A Time of Gifts (32 page)

There was much talk of this obsolete Spanish etiquette. It is hard to imagine when one is surrounded by the easy-going charm of present-day Austrian ways, but portraits are lavish with hints. It is clear that something new and strange was planted in the Habsburg Empire at the marriage of Philip the Handsome to Joan the
Mad. She brought Castille and Aragon and all Spain and an array of new kingdoms as a dowry, and Sicily and half Italy and a slice of North Africa and nearly all the new-found Americas; and ceremoniousness as well, and black clothes and the high Spanish punctilio. With the lapse of generations, when lantern jaws and pendulous underlips held sway in both capitals and infantas and archduchesses were almost interchangeable, sombre capes with the scarlet crosses of Santiago and Calatrava began to mingle with the gaudy plumes and slashes of the Landsknecht captains; Escurial solemnity threw the shadows of ritual postures along the Hofburg flagstones and the Holy Roman Empire and the Most Catholic Kingdom were fused. Was Don John a Spanish or an Austrian hero? Above the cavernous bends of the Tagus, hewn or picked out in coloured scales on the barbicans of Toledo, the great double-headed eagle of the Empire opens its feathers wider, even today, than any kindred emblem by the Danube or in Tyrol. Crossing the Atlantic with its wings heraldically spread on the sails of his fleets, the same bird was emblematic of the sudden expanse of Charles V's amazing inheritance. Cut in volcanic stone and crumbling among the lianas, that display of stone feathers still puzzles the Quetzal-conscious Maya; four centuries of earthquakes have spared them from ruin by Lake Titikaka. Charles was the epitome of the double heritage, a living symbol of the Teutonic and the Latin compound and the whole age. Darkly clad against a dark background, wearied with governing and campaigning, standing with one hand resting on his dog's head, how thoughtfully and sombrely the great Emperor looks out from Titian's picture! When he retired after his abdication, it fitted the prevailing duality that he should settle neither in Melk nor Göttweig nor St. Florian nor in any of the famous Austrian abbeys, but in a small royal annexe which he attached like a limpet to the walls of the little Hieronymite monastery of Yuste, among the beech and ilex woods of Estremadura.

* * *

I had never understood till now how near the Turks had got to taking Vienna. Of the first siege in Tudor times there were few mementoes in the museums. But the evidence of the second, more than a century later, and of the narrow escape of the city, was compellingly laid out. There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows; scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums; helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha's tent, cannon and flags and horsetail banners with their bright brass crescents. Charles of Lorraine and John Sobiesky caracoled in their gilded frames and the breastplate of Rüdiger v. Starhemberg, the town's brave defender, gleamed with oiling and burnishing. (When John Sobiesky of Poland met the Emperor on horseback in the fields after the city was saved, the two sovereigns conversed in Latin for want of a common tongue.) There, too, was the mace of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the skull of Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizir strangled and decapitated at Belgrade by Suleiman's descendant for his failure to take Vienna; and beside it, the executioner's silken bowstring. The great drama had taken place in 1683, eighteen years after the Great Fire of London; but all the corroborative detail, the masses of old maps, the prints and the models of the city, turned it into a real and a recent event.

A huge wall encircled the roofs of the city. Eagle banners fluttered from the gables and the battlements and above them loomed many of the towers and steeples I could see when I looked out of the windows. The trenches and the mines of Turkish sappers, all heading for the two key bastions, wriggled across mezzotints like a tangle of wormcasts; the moats, the glacis, the ruins, and the bitterly contested ravelins had all been tilted by the engravers as though for the convenience of a studious bird. Hundreds of tents encompassed the walls; spahis and janissaries pressed forward; the wild cavalry of the Khan of Krim Tartary scoured the woods and bristling regiments of lancers moved about like counter-marching cornfields. Tethered beyond the fascines and the gabions and the
stacked powder-kegs, a score of camels that had padded all the way from Arabia and Bactria gazed at the scene and then at each other, while turbaned gunners simultaneously plied their linstocks and clouds of smoke burst out of the cannon. And lo! even as I looked, the same guns, captured and melted down and recast as bells when the Moslems were driven downstream, were peacefully chiming the hour from the steeple of St. Stephen's.

It had been a close run thing. What if the Turks had taken Vienna, as they nearly did, and advanced westward? And suppose the Sultan, with half the east at heel, had pitched his tents outside Calais? A few years before, the Dutch had burnt a flotilla of men-of-war at Chatham. Might St. Paul's, only half re-built, have ended with minarets instead of its two bell-towers and a different emblem twinkling on the dome? The muezzin's wail over Ludgate Hill? The moment of retrospective defeatism set off new speculations: that wall—fortifications two and a half miles in length and sixty yards wide—had once enclosed the Inner City with a girdle of rampart and fosse. Like the fortifications of Paris which gave way to the outer boulevards in the last century, they were pulled down and replaced by the leafy thoroughfare of the Ring. Very much in character, the Viennese of the late '50's whirled and galloped about their ballrooms to the beat of Strauss's new ‘Demolition-Polka,' composed in celebration of the change. But, for as long as it stood, that massive wall of defensive masonry, twice battered by the Turkish guns and twice manned by the desperate Viennese, had been, for all its additions, materially the same as the great wall of the thirteenth century; and the cost of building it, I learnt with excitement, had been paid for by the English ransom of Richard Coeur de Lion. So the King's fury on the battlements of Acre had been the first link in a chain which, five centuries later, had helped to save Christendom from the paynims! The thought of this unconscious and delayed-action crusading filled me with keen delight.

Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was
the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan's Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moons of the Sultan's flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They mark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.

* * *

Waking one morning, I saw that it was March 3rd. It was impossible to believe that I'd been in Vienna three weeks! The days had sped by. They had simultaneously spun themselves into a miniature lifetime and turned me into a temporary Viennese. (Unlike halts in summer, winter sojourns bestow a kind of honorary citizenship.) There is little to account for this long lapse of days; there seldom is, in the towns on this journey. I had met many people of different kinds, had eaten meals in a number of hospitable houses, above all, I had seen a lot. Later, when I read about this period in Vienna, I was struck by the melancholy which seems to have impressed the writers so strongly. It owed less to the prevailing political uncertainty than to the fallen fortunes of the old imperial city. These writers knew the town better than I, and they must have been right; and I did have momentary inklings of this sadness. But my impression of infinite and glowing charm is probably the result of a total immersion in the past coupled with joyful dissipation. I felt a touch of guilt about my long halt; I had made friends, and departure would be a deracination. Bent on setting off next day, I began assembling my scattered gear.

What was the name of the village on that penultimate morning, and where was it? West of Vienna, and certainly higher; but all the other details have gone. It was Saturday; everybody was free; we drove there in two motor-cars and feasted in an inn perched on the edge of a beech forest. Then, tingling with
glühwein and himbeergeist, we toiled in high spirits and with the snow halfway up our shanks down a long forest ride. We halted in clouds of our own breath and looked north-east and across Vienna towards Czechoslovakia and the dim line of the Little Carpathians; and, just as the sun was beginning to set, we came on a tarn in a ghostly wood of rime-feathered saplings as two-dimensional and brittle-seeming as white ferns. The water was solid, like a rink. Breaking icicles off the trees, we sent the fragments bounding across the surface and into the assembling shadows with an eerie twittering sound and an echo that took half a minute to die away. It was dark when we drove back, talking and singing with the prospect of a cheerful last evening ahead. How different it seemed from my first arrival, under the tarpaulin with Trudi!
Where was Konrad?
It might have been a year ago. Prompted by my recent preoccupations, perhaps, the conversation veered to Charles V's grandfather, the first Maximilian: The Last of the Knights, as he was called, half-landsknecht, and, until you looked more carefully at Dürer's drawing, half playing-card monarch. Someone was describing how he used to escape from the business of the Empire now and then by retiring to a remote castle in the Tyrolese or Styrian forests. Scorning muskets and crossbows and armed only with a long spear, he would set out for days after stag and wild boar. It was during one of these holidays that he composed a four-line poem, and inscribed it with chalk, or in lampblack, on the walls of the castle cellar. It was still there, the speaker said.

