Vertigo

by W. G. Sebald

  From such carnival exploits, our talk turned to Specht the printer, whose stationer's shop Lukas's wife was now running. For Specht, as Lukas said, had invariably still had his Christmas tree in his shop window when carnival week came round; indeed, that tree, which he had put up during the last week of Advent and which was now quite bare of needles, remained in the window not only until carnival but frequently until Easter, and on one occasion Specht even had to be reminded to remove the tree from the window in time at least for the Corpus Christi procession. Specht, who since the 1920s had written, edited, set and printed the fortnightly four-page newspaper Der Landbote, was an extremely introverted fellow, as is not infrequently the case

  with printers. Moreover, the constant handling of lead type had made him ever smaller and greyer. I had a clear memory of Specht, from whom I had bought my first slate pencils and later the pens and the exercise books made of pulp paper on which the nibs constantly stuck when one was writing. Year in, year out he wore a grey calico coat which almost reached down to the floor, and round steel spectacles, and, whenever you entered the shop beneath the jingling bell, he would emerge from the printroom at the back with an oil rag in his hand. In the evenings, though, he could be seen sitting in the lamplight at the kitchen table, writing the articles and reports which were to be included in Der Landbote. Lukas claimed that much of what Specht wrote week after week for Der Landbote was rejected by him in his capacity as editor as not being up to the standards of the paper. Later on, when we had run out of Kalterer wine, Lukas took me around the house, showed me where Babett's and Bina's café, the Alpenrose, had been, where Dr Rambousek had his surgery, and where the bedrooms and the living room of the three sisters once were. As I was leaving, Lukas clutched my hand in the birdlike grasp of his gouty fingers for a long time, and I said that I would be glad to come over to see him more often so that we might talk further about the past, if he did not mind. Yes, said Lukas, there was something strange about remembering. When he lay on the sofa and thought back, it all became blurred as if he was out in a fog.

  That same evening, over a second bottle of Kalterer in the Engelwirt, I was able to assemble some of my recollections of the Alpenrose. Whether it was Babett and Bina who had the idea of opening the café, or whether Baptist thought that it would support his unmarried sisters, was a part of the story that nobody could recall any more. At all events, there had been a Café Alpenrose, and it had continued until the deaths of Babett and Bina, although nobody had ever set foot in it. In summer, a small green metal table and three green folding chairs stood in the front garden under a pollarded lime tree which afforded a fine broad canopy of leaves. The door of the house was always open, and every couple of minutes Bina would appear in order to look out for the guests who would, surely, be arriving sometime. There is no way of telling what kept visitors away. Probably it was not simply because strangers, as summer guests were referred to in those days, hardly ever came to stay in W., but rather because the coffee house was run by Babett and Bina as a sort of spinsters' parlour which had nothing to offer the men of the village. I do not know, nor did Lukas know, what-sort of figure the two sisters had made at the beginning of their business venture. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that whatever Babett and Bina had been at one time, or had wanted to be, was eventually destroyed by the years of continuous disappointment and perennially revived hope. The impairment to their lives which that destruction and their unending dependency on each other entailed ultimately led to their being regarded as no more than a pair of dotty old maids. Of course it did not help that Bina, smoothing down her apron with her hands, spent the hours running around the house and the front garden, while Babett sat in the kitchen all day long folding tea towels, only to unfold and refold them again. It was with the greatest effort that the two of them managed to keep their small household in order, and what they would have done if one day a guest had actually crossed the threshold is quite inconceivable. Even when making a pot of soup they were more of a hindrance than a help to each other, and the weekly creation of a cake for Sunday, Lukas told me, was always a major operation that took them the whole of Saturday. Nonetheless, whenever the end of the week was approaching, Babett would prevail upon Bina, as much as Bina prevailed upon Babett, that a cake should be baked once again, alternately either an apple cake or a so-called Guglhupf. Once the task was accomplished, the cake would be carried with some ceremony into the front room and there, virginal and freshly dusted with icing sugar, as it was, placed under a glass dome on the sideboard, next to the apple cake, or else the Guglhupf, that had been baked the previous Saturday, so that any guest who had happened by on the Saturday afternoon would have had a choice of two cakes - a stale apple cake and a fresh Guglhupf or a stale Guglhupf and a fresh apple cake. On the Sunday afternoon that choice ceased to be available, for it was always on Sunday afternoons that Babett and Bina consumed either the stale apple cake or the stale Guglhupf with their Sunday afternoon coffee, Babett eating the cake with a cake fork while Bina would be dunking hers, a habit which Babett deplored and which she had never been able to correct in her sister. After consuming the stale cake the two of them would sit for an hour or two, sated and silent, in the gloom of their parlour. On the wall over the sideboard hung a picture of two lovers in the act of committing suicide. It was a winter night and the moon had emerged from behind the clouds to witness this final moment. The pair, out on a narrow landing stage, were about to take their last decisive step. Together, the foot of the girl and that of the man were suspended over the dark waters, and one could sense with relief how both were now in the grip of gravity. I remember that the girl had a thin, viridescent veil draped over her head, while the man's coat was taut against the wind. Below this picture stood the cake intended for the coming week; the clock on the wall ticked, and whenever it was about to strike it gave a long-drawn-out wheeze, as if it could not bring itself to announce the loss of another quarter of an hour. In summer, the light of late afternoon entered through the curtains, in winter the falling dusk, and on the table in the centre, biding its time, stood the enormous aspidistra which the long years had left untouched and around which, in some mysterious manner, everything at the Alpenrose seemed to revolve.

  My grandfather went across to the Alpenrose once a week to call upon Mathild. The two of them usually played several games of cards together and conversed at some length, as there was always plenty to talk about. They would sit in the front parlour, for Mathild did not allow anyone, not even Grandfather, up to her room; Babett and Bina, who respected Mathild as a higher authority, had become accustomed to remain in the kitchen during these visits. I often accompanied my grandfather to the Alpenrose, just as I accompanied him almost everywhere, and there I sat with a diluted raspberry syrup as the cards were shuffled, cut, dealt, played, placed to one side, counted and shuffled again. My grandfather was in the habit of wearing his hat while playing cards, and not until the last game was finished and Mathild had gone out into the kitchen to brew the coffee did he take off the hat and then wipe his forehead with his handkerchief. Of the matters discussed over coffee, there were few I had any notion of, and for that reason, once they started talking together, I generally went out into the front garden, sat on one of the chairs by the green metal table and looked at the old atlas which Mathild put out for me every time. In this atlas there was a page on which the longest rivers and the highest elevations on the surface of the

  Earth were arranged by length or height, and there were wonderfully coloured maps, even of the most distant, scarcely discovered continents, with legends in tiny lettering which, perhaps because I could decipher them only in part just like the early cartographers were able to picture only parts of the world, appeared to me to hold in them all conceivable mysteries. During the colder months of the year I would sit with the atlas on my knees on the top landing, where the light came in through the staircase window and an oleograph hung on the wall showing a wild boar making a gigantic leap
out of the gloom of the forest to scatter hunters at their breakfast in a clearing. The scene, in which, quite apart from the boar and the frightened green-coated hunters, the plates and sausages flying through the air were depicted with great attention to detail, was inscribed Im Ardennerwald, and this caption, innocent in itself, evoked for me something far more dangerous, unknown and profound than the picture by itself could ever have conjured up. The secret contained in the word "Ardennerwald" was deepened by the fact that Mathild had expressly forbidden me to open any of the doors on the top floor. Above all, I was not to climb up into the attic which, as Mathild had given me to understand in her peculiarly persuasive manner, was the dwelling of someone she referred to as the grey chasseur, about whom she would not tell me any more. So on the landing to the first floor I was, as it were, on the borderline of what was permissible, at the point where the lure of temptation could be most keenly sensed. For that reason I always felt as though I had been rescued when my grandfather at last emerged from the coffee room, put his hat on his head, and shook hands with Mathild in farewell.

  When I next saw Lukas, we went up to the attic which I must have mentioned in our conversations. Lukas was of the opinion that not much could have changed up there since those days. He had never cleared out the attic when he took over the house after his aunts died, he said, for this, even then, would have been beyond his powers, given that the whole space was cluttered to the rafters with all manner of implements and miscellaneous lumber and one thing piled on top of another. The attic was indeed a daunting sight. Boxes and baskets were stacked high, sacks, leather gear, doorbells, ropes, mousetraps, beehive frames and cases for all kinds of instruments were hanging from the beams. In a corner a bass tuba still glinted from beneath the layer of dust covering it, and next to it, on an eiderdown that had once been red, lay an enormous, long abandoned wasps' nest, both of them - the brass tuba and the fragile grey paper shell - tokens of the slow disintegration of all material forms in the complete silence of this attic. And yet that silence was not to be trusted. Out of trunks, chests, and wardrobes, some with their lids, drawers and doors half open, all conceivable kinds of utensils and garments were bursting forth. It was easy to imagine that this entire assemblage of the most diverse objects had been moving, in some sort of secret evolution, until the moment we entered, and that it was only because of our presence that these things now held their breath as if nothing had happened. On a shelf that immediately attracted my attention was Mathild's library, comprising almost a hundred volumes, which have since come into my possession and are proving ever more important to me. Besides various literary works from the last century, accounts of expeditions to the polar regions, textbooks on geometry and structural engineering, and a Turkish dictionary complete with a manual for the writing of letters, which had probably once belonged to Baptist, there were numerous religious works of a speculative character, and prayer-books dating back two or three hundred years, with illustrations, some of them perfectly gruesome, showing the torments and travails that await us all. In among the devotional works, to my amazement, there were several treatises by Bakunin, Fourier, Bebel, Eisner, and Landauer, and an autobiographical novel by the socialist Lily von Braun. When I enquired

  about the origins of the books, Lukas was able to tell me only that Mathild had always been a great reader, and because of this, as I might perhaps remember, was thought of by the villagers as peculiar, if not deranged. Just before the First World War she had entered the convent of the Englische Fràulein in Regensburg, but had left there, for reasons which were never made clear to Lukas, before the end of the war, and subsequently had spent several months in Munich during the time of the ill-fated Red Republic, returning home to W. in a seriously disturbed and almost speechless state. He himself, Lukas said, had of course not been born by then, but he well remembered his mother making a remark about how Mathild had been quite unhinged when she came back to W. from the convent and from Communist Munich. Occasionally, when his mother was in a bad mood, she even called Mathild a bigoted Bolshevik. Mathild for her part, however, once she had regained something of her equilibrium, did not allow herself to be put out in the slightest by such remarks. To the contrary, said Lukas, she evidently came to feel quite comfortable in her detachment, and indeed the way in which, year after year, she went about among the villagers whom she despised, forever dressed in a black frock or a black coat, and always in a hat and never, even in the finest weather, without an umbrella, had, as I might remember from my own childhood days, something blissful about it.

  As I continued to look around in the attic, picking up this and that, a hairless china doll, a goldfinch cage, a target rifle, or an old calf-hide knapsack, and discussing the possible provenance and history of these items with Lukas, I became aware of something like an apparition, a uniformed figure, which now could be seen more clearly, now more faintly behind the blade of light that slanted through the attic window. On closer inspection it revealed itself as an old tailor's dummy, dressed in pike-grey breeches and a pike-grey jacket, the collar, cuffs and edgings of which must once have been grass green, and the buttons a golden yellow. On its wooden headpiece the dummy was wearing a hat, also pike-grey, with a bunch of cockerel's tail feathers in it. Perhaps because it had been concealed behind the shaft of light that cut through the darkness of the attic and in which swirled the glinting particles of matter dissolving into weightlessness, the grey figure instantly made a most uncanny impression on me, an impression which was only intensified by the smell of camphor exuding from it. But when I stepped closer, not entirely trusting my eyes, and touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror it crumbled into dust. From what I have been able to discover since, that uniform, trimmed in the colours pike-grey and green, almost certainly belonged to one of the Austrian chasseurs who fought against the French as irregulars around 1800, a conjecture that gained in plausibility when Lukas told me a story which also went back to Mathild. It seems that one of the more distant Seelos forebears led a contingent of one thousand men levied in the Tyrol across the Brenner Pass, down the Adige, past Lake Garda and onto the upper Italian plains, and there, with all his troops, was killed in the terrible Battle of Marengo. The significance for me of this tale of a Tyrolean chasseur who had fallen at Marengo lay not least in the realisation that, in the attic of the Café Alpenrose, which, on my childhood visits, I had been forbidden to go up into on account of it being the haunt of the grey chasseur, there had truly been such a chasseur, even if he did not correspond in every respect to the picture I had formed of him while sitting on the landing. What I had fantasised at the time, and what later often appeared to me in my dreams, was a tall stranger with a high round cap of astrakhan fur set low on his forehead, dressed in a brown greatcoat fastened with broad straps reminiscent of a horse's harness. Lying in his lap he had a short curved sabre with a sheath that gleamed faintly. His feet were encased in spurred jackboots. One foot was on an overturned wine bottle, the other he rested up-angled on the floor, the heel and spur rammed into the wood. Time and again I dreamed, and occasionally still do, that this stranger reaches out his hand to me and I, in the teeth of my fear, venture ever closer to him, so close that, at last, I can touch him. And every time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand, dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the token of some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right.

  Until the end of the 1940s Dr Rudolf Rambousek had his practice in the Alpenrose, in the ground floor room opposite the coffee and wine bar. Dr Rambousek had come to W. not long after the end of the war, from a Moravian town, I believe from Nikolsburg, with his pallid wife and his two adolescent daughters Felicia and Amalia, and for him, and no less for his women, this must have been banishment to the ends of the earth. It was no surprise that this short, corpulent man, who was always dressed like a man about town, was unable to gain a foothold in W. His melancholy and foreign-seeming features, perhaps best described as Levantine, th
e way his lids were always lowered over his large, dark eyes, and his entire somehow distant demeanour, left little doubt that he was one of those who are born to lead inconsolable lives. To my knowledge Dr Rambousek did not befriend a single person during the years he spent in W. He was said to be withdrawn, and it is true that I cannot remember ever having seen him in the street, although he did not live in the Alpenrose but in the teacher's house and must therefore occasionally have been on his way either from the teacher's house to the Alpenrose or from the Alpenrose to the teacher's house. It was not least by virtue of his positively conspicuous absence that he was altogether different from Dr Piazolo, who must already have been approaching seventy and could be seen at every hour of the day and night riding his 750 Zündapp around the village or up and downhill to the outlying hamlets. In winter and summer alike Dr Piazolo, who in emergencies was willing to take on veterinary work without thinking twice about it and who had evidently resolved to die in the saddle, wore an old aviator's cap with earflaps, enormous motorcycling goggles, a leather outfit and leather gaiters. It is also worth mentioning that Dr Piazolo had a double or shadow rider in the priest Father Wurmser, who was also no longer one of the youngest, and who for a good while had been making his visits to the dying on his motorcycle carrying all that was necessary to perform the last rites, the consecrated oil, holy water, salt, a small silver crucifix and the holy sacrament, with him in an old rucksack which was exactly the same as the one belonging to Dr Piazolo. On one occasion the two of them, the priest and Dr Piazolo, mistook each other's rucksacks when they were sitting side by side at the Adlerwirt, and Dr Piazolo drove off to his next patient equipped for the last rites while Father Wurmser brought the doctor's instruments to the next member of his congregation who was about to expire. The similarity not only of the rucksacks belonging to Father Wurmser and Dr Piazolo but also of their general appearance was such that if you saw a dark motorcyclist somewhere in the village or on the roads outside the village, it would have been impossible to say whether it was the doctor or the parson, had it not been for the doctor's habit, while riding his motorcycle, of letting his feet, on which he wore hobnailed boots, drag through the gravel or snow on the road rather than placing them on the foot-rests, which meant that, at least when seen from the front or behind, he cut a different figure from the parson. It is easy to imagine how difficult it must have been for Dr Rambousek to take on his well-established competitors, and to see why he preferred, in contrast to these two as it were omnipresent emissaries, the priest and the physician, not to leave the house at all. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that Dr Rambousek did not enjoy the esteem of those who went to him. I more than once heard my mother extolling the medical skills of Dr Rambousek in the highest possible terms, particularly when talking to Valerie Schwarz, the milliner, who came not from Moravia like Dr Rambousek but from Bohemia, and who, despite her shortness, had a bosom of a size that I have only seen on one occasion since, on the tobacconist in Fellini's film Amarcord. But while my mother and Valerie could not praise Dr Rambousek highly enough, the other villagers would never have dreamed of going to his surgery. If something was the matter, you simply sent for Dr Piazolo, and that was why Dr Rambousek spent most of his time, day after day, month after month and year after year, sitting alone in his surgery in the Alpenrose. At any rate, when I went across to Mathild with my grandfather I always saw him through the half-open door in the sparsely furnished room, sitting in his swivel chair and writing or reading or simply staring out of the window. Once or twice I quietly stepped onto the threshold and waited for him to look across at me or ask me to come closer, but either he never noticed my presence or he did not feel able to address the strange child. One exceptionally hot day in the midsummer of 1949, when - Grandfather and Mathild were conversing in the front room, I sat for a long time on the topmost step of the stairs that led up to the attic, listening to the creaking of the roof timbers and the few other noises, such as the rising and falling screech of a circular saw or the solitary crowing of a cockerel, that came into the house from outside. Before my grandfather's visiting time was ended, I went down into the hall passageway, having determined to ask Dr Rambousek if he was not perhaps capable of healing the old Engelwirt landlord's open sore that grew larger by the day, and to my bewilderment, found the door to the surgery closed. Cautiously, I pressed down the handle. Inside, everything was bathed in the deep green summer light that filtered through the leaves of the lime tree outside the window. The silence that surrounded me seemed boundless. As was his wont, Dr Rambousek was sitting on his swivel chair, except that his body was leaning forwards onto the desk. The left shirt sleeve was rolled halfway up, and in the crook of the elbow, turned sideways at an odd angle, rested the doctor's head, seeming somehow outsize, with its dark, slightly protruding but still beautiful eyes staring fixedly into the void. I left the surgery on tiptoe and climbed back up to my station right at the top of the attic stairs, where I waited until I heard my grandfather coming out of the parlour with Mathild. Not a word about Dr Rambousek did I breathe to my grandfather, both out of fear and because I myself could scarcely believe what I had seen. On the way home we had to pick up the fob watch he had left to be repaired at Ebentheuer's the watchmaker. The doorbell clanged, and there we were, standing in the small shop in which a host of long-case clocks, wall-mounted regulators, kitchen and living room clocks, alarm clocks, pocket and wrist watches were all ticking at once, just as if one clock on its own could not destroy enough time. While Grandfather talked to Ebentheuer, who, as always, had his watchmaker's glass jammed into his left eye, about what had been wrong with his fob watch, I looked across the shop counter into the half-lit living room where the youngest of the Ebentheuer children, who was called Eustach and had water on the brain, was sitting on a high chair, rocking gently back and forth. As for Dr Rambousek, he was found the same evening lifeless and cold in the surgery of the Alpenrose by his wife, who shortly afterwards moved away from W. together with her two daughters. Later I once overheard Valerie Schwarz whisper to my mother that Dr Rambousek had been a morphine addict or morphinist, as she put it, and that hence his skin was often tainted yellow. Because of this to me incomprehensible remark, I believed for a long time that people born in Moravia were called morphinists and that they came from a country quite as far away as Mongolia or China.