Original subtitles

You buy a book. You don't really know why.

It lies around, and then one day you open it, almost absent-mindedly.

And there you are, facing your own innermost secrets.

That's what happened to me with Austerlitz, by Sebald.

The title and cover photo led me to expect a historical novel.

Instead, I found a strangely familiar tale,

with black-and-white photos and texts about 19th-century architecture.

Mostly great railway stations, like the one in Antwerp

where we first meet the hero of this tale.

Only the simplest and smallest structures,

like a hut in a field, a lock-keeper's cottage,

a child's playhouse in the garden, bring us peace,

whereas grand monuments inspire only the wonder

that precedes terror,

for they already cast the shadow of their own destruction.

The sole aim of their gigantic size is to make beautiful ruins.

But there is also something poignant about railway stations.

Feelings of happiness mingled with sorrow.

The torment of leave-taking, a fear of the unknown.

Nothing to do with architecture.

But often our most grandiose plans

reveal the depth of our disquiet.

He's an art historian.

He's obsessed with 19th century architecture,

his single field of study.

The book's narrator crosses his path several times

in the late 1970s

and is enthralled by his unusual ideas.

Their final and most unlikely encounter

occurs at the Brussels Palace of Justice.

For years Austerlitz has been scouring it

for a secret labyrinth allegedly hidden inside.

The biggest stone pile in Europe.

Noteworthy for the amount of emptiness it holds.

It's said the bourgeois of Brussels were in such a rush

that the architect had no time to complete the plans.

So it's as though the palace built itself.

Out of control.

Some corridors lead nowhere

and some unused rooms have not even been mapped.

Was this by mistake, or a deliberate effort

to lead the seeker astray?

It's said that canny citizens of Brussels opened shops in forgotten rooms:

a bar, a tobacconist's, a gambling den, and I even heard

of public toilets, accessible from the street,

run by a gentleman named Achterbos.

Achterbos is an uncommon name.

But so is my own: Austerlitz,

Jacques Austerlitz.

A dark pall already hangs over these early encounters,

dark as the Antwerp Zoo Nocturama described early in the book.

The captive animals live there in a fake world of artificial night.

Their eyes, says the narrator, are very large.

So are Austerlitz's.

A painter's or thinker's eyes, made to pierce the night around us.

The narrator often sees Austerlitz in London, where they both live.

Then they lose sight of each other.

Twenty years go by.

One morning in 1996

the narrator awakes to find a spot

blurring the vision of his right eye.

Though he rarely speaks of himself,

he vividly describes his anxiety about this partial blindness,

as if to make us doubt the veracity of what comes next:

his miraculous encounter that same day with Austerlitz,

who materializes at a caf� in London's Liverpool Street station

and picks up as if they'd parted the day before.

This bar is one of ten at the Great Eastern Hotel,

whose main facade was right inside the station.

This is all that's left.

I gave up my research long ago,

but I occasionally return to my old passions

and I'm always amazed by the strange things we have built.

Just below us, in the basement,

is the old fish cellar of the station restaurant.

Every day, heaps of fish lay there,

hundreds of perch, pikes, plaice and eels.

A realm of the dead!

And upstairs

they recently found a Masonic temple, hidden behind a false wall.

The temple at the rails' end!

The only true network is the railway network.

I too knocked down a false wall.

I discovered the secret of my life.

And here you are to listen, as you did 20 years ago.

Unexpected, improbable, inevitable.

I grew up in Wales,

in the house of Elias,

a Calvinist preacher.

I knew he wasn't my real father,

but I'd no memory of my previous life.

I knew only that I was far from home, as if a captive.

I had only one book at the manse, a Welsh children's bible.

I didn't understand why only animals were saved.

I didn't see any children boarding the ark.

We also had a photo album of the preacher's home village

just before it was flooded for a reservoir

to supply drinking water to Liverpool.

In the last photographs

the houses were already in ruins

They had been demolished just before the flood.

The villagers looked tiny and slightly blurred among the ruins.

Evan the cobbler wasn't surprised.

"Death reduces people.

"They shrink, like linen the first time it's laundered."

I felt akin to those people.

I felt that I too had been engulfed by dark waters

and I too had to strain my eyes

to make out some image of the world far above.

All through my childhood at the manse

I sensed something was being hidden from me.

I remembered a few days ago

that my bedroom windows were walled up.

Against another flood, maybe,

but walled up only on the inside.

From the outside they looked normal.

Unlike those ones.

Those are the windows of the Masonic Temple.

Walled up, as always.

Such temples don't need windows.

Pigeons raised in a windowless room

never develop a sense of direction.

They also lose it if raised in artificial light

or in a cage rigged with mirrors that show the sun somewhere it is not.

The narrator listens, saying nothing.

So we don't know if Austerlitz's passion for architecture

stems from the blind windows of his childhood.

But I imagine him photographing every blind window he sees

so that nothing should be lost

and the tiny sorrows they hide should be saved from oblivion.

The next day Austerlitz takes the narrator to Greenwich Observatory,

where, every day at exactly 1 pm, a large wooden ball falls

to show the correct time, far and wide.

I've never had a wristwatch, nor an alarm clock.

I've always rebelled against the power of time

in the hope that it wouldn't pass,

that every moment would co-exist,

no more past nor future,

just a perpetual present.

But the result would be equally perpetual torment,

I would thus forever be a prisoner at the manse in Bala.

At the end of the war the preacher's wife fell ill

so Elias sent me to board at Stower Grange.

To the other children the school was a grim jail,

but to me it was freedom.

The school had a small unused darkroom

and some old cameras.

I started taking photographs.

Cobblestones. Factory chimneys.

Streaks in the sky.

In the darkroom, I waited for shapes to emerge like memories.

Oddly, I was good at rugby too.

I would smash through the opposition defence,

driven by some dull inner pain I was not even aware of.

Our team! A bunch of convicts.

I'm last on the right in the front row.

My name was still Dafydd Elias then.

In 1949 the head summoned me just before our exams.

For official reasons, he said, I should no longer put Dafydd Elias,

but my real name: Jacques Austerlitz.

"Jacques" I knew from a nursery rhyme.

Who had sung it to me?

But "Austerlitz"?

I couldn't even work out the spelling.

Luckily, the headmaster had typed it out for me.

All he knew was that the Eliases had adopted me before the war.

As for the strange name Austerlitz

the master said it was a village in Moravia

made famous by a great battle.

To know one's real name and not to look for more:

that's the key to bliss.

Later on in the book

Austerlitz finds he shares his name with Fred Astaire's father,

a native of Austria,

and a bow-legged circumciser from Prague mentioned by Kafka

and an Italian woman called Laura Austerlitz

who testified at a trial in 1966

concerning a crime committed in 1944

at a rice mill near Trieste.

This last note was so strange that I tried to find out more.

The San Sabba rice mill in Trieste was a Nazi concentration camp

and Laura Austerlitz, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz,

was a witness at the trial of the camp's SS guards.

But curiously Austerlitz doesn't mention this.

On the way back to London, Austerlitz doesn't talk of Trieste,

but of summer holidays spent

at his school friend Gerald's manor.

Gerald's uncle's butterfly collections,

Badminton games with Adela,

Gerald's young mother.

And a stuffed parrot

with which Jacques Austerlitz feels a kinship

because the parrot is a jaco. A jaco from Gabon.

The label on its case said it chattered away to itself and others.

Alphonso, Gerald's great-uncle, was a naturalist.

When the weather was fine, he'd paint watercolours outdoors.

To paint he always put on his glasses

with, instead of lenses, a fine fabric

that casts a silken-grey veil over the landscape,

subduing its colours and making the world lighter.

One night he took us to the top of a hill

to show us the mysterious world of moths.

An ancient and admirable species,

with a body temperature of 36�C.

Alphonso told us 36� was the ideal natural temperature,

a sort of magical threshold.

All our human misfortune, he said, comes from disregarding this norm.

We've heated up and are thus forever slightly feverish.

I found this a stupid idea.

I saw nothing wrong with a little bit of warmth.

I can still see Adela, as beautiful as she was then.

Late on those long summer days

we would often play badminton

while Gerald tended his pigeons before the night.

The shuttlecock flew to and fro,

cutting a white trail through the twilight.

Adela herself seemed to hover a few inches above the ground

for longer than the law of gravity allows.

This magical interlude ends

when Gerald learns to fly a light aircraft and dies in a crash.

A photo of the plane is printed on this this page.

It has no caption, nor does any other image inserted in the book.

Some relate directly to the story.

Others are more mysterious.

I stumble at these perplexing images.

I cannot read on until I find out what they really are.

Sometimes I succeed.

These tents pitched beside the pyramids look biblical.

Like Hebrews fleeing from Egypt.

It is, in fact, an Australian army camp during World War I.

A postcard from Austerlitz, inviting the narrator to his home.

Photographs.

We marvel at their ability to reproduce reality

but their other properties are even more valuable.

They are flat, for one thing.

You can pile them up,

lay them side by side,

overlap them so that one is partly hidden

and put them next to other things.

They don't move.

You can look at them at leisure.

Yet still they live their own lives.

The crucial thing's the table.

A solid surface.

Clear borders on all sides.

Nothing hidden, nothing buried, nothing below the surface.

As reassuring as the photos on it.

Reassuring and useful.

Imagine you lose your memory.

If you've been careful to take a photo just before,

you can recover some of the time lost.

I fainted once while studying in Paris.

I awoke in a hospital bed. I'd blacked out.

I had no memory of what had gone before.

Three weeks later, when I developed my film,

I saw that, just before I collapsed, I'd been in a museum.

But you don't want to see that.

Big building, tiny image.

Minuscule is the true size of memory.

The old National Library in Paris.

I went there to study after Gerald's death.

Marie de Verneuil.

She often read opposite me.

One day I must have looked unusually sad, and she suggested coffee.

As we were strolling through Palais-Royal,

we stopped at a shop window filled with Napoleonic toy soldiers.

She was studying the history of architecture too.

Talk of buildings was our bond.

She studied structures related to water.

Bridges, spas, houses on stilts, water mills,

like this one in Charentes, the strangest place she'd ever seen.

It belonged to twin brothers. Not these two.

They were easy to fell apart:

one was cross-eyed, the other a hunchback.

That's another advantage of photography.

The image is always pinned to the paper.

Unlike all these images floating around us,

impossible to pin down.

Marie invited me along to Bohemia

to complete her study of thermal spa architecture.

She wanted me to be her photographer,

but also to rescue me from my prison of loneliness.

Between Prague and Marienbad

two uniformed police motorcyclists tailed us.

They rode side by side,

like two phantoms, appearing and disappearing

as the road plunged into the valleys and rose on the crests,

from the top of which you could see as far, said Marie...

As far as the Bohemian shores of the Baltic Sea.

Which didn't strike me as absurd, though quite impossible.

Marienbad's hotels twisted geography, too.

The Pacifik, the Atlantik, the Donbass,

formerly the Florida.

And the Caucase, formely the Weimar,

by far the most imposing building.

But drawing closer, we saw it was shut

and had been for some time.

Curtains still hung in three ground-floor windows, one broken.

I felt they were hiding something vital to me,

something I might grasp if only I could concentrate.

Marie left me no time.

She wanted photos of the portico's Atlases,

their faces especially afflicted,

overwhelmed by the burden of the ornate masonry,

similar, said Marie, to the flab people came to Marienbad to shed.

Obesity was the great affliction of the bourgeoisie in the 1800s.

These buildings, dripping with ornament, are a symptom of it,

she told me that night in our hotel room.

"A cure at Marienbad is recommended for overeaters who hate exercise,

"if it doesn't upset their digestion.

"Case of a 181-lb lymphatic Silesian: dizziness, headaches, insomnia.

"A month's cure in Marienbad: now slim and free of morbid symptoms.

"A Russian woman, weight 205 lbs, lost 51 lbs in six weeks,

"and left many pains in Marienbad."

While Marie read

I was flooded with an immense feeling of happiness

at the idea that I was like these 19th-century patients.

Like them, I had an insidious disease

and, like them, I might hope to be cured.

Next morning Marie wanted to visit the Great Colonnade

then named the Soviet-Czechoslovak Friendship Colonnade.

All bare cast iron, with glass walls:

the 200-metre colonnade was devoid of mystery.

We went in.

I looked down the full length of the colonnade

and saw something I'd not expected.

For some unknown reason,

due to the terrain perhaps, or a neo-Baroque trick,

instead of running straight

the colonnade was slightly curved, like a railway line.

When I saw this bend, invisible from the outside,

I was gripped by vertigo.

Something inside me shifted

or rather my whole being shifted.

I was not inside myself but outside,

as if I now had nothing in common with myself.

I saw Marie walk away

to study some detail.

"And so the rescuer leaves without having rescued you," I thought,

feeling even these words weren't mine.

The next days increased the distance between us.

I felt hemmed in by mysteries.

The buildings' facades held sinister secrets about me.

I was as decrepit as they.

I took the photos Marie asked me to,

but I struggled to concentrate.

Whenever I peered through the lens

I felt a presence beside me

brushing against me

and that, due to some past mistake,

I was trapped in another's life.

Marie was baffled by my sudden remoteness

when I'd seemed so happy the first night.

I cannot repeat the words she used to fetch me back.

No one had ever spoken to me that way.

But I had no answer.

It was the day before my birthday.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give you all my best wishes.

It will be like wishing the best to some machine

whose operation is incomprehensible.

I still wonder what machine she had in mind.

You are a frozen pond.

You keep opening your mouth

to say something, to yell something even.

And then...

I hear no sound.

We were like two actors on a stage.

Her eyes changed colour as the light faded.

It was dark when we left the park.

After Marienbad, I returned to England.

I took a teaching post and continued my research.

I noted down every one of my ideas

in as tiny writing as possible, with increasingly fine pens,

but still they filled thousands of pages.

My office at the institute was too small.

I filled many boxes and brought them to this house I'd bought

thinking I'd stop teaching one day and complete my life's work here.

For evenings on end, I stared at the boxes,

thinking of the title I would give my study.

"Madness in 19th-Century Architecture."

"Monuments and Collective Memory." "Neo-Classicism or Barbarism."

I wrote out drafts on the wall.

I never had guests, anyway.

Here are traces of one,

an arrangement of thematic fragments in alphabetical order.

A grand watertight synthesis was beyond me.

Fragments are better.

More room to breathe.

Then one day I finally retired from teaching.

I opened my boxes... and...

Nothing!

Thousands of pages of clich�s, all of which rang false.

As if writing down my thoughts had stripped them of all meaning.

I saw the sentences dissolve into single words,

words into letters, letters breaking into signs.

Finally, all that remained was an inky spoor,

gleaming in places like snail slime,

filling me with shame and dread.

Austerlitz's anatomy of depression makes for painful reading.

I can't focus, my attention wavers

and I fall prey to the same stupor he describes.

Suddenly a word rouses me:

"Caspian Sea."

Until now, aside from the trip to Marienbad,

all the action has taken place in Northern Europe.

And now this Caspian Sea, 1,000 km to the east, in the Caucasus.

Why?

Short of answers, I typed it into a search engine.

If, at the time, someone had come and led me away to be executed,

I'd have followed meekly, without a word, eyes closed.

Like passengers on a ship crossing the Caspian, so seasick

that they offer no resistance if threatened to be cast overboard.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained,

page 253.

It's a direct quote.

Austerlitz had made it his own, without shame or inverted commas.

Intrigued, I go back over what I've already read.

I find other borrowings:

Kafka's ill-fated love story in Marienbad.

Walter Benjamin, and his gigantic, unfinished study of the 19th century

where he notes that insurgents shot at the Paris clock tower in 1830

to halt the course of time,

as did the child Austerlitz mentions who, to avoid school,

shoots the clock in the family manor to smithereens.

There's a stream of echoes rand quotes throughout the book.

Austerlitz's voice is a chorus of other authors' voices.

And regarding his sincerity,

after all we live in cities we did not build.

All the better if, after Proust,

Austerlitz then borrows from Wittgenstein to tell his disarray.

If language were an ancient city,

a labyrinth of alleys and squares,

a tight network of neighbourhoods, some old,

some torn down and rebuilt,

sprawling ever farther into the countryside,

I'd have been the long-absent inhabitant

who could no longer find his way around,

had no idea what a bus stop was for,

or a back yard,

an intersection, a boulevard, a bridge.

And here is my great work.

My "Profane Temples" are in the apple tree,

my "Glass Architecture: Mirror of Amnesia�

among the leeks

and the bush on the left

looks just like "The Interior and the Trace: Version One."

One night, I gathered up every scrap of my writings

and threw them on the compost heap,

burying the pages under alternate layers

of dirt and rotting leaves.

Then I tidied up, repainted the walls

and felt relieved of the burden of my life.

I read slowly, occasionally putting the book aside,

resuming a few days later, then stopping again.

The book suffers and comes unbound, with blocks of pages

resembling geological strata that was formed over time.

Excavating these strata, I discover long-buried objects.

Like this burial pit of an old lunatic asylum

found beneath Liverpool Street station.

Austerlitz is fascinated to it and takes pictures.

Death permeates his story.

During a short stay at St Clement's mental hospital,

he stares for hours at an abandoned cemetery below.

Each night, insomnia drives him into the streets of London

where he sees the ghosts of the millions buried underground.

His steps always take him to Liverpool Street station,

where, one day at dawn,

he sees an Indian street-sweeper in a white turban

disappear behind a construction fence.

Without knowing why, Austerlitz follows him.

As a child, I learned a little poem, "The Crossing Sweeper", by heart.

"A Hindu, in a turban white,

"plied his broom, left and right,

"so that a trip across the street would not soil the lady's feet."

A pathfinder.

I followed him.

I found myself in a disused waiting room

like an actor who arrives onstage to discover he's forgotten the lines

of the part he has played so often.

The ceiling seemed to be suspended at a prodigious height.

In the blink of an eye I saw vast chasms open.

Rows of pillars and columns as far as the eye could see.

Staircases of stone and wood, walkways.

Drawbridges spanning dizzying abysses.

Once, up on high, I thought I saw

a lacy cupola bordered by a fern-covered balustrade.

I didn't know whether I was in a ruin

or inside the skeleton of an unfinished structure.

It is hard to picture the space he describes.

I recognise parts of it:

the ferns on Roman ruins,

Piranesi's etchings of prisons,

where, as Austerlitz says, "vaults interlock like memories".

Then all these grandiose visions shrink

until all that remains is an image so simple even I can draw it.

This is what Austerlitz says he saw in the disused waiting room.

The preacher Elias and his wife,

and the child they have come to meet,

whom Austerlitz immediately recognises.

I realised I had sat in this very waiting room

when I arrived in London half a century ago.

For the first time I remembered all that I'd tried to forget.

The new clothes that made me miserable.

The inexplicable disappearance of my little green knapsack.

The slow fading of my native tongue.

But what that tongue was,

I still couldn't say.

I understood how poorly trained I was in the art of memory

and, conversely, how hard I had endeavoured

to forget everything associated with my unknown origins.

For example, I knew nothing - incredible as it seems today -

of the Nazi conquest of Europe,

and the slavery state they built.

Nothing of the persecutions I'd escaped.

For me, world history ended in the late 19th century.

I ventured no farther, despite all the signs in my studies

pointing towards the disaster to come.

My interest in architecture

was simply a way of walling up my memories

and protecting myself from my past.

And... like fortification builders

outrun by progress in ballistics,

I had to keep extending my defences, my amnesia.

Until the growing demands of this censorship

led to my nervous breakdown in summer 1992.

But I still had absolutely no idea where I came from,

who I used to be.

The jigsaw pieces somehow fall into place,

as locomotive smoke mingles with that of fires to come.

The final piece is a train.

In the summer of 1939 it left German-occupied Prague for London,

carrying Czech Jewish children that Britain had agreed to take in,

saving them from the Nazis,

but without their parents.

Austerlitz happens to hear a radio programme

about one of these children, also adopted by an English family,

he realises that he was in that particular trip

and also came from Prague.

A single page divides Prague from what's gone before.

To the left, darkness, confusion,

London and its graveyards.

To the right, the cobbles of Prague - where Austerlitz swiftly heads -

their strange patterns and small size,

suited to a city that fears no riots.

The uneven cobblestones are firm beneath his feet,

awaken his numbed senses and jolt his memory.

Mine too. I see the same cobbles in photos of my childhood.

And suddenly I see the book in an entirely new light,

spawning the absurd idea

that it was written just for me.

The evening I arrived, I saw Prague from the castle terraces.

The big television tower glowed above the city.

As a boy, I was riveted by the names of the stations

on the old radio dial in the Welsh manse.

Monte-Ceneri, Berom�nster,

Hilversum, Beograd.

That evening, I needed no radio to hear the voices.

That float through the air after nightfall,

flying, like bats, only at night, shunning daylight.

I saw their jagged lines in the sky

and dreamed of joining them.

The next day, I went to the state archives in Karmelitska Street.

From the outside, it looked like a mansion.

But what I found inside was such a surprise

that I forgot why I'd come

and began taking photographs,

as I once had.

A glass dome above a huge inner courtyard.

A grand staircase of a kind I'd never seen before,

leading to three levels of catwalks,

reminding me of a prison, a monastery,

an opera house and a lunatic asylum.

All of these images intermingled in my mind.

Looking up at the catwalks,

I thought I saw a crowd of people waving hats and handkerchiefs,

like passengers on a steamer sailing out to sea.

A warden appeared.

He didn't understand English, but a clerk did.

She took me up to her office on the 3rd floor.

I told her what I was looking for, and she went out.

Behind the plants, there were Socialist-era photos of the building

as well as 19th-century pictures.

It was a military barracks then,

and before that, the Central Prague post office

and, at the very beginning, a church.

The clerk returned with a list of every Austerlitz

who'd lived in Prague in the last two centuries.

By 1938

only seven remained.

Six men:

Austerlitz Leopold, Austerlitz Viktor,

Austerlitz Tomas,

Austerlitz Jeronym,

Austerlitz Edward, Austerlitz Frantisek.

And one woman:

Austerlitzova Agata.

Jacques Austerlitz visits the nearest address first:

that of Agata Austerlitzova.

On the way there everything beckons to him:

a blue dog on a door lintel,

a lightning bolt on the electricity meter at 12 Sporkova Street.

On the top floor, I rang at the door on the right.

An elderly woman opened.

I'd learnt one sentence in Czech...

"Sorry to disturb you.

"I'm looking for Mrs Agata Austerlitzova."

In alarm, she covered her face with her hands,

hands that I immediately recognised.

Then she peered at me through her fingers.

She whispered in French: "Jacquot!"

Yes, Jacquot, the diminutive of Jacques.

"Jacquot...

"Is it really you?"

Nothing had changed since my childhood.

All had stayed the same throughout my other life,

whose long years now engulfed me,

because, Vera told me,

since she'd lost me and my mother, who was like a sister,

she couldn't bear the slightest change.

I don't know whose story tumbled out first.

