Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  He hovered there for a while before he went all round the octagon once and then quietly vanished again, following the green arrow pointing the way. In this room, which as Austerlitz commented was ideal for its purpose, I was surprised by the simple beauty of the wooden flooring, made of planks of different widths, and by the unusually tall windows, each divided into a hundred and twenty-two lead-framed square glass panes, through which long telescopes were once turned on eclipses of the sun and the moon, on the intersection of the orbits of the stars with the line of the meridian, on the Leonid meteorite showers and the long-tailed comets flying through space. In accordance with his usual custom, Austerlitz took a few photographs, some of them of the snow-white stucco roses in the frieze of flowers running round the ceiling, others of the panorama of the city to the north and northwest on the far side of the park, shot through the leaded windowpanes, and while he was still busy with his camera he embarked on a disquisition of some length on time, much of which has remained clear in my memory. Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish.—It was around three-thirty in the afternoon and dusk was gathering as I left the Observatory with Austerlitz. We lingered for a while in the walled forecourt. Far away, we could hear the hollow grinding of the city, and the air was full of the drone of the great planes flying low and as it seemed to me incredibly slowly over Greenwich from the northeast, at intervals of scarcely more than a minute, and then disappearing again westwards towards Heathrow. Like strange monsters going home to their dens to sleep in the evening, they hovered above us in the darkening air, rigid wings extended from their bodies. The leafless trees on the slopes of the park were already deep in the shadows rising from the earth; before us, at the foot of the hill, was the broad square of turf, black as night and crossed diagonally by two pale sandy paths and the white façades and colonnades of the National Maritime Museum, and on the Isle of Dogs on the far side of the river the sparkling glass towers rose above the rapidly gathering darkness into the last of the daylight. As we walked down to Greenwich, Austerlitz told me that a number of artists had painted the park in past centuries. Their pictures showed the green lawns and the canopies of the trees, usually with very small, isolated human figures in the foreground, generally ladies in brightly colored hooped skirts carrying parasols, and a few of the white, half-tame deer kept in the park at that time. In the background of these paintings, however, behind the trees and the twin domes of the Royal Naval College, you saw the bend in the river and, like a faint line drawn out, as it were, towards the rim of the world, the city of uncounted souls, an indefinable shape, hunched and gray or plaster-colored, a kind of excrescence or crust on the surface of the earth, and above the city the sky occupying half or more of the entire picture, perhaps with rain hanging down from the clouds in the far distance. I believe I first saw an example of these panoramas of Greenwich in one of the dilapidated country houses which, as I mentioned yesterday, I often visited with Hilary when I was studying at Oxford. I clearly remember, said Austerlitz, how on such an excursion, after walking for a long time in a park densely overgrown with young sycamore and birch trees, we came to a silent house of this kind, one of which on average, according to a calculation I made then, was being demolished every two or three days in the 1950s. We saw quite a number of houses at that time from which almost everything had been ripped out—the bookshelves, the paneling and banisters, the brass central heating pipes and the marble fireplaces; houses with their roofs falling in, houses knee-deep in rubble, refuse, and detritus, houses full of sheep and bird droppings, and great lumps of plaster come down from the ceilings. Iver Grove, however, said Austerlitz, a house which stood in the middle of its wilderness of a park at the foot of a gentle south-facing slope, seemed largely intact, at least from the outside. Nonetheless, as we paused on the broad stone steps which had been colonized by hart’s-tongue ferns and other weeds and looked up at the blind windows, it seemed to us as if silent horror had seized upon the house at the prospect of its imminent and shameful end. Inside we found heaps of grain in one of the large ground-floor reception rooms, as if the place were a barn. In a second great hall, ornamented with baroque stucco work, hundreds of sacks of potatoes leaned against each other. We stood gazing at this sight for some time, until—just as I was about to take some photographs—the owner of Iver Grove, who turned out to be a certain James Mallord Ashman, came towards the house along the western terrace.

  Fully understanding our interest in the buildings now everywhere falling into decay, he told us during a long conversation that after the family seat had been requisitioned for use as a convalescent home during the war years, the expense of putting it back into any kind of order, however makeshift, had been far beyond his means, so that he had been obliged to move to Grove Farm, which belonged to the estate and lay at the other end of the park, and to work the land himself. Hence, so Ashman told us, said Austerlitz, the sacks of potatoes and the grain on the floor. Iver Grove had been built around 1780 by one of Ashman’s ancestors, said Austerlitz, a man who suffered from insomnia and with
drew into the observatory he had built at the top of the house to devote himself to various astronomical studies, particularly selenography or the delineation of the moon, and consequently, as Ashman told us, he had also been in frequent contact with John Russell of Guildford, a miniaturist and artist in pastels famous beyond the frontiers of England, who for several decades at this period was working on a map of the moon laid out over an area measuring five feet by five feet, and easily surpassing all earlier depictions of the earth’s satellite in its precision and beauty, those of Riccioli and Cassini and those of Tobias Mayer and Hevelius alike. On nights when the moon did not rise or was veiled by cloud, said Ashman, when he had finished showing us round his house and we entered the billiards room, on such nights his ancestor used to play frame after frame of billiards against himself in this retreat, which he had equipped specially for the purpose, often until the dawn of day. Since his death on New Year’s Eve, 1813, no one had ever picked up a cue in the games room, said Ashman, not his grandfather or his father or himself, Ashman, let alone one of the women, of course. And indeed, said Austerlitz, everything was exactly as it must have been a hundred and fifty years before. The mighty mahogany table, weighted down by the slate slabs embedded in it, stood in its place unmoved; the scoring apparatus, the gold-framed looking glass on the wall, the stands for the cues and their extension shafts, the cabinet full of drawers containing the ivory balls, the chalks, brushes, polishing cloths, and everything else the billiard player requires, had never been touched again or changed in any way. Over the mantelpiece hung an engraving after Turner’s View from Greenwich Park, and the records book in which the selenographer, under the rubric Ashman vs. Ashman, had entered all games won or lost against himself in his fine curving hand still lay open on a tall desk. The inside shutters had always been kept closed, and the light of day never entered the room. Evidently, said Austerlitz, this place had always remained so secluded from the rest of the house that for a century and a half scarcely so much as a gossamer-thin layer of dust had been able to settle on the cornices, the black and white square stone flags of the floor, and the green baize cloth stretched over the table, which seemed like a self-contained universe.

  It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that when we were standing in the billiards room of Iver Grove with Ashman, Hilary remarked on the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the succession of the generations. Ashman replied that in 1941, when the house was requisitioned, he himself had hidden the doors to the billiards room and the nurseries on the top floor of the house by putting in false walls and pushing large wardrobes in front of them, and when these partitions were taken down in the autumn of 1951 or 1952, and he entered the nursery again for the first time in ten years, it wouldn’t have taken much, said Ashman, to overset his reason altogether. The mere sight of the model train with the green Great Western Railway carriages, and the Noah’s Ark with the pairs of well-behaved animals saved from the Flood looking out of it, had made him feel as if the chasm of time were opening up before him, and as he ran his finger over the long row of notches he had carved in silent fury at the age of eight on the edge of his little bedside table, the day before he was sent off to preparatory school, Ashman remembered, the same rage had flared up in him again, and before he knew what he was about he found himself standing in the yard behind the house, firing his rifle several times at the little clock tower on the coach house, where the marks he made are visible on the clock face to this day.

