A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  [5] Superseded by Sir Cecil Parrott’s fine translation a few years ago.

  9. PRAGUE UNDER SNOW

  BUT NEXT evening, when I should have been finding somewhere to sleep after the first day’s march in Hungary, Hans and I were unfolding our napkins under the pink lampshades of the dining-car while the night train to Prague whirled us full tilt in the opposite direction. Hans, who had taken my Central European education in hand, said it would be a shame to go gallivanting further east without seeing the old capital of Bohemia. I couldn’t possibly afford the trip but he had abolished all doubts by a smile and a raised hand enjoining silence. I had been gaining skill, when involved in doings above my station, at accepting this tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb. The banknote I flourished in restaurants, like Groucho Marx’s dollar-bill on a length of elastic, grew more tattered with each airing. I strove to make my protests sound sincere, but they were always brushed aside with amiable firmness.

  Falling asleep after dinner, we woke for a moment in the small hours as the train came to a halt in a vast and silent station. The infinitesimal specks of snow that hovered in the beam of the station lamps were falling so slowly that they hardly seemed to move. A goods train at another platform indicated the sudden accessibility of Warsaw. PRAHA—BRNO—BRESLAU—LODZ—WARZAVA. The words were stencilled across the trucks; the momentary vision of a sledded Polack jingled across my mind’s eye. When the train began to move, the word BRNO slid away in the opposite direction. Then BRNO! BRNO! BRNO! The dense syllable flashed past the window at decreasing intervals and we fell asleep again and plunged on through the Moravian dark and into Bohemia.

  At breakfast time, we climbed down into the awakening capital.

  * * *

  Stripped of the customary approach on foot, Prague remains distinct from all the other towns of this journey. Memory encircles it with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine. I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream. The trajectory had carried Hans and me back into the middle of winter. All the detail—the uprush of the crockets, the processions of statues along the coping of bridges and the levitated palaces—were outlined with snow; and, the higher the buildings climbed, the more densely the woods enfolded the ancient town. Dark with nests, skeleton trees lifted the citadel and the cathedral above the tops of an invading forest and filled the sky with cawing and croaking.

  It was a bewildering and captivating town. The charm and the kindness of Hans’s parents and his brothers were a marvellous enhancement of it, for an articulate enthusiasm for life stamped them all; and, in borrowed evening plumage that night, among the candle-lit faces of an animated dinner party, I first understood how fast was the prevailing pace. Hans we know. Heinz, the eldest brother, a professor of political theory at the University, looked more like a poet or a musician than a don and the ideas he showered about him were stamped with inspiration. Paul, the youngest and a few years older than me, was touched by the same grace. Those candles, rekindled now for a moment, also reveal their kind parents, and Heinz’s dark and beautiful wife. There is also a remarkable relation-in-law of hers, a man of great age and originality, called Pappi, or Haupt zu Pappenheim. His talk, rooted in a picaresque life all over the world, emerged in a headlong rush of omniscience and humour. (My seventeenth-century obsession connected the name at once with the great cavalry commander in the Thirty Years War, one who had sought out Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen, as Rupert had sought out Cromwell at Marston Moor, to be struck down at the same moment as the King in another part of the field. His relation’s discourse had some of the same dash.)

  Much later the scene shifted from these candles to a cave-like nightclub where silhouettes floated past on a tide of cigarette smoke, and the talk—abetted by syphon-hiss and cork-pop, and encouraged rather than hindered by the blues and the muted cymbals and the wailing saxophone—flowed unstaunchably on. It culminated in marvellously abstruse and inventive theories, launched by Heinz, about Rilke and Werfel and the interrelation of Kafka’s Castle—as yet unread by me—and the actual citadel that dominated the capital. When we emerged, the great pile itself was still wrapped in the dark, but only just.

