A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Their parents were captivating survivals of the decades when Paris and the South of France and Rome and Venice were full of northern grandees seeking refuge there from the birch trees and conifers and the frozen lakes of their white and innumerable acres. I could see them, in imagination, lit by the clustering globes of gasoliers on the steps of opera houses and spanking along avenues of lime trees behind carefully matched greys—I could almost catch the twinkle of the scarlet and canary spokes. They would be cantering among the tombs of the Appian Way or gliding from palace to palace, in wonderful clothes, under a maze of bridges. Much of Karl’s father’s life had been spent in painters’ studios and writers’ studies, and the house was full of books in half a dozen languages. In my bedroom I was very taken with an old photograph. It showed my host as a young man, dressed to kill and mounted on a beautiful horse in the middle of a pack of foxhounds. Beyond the tophats and the assembled carriages of his guests, the lost castle loomed. The tale of my rucksack, recounted now as a funny story, brought sympathy showering down. What! I’d lost everything? It wasn’t too bad, I said, thanks to Mr. Gainer’s fiver. “My dear boy, you’ll need every penny!” the Baron exclaimed. “Hang on to it! Karl, Arvid! We must hunt through the attic after dinner.” The attic and various cupboards yielded a splendid rucksack and a jersey, and shirts, socks and pyjamas, a small mountain of things. The whole operation was conducted with speed and laughter, and in ten minutes I was practically fitted out. (I bought the few remaining necessaries next day in Munich for well under a pound.) It was a day of miracles. I was dazed by this immediate and overflowing generosity; but their friendly bohemianism overrode all the reluctance I ought to have felt.

  I stayed five days. When leaving-time came, I might have been a son of the house setting forth. The Baron spread maps and pointed out towns and mountains and monasteries and the country houses of friends he would write to, so that I could have a comfortable night now and then, and a bath. “There we are! Nando Arco at St. Martin! And my old friend Botho Coreth at Hochschatten. The Trautmannsdorffs at Pottenbrunn!” (He wrote to them all and it brought a new dimension into the journey.) He and the Baroness were worried about Bulgaria: “It’s full of robbers and comitadjis. You must take care! They’re a terrible lot. And as for the Turks!” The nature of the hinted menace was obscure.

  The evenings were conversation and books. The Baron enlarged on the influence of Don Juan on Evgenye Oniegin and the decay of German literature and the changes of taste in France: was Paul Bourget read a great deal? Henri de Regnier? Maurice Barrès? I wish I could have answered. Saved from the general loss by its presence in a remote pocket, my only book now was the German translation of Hamlet: how true was the German claim that it was as good as the original? “Not true at all!” the Baron said: “But it’s better than in any other foreign language. Just listen!”; and he took down four books and read out Mark Antony’s speech in Russian, French, Italian and German. The Russian had a splendid ring, as it always does. The French sounded rather thin and the Italian bombastic and orotund; unfairly but amusingly, he exaggerated the styles as he read. The German, however, had a totally different consistency from any utterance I had heard on this journey: slow, thoughtful, clear and musical, stripped of its harshness and over-emphasis and gush; and in those minutes, as the lamplight caught the reader’s white hair and eyebrows and sweeping white moustache and twinkled in the signet ring of the hand that held the volume, I understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.

  All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss had only one result under this roof... What books? I had named them; when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can’t do much about the others but here’s Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S’s of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes; Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia...I made a feint at disclaiming a treasure so far beyond the status of the rough travels ahead. But I had been forestalled, I saw with relief, by an inscription: ‘To our young friend,’ etc., on the page opposite an emblematic ex libris with the name of their machicolated Baltic home. Here and there between the pages a skeleton leaf conjured up those lost woods.

  * * *

  This book became a fetish. I noticed, during the next few days, that it filled everyone with feelings of wonder akin to my own. On the second evening—Rosenheim was the first—placed alongside the resolutely broached new diary on the inn-table of Hohenaschau, it immediately made me seem more exalted than the tramp that I actually was. “What a beautiful little book!,” awed voices would say. Horny fingers reverently turned the pages. “Lateinisch? Well, well...” A spurious aura of scholarship and respectability sprang up.

