A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

  On the far side of the bridge I abandoned the Rhine for its tributary and after a few miles alongside the Neckar the steep lights of Heidelberg assembled. It was dark by the time I climbed the main street and soon softly-lit panes of coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior—mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers—the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality—and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.

  This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: “Who rides so late through night and wind?” But I was puzzled by reitet. (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe’s famous Erlkönig, made more famous still by the music of Schubert?) What, a foreigner? I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue:... “Englischer Student...zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel”...I’d got it pat by now. “Konstantinopel?” she said. “Oh Weh!” O Woe! So far! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said, “You can’t go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!” she answered. “And where are you staying tonight, pray?” I hadn’t thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. “Stay with us,” he said. “You must be our guest.”

  They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess’s orders, I fished out things to be washed—it was my first laundry since London—and handed them over to the maid: wondering, as I did so, how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.

  * * *

  One of the stained-glass armorial shields in the windows bore the slanting zigzag of Franken. This old stronghold of the Salian Franks is a part of northern Bavaria now and the Red Ox Inn was the headquarters of the Franconia student league. All the old inns of Heidelberg had these regional associations, and the most exalted of them, the Saxoborussia, was Heidelberg’s Bullingdon and the members were Prussia’s and Saxony’s haughtiest. They held their sessions at Seppl’s next door, where the walls were crowded with faded daguerrotypes of slashed and incipiently side-whiskered scions of the Hochjunkertum defiant in high boots and tricoloured sashes. Their gauntlets grasped basket-hilted sabres. Askew on those faded pates little caps like collapsed képis were tilted to display the initial of the Corps embroidered on the crown—a contorted Gothic cypher and an exclamation mark, all picked out in gold wire. I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities.[1] With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm. Distance was measured; the sabres crossed at the end of outstretched arms; only the wrists moved; to flinch spelt disgrace; and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime. I had noticed these academic stigmata on the spectacled faces of doctors and lawyers; brow, cheek or chin, and sometimes all three, were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle age had inscribed there. I think Fritz, who was humane, thoughtful and civilized and a few years older than me, looked down on this antique custom, and he answered my question with friendly pity. He knew all too well the dark glamour of the Mensur among foreigners.

  The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Ein’ feste Burg from the next.

  That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it when the French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it? Didn’t I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz! The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...

  Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. “Guess what this gate is called!” Fritz said, slapping a red column. “The Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess.” Of course! I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brother’s head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabeth’s grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did.[2]

  In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suit with H.M.S. Indomitable on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regent’s Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.

  This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ‘’Tis the year’s midnight...the world’s whole sap is sunk.’ On the way back we passed a group of youths sitting on a low wall and kicking their heels as they whistled the Horst Wessel Lied between their teeth. Fritz said, “I think, perhaps, I’ve heard that tune before...”

  That night at the inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam. Except for pale blue eyes set flush with his head like a hare’s, he might have been an albino. He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “Wunderbar!” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany’s colonies? Why shouldn’t G
ermany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country that was run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?” Fritz shut his eyes with a bored groan and murmured “Um Gottes willen!” Then he took him by the elbow with the words, “Komm, Franzi!”; and, rather surprisingly, my accuser allowed himself to be led to the door. Fritz sat down again, saying: “I’m so sorry. You see what it’s like.” Luckily, none of the other tables had noticed and the hateful moment was soon superseded by feasting and talk and wine and, later, by songs to usher in St. Sylvester’s Vigil; and by the time the first bells of 1934 were clashing outside, everything had merged in a luminous haze of music and toasts and greetings.

