A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I felt very lonely as I wandered back to the café. He had promised to write and tell me how things were going. I got a postcard from him in Budapest soon after Easter, saying that the Future was smiling. But he gave no address, so I had no further news until I got to Constantinople, eleven months later. There I found a fat letter, franked in Norderney, Konrad’s home island in the Frisian Archipelago. The first things to emerge from the envelope were several enormous sheets of German postage stamps whose value amounted not only to the pound note that I had thrust on Konrad much against his will—one of the four I had picked up at the Consulate—but the fairy gold as well; and I saw, as I counted up the scores of Bismarck’s heads, that he had sent half as much again. The stamps were accompanied by a long, affectionate, and deeply touching letter, which I read in a café above the Golden Horn. The smuggling, to which he guardedly referred as ‘hazardous trading, dear young,’ had become ancient history by then. All had gone well; he was back in the islands and teaching English; and there was a coy hint that he might be getting married to a lady teacher.... Apart from everything else, I was overjoyed by the idea that his English idiom might not be wholly lost. Perhaps it would spread among Frisian disciples like the words of St. Wilfred.

  But as I walked back to the Fenstergucker, I was troubled by the idea that with only three pounds to last the month, I might be in a fix; especially with a stretch of town life ahead. Of course, in the light of the last days’ windfalls, I could get some more.... Yet, with Konrad gone, the zest had vanished too. What had appeared an escapade now seemed, alone and in cold blood, hideously forbidding.

  Back at our café table, I took out the rest of my letters. The first, with an Indian stamp and Calcutta postmark, was from my father, the first since I had set out from England, re-forwarded from Munich. It was in answer to a letter of mine from Cologne in which I had broken the news of the fait accompli. I opened it with foreboding. But neatly folded inside the letter, was a birthday-cheque for a fiver! I had cast my bread upon the waters and it had returned to me in a quarter of an hour and, so to speak, with knobs on.

  * * *

  During the days with Konrad, our own preoccupations had selfishly taken precedence over everything else. Intermittently rumbling in the distance like stage thunder, the sounds of strife had gradually diminished and then ceased. Among the flat-dwellers these offstage noises had prompted deprecating clicks of the tongue and deep fatalistic sighs, but not for very long: hard times had induced a stoic attitude to trouble. The revolution vanished from the front pages of the foreign press and the headlines describing it in the café newspapers were less lurid each morning. As everything in the mood of the city conspired to reduce the scale of the events, it was easy to misunderstand them and I bitterly regretted this misappraisal later on: I felt like Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme, when he was not quite sure whether he had been present at Waterloo.

  * * *

  Outside the café, meanwhile, I hastened to join a one-way population drift along the Kärntnerstrasse. Everyone was heading for the Ring and I soon found myself jammed in the crowd not far from the point where I had parted from Konrad. All eyes were gazing the same way and in a little while a procession advanced out of the distance: it was to solemnize the end of the emergency. At the head, on a grey horse and carrying his sabre at the slope, rode the Vice-Chancellor, Mayor Fey, who had commanded the government forces: a grim-looking man with a jutting chin and a stahlhelm. An army contingent followed: then a column of the Heimwehr with Prince Starhemberg marching in front in a képi like a ski-cap and a long grey overcoat of martial cut, mildly waving; his face and his tall figure were immediately recognizable from his photographs. A black-clad group of ministers came next, led by the Chancellor himself. Dressed in a morning coat and carrying a top-hat, Dr. Dollfuss was hurrying to keep up. At the approach of Major Fey, the intermittent ripple of clapping remained unchanged; Starhemberg induced a slight rise in volume; but Dollfuss was hailed with something approaching an ovation. Another column of troops formed the rearguard and the procession was over.

  There was something cheerful and engaging about the Chancellor, but in spite of all the anecdotes, his small stature came as a surprise. As the crowd broke up, a fellow-bystander told me yet another. One of the soldiers in the recent siege, pointing to something on the pavement, had exlaimed: “Look! Fancy seeing a tortoise in the streets of Vienna!” “That’s not a tortoise,” his companion had said, “that’s Doktor Dollfuss in his stahlhelm”; and, for an outsider, that was the last of it.

