The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  In our classroom, the plan of which we had to draw to scale in our exercise books, there were twenty-six desks screwed fast to the oiled floorboards.

  From the raised teacher's desk, behind which the crucifix hung on the wall, one could look down on the pupils' heads, but I cannot remember Paul ever occupying that elevated position. If he was not at the blackboard or at the cracked oilcloth map of the world, he would walk down the rows of desks, or lean, arms folded, against the cupboard beside the green tiled stove. His favourite place, though, was by one of the south-facing windows let into deep bays in the wall. Outside those windows, from amidst the branches of the old apple orchard at Frey's distillery, starlings' nesting boxes on long wooden poles reached into the sky, which was bounded in the distance by the jagged line of the Lech valley Alps, white with snow for almost the entire school year. The teacher who preceded Paul, Hormayr, who had been feared for his pitiless regime and would have offenders kneel for hours on sharp-edged blocks of wood, had had the windows half whitewashed so that the children could not see out. The first thing Paul did when he took up the job in 1946 was to remove the whitewash, painstakingly scratching it away with a razor blade, a task which was, in truth, not urgent, since Paul was in any case in the habit of opening the windows wide, even when the weather was bad, indeed even in the harshest cold of winter, being firmly convinced that lack of oxygen impaired the capacity to think. What he liked most, then, was to stand in one of the window bays towards the head of the room, half facing the class and half turned to look out, his face at a slightly upturned angle with the sunlight glinting on his glasses; and from that position on the periphery he would talk across to us. In well-structured sentences, he spoke without any touch of dialect but with a slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the larynx but from somewhere near the heart. This sometimes gave one the feeling that it was all being powered by clockwork inside him and Paul in his entirety was a mechanical human made of tin and other metal parts, and might be put out of operation for ever by the smallest functional hitch. He would run his left hand through his hair as he spoke, so that it stood on end, dramatically emphasizing what he said. Not infrequently he would also take out his handkerchief, and, in anger at what he considered (perhaps not unjustly) our wilful stupidity, bite on it. After bizarre turns of this kind he would always take off his glasses and stand unseeing and defenceless in the midst of the class, breathing on the lenses and polishing them with such assiduity that it seemed he was glad not to have to see us for a while.

  Paul's teaching did include the curriculum then laid down for primary schools: the multiplication tables, basic arithmetic, German and Latin handwriting, nature study, the history and customs of our valley, singing, and what was known as physical education. Religious studies, however, were not taught by Paul himself; instead, once a week, we first had Catechist Meier (spelt e-i), who lisped, and then Beneficiary Meyer (spelt e-y), who spoke in a booming voice, to teach us the meaning of sin and confession, the creed, the church calendar, the seven deadly sins, and more of a similar kind. Paul, who was rumoured to be a free-thinker, something I long found incomprehensible, always contrived to avoid Meier-with-an-i or Meyer-with-a-y both at the beginning and at the end of their religion lessons, for there was plainly nothing he found quite so repellent as Catholic sanctimoniousness. And when he returned to the classroom after these lessons to find an Advent altar chalked on the blackboard in purple, or a red and yellow monstrance, or other such things, he would instantly rub out the offending works of art with a conspicuous vigour and thoroughness. Always before our religion lessons, Paul would always top up to the brim the holy water stoup, embellished with a flaming Sacred Heart, that was fixed by the door, using (I often saw him do it) the watering can with which he normally watered the geraniums. Because of this, the Beneficiary never managed to put the holy water bottle he always carried in his shiny black pigskin briefcase to use. He did not dare simply to tip out the water from the brimful stoup, and so, in his endeavour to account for the seemingly inexhaustible Sacred Heart, he was torn between his suspicion that systematic malice was involved and the intermittent hope that this was a sign from a Higher Place, perhaps indeed a miracle. Most assuredly, though, both the Beneficiary and the Catechist considered Paul a lost soul, for we were called upon more than once to pray for our teacher to convert to the true faith. Paul's aversion to the Church of Rome was far more than a mere question of principle, though; he genuinely had a horror of God's vicars and the mothball smell they gave off. He not only did not attend church on Sundays, but purposely left town, going as far as he could into the mountains, where he no longer heard the bells. If the weather was not good he would spend his Sunday mornings together with Colo the cobbler, who was a philosopher and a downright atheist who took the Lord's day, if he was not playing chess with Paul, as the occasion to work on pamphlets and tracts against the one True Church. Once (I now remember) I witnessed a moment when Paul's aversion to hypocrisy of any description won an incontestable victory over the forbearance with which he generally endured the intellectual infirmities of the world he lived in. In the class above me there was a pupil by the name of Ewald Reise who had fallen completely under the Catechist's influence and displayed a degree of oyerdone piety - it would not be unfair to say, ostentatiously - quite incredible in a ten-year-old. Even at this tender age, Ewald Reise already looked like a fully-fledged chaplain. He was the only boy in the whole school who wore a coat, complete with a purple scarf folded over at his chest and held in place with a large safety pin. Reise, whose head was never uncovered (even in the heat of summer he wore a straw hat or a light linen cap), struck Paul so powerfully as an example of the stupidity, both inbred and wilfully acquired, that he so detested, that one day when the boy forgot to doff his hat to him in the street Paul removed the hat for him, clipped his ear, and then replaced the hat on Reise's head with the rebuke that even a prospective chaplain should greet his teacher with politeness when they met.

  Paul spent at least a quarter of all his lessons on teaching us things that were not on the syllabus. He taught us the rudiments of algebra, and his enthusiasm for natural history once led him (to the horror of his neighbours) to boil the flesh off a dead fox he had found in the woods, in an old preserving pan on his kitchen stove, so that he would then be able to reassemble the skeleton with us in school. We never read the text books that were intended for third and fourth years at primary school, as Paul found them ridiculous and hypocritical; instead, our reading was almost exclusively the Rheinische Hausfreund, a collection of tales for the home, sixty copies of which Paul had procured, I suspect at his own expense. Many of the stories in it, such as the one about a decapitation performed in secret, made the most vivid impression on me, and those impressions have not faded to this day; more than anything else (why, I cannot say) I clearly recall the words said by the passing pilgrim to the woman who kept the Baselstab Inn: When I return, I shall bring you a sacred cockleshell from the Strand at Askalon, or a rose from Jericho. - At least once a week, Paul taught us French. He began with the simple observation that he had once lived in France, that people there spoke French, that he knew how to do it, and that we could easily do it too, if we wished. One May morning we sat outside in the school yard, and on that fresh bright day we easily grasped what un beau jour meant, and that a chestnut tree in blossom might just as well be called un chataignier en fleurs. Indeed, Paul's teaching was altogether the most lucid, in general, that one could imagine. On principle he placed the greatest value on taking us out of the school building whenever the opportunity arose and observing as much as we could around the town - the electric power station with the transformer plant, the smelting furnaces and the steam-powered forge at the iron foundry, the basketware workshops, and the cheese dairy. We visited the mash room at the brewery, and the malt house, where the silence was so total that none of us dared to say a word. And one day we visited Corradi the gunsmith, who had been practising his trad
e in S for close on sixty years. Corradi invariably wore a green eyeshade and, whenever the light that came through his workshop window permitted, he would be bent over the complicated locks of old fire-arms which no one but himself, far and wide, could repair. WTien he had succeeded in fixing a lock, he would go out into the front garden with the gun and fire a few rounds into the air for sheer pleasure, to mark the end of the job.

  What Paul termed his "object lessons" took us, in the course of time, to all of the nearby locations that were of interest for one reason or another and could be reached on foot within about two hours. We visited Fluhenstein Castle, explored the Starzlach Gorge, went to the conduit house above Hofen and the powder magazine where the Veterans' Association kept their ceremonial cannon, on the hill where the stations of the cross led up to the Calvary Chapel. We were more than a little surprised when, after various preliminary studies that took several weeks, we succeeded in finding the derelict tunnel of the brown coal mine on the Straussberg, which had been abandoned after the First

  World War, with what was left of the cable railway that had transported the coal from the mouth of the tunnel to the station at Altstàdten below. Not all our excursions, however, were made with a specific purpose. On particularly fine days we often simply went out into the fields, to go on with our botany or sometimes, under a botanical pretext, simply to idle the time away. On these occasions, usually in early summer, the son of Wohlfahrt the barber and undertaker would frequently join us. Known to everyone as Mangold, and reckoned to be not quite right in the head, he was of uncertain age and of a childlike disposition. It made him deliriously happy, a gangling fellow among school-children not yet into adolescence, to tell us on which day of the week any past or future date we cared to name would fall - despite the fact that he was otherwise incapable of solving the simplest mathematical problem. If, say, one told Mangold that one was born on the 18th of May, 1944, he would shoot back without a moment's hesitation that that was a Thursday. And if one tried difficult questions on him, such as the Pope's or King Ludwig's date of birth, again he could say what day of the week it was, in a flash. Paul, who excelled at mental arithmetic and was a first-rate mathematician, tried for years to fathom Mangold's secret, setting him complicated tests, asking questions, and going to a variety of other lengths. As far as I am aware, though, neither he nor anyone else ever worked it out, because Mangold hardly understood the questions he was asked. That aside, Paul, like Mangold and the rest of us, clearly enjoyed our outings into the countryside. Wearing his windcheater, or simply in shirtsleeves, he would walk ahead of us with his face slightly upturned, taking those long and springy steps that were so characteristic, the very image (as I realize only now as I look back) of the German Wandervogel hiking movement, which must have had a lasting influence on him from his youth. Paul was in the habit of whistling continuously as he walked across the fields. He was an amazingly good whistler; the sound he produced was marvellously rich, exactly like a flute's. And even when he was climbing a mountain, he would with apparent ease whistle whole runs and ties in connected sequence, not just anything, but fine, thoroughly composed passages and melodies that none of us had ever heard before, and which infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or Brahms sonata. When we rested on the way, Paul would take his clarinet, which he carried with him without fail in an old cotton stocking, and play various pieces, chiefly slow movements, from the classical repertoire, with which I was then completely unfamiliar. Apart from these music lessons at which we were merely required to provide an audience, we would learn a new song at least once a fortnight, the contemplative again being given preference over the merry. "Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz, da fing mein Trauern an", "Auf den Bergen die Burgen", "Im Krug zum griinen Kranze" or "Wir gleiten hinunter das Ufer entlang" were the kinds of songs we learnt. But I did not grasp the true meaning that music had for Paul till the extremely talented son of Brandeis the organist, who was already studying at the conservatoire, came to our singing lesson (at Paul's instigation, I assume) and played on his violin to an audience of peasant boys (for that is what we were, almost without exception). Paul, who was standing by the window as usual, far from being able to hide the emotion that young Brandeis's playing produced in him, had to remove his glasses because his eyes had filled with tears. As I remember it, he even turned away in order to conceal from us the sob that rose in him. It was not only music, though, that affected Paul in this way; indeed, at any time - in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings - he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself.

  It was not until I was able to fit my own fragmentary recollections into what Lucy Landau told me that I was able to understand that desolation even in part. It was Lucy Landau, as I found out in the course of my enquiries in S, who had arranged for Paul to be buried in the churchyard there. She lived at Yverdon, and it was there, on a summer's day in the second year after Paul died, a day I recall as curiously soundless, that I paid her the first of several visits. She began by telling me that at the age of seven, together with her father, who was an art historian and a widower, she had left her home town of Frankfurt. The modest lakeside villa in which she lived had been built by a chocolate manufacturer at the turn of the century, for his old age. Mme Landau's father had bought it in the summer of 1933 despite the fact that the purchase, as Mme Landau put it, ate up almost his whole fortune, with the result that she spent her entire childhood and the war years that followed in a house well-nigh unfurnished. Living in those empty rooms had never struck her as a deprivation, though; rather, it had seemed, in a way not easy to describe, to be a special favour or distinction conferred upon her by a happy turn of events. For instance, she remembered her eighth birthday very clearly. Her father had spread a white paper cloth on a table on the terrace, and there she and Ernest, her new school friend, had sat at dinner while her father, wearing a black waistcoat and with a napkin over his forearm, had played the waiter, to rare perfection. At that time, the empty house with its wide-open windows and the trees about it softly swaying was her backdrop for a magical theatre show. And then, Mme Landau continued, bonfire after bonfire began to burn along the lakeside as far as St Aubin and beyond, and she was completely convinced that all of it was being done purely for her, in honour of her birthday. Ernest, said Mme Landau with a smile that was meant for him, across the years that had intervened, Ernest knew of course that the bonfires that glowed brightly in the darkness all around were burning because it was Swiss National Day, but he most tactfully forbore to spoil my bliss with explanations of any kind. Indeed, the discretion of Ernest, who was the youngest of a large family, has always remained exemplary to my way of thinking, and no one ever equalled him, with the possible exception of Paul, whom I unfortunately met far too late - in summer 1971 at Salins-les-Bains in the French Jura.