by W. G. Sebald
In Vienna Dr K. takes a room at the Hotel Matschakerhof, out of sympathy with Grillparzer, who always dined there. It is a gesture of reverence which sadly has no good effect. For most of the time, Dr K. is extremely unwell. He is suffering from dejectedness, and his sight is troubling him. Though he cancels whatever appointments he can, he has a sense of being continually among an alarming number of people. At such times he sits like a ghost at table, suffers bouts of claustrophobia, and imagines that every fleeting glance sees right through him. By his side, close enough to touch, as it were, sits Grillparzer, a man now so ancient that he has almost faded away. He indulges in all sorts of tomfoolery and on one occasion even lays a hand on Dr K.'s knee. During the following night, Dr K. is in a wretched state. His Berlin misadventures are haunting him. He tosses and turns in bed to no avail, puts cold compresses on his head, and stands at the window for a long time gazing down into the street and wishes he lay buried there, a few storeys deeper, in the ground. It is impossible, he notes the following day, to lead the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent, married neither in outer appearance nor in reality, to be merely together; and even more impossible to take the only possible step beyond a friendship withe men for there, on the other side of the prescribed boundary, the boot is already upraised that will crush you under its heel.
The most disconcerting part of it, perhaps, is that life nonetheless always goes on, somehow or other. Thus, for instance, in the course of the morning Dr K. is persuaded by Otto Pick to accompany him out to Ottakring to visit Albert Ehrenstein, whose verses he, Dr K., cannot make any sense of, not with the best will in the world. You, however, take delight in the ship, despoiling the lake with sails. I will go down to the deep. Plunge, thaw, go blind, become ice. In the tram, Dr K. is suddenly convulsed by a violent aversion to Pick, because the latter has a small, unpleasant hole in his nature through which he sometimes creeps forth in his entirety, as Dr K. now observes. Dr K.'s fretful state of mind is exacerbated when Ehrenstein proves to have a black moustache, exactly like Pick, whom he so resembles he could be his twin brother. As like as two eggs, Dr K. keeps on thinking compulsively. On the way to the Prater he finds the company of the two others increasingly unnerving, and on the gondola pond he feels himself to be a prisoner of their whims. When at last he is returned to dry land, it is small consolation. They might just as well have struck him dead with an oar. Lise Kaznelson, who has also come on the outing, now takes a carousel ride, through the jungle. Dr K. notes how helplessly she sits up there in her billowy, well-cut but ill-worn dress. He experiences a surge of sociable feeling in her presence, as he so often does in the company of women, but otherwise is constantly plagued by one of his headaches. When as a jest they have their photograph taken as passengers in an aeroplane which appears to be flying above the big Ferris wheel and the spires of the Votivkirche, Dr K. is himself bemused to find that he is the only one who can still manage some kind of smile at such dizzy heights. On the 14th of September Dr K. travels
to Trieste. He spends the best part of eight hours on Southern Railways, ensconced in a corner of his compartment. He is seized by a creeping paralysis. Outside the country slips by, in a series of seamlessly changing views, bathed in an altogether improbable autumn light. Although he barely moves a limb, that evening at ten past nine Dr K., incomprehensibly, really is in Trieste. The city lies in darkness. Dr K. is being driven to a harbour-front hotel, and sitting in the horse-drawn hackney-cab, with the broad back of the coachman before him, he has a vision of himself as a most mysterious figure. It seems to him that people are stopping in the street, following him with their eyes, as if to say: there he is at last.
In the hotel he reclines on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and looks up at the ceiling. Stray cries from outside drift into the room through curtains stirred by a breeze. Dr K. is aware that in this city there is an iron angel who kills travellers from the north, and he longs to go out. On the borderline between grinding weariness and half-sleep he wanders through the lanes of the harbour quarter, sensing under his skin how it is to be a free man waiting on the kerb, hovering an inch above the ground. The circling reflections of the streetlights on the ceiling above him are signs that any moment now it will break open and something will be revealed. Already cracks are appearing in the smooth surface, and then, in a cloud of plaster dust, gradually showing itself against the half-light, a figure descends on great silk-white wings, swathed in bluish-violet vestments and bound with golden cords, the upraised arm with the sword pointing forwards. A veritable angel, thought Dr K. when he could breathe again, all day long it has flown towards me and I of little faith knew nothing of it. Now he will speak to me, he thought, and lowered his gaze. But when he looked up again, the angel, though it was still there, suspended quite low under the ceiling, was no longer a living angel but a garishly painted ship's figurehead, such as hang from the ceilings of sailors' taverns. The sword guard was fashioned to hold candles and catch the dripping tallow.
The next morning Dr K. crossed the Adriatic in somewhat stormy weather, afflicted with slight seasickness. For a considerable time after he had made land, if that is the right expression, in Venice, the waves were still breaking within him. From the Sandwirth Hotel, where he was staying, he wrote to Felice in Berlin, in an optimistic mood that probably came upon him as his queasiness receded, saying that however tremulous he might feel, he now proposed to plunge into the city and all that it could offer a traveller such as himself. Even the pouring rain, which veiled every outline and shape in an even grey-green, would not deter him; no, quite the contrary, he averred, for the days in Vienna would be washed away all the better. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Dr K. did leave the hotel on that 15th of September. If, as he believed, it was impossible to be here at all, how much more was it impossible for him, on the brink of disintegration, to venture out beneath this watery sky under which the very stones dissolved. So Dr K. remains in the hotel. Towards evening, in the sombre lobby, he writes once more to Felice. Now he no longer makes any reference to exploring the city. Instead, set down in hasty lines underneath the hotel's letterhead with its pretty steam yachts, there are references to his mounting despair. That he was alone
and exchanged not a word with a living soul excepting the staff, that the misery within him was almost overflowing, and that - this much he could say with certainty - he was in a condition in keeping with his nature and ordained for him by a justice not of this world, a condition that he could not transcend and which he would have to endure till the very last of his days.
How Dr K. passed his few days in Venice in reality, we do not know. At all events, his sombre mood does not appear to have lifted. Indeed, he felt it was only this state of mind that sustained him when confronted with such a city as Venice, a city which must have made a deep impression upon him, despite there being newly wedded couples everywhere whose very presence seemed to make a mockery of his mournfulness. How it is beautiful, he wrote, with an exclamation mark, in one of those somewhat awry formulations in which language for a moment gives free rein to the emotions. How it is beautiful, and how we undervalue it! But more precise details Dr K. does not disclose. We know, as I have said, nothing of what he really saw. There is not even a reference to the Doge's Palace, the prison chambers of which were to play so prominent a part in the evolution of his own fantasies of trial and punishment some months later. All we know is that he spent those four days in Venice and that he then took the train from Santa Lucia to Verona.
On the afternoon of his arrival in Verona he walked from the station along the Corso into town, and then wandered among its narrow streets until, in weariness, he went into the Church of Sant'Anastasia. After resting in the cool, shadowy interior for a while, with feelings of both gratitude and distaste, he set off once more, and as he left, just as one might ruffle the hair of a son or younger brother, he ran his fingers over the marble locks of a dwarfish figure which, at the foot of
one of the mighty columns, had been bearing the immense weight of a holy-water font for centuries. Nowhere is there anything to suggest that he saw the fine mural of St George painted by Pisanello over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel. It might be shown, though, that when Dr K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner.
With the approach of evening, Dr K. began to be aware of the growing numbers of people out on the streets, apparently solely for their pleasure, all of them arm-in-arm in couples or groups of three or even more. Perhaps it was the bills, still posted throughout the city, announcing the spettacoli lirici all'Arena that August and the word AIDA displayed in large letters which persuaded him that the Veronese show of carefree togetherness had something of a theatrical performance about it, staged especially to bring home to him, Dr K., his solitary, eccentric condition — a thought he could not get out of his head and which he was only able to escape by seeking refuge in a cinema, probably the Cinema Pathé di San Sebastiano. In tears, so Dr K. recorded the following day in Desenzano, he sat in the surrounding darkness, observing the transformation into pictures of the minute particles of dust glinting in the beam of the projector. However, there is nothing in Dr K.'s Desenzano notes to tell us of what he saw on that 20th of September in Verona. Was it the Pathé newsreel, featuring the review of the cavalry in the presence of His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III, and La Lezione dell'abisso, which, as I discovered in the Biblioteca Civica, were shown that day at the Pathé and which are both now untraceable? Or was it, as I initially supposed, a story that ran with some success in the cinemas of Austria in 1913, the story of the unfortunate Student of Prague, who cut himself off from love and life when, on the 13th of May, 1820, he sold his soul to a certain Scapinelli? The extraordinary exterior shots in this film, the silhouettes of his native city flickering across the screen, would doubtless have sufficed to move Dr K. deeply, most of all perhaps the fate of the eponymous hero, Balduin, since in him he would have recognised a kind of doppelgànger, just as Balduin recognises his other self in the dark-coated brother whom he could never and nowhere escape. In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and
henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness. Would this sort of scenario not have struck Dr K. as the description of a struggle in which, as in the contest he himself had set against the backdrop of the Laurenziberg, the principal character and his opponent are in the most intimate and self-destructive of relationships, such that, when the hero is driven into a corner by his companion he is forced to declare: I am betrothed, I admit it. And what alternative does a man so cornered have but to try and rid himself of his dumb attendant by means of a shot from a pistol? - a shot which, in the silent film, is visible as a puff of smoke. In that moment, in which time itself seems to dissolve, Balduin is released from his delusions. He breathes freely once more and, realising in the same instant that the bullet has penetrated his own heart, dies a dramatic, not to say ostentatious death, the whole scene like a flickering light about to be extinguished, representing the soundless aria of the hero's demise. Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr K. once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.
On the 21st of September Dr K. is in Desenzano on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Most of the townspeople have gathered in the market square to welcome the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company. Dr K.,
however, is reclining on the grass down by the lake, before him the waves lapping the reeds, to his right the promontory of Sirmione, to his left the shore towards Manerba. Simply to lie in the grass is one of Dr K.'s favourite ways of passing the time, when reasonably well disposed. If at such a moment, as once happened in Prague, a gentleman of some distinction with whom he has occasionally had official dealings rides by in a two-horse carriage, Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed and freed from all social standing. In Desenzano, however, even this modest happiness eludes him. Rather he feels ill, sick, as he puts it, at every point of the compass. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is. We have no record of how long the people of Desenzano continued their watch for the Deputy Secretary from Prague that afternoon, nor when, disappointed, they finally dispersed.
