The Emigrants

AMBROS ADELWARTH

I have barely any recollection of my own of Great-Uncle Adelwarth. As far as I can say with any certainty, I saw him only once, in the summer of 1951. That was when the Americans, Uncle Kasimir with Lina and Flossie, Aunt Fini with Theo and the little twins, and Aunt Theres, who was unmarried, came to stay with us in W for several weeks, either all together or one after the other. On one occasion during that time, the in-laws from Kempten and Lechbruck — emigrants, as is well known, tend to seek out their own kind — came to W for a few days, and it was at the resulting reunion of almost sixty members of the family that I saw my Great-Uncle Adelwarth, for the first (and, I believe, the last) time. Naturally, in the great upheaval caused by the visitors, in our own household and indeed throughout the whole village, since rooms had to be found elsewhere, he made no more impression on me at first than any of the others; but when he was called upon, as the eldest of the emigrants and their forefather, as it were, to address the gathered clan, that Sunday afternoon when we sat for coffee at the long trestle tables in the village hall, my attention was inevitably drawn to him as he rose and tapped his glass with a small spoon. Uncle Adelwarth was not particularly tall, but he was nonetheless a most distinguished presence who confirmed and enhanced the self-esteem of all who were there, as the general murmur of approval made clear — even though, as I, at the age of seven, immediately realized (in contrast to the adults, who were caught up in their own preconceptions), they seemed out-classed compared with this man. Although I do not remember what Uncle Adelwarth said in his rather formal address, I do recall being deeply impressed by the fact that his apparently effortless German was entirely free of any trace of our home dialect and that he used words and turns of phrase the meanings of which I could only guess at. After this, for me, truly memorable appearance, Uncle Adelwarth vanished from my sight for good when he left for Immenstadt on the mail bus the following day, and from there journeyed onward by rail to Switzerland. Not even in my thoughts did he remain present, and of his death two years later, let alone its circumstances, I knew nothing throughout my childhood, probably because the sudden end of Uncle Theo, who was felled by a stroke one morning while reading the paper, placed Aunt Fini and the twins in an extremely difficult situation, a turn of events which must have eclipsed the demise of an elderly relative who lived on his own. Moreover, Aunt Fini, whose closeness to him put her in the best position to tell us how things had been with Uncle Adelwarth, now found herself obliged (she wrote) to work night and day to see herself and the twins through, for which reason, understandably, she was the first to stop coming over from America for the summer months. Kasimir visited less and less often also, and only Aunt Theres came with any kind of regularity, for one thing because, being single, she was in by far the best position to do so, and for another because she was incurably homesick her whole life long. Three weeks after she arrived, on every visit, she would still be weeping with the joy of reunion, and three weeks before she left she would again be weeping with the pain of separation. If her stay with us was longer than six weeks, there would be a becalmed period in the middle that she would mostly fill with needlework; but if her stay was shorter there were times when one really did not know whether she was in tears because she was at home at long last or because she was already dreading having to leave again. Her last visit was a complete disaster. She wept in silence, at breakfast and at dinner, out walking in the fields or shopping for the Hummel figurines she doted on, doing crosswords or gazing out of the window. When we accompanied her to Munich, she sat streaming tears between us children in the back of Schreck the taxi driver's new Opel Kapitàn as the roadside trees sped past us in the light of dawn, from Kempten to Kaufbeuren and from Kaufbeuren to Buchloe; and later I watched from the spectators' terrace as she walked towards the silvery aeroplane, with her hatboxes, across the tarmac at Riem airport, sobbing repeatedly and drying her eyes with a handkerchief. Without looking back once, she went up the steps and vanished through the dark opening into the belly of the aircraft — for ever, as one might say. For a while her weeldy letters still reached us (invariably beginning: My dear ones at home, how are you? I am fine!) but then the correspondence, which had been kept up without fail for almost thirty years, broke off, as I noticed when the dollar bills that were regularly enclosed for me stopped coming. It was in the midst of carnival season that my mother put a death notice in the local paper, to the effect that our dear sister, sister-in-law and aunt had departed this life in New York following a short but bravely borne illness. All this prompted the talk again about Uncle Theo's far too early death, but not, as I well remember, of Uncle Adelwarth, who, like Theo, had died a few years or so before.

Our relatives' summer visits were probably the initial reason why I imagined, as I grew up, that I too would one day go to live in America. More important, though, to my dream of America was the different kind of everyday life displayed by the occupying forces stationed in our town. The local people found their moral conduct in general — to judge by comments sometimes whispered, sometimes spoken out loud — unbecoming in a victorious nation. They let the houses they had requisitioned go to ruin, put no window boxes on the balconies, and had wire-mesh fly screens in the windows instead of curtains. The womenfolk went about in trousers and dropped their lipstick-stained cigarette butts in the street, the men put their feet up on the table, the children left their bikes out in the garden overnight, and as for those negroes, no one knew what to make of them. It was precisely this kind of disparaging remark that strengthened my desire to see the one foreign country of which I had any idea at all. In the evenings, but particularly during the endless lessons at school, I pictured every detail of my future in America. This period of my imaginary Americanization, during which I crisscrossed the entire United States, now on horseback, now in a dark brown Oldsmobile, peaked between my sixteenth and seventeenth years in my attempt to perfect the mental and physical attitudes of a Hemingway hero, a venture in mimicry that was doomed to failure for various reasons that can easily be imagined. Subsequently my American dreams gradually faded away, and once they had reached vanishing point they were presently supplanted by an aversion to all things American. This aversion became so deeply rooted in me during my years as a student that soon nothing could have seemed more absurd to me than the idea that I might ever travel to America except under compulsion. Even so, I did eventually fly to Newark on the 2nd of January 1981. This change of heart was prompted by a photograph album of my mother's which had come into my hands a few months earlier and which contained pictures quite new to me of our relatives who had emigrated during the Weimar years. The longer I studied the photographs, the more urgently I sensed a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them. The photograph that follows here, for example, was taken in the Bronx

in March 1939. Lina is sitting on the far left, next to Kasimir. On the far right is Aunt Theres. I do not know who the other people on the sofa are, except for the little girl wearing glasses. That's Flossie, who later became a secretary in Tucson, Arizona, and learnt to belly dance when she was in her fifties. The oil painting on the wall shows our village of W. As far as I have been able to discover, no one now knows the whereabouts of that picture. Not even Uncle Kasimir, who brought it with him to New York rolled up in a cardboard tube, as a farewell gift from his parents, knows where it can have got to.

So on that 2nd of January, a dark and dreary day, I drove south from Newark airport on the New Jersey turnpike in the direction of Lakehurst, where Aunt Fini and Uncle Kasimir, after they moved away from the Bronx and Mamaroneck in the mid Seventies, had each bought a bungalow in a so-called retirement community amidst the blueberry fields. Right outside the airport perimeter I came within an inch of driving off the road when a Jumbo rose ponderously into the air above a truly mountainous heap of garbage, like some creature from prehistoric times. It was trailing a greyish black veil of vapour, and for a moment it was as if it had spread its wings. Then I drove on into flat country, where for the entire length of the Garden State Parkway there was nothing but stunted trees, fields overgrown with heather, and deserted wooden houses, partly boarded up, with tumble-down cabins and chicken runs all around. There, Uncle Kasimir told me later, millions of hens were kept up to the postwar years, laying millions upon millions of eggs for the New York market till new methods of poultry-keeping made the business unprofitable and the smallholders and their birds disappeared. Shortly after nightfall, taking a side road that ran off from the Parkway for several kilometres through a kind of marshland, I reached the old peoples' town called Cedar Glen West. Despite the immense territory covered by this community, and despite the fact that the bungalow condominiums were indistinguishable from each other, and, furthermore, that almost identical glowing Father Christ-mases were standing in every front garden, I found Aunt Finis house without difficulty, since everything at Cedar Glen West is laid out in a strictly geometrical pattern.

Aunt Fini had made Maultaschen for me. She sat at the table with me and urged me to help myself whilst she ate nothing, as old women often do when they cook for a younger relative who has come to visit. My aunt spoke about the past, sometimes covering the left side of her face, where she had had a bad neuralgia for weeks, with one hand. From time to time she would dry the tears that pain or her memories brought to her eyes. She told me of Theo's untimely death, and the years that followed, when she often had to work sixteen hours or more a day, and went on to tell me about Aunt Theres, and how, before she died, she had walked around for months as if she were a stranger to the place. At times, in the summer light, she had looked like a saint, in her white twill gloves which she had worn for years on account of her eczema. Perhaps, said Aunt Fini, Theres really was a saint. At all events she shouldered her share of troubles. Even as a schoolchild she was told by the catechist that she was a tearful sort, and come to think of it, said Aunt Fini, Theres really did seem to be crying most of her life. She had never known her without a wet handkerchief in her hand. And, of course, she was always giving everything away: all she earned, and whatever came her way as the keeper of the millionaire Wallerstein's household. As true as I'm sitting here, said Aunt Fini, Theres died a poor woman. Kasimir, and particularly Lina, doubted it, but the fact was that she left nothing but her collection of almost a hundred Hummel figurines, her wardrobe (which was splendid, mind you) and large quantities of paste jewellery — just enough, all told, to cover the cost of the funeral.

Theres, Kasimir and I, said Aunt Fini as we leafed through her photo album, emigrated from W at the end of

the Twenties. First, I took ship with Theres at Bremerhaven on the 6th of September 1927. Theres was twenty-three and I was twenty-one, and both of us were wearing bonnets. Kasimir followed from Hamburg in summer 1929, a few weeks before Black Friday. He had trained as a tinsmith, and was just as unable to find work as I was, as a teacher, or Theres, as a sempstress. I had graduated from the Institute at Wettenhausen the previous year, and from autumn 1926 I had worked as an unpaid teaching assistant at the primary school in W. This is a photograph taken at that time. "We were on an outing to Falkenstein. The pupils all stood in the back of the

lorry, while I sat in the driver's cab with a teacher named Fuchsluger, who was one of the very first National Socialists, and Benedikt Tannheimer, who was the landlord of the Adler and the owner of the lorry. The child right at the back, with a cross marked over her head, is your mother, Rosa. I remember, said Aunt Fini, that a month or so later, two days before I embarked, I went to Klosterwald with her, and saw her to her boarding school. At that time, I think, Rosa had a great deal of anxiety to contend with, given that her leaving home coincided so unhappily with her siblings' departure for another life overseas, for at Christmas she wrote a letter to us in New York in which she said she felt fearful when she lay awake in the dormitory at night. I tried to console her by saying she still had Kasimir, but then Kasimir left for America too, when Rosa was just fifteen. That's the way it always is, said Aunt Fini thoughtfully: one thing after another. Theres and I, at any rate, she continued after a while, had a comparatively easy time of it when we arrived in New York. Uncle Adelwarth, a brother of our mother, who had gone to America before the First World War and had been employed only in the best of houses since then, was able to find us positions immediately, thanks to his many connections. I became a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres a lady's maid to Mrs Wallerstein, who was about the same age and whose husband, who came from somewhere near Ulm, had made a considerable fortune with a number of brewing patents, a fortune that went on growing as the years went by.

Uncle Adelwarth, whom you probably do not remember any more, said Aunt Fini, as if a quite new and altogether more significant story were now beginning, was a man of rare distinction. He was born at Gopprechts near Kempten in 1886, the youngest of eight children, all of them girls except for him. His mother died, probably of exhaustion, when Uncle Adelwarth, who was given the name Ambros, was not yet two years old. After her death, the eldest daughter, Kreszenz, who cannot have been more than seventeen at the time, had to run the household and play the role of mother as best she could, while their father the innkeeper sat with his customers, which was all he knew how to do. Like the other siblings, Ambros had to give Zenzi a hand quite early on, and at five he was already being sent to the weekly market at Immenstadt, together with Minnie, who was not much older, to sell the chanterelles and cranberries they had gathered the day before. Well into the autumn, said Aunt Fini, the two youngest of the Adelwarth children sometimes did nothing for weeks on end but bring home basketfuls of rosehips; they would cut them open, then dig out the hairy seeds with the tip of a spoon, and, after leaving them in a washtub for a few days to draw moisture, put the red flesh of the hips through the press. If one thinks now of the circumstances in which Ambros grew up, said Aunt Fini, one inevitably concludes that he never really had a childhood. When he was only thirteen he left home and went to Lindau, where he worked in the kitchens of the Bairischer Hof till he had enough for the rail fare to Lausanne, the beauties of which he had once heard enthusiastically praised at the inn in Gopprechts by a travelling watchmaker. Why, I shall never know, said Aunt Fini, but in my mind's eye I always see Ambros crossing Lake Constance from Lindau by steamer, in the moonlight, although that can scarcely have been how it was in reality. One thing is certain: that within a few days of leaving his homeland for good, Ambros, who was then fourteen at the outside, was working as an apprenti garfon in room service at the Grand Hotel Eden in Montreux, probably thanks to his unusually appealing but nonetheless self-controlled nature. At least I think it was the Eden, said Aunt Fini, because, in one of the postcard albums that Uncle Adelwarth left, the world-famous hotel is on one of the opening pages, with its awnings lowered over the windows against the afternoon sun. During his apprenticeship in Montreux, Aunt Fini continued, after she had fetched the album from one of her bedroom drawers and opened it up before me, Ambros wasl

not only initiated into all the secrets of hotel life, but also learnt French to perfection, or rather, he absorbed it; he had the special gift of acquiring a foreign language, without apparent effort and without any teaching aids, within a year or two, solely by making certain adjustments (as he once explained to me) to his inner self. Along with very accomplished New York English he also spoke a most elegant French and an extremely dignified German, which astounded me the most, since he could hardly have had it from Gopprechts. Furthermore, Aunt Fini recalled, he had a far from elementary knowledge of Japanese, as I once discovered by chance when we were shopping together at Sacks' and he came to therescue of a Japanese gentleman who knew no English and was embroiled in some unpleasantness.

Once his Swiss apprentice years were over, Ambros went to London, with excellent recommendations and testimonials, where he took a job at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand in the autumn of 1905, again in room service. It was in his London period that the mysterious episode of the lady from Shanghai occurred. All I know of her is that she had a taste for brown kid gloves; although Uncle Adelwarth did make occasional references later to what he had experienced with this lady (she marked the beginning of my career in misfortune, he once said), I never managed to find out the true facts of the matter. I assume that the lady from Shanghai — whom I always associated, doubtless absurdly, with Mata Hari — often stayed at the Savoy, and that Ambros, who was now about twenty, had contact with her professionally, if one can put it like that. It was the same with the counsellor from the Japanese legation whom he accompanied — in 1907, if I am not mistaken — on a journey by ship and rail via Copenhagen, Riga, St Petersburg, and Moscow, right across Siberia, to Japan, where the unmarried gentleman had a wonderful house set in a lake, near Kyoto. Ambros spent almost two years, partly as valet and partly as the counsellor's guest, in that floating and well-nigh empty house, and as far as I am aware he felt happier there than he had been anywhere else until then. Once, at Mamaroneck, said Aunt Fini, Uncle Adelwarth spent all of one afternoon telling me about his time in Japan. But I no longer remember exactly what he told me. Something about paper walls, I think, about archery, and a good deal about evergreen laurel, myrtle and wild camellia. And I remember something about

an old hollow camphor tree which supposedly had room for fifteen people inside it, a story of a decapitation, and the call of the Japanese cuckoo, said Aunt Fini, her eyes half closed, hototogisu, which he could imitate so well.

After morning coffee on the second day of my stay at Cedar Glen West, I went over to Uncle Kasimir. It was about half past ten when I sat down at the kitchen table with him. Lina was already busy at the stove. My uncle had produced two glasses and poured out the gentian brandy I had brought. In those days, he began, once I had managed to steer the talk to the subject of emigration, people like us simply had no chance in Germany. Only once, when I had finished my tinsmith apprenticeship in Altenstadt, did I get work, in '28, when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg. The Jews of Augsburg had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War,

and it wasn't till '28 that they had the money they needed for a new roof. This is me, said Uncle Kasimir, pushing across the table a framed postcard-size photograph he had taken down from the wall — at the far right, from where you're looking. But after that job there was nothing again for weeks, and one of my mates, Josef Wohlfahrt, who still felt confident about things when we were at work up on the synagogue roof, later hanged himself in despair. Fini wrote enthusiastic letters from her new homeland, so it was no wonder that I finally decided to follow my sisters to America. Of the rail journey across Germany I remember nothing, except that everything seemed unfamiliar and incomprehensible to me — the country we passed through, the huge railway stations and cities, the Rhineland and the vast flatlands up north — most probably because I had never been beyond the Allgàu and the Lechfeld region. But I do still see the offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd in Bremerhaven quite clearly in front of me. The passengers with little money were obliged to wait there till they could embark. I particularly remember the many different kinds of head-gear the emigrants wore: hoods and caps, winter and summer hats, shawls and kerchiefs, and then the peaked caps of the shipping line's stewards and the customs officers, and the bowler hats of the brokers and agents. On the walls hung large oil pictures of the ocean liners of the Lloyd fleet. Every one of them was cleaving a course full steam ahead, the bow rearing up out of the waves, conveying a sense of an unstoppable force driving onward. Above the door through which we finally left was a circular clock with Roman numerals, and over the clock, in ornate lettering, was the motto Mein Feld ist die Welt.

Aunt Lina was pushing boiled potatoes through a press onto a floured pastryboard, and Uncle Kasimir, pouring me another gentian, went on to describe his crossing in the teeth of the February storms. The way the waves rose up from the deep and came rolling on was terrifying, he said. Even as a child I used to be horrified when the frog pond was frozen over, and we played curling on the ice, and I would suddenly think of the darkness under my feet. And now, nothing but black water all around, day in, day out, and the ship always seeming to be in the selfsame place. Most of my fellow travellers were sea-sick. Exhausted they lay in their berths, their eyes glassy or half closed. Others squatted on the floor, stood leaning for hours against a wall, or tottered along the passageways like sleepwalkers. For a full week, I too felt like death. I did not begin to feel better until we cleared the Narrows into Upper Bay. I sat on a bench on deck. The ship had already slowed. I felt a light breeze on my forehead, and as we approached the waterfront Manhattan rose higher and higher before us out of the sunshot morning mists.

My sisters, who were waiting for me on the quayside, were not able to be of much help, nor could Uncle Adelwarth find anything for me, because I was no use as a gardener or cook or servant. On the day after my arrival I rented a back room that looked out on a narrow air shaft, from Mrs Risa Litwak in Bayard Street on the Lower East Side. Mrs Litwak, whose husband had died the year before, spent the whole day cooking and cleaning, or if she wasn't cooking and cleaning she was making paper flowers or sewing all night for her children or for other people, or as a supply sempstress for some business or other. Sometimes she played on a pianola very pretty songs that I seemed to know from somewhere. Until the First World War, the Bowery and the whole Lower East Side were the districts where the immigrants chiefly came to live. More than a hundred thousand Jews arrived there every year, moving into the cramped, dingy apartments in the five- or six-storey tenement blocks. The so-called parlour, which faced the street, was the only room that had two windows, and the fire escape ran past one of them. In the autumn, the Jews would build their sukkahs on the fire escape landings, and in summer, when the heat hung motionless in the city streets for weeks and life was unbearable indoors, hundreds and thousands of people would sleep outside, up in the airy heights, or even on the roofs or sidewalks or the little fenced-off patches of grass on Delancey Street and in Seward Park. The whole of the Lower East Side was one huge dormitory. Even so, the immigrants were full of hope in those days, and I myself was by no means despondent when I started to look for a job at the end of February '28. And before the week was out I already had my place at a workbench, at the Seckler & Margarethen Soda and Seltzers Works near the sliproad up to Brooklyn Bridge. There I made stainless-steel boilers and vats of various sizes, and old Seckler, who was a Jew from Briinn (I never did find out who Margarethen was), sold most of them as "catering equipment" to illicit distilleries where the concern was far less about the asking price than about doing business with the utmost discretion. Seckler, who for some reason took a liking to me, said that the sale of these steel vats and all the rest of the plant

vital to the distilleries had developed as a side-line almost by itself, without his doing anything to encourage it, alongside the main business of the soda and seltzers works, and so he simply did not have the heart to cut it back. Seckler always praised my work, but he was reluctant to pay, and gave a poor wage. At least with me, he would say, you are on the first rung of the ladder. And then one day, it was a few weeks after Passover, he called me in to his office, leaned back in his chair, and said: Have you got a head for heights? If you have, you can go over to the new Yeshiva, they need metalworkers like you. And he gave me the address -500 West 187th Street, corner Amsterdam Avenue. The very next day I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher, helping to rivet copper bands that were almost six metres wide onto the cupola that crowned the building, which looked like a cross between a railway station and an oriental palace. After that, I worked a lot on the tops of skyscrapers, which they went on building until the early Thirties in New York, despite the Depression. I put the copper hoods on the General Electric Building, and from '29 to '30 we spent a year on the sheet-steel work on the summit of the Chrysler Building, which was unbelievably difficult on account of the curvatures and slopes. Since all my acrobatics were done two or three hundred metres above the ground, I naturally made a lot of money, but I spent it as fast as I earned it. And then I broke my wrist skating in Central Park and had no work till '34. And then we moved to the Bronx, and life up in the dizzy heights came to an end.

After lunch, Uncle Kasimir became visibly restless and paced to and fro, and at length he said: I have got to get out of the house! — to which Aunt Lina, who was washing up, replied: What a day to go for a drive! One might indeed have thought that night was falling, so low and inky black was the sky. The streets were deserted. We passed very few other cars on the road. It took us almost an hour to cover the thirty kilometres to the Atlantic, because Uncle Kasimir drove more slowly than I have ever known anyone drive on an open stretch of road. He sat angled up against the wheel, steering with his left hand and telling tales of the heyday of Prohibition. Occasionally he would take a glance ahead to check that we were still in the right lane. The Italians did most of the business, he said. All along the coast, in places like Leonardo, Atlantic Highlands, Little Silver, Ocean Grove, Neptune City, Belmar and Lake Como, they built summer palaces for their families and villas for their women and usually a church as well and a little house for a chaplain. Uncle slowed down even more and wound his window down. This is Toms River, he said, there's no one here in the winter. In the harbour, sailboats lay pushed up together like a frightened flock, rigging rattling. Two seagulls perched on top of a coffee shop built to look like a gingerbread house. The Buyright Store, the Pizza Parlour and the Hamburger Heaven were closed, and the private homes were locked up and shuttered too. The wind blew sand across the road and under the wooden sidewalks. The dunes, said Uncle, are invading the town. If people didn't keep coming in the summer, this would all be buried in a few years. From Toms River the road ran down to Barnegat Bay and across Pelican Island to the eighty-kilometre spit of land that stretches along the coast of New Jersey and is nowhere more than a kilometre or so wide. We parked the car and walked along the beach, with a biting northeasterly at our backs. I'm afraid I don't know much about Ambros Adelwarth, said Uncle Kasimir. When I arrived in New York he was already over forty, and in the early days, and later too, I hardly saw him more than once or twice a year. As far as his legendary past was concerned, of course there were rumours, but all I know for certain is that Ambros was major-domo and butler with the Solomons, who had an estate at Rocky Point, at the furthermost tip of Long Island, surrounded by water on

three sides. The Solomons — with the Seligmanns, the Loebs, the Kuhns, the Speyers and the Wormsers — were amongst the wealthiest of the Jewish banking families in New York. Before Ambros became the Solomons' butler he was valet and travelling companion to Cosmo, the Solomons' son, who was a few years younger than himself and was notorious in New York society for his extravagance and his eternal escapades. On one occasion, for instance, they said he had tried to ride a horse up the stairs in the lobby of The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. But I know stories like that only from hearsay. Fini, who became a sort of confidante for Ambros towards the end, sometimes hinted that there was something tragic about the relationship between Ambros and the Solomons' son. And, as far as I know, young Solomon really was destroyed by some mental illness in the mid Twenties. As for Uncle Adelwarth, all I can say is that I always felt sorry for him, because he could never, his whole life long, permit anything to ruffle his composure. Of course, said Uncle Kasimir, he was of the other persuasion, as anyone could see, even if the family always ignored or glossed over the fact. Perhaps some of them never realized. The older Uncle Adelwarth grew, the more hollowed-out he seemed to me, and the last time I saw him, in the house at Mamaroneck that the Solomons had left him, so finely furnished, it was as if his clothes were holding him together. As I said, Fini looked after him till the end. She'll be able to give you a better idea of what he was like. Uncle Kasimir stopped and stood gazing out at the ocean. This is the edge of the darkness, he said. And in truth it seemed as if the mainland were submerged behind us and as if there were nothing above the watery waste but this narrow strip of sand running up to the north and down towards the south. I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where. Then he took a camera out of his large-check jacket and took this picture, a print of which he sent me two years later, probably when he had finally shot the whole film, together with his gold pocket watch.

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 scheme 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 Christmas '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.

The morning I left Cedar Glen West was icy and dark. Exactly as she had described Uncle Adelwarth the day before, Aunt Fini now stood on the pavement in front of her bungalow, in a dark winter coat that was too heavy for her, waving a handkerchief after me. As I drove off I could see her in the mirror, with clouds of white exhaust about her, growing smaller and smaller; and, as I recall that mirror image, I find myself thinking how strange it is that no one since then has waved a handkerchief after me in farewell. In the few days I still had in New York I began making my notes on the inconsolable Aunt Theres, and about Uncle Kasimir on the roof of the Augsburg Synagogue. But my thoughts kept returning to Ambros Adelwarth in particular, and whether I ought not to see the sanatorium at Ithaca which he had entered voluntarily in his sixty-seventh year and where he had subsequently perished. At the time, true, the idea remained a mere thought, either because I did not want to waste my air ticket back to London or because I was wary of looking more closely into the matter. It was not until the early summer of 1984 that I finally went to Ithaca, having meanwhile taken great pains to decipher Uncle Adelwarth's travel notes of 1913 and having concluded that, if I intended to go to Ithaca, I ought not to defer it any longer. So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Niniveh — I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned. It was as if the car had a will of its own on the broad highway. As all vehicles moved at almost the same speed, overtaking, when it occurred at all, went so slowly that I began to feel like a travelling companion of my neighbour in the next lane as I inched my way forward. At one point, for instance, I drove in the company of a black family for a good half hour. They waved and smiled repeatedly to show that I already had a place in their hearts, as a friend of the family, as it were, and when they parted from me in a broad curve at the Hurleyville exit — the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window -1 felt deserted and desolate for a time. The countryside began to look more uninhabited too. The road crossed a great plateau, with hills and undulations to the right, rising to mountains of some height towards the northerly horizon. Just as the winter days I had spent in America three years before had been dark and colourless, so now the earth's surface, a patchwork of greens, was flooded with light. In the long since abandoned pastures stretching towards the mountains grew clumps of oaks and alders; rectilinear plantations of spruces alternated with irregular stands of birches and aspens, the countless trembling leaves of which had opened only a week or so before; and even on the dark, distant slopes, where pine forests covered the mountainsides, the pale green of larches lit by the evening sun gleamed here and there in the background. When I saw those seemingly uninhabited highlands, I remembered the longing for faraway places that I had known when I bent over my atlas as a pupil at the monastery school, and how often I had travelled, in my thoughts, across the states of America, which I could recite by heart in alphabetical order. In the course of a geography lesson that lasted very nearly an eternity — outside, the early morning blue was still untouched by noonday brightness — I had once explored the regions I was now driving through, as well as the Adirondacks further to the north, which Uncle Kasimir had told me looked just like home. I still remember searching the map with a magnifying glass for the source of the Hudson River, and getting lost in a map square with a great many mountains and lakes. Certain place names such as Sabattis, Gabriels, Hawkeye, Amber Lake, Lake Lila and Lake Tear-in-the-CIouds have remained indelibly in my memory ever since.

At Owego, where I had to turn off the State Highway, I took a break and sat till almost nine in a roadside café, occasionally jotting down a word or two but mostly staring out absent-mindedly through the panoramic windows at the endless traffic and the western sky, still streaked with orange, flamingo pink and gold long after the sun had set. And so it was already late in the evening when I arrived in Ithaca. For maybe half an hour I drove around the town and its suburbs, to get my bearings, before pulling up at a guesthouse in a side street, silent and lit up in its dark garden, like the "Empire des Lumières" in which no one has ever set foot. A path curved from the pavement and ended in a flight of stone steps at the front door, where a shrub stretched out horizontal branches bearing white blossom. In the lamplight I thought for a moment that they were covered with snow. Everyone was plainly already asleep, and it was some time before an aged porter emerged from the depths of the house. He was so doubled over that he cannot have been able to see more than the lower half of anyone standing in front of him. Because of this handicap, no doubt, he had already taken a quick glance at the latecomer outside the glazed door before he crossed the hall, a glance that was the more penetrating for being brief. Without a word he escorted me up a fine mahogany staircase to the top floor, where he showed me to a spacious room overlooking the back garden. I put down my bag, opened one of the high windows, and looked out into the heaving shadows of a cypress that soared up from the depths. The air was filled with its scent and with an unceasing rushing sound, made not by the wind in the trees, as I supposed at first, but by the Ithaca Falls, which were a short distance away, though invisible from my window. Before I arrived in the town it had been impossible to imagine that in the Lake Cayuga region more than a hundred such falls have been tumbling into the deep-carved gorges and valleys ever since the Ice Age. I lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by the long journey. The powdery veils that rose silently from the roar of the Falls drifted into my sleep like white curtains blown into a room black with night. The next morning I searched the telephone books in vain for the Samaria Sanatorium or the Professor Fahnstock mentioned by Aunt Fini. Nor was I any more successful when I called on a psychiatric practice, and when I asked the blue-rinsed lady at reception she visibly paled with horror at the words private mental home. As I was leaving the hotel to make enquiries in town, I met the crooked porter in the front garden, coming up the path with a broom. He listened to my request for information most attentively and then, leaning on his broom, thought in silence for a good minute. Fahnstock, he exclaimed at length, so loudly that he might have been talking to a deaf person, Fahnstock died in the Fifties. Of a stroke, if I am not mistaken. And in a few words that came with a rattle from his constricted chest he went on to tell me that Fahnstock had had a successor, one Dr Abramsky, though Abramsky had not taken any more patients into the sanatorium since the late Sixties. What he did nowadays in that old place on his own, said the porter, turning abruptly to go, no one knew. And from the door he called after me: I have heard say he's become a beekeeper.

The old porter's information enabled me to find the sanatorium without difficulty that afternoon. A long drive swept through a park that must have covered almost a hundred acres and led up to a villa built entirely of wood. With its covered verandahs and balconies it resembled a Russian dacha, or one of those immense pinewood lodges stuffed with trophies that Austrian archdukes and princes built all over their hunting grounds in Styria and the Tyrol in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate their aristocratic guests and the accredited barons of industry. So clear were the signs of decay, so singularly did the window panes flash in the sunlight, that I did not dare go any closer, and instead began by looking around the park, where conifers of almost every kind — Lebanese cedars, mountain hemlocks, Douglas firs, larches, Arolla and Monterey pines, and feathery swamp cypresses — had all grown to their full size. Some of the cedars and larches were forty metres tall, and one of the hemlocks must have been fifty. There were woodland meadows between the trees where bluebells, white cardamines and yellow goats-beard grew side by side. In other parts of the park there were many different ferns, and the new greenery of dwarf Japanese maples, lit up by rays of sunlight, swayed over the fallen leaves underfoot. I had been strolling around the arboretum for almost an hour when I came upon Dr Abramsky busy fitting out new beehives outside his apiary. He was a stocky man close to sixty, and wore threadbare trousers. From the right pocket of his patched-up jacket protruded a goose wing, such as might once have been used as a hand brush. What struck one immediately about Dr Abramsky was his shock of thick, flaming red hair that stood on end as if he were in a state of the greatest anxiety; it reminded me of the Pentecostal tongues of fire over the heads of the disciples, depicted in my first catechism. Quite unperturbed by my appearance out of nowhere, Dr Abramsky pulled up a wicker chair for me and, going on with his work on the beehives, listened to my story When I had finished he put his tools aside and began to talk himself. I never knew Cosmo Solomon, he said, but I did know your great-uncle, since I started here in 1949 at the age of thirty-one, as Fahnstock's assistant. I remember the Adelwarth case so clearly for a special reason. He came at the beginning of a complete change in my thinking, one that led me, in the decade following Fahnstock's death, to cut back my psychiatric practice more and more, and eventually to give it up altogether. Since mid May 1969 — I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years — I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective. You will have seen that the Samaria is now deserted. Giving it up was the step I had to take in order to free myself from any involvement in life. I do not expect anyone can really imagine the pain and wretchedness once stored up in this extravagant timber palace, and I hope all this misfortune will gradually melt away now as it falls apart. For a while Dr Abramsky said nothing, and merely gazed out into the distance. It is true, he said at length, that Ambrose Adelwarth was not committed into our care by any relative, but came to us of his own free will. Why he came here remained a mystery to me for a long time, and he never talked about it. Fahnstock diagnosed profound senile depression with a tendency to cataleptic seizures, though this was contradicted by the fact that Ambrose showed no sign at all of neglecting his person, as patients in that condition usually do. Quite the contrary, he attached the greatest importance to his appearance. I only ever saw him in a three-piece suit and wearing a flawlessly knotted bow tie. Nonetheless, even when he was simply standing at the window looking out he always gave the impression of being filled with some appalling grief. I do not think, said Dr Abramsky, that I have ever met a more melancholy person than your great-uncle; every casual utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment (he held himself erect until the end), was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence. At meals — to which he always came, since he remained absolute in matters of courtesy even in his darkest times — he still helped himself, but what he actually ate was no more than the symbolic offerings that were once placed on the graves of the dead. It was also remarkable how readily Ambrose submitted to shock treatment, which in the early Fifties, as I understood only later, really came close to torture or martyrdom. Other patients often had to be frogmarched to the treatment room, said Dr Abramsky, but Ambrose would always be sitting on the stool outside the door at the appointed hour, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for what was in store for him.

In response to my request, Dr Abramsky described shock treatment in greater detail. At the start of my career in psychiatry, he said, I was of the opinion that electrotherapy was a humane and effective form of treatment. As students we had been taught — and Fahnstock, in his stories about clinical practice, had repeatedly described in graphic terms — how in the old days, when pseudo-epileptic fits were induced by injecting insulin, patients would be convulsed for minutes, seemingly on the point of death, their faces contorted and blue. Compared with this approach, the introduction of electric shock treatment, which could be dispensed with greater precision and stopped immediately if the patient's reaction was extreme, constituted a considerable step forward. In our view, it seemed completely legitimate once sedatives and muscle relaxants began to be used in the early Fifties, to avoid the worst of the incidental injuries, such as dislocated shoulders or jaws, broken teeth, or other fractures. Given these broad improvements in shock therapy, Fahnstock, dismissing my (alas) none too forceful objections with his characteristic lordliness, adopted what was known as the block method, a course of treatment advocated by the German psychiatrist Braunmiihl, which not infrequently involved more than a hundred electric shocks at intervals of only a very few days. This would have been about six months before Ambrose joined us. Needless to say, when treatment was so frequent, there could be no question of proper documentation or assessment of the therapy; and that was what happened with your great-uncle too. Besides, said Dr Abramsky, all of the material on file — the case histories and the medical records Fahnstock kept on a daily basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion — have probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse. I have a recurring dream of that collapse, said Dr Abramsky, gazing at the palm of his left hand as he spoke. I see the sanatorium on its lofty rise, see everything simultaneously, the building as a whole and also the minutest detail; and I know that the woodwork, the roof beams, door posts and panelling, the floorboards and staircases, the rails and banisters, the lintels and ledges, have already been hollowed out under the surface, and that at any moment, as soon as the chosen one amongst the blind armies of beetles dispatches the very last, scarcely material resistance with its jaws, the entire lot will come down. And that is precisely what does happen in my dream, before my very eyes, infinitely slowly, and a great yellowish cloud billows out and disperses, and where the sanatorium once stood there is merely a heap of powder-fine wood dust, like pollen. Dr Abramsky's voice had grown softer as he spoke, but now, pausing first to review (as I supposed) the imaginary spectacle once more before his mind's eye, he returned to reality. Fahnstock, he resumed, had been trained in neurology at an asylum in Lemberg, immediately before the First World War: at a time, that is, when psychiatry was primarily concerned with subduing those in its custody, and keeping them in safe detention. For that reason he was naturally inclined to interpret the recurrent desolation and apathy of sick patients exposed to continued shock therapy, their growing inability to concentrate, their sluggishness of mind, their muted voices, and even cases when patients entirely ceased to speak, as signs of successful therapy. So to his mind the docility of Ambrose was a result of the new treatment. Ambrose was one of the first of our patients to undergo a series of shocks, over a period of weeks and months; but that docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle's longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.

Once again Dr Abramsky fell silent for a lengthy spell, occasionally scrutinizing the lines on his left hand. I believe, he then went on, looking up at me, I believe it was Fahnstock's unmistakably Austrian intonation that predisposed me towards him at first. He reminded me of my father, who was from Kolomea and, like Fahnstock, came from Galicia to the west after the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. Fahnstock tried to re-establish himself in his home town, Linz, whilst my father tried to start up in the liquor trade in Vienna, but both fell foul of circumstances, the one in Linz and the other in Vienna's Leopoldstadt. In early 1921 my father emigrated to America, and Fahnstock must have arrived in New York during the summer months, where he soon resumed his career in psychiatry. In 1925, following two years at the state hospital in Albany, he took up a position at Samaria, a newly established private sanatorium. At about the same time, my father died when a boiler exploded in a soda factory on the Lower East Side. After the accident, his body was found in a partly poached state. When I was growing up in Brooklyn I missed him very much. Even in the face of the greatest adversity he was confident; my mother, by contrast, seemed only a shadow after his death. I now think that, when I myself began as an assistant at the Samaria, I was uncritically on Fahnstock's side because much about him recalled my father. But when Fahnstock began to believe, towards the end of his career, that he had discovered a psychiatric miracle cure in the block or annihilation method, and when he, who had never had the slightest scientific ambition, increasingly became caught up in a kind of experimental mania and even planned to publish a paper about Ambrose, then, and only then, did it dawn on me that his fanatical interest as well as my own vacillation were, in the end, merely proof of our appalling ignorance and corruptibility.

It was almost evening. Dr Abramsky led me back through the arboretum to the drive. He was holding the white goose wing, and from time to time pointed the way ahead with it. Towards the end, he said as we walked, your great-uncle suffered progressive paralysis of the joints and limbs, probably caused by the shock therapy. After a while he had the greatest difficulty with everyday tasks. He took almost the whole day to get dressed. Simply to fasten his cufflinks and his bow tie took him hours. And he was hardly finished dressing but it was time to undress again. What was more, he was having constant trouble with his eyesight, and suffered from bad headaches, and so he often wore a green eyeshade — like someone who works in a gambling saloon. When I went to see him in his room on the last day of his life, because he had failed to appear for treatment for the first time, he was standing at the window, wearing the eyeshade, gazing out at the marshlands beyond the park. Oddly, he had put on armlets made of some satin-like material, such as he might have worn when he used to polish the silver. When I asked why he had not appeared at the appointed time, he replied (I remember his words exactly): It must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man. After he had made this enigmatic remark, Ambrose accompanied me without delay, down to the treatment room where Fahnstock was waiting, and submitted to all the preparations without the least resistance, as he always did. I see him lying before me, said Dr Abramsky, the electrodes on his temples, the rubber bit between his teeth, buckled into the canvas wraps that were riveted to the treatment table like a man shrouded for burial at sea. The session proceeded without incident. Fahnstock's prognosis was distinctly optimistic. But I could see from Ambrose's face that he was now destroyed, all but a vestige of him. When he came round from the anaesthetic, his eyes, which were now strangely glassy and fixed, clouded over, and a sigh that I can hear to this day rose from his breast. An orderly took him back to his room, and when I went there early the following morning, troubled by my conscience, I found him lying on his bed, in patent-leather boots, wearing full uniform, so to speak. Dr Abramsky walked the rest of the way beside me in silence. Nor did he say a word in farewell, but described a gentle arc with the goose wing in the darkening air.

In mid September 1991, when I travelled from England to Deauville during a dreadful drought, the season was long over, and even the Festival du Cinéma Américain, with which they tried to extend the more lucrative summer months a little, had come to its end. I cannot say whether I was expecting Deauville to have something special to offer — some remnant of the past, green avenues, beach promenades, or even a stylish or scandalous clientèle; whatever my notions may have been, it was immediately apparent that the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. The villas built in the latter half of the nineteenth century, neo-Gothic castles with turrets and battlements, Swiss chalets, and even mock-oriental residences, were almost without exception a picture of neglect and desolation. If one pauses for a while before one of these seemingly unoccupied houses, as I did a number of times on my first morning walk through the streets of Deauville, one of the closed window shutters on the parterre or bel étage or the top floor, strange to relate, will open slightly, and a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that soon one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move soundlessly about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by who has happened to stop outside their prison and stand gazing up. Almost everything, in fact, was shut, both in Deauville and across the river in Trouville — the Musée Montebello, the town archives in the town hall, the library (which I had planned to look around in), and even the children's day nursery de l'enfant Jesus, established through the generosity of

the long-deceased Madame la Baronne d'Erlanger, as I was informed by a commemorative plaque placed on the fa$ade of the building by the grateful citizens of Deauville. Nor was the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires open any more, a gigantic brick palace where American multimillionaires, English aristocrats, French high financiers and German industrialists basked in each other's company at the turn of the century. The Roches Noires, as far as I was able to

discover, had closed its doors in the Fifties or Sixties and was converted into apartments, though only those that had a sea view sold well. Now what was once the most luxurious hotel on the coast of Normandy is a monumental monstrosity half sunk in the sand. Most of the flats have long been empty, their owners having departed this life. But there are still some indestructible ladies who come every summer and haunt the immense edifice. They pull the white dustsheets off the furniture for a few weeks and at night, silent on their biers, they lie in the empty midst of it. They wander along the broad passageways, cross the huge reception rooms, climb and descend the echoing stairs, carefully placing one foot before the other, and in the early mornings they walk their ulcerous poodles and pekes on the promenade. In contrast to the Roches Noires, which is gradually falling down, the Hotel Normandy at the other end of Trouville-Deauville, completed in 1912, is still an establishment of the finest class. Built around a number of courtyards in half-timber that looks at

once outsize and miniature, it is frequented nowadays almost exclusively by the Japanese, who are steered through the minutely prescribed daily programme by the hotel staff with an exquisite but also, as I observed, ice-cold courtesy verging on the indignant. And indeed, at the Normandy one felt one was not so much in a celebrated hotel of international standing as in a gastronomic pavilion built by the French for a world fair somewhere near Osaka, and I for one should not have been surprised in the slightest if I had walked out of the Normandy to find next to it another incongruous fantasy in the Balinese or Tyrolean style. Every three days the Japanese at the Normandy were exchanged for a new contingent of their countrymen, who, as one hotel guest explained to me, were brought direct, in air-conditioned coaches, from Charles de Gaulle airport to Deauville, the third call (after Las Vegas and Atlantic City) in a global gambling tour that took them on, back to Tokyo, via Vienna, Budapest and Macao. In Deauville, every morning at ten, they would troop over to the new casino, which was built at the same time as the Normandy, where they would play the machines till lunchtime, in arcades dense with flashing, kaleidoscopic lights and tootling garlands of sound. The afternoons and evenings were also spent at the machines, to which, with stoical faces, they sacrificed whole handfuls of coins; and like children on a spree they were delighted when at last a payout tinkled forth from the box. I never saw any of them at the roulette table. As midnight approached, only a few dubious clients from the provinces would be playing there, shady lawyers, estate agents or car dealers with their mistresses, trying to out-manoeuvre Fortune, who stood before them in the person of a stocky croupier clad inappropriately in the livery of a circus attendant in the big top. The roulette table, screened off with jade-green glass paravents, was in a recently refurbished inner hall — not, in other words, where players had gambled at Deauville in former times. I knew that in those days the gaming hall was much larger. Then there had been two rows of roulette and baccarat tables as well as tables where one could bet on little horses that kept running round and round in circles. Chandeliers of Venetian glass hung from the stuccoed ceiling, and through a dozen eight-metre-high half-rounded windows one looked out onto a terrace where the most exotic of personages would be gathered, in couples or groups; and beyond the balustrade, in the light that fell from the casino, one could see the white sands and, far out, the ocean-going yachts and small steamers, lit up and riding at anchor, beaming their Aldis lamps into the night sky, and little boats moving to and fro like slow glow-worms between them and the coast. When I first set foot in the casino at Deauville, the old gaming hall was filled with the last glimmer of evening light. Tables had been laid for a good hundred people, for a wedding banquet or some anniversary celebration. The rays of the setting sun were caught by the glasses and glinted on the silver drums of the band that was just beginning to rehearse for their gig. The instrumentalists were curly-haired and no longer the youngest. The songs they played dated from the Sixties, songs I heard countless times in the Union bar in Manchester. It is the evening of the day. The vocalist, a blonde girl with a voice still distinctly child-like, breathed passionately into the microphone, which she held up close to her lips with both hands. She was singing in English, though with a pronounced French accent. It is the evening of the day, I sit and watch the children play. At times, when she could not remember the proper words, her singing would become an ethereal hum. I sat down in one of the white lacquer chairs. The music filled the whole room. Pink puffy clouds right up to the golden arabesques of the ceiling stucco. "A whiter shade of pale."

Later that night, in my hotel room, I listened to the sound of the sea. I dreamt I was crossing the Atlantic in a paquebot whose deck superstructure looked exactly like the Hotel Normandy. I was standing at the rail as we entered Le Havre at dawn. The foghorn boomed three times and the immense ship trembled beneath my feet. From Le Havre to Deauville I took the train. In my compartment there was a woman wearing a feathered hat, with a large variety of hatboxes. She was smoking a large Havanna cigar, and gazed tauntingly across at me through the blue haze from time to time. But I did not know how to address her, and in my embarrassment I sat staring at the white kid gloves, with their many tiny buttons, that lay beside her on the upholstered seat. Once I had reached Deauville I took a fly to the Hotel des Roches Noires. The streets were inordinately busy: coaches and carriages of every kind, cars, handcarts, bicycles, errand boys, delivery men and flàneurs wove their seemingly aimless way. It was as if all pandemonium had broken loose. The hotel was hopelessly overbooked. Crowds of people were jostling at the reception desk. It was just before the start of the racing season, and everyone was determined to lodge at one of the best addresses, whatever the cost. Those who were staying at the Roches Noires hired sofas or armchairs to sleep on in the reading room or the salon; the staff were evacuated from their attic quarters to the cellar; the gentlemen ceded their beds to the ladies and lay where they could, in the foyer or the corridors, the window bays or landings, and on the billiard tables. By paying a horrendous bribe I secured a bunk in a lumber room, high on the wall like a luggage rack. Only when I was too fatigued to go on did I climb up into it and sleep for an hour or so. The rest of the time I was looking for Cosmo and Ambros night and day. Now and then I thought I saw them disappear into an entry or a lift or turn a street corner. Or else I really did see them, taking tea out in the courtyard, or in the hall leafing through the latest papers, which were brought early every morning at breakneck speed from Paris to Deauville by Gabriel the chauffeur. They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. Generally, in fact, they behaved as if their altered condition, so to speak, were a terrible family secret not to be revealed under any circumstances. If I approached them, they dissolved before my very eyes, leaving behind them nothing but the vacant space they had occupied. Whenever I caught sight of them, I contented myself with observing them from a distance. "Wherever I happened upon them it was as if they constituted a point of stillness in the ceaseless bustle. It seemed as though the whole world had gathered there in Deauville for the summer of 1913. I saw the Comtesse de Montgomery, the Comtesse de Fitzjames, Baronne d'Erlanger and the Marquise de Massa, the Rothschilds, the Deutsch de la Meurthes, the Koechlins and Biirgels, the Peugeots, the Wormses and the Hennessys, the Isvolskys and the Orlovs, artistes of both sexes, fast women like Réjane and Reichenberg, Greek shipping tycoons, Mexican petroleum magnates and cotton planters from Louisiana. The Trouville Gazette reported that a veritable wave of the exotic had broken upon Deauville that year: des musulmans moldo-valaques, des brahmanes hindous et toutes les variétés de Cafres, de Papous, de Niam-Niams et de Bachibouzouks importés en Europe avec leurs danses simiesques et leurs instruments sauvages. Things were happening round the clock. At the first big race of the season, at La Touque hippodrome, I heard an English gossip columnist say: It actually seems as though people have learnt to sleep on the hoof. It's their glazed look that gives them away. Touch them, and they keel over. Dead tired myself, I stood on the grandstand of the hippodrome. The grass track around the polo field was bordered by long rows of poplars. Through my binoculars I could see their leaves turning in the breeze, silvery grey. The crowd was growing by the minute. Soon there was one vast sea of hats swelling below me, the white egret feathers cresting them like crowns of foam on waves that ebb darkly away. The loveliest of the young ladies appeared last of all, the yearlings of the season, as it were, wearing lace dresses through which their silken undergarments gleamed in Nile green, crevette, or absinthe blue. In no time at all they were surrounded by men in black, the most raffish of whom raised their top hats aloft on their canes. When the race was already due to have started, the Maharajah of Kashmir arrived in his Rolls, which was gold-plated within, and behind him a second limousine from which an incredibly obese lady alighted and was led to her seat by two ancient grooms. Immediately above her, I suddenly realized, were sitting Cosmo Solomon and Ambros. Ambros was wearing a buff linen suit and a black-lacquered Spanish straw hat on his head. But Cosmo was clad in a thick fleeced coat, despite the cloudless midsummer weather, and an aviator's cap from which his blond curls escaped. His right arm, resting on the back of Ambros's seat, was motionless, and motionless they both gazed into the distance. Otherwise, as I now recall, my dreams in Deauville were filled with constant whisperings of the rumours that were in circulation concerning Cosmo and Ambros. On one occasion I saw the two young men sitting late in the evening in the Normandy's vast dining hall at a small table of their own, placed especially for them in the centre of the room, apart from all the rest. On a silver platter between them, occasionally making slow movements, lay a lobster, gleaming a wonderful pink in the muted atmosphere. Ambros was steadily taking the lobster apart, with great skill, placing little morsels before Cosmo, who ate them like a well brought up child. The diners swayed as if there were a light swell, and only the women's glittering earrings and necklaces and the gentlemen's white shirt-fronts were to be seen. Nonetheless, I sensed that everyone kept their eyes on the two lobster eaters, whom I heard variously described as master and man, two friends, relatives, or even brothers. Endlessly the pros and cons of all these theories were advanced, and the discussions filled the hall with a low murmur, even long after the table for two had been cleared and the first light of dawn was at the windows. No doubt it was above all the eccentricity of Cosmo, combined with the impeccable manners of Ambros, that had aroused the curiosity of the Deauville summer guests. And their curiosity naturally grew, and the suspicions that were voiced waxed more audacious, the more the two friends contented themselves with each other's company, turning down the invitations that were extended to them daily. The astounding eloquence of Ambros, which contrasted so strikingly with Cosmo's seemingly total lack of words, also prompted speculation. Moreover, Cosmo's aerobatics and escapades on the polo field afforded a continual talking point, and the interest people took in the curious Americans reached its climax when Cosmo's unparalleled streak of luck began, in the séparée of the casino. Word of it spread through Deauville like wildfire. On top of the whispers already in circulation there was now added the rumour of fraud, or crooked dealing; and talk — on that evening in the dining room, too — never tired of suggesting that Ambros, who did not sit at the roulette table himself, but was always standing immediately behind Cosmo, possessed the mysterious powers of a magnetiseur. Indeed, he was so unfathomable that I felt that he could be compared only to the Austrian countess, a femme au passé obscur who held court in the somewhat remoter corners of my Deauville dream world. Exceptionally delicately built, and indeed almost transparent, she wore grey or brown moiré silk dresses, and would be besieged at any time of the day or night by a horde of admirers of either sex. No one knew her real name (there was no such person as Grafin Dembowski in Vienna), nor could anyone estimate her age or say if she were married or not, or a widow. I first noticed Grafin Dembowski when she did something that no woman had dared to do before her: she removed her white sun hat on the terrace of the casino and laid it on the balustrade beside her. And I saw her for the last time when, awakened from my Deauville dream, I went to the window of my hotel room. Morning was breaking. The beach still merged colourless into the sea, the sea into the sky. And there she was, in the pale but growing light of daybreak, on the deserted Promenade des Planches. Dressed in the most tasteless of styles and appallingly made up, there she came, with a white Angora rabbit lolloping along on a lead. She was also attended by a clubman in acid green livery, who would stoop down whenever the rabbit refused to go on and feed it a little of the enormous cauliflower he held in his crookd left arm.

On the desk in front of me is the agenda book that belonged to Ambros, which Aunt Fini gave me on my winter visit to Cedar Glen West. It is a pocket diary for the year 1913, bound in soft burgundy leather and measuring about twelve centimetres by eight. Ambros must have bought it in Milan, because that is where his entries begin, on the 20th of August: Palace H, 3 pm, Signora M. Evening, Teatro S. Martino, Corso V. Em. I tre Emisferi. Deciphering his tiny handwriting, which not infrequently moved to and fro between several

languages, was an arduous task, one I should probably never have accomplished if those words committed to paper almost eighty years before had not, as it were, opened up of their own accord. The entries gradually become more detailed, and it appears that, at the end of August, Ambros and Cosmo left from Venice for Greece and Constantinople, in a steam yacht. Early morning (it says), myself on deck for a long time, looking astern. The lights of the city receding into the distance under a veil of rain. The islands in the lagoon like shadows. Mai du pays. Le navigateur écrit son journal à la vue de la terre qui s'éloigne. The following day he writes: Off the Croatian coast. Cosmo very restless. A beautiful sky. Treeless mountains. The clouds built high. As good as dark at three in the afternoon. Bad weather. We strike our sails. Seven in the evening, the storm full force. Waves breaking on the deck. The Austrian captain has lit an oil lamp before the picture of Our Lady in his cabin. He is kneeling on the floor, praying. In Italian, strange to say, for the poor lost seamen sepolti in questo sacro mare. The stormy night is followed by a windless day. Steam up, steadily southward. I put things back in order. In the failing light ahead, pearly grey on the line of the horizon, an island. Cosmo stands fore like a pilot. Calls the name Fano to a sailor. Sfsiorsf, the sailor shouts, and, pointing ahead, he repeats, louder: Fano! Fano! Later, low on the already darkened island, I see a fire. There are fishermen on the beach. One of them waves a burning piece of wood. We pass them, and a few hours later enter the harbour of Kassiopé on the north coast of Kérkyra. Next morning the most fearful racket on board. Repairing damage to the engine. Ashore with Cosmo. Up to the ruins of the fortifications. A holm oak growing right out of the castle. We lie beneath the canopy of leaves as in an arbour. Below, they are hammering away at the boiler. A day out of time. At night we sleep on deck. The singing of crickets. Woken by a breeze on my brow. Across the straits, beyond the blue-black mountains of Albania, day is breaking, its glowing flame blazing across the lightless world. And at the same time two white ocean-going yachts trailing white smoke cross the scene, so slowly it is as if they were being pulled across a stage inch by inch. One would hardly think they were moving, but at length they are gone, into the wings of Cape Varvara with its dark green forests, over which hangs the thin sickle of the crescent moon. - 6th September: From Kérkyra via Ithaca and Patras into the Gulf of Corinth. At Itéa decided to send the boat on ahead and travel overland to Athens. Now in the hills at Delphi, the night already very cool. We lay down to sleep two hours ago, wrapped in our coats. Our saddles serve as pillows. The horses stand heads bowed beneath the laurel tree, the leaves of which rustle softly like tiny sheets of metal. Above us the Milky Way (where the Gods pass, says Cosmo), so resplendent that I can write this by its light. If I look straight up I can see the Swan and Cassiopeia. They are the same stars I saw above the Alps as a child and later above the Japanese house in its lake, above the Pacific, and out over Long Island Sound. I can scarcely believe I am the same person, and in Greece. But now and then the fragrance of juniper wafts across to us, so it is surely so.

After these nocturnal entries, the next of any length was written on the day they arrived in Constantinople. Yesterday morning left Piraeus, Ambros recorded on the 15th of September. Somewhat the worse for wear, he wrote, after the laborious overland journey. Calm voyage. Resting for hours under the awning on deck. Never seen water as blue. Truly ultramarine. This morning through the Dardanelles. Great flocks of cormorants. In the early afternoon, far ahead, the capital of the Orient appeared, like a mirage at first, then the green of trees and the colourful jostling houses gradually becoming more distinct. The masts of ships, crowding and swaying gently in a breeze, and the minarets, seeming to sway a little as well. - The Trieste captain paid, we take rooms at the Pera Palas for the time being. We enter the lobby as afternoon tea is being served. Cosmo writes in the register: Freres Solomon, New York, en route pour la Chine. Pera, the reception clerk tells me when I enquire, pera means beyond. Beyond Stamboul. Mellow orchestral music drifts through the foyer. Behind the drawn tulle curtains of the ballroom glide the shadows of dancing couples. Quand l'amour meurt, sings a woman, her voice meandering eerily. The stairs and rooms magnificent. Carpeted landscapes beneath high ceilings. Immense tubs in the bathrooms. From the balcony, a view across the Golden Horn. Evening falls. We watch the dark descending from the outlying hills upon the low roofs, rising from the depths of the city atop the lead-grey cupolas of the mosques till at length it reaches to the tips of the minarets, which gleam especially brightly one last time before the light goes. - At this point, Ambros's entries continue regardless of the dates in his diary. No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. The crowns of pines high aloft. Acacias, cork oaks, sycamores, eucalypts, junipers, laurels, a paradise of trees, shady slopes and groves with tumbling streams and springs. Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You go to a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life. For every one who departs this life, they say, a cypress is planted. In their dense branches the turtle doves nest. When night falls they stop cooing and partake of the silence of the dead. Once the silence descends, the bats come out and flit along their ways. Cosmo claims he can hear every one of their cries. - Whole districts of the city built entirely of wood. Houses of brown and grey weatherworn boards and planks, with flat-topped saddleback roofs and balconies. The Jewish quarter is built the same way. Walking through it today, we turn a corner and unexpectedly have a distant view of a blue line of mountains and the snowy summit of Olympus. For one awful heartbeat I imagine myself in Switzerland or at home again…

Have found a house out of the city, at Eyüp. It is next to the old village mosque, at the head of a square where three roads meet. In the middle of the paved square, with its pollard plane trees, the circular white marble basin of a fountain. Many people from the country pause here on their way to the city. Peasants with baskets of vegetables, charcoal burners, gypsies, tightrope walkers and bear trainers. I am surprised to see hardly a single wagon or any other vehicle. Everyone goes on

foot, or at best on a beast of burden. As if the wheel had not yet been invented. Or are we no longer a part of time? What meaning has a date like the 24th of September?? — Behind the house is a garden, or rather a kind of yard with a fig and a pomegranate tree. Herbs also grow there — rosemary, sage, myrtle, balm. Laudanum. One enters by the blue-painted door at the rear. The hall is broad and stone-flagged and newly whitewashed. The walls like snow. The rooms are almost bare of fittings, and make an empty, deserted impression. Cosmo claims we have rented a ghost house. Wooden steps lead up to a rooftop terrace shaded by an ancient vine. Next door, on the gallery of the minaret, a dwarfish muezzin appears. He is so close that we can see the features of his face. Before crying out the prayer, he calls a greeting across to us. -Under the rooftop vine, the first evening meal in our house. Below on the Golden Horn we can see thousands of boats crossing to and fro, and further to the right the city of Istanbul stretches to the horizon. Mounds of cloud above it, flame-red, copper and purple, lit by the setting sun. Near daybreak we hear a sound that fills the air, such as we have never heard before, a sound like the whispering of a far-off multitude gathered in the open in a field or on a mountainside. We go up to the roof and see a moving baldachin, a pattern of black and white canopied overhead as far as the eye can see. Countless storks, migrating south. Later in the morning we still talk about them in a coffee house on the shore of the Horn. We are sitting on an open balcony at some height, on show like two saints. Tall schooners pass by, at no distance at all. One can feel the swathes of air as they go. In stormy weather, the proprietor says, their booms sometimes smash a window or knock plants off ledges. - 17th October: behind with my notes, less through the demands of life than through idleness. Yesterday an excursion in a Turkish boat, down the Golden Horn and then along the right, Asian bank of the Bosphorus. We leave the outer parts of the city behind. Forested crags, embankments with evergreens. Here and there, lone villas and white summerhouses. Cosmo proves a good sailor. At one point we are surrounded by I do not know how many dolphins. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Like a great herd of swine they ploughed the waves with their muzzles and circled us time and again before finally plunging head over tail away. In the deep coves, the branches bent down low to the eddying waters. We slipped through beneath the trees and, with just a few pulls on the oars, entered a harbour surrounded by strangely silent houses. Two men were squatting on the quay playing dice. Otherwise there was not a soul about. We entered the little mosque by the gate. In an alcove in the half-light within sat a young man studying the Koran. His lids were half closed, his lips were murmuring softly. His body was rocking to and fro. In the middle of the hall a husbandman was saying his afternoon prayers. Again and again he touched his forehead to the floor and remained bowed down for what seemed to me an eternity. The soles of his feet gleamed in the straggling light that entered through the doorway. At length he stood up, first casting a deferential glance to right and left, over his shoulders — to greet his guardian angels, who stand behind him, said Cosmo. We turned to go, from the half-dark of the mosque into the sand-white brightness of the harbour square. As we crossed it, both shading our dazzled eyes like desert travellers, a grey pigeon about the size of a full-grown cockerel tottered clumsily ahead of us, leading us to an alley where we came across a dervish aged about twelve. He was wearing a

very wide gown that reached to the ground and a close-fitting jacket made, like the gown, of the finest linen. The boy, who was extraordinarily beautiful, was wearing a high brimless camel-hair toque on his head. I spoke to him in Turkish, but he only looked at us without a word. On the return, our boat seemed to glide of itself along the dark green overhung crags. The sun had set, the water was a shadowy plain, but higher up a light still moved here and there. Cosmo, at the tiller, says he wants to come out shortly once again, with a photographer, to take a souvenir photograph of the boy dervish …

On the 26th of October Ambros writes: Collected the photographs of the white boy from the studio today. Later, made enquiries at the Chemins de Fer Orientaux and the Banque Ottomane concerning our onward journey. Also bought a Turkish costume for Cosmo and one for myself. Spent the evening with timetables, maps and Karl Baedeker's handbook.

The route they took from Constantinople can be followed fairly closely from the diary notes, despite the fact that they are farther apart now, and at times stop altogether.

They must have crossed the whole of Turkey by rail, down to Adana, and gone on from there to Aleppo and Beirut, and seem to have spent the best part of a fortnight in the Lebanon, for it is not till the 21st of November that "passage to Jaffa" is entered. The day they arrived in Jaffa, through an agent at Franks Hotel, Dr Immanuel Benzinger, they hired two horses at a cost of 15 francs each for the twelve-hour ride up from the coast to Jerusalem. The luggage went ahead by rail. Early on the morning of the 25th, Cosmo and Ambros were on their way through the orange groves and on, in a southeasterly direction, across the plain of Sharon and towards the mountains of Judaea. Through the Holy Land, writes Ambros, often far off the track. The rocks all around radiantly white in the light. For long stretches not a tree, not a shrub, scarcely so much as a meagre clump of weeds. Cosmo very taciturn. Darkened sky. Great clouds of dust rolling through the air. Terrible desolation and emptiness. Late in the afternoon it cleared once more. A rosy glow lay upon the valley, and through an opening in the mountainous terrain we could see the promised city in the distance — a ruined and broken mass of rocks, the Queen of the desert… An hour after nightfall we ride into the courtyard of the Hotel Kaminitz on the Jaffa Road. The maitre d'hotel, a pomaded little Frenchman, is utterly astounded, indeed scandalisé, to see these dust-caked new arrivals, and shakes his head as he studies our entry in the register. Not until I ask him to see that our horses are properly looked after does he recall his duties, whereupon he deals with everything as fast as he is able. The rooms are furnished in a most peculiar manner. One cannot say what period or part of the world one is in. View to one side across domed stone rooftops. In the white moonlight they resemble a frozen sea. Deep weariness, sleep till well into the morning. Numerous dreams with strange voices and shouts. At noontime a deathly silence, broken only by the eternal crowing of cocks. - Today (it reads two days later) a first walk through the city and into the outer districts. All in all, a frightful impression. Vendors of souvenirs and devotional objects in almost every building. They crouch in the gloom of their shops amidst hundreds of olivewood carvings and junk decorated with mother-of-pearl. From the end of the month the faithful will be coming to buy, hordes of them, ten or fifteen thousand Christian pilgrims from all around the world. The more recent buildings of an ugliness hard to describe. Large quantities of filth in the streets. On marche sur des merdes!!! Pulverized limestone ankle-deep in places. The few plants which have survived the drought that has lasted since May are covered in this powdery meal as if by a blight. Une malédiction semble planer sur la ville. Decay, nothing but decay, marasmus and emptiness. Not a sign of any business or industry. All we passed were a tallow-and-soap factory and a bone-and-hide works. Next to this, in a wide square, the knacker's yard. In the middle a big hole. Coagulated blood, heaps of entrails, blackish-brown tripes, dried and scorched by the sun. . Otherwise one church after another, monasteries, religious and philanthropic establishments of every kind and denomination. On the northerly side are the Russian cathedral, the Russian Men's and Women's hospice, the French Hópital de St Louis, the Jewish Home for the Blind, the Church and Hospice of St Augustine, the German school, the German Orphanage, the German Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, the School of the London Mission to the Jews, the Abyssinian Church, the Anglican Church, College and Bishop's House, the Dominican Friary, the Seminary and Basilica of St Stephen, the Rothschild Girls' Institute, the Alliance Israélite College of Commerce, the Church of Notre Dame de France, and, beside the pool of Bethesda, the Monastery of St Anne; on the Mount of Olives are the Russian Tower, the Church of the Assumption, the French Church of Pater Noster, the Carmelite nunnery, the building that houses the Empress Augusta Victoria Foundation, the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, and the

