A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  A card in a metal frame under the doorbell usually revealed the householder’s identity. The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Habsburg Empire at its widest expansion.[3] Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow a stage for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of southern Slav. In one flat there was even a genial old gentleman from Bosnia, probably of Islamized Bogomil descent, Dr. Murad Aslanovic Bey who, in spite of Sarajevo, had remained firmly Austrophile. A little framed flag on the wall still showed a combination of the Austrian double-eagle and the Crescent and a paperweight on his desk was a little bronze figure of a soldier charging with fixed bayonet and fez-tassel flying, a memento of the First K.u.K. Bosniak Infantry Regiment. (These fierce mountain troops had wrought havoc all along the Italian Front from the Dolomites to the Isonzo.) He had long ago abandoned the fez for a grey jäger hat and a blackcock’s tail-feather, and, he hinted, slack observance during Ramadan. A white spade beard made him an easy sitter. In many dwellings, a solitary emblem would strike a note as clear as a tuning fork: Franz Josef, Archduke Otto in a fur-trimmed Hungarian magnate’s costume; a crucifix, a devotional oleograph, an image, a photograph of Pius X under the tiara and crossed keys; a star of David enclosing the Ineffable Tetragrammaton. Because of their frequency in books of magic, the interlocking triangles and the Hebrew symbols always seemed mysterious and arcane. There were faded blazons, framed citations, medals and diplomas and the collapsed-concertina shakos of students with embroidered cyphers on the crown and tricoloured sashes and fencing gauntlets; photographs of Marx and Lenin, a star and a hammer and sickle or two. If there are no swastikas or snapshots of Hitler in my memory, it was not through lack of Nazis: there were plenty; but at that moment, I think, the display of these emblems was an indictable offence. There were death masks of Beethoven and plaster busts, tinted like old ivory, of Mozart and Haydn. This scattered iconology ran parallel with another, where Garbo, Dietrich; Lilian Harvey, Brigitte Helm, Ronald Colman, Conrad Veidt, Leslie Howard and Gary Cooper re-affirmed their universal sway.

  * * *

  There was not much room to move in the first flat I tried that afternoon. The floors were blocked with trunks, crates and containers of varied and enigmatic shapes, with THE KOSHKA BROTHERS stencilled over them in scarlet letters. Multilingual posters displayed the masked and hooded Brothers crossing gorges on tight-ropes, shooting each other out of cannon, flying through the air to clasp hands in a criss-cross of spotlights, piling up in precarious and many layered pagodas and thundering round the insides of giant barrels on motor bicycles. There were Koshka sisters too, and white-haired ancestors and crawling descendants, all talking volubly in Czech. They were athletic, smiling, handsome, slightly stunned-looking and nearly identical figures who continued flexing their knees and feeling their biceps as they spoke, or slowly rotating alternate shoulder blades. I was lost for several minutes in this crowd. At last, with sinking heart, I approached a muscle-bound patriarch and mumbled my set proposal about doing a sketch. He spoke no German, but he gave me a friendly pat and despatched a descendant into the next room, who returned carrying a glossy photograph of the whole tribe. It showed all the Koshkas balanced in a vertiginous grande finale of which he was the supporting Atlas at the base. He signed it with a friendly message and a flourish and led me politely from Koshka to Koshka and each of them, from the seasoned grandsire to the minutest of unbreakable tots, added a signature with a kind word or two and a fringe of exclamation marks. When all the signatures had been garnered, I again murmured something about doing a sketch, but in a strangled voice, for my nerve had long gone. There was a pause, then they all burst out in a joyful deprecating chorus: “No! No! No! Iss a present! For de Picture, ve take not vun groschen! Not vun! Iss free!” But they were sincerely touched at the idea of my pilgrimage.

  In the next flat, someone had just died.

  In a third, the maid said “Ssh!” as she let me into a little softly-lit hall. After a moment a pretty ash-blonde girl tiptoed out of a pink bathroom on pink mules trimmed with swan’s down, tying the sash of a turquoise dressing-gown. She too laid her forefinger collusively across a pursed cupid’s bow, enjoining silence, and whispering “I’m busy now, schatzili!” ; she pointed significantly at the closed door next to the one she had come in by. There was a shako on the table and a greatcoat and a sabre had been flung across an armchair: “Come back in an hour!” Then, with a smile and a friendly pat on the cheek, she tiptoed away again.

