic submariner doing here, so far inland from Kiel and the Baltic? My tablemates were from the country, big, horny-handed men, with a wife or two among them. Some of the older men wore green and grey loden jackets with bone buttons and badgers’ brushes or blackcocks’ feathers in the back of their hatbands. The bone mouthpieces of long cherrywood pipes were lost in their whiskers and on their glazed china bowls, painted castles and pine-glades and chamois glowed cheerfully while shag-smoke poured through the perforations of their metal lids. Some of them, gnarled and mummified, puffed at cheroots through which straws were threaded to make them draw better. They gave me one and I added a choking tribute to the enveloping cloud. The accent had changed again, and I could only grasp the meaning of the simplest sentences. Many words were docked of their final consonants; ‘Bursch’—‘a chap’—for instance, became ‘bua’; ‘A’ was rolled over into ‘O,’ ‘Ö’ became ‘E,’ and every O and U seemed to have a final A appended, turning it into a disyllable. All this set up a universal moo-ing note, wildly distorted by resonance and echo; for these millions of vowels, prolonged and bent into boomerangs, sailed ricochetting up through the fog to swell the tidal thunder. This echoing and fluid feeling, the bouncing of sounds and syllables and the hogsheads of pungent liquid that sloshed about the tables and blotted the sawdust underfoot, must have been responsible for the name of this enormous hall. It was called the Schwemme, or horse-pond. The hollowness of those tall mugs augmented the volume of noise like the amphorae which the Greeks embedded in masonry to add resonance to their chants. My own note, as the mug emptied, was sliding down to middle C.
Mammoth columns were rooted in the flagstones and the sawdust. Arches flew in broad hoops from capital to capital; crossing in diagonals, they groined the barrel-vaults that hung dimly above the smoke. The place should have been lit by pine-torches in stanchions. It was beginning to change, turning now, under my clouding glance,
into the scenery for some terrible Germanic saga, where snow vanished under the breath of dragons whose red-hot blood thawed sword-blades like icicles. It was a place for battle-axes and bloodshed and the last pages of the Nibelungenlied when the capital of Hunland is in flames and everybody in the castle is hacked to bits. Things grew quickly darker and more fluid; the echo, the splash, the boom and the roar of fast currents sunk this beer-hall under the Rhine-bed; it became a cavern full of more dragons, misshapen guardians of gross treasure; or the fearful abode, perhaps, where Beowulf, after tearing the Grendel’s arm out of its socket, tracked him over the snow by the bloodstains and, reaching the mere’s edge, dived in to swim many fathoms down and slay his loathsome water-hag of a mother in darkening spirals of gore.
Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.
* * *
Surely I had never seen that oleograph before? Haloed with stars, the Blessed Virgin was sailing skywards through hoops of pink cloud and cherubim, and at the bottom, in gold lettering, ran the words: Mariä Himmelfahrt. And those trusses of chair-legs, the tabby cat in a nest of shavings and the bench fitted with clamps? Planes, mallets, chisels and braces-and-bits littered the room. There was a smell of glue, and sawdust lay thick on the cobwebs in the mid-morning light. A tall man was sand-papering chair-spokes and a woman was tiptoeing through the shavings with bread and butter and a coffee pot and, as she placed them beside the sofa where I lay blanketed, she asked me with a smile how my Katzenjammer was. Both were utter strangers.
A Katzenjammer is a hangover. I had learnt the word from those girls in Stuttgart.
As I drank the coffee and listened, their features slowly came back to me. At some point, unwillingly emulous of the casualties I had noticed with scorn, I had slumped forward over the Hofbräuhaus table in unwakeable stupor. There has been no vomiting, thank God; nothing worse than total insensibility; and the hefty Samaritan on the bench beside me had simply scooped me up and put me in his handcart, which was full of turned chair legs, and then, wrapping me in my greatcoat against the snow, wheeled it clean across Munich and laid me out mute as a flounder. The calamity must have been brought on by the mixture of the beer with the schnapps I had drunk in Schwabing; I had forgotten to eat anything but an apple since breakfast. Don’t worry, the carpenter said: why, in Prague, the beerhalls kept horses that they harnessed to wickerwork coffins on wheels, just to carry the casualties home at the brewery’s expense... What I needed, he said, opening a cupboard, was a ‘schluck’ of schnapps to put me on my feet. I made a dash for the yard and stuck my head under the pump. Then, combed and outwardly respectable, I thanked my saviours and was soon striding guiltily and at high speed through these outlying streets.
I felt terrible. I had often been drunk, and high spirits had led to rash doings; but never to this hoggish catalepsy.
In the Jugendherberge my rucksack had been tidied away from my unslept-in bed. The caretaker looked in a cupboard in vain and called for the charwoman. No, she said, the only rucksack in the building had departed first thing on the back of their only over-night lodger... What! Was he a spotty young man? I eked out my inadequate German with a few pointilliste prods. Yes, he had been rather pimply: “a pickeliger Bua.”
