The Emigrants

MAX FERBER

Until my twenty-second year I had never been further away from home than a five- or six-hour train journey, and it was because of this that in the autumn of 1966, when I decided, for various reasons, to move to England, I had a barely adequate notion of what the country was like or how, thrown back entirely on my own resources, I would fare abroad. It may have been partly due to my inexperience that I managed to weather the two-hour night flight from Kloten airport to Manchester without too many misgivings. There were only a very few passengers on board, and, as I recall, they sat wrapped up in their coats, far apart in the half-darkness of the cold body of the aircraft. Nowadays, when usually one is quite dreadfully crammed in together with one's fellow passengers, and aggravated by the unwanted attentions of the cabin crew, I am frequently beset with a scarcely containable fear of flying; but at that time, our even passage through the night skies filled me with a sense (false, as I now know) of security. Once we had crossed France and the Channel, sunk in darkness below, I gazed down lost in wonder at the network of lights that stretched from the southerly outskirts of London to the Midlands, their orange sodium glare the first sign that from now on I would be living in a different world. Not until we were approaching the Peak District south of Manchester did the strings of street lights gradually peter out into the dark. At the same time, from behind a bank of cloud that covered the entire horizon to the east, the disc of the moon rose, and by its pale glow the hills, peaks and ridges which had previously been invisible could be seen below us, like a vast, ice-grey sea moved by a great swell. With a grinding roar, its wings trembling, the aircraft toiled downwards until we passed by the strangely ribbed flank of a long, bare mountain ridge seemingly close enough to touch, and appearing to me to be rising and sinking like a giant recumbent body, heaving as it breathed. Looping round in one more curve, the roar of the engines steadily increasing, the plane set a course across open country. By now, we should have been able to make out the sprawling mass of Manchester, yet one could see nothing but a faint glimmer, as if from a fire almost suffocated in ash. A blanket of fog that had risen out of the marshy plains that reached as far as the Irish Sea had covered the city, a city spread across a thousand square kilometres, built of countless bricks and inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.

Although only a scant dozen passengers had disembarked at Ringway airport from the Zurich flight, it took almost an hour until our luggage emerged from the depths, and another hour until I had cleared customs: the officers, understandably bored at that time of the night, suddenly mustered an alarming degree of exactitude as they dealt with me, a rare case, in those days, of a student who planned to settle in Manchester to pursue research, bringing with him a variety of letters and papers of identification and recommendation. It was thus already five o'clock by the time I climbed into a taxi and headed for the city centre. In contrast to today, when a continental zeal..for business has infected the British, in the Sixties no one was out and about in English cities so early in the morning. So, with only an occasional traffic light to delay us, we drove swiftly through the not unhandsome suburbs of Gatley, Northenden and Didsbury to Manchester itself. Day was just breaking, and I looked out in amazement at the rows of uniform houses, which seemed the more rundown the closer we got to the city centre. In Moss Side and Hulme there were whole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up, and whole districts where everything had been demolished. Views opened up across the wasteland towards the still immensely impressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks and warehouses, about a kilometre distant, that had once been the hub of one of the nineteenth century's miracle cities but, as I was soon to find out, was now almost hollow to the core. As we drove in among the dark ravines between the brick buildings, most of which were six or eight storeys high and sometimes adorned with glazed ceramic tiles, it turned out that even there, in the heart of the city, not a soul was to be seen, though by now it was almost a quarter to six. One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum. The taxi driver, whom I had asked to take me to a hotel that was (as I put it) not too expensive, gave me to understand that hotels of the kind I wanted were rare in the city centre, but after driving around a little he turned off Great Bridgewater Street into a narrow alleyway and pulled up at a house scarcely the width of two windows, on the soot-blackened front of which was the name AROSA in sweeping neon letters.

Just keep ringing, said the driver as he left. And I really did have to push the bell long and repeatedly before there was a sign of movement within. After some rattling and shooting of bolts, the door was opened by a lady with curly blonde hair, perhaps not quite forty, with a generally wavy, Lorelei-like air about her. For a while we stood there in wordless confrontation, both of us with an expression of disbelief, myself beside my luggage and she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick. Mrs Irlam — Yes, Irlam like Irlam in Manchester, I would later hear her saying down the phone time and again — Mrs Irlam broke the silence with a question that summed up both her jolted state, roused from her sleep, and her amusement at the sight of me: And where have you sprung from? — a question which she promptly answered herself, observing that only an alien would show up on her doorstep at such an hour on a blessed Friday morning with a case like that. But then, smiling enigmatically, Mrs Irlam turned back in, which I took as a sign to follow her. We went into a windowless room off the tiny hall, where a roll-top desk crammed to bursting with letters and documents, a mahogany chest stuffed with an assortment of bedclothes and candlewick bedspreads, an ancient wall telephone, a keyrack, and a large photograph of a pretty Salvation Army girl, in a black varnished frame, all had, it seemed to me, a life entirely of their own. The girl was in uniform, standing in front of an ivy-covered wall and holding a glistening flugelhorn in the crook of her arm. Inscribed on the slightly foxed passe-partout, in a flowing hand that leant heavily to one side, were the words: Grade Irlam, Urmston nr Manchester, 17 May 1944. Third floor, she said, and, nodding across the hall, her eyebrows raised, added: the lift's over there. The lift was so tiny that I only just fitted in with my case, and its floor was so thin that it sagged beneath the weight of even a single passenger. Later I hardly used it, although it took me quite some time before I could find my way around the maze of dead-end corridors, emergency exits, doors to rooms, toilets and fire escapes, landings and staircases. The room that I moved into that morning, and did not move out of until the following spring, was carpeted in a large floral pattern, wallpapered with violets, and furnished with a wardrobe, a washstand, and an iron bedstead with a candlewick bedspread. From the window there was a view onto semi-derelict slate-roofed outbuildings below and a back yard where rats thronged all that autumn until, a week or so before Christmas, a little ratcatcher by the name of Renfield turned up several times with a battered bucket full of rat poison. He doled the poison out into various corners, drains and pipes, using a soup spoon tied to a short stick, and for a few months the number of rats was considerably reduced. If one looked out across the yard, rather than down into it, one saw the many-windowed deserted depot of the Great Northern Railway Company, a little way beyond a black canal, where sometimes lights would flit about erratically at night.

The day of my arrival at the Arosa, like most of the days, weeks and months to come, was a time of remarkable silence and emptiness. I spent the morning unpacking my suitcase and bags, stowing away my clothing and linen, and arranging my writing materials and other belongings; then, tired after a night of travelling, I fell asleep on my iron bed, my face buried in the candlewick bedspread, which smelled faintly of violet-scented soap. I did not come to till almost half past three, when Mrs Irlam knocked at my door. Apparently by way of a special welcome, she brought me, on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before. She explained that it was called a teas-maid, and was both an alarm clock and a tea-making machine. When I made tea and the

steam rose from it, the shiny stainless steel contraption on its ivory-coloured metal base looked like a miniature power plant, and the dial of the clock, as I soon found as dusk fell, glowed a phosphorescent lime green that I was familiar with from childhood and which I had always felt afforded me an unaccountable protection at night. That may be why it has often seemed, when I have thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea maker brought to my room by Mrs Irlam, by Gracie — you must call me Gracie, she said — as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation, in which I might well have become completely submerged. Very useful, these are, said Gracie as she showed me how to operate the teas-maid that November afternoon; and she was right. After my initiation into the mysteries of what Gracie called an electrical miracle, we went on talking in a friendly fashion, and she repeatedly emphasized that her hotel was a quiet establishment, even if sometimes in the evenings there was (as she put it) a certain commotion. But that need not concern you. It's travelling gentlemen that come and go. And indeed, it was not until after office hours that the doors would open and the stairs creak at the Hotel Arosa, and one would encounter the gentlemen Gracie had referred to, bustling characters clad almost without exception in tattered gabardine coats or macs. Not until nearly eleven at night did the toings and froings cease and the garish women disappear — whom Gracie would refer to, without the slightest hint of irony, with a hold-all phrase she had evidently coined herself, as the gentlemen's travelling companions.

Every evening of the week, the Arosa was bustling with salesmen and clerks, but on Saturday evening, as in the entire rest of the city centre, there was no sign of life. Interrupted only occasionally by stray customers she called irregulars, Gracie would sit at the roll-top desk in her office doing the books. She did her best to smooth out the grey-green pound notes and brick-red ten-shilling notes, then laid them carefully in piles, and, whispering as if at some mystical rite, counted them until she had come up with the same total at least twice. She dealt with the coins no less meticulously; there ^{Was a}lways a considerable quantity, and she stacked them in ^even columns of copper, brass and silver before she set about calculating the total, which she did partly by manual and partly by mathematical means, first converting the pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences to shillings and then the shillings, florins and half crowns into pounds. The final conversion that then followed, of the pound total thus arrived at into the guineas which were at that time still the customary unit in better business establishments, always proved the most difficult part of this financial operation, but without a doubt it was also its crowning glory. Gracie would enter the sum in guineas in her ledger, sign and date it, and stow the money in a Pickley & Patricroft safe that was built into the wall by the desk. On Sundays, she would invariably leave the house early in the morning, carrying a small patent leather case, only to return, just as unfailingly, at lunchtime on the Monday.

As for myself, on those Sundays in the utterly deserted hotel I would regularly be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that I would go out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about amidst the city's immense and time-blackened nineteenth-century buildings, with no particular destination in mind. On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted streets and squares for the few rare hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see. Even the grandest of the buildings, such as the Royal Exchange, the Refuge Assurance Company, the Grosvenor Picture Palace, and indeed the Piccadilly Plaza, which had been built only a few years before, seemed so empty and abandoned that one might have supposed oneself surrounded by mysterious fa$ades or theatrical backdrops. Everything then would appear utterly unreal to me, on those sombre December days when dusk was already falling at three o'clock, when the starlings, which I had previously imagined to be migratory songbirds, descended upon the city in dark flocks that must have numbered hundreds of thousands, and, shrieking incessantly, settled close together on the ledges and copings of warehouses for the night.

Little by little my Sunday walks would take me beyond the city centre to districts in the immediate neighbourhood, such as the one-time Jewish quarter around the star-shaped complex of Strangeways prison, behind Victoria Station. This quarter had been a centre for Manchester's large Jewish community until the inter-war years, but those who lived there had moved into the suburbs and the district had meanwhile been demolished by order of the municipality. All I found still standing was one single row of empty houses, the wind blowing through the smashed windows and doors; and, by way of a sign that someone really had once been there, the barely decipherable brass plate of a one-time lawyers' office, bearing names that had a legendary ring to my ear: Glickmann, Grunwald and Gottgetreu. In Ardwick, Brunswick, All Saints, Hulme and Angel Fields too, districts adjoining the centre to the south, whole square kilometres of working-class homes had been pulled down by the authorities, so that, once the demolition rubble had been removed, all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets. When night fell upon those vast spaces, which I came to think of as the Elysian Fields, fires would begin to flicker here and there and children would

stand around them or skip about, restless shadowy figures. On that bare terrain, which was like a glacis around the heart of the city, it was in fact always and only children that one encountered. They strayed in small groups, in gangs, or quite alone, as if they had nowhere that they could call home. I remember, for instance, late one November afternoon, when the white mist was already rising from the ground, coming across a little boy at a crossroads in the midst of the Angel Fields wasteland, with a Guy stuffed with old rags on a handcart: the only person out and about in the whole area, wanting a penny for his silent companion.