  Ashman and Hilary, Iver Grove and Andromeda Lodge, whatever my thoughts turn to, said Austerlitz as we descended the darkening grassy slopes of the park to the city lights which had now come on in a wide semicircle before us, it all arouses in me a sense of disjunction, of having no ground beneath my feet. I think it was in early October 1957, he continued abruptly after some time, when I was on the point of going to Paris to pursue the studies of architectural history on which I had embarked the previous year at the Courtauld Institute, that I last visited the Fitzpatricks in Barmouth for the double funeral of Uncle Evelyn and Great-Uncle Alphonso. They had died almost within a day of each other, Alphonso of a stroke as he was picking up his favorite apples out in the garden, Evelyn in his icy bed, cramped with pain and anguish. Autumn mists filled the whole valley on the morning of the burial of these two very different men, Evelyn always at odds with himself and the world, Alphonso animated by a cheerfully equable temperament. Just as the funeral procession began moving towards Cutiau cemetery, the sun broke through the hazy veils above the Mawddach, and a breeze blew along its banks. The few dark figures, the group of poplars, the flood of light over the water, the massif of Cader Idris on the far side of the river, these were the elements in a farewell scene which, curiously enough, I rediscovered a few weeks ago in one of the rapid watercolor sketches Turner often made, noting down what he saw either from the life or looking back at the past later. This almost insubstantial picture, bearing the title of Funeral at Lausanne, dates from 1841, and thus from a time when Turner could hardly travel anymore and dwelt increasingly on ideas of his own mortality, and perhaps for that very reason, when something like this little cortège in Lausanne emerged from his memory, he swiftly set down a few brushstrokes in an attempt to capture visions which would melt away again the next moment.

  What particularly attracted me to Turner’s watercolor, said Austerlitz, was not merely the similarity of the scene in Lausanne to the funeral at Cutiau, but the memory it prompted in me of my last walk with Gerald in the early summer of 1966, through the vineyards above Morges on the banks of Lake Geneva. During my subsequent studies of Turner’s life and his sketchbooks I discovered the fact, entirely insignificant in itself but nonetheless one I found curiously moving, that in 1798 he, Turner, had himself visited the estuary of the Mawddach on a journey through Wales, and that at the time he was exactly the same age as I was at the funeral in Cutiau. As I speak of it now, said Austerlitz, it is as if I had been sitting in the south-facing drawing room of Andromeda Lodge among the mourners only yesterday, as if I could still hear their quiet murmuring, and Adela saying she didn’t know what she would do with herself now, all alone in that big house. Gerald, who was then in his last year of school and had come over from Oswestry especially for the funeral, told me about the lack of any improvement in conditions at Stower Grange, which he described as a horrible inkblot disfiguring the souls of its pupils for ever. He was kept from going mad, said Gerald, only by the fact that since joining the Air Cadet Corps he had been able to fly over the whole wretched place in a Chipmunk and get right away from it once a week. The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy. About four o’clock I went down to Barmouth station with Gerald. When I returned—dusk was already falling, said Austerlitz, and fine rain hung suspended in the air, apparently without sinking to the ground—Adela came to meet me from the misty depths of the garden, muffled up in greenish-brown tweed with millions of tiny drops of water clinging to the fine fuzz of its outline and forming a kind of silvery radiance around her. She was carrying a large bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums in the crook of her right arm, and when we had walked side by side across the yard without a word and were standing in the doorway, she raised her free hand and put the hair back from my forehead, as if she knew, in this one gesture, that she had the gift of being remembered. Yes, I can still see Adela, said Austerlitz; in my mind she has remained unchanged, as beautiful as she was then. At the end of those long summer days we quite often played badminton together in the ballroom of Andromeda Lodge, which had been empty since the war, while Gerald fed and watered his pigeons before night fell. The feathered shuttlecock flew between us as we struck it back and forth. The trajectory it followed, always turning on its way although you could not have said how, w
as a streak of white drawn through the evening hour, and I could have sworn that Adela often hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed. After our game we usually stayed in the ballroom for a little while, looking at the images cast on the wall opposite the tall, arched window by the last rays of the sun shining low through the moving branches of a hawthorn, until at last they were extinguished. There was something fleeting, evanescent about those sparse patterns appearing in constant succession on the pale surface, something which never went beyond the moment of its generation, so to speak, yet here, in this intertwining of sunlight and shadow always forming and re-forming, you could see mountainous landscapes with glaciers and ice fields, high plateaux, steppes, deserts, fields full of flowers, islands in the sea, coral reefs, archipelagoes and atolls, forests bending to the storm, quaking grass and drifting smoke. And once, I remember, said Austerlitz, as we gazed together at this slowly fading world, Adela leaned towards