A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  These undergraduates had landed their wandering compatriots in a fix. I cursed their vote; and it wasn’t even true, as events were to prove. But I was stung still more by the tacit and unjust implication that it was prompted by lack of spirit. I urged that there had always been an anti-militarist strain among the English in peace time. But when the blast of war blew in their ears, they imitated the action of the tiger, stiffened the sinews, summoned up the blood, and disguised fair nature with hard-favoured rage, etc. It didn’t cut much ice.

  * * *

  Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded. In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private. The rumours of the concentration camps were still no louder than a murmur; but they hinted at countless unavowable tragedies.

  In one of those lost Rhineland towns, I can’t remember which, I had a glimpse of how quick the change-over had been for many Germans. In a workmen’s bar late at night I made friends with several factory hands in overalls who had come off a late shift. They were about my age, and one of them, an amusing, clownish character, said: why didn’t I doss down on his brother’s camp bed at his place? When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine of Hitleriana. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His S.A. uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger. He explained these cult objects with fetishist zest, saving up till the last the centrepiece of his collection. It was an automatic pistol, a Luger parabellum, I think, carefully oiled and wrapped in mackintosh, accompanied by a pile of green cardboard boxes packed with bullets. He stripped and reassembled the pistol, loaded the magazine and smacked it home and ejected it again, put on a belt and crossbrace with a holster, whipped the gun in and out like a cowboy, tossed it in the air and caught it, spun it round by the trigger-guard and danced about with one eye shut, going through the motions of aiming and firing with loud clicks of the tongue... When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed, and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then! I wasn’t only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!” He gave a clenched fist salute. “You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly—Man hat sich totgelacht. Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” What about all his old pals, I asked. “They changed too!—all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They’re all in the S.A. now.” Had a lot of people done the same, then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!” He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. “Sakra Haxen noch amal! We’ve scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!” He laughed merrily. What did his parents think about it all? I had met them on the way up—rather a nice, seedy-looking old couple listening to the wireless by the kitchen stove. He shrugged and looked depressed. “Mensch! They don’t understand anything. My father’s old-fashioned: only thinks abut the Kaiser and Bismarck and old Hindenburg—and now he’s dead, too—anyway, he helped the Führer to get where he is! And my mother, she knows nothing about politics. All she cares about is going to church. She’s old-fashioned too.”

  * * *

  On the road running east from my last Bavarian halt in Traunstein the sudden clear weather showed how close I was getting to the Alps. The clouds had vanished and the great range soared out of the plain as abruptly as a wall rises from a field. The snow-covered masses climbed and gleamed, slashed with blue shadows; dark loops of fir and the peaks of the Kitzbühel Alps and the East Tyrol overlapped in the sky above a deep mesh of shadowy valleys. A signpost pointed south and along a valley at the end of which Bad Reichenhall lay. On the ledge above, Berchtesgaden was perched, only known, as yet, for its abbey and its castle and its view over the wide Bavarian lowlands.

  But I steered east and reached the banks of the Salzach late in the afternoon. A red, white and black pole barred the road. Inside the customs-house hung the last picture of the Führer. Uniform sleeves were ringed by the last swastika armbands and in a few minutes, beside a barrier striped red and white, an Austrian official was stamping my passport: 24 January 1934.

  By nightfall I was gazing at the statues and wandering down the baroque colonnades of Salzburg in search of a café. The windows, when I found one, looked out on a fountain adorned by stampeding horses and stalactitic with icicles.

  [1] I never saw the rucksack again: I had hoped the diary might have been jettisoned and handed in. Rather oddly the stick, with its twenty-two plaques, had vanished as well. The loss of the journal still aches now and then like an old wound in bad weather. There was no news either of the ‘pickeliger Bua.’ I repaid the fiver from Constantinople almost exactly a year later.

  [2] It was destroyed by a bomb in the war.

  [3] In The Condemned Playground by Cyril Connolly.

  5. THE DANUBE: SEASONS AND CASTLES

  ONLY GLIMPSES of Salzburg remain: bell-towers, bridges, piazzas, fountains, a dome or two and an impression of cloisters which might all have been flown here by djinns and reassembled as an Italian Renaissance city the wrong side of the Alps.

  But I didn’t tarry, and for a depressing reason. The evocative smell of hot ski-wax drifted through many of the windows and swarms of people, little older than me and all bound for the mountains, were clumping the streets with skis over their shoulders. They filled the arcades and the cafés and shouted joyfully to each other as though they were already swooping about the high slopes; worse still, some were English. I loved ski-ing and all this made me feel lonely and out of things. So, early next morning, turning my back on the Salzkammergut and the lakes and the beckoning peaks of Styria and the Tyrol, I slipped away; and soon I was plodding north-west and ever further from temptation through the woods of Upper Austria. I slept in a barn near the village of Eigendorf—too small a hamlet for any map—and the next two nights in Frankenburg and Ried. One of them, spent in a loft where all the racks were filled with apples, was sweet-smelling almost to swooning point. Little has stuck from early Austrian days except the charm of these minor mountains.

  * * *

  St. Martin, one of Baron Liphart’s castles, the earliest of those houses of friends to whom he had written on my behalf, is my first real landmark. To avoid arriving out of the blue, I telephoned before setting out, and learnt that the owner was in Vienna; but he had asked his agent to look after me if I turned up. Graf Arco-Valley, a great favourite of many English people, called ‘Nando’ (but not by me as we never met[1]) had been at Oxford or Cambridge a couple of generations earlier. The schloss was shut up, the friendly agent told me. But we wandered through its twilit rooms and walked about under the trees in the park. Finally he gave me a feast in the cheerful and pretty inn, urging me to tuck in with the assiduity of a jolly uncle taking a nephew out from school. There were a couple of musicians, a zither-player and a violinist, and everybody sang. He told me at breakfast he had telephoned to the next schloss marked down on the Liphart itinerary: I would be welcome any time, they had said. (Things were beginning to look up! I would have given anything to know what my kind sponsor in Munich had written. It was a change to have favourable reports circulating.) As a result, after a
second cow-shed sojourn near Riedau, I found myself in the corner tower of another castle two evenings later, wallowing in a bath of ancient shape, enclouded by the scent of the cones and the pine-logs that roared like caged lions in the huge copper stove.

  * * *

  The word ‘schloss’ means any degree of variation between a fortified castle and a baroque palace. This one was a fair sized manor house. I had felt shy as I ploughed through the snow of the long avenue late that afternoon; quite baselessly. To go by the solicitude of the trio at the stove-side in the drawing-room—the old Count and his wife and their daughter-in-law—I might, once again, have been a schoolboy asked out for a treat, or, better still, a polar explorer on the brink of expiring. “You must be famished after all that walking!” the younger Gräfin said, as a huge tea appeared: she was a beautiful dark-haired Hungarian and she spoke excellent English. “Yes,” said the elder, with an anxious smile, “We’ve been told to feed you up!” Her husband radiated silent benevolence as yet another silver dish appeared. I spread a third hot croissant with butter and honey and inwardly blessed my benefactor in Munich.

  The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. (Next day he wrote a chit to some private gallery in Linz on the back of a visiting card. After his name was printed: K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R.[2] ‘Imperial and Royal Chamberlain,’ that is, ‘and retired Captain of Horse.’ All through Central Europe the initials ‘K.u.K.’—Kaiserlich und Königlich—were the alliterative epitome of the old Dual Monarchy. Only candidates with sixteen or thirty-two quarterings, I learnt later, were eligible for the symbolic gold key that court chamberlains wore on the back of their full-dress uniforms. But now the Empire and the Kingdom had been dismembered and their thrones were empty; no doors opened to the gold keys, the heralds were dispersed, the regiments disbanded and the horses dead long ago. The engraved words croaked loud of spent glories. Rare then, each of those symbols by now must be one with the translucent red button, the unicorn-embroidered robe and the ruby and jade clasp of a mandarin of the first class at the court of Manchus: ‘Finis rerum, and an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene...’) I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a grey and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock’s tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. It was in Salzburg that I had first admired these Austrian country clothes. They were similar in kind, but less splendid in detail, to the livery of the footmen who kept bringing in those silver dishes. There was a feeling of Lincoln green about them, woodland elegance that the Count carried off with the ease of a courtier and a cuirassier.

  I made myself as tidy as I could after my bath. At dinner the Count, drawing on a well-stored but failing memory, recalled ancient journeys he had made as a young A.D.C., attached to an Archduke who was a passionate shot. Out of affability to me, I think, his reminiscences were all connected with the British Isles. ‘Grandes battues’ in County Meath were recalled, and almost antediluvian pheasant-stands at Chatsworth and late-Victorian grouse-drives at Dunrobin; house parties of untold magnificence. “—Und die Herzogin von Sutherland!,” he sighed: “eine Göttin!” A goddess! Ancient balls were conjured up and dinners at Marlborough House; there were discreet hints of half-forgotten scandals; and I saw, in my mind’s eye, hansoms bound for assignations, bowling up St. James’s and turning into a gaslit Jermyn Street. When the name of a vanished grandee escaped his memory, his wife would prompt him. His mind wandered back and away to the estates of a cousin in Bohemia—“The Czechs have taken them away now,” he said with another sigh—and a wild boar shoot which had been held there in honour of Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales: “Er war scharmant!” I was fascinated by all this. As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks—or so I thought—and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!,” he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono—!”

  I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar—the last of a bottle of a liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age. When we had recovered I felt glad that this marvellous drink had been rescued, above all for the Count’s sake—it was too late a stage in life for any more shocks—and ashamed of my pot-house ways; but they were too kind-hearted for the feeling to last long.