It was early the following year, if I remember correctly, that I ventured further out of the city, in a southwesterly direction, beyond St George and Ordsall, along the bank of the canal across which, from my window, I could see the Great Northern Railway Company depot. It was a bright, radiant day, and the water, a gleaming black in its embankment of massive masonry blocks, reflected the white clouds that scudded across the sky. It was so strangely silent that (as I now think I remember) I could hear sighs in the abandoned depots and warehouses, and was frightened to death when a number of seagulls, squawking stridently, all of a sudden flew

out of the shadow of one of the high buildings, into the light. I passed a long-disused gasworks, a coal depot, a bonemill, and what seemed the unending cast-iron palisade fence of the Ordsall slaughterhouse, a Gothic castle in liver-coloured brick, with parapets, battlements, and numerous turrets and gateways, the sight of which absurdly brought to my mind the name of Haeberlein & Metzger, the Nuremberg Lebkuchen makers; whereupon that name promptly stuck in my head, a bad joke of sorts, and continued to knock about there for the rest of the day. Three quarters of an hour later I reached the port of Manchester, where docks kilometres in length branched off the Ship Canal as it entered the city in a broad arc, forming wide side-arms and surfaces on which one could see nothing had moved for years. The few barges and freighters that lay far apart at the docksides, making an oddly broken impression, put me in mind of some massive shipping disaster. Not far from the locks at the harbour mouth, on a road that ran from the docks to Trafford Park, I came across a sign on which TO THE STUDIOS had been painted in crude brush-strokes. It pointed in to a cobbled yard in the middle of which, on a patch of grass, an almond tree was in blossom. At one time the yard must have been part of a carriage business, since it was enclosed partly by stables and outbuildings and partly by one- or two-storey buildings that had formerly been living quarters and office premises. In one of these seemingly deserted buildings was a studio which, in the months to come, I visited as often as I thought acceptable, to talk to the painter who had been working there since the late Forties, ten hours a day, the seventh day not excepted.

When one entered the studio it was a good while before one's eyes adjusted to the curious light, and, as one began to see again, it seemed as if everything in that space, which measured perhaps twelve metres by twelve and was impenetrable to the gaze, was slowly but surely moving in upon the middle. The darkness that had gathered in the corners, the puffy tidemarked plaster and the paint that flaked off the walls, the shelves overloaded with books and piles of newspapers, the boxes, work benches and side tables, the wing armchair, the gas cooker, the mattresses, the crammed mountains of papers, crockery and various materials, the paint pots gleaming carmine red, leaf green and lead white in the gloom, the blue flames of the two paraffin heaters: the entire furniture was advancing, millimetre by millimetre, upon the central space where Ferber had set up his easel in the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades. Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick at the centre and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. And indeed, when I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust. He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night. Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.

As a rule, Ferber spent the mornings before he began work, and the evenings after he left the studio, at a transport café near Trafford Park, which bore the vaguely familiar name Wadi Haifa. It probably had no licence of any kind, and was located in the basement of an otherwise unoccupied building that looked as if it might fall down at any moment. During the three years I spent in Manchester, I sought out Ferber at least once a week at that curious hostelry, and was soon as indifferent as he was to the appalling dishes, a hybrid of the English and the African, that were prepared by the Wadi Haifa's cook, with an incomparable stylish apathy, in a set-up behind the counter that resembled a field kitchen. With a single, sweeping, seemingly slow-motion movement of his left hand (his right was always in his trouser pocket) the cook could take two or three eggs from the box, break them into the pan, and dispose of the shells in the bin. Ferber told me that this cook, who was almost two metres tall, had once been a Maasai chieftain. Now close to eighty, he had travelled (said Ferber), by which highways and byways he could not say, from the south of Kenya to the north of England, in the postwar years. There he soon learnt the rudiments of local cooking, and, giving up the nomadic life, had settled in to his present trade. As for the waiters, noticeably more numerous than the customers, who stood or sat around at the Wadi Haifa wearing expressions of the utmost boredom, Ferber assured me that they were without exception the chieftain's sons, the eldest probably somewhat over sixty, the youngest twelve or thirteen. Since they were each as slim and tall as the other, and all displayed the same disdain in their fine, even features, they were scarcely distinguishable, especially as they would take over from each other at irregular intervals, so that the team of waiters currently on duty was continuously changing. Nonetheless, Ferber, who had observed them closely and used the differences in their ages as an aid to identification, was of the opinion that there were neither more nor less than a dozen waiters, all told, whereas I for my part could never manage to picture those not present at any given moment. It is also worth mentioning that I never once saw any women at the Wadi Haifa, neither family or companions of the boss or his sons nor indeed customers, the clientèle being chiefly workmen from the demolition companies then busy throughout Trafford Park, lorry divers, refuse collectors and others who happened to be out and about.

At every hour of the day and night, the Wadi Haifa was lit by flickering, glaringly bright neon light that permitted not the slightest shadow. When I think back to our meetings in Trafford Park, it is invariably in that unremitting light that I see Ferber, always sitting in the same place in front of a fresco painted by an unknown hand that showed a caravan moving forward from the remotest depths of the picture, across a wavy ridge of dunes, straight towards the beholder. The painter lacked the necessary skill, and the perspective he had chosen was a difficult one, as a result of which both the human figures and the beasts of burden were slightly distorted, so that, if you half shut your eyes, the scene looked like a mirage, quivering in the heat and light. And especially on days when Ferber had been working in charcoal, and the fine powdery dust had given his skin a metallic sheen, he seemed to have just emerged from the desert scene, or to belong in it. He himself once remarked, studying the gleam of graphite on the back of his hands, that in his dreams, both waking and by night, he had already crossed all the earth's deserts of sand and stone. But anyway, he went on, avoiding any further explanation, the darkening of his skin reminded him of an article he had recently read in the paper about silver poisoning, the symptoms of which were not uncommon among professional photographers. According to the article, the British Medical Associations archives contained the description of an extreme case of silver poisoning: in the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man's face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.

One summer evening in 1966, nine or ten months after my arrival in Manchester, Ferber and I were walking along the Ship Canal embankment, past the suburbs of Eccles, Patricroft and Barton upon Irwell on the other side of the black water, towards the setting sun and the scattered outskirts where occasional views opened up, affording an intimation of the marshes that extended there as late as the mid nineteenth century. The Manchester Ship Canal, Ferber told me, was begun in 1887 and completed in 1894. The work was mainly done by a continuously reinforced army of Irish navvies, who shifted some sixty million cubic metres of earth in that period and built the gigantic locks that would make it possible to raise or lower ocean-going steamers up to 150 metres long by five or six metres. Manchester was then the industrial Jerusalem, said Ferber, its entrepreneurial spirit and progressive vigour the envy of the world, and the completion of the immense canal project had made it the largest inland port on earth. Ships of the Canada & Newfoundland Steamship Company, the China Mutual Line, the Manchester Bombay General Navigation Company, and many other shipping lines, plied the docks near the city centre. The loading and unloading never stopped: wheat, nitre, construction timber, cotton, rubber, jute, train oil, tobacco, tea, coffee, cane sugar, exotic fruits, copper and iron °te, steel, machinery, marble and mahogany — everything,

in fact, that could possibly be needed, processed or made in a manufacturing metropolis of that order. Manchester's shipping traffic peaked around 1930 and then went into an irreversible decline, till it came to a complete standstill in the late Fifties. Given the motionlessness and deathly silence that lay upon the canal now, it was difficult to imagine, said Ferber, as we gazed back at the city sinking into the twilight, that he himself, in the postwar years, had seen the most enormous freighters on this water. They would slip slowly by, and as they approached the port they passed amidst houses, looming high above the black slate roofs. And in winter, said Ferber, if a ship suddenly appeared out of the mist when one least expected it, passed by soundlessly, and vanished once more in the white air, then for me, every time, it was an utterly incomprehensible spectacle which moved me deeply.

I no longer remember how Ferber came to tell me the extremely cursory version of his life that he gave me at that time, though I do remember that he was loath to answer the questions I put to him about his story and his early years. It was in the autumn of 1943, at the age of eighteen, that Ferber, then a student of art, first went to Manchester. Within months, in early 1944, he was called up. The only point of note concerning that first brief stay in Manchester, said Ferber, was the fact that he had lodged at 104, Palatine Road — the selfsame house where Ludwig Wittgenstein, then a twenty-year-old engineering student, had lived in 1908. Doubtless any retrospective connection with Wittgenstein was purely illusory, but it meant no less to him on that account, said Ferber. Indeed, he sometimes felt as if he were tightening his ties to those who had gone before; and for that reason, whenever he pictured the young Wittgenstein bent over the design of a variable combustion chamber, or test-flying a kite of his own construction on the Derbyshire moors, he was aware of a sense of brotherhood that reached far back beyond his own lifetime or even the years immediately before it. Continuing with his account, Ferber told me that after basic training at Catterick, in a God-forsaken part of north Yorkshire, he volunteered for a paratroop regiment, hoping that that way he would still see action before the end of the war, which was clearly not far off. Instead, he fell ill with jaundice, and was transferred to the convalescent home in the Palace Hotel at Buxton, and so his hopes were dashed. Ferber was compelled to spend more than six months at the idyllic Derbyshire spa town, recovering his health and consumed with rage, as he observed without explanation. It had been a terribly bad time for him, a time scarcely to be endured, a time he could not bear to say any more about. At all events, in early May 1945, with his discharge papers in

his pocket, he had walked the roughly forty kilometres to Manchester to resume his art studies there. He could still see, with absolute clarity, his descent from the fringes of the moorlands after his walk amidst the spring sunshine and showers. From a last bluff he had had a bird's eye view of the city spread out before him, the city where he was to live ever after. Contained by hills on three sides, it lay there as if in the heart of a natural amphitheatre. Over the flatland to the west, a curiously shaped cloud extended to the horizon, and the last rays of sunlight were blazing past its edges, and for a while lit up the entire panorama as if by firelight or Bengal flares. Not until this illumination died (said Ferber) did his eye roam, taking in the crammed and interlinked rows of houses, the textile mills and dying works, the gasometers, chemicals plants and factories of every kind, as far as what he took to be the centre of the city, where all seemed one solid mass of utter blackness, bereft of any further distinguishing features. The most impressive thing, of course, said Ferber, were all the chimneys that towered above the plain and the flat maze of

housing, as far as the eye could see. Almost every one of those chimneys, he said, has now been demolished or taken out of use. But at that time there were still thousands of them, side by side, belching out smoke by day and night. Those square and circular smokestacks, and the countless chimneys from which a yellowy-grey smoke rose, made a deeper impression on me when I arrived than anything else I had previously seen, said Ferber. I can no longer say exactly what thoughts the sight of Manchester prompted in me then, but I believe I felt I had found my destiny. And I also remember, he said, that when at last I was ready to go on I looked down once more over the pale green parklands deep down below, and, half an hour after sunset, saw a shadow, like the shadow of a cloud, flit across the fields — a herd of deer headed for the night.

As I expected, I have remained in Manchester to this day, Ferber continued. It is now twenty-two years since I arrived, he said, and with every year that passes a change of place seems less conceivable. Manchester has taken possession of me for good. I cannot leave, I do not want to leave, I must not. Even the visits I have to make to London once or twice a year oppress and upset me. Waiting at stations, the announcements on the public address, sitting in the train, the country passing by (which is still quite unknown to me), the looks of fellow passengers — all of it is torture to me. That is why I have rarely been anywhere in my life, except of course Manchester; and even here I often don't leave the house or workshop for weeks on end. Only once have I travelled abroad since my youth, two years ago, when I went to Colmar in the summer, and from Colmar via Basle to Lake Geneva. For a very long time I had wanted to see Griinewald's Isenheim paintings, which were often in my mind as I worked, and especially the "Entombment of Christ", but I never managed to master my fear of travelling. So I was all the more amazed, once I had taken the plunge, to find how easily it went. Looking back from the ferry at the white cliffs of Dover, I even imagined I should be liberated from that moment; and the train ride across France, which I had been particularly afraid of, also went very well. It was a fine day, I had a whole compartment, indeed the entire carriage to myself, the air rushed in at the window, and I felt a kind of festive good spirits rising within me. About ten or eleven in the evening I arrived in Colmar, where I spent a good night at the Hotel Terminus Bristol on the Place de la Gare and the next morning, without delay, went to the museum to look at the Grunewald paintings. The extreme vision of that strange man, which was lodged in every detail, distorted every limb, and infected the colours like an illness, was one I had always felt in tune with, and now I found my feeling confirmed by the direct encounter. The monstrosity of that suffering, which, emanating from the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of Nature, only to flood back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death, rose and ebbed within me like a tide. Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced — consciousness — and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next. When I was in Colmar, said Ferber, I beheld all of this in precise detail, how one thing had led to another and how it had been afterwards. The flood of memory, little of which remains with me now, began with my recalling a Friday morning some years ago when I was suddenly struck by the paroxysm of pain that a slipped disc can occasion, pain of a kind I had never experienced before. I had simply bent down to the cat, and as I straightened up the tissue tore and the nucleuspulposus jammed into the nerves. At least, that is how the doctor later described it. At that moment, all I knew was that I mustn't move even a fraction of an inch, that my whole life had shrunk to that one tiny point of absolute pain, and that even breathing in made everything go black. Until the evening I was rooted in one place in a semi-erect position. How I managed the few steps to the wall, after darkness had fallen, and how I pulled the tartan blanket that was hanging

on the back of the chair over my shoulders, I no longer remember. All I now recall is that I stood at that wall all night long with my forehead against the damp, musty plaster, that it grew colder and colder, that the tears ran down my face, that I began to mutter nonsense, and that through it all I felt that being utterly crippled by pain in this way was related, in the most precise manner conceivable, to the inner constitution I had acquired over the years. I also remember that the crooked position I was forced to stand in reminded me, even in my pain, of a photograph my father had taken of me in the second form at school, bent over my writing. In Colmar, at any rate, said Ferber after a lengthy pause, I began to remember, and it was probably those recollections that prompted me to go on to Lake Geneva after eight days, to retrace another old memory that had long been buried and which I had never dared disturb. My father, said Ferber, beginning anew, was an art dealer, and in the summer months he regularly put on what he called special exhibitions in the lobbies of famous hotels. In 1936 he took me with him to one of these exhibitions at the Victoria Jungfrau in Interlaken and then to the Palace at Montreux. Father's shows usually consisted of about five dozen salon pieces in the Dutch manner, in gold frames, or Mediterranean genre scenes in the style of Murillo, and deserted German landscapes — of these, I remember a composition that showed a gloomy heath with two juniper trees, at a distance from each other, in the blood-red glow of the setting sun. As well as I could, at the age of twelve, I helped Father with the hanging, labelling and despatch of these exhibition pieces, which he described as artistic merchandise. By way of a reward for my efforts, Father, who loved the Alps passionately, took me up the Jungfraujoch in the mountain railway, and from there he showed me the largest glacier in Europe, gleaming snow-white in the midst of summer. The day after the exhibition at the Palace closed, we drove out of Montreux in a hired car, some way along the Rhone valley, and presently turned off to the right, up a narrow and twisting road to a village with a name that struck me as distinctly odd, Miex. From Miex it was a three-hour walk, past the Lac de Tanay, to the summit of Grammont. All the noontide of that blue-skied day in August I lay beside Father on the mountaintop, gazing down into the even deeper blue of the lake, at the country across the lake, over to the faint silhouette of the Jura range, at the bright towns on the far bank, and at St Gingolph, immediately below us but barely visible in a shaft of shadow perhaps fifteen hundred metres deep. On my train journey through Switzerland, which truly is amazingly beautiful, I was already remembering these scenes and images of thirty years before, said Ferber; but they were also strangely threatening, as I saw with increasing clarity during my stay at the Palace, so that in the end I locked the door of my room, pulled down the blinds, and lay in bed for hours at a stretch, which only worsened my incipient anxiety. After about a week it somehow occurred to me that only the reality outside could save me. But instead of strolling around Montreux, or going over to Lausanne, I set off to climb Grammont a second time, regardless of my condition, which by now was quite frail. The day was as bright as it had been the first time, and when I had reached the top, utterly exhausted, there below me was the country around Lake Geneva once again, seemingly completely unchanged, and with no trace of movement but for the one or two tiny boats that left their white wakes on the deep blue water as they proceeded, unbelievably slowly, and the trains that went to and fro at intervals on the far bank. That world, at once near and unattainably far, said Ferber, exerted so powerful an attraction on him that he was afraid he might leap down into it, and might really have done so had not a man of about sixty suddenly appeared before him — like someone who's popped out of the bloody ground. He was carrying a large white gauze butterfly net and said, in an English voice that was refined but quite unplaceable, that it was time to be thinking of going down if one were to be in Montreux for dinner. He had no recollection of having made the descent with the butterfly man, though, said Ferber; in fact the descent had disappeared entirely from his memory, as had his final days at the Palace and the return journey to England. Why exactly this lagoon of oblivion had spread in him, and how far it extended, had remained a mystery to him however hard he thought about it. If he tried to think back to the time in question, he could not see himself again till he was back in the studio, working at a painting which took him almost a full year, with minor interruptions — the faceless portrait "Man with a Butterfly Net". This he considered one of his most unsatisfactory works, because in his view it conveyed not even the remotest impression of the strangeness of the apparition it referred to. Work on the picture of the butterfly man had taken more out of him than any previous painting, for when he started on it, after countless preliminary studies, he not only overlaid it time and again but also, whenever the canvas could no longer withstand the continual scratching-off and re-application of paint, he destroyed it and burnt it several times. The despair at his lack of ability which already tormented him quite enough during the day now invaded his increasingly sleepless nights, so that soon he _wept with exhaustion as he worked. In the end he had no alternative but powerful sedatives, which in turn gave him the most horrific hallucinations, not unlike those suffered by St Anthony on the temptation panel of the Isenheim altar-piece. Thus, for instance, he once saw his cat leap vertically into the air and do a backward somersault, whereupon it lay where it fell, rigid. He clearly remembered placing the dead cat in a shoebox and burying it under the almond tree in the yard. Just as clearly, though, there was the cat at its bowl the next morning, looking up at him as if nothing had happened. And once, said Ferber in conclusion, he dreamt (he could not say whether by day or by night) that in 1887 he had opened the great art exhibition in the purpose-built Trafford Park, together with Queen Victoria. Thousands of people were present as, hand in hand with the fat Queen, who gave off an unsavoury odour, he walked through the endless halls

containing 16,000 gold-framed works of art. Almost without exception, said Ferber, the works were items from his father's holdings. In amongst them, however, there were one or two of my own paintings, though to my dismay they differed not at all, or only insignificantly, from the salon pieces. At length, continued Ferber, we passed through a painted trompe-l'oeil door (done with astounding skill, as the Queen remarked to me) into a gallery covered in layers of dust, in the greatest possible contrast to the glittering crystal palace, where clearly no one had set foot for years and which, after some hesitation, I recognized as my parents' drawing room. Somewhat to one side, a stranger was sitting on the ottoman. In his lap he was holding a model of the Temple of Solomon, made of pinewood, papier-mâché and gold paint. Frohmann, from Drohobycz, he said, bowing slightly, going on to explain that it had taken him seven years to build the temple, from the biblical description, and that he was now travelling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model. Just look, said Frohmann: you can see every crenellation on the towers, every curtain, every threshold, every sacred vessel. And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like. I had been in Manchester for the best part of three years when, having completed my research, I left the city in the summer of 1969 to follow a plan I had long had of becoming a schoolteacher in Switzerland. On my return from a soot-blackened city that was drifting steadily towards ruin, I was deeply moved by the beauty and variety of the Swiss countryside, which by then had almost slipped my memory, and the sight of the snowy mountains in the distance, the high-lying forests, the autumn light, the frozen watercourses and fields, and the fruit trees in blossom in the meadows, touched my heart more powerfully than I could have anticipated; but nevertheless, for various reasons partly to do with the Swiss attitude to life and partly to do with my position as a teacher, I did not care to stay in Switzerland for long. A bare year had passed when I decided to return to England and to take up the offer of a post I found attractive from several points of view, in Norfolk, which was then considered off the beaten track. If I had still occasionally thought of Ferber and Manchester during my months in Switzerland, my memories faded steadily in the period in England which followed and which, as I sometimes note with amazement, has continued up to the present. Of course Ferber did come to my mind at various times over the long years, but I never succeeded in picturing him properly. His face had become a mere shadow. I assumed that Ferber had been drowned in his labours, but avoided making any closer enquiries. It was not until late November 1989, when by sheer chance I came across a painting bearing his signature in the Tate Gallery (I had gone to see Delvaux's "Sleeping Venus"), that Ferber came alive again in my mind. The painting, about one and a half by two metres, bore a title which struck me as both significant and improbable: "G.I. on her Blue Candlewick Cover". Not long after, I came across Ferber in a Sunday colour supplement, again pretty much by chance, since I have long avoided reading the Sunday papers and especially the magazines that come with them. According to the article, his work now fetched the highest prices on the art market, but Ferber himself, ignoring this development, still lived as he had always done, and continued to work at the easel ten hours a day in his studio near the Manchester docks. For weeks I carried the magazine around with me, glancing time and again at the article, which, I sensed, had unlocked in me a sort of gaol or oubliette. I studied Ferber's dark eye, looking sideways out of a photograph that accompanied the text, and tried, at least with hindsight, to understand what inhibitions or wariness there had been on his part that had kept our conversations away from his origins, despite the fact that such a talk, as I now realized, would have been the obvious thing. In May 1939, at the age of fifteen, Friedrich Maximilian Ferber (so the rather meagre magazine account informed me) left: Munich, where his father was an art dealer, for England. The article went on to say that Ferber's parents, who delayed their own departure from Germany for a number of reasons, were taken from Munich to Riga in November 1941, in one of the first deportation trains, and were subsequently murdered there. As I now thought back, it seemed unforgivable that I should have omitted, or failed, in those Manchester times, to ask Ferber the questions he must surely have expected from me; and so, for the first time in a very long while, I went to Manchester once again, a six-hour train journey that crisscrossed the country, through the pine forests and heathlands near Thetford, across the broad lowlands around the Isle of Ely, black at wintertime, past towns and cities each as ugly as the next — March, Peterborough, Loughborough, Nottingham, Alfreton, Sheffield — and past disused industrial plants, slag heaps, belching cooling towers, hills with never a soul about, sheep pastures, stone walls, and on through snow showers, rain, and the ever-changing colours of the sky. By early afternoon I was in Manchester, and immediately set off westwards, through the city, in the direction of the docks. To my surprise, I had no difficulty in finding my way, since

