Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  The Swiss boy with the apple on his head appeared in my mind’s eye, Vera continued; I sensed in me the moment of terror in which the narrow bridge gives way under the sleepwalker’s foot, and imagined that, high in the rocks above, an avalanche was already breaking loose, about to sweep the poor folk who had lost their way (for what else would have brought them to these desolate surroundings?) down into the depths next moment. Minutes went by, said Austerlitz, in which I too thought I saw the cloud of snow crashing into the valley, before I heard Vera again, speaking of the mysterious quality peculiar to such photographs when they surface from oblivion. One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair, gémissements de désespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives. Yes, and the small boy in the other photograph, said Vera after a while, this is you, Jacquot, in February 1939, about six months before you left Prague. You were to accompany Agáta to a masked ball at the house of one of her influential admirers, and she had the snow-white costume made for you especially for the occasion. On the back it says Jacquot Austerlitz, paže růžové královny, in your grandfather’s handwriting, for he happened to be visiting at the time. The picture lay before me, said Austerlitz, but I dared not touch it. The words páže růžové královny, paže růzové královny went round and round in my head, until their meaning came to me from far away, and once again I saw the live tableau with the Rose Queen and the little boy carrying her train at her side.

  Yet hard as I tried both that evening and later, I could not recollect myself in the part. I did recognize the unusual hairline running at a slant over the forehead, but otherwise all memory was extinguished in me by an overwhelming sense of the long years that had passed. I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was; the blurred, dark area above the horizon, the boy’s curly hair, spectrally light around the outline of his head, the cape over his arm which appears to be held at an angle or, as I once thought, said Austerlitz, might have been broken or in a splint, the six large mother-of-pearl buttons, the extravagant hat with the heron’s feather in it, even the folds of the stockings. I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him. That evening in the šporkova, when Vera put the picture of the child cavalier in front of me, I was not, as you might suppose, moved or distressed, said Austerlitz, only speechless and uncomprehending, incapable of any lucid thought. Even later nothing but blind panic filled me when I thought of the five-year-old page. Once I dreamed of returning to the flat in Prague after a long absence. All the furniture is in its proper place. I know that my parents will soon be back from their holiday, and there is something important which I must give them. I am not aware that they have been dead for years. I simply think they must be very old, around ninety or a hundred, as indeed they would be if they were still alive. But when at last they come through the door they are in their mid-thirties at the most. They enter the flat, walk round the rooms picking up this and that, sit in the drawing room for a while and talk to each other in the mysterious language of deaf-mutes. They take no notice of me. I suspect that they are about to set off again for the place somewhere in the mountains where they now live. It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that evening in the šporkova when the eyes of the Rose Queen’s page looked through me. Even the next day, on my way to Terezín, I could not imagine who or what I was. I remember that I stood in a kind of trance on the platform of the bleak station at Holešovice, that the railway lines ran away into infinity on both sides, that I perceived everything indistinctly, and then that I leaned against a window in the corridor of the train, looking out at the northern suburbs as they passed by, at the water meadows of the Vltava and the villas and summer houses on the opposite bank. Once I saw a huge and now disused stone quarry on the other side of the river, then a number of cherry trees in blossom, a few villages far remote from one another, nothing else but the empty Bohemian countryside. When I got out of the train in Lovosice after about an hour, I felt as if I had been traveling for weeks, going further and further east and further and further back in time. The square in front of the station was empty except for a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her. There was no taxi in sight, so I set off on foot from Lovosice in the direction of Terezín. As one leaves the town, the appearance of which I can no longer remember, said Austerlitz, a wide panorama opens up to the north: a field, poison-green in color, in the foreground, behind it a petrochemicals plant half eaten away by rust, with clouds of smoke rising from its cooling towers and chimneys, as they must have done without cease for many long years. Further away I saw the conical Bohemian mountains surrounding the Bohuševice basin in a semicircle, their highest summits disappearing into the low sky this cold, gray morning. I walked on down the straight road, always looking ahead to see if the silhouette of the fortifications, which could not be more than an hour and a half’s walk away, was in sight yet.