The Rings of Saturn

by W. G. Sebald

  apologetically to his nieces) his ailing eyes blinked too much if he looked directly into the camera. —Every summer, FitzGerald paid a visit of a few days to his friend George Crabbe, who was vicar of Merton in Norfolk. In June 1883 he made the journey for the last time. Merton is no further than sixty miles from Woodbridge, but travelling there over the meandering railway network that had spread everywhere during FitzGerald's lifetime involved five changes and took a whole day. What was stirring within FitzGerald's breath as he leant back in his carriage watching the hedgerows and cornfields pass by outside is not recorded, but perhaps it resembled the feelings he once experienced as he sat in the mail coach from Leicester to Cambridge, when the sight of the summer countryside made him feel like an angel because suddenly, without knowing why, he found he had tears of happiness in his eyes. At Merton, Crabbe met him from the train in his dog cart. It had been a long and especially hot day, but FitzGerald remarked on the cool air and remained wrapped tight in his plaid as they drove. At table he drank a little tea but declined to eat anything. Around nine he asked for a glass of brandy and water and retired upstairs to bed. Early next morning, Crabbe heard him moving about his room, but when he went somewhat later to summon him to breakfast he found him stretched out on his bed and no longer among the living.

  The shadows were lengthening as I walked in from Boulge Park to Woodbridge, where I put up for the night at the Bull Inn. The room to which I was shown by the landlord was under the roof. The clinking of glasses in the bar and a low murmur of talk rose up the staircase, with the occasional exclamation or laugh. After time was called, things gradually quietened down. I heard the woodwork of the old half-timber building, which had expanded in the heat of the day and was now contracting fraction by fraction, creaking and groaning. In the gloom of the unfamiliar room, my eyes involuntarily turned in the direction from which the sounds came, looking for the crack that might run along the low ceiling, the spot where the plaster was flaking from the wall or the mortar crumbling behind the panelling. And if I closed my eyes for a while it felt as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship on the high seas, as if the whole building were rising on the swell of a wave, shuddering a little on the crest, and then, with a sigh, subsiding into the depths. I did not get to sleep until day was breaking and the song of a blackbird was in my ear, and shortly thereafter I awoke once more from a dream in which I beheld FitzGerald, my companion of the day before, sitting at a little blue metal table in his graden in his shirtsleeves and wearing a black silk jabot and a tall top hat. Hollyhocks grown higher than a man were flowering around him, chickens were scratching about in a sandy hollow under an elder tree, and his black dog, Bletsoe, lay stretched out in the shade, whilst I, though in the dream I was unable to see myself and was thus like a ghost, sat opposite FitzGerald, playing a game of dominoes with him. Beyond the flower garden an even green park, utterly deserted, extended to the very edge of the world, where the minarets of Khorasan soared. It was not, however, the park of the FitzGerald estate at Boulge, abut that of a country house at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland where I had been a guest for a short time some years ago. In my dream I could make out far off in the distance the three-storey ivy-covered house where the Ashburys presumably still lead their secluded lives to this day; at least, it was a very secluded and indeed quite bizarre life at the time when I met them. Coming from the mountains, I had enquired after accommodation in a small, gloomy shop in Clarahill. I remember that the proprietor, a Mr O'Hare, who was wearing a curious cinnamon-coloured overcoat of thin calico, involved me in a lengthy conversation concerning Newton's theory of gravity. At some point in this talk, Mr O'Hare suddenly interrupted himself and exclaimed: The Ashburys might put you up. One of the daughters came in here some years ago with a note offering Bed and Breakfast. I was supposed to display it in the shop window. I can't think what became of it or whether they ever had any guests. Perhaps I removed it when the letters had paled in the sun. Or perhaps they came and removed it themselves. Mr O'Hare then drove me to the Ashburys in his delivery van and waited on the weedy forecourt until I was asked in. I had to knock several times before the door was opened and Catherine stood there in her faded red summer dress, with an odd stiffness that suggested she had been arrested in mid-movement by the sight of this unannounced stranger. She gazed at me wide-eyed, or rather, she looked right through me. Once I had explained why I was there, it took some time for her to recover he composure, to step a pace aside, and gesture with her left hand, scarcely perceptibly, for me to come in and take a seat in the hall. As she walked away across the stone flags, in silence, I noticed that she was barefoot. Without a sound she vanished in the darkness of the background, and just as soundlessly reappeared a few minutes later, to escort me up a staircase the broad steps of which made climbing astonishingly easy, to the first floor and along various passages to a large room, where the high windows afforded a view over the roofs of the stables and outhouses and the kitchen garden onto hay meadows combed by the wind. Beyond there were trees in various shades of green and, above them, the faint line of the mountains, barely distinguishable from the even blue of the sky. I cannot say how long I stood by one of the three windows, engrossed in that view; all I remember is hearing Catherine, who was waiting in the doorway, say, Will this be all right? and that, as I turned to her, I stammered some incoherent reply. Only when Catherine had gone did I take in the full size of the room. The floorboards were covered with a velvety layer of dust. The curtains had gone and the paper had been stripped off the walls, which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body, and reminded me of one of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked. The only items of furniture in the room were a table and chair and a narrow collapsible iron bedstead of the kind that army officers used to have with them on campaigns. Whenever I rested on that bed over the next few days, my consciousness began to dissolve at the edges, so that at times I could hardly have said how I had got there or indeed where I was. Repeatedly I felt as if I were lying in a traumatic fever in some kind of field hospital. From outside I heard the cries of the peacocks, which went right through me, but what I saw in my mind's eye was not the yard in which they perched on the very top of the junk that had been piling up there for years but a battlefield somewhere in Lombardy over which the vultures circled, and, all around, a country laid waste by war. The armies had long since marched on. I alone, falling from one swoon into the next, was left in a house that had been looted of everything. These images became the more real in my head because the Ashburys lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up. It struck me that all the members of the family were continually wandering hither and thither along the corridors and up and down the stairs. One rarely saw them sitting calm and collected, singly or together. Even their meals they usually ate standing. What work they did always had about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress. Ever since leaving school in 1974, Edmund, the youngest had been working on a fat-bellied boat a good ten yards in length, although, as he casually informed me, he knew nothing about boat-building and had no intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge. It's not going to be launched. It's just something I do. I have to have something to do. Mrs Ashbury collected flower seeds in paper bags. Once she had written the name, date, location, colour and other details on the bags, she would clap them over the dead heads of the blooms, in the overgrown flower beds or further afield in the meadows, and tie them up with string. Then she would cut off all the stalks, and bring the bagged heads indoors and hang them up on a much-knotted line that criss-crossed what was once the library. There were so many of these white-bagged flowerstalks hanging under the library ceiling that they resembled clouds of paper, and when Mrs Ashbury stood on the library steps to hang up or take down the rustling seed-bags she half-vanished amon
g them like a saint ascending into heaven. Once they had been taken down, the bags were stored under some inscrutable system on the shelves, which had evidently long since been unburdened of books. I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seeds she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multicoloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time now remained. On one occasion Clarissa told me that she and her sisters had once intended to start an interior decorating business, but the plan came to nothing, she said, both because of their inexperience and because there was no call in their neighbourhood for such a service. Perhaps that was why they mostly undid what they had sewn either on the same day, the next day or the day after that. It was also possible that in their imagination they envisaged something of such extraordinary beauty that the work they completed invariably disappointed them. At least that was what I thought, when on one of my visits to their workshop they showed me the pieces that had been spared the unstitching. One of them, a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor's dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life, and at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

  On the evening before my departure I was standing out on the terrace with Edmund, leaning on the stone balustrade. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear the cries of the bats that flitted zigzag through the airspace. The park was sinking into darkness when Edmund, after a protracted silence, suddenly said: I have set up the projector in the library. Mother was wondering whether you might want to see what things used to be like here. Inside, Mrs Ashbury was already waiting for the show to begin. I sat down beside her under the paper-bag heavens, the light went out, the projector began to whirr, and on the bare wall above the mantelpiece the mute images of the past appeared, at times quite still and then again following jerkily one upon another, headlong, and rendered unclear by the projection scratches. From a window on the upper floor one looked across the surrounding land, the clumps of trees, fields and meadows, and vice versa, approaching the forecourt from the park, one saw the front of the house, first seeming toy-sized from a distance, then towering ever higher till at length it almost toppled out of the frame. Nowhere was there a sign of neglect. The drive was sanded, the hedges were clipped, the beds in the kitchen garden trim, and the now tumbledown outhouses still well maintained. Later one saw the Ashburys at tea, sitting in a kind of marquee one bright summer's day. It was Edmund's christening, said Mrs Ashbury. Clarissa and Christina were playing badminton. Catherine held a black Scots terrier in her arms. In the background, an old butler was making for the entrance with a laden tray. A maidservant with a cap on her head appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Edmund put in another reel. Much of what followed had to do with work in the garden and on the estate. I remember a slight lad pushing a huge old-fashioned wheelbarrow; a mower pulled by a tiny pony and steered by a dwarfish driver, mowing straight lines up and down the lawn; a view of the dark hothouse where cucumbers were growing; and a series of over-exposed pictures of a field that looked almost snow-white, where dozens of farm labourers were busy cutting the wheat and binding the sheaves. When the last reel was through there was silence for a long time in the library, which was now lit only dimly by the light from the hall. Not until Edmund had stowed the projector in its case and left the room did Mrs Ashbury begin to speak. She told me that she had married in 1946, immediately after her husband came out of the army, and that a few months later, following the sudden death of her father-in-law, they had come to Ireland, quite contrary to the expectations both of them had of their future life, to take possession of the property he had inherited, which was then as good as unsaleable. At that time, said Mrs Ashbury, she had had not the slightest notion of Ireland's Troubles, and to this day they remained alien to her. I remember waking the first night in this house, feeling I was completely out of this world. The moon was shining in at the window, and the light lay so strangely on the layer of wax left on the floor by more than a century of dripping candles that I felt I was adrift on a sea of quicksilver. My husband, said Mrs Ashbury, never said a word about the Troubles, on principle, although he must have witnessed terrible things during the civil war, or perhaps because of that. Only little by little, from the curt answers he gave to my questions on the matter, did I piece together something os his family history, and the history of the land-owning class that became hopelessly impoverished in the decades following the civil war. But the picture I put together was never more than a rough sketch. Apart from my extremely reticent husband, said Mrs Ashbury, my only other source of information was the legends about the Troubles, part tragic and part ludicrous, that had formed during the long years of decline in the heads of our servants, whom we had inherited together with the rest of the inventory and who were themselves already part of history, as it were. Years after we moved in, for instance, I learnt a little from our butler, Quincey, about that dreadful midsummer night in 1920 when the Randolphs' house six miles away was set on fire while the Randolphs themselves were dining with my future parents-in-law. According to Quincey, the rebel Republicans first assembled the servants in the hall and told them without further ado that they had one hour to pack their personal belongings and make some tea for themselves and the freedom fighters, and then a great fire of retribution would be raised. First, said Mrs Ashbury, the children were woken, and the dogs and cats, which were quite beside themselves with premonitions of disaster, were rounded up. Later, according to Quincey, who was Colonel Randolph's valet at the time, all the inhabitants of the house stood out on the lawn amongst items of luggage and furniture and all the nonsensical things one grabs at in a state of panic and fear. At the last moment, in Quincey's telling, he had had to run up to the second floor one more time to rescue the cockatiel that belonged to old Mrs Randolph, who, as it turned out on the following day, was deprived in the catastrophe of her up until then perfectly lucid mind. Powerless, they were all forced to stand by as the Republicans dragged a big drum of petrol from the garage across the courtyard and then, with a loud Heave ho!, rolled it up the steps and into the hall, where they spilled out the contents. Within minutes of the first torch being hurled in, the flames were shooting from the windows and the roof, and before long it was as if one was looking into an immense furnace full of red-hot fire and flying sparks. I do not think, said Mrs Ashbury, that one can even begin to imagine the thoughts of the victims when they witness a sight like that. At all events, the Randolphs, who had always lived fearing the worst and yet did not believe that it could ever happen, were alerted by a gardener who had escaped on a bicycle, and, accompanied by my parents-in-law, drove over to the blaze, which was visible from a long way off. When they arrived at the scene of destruction, those who had started the fire had long disappeared, and all they could do was hug their children and join those huddled together there speechless and paralysed with horror like shipwrecked survivors on a raft. Not till daybreak did the fire abate and the black contours of the burnt-out shell stand out against the sky. The ruin, said Mrs Ashbury, was subsequently demolished. That was before my time, and I never saw it. They say two or three hundred country houses were burnt down during the civil war, regardless of whether they were relatively modest properties or stately homes such as

  Summerhill, where the Austrian Empress Elis
abeth had once been so happy. To the best of my knowledge, said Mrs Ashbury, people were never harmed by the rebels. Evidently burning the houses down was the most effective way of driving out those families who were identified, rightly or wrongly, with the detested rule of the English. In the years after the end of the civil war, even those who had survived unscathed left the country if they possibly could. The only ones who stayed on were those who had no livelihood except what they derived from their estates. Every attempt to sell the houses and land was doomed to failure from the very start, because in the first place there were no buyers far and wide, and in the second, even if a purchaser had appeared, one could hardly have lived in Bournemouth or Kensington for more than a month on the proceeds. At the same time, nobody in Ireland had any idea how they could possibly go on. Farming was in the doldrums, labourers were demanding wages nobody could afford to pay, fewer crops were being planted, and incomes were steadily diminishing. The situation grew more hopeless every year, and the signs of increasing poverty, apparent everywhere, grew more and more ominous. Keeping up the houses even in the most rudimentary way had long been impossible. The paintwork was flaking off the window encasements and the doors; the curtains became threadbare; the wallpaper peeled off the walls; the upholstery was worn out; it was raining in everywhere, and people put out tin tubs, bowls and pots to catch the water. Soon they were obliged to abandon the rooms on the upper storeys, or even whole wings, and retreat to more or less usable quarters on the ground floor. The window panes in the locked-up rooms misted over with cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore the spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotted within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. Every so often, usually after a long period of rain or extended droughts or indeed after any change in the weather, a sudden disastrous collapse would occur in the midst of the encroaching decay that went almost unnoticed, and had assumed the character of normality. Just as people supposed they could hold a particular line, some dramatic and unanticipated deterioration would compel them to evacuate further areas, till they really had no way out and found themselves forced to the last post, prisoners in their own homes. They say that a great-uncle of my husband's in County Clare, who used to run his house in the grand style, ended up living in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury. For years all he supposedly ate for dinner was a simple dish of potatoes prepared by his butler, who now had to double as his cook, although he did still wear a black dinner jacket and open a bottle of Bordeaux, the cellar not being quite empty yet. Great-uncle and the butler, who were both called William, so Quincey told me, and died on the same day, both well past the age of eighty, had their beds in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury, and goodness knows how often I have wondered whether it was a sense of duty that kept the butler going till his master no longer needed him, or whether great-uncle gave up the ghost when his exhausted servant passed away, knowing that without his presence he wouldn't survive a single day. Probably it was the servants, who often worked for decades for scant wages and were no more able to find a place elsewhere at so advanced an age than their masters were, who kept things more or less ticking over. When they lay down to die, the end of those they had looked after was often imminent as well. In our own case it was no different, except that we shared in the general decline rather late in the day. I soon realized that if the Ashburys had been able to keep their property until after the War, it was purely because they kept putting in money from a substantial legacy left to them in the early Thirties, which had shrunk to a tiny amount by the time my husband died. Even so, I was always convinced that things would improve one day. I simply refused to believe that the society we were part of had long since collapsed. Shortly after we arrived in Ireland, Gormanston Castle was sold at auction. Straffan was sold in 1949, Cartin in 1950, French Park in 1953, Killeen Rockingham in 1957, Powerscourt in 1961, not to mention the smaller estates. The extent of our family fiasco only became clear to me when I had to fend for myself and try to support us all somewhat. Since I had no money to pay the labourers' wages, I soon had no choice but to give up farming. We sold off the land bit by bit, which kept the worst at bay for a few years, and as long as we had one or two servants in the house it was still possible to keep up appearances, to the outside world and in our own eyes. When Quincey died, I no longer knew what to do. First I sold the silver and china at auction, and then little by little the pictures, the books and the furniture. But nobody ever showed an interest in taking on the house, which was getting more and more run down, and so we have remained tied to it, like damned souls to their place. Whatever we have tried, from the girls' sewing to the nursery garden Edmund once started to our notion of having paying guests, has without fail gone wrong. you, said Mrs Ashbury, are the first guest who's ever found his way here in the almost ten years since we put the advertisement in the Clarahill grocer's window. Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. When Mrs Ashbury had finished her story, I felt that its significance for me lay in an unspoken invitation to stay there with them and share in a life that was becoming more innocent with every day that passed. The fact that I did not do so was a . . . failure that still sometimes seems like a shadow crossing my soul. The next morning, when I came to say goodbye, I had to look for Catherine for a long while. At last I found her in the kitchen garden, which was overgrown with deadly nightshade, valerian, angelica and shot rhubarb. In the red summer frock she was wearing on the day of my arrival, she was leaning against the trunk of the mulberry tree that had once marked the centre of the neatly laid-out herb and vegetable beds within the high brick wall. I made my way through the wilderness to the island of shade from which Catherine was gazing at me. I have come to say goodbye, I said, stepping into the bower formed by the spreading branches. She was holding a broad-brimmed hat like a pilgrim's, the same red as her dress, and now that I was standing beside her she seemed very far away. She looked right through me, her eyes vacant. I have left my address and telephone number, so that if you ever want . . . I broke the sentence off, not knowing how it might continue. In any case, I noticed that Catherine was not listening. At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms, But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do! —Years after that last exchange with Catherine Ashbury, I saw her again, or thought I did, in Berlin in March 1993. I had taken the underground to Schlesisches Tor, and after strolling around that dreary part of the city for a time I came upon a small group of people waiting to be admitted to a dilapidated building that might once have been a garage for hackney cabs or something of the kind. According to a billboard, an unfinished play I had never heard of, by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, was to be performed on a stage behind this quite untheatrical façade. In the gloomy space within, the seating proved to be tiny wooden stools, which immediately put one in a childlike mood of craving marvels. Before I could account to myself for my thoughts, there she stood on the stage, incredibly wearing the same red dress, with the same light-coloured hair and holding in her hand the same pilgrim's hat, she or her very image, Catherine of Siena, in an empty room, and then far from her father's house, wearied by the heat of the day and the thorns and stones. In the background, I recall, was a pale view of mountains, perhaps in the Trentino, watery green as if they had just risen from ice-bound polar seas. And Catherine, as the sunlight faded, sank down below a tree, took off her shoes and laid her hat aside. I think I shall sleep here, she said, or rest a little. Be still, my heart. The tranquil evening will draw its mantle over our ailing senses . . .