  * * *

  As I followed Hans’s zigzag and switchback course all over the steep city, it occurred to me that hangovers are not always harmful. If they fall short of the double-vision which turns Salisbury Cathedral into Cologne, they invest scenery with a lustre which is unknown to total abstainers. Once we were under the lancets of St. Vitus’s Cathedral, a second conviction began to form. Prague was the recapitulation and the summing-up of all I had gazed at since stepping ashore in Holland, and more; for that slender nave and the airy clerestory owed spiritual allegiance far beyond the Teutonic heartland, and the Slav world. They might have sprung up in France under the early Valois or in Plantagenet England.

  The last of the congregation were emerging to a fickle momentary sunlight. Indoors the aftermath of incense, as one might say with a lisp, still floated among the clustered piers. Ensconced in their distant stalls, an antiphonal rearguard of canons was intoning Nones.

  Under the diapered soffits and sanctuary lamps of a chantry, a casket like a brocaded ark of the covenant enclosed the remains of a saint. Floating wicks and rows of candles lit up his effigy overhead: they revealed a mild mediaeval sovereign holding a spear in his hand and leaning on his shield. It was Good King Wenceslas, no less. The confrontation was like a meeting with Jack the Giant Killer or Old King Cole... English carolsingers, Hans told me as we knelt in a convenient pew, had promoted him in rank. The sainted Czech prince—ancestor of a long line of Bohemian kings, however—was murdered in 934. And there he lay, hallowed by his countrymen for the last thousand years.

  Outside, except for the baroque top to the presiding belfry, the cathedral itself might have been an elaborate gothic reliquary. From the massed upward thrust of its buttresses to the stickle-back ridge of its high-pitched roof it was spiked with a forest of perpendiculars. Up the corner of the transepts, stairs in fretted polygonal cylinders spiralled and counter-spiralled, and flying buttresses enmeshed the whole fabric in a radiating web of slants. Borne up in its flight by a row of cusped and trefoiled half-arches, each of them carried a steep procession of pinnacles and every moulding was a ledge for snow, as though the masonry were perpetually unloosing volleys of snowfeathered shafts among the rooks and the bruise-coloured and quick-silver clouds.

  A spell hangs in the air of this citadel—the Hradcvany, as it is called in Czech; Hradschin in German—and I was under its thrall long before I could pronounce its name. Even now, looking at photographs of the beautiful lost city, the same spell begins to work. There was another heirloom of the old Bohemian kings hard by the cathedral: the church of St. George, whose baroque carapace masked a Romanesque church of great purity. The round arches that we call Norman plunged through bare and massive walls, flat beams bore up the ceiling; and a slim, gilt mediaeval St. George gleamed in the apse as he cantered his charger over the dragon’s lanced and coiling throes. He reminded me of that debonair stone banneret at Ybbs. It was the first Romanesque building I had seen since those faintly remembered Rhenish towns between Christmas and the New Year.

  And, at this very point, confusion begins. The city teems with wonders; but what belongs where? Certainly that stupendous staircase called the Riders’ Steps, and all that lay beyond them, were part of the great castle-palace. The marvellous strangeness of the late gothic vaults enclosing this flight must have germinated in an atmosphere like the English mood which coaxed fan-tracery into bloom. The Winter Queen, in her brief snowy reign, was equally astonished, perhaps; her English renaissance upbringing—those masques and their fantastic stage-sets by Inigo Jones—may have been a better preparation. I kept thinking of her as I peered up. These vaults are almost impossible to describe. The ribs bu
rst straight out of the walls in V-shaped clusters of springers. Grooved like celery stalks and blade-shaped in cross section with the edge pointing down, they expanded and twisted as they rose. They separated, converged again and crossed each other and as they sped away, enclosed slender spans of wall like the petals of tulips; and when two ribs intersected, they might both have been obliquely notched and then half-joggled together with studied carelessness. They writhed on their own axes and simultaneously followed the curve of the vault; and often, after these contorted intersections, the ribs that followed a concave thrust were chopped off short while the convex plunged headlong and were swallowed up in the masonry. The loose mesh tightened as it neared the rounded summit and the frantic reticulation jammed in momentary deadlock. Four truncated ribs, dovetailing in rough parallelograms, formed keystones and then broke loose again with a wildness which at first glance resembled organic violence clean out of control. But a second glance, embracing the wider design, captured a strange and marvellous coherence, as though petrifaction had arrested this whirling dynamism at a chance moment of balance and harmony.