I was aghast. The implications were too much to take in at first. Momentarily, the loss of the diary ousted all other thoughts. Those thousands of lines, the flowery descriptions, the pensées, the philosophic flights, the sketches and verses! All gone. Infected by my distress, the caretaker and the charwoman accompanied me to the police station, where a sympathetic Schupo wrote down all the details, clicking his tongue. “Schlimm! Schlimm!” Bad... So it was; but there was worse. When he asked for my passport, I reached in the pocket of my jerkin: there was no familiar slotted blue binding there: and I remembered with a new access of despair that I had tucked it down the back of a rucksack pocket for the first time on this journey. The policeman looked grave, and I looked graver still: for inside the passport, for fear of losing it or of spending too much, I had folded the canvas envelope with the four new pounds and this left me with three marks and twenty-five pfennigs in the world, and my lifeline cut for the next four weeks. Apart from this I gathered that wandering about Germany without papers was a serious offence. The policeman telephoned the details to the central police station and said “We must go to the British Consulate.” We caught a tram and I jolted along beside him. He was formidable in a greatcoat and belted side-arms and a black-lacquered shako and chin-strap. I had visions of being packed home as a distressed British subject, or conducted to the frontier as an undesirable alien and felt as though last night’s debauch were stamped on my forehead. I might have been back two years in time, guiltily approaching some dreaded study door.
The clerk at the Consulate knew all about it. The Hauptpolizeiamt had telephoned.
The Consul, seated at a huge desk in a comfortable office under photographs of King George V and Queen Mary, was an austere and scholarly-looking figure in horn-rimmed spectacles. He asked me in a tired voice what all the fuss was about.
Perched on the edge of a leather armchair, I told him, and roughly outlined my Constantinople plan and my idea of writing a book. Then caught up in a fit of volubility, I launched myself on a sort of rambling, prudently censored autobiography. When I finished, he asked me where my father was. In India, I told him. He nodded, and there was a tactful pause. He leant back, with fingertips joined, gazing vaguely at the ceiling, and said: “Got a photograph?” This rather puzzled me. “Of my father? I’m afraid not.” He laughed, and said “No, of you”; and I realized things were taking a turn for the better. The clerk and the policeman led me round the corner to a photomaton shop, which left me with only a few pfennigs. Then I signed the documents waiting in the hall and was summoned back to the Consul’s office. He asked me what I proposed to use for money. I hadn’t thought yet. I said perhaps I could find odd jobs on farms, walking every other day, till I’d let enough time elapse for some more cash to mount up... He said “Well! His Majesty’s Government will lend you a fiver. Send it back some time when you’re less broke.” After my amazed thanks he asked me how I had come to leave my stuff unguarded in the Jugendherberge; I told him all: the recital evoked another tired smile. When the clerk came in with the passport, the Consul-General signed and blotted it carefully, took some banknotes from a drawer, placed them between the pages and pushed it over to my side of his desk. “There you are. Try not to lose it this time.” (I’ve got it in front of me now, faded, torn, dog-eared and travel-stained, crammed with the visas of vanished kingdoms and entry- and exit-stamps in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. The face in the discoloured snap has a dissolute and rather impertinent look. The consular stamp has gratis written across it, and the signature is D. St Clair Gainer.)
“Do you know anyone in Munich?” Mr. Gainer said, getting up. I said I did—that is, not exactly, but I’d got an introduction to a family. “Get in touch with them,” he said. “Try and keep out of trouble, and I should avoid beer and schnapps on an empty stomach next time. I’ll look out for the book.”[1]
I walked out into the snowy Prannerstrasse like a reprieved malefactor.
* * *
Luckily, the letter of introduction had been posted a few days before. But I remembered the name—Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff—so I telephoned, and was asked to stay; and that same evening, in Gräfelfing, a little way out of Munich, I found myself at a lamp-lit table with a family of the utmost charm and kindness. It seemed a miracle that a day so ominously begun could end so happily.
The Lipharts were a White Russian family: more specifically, they were from Esthonia and, like many Baltic landowners, they had taken flight through Sweden and Denmark after the loss of their estates at the end of the war. The castle they lived in—was it called Ratshoff?—became a national museum in Esthonia, and the family settled in Munich. They had none of the austerity that one might associate with descendants of Teutonic knights—in fact, nothing Teutonic
at all—and the visual change from solid bulk to these fine-boned Latin-seeming faces was a welcome one. A Greco-esque look stamped this handsome family and they carried off their change of fortune in light-hearted style.
Karl, the eldest son, was a painter, about fifteen years older than me, and as he was short of a sitter for the few days of my stay, I came in handy. We went into Munich every morning and spent peaceful hours of chat in his studio. I listened to anecdotes and scandals and funny stories about Bavaria while the snow piled up on the skylight and the picture dashingly took shape.[2] When the light began to fail we would wait in a café for Karl’s younger brother Arvid, who worked in a bookshop. Here we would hobnob with friends of theirs for an hour or two or have a drink in someone’s house. On a day when there was no painting, I explored as many of the baroque churches and theatres as I could, and spent an entire morning in the Pinakothek. We would catch the train back to Gräfefing in the evening.
A Time of Gifts Page 12