A Time of Gifts (17 page)

* * *

Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I found him in the Gemeindeamt, where he filled out a slip of paper. I presented it at the inn: it entitled me to supper and a mug of beer, a bed for the night and bread and a bowl of coffee in the morning; all on the parish. It seems amazing to me now, but so it was, and there was no kind of slur attached to it; nothing, ever, but a friendly welcome. I wonder how many times I took advantage of this generous and, apparently, very old custom? It prevailed all through Germany and Austria, a survival perhaps, of some ancient charity to wandering students and pilgrims, extended now to all poor travellers.

The Gastwirtschaft was a beetling chalet with cut logs piled to the eaves. An elaborate balcony ran all the way round it; carved and fretted woodwork frilled it at every point and a layer of snow
two feet thick, like the cotton-wool packing for a fragile treasure, muffled the shallow tilt of the enormous wide-eaved roof.

Of the village in the snowy dark outside, nothing has stuck. But unlike the three overnight halts that follow—Riedering, Söllhuben and Röttau, that is to say—it is at least marked on maps.

Each of these little unmarked hamlets seems smaller in retrospect than the other two, and remoter, and more deeply embedded in hills and snow and dialect. They have left an impression of women scattering grain in their yards to a rush of poultry, and of hooded children returning from school with hairy satchels and muffled ears: homing goblins, slapping along lanes on skis as short and wide as barrel-staves and propelling themselves with sticks of unringed hazel. When we passed each other, they would squeak “
Grüss Gott!
” in a polite shrill chorus. One or two were half gagged by cheekfuls bitten from long slices of black bread and butter.

All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey discs and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and clogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air: then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded. Outside the villages the telegraph wire was a single cable of flakes interrupted by birds alighting and I would follow the path below and break through the new and sparkling crust to sink in powdery depths. I travelled on footpaths and over stiles and across fields and along country roads that ran through dark woods and out again into the white ploughland and pasture. The valleys were dotted with villages that huddled round the shingle roofs of churches, and all the belfries tapered and then swelled again into black ribbed cupolas. These onion-domes had a fleetingly Russian look. Otherwise, especially when the bare hardwoods were replaced by conifers, the décor belonged to Grimms' Fairy Tales. “Once upon a time, on the edge of a dark forest, there lived an old woodman, with a single beautiful daughter,” it was that sort of a region. Cottages that looked as innocent as cuckoo-clocks turned into witches' ginger-bread after dark. Deep and crusted loads of snow weighed the conifer-branches to the ground. When I touched
them with the tip of my new walking stick, up they sprang in sparkling explosions. Crows, rooks and magpies were the only birds about and the arrows of their footprints were sometimes crossed by the deeper slots of hares' pads. Now and again I came on a hare, seated alone in a field and looking enormous; hindered by the snow it would lope awkwardly away to cover, for the snow slowed everything up, especially when the rails and the posts beside the path were buried. The only people I saw outside the villages were woodcutters. They were indicated, long before they appeared, by the wide twin grooves of their sledges, with cart-horses' crescent-shaped tracks stamped deep between. Then they would come into view on a clearing or the edge of a distant spinney and the sound of axes and the rasp of two-handed saws would reach my ears a second after my eye had caught the vertical fall or the horizontal slide of the blades. If, by the time I reached them, a tall tree was about to come down, I found it impossible to move on. The sledge-horses, with icicled fetlocks and muzzles deep in their nosebags, were rugged up in sacking and I stamped to keep warm as I watched. Armed with beetles, rustic bruisers at work in a ring of chips and sawdust and trodden snow, banged the wedges home. They were rough and friendly men, and one of them, on the pretext of a strange presence and with a collusive wink, was sure to pull out a bottle of schnapps. Swigs, followed by gasps of fiery bliss, sent prongs of vapour into the frosty air. I took a turn with the saw once or twice, clumsily till I got the hang of it, unable to tear myself away till at last the tree came crashing down. Once, arriving on the scene just as the loading of the dismembered tree was complete, I got a lift on the sledge, and swished along behind two of those colossal chestnuts with flaxen manes and tails and ornate jingling collars. The trip ended with more schnapps in a Gastwirtschaft, and a departure sped by dialect farewells. It shot through my mind that if I were up against it further on, I might do worse than hitch on to one of these forest teams, as one of the woodmen half jocularly suggested, and hack away for my keep.

