Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  It may have been as much as an hour before I finally rang the bell of the right-hand flat on the top floor, and then half an eternity seemed to pass before I heard movement inside, the door was opened, and I found myself facing Vera Ryšanová, who—as she was soon to tell me—had been my mother Agáta’s neighbor and my nurserymaid in the thirties when she, Vera, had been studying Romance languages at Prague University.

  I think that the reason why I did not immediately recognize her, said Austerlitz, although despite her fragility she seemed quite unchanged, was my agitated condition, in which I could hardly believe my eyes. So I merely stammered out the sentence I had laboriously learnt by heart the day before: Promiňte, prosím, že Vás obtěžuji. Hledám paní Agátu Austerlitzovou, která zde možná v roce devatenáct set třicet osm bydlela. I am looking for a Mrs. Agáta Austerlitzová who may have been living here in 1938. With a gesture of alarm, Vera covered her face with both hands, hands which, it flashed through my mind, were endlessly familiar to me, stared at me over her spread fingertips, and very quietly but with what to me was a quite singular clarity spoke these words in French: Jacquot, she said, dis, est-ce que c’est vraiment toi? We embraced, we held each other’s hands, we embraced again, I don’t know how often, before Vera led me through the dark hall into a room where everything was just as it had been almost sixty years ago. The furniture she had inherited in May 1933 together with her great-aunt’s flat, the display cabinet with a masked Meissen china Pulcinello on the left and his beloved Columbine on the right, the glass-fronted bookcase with the fifty-five small volumes of the Comédie humaine bound in carmine red, the writing desk, the long ottoman, the camel-hair rug lying folded at one end of it, the blue-tinged aquatint of the Bohemian mountains—throughout my entire life, which was now unraveling headlong before me, all this had stayed in the same place because as Vera told me, said Austerlitz, once she had lost me and my mother, who was almost a sister to her, she could not bear to alter anything. I don’t remember in what order Vera and I told each other our stories that late March afternoon and evening, said Austerlitz, but I think that after I had given her a brief account of myself, leaving out all that had weighed on me so heavily over the years, we spoke first about my lost parents, Agáta and Maximilian. Maximilian Aychenwald, who had come to Prague from St. Petersburg where his father traded in spices until the year of the revolution, soon established himself as one of the most prominent officials of the Czech Social Democratic Party, said Vera. He had met my mother, fifteen years younger than he was and then appearing in various provincial towns as she embarked on her stage career, in Nikolsburg on one of the many journeys he made to speak at public gatherings and shop-floor meetings. In May 1933, when I had only just settled in here, said Vera, they came back from a visit to Paris which, as they never tired of repeating, had been full of the most wonderful events and encounters, and perhaps that was why they decided, directly upon their return, to move into a flat in this house together, though they always remained unmarried. Agáta and Maximilian, said Vera, both had a special fondness for all things French. Maximilian was a lifelong republican, and had dreamt of making Czechoslovakia an island of freedom in the midst of the tide of Fascism then inexorably spreading throughout Europe, a kind of second Switzerland, while Agáta’s rather more colorful notion of the ideal world was inspired by the works of Jacques Offenbach, whom she admired enormously, which incidentally, said Vera, was the reason for my first name, not a usual one among Czechs. It was through an interest in every aspect of French civilization, she added, something which as an enthusiastic student of Romance culture I shared with both Agáta and Maximilian, that a friendship began to develop between us immediately after our first conversation on the day when they moved in, a friendship which led as if quite naturally, so Vera told me, said Austerlitz, to her offering, since unlike Agáta and Maximilian she had her time largely at her own disposal, to assume the duties of nanny for the few years until I started nursery school. It was an offer she had never once regretted later, said Vera, for even before I could talk it had always seemed to her as if no one understood her better than this small boy who, by the age of not quite three, entertained her in the most delightful way with his conversational gifts. By agreement with Agáta, when we walked over the meadow slopes of the Seminar Garden among the pear and cherry trees, or on hot days through the shadier grounds of the park of Schönborn Palace, we spoke French, and only when we came home late in the afternoon and Vera was making our supper did we revert to Czech, for the discussion of more domestic and childish matters, as it were. In the middle of her account Vera herself, quite involuntarily, had changed from one language to the other, and I, who had not for a moment thought that Czech could mean anything to me, not at the airport or in the state archives, or even while learning by heart the question which would have been of scant use to me addressed to the wrong quarters, now understood almost everything Vera said, like a deaf man whose hearing has been miraculously restored, so that all I wanted to do was close my eyes and listen forever to her polysyllabic flood of words. In the warm season of the year in particular, said Vera, she had always had to move the geraniums on the sill aside as soon as we came back from our daily walk, so that I could take my favorite place on the window seat and look down on the garden with its lilac trees and the low building opposite where the hunchbacked tailor Moravec had his workshop, and while she, so Vera said, cut bread and boiled the kettle, I used to give her a running commentary on whatever Moravec happened to be doing: mending the worn hem of a jacket, rummaging in his button box, or sewing a quilted lining into an overcoat. But I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, not to miss the moment when Moravec put down his needle and thread, his big scissors, and the other tools of his trade, cleared the baize-covered table, spread a double sheet of newspaper on it, and laid out on this sheet blackened with print the supper he must have been looking forward to for some time, a supper which varied according to the season and might be curd cheese with chives, a long radish, a few tomatoes with onions, a smoked herring, or boiled potatoes. He’s putting the sleeve dummy in the wardrobe, he’s going out into the kitchen, now he’s bringing in his beer, now he’s sharpening his knife, he’s cutting a slice of sausage, taking a long drink from his glass, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand—it was in this or some similar fashion, always the same yet always slightly different, that I used to describe the tailor’s supper to her almost every evening, said Vera, and I often had to be reminded not to forget my own bread-and-butter soldiers. As she told me about my curious love of such observation, Vera had risen and opened both the inner and the outer windows to let me look down into the garden next door, where the lilac happened to be in flower, its blossoms so thick and white that in the gathering dusk it looked as if there had been a snowstorm in the middle of spring. And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor’s house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequently used to be seen in his time, swinging his heavy iron filled with red-hot coals through the air, these and other images, said Austerlitz, ranged themselves side by side, so that deeply buried and locked away within me as they had been, they now came luminously back to my mind as I looked out of the window. It was the same when Vera, without a word, opened the door to the room where the little couch on which I always slept when my parents were away still stood in its place, at the foot of the four-poster bed with its barley-sugar uprights and pillows piled high which, together with the rest of the furniture, she had inherited from her great-aunt. The crescent moon shone into the dark room, and there was a white blouse hanging from the catch of the half-open window just as it had always hung there in the past, I now remembered, said Austerlitz. I saw Vera as she had been then, sitting beside me on the divan telling me stories from the Riesengebirge and the Bohemian Forest, I s
aw her uncommonly beautiful eyes misting over in the twilight, so to speak, when after reaching the end of the story she took off her glasses and bent down to me. Later, I now remembered, while she sat in the next room over her books I liked to lie awake for a while, safe as I knew myself to be in the care of my solicitous guardian and the pale glow of the circle of light where she sat reading. With only the slightest effort of will I could conjure it all up; the hunchbacked tailor, who would now be in his own bedchamber, the moon traveling round the building, the patterns of the carpet and wallpaper, even the course traced by the hairline cracks in the tiles of the tall stove. But when I got tired of this game and wanted to go to sleep I had only to wait to hear Vera lift the next leaf of her book in the other room, and I can still feel, said Austerlitz, or perhaps it is only now that I feel again, the sense of my consciousness dissolving among the poppies and leafy tendrils etched into the opaque glass of the door before I caught the slight rustle of the page turning. On our walks, Vera continued when we were sitting in the living room again and she had given me a cup of peppermint tea with her two now unsteady hands, on our walks we hardly ever went further than the Seminar Garden, the Khotek Gardens, and the other green spaces in the Lesser Quarter. Only occasionally, in summer, did we make rather longer expeditions with my little pushchair, which as I might perhaps remember had a small colored whirligig fastened to it, going as far as Sofia Island, the swimming school on the banks of the Vltava, or the observation platform on Petřín Hill, from which we may have spent an hour or more looking at the city spread out below us with its many towers, all of which I had known by heart, as well as the names of the seven bridges spanning the glittering river. Since I have been unable to go out of doors, so that I now see almost nothing new, said Vera, the pictures we enjoyed so much at the time come back to me with increasing clarity, like pure fantasies. I often feel, said Vera, as if I were gazing at a diorama as I once did when I was a child in Reichenberg, seeing the figures inside a case filled with some strangely translucent aura poised motionless in mid-movement, owing their lifelike appearance, oddly enough, to their extremely diminutive size. In later life I never set eyes on anything more magical than the yellow Syrian desert in the Reichenberg diorama, the peaks of the Zillertal Alps rising white and radiant above the dark pine forests, and that moment frozen in time when the young poet Goethe, wearing a short, light-brown coat fluttering in the wind, is about to climb into a post-chaise to which his traveling bags are already strapped. These days, Vera continued, the pictures of our excursions together from the šporkova through the Lesser Quarter tend to go hand in hand with such reminiscences of my own childhood. When memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain, and now, as I tell you this, if I close my eyes I see the two of us as it were disembodied, or, more precisely, reduced to the unnaturally enlarged pupils of our eyes, looking down from the observation platform on the Petřin Hill at the green slopes below, with the funicular railway making its way upwards like a fat caterpillar, while further out, on the other side of the city, the railway train you always waited so eagerly to see is making its way past the row of houses at the foot of the Vyšehrad and slowly crossing the bridge over the river, trailing a white cloud of vapor. When the weather was bad, said Vera, we often visited my aunt Otýlie in the glove shop on the šeríková which she had been running since before the Great War and in which, as in some consecrated shrine or temple, a muted atmosphere banishing all profane ideas reigned. Aunt Otýlie was a spinster lady of alarmingly fragile appearance. She always wore an outer garment of pleated black silk with a detachable white lace collar, and moved about in a little cloud of lily-of-the-valley perfume. If she was not busy serving one of the women she described as her honored lady clients, she was constantly occupied in maintaining order among her stock of hundreds, if not thousands, of different pairs of gloves of all kinds, ranging from cotton for everyday wear to the most elegant velvet or kid creations from Paris and Milan, arranged in a hierarchy of her own devising which she had preserved for decades through all the vicissitudes of time, and which only she really understood. But when we went to see her, said Vera, she gave you her entire attention, showed you this and that, let you look at the shallow drawers which glided out with extraordinary ease, and allowed you not just to pick up glove after glove but even to try them on, explaining the niceties of every model to you patiently, just as if she saw you as heir presumptive to her business. And I remember, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that it was Aunt Otýlie who taught you to count at the age of three and a half, using a row of small, shiny black malachite buttons sewn to an elbow-length velvet glove which you particularly liked—jeden, dvě, tři, counted Vera, and I, said Austerlitz, went on counting—čtyři, pět, šest, sedm—feeling like someone taking uncertain steps out on to the ice. Deeply moved as I was on my first visit to the šporkova, I do not remember all Vera’s stories in precise detail today, said Austerlitz, but I think that by some turn or other in our conversation we went on from Aunt Otýlie’s glove shop to the Estates Theater, where Agáta made her début in Prague in the autumn of 1938 in the role of Olympia, a part she had dreamed of since the beginning of her career. In mid-October, said Vera, on the evening before the first night, we went to the dress rehearsal of the operetta together, and as soon as we entered the theater by the stage door, she said, I fell into a reverent silence, although I had been chattering nineteen to the dozen on our way through the city. I had also been unusually quiet and lost in thought during the performance of the somewhat haphazard arrangement of scenes, and on our way home by tram as well. It was because of this more or less casual remark of Vera’s, said Austerlitz, that I went to see the Estates Theater next morning, and sat alone for a long time in the stalls directly under the top of the dome, having obtained permission from the porter, in exchange for a not inconsiderable tip, to take some photographs in the recently refurbished auditorium. Around me the tiers of seats with their gilded adornments shining through the dim light rose to the roof; before me the proscenium arch of the stage on which Agáta had once stood was like a blind eye. And the harder I tried to conjure up at least some faint recollection of her appearance, the more the theater seemed to be shrinking, as if I myself had shrunk to the stature of a little Tom Thumb enclosed in a sort of velvet-lined casket. Only after a while, when someone or other walked quickly over the stage behind the drawn curtain, sending a ripple through the heavy folds of fabric with his rapid pace, only then, said Austerlitz, did the shadows begin to move, and I saw the conductor of the orchestra down in the pit like a beetle in his black tailcoat, and other black-clad figures busy with all kinds of instruments, I heard their music mingling with the voices, and all of a sudden I thought that in between one of the musicians’ heads and the neck of a double bass, in the bright strip of light between the wooden floorboards and the hem of the curtain, I caught sight of a sky-blue shoe embroidered with silver sequins. On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her flat in the šporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that Agáta had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain. Vera said that I had been deeply affected by the dress rehearsal in the Estates Theater, first and foremost, she suspected, because I was afraid Agáta had genuinely changed into someone who, though she might now be a magical figure, was also a complete stranger to me, and I myself, Austerlitz continued, suddenly remembered that I had been filled by a grief previously unknown to me when, long past my usual bedtime, I lay with my eyes wide open in the dark on the divan in Vera’s room, listening to the church clocks strike the quarter-hours and waiting for Agáta to come home, waiting to hear the car bringing her back from that other world stop outside the gate, waiting for her to come into the room at last and sit down beside me, enveloped by a strange theatrical odor in which dust and drifts of perfume mingled. I see her wearing an ashen-gray silk bodice laced up in front, but
I cannot make out her face, only an iridescent veil of pale, cloudy milkiness wafting close to her skin, and then, said Austerlitz, I see the scarf slip from her right shoulder as she lays her hand on my forehead.