Vertigo

by W. G. Sebald

  The steamer cast off and, sounding its horn a number of times, slipped out onto the lake at an oblique angle. Undine was still standing at the rail. After a while he could barely distinguish her outline, and then the ship itself had become almost invisible. Only the white wake which it trailed through the water was still to be seen until this was also smoothed over. As for the tarot cards, Dr K., walking back to the sanatorium, had to acknowledge that in his own case too they had resulted in quite unequivocal constellations, inasmuch as all the cards which showed not merely numbers but kings, queens and knaves were, invariably, as far as possible removed from his person, to the very limits of the game, so to speak. Indeed, on one occasion when the cards were laid, only two figures appeared at all, and another time none whatsoever, evidently a most unusual distribution and one which prompted the Russian lady to look upwards into his eyes and declare that he must surely be the strangest guest in Riva in a long time.

  In the early afternoon of the day following the mermaid's departure, Dr K. lay resting as the establishment's rules required when he heard hurried footsteps in the corridor outside his room, and the customary silence had hardly returned than they were heard again, this time going in the other direction. When Dr K. looked out into the passage, to see what had occasioned this to-ing and fro-ing in breach of all the hydro's practices, he glimpsed Dr von Hartungen, his white coat flying and attended by two nurses, just turning the corner. Later that afternoon the mood in all of the reception rooms was curiously subdued, and at tea the staff were noticeably monosyllabic. The sanatorium patients exchanged glances in embarrassed consternation, like children forbidden to speak by their parents. At dinner, Dr K.'s right-hand table companion, retired General of Hussars Ludwig von Koch, whom he had come to look upon as an amiable permanent fixture and to whom he had hoped to turn for consolation after the loss of the girl from Genoa, was not in his place. Dr K. now had no neighbour at table at all, and sat quite alone at dinner, like a man with a contagious disease. The next morning the sanatorium management announced that Major General Ludwig von Koch, of Neusiedl in Hungary, had passed away in the early afternoon of the previous day. In answer to his concerned enquiries, Dr K. learned from Dr von Hartungen that General von Koch had taken his own life, with his old army pistol. In some incomprehensible way, Dr von Hartungen added with a nervous gesture, he had contrived to shoot himself both in the heart and in the head. He was found in his armchair, the novel he had always been reading lying open in his lap.

  The funeral, which took place on the 6th of October in Riva, was a desolate affair. It had not proved possible to notify the only relative of the General, who had neither wife nor children. Dr von Hartungen, one of the nurses, and Dr K. were the only mourners. The priest, reluctant to bury a suicide, performed the office in the most cursory manner. The funeral oration was confined to an appeal to the Almighty Father in his infinite goodness to grant everlasting peace to this taciturn and oppressed soul - quest'uomo più taciturno e mesto, said the priest, his gaze upturned with a reproachful expression. Dr K. seconded this meagre wish and, once the ceremony had been concluded with a few more mumbled words, he followed Dr von Hartungen, at some distance, back to the sanatorium. The October sun shone so warm that day that Dr K. was obliged to take off his hat and carry it in his hand.

  Over the years that followed, lengthy shadows fell upon those autumn days at Riva, which, as Dr K. on occasion said to himself, had been so beautiful and so appalling, and from these shadows there gradually emerged the silhouette of a barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark

  and hanging in folds. Three whole years it takes until the vessel, as if it were being borne across the waters, gently drifts into the little port of Riva. It berths in the early hours of the morning. A man in blue overalls comes ashore and makes fast the ropes. Behind the boatmen, two figures in dark tunics with silver buttons carry a bier upon which lies, under a large floral-patterned cover, what was clearly the body of a human being. It is Gracchus the huntsman. His arrival was announced at midnight to Salvatore, the podestà of Riva, by a pigeon the size of a cockerel, which flew in at his bedroom window and then spoke in his ear. Tomorrow, the pigeon said, the dead hunter Gracchus will arrive. Receive him in the name of the town. After some deliberation, Salvatore arose and set the necessary preparations in train. Now, entering the lord mayor's office in the light of dawn, his cane and top hat with its mourning band in his black-gloved right hand, he finds to his satisfaction that his instructions have been followed correctly. Fifty boys forming a guard of honour stand in the long hallway, and in one of the rear rooms on the upper storey, as he hears from the ship's master, who meets him at the entrance, Gracchus the huntsman lies upon his bier, a man, it now transpires, of wild, tangled hair and beard, his ravaged skin darkened to the colour of bronze.

  We the readers, the sole witnesses of what was said between the huntsman and the deputy of the community of Riva, learn little of the fate of Gracchus, except that many, many years before, in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois - and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? - he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain; and that because of a wrong turn of the tiller, a moment of inattention on the part of the helmsman, distracted by the beauty of the huntsman's dark green country, the barque which was to have ferried him to the shore beyond failed to make the crossing, so that he, Gracchus, has been voyaging the seas of the world ever since, without respite, as he says, attempting now here and now there to make land. The question of who is to blame for this undoubtedly great misfortune remains unresolved, as indeed does the matter of what his guilt, the cause of his misfortune, consists in. But as it was Dr K. who conjured up this tale, it seems to me that the meaning of Gracchus the huntsman's ceaseless journey lies in a penitence for a longing for love, such as invariably besets Dr K., as he explains in one of his countless Fledermaus-letters to Felice, precisely at the point where there is seemingly, and in the natural and lawful order of things, nothing to be enjoyed.

  The better to elucidate this somewhat impenetrable observation, Dr K. adduces an episode from "the evening before last", in which the son - now surely aged forty - of the owner of a Jewish bookshop in Prague becomes the focus of the illicit emotion described in this letter. This man, in no way attractive, indeed repulsive, who has had almost nothing but misfortune in life, spends the entire day in his father's tiny store, dusting off the prayer stoles or peeking out at the street through gaps between books which, Dr K. expressly notes, are mostly of an obscene nature; this wretched creature, who feels himself (as Dr K. knows) to be German and for that reason goes to the Deutsches Haus every evening after supper to nurture his delusion of grandeur as a member of the German Casino Club, becomes for Dr K., in that episode which occurred the day before yesterday, as he tells Felice, an object of fascinated interest in a way he cannot entirely explain even to himself. Quite by chance, writes Dr K., I noticed him leaving the shop yesterday evening. He walked ahead of me, every inch the young man I had in my memory. His back is strikingly broad, and he bears himself so curiously upright that it is hard to tell whether he is indeed straight as a ramrod or malformed. Do you now understand, my dearest, writes Dr K., can you understand (please tell me!) why it was that I followed this man down Zeltnergasse, veritably lusting, turned into the Graben behind him, and watched him enter the gates of the Deutsches Haus with a feeling of unbounded pleasure?

  At this point Dr K. surely came within an inch of admitting to a desire which we must assume remained unstilled. But instead, remarking that it is already late, he hastily concludes his letter, one which he had begun with comments on a photograph of a niece of Felice's, writing: Yes, this little child deserves to be loved. That fearful gaze, as if all the terrors of the earth had been revealed to her in the studio. But what love could have been sufficient
to spare the child the terrors of love, which for Dr K. stood foremost among all the terrors of the earth? And how are we to fend off the fate of being unable to depart this life, lying before the podestà, confined to a bed in our sickness, and, as Gracchus the huntsman does, touching, in a moment of distraction, the knee of the man who was to have been our salvation.

  Il ritorno in patria

  In November 1987, after spending the last weeks of the summer in Verona, working on my various tasks, and the month of October, because I could not bear to wait any longer for the onset of winter, in a hotel high above Bruneck, near the tree line, I decided one afternoon, when the Großvenediger emerged from behind a grey snow cloud in an especially ominous way, that I should return to England, but before that go to W. for a while, where I had not been since my childhood. As there was only one bus a day from Innsbruck to Schattwald, and that, as far as I could discover, at seven in the morning, I had no alternative but to take the night express across the Brenner, a train with unpleasant associations for me, which arrives in Innsbruck at about half past four. At Innsbruck, as always when I arrive there, no matter what the time of year, the weather was quite atrocious. It cannot have been more than five or six degrees above zero, and the clouds were hanging so low that the tops of the houses disappeared in them and the dawn could not break through. Moreover, it rained incessantly. So there was no question of walking into town or taking a stroll along the river Inn. I looked out across the deserted station forecourt. Now and then some vehicle would crawl slowly along the gleaming black roads, the last of an amphibian species close to extinction, retreating now to the deeper waters. The ticket hall was also deserted, apart from a small chap with a goitre wearing a green loden cape. Holding his folded, dripping umbrella against his shoulder with its tip upwards like a rifle, he was walking back and forth with measured tread and making such precise about-turns that he might have been guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The down-and-outs then appeared, one after the other, though from where was uncertain, till there were a dozen of them, a lively group gathered around a crate of Gòsser beer which had made a sudden miraculous appearance in their midst, seemingly out of thin air. United by the inveterate alcoholism of the Tyrol which is known for its extremism far beyond the region, these Innsbruck dossers, some of whom appeared to have only recently dropped our of ordered life, while others were already in a completely ruinous state, and every single one of whom had something of the philosopher or even of the preacher about him, were holding forth on current events as well as the most fundamental questions. It was remarkable in their disputations that those who chimed in at the top of their voices were invariably the ones who left off in mid-sentence, suddenly silenced as if by a stroke. Whatever happened to be the topic, every point was underscored by highly theatrical, apodictic gestures, and even when one of their number, no longer able to put into words the thought which had just come into his head, turned away with a wave of contempt, it seemed to me as if their manner derived from a distinctive dramatic repertoire completely unknown on the stage. Possibly this was because all of them were holding their beer bottles in their right hands, and were thus in a sense acting out one-armed, left-handed roles. And perhaps, I concluded from this observation, it might be a good ploy to tie the right hands of all drama students behind their backs for a year at the start of their training. With reflections such as these I passed the time until increasing numbers of commuters began traversing the hall, and the dossers made themselves scarce. At six o'clock on the dot, the so-called Tiroler Stuben opened, and I took a seat in a restaurant which for sheer dreariness far surpassed every other station bar I had ever been in, ordered a coffee and leafed through the Tiroler Nachrichten. Neither of these, the Tyrolean morning coffee nor the Tiroler Nachrichten, did anything to improve my state of mind. It therefore did not surprise me in the slightest when things took an even worse turn, and the waitress, to whom I had made a joking remark about the corrosive properties of the Tyrolean chicory coffee, gave me the benefit of her sharp tongue in the most ill-tempered manner imaginable.

  Frozen through and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep as I was, the insolence of this Innsbruck waitress like a noxious poison went right under my skin. The words in the newspaper jittered and swam before my eyes, and more than once I felt as though my insides had seized up. Not until the bus was leaving town did I gradually begin to feel somewhat better. It was still pouring with rain, so heavily that the houses close to the road could hardly be made out, and the mountains not at all. Now and then the bus stopped so that one of the old women standing at intervals along the roadside beneath their black umbrellas could get on. Soon quite a number of these Tyrolean women were aboard. In the dialect I was familiar with from childhood, croakily articulated at the back of the throat like some bird language, they talked mainly or indeed exclusively about the never-ending rain, which in many places had already caused whole mountainsides to slide into the valleys. They spoke of the hay rotting in the fields and the potatoes rotting in the ground; of the redcurrants which had come to nothing for a third year in a row; of the elder, which this year had not flowered until the beginning of August and had then been completely ruined by the rain; and of the fact that not a single eatable apple had been picked far and wide. As they went on discussing the effects of the ever-worsening weather, complaining that there was neither sunlight nor warmth, the scene outside brightened up, a little at first and then more and more. One could now see the river Inn, its waters meandering through broad stony reaches, and soon beautiful green meadows came into view. The sun came out, the entire landscape was radiant, and the Tyrolean women fell silent one after the other and simply looked out at the miracle passing by. I felt much the same myself. The countryside seemed freshly varnished - we were now driving out of the Inn valley in the direction of the Fern Pass - and the steaming forests and blue skies above, though I had come up from the south and had had to endure the Tyrolean darkness for only a couple of hours, were like a revelation even to me. Once I noticed a dozen hens right out in the middle of a green field. For some reason that I still cannot fathom, the sight of this small flock that had ventured so far out into the open affected me deeply. I do not know what it is about certain things or creatures that sometimes moves me like this. The road climbed steadily upwards. The flame-red stands of larch trees were blazing on the sides of the mountains, and I saw that snow had fallen a long way down. We crossed the Fern Pass. I marvelled at the screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair, and I was astonished again at the mysterious slow motion quality of the water-falls which, for as long as I could remember, had been cascading, unchanged, over the rock faces. At a hatpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Fernstein and Samaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.

  Around noon — the Tyrolean women had long since got out at Reutte, WeiEenbach, Haller, Tannheim and Schattwald - the bus, with me as its last passenger, reached the Oberjoch customs post. Meanwhile, the weather had changed once again. A dark layer of cloud, verging on the black, lay across the entire Tannheim valley, which made a lightless and godforsaken impression. There was not the slightest sign of movement anywhere. Not even a single car could be seen on the stretch of road disappearing far into the remoter depths of the valley. On one side the mountains rose up into the mists; on the other lay wet boggy grassland, and behind it, from out of the Vilsgrund, arose the wedge of the Pfronten forests, consisting solely of blackish-blue spruce. The customs officer on duty, who told me he lived in Maria Rain, promised to drop off my bag at the Engelwirt inn when he finished work, on his way home through W., which left me free, once I had exchanged a few generalities with him about the dreadfulness of this time of year, to set off carrying nothing but my small leather rucksack over my shoulder, through the boggy meadows bordering the no man's land an
d down through the Alpsteig gorge to Krummenbach, and from there to Unterjoch, past the Pfeiffermühle and through the Enge Piatt to W. The gorge was sunk in a darkness that I would not have thought possible in the middle of the day. Only, to my left, above the brook invisible from the path, there hung a little meagre light. Spruce trees, a good seventy to eighty years old, stood on the slopes. Even on those growing up from the depths of the ravine, the evergreen tops did not appear until far above the level of the path. Time and again, whenever there was a movement in the air above, the drops of water caught in the countless pine needles came raining down. In places where the spruce stood further apart, grew isolated beech trees that had long since shed their leaves, their branches and trunks blackened by the persistent wet. It was quite still in the gorge save for the sound of the water at the bottom, no birdsong, nothing. Increasingly a sense of trepidation oppressed me, and it seemed as if the further down I walked, the colder and gloomier it became. At one of the few more open places, where a vantage-point afforded a view both down onto a waterfall and a deep rockpool and upwards into the sky, without my being able to say which was the more eerie, I saw through the apparently-infinite loftiness of the trees, flurries of snow high up in the leaden greyness, but none of it had yet found its way down into the gorge. After a further half-hour's walk, when the gorge opened out and the meadows of Krummenbach lay before me, I stopped for a long time beneath the last trees, watching from out of the darkness as the whitish-grey snow fell, its silence completely extinguishing what little pallid colour there was in those wet deserted fields. Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled cell I sat for a while. Outside, snowflakes were drifting past the small window, and presently it seemed to me as if I were in a boat on a voyage, crossing vast waters. The moist smell of lime became sea air; I could feel the spray on my forehead and the boards swaying beneath my feet, and I imagined myself sailing in this ship out of the flooded mountains. But what I remember most about the Krummenbach chapel, apart from this transformation of the stone walls into the hull of a wooden boat, is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand around the mid-eighteenth century, and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes, little could be made out with any degree of certainty - faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated limbs, an arm raised to strike. The garments, painted in dark colours, had merged beyond recognition with the background, which was equally unrecognisable. Insofar as anything was still visible at all, it was like looking at some ghostly battle of faces and hands suspended in the gloom of decay. I could not then and cannot now recall whether I was ever in the Krummenbach chapel as a child with my grandfather, who took me with him everywhere. But there were many chapels like that of Krummenbach around W., and much of what I saw and felt in them at the time will have stayed with me - a fear of the acts of cruelty depicted there no less than the wish, in all its impossibility, that the perfect tranquility prevailing within them might sometime be recaptured. When the snow had eased off, I started on my way again, through the Brànte and along the Krummenbach as far as Unterjoch, where I ate bread soup and drank half a litre of Tyrolean wine at the Hirschwirt inn, to warm myself and prepare for the next stretch, which would be twice the distance. Perhaps prompted by the pitiful pictures in the Krummenbach chapel, my mind turned to Tiepolo once again, and the belief I had held for a long time that, when he travelled with his sons Lorenzo and Domenico from Venice across the Brenner in the autumn of 1750, he decided at Ziri that, contrary to the advice he had been given to leave the Tyrol via Seefeld, he instead made his way westward via Telfs, following the salt wagons across the Gaicht Pass, through the Tannheim valley, over the Oberjoch and through the Iller valley into the lowlands. And I beheld Tiepolo, who must have been approaching sixty by that time and already suffered badly from gout, lying in the cold of the winter months at the top of the scaffolding half a metre below the ceiling of the grand stairway in the palace at Würzburg, his face splattered with lime and distemper, applying the colours with a steady hand, despite the pain in his right arm, onto the wet plaster of the immense, miraculous painting he was creating little by little. With imaginings such as these, and thinking about the Krummenbach painter who had, perhaps in the very same winter, toiled just as hard to represent the fourteen small Stations of the Cross as Tiepolo with his magnificent fresco, I walked on, the time being now about three o'clock, through the fields below the Sorgschrofen and the Sorgalpe, till I struck the road shortly before reaching the Pfeiffermühle. From there it was another hour to W. The last of the daylight was fading by the time I got to the Enge Piatt. To my left was the river, to the right the dripping rock faces through which the road had been blasted at the turn of the century. Above, in front and presently behind me there was nothing but the unstirring black pine forests. The last stretch of the journey was as never-ending as I remembered it from the old days. In the Enge Piatt in April 1945, a so-called last skirmish took place, in which, as it says on the iron memorial cross which still stands in the cemetery in W., 24-year-old Alois Thimet of Rosenheim, 41-year-old Erich Daimler of Stuttgart, 17-year-old Rudolf Leitenstorfer (place of birth unknown), and Werner Hempel (year of birth unknown) of Bòrneke, died for their Fatherland. In the course of my childhood in W. I heard people speak of that last skirmish on various occasions,