by W. G. Sebald
The idea I had formed in my mind was of a mighty complex rising high above the level country, but in fact Terezín lies so far down in the damp lowlands around the confluence of the Eger and the Elbe that, as I read later, there is nothing to be seen of the town, even from the hills around Leitmeritz or indeed from its immediate vicinity, except the chimney of the brewery and the church tower. The brick walls built in the eighteenth century to a star-shaped ground plan, undoubtedly by serf labor, rise from a broad moat and stand not much higher than the outlying fields. In the course of time, moreover, all kinds of shrubs and bushes have covered the former glacis and the grass-grown ramparts, giving the impression that Terezín is not so much a fortified town as one half-hidden and sunk into the marshy ground of the floodplain. At any rate, as I made my way that morning to Terezín along the main road from Lovosice, I did not know until the last minute how close I already was to my journey’s end. Several sycamores and chestnuts, their bark blackened by rain, still obstructed my view when I found myself standing among the façades of the old garrison buildings, and a few more steps brought me out on the central square, which was surrounded by a double avenue of trees.
From the first, I felt that the most striking aspect of the place was its emptiness, said Austerlitz, something which to this day I still find incomprehensible. I knew from Vera that for many years now Terezín had been an ordinary town again. Despite this, it was almost a quarter of an hour before I saw the first human being on the other side of the square, a bent figure toiling very slowly forward and leaning on a stick, yet when I took my eye off it for a moment the figure had suddenly gone. Otherwise I met no one all morning in the straight, deserted streets of Terezín, except for a mentally disturbed man who crossed my path among the lime trees of the park with the fountain, telling I have no idea what tale in a kind of broken German while frantically waving his arms, before he too, still clutching the hundred-crown note I had given him, seemed to be swallowed up by the earth, as they say, even as he was running off. Although the sense of abandonment in this fortified town, laid out like Campanella’s ideal sun state to a strictly geometrical grid, was extraordinarily oppressive, yet more so was the forbidding aspect of the silent façades. Not a single curtain moved behind their blind windows, however often I glanced up at them. I could not imagine, said Austerlitz, who might inhabit these desolate buildings, or if anyone lived there at all, although on the other hand I had noticed that long rows of dustbins with large numbers on them in red paint were ranged against the walls of the back yards.
What I found most uncanny of all, however, were the gates and doorways of Terezín, all of them, as I thought I sensed, obstructing access to a darkness never yet penetrated, a darkness in which I thought, said Austerlitz, there was no more movement at all apart from the whitewash peeling off the walls and the spiders spinning their threads, scuttling on crooked legs across the floorboards, or hanging expectantly in their webs.
Not long ago, on the verge of waking from sleep, I found myself looking into the interior of one of these Terezín barracks. It was filled from floor to ceiling with layer upon layer of the cobwebs woven by those ingenious creatures. I still remember how, in my half-conscious state, I tried to hold fast to my powdery gray dream image, which sometimes quivered in a slight breath of air, and to discover what it concealed, but it only dissolved all the more and was overlaid by the memory, surfacing in my mind at the same time, of the shining glass in the display windows of the ANTIKOS BAZAR on the west side of the town square, where I had stood for a long time around midday in what proved to be the vain hope that someone might arrive and open this curious emporium. As far as I could see, said Austerlitz, the ANTIKOS BAZAR is the only shop of any kind in Terezín apart from a tiny grocery store. It occupies the entire façade of one of the largest buildings, and I think its vaults reach back a long way as well.
Of course I could see nothing but the items on display in the windows, which can have amounted to only a small part of the junk heaped up inside the shop. But even these four still lifes obviously composed entirely at random, which appeared to have grown quite naturally into the black branches of the lime trees standing around the square and reflected in the glass of the windows, exerted such a power of attraction on me that it was a long time before I could tear myself away from staring at the hundreds of different objects, my forehead pressed against the cold window, as if one of them or their relationship with each other must provide an unequivocal answer to the many questions I found it impossible to ask in my mind. What was the meaning of the festive white lace tablecloth hanging over the back of the ottoman, and the armchair with its worn brocade cover? What secret lay behind the three brass mortars of different sizes, which had about them the suggestion of an oracular utterance, or the cut-glass bowls, ceramic vases, and earthenware jugs, the tin advertising sign bearing the words Theresienstädter Wasser, the little box of seashells, the miniature barrel organ, the globe-shaped paperweights with wonderful marine flowers swaying inside their glassy spheres, the model ship (some kind of corvette under full sail), the oakleaf-embroidered jacket of light, pale, summery linen, the staghorn buttons, the outsize Russian officer’s cap and the olive-green uniform tunic with gilt epaulettes that went with it, the fishing rod, the hunter’s bag, the Japanese fan, the endless landscape painted round a lampshade in fine brushstrokes, showing a river running quietly through perhaps Bohemia or perhaps Brazil?
And then there was the stuffed squirrel, already moth-eaten here and there, perched on the stump of a branch in a showcase the size of a shoebox, which had its beady button eye implacably fixed on me, and whose Czech name—veverka—I now recalled like the name of a long-lost friend. What, I asked myself, said Austerlitz, might be the significance of the river never rising from any source, never flowing out into any sea but always back into itself, what was the meaning of veverka, the squirrel forever perched in the same position, or of the ivory-colored porcelain group of a hero on horseback turning to look back, as his steed rears up on its hindquarters, in order to raise up with his outstretched left arm an innocent girl already bereft of her last hope, and to save her from a cruel fate not revealed to the observer?
They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementoes stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them. As I waited outside the bazaar, Austerlitz resumed after a little while, a light rain had begun to fall, and since neither the proprietor of the shop, whose name was given as Augustýn Němeček, nor anyone else was in evidence, I finally walked on, going up and down a few streets until suddenly, on the northeast corner of the town square, I found myself outside the so-called Ghetto Museum, which I had overlooked before. I climbed the steps and entered the lobby, where a lady of uncertain age in a lilac blouse, her hair waved in an old-fashioned style, sat behind a kind of cash desk. She put down the crochet work she was doing and leaned slightly forward to give me a ticket. When I asked if I was the only visitor today she said that the museum had only recently opened and not many people from outside the town came to see it, particularly at this time of year and in such weather. And the people of Terezín didn’t come anyway, she added, picking up the white handkerchief she was edging with loops like flower petals. So I went round the exhibition by myself, said Austerlitz, through the rooms on the mezzanine floor and the floor above, stood in front of the display panels, sometimes skimming over the captions, sometimes reading them letter by letter, stared at the photographic reproductions, could not believe my eyes, and several times had to turn away and look out of a window into the garden behind the building, having for the first time acquired some idea of the history of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now, in this place, surrounded me on all sides. I studied the maps of the Gre
ater German Reich and its protectorates, which had never before been more than blank spaces in my otherwise well-developed sense of topography, I traced the railway lines running through them, felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the National Socialists, by the evidence of their mania for order and purity, which was put into practice on a vast scale through measures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal. I was confronted with incontrovertible proof of the setting up of a forcedlabor system throughout Central Europe, and learned of the deliberate wastage and discarding of the work slaves themselves, of the origins and places of death of the victims, the routes by which they were taken to what destinations, what names they had borne in life and what they and their guards looked like. I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum from room to room and back again, ignorant as I feared I had been through my own fault, far exceeded my comprehension. I saw pieces of luggage brought to Terezín by the internees from Prague and Pilsen, Würzburg and Vienna, Kufstein and Karlsbad and countless other places; the items such as handbags, belt buckles, clothes brushes, and combs which they had made in the various workshops; meticulously worked out projects and production plans for the agricultural exploitation of the open areas behind the ramparts and on the glacis, where oats and hemp, hops and pumpkins and maize were to be grown on plots of land meticulously parceled out. I saw balance sheets, registers of the dead, lists of every imaginable kind, and endless rows of numbers and figures, which must have served to reassure the administrators that nothing ever escaped their notice. And whenever I think of the museum in Terezín now, said Austerlitz, I see the framed ground plan of the star-shaped fortifications, color-washed in soft tones of gray-brown for Maria Theresia, her Imperial Highness in Vienna who had commissioned it, and fitting neatly into the folds of the surrounding terrain, the model of a world made by reason and regulated in all conceivable respects. This impregnable fortress has never been besieged, not even by the Prussians in 1866, but throughout the nineteenth century—if one disregards the fact that a considerable number of political prisoners of the Habsburg empire pined away in the casemates of one of its outworks—remained a quiet garrison for two or three regiments and some two thousand civilians throughout the nineteenth century, somewhat out of the way, a town with yellow-painted walls, galleried courtyards, well-clipped trees, bakeries, beerhouses, casinos, soldiers’ quarters, armories, bandstand concerts, occasional forays for the purpose of military maneuvers, officers’ wives who were bored to death, and service regulations which, it was believed, would never change for all eternity. When, towards the end of the day, the museum guardian came up to me and indicated that she would soon have to close, said Austerlitz, I had just been reading, several times over, a note on one of the display panels, to the effect that in the middle of December 1942, and thus at the very time when Agáta came to Terezín, some sixty thousand people were shut up together in the ghetto, a built-up area of one square kilometer at the most, and a little later, when I was out in the deserted town square again, it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they had never been taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and basements and attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down the stairs, looking out of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and alleys, and even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air, hatched with gray as it was by the fine rain. With this picture before my eyes I boarded the old-fashioned bus which had appeared out of nowhere, and stopped by the pavement directly in front of me a few paces from the entrance to the museum. It was one of those buses which travel from the country into the capital. The driver gave me change for a hundred-crown note without a word, and I remember that I held it clutched firmly in my hand all the way to Prague. Outside, the darkening Bohemian fields passed by, hop poles, deep brown fields, flat, empty country all around. The bus was very overheated. I felt drops of perspiration break out on my forehead and a constriction in my chest. Once, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the other passengers, without exception, had fallen asleep, leaning and sprawling at awkward angles in their seats. Some had their heads dropped forward, others sideways or tipped back. Several were snoring quietly. Only the driver looked straight ahead at the ribbon of road gleaming in the rain. As so often when one is traveling south, I had the impression of going steadily downhill, particularly when we reached the suburbs of Prague and it seemed as if we were descending a kind of ramp into a labyrinth through which we moved very slowly, now this way and now that, until I had lost all sense of direction. When we reached the Prague bus station, an overcrowded traffic junction at this early hour of the evening, I therefore set out the wrong way through the great throng of people waiting there or getting in and out of buses. There were so many of them streaming towards me out in the street, said Austerlitz, most of them carrying large bags and with pale, sad faces, that I thought they could only be coming away from the city center. Only later did I see from the map that I had reached the center not in a more or less straight line, as I thought at first, but by way of a wide detour taking me almost to the Vyšehrad, and then through the New Town and along the banks of the Vltava back to my hotel on Kampa Island. It was already late by the time I lay down, exhausted from the day’s walking, and tried to fall asleep by listening to the water rushing down over the weir outside my window. But whether I kept my eyes wide open or closed, all through the night I saw pictures from Terezín and the Ghetto Museum, the bricks of the fortification walls, the display window of the Bazaar, the endless lists of names, a leather suitcase bearing a double sticker from the Hotels Bristol in Salzburg and Vienna, the closed gates I had photographed, the grass growing between the cobblestones, a pile of briquettes outside a cellar entrance, the squirrel’s glass eye and the two forlorn figures of Agáta and Vera pulling the laden toboggan through the driving snow to the Trade Fair building at Holešovice. Only towards morning did I sleep briefly, but even then, in the deepest unconsciousness, the flow of pictures did not cease but instead condensed into a nightmare in which, from where I do not know, said Austerlitz, the north Bohemian town of Dux appeared to me situated in the middle of a devastated plain, a place of which all I had previously known was that Casanova spent the last years of his life there in Count Waldstein’s castle writing his memoirs, a number of mathematical and esoteric tracts, and his five-volume futuristic novel Icosameron. In my dream I saw the old roué shrunk to the size of a boy, surrounded by the gold-stamped rows of books in Count Waldstein’s library of more than forty thousand volumes, bending over his writing desk alone on a bleak November afternoon. He had taken off his powdered wig, and his own sparse hair was wafting above his head in a little white cloud, like a sign of the dissolution of his corporeal being. He wrote on and on, his left shoulder slightly raised. There was nothing to be heard but the scratching of his pen, which stopped only when the writer looked up for a couple of seconds, and his watery eyes, already half blind for long-distance vision, sought what little brightness was still left in the sky above the park of Dux. On the other side of the enclosed land, in deep darkness, lay the whole region extending from Teplice to Most and Chomutov. Over to the north, from end to end of the horizon, stood the black wall of the Grenzmark mountains, and in front of them, along their foothills, the torn and ravaged land, with slopes and terraces which dropped far below what had formerly been the surface of the earth. Where roads had passed over firm ground, where human beings had lived, foxes had run across country and birds of many kinds had flown from bush to bush, now there was nothing but empty space, and at the bottom of it stones and gravel and stagnant water, untouched even by the natural movement of the air. The shadowy forms of power stations with their glowing furnaces drifted like ships in the somber air: chalk-colored buildings like blocks, cooling towers with jagged rims, tall chimneys above which motionless plumes of smoke stood white against
the sickly colors streaking the western sky. A few stars showed only on the pallid, nocturnal side of the firmament, sooty, smoking lights extinguished one by one, leaving scab-like traces in the orbits through which they have always moved. To the south, in a broad semicircle, rose the cones of the extinct Bohemian volcanoes, which I wished in my nightmare would erupt and cover everything around with black dust.—Not until around half-past two the next day, when I had to some degree pulled myself together again, did I go from Kampa Island to the šporkova to pay what would be my last visit for the time being, Austerlitz continued. I had already told Vera that I must retrace my journey from Prague to London by train, all the way across Germany, a country unknown to me, but that then I would soon come back and perhaps take a flat somewhere near her for a few months. It was one of those radiant spring days when the weather is clear as glass. Vera was complaining of a dull pain behind her eyes which had been troubling her since early that morning, and she asked me to pull the curtains over the windows on the sunny side of the room. Leaning back in her red velvet armchair in the gloom, with her tired eyelids closed, she listened as I told her what I had seen in Terezín. I also asked Vera about the Czech word for a squirrel, and after a while, with a smile spreading slowly over her beautiful face, she said it was veverka. And then, said Austerlitz, Vera told me how in autumn we would often stand by the upper enclosure wall of the Schönborn Garden to watch the squirrels burying their treasures. Whenever we came home afterwards, I had to read aloud from your favorite book about the changing seasons, said Vera, even though you knew it by heart from the first line to the last, and she added that I never tired of the winter pictures in particular, scenes showing hares, deer, and partridges transfixed with astonishment as they stared at the ground covered with newly fallen snow, and Vera said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde si schovaly zásoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end? It was six years after their farewell outside the gates of the Trade Fair in Holešovice, so Vera continued, that she learned how Agáta was sent east in September 1944 with one and a half thousand others who had been interned in Terezín. For a long time after that, said Vera, she herself had been almost incapable of thinking of Agáta, of what must have become of her, and of her own life continuing into a pointless future. For weeks she was hardly in her right mind, she had felt a kind of dragging outside her body, she had tried to pick up broken threads and could not believe that everything had really happened as it did. None of her endless attempts later to find out my whereabouts in England or my father’s in France had produced any results. Whatever she tried, it was as if all traces were lost in the sand, for at the time, with an army of censors causing havoc in the postal services, it often took months to get an answer from abroad. Perhaps, Vera surmised, said Austerlitz, it would have been different if she could have turned in person to the appropriate authorities, but she lacked both the opportunity and the means to do so. And in this way the years had raced by, seeming in retrospect like a single leaden day. She had indeed gone into the teaching profession and did what was necessary to maintain herself, but almost all her feelings had been extinguished, and she had not truly breathed since that time. Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive. Such remarks of Vera’s were often followed by a long silence, said Austerlitz, as if neither of us knew what to say, and the hours passed by almost imperceptibly in the darkened flat in the šporkova. Towards evening, when I said goodbye to Vera, holding her weightless hands in mine, she suddenly remembered how, on the day of my departure from the Wilsonova Station, Agáta had turned to her when the train had disappeared from view, and said: We left from here for Marienbad only last summer. And now—where will we be going now? This reminiscence, which I did not fully take in at first, was soon occupying my mind so much that I made a call to Vera from the hotel on the island that evening, although in the normal way I never use the telephone. Yes, she said, in a voice very faint with weariness, yes, in the summer of 1938 we all went to Marienbad together, Agáta, Maximilian, Vera herself, and me. We had spent three wonderful, almost blissful weeks there. The overweight or underweight spa guests, moving at a curiously slow pace through the grounds with their drinking glasses, radiated an extraordinary peacefulness, as Agáta once remarked in passing. We stayed at the Osborne-Balmoral boardinghouse behind the Palace Hotel. In the morning we generally went to the baths, and we took long walks in the country around Marienbad in the afternoons. I had retained no memory at all of that summer holiday when I was just four years old, said Austerlitz, and perhaps that was why when I was in that very place later, in Marienbad at the end of August 1972, I felt nothing but blind terror in the face of the better turn my life should have taken at that time. Marie de Verneuil, with whom I had been in correspondence since the time I spent in Paris, had invited me to accompany her on a visit to Bohemia, where she had to carry out some research for her studies on the architectural history of the spas of Europe, and I think I may now say, added Austerlitz, that she also hoped to try to liberate me from my self-inflicted isolation. She had arranged everything to perfection. Her cousin Frédéric Félix, attaché to the French embassy in Prague, had sent an enormous Tatra limousine to meet us at the airport and take us straight to Marienbad. We sat in the deeply upholstered back of the car for two or three hours as it drove west through the empty countryside, on a road which ran perfectly straight for long stretches of our journey, sometimes dipping down into valleys, then climbing again to extended plateaux over which one could see into the far distance, to the point, said Marie, where the wastes of Bohemia approach the Baltic. Sometimes we drove past low ranges of hills covered with blue forest, standing out sharp as a saw blade against the uniformly gray sky. There were almost no other vehicles. Only occasionally did a small car of some kind come towards us, and now and then we overtook a truck crawling up the long gradients and trailing behind it great clouds of exhaust fumes. But ever since leaving Prague airport we had been followed by two uniformed motorcyclists who always preserved the same distance. They wore leather crash helmets and black goggles with their tunics and breeches, and their carbines were slung at an angle over their right shoulders. These two escorts made me very uneasy, said Austerlitz, particularly when we went over the top of one of the low hills and down again and they vanished from sight for a while, only to reappear outlined even more menacingly against the light. Marie, who was not so easily intimidated, merely laughed and said that the two shadowy riders were obviously the guard of honor specially provided by the čSSR for visitors from France. As we approached Marienbad along a road running further and further downhill between wooded slopes, darkness had fallen, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that a slight sense of disquiet brushed me as we emerged from the firs growing all the way down to the outlying houses and slid into the town, which was sparsely illuminated by a few street lamps. The car stopped outside the Palace Hotel. Marie exchanged a few words with the chauffeur as he took out our luggage, and then we were in the foyer, which was made to look double its size, so to speak, by a row of tall mirrors along the walls. The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight. It was some while before the reception clerk at his desk in a cramped booth looked up from what he was reading and turned to his late-come guests with a barely audible murmur of Dobrý večer. This remarkably thin man—the first thing you noticed about him was that although he could not have been much over forty his forehead was wrinkled in fan-like folds above the root of his nose—went through the necessary formalities without another word, very
slowly, almost as if he were moving in a denser atmosphere than ours, asked to see our visas, looked at our passports and his register, made an entry of some length on the squared paper of a school exercise book in laborious handwriting, gave us a questionnaire to fill in, looked in a drawer for our key, and finally, ringing a bell, summoned as it seemed from nowhere a porter with a bent back, who was wearing a mouse-gray nylon coat that came down to his knees and, like the clerk at the reception desk, appeared to be afflicted by a chronic lethargy which incapacitated his limbs. When he preceded us up to the third floor with our two lightweight suitcases—the paternoster lift, Marie had pointed out to me as soon as we entered the foyer, had obviously been out of order for a very long time—he found it increasingly hard to climb the stairs and, like a mountaineer negotiating the last difficult ridge before attaining the summit, he had to stop several times for a rest, whereupon we too waited for a while a couple of steps below him. On the way up we met not a living soul except for another member of the hotel staff who, dressed in the same gray coat as his colleague and perhaps worn, I thought to myself, said Austerlitz, by all the employees of the state-owned spa hotels, was sitting asleep in a chair on the top landing with his head sunk forward, and a tin tray of broken glass on the floor beside him. The room unlocked for us was Number 38—a large room resembling a salon. The walls were covered with burgundy-red brocade wallpaper, very faded in places. The portières dated from a past time as well, and so did the bed standing in an alcove with its white pillows stacked at a curiously steep angle. Marie immediately began settling in, opened all the wardrobes, went into the bathroom, turned on the taps and the huge old-fashioned shower to make sure they were working, and inspected the whole place very closely. It was odd, she said at last, but she had the impression that although everything else was in perfect order the writing desk had not been dusted for years. What can be the explanation, she asked me, said Austerlitz, of this remarkable phenomenon? Do ghosts haunt the desk, I wonder? I don’t remember what I replied, said Austerlitz, but I do recall that as we sat together by the window for a couple of hours that evening Marie told me a great deal about the history of the spa, of the forests which still covered the valley floor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the building of the first neo-classical houses and hotels set haphazard on the slopes, and the subsequent rapid rise in the fortunes of the resort. Architects, masons, decorators, tin- and locksmiths, and stucco workers came from Prague and Vienna and from all the corners of the Empire, many of them from as far afield as the Veneto. One of Prince Lobkowitz’s court gardeners began turning what had once been woodland into a landscaped park in the English style, planted rare and native trees, laid out lawns surrounded by bushes and shrubs, avenues, arbored walks, and pavilions from which to admire the view. More and prouder hotels constantly rose from the ground, and so did assembly rooms, baths, reading rooms, a concert hall, and a theater where all manner of eminent artistes were soon appearing. In 1873 the great cast-iron colonnade was built, and by now Marienbad was one of the most fashionable of European resorts. Marie claimed—and here, said Austerlitz, she launched, with her strong sense of the comical, into a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms—Marie claimed that the mineral waters and particularly the so-called Auschowitz Springs had gained a great reputation for curing the obesity then so common among the middle classes, as well as digestive disturbances, sluggishness of the intestinal canal and other stoppages of the lower abdomen, irregular menstruation, cirrhosis of the liver, disorders of bile secretion, gout, hypochondriacal spleen, diseases of the kidneys, the bladder, and the urinary system, glandular swellings and scrofulous deformities, not to mention weakness of the nervous and muscular systems, fatigue, trembling of the limbs, paralysis, mucous and bloody fluxes, unsightly eruptions on the skin, and practically every other medical disorder known to the human race. I can just see them in my mind’s eye, said Marie, a set of very corpulent men disregarding their doctors’ advice and giving themselves up to the pleasures of the table, which even at a spa were lavish at the time, in order to suppress, by dint of their increasing girth, the anxiety for the security of their social position constantly stirring within them, and I see other patients, most of them ladies and rather pale and sallow already, deep in their own thoughts as they walk along the winding paths from one of the little temples which house fountains to the next, or else in elegiac mood, watching the play of the clouds moving over the narrow valley from the viewing points of the Amalienhöhe or Schloss Miramont. The rare sense of happiness that I felt as I listened to my companion talking, said Austerlitz, paradoxically enough gave me the idea that I myself, like the guests staying in Marienbad a hundred years ago, had contracted an insidious illness, and together with that idea came the hope that I was now beginning to be cured. Indeed, I had never in my life passed over the threshold into sleep more securely than on that first night I spent with Marie. I listened to her regular breathing, and saw her beautiful face next to me every so often for a split second in the summer lightning that flashed across the sky. Then the rain fell steadily outside, the white curtains blew into the room, and as my mind became gradually submerged I felt, like a slight easing behind my forehead, the belief rise within me that I had found release at last. But nothing came of it. I woke before dawn with such an abysmal sense of distress that without even being able to look at Marie I sat up and, like a man seasick, had to perch on the edge of the bed. I had dreamed that one of the hotel servants brought us a drink of a virulent green color for breakfast on a tin tray, with a French newspaper bearing an article on the front page which held forth on the necessity of reforming the spas, speaking several times of the sad lot of the hotel employees qui portent, so my dream newspaper put it, said Austerlitz, ces longues blouses grises comme en portent les quincailliers. The rest of the newspaper consisted almost entirely of death announcements the size of postage stamps, in tiny print which I could decipher only with great difficulty. The announcements were not just in French but also in German, Polish, and Dutch. I still remember, said Austerlitz, Frederieke van Wincklmann, whose death notice said that she had kalm en rustig van ons heengegaan, I remember the strange word rouwkamer and the information that De bloemen worden na de crematieplechtigheid neergelegd aan de voet van het Indisch Monument te Den Haag. I had gone over to the window, where I looked down the main street, still wet with rain, and saw the grand hotels ranged in a semicircle rising to the heights, the Pacifik, the Atlantic, the Metropole, the Polonia and Bohemia with their rows of balconies, their corner turrets and roof ridges emerging from the morning mist like oceangoing steamers from a dark sea. At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life. Later, on a walk through the deserted town and up to the fountain colonnade, I kept feeling as if someone else were walking beside me, or as if something had brushed against me. Every new view that opened out before us as we turned a corner, every façade, every flight of steps looked to me both familiar and utterly alien. I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie, not on this first walk we took through the deserted park nor in the late afternoon, when we sat in the dimly lit kavárna of the Město Moskva under a picture of pink water lilies measuring at least four square yards. I remember, said Austerlitz, that we ordered an ice cream, or rather, as it turned out, a confection resembling an ice cream, a plaster-like substance tasting of potato starch and notable chiefly for the fact that even after more than an hour it did not melt. Apart from us the only customers in the Město Moskva were two old gentlemen playing chess at one of the tables at the back. The waiter who was standing by the net curtains, which were discolored with smoke, his hands behind his back and looking out, lost in thought, at the rubbish dump overgrown
with giant hogweed on the other side of the road, was himself advanced in age. His white hair and moustache were carefully trimmed, and although he too wore one of those mouse-gray nylon coats it was easy to imagine him in deep black, well-cut tails, with a velvet bow tie above a starched shirtfront radiant with supernatural cleanliness, wearing shiny patent-leather shoes which reflected the lamplight of a grand hotel lobby. When he brought Marie a flat pack of forty Cuban cigarettes displaying a pretty palm-frond motif, and then gave her a light with an elegantly executed gesture, I could see that she greatly admired him. The Cuban tobacco smoke hung in blue drifts in the air between us, and some time went by before Marie asked what was in my mind, why I was so abstracted, so lost in thought; how could I have lapsed so suddenly from the happy mood which she had sensed in me yesterday? And all I could say was that I didn’t know. I think, said Austerlitz, I tried to explain that something or other unknown wrenched at my heart here in Marienbad, something very obvious like an ordinary name or a term which one cannot remember for the sake of anyone or anything in the world. I do not now recall in detail how we spent those few days in Marienbad, said Austerlitz. I know that I often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the retiring rooms, which did me good in one way but in another may have weakened the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory. Once we went to a concert at the Gogol Theater, where a Russian pianist called Bloch played the Papillons and Kinderszenen to an audience of half a dozen. On the way back to the hotel Marie spoke, almost as a warning, so it seemed to me, said Austerlitz, of the clouding of Schumann’s mind as his madness came on and how at last, in the middle of carnival crowds in Düsseldorf, he took a leap over the parapet of the bridge into the icy waters of the Rhine, from which he was pulled out by two fishermen. He lived for a number of years after that, said Marie, in a private asylum for the mentally deranged near Bonn or Bad Godesberg, where he was visited by Clara and the young Brahms at intervals, and since it was impossible to converse with him anymore, withdrawn from the world as he was and humming tunelessly to himself, they generally contented themselves with looking into his room for a while through a small trap in the door. As I listened to Marie and tried to imagine poor Schumann in his Bad Godesberg cell I had another picture constantly before my eyes, that of the pigeon loft we had passed on an excursion to Königswart. Like the country estate to which it belonged, this dovecote, which may have dated from the Metternich period, was in an advanced state of decay. The floor inside the brick walls was covered with pigeon droppings compressed under their own weight, yet already over two feet high, a hard, desiccated mass on which lay the bodies of some of the birds who had fallen from their niches, mortally sick, while their companions, surviving in a kind of senile dementia, cooed at one another in tones of quiet complaint in the darkness under the roof, and a few downy feathers, spinning round in a little whirlwind, slowly sank through the air. The torment inherent in both these images that came into my mind in Marienbad, the mad Schumann and the pigeons immured in that place of horror, made it impossible for me to attain even the lowest step on the way to self-knowledge. On the final day of our visit, Austerlitz continued at last, in the evening and as if to say goodbye, we walked through the park and down to the Auschowitz Springs. There is a prettily built and fully glazed pump room there, all painted white inside. In this pump room, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, where, apart from the regular splashing of the water, silence reigned entirely, Marie moved closer to me and asked whether I had remembered that tomorrow was my birthday.