A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I sat under a birch tree to sketch Schloss Schönbühel. Gleaming as though it were carved ivory, it sprang out of a pivot of rock which the river almost surrounded and ended in a single and immensely tall white tower crowned with a red onion cupola. “It’s the castle of the Counts Seilern,” a passing postman said. Smoke curled from a slim chimney: luncheon must have been on the way. I imagined the counts seated expectantly down a long table, hungry but polite, with their hands neatly crossed between their knives and forks.

  * * *

  A falcon, beating its wings above an unwary heron half way up this northern bend, would command the same view of the river as mine. I had climbed to the ruins of Aggstein—unnecessarily steeply, as I had strayed from the marked pathway—and halted among the battlements of the keep to get my breath back. This gap-toothed hold of the Künringers teems with horrible tales; but I had scrambled up here for a different reason. The polymath’s talk, two nights before, had made me long to look down on this particular reach.

  There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action!

  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 Andalusia—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 collar-bone 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 Boëthius, “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.”

  Grim thoughts for a cloudless morning.

  * * *

  In Mitter Arnsdorf I stayed under the friendly roof of Frau Oberpostkommandeurs-Witwe Hübner—the widow, that is, of Chief-Postmaster Hübner—and sat talking late.r />
  She was between sixty and seventy, rather plump and jolly, with a high-buttoned collar and grey hair arranged like a cottage loaf. The photograph of her husband showed an upright figure in a many-buttoned uniform, sword, shako, pince-nez and whiskers that were twisted into two martial rings. She was glad of someone to talk to, she told me. Usually her only companion in the evenings was her parrot Toni, a beautiful and accomplished macaw that whistled and answered questions pertly in Viennese dialect, and sang fragments of popular songs in a quavering and beery voice. He could even manage the first two lines of Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, in celebration of Marlborough’s ally, the conqueror of Belgrade.

  But his mistress was a born monologuist. Ensconced in mahogany and plush, I learnt all about her parents, her marriage and her husband, who had been, she said, a thorough gentleman and always beautifully turned out—“ein Herr durch und durch! Und immer tip-top angezogen.” One son had been killed on the Galician Front, one was a postmaster in Klagenfurt, another, the giver of the parrot, was settled in Brazil, one daughter had married a civil engineer in Vienna, and another—here she heaved a sigh—was married to a Czech who was very high up in a carpet-manufacturing firm in Brno—“but a very decent kind of man,” she hastened to add: “sehr anständig.” I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness. It needed neither prompting nor response, nothing beyond an occasional nod, a few deprecating clicks of the tongue, or an assenting smile. Once, when she asked rhetorically, and with extended hands: “So what was I to do?,” I tried to answer, a little confusedly, as I had lost the thread. But my words were drowned in swelling tones: “There was only one thing to do! I gave that umbrella away next morning to the first stranger I could find! I couldn’t keep it in the house, not after what had happened. And it would have been a pity to burn it...” Arguments were confronted and demolished, condemnations and warnings uttered with the lifting of an admonitory forefinger. Comic and absurd experiences, as she recalled them, seemed to take possession of her: at first, with the unsuccessful stifling of a giggle, then leaning back with laughter until finally she rocked forward with her hands raised and then slapped on her knees in the throes of total hilarity while her tears flowed freely. She would pull herself together, dabbing at her cheeks and straightening her dress and her hair with deprecating self-reproof. A few minutes later, tragedy began to build up; there would be a catch in her voice: “...and next morning all seven goslings were dead, laid out in a row. All seven! They were the only things that poor old man still cared about!” She choked back sobs at the memory until sniffs and renewed dabs with her handkerchief and the self-administered consolations of philosophy came to the rescue and launched her on a fresh sequence. At the first of these climaxes the parrot interrupted a pregnant pause with a series of quacks and clicks and the start of a comic song. She got up, saying crossly, “Schweig, du blöder Trottel!,”[2] threw a green cloth over the cage and silenced the bird; then picked up the thread in her former sad key. But in five minutes the parrot began to mutter “Der arme Toni!”—(Poor Toni)—and, relenting, she would unveil him again. It happened several times. Her soliloquy flowed on as voluminously as the Danube under her window, and the most remarkable aspect of it was the speaker’s complete and almost hypnotic control of her listener. Following her raptly, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands.

  Sleep was creeping on. Gradually Frau Hübner’s face, the parrot’s cage, the lamp, the stuffed furniture and the thousand buttons on the upholstery began to lose their outlines and merge. The rise and fall of her rhetoric and Toni’s heckling would be blotted out for seconds, or even minutes. At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with a repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.

  * * *

  When I crossed the bridge at Mautern and saw the low country opening eastward, I knew that a big change was coming. I hated the thought of leaving this valley. After something to eat beside the barbican of Krems I doubled back, halting for a coffee in Stein by the statue of St. John Nepomuk, whose monument dominates the little town. He had been appearing frequently along the road. This Bohemian saint, the champion of the inviolacy of the confessional, became a great favourite of the Jesuits. They have set him up with so twirling a posture and such a spin of cassock and stole that the surrounding air might be rifled. The vineyards on the hill above filled a thousand buckets at vintage time, someone told me. The cliffs are warrened with cask-lined caves.

  In a mile or two, safely back in the wide and winding canyon, I got to Dürnstein. It was a little town of vintners and fishermen. Tilting uphill from the water’s edge, it was shored with buttresses, pierced by arches, riddled with cellars and plumed with trees. Where the ice and the current allowed it, the Danube reflected the violin curves of the church and an Augustinian priory and a seventeenth-century schloss. It was another Starhemberg castle, half of it jutting into the river, half embedded in the fabric of the town.

  From the west barbican a long crenelated wall ran steeply up the mountainside to the tip of a crag that overhung both the town and river. Obeying the polymath—in this, as in all things—I was soon clambering about the wreckage of the stronghold that covered this low mountain top. Lancets pierced the remains of the battlemented walls, there were pointed arches and a donjon; but, except for the clustering stumps of the vaulting, all trace of a roof had gone and firs and hazel-saplings grew thick in the crumbling cincture. This wreckage was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been imprisoned.

  I had forgotten how this—the result of a quarrel on the Third Crusade—had come about and when I had listened to it, over the innstove a few nights before, it had seemed extremely odd. It is briefly this. At the end of the siege of Acre the victorious sovereigns marched into the town and hoisted their banners. Richard, seeing the flag of Leopold, Duke of Austria, fluttering, as he thought, presumptuously close to his own, flew into a rage and had it hauled down and thrown into the moat. Mortally insulted, Leopold left Palestine, abandoned the Crusade and returned to Austria. Next year, Richard was summoned to England by the misgovernment of Prince John. He broke off his victorious campaign against Saladin and, to dodge his Christian enemies (who were understandably numerous), set off in disguise. Reaching Corfu, he embarked in a pirate ship which was tossed off her course by the autumn storms and wrecked at the head of the Adriatic. From here his only way lay overland through hostile states; worst of all, through the Duchy of his enemy. In a tavern near Vienna, his disguise was penetrated by some of Leopold’s men and he was taken prisoner—betrayed, some say, by his commanding looks; according to others, by the careless splendour of his gloves—and donjoned incognito on this crag. How he was rescued by Blondel, his minstrel and fellow-troubadour—who is said to have discovered him by singing outside every likely prison until his friend’s voice answered with the second verse—has always sounded too good to be true. But on the spot, it is impossible to doubt it.[3]

  Wandering along the river’s bank just before sunset, I felt I would like to settle and write here for ages. Meditating, admonishing and blessing, a team of sainted and weather-fretted Abbots postured with operatic benignity along the Canons’ balustrade. Their haloes were dripping with icicles; snow had filled the clefts of their mitres and furred the curls of their pastoral staves. I could hear the sigh of the river just below. When I leant over the balustrade, it rose to a roar. Under the bare chestnut branches, the current was rushing by, flurrying the reflections which the lights on the other bank dropped into the flood. Beyond King Richard’s castle the forested uplands of the north bank suddenly broke off. A precipice dropped sheer and at its foot, meadows and orchards followed the river
upstream in a three-mile-long question-mark. Halfway, dissolving in the blue of the dusk, an island hovered over its own flawed image.

  The cliff possesses an acoustic foible which I have never met anywhere else. I remembered it, standing in the same place, and hearing it again, three decades later. A tug, with a string of barges and a flag that was unidentifiable in the failing light, was creeping upstream against the press of the current. When its siren sounded, after a delay of three seconds the long-drawn out boom was joined by an echo from the cliff which was exactly an octave higher, forming a chord; and when the lower note ended, the higher outlived it solo for another three seconds and died away.

  * * *

  Crossing the river by the little ferry from Dürnstein, I struck southward. By early afternoon I was approaching an enormous white building that I had espied the day before from the ruins of Dürnstein. It was the Benedictine Abbey of Göttweig, a stately rectangle lifted high above the hills and forests, with a cupola at each corner. Having enlarged so freely on the wonders of Melk, I daren’t say much about Göttweig: only that it is a resplendent and worthy rival to its great sister abbey at the other end of the Wachau.

  Snow-clouds were assembling as I took the uphill path. I overtook a boy of my own age, a bookish shoemaker called Paul, who had taught himself English. He was a great friend of the monks, I learnt, and I think he would have liked to have taken monastic vows himself if family responsibilities had not stood in the way. The most famous part of the Abbey is the Grand Staircase, a wide, shallow and magnificent flight where elaborate lanterns alternate with immense monumental urns at each right-angle turn of the broad marble balustrade. Paul told me that Napoleon is believed to have ridden his horse up these stairs: he passed this way, crossing the river near Krems, in the late autumn of 1805, between the victories of Ulm and Austerlitz.