A Time of Gifts (9 page)

The amazing procession went on all day.

The walled town of Andernach was bearing down on us. The engineer snored in his bunk, Peter was smoking at the tiller and I lolled in the sun on the cabin roof while Uli sent flourishes and gracenotes cascading from his mouth-organ. Two or three bridges and half-a-dozen castles later, after a final hour or so of snow-covered slopes, we were losing speed under the lee of the Ehrenbreitstein. This colossal and extremely business-like modern fort was a cliff of masonry bristling with casemates and slotted with gun-embrasures. The town of Coblenz rose from the other shore with a noble sweep.

We slanted in towards the quay on the west bank; gradually, to prevent the barges bumping into each other or piling up as we lost speed. The whole manoeuvre was for my sake as the others had to hasten on. It was a sad parting: “Du kommst nicht mit?,” they cried. When we were going slow enough, and close enough to the embankment, I jumped ashore. We waved to each other as they steered amidstream again, and Uli unloosed a succession of piercing shrieks from the siren and then a long blast of valediction that echoed amazingly along the cliffs of Coblenz. Then they straightened out and slid under a bridge of boats and sped south.

* * *

A point like a flat-iron jutted into the river and a plinth on its tip lifted a colossal bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I many yards into the air among the sparrows and the gulls. This projection of rock and masonry had once been an isolated southern settlement of the Teutonic Knights—to my surprise: I had always imagined these warriors hacking away at Muscovites in a non-stop snowstorm on the shores of the Baltic or the Masurian lakes. The Thirty Years War raged through the place. Metternich was born a few doors away. But a hoarier, more cosmic chronology had singled it out. Two great rivers, rushing blind down their converging canyons, collide under the tip of the flat-iron and the tangled flux of the current ruffles and dwindles downstream till the Rhine's great silted volume subdues the clearer flow of the newcomer. The Moselle! I knew that this loop of water, swerving under its bridges and out of sight, was the last stretch of a long valley of the utmost significance and beauty. A seagull, flying upstream, would look down for scores of miles on tiered and winding vineyards, and swoop, if he chose, through the great black Roman gates of Trier and then over the amphitheatre and across the frontier into Lorraine. Skimming through the weather-vanes of the old Merovingian city of Metz, he would settle among the rocks of the Vosges where the stream begins. I was tempted, for a moment, to
follow it: but its path pointed due west; I'd never get to Constantinople that way. Ausonius, if I had read him then, might have tipped the scales.

Coblenz is on a slant. Every street tilted and I was always looking across towers and chimney-pots and down on the two corridors of mountain that conducted the streams to their meeting. It was a buoyant place under a clear sky, everything in the air whispered that the plains were far behind and the sunlight sent a flicker and a flash of reflections glancing up from the snow; and two more invisible lines had been crossed and important ones: the accent had changed and wine cellars had taken the place of beer-halls. Instead of those grey mastodontic mugs, wine-glasses glittered on the oak. (It was under a vista of old casks in a Weinstube that I settled with my diary till bedtime.) The plain bowls of these wine-glasses were poised on slender glass stalks, or on diminishing pagodas of little globes, and both kinds of stem were coloured: a deep green for Mosel and, for Rhenish, a brown smoky gold that was almost amber. When horny hands lifted them, each flashed forth its coloured message in the lamplight. It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much. Deceptively and treacherously, those innocent-looking goblets hold nearly half a bottle and simply by sipping one could explore the two great rivers below and the Danube and all Swabia, and Franconia too by proxy, and the vales of Imhof and the faraway slopes of Würzburg: journeying in time from year to year, with draughts as cool as a deep well, limpidly varying from dark gold to pale silver and smelling of glades and meadows and flowers. Gothic inscriptions still flaunted across the walls, but they were harmless here, and free of the gloom imposed by those boisterous and pace-forcing black-letter hortations in the beer-halls of the north. And the style was better: less emphatic, more lucid and laconic; and both consoling and profound in content; or so it seemed as the hours passed.
Glaub, was wahr ist
,
[8]
enjoined a
message across an antlered wall,
Lieb, was rar ist; Trink, was klar ist
. I only realized as I stumbled to bed how pliantly I had obeyed.

It was the shortest day of the year and signs of the season were becoming hourly more marked. Every other person in the streets was heading for home with a tall and newly felled fir-sapling across his shoulder, and it was under a mesh of Christmas decorations that I was sucked into the Liebfrauenkirche next day. The romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams. A Dominican in horn-rimmed spectacles delivered a vigorous sermon. A number of Brownshirts—I'd forgotten all about them for the moment—was scattered among the congregation, with eyes lowered and their caps in their hands. They looked rather odd. They should have been out in the forest, dancing round Odin and Thor, or Loki perhaps.

* * *

Coblenz and its great fortress dropped behind and the mountains took another pace forward. Serried vineyards now covered the banks of the river, climbing as high as they could find a foothold. Carefully buttressed with masonry, shelf rose on shelf in fluid and looping sweeps. Pruned to the bone, the dark vine-shoots stuck out of the snow in rows of skeleton fists which shrank to quincunxes of black commas along the snow-covered contour-lines of the vineyards as they climbed, until the steep waves of salients and re-entrants faltered at last and expired overhead among the wild bare rocks. On the mountains that overhung these flowing ledges, scarcely a peak had been left without a castle. At Stolzenfels, where I stopped for something to eat, a neo-Gothic keep climbed into the sky on a staircase of vineyards, and another castle echoed it from Oberlahnstein on the other shore. Then another rose up, and another, and yet another: ruin on ruin, and vineyard on vineyard... They seemed to revolve as they moved downstream, and
then to impend. Finally a loop of the river would carry them away until the dimness of the evening blurred them all and the lights of the shore began to twinkle among their darkening reflections. Soon after dark, I halted at Boppard. It was lodged a little way up the mountain-side so that next morning a fresh length of the river uncoiled southward while the Sunday morning bells were answering our own chimes upstream and down.

When the cliffs above were too steep for snow, spinneys frilled the ledges of shale, and fans of brushwood split the sunbeams into an infinity of threads. Higher still, the gap-toothed and unfailing towers—choked with trees and lashed together with ivy—thrust angles into the air which followed up the impulse of the crags on which they were perched; and, most fittingly, their names all ended in the German word for ‘angle' or ‘rock' or ‘crag' or ‘keep': Hoheneck, Reichenstein, Stolzenfels, Falkenburg... Each turn of the river brought into view a new set of stage wings and sometimes a troop of islands which the perpetual rush of the water had worn thin and moulded into the swerve of the current. They seemed to float there under a tangle of bare twigs and a load of monastic or secular ruins. A few of these eyots were sockets for towers which could bar the river by slinging chains to either bank and holding up ships for toll or loot or ransom. Dark tales abound.
[9]

Fragmentary walls, pierced by old gateways, girdled most of the little towns. I halted in many of them for a glass of wine out of one of those goblets with coloured stems with a slice of black bread and butter, sipping and munching by the stove while, every few minutes, my dripping boots shed another slab of hobnail-impacted snow several inches thick. The river, meanwhile, was narrowing fast and the mountains were advancing and tilting more steeply until there was barely space for the road. A huge answering buttress
loomed on the other bank and on its summit, helped by the innkeeper's explanation, I could just discern the semblance of the Lorelei who gave the rock its name. The river, after narrowing with such suddenness, sinks to a great depth here and churns perilously enough to give colour to the stories of ships and sailors beckoned to destruction. The siren of a barge unloosed a long echo; and the road, scanned by brief halts, brought me into Bingen at dusk.

The only customer, I unslung my rucksack in a little Gasthof. Standing on chairs, the innkeeper's pretty daughters, who were aged from five to fifteen, were helping their father decorate a Christmas tree; hanging witch-balls, looping tinsel, fixing candles to the branches, and crowning the tip with a wonderful star. They asked me to help and when it was almost done, their father, a tall, thoughtful-looking man, uncorked a slim bottle from the Rüdesheim vineyard just over the river. We drank it together and had nearly finished a second by the time the last touches to the tree were complete. Then the family assembled round it and sang. The candles were the only light and the solemn and charming ceremony was made memorable by the candle-lit faces of the girls—and by their beautiful and clear voices. I was rather surprised that they didn't sing
Stille Nacht
: it had been much in the air the last few days; but it is a Lutheran hymn and I think this bank of the Rhine was mostly Catholic. Two of the carols they sang have stuck in my memory:
O Du Heilige
and
Es ist ein Reis entsprungen
: both were entrancing, and especially the second, which, they told me, was very old. In the end I went to church with them and stayed the night. When all the inhabitants of Bingen were exchanging greetings with each other outside the church in the small hours, a few flakes began falling. Next morning the household embraced each other, shook hands again and wished every one a happy Christmas. The smallest of the daughters gave me a tangerine and a packet of cigarettes wrapped beautifully in tinsel and silver paper. I wished I'd had something to hand her, neatly done up in holly-patterned ribbon—I thought later of my aluminium pencil-case
containing a new Venus or Royal Sovereign wound in tissue paper, but too late. The time of gifts.
[10]

The Rhine soon takes a sharp turn eastwards, and the walls of the valley recede again. I crossed the river to Rüdesheim, drank a glass of Hock under the famous vineyard and pushed on. The snow lay deep and crisp and even. On the march under the light fall of flakes, I wondered if I had been right to leave Bingen. My kind benefactors had asked me to stay, several times; but they had been expecting relations and, after their hospitality, I felt, in spite of their insistence, that a strange face at their family feast might be too much. So here I was on a sunny Christmas morning, plunging on through a layer of new snow. No vessels were moving on the Rhine, hardly a car passed, nobody was out of doors and, in the little towns, nothing stirred. Everyone was inside. Feeling lonely and beginning to regret my flight, I wondered what my family and my friends were doing, and skinned and ate the tangerine rather pensively. The flung peel, fallen short on the icy margin, became the target for a sudden assembly of Rhine gulls. Watching them swoop, I unpacked and lit one of my Christmas cigarettes, and felt better.

In the inn where I halted at midday—
where was it
? Geisenheim? Winkel? Östrich? Hattenheim?—a long table was splendidly spread for a feast and a lit Christmas tree twinkled at one end. About thirty people were settling down with a lot of jovial noise when some soft-hearted soul must have spotted the solitary figure in the empty bar. Unreluctantly, I was drawn into the feast; and here, in my memory, as the bottles of Johannisberger and Markobrunner mount up, things begin to grow blurred.

A thirsty and boisterous rump at the end of the table was still drinking at sunset. Then came a packed motorcar, a short journey, and a large room full of faces and the Rhine twinkling far below. Perhaps we were in a castle...some time later, the scene changes: there is another jaunt, through the dark this time, with the lights
multiplying and the snow under the tyres turning to slush; then more faces float to the surface and music and dancing and glasses being filled and emptied and spilled.

I woke up dizzily next morning on someone's sofa. Beyond the lace curtains and some distance below, the snow on either side of the tramlines looked unseasonably mashed and sooty for the feast of Stephen.

 

[1]
“People, to arms!”

[2]
‘Who loves not wine, women and song,

Remains a fool his whole life long!'

The exploding exclamation marks and the metaphorical slaps on the back always managed to weave a note of obscure melancholy into these otherwise charming places. They spoke of wine but it was beer-mugs, not glasses, that jostled each other on the tables.

[3]
‘So wave, my maiden, wave, wave, wave.'

[4]
See
Introductory Letter
.

[5]
Nunc mihi, mox hujus, sed postmodo nescio cujus.

[6]
They were all from Britain. They sailed up the Rhine on a bridal convoy, to be martyred here—perhaps by Attila, perhaps by the pagan emperor Maximian—and later were canonized en masse and finally immortalized by Carpaccio.

[7]
Just about here! I've looked it up a minute ago in the
Gallic War
.

[8]
‘Believe what is true; love what is rare; drink what is clear.'

[9]
One of them concerns a mid-stream toll-tower outside Bingen, where I slept: the Mäuseturm. It is the legendary scene of the death of Hatto, Archbishop of Mainz, in the tenth century. He was devoured by mice in the tower, the legend says, in retribution for his tyranny; the story inspired Southey's poem. Rodents play a great part in German legend, e.g.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
.