A Time of Gifts (8 page)

* * *

I woke up in a bargemen's lodging house above a cluster of masts and determined to stay another day in this marvellous town.

It had occurred to me that I might learn German quicker by reading Shakespeare in the famous German translation. The young man in the bookshop spoke some English. Was it
really
so good, I asked him. He was enthusiastic: Schlegel and Tieck's version, he said, was
almost
as good as the original; so I bought
Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark
, in a paperbound pocket edition. He was so helpful that I asked him if there were any way of travelling up the Rhine by barge. He called a friend into consultation who was more fluent in English: I explained I was a student, travelling to Constantinople on foot with not much money, and that I didn't mind how uncomfortable I was. The newcomer asked: student of what? Well—literature: I wanted to write a book. “
So!
You are travelling about Europe like Childe Harold?,” he said. “Yes,
yes
! Absolutely like Childe Harold!” Where was I staying? I told them. “Pfui!” They were horrified, and amused. Both were delightful and, as the upshot of all this, I was asked to stay with one of them. We were to meet in the evening.

The day passed in exploring churches and picture galleries and looking at old buildings, with a borrowed guidebook.

Hans, who was my host, had been a fellow-student at Cologne University with Karl, the bookseller. He told me at dinner that he had fixed up a free lift for me next day on a string of barges heading upstream, all the way to the Black Forest if I wanted. We drank delicious Rhine wine and talked about English literature. The key figures in Germany I gathered, were Shakespeare, Byron, Poe, Galsworthy, Wilde, Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Charles Morgan and, very recently, Rosamund Lehmann. What about Priestley, they asked:
The Good Companions
?—and
The Story of San Michele
?

It was my first venture inside a German house. The interior was composed of Victorian furniture, bobbled curtains, a stove with green china tiles and many books with characteristic German bindings. Hans's cheerful landlady, who was the widow of a don at the University, joined us over tea with brandy in it. I answered many earnest questions about England: how lucky and enviable I was, they said, to belong to that fortunate kingdom where all was so just and sensible! The allied occupation of the Rhineland had come to an end less than ten years before, and the British, she said, had left an excellent impression. The life she described revolved round football, boxing matches, fox-hunts and theatricals. The Tommies got drunk, of course, and boxed each other in the street—she lifted her hands in the posture of squaring up—but they scarcely ever set about the locals. As for the colonel who had been billeted on her for years, with his pipe and his fox terriers—what a gentleman! What kindness and tact and humour! “Ein Gentleman durch und durch!” And his soldier servant—an angel!—had married a German girl. This idyllic world of cheery Tommies and Colonel Brambles sounded almost too good to be true and I basked vicariously in their lustre. But the French, they all agreed, were a different story. There had, it seems, been much friction, bloodshed even, and the ill-feeling still lingered. It sprang mainly from the presence of Senegalese units among the occupying troops; their inclusion had been interpreted as an act of calculated vengeance. The collapse of the Reichsmark was touched on, and Reparations; Hitler cropped up. The professor's widow couldn't bear him: such a mean face! “So ein gemeines Gesicht!”—and that voice! Both the others were against him too, and the whole Nazi movement: it was no solution to Germany's problems; and wrong...the conversation slid into a trough of depression. (I divined that it was a theme of constant discussion and that they were all against it, but in different ways and for different reasons. It was a time when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany.) The conversation revived over German literature: apart from Remarque, the only German book I had read was a translation of
Zarathustra
.
Neither of them cared much for Nietzsche, “But he understood us Germans,” Hans said in an ambiguous tone. The Erasmian pronunciation of Latin cropped up, followed by the reciting of rival passages from the ancient tongues: innocent showing off all round with no time for any of us to run dry. We grew excited and noisy, and our hostess was delighted. How her husband would have enjoyed it! The evening ended with a third round of handshakes. (The first had taken place on arrival and the second at the beginning of dinner, when the word
Mahlzeit
was ritually pronounced. German days are scanned by a number of such formalities.)

The evening ended for me with the crowning delight of a bath, the first since London. I wondered if the tall copper boiler had been covertly lit as a result of a lively account of my potentially verminous night in the workhouse...“My husband's study,” my hostess had said with a sigh, when she showed me my room. And here, under another of those giant meringue eiderdowns, I lay at last between clean sheets on an enormous leather sofa with a shaded light beside me beneath row upon row of Greek and Latin classics. The works of Lessing, Mommsen Kant, Ranke, Niebuhr and Gregorovius soared to a ceiling decoratively stencilled with sphinxes and muses. There were plaster busts of Pericles and Cicero, a Victorian view of the Bay of Naples behind a massive desk and round the walls, faded and enlarged, in clearings among the volumes, huge photographs of Paestum, Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte and Segesta. I began to understand that German middle-class life held charms that I had never heard of.

