by W. G. Sebald
The entire building, from the outside more like a mansion house than anything else, therefore consists of four wings, each not much more than three meters deep, set around the courtyard in an almost Illusionist manner and without any corridors or passages in them. It is a style resembling the prison architecture of the bourgeois epoch, when it was decided that the most useful design for the penal system was to build wings of cells around a rectangular or circular courtyard, with catwalks running along the interior. And it was not just of a prison that the archives building in the Karmelitská reminded me, said Austerlitz; it also suggested a monastery, a riding school, an opera house, and a lunatic asylum, and all these ideas mingled in my mind as I looked at the twilight coming in from above, and thought that on the rows of galleries I saw a dense crowd of people, some of them waving hats or handkerchiefs, as passengers on board a steamer used to do when it put out to sea.
At any rate, it was a little while before I managed to bring myself back to the present, and turned to the lodge near the entrance, from which the porter had been keeping an eye on me ever since I had crossed the threshold and, attracted by the light of the interior courtyard, had passed by him without noticing his presence. If you wanted to speak to this porter you had to lean a long way down to his window, which was so low that he appeared to be kneeling on the floor of his lodge. Although I had soon adopted the right position, said Austerlitz, I could not make myself understood, with the result that after launching into a long verbal torrent in which I could make out nothing but the words anglický and Angličan, repeated several times with special emphasis, the porter eventually phoned to request assistance from one of the archive’s officials, who did indeed, at practically the next moment, while I was still filling in a visitor’s form at the desk opposite the lodge, materialize beside me as if she had, as they say, sprung out of the ground. Tereza Ambrosová—so she introduced herself to me, immediately asking in her slightly hesitant but otherwise very correct English what I wanted to know—Tereza Ambrosová was a pale woman of almost transparent appearance, and about forty years old.
As we went up to the third floor in the cramped lift, which scraped against one side of the shaft, in silence and with a sense of awkwardness because of the unnatural physical proximity into which one is forced in such a box, I saw a gentle pulsation in the curve of a blue vein beneath the skin of her right temple, almost as fast as the throbbing in a lizard’s throat when it lies motionless on a rock in the sun. We reached Mrs. Ambrosová’s office by walking down one of the galleries encircling the courtyard. I hardly dared glance over the balustrade to the depths below where two or three cars were parked, looking curiously elongated from above, or at least much longer than they would appear in the street. The office which we entered straight from this gallery was full of stacks of papers tied up with string, not a few of them discolored by sunlight and brittle at the edges, crammed into roll-front cupboards, deposited on shelves that sagged under their weight, piled high on a rickety little trolley which seemed to be specially intended for the transport of files, on an old-fashioned wing chair pushed against the wall, and on the two desks facing each other in the room. There were a good dozen houseplants among these mountains of paper, in plain clay flowerpots or brightly colored majolica jardinières: mimosas and myrtles, thick-leaved aloes, gardenias, and a large hoya twining its way around a trelliswork frame. Mrs Ambrosová, who had very courteously pulled out a chair for me beside her desk, listened attentively with her head tilted slightly to one side as, for the first time in my life, I began explaining to someone else that because of certain circumstances my origins had been unknown to me, and that for other reasons I had never inquired into them, but now felt compelled, because of a series of coincidental events, to conclude or at least to conjecture that I had left Prague at the age of four and a half, in the months just before the war broke out, on one of the so-called children’s transports departing from the city at the time, and I had therefore come to consult the archives in the hope that people of my surname living here between 1934 and 1939, who could not have been very numerous, might be found in the registers, with details of their addresses. I fell into such a panic as I offered these explanations, which suddenly struck me as not just far too cursory but positively absurd, that I began to stammer and could hardly bring out a word. All at once I felt the heat from the stout radiator, which was encrusted with several layers of lumpy oil paint and stood under the wide-open window; I heard nothing but the noise rising from the Karmelitská, the heavy rumble of the trams, the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances somewhere in the distance, and I calmed down only when Tereza Ambrosová, whose deep-set violet eyes had been gazing at me with some concern, gave me a glass of water. As I took a few sips from this glass, which I had to hold in both hands, she said that the registers of those living in Prague at the time in question had been preserved complete, that Austerlitz was indeed one of the more unusual surnames, so she thought there could be no particular difficulty in finding me the entries I wanted by tomorrow afternoon.
She would see to it personally, she told me. I cannot remember, said Austerlitz, with what words I said goodbye to Mrs. Ambrosová, how I got out of the archives building or where I went after that; all I know is that I took a room in a small hotel on Kampa Island not far from the Karmelitská and sat there by the window until darkness fell, looking out at the heavy, leaden-gray waters of the Vltava, and over the river to the city, which I now feared was entirely alien to me, a place with which I had no connection at all. These thoughts went through my head with grinding slowness, each more confused and harder to grasp than the one that went before. I spent the whole night either lying awake or tormented by fearful dreams in which I had to climb up and down flights of steps ringing hundreds of doorbells in vain, until, in the outermost suburbs, I came upon a darkly looming building, from the dungeon-like basement of which there emerged a caretaker called Bartoloměj Smečka, a veteran, it seemed, of long-lost campaigns, clad in a crumpled redingote and a flowered fancy waistcoat with a gold watch chain draped over it, who having studied the note I handed him shrugged his shoulders, saying that unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.
Next day, Austerlitz continued, I went back to the state archives building in the Karmelitská, where, in order to compose myself a little, I first took some photographs of the great inner court and the stairway leading up to the galleries, which in its asymmetrical construction reminded me of the follies built by so many English noblemen in their parks and gardens. In the end I went up this stairway, pausing on each landing for a while to look through one of the irregular openings in the wall and down at the empty yard, which I saw traversed only once by one of the archive’s gray-coated porters, whose right leg flexed slightly inward as he walked. When I entered Tereza Ambrosová’s office she was just watering her geranium cuttings, which stood in an assortment of flowerpots on the sill between the inner and outer windows. They do better in this overheated atmosphere than in the cold springtime air at home, said Mrs. Ambrosová. We haven’t been able to regulate the steam heating for a long time, so it’s often like a hothouse in here, particularly at this time of year. That may be why you felt unwell yesterday, she said, adding, I’ve already made a note of the addresses of all those named Austerlitz in the register. As I suspected, they didn’t come to more than half a dozen. Mrs. Ambrosová put her green watering can down and gave me a sheet of paper from her desk. Austerlitz Leopold, Austerlitz Viktor, Austerlitz Tomáš, Austerlitz Jeroným, Austerlitz Edward, and Austerlitz František were listed one beneath another, and at the end there was an Austerlitzová Agáta, evidently a single woman. The names were followed by the professions of their bearers—dealer in textiles en gros, rabbi, bandages manufacturer, principal clerk, silversmith, printing works proprietor, and finally opera singer—together with the number of the city district and
the street: VII U vozovky, II Betlemská, and so on. Mrs. Ambrosová suggested that before crossing the river I might begin my inquiries in the Lesser Quarter, which wasn’t ten minutes’ walk away from here, she said. I could try the šporkova, a small street a few paces uphill from the Schönborn Palace, where the register of inhabitants for 1938 said that Agáta Austerlitzová had been living at Number 12 in that year. And so, said Austerlitz, no sooner had I arrived in Prague than I found myself back among the scenes of my early childhood, every trace of which had been expunged from my memory for as long as I could recollect. As I walked through the labyrinth of alleyways, thoroughfares, and courtyards between the Vlašská and Nerudova, and still more so when I felt the uneven paving of the šporkova underfoot as step by step I climbed uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life. It was true that I could recognize nothing for certain, yet I had to keep stopping now and then because my glance was caught by a finely wrought window grating, the iron handle of a bell pull, or the branches of an almond tree growing over a garden wall. Once I stood for a considerable time outside the vaulted entrance to a building, said Austerlitz, looking up at a half-relief set in the smooth plaster above the keystone of the arch. The cast was no more than a square foot in size, and showed, set against a spangled sea-green background, a blue dog carrying a small branch in its mouth, which I could tell, by the prickling of my scalp, it had brought back out of my past. Then there was the cool air as I entered the front hall of Number 12 šporkova, the metal box for the electrics built into the wall beside the entrance with its lightning symbol, the octofoil mosaic flower in shades of dove gray and snow white set in the flecked artificial-stone floor of the hall, the smell of damp limewash, the gently rising flight of stairs, with hazelnut-shaped iron knobs placed at intervals in the handrail of the banisters—all of them signs and characters from the type case of forgotten things, I thought, and was overcome by such a state of blissful yet anxious confusion that more than once I had to sit down on the steps in the quiet stairwell and lean my head against the wall.