A Time of Gifts (23 page)

The millions of pine needles that cross-hatched the sunbeams sprinkled the paths with an entrancing broken light. An icy zest crackled among the branches, and I paced through these sparkling woods like a Huron. But there were moments in the early morning when the dense conifers and the diaphanous skeletons of the hardwoods were as insubstantial as plumage, and the early mists, hovering in the valleys, floated the transparent peaks on air and enclosed the rock-pinnacles in diminishing smoke-rings of vapour. At these moments the landscape below seemed to have moved far from Central Europe, further even than Red Indian forests; all the way to China. The painter's red-inkstone cypher, trailing its lightly brushed-in kite's tail of ideograms, should have stamped the pallor of the sky.

Footpaths corkscrewed down-hill from these uplands; down, down until the trees thinned and the sunlight died away. Meadows would appear, then a barn, then an orchard and a churchyard and threads of smoke ascending from the chimney-pots of a riverside hamlet; and I was back among the shadows.

There was always a Golden Hart or a White Rose for bread and cheese among the huddle of roofs, or for a coffee and Himbeergeist. Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved
again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures...a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

* * *

After supper and filling in my diary in the front room of the inn in Persenbeug—I think I must have been staying there on the charitable-burgomaster principle—I started to sketch the innkeeper's daughter Maria while she busied herself over a basket of darning. I was talking to her about my visit to St. Florian: either it had been the wrong time for sightseers or a day when the Abbey was officially shut. The janitor was adamant. I told him it was my only chance—I had come all the way across Europe to see the Abbey; and at last, when I must have sounded on the brink of tears, he had begun to melt. He had handed me over to the friendly Canon in the end, who showed me all. Maria laughed. So did a man at the next table who lowered the
Neue Freie Presse
, and looked over his spectacles. He was a tall and scholarly-looking figure with a long amusing face and large blue eyes. He was dressed in leather breeches and a loden-jacket, and a big dark dog with Breughel tendencies called Dick lay quietly beside his chair. “You did the right thing,” he said. “In Germany you would only have got in by shouting.” Maria and two watermen, the only other people in the Gastzimmer, laughed and agreed.

The Danube inspires those who live on its banks with an infectious passion. My companions knew everything about the river. They rejoiced in the fact that, after the Volga, which was almost too far away to count, it was the largest river in Europe; and the man in loden added that it was the only one that flowed from west to east. The watermen were full of lurid descriptions of the hazards of the Strudengau and their tales were amply borne out by the others. The man in loden, I discovered, spoke perfect English, but except in the frequent case of a word I didn't understand, he stuck to German out of politeness to the others. The Danube, he said, played a rôle in the
Nibelungenlied
that was just as important as that of the Rhine. I hadn't read it yet but I admitted I had never connected the story with any river but the latter. “Nor has anyone!” he said. “That's because of Dr. Wagner! Magnificent sounds, but very little to do with the actual legend.” Which part of the Danube? “
Exactly here!
All the way downstream, right into Hungary.”

We looked out of the window. The flood was rushing by under the stars. It was the widest river in Europe, he went on, and the richest by far in interesting life. Over seventy different kinds of fish swim in it. It had its own species of salmon and two distinct kinds of pike-perch—stuffed specimens of a few of them were hung round the walls in glass cases. The river was a link between the fish of Western Europe and those that populated the Dniestr, the Dniepr, the Don and the Volga. “The Danube has always been an invasion route,” he said. “Even above Vienna, you get fish that never venture west of the Black Sea otherwise. At least, extremely seldom. True sturgeon stay in the Delta—alas!—but we get plenty of their relations up here.” One of them, the sterlet, was quite common in Vienna. It was delicious, he said. Sometimes they ventured as far upstream as Regensburg and Ulm. The biggest of them, another sturgeon-cousin called the Hausen, or
Acipenser Huso
, was a giant that sometimes attained the length of twenty-five feet, and, in very rare cases, thirty; and it could weigh as much as two thousand pounds. “But it's a harmless creature,” he went on. “It only
eats small stuff. All the sturgeon family are short-sighted, like me. They just fumble their way along the bottom with their feelers, grazing on water plants.” He shut his eyes and then, with a comic expression of bewilderment, extended his fingers among the wine glasses with an exploratory flutter. “Its true home is the Black Sea and the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. But the real terror of the Danube is the
Wels
!” Maria and the watermen nodded their heads in sad assent, as though a Kraken or the Grendel had been mentioned. The
Silurus glanis
or Giant Catfish! Though it was smaller than the Hausen, it was the largest purely European fish and it sometimes measured thirteen feet.

“People say they eat babies if they fall in the water,” Maria said, dropping a half-darned sock into her lap.

“Geese, too,” one of the watermen said.

“Ducks,” the other added.

“Lambs.”

“Dogs.”

“Dick had better look out!” Maria appended.

My polymath neighbour's reassuring pats on the shaggy scalp at his side were rewarded by a languorous gaze and a few tail-thumps, while his master told me that a swallowed poodle had been cut out of a catfish a year or two before.

“They are terrible creatures,” he said, “terrible and extraordinary.”

I asked him what they looked like and he repeated the question ruminatively to himself. “Beastly!” he said at last. “You see, they have no scales, they are quite smooth. Dull-coloured and slimey. But the face! That's the thing! It has great blunt features and hateful little staring eyes.” As he spoke, he lowered his brows in a scowl and somehow contrived to make the large frank eyes behind the lenses contract and protrude simultaneously in a glare of venomous rage—“and its mouth!” he went on, “its mouth is the worst of all! It's underslung and fitted with rows of terrifying little teeth.” He widened his mouth to a slit that sank balefully at both ends and thrust out his lower jaw in a hideous Habsburg jut. “And it
has long, long whiskers,” he said, spreading his finger-tips across both his cheeks, “sweeping out on either side.” He fanned them airily away and over his shoulders like the long barbels of the giant catfish streaming in the current. “
It looks like this!
” he said, slowly rising from his chair and, as he did so, he thrust the dreadful mask towards us across the wine glasses. It was as if the great fish had swum in silently through the door. Maria said “
Herr Jesus!
” with a nervous laugh, and the dog jumped up and barked excitedly. Then his features resumed their normal cast, and he sat back again smiling at our amazement.

I had chanced on a gold mine! ‘Enquire Within About Everything': flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology—it was a richer source than any castle library. His English, mastered from governesses with his brothers, was wide in range, flawless in its idiom and polished by many sojourns in England. He was full of stories about the inhabitants of Danubian castles, of which he was one, as I had more or less gathered from the others' style in addressing him: his lair was a battered Schloss near Eferding, and it was the empty heronry I had noticed there which had first excited him when he was a boy about the fauna of the river. He had a delightful Bohemian, scholar-gipsy touch.

He was on his way back from an antiquarian visit to Ybbs, the little town immediately across the river. His goal there had been the carved tomb of Hans, Knight of Ybbs: “A figure,” he said, “of knock-out elegance!” He showed me a snapshot the parish priest had given him. (It was so striking that I crossed the river to see it next day. The Knight, standing in high relief in a rectangle which is deeply incised with gothic lettering, was carved in 1358. Falling in battle in the same decade as Crécy and Poitiers, he was an exact contemporary of du Guesclin and the Black Prince: at the very pinnacle, that is, of the age of chivalry. He is in full plate armour and the fingers of his right gauntlet curl round the shaft of a lance from which a pennant flutters. Those of the other, under an elbow bent at an angle which shifts the breastplated torso to one side from a wasp waist, are spread on the cross-hilt of a two-handed
sword, to which a notched shield is strapped. His pointed steel cap is ridged like an almond and chain mail covers cheek, chin and throat like a nun's wimple: similar to that arrangement, with starched linen in lieu of metal, which gives a knight-like look to the nuns in some Orders. A huge oak-leaf-crested and slit-eyed tilting helm balances on one of his plated shoulders. The sinuous flow of the carving gives a lively, poetical and debonair stance to the Knight which is probably unique in such effigies.)

At the mention of the Ritter von Ybbs, I asked him the exact meaning of
von
. He explained how a ‘Ritter von' and an ‘Edler von'—Knight, or Nobleman, ‘of' somewhere—were originally feudal landowners holding a fief, and usually an eponymous one, in knight's fee. Later it simply became the lowest rank in the scale of titles. Its fiendish aura in England, due to the military bent of Prussian junkers, is absent in Austria where a milder, squire-ish feeling hovers about the prefix. This was the cue for an excursus on Central European aristocracy, conducted with great brio and the detachment of a zoologist. I had got the hang of it on broad lines; but what about those figures who had intrigued me in Germany: landgraves, margraves, rhinegraves and wildgraves? Who was the Margravine of Bayreuth and Anspach? The answers led him to a lightning disquisition on the Holy Roman Empire and how the tremendous title had pervaded and haunted Europe from Charlemagne to the Napoleonic Wars. The rôles of the Electors—the princes and prelates who chose the Emperors until the Crown became an unofficial Habsburg heirloom, when they ratified it still—were at last made clear. Between his election and accession, I learnt, a prospective Emperor was styled King of the Romans. “Why!” he said, “there was an English one, King John's son, Richard of Cornwall! And his sister Isabella married the Emperor Frederick II, the
stupor mundi
! But Richard never succeeded, poor fellow—as you know”—a tacit, all-purpose nod seemed the best response here—“he died of grief when his son Henry of Almain was murdered by Guy de Montfort at Viterbo. Dante writes about it...” By this time I had stopped being surprised at anything. He
explained the mediatization of lesser sovereign states when the Empire was dissolved; and from here, at a dizzy pace, he branched into the history of the Teutonic Knights, the Polish szlachta and their elective kings, the Moldowallachian hospodars and the great boyars of Rumania. He paid brief tribute to the prolific loins of Rurik and the princely progeny they scattered across the Russias, and the Grand Princes of Kiev and Novgorod, the Khans of Krim Tartary and the Kagans of the Mongol Hordes. If nothing had interrupted, we would have reached the Great Wall of China and flown across the sea to the Samurai world.
[9]
But something recalled us nearer home: to the ancient, almost Brahminic Austrian rules of eligibility and the stifling Spanish ceremony of the Court which had survived from the times of Charles V. He was critical of the failures of the nobility at crucial moments, but he was attached to it nevertheless. The proliferation of central European titles came under mild fire. “It's much better in England, where all but one reverts to Mister in the end. Look at me and my brothers! All handle and no jug.” Would he have liked titles to be done away with?
[10]
“No, no!” he said, rather contradictorily. “They should be preserved at all costs—the world is getting quite dull enough. And they are not
really
multiplying—history and ecology are against them. Think of the Oryx! Think of the Auckland Island Merganser! The Great Auk! The Dodo!” His face was divided by a grin: “You ought to see some of my aunts and uncles.” But a moment later his brow was clouded by concern. “Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power-dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They'll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East—they would never come back! Never, never, never!” He looked so depressed that I changed the subject by asking him about the Germanic tribes who had once lived here—the
Marcomanni and the Quadi—I couldn't get their odd names out of my head. “What?” He cheered up at once. Those long-haired Wotan-worshippers, who peered for centuries between the tree-boles, while the legionaries drilled and formed tortoise on the other bank? His eyes kindled, and I drank in more about the Völkerwanderungen in a quarter of an hour than I could have gleaned in a week with the most massive historical atlases.