The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  4th December: Last night dreamt that Cosmo and I crossed the glaring emptiness of the Jordan valley. A blind guide walks ahead of us. He points his staff to a dark spot on the horizon and cries out, several times, er-Riha, er-Riha. As we approach, er-Riha proves to be a dirty village with sand and dust swirling about it. The entire population has gathered on the edge of the village in the shade of a tumbledown sugar mill. One has the impression that they are nothing but beggars and footpads. A noticeable number are gouty, hunchbacked or disfigured. Others are lepers or have immense goitres. Now I see that all these people are from Gopprechts. Our Arab escorts fire their long rifles into the air. We ride past, and the people cast malevolent looks after us. At the foot of a low hill we pitch the black tents. The Arabs light a small fire and cook a dark green broth of Jew's mallow and mint leaves, and bring some of it over to us in tin bowls, with slices of lemon and crushed grain. Night falls rapidly. Cosmo lights the lamp and spreads out his map on the colourful carpet. He points to one of the many white spaces and says: We are now in Jericho. The oasis is a four-hour walk in length and a one-hour walk in breadth, and of a rare beauty per matched only by the paradisal orchard of Damascus merveilleux verger de Damas. The people here have all want. Whatever they sow grows immediately in this fertile soil. The glorious gardens flower forever. The gree corn sways in the bright palm groves. The fiery hea summer is made bearable by the many watercourses pastures, the crowns of the trees and the vine leaves ovej pathways. The winters are so mild that the people of blessèd land wear no more than a linen shirt, even wher mountains of Judaea, not far off, are white with sno1 Several blank pages follow the account of the drean er-Riha. During this time, Ambros must have been ch occupied with recruiting a small troop of Arabs and acqui the equipment and provisions needed for an expedition tc Dead Sea, for on the 16th of December he writes: Left c crowded Jerusalem with its hordes of pilgrims three days and rode down the Kidron Valley into the lowest regioi earth. Then, at the foot of the Yeshimon Mountains, a the Sea as far as Ain Jidy. One wrongly imagines these sb as destroyed by fire and brimstone, a thing of salt and a for thousands of years. I myself have heard the Dead which is about the size of Lac Leman, described as beir motionless as molten lead, though the surface is ruffle times into a phosphorescent foam. Birds cannot fly aero: they say, without suffocating in the air, and others report on moonlit nights an aura of the grave, the colour of absinthe, rises from its depths. None of all this have we found fc true. In fact, the Sea's waters are wonderfully clear, and b on the shore with scarcely a sound. On the high ground tc tight there are green clefts from which streams come forth. There is also to be seen a mysterious white line that is visible early in the morning. It runs the length of the Sea, and vanishes an hour or so later. No one, thus Ibrahim Hishmeh, our Arab guide, can explain it or give a reason. Ain Jidy itself is a blessèd spot with pure spring water and rich vegetation. We made our camp by some bushes on the shore where snipe stalk and the bulbul bird, brown and blue of plumage and red of beak, sings. Yesterday I thought I saw a large dark hare, and a butterfly with gold-speckled wings. In the evening, when we were sitting on the shore, Cosmo said that once the whole of the land of Zoar on the south bank was like this. Where now mere traces remained of the five overthrown cities of Gomorrha, Ruma, Sodom, Seadeh and Seboah, the oleanders once grew thirty feet high beside rivers that never ran dry, and there were acacia forests and oshac trees as in Florida. There were irrigated orchards and melon fields far and wide, and he had read a passage where Lynch, the explorer, claimed that down from the gorge of Wadi Kerek a forest torrent fell with a fearful roar that could only be compared with the Niagara Falls. - In the third night of our stay at Ain Jidy a stiff wind rose out on the Sea and stirred the heavy waters. On land it was calmer. The Arabs had long been asleep beside the horses. I was still sitting up in our bed, which was open to the heavens, in the light of the swaying lantern. Cosmo, curled up slightly, was sleeping at my side. Suddenly a quail, perhaps frightened by the storm on the Sea, took refuge in his lap and remained there, calm now, as if it were its rightful place. But at daybreak, when Cosmo stirred, it ran away quickly across the level ground, as quail do, lifted off into the air, beat its wings tremendously fast for a moment, then extended them rigid and motionless and glided by a little thicket in an utterly beautiful curve, and was gone. It was shortly before sunrise. Across the water, about twelve miles away, the blue-black ridge-line of the Moab Mountains of Araby ran level along the horizon, merely rising or dipping slightly at points, so that one might have thought the watercolourist's hand had trembled a little.

  The last entry in my Great-Uncle Adelwarth's little agenda book was written on the Feast of Stephen. Cosmo, it reads, had had a bad fever after their return to Jerusalem but was already on the way to recovery again. My great-uncle also noted that late the previous afternoon it had begun to snow and that, looking out of the hotel window at the city, white in the falling dusk, it made him think of times long gone. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

  MAX FERBER

  They come when night falls

  to search for life

  Until my twenty-second year I had never been further away from home than a five- or six-hour train journey, and it was because of this that in the autumn of 1966, when I decided, for various reasons, to move to England, I had a barely adequate notion of what the country was like or how, thrown back entirely on my own resources, I would fare abroad. It may have been partly due to my inexperience that I managed to weather the two-hour night flight from Kloten airport to Manchester without too many misgivings. There were only a very few passengers on board, and, as I recall, they sat wrapped up in their coats, far apart in the half-darkness of the cold body of the aircraft. Nowadays, when usually one is quite dreadfully crammed in together with one's fellow passengers, and aggravated by the unwanted attentions of the cabin crew, I am frequently beset with a scarcely containable fear of flying; but at that time, our even passage through the night skies filled me with a sense (false, as I now know) of security. Once we had crossed France and the Channel, sunk in darkness below, I gazed down lost in wonder at the network of lights that stretched from the southerly outskirts of London to the Midlands, their orange sodium glare the first sign that from now on I would be living in a different world. Not until we were approaching the Peak District south of Manchester did the strings of street lights gradually peter out into the dark. At the same time, from behind a bank of cloud that covered the entire horizon to the east, the disc of the moon rose, and by its pale glow the hills, peaks and ridges which had previously been invisible could be seen below us, like a vast, ice-grey sea moved by a great swell. With a grinding roar, its wings trembling, the aircraft toiled downwards until we passed by the strangely ribbed flank of a long, bare mountain ridge seemingly close enough to touch, and appearing to me to be rising and sinking like a giant recumbent body, heaving as it breathed. Looping round in one more curve, the roar of the engines steadily increasing, the plane set a course across open country. By now, we should have been able to make out the sprawling mass of Manchester, yet one could see nothing but a faint glimmer, as if from a fire almost suffocated in ash. A blanket of fog that had risen out of the marshy plains that reached as far as the Irish Sea had covered the city, a city spread across a thousand square kilometres, built of countless bricks and inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.

  Although only a scant dozen passengers had disembarked at Ringway airport from the Zurich flight, it took almost an hour until our luggage emerged from the depths, and another hour until I had cleared customs: the officers, understandably bored at that time of the night, suddenly mustered an alarming degree of exactitude as they dealt with me, a rare case, in those days, of a student who planned
to settle in Manchester to pursue research, bringing with him a variety of letters and papers of identification and recommendation. It was thus already five o'clock by the time I climbed into a taxi and headed for the city centre. In contrast to today, when a continental zeal ..for business has infected the British, in the Sixties no one was out and about in English cities so early in the morning. So, with only an occasional traffic light to delay us, we drove swiftly through the not unhandsome suburbs of Gatley, Northenden and Didsbury to Manchester itself. Day was just breaking, and I looked out in amazement at the rows of uniform houses, which seemed the more rundown the closer we got to the city centre. In Moss Side and Hulme there were whole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up, and whole districts where everything had been demolished. Views opened up across the wasteland towards the still immensely impressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks and warehouses, about a kilometre distant, that had once been the hub of one of the nineteenth century's miracle cities but, as I was soon to find out, was now almost hollow to the core. As we drove in among the dark ravines between the brick buildings, most of which were six or eight storeys high and sometimes adorned with glazed ceramic tiles, it turned out that even there, in the heart of the city, not a soul was to be seen, though by now it was almost a quarter to six. One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum. The taxi driver, whom I had asked to take me to a hotel that was (as I put it) not too expensive, gave me to understand that hotels of the kind I wanted were rare in the city centre, but after driving around a little he turned off Great Bridgewater Street into a narrow alleyway and pulled up at a house scarcely the width of two windows, on the soot-blackened front of which was the name AROSA in sweeping neon letters.

  Just keep ringing, said the driver as he left. And I really did have to push the bell long and repeatedly before there was a sign of movement within. After some rattling and shooting of bolts, the door was opened by a lady with curly blonde hair, perhaps not quite forty, with a generally wavy, Lorelei-like air about her. For a while we stood there in wordless confrontation, both of us with an expression of disbelief, myself beside my luggage and she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick. Mrs Irlam -Yes, Irlam like Irlam in Manchester, I would later hear her saying down the phone time and again - Mrs Irlam broke the silence with a question that summed up both her jolted state, roused from her sleep, and her amusement at the sight of me: And where have you sprung from? - a question which she promptly answered herself, observing that only an alien would show up on her doorstep at such an hour on a blessed Friday morning with a case like that. But then, smiling enigmatically, Mrs Irlam turned back in, which I took as a sign to follow her. We went into a windowless room off the tiny hall, where a roll-top desk crammed to bursting with letters and documents, a mahogany chest stuffed with an assortment of bedclothes and candlewick bedspreads, an ancient wall telephone, a keyrack, and a large photograph of a pretty Salvation Army girl, in a black varnished frame, all had, it seemed to me, a life entirely of their own. The girl was in uniform, standing in front of an ivy-covered wall and holding a glistening flugelhorn in the crook of her arm. Inscribed on the slightly foxed passe-partout, in a flowing hand that leant heavily to one side, were the words: Grade Irlam, Urmston nr Manchester, 17 May 1944. Third floor, she said, and, nodding across the hall, her eyebrows raised, added: the lift's over there. The lift was so tiny that I only just fitted in with my case, and its floor was so thin that it sagged beneath the weight of even a single passenger. Later I hardly used it, although it took me quite some time before I could find my way around the maze of dead-end corridors, emergency exits, doors to rooms, toilets and fire escapes, landings and staircases. The room that I moved into that morning, and did not move out of until the following spring, was carpeted in a large floral pattern, wallpapered with violets, and furnished with a wardrobe, a washstand, and an iron bedstead with a candlewick bedspread. From the window there was a view onto semi-derelict slate-roofed outbuildings below and a back yard where rats thronged all that autumn until, a week or so before Christmas, a little ratcatcher by the name of Renfield turned up several times with a battered bucket full of rat poison. He doled the poison out into various corners, drains and pipes, using a soup spoon tied to a short stick, and for a few months the number of rats was considerably reduced. If one looked out across the yard, rather than down into it, one saw the many-windowed deserted depot of the Great Northern Railway Company, a little way beyond a black canal, where sometimes lights would flit about erratically at night.

  The day of my arrival at the Arosa, like most of the days, weeks and months to come, was a time of remarkable silence and emptiness. I spent the morning unpacking my suitcase and bags, stowing away my clothing and linen, and arranging my writing materials and other belongings; then, tired after a night of travelling, I fell asleep on my iron bed, my face buried in the candlewick bedspread, which smelled faintly of violet-scented soap. I did not come to till almost half past three, when Mrs Irlam knocked at my door. Apparently by way of a special welcome, she brought me, on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before. She explained that it was called a teas-maid, and was both an alarm clock and a tea-making machine. When I made tea and the

  steam rose from it, the shiny stainless steel contraption on its ivory-coloured metal base looked like a miniature power plant, and the dial of the clock, as I soon found as dusk fell, glowed a phosphorescent lime green that I was familiar with from childhood and which I had always felt afforded me an unaccountable protection at night. That may be why it has often seemed, when I have thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea maker brought to my room by Mrs Irlam, by Gracie - you must call me Gracie, she said - as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation , in which I might well have become completely submerged. Very useful, these are, said Gracie as she showed me how to operate the teas-maid that November afternoon; and she was right. After my initiation into the mysteries of what Gracie called an electrical miracle, we went on talking in a friendly fashion, and she repeatedly emphasized that her hotel was a quiet establishment, even if sometimes in the evenings there was (as she put it) a certain commotion. But that need not concern you. It's travelling gentlemen that come and go. And indeed, it was not until after office hours that the doors would open and the stairs creak at the Hotel Arosa, and one would encounter the gentlemen Gracie had referred to, bustling characters clad almost without exception in tattered gabardine coats or macs. Not until nearly eleven at night did the toings and froings cease and the garish women disappear - whom Gracie would refer to, without the slightest hint of irony, with a hold-all phrase she had evidently coined herself, as the gentlemen's travelling companions.

  Every evening of the week, the Arosa was bustling with salesmen and clerks, but on Saturday evening, as in the entire rest of the city centre, there was no sign of life. Interrupted only occasionally by stray customers she called irregulars, Gracie would sit at the roll-top desk in her office doing the books. She did her best to smooth out the grey-green pound notes and brick-red ten-shilling notes, then laid them carefully in piles, and, whispering as if at some mystical rite, counted them until she had come up with the same total at least twice. She dealt with the coins no less meticulously; there Was always a considerable quantity, and she stacked them in even columns of copper, brass and silver before she set about calculating the total, which she did partly by manual and partly by mathematical means, first converting the pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences to shillings and then the shillings, florins and half crowns into pounds. The final conversion that then followed, of the pound total thus arrived at into the guineas which were at that time still the customa
ry unit in better business establishments, always proved the most difficult part of this financial operation, but without a doubt it was also its crowning glory. Gracie would enter the sum in guineas in her ledger, sign and date it, and stow the money in a Pickley & Patricroft safe that was built into the wall by the desk. On Sundays, she would invariably leave the house early in the morning, carrying a small patent leather case, only to return, just as unfailingly, at lunchtime on the Monday.