Otherwise, except for birds, most of these white landscapes
were empty, and I would crunch along adding the track of my hobnails to their criss-cross of little tridents. Fired by the Baron's example, I tried to get by heart, from Schlegel and Tieck's pocket translation, the passages of
Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark
which I knew in English. ‘Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer...' came rumbling out over the snow in its new guise:

until I got to ‘It is a fear of something after death/that undiscovered country from whose bourne/no traveller returns':

Again, anyone bumping into me unawares, like the crone on the Ulm road, would have taken me for drunk; in a literary sense they would have been right.

Every mile or so wooden calvaries, hewn and painted with rustic velleities of baroque, stood askew beside the path. Streaming wounds mangled the gaunt figures and exposure had warped or split them along the grain. Haloes of tarnished brass put out spikes behind the heads; the brows were clumsily hooped already with plaits of real thorns and sheltered by pointed snow-laden chevrons. They might have been the lineal replacements, changed every few generations, of the first Christian emblems which St. Boniface, hot-foot from Devonshire, had set up in Germany. He converted the country a hundred years after St. Augustine had arrived in Kent; and not much more than two centuries after Hengist and Horsa had landed in Britain while their German kinsmen were bursting into Gaul and into these trans-Danubian
woods. This saint from Devonshire was not the only Englishman to help drive the old gods out: monks from south-east England, the West Country and the Shires were soon seated on all the earliest bishops' thrones of Germany.

Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape—the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn—all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous. Objects expand or shrink and the change makes the scenery resemble early woodcuts of winter husbandry. Sometimes the landscape moves it further back in time. Pictures from illuminated manuscripts take shape; they become the scenes which old breviaries and Books of Hours enclosed in the O of
Orate, fratres
. The snow falls; it is Carolingian weather... Set on the way by my Villon craze, I had discovered and devoured Helen Waddell's
Mediaeval Latin Lyrics
and the
Wandering Scholars
the year before and had seized on the Archpoet and the
Carmina Burana
; and I wasn't slow, in the present circumstances, to identify myself with one of those itinerant mediaeval clerks. In an inn or a cowshed, when I scratched away the ice-ferns in the morning and the winter scene widened, the illusion was complete:

It was the world all round me! ‘De ramis cadunt folia...' they had fallen long ago. ‘Modo frigescit quidquid est...' icicles,
barring the scene out-of-doors, dripped from the eaves in confirmation.

There was something meditative and consoling about this dim season, except towards evening, when the sun—invisible through the clouds, reduced to a silvery blur or expanded to an orange globe like a winter cherry—began to set. Then rooks fell silent; the pink after-glow faded on faraway peaks; the light dwindled over the grey fields; and life ebbed with a shudder like a soul leaving the body. All was suddenly quiet and ghostly and I longed for the first glimpse of the lamplight streaming through the windows of my destined village. I lost my way now and then through misunderstanding instructions at a farm or a cottage; sometimes dialect or lack of teeth or the wind had garbled them. Heading in the twilight for one of those three uncharted villages, I had a moment of panic. I was long past the last signpost: it had pointed to Pfaffenbichl and Marwang—I remember these two names because the first was ridiculous and the second rather sinister. All at once it was dark and the snow was coming down fast. I was feeling my way by a wooden rail when I lost touch and fell stumbling in a drift and floundered in circles but couldn't find the rail. I must have strayed into a field. Luckily I found a ruined barn and fumbled my way to the door. I lit a match and cleared the snow and the ancient cow-pats and owls' pellets out of a corner and, pulling on every stitch of extra clothing from my rucksack, resigned myself to the thought of sheltering there till daybreak. The sun had only just set.

I usually had an apple and a hunk of bread and a flask, but not this time. There was no light to read by or dry wood for a fire, the cold was getting worse and the wind was driving snow through a score of gaps. I huddled in a ball with my arms round my knees, stirring every few minutes to stamp and flap my arms. Too low for wolves, I thought melodramatically; or was it? After a while I stopped the singing with which I was trying to pass the interminable hours. There was nothing for it but to sit clenched and shivering in this prehistoric burial posture and listen to my teeth
rattling. Every now and then I seemed to fall into a sort of catalepsy. But suddenly—was it midnight, or one in the morning? or later perhaps?—the wind fell and I heard voices, quite near, and jumped up and ran out shouting. There was silence, then someone called back. I could make out two faint blurs. They were villagers returning home. What was I doing there, on such a night? I told them. “Der arme Bua!” They were all sympathy. But it was only half-past eight and the village was a mere two or three hundred metres away, just round the end of the hill... And within five minutes, there were the roofs and the belfry and the lighted doorway. The carpet of lamplight unrolled across the snow and the flakes floating past the windows were turning to sequins. Inside the inn the lamplit and steaming rustics round the table, veiled in the smoke of their lidded pipes, were maundering away with slurred vowels over their mugs. It was no good trying to explain.

* * *

“Hans.”

“ What?”

“Can you see me?”

“No.”

“Well, the dumplings are enough.”

The inn-keeper's wife, who was from Munich, was illustrating the difficulties of the dialect by an imaginary conversation between two Bavarian peasants. They are seated on either side of a table, helping themselves from a huge dish of
Knödel
, and it is only when the plate of one of them is piled high enough with dumplings to hide him from view that he stops. In ordinary German, this dialogue would run: “Hans!” “Was?” “Siehst Du mich?” “Nein.” “Also, die Knödel sind genug.” But in the speech of Lower Bavaria, as closely as I can remember, it turns into: “Schani!” “Woas?” “Siahst Du ma?” “Na.” “Nacha, siang die Kniadel knua.” Such sounds were mooing and rumbling in the background all through this Bavarian trudge.

The inns in these remote and winter-bound thorpes were warm and snug. There was usually a picture of Hitler and a compulsory poster or two, but they were outnumbered by pious symbols and more venerable mementoes. Perhaps because I was a foreigner, politics seldom entered the conversations I had to share in; rather surprisingly, considering the closeness of those villages to the fountain-head of the Party. (It was different in towns.) Inn-talk, when it concerned the regional oddities of Bavaria, was rife with semi-humorous bias. Even then, many decades after Bismarck's incorporation of the Bavarian Kingdom into the German Empire, Prussia was the chief target. A frequent butt of these stories was a hypothetical Prussian visitor to the province. Disciplined, blinkered, pig-headed and sharp-spoken, with thin vowels and stripped consonants—every “
sch
” turning into “
s
” and every hard “
g
” into “
y
”—this ridiculous figure was an unfailing prey for the easy-going but shrewd Bavarians. Affection for the former ruling family still lingered. The hoary origins and the thousand years' sway of the Wittelsbachs were remembered with pride and their past follies forgiven. So august and gifted and beautiful a dynasty had every right, these old people inferred, to be a bit cracked now and then. The unassuming demeanour of Prince Ruprecht, the actual Pretender—who was also the last Stuart Pretender to the British throne—was frequently extolled; he was a distinguished doctor in Munich, and much loved. All this breathed homesickness for a past now doubly removed and thickly overlaid by recent history. I liked them for these old loyalties. Not everyone is fond of Bavarians: their fame is mixed, both inside Germany and out and one hears damning tales of aggressive ruthlessness. They seemed a rougher race than the civilized Rhinelanders or the diligent and homely Swabians. They were, perhaps, more raw in aspect and more uncompromising in manner; and—trivial detail!—an impression remains, perhaps a mistaken one, of darker hair. But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evenings with. They have left a memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech
and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, for from the Norwegian fiords to Nepal, above certain contour-lines, the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same. It soars to a feverish zenith in Switzerland, where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears.