Vertigo

by W. G. Sebald

  and imagined the combatants with soot-blackened faces, crouching behind tree trunks with their rifles at the ready or leaping from rock to rock across the deepest chasms, suspended motionless in mid-air, for at least as long as I could hold my breath or keep my eyes shut.

  It was dusk by the time I had passed through the Piatt. White mists were rising from the meadows, and below, by the river, now a good distance away, stood the black sawmill, which, together with its timberyard, burned to the ground in the 1950s, a few days after I started school, in a huge fire that lit up the whole of the valley. Darkness now descended on the road. In former times, when it was made up with crushed limestone, it had been easier to walk on, I remembered, and almost the colour of white. Like a luminous ribbon, it had stretched out before one even on a starless night, I recalled, realising at the same time that I could scarcely lift my feet for weariness. Also, it seemed strange that not a single vehicle had overtaken me, or had come from the other direction, on the whole stretch from the Unterjoch. I stood for a long time on the stone bridge a short distance before the first houses of W., listening to the steady murmur of the river and looking into the blackness which now enveloped everything. On a piece of waste land beside the bridge, where willows, deadly nightshade, burdock, mulleins, verbena and mugwort used to grow, there had always been a gypsy camp in the summer months after the war. Whenever we went to the swimming pool, which the council had built in 1936 to promote public health, we would pass the gypsies, and every time as we did so my mother picked me up and carried me in her arms. Across her shoulder I saw the gypsies look up briefly from what they were about, and then lower their eyes again as if in revulsion.

  I do not believe that any of the locals ever spoke to them, nor as far as I know did the gypsies come into the village to hawk goods or tell fortunes. Where they came from, how they had managed to survive the war, and why of all places they had chosen that cheerless spot by the Ach bridge for their summer camp, are questions that occur to me only now - for example, when I leaf through the photo album which my father bought as a present for my mother for the first so-called Kriegsweihnacht. In it are pictures of the Polish campaign, all neatly captioned in white ink. Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out, smiling, from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of the

  Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war.

  A good thirty years had gone by since I had last been in W. In the course of that time - by far the longest period of my life - many of the localities I associated with it, such as the Altachmoos, the parish woods, the tree-lined lane that led to Haslach, the pumping station, Petersthal cemetery where the plague dead lay, or the house in the Schray where Dopfer the hunchback lived, had continually returned in my dreams and daydreams and had become more real to me than they had been then, yet the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me than any other place I could conceive of. In a certain sense it was reassuring, on my first walk around the streets in the pale glow of the lamps, to find that everything was completely changed. The house of the head forester, a small shingled villa with a pair of antlers and the inscription "1913" above the front door, together with its small orchard, had made way for a holiday home; the fire station and its handsome slatted tower, where the fire brigade's hoses hung in silent anticipation of the next conflagration, were no longer there; the farmhouses had without exception been rebuilt, with added storeys; the vicarage, the curate's lodge, the school, the town hall where Fürgut the one-armed clerk went in and out of with a regularity that my grandfather could set his watch by, the cheese dairy, the poorhouse, Michael Meyer's grocery and haberdashery - all had been thoroughly modernised or had disappeared altogether. Not even when I entered the Engelwirt inn did I have any sense of knowing my way around, for here too, where we had lived in rented accommodation on the first floor for several years, the whole house had been rebuilt and converted from the foundations up to the very rafters, not to mention the changes to the furnishings and fittings. What now presented itself, in the pseudo-Alpine style which has become the new vernacular throughout the Federal Republic, as a house offering refined hospitality to its patrons, in those distant days was a hostelry of disrepute where the village peasants sat around until deep into the night and, particularly in winter, often drank themselves senseless. The Engelwirt inn owed its local standing, which remained unassailable despite everything, to the fact that, in addition to the smoke-filled bar beneath the ceiling of which ran the longest and most crooked stove-pipe I have ever seen, it had a large function room in which long tables could be set up for weddings and funerals, with enough seating for half the village. Every fortnight the newsreel would be shown there and feature films such as Piratenliebe, Niccolò Paganini, Tomahawk and Monche, Màdchen und Panduren. The cavalry irregulars referred to in this this last title could be seen charging through dappled birch woods; Indians rode across limitless plains; the crippled violinist reeled off a cadenza at the base of a prison wall while his companion filed through the iron bars of his cell window; General Eisenhower, on his return from Korea, got out of an aeroplane, the propeller of which was still revolving slowly; a hunter whose chest had been torn open by a bear's paw staggered down into the valley; politicians were seen in front of the new parliament, climbing out of the back of a Volkswagen; and almost every week we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin or Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered them a natural condition of all larger cities. Of all the events ever put on in the Engelwirt function room, it was an amateur production of Schiller's The Robbers, staged there several times during the winter of 1948 or 1949 which made the greatest impression on me. Half a dozen times, at least, I must have sat in the darkened Engelwirt hall among an audience some of whom had come over from neighbouring villages. Scarcely ever has anything that I have seen in the theatre since affected me as much as the The Robbers - Old Moor in the ice-cold exile

  of his bleak house, the gruesome Franz with his deformed shoulder, the return of the prodigal son from the forests of Bohemia, or that curious slight movement of the body, never failing to excite me, with which the deathly pale Amalia said: Hark, hark! Did I not hear the gate? And there, before her, is Moor the robber, and she speaks of how her love made the burning sand green and the thorn bushes blossom, without ever knowing that the man from whom she still supposed herself to be separated by mountains, oceans and horizons had come home and was standing beside her. Always then I would wish to intervene in the proceedings and in a single word tell Amalia that she had only to reach out her hand in order to move from her dusty prison to that paradise of love she so desired. But since I could not bring myself to call out in this way, the turn that the events might otherwise have taken was never revealed to me. Towards the end of the play's run, in early February, it was given an open-air performance, in the paddock next to the postmaster's house, mainly, I suppose, so that a series of photographs could be taken. The winter's tale that resulted was notable not only on account of the snow which covered the ground in this open-air production even in the scenes set indoors, but mainly because Moor the robber now entered the action on horseback, which had of course not been possible in the function room. I believe it was on this occasion that I first noticed that horses often have a

  somewhat crazed look in their eyes. At all events, that performance on the postmaster's paddock was the last of The Robbers, and indeed the last theatre performance of any kind in W. Only during carnival time did the actors don their costumes once more, to join the carnival procession and take their places in a group photograph together with the fire brigade and the clowns.

  Behind the reception desk in the Engelwirt, after I had rung the bell several times to no avail, a tight-lipped woman eventually materialised. I
had not heard a door open anywhere, not seen her come in, and yet there she suddenly was. She scrutinised me with open disapproval, perhaps on account of my outward appearance, which was none the better for my long walk, or because I betrayed an absent-mindedness that must have been unaccountable to her. I asked for a room on the first floor facing on to the street, initially for an indefinite period. Although it must have been possible to comply readily with my request, since November, in the hotel trade too, is the month of the dead, during which time the reduced service staff in the now vacant houses mourn the departed guests as if they had taken leave for ever - although a room on the first floor facing on to the street must without doubt have been available, the receptionist endlessly leafed back and forth in her register before handing the keys to me. She held her cardigan together with her left hand, as if she were cold, awkwardly and clumsily performing her tasks using only her other hand, so that it seemed to me as if she were marking time in order to make up her mind about this odd November guest. She studied the completed registration form, on which I had given "foreign correspondent" as my occupation and written my complicated English address, with raised eyebrows, for when and for what purpose had an English foreign correspondent ever come to W., on foot, in November, and unshaven to boot, and taken a room in the Engelwirt inn for an indefinite period! This woman, who was doubtless most efficient at all other times, seemed positively disturbed when, in reply to her enquiry after my luggage, I told her that it would be brought along that evening by an officer from the Oberjoch customs post.

  Insofar as I could tell with any certainty, given the structural changes that had been made in the Engelwirt, the room allocated to me was approximately where our living room had once been, the room which was furnished with all the pieces my parents had bought in 1936 when, after two or three years of continuous upturn in the country's fortunes, it seemed assured that my father, who at the calamitous close of the Weimar era had enlisted in the so-called army of the One Hundred Thousand and was now about to be promoted to quartermaster, could not only look forward to a secure future in the new Reich but could even be said to have attained a certain social position. For my parents, both of whom came from provincial backwaters, my mother from W. and my father from the Bavarian Forest, the acquisition of living room furniture befitting their station, which, as the unwritten rule required, had to conform in every detail with the tastes of the average couple representative of the emerging classless society, probably marked the moment when, in the wake of their in some respects rather difficult early lives, it must have seemed to them as if there were, after all, something like a higher justice. This living room, then, boasted a ponderously ornate armoire, in which were kept the tablecloths, napkins, silver cutlery, Christmas decorations and, behind the glass doors of the upper half, the bone china tea service which, as far as I can remember, was never brought out on a single occasion; a sideboard on which an earthenware punchbowl glazed in peculiar hues and two so-called lead crystal flower vases were placed symmetrically on crocheted doilies; the draw-leaf dining table with a set of six chairs; a sofa with an assortment of embroidered cushions; on the wall behind it two small Alpine landscapes in black varnished frames, the one hung a little higher than the other; a smokers' table with gaudily coloured ceramic cigar and cigarette containers and matching candlestick, an ashtray made of horn and brass, and an electric smoke absorber in the shape of an owl. In addition, apart from the drapes and net curtains, ceiling lights and standard lamp, there was a flower étagère made of bamboo cane, on the various levels of which an Araucaria, an asparagus fern, a Christmas cactus and a passion flower led their strictly regulated plant lives. It should also be mentioned that on the top of the armoire stood the living room clock which counted out the hours with its cold and loveless chimes, and that in the upper half of the armoire, next to the bone china tea service, was a row of clothbound dramatic works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Hebbel and Sudermann. These were inexpensive editions published by the Volksbühnenverband, which my father, who would probably never have taken it into his head to go to the theatre, and less still to read a play, had bought one day, in a passing moment of aspiration to higher ideals, from a travelling salesman. The guest room through the window of which I now looked down into the street was a world away from all of that; I myself, though, was no more than a breath away, and if the living room clock had started chiming in my sleep, I would not have been in the least surprised.

  Like most of the houses in W., the Engelwirt was separated lengthwise into two sections by a broad passageway on both floors. On the ground floor, the function room was on one side, on the other the public bar, the kitchen, the ice store, and the pissoir. On the upper floor, the one-legged landlord Sallaba, who had turned up in W. after the war to take over the tenancy together with his beautiful wife, who regarded the village always as an odious place, had set up his household. Sallaba possessed a large number of stylish suits and ties with tie-pins; but it was not so much his wardrobe, which was indeed exceptional for W., as his one-leggedness and the astonishing speed and virtuosity with which he moved about on his crutches that gave him the air of a man of the world in my eyes. Sallaba was said to be a Rhinelander, a term which remained a mystery to me for a long time and which I supposed to be a character trait. Apart from the Sallabas and ourselves, the erstwhile landlady of the Engelwirt, Rosina Zobel, also lived on the first floor; she had given up running the inn several years ago and ever since had spent the entire day in her partially darkened parlour. She either sat in her wing chair, or walked back and forth, or lay on the sofa. No one knew whether it was red wine that had made her melancholy or whether it was because of her melancholy that she had turned to red wine. She was never seen doing any work; she did not shop, or cook, nor was she to be seen laundering clothes or tidying the room. Only once did I see her in the garden with a knife in her hand and a bunch of chives, looking up into the pear tree which had recently come into leaf. The door to the Engelwirt landlady's room was usually left slightly ajar, and I frequently went in to her and would spend hours looking at the collection of postcards she kept in three large folio volumes. The landlady, wine glass in hand, sometimes sat next to me at the table as I browsed, but only ever spoke to tell me the name of the town I happened to be pointing to. As the minutes passed by this resulted in a long topographical litany of place names such as Chur, Bregenz, Innsbruck, Altaussee, Hallstatt, Salzburg, Vienna, Pilsen, Marienbad, Bad Kissingen, Würzburg, Bad Homburg and Frankfurt am Main. There were also numerous Italian cards from Merano, Bolzano, Riva, Verona, Milan, Ferrara, Rome and Naples. One of these postcards, showing the smoking peak of Vesuvius, somehow or other got into an album belonging to my parents, and so has come into my