The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  The morning I left Cedar Glen West was icy and dark. Exactly as she had described Uncle Adelwarth the day before, Aunt Fini now stood on the pavement in front of her bungalow, in a dark winter coat that was too heavy for her, waving a handkerchief after me. As I drove off I could see her in the mirror, with clouds of white exhaust about her, growing smaller and smaller; and, as I recall that mirror image, I find myself thinking how strange it is that no one since then has waved a handkerchief after me in farewell. In the few days I still had in New York I began making my notes on the inconsolable Aunt Theres, and about Uncle Kasimir on the roof of the Augsburg Synagogue. But my thoughts kept returning to Ambros Adelwarth in particular, and whether I ought not to see the sanatorium at Ithaca which he had entered voluntarily in his sixty-seventh year and where he had subsequently perished. At the time, true, the idea remained a mere thought, either because I did not want to waste my air ticket back to London or because I was wary of looking more closely into the matter. It was not until the early summer of 1984 that I finally went to Ithaca, having meanwhile taken great pains to decipher Uncle Adelwarth's travel notes of 1913 and having concluded that, if I intended to go to Ithaca, I ought not to defer it any longer. So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Niniveh - I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned. It was as if the car had a will of its own on the broad highway. As all vehicles moved at almost the same speed, overtaking, when it occurred at all, went so slowly that I began to feel like a travelling companion of my neighbour in the next lane as I inched my way forward. At one point, for instance, I drove in the company of a black family for a good half hour. They waved and smiled repeatedly to show that I already had a place in their hearts, as a friend of the family, as it were, and when they parted from me in a broad curve at the Hurleyville exit - the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window -1 felt deserted and desolate for a time. The countryside began to look more uninhabited too. The road crossed a great plateau, with hills and undulations to the right, rising to mountains of some height towards the northerly horizon. Just as the winter days I had spent in America three years before had been dark and colourless, so now the earth's surface, a patchwork of greens, was flooded with light. In the long since abandoned pastures stretching towards the mountains grew clumps of oaks and alders; rectilinear plantations of spruces alternated with irregular stands of birches and aspens, the countless trembling leaves of which had opened only a week or so before; and even on the dark, distant slopes, where pine forests covered the mountainsides, the pale green of larches lit by the evening sun gleamed here and there in the background. When I saw those seemingly uninhabited highlands, I remembered the longing for faraway places that I had known when I bent over my atlas as a pupil at the monastery school, and how often I had travelled, in my thoughts, across the states of America, which I could recite by heart in alphabetical order. In the course of a geography lesson that lasted very nearly an eternity - outside, the early morning blue was still untouched by noonday brightness - I had once explored the regions I was now driving through, as well as the Adirondacks further to the north, which Uncle Kasimir had told me looked just like home. I still remember searching the map with a magnifying glass for the source of the Hudson River, and getting lost in a map square with a great many mountains and lakes. Certain place names such as Sabattis, Gabriels, Hawkeye, Amber Lake, Lake Lila and Lake Tear-in-the-CIouds have remained indelibly in my memory ever since.

  At Owego, where I had to turn off the State Highway, I took a break and sat till almost nine in a roadside café, occasionally jotting down a word or two but mostly staring out absent-mindedly through the panoramic windows at the endless traffic and the western sky, still streaked with orange, flamingo pink and gold long after the sun had set. And so it was already late in the evening when I arrived in Ithaca. For maybe half an hour I drove around the town and its suburbs, to get my bearings, before pulling up at a guesthouse in a side street, silent and lit up in its dark garden, like the "Empire des Lumières" in which no one has ever set foot. A path curved from the pavement and ended in a flight of stone steps at the front door, where a shrub stretched out horizontal branches bearing white blossom. In the lamplight I thought for a moment that they were covered with snow. Everyone was plainly already asleep, and it was some time before an aged porter emerged from the depths of the house. He was so doubled over that he cannot have been able to see more than the lower half of anyone standing in front of him. Because of this handicap, no doubt, he had already taken a quick glance at the latecomer outside the glazed door before he crossed the hall, a glance that was the more penetrating for being brief. Without a word he escorted me up a fine mahogany staircase to the top floor, where he showed me to a spacious room overlooking the back garden. I put down my bag, opened one of the high windows, and looked out into the heaving shadows of a cypress that soared up from the depths. The air was filled with its scent and with an unceasing rushing sound, made not by the wind in the trees, as I supposed at first, but by the Ithaca Falls, which were a short distance away, though invisible from my window. Before I arrived in the town it had been impossible to imagine that in the Lake Cayuga region more than a hundred such falls have been tumbling into the deep-carved gorges and valleys ever since the Ice Age. I lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by the long journey. The powdery veils that rose silently from the roar of the Falls drifted into my sleep like white curtains blown into a room black with night. The next morning I searched the telephone books in vain for the Samaria Sanatorium or the Professor Fahnstock mentioned by Aunt Fini. Nor was I any more successful when I called on a psychiatric practice, and when I asked the blue-rinsed lady at reception she visibly paled with horror at the words private mental home. As I was leaving the hotel to make enquiries in town, I met the crooked porter in the front garden, coming up the path with a broom. He listened to my request for information most attentively and then, leaning on his broom, thought in silence for a good minute. Fahnstock, he exclaimed at length, so loudly that he might have been talking to a deaf person, Fahnstock died in the Fifties. Of a stroke, if I am not mistaken. And in a few words that came with a rattle from his constricted chest he went on to tell me that Fahnstock had had a successor, one Dr Abramsky, though Abramsky had not taken any more patients into the sanatorium since the late Sixties. What he did nowadays in that old place on his own, said the porter, turning abruptly to go, no one knew. And from the door he called after me: I have heard say he's become a beekeeper.

  The old porter's information enabled me to find the sanatorium without difficulty that afternoon. A long drive swept through a park that must have covered almost a hundred acres and led up to a villa built entirely of wood. With its covered verandahs and balconies it resembled a Russian dacha, or one of those immense pinewood lodges stuffed with trophies that Austrian archdukes and princes built all over their hunting grounds in Styria and the Tyrol in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate their aristocratic guests and the accredited barons of industry. So clear were the signs of decay, so singularly did the window panes flash in the sunlight, that I did not dare go any closer, and instead began by looking around the park, where conifers of almost every kind - Lebanese cedars, mountain hemlocks, Douglas firs, larches, Arolla and Monterey pines, and feathery swamp cypresses - had all grown to their full size. Some of the cedars and larches were forty metres tall, and one of the hemlocks must have been fifty. There were woodland meadows between the trees where bluebells, white cardamines and yellow goats-beard grew side by side. In other parts of the park there were many di
fferent ferns, and the new greenery of dwarf Japanese maples, lit up by rays of sunlight, swayed over the fallen leaves underfoot. I had been strolling around the arboretum for almost an hour when I came upon Dr Abramsky busy fitting out new beehives outside his apiary. He was a stocky man close to sixty, and wore threadbare trousers. From the right pocket of his patched-up jacket protruded a goose wing, such as might once have been used as a hand brush. What struck one immediately about Dr Abramsky was his shock of thick, flaming red hair that stood on end as if he were in a state of the greatest anxiety; it reminded me of the Pentecostal tongues of fire over the heads of the disciples, depicted in my first catechism. Quite unperturbed by my appearance out of nowhere, Dr Abramsky pulled up a wicker chair for me and, going on with his work on the beehives, listened to my story When I had finished he put his tools aside and began to talk himself. I never knew Cosmo Solomon, he said, but I did know your great-uncle, since I started here in 1949 at the age of thirty-one, as Fahnstock's assistant. I remember the Adelwarth case so clearly for a special reason. He came at the beginning of a complete change in my thinking, one that led me, in the decade following Fahnstock's death, to cut back my psychiatric practice more and more, and eventually to give it up altogether. Since mid May 1969 — I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years - I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective. You will have seen that the Samaria is now deserted. Giving it up was the step I had to take in order to free myself from any involvement in life. I do not expect anyone can really imagine the pain and wretchedness once stored up in this extravagant timber palace, and I hope all this misfortune will gradually melt away now as it falls apart. For a while Dr Abramsky said nothing, and merely gazed out into the distance. It is true, he said at length, that Ambrose Adelwarth was not committed into our care by any relative, but came to us of his own free will. Why he came here remained a mystery to me for a long time, and he never talked about it. Fahnstock diagnosed profound senile depression with a tendency to cataleptic seizures, though this was contradicted by the fact that Ambrose showed no sign at all of neglecting his person, as patients in that condition usually do. Quite the contrary, he attached the greatest importance to his appearance. I only ever saw him in a three-piece suit and wearing a flawlessly knotted bow tie. Nonetheless, even when he was simply standing at the window looking out he always gave the impression of being filled with some appalling grief. I do not think, said Dr Abramsky, that I have ever met a more melancholy person than your great-uncle; every casual utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment (he held himself erect until the end), was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence. At meals - to which he always came, since he remained absolute in matters of courtesy even in his darkest times - he still helped himself, but what he actually ate was no more than the symbolic offerings that were once placed on the graves of the dead. It was also remarkable how readily Ambrose submitted to shock treatment, which in the early Fifties, as I understood only later, really came close to torture or martyrdom. Other patients often had to be frogmarched to the treatment room, said Dr Abramsky, but Ambrose would always be sitting on the stool outside the door at the appointed hour, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for what was in store for him.