me and asked: Do you see the fronds of the palm trees, do you see the caravan coming through the dunes over there? By the time Austerlitz repeated this question of Adela’s, a question still imprinted on his memory, we were on our way back into the city from Greenwich. Our taxi made slow progress in the dense evening traffic. It had begun to rain; the beams of headlights gleamed on the asphalt, cutting through the windscreen covered with silvery beads. It took us nearly an hour to travel a distance of not much more than three miles to Tower Bridge by way of Greek Street, Evelyn Street, Lower Road, and Jamaica Road. Austerlitz leaned back with his arms round his rucksack, staring ahead in silence. Perhaps he had closed his eyes, I thought, but I did not venture to glance sideways at him. Only at Liverpool Street Station, where he waited with me in McDonald’s until my train left, and after a casual remark about the glaring light which, so he said, allowed not even the hint of a shadow and perpetuated the momentary terror of a lightning flash—only at Liverpool Street did he resume his story. I never saw Adela again after the day of the funeral, he began, which was my own fault, because I did not once return to England all the time I was in Paris. And then, he continued, when I had taken up my appointment in London and went to Cambridge to see Gerald, who had now finished his studies and was beginning his research work, Andromeda Lodge had been sold and Adela had gone to North Carolina with an entomologist called Willoughby. Gerald, who at the time had rented a cottage in the tiny village of Quy not far from Cambridge airfield and had bought a Cessna with his share of the proceeds from the sale of the property, kept coming back to his passion for flying in all our conversations, whatever their ostensible subjects. I remember, for instance, said Austerlitz, that once, when we were discussing our schooldays at Stower Grange, he told me at length how after I had gone up to Oxford he spent many of the endless hours of study at the school working out an ornithological system based, as its principal criterion, on the degree of a bird’s aptitude for flight, and according to Gerald, said Austerlitz, whatever way he modified this system pigeons always led the field, not just for their speed in traveling very long distances but for their navigational abilities, which set them apart from all other living creatures. You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin. At least, Gerald had said, the scientific explanations known to him claiming that pigeons take their bearings from the constellations, or air currents, or magnetic fields are not much more conclusive than the various theories he worked out himself as a boy of twelve, hoping that once he had solved this problem he would be able to make the pigeons fly the other way, for instance from their home in Barmouth to his place of exile in Oswestry, and he kept imagining them suddenly sailing down to him out of the sky, with sunlight filtered through the feathers of their motionless, outstretched wings, and landing with a faint coo in their throats on the sill of the window where, as he said, he often stood for hours on end. The sense of liberation he had felt when he first became aware of the lifting capacity of the air beneath him in one of the Cadet Corps planes, Gerald said, was indescribable, and he himself still remembered, added Austerlitz, how proud, indeed positively radiant Gerald had been when once, in the late summer of 1962 or 1963, they took off together from the runway of Cambridge airfield for an evening flight. The sun had set not long before we started, but as soon as we gained altitude we were surrounded once again by a glittering brightness which did not fade until we were going south, following the white strip of the Suffolk coast, when shadows emerged from the depths of the sea, gradually rising and inclining towards us, until the last gleam of light was extinguished on the horizons of the western world. Soon the shapes of the landscape below, the woods and the pale stubble fields, could be distinguished only as shadowy outlines, and I shall never forget, said Austerlitz, how the curving estuary of the Thames emerged before us as if out of nothing, a dragon’s tail, black as cart grease, winding its way through the falling night, while the lights of Canvey Island, Sheerness, and Southend-on-Sea came on beside it. Later, as we described a wide arc over Picardy in the darkness and then turned back on course for England, if we raised our eyes from the illuminated board instruments to look through the glazed cockpit we could see the whole vault of heaven as I had never seen it before, apparently at a standstill but in truth turning slowly, with the constellations of the Swan, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Charioteer, the Corona Borealis, and all the rest almost lost in the shimmering dust of the myriads of nameless stars sprinkled over the sky. It was in the autumn of 1965, continued Austerlitz, who had drifted for some time in his memories, that Gerald began developing what we now know was his trail-blazing hypothesis on the so-called Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Serpent. He spoke of huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms projecting several light-years into the void, where new stars were born in a process of condensation steadily intensifying under the influence of gravity. I remember Gerald’s saying that there were positive nurseries of stars out there, a claim which I recently found confirmed in a newspaper report accompanying one of the spectacular photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble telescope on its further journey into space. At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies.