A Time of Gifts (25 page)

In the half-century following Melk, rococo flowers into miraculously
imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes. Scripture pastorals are painted on the walls of the stately interiors. Temples and cylindrical shrines invade the landscape of the Bible. Chinese pagodas, African palms, Nile pyramids and then a Mexican volcano and the conifers and wigwams of Red Indians spring up in Arcady. Walls of mirror reflect these scenes. They bristle with sconces, sinuous gold and silver boundaries of twining branches and the heaped-up symbols of harvest and hunting and warfare mask the joins and the great sheets of glass answer each other across wide floors and reciprocate their reflections to infinity. The faded quicksilver, diffusing a submarine dusk, momentarily touches the invention and the delight of this looking-glass world with a hint of unplanned sadness.

But one is always looking up where those buoyant scenes in grisaille or pastel or polychrome, unfolding elliptically in asymmetric but balancing girdles of snowy cornice, enclose room after room with their resplendent lids. Scriptural throngs tread the air among the banks of vapour and the toppling perspectives of the balustrades. Allegories of the seasons and chinoiserie eclogues are on
the move. Aurora chases the Queen of the Night across the sky and Watteau-esque trios, tuning their lutes and their violins, drift by on clouds among ruins and obelisks and loosened sheaves. A sun declining on a lagoon in Venice touches the rims of those clouds and veils the singing faces and the plucked strings in a tenuous melancholy; irony and pity float in the atmosphere and across the spectator's mind, for there is little time left and a closing note sounds in all these rococo festivals.

* * *

Ceremonious and jocund, Melk is high noon. Meridian glory surrounded us as a clock in the town struck twelve. The midday light showered on the woods and a yellow loop of the Danube and a water-meadow full of skaters, all foreshortened as they wheeled and skimmed beneath the flashing line of windows. We were standing at the centre of a wide floor and peering—under a last ceiling-episode of pillars and flung cloud where the figures rotated beneath a still loftier dayspring of revelation—at a scene like a ballroom gallop getting out of hand. Draperies whirled spiralling up biblical shanks and resilient pink insteps trod the sky. We might have been gazing up through a glass dance-floor and my companion, touching me on the elbow, led me away a couple of paces and the scene reeled for a second with the insecurity of Jericho, as
trompe l'oeil
ceilings will when a shift of focus inflicts the beholder with a fleeting spasm of vertigo. He laughed, and said: “On se sent un peu gris, vous ne trouvez pas?”

A bit tipsy... It was quite true. We had been talking about the rococo interplay of spiritual and temporal, and for a few instants, at these last words, my companion was transformed as well: habit, scapular, cowl and tonsure had all vanished and a powdered queue uncoiled down his brocaded back from a bow of watered silk. He was a Mozartian courtier. His light-hearted voice continued its discourse as he stood with his left hand poised on his sword knot. With explanatory sweeps of a clouded cane in his right, he unravelled
the stratagems of the ceiling-painter; and when, to balance the backward tilt of his torso, he advanced a leg in a Piranesi stance, I could all but hear a red heel tap on the chessboard floor.

* * *

One of the Abbey's bells began tolling on a more insistent note and, with an apology from my mentor, who was safely back in his native century, we hastened our step. In a few minutes I was several fields away, high above the Danube with the dome and the cupolas already dropping out of sight below a clump of trees. Twin gold crosses followed them and the cross on the dome last of all. Nothing remained in those hills to give the Abbey's presence away. The vanished pinnacles might have been the pigeon-loft of a farm.

Un peu gris
. It was too mild a term.

* * *

The footpath along the southern bank was leading me into the heart of the Wachau, a region of the Danube as famous as those stretches of the Rhine I had travelled at Christmas or the Loire in Touraine. Melk was the threshold of this unspeakably beautiful valley. As we have seen by now, castles beyond counting had been looming along the river. They were perched on dizzier spurs here, more dramatic in decay and more mysteriously cobwebbed with fable. The towered headlands dropped sheer, the liquid arcs flowed round them in semicircles. From ruins further from the shore the land sloped more gently, and vineyards and orchards descended in layers to the tree-reflecting banks. The river streamed past wooded islands and when I gazed either way, the seeming water-staircase climbed into the distance. Its associations with the
Nibelungenlied
are close, but a later mythology haunts it. If any landscape is the meeting place of chivalrous romance and fairy tales, it is this. The stream winds into distances where Camelot or Avalon might lie,
the woods suggest mythical fauna, the songs of Minnesingers and the sound of horns just out of earshot.

I sat under a birch tree to sketch Schloss Schönbühel. Gleaming as though it were carved ivory, it sprang out of a pivot of rock which the river almost surrounded and ended in a single and immensely tall white tower crowned with a red onion cupola. “It's the castle of the Counts Seilern,” a passing postman said. Smoke curled from a slim chimney: luncheon must have been on the way. I imagined the counts seated expectantly down a long table, hungry but polite, with their hands neatly crossed between their knives and forks.

* * *

A falcon, beating its wings above an unwary heron half way up this northern bend, would command the same view of the river as mine. I had climbed to the ruins of Aggstein—unnecessarily steeply, as I had strayed from the marked pathway—and halted among the battlements of the keep to get my breath back. This gap-toothed hold of the Künringers teems with horrible tales; but I had scrambled up here for a different reason. The polymath's talk, two nights before, had made me long to look down on this particular reach.

There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action!

I mentioned earlier that we—or rather, the polymath—had talked about the Marcomanni and the Quadi, who had lived north of the river hereabouts. The habitat of the Marcomanni lay a little further west; the Quadi dwelt exactly where we were sitting.
“Yes,” he had said, “things were more or less static for a while...” He illustrated this with a pencil-stub on the back of the
Neue Freie Presse
. A long sweep represented the Danube; a row of buns indicated the races that had settled along the banks; then he filled in the outlines of eastern Europe. “...and suddenly, at last,” he said, “something happens!” An enormous arrow entered the picture on the right, and bore down on the riverside buns. “The Huns arrive! Everything starts changing place at full speed!” His pencil leaped feverishly into action. The buns put forth their own arrows of migration and began coiling sinuously about the paper till Mitteleuropa and the Balkans were alive with demons' tails. “Chaos! The Visigoths take shelter south of the lower Danube, and defeat the Emperor Valens at Adrianople,
here!
,” he twisted the lead on the paper—“in 476. Then—in only a couple of decades”—a great loop of pencil swept round the tip of the Adriatic and descended a swiftly-outlined Italy “—we get Alaric! Rome is captured! The Empire splits in two—” the pace of his delivery reminded me of a sports commentator “—and the West totters on for half a century or so. But the Visigoths are heading westwards,” an arrow curved to the left and looped into France, which rapidly took shape, followed by the Iberian peninsula. “Go West, young Goth!,” he murmured as his pencil threw off Visigothic kingdoms across France and Spain at a dizzy speed. “There we are!” he said; then, as an afterthought, he absentmindedly pencilled in an oval across northern Portugal and Galicia, and I asked him what it was. “The Suevi, same as the Swabians, more or less: part of the whole movement. But
now
,” he went on, “
here go the Vandals!
” A few vague lines from what looked like Slovakia and Hungary joined together and then swept west in a broad bar that mounted the Danube and advanced into Germany. “Over the Rhine in 406: then clean across Gaul—” here the speed of his pencil tore a ragged furrow across the paper “—through the Pyrenees three years later—here they come!—then down into Andalusia—hence the name—and
hop!
—” the pencil skipped the imaginary straits of Gibraltar and began rippling eastwards again “—along the north African coast to”—he
improvised the coast as he went, then stopped with a large black blob—“
Carthage!
And all in thirty-three years from start to finish!” His pencil was busy again, so I asked him the meaning of all the dotted lines he had started sending out from Carthage into the Mediterranean. “Those are Genseric's fleets, making a nuisance of themselves. Here he goes, sacking Rome in 455! There was lots of sea activity just about then.” Swooping to the top of the sheet, he drew a coast, a river's mouth and a peninsula: “That's the Elbe, there's Jutland.” Then, right away in the left hand corner, an acute angle appeared, and above it, a curve like an ample rump; Kent and East Anglia, I was told. In a moment, from the Elbe's mouth, showers of dots were curving down on them. “—and there go your ancestors, the first Angles and Saxons, pouring into Britain only a couple of years before Genseric sacked Rome.” Close to the Saxon shore, he inserted two tadpole figures among the invading dots: what were they? “Hengist and Horsa,” he said, and refilled the glasses.

This was the way to be taught history! It was just about now that a second bottle of Langenlois appeared. His survey had only taken about five minutes; but we had left the Marcomanni and the Quadi far behind... The polymath laughed. “I forgot, about them in the excitement! There's no problem about the Marcomanni,” he said. “They crossed the river and became the Bayuvars—and the Bayuvars are the Bavarians—I've got a Markoman grandmother. But the Quadi! There are plenty of mentions of them in Roman history. Then, all of a sudden—none! They vanished just about the time of the Vandals' drive westward...” They probably went along with them too, he explained, as part of the slipstream... “A whole nation shimmering upstream like elvers—not that there are any eels in the Danube,” he interrupted himself parenthetically, on a different note. “Not native ones, unfortunately: only visitors—suddenly, the forests are empty. But, as nature hates a vacuum, not for long. A new swarm takes their place. Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden!” There was no room on the
Neue Freie Presse
, so he shifted a glass and drew the tip of Scandinavia
on the scrubbed table top. “This is the Baltic Sea, and here they come.” A diagram like the descent of a jellyfish illustrated their itinerary. “By the middle of the fifth century they were settled all along the left bank of the Middle Danube—if ‘settled' is the word—they were all such fidgets.” I'd never heard of the Rugii. “But I expect you've heard of Odoaker? He was a Rugian.” The name, pronounced in the German way, did suggest something. There were hints of historical twilight in the syllables, something momentous and gloomy...but what? Inklings began to flicker.

Hence my ascent to this ruin. For it was Odoacer, the first barbarian king after the eclipse of the last Roman Emperor. (“Romulus Augustulus!” the polymath had said. “What a name! Poor chap, he was very good-looking, it seems, and only sixteen.”)

Behind the little town of Aggsbach Markt on the other bank, the woods which had once teemed with Rugians rippled away in a fleece of tree-tops. Odoacer came from a point on the north bank only ten miles downstream. He dressed in skins, but he may have been a chieftain's, even a king's son. He enlisted as a legionary, and by the age of forty-two he was at the head of the winning immigrant clique in control of the Empire's ruins, and finally King. After the preceding imperial phantoms, his fourteen years' reign seemed—humiliatingly to the Romans—an improvement. It was not a sudden night at all, but an afterglow, rather, of a faintly lighter hue and lit with glimmers of good government and even of justice. When Theodoric replaced him (by slicing him in half with his broadsword from the collar-bone to the loins at a banquet in Ravenna) it was still not absolutely the end of Roman civilization. Not quite; for the great Ostrogoth was the patron of Cassiodorus and of Boëthius, “the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman.” But he slew them both and then died of remorse; and the Dark Ages had come, with nothing but candles and plainsong left to lighten the shadows. “Back to the start,” as the polymath had put it, “and lose ten centuries.”