by W. G. Sebald
In his autobiographical essay, he also tells us (as Gisela Steinlechner, too, has pointed out) that his mother “had a hare” at what the author calls a time of revolt and the “need for silver.” By saying that she had a hare (einen Hasen bekam) he means, of course, that she “was brought or given” a hare, a useful addition to the meager diet of the times. The brief phrase used by Herbeck, however, suggests that his mother “had a hare” as a woman might have a baby.
This hare is then killed by his mother in his father’s presence, and after that skinned. Herbeck does not mention the dish of roast hare itself, but adds at the close of his account of the incident only the confession “It tasted too good to me,” which in a few words sums up the moral of the whole story. The true extent of his involvement in the dark machinations of social life is that he was involved in the joint family crime not just as victim but as perpetrator, having helped to consume his likeness and namesake. To those who can understand it, the legend of the poor hare used by Herbeck to explain his sad fate is an exemplary tale of suffering. “The greater the suffering,” he once wrote, “the greater the poet. The harder the work. The deeper the meaning.”
To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland
ON KAFKA’S TRAVEL DIARIES
A Dutch acquaintance recently told me how she traveled last winter from Prague to Nuremberg. During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all. This story made me return, after I had not looked at them for a long time, to the notes that Kafka made when he and Max Brod traveled from Prague to Paris by way of Switzerland and northern Italy in August and September 1911. Much of that account is as real to me as if I myself had been there, and not just because “Max” is so frequently mentioned, for instance when a lady’s hat falls on him in the train compartment, or when Franz leaves him alone “sitting over a grenadine by himself in the darkness on the outskirts of a half-empty open-air café”; no, in a curious way the stages of that summer trip of the past taken by the two bachelors are more familiar to me than any other place at a later date. Even the car drive in the rain through Munich by night—“The tires make a rushing noise on the asphalt, like the whirr of a cinema projector”—bring back great tracts of the memory of my first real journey, taken in 1948, when I and my father, who had just returned from a POW camp, went from W. to visit my grandparents in Plattling. My mother had made me a green jacket, and a little rucksack of check fabric. I think we traveled in a third-class compartment. At Munich station, where you could see huge mounds of rubble and ruins as you stood in the forecourt, I felt unwell and had to throw up in one of those “cabins” of which Kafka writes that he and Max washed their hands and faces in them before boarding the night train which passed through the dark foothills of the Alps by way of Kaufering, Buchloe, Kaufbeuren, Kempten, and Immenstadt to Lindau, where there was a great deal of singing on the platform long after midnight, a situation I know very well, since there are always a number of drunks at Lindau station who have been out on excursions. Similarly, the “impression of separate buildings standing very upright in St. Gall, without being part of a street,” but running along the slopes of the valley like one of Schiele’s Krumau pictures, accurately corresponds to the scenery of a place where I lived for a year. In general, Kafka’s comments on the Swiss landscape, the “dark, hilly, wooded banks of Lake Zug” (and how often he writes of such things) remind me of my own childhood expeditions to Switzerland, for instance a day trip we made by bus in 1952 from S. to Bregenz, St. Gall, and Zürich, along the Walensee, through the Rhine valley and home again. At the time there were comparatively few cars around in Switzerland, and because many of those were American limousines—Chevrolets, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles—I really thought we were in some entirely foreign, quasi-utopian country, rather as Kafka found himself thinking of Captain Nemo and A Journey Through Planetary Space when he saw a revenue cutter on Lago Maggiore.
In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen years ago, Max and Franz (one almost envisages them as a couple invented by Franz himself) decided to go on to Paris, since cholera had broken out in Italy. At a coffee-house table in the cathedral square, they discuss apparent death and shooting pains in the region of the heart—obviously a particular obsession in the now sclerotic Habsburg empire, which had been suspended in a kind of afterlife for decades. Mahler, notes Kafka, had expected those pains in the heart too. He had died only a few months earlier, on May 18, at the Löw Sanatorium as a thunderstorm broke over the town, just as there was a thunderstorm on the day of Beethoven’s death.
Open in front of me now I have a recently published album containing photographs of Mahler. He is sitting on the deck of an oceangoing liner, walking in the countryside near his house in Toblach, on the beach in Zandvoort, asking a passerby the way in Rome. He looks to me very small, rather like the impresario of a touring theatrical company down on its luck. In fact, the passages of his music I like best are those where you can still hear the Jewish village musicians playing in the distance. Not so long ago I was listening to some Lithuanian buskers in the pedestrian zone of a north German town, and their music sounded exactly the same. One had an accordion, another a battered tuba, the third a double bass. As I listened, hardly able to tear myself away, I understood why Wiesengrund once wrote of Mahler that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart.
The friends spent their few days in Paris in a rather melancholy mood, going on several sightseeing expeditions and searching for the joys of love in a “rationally furnished” brothel with “an electric bell,” where the business was conducted so swiftly that you were out in the street again before you knew it. “It is difficult,” writes Kafka, “to see the girls there very closely.… I really remember only the one who was standing straight in front of me. She had gaps in her teeth, stood very upright, held her dress together with her clenched fist over her pudenda, and rapidly opened and closed her large eyes and her large mouth. Her blond hair was untidy. She was thin. Felt afraid of forgetting to keep my hat on. You positively have to wrench your hand away from the brim.” Even the brothel has its own social standards. “A long, lonely, pointless way home,” the note concludes. Max returns to Prague on September 14. Kafka spends another week in the sanatorium at the natural spa of Erlenbach in Zürich. “Traveled with a Jewish goldsmith from Krakow,” he writes after arriving. Kafka must have met this young man, who had already traveled widely, on the way back from Paris to Zürich. He mentions that getting out of the train the goldsmith carries his small suitcase like a heavy burden. “He has,” writes Kafka, “long, curly hair through which he occasionally runs his fingers, a bright gleam in his eyes, a slightly hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a suit of American cut, a frayed shirt, socks falling down over his shoes.” A traveling journeyman—what had he been doing in Switzerland? Kafka, we are told, took another walk that first evening in the dark little garden of the sanatorium, and next day there were “morning gymnastic exercises to the sound of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn played by someone on the cornet.”
Dream Textures
A BRIEF NOTE ON NABOKOV
At the very beginning of Nabokov’s autobiography, programmatically entitled Speak, Memory, there is the story of a man who, we must assume, is still very young, and who suffers a panic attack when he first sees a home movie shot in his parents’ house a few weeks befor
e his birth. All the images trembling on the screen are familiar to him, he recognizes everything, everything is right except for the fact, which disturbs him deeply, that he himself is not where he has always been, and the other people in the house do not seem to mourn his absence. The sight of his mother waving from one of the windows on the upper floor is felt by the distressed viewer to be a farewell gesture, and he is terrified by the sight of the new baby carriage standing on the porch—“with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; and even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.” Nabokov is here suggesting an experience of the anticipation of death in the memory of a time before life, something that makes the viewer a kind of ghost in his own family. Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, “in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,” and are “silent, bothered, strangely depressed,” obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, “they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret.” Nabokov’s speculations about those who tread the border between life and the world beyond originate in the realm of his childhood, which vanished without trace in the October Revolution; despite the evocative accuracy of his memories, he sometimes wonders whether that Arcadian land ever really existed. Cut off irrevocably as he was from his place of origin by the decades of terror in Russian history, he must surely have felt that retrieving one of its images caused him severe phantom pains, even though he usually looks discreetly, only through the prism of irony, at what he has lost. In the fifth chapter of Pnin he speaks at length and in different voices of the price you must pay on going into exile: not least, besides the material goods of life, the certainty of your own reality. The young emigrants of the early novels, Ganin, Fyodor, and Edelweiss, are already marked much more deeply by the experience of loss than by their new and foreign surroundings. Unexpectedly finding themselves on the wrong side of the frontier, they are airy beings living a quasi-extraterritorial, somehow unlawful afterlife in rented rooms and boardinghouses, just as their author lived at one remove from the reality of Berlin in the twenties. The strange unreality of such an existence in a foreign land seems to me nowhere more clearly expressed than in Nabokov’s remark, made in passing, that he had appeared as an extra in evening dress in several of the films shot in Berlin at that time, which frequently included doppelgängers and such shadowy figures among their characters. There is no proof anywhere else of these appearances of his, so we do not know whether any of them may still be faintly preserved on a brittle strip of celluloid or whether they are now all extinguished, and it seems to me that they have something of the ghostly quality to be found in Nabokov’s own prose, for instance in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in the passage where the narrator, V., in conversation with Sebastian’s student friend at Cambridge, has a feeling that the ghost of his brother, whose story is on his mind, is moving around the room in the light reflected from the fire on the hearth. This scene of course echoes the ghost stories that were so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while a rational view of the world was making itself felt. Nabokov liked to make use of such clichés: dust swirls in circles above the floor; there are inexplicable drafts of air, curiously iridescent effects of light, mysterious coincidences, and strange chance meetings. In the train to Strasbourg, V. finds himself opposite a gentleman called Silbermann whose shape blurs to an indistinct outline in the evening light as the train goes on and on straight into the sunset. Silbermann is a traveling salesman by profession, one of those restless spirits who often cross the narrator’s path in Nabokov’s books. Silbermann asks whether V. is a traveler too, and on getting an answer in the affirmative wants to know exactly what he travels in. V. tells him that he travels in the past, a remark that Silbermann instantly understands. Ghosts and writers meet in their concern for the past—their own and that of those who were once dear to them. As V. tries to trace the real life of Sebastian, that vanished knight of the night, he feels a growing suspicion that his brother is looking over his shoulder as he writes. Such intimations occur with striking regularity in Nabokov’s work, perhaps because after the murder of his father and the death of his brother Sergey, who died of consumption in Hamburg in January 1945 while he was in a concentration camp, he had a vague sense of the continuing presence of those who had been violently torn from this life. As a result, one of Nabokov’s main narrative techniques is to introduce, through barely perceptible nuances and shifts of perspective, an invisible observer—an observer who seems to have a better view not only than the characters in the narrative but than the narrator and the author who guides the narrator’s pen; it is a trick that allows Nabokov to see the world, and himself in it, from above. In fact, his work contains many passages written from a kind of bird’s-eye view. From a vantage point high above the road, an old woman picking herbs sees two cyclists and a car approaching a bend from different directions. From even higher up, from the dusty blue of the sky, an aircraft pilot sees the whole course of the road and two villages lying twelve miles apart. And if we could mount even farther up, where the air grows thinner and thinner, we might perhaps, says the narrator at this point, see the entire length of the mountain range and a distant city in another land—Berlin, for instance. This is to see the world through the eye of the crane, as the Dutch painters sometimes did in painting scenes like the Flight into Egypt, when they rose above the flat panorama surrounding them down on earth. In the same way writing, as Nabokov practiced it, is raised on high by the hope that, given sufficient concentration, the landscapes of time that have already sunk below the horizon can be seen once again in a synoptic view. Nabokov also knew, better than most of his fellow writers, that the desire to suspend time can prove its worth only in the most precise re-evocation of things long overtaken by oblivion. The pattern on the bathroom floor at Vyra, the white steam rising above the tub at which the boy looks dreamily from his seat in the dimly lit lavatory, the curve of the doorframe on which he leans his forehead—suddenly, with a few well-chosen words, the whole cosmos of childhood is conjured up before our eyes as if pulled out of a black top hat. A large oil lamp on an alabaster stand is moved through the darkness. It hovers gently in the air, and gently settles in its place. The white-gloved hand of a servant, which is now the hand of memory, sets it down in the middle of the round table. We are attending the séance staged by Nabokov, and strangely familiar characters and objects emerge surrounded by that claritas which has always, since Saint Thomas Aquinas, been regarded as the sign of a true epiphany. Even for Nabokov, recording such visionary moments was a very arduous business. A short sequence of words often needed hours of work before the rhythm was right, down to the last cadence, before the gravity of earth had been overcome and the author, now as it were disembodied himself, could reach the opposite bank across his precarious bridge of written characters. Where that undertaking succeeds, however, one is borne along by the current of lines sweeping on and on into a radiant realm which, like everything that is wonderful, has a touch of the surreal about it, and finally seems to stand on the threshold of the revelation of an absolute truth, “dazzling,” as we are told at the end of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, “in its splendor and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity.” To se
t something so beautiful in motion, according to both Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Nabokov has compared the shifts to which the writer must resort in composing such a sentence to the moves of a game of chess, one in which the players themselves are chessmen in a game played by an invisible hand. A steamer moves slowly away from the roadsteads of Sebastopol and out on the water. From the banks the sounds of the Bolshevist revolution still echo—shouting and salvos of gunfire. But on the ship’s deck, father and son face each other over a chessboard, already immersed in the looking-glass world of exile ruled by the White Queen where one easily becomes dizzy simply by living backward. “Life is a Chequer-board of Nights and Days / where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: / Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, / And one by one back in the Closet lays.” Nabokov would certainly have subscribed to the notion of eternal movement expressed in these lines translated from the eleventh-century Persian poet by Edward FitzGerald, one of his distant predecessors at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is not surprising that from the moment of his exile Nabokov never had a real home, not in his years in England or in Berlin, or in Ithaca where he famously lived only in rented accommodation and kept moving on. His final place of residence in Montreux, where he could see above every earthly obstacle from his front-of-the-circle seat on the top floor of the Palace Hotel and out into the sun setting above the lake, was surely his dearest and most appropriate home after the Vyra estate of his childhood, just as a visitor called Simona Marini, who went to see him on February 3, 1972, tells us that the cable railway, particularly the chairlift, was his favorite means of transport. “I find it delightful and dreamlike in the best sense of the word to hover in the morning sunlight on this magical perch between the valley and the treeline, observing my shadow from above as, in a seated position—a ghostly butterfly net in its ghostly hand—it moves gently down the flowery slope like a scissor-cut seen sideways among the dancing alpines and fritillaries. One day,” adds Nabokov, “yet subtler dream material will meet the butterfly hunter as he glides away upright over the mountains, borne aloft by a small rocket strapped to his back.” This image of an ascension into heaven with its final touch of humor evokes another such passage, in my opinion the finest he ever wrote. It is at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory, and is an account of a scene that often took place at Vyra when the peasants from the village came up to the manor house with some petition or other, usually at midday when the Nabokovs were in their first-floor dining room. Once the lord of the manor, Vladimir Dimitrievich, had risen from table and gone out to see the petitioners and hear their request, then if the matter could be settled to the delegation’s satisfaction it was their custom to throw him into the air three times by their united powers and catch him again as he came down. “From my place at table,” writes Nabokov,