Austerlitz

by W. G. Sebald

  Since that time, which, as I told myself while attempting to decipher, through the sparse stems of the asparagus fern, the letters forming the words morts en déportation, was now half a century ago, since that time, said Austerlitz, not much more than a dozen years had passed before I moved into Amélie Cerf’s apartment in the rue Émile Zola with my few belongings. What, I wondered, are twelve or thirteen such years, if not a single moment of unalterable pain? Was Amélie Cerf, whom I remember as physically almost nonexistent, perhaps the last surviving member of her tribe? Was there no one left to put up a memorial to her in the family mausoleum? Did she ever come to lie in that tomb at all, or did she dissolve into the empty air like Hugo and Lucie?

  As for myself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. Without the slightest hesitation, and never making any corrections, he filled in one after another of his index cards in tiny copperplate handwriting, subsequently setting them out in front of him in meticulous order. Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-red chimneys, the bright and icy blue sky, and the snow-white metal weathervane with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure of the sky itself. The reflections in the old glass panes were slightly irregular or undulating, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that at the sight of them, for some reason I could not understand, tears came to my eyes. It was on the same day, added Austerlitz, that Marie de Verneuil, who was working in the records department too and must have noticed my strange fit of melancholy, pushed a note over to me asking me to join her for a cup of coffee. In the state I was in at the time I did not stop to reflect on the unconventionality of her conduct, but nodded in silent acceptance of her invitation and went out with her, almost obediently, one might say, said Austerlitz, downstairs, across the inner courtyard, and through the library gates, down several of the streets so full of pleasant air that fresh and somehow festive morning, and over to the Palais-Royal, where we sat for a long time under the arcades beside a shop window in which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, hundreds and hundreds of tin soldiers in the brightly colored uniforms of the Napoleonic army were drawn up in marching order and battle formation. On that first encounter, and indeed later, Marie told me very little about herself and her background, perhaps because she came from a very distinguished family, while as she probably guessed I was from nowhere, so to speak. Once we had discovered our common interests, our conversation in the café under the arcade, during which Marie alternately ordered peppermint tea and vanilla ice cream, turned mainly on subjects of architectural history, including, as I still remember very clearly, said Austerlitz, a paper mill in the Charente which Marie had visited with a cousin of hers not long before and which by her account of it was one of the strangest places she had ever seen. This enormous building, made of oak beams and sometimes groaning under its own weight, said Marie, stands half hidden among trees and bushes on the bend of a river with waters of a deep, almost unnatural green. Inside the mill two brothers, each proficient in his own skills, one of whom had a squint and the other a crooked shoulder, turn great masses of soaked paper and rags of fabric into clean sheets of blank paper, which are then dried on the racks of a large airing loft at the top of the mill. You are surrounded by a quiet twilight there, said Marie, you see the light of day outside through cracks in the slatted blinds, you hear water running gently over the weir, and the heavy turning of the millwheel, and you wish for nothing more but eternal peace. Everything Marie meant to me from then on, said Austerlitz, was summed up in this tale of the paper mill in which, without speaking of herself, she revealed her inner being to me. In the weeks and months that followed, Austerlitz continued, we often strolled together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Tuileries, and the Jardin des Plantes, walking up and down the esplanade between the well-pruned plane trees with the west front of the Natural History Museum now on our right and now on our left, going into the palm house and coming out of it again, tracing the convoluted paths of the Alpine garden, or traversing the dreary terrain of the old zoo where large animals from the African colonies had once been put on display, said Austerlitz, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, dromedaries, and crocodiles, although most of the enclosures, decked out with pitiful remnants of natural objects—tree stumps, artificial rocks, and pools of water—were now empty and deserted. On these walks it was not unusual for us to hear one of the children whose adult companions still took them to the zoo calling out, in some exasperation: Mais il est où? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort? I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm.

  Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said something which I have never forgotten, she said that captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another à travers une brèche d’incompréhension. Marie spent every second or third weekend, continued Austerlitz, his narrative taking another direction, with her parents or wider family, who owned several estates in the wooded country around Compiègne or further north in Picardy. At those times when she was not in Paris, which always cast me into an anxious mood, I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city, taking the Métro out to Montreuil, Malakoff, Charenton, Bobigny, Bagnolet, Le Pré St. Germain, St. Denis, St. Mandé, or elsewhere, to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realized only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind. It was on such a suburban expedition, one unusually oppressive Sunday in September when gray storm clouds were rolling over the sky from the southwest, that I went out to Maisons-Alfort and there discovered the mu
seum of veterinary medicine, of which I had never heard before, in the extensive grounds of the École Vétérinaire, itself founded two hundred years ago. An old Moroccan sat at the entrance, wearing a kind of burnoose, with a fez on his head. I still have the twenty-franc ticket he sold me in my wallet, said Austerlitz, and taking it out he handed it to me over the table of the bistro where we were sitting as if there were something very special about it.