  But in the fourth flat was a music teacher with a free period between lessons, and we were off.

  Konrad and I had a snug and cheerful dinner in one of the lanes of the old Town. Then we went to a cinema, and into a bar for a final drink. We talked about Shakespeare and England and the Frisian Islands as we puffed away at two more of the Herr Direktor’s cigars (Director of what, we wondered?) like two bookies after a lucky day at the races.

  Our way back took us along the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. About lamplighting time, I had noticed a small, drifting population of decorative girls who shot unmistakable glances of invitation at passersby. Konrad shook his head. “You must beware, dear young,” he said in a solemn voice. “These are wenches and they are always seeking only pelf. They are wanton, and it is their wont.”

  * * *

  We drew blank at the Consulate again next morning; but this time it didn’t seem to matter. Emboldened by yesterday’s progress, Konrad thought we might lay siege to a more ambitious quarter, nearer the heart of the town, but still outside the dread zones where the proud lackeys held sway. The tall buildings didn’t look very different to me, but, as a concession to our richer prospective sitters, I let him persuade me into charging three schillinge instead of two.

  The preliminary moment, standing in the hall with a score of unpressed doorbells and all the tiers of mystery piling up overhead, on the edge, as it were, of a still undrawn cover rife with quarry, was filled with a tremor of excitement. There was no sound, except someone practising the violin somewhere.

  In answer to the first peal, a bearded man in a smock and a Lavallière tie ushered me into a room full of stacked and hanging canvases. There were mountain ranges showing pink in the afterglow, country inns with vine-trellises, cloisters under cascading wisteria, oases and sphinxes and pyramids and caravans casting long sunset shadows over the dunes. An easel in the middle of the room displayed a damp and half-finished atoll at daybreak, plumey with palm trees. He stroked his beard as he led me from picture to picture as though to aid me in my choice. I was embarrassed when I had to explain that I was a kind of cher confrère. He seemed rather vexed, though we both sent up jovial and insincere peals of laughter; but the glint in his eye and the gnash of his splendid teeth grew fiercer, and I felt that, had the exit corridor been longer, they might have detached a bit, like a bite out of a muffin.

  The second call was a surprise. I was let in by a wild-eyed Englishwoman from Swindon with bobbed iron-grey hair. She didn’t want to be drawn but she talked without stopping as she poured out tea and plied me with short-cake and Edinburgh Rock from an old Huntley and Palmers tin. She had come to Vienna many years ago as a lady’s companion and they had both become converts to the Catholic faith and when her employer died, my hostess had inherited the little flat where she now gave English lessons. It was plain to see, and to hear, that she was in the throes of an acute and rather disturbing religious passion that was chiefly fixed on the church of the Franciscans hard by. She took me down a floor to draw an Indian friend who was a Syrian Jacobite Christian from Travancore. Voluminous in a mauve and gold-edged sari under a black fur coat, she overflowed from a rocking chair beside a roaring stove. From her I graduated to a flat that was decorated in white suède and corduroy and many cushions. Here a burly, golden-haired and Anglophil baron in a white polo jersey allowed me to draw hi
m and then insisted on sketches of three cheerful and ornate young men in similar jerseys but of different colours while they put on Cole Porter records and gave me a Manhattan cocktail from a huge electro-plated shaker. The baron reminisced with enjoyment about London and parties and the Chelsea Arts Ball. As for Lady Malcolm’s Servants Ball, he declared that words failed him. It was a familiar London atmosphere, and I felt a bit homesick. Beyond the next door a terrible row was going on and I wished I hadn’t rung. A figure stamped down the hall shouting at someone in the depths of the flat. Jerking the door open, he glared at me with hatred and disgust, slammed it shut, and resumed his interrupted quarrel.

  Shed evening clothes scattered the floor of the next flat—tails, a white tie, an opera hat, gold high-heeled shoes kicked off, a black skirt twinkling with sequins, spirals of streamers and a hail-drift of those multicoloured little papier-maché balls that are sometimes flung at parties. The face of the tousled and pyjama-clad young man who had crept to the door displayed familiar symptoms of hangover. His bloodshot eyes signalled helpless appeal. “I’m sorry!” he said. “Can’t speak...,” then: “Kopfweh!” pointing to his head. Headache...A woman’s voice moaned expiringly in the background, and I stole away. (There were similar signs in many faces and flats; it was the end of carnival, which political upsets had failed to damp. Shrove Tuesday was only a few days off.) In an armchair in a large drawing-room on another floor, inert as an aardvark or a giant ant-eater and moving his head slowly from side to side with the puzzled expression of a ruminant, sat a middle-aged man, wide-eyed. Beyond the negative and slow-motion rocking of his head, he returned no answer to my awestruck overtures. Again, there was nothing for it but retreat. But the last sitters of the morning were a jolly retired Admiral and his wife surrounded by Biedermeier and Sezession furniture. He declared, with a breezy quarterdeck laugh, that he was still an active Admiral from whom, with the loss of Trieste and Fiume—his navy had retired. His midshipman’s dirk and his dress-sword hung on the wall. There were enlarged photographs of the gun-decks of warships in those lost ports. One of these illustrated a tour of inspection by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his whiskers twisted up fiercely under his cocked hat.

  It had been a splendid morning. Konrad and I agreed, unfolding and shaking out our napkins. He tucked his prudently into his collar as some cutlets of young lamb arrived. They were delicious; he declared it a lamb unparalleled. On our fourth evening, when I picked him up in a café at the end of the afternoon’s toil, we decided it had been another bumper day but we both had the feeling, I didn’t quite know why, that it might turn out to be the last. Over dinner, which we had ordered earlier—a delicious roast chicken, of the classical sort that sizzles enclouded in the strip-cartoon dreams of slumbering tramps—we talked of our plans. I outlined roughly what I thought my itinerary would be. But what about him? He had been hanging about, he had told me earlier, waiting with rather Micawber-like optimism for something—I’ve forgotten what—which persistently failed to turn up. “But I am fostering a deep plan,” he said earnestly at last. “It is a plan that leads on to fortune. It was divulged to me by a well-versed and thoughtful one. But it has need of capital...” We both looked glum: no hopes there. I asked him out of curiosity how much. He named the sum and we both nodded sadly at our wine glasses. Then—it was literally a double-take—I asked him to repeat it. “Twenty schillinge,” he said. “Twenty schillinge? But Konrad, that’s easy! We’ve probably got it already! If not, we’ll get it tomorrow morning!” I had been handing over half of the takings, but Konrad had looked on himself as my custodian and now insisted on handing them all back, knotted in a handkerchief. “There, dear young,” he said, “it is the moiety of your guerdon.” After paying for dinner, we were only two schillings short of the needed capital. I asked him what kind of enterprise he had in mind.

  “For many moons, dear young,” he said, looking at me gravely with wide blue eyes, “I have been longing to become a smuggler. A saccharine smuggler, dear young! No, do not laugh!” Ever since Czechoslovakia—or was it Austria or Hungary?—had placed an exorbitant tax on saccharine, the secret import of this innocent commodity made great profits—all one needed was the initial outlay: “And there are people—wise, daring and nimble ones,” Konrad said, “who, on nights when the moon lacks, scull across the Danube in barques.” They were never caught. Austrians, Hungarians and Czechs were engaged in this traffic: “serious folk, of a gentlemanly cast of mind.” After all, it was an unjust law, much more honoured in the breach than the observance. “And this breach of the law is meaning succour to persons that ail,” he said. “It enables those of great girth to become once again slender.” I hoped he wouldn’t be involved in the frontier-crossing part. “No, no! I shall be an envoy, dear young, a stately negotiator! They think that I have a dignified bearing,” he said, straightening his tie with a cough. “I hope I have, dear young, in spite of all!” His eyes kindled happily at the thought of his prospects.

  The night before, we had been looking at the photograph of the Koshka Brothers when the proprietor had brought the bill. As a great admirer of the Brothers, he had been much struck by the picture. I had made him a present of it, and his delight had found expression in two glasses of Himbeergeist. Now the photograph had been pinned on the wall; and two more tulip-shaped glasses had appeared at the same time as coffee. Sustained by the glow of future hopes, we now ordered two more, and lit the last of the Direktor’s cigars. At Konrad’s request, we spent the rest of the evening reading aloud from Shakespeare. As more Himbeergeist appeared, my renderings, in the battle-smoke of flourished cigars, became more impassioned and sonorous. “Noble words!” Konrad kept interjecting, “noble words, dear young!” We sang and recited on the long trudge back to the Heilsarmee. Both of us felt a touch of guilt about occupying our two cots there, in the midst of our affluence; it was another prompting towards departure. We were fairly tipsy; Konrad, I noticed, as he bumped into a lamp-post with a faint giggle, a little more so than I was. We both stumbled slightly going upstairs. We were anxious lest our places had been taken, but there they were, side by side at the far end and both empty still.

  It was late and all was silent except for the haunting involuntary chorus that spans the watches of the night in these dormitories. As we tiptoed down the long row Konrad bumped into the foot of a bed and a bearded face like a black hedgehog shot out of the other end of a cocoon of blankets and fired off a torrent of abuse. Konrad stood murmuring and rooted to the spot, his hat lifted in a chivalrous posture of apology. The noise woke several sleepers on either side, who launched a rumbling crescendo of blasphemy and anathema at Konrad’s protesting victim. I led him by the elbow to our corner, as though on wheels and with his hat still lifted, while the altercation waxed louder until it reached a noisy climax and then very slowly waned into near-silence. Konrad sat down on the edge of his cot, murmuring, as he unlaced his boots: “He was chafed by mishap and choler unsealed their lips.”

  * * *

  “Let us regain our fardels,” Konrad said next morning. We bade goodbye to the people in the office and to a few fellow-inmates with whom we were on hobnobbing terms, and I hoisted on my rucksack. Konrad’s fardel—a wicker creel slung diagonally across his torso on a long baldric of canvas and leather—turned him into a lanky urban fisherman. For the fourth time we set off for the Wallnerstrasse. It was a bright, blowy morning; and we had been right to be optimistic; the moment I entered the Consulate, the clerk held up from afar a registered envelope crossed with blue chalk, and some others. The good news, which would have spread delight four days before, was something of an anti-climax now. We headed for a coffee house in the Kärntnerstrasse called Fenstergucker. Settling at a corner table by the window near a hanging grove of newspapers on wooden rods, we ordered Eier im Glass, then hot Brötchen and butter, and delicious coffee smothered in whipped cream. It was a morning of decisions, separations, departures; and they weighed on us both. Konrad was determined to set off at once and smi
te while the iron was hot, determination high and the capital still intact. He became gently excited and the Harfleur spirit was beating its wings in the air; but I felt anxious about him and hoped his associates had as gentlemanly a cast of mind as he thought. He, in his turn, was filled with concern about me. It was true that we had been ripping rather fast through the fairy gold; but he built up a headstrong Sir Harry Scattercash kind of picture that I rather liked. “Husband all lucre when you are in squandering vein, dear young,” he said, and “Do not dog bona robas.”

  I accompanied him to the junction of the Kärntnerstrasse and the Ringstrasse by the Opera House. He was going to catch a tram to the Donaukai Bahnhof and then continue eastwards by rail along the Danube. He was rather arch and secretive about place names; I don’t think he wanted to involve me, even remotely, in these illicit doings. He climbed on the tram, sat down, then immediately gave his seat to an elderly and almost spherical nun with a carpet bag. As it clattered off, I could see him towering head and shoulders above the other passengers, strap-hanging with one hand, holding up his Habig hat between the two long first fingers of the other, smiling and slowly rotating it in valediction, while I waved until the tram clashed across the points and swung left into the Schubertring and out of sight.