  * * *

  Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year’s Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and the castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)[3]

  “Don’t forget your treuer Wanderstab,” Frau Spengel said, handing me my gleaming stick as I was loading up for departure on the second of January. Fritz accompanied me to the edge of the town. Ironed linen lay neatly in my rucksack; also a large parcel of Gebäck, special Sylvestrine cakes rather like shortbread, which I munched as I loped along over the snow. All prospects glowed, for the next halt—at Bruchsal, a good stretch further—was already fixed up. Before leaving London, a friend who had stayed there the summer before and canoed down the Neckar by faltboot with one of the sons of the house, had given me an introduction to the mayor. Fritz had telephoned; and by dusk I was sitting with Dr. Arnold and his family drinking tea laced with brandy in one of the huge baroque rooms of Schloss Bruchsal. I couldn’t stop gazing at my magnificent surroundings. Bruchsal is one of the most beautiful baroque palaces in the whole of Germany. It was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince-Bishops of Spires, I can’t remember when their successors stopped living in it; perhaps when their secular sovereignty was dissolved. But for many decades it had been the abode of the Burgomasters of Bruchsal. I stayed here two nights, sleeping in the bedroom of an absent son. After a long bath, I explored his collection of Tauchnitz editions and found exactly what I wanted to read in bed—Leave it to Psmith—and soon I wasn’t really in a German schloss at all, but in the corner seat of a first-class carriage on the 3:45 from Paddington to Market Blandings, bound for a different castle.

  * * *

  It was the first time I had seen such architecture. The whole of next day I loitered about the building; hesitating halfway up shallow staircases balustraded by magnificent branching designs of wrought metal; wandering through double doors that led from state room to state room; and gazing with untutored and marvelling eyes down perspectives crossed by the diminishing slants of winter sunbeams. Pastoral scenes unfolded in light-hearted colours across ceilings that were enclosed in a studiously asymetrical icing of scrolls and sheaves; shells and garlands and foliage and ribands depicted myths extravagant enough to stop an unprepared observer dead in his tracks. The sensation of wintry but glowing interior space, the airiness of the snowy convolutions, the twirl of the metal foliage and the gilt of the arabesques were all made more buoyant still by reflections from the real snow that lay untrodden outside; it came glancing up through the panes, diffusing a still and muted luminosity: a northern variant (I thought years later) of the reflected flicker that canals, during Venetian siestas, send up across the cloud-born apotheoses and rapes that cover the ceilings. Only statues and skeleton trees broke the outdoor whiteness, and a colony of rooks.

  In England, the Burgomaster, with his white hair and moustache, his erect bearing and grey tweeds, might have been colonel of a good line regiment. After dinner he tucked a cigar in a holder made of a cardboard cone and a quill, changed spectacles and, hunting through a pile of music on the piano, sat down and attacked the Waldstein Sonata with authority and verve. The pleasure was reinforced by the player’s enjoyment of his capacity to wrestle with it. His expression of delight, as he peered at the notes through a veil of cigar smoke and tumbling ash, was at odds with the gravity of the music. It was a surprise; so different was it from an evening spent with his putative English equivalent; and when the last chord had been struck, he leapt from the stool with a smile of youthful and almost ecstatic enjoyment amid the good-humoured applause of his family. A rush of appraisal broke out, and hot argument about possible alternative interpretations.

  * * *

  There was no doubt about it, I thought next day: I’d taken a wrong turning. Instead of reaching Pforzheim towards sunset, I was plodding across open fields with snow and the night both falling fast. My new goal was a light which soon turned out to be the window of a farmhouse by the edge of a wood. A dog had started barking. When I reached the door a man’s silhouette appeared in the threshold and told the dog to be quiet and shouted: “Wer ist da?” Concluding that I was harmless, he let me in.

  A dozen faces peered up in surprise, their spoons halted in mid air, and their features, lit from below by a lantern on the table, were as gnarled and grained as the board itself. Their clogs were hidden in the dark underneath, and the rest of the room, except for the crucifix on the wall, was swallowed by shadow. The spell was broken by the unexpectedness of the irruption: A stranger from Ausland! Shy, amazed hospitality replaced earlier fears and I was soon seated among them on the bench and busy with a spoon as well.

  The habit of grasping and speaking German had been outpaced during the last few days by another change of accent and idiom. These farmhouse sentences were all but out of reach. But there was something else here that was enigmatically familiar. Raw knuckles of enormous hands, half clenched still from the grasp of ploughs and spades and bill-hooks, lay loose among the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open. Smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the light caught its pewter ladle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp-haired giants...A small crone in a pleated coif sat at the end of the table, her eyes bright and timid in their hollows of bone and all these puzzled features were flung into relief by a single wick from below. Supper at Emmaus or Bethany? Painted by whom?

  Dog-tired from the fields, the family began to stretch and get down the moment the meal was over and to amble bedwards with dragging clogs. A grandson, apologizing because there was no room indoors, slung a pillow and two blankets over his shoulder, took the lantern and led the way across the yard. In the barn the other side, harrows, ploughshares, scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern’s beam. The head of a cart-horse, with a pale mane and tail and ears pricked at our advent, almost touched the rafters.

  When I was alone I stretched out on a bed of sliced hay like a crusader on his tomb, snugly wrapped up in greatcoat and blankets, with crossed legs still putteed and clodhoppered. Two owls were within earshot. The composite smell of snow, wood, dust, cobwebs, mangolds, beetroots, fodder, cattlecake and the cows’ breath was laced with an ammoniac tang from the plip-plop and the splash that sometimes broke the rhythm of the munching and the click of horns. There was an occasional grate of blocks and halters through their iron rings, a moo from time to time, or a huge horseshoe scraping or clinking on the cobbles. This was more like it!

  The eaves were stiff with icicles next morning. Everyone was out of the kitchen and already at work, except the old woman in the coif. She gave me a scalding bowl of coffee and milk with dark brown bread broken in it. Would an offer to pay be putting my foot in it, I wondered; and then tentatively proposed it. There was no offence;
but, equally, it was out of the question: “Nee, nee!” she said, with a light pat of her transparent hand. (It sounded the same as the English ‘Nay.’) The smile of her totally dismantled gums had the innocence of an infant’s. “Gar nix!” After farewells, she called me back with a shrill cry and put a foot-long slice of buttered black bread in my hand; I ate my way along this gigantic and delicious butterbrot as I went, and after a furlong, caught sight of all the others. They waved and shouted “Gute Reise!” They were hacking at the frost-bitten grass with mattocks, delving into a field that looked and sounded as hard as iron.

  Stick-nail fetishism carried me to Mühlacker, all of two miles off my way, in order to get the local stocknagel hammered on, the seventeenth. It was becoming a fixation.

  Of the town of Pforzheim, where I spent the next night, I remember nothing. But the evening after I was in the heart of Stuttgart by lamp-lighting time, sole customer in a café opposite the cubistic mass of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin. Snow and sleet and biting winds had emptied the streets of all but a few scuttling figures, and two cheerless boys doggedly rattling a collection box. Now they had vanished as well and the proprietor and I were the only people in sight in the whole capital of Württemberg. I was writing out the day’s doings and vaguely wondering where to find lodging when two cheerful and obviously well-brought up girls came in, and began buying groceries at the counter. They were amusingly dressed in eskimo hoods, furry boots and gauntlets like grizzly bears which they clapped together to dispel the cold. I wished I knew them... The sleet, turning to hail, rattled on the window like grapeshot. One of the girls, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, catching sight of my German-English dictionary, daringly said “How do you do, do, Mister Brown?” (This was the only line of an idiotic and now mercifully forgotten song, repeated ad infinitum like Lloyd George Knew My Father; it had swept across the world two years before.) Then she laughed in confusion at her boldness, under a mild reproof from her companion. I jumped up and implored them to have a coffee, or anything... They suddenly became more reserved: “Nein, nein, besten Dank, aber wir müssen weg!” I looked crestfallen; and after an exchange of “Warum nicht?”s, they consented to stay five minutes, but refused coffee.