Vertigo

IV Il ritorno in patria

In November 1987, after spending the last weeks of the summer in Verona, working on my various tasks, and the month of October, because I could not bear to wait any longer for the onset of winter, in a hotel high above Bruneck, near the tree line, I decided one afternoon, when the Großvenediger emerged from behind a grey snow cloud in an especially ominous way, that I should return to England, but before that go to W. for a while, where I had not been since my childhood. As there was only one bus a day from Innsbruck to Schattwald, and that, as far as I could discover, at seven in the morning, I had no alternative but to take the night express across the Brenner, a train with unpleasant associations for me, which arrives in Innsbruck at about half past four. At Innsbruck, as always when I arrive there, no matter what the time of year, the weather was quite atrocious. It cannot have been more than five or six degrees above zero, and the clouds were hanging so low that the tops of the houses disappeared in them and the dawn could not break through. Moreover, it rained incessantly. So there was no question of walking into town or taking a stroll along the river Inn. I looked out across the deserted station forecourt. Now and then some vehicle would crawl slowly along the gleaming black roads, the last of an amphibian species close to extinction, retreating now to the deeper waters. The ticket hall was also deserted, apart from a small chap with a goitre wearing a green loden cape. Holding his folded, dripping umbrella against his shoulder with its tip upwards like a rifle, he was walking back and forth with measured tread and making such precise about-turns that he might have been guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The down-and-outs then appeared, one after the other, though from where was uncertain, till there were a dozen of them, a lively group gathered around a crate of Gòsser beer which had made a sudden miraculous appearance in their midst, seemingly out of thin air. United by the inveterate alcoholism of the Tyrol which is known for its extremism far beyond the region, these Innsbruck dossers, some of whom appeared to have only recently dropped our of ordered life, while others were already in a completely ruinous state, and every single one of whom had something of the philosopher or even of the preacher about him, were holding forth on current events as well as the most fundamental questions. It was remarkable in their disputations that those who chimed in at the top of their voices were invariably the ones who left off in mid-sentence, suddenly silenced as if by a stroke. Whatever happened to be the topic, every point was underscored by highly theatrical, apodictic gestures, and even when one of their number, no longer able to put into words the thought which had just come into his head, turned away with a wave of contempt, it seemed to me as if their manner derived from a distinctive dramatic repertoire completely unknown on the stage. Possibly this was because all of them were holding their beer bottles in their right hands, and were thus in a sense acting out one-armed, left-handed roles. And perhaps, I concluded from this observation, it might be a good ploy to tie the right hands of all drama students behind their backs for a year at the start of their training. With reflections such as these I passed the time until increasing numbers of commuters began traversing the hall, and the dossers made themselves scarce. At six o'clock on the dot, the so-called Tiroler Stuben opened, and I took a seat in a restaurant which for sheer dreariness far surpassed every other station bar I had ever been in, ordered a coffee and leafed through the Tiroler Nachrichten. Neither of these, the Tyrolean morning coffee nor the Tiroler Nachrichten, did anything to improve my state of mind. It therefore did not surprise me in the slightest when things took an even worse turn, and the waitress, to whom I had made a joking remark about the corrosive properties of the Tyrolean chicory coffee, gave me the benefit of her sharp tongue in the most ill-tempered manner imaginable.

Frozen through and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep as I was, the insolence of this Innsbruck waitress like a noxious poison went right under my skin. The words in the newspaper jittered and swam before my eyes, and more than once I felt as though my insides had seized up. Not until the bus was leaving town did I gradually begin to feel somewhat better. It was still pouring with rain, so heavily that the houses close to the road could hardly be made out, and the mountains not at all. Now and then the bus stopped so that one of the old women standing at intervals along the roadside beneath their black umbrellas could get on. Soon quite a number of these Tyrolean women were aboard. In the dialect I was familiar with from childhood, croakily articulated at the back of the throat like some bird language, they talked mainly or indeed exclusively about the never-ending rain, which in many places had already caused whole mountainsides to slide into the valleys. They spoke of the hay rotting in the fields and the potatoes rotting in the ground; of the redcurrants which had come to nothing for a third year in a row; of the elder, which this year had not flowered until the beginning of August and had then been completely ruined by the rain; and of the fact that not a single eatable apple had been picked far and wide. As they went on discussing the effects of the ever-worsening weather, complaining that there was neither sunlight nor warmth, the scene outside brightened up, a little at first and then more and more. One could now see the river Inn, its waters meandering through broad stony reaches, and soon beautiful green meadows came into view. The sun came out, the entire landscape was radiant, and the Tyrolean women fell silent one after the other and simply looked out at the miracle passing by. I felt much the same myself. The countryside seemed freshly varnished — we were now driving out of the Inn valley in the direction of the Fern Pass — and the steaming forests and blue skies above, though I had come up from the south and had had to endure the Tyrolean darkness for only a couple of hours, were like a revelation even to me. Once I noticed a dozen hens right out in the middle of a green field. For some reason that I still cannot fathom, the sight of this small flock that had ventured so far out into the open affected me deeply. I do not know what it is about certain things or creatures that sometimes moves me like this. The road climbed steadily upwards. The flame-red stands of larch trees were blazing on the sides of the mountains, and I saw that snow had fallen a long way down. We crossed the Fern Pass. I marvelled at the screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair, and I was astonished again at the mysterious slow motion quality of the water-falls which, for as long as I could remember, had been cascading, unchanged, over the rock faces. At a hatpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Fernstein and Samaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.

Around noon — the Tyrolean women had long since got out at Reutte, WeiEenbach, Haller, Tannheim and Schattwald — the bus, with me as its last passenger, reached the Oberjoch customs post. Meanwhile, the weather had changed once again. A dark layer of cloud, verging on the black, lay across the entire Tannheim valley, which made a lightless and godforsaken impression. There was not the slightest sign of movement anywhere. Not even a single car could be seen on the stretch of road disappearing far into the remoter depths of the valley. On one side the mountains rose up into the mists; on the other lay wet boggy grassland, and behind it, from out of the Vilsgrund, arose the wedge of the Pfronten forests, consisting solely of blackish-blue spruce. The customs officer on duty, who told me he lived in Maria Rain, promised to drop off my bag at the Engelwirt inn when he finished work, on his way home through W., which left me free, once I had exchanged a few generalities with him about the dreadfulness of this time of year, to set off carrying nothing but my small leather rucksack over my shoulder, through the boggy meadows bordering the no man's land and down through the Alpsteig gorge to Krummenbach, and from there to Unterjoch, past the Pfeiffermühle and through the Enge Piatt to W. The gorge was sunk in a darkness that I would not have thought possible in the middle of the day. Only, to my left, above the brook invisible from the path, there hung a little meagre light. Spruce trees, a good seventy to eighty years old, stood on the slopes. Even on those growing up from the depths of the ravine, the evergreen tops did not appear until far above the level of the path. Time and again, whenever there was a movement in the air above, the drops of water caught in the countless pine needles came raining down. In places where the spruce stood further apart, grew isolated beech trees that had long since shed their leaves, their branches and trunks blackened by the persistent wet. It was quite still in the gorge save for the sound of the water at the bottom, no birdsong, nothing. Increasingly a sense of trepidation oppressed me, and it seemed as if the further down I walked, the colder and gloomier it became. At one of the few more open places, where a vantage-point afforded a view both down onto a waterfall and a deep rockpool and upwards into the sky, without my being able to say which was the more eerie, I saw through the apparently-infinite loftiness of the trees, flurries of snow high up in the leaden greyness, but none of it had yet found its way down into the gorge. After a further half-hour's walk, when the gorge opened out and the meadows of Krummenbach lay before me, I stopped for a long time beneath the last trees, watching from out of the darkness as the whitish-grey snow fell, its silence completely extinguishing what little pallid colour there was in those wet deserted fields. Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled cell I sat for a while. Outside, snowflakes were drifting past the small window, and presently it seemed to me as if I were in a boat on a voyage, crossing vast waters. The moist smell of lime became sea air; I could feel the spray on my forehead and the boards swaying beneath my feet, and I imagined myself sailing in this ship out of the flooded mountains. But what I remember most about the Krummenbach chapel, apart from this transformation of the stone walls into the hull of a wooden boat, is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand around the mid-eighteenth century, and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes, little could be made out with any degree of certainty — faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated limbs, an arm raised to strike. The garments, painted in dark colours, had merged beyond recognition with the background, which was equally unrecognisable. Insofar as anything was still visible at all, it was like looking at some ghostly battle of faces and hands suspended in the gloom of decay. I could not then and cannot now recall whether I was ever in the Krummenbach chapel as a child with my grandfather, who took me with him everywhere. But there were many chapels like that of Krummenbach around W., and much of what I saw and felt in them at the time will have stayed with me — a fear of the acts of cruelty depicted there no less than the wish, in all its impossibility, that the perfect tranquility prevailing within them might sometime be recaptured. When the snow had eased off, I started on my way again, through the Brànte and along the Krummenbach as far as Unterjoch, where I ate bread soup and drank half a litre of Tyrolean wine at the Hirschwirt inn, to warm myself and prepare for the next stretch, which would be twice the distance. Perhaps prompted by the pitiful pictures in the Krummenbach chapel, my mind turned to Tiepolo once again, and the belief I had held for a long time that, when he travelled with his sons Lorenzo and Domenico from Venice across the Brenner in the autumn of 1750, he decided at Ziri that, contrary to the advice he had been given to leave the Tyrol via Seefeld, he instead made his way westward via Telfs, following the salt wagons across the Gaicht Pass, through the Tannheim valley, over the Oberjoch and through the Iller valley into the lowlands. And I beheld Tiepolo, who must have been approaching sixty by that time and already suffered badly from gout, lying in the cold of the winter months at the top of the scaffolding half a metre below the ceiling of the grand stairway in the palace at Würzburg, his face splattered with lime and distemper, applying the colours with a steady hand, despite the pain in his right arm, onto the wet plaster of the immense, miraculous painting he was creating little by little. With imaginings such as these, and thinking about the Krummenbach painter who had, perhaps in the very same winter, toiled just as hard to represent the fourteen small Stations of the Cross as Tiepolo with his magnificent fresco, I walked on, the time being now about three o'clock, through the fields below the Sorgschrofen and the Sorgalpe, till I struck the road shortly before reaching the Pfeiffermühle. From there it was another hour to W. The last of the daylight was fading by the time I got to the Enge Piatt. To my left was the river, to the right the dripping rock faces through which the road had been blasted at the turn of the century. Above, in front and presently behind me there was nothing but the unstirring black pine forests. The last stretch of the journey was as never-ending as I remembered it from the old days. In the Enge Piatt in April 1945, a so-called last skirmish took place, in which, as it says on the iron memorial cross which still stands in the cemetery in W., 24-year-old Alois Thimet of Rosenheim, 41-year-old Erich Daimler of Stuttgart, 17-year-old Rudolf Leitenstorfer (place of birth unknown), and Werner Hempel (year of birth unknown) of Bòrneke, died for their Fatherland. In the course of my childhood in W. I heard people speak of that last skirmish on various occasions,

and imagined the combatants with soot-blackened faces, crouching behind tree trunks with their rifles at the ready or leaping from rock to rock across the deepest chasms, suspended motionless in mid-air, for at least as long as I could hold my breath or keep my eyes shut.

