by W. G. Sebald
On my third day in Prague, so Austerlitz continued his story, when he had recovered some degree of composure, I went up to the Seminar Garden early in the morning. The cherry and pear trees of Vera’s story had now been grubbed up and replaced by young saplings, with thin branches which would not bear fruit for some time yet to come. The path wound uphill, describing wide curves through the grass, which was wet with dew. Halfway up I met an old lady with an overfed, reddish-brown dachshund which was not very good on its legs and stopped now and then, staring with its brow furrowed at the ground ahead of it. The sight of it reminded me that on my walks with Vera I often used to see old ladies of this kind with bad-tempered little dogs, almost always wearing wire muzzles, which may have been the reason for their mute ill will. Then I sat on a bench in the sun until nearly midday, looking out over the buildings of the Lesser Quarter and the river Vltava at the panorama of the city, which seemed to be veined with the curving cracks and rifts of past time, like the varnish on a painting. A little later, said Austerlitz, I discovered another such pattern created by no discernible law in the entwined roots of a chestnut tree clinging to a steep slope, through which, Vera had told me, said Austerlitz, I liked to climb as a child. And the dark green yews growing under the taller trees were familiar to me too, as familiar as the cool air which enveloped me at the bottom of the ravine and the countless windflowers covering the woodland floor, faded now in April, and I understood why, on one of my visits to a Gloucestershire country house with Hilary years ago, my voice failed me when, in the park which was laid out very much like the Schönborn gardens, we unexpectedly came upon a north-facing slope covered by the finely cut leaves and snow-white blooms of the March-flowering Anemone nemorosa.—It was with the botanical name of these shade-loving anemones that Austerlitz concluded another section of his story on that evening in the late winter of 1997, when we sat in the Alderney Street house amidst what seemed to me a silence of unfathomable profundity.
Quarter or half an hour may have gone by in the light of the blue, evenly flickering flames of the little gas fire, before Austerlitz rose and said it would probably be best if I spent the night under his roof. So saying, he went upstairs ahead of me, and led me into a room which, like those on the ground floor, was quite unfurnished except for a kind of camp bed standing unfolded against one wall, with handles at both ends so that it resembled a stretcher. Beside the bed there was a wine crate with a blackened coat of arms burnt into it which had once contained Château Gruaud-Larose, and on the crate, in the gentle light of a shaded lamp, stood a glass, a carafe of water, and an old-fashioned radio in a dark brown Bakelite case. Austerlitz wished me good night and latched the door carefully behind him. I went over to the window, looked down at the empty street below, turned back to the room, sat down on the bed, undid my shoelaces, thought about Austerlitz, whom I could now hear moving about the room next door, and then, when I looked up again, saw in the faint light a small collection of seven differently shaped Bakelite jars on the mantelpiece. None of these containers was more than two or three inches high, and when I opened them one by one and held them in the light of the lamp, each proved to contain the mortal remains of one of the moths which—as Austerlitz had told me—had met its end here in this house. I tipped one of them, a weightless, ivory-colored creature with folded wings that might have been woven of some immaterial fabric, out of its Bakelite box onto the palm of my right hand. Its legs, which it had drawn up under its silver-scaled body as if just clearing some final obstacle, were so delicate that I could scarcely make them out, while the antennae curving high above the whole body also trembled on the edge of visibility. However, the staring black eye projecting somewhat from the head was distinct enough. Spellbound by this nocturnal apparition, which although it might have died years ago bore no sign of decay, I studied it intently before replacing it in its narrow tomb. As I lay down I turned on the radio set standing on the wine crate beside the bed. The names of cities and radio stations with which I used to link the most exotic ideas in my childhood appeared on its round, illuminated dial—Monte Ceneri, Rome, Ljubljana, Stockholm, Beromünster, Hilversum, Prague, and others besides. I turned the volume down very low and listened to a language I did not understand drifting in the air from a great distance: a female voice, which was sometimes lost in the ether, but then emerged again and mingled with the performance of two careful hands moving, in some place unknown to me, over the keyboard of a Bösendorfer or Pleyel and playing certain musical passages, I think from the Well-Tempered Clavier, which accompanied me far into the realms of slumber. When I woke in the morning only a faint crackle and hiss was coming from the narrow brass mesh over the loudspeaker. Soon afterwards, when I mentioned the mysterious radio at breakfast, Austerlitz told me he had always imagined that the voices moving through the air after the onset of darkness, only a few of which we could catch, had a life of their own, like bats, and shunned the light of day. In the long, sleepless nights of recent years, he said, when I was listening to the women announcers in Budapest, Helsinki, or La Coruña, I often saw them weaving their erratic way far out in the air, and wished I were already in their company. But to come back to my story … It was when I had returned from the Schönborn Garden, as we were sitting in Vera’s flat again, that she first told me about my parents at greater length: their origins so far as she knew of them, the course of their lives, and the annihilation, within the space of only a few years, of their entire existence. Despite her dark and rather melancholy appearance, so I think Vera began, said Austerlitz, your mother Agáta was a very genial, on occasion even lighthearted woman. In this she was just like her father, old Austerlitz, who owned a fez- and slipper-making factory in Sternberg which he had founded while the country was still under Austrian rule, and who had the ability of simply ignoring any unpleasantness. Once, when he was visiting this house, I heard him speak of the considerable boom in his business since Mussolini’s men had taken to wearing that semi-Oriental item of headgear the fez, saying that he could hardly manufacture and export enough of them to Italy. At the time Agáta herself, secure as she felt in the recognition she had won much faster than she dared to hope in her career as an opera and operetta singer, thought that everything would turn out all right in the end, whereas Maximilian, in spite of the cheerful disposition which he shared with Agáta, had been convinced ever since I knew him, said Vera, so Austerlitz told me, that the parvenus who had come to power in Germany and the corporate bodies and other human swarms endlessly proliferating under the new regime, a spectacle which inspired him, as he often said, with a sense of positive horror, had abandoned themselves from the first to a blind lust for conquest and destruction, taking its cue from the magic word thousand which the Reichskanzler, as we could all hear on the wireless, repeated constantly in his speeches. A thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty thousand, a thousand times a thousand, thousands upon thousands: such was the refrain he barked out in his hoarse voice, drumming into the Germans the notion that the promise of their own greatness was about to be fulfilled. Nonetheless, said Vera, Austerlitz continued, Maximilian did not in any way believe that the German people had been driven into their misfortune; rather, in his view, they had entirely re-created themselves in this perverse form, engendered by every individual’s wishful thinking and bound up with false family sentiment, and had then brought forth, as symbolic exponents of their innermost desires, so to speak, the Nazi grandees, whom Maximilian regarded without exception as muddle-headed and indolent. From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of 1933, he had gone a little way up into the Erzgebirge, where he came upon some day trippers in a beer garden who had been buying all manner of things in a village on the German side of the border, including a new kind of boiled sweet which had, embedded in its sugary mass, a raspberry-colored swastika that literally melted in the mouth. At the sight of these
Nazi treats, Maximilian had said, he suddenly realized that the Germans had wholly reorganized their production lines, from heavy industry down to the manufacturing of items such as these vulgar sweets, not because they had been ordered to do so but each of his own accord, out of enthusiasm for the national resurgence. Vera went on, said Austerlitz, to tell me that Maximilian visited Austria and Germany several times in the 1930s, to gain a more accurate idea of general developments, and that she remembered precisely how, immediately after returning from Nuremberg, he had described the Führer’s prodigious reception at the Party rally. Hours before his arrival, the entire population of Nuremberg and indeed people from much further afield, crowds flocking in not just from Franconia and Bavaria but from the most remote parts of the country, Holstein and Pomerania, Silesia and the Black Forest, stood shoulder to shoulder all agog with excitement along the predetermined route, until at last, heralded by roars of acclamation, the motorcade of heavy Mercedes limousines came gliding at walking pace down the narrow alley which parted the sea of radiant uplifted faces and the arms outstretched in yearning. Maximilian had told her, said Vera, that in the middle of this crowd, which had merged into a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions, he had felt like a foreign body about to be crushed and then excreted. From where he stood in the square outside the Lorenzkirche, he said, he saw the motorcade making its slow way through the swaying masses down to the Old Town, where the houses with their pointed and crooked gables, their occupants hanging out of the windows like bunches of grapes, resembled a hopelessly overcrowded ghetto into which, so Maximilian had said, the long-awaited savior was now making his entry. It was in just the same vein, said Vera, that Maximilian later repeatedly described the spectacular film of the Party rally which he had seen in a Munich cinema, and which confirmed his suspicions that, out of the humiliation from which the Germans had never recovered, they were now developing an image of themselves as a people chosen to evangelize the world. Not only did the overawed spectators witness the Führer’s airplane descending slowly to earth through towering mountain ranges of cloud; not only was the tragic history they all shared invoked in the ceremony honoring the war dead during which, as Maximilian described it to us, Hitler and Hess and Himmler strode down the broad avenue lined, in straight serried ranks, with columns and companies created by the power of the new state out of a host of immovable German bodies, to the accompaniment of a funeral march which stirred the innermost soul of the entire nation; not only might one see warriors pledging themselves to die for the Fatherland, and the huge forests of flags mysteriously swaying as they moved away by torchlight into the dark—no, said Vera, Maximilian told us that a bird’s-eye view showed a city of white tents extending to the horizon, from which as day broke the Germans emerged singly, in couples, or in small groups, forming a silent procession and pressing ever closer together as they all went in the same direction, following, so it seemed, some higher bidding, on their way to the Promised Land at last after long years in the wilderness. It was only a few months after this experience of Maximilian’s in the Munich cinema that the Austrians were to be heard over the wireless, hundreds of thousands of them pouring into the Heldenplatz in Vienna, their shouts breaking over us like a flood tide for hours on end, said Vera. In Maximilian’s opinion, she told me, this collective paroxysm on the part of the Viennese crowds marked the watershed. It was still a sinister echo in our ears when, with summer hardly over, the first refugees arrived here in Prague, expelled from the now so-called Ostmark region after being robbed by their former fellow citizens of everything but a few schillings. In what they probably knew was the false hope of keeping their heads above water in a foreign country, they went from door to door as itinerant pedlars, offering for sale hairpins and slides, pencils and writing paper, ties and other items of haberdashery, just as their ancestors had once walked the countryside of Galicia, Hungary, and the Tyrol with packs on their backs. I remember, said Vera, Austerlitz added, one such hawker, a man called Saly Bleyberg, who had built up his own garage business in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna not far from the Praterstern during the difficult interwar years, and who when Agáta invited him in for a cup of coffee told us the most appalling tales of the despicable conduct of the Viennese: the methods used to force him to make over his business to a certain Herr Haselberger, the manner in which he was then cheated of the sale price, which was ridiculously low anyway, how he was robbed of his bank deposits and securities, how all his furniture and his Steyr car were appropriated, and how at last he, Saly Bleyberg and his family, sitting on their suitcases in the hall of the building where they lived, had been obliged to hear the drunken caretaker negotiating with the young couple, obviously just married, who had come to look at the now vacant flat. Although the story we heard from poor Bleyberg, who kept crumpling the handkerchief in his hand with helpless rage, was far worse than anything we had imagined, and although after the Munich Agreement the situation held out no hope at all, said Vera, Maximilian stayed in Prague throughout the winter, whether because of his work for the Party, which was now a matter of particular urgency, or because he refused, for as long as was humanly possible, to give up his belief that the law would protect a man. For her part, Agáta was not prepared to go to France ahead of Maximilian, although he had repeatedly advised her to leave, and so it was that your father, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, then in the utmost danger, did not leave until it was almost too late, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, by plane from Ruzyně to Paris. I still remember, said Vera, that when he said goodbye he was wearing a wonderful plum-colored double-breasted suit, and a black felt hat with a green band and a broad brim. Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up the Narodní a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going. What particularly upset us, so Vera remarked, said Austerlitz, was the instant change to driving on the right. It often made my heart miss a beat, she said, when I saw a car racing down the road on the wrong side, since it inevitably made me think that from now on we must live in a world turned upside down. Of course, Vera continued, it was much harder for Agáta than for me to manage under the new regime. Since the Germans had issued their decrees on the Jewish population, she could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of the tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event. Nor could she herself appear onstage anymore, and access to the banks of the Vltava and the parks and gardens she had loved so much was barred to her. All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world. The ever-extended list of bans—before long it was forbidden for Jews to walk on the pavement on the side of the road next to the park, to go into a laundry or dry cleaner’s, or to make a call from a public telephone—all of this, I still hear Vera telling me, said Austerlitz, soon brought Agáta to the brink of despair. I can see her now pacing up and down this room, said Vera, I can see her striking her forehead with the flat of her hand, and crying out, chanting the syllables one by one: I do not un der stand it! I do not un der stand it! I shall ne ver un der stand it!! Nonetheless, she went into the city as often as she could, applying to I don’t know how many or what authorities, she stood for hours in the sole post office which the forty thousand Jews in Prague were allowed to use, waiting to send a telegram; she made inquiries, pulled strings, left financial deposits, produced affidavits and guarantees, and when she came home she would sit up racking her brains until late into the night. But the more trouble she took, and the longer she went on trying, the further did any hope of her getting an emigration permit recede, so in the summer, when t
here was already talk of the forthcoming war and the likelihood of even harsher restrictions when it broke out, she finally decided, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that she would send me at least to England, having succeeded through the good offices of one of her theatrical friends in getting my name put down for one of the few children’s transports leaving Prague for London during those months. Vera remembered, said Austerlitz, that the happy excitement Agáta felt at this first successful outcome of her efforts was overshadowed by her grief and anxiety as she imagined how I would feel, a boy not yet five years old who had always led a sheltered life, on my long railway journey and then among strangers in a foreign country. On the other hand, said Vera, Agáta hoped that now the first step had been taken, some way for her to leave too would surely be found quite quickly, and then you could all be together in Paris. So she was torn between wishful thinking and her fear that she was doing something irresponsible and unforgivable, and who knows, Vera said to me, whether she might not have kept you with her after all had there been just a few more days left before you were to set off from Prague. I have only an indistinct, rather blurred picture of the moment of farewell at the Wilsonova Station, said Vera, adding, after a few moments’ reflection, that I had my things with me in a little leather suitcase, and food for the journey in a rucksack—un petit sac à dos avec quelques viatiques, said Austerlitz, those had been Vera’s exact words, summing up, as he now thought, the whole of his later life. Vera also remembered the twelve-year-old girl with the bandoneon to whose care they had entrusted me, a Charlie Chaplin comic bought at the last minute, the fluttering of white handkerchiefs like a flock of doves taking off into the air as the parents who were staying behind waved to their children, and her curious impression that the train, after moving off very slowly, had not really left at all, but in a kind of feint had rolled a little way out of the glazed hall before sinking into the ground. But from that day on Agáta was a changed woman, Vera continued, said Austerlitz. What she had preserved of her cheerfulness and confidence, in defiance of all difficulties, was now overcast by a depression which she was clearly unable to dispel. I think she did make one more attempt to buy her freedom, said Vera, but after that she almost never left the building, she shrank from opening the windows, she would sit motionless for hours in the blue velvet armchair in the darkest corner of the drawing room, or lie on the sofa with her hands over her face. She was simply waiting to see what happened next, and above all she was waiting for post from England and Paris. She had several addresses for Maximilian—a hotel in the rue de l’Odéon, a small rented flat near the Glacière Métro station, and a third place, said Vera, in a district I no longer remember—and she tormented herself by wondering whether at some crucial moment she had mixed up these addresses, so that it was her own fault if her correspondence had gone astray, while at the same time she feared that Maximilian’s letters to her had been detained by the security services on their arrival in Prague. And indeed the letterbox was always empty up to the winter of 1941, when Agáta was still living in the šporkova, so that as she said to me once, oddly, it was as if those messages in which we placed our last hopes were misdirected or swallowed up by the evil spirits abroad in the air all around us. It was only later, said Vera, that I realized how well this remark of Agáta’s conveyed the invisible terrors beneath which the city of Prague lay cowering at the time, only when I learned of the true extent of the perversion of the law under the Germans, the acts of violence they committed daily in the basement of the Petschek Palace, in the Pankrác Prison, and at the killing grounds out in Kobylisy. After ninety seconds in which to defend yourself to a judge you could be condemned to death for a trifle, some offense barely worth mentioning, the merest contravention of the regulations in force, and then you would be hanged immediately in the execution room next to the law court, where there was an iron rail running along the ceiling down which the lifeless bodies were pushed a little further as required. The bill for these cursory proceedings was sent to the relations of the hanged or guillotined victim, with the information that it could be settled in monthly installments. Although little hint of it made its way out at the time, fear of the Germans spread through the whole city like a creeping miasma. Agáta said it even drifted in through the closed doors and windows, taking one’s breath away. When I look back at the two years following the outbreak of the war, said Vera, it is as if at that time everything was caught in a vortex whirling downwards at ever-increasing speed. Bulletins came thick and fast over the wireless, read by the announcers in a curiously high-pitched tone of voice, as if forced out of the larynx: news of the never-ending exploits of the Wehrmacht, which had soon occupied the entire European continent, while its successive campaigns, with apparently conclusive logic, held out to the Germans the prospect of a vast world empire in which, thanks to the fact that they belonged to the chosen people, they would all be able to embark on the most glittering careers. I believe, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that even the last remaining German skeptics were overcome by a kind of euphoria, such as one feels at high altitude, in these years when victory followed upon victory, while we, the oppressed, lived below sea level, as it were, and had to watch as the SS pervaded the economy of the entire country, and one business firm after another was handed over to German trustees. They had even aryanized the fez and slipper factory in Sternberg. The means Agáta still had at her disposal were barely enough for the necessities. Her bank accounts had been frozen ever since she was obliged to send in an eight-page statement of her assets, under dozens of headings. She was also strictly forbidden to dispose of any valuables such as pictures or antiques, and I remember, said Vera, how she once showed me a passage in one of those proclamations issued by the occupying power stating that in the case of any contravention of this regulation, both the Jew concerned in the transaction and the person acquiring the property must expect the most severe of measures to be taken by the State Police. The Jew concerned in the transaction! Agáta had cried, adding: Really, the way these people write! It’s enough to make your head swim. I think it was in the late autumn of 1941, said Vera, that Agáta had to take her wireless, her gramophone and the records she loved so much, her binoculars and opera glasses, musical instruments, jewelry, furs, and the clothes Maximilian had left behind to the so-called Compulsory Collection Center. Because of some mistake she had made in complying with this order, she was sent to shovel snow on Ruzyně airfield on a freezing day—winter came very early that year, said Vera—and at three o’clock the next morning, in the deepest part of the night, the two envoys of the Israelite religious community whom she had been expecting for some time arrived with the news that Agáta must prepare to be taken away within six days. These messengers, as Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings, and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served. The pair spoke quietly to Agáta for some time, and gave her a sheaf of printed forms and instructions setting out everything down to the very smallest detail: where and when the person summoned must present herself, what items of clothing were to be brought—coat, raincoat, warm headgear, earmuffs, mittens, nightdress, underclothes, and so on—what articles of personal use it was advisable to bring, for instance sewing things, leather grease, a spirit stove, and candles; the weight of the main item of luggage, which was not to exceed fifty kilos; what else could be brought in the way of hand baggage and provisions; how the luggage was to be labeled, with name, destination, and the number allotted to her; the proviso that all the attached forms were to be filled in and signed, that it was not permitted to bring cushions or other articles of furnishing, or to make rucksacks and traveling bags out of Persian rugs, winter coats, or other valuable remnants of fabric; and furthermore that matches, lighters, and smoking were prohibited at the embarkation point and thereafter in general, and all orders issued
by the official authorities were to be followed to the letter in every contingency. Agáta was unable, as I could see for myself, said Vera, to follow these nauseatingly phrased directives; instead, she simply flung a few wholly impractical items into a bag at random, like someone going away for the weekend, so that finally, difficult as it was for me and guilty as it made me feel, I did her packing while she simply stood at the window, turning away from me to look out at the empty street. Early in the morning of the appointed day we set off while it was still dark, with her luggage strapped to a toboggan, and without a word we made the long journey through the snow spinning down around us, along the left bank of the Vltava, past the Baumgarten, and further out still to the Trade Fair Palace at Holešovice. The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning. We waited there in the crowd of those who had been summoned, a silent assembly stirred only, now and then, by an apprehensive murmur running through it. There were men and there were women, families with young children and solitary figures, there were the elderly and the infirm, ordinary folk and those who had been well-to-do, all of them, in accordance with the instructions they had received, with their transport numbers round their necks on pieces of string. Agáta soon asked me to leave her. When we parted she embraced me and said: Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for me sometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much. If you look into the dark water of the pools, perhaps one of these days you will see my face. Well, said Vera, so then I went home. It took me over two hours to walk back to the šporkova. I tried to think where Agáta might be now, whether she was still waiting at the entrance or was already inside the Trade Fair precinct. I learned only years later, from one who had survived the ordeal, what it was like there. The people being taken away were herded into an unheated exhibition hall, a great barn-like building which was freezing in the middle of winter. It was a bleak place where, under faint, glaucous lamplight, the utmost confusion reigned. Many of those who had just arrived had to have their baggage searched, and were obliged to hand over money, watches, and other valuables to a Hauptscharführer called Fiedler who was feared for his brutality. A great mound of silver cutlery lay on a table, along with fox furs and Persian lamb capes. Personal details were taken down, questionnaires handed out, and identity papers stamped EVACUATED or GHETTOIZED. The German officials and their Czech and Jewish assistants walked busily to and fro, and there was much shouting and cursing, and blows as well. Those who were to leave had to stay in the places allotted to them. Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon. They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early one morning when scarcely anyone was out and about, they were marched under guard to nearby Holešovice railway station, where it took almost another three hours to load them on the trucks. Later, said Vera, I often walked out to Holešovice, to Stromovka Park and the Trade Fair precinct. On these occasions I usually visited the lapidarium installed there in the sixties and spent hours looking at the mineral samples in the glass cases—pyrite crystals, deep green Siberian malachites, specimens of Bohemian mica, granite, quartz, and limestone of an isabelline yellow hue—wondering at the nature of the foundations on which our world is built. On the very day when Agáta had been forced to leave her flat, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, a man from the Trusteeship Center for Requisitioned Goods came to the šporkova and put a paper seal on the doors. Then, between Christmas and the New Year, a troop of very shady characters arrived to clear away everything that had been left behind, the furniture, the lamps and candelabra, the carpets and curtains, the books and musical scores, the clothes from the wardrobes and drawers, the bed linen, pillows, eiderdowns, blankets, china and kitchen utensils, the pot plants and umbrellas, even the bottled pears and cherries which had been standing forgotten in the cellar for years, and the remaining potatoes. They took everything, down to the very last spoon, off to one of the over fifty depots, where these abandoned objects were itemized separately with that thoroughness peculiar to the Germans, were valued, then washed, cleaned or mended as necessary, and finally stored, row upon row, on specially made shelves. Last of all, said Vera, a pest control officer turned up in the šporkova. He struck me as a particularly sinister figure, with an unpleasant look in his eye which went right through me. To this day he sometimes haunts my dreams, in which I see him surrounded by clouds of poisonous white smoke as he goes about fumigating the rooms.—When Vera had come to the end of her story, so Austerlitz continued that morning in Alderney Street, she handed me, after a long pause in which the silence in the šporkova flat seemed to grow deeper with every breath we two small photographs measuring about three by four inches from the little occasional table beside her chair. She had found them by chance the previous evening inside one of the fifty-five carmine-red volumes of Balzac which she had happened to pick up, she did not know why. Vera said she could not remember unfastening the glass doors and taking the book off the shelf where it stood with its companions, she merely saw herself sitting here in this armchair and—for the first time since her late twenties, a point on which she laid special emphasis—turning the pages which tell the story of the great injustice suffered by Colonel Chabert. How the two pictures had slipped between the leaves was a mystery to her, said Vera. Perhaps Agáta had borrowed the small volume while she was still living here in the šporkova, in the last weeks before the Germans marched in. In any case, one of the photographs showed the stage of a provincial theater, perhaps in Reichenau or Olmütz or one of the other towns where Agáta sometimes performed before she was engaged to appear in Prague. At first glance, said Austerlitz, Vera said she had thought the two figures in the bottom left-hand corner were Agáta and Maximilian—they were so tiny that it was impossible to make them out well—but then of course she noticed that they were other people, perhaps the impresario, or a conjuror and his woman assistant. She had wondered, said Vera, what kind of play or opera had been staged in front of this alarming backdrop, and because of the high mountain range and the wild forest background she thought it might have been Wilhelm Tell, or La Sonnambula, or Ibsen’s last play.