by W. G. Sebald
Aunt Fini was sitting in her armchair in the dark living room when I went in to her that evening. Only the glow of the street lights was on her face. The aches have eased off, she said, the pain is almost over. At first I thought I was only imagining that it was getting better, so slow was the improvement. And once I was almost without pain, I thought: if you move now, it'll start again. So I just stayed sitting here. I've been sitting here all afternoon. I couldn't say whether I mightn't have nodded off now and then. I think I was lost in my thoughts most of the time. My aunt switched on the little reading lamp but kept her eyes closed. I went out into the kitchen and made her two soft-boiled eggs, toast, and peppermint tea. When I took the tray in to her I turned the conversation back to Uncle Adelwarth. About two years after he arrived in America, said Aunt Fini, dunking a soldier into one of the eggs, Ambros took a position with the Solomons on Long Island. What happened to the counsellor at the Japanese legation, I can't remember now. At all events, Uncle quickly made his way at the Solomons'. Within an amazingly short time, old Samuel Solomon, who was very impressed by the unfailing sureness of Ambros in all things, offered him the position of personal attendant to his son, to watch over him, since he believed, not without reason, that great dangers lay in his path. There is no doubt that Cosmo Solomon, whom I never had the opportunity to meet, was inclined to eccentricity. He was extremely gifted, and a very promising student of engineering, but gave up his studies to build flying machines in an old factory in Hackensack. At the same time, mind you, he spent a lot of time at places like Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, for one thing because he was an excellent polo player, for another because he could blow huge sums of money at luxury hotels like the Breakers, the Poinciana or the American Adelphi, which at that time, so Uncle Adelwarth once told me, was plainly the main thing as far as he was concerned. Old Solomon was worried by the dissipated life his son was leading, and felt it had no future. When he tried to cut back his allowance, which in point of fact had been unlimited, Cosmo hit upon the idea of opening up a source of income that would never dry up, by playing the casinos of Europe during the summer months. In June 1911, with Ambros as his friend and guide, he went to France for the first time, and promptly won considerable sums at Evian on Lake Geneva and then at Monte Carlo, in the Salle
Schmidt. Uncle Adelwarth once told me that Cosmo would become strangely detached when he was playing roulette. At first, Ambros would think he was concentrating on calculations of probability, till one day Cosmo told him that at such times he actually was in a trance of some kind, trying to decipher the right number as it appeared for a fraction of a second from out of mists that were ordinarily impenetrable, whereupon, without the slightest hesitation, and as it were still in a dream, he would place his bet, either en plein or à cheval. Cosmo claimed that this condition of total withdrawal from normal life was dangerous, and it was the task of Ambros to watch over him as one would over a sleeping child. Of course I do not know what was really going on, said Aunt Fini, but one thing is certain: at Evian and Monte Carlo, the two of them made such a killing that Cosmo was able to buy an aeroplane from Deutsch de la Meurthe, the French industrialist. He flew it in the Quinzaine d'Aviation de la Baie de Seine at Deauville that August, and was by far the most daring of them all at looping the loop. Cosmo was in Deauville with Ambros in the summer of 1912 and 19x3 also, and caught the imagination of society, not just with his astounding luck at roulette and his daredevil acrobatics on the polo field but chiefly, I'm certain, by the fact that he turned down every invitation he received to tea, dinner or such like, and never went out or ate with anyone but Ambros, whom he always treated as an equal. Incidentally, said Aunt Fini, in Uncle Adelwarth's postcard album there is a picture that shows Cosmo with a trophy presented by an aristocratic lady - the Comtesse de Fitzjames, if I remember rightly -after a match at the Clairefontaine Hippodrome, probably a charity event. It is the only photograph of Cosmo Solomon
that I possess. There are relatively few photos of Ambros, too, probably because, like Cosmo, he was very shy, despite his familiarity with the ways of the world. In the summer of 1913, Aunt Fini continued, a new casino was opened at Deauville, and during the first few weeks people were seized by so frenetic a gambling fever that all the roulette and baccarat tables, and what they call the pet its chevaux, were constantly occupied by players, and besieged by more who wanted to play. One well-known joueuse called Marthe Hanau supposedly masterminded the hysteria. I remember clearly, said Aunt Fini,- that Uncle Adelwarth once called her a notorious filibustière, who had been a thorn in the flesh of the casino management for years but was now coaxing the gamblers to the tables on their behalf and at their behest. Apart from the machinations of Marthe Hanau, it was the overexcited atmosphere, which had been quite changed by the ostentatious luxury of the new casino, that was responsible for the unparalleled rise in the earnings of the Deauville Bank that summer of 1913, in Uncle Adelwarth's view. As for Cosmo, in the summer of 1913 he held even more aloof than in previous years from a social whirl that was growing ever headier, and would play only late in the evening, in the inner sanctum, the Salle de la Cuvette. Only gentlemen in dinner jackets were admitted to the privé, where the atmosphere that prevailed was always, as Uncle Adelwarth put it, most ominous - small wonder, said Aunt Fini, if you consider that whole fortunes, family properties, real estate and the achievements of lifetimes were not infrequently gambled away within hours. At the start of the season, Cosmo's luck was often changeable, but towards the end it would surpass even his own expectations. Eyes half closed, he would win time after time, pausing only when Ambros brought him a consommé or café au lait. Two evenings in a row, so Uncle Adelwarth told me, Cosmo cleaned out the bank and runners had to fetch more money, said Aunt Fini; and then on the third evening, when he broke the bank again, Cosmo won so much that Ambros was busy till dawn counting the money and packing it into a steamer trunk. After spending the summer in Deauville, Cosmo and Ambros travelled via Paris and Venice to Constantinople and Jerusalem. I cannot tell you anything of what happened on that journey, said Aunt Fini, because Uncle Adelwarth would never answer questions about it. But there is a photo of him in Arab
costume, taken when, they were in Jerusalem, and, said Aunt Fini, I have a kind of diary too, in tiny writing, that Ambros kept. For a long time I had quite forgotten about it, but, strange to say, I tried only recently to decipher it. With my poor eyes, though, I could not make out much more of it than the odd word; perhaps you should give it a try.
With long pauses, during which she often seemed very far away and lost, Aunt Fini told me, on my last day at Cedar Glen West, of the end of Cosmo Solomon and the later years of my Great-Uncle Ambros Adelwarth. Shortly after the two globetrotters returned from the Holy Land, as Aunt Fini put it, the war broke out in Europe. The more it raged, and the more we learnt of the extent of the devastation, the less Cosmo was able to regain a footing in the unchanged daily life of America. He became a stranger to his former friends, he abandoned his apartment in New York City, and even out on Long Island he soon withdrew entirely to his own quarters and at length to a secluded garden house known as the summer villa. Aunt Fini said that one of the Solomons' old gardeners once told her that in those days Cosmo would often be steeped in melancholy all day, and then at night would pace to and fro in the unheated summer villa, groaning softly. Wildly agitated, he would string out words that bore some relation to the fighting, and as he uttered these words of war he would apparently beat his forehead with his hand, as if he were vexed at his own incomprehension or were trying to learn what he said by heart. Frequently he would be so beside himself that he no longer even recognized Ambros. And yet he claimed that he could see clearly, in his own head, what was happening in Europe: the inferno, the dying, the rotting bodies lying in the sun in open fields. Once he even took to cudgelling the rats he saw running through the trenches. When the war ended, Cosmo's condition temporarily improved. He went back to designing flying machines, drew up a schem
e for a tower house on the coast of Maine, took to playing the cello again, studied maps and ocean charts, and discussed with Ambros the various travels he planned. To the best of my knowledge, they made only one of these journeys, in the early summer of 1923, when the two of them went to Heliopolis. One or two pictures have survived from that visit to Egypt: one shows a kafeneion in Alexandria called the Paradeissos, one the San Stefano casino at Ramleh, and one the casino at Heliopolis. Their visit to Egypt seems to have
OASIS D HELIOPOLIS, CASINO
been made at rather short notice, said Aunt Fini, and from what Uncle Adelwarth told me it was an attempt to regain the past, an attempt that appears to have failed in every respect. The start of Cosmo's second serious nervous breakdown appears to have been connected with a German film about a gambler that was screened in New York at the time, which Cosmo described as a labyrinth devised to imprison him and drive him mad, with all its mirror reversals. He was particularly disturbed by an episode towards the end of the film in which a one-armed showman and hypnotist by the name of Sandor Weltmann induced a sort of collective hallucination in his audience. From the depths of the stage (as Cosmo repeatedly described it to Ambros) the mirage image of an oasis appeared. A caravan emerged onto the stage from a grove of palms, crossed the stage, went down into the auditorium, passed amongst the spectators, who were craning round in amazement, and vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The terrible thing was (Cosmo insisted) that he himself had somehow gone from the hall together with the caravan, and now could no longer tell where he was. One day, not long after, Aunt Fini continued, Cosmo really did disappear. I do not know where they searched for him, or for how long, but know that Ambros finally found him two or three days later on the top floor of the house, in one of the nursery rooms that had been locked for years. He was standing on a stool, his arms hanging down motionless, staring out at the sea where every now and then, very slowly, steamers passed by, bound for Boston or Halifax. When Ambros asked why he had gone up there, Cosmo said he had wanted to see how his brother was. But he never did have a brother, according to Uncle Adelwarth. Soon after, when Cosmo's condition had improved to some extent, Ambros accompanied him to Banff in the Canadian Rockies, for
the good air, on the advice of the doctors. They spent the whole summer at the famous Banff Springs Hotel. Cosmo was then like a well-behaved child with no interest in anything and Ambros was fully occupied by his work and his increasing concern for his charge. In mid October the snows began. Cosmo spent many an hour looking out of the tower window at the vast pine forests all around and the snow swirling down from the impenetrable heights. He would hold his rolled-up handkerchief clenched in his fist and bite into it repeatedly out of desperation. When darkness fell he would lie down on the floor, draw his legs up to his chest and hide his face in his hands. It was in that state that Ambros had to take him home and, a week later, deliver him to the Samaria Sanatorium at Ithaca, New York, where that same year, without saying a word or moving a muscle, he faded away.
These things happened more than half a century ago, said Aunt Fini. At that time I was at the Institute in Wettenhausen and knew nothing of Cosmo Solomon, nor of our mother's brother who had emigrated from Gopprechts. It was a long time before I learnt anything of Uncle Adelwarth's earlier days, even after I arrived in New York, and despite the fact that I was always in touch with him. After Cosmo's death, he became butler in the house at Rocky Point. From 1930 to 1950 I regularly drove out to Long Island, either alone or with Theo, as an extra help when big occasions were being prepared, or simply to visit. In those days, Uncle Adelwarth had more than half a dozen servants under him, not counting the gardeners and chauffeurs. His work took all his time and energy. Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum. I could not possibly have imagined him in his shirtsleeves, or in stockinged feet without his half-boots, which were unfailingly polished till they shone, and it was always a mystery to me when, or if, he ever slept, or simply rested a little. At that time he had no interest in talking about the past at all. All that mattered to him was that the hours and days in the Solomons' household should pass without any disruption, and that the interests and ways of old Solomon should not conflict with those of the second Mrs Solomon. From about the time he was thirty-five, said Aunt Fini, this became particularly difficult for Uncle Adelwarth, given that old Solomon had announced one day, without preamble, that he would no longer be present at any dinners or gatherings whatsoever, that he would no longer have anything at all to do with the outside world, and that he was going to devote himself entirely to growing orchids, whereas the second Mrs Solomon, who was a good twenty years younger than him, was known far beyond New York for her weekend parties, for which guests generally arrived on Friday afternoons. So on the one hand Uncle Adelwarth was increasingly kept busy looking after old Solomon, who practically lived in his hothouses, and on the other he was fully occupied in pre-empting the second Mrs Solomon's characteristic liking for tasteless indiscretions. Presumably the demands made by these twofold duties wore him down more, in the long term, than he admitted to himself, especially during the war years, when old Solomon, scandalized by the stories that still reached him in his seclusion, took to spending most of his time sitting wrapped in a travelling rug in an overheated glasshouse amidst the pendulous air-roots of his South American plants, uttering scarcely a syllable beyond the bare essentials, while Margo Solomon persisted in holding court. But when old Solomon died in his wheelchair in the early months of 1947, said Aunt Fini, something curious happened: now it was Margo who, having ignored her husband for nearly ten years, could hardly be persuaded to leave her room. Almost all the staff were discharged. Uncle Adelwarth's principal duty was now to look after the house, which was well-nigh deserted and largely draped with white dust-sheets. That was when Uncle Adelwarth began, now and again, to recount to me incidents from his past life. Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself. As if to distract me from her last words, Aunt Fini picked up one of the albums from the side table. This, she said, opening it and passing it over to me, is Uncle
Adelwarth as he was then. As you can see, I am on the left with Theo, and on the right, sitting beside Uncle, is his sister Balbina, who was just then visiting America for the first time. That was in May 1950. A few months after the picture was taken, Margo Solomon died of the complications of Banti's disease. Rocky Point passed to various beneficiaries and was sold off, together with all the furniture and effects, at an auction that lasted several days. Uncle Adelwarth was sorely affected by the dispersal, and a few weeks later he moved into the house at Mamaroneck that old Solomon had made over to him before he died. There is a picture of the living room on one of the next pages, said Aunt Fini. The whole house was always very neat and tidy, down to the last detail, like the room in this photograph. Often it seemed to me as if Uncle
Adelwarth was expecting a stranger to call at any moment. But no one ever did. Who would, said Aunt Fini. So I went over to Mamaroneck at least twice a week. Usually I sat in the blue armchair when I visited, and Uncle sat at his bureau, at a slight angle, as if he were about to write something or other. And from there he would tell me stories and many a strange tale. At times I thought the things he said he had witnessed, such as beheadings in Japan, were so improbable that I supposed he was suffering from Korsakov's syndrome: as you may know, said Aunt Fini, it is an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions. At any rate, the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became. After Christ
mas '52 he fell into such a deep depression that, although he plainly felt a great need to talk about his life, he could no longer shape a single sentence, nor utter a single word, or any sound at all. He would sit at his bureau, turned a little to one side, one hand on the desktop pad, the other in his lap, staring steadily at the floor. If I talked to him about family matters, about Theo or the twins or the new Oldsmobile with the white-walled tyres, I could never tell if he were listening or not. If I tried to coax him out into the garden, he wouldn't react, and he refused to consult a doctor, too. One morning when I went out to Mamaroneck, Uncle Adelwarth was gone. In the mirror of the hall stand he had stuck a visiting card with a message for me, and I have carried it with me ever since. Have gone to Ithaca. Yours
ever - Ambrose. It was a while before I understood what he meant by Ithaca. Needless to say, I drove over to Ithaca as often as I could in the weeks and months that followed. Ithaca is in a beautiful part of the country. All around there are forests and gorges through which the water rushes down towards the lake. The sanatorium, which was run by a Professor Fahnstock, was in grounds that looked like a park. I still remember, said Aunt Fini, standing with Uncle Adelwarth by his window one crystal-clear Indian Summer morning. The air was coming in from outside and we were looking over the almost motionless trees towards a meadow that reminded me of the Altach marsh when a middle-aged man appeared, holding a white net on a pole in front of him and occasionally taking curious jumps. Uncle Adelwarth stared straight ahead, but he registered my bewilderment all the same, and said: It's the butterfly man, you know. He comes round here quite often. I thought I caught an undertone of mockery in the words, and so took them as a sign of the improvement that Professor Fahnstock felt had been effected by the electroconvulsive therapy. Later in the autumn, though, the extent of the harm that had been done to Uncle's spirit and body was becoming clearer. He grew thinner and thinner, his hands, which used to be so calm, trembled, his face became lopsided, and his left eye moved restlessly. The last time I visited Uncle Adelwarth was in November. When it was time for me to leave, he insisted on seeing me to my car. And for that purpose he specially put on his paletot with the black velvet collar, and his Homburg. I still see him standing there in the driveway, said Aunt Fini, in that heavy overcoat, looking very frail and unsteady.