  The Count retired early, kissing first the hands and then the cheeks of his wife and daughter-in-law. When he said goodnight to me, his hand felt as light as a leaf. With his free hand he gave my forearm a friendly pat and faded away down a lamplit grove of antlers. Then the elder Gräfin, who had put on spectacles and spread her needlework on her lap, said, “Now come and tell us all about your travels.” So I did my best.

  * * *

  At this dead time of the year, when agriculture had come to a halt, most of the dwellers in these castles were dispersed until harvest or shooting or school holidays should muster them again. When I think of these havens, later castles at other seasons intrude their memories and the resulting confusion of unlabelled lantern-slides composes a kind of archetypal schloss, of which each separate building becomes a variation.

  An archetypal schloss... At once, in my mind’s eye, an angular relic of the Dark Ages confronts the wind on top of a crag. More slowly, a second vision begins to cohere. Staircases entwine. Allegorical ceilings unfold. Conch-blowing tritons, at the heart of radiating vistas of clipped hornbeam, shoot plumes of water at the sky. Both visions are true. But finally a third category emerges: a fair-sized country house, that is, which combines the castle-principle with a touch of the monastery and the farm. It is usually beautiful and always pleasing and sometimes age or venerability demand sterner epithets. A rustic baroque, even if it is only a later superimposition on a much older core, is the presiding style. There are shingle roofs, massive walls whitewashed or mottled with lichen and rectangular and cylindrical towers capped with pyramids or cones or with wasp-waisted cupolas of red or grey tiles. Cavernous gateways breach the arcades of thick and flattened arches. There is a chapel and stables and a coach-house full of obsolete carriages; barns and waggons and sledges and byres and a smithy; then fields and hayricks and woods. Indoors, a pattern of flagstones rings underfoot, or the lighter resonance of polished wood. The spans of elliptical and snow-white cross-vaults spring low in the corners of the rooms and between them flared embrasures taper to tall double windows that are tight shut and ice-flowered in winter, with bolsters between them to foil draughts. In summer the tilt of the slatted shutters guides the glance downwards to leaf-shadows on cobblestones and a battered fountain or a sundial. The pockmarked statues are curdled with lichen. Scythes swish through deep hayfields. There is an interlock of orchards and slanting meadows; and beyond them, cattle and woods and a herd of deer that lift all their antlers simultaneously at the sound of a footfall.

  As I shut my eyes and explore, looking-glasses throw back the faded reflections:
the corroborative detail assembles fast. In portraits,[3] the solemn seventeenth-century magnates in lace collars and black breastplates are out-numbered by descendants in Addisonian periwigs and powder. Later, by slender figures romantically moustached, and dressed in white uniforms that conjure up pictures of Sarah Bernhardt in l’Aiglon. Lancers’ torsoes taper into their sashes like bobbins. Red and white ribbons cross their breasts and sometimes the Golden Fleece sprouts from those high star-crusted collars. Hands rest on the hilt of a sabre looped with a double-headed-eagle sabretache.[4] Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon’s helmet or an uhlan’s czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette. In later pictures, pale blue replaces these snowy regimentals, in melancholy homage to the progress in firearms and marksmanship since the battle of Königgrätz. The passion for the chase breaks out over the walls and stags’ antlers spread their points among the panoplies. There are elks’ horns from the frontiers of Poland and Lithuania, bears from the Carpathians, the tushes of wild boars twisting up like moustaches, chamois from the Tyrol and bustards, capercaillies and blackcock; along every available inch of the passages, the twin prongs of roe deer, calligraphically inscribed with a faded date and the venue, multiply forever. A respectable assembly of books fills the library. There is a missal or two in the hall, the Wiener Salonblatt and Vogue lie anachronistically about the drawing room and perhaps a poetical grandson or great-niece has left a pocket-volume of Hyperion or the Duino Elegies on a window-sill. Miniatures and silhouettes constellate the spaces between the portraits and the looking-glasses. Heraldic details abound: crowns or circlets with nine, seven or five pearls celebrate the owner’s rank and stamp his possessions as plentifully as brands on a ranch. On a handy shelf the small gilt volumes of the Almanach de Gotha, a different colour for each degree, fall open automatically, like the Baronetage in the hands of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, at the castellan’s own family. Biedermeier tables are crowded with photographs. Scores of summers have faded the green, the royal blue, the canary and the claret-coloured velvet of their frames. Between his embossed crown and a signature turned yellow with age, Franz Joseph presides like an agathos daimon. The Empress, goddess-like among a photographer’s cardboard turrets, gazes into the distance with her hand on the head of an enormous deer-hound. Sewn into her habit, she clears prodigious fences; or with a swan-like turn of her throat, she looks over her bare shoulder under piled-up tiers of thick plaits or cascading coils that are sprinkled with diamond stars.