Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  When we wake up tomorrow, she said, I shall wish you every happiness, and it will be like telling a machine working by some unknown mechanism that I hope it will run well. Can’t you tell me the reason, she asked, said Austerlitz, why you remain so unapproachable? Why, she said, have you been like a pool of frozen water ever since we came here? Why do I see your lips opening as if you were about to say something, maybe even cry out loud, and then I hear not the slightest sound? Why did you never unpack when we arrived, always preferring to live out of a rucksack, as it were? We stood there a couple of paces apart, like two actors on stage. The color of Marie’s eyes changed as the light dimmed. And once again I tried to explain to her and to myself what incomprehensible feelings had been weighing on me over the last few days; how I kept thinking, like a madman, that there were mysterious signs and portents all around me here; how it even seemed to me as if the silent façades of the buildings knew something ominous about me, how I had always believed I must be alone, and in spite of my longing for her I now felt it more than ever before. But it isn’t true, said Marie, it isn’t true that we need absence and loneliness. It isn’t true. It’s only in your mind. You are afraid of I don’t know what. You have always been rather remote, of course, I could tell that, but now it’s as if you stood on a threshold and you dared not step over it. That evening in Marienbad, said Austerlitz, I could not admit to myself how right everything Marie said was, but today I know why I felt obliged to turn away when anyone came too close to me, I know that I thought this turning away made me safe, and that at the same time I saw myself transformed into a frightful and hideous creature, a man beyond the pale. Dusk was gathering as we walked back through the park. Dark trees and bushes lined both sides of the white sandy path curving ahead of us, and Marie, whom I lost entirely soon afterwards, by my own fault, was murmuring something quietly to herself. All I remember of it now is a phrase about the poor lovers qui se promenaient dans les allées désertes du parc. We were almost back in the town, said Austerlitz, when a little company of some ten or a dozen small people emerged from the dark as if out of nowhere, at a place where white mist was already rising from the ground, and crossed our path. They were the sort of visitors sent to the spa because of their failing health by some Czech enterprise or other, or perhaps they came from one of the neighboring Socialist countries. They were strikingly short, almost dwarfish figures, slightly bent, moving along in single file, and each of them held one of those pitiful plastic mugs from which the water of the springs was drunk in Mariánské Lázně at the time. I also remember, added Austerlitz, that without exception they wore raincoats of thin blue-gray Perlon, the kind of thing that had been fashionable in the West in the late 1950s. To this day I can sometimes hear the dry rustling with which, as suddenly as they had appeared on one side of the path, they vanished again on the other.—I dwelt on my memories of Marienbad all night after my last visit to the šporkova, continued Austerlitz. As soon as it began to grow light outside I packed, left the hotel on Kampa Island, and crossed the Charles Bridge, which was wrapped in early mist, walked through the streets of the Old Town and over the still deserted Wenceslas Square, making my way to the main station on Wilsonova which, as it turned out, did not correspond in the least to the idea I had formed of it from Vera’s narrative. Its Jugendstil architecture, once famous far beyond Prague, had been surrounded, obviously in the 1960s, by ugly glass façades and concrete blocks, and it took me some time to find a way into this forbidding complex over a taxi ramp leading down to the basement story. The low-ceilinged hall I now entered was crowded with throngs of people who had spent the night there among piles of luggage, huddled together in groups of various sizes, most of them still asleep. A sickening red-hued light immersed the entire apparently boundless encampment in a positively infernal glare as it shone from a slightly raised platform measuring at least ten by twenty meters, on which about a hundred games machines were arranged in several batteries, idling to no purpose and chanting inanely to themselves. I stepped over some of the motionless bodies on the floor, went upstairs and downstairs but failed to find my way through this labyrinthine station, which seemed to consist of nothing but sales booths and stands of all kinds. Eventually I asked a uniformed man who came towards me: Hlavní nádráží? Wilsonovo nádráží? whereupon he took me carefully by the sleeve, like a lost child, guided me to a dark recess in a remote corner, and there showed me a memorial plaque saying that the station had been named in 1919 after the freedom-loving American president Wilson. When I had deciphered the memorial and nodded my thanks to the railway official, who had patiently stayed beside me, he led me round a few more corners and up several steps to a kind of mezzanine floor, from which I could look up at the mighty dome of the former Wilsonova Station, or more accurately at half the dome, since the other half had been sliced away, so to speak, by the new construction towering up into it. Along the semicircular lower rim of the dome ran a gallery with small café tables on it. When I had bought myself a ticket for the Hook of Holland I sat there for half an hour, until it was time for my train to leave, trying to think my way back through the decades, to remember what it had been like when, carried in Agáta’s arms—as Vera had told me, said Austerlitz—I craned my neck, unable to take my eyes off the vault reaching such a vast height above us. But neither Agáta nor Vera nor I myself emerged from the past. Sometimes it seemed as if the veil would part; I thought, for one fleeting instant, that I could feel the touch of Agáta’s shoulder or see the picture on the front of the Charlie Chaplin comic which Vera had bought me for the journey, but as soon as I tried to hold one of these fragments fast, or get it into better focus, as it were, it disappeared into the emptiness revolving over my head. It was all the more surprising and indeed alarming a little later, said Austerlitz, when I looked out of the corridor window of my carriage just before the train left at seven-thirteen, to find it dawning upon me with perfect certainty that I had seen the pattern of the glass and steel roof above the platforms before, made up as it was of triangles, round arches, horizontal and vertical lines and diagonals, and in the same half-light. As the train rolled very slowly out of the station, through a passage between the backs of blocks of flats and into the dark tunnel running under the New Town, and then I crossed the Vltava with a regular beat, it really seemed to me, said Austerlitz, as if time had stood still since the day when I first left Prague. It was a dark, oppressive morning. A small lamp with a pink pleated shade, the kind of thing one used to see in the windows of Belgian brothels, stood on the white cloth covering the little table in the Czech State Railways dining car, where I was sitting in order to get a better view. The chef, his toque at an angle on his head, leaned in the entrance to his galley smoking and talking to the waiter, a curly-haired, slight little man in a check waistcoat and yellow bow tie. Outside, under the lowering sky, meadows and fields passed by, fishponds, woods, the curve of a bend in a river, a stand of alders, hills and valleys, and at Beroun, if I remember correctly, a limeworks extending over a square mile or more, with chimneys and towering silos disappearing into the low clouds above, huge square buildings of crumbling concrete roofed with rusty corrugated iron, conveyor belts moving up and down, mills to grind the stone, conical mounds of gravel, huts and freight trucks, all of it uniformly covered with pale gray sinter and dust.

  Then the wide countryside opened out again, and all the time I was looking out I never saw a vehicle on the roads, or a single human being except for the stationmasters who, whether from boredom or habit or because of some regulation which they had to observe, had come out on the platform at even the smallest stations such as Holoubkov, Chrást, or Rokycany in their red uniform caps, most of them, it seemed to me, sporting blond moustaches, and determined not to miss the Prague express as it thundered by on this pallid April morning. All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. W
hat made me uneasy at the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. Beyond Pilsen the line ran towards the mountains dividing Bohemia from Bavaria. Soon the gradient was delaying the tempo of the train, and dark forests were almost encroaching on the railway embankment. Swathes of mist or low, drifting cloud hung among the dripping pines, until after about an hour the line went downhill again, the valley gradually broadened, and we came out into pleasant countryside. I don’t know what I had expected of Germany, said Austerlitz, but wherever I looked I saw trim towns and villages, neat yards around factories and industrial buildings, lovingly tended gardens, piles of firewood tidily stacked under cover, level asphalted cart tracks running through the meadows, roads with brightly colored cars purring along them at great speed, well-managed woodland, regulated watercourses, and new railway buildings where the stationmasters obviously felt under no obligation to come out. Parts of the sky had cleared, cheerful patches of sunlight lit up the country here and there, and the train, which had often seemed to be having difficulty in making any progress on the Czech side of the border, was now suddenly racing along with almost improbable ease. Around midday we reached Nuremberg, and when I saw the name on a signal box in its German spelling of Nürnberg, which was unfamiliar to me, I remembered what Vera had said about my father’s account of the National Socialist Party rally of 1936 and the roars of acclamation rising from the people who had gathered here at the time. Although I had really meant to do no more than ask about my next connections, said Austerlitz, that recollection may have been why I walked out of Nuremberg Station without pausing to think, and on into that unknown city. I had never before set foot on German soil, I had always avoided learning anything at all about German topography, German history, or modern German life, and so, said Austerlitz, Germany was probably more unfamiliar to me than any other country in the world, more foreign even than Afghanistan or Paraguay. As soon as I had emerged from the underpass in front of the station I was swept along by a huge crowd of people who were streaming down the entire breadth of the street, rather like water in a riverbed, going in not just one but both directions, as if flowing simultaneously up and down stream. I think it was a Saturday, the day when people go to shop in town, inundating these pedestrian zones which apparently, as I was told later, said Austerlitz, exist in more or less the same form in all German cities. The first thing that caught my eye on this excursion was the great number of gray, brown, and green loden coats and hats, and how well and sensibly everyone was dressed in general, how remarkably solid were the shoes of the pedestrians of Nuremberg. I avoided looking closely at the faces coming towards me, and thought it odd that few of these people raised their voices as they moved quietly through the city. Looking up at the façades on both sides of the street, even those of the older buildings which, judging by their style, must date from the sixteenth or fifteenth century, I was troubled to realize that I could not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the corners of the houses or on the gables, the window frames or the sills, nor was there any other trace of past history. I remember, said Austerlitz, that the paving under my feet sloped slightly downhill, that once, looking over the parapet of a bridge, I caught sight of two snow-white swans swimming on black water, and then, high above the rooftops, of the castle, somehow miniaturized and in postage-stamp format, so to speak. I could not bring myself to go into a café or buy anything from one of the many stalls and booths. When I turned to go back to the station after about an hour, I felt increasingly as if I had to struggle against a current growing ever stronger, perhaps because I was now going uphill, or maybe there were in fact more people moving one way than the other. In any case, said Austerlitz, I felt more panic-stricken with every passing minute, so that at last, although I was not at all far from the station, I had to stop under the red sandstone arch of a window displaying the pages of the local Nuremberg newspaper, where I waited until the crowds of shoppers had to some extent thinned out. I cannot now say for certain how long I stood there, my senses dazed, on the outer edge of this flood of Germans moving endlessly past me, said Austerlitz, but I think it was four or five o’clock by the time an elderly woman wearing a kind of Tyrolean hat with a cockerel’s feather in it stopped beside me, probably taking me for one of the homeless because of my old rucksack, fetched a one-mark coin out of her purse with arthritic fingers, and carefully handed it to me as alms. I was still holding this coin, minted in 1956 with the head of Chancellor Adenauer on it, when I was finally in the train again late that afternoon, traveling towards Cologne, said Austerlitz. I stood in the corridor looking out of the window almost throughout this part of the journey. I think it was between Würzburg and Frankfurt that the line ran through a densely forested region with leafless stands of oak and beech trees, and mile upon mile of conifers. As I gazed out, a distant memory came to me of a dream I often had both in the manse at Bala and later, a dream of a nameless land without borders and entirely overgrown by dark forests, which I had to cross without any idea where I was going, and it dawned upon me, said Austerlitz, that what I now saw going past outside the train was the original of the images that had haunted me for so many years. Then I recollected another idea which had obsessed me over a long period: the image of a twin brother who had been with me on that long journey, sitting motionless by the window of the compartment, staring out into the dark. I knew nothing about him, not even his name, and I had never exchanged so much as a word with him, but whenever I thought of him I was tormented by the notion that towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings. And then, Austerlitz continued, somewhere beyond Frankfurt, when I entered the Rhine valley for the second time in my life, the sight of the Mäuseturm in the part of the river known as the Binger Loch revealed, with absolute certainty, why the tower in Lake Vyrnwy had always seemed to me so uncanny. I could not take my eyes off the great river Rhine flowing sluggishly along in the dusk, the apparently motionless barges lying low in the water, which almost lapped over their decks, the trees and bushes on the other bank, the fine cross-hatching of the vineyards, the stronger transverse lines of the walls supporting the terraces, the slate-gray rocks and ravines leading off sideways into what seemed to me a prehistoric and unexplored realm.

  While I was still under the spell of this landscape, to me a truly mythological one, said Austerlitz, the setting sun broke through the clouds, filled the entire valley with its radiance, and illuminated the heights on the other side where three gigantic chimneys towered into the sky at the place we were just passing, making the steep slopes on the eastern mountains look like hollow shells, mere camouflage for an underground industrial site covering many square miles. Passing through the valley of the Rhine, said Austerlitz, you can scarcely tell what century it is. As you look out of the train window it is difficult to say even of the castles standing high above the river, bearing such strange and somehow preposterous names as Reichenstein, Ehrenfels, and Stahleck, whether they are medieval or were built by the industrial barons of the nineteenth century. Some of them, for instance Burg Katz and Burg Maus, seem to be rooted in legend, and even the ruins resemble a romantic stage set. At least, I no longer knew in what period of my life I was living as I journeyed down the Rhine valley. Through the evening sunlight I saw the glow of a fiery dawn rising from my past above the other bank, pervading the whole sky. Even today, Austerlitz continued, when I think of my Rhine journeys, the second of them hardly less terrifying than the first, everything becomes confused in my head: my experiences of that time, what I have read, memories surfacing and
then sinking out of sight again, consecutive images and distressing blank spots where nothing at all is left. I see that German landscape, said Austerlitz, as it was described by earlier travelers, the great river not yet regulated in any way, flooding its banks in places, salmon leaping in the water, crayfish crawling over the fine sand; I see Victor Hugo’s somber pen-and-ink drawings of the Rhine castles, and Joseph Mallord Turner sitting on a folding stool not far from the murderous town of Bacharach, swiftly painting his watercolors; I see the deep waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the people of Llanwyddyn submerged in them; and I see, said Austerlitz, the great army of mice, a gray horde said to have plagued the German countryside, plunging into the river and swimming desperately, their little throats raised only just above the water, to reach the safety of the island.