  Everything here was strange. The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostrich-plumes under the freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep the bright paint that spiralled them unchipped. But in King Vladislav’s vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close to the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling: parting, crossing, re-joining, and—once again—enclosing those slim subdivided tulips as they climbed. Then they cast their intertwining arcs in wider and yet wider loops with the looseness and the overlap of lassoos kept perpetually on the move, accelerating, as they ascended, to the speed of coiling stockwhips... Spaced out along the wide ridge of the vault, their intersections composed the corollas of marguerites and then fled away once more into wider patterns that needed another shift of focus to apprehend. Travelling the length of that arched vista of ceiling, the loops of the stone ribs expanded and crossed and changed partners, simultaneously altering direction and handing on the succession of arcs until the parabolas, reaching the far limit of this strange curvilinear relay-race, began to swing back. Nearing home and completing the journey in reverse, they re-joined their lost companions at their starting point and sank tapering and interlocked. The sinuous mobility entranced the eye, but it was not only this. Lit by the wintry chiaroscuro of the tall windows, the white tulip-shaped expanses that these stone ribs enclosed so carelessly seemed to be animated by an even more rapid and streamlined verve. Each of these incidental and sinuous facets reflected a different degree of white, and their motion, as they ascended the reversed half-cones of the vault and curled over into the ceiling, suggested the spreading and upward-showering rush of a school of dolphins leaping out of the water.

  It was amazing and marvellous. I had never seen anything like it. One can imagine a draughtsman twiddling arcs and marguerites with his compass and elaborating them for fun in vast symmetrical tangles—only to push them aside with a sigh. It is the high-spirited audacity of their materialization that turns everything to wonder. Hans was telling me as I gazed how Count Thurn and a party of Protestant nobles had tramped under these vaults on the way to their fateful meeting with the councillors of the Holy Roman Emperor, all in full armour: the word ‘armour’ suddenly offered a solution. It seemed, all at once, the apt analogy and the key to everything here. The steel whorls and flutings, those exuberant wings of metal that adorned the plate-armour of Maximilian’s Knights! Carapaces which, for all their flamboyance and vainglory, withstood mace-blows and kept out arrows and the points of swords and lances. In the same way the flaunting halls and the seven hundred rooms of this castle have maintained thousands of labyrinthine tons of Kafka masonry against fire and siege for centuries. These vaults and these stairways were concave three-dimensional offshoots of the Danubian breakout, and shelter for Landsknechts. Altdorfer’s world!

  Heraldry smothered the walls and the vaults that followed. Shield followed painted shield and aviaries and zoos and aquaria supplied the emblems that fluttered and reared and curvetted among the foliage on the helmets. We were in the very heart of the Landsknecht century. Reached by a spiral, the last of these castle-interiors was an austere and thick-walled room, roofed with dark beams and lit by deeply embrased leaded windows; a sturdy old table was set on the waxed flag-stones. It was in this Imperial aulic council chamber, on May 23, 1618, that Thurn and those mail-clad Czech lords had pressed their claims on the Imperial councillors and broken the deadlock by throwing them out of the window. The Defenestrations of Prague were the penultimate act before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The last was the arrival of the Elector Palatine and his English Electress to be crowned.[1]

  It was time to seek out one of the wine cellars we had noticed on the way up.

