A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A couple of years ago I saw a remarkable documentary about a remarkable man, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who during the Second World War, led and daring raid on the German forces in occupied Crete, capturing the General stationed on the island and taking him into Allied custody. Then over ninety, he could still tell a good story about his travels, and I made a note to read his books.

To my shame it has taken a while to get around to this, but I am now enjoying his account of a walk from London to Constantinople, a tale so rich in detail that it sprawls over two volumes. A Time of Gifts is the first, chronicling how in the winter of 1933, at the age of eighteen, he set off from Britain with little more than a rucksack, a walking stick and a sturdy pair of boots.

The trek gets off to a good start: in Hook of Holland he stops for a coffee after getting off the boat. As he’s leaving, the landlord wants to know where he’s headed:

I put on my greatcoat, slung the rucksack, grasped my stick and headed for the door. The landlord asked where I was going: I said: “Constantinople”. His brows went up and he signalled for me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them; he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey.

After following the Rhine upstream through the Netherlands and Germany, stopping in beer cellars and wine houses – “It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much.” – he reaches Austria. In less than five years time the country would be annexed in the 1938 Anchluss, succumbing to the horrors of Nazism that he had already seen in his walk through Germany. In the early months of 1934, the old order of the Habsburgs lives on in the castles that line the Danube, and armed with letters of introduction, Fermor is invited to stay with the lower nobility from an Empire that disintegrated a mere fifteen years before.

They certainly have a lot to talk about, and Fermor soaks up stories about the old kaiserlich und königlich:

As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks – or so I thought – and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!”, he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono – !” I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar – the last of a bottle of liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age.

As much as it is a cliché to say that Fermor writes exquisitely about a world that’s now gone forever, it happens to be true in this case. He also links us to the world of Jaroslav Hašek and Joseph Roth, and for that I will always be grateful.

The Book of Genesis

I’m not sure how this particular bibulous biblical reference came into conversation last week, but Noah’s infamous ventures with wine growing ended up scrutinised with a glass of wine over supper, so here it is in full.

Noah, having recently battened down the hatches on his ark and saved his family and the world’s animals from drowning in the flood, has now been told by God to multiply, and replenish the earth. He sets about this by becoming a farmer, along with which he plants a few rows of grapes. In the Old Testament’s first reference to viticulture, Noah gets disgustingly drunk and passes out in his gaff:

9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

9:21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

9:22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

9:23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

9:24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

9:27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

What happens when Noah passes out is clothed in biblical obfuscation. It’s pretty much open to conjecture but there those who suggest a serious misdemeanour, either after the booze gets the better of him, or before. At any rate, the other two brothers cover the old boy up and sit out the wrath of the grape the next day when Noah wakes up with the bible’s first hangover. Ham’s son Canaan gets it in the neck for what has happened between his father and grandfather, so it was obviously something worse than not putting him into the recovery position...

Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

Another foray into South American literature, this time to Chile, and writer in exile Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño’s magnum opus is 2666, which has been eyeballing me from the bookshelf of the local library for a while now. At over 900 pages in translation, however, I have shied away from it in favour of one of his shorter pieces, Distant Star, the story of a poet-aviator Carlos Wieder, and his part in the murderous regime that took over in the 1973 coup.

Known to the book’s unnamed author as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle in the period running up to Pinochet’s takeover, Wieder is first encountered in various university poetry groups. A little older than his fellow students, he is an accomplished poet who claims to be an autodidact. More infuriatingly, to the author and his friend Bibiano O’Ryan, he is adored by the two stunningly beautiful Garmendia sisters, who fail to notice Bibiano or the writer at all.

After the fall of Allende, the writer is in a prison camp, when one afternoon he looks up to see a Messerchmitt sky-writing poetry. The pilot is Ruiz-Tagle, now know by the name Carlos Wieder. Following his release, finding himself expelled from university and unable to get a job in the country, the author leaves Chile, but on his travels he continues to hear about the poet-aviator Wieder and his exploits.

After a reckless display in which Wieder flies into a thunderstorm while writing a poem about death, the pilot invites a party of friends, fellow officers and socialites back a rented apartment where he has set up a photography exhibition. No one has seen the content, which is in a locked spare room that Wieder promises to open at midnight. The party goes pretty well, at first:

The first guests arrived at 9.00 in the evening. Most of them were old school friends who hadn’t seen each other for some time. At 11.00, twenty people were present, all of the moderately drunk. No-one had yet entered the spare bedroom, occupied by Wieder, on the walls of which were displayed the photos he was planning to submit to the judgment of his friends. Lieutenant Julio César Muñoz Cano, who years later was to publish a self-denunciatory memoir entitled Neck in a Noose relating his activities during the early years of the military regime, informs us that Carlos Wieder behaved normally (or perhaps abnormally: he was much quieter than usual, to the point of meekness, and throughout the night his face had a freshly washed look). He attended to the guests as if he were in his own home (everyone was getting along splendidly, too well, in fact, writes Muñoz Cano).

Come pumpkin time, Wieder assembles the guests and opens the door, ordering them in one at a time:

The room was lit in the usual way. There were no extra lamps or spotlights to heighten the visual effect of the photos. It was not meant to be like an art gallery, but simply a room, a spare bedroom temporarily occupied by a young visitor. There is, of course, no truth to the story that there were coloured lights or drum beats coming from a cassette player hidden under the bed. The ambience was meant to be everyday, normal, low-key. Outside the party continued. The young men drank as young men do, like the victors they were, and they held their drink like Chileans. The laughter, recalls Muñoz Cano, was contagious, without the slightest hint of menace or anything sinister.

The reaction of the first visitor to the exhibition, the beautiful and confident Tatiana von Beck, is memorable, to say the least:

Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken – everyone noticed. She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn’t find the words. Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone.

A room full of half-cut officers looks on, unsure what to do next:

Wieder’s father broke the spell. He made his way forward politely, addressing each officer by name as he excused himself, then went into the room. The owner of the flat followed him in. Almost immediately he came out again, went up to Wieder, seized him by the lapels, and for a moment it looked as if he would hit him, but then he turned away and stormed off to the living room in search of a drink.

He’ll need it. Wieder has printed out photographs of dozens of atrocities committed by himself on behalf of the military regime, including the murders of the Garmendia sisters. They cover every inch of wall in the room.

Now disgraced, Wieder sinks into obscurity. His writings appear occasionally under pseudonyms in small journals in Europe and South America. The author thinks he has disappeared, until a private detective arrives on his doorstop in Barcelona and demands that they confront Wieder...