by W. G. Sebald
possession. The third volume contained pictures from overseas, particularly from the Far East, from Dutch South East Asia, and from China and Japan. This collection of postcards, which ran to several hundred in all, had been put together by Rosina Zobel's husband, old Engelwirt, who before marrying Rosina had travelled far and wide, spending the greater part of a considerable inheritance, and who had now been bedridden for a number of years. People said that he lay in the room adjoining Rosina's and had a large wound in his hip which would not heal. They said that as a youngster he had tried to hide a cigar, which he had been secretly smoking, from his father, and had put it in his trouser pocket. The burn he had sustained had soon mended, but later, when he was nearly fifty, it opened up again and now refused to close at all, indeed it became larger every year, and he might well, so they said, end up dying of gangrene. I considered this statement, which I could not understand, to be some sort of judgement, and I envisioned the Engelwirt's martyrdom in all the colours of hellfire. I never saw him in person, though, and, as far as I can remember, the landlady, who in any case spoke very little, never once mentioned him. On a couple of occasions, however, I thought I heard him wheezing in the other room. Later on, as time went by, it seemed to me less and less likely that the Engelwirt landlord had existed at all, and I wondered if I had not simply imagined him. However, further enquiries in W. left no room for doubt in the matter. It also transpired that the children of the Engelwirt couple, Johannes and Magdalena, who were not much older than I, had been brought up elsewhere by an aunt, as the Engelwirt landlady had started drinking heavily after the birth of Magdalena and had no longer been capable of looking after the children. Towards me, perhaps because I was otherwise not in her charge, the landlady showed endless patience. Not infrequently I sat in bed with her, she at the head and I at the foot, and recited everything to her that I knew by heart, including of course the Lord's Prayer, the Angelus and other orisons which had not passed her lips for a very long time. I can still see her as she listened to me, head inclined against the bedstead, eyes closed, the glass and bottle of Kalterer wine on the marble top of the table beside her, expressions of pain and relief crossing her face in turn. It was also from her that I learned how to tie a bow; and whenever I left the room she laid her hand upon me. To this day I can sometimes feel her thumb against my forehead.
Across the street from the Engelwirt inn was the Seelos house, where the Ambrose family lived. My mother was often there because she was very close to the Ambrose children who, some ten years younger than she, had frequently been looked after by her when they were growing up. The Ambroses had come to W. during the last century from Imst in the Tyrol, and whenever there was fault to be found with them, they were still referred to as the Tyroleans. Otherwise, though they were named after the house that they had taken over, and were generally not called the Ambroses, but Seelos Maria, Seelos Lena, Seelos Benedikt, Seelos Lukas and Seelos Regina. Seelos Maria was a large, slow-moving woman who had worn black since the death, several years before, of her husband Baptist, and spent her days making coffee in the Turkish fashion, perhaps in memory of Baptist, who had been a master builder and had been employed in that capacity in Constantinople for eighteen months before the First World War, from where, no doubt, he brought with him the true art of coffee-making. Nearly all the larger buildings in W. and the surrounding area, the school, the railway station in Haslach and the turbine powerhouse, which supplied the entire district with electricity, had been designed on the drawing board of Ambrose and constructed under his supervision. He had died of a stroke, much too young as they always used to say, on May Day, 1933. He was found in his workplace, collapsed over the blueprint apparatus, a pencil behind his ear and a pair of compasses still in his hand. The Seelos family lived on what Baptist had left, and on the income from the fields and the two houses that he had acquired during his lifetime. Baptist's workplace was later rented out, curiously enough to a Turk of about twenty-five named Ekrem, who, from God knows where, had arrived in W. after the "Umsturz", as the end of the War was referred to, and who spent his time making large quantities of Turkish delight in the kitchen, which he then sold at fairs. Perhaps it was Ekrem who taught Seelos Maria how to brew mocha, and who found ways of procuring the precious black beans of which Maria always had a supply, even in the hardest of times. One day Seelos Lena was delivered of a child of Ekrem's, but fortunately, as I heard people say, it lived for only a week. I well remember the tiny white infants coffin on the heavy black hearse being drawn to the cemetery by our neighbour's pair of black horses, and the rainwater running down off the pile of clay into the small grave during the interment. Soon afterwards, if not even before, Ekrem disappeared from W., to Munich as rumour had it, where he was said to have set up as a tropical fruit merchant, and Lena emigrated to California, where she married a telephone engineer, with whom she was killed in a car accident.
The Seelos family also included the three unmarried sisters of Baptist, the Aunts Babett, Bina and Mathild, who lived in the house next door, and bachelor Uncle Peter, who had been a wheelwright with his workshop at the back of the Seelos house. In the years after the war, when he would have been about sixty, he took to walking around the village and would watch people at their work. Only rarely did he pick up a hoe or a fork himself and poke about with it in the yard or the garden. I never knew Peter to be any different, for it was already many a year since, little by little, he had begun to lose his mind. At first he neglected his business as a wheelwright, taking on commissions but only half finishing them, and then he turned to producing complicated pseudo-architectural plans, such as one for a water house built over the river Ach, or another for a forest pulpit, a sort of spiral stairs-cum-platform, which was to have encircled one of the tallest pines in the parish woods, and from the top of which the parish priest was to have made a speech to his trees on a certain day every year. Most of these plans, unfortunately lost, of which Peter drew up page after page, he never seriously tackled. The only one actually realised was what he called the Salettl, which was built into the roof of the Seelos house, a wooden platform being erected about a metre below the ridge, and raised upon this, once the tiles were removed, a timber framework for a glass observatory that reached through and above the ridge. From this vantage-point one could see over the rooftops of the village far out into the high moors and the fields and right across to the dark shadowy mountains rising up from the valley. The completion of the Salettl took some time, and after he had held a solitary topping-out ceremony all on his own, Peter did not come down from his observation post for weeks. It was said that he spent a large part of the first years of the war up there, sleeping by day and watching the stars by night, drawing the constellations on large deep blue sheets of card, or alternatively perforating them by means of bradawls of varying sizes so that, when he attached the sheets to the wooden frames of his glass house, he could actually enjoy the illusion, as in a planetarium, that the star-lit heavens were vaulted above his head. Towards the end of the war, when Seelos Benedikt, who had always been a timorous child, was sent to a school for non-commissioned officers at Rastatt, Peter's condition deteriorated noticeably. At times he would wander about the village with a cape cut from his charts of the night sky, talking of how one could see the stars by day both from the bottom of a well and from the peaks of the highest mountains, which was probably the consolation he offered himself for the circumstance that now, every evening at the onset of darkness which formerly he had always welcomed, he was beset with so great a fear that he had to cover his ears with his hands or flail about wildly. It was because of this condition that a sort of closet was built for him on the half-landing where his bed was installed, and which he soon went into of his own accord in the late afternoons. From that time
onwards, the salettl was no longer used. Not till tne sawmill burned down did anyone think of the lookout again. Then we all climbed up to the Salettl, with the whole of the Seelos family and most of their neighbours, to watc
h the enormous fire blazing into the sky and lighting from below the pall of smoke drifting a long way out. But Uncle Peter was not with us. That same year when the sawmill burned down, he was admitted to the hospital in Pfronten, for suddenly no one, not even Regina, the most beautiful of the Seelos children and the one whom he liked the best, could get him to eat a thing. Peter would not stay in the hospital, though, but was up and away the very first night, leaving a note which read: My dear Doctor! I have gone to the Tyrol. Yours most sincerely, Peter Ambrose. The ensuing search failed to find him, and to this day he has not been heard of again.
For the first week of my sojourn in W. I did not leave the Engelwirt inn. Troubled by dreams at night and getting no peace till the first light of dawn, I slept through the entire morning. I spent the afternoons sitting in the empty bar room, turning over my recollections and writing up my notes, and in the evenings when the regulars came in, whom I recognised, almost to a man, from my schooldays and who all appeared to have grown older at a stroke, I listened to their talk while pretending to read the newspaper, never tiring of it and ordering one glass of Kalterer after the other. Hunched over the long table they sat, most as in the old days with their hats on their heads, under an enormous picture of woodcutters at work. This painting, which had hung in the same place in the old Engelwirt inn, had by now become so blackened that it was scarcely possible to make out what it actually portrayed. Not till one had looked at it for some time did the phantom shapes of the woodcutters become apparent. They were in the process of stripping and clamping the timber, and were painted in the powerful, energetic postures characteristic of images that glorify work and warfare. The artist Hengge, by whom, without any doubt, this picture was done, had produced many such woodcutter scenes in his time. His fame reached its peak in the 1930s, when he was known as far afield as Munich. His murals, always in dark shades of brown, were to be seen on the walls of buildings all around W. and the surrounding area, and were always of his favoured motifs of woodcutters, deer poachers and rebellious peasants carrying the Bundschuh-banner unless a particular theme had been requested of him. On the Seefelders house, for example, where my grandfather lived and where I was born, a motor race was depicted, because it had seemed to old Seefelder, a blacksmith by trade, to go with the machine workshop he had set up a couple of years before the war, and appropriate
also to the new age which was then dawning in W., and the transformer station on the edge of the village was adorned with an allegorical representation of the taming of the power of water. For me there was something most unsettling about
all of these Hengge pictures. One especially, on the Raiffeisen Bank, showing a tall reaper woman, sickle in hand, standing
in front of a field at harvest time, always looked to me like a fearful battle scene, and frightened me so that whenever I passed, I had to avert my eyes. Hengge the painter was perfectly capable of extending his repertoire. But whenever he was able to follow his own artistic inclination, he would paint only pictures of woodcutters. Even after the war, when for a variety of reasons his monumental works were no longer much in demand, he continued in the same vein. In the end, his house was said to have been so crammed with pictures of woodcutters that there was scarcely room for Hengge himself, and death, so the obituary said, caught him in the midst of a work showing a woodcutter on a sledge hurtling down into the valley below. On reflection, it had occurred to me that those Hengge paintings, apart from the frescoes in the parish church, were pretty much the only pictures I had seen until I was seven or eight years old, and I now have the feeling that these woodcutters and the crucifixions and the large canvas of the Battle of the Lechfeld, where Prince Bishop Ulrich, astride his grey charger, rides over one of the Huns lying prostrate on the ground - and here again all the horses have this crazed look in their eyes - made a devastating impression on me. For that reason, when I had reached a certain point in my notes, I left my post in the Engelwirt bar to see the Hengge murals once more, or those that were still there. I cannot say that their effect on me on re-acquaintance was any less devastating, rather the contrary. At all events I found that as I went from one of his works to another I was drawn onward, and I walked through the fields and towards the outlying hamlets
on the surrounding mountainsides and hills. I made my way up to Bichl and walked on to the Adelharz, to Enthalb der Ach, to Bàrenwinkel and Jungholz, into the Vordere and the Hintere Reutte, out to Haslach and Oy, into the Schrey and from there on to Elleg, all of them paths that I had walked in my childhood at my grandfather's side and which had meant so much to me in my memory, but, as I came to realise, meant nothing to me now. From every one of these excursions I returned dispirited to the Engelwirt and to the writing of my notes, which had afforded me a degree of comfort of late, even as the example of Hengge the artist, and the questionable nature of painting as an enterprise in general, remained before me as a warning.
I had learned that the only member of the Seelos family still living in W. was Lukas. The Seelos house had been sold, and Lukas lodged in the smaller house next door, where once Babett, Bina and Mathild had dwelt. I had been in W. for about ten days before I finally decided to go over and call on Lukas. He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him, and now spent his days sitting at home on the sofa, while his wife continued to run the little stationer's shop belonging to old Specht. He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside. Moreover, he was troubled by the fact that, apart from Regina, who was married to an industrialist in northern Germany, he was the last of the Ambrose clan. He told me the story of how Uncle Peter disappeared in the Tyrol, and of the death of his mother soon afterwards, who during the last weeks of her life had lost so much of her considerable weight that nobody had recognised her any more; and he expatiated at length on the strange circumstance that Aunts Babett and Bina, who had done everything together since they were children, had died on the same day, one of heart failure and the other of grief. No one had ever been able to find out much, he said, about the car accident in America in which Lena and her husband were killed. It seemed that the two of them simply left the road in their Oldsmobile, which as he knew from a photo had whitewall tyres, and plunged into the depths. Mathild had lasted a long time, until she was well over eighty, perhaps because she had the most alert mind of any of them. She had died a quiet death in her own bed in the middle of the night. His wife, Lukas said, had found her the next day, lying just as she always did when she retired in the evening. But Benedikt, unwilling to go further into the subject, had been consumed by ill fortune and now, he added, it was his own turn. Having brought to an end his chronicle of the Ambrose family with this remark, not without satisfaction as it seemed to me, Lukas wanted to know what had brought me back to W. after so many years, and in November of all times. To my surprise, he understood my rather complicated and sometimes contradictory explanations right away. He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling. To which Lukas replied that now, laid up as he was on his sofa for much of the day or at best performing pointless little tasks about the house, it was quite unthinkable that h
e had once been a good goalkeeper and that he, who was ever more frequently assailed by dark moods, had in his time played the clown round the village - had indeed held for years, as I perhaps remembered, the honorary office of carnival jester since a successor was not to be found who could hold a candle to him. As he recalled that glorious time, Lukas's gouty hands began to move more freely, demonstrating how one grasped the great carnival shears, which he said required exceptional strength and poise, and how he had stuck his fool's staff up the women's skirts at the very moment when they least expected it. Just as they imagined themselves safe, behind locked doors on the top floor, and were leaning out of the windows to watch as the carnival floats passed by, he had climbed up at the back through the hay loft, or up an espalier, and given them the fright they were hoping for all along, though they would never admit as much. Often he had ducked into the kitchen and filched the freshly baked doughnuts in order to distribute them in the street to the applause of the women until, seeing the empty plates, they realised it was their own doughnuts that had been handed out.