One of them is reported to have observed that those in whom we invest our hopes only ever make their appearance when they are no longer needed.
Following this failed encounter, which was as disheartening for him as it was for the people of Desenzano, Dr K. spends three weeks in Riva at Dr von Hartungen's hydropathic establishment, arriving by steamer just before nightfall that day. A porter wearing a long green apron fastened at the back with a brass chain shows Dr K. to his room, from the balcony of which he gazes out over the lake, serenely peaceful in the gathering darkness. All is now blue on blue, and nothing appears to move, not even the steamer, already some way out upon the water. In the morning, the daily routine of the hydro begins. In the intervals between the various cold douches and the electrical treatment prescribed for him, Dr K. tries as far as possible to immerse himself entirely in quiet and tranquillity, but the woes he endured with Felice, and she with him, continually come over him, like a living thing, usually when he
awakes, though also at mealtimes when he often feels quite paralysed and unable to pick up his knife and fork. At table, as it happens, the place to Dr K.'s right is occupied by an old general who remains silent for the most part, but now and then will venture a cryptic yet penetrating observation. Thus on one occasion, looking up abruptly from the book which always lies open beside him, he remarks that, when one thinks about it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the final despatches, both of which he knew inside out. Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything! Even the greatest battles in the history of the world were won or lost like that. Tiny details, but they weigh as heavy as the 50,000 dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo. The fact is that ultimately it all comes down to the question of specific gravity. Stendhal had a clearer grasp of this than any high command, he says, and now, in my old age, I have apprenticed myself to that old master, so that I may not die quite without understanding. It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.
Although he is aware that the remarks of his dining companion are not directed at himself, Dr K. experiences a slight surge of confidence and a species of tacit solidarity as he listens. The girl to his left, whom he takes to be unhappy on account of the silent gentleman to her right, that is, on account of himself, now begins interestingly to acquire definition in his mind. She is somewhat short of stature, comes from Genoa, looks very Italian, but is in fact from Switzerland, and, it now transpires, has a voice of a curiously dark timbre. Whenever she speaks to him in that voice, an infrequent enough occurrence, it seems to Dr K. like an extraordinary expression of confidence and trust. In her frail condition she becomes most precious to him, and before long he is rowing out a short way onto the lake with her in the afternoons. The crags rise from the water in the mellow autumn light, nuanced in shades of green, as if the entire location were an album and the mountains had been drawn on an
empty page by some sensitive dilettante, as a remembrance for the lady to whom the album belongs.
Out there they tell each other their ailments, both of them, as one would like to believe, buoyed up by an ephemeral improvement in their condition and sense of peaceable quiescence. Dr K. evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have-long since become separated from the natural order of things. That was the reason why all false lovers (and all lovers, he adds, are false) closed their eyes while lovemaking or else, which came to the same thing, kept them wide open with craving. Never were we more helpless or lacking in rational sense than in that condition. Our dreams could then be constrained no longer and we became subject to the compulsion of constantly going through the whole gamut of variations and repetitions which, as he himself had often enough found, extinguished everything, even the image of the lover one so wished to preserve. Curiously, when he became caught up in such states, which he considered bordered on madness, the only thing that helped was to clap an imaginary black Napoleonic tricorne over his thoughts. At present, however, there was nothing he had less need of than such a hat, for out here on the lake they were indeed almost disembodied, and possessed of a natural understanding of their own scant significance.
In accordance with the expressed hopes of Dr K., they agreed that neither would divulge the other's name, that they would exchange no pictures, nor a shred of paper, nor even a single written word, and that once the few days that remained to them were over they must simply let each other go. In the event though it was not easy. When the hour of their parting arrived, Dr K. had to create all manner of comical diversions to prevent the girl from Genoa from sobbing in front of the leave-taking party. When at last Dr K. accompanied her down to the steamer jetty, and she mounted the little gangplank to board the ship, with an unsteady step, he recalled how a few evenings previously they had joined some other residents and a young, extremely wealthy, very elegant Russian woman had told their fortunes from the cards, out of boredom and desperation - for elegant persons are more often alone among the unstylish than vice versa. Nothing of any consequence emerged out of this purely frivolous and foolish charade. Not until it was the turn of the girl from Genoa did an unambiguous constellation come up, which caused the Russian lady to inform her that she would never enter the so-called state of matrimony. For Dr K. it was uncanny in the extreme to hear a solitary life foretold from the cards for this girl of all people, the object of his affections, whom he had thought of as the mermaid ever since he had first seen her, on account of her water-green eyes; for there was nothing of a spinster about her at all, except perhaps the way she wore her hair, as he now thought to himself on seeing her for the last time, her right hand on the rail, while the left described, somewhat awkwardly, a sign in the air which betokened the end.