A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  [6] The refrain, with the spelling modernized, is:

  Woefully arrayed,

  My blood, man,

  For thee ran,

  It may not be nayed;

  My body blue and wan,

  Woefully arrayed.

  [7] But his perspective was still short of solution! The ends of all those volleys pepper the target area with near-misses, instead of converging on a single bull’s eye, as, half a century before, Brunelleschi had discovered and Alberti had written that they should. The northward journey of ideas was beset with delays.

  [8] ‘One for the lord, one for the serf, one for the ancient woodman’s right.’

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

  [10] They had been, officially, but nobody paid the slightest attention.

  6. THE DANUBE: APPROACH TO A KAISERSTADT

  NEXT MORNING, after we had rowed across to Ybbs and back, conversation in the sunny front room of the inn flowed on till luncheon. The sun was well down the sky when I set out, and by nightfall I found myself in a mildly spurious kind of hunters’ tavern in a valley only five miles further on. There was an open stove and the walls were laden with guns, hunting knives, horns, animal traps, badgers, moor-hens, weasels, pheasant and deer. Everything was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers. There were even some genuine foresters among the people out for the evening from Krems. A tireless accordionist accompanied the singing and through the thickening haze of wine, even the soppiest songs sounded charming: ‘Sag beim Abschied leise “Servus,”’ ‘Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier,’ and ‘In einer kleinen Konditorei.’ Songs from the White Horse Inn followed, and regimental marches of the most unmilitary kind, like the Deutschmeistermarsch (‘Wir sind vom K.u.K. Infanterieregiment’), the Kaiserjäger and Radetzky Marches and the Erzherzog-Johann-Lied. Musically speaking, London never plucks at the heart-strings. But Paris, from Villon to Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker, never stops, nor does Naples, nor, above all, does Vienna: ‘Goodnight Vienna’; ‘Ich möcht mal wieder in Grinzing sein; Wien, Wien, nur du allein!’—they followed each other staunchlessly and the eyes of the singers grew mistier and mistier with home-sickness. Then we moved on to the rival dreamland of Styria and the Tyrol: peaks, valleys, forests, streams, cowbells, shepherds’ flutes, chamois and eagles: ‘Zillertal, du bist mein Freud!,’ ‘Fern vom Tirolerland,’ ‘Hoch vom Dachstein an’... Everything became blurred and golden. The one I liked most was the Andreas-Hofer-Lied, a moving lament for the great mountain leader of the Tyrolese against Napoleon’s armies, executed in Mantua and mourned ever since. I found myself, with two new friends, still singing it in the small hours as we descended the valley. We passed the luminous vision of a watermill fossilized in ice and snow. When we reached the river, we rowed across to a circular bastion and a tall belfry glimmering among the trees on the other bank. As we climbed the steps into the starry town of Pöchlarn, a window opened and told us to stop making such a noise.

  We were invading one of the most important Danubian landmarks of the Nibelungenlied! The polymath had said it was the only place in the whole saga where no slaughter had broken out. The Margrave Rüdiger entertained the Nibelungen-Burgundians in this very castle, feasting them in coloured tents pitched all over the meadows. They were celebrating a betrothal with dancing and songs to the viol. Then the great army rode away to Hungary and their doom. ‘And none of them,’ the poet says, ‘ever got back alive to Pöchlarn.’

  * * *

  The mountains had once more loosened their hold on the river and the little towns succeeded each other at shorter intervals. Those across the water slid into view quietly posing above their reflections with a two-dimensional and stage-like solemnity. The gabled and coloured façades, entwined with ironwork and symmetrically leaved with shutters, joined in a line of scenery that ran the length of each quay. A few arches pierced this back-drop. Russet or sulphurous cupolas were lifted above the roofs. Higher still there was always a castle and stream-beds descended the darkly timbered valleys. But the quays and the nets and anchors along the water’s brink might have belonged to small maritime ports.

  Strictly speaking, the Bohemian Forest had come to an end some way upstream. The old Kingdom of Bohemia, which had belonged to the Empire for the last three centuries, vanished when it became part of Czechoslovakia in 1919. It had always been landlocked by surrounding states. How could the famous stage-direction—“The Coast of Bohemia”—have ever slipped from Shakespeare’s pen? When he introduced it in The Winter’s Tale, Bohemia wasn’t a half-mythical country, like ‘Illyria’ in Twelfth Night. Its whereabouts and its character were as well known as Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost, or Scotland in Macbeth. In fact, as an important Protestant stronghold, it was particularly famous at the time. The Elector Palatine—the Protestant champion of Europe—was married to Princess Elizabeth, and three years after Shakespeare’s death he was elected to the throne of Bohemia. (The Winter Queen again! Shakespeare must have known her well and, according to some, the bridal masque in The Tempest was written for their betrothal.) How could Shakespeare have thought that her Kingdom was on the sea?

  As I marched downstream, inspiration struck. ‘Coast’ must originally have meant ‘side’ or ‘edge,’ not necessarily connected with ‘sea’ at all! Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia—at any rate, the Coast of the Forest: near enough![1]

  Let us run quickly through the relevant part of the story. The King of Sicily is unjustly convinced that Perdita, his infant daughter, is the bastard offspring of his Queen Hermione by his former friend and guest, the King of Bohemia. Antigonus, a faithful old courtier determined to save Perdita from her father’s anger, flees from the court with the baby under his cloak, and takes ship for Bohemia. By what route? Shakespeare doesn’t say. He would scarcely have gone via the Black Sea. I saw him sailing from Palermo, landing at Trieste, travelling overland, then embarking in Vienna in a vessel sailing upstream. The ship, running into a terrible storm, probably among the Grein whirlpools, founders. Antigonus, the old courtier, scrambles ashore—perhaps just under the castle of Werfenstein!—and then, amid thunder and lightning, he just has time to perch the swaddled Perdita in a safe place when the second of Shakespeare’s most famous stage-directions—‘Exit pursued by bear’—comes into force. (Bears have died out in the Austrian mountains, but there were plenty then.) While the beast in question devours Antigonus in the wings, enter an old shepherd. He sees Perdita and carries the little bundle home, and, finally brings her up as his daughter. Sixteen years later comes the marvellous sheep-shearing feast, with its promise of recognition and a happy ending and its magical speeches. It was probably celebrated in one of those upland farms...

  I hastened along the banks to get to Vienna a day earlier: ‘Sir: Perhaps I can shed a little new light on a matter which has puzzled generations of scholars.’ The mock-modest fuse that would touch off the bombshell began forming and re-forming...

  Who first misquoted and launched the phrase ‘the Coast of Bohemia’? The correct stage-direction, as I discovered on my first morning in Vienna, runs: ‘Bohemia: A desert country near the Sea.’

  It was total collapse.

  * * *

  At night the stars flashed in a cloudless void. Nothing but an early, brief mist dimmed the pale skies in the morning and the snow on the peaks was coloured at both ends of each day by almost too poignant a flush. I felt that I had been let loose among a prodigality of marvels, and the thought was made more exhilarating still by the illusion of privacy. This landscape might have been an enormous and unending park, scattered with woods and temples and pavilions, for often the only footprints in the snow were mine.

  Through the last water-meadow, before the mountains resumed their grip, I was approaching one of those landmarks. High
on a limestone bluff, beneath two baroque towers and a taller central dome, tiers of uncountable windows streamed away into the sky. It was Melk at last, a long conventual palace cruising above the roofs and the trees, a quinquereme among abbeys.

  No janitor was about. A young Benedictine, finding me loitering in the gatehouse, took me in tow, and as we crossed the first great courtyard, I knew I was in luck. He spoke beautiful French; he was learned and amusing and the ideal cicerone for all that lay ahead.

  Afterwards, it was in confused musical terms that the stages of our progress strung themselves together in my memory. This is how they resound there still. Overtures and preludes followed each other as courtyard opened on courtyard. Ascending staircases unfolded as vaingloriously as pavanes. Cloisters developed with the complexity of double, triple and quadruple fugues. The suites of state apartments concatenated with the variety, the mood and the décor of symphonic movements. Among the receding infinity of gold bindings in the library, the polished reflections, the galleries and the terrestrial and celestial globes gleaming in the radiance of their flared embrasures, music, again, seemed to intervene. A magnificent and measured polyphony crept in one’s ears. It was accompanied by woodwind at first, then, at shortening intervals, by violins and violas and ’cellos and then double basses while a sudden scroll-work of flutes unfurled in mid-air; to be joined at last by a muted fanfare from the ceiling, until everything vibrated with a controlled and pervading splendour. Beyond it, in the church, a dome crowned the void. Light spread in the painted hollows and joined the indirect glow from the ovals and the lunettes and the windows of the rotunda. Galleries and scalloped baldachinos and tiered cornices rose to meet it; and the soft light, falling on the fluted pilasters and circles of gold spokes, and on the obelisks wreathed with their sculpted clouds, suffused the honeycomb side-chapels and then united in a still and universal radiance. Music might just have fallen silent; unless it were about to begin. In the imagination, instruments assembled—unseen cymbals just ajar that would collide with a resonance no more strident than a whisper; drums an inch below their padded sticks with palms ready to muffle them; oboes slanting, their reeds mute for a moment more; brass and woodwind waiting; fingers stretched motionless across the wires of a harp and fifty invisible bows poised in the air above fifty invisible sets of strings.

  * * *

  For me the famous buildings were a peak in a mountain range of discovery which had begun at Bruchsal and continued long afterwards. Again and again during these weeks I was to find myself wandering through great concavities illuminated by reflections from the snow. Sunlight flared in lintels and broken pediments, and streamed in over snowy sills so close to the ceilings that they gave a last lift to the trompe l’ oeil Ascensions and Transfigurations and Assumptions as they poured across them and quickened the white and cream wreaths of stucco holding them aloft: garlands doubly etherealized by the reverberated radiance of the snowflakes, and composed of all that reed and palm-leaf and tendril and scallop and conch and the spines of the murex can inspire.

  In this high baroque style, halted at a point on the frontier of rococo where the extravagant magic of later decades is all implicit, how easily the same aesthetic mood glides from church to palace, from palace to ballroom, from ballroom to monastery and back into church again! Paradox reconciles all contradictions. Clouds drift, cherubim are on the wing, and swarms of putti, baptised in flight from the Greek Anthology, break loose over the tombs. They try on mitres and cardinals’ hats and stumble under the weight of curtains and crosiers while stone Apostles and Doctors of the Church, who are really encyclopaedists in fancy dress, gaze down indulgently. Female saints display the instruments of their martyrdom as light-heartedly as dice-boxes and fans. They are sovereigns’ favourites, landgravines dressed as naiads; and the androgynous saint-impersonating courtiers who ogle the ornate ceilings so meltingly from their plinths might all be acting in a charade. Sacred and profane change clothes and penitents turn into dominoes with the ambiguity of a masqued ball.

  In the half-century following Melk, rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes. Scripture pastorals are painted on the walls of the stately interiors. Temples and cylindrical shrines invade the landscape of the Bible. Chinese pagodas, African palms, Nile pyramids and then a Mexican volcano and the conifers and wigwams of Red Indians spring up in Arcady. Walls of mirror reflect these scenes. They bristle with sconces, sinuous gold and silver boundaries of twining branches and the heaped-up symbols of harvest and hunting and warfare mask the joins and the great sheets of glass answer each other across wide floors and reciprocate their reflections to infinity. The faded quicksilver, diffusing a submarine dusk, momentarily touches the invention and the delight of this looking-glass world with a hint of unplanned sadness.

  But one is always looking up where those buoyant scenes in grisaille or pastel or polychrome, unfolding elliptically in asymmetric but balancing girdles of snowy cornice, enclose room after room with their resplendent lids. Scriptural throngs tread the air among the banks of vapour and the toppling perspectives of the balustrades. Allegories of the seasons and chinoiserie eclogues are on the move. Aurora chases the Queen of the Night across the sky and Watteau-esque trios, tuning their lutes and their violins, drift by on clouds among ruins and obelisks and loosened sheaves. A sun declining on a lagoon in Venice touches the rims of those clouds and veils the singing faces and the plucked strings in a tenuous melancholy; irony and pity float in the atmosphere and across the spectator’s mind, for there is little time left and a closing note sounds in all these rococo festivals.

  * * *

  Ceremonious and jocund, Melk is high noon. Meridian glory surrounded us as a clock in the town struck twelve. The midday light showered on the woods and a yellow loop of the Danube and a water-meadow full of skaters, all foreshortened as they wheeled and skimmed beneath the flashing line of windows. We were standing at the centre of a wide floor and peering—under a last ceiling-episode of pillars and flung cloud where the figures rotated beneath a still loftier dayspring of revelation—at a scene like a ballroom gallop getting out of hand. Draperies whirled spiralling up biblical shanks and resilient pink insteps trod the sky. We might have been gazing up through a glass dance-floor and my companion, touching me on the elbow, led me away a couple of paces and the scene reeled for a second with the insecurity of Jericho, as trompe l’oeil ceilings will when a shift of focus inflicts the beholder with a fleeting spasm of vertigo. He laughed, and said: “On se sent un peu gris, vous ne trouvez pas?”

  A bit tipsy... It was quite true. We had been talking about the rococo interplay of spiritual and temporal, and for a few instants, at these last words, my companion was transformed as well: habit, scapular, cowl and tonsure had all vanished and a powdered queue uncoiled down his brocaded back from a bow of watered silk. He was a Mozartian courtier. His light-hearted voice continued its discourse as he stood with his left hand poised on his sword knot. With explanatory sweeps of a clouded cane in his right, he unravelled the str
atagems of the ceiling-painter; and when, to balance the backward tilt of his torso, he advanced a leg in a Piranesi stance, I could all but hear a red heel tap on the chessboard floor.

  * * *

  One of the Abbey’s bells began tolling on a more insistent note and, with an apology from my mentor, who was safely back in his native century, we hastened our step. In a few minutes I was several fields away, high above the Danube with the dome and the cupolas already dropping out of sight below a clump of trees. Twin gold crosses followed them and the cross on the dome last of all. Nothing remained in those hills to give the Abbey’s presence away. The vanished pinnacles might have been the pigeon-loft of a farm.

  Un peu gris. It was too mild a term.

  * * *

  The footpath along the southern bank was leading me into the heart of the Wachau, a region of the Danube as famous as those stretches of the Rhine I had travelled at Christmas or the Loire in Touraine. Melk was the threshold of this unspeakably beautiful valley. As we have seen by now, castles beyond counting had been looming along the river. They were perched on dizzier spurs here, more dramatic in decay and more mysteriously cobwebbed with fable. The towered headlands dropped sheer, the liquid arcs flowed round them in semicircles. From ruins further from the shore the land sloped more gently, and vineyards and orchards descended in layers to the tree-reflecting banks. The river streamed past wooded islands and when I gazed either way, the seeming water-staircase climbed into the distance. Its associations with the Nibelungenlied are close, but a later mythology haunts it. If any landscape is the meeting place of chivalrous romance and fairy tales, it is this. The stream winds into distances where Camelot or Avalon might lie, the woods suggest mythical fauna, the songs of Minnesingers and the sound of horns just out of earshot.