  * * *

  I climb about the steep city in retrospect and re-discover fragments one by one. There are renaissance buildings, light arcaded pavilions and loggias on slim Ionic pillars that could have alighted here from Tuscany or Latium, but the palaces on the squares and the citadel and the steep wooded slopes belong to the Habsburg afternoon. Troops of Corinthian pillars parade along half-façades of ashlars rusticated like the nail-head patterns on decanters, and symbols and panoplies overflow the pediments. Branching under processions of statues, shallow staircases unite before great doorways where muscle-bound Atlantes strain under the weight of the lintels, and the gardens underneath them are flocked by marble populations. Nymphs bind their collapsing sheaves, goddesses tilt cornucopias, satyrs give chase, nymphs flee, and tritons blow fanfares from their twirling shells. (The snow in the folds of their flying garments and the icicles which seal the lips of the river gods are there till spring.) Terraces climb the hillside in a giant staircase and somewhere, above the frosty twigs, juts a folly like a mandarin’s hat; it must have been built about the time when Don Giovanni was being composed a mile away. Looking-glass regions succeed each other inside the palaces—aqueous reaches under vernal and sunset pastorals where painters and plasterers and cabinet-makers and glaziers and brasiers have fused all their skills in a silence that still seems to vibrate with fugues and passacaglias and the ghosts of commiserating sevenths.

  Where, in this half-recollected maze, do the reviving memories of the libraries belong? To the Old University perhaps, one of the most ancient and famous in Europe, founded by the great King Charles IV in 1384. I’m not sure. But I drive wedge-shaped salients into oblivion nevertheless and follow them through the recoiling mists with enfilading perspectives of books until bay after bay coheres. Each of them is tiered with burnished leather bindings and gold and scarlet gleam on the spines of hazel and chestnut and pale vellum. Globes space out the chessboard floors. There are glass-topped homes for incunables. Triangular lecterns display graduals and antiphonals and Books of Hours and coloured scenes encrust the capitals on the buckled parchment; block-notes and lozenges climb and fall on four-line Gregorian staves where the Carolingian uncials and blackletter spell out the responses. The concerted spin of a score of barley-sugar pillars uphold elliptic galleries where brass combines with polished oak, and obelisks and pineapples alternate on the balustrades. Along the shallow vaulting of these chambers, plasterwork interlocks triangular tongues of frosty bracken with classical and allegorical scenes. Ascanius pursues his stag, Dido laments the flight of Aeneas, Numa slumbers in the cave of Egeria and all over the ceiling draped sky-figures fall back in a swoon from a succession of unclouding wonders.

  Floating downhill, memory scoops new hollows. Churches, echoin
g marble concavities dim as cisterns in this cloudy weather, celebrate the Counter-Reformation. Plinths round the floor of rotundas hoist stone evangelists aloft. With robes spiralling in ecstasy and mitres like half-open shears, they hover halfway up the twin pillars from whose acanthus-tops the dome-bearing semi-circles fly. In one of these churches, where the Tridentine fervour had been dulled by two centuries of triumph, there were saints of a less emphatic cast. The figure of St. John the Divine—imberb, quizzically smiling, quill in hand and at ease in a dressing-gown with his hair flowing loose like an undress-wig, he might be setting down the first line of Candide instead of the Apocalypse; perhaps the sculptor has confused his Enlightenments. Seen from a fountain-square of the Hradcvany, the green copper domes, where each snow-laden segment is pierced with a scrolled lunette, might belong to great Rome itself. The pinnacles on all the cupolas are tipped with monstrances shooting rays like golden fireworks; and when these and the gold balls on the tips of the other finials are touched by a rare sunbeam, the air glitters for a moment with a host of flying baubles.

  * * *

  A first glance, then, reveals a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars. It celebrates the Habsburg marriage-claims to the crown of Bohemia and reaffirms the questionable supercession of the old elective rights of the Bohemians; and alongside the Emperor’s temporal ascendancy, this architecture symbolizes the triumph of the Pope’s Imperial champion over the Hussites and the Protestants. Some of the churches bear witness to the energy of the Jesuits. They are stone emblems of their fierce zeal in the religious conflict. (Bohemia had been a Protestant country at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. It was Catholic once more at its close and as free of heresy as Languedoc after the Albigensian crusade, or the sea-shore of oyster-response at the end of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’)[2]