everything in Manchester had essentially remained the same as it had been almost a quarter of a century before. The buildings that had been put up to stave off the general decline were now themselves in the grip of decay, and even the so-called development zones, created in recent years on the fringes of the city centre and along the Ship Canal, to revive the entrepreneurial spirit that so much was being made of, already looked semi-abandoned. The wasteland and the white clouds drifting in from the Irish Sea were reflected in the glinting glass fronts of office blocks, some of which were only half occupied, and some of which were still under construction. Once I was out at the docks it did not take me long to find Ferber's studio. The cobbled yard was unaltered. The almond tree was about to blossom, and when I crossed the threshold ^{u was} as if I had been there only yesterday. The same dull light was entering by the window, and the easel still stood in the middle of the room on the black encrusted floor, a black piece card on it, overworked to the point of being unrecognizable. To judge by the picture clipped to a second easel, the model that had served Ferber for this exercise in destruction was a Courbet that I had always been especially fond of, "The

Oak of Vercingetorix". But Ferber himself, whom I had not noticed at first as I came in from outside, was sitting towards the rear in his red velvet armchair, a cup of tea in his hand, watching his visitor out of the corner of his eye. I was now getting on for fifty, as he had been then, while Ferber himself was almost seventy. By way of welcome he said: Aren't we all getting on! He said it with a throwaway smile, and then, not seeming to me to have aged in the slightest, gestured towards a copy of Rembrandt's portrait of a man with a magnifying glass, which still hung in the same place on the wall as it had twenty-five years before, and added: Only he doesn't seem to get any older.

Following this late reunion, which neither of us had expected, we talked for three whole days far into the night, and a great many more things were said than I shall be able to write down here: concerning our exile in England, the immigrant city of Manchester and its irreversible decline, the Wadi Haifa (which had long ceased to exist), the flugelhorn player Gracie Irlam, my year as a schoolteacher in Switzerland, and my subsequent attempt, also aborted, to settle in Munich, in a German cultural institute. Ferber commented that, purely in terms of time, I was now as far removed from Germany as he had been in 1966; but time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul. There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. When I think of Germany, it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head. Probably the reason why I have never been to Germany again is that I am afraid to find that this insanity really exists. To me, you see, Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place, inhabited by people whose faces are both lovely and dreadful. All of them are dressed in the style of the Thirties, or even earlier fashions, and wearing headgear that does not go with their clothing at all — pilots' helmets, peaked caps, top hats, ear muffs, crossover headbands, and hand-knitted woollen caps. Almost every day a beautiful woman wearing a ball gown made of grey parachute silk and a broad-brimmed hat trimmed with grey roses visits me. Hardly have I sat down in my armchair, tired from work, but I hear her steps outside on the pavement. She sweeps in at the gate, past the almond tree, and there she is, on the threshold of my workshop. Hastily she comes over to me, like a doctor afraid that she may be too late to save a sinking patient. She takes off her hat and her hair tumbles about her shoulders, she strips off her fencing gloves and tosses them onto this little table, and she bends down towards me. I close my eyes in a swoon — and how it goes on after that point, I do not know. One thing is certain: we never say a word. The scene is always a silent one. I think the grey lady understands only her mother tongue, German, which I have not once spoken since I parted from my parents at Oberwiesenfeld airport in Munich in 1939, and which survives in me as no more than an echo, a muted and incomprehensible murmur. It may possibly have something to do with this loss of language, this oblivion, Ferber went on, that my memories reach no further back than my ninth or eighth year, and that I recall little of the Munich years after 1933 other than processions, marches and parades. There seems always to have been a reason for them: May Day or Corpus Christi, carnival or the tenth anniversary of the Putsch, Reichsbauerntag or the inauguration of the Haus der Kunst. They were forever bearing either the Sacred Heart through the city centre or what they called the Blutfahne, the banner of blood. On one occasion, said Ferber, they put up trapezi-form pedestals draped in chestnut-coloured cloth on either side of the Ludwigstrasse, all the way from the Feldherrnhalle into the heart of Schwabing, and on every one of the pedestals a flame was burning in a shallow iron bowl. At these constant assemblies and parades, the number of different uniforms and insignia noticeably increased. It was as if a new species of humanity, one after another, was evolving before our very eyes. I was filled with wonderment, anger, yearning and revulsion in equal measure; as a child, and then as a teenager, I would stand silently amidst the cheering or awe-struck crowds, ashamed that I did not belong. At home, my parents never talked about the new order in my presence, or only did so obliquely. We all tried desperately to maintain an appearance of normality, even after Father had to hand over the management of his gallery across from the Haus der Kunst, which had opened only the year before, to an Aryan partner. I still did my homework under Mother's supervision; we still went to Schliersee for the skiing in winter, and to Oberstdorf or the Walsertal for our summer holidays; and of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing. Thus, for instance, all my family and relatives remained largely silent about the reasons why my grandmother Lily Lanzberg took her own life; somehow they seem to have agreed that towards the end she was no longer quite in her right mind. Uncle Leo, Mother's twin brother, with whom we drove from Bad Kissingen to Wiirzburg after the funeral, at the end of July 1936, was the only one I occasionally heard talk outspokenly about the situation; but this was generally met with disapproval. I now remember (said Ferber) that Uncle Leo, who taught Latin and Greek at a grammar school in Wiirzburg until he was dismissed, once showed Father a newspaper clipping dating from 1933, with a photograph of the book burning on the Residenzplatz in Wiirzburg. That photograph, said Uncle, was a forgery. The burning of the books took place on the evening of the 10th of May, he said — he repeated it several times — the books were burnt on the evening of the 10th of May, but since it was already dark, and they couldn't take any decent photographs, they simply took a picture of some other gathering outside the palace, Uncle claimed, and added a swathe of smoke and a dark night sky. In other words, the photographic document published in the paper was a fake. And just as that document was a fake, said Uncle, as if his discovery were the one vital proof, so too everything else has been a fake, from the very start. But Father shook his head without saying a word, either because he was appalled or because he could not assent to Uncle Leo's sweeping verdict. At first I too found the Wurzburg story, which Ferber said he was only then remembering for the first time, somewhat on the improbable side; but in the meantime I have tracked down the photograph in question in a Wurzburg archive, and as one can easily see there is indeed no doubt that Ferber's

uncle's suspicions were justified. Continuing his account of his visit to Wurzburg in summer 1936, Ferber said that one day when they were strolling in the palace gardens Uncle Leo told him that he had been compulsorily retired on the 31st of December the year before and that, in consequence, he was preparing to emigrate from Germany, and was planning to go to England or America shortly. Afterwards we were in the great hall of the palace, and I stood beside Uncle, craning up at Tiepolo's glorious ceiling fresco above the stairwell, which at that time meant nothing to me; beneath the loftiest of skies, the creatures and people of the four realms of the world are assembled on it in fantastic array. Strangely enough, said Ferber, I only thought of that afternoon in Wiirzburg with Uncle Leo a few months ago, when I was looking through a new book on Tiepolo. For a long time I couldn't tear myself away from the reproductions of the great Wiirzburg fresco, its light-skinned and dark-skinned beauties, the kneeling Moor with the sunshade and the magnificent Amazon with the feathered headdress. For a whole evening, said Ferber, I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Wiirzburg came back to me, and the return to Munich, where the general situation and the atmosphere at home were steadily becoming more unbearable, and the silence was thickening. Father, said Ferber, was something of a born comedian or play-actor. He enjoyed life, or rather, he would have enjoyed it; he would have liked to go to the Theater am Gàrtnerplatz still, to the revues and wine bars; but, because of the circumstances, the depressive traits that were also in his character overlaid his essentially cheerful nature towards the end of the Thirties. He began to display an absent-mindedness and irritability which I had not seen in him before; both he and Mother put it down to a passing nervousness, which for days at a time would dictate his behaviour. He went to the cinema more and more often, to see cowboy films and the mountaineering films of Luis Trenker. Not once was there any talk of leaving Germany, at least not in my presence, not even after the Nazis had confiscated pictures, furniture and valuables from our home, on the grounds that we had no right to the German heritage. All I remember is that my parents were particularly affronted by the uncouth manner in which the lower ranks stuffed their pockets full of cigarettes and cigarillos. After the Kristallnacht, Father was interned in Dachau. Six weeks later he came home, distinctly thinner and with his hair cropped

short. To me he said not a word about what he had seen and experienced. How much he told Mother, I do not know. Once more, in early 1939, we went to Lenggries for the skiing. It was my last time and I think it was Father's, too. I took a photo of him up on the Brauneck. It is one of the few that have survived from those years, said Ferber. Not long after our trip to Lenggries, Father managed to get a visa for me by bribing the English consul. Mother was counting on their both following me soon. Father was finally determined to leave the country, she said. They only had to make the necessary arrangements. So my things were packed, and on the 17th of May, Mothers fiftieth birthday, my parents took me to the airport. It was a fine, bright morning, and we drove from our house in Sternwartstrasse in Bogenhausen across the Isar, through the Englischer Garten along Tivolistrasse, across the Eisbach, which I still see as clearly as I did then, to Schwabing and then out of the city along Leopoldstrasse towards Oberwiesenfeld. The drive seemed endless to me, said Ferber, probably because none of us said a word. When I asked if he remembered saying goodbye to his parents at the airport, Ferber replied, after a long hesitation, that when he thought back to that May morning at Oberwiesenfeld he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them, or whether he and his parents had embraced or not. He could still see his parents sitting in the back of the hired car on the drive out to Oberwiesenfeld, but he could not see them at the airport itself. And yet he could picture Oberwiesenfeld down to the last detail, and all these years had been able to envisualize it with that fearful precision, time and time again. The bright concrete strip in front of the open hangar and the deep dark inside it, the swastikas on the rudders of the aircraft, the fenced-off area where he had to wait with the other passengers, the privet hedge around the fence, the groundsman with his wheelbarrow, shovel and brush, the weather station boxes, which reminded him of bee-hives, the cannon at the airfield perimeter — he could see it all with painful clarity, and he could see himself walking across the short grass towards the white Lufthansa Junkers 52, which bore the name Kurt Wüsthoff and the number D—3051. I see myself mounting the wheeled wooden steps, said Ferber, and sitting down in the plane beside a woman in a blue Tyrolean hat, and I see myself looking out of the little square window as we raced across the big, green, deserted airfield, at a distant flock of sheep and the tiny figure of a shepherd. And then I see Munich slowly tilting away below me.

The flight in the JU52 took me only as far as Frankfurt, said Ferber, where I had to wait for several hours and clear customs. There, at Frankfurt am Main airport, my opened suitcase sat on an ink-stained table while a customs official, without touching a thing, stared into it for a very long time, as if the clothes which my mother had folded and packed in her distinctive, highly orderly way, the neatly ironed shirts or my Norwegian skiing jersey, might possess some mysterious significance. What I myself thought as I looked at my open suitcase, I no longer know; but now, when I think back, it feels as if I ought never to have unpacked it, said Ferber, covering his face with his hands. The BEA plane in which I flew on to London at about three that afternoon, he continued, was a Lockheed Electra. It was a fine flight. I saw Belgium from the air, the Ardennes, Brussels, the straight roads of Flanders, the sand dunes of Ostende, the coast, the white cliffs of Dover, the green hedgerows and hills south of London, and then, appearing on the horizon like a low grey range of hills, the island capital itself. We landed at half past five at Hendon airfield. Uncle Leo met me. We drove into the city, past endless rows of suburban houses so indistinguishable from one another that I found them depressing yet at the same time vaguely ridiculous. Uncle was living in a little emigre hotel in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. My first night in England was spent in that hotel, on a peculiar, high-framed bed, and was sleepless not so much because of my distress as because of the way that one is pinned down, in English beds of that kind, by bedding which has been tucked under the mattress all the way round. So the next morning, the 18th of May, I was bleary-eyed and weary when I tried on my new school uniform at Baker's in Kensington, with my uncle — a pair of short black trousers, royal blue knee-length socks, a blazer of the same colour, an orange shirt, a striped tie, and a tiny cap that would not stay put on my full shock of hair no matter how I tried. Uncle, given the funds at his disposal, had found me a third-rate public school at Margate, and I believe that when he saw me kitted out like that he was as close to tears as I was when I saw myself in the mirror. And if the uniform felt like a fool's motley, expressly designed to heap scorn upon me, then the school itself, when we arrived there that afternoon, seemed like a prison or mental asylum. The circular bed of dwarf conifers in the curve of the drive, the grim facade capped by battlements of sorts, the rusty bell-pull beside the open door, the school janitor who came limping out of the darkness of the hall, the colossal oak stairwell, the coldness of all the rooms, the smell of coal, the incessant cooing of the decrepit pigeons that perched everywhere on the roof, and numerous other sinister details I no longer remember, conspired to make me think that I would go mad in next to no time in that establishment. It presently emerged, however, that the regime of the school — where I was to spend the next few years — was in fact fairly lax, sometimes to the point of anarchy. The headmaster and founder of the school, a man by the name of Lionel Lynch-Lewis, was a bachelor of almost seventy, invariably dressed in the most eccentric manner and scented with a discreet hint of lilac; and his staff, no less eccentric, more or less left the pupils, who were mainly the sons of minor diplomats from unimportant countries, or the offspring of other itinerants, to their own devices. Lynch-Lewis took the view that nothing was more damaging to the development of young adolescents than a regular school timetable. He maintained that one learnt best and most easily in one's free time. This attractive concept did in fact bear fruit for some of us, but others ran quite disturbingly wild as a result. As for the parrot-like uniform which we had to wear and which, it turned out, had been designed by Lynch-Lewis himself, it formed the greatest possible contrast to the rest of his pedagogical approach. At best, the outré riot of colour we were obliged to wear fitted in with the excessive emphasis placed by Lynch-Lewis on the cultivation of correct English, which in his view could mean only turn-of-the-century stage English. Not for nothing was it rumoured in Margate that our teachers were all, without exception, recruited from the ranks of actors who had failed, for whatever reason, in their chosen profession. Oddly enough, said Ferber, when I look back at my time in Margate I cannot say whether I was happy or unhappy, or indeed what I was. At any rate, the amoral code that governed life at school gave me a certain sense of freedom, such as I had not had till then — and, that being so, it grew steadily harder for me to write my letters home or to read the letters that arrived from home every fortnight. The correspondence became more of a chore, and when the letters stopped coming, in November 1941, I was relieved at first, in a way that now strikes me as quite terrible. Only gradually did it dawn on me that I would never again be able to write home; in fact, to tell the truth, I do not know if I have really grasped it to this day. But it now seems to me that the course of my life, down to the tiniest detail, was ordained not only by the deportation of my parents but also by the delay with which the news of their death reached me, news I could not believe at first and the meaning of which only sank in by degrees. Naturally, I took steps, consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents' sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years.

In early 1942 (Ferber concluded, the evening before I left Manchester), Uncle Leo embarked at Southampton for New York. Before he left he visited Margate one last time, and we agreed that I would follow him in the summer, when I had completed my last year at school. But when the time came I did not want to be reminded of my origins by anything or anyone, so instead of going to New York, into the care of my uncle, I decided to move to Manchester on my own. Inexperienced as I was, I imagined I could begin a new life in Manchester, from scratch; but instead, Manchester reminded me of everything I was trying to forget. Manchester is an immigrant city, and for a hundred and fifty years, leaving aside the poor Irish, the immigrants were chiefly Germans and Jews, manual workers, tradesmen, freelancers, retailers and wholesalers, watchmakers, hatters, cabinet-makers, umbrella makers, tailors, bookbinders, typesetters, silversmiths, photographers, furriers and glovers, scrap merchants, hawkers, pawnbrokers, auctioneers, jewellers, estate agents, stockbrokers, chemists and doctors. The Sephardic Jews, who had been settled in Manchester for a long time and had names like Besso, Raphael, Cattun, Calderon, Farache, Negriu, Messulam or di Moro, made little distinction between the Germans and other Jews with names like Leibrand, Wohlgemuth, Herzmann, Gottschalk, Adler, Engels, Landeshut, Frank, Zirndorf, Wallerstein, Aronsberg, Haarbleicher, Crailsheimer, Danziger, Lipmann or Lazarus. Throughout the nineteenth century, the German and Jewish influence was stronger in Manchester than in any other European city; and so, although I had intended to move in the opposite direction, when I arrived in Manchester I had come home, in a sense, and with every year I have spent since then in this birthplace of industrialization, amidst the black facades, I have realized more clearly than ever that I am here, as they used to say, to serve under the chimney. Ferber said nothing more. For a long time he stared into space, before sending me on my way with a barely perceptible wave of his left hand. When I returned to the studio the following morning to take my leave of him he handed me a brown paper package tied with string, containing a number of photographs and almost a hundred pages of handwritten memoirs penned by his mother in the Sternwartstrasse house between 1939 and 1941, which showed (said Ferber) that obtaining a visa had become increasingly difficult and that the plans his father had made for their emigration had necessarily grown more complex with every week that passed — and, as his mother had clearly understood, impossible to carry out. Mother wrote not a word about the events of the moment, said Ferber, apart from the odd oblique glance at the hopeless situation she and Father were in; instead, with a passion that was beyond his understanding, she wrote of her childhood in the village of Steinach, in lower Franconia, and her youth in Bad Kissingen. In the time that had passed since they were written, said Ferber, he had read the memories his mother had committed to paper, presumably not least with himself in mind, only twice. The first time, after he received the package, he had skimmed over them. The second time he had read them meticulously, many years later. On that second occasion, the memoirs, which at points were truly wonderful, had seemed to him like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun — in this case, the remembering, writing and reading. That is why I would rather you took this package, Ferber said, and saw me out to the yard, where he walked with me as far as the almond tree.

The manuscript which Ferber gave me on that morning in Manchester is before me now. I shall try to convey in excerpts what the author, whose maiden name was Luisa Lanzberg, recounts of her early life. At the very beginning she writes that not only she and her brother Leo were born at Steinach, near Bad Kissingen, but also her father Lazarus, and her grandfather Löb before him. The family was recorded as living in the village, which had formerly been under the jurisdiction of the prince-bishops of Wiirzburg and a third of whose inhabitants were Jews long resident there, at least as far back as the late seventeenth century. It almost goes without saying that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbours and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all. From Bad Kissingen the road to Steinach goes by way of Grossenbrach, Kleinbrach, and Aschach with its castle and Graf Luxburg's brewery. From there it climbs the steep Aschacher Leite, where Lazarus (Luisa writes) always got down from his calèche so that the horses would not have so hard a job of it. From the top, the road runs down, along the edge of the wood, to Höhn, where the fields open out and the hills of the Rhön can be seen in the distance. The Saale meadows spread before you, the Windheim woods nestle in a gentle curve, and there are the tip of the church tower and the old castle — Steinach! Now the road crosses the stream and enters the village, up to the square by the inn, then down to the right to the lower part of the village, which Luisa calls her real home. That is where the Lions live, she writes, where we get oil for the lamps. There lives Meier Frei, the merchant, whose return from the annual Leipzig trade fair is always a big event. There lives Gessner the baker, to whom we took our Sabbath meal on Friday evenings, Liebmann the slaughterer, and Salomon Stern, the flour merchant. The poorhouse, which usually had no occupants, and the fire station with the slatted shutters on the tower, were in the lower part of the village, and so was the old castle with its cobbled forecourt and the Luxburg arms over the gateway. By way of Federgasse, which (Luisa writes) was always full of geese and which she was afraid to walk down as a child, past Simon Feldhahn's haberdashery and Fròhlich the plumber's house with its green tin shingle cladding, you come to a square shaded by a gigantic chestnut tree. In the house on the other side — before which the square divides into two roads like waves at the bow of a ship, and behind which the Windheim woods rise — I was born and grew up (so the memoir in front of me reads), and there I lived until my sixteenth year, when, in January 1905, we moved to Kissingen.

Now I am standing in the living room once again, writes Luisa. I have walked through the gloomy, stone-flagged hall, have placed my hand cautiously on the handle, as I do almost every morning at that time, I have pushed it down and opened the door, and inside, standing barefoot on the white scrubbed floorboards, I look around in amazement at all the nice things in the room. There are two green velvet armchairs with knotted fringes all round, and between the windows that face onto the square is a sofa in the same style. The table is of light-coloured cherrywood. On it are a fan-like frame with five photographs of our relatives in Mainstockheim and Leutershausen and, in a frame of its own, a picture of Papa's sister, who people say was the most beautiful girl for miles around, a real Germania. Also on the table is a china swan with its wings spread, and in it, in a white lace frill, our dear Mama's evergreen bridal bouquet, beside the silver menora which is required on Friday evenings and for which Papa cuts paper cuffs especially every time, to prevent the wax dripping from the candles. On the tallboy by the wall, opened at a page, lies a folio-sized volume ornately bound in red with golden tendrils of vine. This, says Mama, is the works of her favourite poet, Heine, who is also the favourite poet of Empress Elisabeth. Next to it is the little basket where the newspaper, the Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten, is kept, which Mama is immersed in every evening despite the fact that Papa, who goes to bed far earlier, always tells her that it is not healthy to read so late at night. The hoya plant is on the cane table in the bay of the east window. Its leaves are firm and dark, and it has a lot of pink-hearted umbels consisting of white, furry stars. When I come down early in the mornings, the sun is already shining into the room and gleaming on the drops of honey that cling to every little star. I can see through the leaves and flowers into the grassy garden where the hens are out pecking. Franz, our stable boy, a very taciturn albino, will have hitched the horses to the calèche by the time Papa is ready to leave, and over there, across the fence, is a tiny house under an elder, where you can usually see Kathinka Strauss at this time. Kathinka is a spinster of perhaps forty, and people say she is not quite right in the head. When the weather permits, she spends her day walking around the chestnut tree in the Square, clockwise or anti-clockwise according to whim, knitting something that she plainly never finishes. Though there is little else that she can call her own, she always wears the most outrageous bonnets on these walks; one, which featured a seagull's wing, I remember particularly well because Herr Bein the teacher referred to it in school, telling us we should never kill any creature merely in order to adorn ourselves with its feathers.

Though Mother is long reluctant to let us out of the home, Leo and I are sent to the day nursery when we are four or five. We do not need to go till after morning prayers. It is all very straightforward. The Sister is already in the yard. You go up to her and say: Frau Adelinde, may I have a ball, please? Then you take the ball across the yard and down the steps to the playground. The playground is at the bottom of the broad moat that circles the old castle, where there are now colourful flower beds and vegetable patches. Right above the playground, in a long suite of rooms in the almost completely deserted castle, lives Regina Zufrass. As everyone knows, she is a terribly busy woman and is always hard at work, even on Sundays. Either she is looking after her poultry or you see her in amongst the beanpoles or she is mending the fence or rummaging in one of the rooms, which are far too big for her and her husband. We even saw Regina Zufrass up on the roof once, fixing the weather vane, and we watched with bated breath, expecting her to fall off at any moment and land on the balcony with every bone in her body broken. Her husband, Jofferle, jobs as a waggoner in the village. Regina is none too pleased with him, and he for his part, so they say, is frightened to go home to her. Often people have to be sent to look for him. They tend to find him drunk, sprawled out beside the overturned hay-cart. The horses have long been used to all this and stay patiently by the up-ended waggon. At length the hay is loaded back on and Jofferle is fetched home by Regina. The next day, the green shutters at their windows remain shut, and when we children are eating our sandwiches down in the playground we wonder what can be going on in there. And then, every Thursday morning Mama draws a fish on the waxed paper she wraps the sandwiches in, so that we won't forget to buy half a dozen barbels from the fish man on our way home from the kindergarten. In the afternoon, Leo and I walk hand in hand along the Saale, on the bank where there is a dense copse of willows and alders, and rushes grow, past the sawmill and across the little bridge, where we stop to look down at the golden ringlets round the pebbles on the riverbed before we go on to the fish man's cottage, which is surrounded by bushes. First we have to wait in the parlour while the fish man's wife fetches the fish man. A fat-bellied white coffeepot with a cobalt blue knob is always on the table, and sometimes it seems as if it fills the whole room. The fish man appears in the doorway and takes us straight out through the slightly sloping garden, past his radiant dahlias, down to the Saale, where he takes out the barbels one by one from a big wooden crate in the water. When we eat them for supper we are not allowed to speak because of the bones, and have to keep as quiet as fish ourselves. I never felt particularly comfortable about those meals, and the skewed fish-eyes often went on watching me even in my sleep.

In summer, on the Sabbath, we often take a long walk to Bad Bocklet, where we can stroll around the colonnaded hall and watch the fashionably dressed people taking coffee; or, if it is too hot for a walk, we sit in the late afternoon with the Liebermanns and the Feldhahns in the shade of the chestnut trees by the bowling alley in Reuss's beer garden. The men have beer and the children have lemonade; the women can never decide what they want, and only take a sip of everything, while they cut up the Sabbath loaves and salted beef. After supper, some of the men play billiards, which is thought very daring and progressive. Ferdinand Lion even smokes a cigar! Afterwards they all go to the synagogue together. The women pack the things up and as dusk falls they make their way home with the children. Once, on his way home, Leo is wretched because of his new sailor's outfit, made of starched bright blue and white cotton — mainly because of the fat tie and the bibbed collar that hangs over his shoulders, sporting crossed anchors which Mother sat up very late embroidering the night before. Not until we are sitting on the front steps, by which time it is already dark, watching the storm clouds shift in the sky, does he gradually forget his misery. Once

Father is home, the candle made of many interwoven strands of wax is lit to mark the end of the Sabbath. We smell the little spice-box and go upstairs to bed. Soon dazzling white lightning is flashing across the sky, and the crashes of thunder set the whole house shaking. We stand at the window. There are moments when it is brighter than daylight outside. Clumps of hay are afloat on the swirling waters in the gutters. Then the storm passes over, but presently returns once more. Papa says it cannot make it over Windheim woods.

On Sunday afternoon Papa does his accounts. He takes a small key out of a leather pouch, unlocks the gleaming walnut bureau, opens the centre section, puts the key back into the pouch, sits down with a certain ceremony, and, settling himself, takes out the hefty account book. For an hour or so he makes entries and notes in this book and a number of smaller ones, and on pieces of paper cut to various sizes; softly moving his lips, he adds up long columns of figures and makes calculations, and, depending on what the results are like, his face will brighten up or cloud over for a time. A great many special things are kept in the numerous drawers of the bureau — deeds, certificates, correspondence, Mamas jewellery, and a broad ribbon to which large and small pieces of silver are attached by narrow braids of silk, as if they were medals or decorations: the hollegrasch coins that Leo is given by his godfather Selmar in Leutershausen every year, which I covetously marvel at. Mama sits in the living room with Papa, reading the Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten — all the things she did not get round to reading during the week, for preference the spa columns and a miscellany feature. Whenever she comes across something incredible or remarkable she reads it out to Papa, who has to stop his adding up for a while. Perhaps because I couldn't get the story of Paulinchen, the girl who went up in flames, out of my head at that time, I can hear Mama even now telling Papa in her very own theatrical way (in her youth she had dreamt of being an actress) that ladies' dresses could now be fireproofed, for an exceedingly low cost, by immersing the material they were to be made from in a solution of zinc chloride. Even the finest of materials, I still hear Mama informing Papa, can be held to a naked flame after it has been thus treated, and it will char to ash without catching fire. If I am not with my parents in the living room on those eternally long Sundays, I am upstairs in the green room. In summer, when it is hot, the windows are open but the shutters are closed, and the light that enters makes a slanted Jacob's ladder pattern in the twilight around me. It is very quiet in the house, and throughout the neighbourhood. In the afternoon, the carriages out on excursions from the spa at Kissingen pass through the village. You can hear the horses' hooves from a long way off. I open one of the shutters a little and look down the road. The coaches drive via Steinach to Neustadt and Neuhaus and on to Salzburg castle, and in them the summer spa clientèle sit facing each other, grand ladies and gentlemen and, not infrequently, real Russian celebrities. The ladies are very finely turned out in feather bonnets and veils and with parasols of lace or brightly coloured silk. The village boys turn cartwheels right in front of the carriages, and the elegant passengers toss them copper coins by way of reward.

Autumn arrives, and the autumn holidays are approaching. First comes Rosh Hashanah, bringing in the New Year. The day before, all the rooms are swept, and on the eve Mama and Papa go to the synagogue, wearing their festive best: Papa in his frock coat and top hat, Mama in her deep blue velvet dress and the bonnet made entirely of white lilac blossom. Meanwhile, at home, Leo and I spread a starched linen cloth on the table and place the wine glasses on it, and under our parents' plates we put our New Year letters, written in our finest hand. A week and a half later is Yom Kippur. Father, in his death robes, moves about the house like a ghost. A mood of rue and penitence prevails. None of us will eat until the stars rise. Anbeiƒen. And four days later it is already the Feast of Tabernacles. Franz has put up the trellis for the sukkah under the elder, and we have decorated it with colourful garlands of glossy paper and long chains of threaded rosehips. From the ceiling hang ruddy-cheeked apples, yellow pears and golden-green grapes which Aunt Elise sends us every year from Mainstockheim in a little box lined with wood-shavings. On the two main and four half feast days we shall take our meals in the sukkah, unless the weather is exceptionally bad and cold. Then we stay in the kitchen, and only Papa will sit out in the bower, eating all by himself — a sign that winter is gradually coming. It is also at this time of the year that a wild boar the Prince Regent has shot in the Rhön is brought to Steinach, where its bristles are singed off outside the smithy on a wood fire. At home we study the May & Edlich catalogue from Leipzig, a thick compendious volume that reveals the entire wondrous world of merchandise, page after page, classified and described. Out of doors the colours gradually fade away. Our winter clothes are fetched out. They smell of naphthalene. Towards the end of November the Young Progressives' Club holds a masked ball at Reuss's. Frau Miintzer from Neustadt has made Mama a dress of raspberry-coloured silk for the occasion. The gown is long and flounced very elegantly at the hem. The children are allowed to watch the opening of the ball from the doorway to the next room. The hall is abuzz with festive murmuring. To set the mood, the band plays tunes from operettas, softly, till Herr Hainbuch, who works for the forestry commission, climbs onto the dais and, by way of an official start to the occasion, delivers a speech in praise of the fatherland. Glasses are raised, a flourish from the band, the masks gaze seriously into each other's eyes, another flourish, and the landlord, Herr Reuss, carries in a black box with a tulip-shaped metal funnel — the new gramophone, which pours forth real music without one's needing to do a thing. "We are speechless with wonder. The ladies and gentlemen take their positions for a polonaise. Silberberg, the cobbler, quite unrecognizable in his tails, black tie, tie pin and patent leather shoes, walks ahead, conducting with a baton. Behind him come the couples, wheeling and twirling about the hall in every conceivable kind of way. The loveliest of them all, by far, is Aline Feldhahn as the Queen of the Night, in a dark dress bestrewn with stars. She is partnered by Siegfried Frey, wearing his hussar's uniform. Aline and Siegfried later married and had two children, but Siegfried, who was said to have a taste for dissipation, suddenly disappeared, and neither Aline nor old Löb Frey nor anyone else ever found out what became of him. Kathinka Strauss, though, claimed that Siegfried emigrated, to Argentina or Panama.

