The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  It is autumn again, and Leo is now at grammar school in Miinnerstadt, a two-hour walk from Steinach, where he is living at Lindwurm the hatter's. His meals are sent to him twice a week - half a dozen little pots, stacked in a carrier. Lindwurm's daughter only has to warm them up. Inconsolable at having to go to school alone from now on, I fall ill. At least every other day I run a temperature and sometimes I am quite delirious. Dr Homburger prescribes elder juice and cold compresses. My bed has been made up on the sofa in the yellow room. For almost three weeks I lie there. Time and again I count the pieces of soap in the pyramid stacked on the marble top of the washstand, but I never arrive at the same total twice. The little yellow dragons on the wallpaper haunt me even in my dreams. I am often in great turmoil. When I wake up, I see the jars of preserves ranged on the chest and in the cold compartments of the tiled stove. I try in vain to work out what they mean. They don't mean anything, says Mama, they're just cherries, plums and pears. Outside, she tells me, the swallows are already gathering. At night, in my sleep, I can hear the swishing flight of great flocks of migrating birds as they pass over the house. When at last my condition improves somewhat, the windows are opened wide one bright Friday afternoon. From my position on the sofa I can see the whole Saale valley and the road to Höhn, and I can see Papa returning from Kissingen by that road, in the calèche. Just a little later, still wearing his hat on his head, he comes into my room. He has brought me a wooden box of sweets with a peacock butterfly painted on it. That evening, a hundredweight of apples, goldings and red calvilles, are laid down for winter on the floor of the next room. Their scent puts me to a more peaceful sleep than I have known for a long time, and when Dr Homburger examines me the next morning he pronounces me perfectly healthy again. But then, when the summer holidays are starting nine months later, it is Leo's turn. He has a lung complaint, and Mama insists that it comes from his airless lodgings at Lindwurm's, and the lead vapours from the hatter's workshop. Dr Homburger agrees. He prescribes a mixture of milk and Selters water, and orders Leo to spend a lot of time in the healthy air of the Windheim pine forests. Now a basket of sandwiches, curd cheese and boiled eggs is made up every morning. I pour Leo's health drink through a funnel into green bottles. Frieda, our cousin from Jochsberg, goes to the woods ..with us, as supervisor, as it were. She is already sixteen, very beautiful, and has a very long, thick, blonde plait. In the afternoon, Carl Hainbuch, the chief forester's son, invariably just happens to make an appearance, and walks for hours beneath the trees with Frieda. Leo, who reveres his cousin more than anyone, sits on the very top of one of the erratic boulders, watching the romantic scene with displeasure. What interests me most are the countless glossy black stag beetles in the Windheim woods. I track their crooked wanderings with a patient eye. At times it looks as if something has shocked them, physically, and it seems as if they have fainted. They lie there motionless, and it feels as if the world's heart had stopped. Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay's feather in her hand?

  If I think back nowadays to our childhood in Steinach (Luisa's memoirs continue at another point), it often seems as if it had been open-ended in time, in every direction - indeed, as if it were still going on, right into these lines I am now writing. But in reality, as I know only too well, childhood ended in January 1905 when the house and fields at Steinach were auctioned off and we moved into a new three-storey house in Kissingen, on the corner of Bibrastrasse and Ehrhardstrasse. Father had bought it one day, without hesitation, from Kiesel the builder, for a price of 66,000 gold marks, a sum which struck us all as the stuff of myth, and most of which he had raised on a mortgage with a Frankfurt bank, a fact which it took Mama a long time to accept. The

  Lazarus Lanzberg stables had been doing better and better in recent years, supplying as far afield as the Rhineland, Brandenburg and Holstein, buying everywhere, and leaving all their customers well pleased and satisfied. The contract Papa had won as supplier and provisioner to the army, which he proudly mentioned whenever he had the chance, had doubtless been the decisive factor in giving up farming, moving from backwater Steinach, and finally establishing a position in middle-class life. At that time I was almost sixteen, and believed that a completely new world, even lovelier than that of childhood, would be revealed to me in Kissingen. In some respects that was really how it was, but in others the Kissingen years up until my marriage in 19 21 seem in retrospect to have marked the first step on a path that grew narrower day by day and led inevitably to the point I have now arrived at. I find it difficult to think back to my youth in Kissingen. It is as if the gradual dawn of what was called the serious side of life, the minor and major disappointments that soon began to mount up, had affected my ability to take things in. And so there is a good deal I can no longer picture. Even of our arrival in Kissingen I have only fragmentary memories. I know it was bitterly cold, there was endless work to be done, my fingers were frozen, for days the house refused to warm up despite the fact that I poked the coals in the Irish stoves in all the rooms; the hoya plant had not survived the move; and the cats had run away, back to the old home, and, though Papa went back especially to Steinach, they were nowhere to be found. To me the house, which the people of Kissingen soon took to calling the Lanzberg Villa, always remained essentially a strange place. The vast, echoing stairwell; the linoleum flooring in the hall; the corridor at the

  back where the telephone hung over the laundry basket and you had to hold the heavy receivers to your ears with both hands; the pale, hissing gaslight; the sombre Flemish furniture

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  with its carved columns - there was something distinctly creepy about all of it, and at times I feel quite definitely that it did steady and irreparable harm to me. Only once, if I remember rightly, did I ever sit on the window seat in the drawing room, which was painted with foliage and tendrils like a festive bower, and from the ceiling of which a brand new brass Sabbath-lamp hung down, also fuelled by gas; I leafed through a page or two of the blue velvet postcard album which had its place on the shelf of the smoking table, and felt like a visitor, passing through. Often in the mornings or evenings, when I looked out of my top floor window across the flower beds of the spa nursery gardens to the green, wooded hills all around, I felt like a maid. From the very first spring we rented out several rooms in the house. Mother, who ran the household, was an exacting teacher of domestic management. At six o'clock, right after I got up, my first task was to give the white chickens in the garden their measure of grain and fetch in the eggs. Then breakfast had to be made, the rooms tidied, the vegetables trimmed, and lunch cooked. In the afternoons, for a while, I did a course in shorthand and book-keeping that was taught by nuns. Frau Ignatia was very proud of me. At other times I took the children of visitors to the spa for walks in the public gardens - for instance, Herr Weintraub's fat little boy. Herr Weintraub was a timber merchant and came every year from Perm in Siberia, because Jews (so he said) were not allowed at watering places in Russia. From about four o'clock I would sit out in the chalet darning or crocheting, and in the evening there was the vegetable patch to be watered, with water from the well - the tap water cost too much, claimed Papa. I could go to evening concerts only if Leo was home from the grammar school.

  Usually his friend Armand Wittelsbach, who later became an antiques dealer in Paris, would collect us after dinner. I would wear a white dress and stroll through the park between Armand and Leo. On occasions the spa gardens were illuminated: there would be Chinese lanterns strung across the avenues, shedding colourful, magical light. The fountains in front of the Regent's building would jet silver and gold alternately. But at ten o'clock the spell broke and we had to be home. Part of the way, Armand would walk on his hands beside me. I also remember a birthday outing with Armand and Leo. We set out at five in the morning, fi
rst towards Klausenhof and from there through the beech woods, where we picked big bunches of lily of the valley, back to Kissingen. We had been invited to breakfast with the Wittelsbachs. It was about that time, too, that we looked out for Halley's comet at night, and once there was a total eclipse of the sun in the early afternoon. It was dreadful to see the shadow of the moon slowly blotting out the sun, the leaves of the rambling rose on the balcony (where we stood with our soot-darkened pieces of glass) seeming to wither, and the birds flapping about in a frightened panic. And I recall that it was on the day after that Laura Mandel and her father first visited us from Trieste. Herr Mandel was nearly eighty but Laura was just our own age, and both of them made the greatest imaginable impression on me, Herr Mandel on account of his elegant appearance - he wore the most stylish linen suits and broad-brimmed straw hats - and Laura (who only ever called her father Giorgio), because of her firm, freckled forehead and her wonderful eyes, which were often rather misty. During the day, Herr Mandel would usually sit somewhere that was partly in the shade - by the silver poplar in our garden, on a bench in Luitpold Park, or on the terrace of the Wittelsbacher Hof hotel - reading the papers, making occasional notes, and often simply lost in thought. Laura said he had long been busy projecting an empire in which nothing ever happened, for he detested nothing more than enterprises, developments, great events, changes, or incidents of any kind. For her part, Laura was all for revolution. I once went to the theatre in Kissingen with her when some Viennese operetta - I no longer know if it was the Zigeunerbaron or Rastlbinder - was being performed to mark the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef's birthday. First the orchestra played the Austrian national anthem. Everyone stood up except Laura, who remained demonstratively seated because - coming from Trieste - she could not stand Austrians. What she said concerning this was the first political thought I ever came across in my life, and how often have I not wished, of late, that Laura were here again to discuss things with me. For several years she stayed with us during the summer months, the last time being that especially lovely season when both of us turned twenty-one, myself on the 17th of May and she on the 7th of July. I remember her birthday particularly. We had taken the little steamer upriver to the salt-vapour frames, and were strolling about in the cool salty air near the timber scaffold down which the mineral water continuously flows. I was wearing my new black straw hat with the green ribbon which I had bought at Tauber's in Wurzburg, where Leo was now reading classics. It was a beautiful day, and as we were walking along the paths a huge shadow suddenly fell upon us. We looked up at the sky, at the same time as all the other summer guests out walking by the frames, and there was a gigantic zeppelin gliding soundlessly through the blue air, apparently only just clearing the tops of the trees. Everyone was amazed, and a young man standing nearby took that as an excuse to talk to us - taking his courage in both hands, as he later admitted to me. His name, he told us right away, was Fritz Waldhof, and he played the French horn in the spa orchestra, which consisted chiefly of members of the Wiener Konzertverein who took jobs at Kissingen during the summer break every year. Fritz, for whom I had an instant liking, saw us home that afternoon, and the following week we went on our first outing together. Again it was a glorious summer day. I walked ahead with Fritz, and Laura, who had distinct doubts about him, followed with a Hamburg cellist named Hansen. Needless to say, I no longer remember what we talked about. But I do remember that the fields on either side of the path were full of flowers and that I was happy, and oddly enough I also recall that, not far out of town, just where the sign to Bodenlaube is, we overtook two very refined Russian gentlemen, one of whom (who looked particularly majestic) was speaking seriously to a boy of about ten who had been chasing butterflies and had lagged so far behind that they had had to wait for him. This warning can't have had much effect, though, because whenever we happened to look back we saw the boy running about the meadows with upraised net, exactly as before. Hansen later claimed that he had recognized the elder of the two distinguished Russian gentlemen as Muromzev, the president of the first Russian parliament, who was then staying in Kissingen.

  I spent the years which followed that summer in the usual way, doing my household duties, handling the accounts and correspondence in the stables and provisioning business, and waiting for the Viennese horn player to return to Kissingen, which he did regularly, together with the swallows. Over the nine months of separation each year we always grew apart somewhat, despite the many letters we wrote, and so it took Fritz, who like myself was essentially an undemonstrative person, a long time before he proposed to me. It was just before the end of the 1913 season, on a September afternoon that trembled with limpid loveliness. We were sitting by the salt-frames and I was eating bilberries with sour cream from a china bowl, when suddenly Fritz, in the middle of a carefully worked out reminiscence of our first outing to Bodenlaube, broke off and asked me, without further ado, if I should like to marry him. I did not know what to reply, but I nodded, and, though everything else around me blurred, I saw that long-forgotten Russian boy as clearly as anything, leaping about the meadows with his butterfly net; I saw him as a messenger of joy, returning from that distant summer day to open his specimen box and release the most beautiful red admirals, peacock butterflies, brimstones and tortoiseshells to signal my final liberation. Father, however, was reluctant to agree to a speedy engagement. He was not only troubled by the rather uncertain prospects of a French horn player, but also claimed that the proposed attachment was bound to cut me off from the Jewish faith. In the end it was not so much my own petitioning as the unceasing diplomatic efforts of Mother, who was not so concerned about upholding our traditional life, that won the day; and the following May, on my and Leo's twenty-fifth birthday, we celebrated our engagement at a small family gathering. A few months later, however, my dearest Fritz, who had been called up into the Austrian Musicians' Corps and transferred to Lemberg, suffered a stroke in the midst of playing the Freischutz overture for the garrison's., officers, and fell lifeless from his chair. His death was described to me a few days later in a telegram of condolence from Vienna, and for weeks the words and letters danced before my eyes in all sorts of new combinations. I really cannot say how I went on living, or how I got over the terrible pain of parting that tormented me day and night after Fritz's death, or indeed whether I have ever got over it. At all events, throughout the war I worked as a nurse with Dr Kosilowski. All the spa buildings and sanatoria in Kissingen were full of the wounded and the convalescent. Whenever a new arrival reminded me of Fritz, in appearance or manner, I would be overwhelmed afresh by my tragedy, and that may be why I looked after those young men so well, some of whom were very seriously injured - as if by doing so I might still save the life of my horn player. In May 1917 a contingent of badly wounded artillerymen was brought in, among them a lieutenant whose eyes were bandaged up. His name was Friedrich Frohmann, and I would sit at his bedside long after my duties were over, expecting some kind of a miracle. It was several months before he could open his seared eyes again. As I had guessed, they were Fritz's greyish-green eyes; but extinguished and blind. At Friedrich's request we soon began to play chess, describing the moves we had made or wanted to make in words - bishop to d6, rook to f"4, and so on. By an extraordinary feat of memory, Friedrich was soon able to retain the most complex games; and if his memory did fail him, he resorted to his sense of touch. Whenever his fingers moved across the pieces, with a delicate care that I found devastating, I was always reminded of the fingers of my horn player moving upon the keys of his instrument. As the year neared its end, Friedrich came down with some unidentifiable infection and died of it within a fortnight. It was almost the death of me, too, as they later told me. I lost all my beautiful hair and over a quarter of my body weight, and for a long time I lay in a profound, ebbing and flowing delirium in which all I saw was Fritz and Friedrich, and myself, alone, separate from the two of them. To what it was that I owed thanks for my utterly unexpected recovery late that winter, or
whether "thanks" is at all the right word, I know as little as I know how one gets through this life. Before the war's end I was awarded the Ludwig Cross in recognition of what they called my self-sacrificing devotion to duty. And then one day the war really was over. The troops came home. The revolution broke out in Munich. The Freikorps soldiers gathered their forces in Bamberg. Eisner was assassinated by Anton Arco Valley. Munich was re-taken and martial law was imposed. Landauer was killed, young Egelhofer and Leviné were shot, and Toller was locked up in a fortress. When everything was finally back to normal and it was business more or less as usual, my parents decided that now was the time to find me a husband, to take my mind off things. Before long, a Jewish marriage broker from Wiirzburg by the name of Brisacher introduced my present husband, Fritz Ferber, to our home. He came from a Munich family of livestock traders, but was himself just in the process of setting himself up in middle-class life as a dealer in fine art. Initially I consented to become engaged to Fritz Ferber solely because of his name, though later I did come to esteem and love him more with every day. Like the horn player before him, Fritz Ferber liked to take long walks out of town, and, again like him, he was by nature shy but essentially cheerful. In the summer of 1921, soon after our marriage, we went to the Allgàu, and Fritz took me up the Ifen, the Himmelsschrofen and the Hohes Licht. We looked down into the valleys - the Ostrachtal, the Illertal and the Walsertal - where the scattered villages were so peaceful it was as if nothing evil had ever happened anywhere on earth. Once, from the summit of the Kanzelwand, we watched a bad storm far below us, and when it had passed the green meadows gleamed in the sunshine and the forests steamed like an immense laundry. From that moment I knew for certain that I was now Fritz Ferber's and that I would be glad to work at his side in the newly established Munich picture gallery. When we returned from the Allgäu we moved into the house in Sternwartstrasse where we still live. It was a radiant autumn, and a hard winter to follow. True, it did not snow much, but for weeks on end the Englischer Garten was a miracle of hoar frost such as I had never seen, and on the Theresienwiese they opened up an ice-rink for the first time since the outbreak of war, where Fritz and I would skate in wonderful, sweeping curves, he in his green jacket and I in my fur-trimmed coat. When I think