Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  If you approach the new Bibliothèque Nationale from the place Valhubert you find yourself at the foot of a flight of steps which, made out of countless grooved hardwood boards and measuring three hundred by a hundred and fifty meters, surrounds the entire complex on the two sides facing the street like the lower story of a ziggurat. Once you have climbed the steps, at least four dozen in number and as closely set as they are steep, a venture not entirely without its dangers even for younger visitors, said Austerlitz, you are standing on an esplanade which positively overwhelms the eye, built of the same grooved wood as the steps, and extending over an area about the size of nine football pitches between the four corner towers of the library which thrust their way twenty-two floors up into the air. You might think, especially on days when the wind drives rain over this totally exposed platform, as it quite often does, said Austerlitz, that by some mistake you had found your way to the deck of the Berengaria or one of the other oceangoing giants, and you would be not in the least surprised if, to the sound of a wailing foghorn, the horizon of the city of Paris suddenly began rising and falling against the gauge of the towers as the great steamer pounded onwards through mountainous waves, or if one of the tiny figures, having unwisely ventured on deck, were swept over the rail by a gust of wind and carried far out into the wastes of the Atlantic waters. The four glazed towers themselves, named in a manner reminiscent of a futuristic novel La tour des lois, La tour des temps, La tour des nombres and La tour des lettres, make a positively Babylonian impression on anyone who looks up at their façades and wonders about the still largely empty space behind their closed blinds. When I first stood on the promenade deck of the new Bibliothèque Nationale, said Austerlitz, it took me a little while to find the place where the visitor is carried down on a conveyor belt to what appears to be a basement storey but, in reality, is the ground floor. This downwards journey, when you have just laboriously ascended to the plateau, struck me as an utter absurdity, something that must have been devised—I can think of no other explanation, said Austerlitz—on purpose to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers, especially as it ends in front of a sliding door of makeshift appearance which had a chain across it on the day of my first visit, and where you have to let yourself be searched by semi-uniformed security men. The floor of the large hall which you then enter is laid with rust-red carpet, on which a few low seats are placed far apart, backless upholstered benches and small chairs like folding stools where visitors to the library can perch only in such a way that their knees are almost level with their heads, so that my first thought at the sight of them, said Austerlitz, was that the people whom I saw crouching so close to the ground, some by themselves and some in small groups, were members of a wandering tribe encamped here on their way through the Sahara or the Sinai desert in the last glow of the setting sun, in order to await the coming of darkness.

  And of course, Austerlitz continued, you cannot leave the red Sinai hall for the inner citadel of the library without more ado; first you have to put your request at an information point staffed by half a dozen ladies, whereupon, if this request to any degree exceeds the very simplest contingency, you take a number, like a visitor to a tax office; you then have to wait, often for half an hour or more, until another member of staff calls you into a separate cubicle, as if you were on business of an extremely dubious nature, or at least had to be dealt with away from the public gaze, and here you must say again what it is you have come for and receive the relevant instructions. Despite such measures of control I finally succeeded, said Austerlitz, in gaining admission to the newly opened Haut-de-jardin public reading room, where I subsequently sat for many hours and days on end, looking out abstractedly, as my habit now is, at the inner courtyard and the curious nature reserve cut, so to speak, from the surface of the promenade deck and sunk two or three stories deep, which has been planted with about a hundred full-grown stone pines from the Forêt de Bord transported, how I do not know, to this place of banishment. If one looks down from the deck at the spreading gray-green crowns of the trees, some of which perhaps are still thinking of their home in Normandy, it is like looking across an uneven expanse of moorland, while from the reading room you can see only the blotched red trunks which, although fixed in place with steel hawsers rising at an oblique angle, sway slightly back and forth on stormy days like waterweed in an aquarium. In the daydreams into which I fell in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I sometimes felt as if I saw circus acrobats climbing the cables slanting up from the ground to the evergreen canopy, placing one foot in front of the other as they made their way upwards with the ends of their balancing poles quivering, or as if, always on the edge of invisibility, I saw dodging now here, now there, those two mythical squirrels said to have been brought to the library in the hope that they will increase and multiply, founding a large colony of their species in this artificial pine grove to entertain any readers who look up from their books now and then. And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which had lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud, and fell lifeless to the ground. Sitting at my place in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I thought at length about the way in which such unforeseen accidents, the fall of a single creature to its death when diverted from its natural path, or the recurrent symptoms of paralysis affecting the electronic data retrieval system, relate to the Cartesian overall plan of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. At any rate, as far as I myself was concerned, a man who, after all, had devoted almost the whole of his life to the study of books and who had been equally at home in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the rue Richelieu, I for my part, said Austerlitz, found that this gigantic new library, which according to one of the loathsome phrases now current is supposed to serve as the treasure house of our entire literary heritage, proved useless in my search for any traces of my father who had disappeared from Paris more than fifty years ago. Confronted day after day by a system which appeared to consist entirely of obstructions and was placing an increasing strain on my nerves, I set aside my researches for a while and one morning, when for some reason or other the fifty-five carmine-red volumes in Vera’s bookcase came into my mind, I instead began reading the novels of Balzac, hitherto unknown to me, starting with the story of Colonel Chabert, a man whose glorious career in the service of the Emperor ends abruptly on the battlefield of Eylau, when he receives a saber blow and sinks unconscious to the ground. Years later, after long wanderings across Germany, the colonel, risen from the dead, so to speak, returns to Paris to claim his rights to his estates, to his wife the Comtesse Ferraud who has now remarried, and to his own name. He is presented as a ghostly figure, said Austerlitz, standing in the lawyer Derville’s office, a gaunt and desiccated old soldier, as we are told at this point. His eyes appear half-blind, veiled as they are by a mother-of-pearl gleam, flickering unsteadily like candle flames. His face is pale, its lines sharp as a knife edge. Around his neck he wears a shabby cravat of black silk. Je suis le Colonel Chabert, celui qui est mort à Eylau are the words with which he introduces himself, and then he tells the tale of the mass grave (a fosse des morts, as Balzac describes it, said Austerlitz), into which he was thrown the day after the battle along with the rest of the fallen, and where he finally came to himself, as he says, in excruciating pain. J’entendis, ou crus entendre, Austerlitz quoted from memory, looking out of the brasserie window at the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, des gémissements poussés par le monde des cadavres au milieu duquel je gisais. Et quoique la mémoire de ces moments soit bien ténébreuse, quoique mes souvenirs soient bien confus, malgré les impressions de souff
rances encore plus profondes que je devais éprouver et qui ont brouillé mes idées, il y a des nuits où je crois encore entendre ces soupirs étouffés. Only a few days after reading this book, the more melodramatic aspects of which, Austerlitz continued, reinforced the suspicion I had always entertained that the border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think, I was in the reading room again and, on opening an American architectural journal—this was at exactly six in the evening—I came upon a large-format photograph showing the room filled with open shelves up to the ceiling where the files on the prisoners in the little fortress of Terezín, as it is called, are kept today. I remembered, said Austerlitz, that at the time of my first visit to the Bohemian ghetto I could not bring myself to enter the outworks on the glacis to the south of the star-shaped town, and perhaps that was why, at the sight of the records room, a kind of idée fixe forced itself upon me that, all along, my true place of work should have been there in the little fortress of Terezín, where so many had perished in the cold, damp casemates, and it was my own fault that I had not taken it up.