A Time of Gifts (16 page)

Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.

* * *

Surely I had never seen that oleograph before? Haloed with stars, the Blessed Virgin was sailing skywards through hoops of pink cloud and cherubim, and at the bottom, in gold lettering, ran the words:
Mariä Himmelfahrt
. And those trusses of chair-legs, the tabby cat in a nest of shavings and the bench fitted with clamps? Planes, mallets, chisels and braces-and-bits littered the room. There was a smell of glue, and sawdust lay thick on the cobwebs in the mid-morning light. A tall man was sand-papering chair-spokes and a woman was tiptoeing through the shavings with bread and butter and a coffee pot and, as she placed them beside the sofa where I lay blanketed, she asked me with a smile how my Katzenjammer was. Both were utter strangers.

A
Katzenjammer
is a hangover. I had learnt the word from those girls in Stuttgart.

As I drank the coffee and listened, their features slowly came back to me. At some point, unwillingly emulous of the casualties I had noticed with scorn, I had slumped forward over the Hofbräuhaus table in unwakeable stupor. There has been no vomiting, thank God; nothing worse than total insensibility; and the hefty Samaritan on the bench beside me had simply scooped me up and put me in his handcart, which was full of turned chair legs, and then, wrapping me in my greatcoat against the snow, wheeled it
clean across Munich and laid me out mute as a flounder. The calamity must have been brought on by the mixture of the beer with the schnapps I had drunk in Schwabing; I had forgotten to eat anything but an apple since breakfast. Don't worry, the carpenter said: why, in Prague, the beerhalls kept horses that they harnessed to wickerwork coffins on wheels, just to carry the casualties home at the brewery's expense... What I needed, he said, opening a cupboard, was a ‘schluck' of schnapps to put me on my feet. I made a dash for the yard and stuck my head under the pump. Then, combed and outwardly respectable, I thanked my saviours and was soon striding guiltily and at high speed through these outlying streets.

I felt terrible. I had often been drunk, and high spirits had led to rash doings; but never to this hoggish catalepsy.

In the Jugendherberge my rucksack had been tidied away from my unslept-in bed. The caretaker looked in a cupboard in vain and called for the charwoman. No, she said, the only rucksack in the building had departed first thing on the back of their only over-night lodger... What! Was he a spotty young man? I eked out my inadequate German with a few pointilliste prods. Yes, he
had
been rather pimply: “
a pickeliger Bua
.”

I was aghast. The implications were too much to take in at first. Momentarily, the loss of the diary ousted all other thoughts. Those thousands of lines, the flowery descriptions, the pensées, the philosophic flights, the sketches and verses! All gone. Infected by my distress, the caretaker and the charwoman accompanied me to the police station, where a sympathetic Schupo wrote down all the details, clicking his tongue. “
Schlimm! Schlimm!
” Bad... So it was; but there was worse. When he asked for my passport, I reached in the pocket of my jerkin: there was no familiar slotted blue binding there: and I remembered with a new access of despair that I had tucked it down the back of a rucksack pocket for the first time on this journey. The policeman looked grave, and I looked graver still: for inside the passport, for fear of losing it or of spending too much, I had folded the canvas envelope with the four new pounds
and this left me with three marks and twenty-five pfennigs in the world, and my lifeline cut for the next four weeks. Apart from this I gathered that wandering about Germany without papers was a serious offence. The policeman telephoned the details to the central police station and said “We must go to the British Consulate.” We caught a tram and I jolted along beside him. He was formidable in a greatcoat and belted side-arms and a black-lacquered shako and chin-strap. I had visions of being packed home as a distressed British subject, or conducted to the frontier as an undesirable alien and felt as though last night's debauch were stamped on my forehead. I might have been back two years in time, guiltily approaching some dreaded study door.

The clerk at the Consulate knew all about it. The Hauptpolizeiamt had telephoned.

The Consul, seated at a huge desk in a comfortable office under photographs of King George V and Queen Mary, was an austere and scholarly-looking figure in horn-rimmed spectacles. He asked me in a tired voice what all the fuss was about.

Perched on the edge of a leather armchair, I told him, and roughly outlined my Constantinople plan and my idea of writing a book. Then caught up in a fit of volubility, I launched myself on a sort of rambling, prudently censored autobiography. When I finished, he asked me where my father was. In India, I told him. He nodded, and there was a tactful pause. He leant back, with fingertips joined, gazing vaguely at the ceiling, and said: “Got a photograph?” This rather puzzled me. “Of my father? I'm afraid not.” He laughed, and said “No, of you”; and I realized things were taking a turn for the better. The clerk and the policeman led me round the corner to a photomaton shop, which left me with only a few pfennigs. Then I signed the documents waiting in the hall and was summoned back to the Consul's office. He asked me what I proposed to use for money. I hadn't thought yet. I said perhaps I could find odd jobs on farms, walking every other day, till I'd let enough time elapse for some more cash to mount up... He said “Well! His Majesty's Government will lend you a fiver. Send it
back some time when you're less broke.” After my amazed thanks he asked me how I had come to leave my stuff unguarded in the
Jugendherberge
; I told him all: the recital evoked another tired smile. When the clerk came in with the passport, the Consul-General signed and blotted it carefully, took some banknotes from a drawer, placed them between the pages and pushed it over to my side of his desk. “There you are. Try not to lose it this time.” (I've got it in front of me now, faded, torn, dog-eared and travel-stained, crammed with the visas of vanished kingdoms and entry- and exit-stamps in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. The face in the discoloured snap has a dissolute and rather impertinent look. The consular stamp has
gratis
written across it, and the signature is
D. St Clair Gainer
.)

“Do you know anyone in Munich?” Mr. Gainer said, getting up. I said I did—that is, not exactly, but I'd got an introduction to a family. “Get in touch with them,” he said. “Try and keep out of trouble, and I should avoid beer and schnapps on an empty stomach next time. I'll look out for the book.”
[1]

I walked out into the snowy Prannerstrasse like a reprieved malefactor.

* * *

Luckily, the letter of introduction had been posted a few days before. But I remembered the name—Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff—so I telephoned, and was asked to stay; and that same evening, in Gräfelfing, a little way out of Munich, I found myself at a lamp-lit table with a family of the utmost charm and kindness. It seemed a miracle that a day so ominously begun could end so happily.

The Lipharts were a White Russian family: more specifically, they were from Esthonia and, like many Baltic landowners, they had taken flight through Sweden and Denmark after the loss of their estates at the end of the war. The castle they lived in—was it called Ratshoff?—became a national museum in Esthonia, and the family settled in Munich. They had none of the austerity that one might associate with descendants of Teutonic knights—in fact, nothing Teutonic at all—and the visual change from solid bulk to these fine-boned Latin-seeming faces was a welcome one. A Greco-esque look stamped this handsome family and they carried off their change of fortune in light-hearted style.

Karl, the eldest son, was a painter, about fifteen years older than me, and as he was short of a sitter for the few days of my stay, I came in handy. We went into Munich every morning and spent peaceful hours of chat in his studio. I listened to anecdotes and scandals and funny stories about Bavaria while the snow piled up on the skylight and the picture dashingly took shape.
[2]
When the light began to fail we would wait in a café for Karl's younger brother Arvid, who worked in a bookshop. Here we would hobnob with friends of theirs for an hour or two or have a drink in someone's house. On a day when there was no painting, I explored as many of the baroque churches and theatres as I could, and spent an entire morning in the Pinakothek. We would catch the train back to Gräfefing in the evening.

Their parents were captivating survivals of the decades when Paris and the South of France and Rome and Venice were full of northern grandees seeking refuge there from the birch trees and conifers and the frozen lakes of their white and innumerable acres. I could see them, in imagination, lit by the clustering globes of gasoliers on the steps of opera houses and spanking along avenues of lime trees behind carefully matched greys—I could almost catch the twinkle of the scarlet and canary spokes. They would be cantering among the tombs of the Appian Way or gliding from palace
to palace, in wonderful clothes, under a maze of bridges. Much of Karl's father's life had been spent in painters' studios and writers' studies, and the house was full of books in half a dozen languages. In my bedroom I was very taken with an old photograph. It showed my host as a young man, dressed to kill and mounted on a beautiful horse in the middle of a pack of foxhounds. Beyond the tophats and the assembled carriages of his guests, the lost castle loomed. The tale of my rucksack, recounted now as a funny story, brought sympathy showering down. What! I'd lost everything? It wasn't too bad, I said, thanks to Mr. Gainer's fiver. “My dear boy, you'll need every penny!” the Baron exclaimed. “Hang on to it! Karl, Arvid! We must hunt through the attic after dinner.” The attic and various cupboards yielded a splendid rucksack and a jersey, and shirts, socks and pyjamas, a small mountain of things. The whole operation was conducted with speed and laughter, and in ten minutes I was practically fitted out. (I bought the few remaining necessaries next day in Munich for well under a pound.) It was a day of miracles. I was dazed by this immediate and overflowing generosity; but their friendly bohemianism overrode all the reluctance I ought to have felt.

I stayed five days. When leaving-time came, I might have been a son of the house setting forth. The Baron spread maps and pointed out towns and mountains and monasteries and the country houses of friends he would write to, so that I could have a comfortable night now and then, and a bath. “There we are! Nando Arco at St. Martin! And my old friend Botho Coreth at Hochschatten. The Trautmannsdorffs at Pottenbrunn!” (He wrote to them all and it brought a new dimension into the journey.) He and the Baroness were worried about Bulgaria: “It's full of robbers and comitadjis. You must take care! They're a terrible lot.
And as for the Turks!
” The nature of the hinted menace was obscure.

The evenings were conversation and books. The Baron enlarged on the influence of
Don Juan
on
Evgenye Oniegin
and the decay of German literature and the changes of taste in France: was Paul Bourget read a great deal? Henri de Regnier? Maurice Barrès?
I wish I could have answered. Saved from the general loss by its presence in a remote pocket, my only book now was the German translation of
Hamlet
: how true was the German claim that it was as good as the original? “Not true at all!” the Baron said: “But it's better than in any
other
foreign language. Just listen!”; and he took down four books and read out Mark Antony's speech in Russian, French, Italian and German. The Russian had a splendid ring, as it always does. The French sounded rather thin and the Italian bombastic and orotund; unfairly but amusingly, he exaggerated the styles as he read. The German, however, had a totally different consistency from any utterance I had heard on this journey: slow, thoughtful, clear and musical, stripped of its harshness and over-emphasis and gush; and in those minutes, as the lamplight caught the reader's white hair and eyebrows and sweeping white moustache and twinkled in the signet ring of the hand that held the volume, I understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.

All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss had only one result under this roof... What books? I had named them; when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can't do much about the others but here's Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S's of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes; Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia...I made a feint at disclaiming a treasure so far beyond the status of
the rough travels ahead. But I had been forestalled, I saw with relief, by an inscription: ‘To our young friend,' etc., on the page opposite an emblematic
ex libris
with the name of their machicolated Baltic home. Here and there between the pages a skeleton leaf conjured up those lost woods.

* * *

This book became a fetish. I noticed, during the next few days, that it filled everyone with feelings of wonder akin to my own. On the second evening—Rosenheim was the first—placed alongside the resolutely broached new diary on the inn-table of Hohenaschau, it immediately made me seem more exalted than the tramp that I actually was. “What a beautiful little book!,” awed voices would say. Horny fingers reverently turned the pages. “Lateinisch? Well, well...” A spurious aura of scholarship and respectability sprang up.