  * * *

  Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I found him in the Gemeindeamt, where he filled out a slip of paper. I presented it at the inn: it entitled me to supper and a mug of beer, a bed for the night and bread and a bowl of coffee in the morning; all on the parish. It seems amazing to me now, but so it was, and there was no kind of slur attached to it; nothing, ever, but a friendly welcome. I wonder how many times I took advantage of this generous and, apparently, very old custom? It prevailed all through Germany and Austria, a survival perhaps, of some ancient charity to wandering students and pilgrims, extended now to all poor travellers.

  The Gastwirtschaft was a beetling chalet with cut logs piled to the eaves. An elaborate balcony ran all the way round it; carved and fretted woodwork frilled it at every point and a layer of snow two feet thick, like the cotton-wool packing for a fragile treasure, muffled the shallow tilt of the enormous wide-eaved roof.

  Of the village in the snowy dark outside, nothing has stuck. But unlike the three overnight halts that follow—Riedering, Söllhuben and Röttau, that is to say—it is at least marked on maps.

  Each of these little unmarked hamlets seems smaller in retrospect than the other two, and remoter, and more deeply embedded in hills and snow and dialect. They have left an impression of women scattering grain in their yards to a rush of poultry, and of hooded children returning from school with hairy satchels and muffled ears: homing goblins, slapping along lanes on skis as short and wide as barrel-staves and propelling themselves with sticks of unringed hazel. When we passed each other, they would squeak “Grüss Gott!” in a polite shrill chorus. One or two were half gagged by cheekfuls bitten from long slices of black bread and butter.

  All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey discs and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and clogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air: then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded. Outside the villages the telegraph wire was a single cable of flakes interrupted by birds alighting and I would follow the path below and break through the new and sparkling crust to sink in powdery depths. I travelled on footpaths and over stiles and across fields and along country roads that ran through dark woods and out again into the white ploughland and pasture. The valleys were dotted with villages that huddled round the shingle roofs of churches, and all the belfries tapered and then swelled again into black ribbed cupolas. These onion-domes had a fleetingly Russian look. Otherwise, especially when the bare hardwoods were replaced by conifers, the décor belonged
to Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “Once upon a time, on the edge of a dark forest, there lived an old woodman, with a single beautiful daughter,” it was that sort of a region. Cottages that looked as innocent as cuckoo-clocks turned into witches’ ginger-bread after dark. Deep and crusted loads of snow weighed the conifer-branches to the ground. When I touched them with the tip of my new walking stick, up they sprang in sparkling explosions. Crows, rooks and magpies were the only birds about and the arrows of their footprints were sometimes crossed by the deeper slots of hares’ pads. Now and again I came on a hare, seated alone in a field and looking enormous; hindered by the snow it would lope awkwardly away to cover, for the snow slowed everything up, especially when the rails and the posts beside the path were buried. The only people I saw outside the villages were woodcutters. They were indicated, long before they appeared, by the wide twin grooves of their sledges, with cart-horses’ crescent-shaped tracks stamped deep between. Then they would come into view on a clearing or the edge of a distant spinney and the sound of axes and the rasp of two-handed saws would reach my ears a second after my eye had caught the vertical fall or the horizontal slide of the blades. If, by the time I reached them, a tall tree was about to come down, I found it impossible to move on. The sledge-horses, with icicled fetlocks and muzzles deep in their nosebags, were rugged up in sacking and I stamped to keep warm as I watched. Armed with beetles, rustic bruisers at work in a ring of chips and sawdust and trodden snow, banged the wedges home. They were rough and friendly men, and one of them, on the pretext of a strange presence and with a collusive wink, was sure to pull out a bottle of schnapps. Swigs, followed by gasps of fiery bliss, sent prongs of vapour into the frosty air. I took a turn with the saw once or twice, clumsily till I got the hang of it, unable to tear myself away till at last the tree came crashing down. Once, arriving on the scene just as the loading of the dismembered tree was complete, I got a lift on the sledge, and swished along behind two of those colossal chestnuts with flaxen manes and tails and ornate jingling collars. The trip ended with more schnapps in a Gastwirtschaft, and a departure sped by dialect farewells. It shot through my mind that if I were up against it further on, I might do worse than hitch on to one of these forest teams, as one of the woodmen half jocularly suggested, and hack away for my keep.

  Otherwise, except for birds, most of these white landscapes were empty, and I would crunch along adding the track of my hobnails to their criss-cross of little tridents. Fired by the Baron’s example, I tried to get by heart, from Schlegel and Tieck’s pocket translation, the passages of Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark which I knew in English. ‘Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer...’ came rumbling out over the snow in its new guise:

  Ob’s edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil’ und Schleudern

  Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,

  Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,

  Durch Widerstand sie enden

  until I got to ‘It is a fear of something after death/that undiscovered country from whose bourne/no traveller returns’:

  Nur dass die Furcht vor etwas nach dem Tod—

  Das unentdeckte Land, von des Bezirk

  Kein Wandrer wiederkehrt

  Again, anyone bumping into me unawares, like the crone on the Ulm road, would have taken me for drunk; in a literary sense they would have been right.

  Every mile or so wooden calvaries, hewn and painted with rustic velleities of baroque, stood askew beside the path. Streaming wounds mangled the gaunt figures and exposure had warped or split them along the grain. Haloes of tarnished brass put out spikes behind the heads; the brows were clumsily hooped already with plaits of real thorns and sheltered by pointed snow-laden chevrons. They might have been the lineal replacements, changed every few generations, of the first Christian emblems which St. Boniface, hot-foot from Devonshire, had set up in Germany. He converted the country a hundred years after St. Augustine had arrived in Kent; and not much more than two centuries after Hengist and Horsa had landed in Britain while their German kinsmen were bursting into Gaul and into these trans-Danubian woods. This saint from Devonshire was not the only Englishman to help drive the old gods out: monks from south-east England, the West Country and the Shires were soon seated on all the earliest bishops’ thrones of Germany.

  Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape—the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn—all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous. Objects expand or shrink and the change makes the scenery resemble early woodcuts of winter husbandry. Sometimes the landscape moves it further back in time. Pictures from illuminated manuscripts take shape; they become the scenes which old breviaries and Books of Hours enclosed in the O of Orate, fratres. The snow falls; it is Carolingian weather... Set on the way by my Villon craze, I had discovered and devoured Helen Waddell’s Mediaeval Latin Lyrics and the Wandering Scholars the year before and had seized on the Archpoet and the Carmina Burana; and I wasn’t slow, in the present circumstances, to identify myself with one of those itinerant mediaeval clerks. In an inn or a cowshed, when I scratched away the ice-ferns in the morning and the winter scene widened, the illusion was complete:

  Nec lympha caret alveus,

  nec prata virent herbida,

  sol nostra fugit aureus

  confinia;

  est inde dies niveus,

  nox frigida.

  It was the world all round me! ‘De ramis cadunt folia...’ they had fallen long ago. ‘Modo frigescit quidquid est...’ icicles, barring the scene out-of-doors, dripped from the eaves in confirmation.

  There was something meditative and consoling about this dim season, except towards evening, when the sun—invisible through the clouds, reduced to a silvery blur or expanded to an orange globe like a winter cherry—began to set. Then rooks fell silent; the pink after-glow faded on faraway peaks; the light dwindled over the grey fields; and life ebbed with a shudder like a soul leaving the body. All was suddenly quiet and ghostly and I longed for the first glimpse of the lamplight streaming through the windows of my destined village. I lost my way now and then through misunderstanding instructions at a farm or a cottage; sometimes dialect or lack of teeth or the wind had garbled them. Heading in the twilight for one of those three uncharted villages, I had a moment of panic. I was long past the last signpost: it had pointed to Pfaffenbichl and Marwang—I remember these two names because the first was ridiculous and the second rather sinister. All at once it was dark and the snow was coming down fast. I was feeling my way by a wooden rail when I lost touch and fell stumbling in a drift and floundered in circles but couldn’t find the rail. I must have strayed into a field. Luckily I found a ruined barn and fumbled my way to the door. I lit a match and cleared the snow and the ancient cow-pats and owls’ pellets out of a corner and, pulling on every stitch of extra clothing from my rucksack, resigned myself to the thought of sheltering there till daybreak. The sun had only just set.

  I usually had an apple and a hunk of bread and a flask, but not this time. There was no light to read by or dry wood for a fire, the cold was getting worse and the wind was driving snow through a score of gaps. I huddled in a ball with my arms round my knees, stirring every few minutes to stamp and flap my arms. Too low for wolves, I thought melodramatically; or was it? After a while I stopped the singing with which I was trying to pass the interminable hours. There was nothing for it but to sit clenched and shivering in this prehistoric burial posture and listen to my teeth rattling. Every now and then I seemed to fall into a sort of catalepsy. But suddenly—was it midnight, or one in the morning? or later perhaps?—the wind fell and I heard voices, quite near, and jumped up and ran out shouting. There was silence, then someone called back
. I could make out two faint blurs. They were villagers returning home. What was I doing there, on such a night? I told them. “Der arme Bua!” They were all sympathy. But it was only half-past eight and the village was a mere two or three hundred metres away, just round the end of the hill... And within five minutes, there were the roofs and the belfry and the lighted doorway. The carpet of lamplight unrolled across the snow and the flakes floating past the windows were turning to sequins. Inside the inn the lamplit and steaming rustics round the table, veiled in the smoke of their lidded pipes, were maundering away with slurred vowels over their mugs. It was no good trying to explain.

  * * *

  “Hans.”

  “ What?”

  “Can you see me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the dumplings are enough.”

  The inn-keeper’s wife, who was from Munich, was illustrating the difficulties of the dialect by an imaginary conversation between two Bavarian peasants. They are seated on either side of a table, helping themselves from a huge dish of Knödel, and it is only when the plate of one of them is piled high enough with dumplings to hide him from view that he stops. In ordinary German, this dialogue would run: “Hans!” “Was?” “Siehst Du mich?” “Nein.” “Also, die Knödel sind genug.” But in the speech of Lower Bavaria, as closely as I can remember, it turns into: “Schani!” “Woas?” “Siahst Du ma?” “Na.” “Nacha, siang die Kniadel knua.” Such sounds were mooing and rumbling in the background all through this Bavarian trudge.

  The inns in these remote and winter-bound thorpes were warm and snug. There was usually a picture of Hitler and a compulsory poster or two, but they were outnumbered by pious symbols and more venerable mementoes. Perhaps because I was a foreigner, politics seldom entered the conversations I had to share in; rather surprisingly, considering the closeness of those villages to the fountain-head of the Party. (It was different in towns.) Inn-talk, when it concerned the regional oddities of Bavaria, was rife with semi-humorous bias. Even then, many decades after Bismarck’s incorporation of the Bavarian Kingdom into the German Empire, Prussia was the chief target. A frequent butt of these stories was a hypothetical Prussian visitor to the province. Disciplined, blinkered, pig-headed and sharp-spoken, with thin vowels and stripped consonants—every “sch” turning into “s” and every hard “g” into “y”—this ridiculous figure was an unfailing prey for the easy-going but shrewd Bavarians. Affection for the former ruling family still lingered. The hoary origins and the thousand years’ sway of the Wittelsbachs were remembered with pride and their past follies forgiven. So august and gifted and beautiful a dynasty had every right, these old people inferred, to be a bit cracked now and then. The unassuming demeanour of Prince Ruprecht, the actual Pretender—who was also the last Stuart Pretender to the British throne—was frequently extolled; he was a distinguished doctor in Munich, and much loved. All this breathed homesickness for a past now doubly removed and thickly overlaid by recent history. I liked them for these old loyalties. Not everyone is fond of Bavarians: their fame is mixed, both inside Germany and out and one hears damning tales of aggressive ruthlessness. They seemed a rougher race than the civilized Rhinelanders or the diligent and homely Swabians. They were, perhaps, more raw in aspect and more uncompromising in manner; and—trivial detail!—an impression remains, perhaps a mistaken one, of darker hair. But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evenings with. They have left a memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, for from the Norwegian fiords to Nepal, above certain contour-lines, the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same. It soars to a feverish zenith in Switzerland, where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears.