Read Online A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor - Free Book Online Page B

bowl of coffee in exchange for our tools. Another distributed slices of black bread and when the bowls had been handed in, my chopping-mate broke the icicles off the spout of the pump and we worked the handle in turn to slosh the sleep from our faces. The doors were then unbarred.
    My chopping-mate was a Saxon from Brunswick and he was heading for Aachen, where, after he had drawn blank in Cologne, Duisburg, Essen and Düsseldorf and combed the whole of the Ruhr, he hoped to find work in a pins-and-needles factory. “Gar kein Glück!” he said. He hunched his shoulders into his lumberjack’s coat and turned the flaps of his cap down over his ears. A few people were about now, stooping like us against the falling flakes. Snow lay on all the ledges and sills and covered the pavements with a trackless carpet. A tram clanged by with its lights still on, although daylight was beginning and when we reached the heart of the city, the white inviolate gardens and frozen trees expanded round the equestrian statue of an Elector. What about the government, I asked: were they any help? He said “Ach, Quatsch!” (“All rot!”) and shrugged as though it were all too taxing a theme for our one-sided idiom. He had been in trouble, and he had no hopes of a turn for the better... The sky was loosening and lemon-coloured light was dropping through the gaps in the snow-clouds as we crossed the Skagerrak Bridge and wails downstream announced that a ship of heavy draught was weighing anchor. At the crossroads on the other side we lit the last two cigars from a packet I had bought on the Stadthouder . He blew out a long cloud and burst out laughing: “Man wird mich für einen Grafen halten!,” he said: “They’ll take me for a Count!” When he’d gone a few paces, he turned and shouted with a wave: “Gute Reise, Kamerad!” and struck west for Aachen. I headed south and upstream for Cologne.

    * * *
    After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest’s initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it.
    Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air