* * *

The gables of the Rhine-quays were gliding past and, as we gathered speed and sailed under one of the spans of the first bridge, the lamps of Cologne all went on simultaneously. In a flash the fading city soared out of the dark and expanded in a geometrical infinity of electric bulbs. Diminishing skeletons of yellow dots leaped into
being along the banks and joined hands across the flood in a sequence of lamp-strung bridges. Cologne was sliding astern. The spires were the last of the city to survive and as they too began to dwindle, a dark red sun dropped through bars of amber into a vague
Abendland
that rolled glimmering away towards the Ardennes. I watched the twilight scene from the bows of the leading barge. The new plaque on my stick commemorated the three Magi—their bones had been brought back from the crusade by Frederick Barbarossa—and the legend of St. Ursula and her suite of eleven thousand virgins.
[6]

The barges were carrying a cargo of cement to Karlsruhe, where they were due to take on timber from the Black Forest and sail downstream again, possibly to Holland. The barges were pretty low in the water already: the cement sacks were lashed under tarpaulin lest a downpour should turn the cargo to stone. Near the stern of the leading barge the funnel puffed out a rank volume of diesel smoke, and just aft of this hazard swung the brightly painted and beam-like tiller.

The crew were my pals from the bar! I had been the first to realize it. The others grasped the fact more slowly, with anguished cries of recognition as everything gradually and painfully came back to them. Four untidy bunks lined the walls of the cabin and a brazier stood in the middle. Postcards of Anny Ondra, Lilian Harvey, Brigitte Helm and Marlene Dietrich were pinned on the planks of this den; there was Max Schmeling with the gloves up in a bruising crouch, and two chimpanzees astride a giraffe. Uli and Peter and the diesel-engineer were all from Hamburg. We sat on the lower bunks and ate fried potatoes mixed with
Speck
: cold lumps of pork fat which struck me as the worst thing I had ever eaten. I contributed a garlic sausage and a bottle of schnapps—leaving presents from Cologne—and at the sight of the bottle, Uli
howled like a beagle in pain. Cologne had been a testing time for them all; they were at grips with a group-hangover; but the bottle was soon empty all the same. Afterwards Peter brought out a very elaborate mouth-organ. We sang
Stille Nacht
, and I learnt the words of
Lore, Lore, Lore
and
Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele 'naus
; they said this had been the wartime equivalent of
Tipperary
; then came a Hamburg song about ‘Sankt Pauli und die Reeperbahn.' By pulling down a lock of his hair and holding the end of a pocket comb under his nose to simulate a toothbrush moustache, Uli gave an imitation of Hitler making a speech.

It was a brilliant starry night but very cold and they said I would freeze to death on the cement sacks; I had planned to curl up in my sleeping bag and lie gazing at the stars. So I settled in one of the bunks, getting up every now and then to smoke a cigarette with whoever was on duty at the tiller.

Each barge had a port and starboard light. When another string of barges came downstream, both flotillas signalled with lanterns and the two long Indian files would slide past each other, rocking for a minute or two in each other's wakes. At one point we passed a tug trailing nine barges, each of them twice the length of ours; and later on, the bright speck of a steamer twinkled in the distance. It expanded as it advanced until it towered high above us, and then dwindled and vanished. Deep quarries were scooped out of the banks between the starlit villages that floated downstream. There was a faint glimmer of towns and villages across the plain. Even travelling against the current, we were moving more slowly than we should; the engineer didn't like the sound of the engine: if it broke down altogether, our little procession would start floating chaotically backwards and downstream. Files of barges were constantly overtaking us. As dawn broke, amid a shaking of heads, we tied up at the quays of Bonn.

The sky was cloudy and the classical buildings, the public gardens and the leafless trees of the town looked dingy against the snow; but I didn't dare to wander far in case we were suddenly ready to start. My companions were more heavily smeared with
diesel-oil each time I returned; the engine lay dismembered across the deck amid spanners and hacksaws in an increasingly irreparable-looking chaos and at nightfall it seemed beyond redemption. We supped near and Uli and Peter and I, leaving the engineer alone with his blow-lamp, trooped off to a Laurel and Hardy film—we'd had our eye on it all day—and rolled about in paroxysms till the curtain came down.

At daybreak, all was well! The engine rang with a brisk new note. The country sped downstream at a great pace and the Siebengebirge and the Siegfried-haunted Drachenfels began to climb into the sparkling morning and the saw-teeth of their peaks shed alternate spokes of shadow and sunlight across the water. We sailed between tree-tufted islands. The Rhine crinkled round us where the current ran faster and the bows of vessels creased the surface with wide arrows and each propeller trailed its own long groove between their expanding lines. Among the little tricolours fluttering from every poop the Dutch red-white-and-blue was almost as frequent as the German black-white-and-red. A few flags showing the same colours as the Dutch but with the stripes perpendicular instead of horizontal, flew from French vessels of shallow draught from the quays of Strasbourg. The rarest colours of all were the black-yellow-and-red of Belgium. These boats, manned by Walloons from Liège, had joined the great river
via
the Meuse, just below Gorinchem. (What a long way off the little town seemed now, both in time and distance!) A stiff punctilio ruled all this going and coming. Long before crossing or overtaking each other, the appropriate flags were flourished a prescribed number of times from either vessel; and each exchange was followed by long siren blasts. Note answered note; and these salutations and responses and reciprocally fluttering colours spread a charming atmosphere of ceremony over the watery traffic like the doffing of hats between grandees. Sometimes a
Schleppzug
—a string of barges—lay so heavy under its cargo that the coiling bow-wave hid the vessels in turn as though they were sinking one after the other and then emerging for a few seconds as the wave dropped, only to
vanish with the next curl of water; and so all along the line. Seagulls still skimmed and swooped and hovered on beating wings for thrown morsels or alighted on the bulwarks and stood there pensively for a minute or two. I watched all this from a nest among the sacks with a mug of Uli's coffee in one hand and a slice of bread in the other.

How exhilarating to be away from the plain! With every minute that passed the mountains climbed with greater resolution. Bridges linked the little towns from bank to bank and the water scurried round the piers on either side as we threaded upstream. Shuttered for the winter, hotels rose above the town roofs and piers for passenger steamers jutted into the stream. Unfabled as yet, Bad Godesberg slipped past. Castles crumbled on pinnacles. They loomed on their spikes like the turrets of the Green Knight before Sir Gawain; and one of them—so my unfolding river map told me—might have been built by Roland. Charlemagne was associated with the next. Standing among tall trees, the palaces of electors and princes and pleasure-loving archbishops reflected the sunlight from many windows. The castle of the Princes of Wied moved out of the wings, floated to the centre and then drifted slowly off-stage again. Was this where the short-reigned Mpret of Albania grew up? Were any of these castles, I wondered, abodes of those romantic-sounding noblemen, Rheingrafen and Wildgrafen—Rhine-Counts or Counts of the Forest, or the Wilderness or of Deer? If I had had to be German, I thought, I wouldn't have minded being a Wildgrave; or a Rhinegrave...A shout from the cabin broke into these thoughts: Uli handed up a tin plate of delicious baked beans garnished with some more frightful
Speck
, which was quickly hidden and sent to join the Rheingold when no one was looking.

On the concertina-folds of my map these annotated shores resembled a historical traffic-block. We were chugging along Caesar's
limes
with the Franks. ‘Caesar threw a bridge across the Rhine...' Yes, but where?
[7]
Later emperors moved the frontier eastward into
the mountains far beyond the left bank, where, so they said, the Hercynian forest, home of unicorns, was too dense for a cohort to deploy, let alone a legion. (Look what happened to the legions of Quintilius Varus a hundred miles north-east! Those were vague regions, utterly unlike the shores of the brilliant Rhine: the
Frigund
of German myth, a thicket that still continued after sixty days of travel and the haunt, when the unicorns trotted away into fable, of wolves and elks and reindeers and the aurochs. The Dark Ages, when they reached them, found no lights to extinguish, for none had ever shone there.) Westward the map indicated the outlines of Lothair's kingdom after the Carolingian break-up. Later fragmentations were illustrated heraldically by a jostle of crossed swords and crosiers and shields with closed crowns and coronets and mitres on top, and electoral caps turned up with ermine. Sometimes the hats of cardinals were levitated above their twin pyramids of tassels and an unwieldy growth of crests sprang from the helmets of robber knights. Each of these emblems symbolized a piece in a jigsaw of minute but hardy sovereign fiefs that had owed homage only to the Holy Roman Emperor; each of them exacted toll from the wretched ships that sailed under their battlements; and when Napoleon's advance exorcized the lingering ghost of the realm of Charlemagne, they survived, and still survive, in a confetti of mediatizations. On the terrace of one waterside schloss a strolling descendant in a Norfolk jacket was lighting his mid-morning cigar.