  In response to my request, Dr Abramsky described shock treatment in greater detail. At the start of my career in psychiatry, he said, I was of the opinion that electrotherapy was a humane and effective form of treatment. As students we had been taught - and Fahnstock, in his stories about clinical practice, had repeatedly described in graphic terms - how in the old days, when pseudo-epileptic fits were induced by injecting insulin, patients would be convulsed for minutes, seemingly on the point of death, their faces contorted and blue. Compared with this approach, the introduction of electric shock treatment, which could be dispensed with greater precision and stopped immediately if the patient's reaction was extreme, constituted a considerable step forward. In our view, it seemed completely legitimate once sedatives and muscle relaxants began to be used in the early Fifties, to avoid the worst of the incidental injuries, such as dislocated shoulders or jaws, broken teeth, or other fractures. Given these broad improvements in shock therapy, Fahnstock, dismissing my (alas) none too forceful objections with his characteristic lordliness, adopted what was known as the block method, a course of treatment advocated by the German psychiatrist Braunmiihl, which not infrequently involved more than a hundred electric shocks at intervals of only a very few days. This would have been about six months before Ambrose joined us. Needless to say, when treatment was so frequent, there could be no question of proper documentation or assessment of the therapy; and that was what happened with your great-uncle too. Besides, said Dr Abramsky, all of the material on file - the case histories and the medical records Fahnstock kept on a daily basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion - have probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse. I have a recurring dream of that collapse, said Dr Abramsky, gazing at the palm of his left hand as he spoke. I see the sanatorium on its lofty rise, see everything simultaneously, the building as a whole and also the minutest detail; and I know that the woodwork, the roof beams, door posts and panelling, the floorboards and staircases, the rails and banisters, the lintels and ledges, have already been hollowed out under the surface, and that at any moment, as soon as the chosen one amongst the blind armies of beetles dispatches the very last, scarcely material resistance with its jaws, the entire lot will come down. And that is precisely what does happen in my dream, before my very eyes, infinitely slowly, and a great yellowish cloud billows out and disperses, and where the sanatorium once stood there is merely a heap of powder-fine wood dust, like pollen. Dr Abramsky's voice had grown softer as he spoke, but now, pausing first to review (as I supposed) the imaginary spectacle once more before his mind's eye, he returned to reality. Fahnstock, he resumed, had been trained in neurology at an asylum in Lemberg, immediately before the First World War: at a time, that is, when psychiatry was primarily concerned with subduing those in its custody, and keeping them in safe detention. For that reason he was naturally inclined to interpret the recurrent desolation and apathy of sick patients exposed to continued shock therapy, their growing inability to concentrate, their sluggishness of mind, their muted voices, and even cases when patients entirely ceased to speak, as signs of successful therapy. So to his mind the docility of Ambrose was a result of the new treatment. Ambrose was one of the first of our patients to undergo a series of shocks, over a period of weeks and months; but that docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle's longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.

  Once again Dr Abramsky fell silent for a lengthy spell, occasionally scrutinizing the lines on his left hand. I believe, he then went on, looking up at me, I believe it was Fahnstock's unmistakably Austrian intonation that predisposed me towards him at first. He reminded me of my father, who was from Kolomea and, like Fahnstock, came from Galicia to the west after the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. Fahnstock tried to re-establish himself in his home town, Linz, whilst my father tried to start up in the liquor trade in Vienna, but both fell foul of circumstances, the one in Linz and the other in Vienna's Leopoldstadt. In early 1921 my fa
ther emigrated to America, and Fahnstock must have arrived in New York during the summer months, where he soon resumed his career in psychiatry. In 1925, following two years at the state hospital in Albany, he took up a position at Samaria, a newly established private sanatorium. At about the same time, my father died when a boiler exploded in a soda factory on the Lower East Side. After the accident, his body was found in a partly poached state. When I was growing up in Brooklyn I missed him very much. Even in the face of the greatest adversity he was confident; my mother, by contrast, seemed only a shadow after his death. I now think that, when I myself began as an assistant at the Samaria, I was uncritically on Fahnstock's side because much about him recalled my father. But when Fahnstock began to believe, towards the end of his career, that he had discovered a psychiatric miracle cure in the block or annihilation method, and when he, who had never had the slightest scientific ambition, increasingly became caught up in a kind of experimental mania and even planned to publish a paper about Ambrose, then, and only then, did it dawn on me that his fanatical interest as well as my own vacillation were, in the end, merely proof of our appalling ignorance and corruptibility.