It was dusk by the time I had passed through the Piatt. White mists were rising from the meadows, and below, by the river, now a good distance away, stood the black sawmill, which, together with its timberyard, burned to the ground in the 1950s, a few days after I started school, in a huge fire that lit up the whole of the valley. Darkness now descended on the road. In former times, when it was made up with crushed limestone, it had been easier to walk on, I remembered, and almost the colour of white. Like a luminous ribbon, it had stretched out before one even on a starless night, I recalled, realising at the same time that I could scarcely lift my feet for weariness. Also, it seemed strange that not a single vehicle had overtaken me, or had come from the other direction, on the whole stretch from the Unterjoch. I stood for a long time on the stone bridge a short distance before the first houses of W., listening to the steady murmur of the river and looking into the blackness which now enveloped everything. On a piece of waste land beside the bridge, where willows, deadly nightshade, burdock, mulleins, verbena and mugwort used to grow, there had always been a gypsy camp in the summer months after the war. Whenever we went to the swimming pool, which the council had built in 1936 to promote public health, we would pass the gypsies, and every time as we did so my mother picked me up and carried me in her arms. Across her shoulder I saw the gypsies look up briefly from what they were about, and then lower their eyes again as if in revulsion.

I do not believe that any of the locals ever spoke to them, nor as far as I know did the gypsies come into the village to hawk goods or tell fortunes. Where they came from, how they had managed to survive the war, and why of all places they had chosen that cheerless spot by the Ach bridge for their summer camp, are questions that occur to me only now — for example, when I leaf through the photo album which my father bought as a present for my mother for the first so-called Kriegsweihnacht. In it are pictures of the Polish campaign, all neatly captioned in white ink. Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out, smiling, from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of the

Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war.

A good thirty years had gone by since I had last been in W. In the course of that time — by far the longest period of my life — many of the localities I associated with it, such as the Altachmoos, the parish woods, the tree-lined lane that led to Haslach, the pumping station, Petersthal cemetery where the plague dead lay, or the house in the Schray where Dopfer the hunchback lived, had continually returned in my dreams and daydreams and had become more real to me than they had been then, yet the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me than any other place I could conceive of. In a certain sense it was reassuring, on my first walk around the streets in the pale glow of the lamps, to find that everything was completely changed. The house of the head forester, a small shingled villa with a pair of antlers and the inscription "1913" above the front door, together with its small orchard, had made way for a holiday home; the fire station and its handsome slatted tower, where the fire brigade's hoses hung in silent anticipation of the next conflagration, were no longer there; the farmhouses had without exception been rebuilt, with added storeys; the vicarage, the curate's lodge, the school, the town hall where Fürgut the one-armed clerk went in and out of with a regularity that my grandfather could set his watch by, the cheese dairy, the poorhouse, Michael Meyer's grocery and haberdashery — all had been thoroughly modernised or had disappeared altogether. Not even when I entered the Engelwirt inn did I have any sense of knowing my way around, for here too, where we had lived in rented accommodation on the first floor for several years, the whole house had been rebuilt and converted from the foundations up to the very rafters, not to mention the changes to the furnishings and fittings. What now presented itself, in the pseudo-Alpine style which has become the new vernacular throughout the Federal Republic, as a house offering refined hospitality to its patrons, in those distant days was a hostelry of disrepute where the village peasants sat around until deep into the night and, particularly in winter, often drank themselves senseless. The Engelwirt inn owed its local standing, which remained unassailable despite everything, to the fact that, in addition to the smoke-filled bar beneath the ceiling of which ran the longest and most crooked stove-pipe I have ever seen, it had a large function room in which long tables could be set up for weddings and funerals, with enough seating for half the village. Every fortnight the newsreel would be shown there and feature films such as Piratenliebe, Niccolò Paganini, Tomahawk and Monche, Màdchen und Panduren. The cavalry irregulars referred to in this this last title could be seen charging through dappled birch woods; Indians rode across limitless plains; the crippled violinist reeled off a cadenza at the base of a prison wall while his companion filed through the iron bars of his cell window; General Eisenhower, on his return from Korea, got out of an aeroplane, the propeller of which was still revolving slowly; a hunter whose chest had been torn open by a bear's paw staggered down into the valley; politicians were seen in front of the new parliament, climbing out of the back of a Volkswagen; and almost every week we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin or Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered them a natural condition of all larger cities. Of all the events ever put on in the Engelwirt function room, it was an amateur production of Schiller's The Robbers, staged there several times during the winter of 1948 or 1949 which made the greatest impression on me. Half a dozen times, at least, I must have sat in the darkened Engelwirt hall among an audience some of whom had come over from neighbouring villages. Scarcely ever has anything that I have seen in the theatre since affected me as much as the The Robbers — Old Moor in the ice-cold exile

of his bleak house, the gruesome Franz with his deformed shoulder, the return of the prodigal son from the forests of Bohemia, or that curious slight movement of the body, never failing to excite me, with which the deathly pale Amalia said: Hark, hark! Did I not hear the gate? And there, before her, is Moor the robber, and she speaks of how her love made the burning sand green and the thorn bushes blossom, without ever knowing that the man from whom she still supposed herself to be separated by mountains, oceans and horizons had come home and was standing beside her. Always then I would wish to intervene in the proceedings and in a single word tell Amalia that she had only to reach out her hand in order to move from her dusty prison to that paradise of love she so desired. But since I could not bring myself to call out in this way, the turn that the events might otherwise have taken was never revealed to me. Towards the end of the play's run, in early February, it was given an open-air performance, in the paddock next to the postmaster's house, mainly, I suppose, so that a series of photographs could be taken. The winter's tale that resulted was notable not only on account of the snow which covered the ground in this open-air production even in the scenes set indoors, but mainly because Moor the robber now entered the action on horseback, which had of course not been possible in the function room. I believe it was on this occasion that I first noticed that horses often have a

somewhat crazed look in their eyes. At all events, that performance on the postmaster's paddock was the last of The Robbers, and indeed the last theatre performance of any kind in W. Only during carnival time did the actors don their costumes once more, to join the carnival procession and take their places in a group photograph together with the fire brigade and the clowns.

Behind the reception desk in the Engelwirt, after I had rung the bell several times to no avail, a tight-lipped woman eventually materialised. I had not heard a door open anywhere, not seen her come in, and yet there she suddenly was. She scrutinised me with open disapproval, perhaps on account of my outward appearance, which was none the better for my long walk, or because I betrayed an absent-mindedness that must have been unaccountable to her. I asked for a room on the first floor facing on to the street, initially for an indefinite period. Although it must have been possible to comply readily with my request, since November, in the hotel trade too, is the month of the dead, during which time the reduced service staff in the now vacant houses mourn the departed guests as if they had taken leave for ever — although a room on the first floor facing on to the street must without doubt have been available, the receptionist endlessly leafed back and forth in her register before handing the keys to me. She held her cardigan together with her left hand, as if she were cold, awkwardly and clumsily performing her tasks using only her other hand, so that it seemed to me as if she were marking time in order to make up her mind about this odd November guest. She studied the completed registration form, on which I had given "foreign correspondent" as my occupation and written my complicated English address, with raised eyebrows, for when and for what purpose had an English foreign correspondent ever come to W., on foot, in November, and unshaven to boot, and taken a room in the Engelwirt inn for an indefinite period! This woman, who was doubtless most efficient at all other times, seemed positively disturbed when, in reply to her enquiry after my luggage, I told her that it would be brought along that evening by an officer from the Oberjoch customs post.

Insofar as I could tell with any certainty, given the structural changes that had been made in the Engelwirt, the room allocated to me was approximately where our living room had once been, the room which was furnished with all the pieces my parents had bought in 1936 when, after two or three years of continuous upturn in the country's fortunes, it seemed assured that my father, who at the calamitous close of the Weimar era had enlisted in the so-called army of the One Hundred Thousand and was now about to be promoted to quartermaster, could not only look forward to a secure future in the new Reich but could even be said to have attained a certain social position. For my parents, both of whom came from provincial backwaters, my mother from W. and my father from the Bavarian Forest, the acquisition of living room furniture befitting their station, which, as the unwritten rule required, had to conform in every detail with the tastes of the average couple representative of the emerging classless society, probably marked the moment when, in the wake of their in some respects rather difficult early lives, it must have seemed to them as if there were, after all, something like a higher justice. This living room, then, boasted a ponderously ornate armoire, in which were kept the tablecloths, napkins, silver cutlery, Christmas decorations and, behind the glass doors of the upper half, the bone china tea service which, as far as I can remember, was never brought out on a single occasion; a sideboard on which an earthenware punchbowl glazed in peculiar hues and two so-called lead crystal flower vases were placed symmetrically on crocheted doilies; the draw-leaf dining table with a set of six chairs; a sofa with an assortment of embroidered cushions; on the wall behind it two small Alpine landscapes in black varnished frames, the one hung a little higher than the other; a smokers' table with gaudily coloured ceramic cigar and cigarette containers and matching candlestick, an ashtray made of horn and brass, and an electric smoke absorber in the shape of an owl. In addition, apart from the drapes and net curtains, ceiling lights and standard lamp, there was a flower étagère made of bamboo cane, on the various levels of which an Araucaria, an asparagus fern, a Christmas cactus and a passion flower led their strictly regulated plant lives. It should also be mentioned that on the top of the armoire stood the living room clock which counted out the hours with its cold and loveless chimes, and that in the upper half of the armoire, next to the bone china tea service, was a row of clothbound dramatic works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Hebbel and Sudermann. These were inexpensive editions published by the Volksbühnenverband, which my father, who would probably never have taken it into his head to go to the theatre, and less still to read a play, had bought one day, in a passing moment of aspiration to higher ideals, from a travelling salesman. The guest room through the window of which I now looked down into the street was a world away from all of that; I myself, though, was no more than a breath away, and if the living room clock had started chiming in my sleep, I would not have been in the least surprised.

Like most of the houses in W., the Engelwirt was separated lengthwise into two sections by a broad passageway on both floors. On the ground floor, the function room was on one side, on the other the public bar, the kitchen, the ice store, and the pissoir. On the upper floor, the one-legged landlord Sallaba, who had turned up in W. after the war to take over the tenancy together with his beautiful wife, who regarded the village always as an odious place, had set up his household. Sallaba possessed a large number of stylish suits and ties with tie-pins; but it was not so much his wardrobe, which was indeed exceptional for W., as his one-leggedness and the astonishing speed and virtuosity with which he moved about on his crutches that gave him the air of a man of the world in my eyes. Sallaba was said to be a Rhinelander, a term which remained a mystery to me for a long time and which I supposed to be a character trait. Apart from the Sallabas and ourselves, the erstwhile landlady of the Engelwirt, Rosina Zobel, also lived on the first floor; she had given up running the inn several years ago and ever since had spent the entire day in her partially darkened parlour. She either sat in her wing chair, or walked back and forth, or lay on the sofa. No one knew whether it was red wine that had made her melancholy or whether it was because of her melancholy that she had turned to red wine. She was never seen doing any work; she did not shop, or cook, nor was she to be seen laundering clothes or tidying the room. Only once did I see her in the garden with a knife in her hand and a bunch of chives, looking up into the pear tree which had recently come into leaf. The door to the Engelwirt landlady's room was usually left slightly ajar, and I frequently went in to her and would spend hours looking at the collection of postcards she kept in three large folio volumes. The landlady, wine glass in hand, sometimes sat next to me at the table as I browsed, but only ever spoke to tell me the name of the town I happened to be pointing to. As the minutes passed by this resulted in a long topographical litany of place names such as Chur, Bregenz, Innsbruck, Altaussee, Hallstatt, Salzburg, Vienna, Pilsen, Marienbad, Bad Kissingen, Würzburg, Bad Homburg and Frankfurt am Main. There were also numerous Italian cards from Merano, Bolzano, Riva, Verona, Milan, Ferrara, Rome and Naples. One of these postcards, showing the smoking peak of Vesuvius, somehow or other got into an album belonging to my parents, and so has come into my

possession. The third volume contained pictures from overseas, particularly from the Far East, from Dutch South East Asia, and from China and Japan. This collection of postcards, which ran to several hundred in all, had been put together by Rosina Zobel's husband, old Engelwirt, who before marrying Rosina had travelled far and wide, spending the greater part of a considerable inheritance, and who had now been bedridden for a number of years. People said that he lay in the room adjoining Rosina's and had a large wound in his hip which would not heal. They said that as a youngster he had tried to hide a cigar, which he had been secretly smoking, from his father, and had put it in his trouser pocket. The burn he had sustained had soon mended, but later, when he was nearly fifty, it opened up again and now refused to close at all, indeed it became larger every year, and he might well, so they said, end up dying of gangrene. I considered this statement, which I could not understand, to be some sort of judgement, and I envisioned the Engelwirt's martyrdom in all the colours of hellfire. I never saw him in person, though, and, as far as I can remember, the landlady, who in any case spoke very little, never once mentioned him. On a couple of occasions, however, I thought I heard him wheezing in the other room. Later on, as time went by, it seemed to me less and less likely that the Engelwirt landlord had existed at all, and I wondered if I had not simply imagined him. However, further enquiries in W. left no room for doubt in the matter. It also transpired that the children of the Engelwirt couple, Johannes and Magdalena, who were not much older than I, had been brought up elsewhere by an aunt, as the Engelwirt landlady had started drinking heavily after the birth of Magdalena and had no longer been capable of looking after the children. Towards me, perhaps because I was otherwise not in her charge, the landlady showed endless patience. Not infrequently I sat in bed with her, she at the head and I at the foot, and recited everything to her that I knew by heart, including of course the Lord's Prayer, the Angelus and other orisons which had not passed her lips for a very long time. I can still see her as she listened to me, head inclined against the bedstead, eyes closed, the glass and bottle of Kalterer wine on the marble top of the table beside her, expressions of pain and relief crossing her face in turn. It was also from her that I learned how to tie a bow; and whenever I left the room she laid her hand upon me. To this day I can sometimes feel her thumb against my forehead.

Across the street from the Engelwirt inn was the Seelos house, where the Ambrose family lived. My mother was often there because she was very close to the Ambrose children who, some ten years younger than she, had frequently been looked after by her when they were growing up. The Ambroses had come to W. during the last century from Imst in the Tyrol, and whenever there was fault to be found with them, they were still referred to as the Tyroleans. Otherwise, though they were named after the house that they had taken over, and were generally not called the Ambroses, but Seelos Maria, Seelos Lena, Seelos Benedikt, Seelos Lukas and Seelos Regina. Seelos Maria was a large, slow-moving woman who had worn black since the death, several years before, of her husband Baptist, and spent her days making coffee in the Turkish fashion, perhaps in memory of Baptist, who had been a master builder and had been employed in that capacity in Constantinople for eighteen months before the First World War, from where, no doubt, he brought with him the true art of coffee-making. Nearly all the larger buildings in W. and the surrounding area, the school, the railway station in Haslach and the turbine powerhouse, which supplied the entire district with electricity, had been designed on the drawing board of Ambrose and constructed under his supervision. He had died of a stroke, much too young as they always used to say, on May Day, 1933. He was found in his workplace, collapsed over the blueprint apparatus, a pencil behind his ear and a pair of compasses still in his hand. The Seelos family lived on what Baptist had left, and on the income from the fields and the two houses that he had acquired during his lifetime. Baptist's workplace was later rented out, curiously enough to a Turk of about twenty-five named Ekrem, who, from God knows where, had arrived in W. after the "Umsturz", as the end of the War was referred to, and who spent his time making large quantities of Turkish delight in the kitchen, which he then sold at fairs. Perhaps it was Ekrem who taught Seelos Maria how to brew mocha, and who found ways of procuring the precious black beans of which Maria always had a supply, even in the hardest of times. One day Seelos Lena was delivered of a child of Ekrem's, but fortunately, as I heard people say, it lived for only a week. I well remember the tiny white infants coffin on the heavy black hearse being drawn to the cemetery by our neighbour's pair of black horses, and the rainwater running down off the pile of clay into the small grave during the interment. Soon afterwards, if not even before, Ekrem disappeared from W., to Munich as rumour had it, where he was said to have set up as a tropical fruit merchant, and Lena emigrated to California, where she married a telephone engineer, with whom she was killed in a car accident.

The Seelos family also included the three unmarried sisters of Baptist, the Aunts Babett, Bina and Mathild, who lived in the house next door, and bachelor Uncle Peter, who had been a wheelwright with his workshop at the back of the Seelos house. In the years after the war, when he would have been about sixty, he took to walking around the village and would watch people at their work. Only rarely did he pick up a hoe or a fork himself and poke about with it in the yard or the garden. I never knew Peter to be any different, for it was already many a year since, little by little, he had begun to lose his mind. At first he neglected his business as a wheelwright, taking on commissions but only half finishing them, and then he turned to producing complicated pseudo-architectural plans, such as one for a water house built over the river Ach, or another for a forest pulpit, a sort of spiral stairs-cum-platform, which was to have encircled one of the tallest pines in the parish woods, and from the top of which the parish priest was to have made a speech to his trees on a certain day every year. Most of these plans, unfortunately lost, of which Peter drew up page after page, he never seriously tackled. The only one actually realised was what he called the Salettl, which was built into the roof of the Seelos house, a wooden platform being erected about a metre below the ridge, and raised upon this, once the tiles were removed, a timber framework for a glass observatory that reached through and above the ridge. From this vantage-point one could see over the rooftops of the village far out into the high moors and the fields and right across to the dark shadowy mountains rising up from the valley. The completion of the Salettl took some time, and after he had held a solitary topping-out ceremony all on his own, Peter did not come down from his observation post for weeks. It was said that he spent a large part of the first years of the war up there, sleeping by day and watching the stars by night, drawing the constellations on large deep blue sheets of card, or alternatively perforating them by means of bradawls of varying sizes so that, when he attached the sheets to the wooden frames of his glass house, he could actually enjoy the illusion, as in a planetarium, that the star-lit heavens were vaulted above his head. Towards the end of the war, when Seelos Benedikt, who had always been a timorous child, was sent to a school for non-commissioned officers at Rastatt, Peter's condition deteriorated noticeably. At times he would wander about the village with a cape cut from his charts of the night sky, talking of how one could see the stars by day both from the bottom of a well and from the peaks of the highest mountains, which was probably the consolation he offered himself for the circumstance that now, every evening at the onset of darkness which formerly he had always welcomed, he was beset with so great a fear that he had to cover his ears with his hands or flail about wildly. It was because of this condition that a sort of closet was built for him on the half-landing where his bed was installed, and which he soon went into of his own accord in the late afternoons. From that time

onwards, the salettl was no longer used. Not till tne sawmill burned down did anyone think of the lookout again. Then we all climbed up to the Salettl, with the whole of the Seelos family and most of their neighbours, to watch the enormous fire blazing into the sky and lighting from below the pall of smoke drifting a long way out. But Uncle Peter was not with us. That same year when the sawmill burned down, he was admitted to the hospital in Pfronten, for suddenly no one, not even Regina, the most beautiful of the Seelos children and the one whom he liked the best, could get him to eat a thing. Peter would not stay in the hospital, though, but was up and away the very first night, leaving a note which read: My dear Doctor! I have gone to the Tyrol. Yours most sincerely, Peter Ambrose. The ensuing search failed to find him, and to this day he has not been heard of again.

For the first week of my sojourn in W. I did not leave the Engelwirt inn. Troubled by dreams at night and getting no peace till the first light of dawn, I slept through the entire morning. I spent the afternoons sitting in the empty bar room, turning over my recollections and writing up my notes, and in the evenings when the regulars came in, whom I recognised, almost to a man, from my schooldays and who all appeared to have grown older at a stroke, I listened to their talk while pretending to read the newspaper, never tiring of it and ordering one glass of Kalterer after the other. Hunched over the long table they sat, most as in the old days with their hats on their heads, under an enormous picture of woodcutters at work. This painting, which had hung in the same place in the old Engelwirt inn, had by now become so blackened that it was scarcely possible to make out what it actually portrayed. Not till one had looked at it for some time did the phantom shapes of the woodcutters become apparent. They were in the process of stripping and clamping the timber, and were painted in the powerful, energetic postures characteristic of images that glorify work and warfare. The artist Hengge, by whom, without any doubt, this picture was done, had produced many such woodcutter scenes in his time. His fame reached its peak in the 1930s, when he was known as far afield as Munich. His murals, always in dark shades of brown, were to be seen on the walls of buildings all around W. and the surrounding area, and were always of his favoured motifs of woodcutters, deer poachers and rebellious peasants carrying the Bundschuh-banner unless a particular theme had been requested of him. On the Seefelders house, for example, where my grandfather lived and where I was born, a motor race was depicted, because it had seemed to old Seefelder, a blacksmith by trade, to go with the machine workshop he had set up a couple of years before the war, and appropriate

also to the new age which was then dawning in W., and the transformer station on the edge of the village was adorned with an allegorical representation of the taming of the power of water. For me there was something most unsettling about

all of these Hengge pictures. One especially, on the Raiffeisen Bank, showing a tall reaper woman, sickle in hand, standing

in front of a field at harvest time, always looked to me like a fearful battle scene, and frightened me so that whenever I passed, I had to avert my eyes. Hengge the painter was perfectly capable of extending his repertoire. But whenever he was able to follow his own artistic inclination, he would paint only pictures of woodcutters. Even after the war, when for a variety of reasons his monumental works were no longer much in demand, he continued in the same vein. In the end, his house was said to have been so crammed with pictures of woodcutters that there was scarcely room for Hengge himself, and death, so the obituary said, caught him in the midst of a work showing a woodcutter on a sledge hurtling down into the valley below. On reflection, it had occurred to me that those Hengge paintings, apart from the frescoes in the parish church, were pretty much the only pictures I had seen until I was seven or eight years old, and I now have the feeling that these woodcutters and the crucifixions and the large canvas of the Battle of the Lechfeld, where Prince Bishop Ulrich, astride his grey charger, rides over one of the Huns lying prostrate on the ground — and here again all the horses have this crazed look in their eyes — made a devastating impression on me. For that reason, when I had reached a certain point in my notes, I left my post in the Engelwirt bar to see the Hengge murals once more, or those that were still there. I cannot say that their effect on me on re-acquaintance was any less devastating, rather the contrary. At all events I found that as I went from one of his works to another I was drawn onward, and I walked through the fields and towards the outlying hamlets

on the surrounding mountainsides and hills. I made my way up to Bichl and walked on to the Adelharz, to Enthalb der Ach, to Bàrenwinkel and Jungholz, into the Vordere and the Hintere Reutte, out to Haslach and Oy, into the Schrey and from there on to Elleg, all of them paths that I had walked in my childhood at my grandfather's side and which had meant so much to me in my memory, but, as I came to realise, meant nothing to me now. From every one of these excursions I returned dispirited to the Engelwirt and to the writing of my notes, which had afforded me a degree of comfort of late, even as the example of Hengge the artist, and the questionable nature of painting as an enterprise in general, remained before me as a warning.

I had learned that the only member of the Seelos family still living in W. was Lukas. The Seelos house had been sold, and Lukas lodged in the smaller house next door, where once Babett, Bina and Mathild had dwelt. I had been in W. for about ten days before I finally decided to go over and call on Lukas. He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him, and now spent his days sitting at home on the sofa, while his wife continued to run the little stationer's shop belonging to old Specht. He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside. Moreover, he was troubled by the fact that, apart from Regina, who was married to an industrialist in northern Germany, he was the last of the Ambrose clan. He told me the story of how Uncle Peter disappeared in the Tyrol, and of the death of his mother soon afterwards, who during the last weeks of her life had lost so much of her considerable weight that nobody had recognised her any more; and he expatiated at length on the strange circumstance that Aunts Babett and Bina, who had done everything together since they were children, had died on the same day, one of heart failure and the other of grief. No one had ever been able to find out much, he said, about the car accident in America in which Lena and her husband were killed. It seemed that the two of them simply left the road in their Oldsmobile, which as he knew from a photo had whitewall tyres, and plunged into the depths. Mathild had lasted a long time, until she was well over eighty, perhaps because she had the most alert mind of any of them. She had died a quiet death in her own bed in the middle of the night. His wife, Lukas said, had found her the next day, lying just as she always did when she retired in the evening. But Benedikt, unwilling to go further into the subject, had been consumed by ill fortune and now, he added, it was his own turn. Having brought to an end his chronicle of the Ambrose family with this remark, not without satisfaction as it seemed to me, Lukas wanted to know what had brought me back to W. after so many years, and in November of all times. To my surprise, he understood my rather complicated and sometimes contradictory explanations right away. He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling. To which Lukas replied that now, laid up as he was on his sofa for much of the day or at best performing pointless little tasks about the house, it was quite unthinkable that he had once been a good goalkeeper and that he, who was ever more frequently assailed by dark moods, had in his time played the clown round the village — had indeed held for years, as I perhaps remembered, the honorary office of carnival jester since a successor was not to be found who could hold a candle to him. As he recalled that glorious time, Lukas's gouty hands began to move more freely, demonstrating how one grasped the great carnival shears, which he said required exceptional strength and poise, and how he had stuck his fool's staff up the women's skirts at the very moment when they least expected it. Just as they imagined themselves safe, behind locked doors on the top floor, and were leaning out of the windows to watch as the carnival floats passed by, he had climbed up at the back through the hay loft, or up an espalier, and given them the fright they were hoping for all along, though they would never admit as much. Often he had ducked into the kitchen and filched the freshly baked doughnuts in order to distribute them in the street to the applause of the women until, seeing the empty plates, they realised it was their own doughnuts that had been handed out.

From such carnival exploits, our talk turned to Specht the printer, whose stationer's shop Lukas's wife was now running. For Specht, as Lukas said, had invariably still had his Christmas tree in his shop window when carnival week came round; indeed, that tree, which he had put up during the last week of Advent and which was now quite bare of needles, remained in the window not only until carnival but frequently until Easter, and on one occasion Specht even had to be reminded to remove the tree from the window in time at least for the Corpus Christi procession. Specht, who since the 1920s had written, edited, set and printed the fortnightly four-page newspaper Der Landbote, was an extremely introverted fellow, as is not infrequently the case

with printers. Moreover, the constant handling of lead type had made him ever smaller and greyer. I had a clear memory of Specht, from whom I had bought my first slate pencils and later the pens and the exercise books made of pulp paper on which the nibs constantly stuck when one was writing. Year in, year out he wore a grey calico coat which almost reached down to the floor, and round steel spectacles, and, whenever you entered the shop beneath the jingling bell, he would emerge from the printroom at the back with an oil rag in his hand. In the evenings, though, he could be seen sitting in the lamplight at the kitchen table, writing the articles and reports which were to be included in Der Landbote. Lukas claimed that much of what Specht wrote week after week for Der Landbote was rejected by him in his capacity as editor as not being up to the standards of the paper. Later on, when we had run out of Kalterer wine, Lukas took me around the house, showed me where Babett's and Bina's café, the Alpenrose, had been, where Dr Rambousek had his surgery, and where the bedrooms and the living room of the three sisters once were. As I was leaving, Lukas clutched my hand in the birdlike grasp of his gouty fingers for a long time, and I said that I would be glad to come over to see him more often so that we might talk further about the past, if he did not mind. Yes, said Lukas, there was something strange about remembering. When he lay on the sofa and thought back, it all became blurred as if he was out in a fog.

That same evening, over a second bottle of Kalterer in the Engelwirt, I was able to assemble some of my recollections of the Alpenrose. Whether it was Babett and Bina who had the idea of opening the café, or whether Baptist thought that it would support his unmarried sisters, was a part of the story that nobody could recall any more. At all events, there had been a Café Alpenrose, and it had continued until the deaths of Babett and Bina, although nobody had ever set foot in it. In summer, a small green metal table and three green folding chairs stood in the front garden under a pollarded lime tree which afforded a fine broad canopy of leaves. The door of the house was always open, and every couple of minutes Bina would appear in order to look out for the guests who would, surely, be arriving sometime. There is no way of telling what kept visitors away. Probably it was not simply because strangers, as summer guests were referred to in those days, hardly ever came to stay in W., but rather because the coffee house was run by Babett and Bina as a sort of spinsters' parlour which had nothing to offer the men of the village. I do not know, nor did Lukas know, what-sort of figure the two sisters had made at the beginning of their business venture. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that whatever Babett and Bina had been at one time, or had wanted to be, was eventually destroyed by the years of continuous disappointment and perennially revived hope. The impairment to their lives which that destruction and their unending dependency on each other entailed ultimately led to their being regarded as no more than a pair of dotty old maids. Of course it did not help that Bina, smoothing down her apron with her hands, spent the hours running around the house and the front garden, while Babett sat in the kitchen all day long folding tea towels, only to unfold and refold them again. It was with the greatest effort that the two of them managed to keep their small household in order, and what they would have done if one day a guest had actually crossed the threshold is quite inconceivable. Even when making a pot of soup they were more of a hindrance than a help to each other, and the weekly creation of a cake for Sunday, Lukas told me, was always a major operation that took them the whole of Saturday. Nonetheless, whenever the end of the week was approaching, Babett would prevail upon Bina, as much as Bina prevailed upon Babett, that a cake should be baked once again, alternately either an apple cake or a so-called Guglhupf. Once the task was accomplished, the cake would be carried with some ceremony into the front room and there, virginal and freshly dusted with icing sugar, as it was, placed under a glass dome on the sideboard, next to the apple cake, or else the Guglhupf, that had been baked the previous Saturday, so that any guest who had happened by on the Saturday afternoon would have had a choice of two cakes — a stale apple cake and a fresh Guglhupf or a stale Guglhupf and a fresh apple cake. On the Sunday afternoon that choice ceased to be available, for it was always on Sunday afternoons that Babett and Bina consumed either the stale apple cake or the stale Guglhupf with their Sunday afternoon coffee, Babett eating the cake with a cake fork while Bina would be dunking hers, a habit which Babett deplored and which she had never been able to correct in her sister. After consuming the stale cake the two of them would sit for an hour or two, sated and silent, in the gloom of their parlour. On the wall over the sideboard hung a picture of two lovers in the act of committing suicide. It was a winter night and the moon had emerged from behind the clouds to witness this final moment. The pair, out on a narrow landing stage, were about to take their last decisive step. Together, the foot of the girl and that of the man were suspended over the dark waters, and one could sense with relief how both were now in the grip of gravity. I remember that the girl had a thin, viridescent veil draped over her head, while the man's coat was taut against the wind. Below this picture stood the cake intended for the coming week; the clock on the wall ticked, and whenever it was about to strike it gave a long-drawn-out wheeze, as if it could not bring itself to announce the loss of another quarter of an hour. In summer, the light of late afternoon entered through the curtains, in winter the falling dusk, and on the table in the centre, biding its time, stood the enormous aspidistra which the long years had left untouched and around which, in some mysterious manner, everything at the Alpenrose seemed to revolve.

My grandfather went across to the Alpenrose once a week to call upon Mathild. The two of them usually played several games of cards together and conversed at some length, as there was always plenty to talk about. They would sit in the front parlour, for Mathild did not allow anyone, not even Grandfather, up to her room; Babett and Bina, who respected Mathild as a higher authority, had become accustomed to remain in the kitchen during these visits. I often accompanied my grandfather to the Alpenrose, just as I accompanied him almost everywhere, and there I sat with a diluted raspberry syrup as the cards were shuffled, cut, dealt, played, placed to one side, counted and shuffled again. My grandfather was in the habit of wearing his hat while playing cards, and not until the last game was finished and Mathild had gone out into the kitchen to brew the coffee did he take off the hat and then wipe his forehead with his handkerchief. Of the matters discussed over coffee, there were few I had any notion of, and for that reason, once they started talking together, I generally went out into the front garden, sat on one of the chairs by the green metal table and looked at the old atlas which Mathild put out for me every time. In this atlas there was a page on which the longest rivers and the highest elevations on the surface of the

Earth were arranged by length or height, and there were wonderfully coloured maps, even of the most distant, scarcely discovered continents, with legends in tiny lettering which, perhaps because I could decipher them only in part just like the early cartographers were able to picture only parts of the world, appeared to me to hold in them all conceivable mysteries. During the colder months of the year I would sit with the atlas on my knees on the top landing, where the light came in through the staircase window and an oleograph hung on the wall showing a wild boar making a gigantic leap out of the gloom of the forest to scatter hunters at their breakfast in a clearing. The scene, in which, quite apart from the boar and the frightened green-coated hunters, the plates and sausages flying through the air were depicted with great attention to detail, was inscribed Im Ardennerwald, and this caption, innocent in itself, evoked for me something far more dangerous, unknown and profound than the picture by itself could ever have conjured up. The secret contained in the word "Ardennerwald" was deepened by the fact that Mathild had expressly forbidden me to open any of the doors on the top floor. Above all, I was not to climb up into the attic which, as Mathild had given me to understand in her peculiarly persuasive manner, was the dwelling of someone she referred to as the grey chasseur, about whom she would not tell me any more. So on the landing to the first floor I was, as it were, on the borderline of what was permissible, at the point where the lure of temptation could be most keenly sensed. For that reason I always felt as though I had been rescued when my grandfather at last emerged from the coffee room, put his hat on his head, and shook hands with Mathild in farewell.

When I next saw Lukas, we went up to the attic which I must have mentioned in our conversations. Lukas was of the opinion that not much could have changed up there since those days. He had never cleared out the attic when he took over the house after his aunts died, he said, for this, even then, would have been beyond his powers, given that the whole space was cluttered to the rafters with all manner of implements and miscellaneous lumber and one thing piled on top of another. The attic was indeed a daunting sight. Boxes and baskets were stacked high, sacks, leather gear, doorbells, ropes, mousetraps, beehive frames and cases for all kinds of instruments were hanging from the beams. In a corner a bass tuba still glinted from beneath the layer of dust covering it, and next to it, on an eiderdown that had once been red, lay an enormous, long abandoned wasps' nest, both of them — the brass tuba and the fragile grey paper shell — tokens of the slow disintegration of all material forms in the complete silence of this attic. And yet that silence was not to be trusted. Out of trunks, chests, and wardrobes, some with their lids, drawers and doors half open, all conceivable kinds of utensils and garments were bursting forth. It was easy to imagine that this entire assemblage of the most diverse objects had been moving, in some sort of secret evolution, until the moment we entered, and that it was only because of our presence that these things now held their breath as if nothing had happened. On a shelf that immediately attracted my attention was Mathild's library, comprising almost a hundred volumes, which have since come into my possession and are proving ever more important to me. Besides various literary works from the last century, accounts of expeditions to the polar regions, textbooks on geometry and structural engineering, and a Turkish dictionary complete with a manual for the writing of letters, which had probably once belonged to Baptist, there were numerous religious works of a speculative character, and prayer-books dating back two or three hundred years, with illustrations, some of them perfectly gruesome, showing the torments and travails that await us all. In among the devotional works, to my amazement, there were several treatises by Bakunin, Fourier, Bebel, Eisner, and Landauer, and an autobiographical novel by the socialist Lily von Braun. When I enquired

about the origins of the books, Lukas was able to tell me only that Mathild had always been a great reader, and because of this, as I might perhaps remember, was thought of by the villagers as peculiar, if not deranged. Just before the First World War she had entered the convent of the Englische Fràulein in Regensburg, but had left there, for reasons which were never made clear to Lukas, before the end of the war, and subsequently had spent several months in Munich during the time of the ill-fated Red Republic, returning home to W. in a seriously disturbed and almost speechless state. He himself, Lukas said, had of course not been born by then, but he well remembered his mother making a remark about how Mathild had been quite unhinged when she came back to W. from the convent and from Communist Munich. Occasionally, when his mother was in a bad mood, she even called Mathild a bigoted Bolshevik. Mathild for her part, however, once she had regained something of her equilibrium, did not allow herself to be put out in the slightest by such remarks. To the contrary, said Lukas, she evidently came to feel quite comfortable in her detachment, and indeed the way in which, year after year, she went about among the villagers whom she despised, forever dressed in a black frock or a black coat, and always in a hat and never, even in the finest weather, without an umbrella, had, as I might remember from my own childhood days, something blissful about it.

As I continued to look around in the attic, picking up this and that, a hairless china doll, a goldfinch cage, a target rifle, or an old calf-hide knapsack, and discussing the possible provenance and history of these items with Lukas, I became aware of something like an apparition, a uniformed figure, which now could be seen more clearly, now more faintly behind the blade of light that slanted through the attic window. On closer inspection it revealed itself as an old tailor's dummy, dressed in pike-grey breeches and a pike-grey jacket, the collar, cuffs and edgings of which must once have been grass green, and the buttons a golden yellow. On its wooden headpiece the dummy was wearing a hat, also pike-grey, with a bunch of cockerel's tail feathers in it. Perhaps because it had been concealed behind the shaft of light that cut through the darkness of the attic and in which swirled the glinting particles of matter dissolving into weightlessness, the grey figure instantly made a most uncanny impression on me, an impression which was only intensified by the smell of camphor exuding from it. But when I stepped closer, not entirely trusting my eyes, and touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror it crumbled into dust. From what I have been able to discover since, that uniform, trimmed in the colours pike-grey and green, almost certainly belonged to one of the Austrian chasseurs who fought against the French as irregulars around 1800, a conjecture that gained in plausibility when Lukas told me a story which also went back to Mathild. It seems that one of the more distant Seelos forebears led a contingent of one thousand men levied in the Tyrol across the Brenner Pass, down the Adige, past Lake Garda and onto the upper Italian plains, and there, with all his troops, was killed in the terrible Battle of Marengo. The significance for me of this tale of a Tyrolean chasseur who had fallen at Marengo lay not least in the realisation that, in the attic of the Café Alpenrose, which, on my childhood visits, I had been forbidden to go up into on account of it being the haunt of the grey chasseur, there had truly been such a chasseur, even if he did not correspond in every respect to the picture I had formed of him while sitting on the landing. What I had fantasised at the time, and what later often appeared to me in my dreams, was a tall stranger with a high round cap of astrakhan fur set low on his forehead, dressed in a brown greatcoat fastened with broad straps reminiscent of a horse's harness. Lying in his lap he had a short curved sabre with a sheath that gleamed faintly. His feet were encased in spurred jackboots. One foot was on an overturned wine bottle, the other he rested up-angled on the floor, the heel and spur rammed into the wood. Time and again I dreamed, and occasionally still do, that this stranger reaches out his hand to me and I, in the teeth of my fear, venture ever closer to him, so close that, at last, I can touch him. And every time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand, dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the token of some great woe that nothing in the world will ever put right.

Until the end of the 1940s Dr Rudolf Rambousek had his practice in the Alpenrose, in the ground floor room opposite the coffee and wine bar. Dr Rambousek had come to W. not long after the end of the war, from a Moravian town, I believe from Nikolsburg, with his pallid wife and his two adolescent daughters Felicia and Amalia, and for him, and no less for his women, this must have been banishment to the ends of the earth. It was no surprise that this short, corpulent man, who was always dressed like a man about town, was unable to gain a foothold in W. His melancholy and foreign-seeming features, perhaps best described as Levantine, the way his lids were always lowered over his large, dark eyes, and his entire somehow distant demeanour, left little doubt that he was one of those who are born to lead inconsolable lives. To my knowledge Dr Rambousek did not befriend a single person during the years he spent in W. He was said to be withdrawn, and it is true that I cannot remember ever having seen him in the street, although he did not live in the Alpenrose but in the teacher's house and must therefore occasionally have been on his way either from the teacher's house to the Alpenrose or from the Alpenrose to the teacher's house. It was not least by virtue of his positively conspicuous absence that he was altogether different from Dr Piazolo, who must already have been approaching seventy and could be seen at every hour of the day and night riding his 750 Zündapp around the village or up and downhill to the outlying hamlets. In winter and summer alike Dr Piazolo, who in emergencies was willing to take on veterinary work without thinking twice about it and who had evidently resolved to die in the saddle, wore an old aviator's cap with earflaps, enormous motorcycling goggles, a leather outfit and leather gaiters. It is also worth mentioning that Dr Piazolo had a double or shadow rider in the priest Father Wurmser, who was also no longer one of the youngest, and who for a good while had been making his visits to the dying on his motorcycle carrying all that was necessary to perform the last rites, the consecrated oil, holy water, salt, a small silver crucifix and the holy sacrament, with him in an old rucksack which was exactly the same as the one belonging to Dr Piazolo. On one occasion the two of them, the priest and Dr Piazolo, mistook each other's rucksacks when they were sitting side by side at the Adlerwirt, and Dr Piazolo drove off to his next patient equipped for the last rites while Father Wurmser brought the doctor's instruments to the next member of his congregation who was about to expire. The similarity not only of the rucksacks belonging to Father Wurmser and Dr Piazolo but also of their general appearance was such that if you saw a dark motorcyclist somewhere in the village or on the roads outside the village, it would have been impossible to say whether it was the doctor or the parson, had it not been for the doctor's habit, while riding his motorcycle, of letting his feet, on which he wore hobnailed boots, drag through the gravel or snow on the road rather than placing them on the foot-rests, which meant that, at least when seen from the front or behind, he cut a different figure from the parson. It is easy to imagine how difficult it must have been for Dr Rambousek to take on his well-established competitors, and to see why he preferred, in contrast to these two as it were omnipresent emissaries, the priest and the physician, not to leave the house at all. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that Dr Rambousek did not enjoy the esteem of those who went to him. I more than once heard my mother extolling the medical skills of Dr Rambousek in the highest possible terms, particularly when talking to Valerie Schwarz, the milliner, who came not from Moravia like Dr Rambousek but from Bohemia, and who, despite her shortness, had a bosom of a size that I have only seen on one occasion since, on the tobacconist in Fellini's film Amarcord. But while my mother and Valerie could not praise Dr Rambousek highly enough, the other villagers would never have dreamed of going to his surgery. If something was the matter, you simply sent for Dr Piazolo, and that was why Dr Rambousek spent most of his time, day after day, month after month and year after year, sitting alone in his surgery in the Alpenrose. At any rate, when I went across to Mathild with my grandfather I always saw him through the half-open door in the sparsely furnished room, sitting in his swivel chair and writing or reading or simply staring out of the window. Once or twice I quietly stepped onto the threshold and waited for him to look across at me or ask me to come closer, but either he never noticed my presence or he did not feel able to address the strange child. One exceptionally hot day in the midsummer of 1949, when — Grandfather and Mathild were conversing in the front room, I sat for a long time on the topmost step of the stairs that led up to the attic, listening to the creaking of the roof timbers and the few other noises, such as the rising and falling screech of a circular saw or the solitary crowing of a cockerel, that came into the house from outside. Before my grandfather's visiting time was ended, I went down into the hall passageway, having determined to ask Dr Rambousek if he was not perhaps capable of healing the old Engelwirt landlord's open sore that grew larger by the day, and to my bewilderment, found the door to the surgery closed. Cautiously, I pressed down the handle. Inside, everything was bathed in the deep green summer light that filtered through the leaves of the lime tree outside the window. The silence that surrounded me seemed boundless. As was his wont, Dr Rambousek was sitting on his swivel chair, except that his body was leaning forwards onto the desk. The left shirt sleeve was rolled halfway up, and in the crook of the elbow, turned sideways at an odd angle, rested the doctor's head, seeming somehow outsize, with its dark, slightly protruding but still beautiful eyes staring fixedly into the void. I left the surgery on tiptoe and climbed back up to my station right at the top of the attic stairs, where I waited until I heard my grandfather coming out of the parlour with Mathild. Not a word about Dr Rambousek did I breathe to my grandfather, both out of fear and because I myself could scarcely believe what I had seen. On the way home we had to pick up the fob watch he had left to be repaired at Ebentheuer's the watchmaker. The doorbell clanged, and there we were, standing in the small shop in which a host of long-case clocks, wall-mounted regulators, kitchen and living room clocks, alarm clocks, pocket and wrist watches were all ticking at once, just as if one clock on its own could not destroy enough time. While Grandfather talked to Ebentheuer, who, as always, had his watchmaker's glass jammed into his left eye, about what had been wrong with his fob watch, I looked across the shop counter into the half-lit living room where the youngest of the Ebentheuer children, who was called Eustach and had water on the brain, was sitting on a high chair, rocking gently back and forth. As for Dr Rambousek, he was found the same evening lifeless and cold in the surgery of the Alpenrose by his wife, who shortly afterwards moved away from W. together with her two daughters. Later I once overheard Valerie Schwarz whisper to my mother that Dr Rambousek had been a morphine addict or morphinist, as she put it, and that hence his skin was often tainted yellow. Because of this to me incomprehensible remark, I believed for a long time that people born in Moravia were called morphinists and that they came from a country quite as far away as Mongolia or China.

During the years when we lived above the Engelwirt, I would unfailingly, in the early evenings, be seized by the desire to go down to the taproom to help Romana wipe the tables and benches, sweep the floor or dry the glasses. It was not, of course, these chores but Romana herself who drew me and in whose company I conspired to spend as much time as I possibly could. Romana was the elder of two daughters of a family of small-holders who, in the hamlet of Bàrenwinkel, rented a few patches of land and a crooked, timber-framed house which, toysized in comparison with the other farmsteads, stood all by itself on a hillock and always reminded me of the story of Noah, especially as in and around it there appeared to be two of every kind — apart from the parents and the two sisters, Romana and Lisabeth, there was a cow and a bull, two goats, two pigs, two geese, and so on. There were larger numbers only of cats and hens, and they sat or scratched about way into the surrounding fields. There were also a sizeable flock of white doves which, when they were not clambering back and forth over the ridge, soared above and around the little house which, with its shingled and much-mended hipped roof, unusual for the area, looked for all the world like the biblical Ark stranded on the brow of a hill. And every time I passed by there, Romana's father, who was a canny old rogue, would be peering out of one of the tiny windows like Noah himself, smoking a cheroot. Romana came over from the Barenwinkel every afternoon at five, and I often walked to meet her at the bridge. She was then twenty-five at most, and everything about her seemed to me to be of exceptional beauty. She was tall, with a broad, open face and water-grey eyes and as much flaxen hair as a Haflinger pony. She differed in every respect from the womenfolk of W., who were almost without exception small, dark, thin-haired and mean. She was so unlike the other women and maids that no one, despite her conspicuous beauty, ever made a proposal of marriage to her. If, later in the evening, I was allowed down into the taproom again to fetch a packet of Zuban cigarettes for my father, Romana would be sailing through the throng of peasants and woodcutters, who would regularly be sozzled by nine, as if she came from another world. At night the taprooms made a fearsome impression, and if it had not been for Romana I would probably not have dared enter that dreadful place where the menfolk sat hunched on the long benches with a vacant look in their eyes. Occasionally one of these motionless figures would rise and sway, as if he were on a raft, towards the door that opened onto the hallway. There were pools of beer and melted snow on the oiled floorboards, and the smoke, drifting through the bar in dense swathes towards the rattling ventilator, joined with the sour reek of wet leather and loden cloaks and spilled gentian schnapps. Mounted on the walls above the brown-painted panelling, stuffed martens, lynxes, capercaillies, vultures and other exterminated creatures were awaiting the time until they could take their long overdue revenge. The peasants and woodcutters almost always sat together in groups at the top or bottom ends of the bar. In the middle stood the large iron stove, which quite often in the winter months was stoked and poked so much that it started to glow. The only one who sat alone, unheeded by all the others, was Hans Schlag the huntsman of whom it was said that he hailed from other parts, from KoEgarten on the Neckar in fact, and that he had managed extensive hunting grounds in the Black Forest for several years before moving from there to the district around W., nobody knew precisely why. He had been out of work for over a year until he had been taken on by the Bavarian forestry commission. Schlag the hunter was a fine figure of a man, with dark, curly hair and beard and uncommonly deep-set, brooding eyes. For hours, frequently until far into the night, he would sit with his half-emptied tankard without exchanging a word with anyone. His dog, Waldmann, slept at his feet, tied to the rucksack hanging from the back of the chair. Whenever I went down into the taproom to fetch a packet of Zuban for my father, Schlag the hunter would be sitting at his table like that. His eyes were always lowered, looking at the gold pocket-watch, an exceptionally fine piece, which he had placed in front of him, as if there were some important appointment he had to keep; but in between times he would look across through his half-closed eyes at Romana, who would be standing behind the high bar filling the schnapps and beer glasses. On one evening that has remained stardingly clear in my memory, at the beginning of December, when snow had fallen as far down as the valley for the first time, the hunter was not sitting in his place when I came into the taproom after supper, and Romana, inexplicably, was nowhere to be seen either. Intending to fetch the packet of five Zuban from the Adlerwirt, I went through the rear of the house out into the yard. A myriad minute crystals glittered in the snow all around me and in the sky above glittered the stars. The headless giant Orion with his short shimmering sword was just rising from behind the black-blue shadow of the mountains. I remained standing for a long time amid that winter splendour, listening to the ringing of the cold and the sound the heavenly lights made in their slow orbits. I suddenly had a feeling then that something was moving in the open doorway of the woodshed. It was Schlag the hunter, who, holding onto the slatted frame of the shed with one hand, stood there in the darkness like a man leaning into the wind, his entire body moving to a strange, consistent and undulating rhythm. Between him and the slatting he gripped with his left hand, Romana lay on a heap of cut turf, and her eyes, as I could make out in the light reflected from the snow, were turned sideways and as wide open as those of Dr Rambousek when his head had lain lifeless on the top of his desk.

From deep in the hunter's chest came a heavy moaning and panting, his frosty breath rose from his beard, and time after time, when the wave surged through the small of his back, he thrust into Romana, while she, for her part, clung closer and closer to him, until the hunter and Romana were but one single indivisible form. I do not think that Romana or Schlag had any idea that I was there. Only Waldmann saw me. Fastened as always to his master's rucksack, he stood quietly behind him on the ground and looked across at me. That same night, around one or two o'clock, the one-legged Engelwirt landlord Sallaba destroyed the entire furnishings and fittings of the bar. When I went to school the following morning, the whole floor was ankle-deep in broken glass. It was a scene of utter devastation. Even the new revolving display cabinet for the Waldbaur chocolates, which reminded me of the tabernacle in church because it could be rotated, had been ripped from the bar and hurled right across the room. Things were not much better outside in the passage. Frau Sallaba was sitting on the cellar steps, crying her eyes out. All the doors were wide open, even the enormous door, fit for a bank vault, that led into the ice store, inside which the ice, stacked in big blocks one on top of the other for the summer, glinted a pale shade of blue. At the sight of the open ice store, or rather at the memory of this sight, it suddenly came to me that, whenever I stepped into the ice store with Romana, I imagined us being locked in there by accident and that, holding each other tight, we would freeze to death, life ebbing out of our bodies as slowly and silently as ice melts in the warmth of the sun.

At school Fràulein Rauch, who meant no less to me than Romana, wrote up on the blackboard in her even handwriting the chronicle of the calamities which had befallen W. over the ages and underneath it drew a burning house in coloured chalk. The children in the class sat bent over their exercise books, looking up every so often to decipher the faint, faraway letters with screwed-up eyes as they copied, line by line, the long list of terrible events which, when recorded in this way, had something reassuring and comforting about them. In 1511 the Black Death claimed 105 lives. In 1530, 100 houses went up in flames. 1569: the whole settlement devastated in a blaze. 1605: another fire reduced 140 houses to ashes. 1633: W. burned down by the Swedes. 1635: 700 inhabitants died of the plague. 1806-14: 19 volunteers from W. fell in the wars of liberation. 1816-17: years of famine in consequence of unprecedented rainfall. 1870-71: 5 fusiliers from W. lost their lives in battle. 1893: on the 16th of April a great conflagration destroyed the entire village. 1914-18: 68 of our sons laid down their lives for the fatherland. 1939-45: 125 from our ranks did not return home from the Second World War. In the quiet of the classroom the nibs of our pens scratched across the paper. Fràulein Rauch walked along the rows in her tight-fitting green skirt. Whenever she came close to me, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. That day it never grew light outside. The greyness of the early hours lasted almost until noon and was followed immediately by a gradual nightfall. Even now, at one o'clock, half an hour before school ended for the day, the lights had to be on in the classroom. The white luminous globes hanging from the ceiling and the rows of children bent over their work were reflected in the darkened window-panes through whose mirrored surface the just discernible tops of the apple trees were like black coral in the depths of the ocean. All day an unwonted silence had spread out and taken possession of us. Not even when the caretaker at the end of the last lesson rang the bell in the hall did we break into our customary uproar; rather, we got up without a sound and packed our things away in an orderly fashion without so much as a murmur. Fràulein Rauch helped this or that child, struggling in thick winter clothes, to straighten the satchel on his back.

The schoolhouse stood on a rise at the edge of the village, and, as always when we came out at lunchtime, on that, for me, memorable day too, I looked over the open valley to my left across the rooftops to the forested foothills, behind which arose the jagged rocky ridge of the Sorgschrofen. The houses and farmsteads, the fields, the empty roads and tracks — all was deadened and still under a thin dusting of white. Above us hung the leaden sky, as low and heavy as it only ever is before a great fall of snow. If you put your head right back and stared long enough into that incomprehensible void, you could believe you saw the first flurries of snow swirling out of it. My way took me past the teacher's house and the curate's house and by the high cemetery wall, at the end of which St George was forever driving a spear through the throat of the griffin-like winged creature lying at his feet. From there I had to go down Church Hill and along the so-called Upper Street. A smell of burnt horn

came from the smithy. The forge fire had died down, and the tools, the heavy hammers, tongs and rasps were lying abandoned all round. In W., noon was the hour of things deserted. The water in the tub, into which the blacksmith, when working at his anvil would plunge the red-hot iron so that it hissed, was so calm, and shone so darkly in the pale light that fell on its surface from the open gateway, it was as though no one had ever disturbed it, as though it were destined to remain preserved in this inviolate state for ever. In the shop where Kòpf the barber practised his trade, the padded chair with its extendable headrest stood abandoned. The cut-throat razor lay open on the marbled top of the washstand. Since father had returned home from the war, I was sent once a month to have my hair cut, and nothing frightened me more than old Kòpf setting about shaving the fuzz from my neck with that freshly stropped knife. The fear became so deeply engrained in me that many years later, when I first saw a representation of the scene in which Salome bears in the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter, my thoughts immediately turned to Kòpf. To this day I cannot bring myself to enter a barber's, and that I should have gone of my own accord a few years ago at Santa Lucia station in Venice to have my overnight stubble removed still strikes me as a bizarre aberration. The fear that seized me at the sight of Kòpf's cabinet gave way to feelings of hope when I paused in front of the small co-op to gaze into the display window at the golden pyramid constructed by Frau Unsinn, the shopkeeper, entirely of Sanella margarine cubes, a sort of pre-Christmas miracle which, every day on my way home from school, touched me like a beacon heralding the new age which was now about to begin even in W. In contrast to the golden sheen on the Sanella cubes, everything else you could buy in Frau Unsinn's shop, the flour in the barrel, the soused herrings in the large tin drum, the pickled gherkins, the massive block of ersatz honey which resembled an iceberg, the blue patterned packets of chicory coffee, and the Emmental cheese wrapped in a damp cloth, seemed to have passed into oblivion. The Sanella pyramid, I knew, towered into the future, and while, before my mind's eye, it grew higher and higher, so high that it almost reached up to the heavens, a vehicle such as I had never seen appeared at the far end of the deserted Long Road which I had now reached. It was a lilac limousine with a lime-green roof and huge tail fins. Infinitely slow and quite soundless it came gliding towards me. Inside, at the ivory-coloured steering wheel, sat a black man who showed me his teeth, also ivory-coloured, grinning as he went past, perhaps because I was the only living soul he had seen while driving through this remote place. Since among the little clay figures assembled round our Christmas manger, it was the black-faced one of the three Magi who wore a purple cloak with a lime-green border, there was no doubt in my mind that the driver of the car that had drifted past me at that sombre midday hour was none other than King Melchior, and that he bore with him in the vast boot of his streamlined lilac limousine several ounces of gold, a frankincense caddy and an ebony box filled with myrrh. It may well be that I became quite convinced of this only later when, in the afternoon, I re-imagined that scene in the minutest detail as the snow began to fall more and more heavily and I sat at the window watching it twirl down without cease from on high and covering everything by nightfall, the stacks of firewood, the chopping block, the roof of the shed, the redcurrant bushes, the water trough and the kitchen garden in the nunnery next door.

On the following morning, the light still burning in the kitchen, my grandfather came in from clearing paths and told us that word had just reached him from Jungholz that Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine. He had evidently fallen while crossing by the narrow footbridge which was dangerous even in summer, and as good as impassable in winter, said my grandfather, waiting as he did every day till my mother was not watching to pour down the sink the milky coffee which was always kept for him on the hotplate of the range. In my grandfather's opinion it was out of the question that Schlag, who must have known his own territory like the back of his hand, should have ended up on the other side purely by mistake. By the same token, nobody knew what the hunter, if he had deliberately gone out of his way, had been doing there, over the Austrian border, at this time of year of all times and with the weather closing in. Whichever way you looked at it, concluded my grandfather, it was a queer and perplexing business. I, for my part, was not able to get the matter out of my mind all day long. When I was at my schoolwork, all I had to do was lower my eyelids a little and I beheld Schlag the hunter lying dead at the bottom of the ravine. And so it was no surprise to me when, at midday, I came upon him on my way home from school. I had heard the jingling of a horse's harness for some time before, out of the grey air and the gently swirling snow, a woodcutters' sledge drawn by the heavy bay belonging to the proprietor of the sawmill, appeared, bearing upon it what was plainly the body of a man under a wine-coloured horse blanket. The sledge, led by the saw-mill proprietor and accompanied by the Jungholz gendarme, halted at the crossroads at the very moment when Dr Piazolo approached, as if by prearrangement, ploughing through the knee-deep snow astride his Ztindapp. Dr Piazolo, who had evidently already been informed of the tragedy that had occurred, switched the engine off and walked over to the sledge. He drew the blanket down halfway, and beneath it, in what one might say was a peculiarly relaxed posture, there indeed lay the body of the hunter Hans Schlag from KoEgarten on the Neckar. His grey-green attire was hardly disturbed, quite as though nothing had happened. One might have supposed that Schlag had simply fallen asleep, had it not been for the dreadful pallor of his face and the wild hair and beard, streaked with frost and hard as ice. Dr Piazolo had taken off his black motorcycle gloves and, with a cautiousness uncharacteristic in him, was feeling different parts of the body, gone rigid with the cold and rigor mortis, which had set in some time ago. He voiced a suspicion that the hunter, who did not seem to have been injured, had to all appearances initially survived the fall from the footbridge. It was quite possible, he said, that the hunter had lost consciousness through sheer fright at the moment when he slipped, and that his fall had been broken by the saplings growing in the ravine. Death probably did not occur until some time afterwards, as a result of exposure. The gendarme, who had followed Dr Piazolo's conjectures and concurred with them, now reported for his part that the unfortunate Waldmann, who now lay as stiff as a poker at the feet of the hunter, had in point of fact still been alive when the tragedy was discovered. In his opinion, the gendarme said, the hunter had put the dachshund in his rucksack before crossing the bridge, and the rucksack had somehow been dislodged during the fall, for it was found a short distance away, with a trail leading from it across to Schlag, by whose side the dachshund had dug through the-snow into the forest floor, which was frozen only on the surface. Strangely enough, as soon as the hunter and his dog had been approached, Waldmann had suddenly gone raving mad, even though there was little more than a breath of life left in him, and he had to be shot there and then. Dr Piazolo bent down once more over the hunter, fascinated, it seemed, by the fact that the snowflakes lay on his face without melting. Then he carefully pulled the horse blanket up over the motionless figure, whereupon, triggered by God knows what slight touch or movement, the repeating watch in the hunter's waistcoat pocket played a bar or so of the song "Ob immer Treu und Redlichkeit". The men looked at each other with expressions of bewilderment. Dr Piazolo shook his head and climbed onto his motorcycle. The sledge moved on and, still unobserved, I slowly walked the rest of my way home. I have since learned that an autopsy was carried out on the body of Schlag the hunter, who apparently had no relatives of any sort, at the district hospital; it did not, however, yield any further insight beyond the cause of death already established by Dr Piazolo, except for the fact, described in the post-mortem report as curious, that a sailing ship was tattooed on the left upper arm of the dead man.

Shortly before Christmas, a few days after the encounter with the dead hunter, I succumbed to a grave illness which Dr Piazolo and a physician from the nearest town, whom he consulted, diagnosed as diphtheria. Confined to my bed, I lay there, my throat becoming increasingly sore until at length it felt raw and torn open inside and I was fearfully convulsed every few minutes by a cough that racked my chest and my whole body. My limbs, once the illness had me in its grip, seemed so heavy to me that I could no longer raise either my head or my legs or arms, indeed not even my hands. Deep within my body I felt an immense pressure, as if my organs were being put through a mangle.

Again and again I saw before me the village blacksmith with his tongs pulling my heart, licked by blue flames like St Elmo's fire, out of the glowing embers and plunging it into a bucket of ice-cold water. The headache alone forced me sometimes to the limits of consciousness, but it was not until the illness reached its climax, when my temperature had risen to a fraction below the critical point, that delirium saved me from the worst extremes of pain. As though in the middle of a desert I lay in a shimmer of heat, my lips cracked and grey and flaking and in my mouth the foul taste of the rotting skin in my throat. My grandfather dripped luke-warm water into my mouth, and I felt it slowly trickling down across the scorched patches inside my throat. Time and again, in my delirium, I saw myself gingerly stepping past Frau Sallaba, who sat weeping on the stairs that led down into the cellar, and there, in the furthermost, darkest corner, opening the door of the cupboard where preserved eggs were kept for winter months in a large earthenware crock. I put my hand and forearm through the chalky surface of the water almost to the bottom of the container, and to my horror I felt that what was stored in this pot was not eggs safely sequestered, each one of them, in its shell, but something soft, something that slipped through my fingers and which I instantly knew could only be eyeballs gouged from their sockets. Dr Piazolo, who at the onset of my illness had ordered my room to be turned into a quarantine ward which only my grandfather and mother were allowed to enter, had me swathed from head to toe in dampened warm sheets, which at first proved beneficial, but, because of the constriction, soon gave rise in me to panic and fear. Twice a day my mother had to wash the floor with vinegar water, and until dusk fell the windows of my sickward were kept wide open so that at times the snow drifted in almost as far as the middle of the room, and my grandfather would sit by my bed in his overcoat with his hat on his head. The illness ran its course over two weeks, until after Christmas, even when Epiphany had come round I could scarcely eat anything other than spoonfuls of bread and milk. The door to the quarantine ward was now left ajar, and some of those who lived and worked in our house took turns to put in an appearance at the threshold, including Romana a couple of times, gaping at this boy who, by dint of a miracle, had just escaped with his life. It was already Lent before I was allowed to go into the garden occasionally. For the time being, a return to school was ruled out. In the spring, for two hours a day, I was placed in the care of my teacher, Fràulein Rauch. Fràulein Rauch was the daughter of the chief forester, so every afternoon I went across to the shingled villa which stood in a small arboretum and was both the forestry commission's district office and the chief forester's home. There, when the weather was cold, I would sit with my teacher on the bench by the stove and on sunny days outside in the revolving summer-house under the trees, completely devoted to the tasks I was set, filling my exercise books with a web of lines and numbers in which I hoped to entangle Fràulein Rauch for ever.

I had spent the better part of a month, till the beginning of December, in W., and for more or less the entire time I had been the only guest at the Engelwirt inn. Only occasionally did one of those solitary commercial travellers appear, who spend the evenings in the bar room finishing off their day's work, calculating percentages and rates of commission. As I too was forever bent over my papers, they may well, at first, have taken me for another salesman but, after a closer look at my outward appearance, they probably decided that mine was a different and perhaps more dubious profession. Disturbed not so much by this scrutiny as by the first preparations that were being made in the house for the beginning of the winter season, I resolved to leave, particularly as my writing had reached the point at which I either had to continue for ever or break off. The following day, after changing several times and spending lengthy periods waiting on the platforms of draughty provincial stations — I cannot remember anything about this journey other than the grotesque figure of a middleaged chap of gigantic proportions who was wearing a hideous, modishly styled Trachten suit and a broad tie with multi-coloured bird feathers sewn onto it, which were ruffled by the wind — on that day, with W. already far behind me, I sat in the Hook of Holland express travelling through the German countryside, which has always been alien to me, straightened out and tidied up as it is to the last square inch and corner. Everything appeared to be appeased and numbed in some sinister way, and this sense of numbness soon came over me also. I did not care to open the newspapers that I had bought, or to drink the mineral water that was there before me. Stretches of grassland swept past on either side and ploughed fields in which the pale green winter wheat had emerged according to schedule; neatly delineated fir-tree plantations, gravel pits, football pitches, industrial estates, and the ever-expanding colonies of family homes behind their rustic fences and privet hedges, all of them painted in that slightly greyish shade of white which has become the preferred colour of the nation. As I looked out, it made me uneasy that not a soul was to be seen anywhere, though enough vehicles were speeding along the wet roads veiled in dense mists of spray. Even in the streets of the towns, there were far more cars than people. It was as if mankind had already made way for another species, or had fallen under a kind of curfew. The silence of my fellow passengers sitting motionless in the air-conditioned express carriage did nothing to dispel such conjectures, but as I looked out at the passing landscape which had been so thoroughly parcelled up and segmented, the words "south-west Germany", "south-west Germany" were running over and over in my mind, till after a couple of hours of mounting irritation I came to the conclusion that something like an eclipse of my mental faculties was about to occur.

The compulsive fixation did not wear off until the train pulled into Heidelberg station, where there were so many people crowding the platforms that I feared they were fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste. The last to come into my compartment of those passengers who had just boarded was a young woman wearing a beret of brown velvet whom I instantly recognised, without a shadow of a doubt, as Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who according to the chronicles travelled to Heidelberg as the bride of the Elector Palatine and, during the short period in which she held court there in great splendour, became known as the Winter Queen. No sooner had she sat down and settled herself into her corner than this young woman was deeply immersed in a book entitled The Seas of Bohemia, written by an authoress unknown to me by the name of Mila Stern. Only when we were travelling alongside the Rhine did she occasionally look up from her reading and glance out through the window at the river and the steep slopes of the opposite bank. A stiff northerly wind must have sprung up, because the flags on the barges that were ploughing their way upstream through the grey waters were not flying backwards from the stern but forwards, as in a child's drawing, and this lent the scene something that was at once touching and awry. The light outside had steadily diminished, and the great river valley was now filled with a faint luminescence. I stepped out into the corridor. The slate- and violet-coloured vineyards, hatched into the hillsides, were covered here and there with turquoise bird-netting. Snow now began to drift by, scoring delicate slanting lines over a view which was constantly changing as we slid past yet always remained the same. Suddenly I felt we were on our way to the far north, approaching the furthermost tip of the island of Hokkaido. The Winter Queen, who I believed had brought about this transformation of the Rhine landscape, had also come out into the corridor, and had already been standing watching the beautiful scene for some time at my side before I heard her reciting, entirely to herself, as it seemed to me, the following lines, with a long-lost inflexion in her voice:

That I did not know what to respond at the time, did not know how this winter verse continued, and, despite the feelings within me, could not say a word but merely stood there stupid and mute, looking out onto a world that was now almost gone in the fading twilight, is something which, since that day, I have often much regretted. Presently the Rhine valley opened out, gleaming apartment blocks appeared on the plain, and the train drew into Bonn, where the Winter Queen, without my having been able to say even a word to her, got out. Time and again since then, I have attempted to find that book, The Seas of Bohemia, but though it is undoubtedly of the greatest importance for me, it is, alas, not listed in any bibliography, in any catalogue, or indeed anywhere at all.

The following afternoon, back in London, my first port of call was the National Gallery. The painting by Pisanello that I wanted to see was not in its usual place, but owing to renovation work had been hung in a poorly lit room in the basement into which few of the visitors who wandered the gallery every day found their way. It is a small painting, measuring about 30 by 50 centimetres, lamentably imprisoned in a far too heavy Victorian frame. The upper half of the picture is almost completely filled by a golden disc, radiant against the blue of the sky and serving as a background for the Virgin and her Redeemer Child. Lower down runs a line of dark green treetops from one side to the other. On the left stands the patron saint of herds, herdsmen and lepers, St Anthony. He is wearing a dark red cowled habit and a capacious earthen-brown cloak. In his hand he holds a bell. Beside him lies a tame boar, close against the ground in kindly submission. The hermit with a stern expression surveys the shining knight who stands before him, and who, for his part, is all of this world, almost heart-rendingly so. The dragon, a ringed and winged creature, has already breathed its last. The ornate armour, wrought of white metal, draws the evening light unto it. Not the slightest shadow of guilt shows on the youthful face of St George. His neck and throat are bared to us, unprotected. The most remarkable feature, however, is the very finely worked broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with a large feather which the knight wears on his head. I wish I could know how Pisanello conceived the idea of furnishing St George with such inappropriate and positively extravagant headgear. San Giorgio con cappello di paglia — most odd indeed, as the two trusty horses gazing across the knight's shoulder may well be thinking too.

I made my way back from the National Gallery to Liverpool Street station on foot. As I did not want to walk along the Strand and then down Fleet Street, I negotiated the labyrinth of smaller streets above these busy thoroughfares; Chandos Place, Maiden Lane and Tavistock Street took me to Lincoln's Inn Fields and from there, via Holborn Circus and the Holborn Viaduct, I reached the western perimeter of the City. I cannot have covered much more than three miles, yet I felt as if I had never walked so far in my life than on that afternoon. I became fully aware of my fatigue, however, only as I paused at the threshold of an underground station, from which came the familiar sweetish, dusty warmth of the subterranean world, and, as I stood there, detected, like a scent which might stir the imaginings of an oarsman far out to sea, the faint perfume of the white, pink and russet-red chrysanthemums being sold at the entrance by a man with something of Prospero about him. I then realised that this was the station where, on my frequent journeys by tube, no one ever embarked or alighted. The train would stop, the doors open; one looked out onto the deserted platform and heard the warning "Mind the gap"; the doors would close again, and the train move off. Whenever I had travelled through that station it had been the same, and on not one occasion did any of the other passengers so much as raise an eyebrow. Evidently it was only I who found this strange circumstance unnerving. So now I stood on the pavement before the entrance to that very station and, if I were not to walk that last tiring stretch, I had only to enter the dark ticket hall where, apart from a black woman sitting in her inspector's box, there was no sign of life. Although I stood there for a considerable time, on the very brink so to speak, and even exchanged a few glances with the black inspector, I did not dare to take the final step.

The train rolled slowly out of Liverpool Street station, past the soot-stained brick walls the recesses of which have always seemed to me like parts of a vast system of catacombs that comes to the surface there. In the course of time a multitude of buddleias, which thrive in the most inauspicious conditions, had taken root in the gaps and cracks of the nineteenth-century brickwork. The last time I went past those black walls, on my way to Italy in the summer, the sparse shrubs were just flowering. And I could hardly believe my eyes, as the train was waiting at a signal, to see a yellow brimstone butterfly flitting about from one purple flower to the other, first at the top, then at the bottom, now on the left, constantly moving. But that was many months ago, and this butterfly memory was perhaps prompted only by a wishful thought. There was no room for doubt, however, about the reality of my poor fellow travellers, who had all set off early that morning neatly turned out and spruced up, but were now slumped in their seats like a defeated army and, before they turned to their newspapers, were staring out at the desolate forecourts of the metropolis with fixed unseeing eyes. Soon, where the wilderness of buildings thinned out a little, three tall blocks of flats entirely boxed in scaffolding and surrounded by uneven patches of grass became visible at some distance, while much further off, before the blazing strip of sky on the western horizon, rain fell like a great funeral pall from the dark-blue cloud that hung over the entire city. When the train changed track, I was able to glance back at the great towers of the City, rising far above everything around them, the topmost storeys gilded by the rays of the sun slanting in from the west. The suburbs swept past — Arden, Forest Gate, Maryland — before we reached the open countryside. The light over the western horizon was gradually extinguished. The shadows of evening were already settling on the fields and hedgerows. Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys's diary, Everyman's Library 1913, which I had purchased that afternoon, and read passages at random in this 1,500-page account, until drowsiness overcame me and I found myself going over the same few lines again and again without any notion what they meant. And then I dreamed that I was walking through a mountainous terrain. A white roadway of finely crushed stone stretched far ahead and in endless hairpins went on and up through the woods and finally, at the top of the pass, led through a deep cutting across to the other side of the high range, which I recognised in my dream as the Aips. Everything I saw from up there was of the same chalky colour, a bright, glaring grey in which a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered, as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light. From my vantage-point the road continued downward, and in the distance a second range of mountains at least as lofty as the first one arose, which I feared I would not be able to cross. To my left there was a drop into truly vertiginous depths. I walked to the edge of the road, and knew that I had never gazed down into such chasms before. Not a tree was there to be seen, not a bush, not even a stunted shrub or a tussock of grass: there was nothing but ice-grey shale. The shadows of the clouds scudded across the steep slopes and through the ravines. The silence was absolute, for even the last traces of plant life, the last rustling leaf or strip of bark, were long gone, and only "the stones lay unmoved upon on the ground. Into that breathless void, then, words returned to me as an echo that had almost faded away — fragments from the account of the Great Fire of London as recorded by Samuel Pepys. We saw the fire grow. It was not bright, it was a gruesome, evil, bloody flame, sweeping, before the wind, through all the City. Pigeons lay destroyed upon the pavements, in hundreds, their feathers singed and burned. A crowd of looters roams through Lincoln's Inn. The churches, houses, the woodwork and the building stones, ablaze at once. The churchyard yews ignited, each one a lighted torch, a shower of sparks now tumbling to the ground. And Bishop Braybrooke's grave is opened up, his body disinterred. Is this the end of time? A muffled, fearful, thudding sound, moving, like waves, throughout the air. The powder house exploded. We flee onto the water. The glare around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great arc the jagged wall of fire. And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as far as Windsor Park.