Who told us all this? Einer? One of the Austrian couple who were with us? Probably not Robin or Lee or Basset...I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten the place we were coming from and the name of the castle. Whoever it was, I must have asked him to write it out, for here it is, transcribed inside the cover of a diary I began a fortnight later—frayed and battered now—with the old Austrian spelling painstakingly intact. There was something talismanic about these lines, I thought.

They have a more hopeful drift than the comparable five lines by an earlier Caesar, especially the last line. I preferred Maximilian's end to Hadrian's desolating

 

[1]
It was closed years ago and a new hostel was opened in the Schiffgasse, in the Second District.

[2]
“Good morning, Madam! I am an English student walking to Constantinople on foot, and I would so much like to do a sketch of you.”

[3]
Florence, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Fiume, Lubljana, Zagreb, Ragusa, Sarajevo, Budapest, Clausenburg, Csernovitz, Lvov, Brno, Prague...all of them, for varying periods, were part of the Empire. The influx of their citizens to Vienna is the other side of the medal from endemic irredentism and sporadic revolt. (Habsburg absolutism, backed by Metternich's secret police and the dread Moravian fortress-prison of Spielberg were the villains of much nineteenth-century literature: Browning, Meredith and Stendhal spring to mind.)

[4]
I only learnt with certainty that Einer had survived the battle when his admirable book about it came out.
Daedalus Returned
(Hutchinson, 1958) gives a thoughtful, sympathetic and compelling picture of the anxieties and dangers of those days. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross after the battalion he commanded had been the first to enter Canea. Following many operations on the Russian front, he was taken prisoner in 1944 during the Ardennes counter-offensive. I. Mc. D. G. Stewart, in his
The Struggle for Crete
, says: ‘Von der Heydte's...barely disguised distaste for the leaders of the regime was said to have blocked his promotion.' He is now a professor of International Law at Würzburg University, and in a recent letter posted during a journey across Ethiopia, he writes: “I hope we may meet soon and wander once more along the silver streets of our youth.”

[5]
It is in Yugoslavia now. When I went there two years ago, it was a soaking day, so I could only catch a glimpse of the lovely spectres through a film of rain.

[6]
Live, don't know how long,

And die, don't know when;

Must go, don't know where;

I am astonished I am so cheerful.

   Stop press! I've just discovered that the castle is called Schloss Tratzberg. It is near Jenbach, still standing, and not very far from Innsbruck.

T
HE FRIEND
who had driven me through the eastern suburbs of Vienna drew up under the barbican of Fischamend: “Shall we drive on?” he asked. “Just a bit further?” Unawares, we had gone too far already. The road ran straight and due east beside the Danube. It was very tempting; all horsepower corrupts. But rather reluctantly, I fished out my rucksack, waved to the driver on his return journey to Vienna and set off.

Trees lined the road in a diminishing vista. The magpies that flew to and fro in the thin yellow sunshine were beyond all joy-and-sorrow computation and all other thoughts were chased away, as I approached the little town of Petronell, by wondering what a distant object could be that was growing steadily larger as I advanced. It turned out to be a Roman triumphal gateway standing in the middle of a field like a provincial version of the Arch of Titus; alone, enormous and astonishing. The vault sprang from massive piers and the marble facings had long fallen away, laying bare a battered and voluminous core of brick and rubble. Rooks crowded all over it and hopped among the half-buried fragments that scattered the furrows. Visible for miles, the arch of Carnuntum must have amazed the Marcomanni and the Quadi on the opposite bank. Marcus Aurelius wintered here three years, striding cloaked across the ploughland amid the hovering pensées, alternately writing his meditations and subduing the barbarians on the other side of the Danube. His most famous victory—fought in a deep canyon and celestially reinforced by thunder and hail—was known as the Miracle of the Thundering Legions. It is commemorated on the Antonine Column in Rome.