  Inside the museum, Austerlitz continued, I did not meet another living soul, either in the well-proportioned stairway or in the three exhibition rooms on the first floor. All the more uncanny in the ambient silence, which was merely emphasized by the creaking of the floorboards beneath my feet, seemed the exhibits assembled in the glass-fronted cases reaching almost to the ceiling, and dating without exception from the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were plaster casts of the jaws of many different kinds of ruminants and rodents; kidney stones which had been found in circus camels, as large and spherically perfect as skittle balls; the cross section of a piglet only a few hours old, its organs rendered transparent by a process of chemical diaphanization and now floating in the liquid around it like a deep-sea fish which would never see the light of day; the pale blue fetus of a foal, where the quicksilver injected as a contrast medium into the network of veins beneath its thin skin had formed patterns like frost flowers as it leached out; the skulls and skeletons of many different creatures; whole digestive systems in formaldehyde; pathologically malformed organs, shrunken hearts and bloated livers; trees of bronchial tubes, some of them three feet high, their petrified and rust-colored branches looking like coral growths; and in the teratological department there were monstrosities of every imaginable and unimaginable kind, Janus-faced and two-headed calves, Cyclopean beasts with outsized foreheads, a human infant born in Maisons-Alfort on the day when the Emperor was exiled to the island of St. Helena, its legs fused together so that it resembled a mermaid, a ten-legged sheep, and truly horrific creatures consisting of little more than a scrap of skin, a crooked wing, and half a claw. Far the most awesome of all, however, so said Austerlitz, was the exhibit in a glass case at the back of the last cabinet of the museum, the life-sized figure of a horseman, very skillfully flayed in the post-Revolutionary period by the anatomist and dissector Honoré Fragonard, who was then at the height of his fame, so that every strand in the tensed muscles of the rider and his mount, which was racing forward with a panic-stricken expression, was clearly visible in the colors of congealed blood, together with the blue of the veins and the ocher yellow of the sinews and ligaments.

  Fragonard, who was descended from the famous family of Provençal perfumiers, said Austerlitz, had apparently dissected over three thousand bodies and parts of bodies in the course of his career, and consequently he, an agnostic who did not believe in the immortality of the soul, must have spent all the hours of his days and nights intent upon death, surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, and, as I imagine, moved by a desire to secure for the frail body at least some semblance of eternal life through a process of vitrification, by translating its so readily corruptible substance into a miracle of pure glass. In the weeks following my visit to the museum of veterinary science, Austerlitz continued his story, gazing now at the boulevard outside, I was unable to recall any of what I have just told you, for it was in the Métro on my way back from Maisons-Alfort that I had the first of the several fainting fits I was to suffer, causing temporary but complete loss of memory, a condition described in psychiatric textbooks, as far as I am aware, Austerlitz added, as hysterical epilepsy. Only when I developed the photographs I had taken that Sunday in September at Maisons-Alfort was I able, with their aid and guided by Marie’s patient questioning, to reconstruct my buried experiences. Then I remembered the courtyards of the veterinary school lying white in the afternoon heat as I left the museum, I recollected that as I walked along beside the wall I felt that I had reached steep and impassable terrain, and that I had wanted to sit down but nonetheless walked on, into the bright rays of the sun, until I came to the Métro station where I had to wait endlessly, as it seemed to me, in the brooding darkness of the tunnel for the next train to come in. The carriage in which I traveled towards the Bastille, said Austerlitz, was not very full. Later I remembered a Gypsy playing the accordion, and a very dark Indochinese woman with an alarmingly thin face and eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Of the few other passengers, I could recollect only that they were all looking out of the side windows of the train into the darkness, where there was nothing to be seen but a pallid reflection of the carriage where they sat. Gradually I also came to remember suddenly feeling unwell during the journey, with a phantom pain spreading through my chest, and thinking I was about to die of the weak heart I have inherited, from whom I do not know. I did not return to my senses until I was in the Salpêtrière, to which I had been taken and where I was now lying in one of the men’s wards, containing perhaps forty patients or more, somewhere in that gigantic complex of buildings where the borders between hospital and penitentiary have always been blurred, and which seems to have grown and spread of its own volition over the centuries until it now forms a universe of its own between the Jardin des Plantes and the gare d’Austerlitz. I lay there in my semi-conscious condition for several days, and in that state I saw myself wandering around a maze of long passages, vaults, galleries and grottoes where the names of various Métro stations—Campo Formio, Crimée, Elysée, Iéna, Invalides, Oberkampf, Simplon, Solferino, Stalingrad—and certain discolorations and shadings in the air seemed to indicate that this was a place of exile for those who had fallen on the field of honor, or lost their lives in some other violent way. I saw armies of these unredeemed souls thronging over bridges to the opposite bank, or coming towards me down the tunnels, their eyes fixed, cold, and dead. Sometimes they manifested themselves in one of the dark catacombs where, covered in frayed and dusty plumage, they were crouching on the stony floor and, turning silently towards one another, made digging motions with their earth-stained hands. And when at last I began to improve, said Austerlitz, I also recollected how once, while my mind was still quite submerged, I had seen myself standing, filled with a painful sense that something within me was trying to surface from oblivion, in front of a poster painted in bold brushstrokes which was pasted to the tunnel wall and showed a happy family on a winter holiday in Chamonix. The peaks of the mountains towered snow-white in the background, with a wonderful blue sky above them, the straight upper edge of which did not entirely hide a yellowed notice issued by the Paris city council in July 1943. Who knows, said Austerlitz, what would have become of me there in the Salpêtrière—when I could remember nothing about myself, or my own previous history, or anything else whatsoever, and as I was told later I kept babbling disconnectedly in various languages—who knows what would have become of me had it not been for one of the nursing staff, a man with fiery red hair and flickering eyes called Quentin Quignard, who looked in my notebook and under the barely legible initials M. de V. found the address 7, place des Vosges, written by Marie in a blank space among my notes after our first conversation at the café in the arcades of the Palais-Royal? When they had fetched her, said Austerlitz, she sat beside my bed for hours and days on end, talking calmly to me, whilst at first I remained quite unaware of who she was, even though I felt a deep longing for her, particularly when I sank into the weariness that weighed so heavily on me and tried, in a last stirring of consciousness, to bring my hand out from under the blankets, as a sign of both farewell and the hope that she would soon return. On one of her regular visits to my sickbed in the Salpêtrière, Marie brought me a book from her grandfather’s library, published in Dijon in 1755, a little medical work pour toutes sortes de maladies, internes et externes, invétérées et difficiles à guérir, as the title page said, a beautiful specimen of the art of printing, in the preface to which the printer himself, one Jean Ressayre, reminds the pious and charitable ladies of the upper classes that they had
been chosen as instruments of divine mercy by the highest authority governing our fate, and that if they turned their hearts to the abandoned and afflicted in their misery, it would draw upon themselves and their families the heavenly rewards of grace, prosperity, and happiness. I read every line of this delightful foreword several times, said Austerlitz, and studied the prescriptions for making aromatic oils, powders, essences, and infusions to soothe overwrought nerves, cleanse the blood from secretions of black bile and dispel melancholy by means of such ingredients as pale and dark rose leaves, March violets, peach blossom, saffron, melissa, and eyebright, and indeed by immersing myself in the better world of this little book, whole passages of which I still know by heart, said Austerlitz, I regained my lost sense of myself and my memory, gradually mastering the crippling physical weakness which had overcome me after my visit to the veterinary museum, so that I could soon walk on Marie’s arm down the long corridors of the Salpêtrière, through the diffuse, dusty gray light which pervades everything in that institution. After I had been discharged from the fortress-like hospital, which covers a site of thirty hectares and, with its four thousand patients, represents at any given time almost the entire range of disorders from which humanity can suffer, so Austerlitz continued, we resumed our walks in the city. Among the images I have retained in my memory from these excursions is one of a little girl with a rebellious mop of hair and green eyes the color of iced water who stumbled over the hem of her raincoat, which was much too long for her, as she was playing with her skipping rope in one of the lime-white squares in the Luxembourg Gardens and grazed her right knee, a scene regarded by Marie as a déjà vu because, she said, over twenty years ago just the same accident had happened to her at exactly the same place, an incident which at the time seemed to her shameful and aroused in her the first premonitions of death. Not long afterwards, one Saturday afternoon when a cold mist hung low in the air, we wandered through the half-deserted area between the tracks of the gare d’Austerlitz and the quai d’Austerlitz on the left bank of the Seine, slowly finding our way among abandoned dockyards, boarded-up warehouses, goods depots, customs halls, and a few garages and car repair shops. In one of the empty spaces not far from the station itself, the Bastiani Traveling Circus had erected its small tent, much mended and wreathed in strings of orange electric lights. By tacit agreement, we entered just as the performance was coming to a close. A few dozen women and children were seated on low stools round the ring—not that it was really a ring, said Austerlitz, rather it was a vague sort of rondelle on which a few shovelfuls of sawdust had been thrown, so hemmed in by the front row of spectators that even a pony could hardly have trotted round it in a circle. We were just in time for the last number, featuring a conjuror in a dark blue cloak who produced from his top hat a bantam cockerel with wonderfully colored plumage, not much bigger than a magpie or a raven. This brightly hued bird, obviously completely tame, went over a kind of miniature show-jumping course consisting of all manner of little steps, ladders, and other obstacles which he had to negotiate, gave the right answer to sums such as two times three or four minus one by clattering his beak when the conjurer showed him cards with the figures written on them, at a whispered command lay down on the ground to fall asleep, resting in a curious position on his side with his wings outspread, and finally disappeared into the top hat again. After the conjuror’s exit the lights slowly dimmed, and when our eyes were used to the darkness we saw a quantity of stars traced in luminous paint inside the top of the tent, giving the impression that we were really out of doors. We were still looking up with a certain sense of awe at this artificial firmament which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, was almost close enough for us to touch its lower rim, when the whole circus troupe came in one by one, the conjuror and his wife, who was very beautiful, with their equally beautiful, black-haired children, the last of them carrying a lantern and accompanied by a snow-white goose. Each of these artistes had a musical instrument. If I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, they played a transverse flute, a rather battered tuba, a drum, a bandoneon, and a fiddle, and they all wore Oriental clothing with long, fur-edged cloaks, while the men had pale green turbans on their heads. At a signal between themselves they began playing in a restrained yet penetrating manner which, although or perhaps because I have been left almost untouched by any kind of music all my life, affected me profoundly from the very first bar. I cannot say what it was that the five circus performers played that Saturday afternoon in the circus tent beyond the gare d’Austerlitz for their tiny audience, drawn from heaven knows where, said Austerlitz, but it seemed to me, he added, as if the music came from somewhere very distant, from the East, I thought, from the Caucasus or Turkey. Nor can I say what was suggested to my mind by the sounds produced by the players, none of whom, I am sure, could read musical notation. Sometimes I seemed to hear a long-forgotten Welsh hymn in their melodies, or then again, very softly yet making the senses swirl, the revolutions of a waltz, a ländler theme, or the slow sound of a funeral march, which put me in mind of the curiously halting progress of a uniformed guard of honor escorting a body to its last resting place, and of how, in their ceremonious manner, they pause every time before taking the next step, with one foot suspended an inch above the ground for the briefest of moments. I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life. Why certain tonal colors, subtleties of key, and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never understand, said Austerlitz, but today, looking back, it seems to me as if the mystery which touched me at the time was summed up in the image of the snow-white goose standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions.—As I might perhaps be aware, said Austerlitz taking up his tale again at our next meeting at the Brasserie Le Havane, the new Bibliothèque Nationale bearing the name of the French President now stands on what over the years had become the increasingly dilapidated area on the left bank of the Seine where he and Marie de Verneuil had once attended that unforgettable circus performance. The old library in the rue Richelieu has been closed, as I saw for myself not long ago, said Austerlitz, the domed hall with its green porcelain lampshades which cast such a soothing, pleasant light is deserted, the books have been taken off the shelves, and the readers, who once sat at the desks numbered with little enamel plates, in close contact with their neighbors and silent harmony with those who had gone before them, might have vanished from the face of the earth. I do not think, said Austerlitz, that many of the old readers go out to the new library on the quai François Mauriac. In order to reach the Grande Bibliothèque you have to travel through a desolate no-man’s-land in one of those robot-driven Métro trains steered by a ghostly voice, or alternatively you have to catch a bus in the place Valhubert and then walk along the wind-swept riverbank towards the hideous, outsize building, the monumental dimensions of which were evidently inspired by the late President’s wish to perpetuate his memory whilst, perhaps because it had to serve this purpose, it was so conceived that it is, as I realized on my first visit, said Austerlitz, both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader.