The Emigrants

PAUL BEREYTER

In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life. A short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train. The obituary in the local paper was headed "Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher" and there was no mention of the fact that Paul Bereyter had died of his own free will, or through a self-destructive compulsion. It spoke merely of the dead man's services to education, his dedicated care for his pupils, far beyond the call of duty, his great love of music, his astonishing inventiveness, and of much else in the same vein. Almost by way of an aside, the obituary added, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practising his chosen profession. It was this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement, as much as the violent manner of his death, which led me in the years that followed to think more and more about Paul Bereyter, until, in the end, I had to get beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know. My investigations took me back to S, which I had visited less and less since leaving school. I soon learned that, right up to his death, Paul Bereyter had rented rooms there, in a house built in 1970 on the land that had once been Dagobert Lerchenmiiller's nursery and market garden, but he had seldom lived there, and it was thought that he was mostly abroad, no one quite knew where. His continual absence from the town, and his increasingly odd behaviour, which had first become apparent a few years before his retirement, gave him the reputation of an eccentric. This reputation, regardless of his undoubted pedagogic ability, had clung to Paul Bereyter for some considerable time, and had, as far as his death was concerned, confirmed the belief among the people of S (amidst whom Paul Bereyter had grown up and, albeit it with certain interruptions, always lived) that things had happened as they were bound to happen. The few conversations I had in S with people who had known Paul Bereyter were not very revealing, and the only thing that seemed remarkable was that no one called him Paul Bereyter or even Bereyter the teacher. Instead, he was invariably referred to simply as Paul, giving me the impression that in the eyes of his contemporaries he had never really grown up. I was reminded then of how we had only ever spoken of him as Paul at school, not without respect but rather as one might refer to an exemplary older brother, and in a way this implied that he was one of us, or that we belonged together. This, as I have come to realize, was merely a fabrication of our minds, because, even though Paul knew and understood us, we, for our part, had little idea of what he was or what went on inside him. And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like in that spacious apartment on the top floor of Lerchenmiiller's old house, which had once stood where the present block of flats is now, amidst an array of green vegetable patches and colourful flower beds, in the gardens where Paul often helped out of an afternoon. I imagined him lying in the open air on his balcony where he would often sleep in the summer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I imagined him skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him stretched out on the track. As I pictured him, he had taken off his spectacles and put them on the ballast stones by his side. The gleaming bands of steel, the crossbars of the sleepers, the spruce trees on the hillside above the village of Altstàdten, the arc of the mountains he knew so well, were a blur before his short-sighted eyes, smudged out in the gathering dusk. At the last, as the thunderous sound approached, all he saw was a darkening greyness and, in the midst of it, needle-sharp, the snow-white silhouettes of three mountains: the Kratzer, the Trettach and the Himmelsschrofen. Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.

In December 1952 my family moved from the village of W to the small town of S, 19 kilometres away. The journey — during which I gazed out of the cab of Alpenvogel's wine-red furniture van at the endless lines of trees along the roadsides, thickly frosted over and appearing before us out of the light-less morning mist — seemed like a voyage halfway round the world, though it will have lasted an hour at the very most. When at length we trundled across the Ach bridge into S, at that time no more than a small market town of perhaps nine thousand souls, I was overcome by a powerful feeling that a new life filled with the bustle of cities would be starting for us there. The blue enamel street names, the huge clock in front of the old railway station, and what seemed to me then the truly magnificent facade of the Wittelsbacher Hof Hotel, were all, I felt, unmistakable signs of a new beginning. It was, I thought, particularly auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by patches of waste land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air.

On the afternoon that we arrived, the temperature plummeted. A snow blizzard set in that continued for the rest of the day and eased off to an even, calm snowfall only towards the night. When I went to the school in S for the first time the following morning, the snow lay so thick that I felt a kind of exhilaration at the sight of it. The class I joined was the third grade, which was taught by Paul Bereyter. There I stood, in my dark green pullover with the leaping stag on it, in front of fifty-one fellow pupils, all staring at me with the greatest possible curiosity, and, as if from a great distance, I heard Paul say that I had arrived at precisely the right moment, since he had been telling the story of the stag's leap only the day before, and now the image of the leaping stag, worked into the fabric of my pullover, could be copied onto the blackboard. He asked me to take off the pullover and take a seat in the back row beside Fritz Binswanger for the time being, while he, using my picture of a leaping stag, would show us how an image could be broken down into numerous tiny pieces — small crosses, squares or dots — or else assembled from these. In no time I was bent over my exercise book, beside Fritz, copying the leaping stag from the blackboard onto my grid-marked paper. Fritz too, who (as I soon learnt) was repeating his third grade year, was taking visible pains over his effort, yet his progress was infinitely slow. Even when those who had started late were long finished, he still had little more than a dozen crosses on his page. We exchanged silent glances, and I rapidly completed his fragmentary piece of work. From that day on, in the almost two years that we sat next to each other, I did most of his arithmetic, his writing and his drawing exercises. It was very easy to do, and to do seamlessly, as it were, chiefly because Fritz and I had the selfsame, incorrigibly sloppy handwriting (as Paul repeatedly observed, shaking his head), with the one difference that Fritz could not write quickly and I could not write slowly. Paul had no objection to our working together; indeed, to encourage us further he hung the case of cockchafers on the wall beside our desk. It had a deep frame and was half-filled with soil. In it, as well as a pair of cockchafers labelled Melolontha vulgaris in the old German hand, there were a clutch of eggs, a pupa and a larva, and, in the upper portion, cockchafers were hatching, flying, and eating the leaves of apple trees. That case, demonstrating the mysterious metamorphosis of the cockchafer, inspired Fritz and me in the late spring to an intensive study of the whole nature of cockchafers, including anatomical examination and culminating in the cooking and eating of a cockchafer stew. Fritz, in fact, who came from a large family of farm labourers at Schwarzenbach and, as far as was known, had never had a real father, took the liveliest interest in anything connected with food, its preparation, and the eating of it. Every day he would expatiate in great detail on the quality of the sandwiches I brought with me and shared with him, and on our way home from school we would always stop to look in the window of Turra's delicatessen, or to look at the display at Einsiedler's exotic fruit emporium, where the main attraction was a dark green trout aquarium with air bubbling up through the water. On one occasion when we had been standing for a long time outside Einsiedler's, from the shadowy interior of which a pleasant coolness wafted out that September noon, old Einsiedler himself appeared in the doorway and made each of us a present of a white butterpear. This constituted a veritable miracle, not only because the fruits were such splendid rarities but chiefly because Einsiedler was widely known to be of a choleric disposition, a man who despised nothing so much as serving the few customers he still had. It was while he was eating the white butterpear that Fritz confided to me that he planned to be a chef; and he did indeed become a chef, one who could be said without exaggeration to enjoy international renown. He perfected his culinary skills at the Grand Hotel Dolder in Zurich and the Victoria Jungfrau in Interlaken, and was subsequently as much in demand in New York as in Madrid or London. It was when he was in London that we met again, one April morning in 1984, in the reading room of the British Museum, where I was researching the history of Bering's Alaska expedition and Fritz was studying eighteenth-century French cookbooks. By chance we were sitting just one aisle apart, and when we both happened to look up from our work at the same moment we immediately recognized each other despite the quarter century that had passed. In the cafeteria we told each other the stories of our lives, and talked for a long time about Paul, of whom Fritz mainly recalled that he had never once seen him eat.

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 trade 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.

A lengthy silence followed this disclosure before Mme Landau added that she had been reading Nabokov's autobiography on a park bench on the Promenade des Cordeliers when Paul, after walking by her twice, commented on her reading, with a courtesy that bordered on the extravagant. From then on, all that afternoon and throughout the weeks that followed, he had made the most appealing conversation, in his somewhat old-fashioned but absolutely correct French. He had explained to her at the outset, by way of introduction, as it were, that he had come to Salins-les-Bains, which he knew of old, because what he referred to as

his condition had been deteriorating in recent years to the point where his claustrophobia made him unable to teach and he saw his pupils, although he had always felt affection for them (he stressed this), as contemptible and repulsive creatures, the very sight of whom had prompted an utterly groundless violence in him on more than one occasion. Paul did his best to conceal his distress and the fear of insanity that came out in confessions of this kind. Thus, Mme Landau said, he had told her, only a few days after they had met, with an irony that made everything seem light and unimportant, of his recent attempt to take his own life. He described this episode as an embarrassment of the first order which he was loath to recall but about which he felt obliged to tell her so that she would know all that was needful concerning the strange companion at whose side she was so kind as to be walking about summery Salins. Le pauvre Paul, said Mme Landau, lost in thought, and then, looking across at me once more, observed that in her long life she had known quite a number of men — closely, she emphasized, a mocking expression on her face — all of whom, in one way or another, had been enamoured of themselves. Every one of these gentlemen, whose names, mercifully, she had mostly forgotten, had, in the end, proved to be an insensitive boor, whereas Paul, who was almost consumed by the loneliness within him, was the most considerate and entertaining companion one could wish for. The two of them, said Mme Landau, took delightful walks in Salins, and made excursions out of town. They visited the thermal baths and the salt galleries together, and spent whole afternoons up at Fort Belin. They gazed down from the bridges into the green water of the Furieuse, telling each other stories as they stood there. They went to the house at Arbois where Pasteur grew up, and in Arc-et-Senans they had seen the saltern buildings which in the eighteenth century had been constructed as an ideal model for factory, town and society; on this occasion,

Paul, in a conjecture she felt to be most daring, had linked the bourgeois concept of Utopia and order, as expressed in the designs and buildings of Nicolas Ledoux, with the progressive destruction of natural life. She was surprised, as she talked about it now, said Mme Landau, at how clear the images that she had supposed buried beneath grief at the loss of Paul still were to her. Clearest of all, though, were the memories of their outing — a somewhat laborious business despite the chair lift — up Montrond, from the summit of which she had gazed down for an eternity at Lake Geneva and the surrounding country, which looked considerably reduced in size, as if intended for a model railway. The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.

On a later visit to the Villa Bonlieu, when I enquired further about Paul's apparent familiarity with the French Jura and the area around Salins from an earlier time in his life, which Mme Landau had intimated, I learnt that in the period from autumn 1935 to early 1939 he had first been for a short while in Besangon and had then taught as house tutor to a family by the name of Passagrain in Dole. As if in explanation of this fact, not at first glance compatible with the circumstances of a German primary school teacher in the Thirties, Mme Landau put before me a large album which contained photographs documenting not only the period in question but indeed, a few gaps aside, almost the whole of Paul Bereyter's life, with notes penned in his own hand. Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them. The earliest photographs told the story of a happy childhood in the Bereyter family home in Blumenstrasse, right next to Lerchenmuller's nursery garden, and frequently showed Paul with his cat or with a rooster that was evidently completely domesticated. The years in a country boarding school followed, scarcely any less happy than the years of childhood that had gone before, and then Paul's entry into teacher training college at Lauingen, which he referred to as

the teacher processing factory in his gloss. Mme Landau observed that Paul had submitted to this training, which followed the most narrow-minded of guidelines and was dictated by a morbid Catholicism, only because he wanted to teach children at whatever cost — even if it meant enduring training of that kind. Only because he was so absolute and unconditional an idealist had he been able to survive his time at Lauingen without his soul being harmed in any way. In 1934 to 1935, Paul, then aged twenty-four, did his probation year at the primary school in S, teaching, as I learnt to my amazement, in the very classroom where a good fifteen years later he taught a pack of children scarcely distinguishable

from those pictured here, a class that included myself. The summer of 1935, which followed his probation year, was one of the finest times of all (as the photographs and Mme Landau's comments made clear) in the life of prospective primary school teacher Paul Bereyter.

That summer, Helen Hollaender from Vienna spent several weeks in S. Helen, who was a month or so older, spent that time at the Bereyter home, a fact which is glossed in the album with a double exclamation mark, while her mother put up at Pension Luitpold for the duration. Helen, so Mme Landau believed, came as a veritable revelation to Paul; for if these pictures can be trusted, she said, Helen Hollaender was an independent-spirited, clever woman, and furthermore her waters ran deep. And in those waters Paul liked to see his own reflection.

And now, continued Mme Landau, just think: early that September, Helen returned with her mother to Vienna, and Paul took up his first teaching post in the remote village of W. There, before he had had the time to do more than remember the children's names, he was served official notice that it would not be possible for him to remain as a teacher, because of the new laws, with which he was no doubt familiar. The wonderful future he had dreamt of that summer collapsed without a sound like the proverbial house of cards. All his prospects blurred. For the first time, he experienced that insuperable sense of defeat that was so often to beset him in later times and which, finally, he could not shake off. At the end of October, said Mme Landau, drawing to a close for the time being, Paul travelled via Basle to Besangon, where he took a position as a house tutor that had been found for him through a business associate of his father. How wretched he must have felt at that time is apparent in a small photograph taken one Sunday afternoon, which shows Paul on the left, a Paul who had plunged within a month

from happiness to misfortune, and was so terribly thin that he seems almost to have reached a physical vanishing point. Mme Landau could not tell me exactly what became of Helen Hollaender. Paul had preserved a resolute silence on the subject, possibly because he was plagued by a sense of having failed her or let her down. As far as Mme Landau had been able to discover, there could be little doubt that Helen and her mother had been deported, in one of those special trains that left Vienna at dawn, probably to Theresienstadt in the first instance.

Gradually, Paul Bereyter's life began to emerge from the background. Mme Landau was not in the least surprised that I was unaware, despite the fact that I came from S and knew what the town was like, that old Bereyter was what was termed half Jewish, and Paul, in consequence, only three quarters an Aryan. Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schòferle, who ran a coffee house in S, informed Paul's mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele, and begged to request her, with respect of course, not to take her afternoon coffee at his house any more. I do not find it surprising, said Mme Landau, not in the slightest, that you were unaware of the meanness and treachery that a family like the Bereyters were exposed to in a miserable hole such as S then was, and such as it still is despite all the so-called progress; it does not surprise me at all, since that is inherent in the logic of the whole wretched sequence of events.

In an effort to resume a more factual tone after the little outburst she had permitted herself, Mme Landau told me that Paul's father, a man of refinement and inclined to melancholy, came from Gunzenhausen in Franconia, where Paul's grandfather Amschel Bereyter had a junk shop and had married his Christian maid, who had grown very fond of him after a few years of service in his house. At that time Amschel was already past fifty, while Rosina was still in her mid twenties. Their marriage, which was naturally a rather quiet one, produced only one child, Theodor, the father of Paul. After an apprenticeship in Augsburg as a salesman, Theodor was employed for a lengthy spell in a Nuremberg department store, working his way up to the higher echelons, before moving to S in 1900 to open an emporium with capital saved partly from his earnings and partly borrowed. He sold everything in the emporium, from coffee to collar studs, camisoles to cuckoo clocks, candied sugar to collapsible top hats. Paul once described that wonderful emporium to her in detail, said Mme Landau, when he was in hospital in Berne in 1975, his eyes bandaged after an operation for cataracts. He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him. In his childhood, everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells — mothballs and lily-of-the-valley soap were always the most pungent, while felted wool and loden cloth assailed the nose only in wet weather, herrings and linseed oil in hot. For hours on end, Paul had said, deeply moved by his own memories, he had ridden in those days past the dark rows of bolts of material, the gleaming leather boots, the preserve jars, the galvanized watering cans, the whip stand, and the case that had seemed especially magical to him, in which rolls of Giitermann's sewing thread were neatly arrayed behind little glass windows, in every colour of the rainbow. The emporium staff consisted of Frommknecht, the clerk and accountant, one of whose shoulders was permanently raised higher from years of bending over correspondence and the endless figures and calculations; old Fraulein Steinbeiss, who flitted about all day long with a cloth and a feather duster; and the two attendants, Hermann Muller and Heinrich Miiller (no relation, as they incessantly insisted), who stood on either side of the monumental cash register, invariably wearing waistcoats and sleeve bands, and treated customers with the condescension that comes naturally, as it were, to those who occupy a higher station in life. Paul's father Theo Bereyter, though, whenever he, the emporium proprietor himself, came down to the shop for an hour or so (as he did every day) in his frock coat or a pin-striped suit and spats, would take up a position between the two potted palms, which would be either inside or outside the swing door depending on the weather, and would escort every single customer into the emporium with the most respectful courtesy, regardless of whether it was the neediest resident from the old people's home across the road or the opulent wife of Hastreiter, the brewery owner, and then see them out again with his compliments.

The emporium, Mme Landau added, being the only large store in the town and indeed in the entire district, by all accounts ensured a good middle class standard of living for the Bereyter family, and even one or two extravagances, as is evident (said Mme Landau) from the mere fact that Theodor drove a Diirkopp in the Twenties, attracting excited interest

as far afield as the Tyrol, Ulm or Lake Constance, as Paul liked to recall. Theodor Bereyter died on Palm Sunday, 1936; this too I heard from Mme Landau, who must have talked endlessly to Paul about these things, as I came to realize more clearly with every visit. The cause of death was given as heart failure, but in fact, as Mme Landau emphasized, he had died from the fury and fear that had been consuming him ever since, precisely two years before his death, the Jewish families, resident in his home town of Gunzenhausen for generations, had been the target of violent attacks. The emporium owner, escorted only by his wife and those in his employ, was buried before Easter in a remote corner, reserved for suicides and people of no denomination, behind a low wall in the churchyard at S. It is worth mentioning in this connection, said Mme Landau, that although the emporium, which passed to the widow, Thekla, could not be "Aryanized" after Theodor Bereyter's death, the family nonetheless had to sell it for next to nothing to Alfons Kienzle, a livestock and real estate agent who had recently set up as a respectable businessman. After this dubious transaction Thekla Bereyter fell into a depression and died within a few weeks.

All of these occurrences, Mme Landau said, Paul followed from afar without being able to intervene. On the one hand, when the bad news reached him it was always already too late to do anything, and, on the other, his powers of decision had been in some way impaired, making it impossible for him to think even as far as a single day ahead. For this reason, Mme Landau explained, Paul for a long time had only a partial grasp of what had happened in S in 1935 and 1936, and did not care to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. It was only in the last decade of his life, which he largely spent in Yverdon, that reconstructing those events became important to him, indeed vital, said Mme Landau. Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes — on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks' supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz, powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

What I was least able to understand in Paul's story, after all that, was the fact that in early 1939 — be it because the position of a German tutor in France in times that were growing more difficult was no longer tenable, or out of blind rage or even a sort of perversion — he went back to Germany, to the capital of the Reich, to Berlin, a city with which he was quite unfamiliar. There he took an office job at a garage in Oranienburg, and a few months later he was called up; those who were only three-quarter Aryans were apparently included in the muster. He served, if that is the word, for six years, in the motorized artillery, variously stationed in the Greater German homeland and in the several countries that were occupied. He was in Poland, Belgium, France, the Balkans, Russia and the Mediterranean, and doubtless saw more than

any heart or eye can bear. The seasons and the years came and went. A Walloon autumn was followed by an unending white winter near Berdichev, spring in the Departement Haute-Saóne, summer on the coast of Dalmatia or in Romania, and always, as Paul wrote under this photograph,

one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away — but from where? — and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

Paul's return to Germany in 1939 was an aberration, said Mme Landau, as was his return to S after the war, and to his teaching life in a place where he had been shown the door. Of course, she added, I understand why he was drawn back to school. He was quite simply born to teach children — a veritable Melammed, who could start from nothing and hold the most inspiring of lessons, as you yourself have described to me. And furthermore, as a good teacher he would have believed that one could consider those twelve wretched years over and done with, and simply turn the page and begin afresh. But that is no more than half the explanation, at most. What moved and perhaps even forced Paul to return, in 1939 and in 1945, was the fact that he was a German to the marrow, profoundly attached to his native land in the foothills of the Alps, and even to that miserable place S as well, which in fact he loathed and, deep within himself, of that I am quite sure, said Mme Landau, would have been pleased to see destroyed and obliterated, together with the townspeople, whom he found so utterly repugnant. Paul, said Mme Landau, could not abide the new flat that he was more or less forced to move into shortly before he retired, when the wonderful old Lerchenmiiller house was pulled down to make way for a hideous block of flats; but even so, remarkably, in all of those last twelve years that he was living here in Yverdon he could never bring himself to give up that flat. Quite the contrary, in fact: he would make a special journey to S several times a year especially to see that all was in order, as he put it. Whenever he returned from one of those expeditions, which generally took just two days, he would always be in the gloomiest of spirits, and in his childishly appealing way he would rue the fact that, to his own detriment, he had once again ignored my urgent advice not to go there any more.

Here in Bonlieu, Mme Landau told me on another occasion, Paul spent a lot of time gardening, which I think he loved more than anything else. After we had left Salins and our decision had been taken that from now on he would live in Bonlieu, he asked me if he might take the garden in hand, which at that time was fairly neglected. And Paul really did transform the garden, in a quite spectacular manner. The young trees, the flowers, the plants and climbers, the shady ivy beds, the rhododendrons, the roses, the shrubs and perennials — they all grew, not a bare patch anywhere. Every afternoon, weather permitting, said Mme Landau, Paul was busy in the garden. But sometimes he would simply sit for a while, gazing at the greenery that burgeoned all around him. The doctor who had operated on his cataracts had advised him that peaceful spells spent simply looking at the leaves would protect and improve his eyesight. Not, of course, that Paul took any notice whatsoever of the doctor's orders at night, said Mme Landau. His light was always on till the small hours. He read and read — Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so. He copied out passages into notebooks which give a good idea of how much the lives of these particular authors interested him. Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said

Mme Landau, handing, me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of

which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.

In early 1982, the condition of Paul's eyes began to deteriorate. Soon all he could see were fragmented or shattered images. No second operation was going to be possible; Paul bore the fact with equanimity, said Mme Landau, and always looked back with immense gratitude to the eight years of light that the Berne operation had afforded him. If he paused to consider, Paul had said to her shortly after being given an extremely unfavourable prognosis, that as a child he had already been troubled with little dark patches and pearldrop shapes before his eyes, and had always been afraid that he would go blind at any time, then it was amazing, really, that his eyes had done him such good service for quite so long. The fact was, said Mme Landau, that Paul's whole manner at that time was extraordinarily composed as he contemplated the mouse-grey (his word) prospect before him. He realized then that the world he was about to enter might be a more confined one than that he had hitherto lived in, but he also believed there would be a certain sense of ease. I offered to read Paul the whole of Pestalozzi, said Mme Landau, to which he replied that for that he would gladly sacrifice his eyesight, and I should start right away, for preference, perhaps, with The Evening Hour of a Hermit. It was some time in the autumn, during one such reading hour, said Mme Landau, that Paul, without any preamble, informed me that there was now no reason to keep the fiat in S and he proposed to give it up. Not long after Christmas we went to S to see to it. Since I had not set foot in the new Germany, I had misgivings as I looked forward to the journey. No snow had fallen, there was no sign anywhere of any winter tourism, and when we got out at S I felt as if we had arrived at the end of the world, and experienced so uncanny a premonition that I should have liked most of all to turn back on the spot. Paul's flat was cold and dusty and full of the past. For two or three days we busied ourselves in it aimlessly. On the third day a spell of mild fóhn weather set in, quite unusual for the time of year. The pine forests were black on the mountainsides, the windows gleamed like lead, and the sky was so low and dark, one expected ink to run out of it any moment. The pain in my temples was so dreadful that I had to lie down, and I well remember that, when the aspirin Paul had given me gradually began to take effect, two strange, sinister patches began to move behind my eyelids, furtively. It was not till dusk that I woke; though on that day it was as early as three. Paul had covered me with a blanket, but he himself was nowhere to be seen. As I stood, irresolute in the hall, I noticed that Paul's windcheater was missing, which, as he had happened to mention that morning, had been hanging there for almost forty years. I knew at that moment that Paul had gone out, wearing that jacket, and that I would never see him alive again. So, in a way, I was ready when the doorbell rang soon after. It was only the manner in which he died, a death so inconceivable to me, that robbed me of my self-control at first; yet, as I soon realized, it was for Paul a perfectly logical step. Railways had always meant a great deal to him — perhaps he felt they were headed for death. Timetables and directories, all the logistics of railways, had at times become an obsession with him, as his flat in S showed. I can still see the Màrklin model railway he had laid out on a deal table in the spare north-facing room: to me it is the very image and symbol of Paul's German tragedy. When Mme Landau said this, I thought of the stations, tracks, goods depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often drawn on the blackboard and which we had to copy into our exercise books as carefully as we could. It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that

omeone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn't know. All those years that he was here in Yverdon I had no notion that Paul had found his fate already systematically laid out for him in the railways, as it were. Only once, obliquely, did he talk about his passion for railways, more as one talks of a quaint interest that belongs to the past. On that occasion, said Mme Landau, Paul told me that as a child he had once spent his summer holidays in Lindau, and had watched from the shore every day as the trains trundled across from the mainland to the island and from the island to the mainland. The white clouds of steam in the blue air, the passengers waving from the windows, the reflection in the water — this spectacle, repeated at intervals, so absorbed him that he never once appeared on time at the dinner table all that holiday, a lapse that his aunt responded to with a shake of the head that grew more resigned every time, and his uncle with the comment that he would end up on the railways. When Paul told me this perfectly harmless holiday story, said Mme Landau, I could not possibly ascribe the importance to it that it now seems to have, though even then there was something about that last turn of phrase that made me uneasy. I suppose I did not immediately see the innocent meaning of Paul's uncle's expression, end up on the railways, and it struck me as darkly foreboding. The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant — I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death — lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.