We have been going to school for a few years now. It is a school where we are all taught together in one form, exclusively for Jewish children. Our teacher, Salomon Bein, whose excellence the parents miss no opportunity to praise, imposes strict discipline, and sees himself first and foremost as a loyal servant of the state. Together with his lady wife and his unmarried sister Regine, he lives in the schoolhouse. In the mornings, when we cross the yard, he is already there in the doorway, spurring latecomers along by shouting hopp! hopp! and clapping his hands. In the classroom, after the blessing — Thou who hast made the day, O Lord — and after we have sharpened our slate pencils and cleaned our quill pens, jobs I dislike and which Herr Bein supervises closely, we are delegated to various tasks in rotation. Some are assigned to practise their handwriting; others have to do sums; yet others have to write an essay, or draw in their local history books. One group has visual instruction. A scroll is fetched out from the back of the cupboard and hung in front of the blackboard. The whole picture is of nothing but snow, with one coal-black raven in the middle. During the first one or two periods, especially in winter when the daylight never really brightens, I am always very slow about my work. I look out through the blue panes and see the deaf and dumb daughter of Stern, the flour merchant, on the other side of the yard, sitting at her work bench in her little room. She makes artificial flowers out of wire, crèpe and tissue paper, dozens of them, day in, day out, year in, year out. In nature study we learn about real flowers: larkspur, Turk's cap lily, loosestrife and lady's smock. We also learn about red ants and whales, from the animal kingdom. And once, when the village street is being newly surfaced, the teacher draws a picture on the blackboard, in coloured chalks, of the Vogelsberg as an erupting volcano, and explains where the blocks of basalt come from. He also has a collection of colourful stones in his minerals cabinet — rose quartz, rock crystal, amethyst, topaz and tourmaline. We draw a long line to mark how much time it has taken for them to form. Our entire lives would not even show as the tiniest dot on that line. Even so, the hours at school stretch as vast as the Pacific Ocean, and it takes an eternity till Moses Lion, who is sent to fetch wood almost every day by way of punishment, comes back up from the wood store with a basketful. Then, before we know it, Hanukkah is upon us, and it is Herr Bein's birthday. The day before, we decorate the walls of the classroom with branches of fir and little blue and yellow flags. We place the present on the teacher's desk. I remember that on one occasion it was a red velvet blanket, and once a copper hot-water bottle. On the morning of the birthday we all gather early in the classroom, in our best clothes. Then the teacher arrives, followed by his wife and the slightly dwarfish Fràulein Regine. We all stand up and say: Good morning, Herr Bein! Good morning, Frau Bein! Good morning, Fraulein Regine! Our teacher, who has of course long since known what was being prepared, affects to be completely surprised by his present and the decorations. He raises a hand to his forehead, several times, shaking his head, as if he does not know what to say, and, deeply touched, walks up and down the class, thanking each one of us effusively. There are no lessons today; instead, stories and German legends of old are read aloud. We also have a guessing game. For instance, we have to guess the three things that give and take in infinite plenty. Of course no one knows the answer, which Herr Bein then tells us in tones of great significance: the earth, the sea, and the Reich. Perhaps the best thing about that day is that, before we go home, we are allowed to jump over the Hanukkah candles, which have been fixed to the threshold with drops of wax. It is a long winter. At home, Papa does exercises with us in the evening. The geese are gone from their hutch. Soon after, parts of them are preserved in boiling hot fat. Some village women come to slice the quills from the feathers. They sit in the spare room, each with a heap of down in front of her, slicing almost the whole night long. It looks as if snow has fallen. But the next morning, when we get up, the room is so clean, so devoid of feathers, that you'd think nothing had ever happened. Early in the year, spring cleaning has to be done in preparation for Passover. It is worse at school. Frau Bein and Fràulein Regine are at it for at least a week. The mattresses are taken out to the yard, the bedding is hung over the balcony, the floors are newly waxed, and all the cooking utensils are immersed in boiling water. We children have to sweep the classroom and wash the shutters with soapsuds. At home, too, all the rooms and chests are cleared out. The bustle is dreadful. The evening before Passover, Mama sits down for a while for the first time in days. Meanwhile, Father's job is to go around the house with a goose feather checking to see that not a single crumb of bread is still to be found.

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

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

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

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

f

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

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

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

back to those days, I see shades of blue everywhere — a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon, crisscrossed by the tracks of ice-skaters long vanished.

The memoirs of Luisa Lanzberg have been very much on my mind since Ferber handed them over to me, so much so that in late June 19911 felt I should make the journey to Kissingen and Steinach. I travelled via Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt, and had to change a number of times, and sit out lengthy waits in the Aschaffenburg and Gemünden station buffets, before I reached my destination. With every change the trains were slower and shorter, till at last, on the stretch from Gemünden to Kissingen, I found myself in a train (if that is the right word) that consisted only of an engine and a single carriage — something I had not thought possible. Directly across from me, even though there were plenty of seats free, a fat, square-headed man of perhaps fifty had plumped himself down. His face was flushed and blotched with red, and his eyes were very close-set and slightly squint. Puffing noisily, he dug his unshapely tongue, still caked with bits of food, around his half-open mouth. There he sat, legs apart, his stomach and gut stuffed horribly into summer shorts. I could not say whether the physical and mental deformity of my fellow-passenger was the result of long psychiatric confinement, some innate debility, or simply beer-drinking and eating between meals. To my considerable relief the monster got out at the first stop after Gemtinden, leaving me quite alone in the carriage but for an old woman on the other side of the aisle who was eating an apple so big that the full hour it took till we reached Kissingen was barely enough for her to finish it. The train followed the bends of the river, through the grassy valley. Hills and woods passed slowly, the shadows of evening settled upon the countryside, and the old woman went on dividing up the apple, slice by slice, with the penknife she held open in her hand, nibbling the pieces, and spitting out the peel onto a paper napkin in her lap. At Kissingen there was only one single taxi in the deserted street outside the station. In answer to my question, the driver told me that at that hour the spa clientèle were already tucked up in bed. The hotel he drove me to had just been completely renovated in the neo-imperial style which is now inexorably taking hold throughout Germany and which discreetly covers up with light shades of green and gold leaf the lapses of taste committed in the postwar years. The lobby was as deserted as the station forecourt. The woman at reception, who had something of the mother superior about her, sized me up as if she were expecting me to disturb the peace, and when I got into the lift I found myself facing a weird old couple who stared at me with undisguised hostility, if not horror. The woman was holding a small plate in her claw-like hands, with a few slices of wurst on it. I naturally assumed that they had a dog in their room, but the next morning, when I saw them take up two tubs of raspberry yoghurt and something from the breakfast bar that they had wrapped in a napkin, I realized that their supplies were intended not for some putative dog but for themselves.

I began my first day in Kissingen with a stroll in the grounds of the spa. The ducks were still asleep on the lawn, the white down of the poplars was drifting in the air, and a few early bathers were wandering along the sandy paths like lost souls. Without exception, these people out taking their painfully slow morning constitutionals were of pensioner age, and I began to fear that I would be condemned to spend the rest of my life amongst the patrons of Kissingen, who were in all likelihood preoccupied first and foremost with the state of their bowels. Later I sat in a cafe, again surrounded by elderly people, reading the Kissingen newspaper, the Saale-Zeitung. The quote of the day, in the so-called Calendar column, was from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and read: Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds. It was the 25th of June. According to the paper, there was a crescent moon and the anniversary of the birth of Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian poet, and of the English writer George Orwell. Other dead birthday boys whom the newspaper remembered were the aircraft builder Willy Messerschmidt (1898–1978), the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberath (1894–1990), and the East German author Hans Marchwitza (1890–1965). The death announcements, headed Totentafel, included that of retired master butcher Michael Schultheis of Steinach (80). He was extremely popular. He was a staunch member of the Blue Cloud Smokers' Club and the Reservists' Association. He spent most of his leisure time with his loyal alsatian, Prinz. -

Pondering the peculiar sense of history apparent in such notices, I went to the town hall. There, after being referred elsewhere several times and getting an insight into the perpetual peace that pervades the corridors of small-town council chambers, I finally ended up with a panic-stricken bureaucrat in a particularly remote office, who listened with incredulity to what I had to say and then explained where the synagogue had been and where I would find the Jewish cemetery. The earlier temple had been replaced by what was known as the new synagogue, a ponderous turn-of-the-century building in a curiously orientalized, neo-romanesque style, which was vandalized during the Kristallnacht and then completely demolished over the following weeks. In its place in Maxstrasse, directly opposite the back entrance of the town hall, is now the labour exchange. As for the Jewish cemetery, the official, after some rummaging in a key deposit on the wall, handed me two keys with orderly labels, and offered me

the following somewhat idiosyncratic directions: you will find the Israelite cemetery if you proceed southwards in a straight line from the town hall for a thousand paces till you get to the end of Bergmannstrasse. When I reached the gate it turned out that neither of the keys fitted the lock, so I climbed the

wall- What I saw had little to do with cemeteries as one thinks of them; instead, before me lay a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movement of the air. Here

and there a stone placed on the top of a grave witnessed that someone must have visited one of the dead — who could say how long ago. It was not possible to decipher all of the chiselled inscriptions, but the names I could still read — Hamburger, Kissinger, Wertheimer, Friedlànder, Arnsberg, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthhold, Seeligmann, Frank, Hertz, Goldstaub, Baumblatt and Blumenthal — made me think that perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language. A shock of recognition shot through me at the grave of Maier Sterm,

who died on the 18th of May, my own birthday; and I was touched, in a way I knew I could never quite fathom, by the symbol of the writer's quill on the stone of Friederike Halbleib, who departed this life on the 28th of March 1912-I imagined her pen in hand, all by herself, bent with bated breath over her work; and now, as I write these lines, it feels as if / had lost her, and as if / could not get over the los.¹ despite the many years that have passed since her departure. I stayed in the Jewish cemetery till the afternoon, walking up and down the rows of graves, reading the names of the dead, but it was only when I was about to leave that I discovered a more recent gravestone, not far from the locked gate, on which were the names of Lily and Lazarus Lanzberg, and of Fritz and Luisa Ferber. I assume Ferber's Uncle Leo had had it erected there. The inscription says that Lazarus Lanzberg died in Theresienstadt in 1942, and that Fritz and Luisa were deported, their fate unknown, in November 1941. Only Lily, who took her own life, lies in that grave. I stood before it for some time, not knowing what I should think; but before I left I placed a stone on the grave, according to custom.

Although I was amply occupied, during my several days in Kissingen and in Steinach (which retained not the slightest trace of its former character), with my research and with __the writing itself, which,

as always, was going laboriously, I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves. I therefore decided to leave sooner than I had planned, a decision which was the easier to take since

my enquiries, though they had produced much on the general history of Kissingen's Jewry, had brought very little to light concerning the Lanzberg family. But I must still say something about the trip I took up to the salt-frames in a motor launch that was moored at the edge of the spa grounds. It was about one o'clock on the day before I left, at an hour when the spa visitors were eating their diet-controlled lunches, or indulging in unsupervised gluttony in gloomy restaurants, that I went down to the riverbank and boarded the launch. The woman who piloted the launch had been waiting in vain, till that moment, for even a single passenger. This lady, who generously allowed me to take her picture, was from Turkey, and had already been working for the Kissingen river authority for a number of years. In addition to the captain's cap that sat jauntily on her head, she was wearing a blue and white jersey dress which was reminiscent (at least from a distance) of a sailor's uniform, by way of a further concession to her office. It soon turned out that the mistress of the launch was not only expert at manoeuvring her craft on the narrow river but also had views on the way of the world that were worth considering. As we headed up the Saale she gave me a few highly impressive samples of her critical philosophy, in her somewhat Turkish but nonetheless very flexible German, all of which culminated in her oft-repeated point that there was no end to stupidity, and nothing as dangerous. And people in Germany, she said, were just as stupid as the Turks, perhaps even stupider. She was visibly pleased to find a sympathetic ear for her views, which she shouted above the pounding of the diesel engine and underlined with an imaginative repertoire of gestures and facial expressions; she rarely had the opportunity to talk to a passenger, she said, let alone one with a bit of sense. The boat ride lasted some twenty minutes. When it was over, we parted with a shake of hands and, I believe, a certain mutual respect. The salt-frames, which I had only seen in an old photograph before, were a short distance upriver, a little way off in the fields. Even at first glance, the timber building was an overwhelming construction, about two hundred metres long and surely twenty metres high, and yet, as I learnt from information displayed in a glass-fronted case, it was merely part of a complex that had once been far more extensive. There was currently no access — notices by the steps explained that the previous year's hurricane had made structural examinations necessary — but, since there was no one around who might have denied me permission, I climbed up to the gallery that ran along the entire complex at a height of about five metres.

From there one could take a close look at the blackthorn twigs that were bunched in layers as high as the roof. Mineral water raised by a cast-iron pumping station was running down them, and collecting in a trough under the frame.

Completely taken aback both by the scale of the complex and by the steady mineral transformation wrought upon the twigs by the ceaseless flow of the water, I walked up and down the gallery for a long time, inhaling the salty air, which the

slightest breath of air loaded with myriad tiny droplets. At length I sat down on a bench in one of the balcony-like landings off the gallery, and all that afternoon immersed myself in the sight and sound of that theatre of water, and in ruminations about the long-term and (I believe) impenetrable process which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water, produces the very strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth patterns of Nature even as it is being dissolved.

During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had (in other words, mostly at the so-called weekend and at night), I was working on the account of Max Ferber given above. It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a "final" version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched. So I hesitated _t0 send Ferber my cut-down rendering of his life; and, as I hesitated, I heard from Manchester that Ferber had been taken to Withington Hospital with pulmonary emphysema. Withington Hospital was a one-time Victorian workhouse, where the homeless and unemployed had been subjected to a strict regime. Ferber was in a men's ward with well over twenty beds, where much muttering and groaning went on, and doubtless a good deal of dying. He clearly found it next to impossible to use his voice, and so responded to what I said only at lengthy intervals, in an attempt at speech that sounded like the rustle of dry leaves in the wind. Still, it was plain enough that he felt his condition was something to be ashamed of and had resolved to put it behind him as soon as possible, one way or another. He was ashen, and the weariness kept getting the better of him. I stayed with him for perhaps three quarters of an hour before taking my leave and walking the long way back through the south of the city, along the endless streets — Burton Road, Yew Tree Road, Claremont Road, Upper Lloyd Street, Lloyd Street North — and through the deserted Hulme estates, which had been rebuilt in the early Seventies and had now been left to fall down again. In Higher Cambridge Street I passed warehouses where the ventilators were still revolving in the broken windows.

I had to cross beneath urban motorways, over canal bridges and wasteland, till at last, in the already fading daylight, the facade of the Midland Hotel appeared before me, looking like some fantastic fortress. In recent years, ever since his income had permitted, Ferber had rented a suite there, and I too had taken a room for this one night. The Midland was built in the late nineteenth century, of chestnut-coloured bricks and chocolate-coloured glazed ceramic tiles which neither soot nor acid rain have been able to touch. The building runs to three basement levels, six floors above ground, and a total of no fewer than six hundred rooms, and was once famous throughout the land for its luxurious plumbing. Taking a shower there was like standing out in a monsoon. The brass and copper pipes, which were always highly polished, were so capacious that one of the bathtubs (three metres long and one metre wide) could be filled in just twelve seconds. Moreover, the Midland was renowned for its palm courtyard and, as various sources tell, for its hothouse atmosphere, which brought out both the guests and the staff in a sweat and generally conveyed the impression that here, in the heart of this northern city with its perpetual cold wet gusts, one was in fact on some tropical isle of the blessed, reserved for mill owners, where even the clouds in the sky were made of cotton, as it were. Today the Midland is on the brink of ruin. In the glass-roofed lobby, the reception rooms, the stairwells, the lifts and the corridors one rarely encounters either a hotel guest or one of the chambermaids or waiters who prowl about like sleepwalkers. The legendary steam heating, if it works at all, is erratic; fur flakes from out of the taps; the window panes are coated in thick grime marbled by rain; whole tracts of the building are closed off; and it is presumably only a matter of time before the Midland closes its doors and is sold off and transformed into a Holiday Inn.

When I entered my room on the fifth floor I suddenly felt as if I were in a hotel somewhere in Poland. The old-

fashioned interior put me curiously in mind of a faded wine-red velvet lining, the inside of a jewellery box or violin case. I kept my coat on and sat down on one of the plush armchairs in the corner bay window, watching darkness fall outside. The rain that had set in at dusk was pouring down into the gorges of the streets, lashed by the wind, and down below the black taxis and double-decker buses were moving across the shining tarmac, close behind or beside each other, like a herd of elephants. A constant roar rose from below to my place by the window, but there were also moments of complete silence from time to time. In one such interval (though it was utterly impossible) I thought I heard the orchestra tuning their instruments, amidst the usual scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, in the Free Trade Hall next door; and far off, far, far off in the distance, I also heard the little opera singer who used to perform at Liston's Music Hall in the Sixties, singing long extracts from Parsifal in German. Liston's Music Hall was in the city centre, not far from Piccadilly Gardens, above a so-called Wine Lodge where the prostitutes would take a rest and where they had Australian sherry on tap, in big barrels. Anyone who felt the urge could get up on the stage at that music hall and, with the swathes of smoke drifting, perform the piece of his choice to a very mixed and often heavily intoxicated audience, accompanied on the Wurlitzer by a lady who invariably wore pink tulle. As a rule the choice fell upon folk ballads and the sentimental hits that were currently in vogue. The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train, began the favourite of the winter season of 1966 to 1967. And there to greet me are my Mama and Papa. Twice a week, at a late hour when the heaving mass of people and voices verged on the infernal, the heroic tenor known as Siegfried, who cannot have been more than one metre fifty tall, would take the stage. He was in his late forties, wore a herringbone coat that reached almost to the floor and on his head a Homburg tilted back. He would sing O weh, des Höchsten Schmerzenstag or Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön or some other impressive arioso, not hesitating to act out stage directions such as "Parsifal is on the point of fainting" with the required theatricality. And now, sitting in the Midland's turret room above the abyss on the fifth floor, I heard him again for the first time since those days. The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown, of the Litzmannstadt ghetto that was established in 1940 in the Polish industrial centre of Lodz, once known as polski

Manczester. The photographs, which had been discovered in 1987 in a small suitcase, carefully sorted and inscribed, in an antique dealer's shop in Vienna, had been taken as personal souvenirs by a book-keeper and financial expert named Genewein, who came from near Salzburg and who was himself in one of the pictures, counting money at his bureau. The pictures also showed the lord mayor of Litzmannstadt, one Hans Biebow, on his birthday, well scrubbed and with a neat parting, at a table adorned with asparagus ferns and groaning beneath potted plants, bouquets, cakes and cold cuts. There were German men too with their girlfriends and wives, all — without exception — in high spirits. And there were pictures of the ghetto — street cobbles, tram tracks, housefronts, hoardings, demolition sites, fire protection walls, beneath a sky that was grey, watery green, or white and blue — strangely deserted pictures, scarcely one of which showed a living soul, despite the fact that at times there were as many as a hundred and seventy thousand people in Litzmannstadt, in an area of no more than five square kilometres. The photographer had also recorded the exemplary organization within the ghetto: the postal system, the police, the courtroom, the fire brigade, soil disposal, the hairdresser's, the medical services, the laying out of the dead, and the burial ground. More important to him than anything else, apparently, was to show "our industry", the ghetto works that were essential to the wartime economy. In these production sites, most of which were designed for basic manufacture, women were sitting making baskets, child apprentices were busy in the metalwork shop, men were making bullets or working in the nail factory or the rag depot, and everywhere there were faces, countless faces, who looked up from their work (and were permitted to do so) purposely and solely for the fraction of a second that it took to take the photograph. Work is our only course, they said. - Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometrical patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home. Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women's names were — Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.

Photograph of the author by Jan Peter Tripp

W. G. SEBALD was born in 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany. He studied German language and literature in Switzerland and Britain. Beginning in 1970 he taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of The British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, The Natural History of Destruction, and After Nature won many international awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Berlin Literature Prize. He died in December 2001.

MICHAEL HULSE has translated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Jakob Wassermann's Caspar Hauser as well as contemporary German writing by Luise Rinser, Botho Straus, and Elfriede Jelinek. An award-winning poet, he is the author of Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis.