Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I mentioned earlier that we—or rather, the polymath—had talked about the Marcomanni and the Quadi, who had lived north of the river hereabouts. The habitat of the Marcomanni lay a little further west; the Quadi dwelt exactly where we were sitting. ‘Yes,’ he had said, ‘things were more or less static for a while . . .’ He illustrated this with a pencil-stub on the back of the Neue Freie Presse. A long sweep represented the Danube; a row of buns indicated the races that had settled along the banks; then he filled in the outlines of eastern Europe. ‘. . . and suddenly, at last,’ he said, ‘something happens!’ An enormous arrow entered the picture on the right, and bore down on the riverside buns. ‘The Huns arrive! Everything starts changing place at full speed!’ His pencil leaped feverishly into action. The buns put forth their own arrows of migration and began coiling sinuously about the paper till Mitteleuropa and the Balkans were alive with demons’ tails. ‘Chaos! The Visigoths take shelter south of the lower Danube, and defeat the Emperor Valens at Adrianople, here!,’ he twisted the lead on the paper—‘in 476. Then—in only a couple of decades’—a great loop of pencil swept round the tip of the Adriatic and descended a swiftly outlined Italy ‘— we get Alaric! Rome is captured! The Empire splits in two –’ the pace of his delivery reminded me of a sports commentator ‘— and the West totters on for half a century or so. But the Visigoths are heading westwards,’ an arrow curved to the left and looped into France, which rapidly took shape, followed by the Iberian peninsula. ‘Go West, young Goth!’ he murmured as his pencil threw off Visigothic kingdoms across France and Spain at a dizzy speed. ‘There we are!’ he said; then, as an afterthought, he absentmindedly pencilled in an oval across northern Portugal and Galicia, and I asked him what it was. ‘The Suevi, same as the Swabians, more or less: part of the whole movement. But now,’ he went on, ‘here go the Vandals!’ A few vague lines from what looked like Slovakia and Hungary joined together and then swept west in a broad bar that mounted the Danube and advanced into Germany. ‘Over the Rhine in 406: then clean across Gaul —’ here the speed of his pencil tore a ragged furrow across the paper—‘through the Pyrenees three years later—here they come!—then down into Andalucia ‘—hence the name—and hop!—’ the pencil skipped the imaginary straits of Gibraltar and began rippling eastwards again—along the north African coast to’—he improvised the coast as he went, then stopped with a large black blob—‘Carthage! And all in thirty-three years from start to finish!’ His pencil was busy again, so I asked him the meaning of all the dotted lines he had started sending out from Carthage into the Mediterranean. ‘Those are Genseric’s fleets, making a nuisance of themselves. Here he goes, sacking Rome in 455! There was lots of sea activity just about then.’ Swooping to the top of the sheet, he drew a coast, a river’s mouth and a peninsula: ‘That’s the Elbe, there’s Jutland.’ Then, right away in the left hand corner, an acute angle appeared, and above it, a curve like an ample rump; Kent and East Anglia, I was told. In a moment, from the Elbe’s mouth, showers of dots were curving down on them. ‘—and there go your ancestors, the first Angles and Saxons, pouring into Britain only a couple of years before Genseric sacked Rome.’ Close to the Saxon shore, he inserted two tadpole figures among the invading dots: what were they? ‘Hengist and Horsa,’ he said, and refilled the glasses.

  This was the way to be taught history! It was just about now that a second bottle of Langenlois appeared. His survey had only taken about five minutes; but we had left the Marcomanni and the Quadi far behind . . . The polymath laughed. ‘I forgot about them in the excitement! There’s no problem about the Marcomanni,’ he said. ‘They crossed the river and became the Bayuvars—and the Bayuvars are the Bavarians—I’ve got a Markoman grandmother. But the Quadi! There are plenty of mentions of them in Roman history. Then, all of a sudden—none! They vanished just about the time of the Vandals’ drive westward . . .’ They probably went along with them too, he explained, as part of the slipstream . . . ‘A whole nation shimmering upstream like elvers—not that there are any eels in the Danube,’ he interrupted himself parenthetically, on a different note. ‘Not native ones, unfortunately: only visitors—suddenly, the forests are empty. But, as nature hates a vacuum, not for long. A new swarm takes their place. Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden!’ There was no room on the Neue Freie Presse, so he shifted a glass and drew the tip of Scandinavia on the scrubbed table top. ‘This is the Baltic Sea, and here they come.’ A diagram like the descent of a jellyfish illustrated their itinerary. ‘By the middle of the fifth century they were settled all along the left bank of the Middle Danube—if “settled” is the word—they were all such fidgets.’ I’d never heard of the Rugii. ‘But I expect you’ve heard of Odoaker? He was a Rugian.’ The name, pronounced in the German way, did suggest something. There were hints of historical twilight in the syllables, something momentous and gloomy . . . but what? Inklings began to flicker.

  Hence my ascent to this ruin. For it was Odoacer, the first barbarian king after the eclipse of the last Roman Emperor. (‘Romulus Augustulus!’ the polymath had said. ‘What a name! Poor chap, he was very good-looking, it seems, and only sixteen.’)

  Behind the little town of Aggsbach Markt on the other bank, the woods which had once teemed with Rugians rippled away in a fleece of tree-tops. Odoacer came from a point on the north bank only ten miles downstream. He dressed in skins, but he may have been a chieftain’s, even a king’s son. He enlisted as a legionary, and by the age of forty-two he was at the head of the winning immigrant clique in control of the Empire’s ruins, and finally King. After the preceding imperial phantoms, his fourteen years’ reign seemed—humiliatingly to the Romans—an improvement. It was not a sudden night at all, but an afterglow, rather, of a faintly lighter hue and lit with glimmers of good government and even of justice. When Theodoric replaced him (by slicing him in half with his broadsword from the collarbone to the loins at a banquet in Ravenna) it was still not absolutely the end of Roman civilization. Not quite; for the great Ostrogoth was the patron of Cassiodorus and of Boethius, ‘the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman.’ But he slew them both and then died of remorse; and the Dark Ages had come, with nothing but candles and plainsong left to lighten the shadows. ‘Back to the start,’ as the polymath had put it, ‘and lose ten centuries.’

  * I loved all this. I was soon suspiciously expert in all the relevant sociohistorical lore, to which others might give a grosser name. But I would have been genuinely taken aback if anyone had taxed me with snobbery.

  Konrad

  from A Time of Gifts

  Paddy spent the night after his nineteenth birthday, 12 February 1934, in a Salvation Army hostel on the outskirts of Vienna. He was broke, and was hoping that his monthly allowance of £4 would be waiting at the British Consulate. It wasn’t; but his new friend Konrad hit upon an excellent solution to the problem.

  An arresting figure in blue-striped pyjamas was sitting up reading in the next bed when I awoke. The fleeting look of Don Quixote in his profile would have been pronounced if his whiskers had been springier but they drooped instead of jutting. His face was narrow-boned and his silky, pale brown hair was in premature retreat from his brow and thin on top. His light blue eyes were of an almost calf-like gentleness. Between the benign curve of his moustache and a well-shaped but receding chin the lower lip drooped a little, revealing two large front teeth, and his head, poised on a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, was attached to a tall and gangling frame. No appearance could have tallied more closely with foreign caricatures of a certain kind of Englishman; but instead of the classical half-witted complacency—Un Anglais à Mabille—a mild, rather distinguished benevolence stamped my neighbour. When he saw that I was awake, he said, in English, ‘I hope your slumbers were peaceful and mated with quiet dreams?’ The accent, though unmistakably foreign, was good, but the turn of phrase puzzling. No trace of facetiousness marred an expression of sincere and gentle concern.
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  His name was Konrad, and he was the son of a pastor in the Frisian Islands. I hadn’t read The Riddle of the Sands and I wasn’t sure of their whereabouts but I soon learnt that they follow the coasts of Holland and Germany and Denmark in a long-drawn-out archipelago from the Zuider Zee to the Heligoland Bight where they turn north and die away off the Jutish coast. Tapered by tides and winds, interspersed with reefs, always crumbling and changing shape, littered with wrecks, surrounded by submerged villages, clouded with birds, and heavily invaded, some of them, by summer bathers, the islands scarcely rise above sea-level. Konrad belonged to the German central stretch. He had learnt English at school and had continued his studies, during his spare time from a multiplicity of jobs, almost exclusively by reading Shakespeare and this sometimes gave his utterances an incongruous and even archaic turn. I can’t remember what mishaps had brought him, in his late thirties, into such low water and he didn’t dwell on them. He was not a dynamic personality. The quiet good humour, the poise and the mild but unmistakable dignity of bearing that glowed from him, were strikingly at odds with the feckless morning hubbub of the enormous room. Holding up a disintegrating volume, he told me he was rereading Titus Andronicus. [. . .]

  We shared some of his bread and cheese at one of the scrubbed tables down the middle of the room and, as we ate, I learnt that his feelings for the English language—and for England in general—sprang from a theory about his native archipelago. Before they were driven to the islands, the Frisians had been a powerful and important mainland race and it seems that they and their language were more akin to the ultimate English than any of the other Germanic tribes that invaded Britain. He was convinced that Hengist and Horsa were Frisians. (Where was the polymath? As Konrad spoke, I began to see the two invaders in a new light: instead of meaty, freckled and tow-haired giants barging their berserker way into Kent, I now saw two balding, slightly equine and Konrad-like figures wading ashore with diffident coughs.) He cited a further proof of the closeness of the two nations: a couple of centuries after Hengist, when the shipwrecked St Wilfred of York began to preach to the still heathen Frisians, no interpreter was needed. It was the same when St Willibrod arrived from Northumbria. I asked him to say something in the Frisian dialect. I couldn’t understand his answer, but the short words and flat vowels sounded just as English must to someone who doesn’t know the language.

  I drew him as he talked, and it came out well—one couldn’t go wrong! He gazed at the result with thoughtful approval and offered to guide me to the British Consulate, where I hoped salvation lay. We left our effects, as he called them, in the office. ‘We must beware,’ he said. ‘Among good and luckless men there is no lack of base ones, footpads and knaves who never shrink from purloining. Some love to filch.’ Tall and bony in a long, threadbare overcoat and a rather wide-brimmed trilby, he looked serious and imposing, though something in his bearing and in his wide, soft gaze lent a touch of absurdity. His stylish and well-brushed hat was on the point of disintegration. With unexpected worldliness, he showed me the maker’s name inside: ‘Habig,’ he said. ‘He is the most renowned of the hatters of Vienna.’

  The surroundings were even more depressing by daylight. The Hostel lay in the Kolonitzgasse in the Third District between the loading bays of the Customs House and the grimy arches of a viaduct and an overhead railway track, silent now like the whole derelict quarter. Rubbish seemed to cover everything. Our track took us over the Radetzky Bridge and beside the Danube Canal through a dismal scene of sad buildings and dirty snow under a cloudy sky. We turned up the Rotenturmstrasse and, as we made our way into the Inner City, things began to change. We passed St Stephen’s Cathedral and its single gothic spire. The barriers and the road-blocks of the day before were still there, but passage was free and for the moment no gunfire sounded in the distance. The city seemed to have returned to normal. Palaces began to assemble, fountains rose, and monuments with fantastical elaboration. We crossed the Graben to the Am Hof-Platz: passing a tall pillar with a statue of the Virgin, we headed for a street the other side, where a flagpole and a tin oval with the lion and the unicorn indicated the British Consulate. The clerk inside looked in all the pigeon-holes for a registered letter. There was nothing.

  If Vienna had looked grim and overcast before, it was doubly so as I joined Konrad below in the Wallnerstrasse. A few drops of sleety drizzle were falling. ‘Be not downcast, my dear young,’ Konrad said, when he saw me. ‘We must take counsel.’ We walked down the Kohlmarkt. At the other end a great archway opened into the courtyard of the Hofburg and zinc-green domes assembled over rows of windows. We turned left into the Michaelerkirche. It was dark inside and after the classical surroundings, unexpectedly gothic and empty except for a beadle who was lighting candles for an impending Mass. We settled in a pew, and after perfunctory prayers for the beadle’s benefit, Konrad said: ‘Hark, Michael! All is not lost. I have been ripening a plan. Have you your sketch-block by you?’ I tapped the pocket of my greatcoat, and he unfolded his plan, which was that I should sketch professionally from house to house. I was appalled, firstly from timidity, secondly out of very well-founded modesty. I protested that my drawing of him had been a lucky exception. Usually they were very amateurish; putting his suggestion into practice would almost be taking money under false pretences. Konrad quickly overrode these objections. Think of wandering artists at fairs! Where was my spirit of enterprise? His siege was mild but firm.

  I gave in and soon I began to feel rather excited. Before we left, I thought of lighting a candle to bring us luck, but we hadn’t a single coin between us. We headed for the Mariahilf Quarter. Falling into step, he said: ‘We will commence with the small buggers’—to my surprise, for his usual discourse was rather prim. I asked him: what small buggers? He stopped dead, and a blush began to spread until it had entirely mantled his long face. ‘Oh! dear young!’ he cried. ‘I am sorry! Ich meinte, wir würden mit Kleinbürgern anfangen—with little burghers! The rich and the noble here,’ he waved his hand round the old city, ‘have always lackeys, many and proud, and sometimes they are not deigning to vouchsafe.’ As we walked, he rehearsed me in what to say. He thought I should ask for five Schillinge a picture. I said it was too much: I would ask for two: a bit more than an English shilling, in fact. Why didn’t he keep me company for the first few times? ‘Ah, dear young!’ he said, ‘I am of ripe years already! I would be always frightening them! You, so tender, will melt hearts.’ He told me that Viennese front doors were pierced by peepholes at eye level, through which the inhabitants always surveyed prospective visitors before they unlatched. ‘Never cast your eye on it,’ he advised me: ‘Ring, then gaze upward at the Everlasting with innocence and soul.’ He took my walking stick, and advised me to carry my coat folded over my arm and to hold my sketching book and pencil in the other hand. My outfit looked a little odd, but it was still clean and tidy: boots, puttees, cord breeches, leather jerkin and a grey shirt and a pale blue hand-woven and rather artistic tie. I combed my hair in a shop window, and the closer we got to our field of action, the more I felt we must have resembled Fagin and the Artful Dodger. We shook hands earnestly in the hall of an old-fashioned block of flats and I mounted and rang the first bell on the mezzanine floor.

  The little brass peep-hole gleamed cyclopically. I pretended not to notice that an eye had replaced the lid on the other side but bent my gaze on vacancy; and when the door opened and a little maid asked me what I wanted, I spoke up on cue: ‘Darf ich mit der Gnä’ Frau sprechen, bitte?’ (‘Please may I speak to the gracious lady?’) She left me in the open doorway, and I waited, eagerly poised for my next utterance, which was to be: ‘Guten Tag, Gnä’ Frau! Ich bin ein englischer Student, der zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel wandert, und ich möchte so gern eine Skizze von Ihnen machenl’* But it remained unuttered, for the maid’s embassy to the drawing-room, almost before she could have opened her mouth, produced results that neither Konrad nor I could have foreseen. A man’s shrill voice cried: ‘Ach nein! Es i
st nicht mehr zu leiden!’ ‘It’s not to be borne! I must make an end!’; and, hot-foot on these words, a small bald figure in a red flannel dressing-gown came hurtling down the passage with the speed of a cannon ball. His head was averted and his eyes were tight shut as though to exclude some loathed vision and his palms were repellingly spread at the ends of his arms. ‘Aber nein, Helmut!’ he cried. ‘Nein, nein, nein! Not again, Helmut! Weg! Weg! Weg! Weg! Away, away, away!’ His hands by now were against my chest and thrusting. He carried me before him like snow before a snowplough and the two of us, one advancing and one retreating, flowed out through the door and across the landing in a confused and stumbling progress. Meanwhile the little maid was squeaking ‘Herr Direktor! It’s not Herr Helmut!’ Suddenly he stopped; and his reopened eyes sprang from their sockets. ‘My dear young man!’ he cried aghast. ‘A thousand times, my apologies! I thought you were my brother-in-law! Come in! Come in!’ Then he shouted to the room we had left, ‘Anna! It’s not Helmut!’ and a woman in a dressing-gown was soon at hand and anxiously seconding her husband’s apologies. ‘My dear sir!’ he continued, ‘please come in!’ I was whirled into the drawing-room. ‘Gred! Bring a glass of wine and a slice of cake! There! Sit down! A cigar?’ I found myself in an armchair, facing the man and his wife, who were beaming at me. His rosy face was adorned with one of those waxed and curled moustaches that are kept in position overnight by a gauze bandage. His eyes sparkled and his fingers drummed arpeggios in double time on his knees as he talked. His wife murmured something and he said: ‘Oh yes! Who are you?’ I slipped into my second phase (‘Student,’ ‘Constantinople,’ ‘sketch,’ etc.). He listened intently and I had barely finished before he shot into his bedroom. He emerged two minutes later in a stand-up collar, a speckled bow tie and a velvet jacket trimmed with braid. His moustache had a fresh twist to it and two carefully trained strands of hair were arranged across his scalp with great skill. Sitting on the edge of his chair, he folded his hands palm to palm on his joined knees with a challenging jut to his elbows, and, gazing nobly into the middle distance with one toe tapping at high speed, froze into a bust. I got to work, and his wife poured out another glass of wine. The sketch didn’t seem very good to me, but when it was finished, my sitter was delighted. He sprang to his feet and flew buoyantly about the room with the sketch at arm’s length, the forefinger and thumb of the other hand joined in connoisseurship. ‘Ein chef d’oeuvre!’ he said—‘Ein wirkliches Meisterstück!’ They declared themselves astonished at the low fee demanded. I graciously accepted a handful of cigars as well, and did a sketch of his wife. He persisted, as she sat, in using the bun on the crown of her head as a pivot for swivelling her face to more telling angles; and when this was finished they led me across the landing to do a sketch of a retired lady singer who in her turn passed me on to the wife of a music publisher. I was launched! When I found Konrad again, he was patiently mooning about the pavement. I approached him as though I had just slain the Jabberwock, and was suitably acclaimed. In a few minutes, we were in a snug Gastzimmer, toying with Krenwurst, ordering delicious Jungfernbraten and geröstete potatoes and wine. Thanks to Trudi, Major Brock and, that morning, Konrad and my recent sitter, body and soul had been kept firmly together; but it was the first actual meal since dinner at the castle two days earlier. It seemed a long time ago. For Konrad, I think, it was the first real spread for much longer. A little flustered at first, he professed to deplore all this extravagance. My attitude, from a phrase in The Winter’s Tale which we had been looking at earlier, was ‘’Tis fairy gold, boy, and ‘twill prove so’; and, as we clinked glasses, my elation affected him. ‘You see, dear young, how boldness is always prospering?’ After this feast, I went back to work, leaving Konrad in a café reading Venus and Adonis.