Church of Agony; to the south and west are the Armenian Orthodox Monastery of Mount Zion, the Protestant School, the Sisters of St Vincent, the Hospice of the Knights of St John, the Convent of the Sisters of St Clare, the Montefiore Hospice and the Moravian Lepers' Home. In the centre of the city there are the Church and Residence of the Latin Patriarch, the Dome of the Rock, the School of the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, the school and printing works of the Franciscan Brotherhood, the Coptic Monastery, the German Hospice, the German Protestant Church of the Redeemer, the United Armenian Church of the Spasm (as it is called), the Couvent des Soeurs de Zion, the Austrian Hospital, the Monastery and Seminary of the Algerian Mission Brotherhood, the Church of Sant'Anna, the Jewish Hospice, the Ashkenazy and Sephardic Synagogues, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, below the portal of which a misshapen little man with a cucumber of a nose offered us his services as a guide through the intricacies of the aisles and transepts, chapels, shrines and altars. He was wearing a bright yellow frock coat which to my mind dated far back into the last century, and his crooked legs were clad in what had once been a dragoon's breeches, with sky-blue piping. Taking tiny steps, always half turned to us, he danced ahead and talked nonstop in a language he probably thought to be German or English but which was in fact of his own invention and to me, at all events, quite incomprehensible. Whenever his eye fell on me I felt as despised and cold as a stray dog. Later, too, outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a continuing feeling of oppressiveness and misery. No matter which direction we went in, we always came up at one of the steep ravines that crisscross the city, falling away to the valleys. By now the ravines have largely been filled with the rubbish of a thousand years, and everywhere liquid waste flows openly into them. As a result, the water of numerous springs has become undrink-able. The erstwhile pools of Siloam are no more than foul puddles and cesspits, a morass from which the miasma rises that causes epidemics to rage here almost every summer. Cosmo says repeatedly that he is utterly horrified by the city.

On the 27th of November Ambros notes that he has been to Raad's Photographic Studio in the Jaffa Road and has had his picture taken, at Cosmo's wish, in his new striped Arab robe. In the afternoon (he continues) out of the city to the Mount of Olives. We pass a withered vineyard. The soil beneath the black vines rust-coloured, exhausted and scorched. Scarcely a wild olive tree, a thorn bush, or a little hyssop. On the crest of the Mount of Olives runs a riding track. Beyond the valley of Jehoshaphat, where at the end of time, it is said, the entire human race will gather in the flesh, the silent city rises from the white limestone with its domes, towers and ruins. Over the rooftops not a sound, not a trace of smoke, nothing. Nowhere, as far as the eye can see, is there any sign of life, not an animal scurrying by, or even the smallest bird in flight. On dirait que cest la terre maudite. . On the other side, what must be more than three thousand feet below, the Jordan and part of the Dead Sea. The air is so bright, so thin and so clear that without thinking one might reach out a hand to touch the tamarisks down there on the river bank. Never before had we been washed in such a flood of light! A little further on, we found a place to rest in a mountain hollow where a stunted box tree and a few wormwood shrubs grow. We leant against the rock wall for a long time, feeling how everything gradually faded… In the evening, studied the guidebook I bought in Paris. In the past, it says, Jerusalem looked quite different. Nine tenths of the splendours of the world were to be found in this magnificent city. Desert caravans brought spices, precious stones, silk and gold. From the sea ports of Jaffa and Askalon, merchandise came up in abundance. The arts and commerce were in full flower. Before the walls, carefully tended gardens lay outspread, the valley of Jehoshaphat was canopied with cedars, there were streams, springs, fish pools, deep channels, and everywhere cool shade. And then came the age of destruction. Every settlement up to a four-hour journey away in every direction was destroyed, the irrigation systems were wrecked, and the trees and bushes were cut down, burnt and blasted, down to the very last stump. For years the Caesars deliberately made it impossible to live there, and in later times too Jerusalem was repeatedly attacked, liberated and pacified, until at last the desolation was complete and nothing remained of the matchless wealth of the Promised Land but dry stone and a remote idea in the heads of its people, now dispersed throughout the world.

4th December: Last night dreamt that Cosmo and I crossed the glaring emptiness of the Jordan valley. A blind guide walks ahead of us. He points his staff to a dark spot on the horizon and cries out, several times, er-Riha, er-Riha. As we approach, er-Riha proves to be a dirty village with sand and dust swirling about it. The entire population has gathered on the edge of the village in the shade of a tumbledown sugar mill. One has the impression that they are nothing but beggars and footpads. A noticeable number are gouty, hunchbacked or disfigured. Others are lepers or have immense goitres. Now I see that all these people are from Gopprechts. Our Arab escorts fire their long rifles into the air. We ride past, and the people cast malevolent looks after us. At the foot of a low hill we pitch the black tents. The Arabs light a small fire and cook a dark green broth of Jew's mallow and mint leaves, and bring some of it over to us in tin bowls, with slices of lemon and crushed grain. Night falls rapidly. Cosmo lights the lamp and spreads out his map on the colourful carpet. He points to one of the many white spaces and says: We are now in Jericho. The oasis is a four-hour walk in length and a one-hour walk in breadth, and of a rare beauty per matched only by the paradisal orchard of Damascus merveilleux verger de Damas. The people here have all want. Whatever they sow grows immediately in this fertile soil. The glorious gardens flower forever. The gree corn sways in the bright palm groves. The fiery hea summer is made bearable by the many watercourses pastures, the crowns of the trees and the vine leaves ovej pathways. The winters are so mild that the people of blessèd land wear no more than a linen shirt, even wher mountains of Judaea, not far off, are white with sno¹ Several blank pages follow the account of the drean er-Riha. During this time, Ambros must have been ch occupied with recruiting a small troop of Arabs and acqui the equipment and provisions needed for an expedition tc Dead Sea, for on the 16th of December he writes: Left c crowded Jerusalem with its hordes of pilgrims three days and rode down the Kidron Valley into the lowest regioi earth. Then, at the foot of the Yeshimon Mountains, a the Sea as far as Ain Jidy. One wrongly imagines these sb as destroyed by fire and brimstone, a thing of salt and a for thousands of years. I myself have heard the Dead which is about the size of Lac Leman, described as beir motionless as molten lead, though the surface is ruffle times into a phosphorescent foam. Birds cannot fly aero: they say, without suffocating in the air, and others report on moonlit nights an aura of the grave, the colour of absinthe, rises from its depths. None of all this have we found fc true. In fact, the Sea's waters are wonderfully clear, and b on the shore with scarcely a sound. On the high ground tc tight there are green clefts from which streams come forth. There is also to be seen a mysterious white line that is visible early in the morning. It runs the length of the Sea, and vanishes an hour or so later. No one, thus Ibrahim Hishmeh, our Arab guide, can explain it or give a reason. Ain Jidy itself is a blessèd spot with pure spring water and rich vegetation. We made our camp by some bushes on the shore where snipe stalk and the bulbul bird, brown and blue of plumage and red of beak, sings. Yesterday I thought I saw a large dark hare, and a butterfly with gold-speckled wings. In the evening, when we were sitting on the shore, Cosmo said that once the whole of the land of Zoar on the south bank was like this. Where now mere traces remained of the five overthrown cities of Gomorrha, Ruma, Sodom, Seadeh and Seboah, the oleanders once grew thirty feet high beside rivers that never ran dry, and there were acacia forests and oshac trees as in Florida. There were irrigated orchards and melon fields far and wide, and he had read a passage where Lynch, the explorer, claimed that down from the gorge of Wadi Kerek a forest torrent fell with a fearful roar that could only be compared with the Niagara Falls. - In the third night of our stay at Ain Jidy a stiff wind rose out on the Sea and stirred the heavy waters. On land it was calmer. The Arabs had long been asleep beside the horses. I was still sitting up in our bed, which was open to the heavens, in the light of the swaying lantern. Cosmo, curled up slightly, was sleeping at my side. Suddenly a quail, perhaps frightened by the storm on the Sea, took refuge in his lap and remained there, calm now, as if it were its rightful place. But at daybreak, when Cosmo stirred, it ran away quickly across the level ground, as quail do, lifted off into the air, beat its wings tremendously fast for a moment, then extended them rigid and motionless and glided by a little thicket in an utterly beautiful curve, and was gone. It was shortly before sunrise. Across the water, about twelve miles away, the blue-black ridge-line of the Moab Mountains of Araby ran level along the horizon, merely rising or dipping slightly at points, so that one might have thought the watercolourist's hand had trembled a little.

The last entry in my Great-Uncle Adelwarth's little agenda book was written on the Feast of Stephen. Cosmo, it reads, had had a bad fever after their return to Jerusalem but was already on the way to recovery again. My great-uncle also noted that late the previous afternoon it had begun to snow and that, looking out of the hotel window at the city, white in the falling dusk, it made him think of times long gone. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.