  * * *

  I hadn’t arrived in Vienna totally unprepared. There were a few inhabitants on whom I could stake a shadowy claim. But, for the sake of morale, prompted by a sort of vagrant’s amour-propre, I hadn’t wanted to launch myself on them when I was absolutely broke. Now that this problem was solved, I dumped my stuff at the cheapest lodging house I could find and sought out a telephone. If I were asked to a meal it would be best, I felt, to turn up unburdened; a rucksack would have been too broad a hint. Unfounded though they had been, my qualms at the last castle had implanted the uncharacteristic notion in my mind that the appearance on the doorstep of an affable tramp with all his possessions on his back might possibly be considered a nuisance. (I shudder to think of the scourge I must have been. The idea that they are always welcome is a protective illusion of the young. Dangerously untroubled by doubts, I rejoiced in these changes of fortune with the zest of an Arabian beggar clad and feasted by the Caliph or the crapulous tinker who is picked up snoring and spirited to splendour in the first scene of The Taming of the Shrew.)

  In Vienna, the brunt fell on compatriots and Austrians almost equally. Robin Forbes-Robertson Hale, the sister-in-law of an old friend, put me up in a large flat which was always teeming with guests. It was perched in a gaunt and fascinating rookery in a street of the Inner City called the Schreyvogelgasse, or Shriekbird Lane. Tall and striking, she was just back, with two Austrian friends, from a wintry stay in Capri: they belonged to a small half-native and half-expatriate Bohemian set which seemed perfect from the first moment I became involved in it. With the end of the political troubles, the last days of Carnival were given over to music and dancing and dressing up. Wildish nights and late mornings set in, and after a last climactic fancy dress party, I woke in an armchair with an exploding head still decked with a pirate’s eyepatch and a cut-out skull and crossbones. At the first strokes of noon from the tower of the nearby Schottenkirche, the shuttered penumbra began to stir with groans; a concerted croaking for Alka-Seltzer broke out. A pierrot, a Columbine, a lion and a sleeping lioness with her moulting tail over the back of a sofa were disposed about the drawing-room like damaged but still just articulate toys.

  The recollection of the days that followed is blurred by the penitential onslaughts of snow, rain, sleet and hail which scourged the city with all the rigours of February and Shrovetide and Ash Wednesday. It was a wild winter; but the angry skies and the wind make the fires and the lamplight glow all the brighter in retrospect. With the first days of March, the Lenten ferocity flagged a little. I was living in a state of exaltation. I couldn’t quite believe I was there; and as though to put it beyond question, I often repeated ‘I’m in Vienna’ to myself when I woke up in the night or as I wandered about the streets.

  Some of this small society lived in old houses in the Inner City, others in the gently decaying fragments of subdivided palaces still adorned by swirls of wrought iron and leafy arabesques and moulded ceilings and the shutters and the double doors opened with intricately flourished handles. One of these new friends, Basset Parry-Jones, was a teacher—of English literature, I think—at the Konsularakademie, a sort of extension for older students of the Theresianum, the celebrated school founded by Maria Theresa. (Like students at St. Cyr and Saumur and the grim institution in Young Törless, the boys once wore cocked hats and rapiers which turned them into miniature French Academicians. It was the most famous place of its kind in the country and only rivalle
d by the Jesuit foundation at Kalksburg.) The Konsularakademie used to train candidates for the Diplomatic Service of the old Dual Monarchy and it still trailed some clouds of this k. und k. glory. Basset—half-sardonic half-enthusiastic, always beautifully dressed and a staunch guide and companion for noctambulism—lent me books and got permission for me to consult the Akademie library. Another new friend was an American girl called Lee, who was recuperating from some minor illness under the same roof. Good-looking, solemn and gentle, she was the daughter of the United States military attaché in a neighbouring capital. Surprisingly, or half-inevitably, she was a convinced pacifist. She applauded my reluctance to become a professional soldier but when I told her that I was only shy of peace-time soldiering, this excellent first impression was ruined. We often argued, and once or twice, in spite of her convalescence, until long after dawn. She was as little qualified as I for such debates: emotion and a kind heart were her guides; the arguments grew blurred on either side as the protracted but unacrimonious hours advanced, and ended in concord.

  A colleague of Basset’s called Baron von der Heydte and known as Einer, was a great friend of everyone, and soon of mine. In his middle twenties, civilized, quiet, thoughtful and amusing, he belonged to a family of Catholic landowners and soldiers in Bavaria, but his style and manner were far removed from what foreigners consider the German military tradition; and with the Nazi movement he had still less in common. (A few years later, I heard he had returned to Germany. Out of family atavism, and to avoid politics and the party activities which were swallowing up the whole of German civilian life, he had become a regular cavalry officer, rather like ancien régime Frenchmen, I think, who followed the profession of arms in spite of their hatred of the government.)

  On the first day of the battle of Crete, the memory of these Vienna weeks leapt back to my mind.

  Shortly after the first wave of German parachutists had dropped, a captured enemy document was brought to our battle H.Q. in the rocks outside Herakleion, where I was a junior officer. The paper contained the entire enemy order of battle, and, as I was thought to know German, it was handed to me: the spearhead of the attack, it disclosed, was under the command of a Captain von der Heydte: his battalion had been dropped near Galata, at the other end of the island, between Canea and Maleme aerodrome: close to where I had been stationed until a few days before. A German officer who was taken prisoner soon after cleared up any doubt. It was Einer, beyond question: he had transferred from the cavalry to a parachute unit some time before.

  The noise and the fighting died down at sunset. The short May night was illuminated by destroyed planes burning fitfully among the olive-trees and during these hours of respite, I couldn’t stop thinking of this strange coincidence. Chaos broke out again at dawn; and, all through the mortal blind-man’s-buff of the next eight days, I thanked my stars that we were loose, as it were, in different parts of the wood, for battles had degenerated during the last eighty-seven years. No chance now, like Cardigan and Radziwill recognizing each other from London ballrooms, of exchanging brief and ceremonious greetings through the smoke of the Russian guns. Again and again, in those whistling and echoing ravines, where a new and unknown smell was beginning to usurp the scents of spring, my thoughts flew back to the winter of 1934 and the tunes and jokes and guessing games, the candlelight and the scent of burning pine-cones when nothing was flying through the air more solid than snowflakes.[4]

  Surrounded by maps and atlases in the Akademie library, I discovered that, as the crow flies between Rotterdam and Constantinople, I was a little less than half-way. But no crow would have flown in the enormous loop that I had followed, and when I plotted the route and stepped it out with dividers, the total came to a great deal more than half; not that this meant much: the rest of the journey was sure to take an equally tortuous course. I knocked off the miles for the trip on the Rhine-barge and the lifts I had taken in bad weather and found that the distance I had actually slogged on my two feet was seven hundred and fifty miles. The journey had lasted sixty-two days, and when I had struck out the halts of more than one night and divided the distance by the time, the average worked out at twelve miles a day. Bearing in mind a few marches from daybreak till long after dark, but conveniently forgetting the times I had merely strolled to the next village, I was a little disappointed. I had imagined it was far more. But I was delighted with everything else. I never tired of recapitulating the journey. I had crossed three parallels of latitude and eleven meridians and moved over from the North Sea—still called ‘the German Ocean’ on old maps—to a minute-line of longitude running from the Baltic to the south-east Adriatic. Even looked at from the moon—so the terrestrial and celestial globes suggested—the distance covered would have been as discernible as the Great Wall of China.

  Back among the maps, and conscious all at once of the accessibility of the Mediterranean, I was assaulted by a train of thought which for a moment set the expedition in jeopardy. It is a famous hazard. All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of a nearly irresistable pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandoline strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe’s Law and is ineluctable as Newton’s or Boyle’s. I had felt twinges of its power as I crossed the Inn between Augsburg and Munich during a snowstorm: why not follow the river upstream to the Brenner, soft voices had seemed to whisper, and swoop down on Lombardy? And, sitting as restlessly as a fifth-century Goth and gazing at the cartographic defiles that cross the atlas page to Venice, I felt it now; but not for long. Thank heavens the fit passed. Venice, after all, was on the edge of familiar territory: Italy could wait. Just in time, the windings of the Middle and the Lower Danube began to reassert their claims and the Carpathians and the Great Hungarian Plain and the Balkan ranges and all these mysterious regions which lay between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea brought their rival magnetisms into play. Was I really about to trudge through this almost mythical territory? How would it compare to the lands I had already crossed? I would have been amazed had I known how circuitous it would be, and how much further than I had thought.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, there was Vienna.

  I had always enjoyed museums and picture galleries, but it was firmly established here that no stranger could let any of the city’s wonders elude him—“I suppose you’ve seen the Harrach collection? Have you looked at Habsburg tombs in the Kapuzinerkirche yet? What about the Belvedere?”—that I was shamed into exploring Vienna with unusual thoroughness. I found a companion now and then. One, much too briefly, was a funny, extremely vague and marvellously beautiful girl who was being finished in Vienna, called Ailsa McIver. She had the sort of radiant high spirits that made everyone turn round and smile. But usually I was alone.

  Few delights could compare with these wintry days: the snow outside, the bare trees outlined by the frost, the muted light, and, indoors, the rooms following each other filled with the spoils, the heirlooms and the dowries of a golden age. The galleries of the hibernating city retreated and grew smaller in the distance like vistas along dim rectangular telescopes. I had heard someone say that Vienna combined the splendour of a capital with the familiarity of a village. In the Inner City, where crooked lanes opened on gold and marble outbursts of Baroque, it was true; and, in the Kärntnerstrasse or the Graben, after I had bumped into three brand-new acquaintances within a quarter of an hour, it seemed truer still, and parts of the town suggested an even narrower focus. There were squares as small and complete and as carefully furnished as rooms. Façades of broken pediment and tiered shutter enclosed hushed rectangles of cobble; the drip of icicles eroded gaps in the frozen scallops of the fountains; the statues of archdukes or composers presided with pensive nonchalance; and all at once, as I loitered there, the silence would fly in pieces when
the initial clang from a tower routed a hundred pigeons crowding a Palladian cornice and scattered avalanches of snow and filled the geometric sky with wings. Palace succeeded palace, casemented arches sailed across the streets, pillars lifted their statues; ice-fettered in their pools, tritons floundered beneath a cloudy heaven and ribbed cupolas expanded by the score. The greatest of these, the dome of the Karlskirche, floated with a balloon’s lightness in an enclosing hemisphere of snow and the friezes that spiralled the shafts of the two statue-crowned guardian columns—free-standing and as heavily wrought as Trajan’s—gained an added impromptu spin when they vanished half-way up in a gyre of flakes.

  A hint of touchy Counter-Reformation aggression accompanies some ecclesiastical Baroque. There is a dash of it here and there in Vienna, and St. Stephen’s—steep and streamlined and Gothic—springs up unchallenged in the heart of it as though the balance needed redress. Bristling with finials and unloosing its gargoyles, the Cathedral lifts a solitary and warning steeple which dominates every dome and cupola and bell-tower in the city. (Styles of architecture become an obsession in this town. They played a great part in the circle I had strayed into. In a game of analogies, someone had suggested a murex shell, with its spines and its centrifugal asymmetry and its flaky and crusted surfaces, as the epitome of Rococo. Likewise, the symmetrical convolutions and the balancing arabesques of Baroque could be symbolized by a violin. A crosier hit off the brackeny helix and the exfoliation of Flamboyant; and Gothic could be a mitre—in the case of a cathedral, a whole Council of them piled like a card house until they vanished tapering in the clerestory shadows where void and solid change places and turn to stone.) In the rank of fiacres outside the south door of St. Stephen’s, cabbies in bowlers conversed in the Vienna dialect while they straightened the blankets on their horses’ quarters and gave them their feed in buckets. Some of these were as heavily whiskered as their masters. They steamed and fidgeted between the shafts, scattering their oats over the caked snow and the cobbles and sending an agreeable stable-yard whiff across the fumes of the hot coffee and the fresh cakes in the pastrycooks’ shops. Joining in my memory with the cold edge of the frost, the combination of these scents conjure up the city in a second.