We spoke mainly

of my father, Maximilian,

a Czech Social Democrat official,

and my mother, Agata,

an actress who worshipped Jacques Offenbach -

hence my unusual first name for a Czech.

When I was born, Vera, still a student,

offered to babysit for me.

When we returned from our walks

you'd stand at this window

and watch the humpbacked tailor

in his workshop in the building opposite.

While I made you a snack

you would describe his every movement.

You had strange powers of observation.

At bedtime, I would read you your favourite book.

It was about the four seasons.

When we got to winter

you would always ask...

"When everything is covered with snow

"how do the squirrels

"find the spot where they buried

"their hazelnuts?"

That question obsessed you.

How do squirrels remember?

How do we remember?

She spoke in French,

but sometimes unconsciously switched into Czech.

I'd never heard or spoken this language,

but I understood her,

like a deaf man whose hearing is miraculously restored.

The tailor, said Vera, often came out in the evening

to empty the hot embers from his heavy iron.

And now, as night had fallen,

I locked out the window

and saw the sparks flying in the night.

In autumn 1938, Vera said,

Agata was cast in her dream role: Olympia, in The Tales of Hoffmann,

at the Estates Theatre.

I bribed the guard to unlock the door to the empty auditorium.

On the stage shone a single bulb,

left on between performances, I was told later on,

to keep ghosts away from the stage without actors.

Others say it gives the ghosts a chance to act too.

At one point I thought I saw,

poking out from under the curtain,

the toe of a sky-blue shoe with silver sequins.

That evening

Vera told me that Agata wore the same blue shoes to play Olympia.

I thought my head would burst.

Yesterday I came across this in an old book.

It looks like a provincial theatre.

The man and woman might be your parents

or your mother with her impresario.

Or maybe complete strangers.

The photo's too small to say for sure.

But I have absolutely no doubts about this one.

It's you.

Six months before you left Prague.

It says on the back:

"Jacquot in his pageboy costume."

I've scrutinized it closely since.

It is me.

But the image arouses absolutely no memory,

no emotion in me.

Only a sort of blind panic.

The child has come to claim his due.

This flow of memories, mixing the voices of Austerlitz and Vera,

becomes hard to follow.

Late in the evening, Austerlitz interrupts his tale

and invites the narrator to stay the night.

In the guest room are five boxes

and an old radio playing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

In each box a tattered moth,

as translucent as the book's photos.

Ghosts, rather than images,

memories flattened like pressed flowers,

like the wood anemones on the slopes of the parks of Prague

where Austerlitz played as a child.

"The Tales of Hoffman"

finished rehearsing in October 1938,

as the Germans were annexing the Sudetenland.

Your father had fought

to make Czechoslovakia a bastion of resistance

in the heart of fascist Europe.

On 14 March 1939

he bade us farewell

and fled to Paris

to escape imminent arrest.

The next morning

the Germans marched into Prague.

Silence fell on the city.

German law and order.

Cars abruptly had to drive

on the right-hand side of the street.

And every time I saw a car driving on the right of the street,

I knew that we were living in a world out of kilter.

[ OFFICE HOURS FOR JEWS: 8-9 a.m. only ]

[ OFFICE HOURS FOR JEWS: 8-9 a.m. only ] For Agata, it was much worse.

As a Jew, she was only allowed to go out at certain times of day.

[ Jews are banned from Prague's district forests ] She was banned from the stage,

entering parks and gardens,

[ Ban on selling caps to Jews ] from using a public telephone.

[ Use of laundries forbidden to Jews ]

In the summer of 1939

she managed to send you away

on one of the few trains taking Jewish children from Prague to London.

I went to the station with you.

Then came Agata's turn.

One day in winter 1942,

at three in the morning,

two officials from the Jewish Council

- they always came at night, in pairs -

brought her an order for...

... for her transfer to the Terezin Ghetto.

With a detailed list of instructions for what to do,

prepare and... take with her.

Six days later,

we put her luggage on a sled before dawn

and went to the assembly place for Jewish deportees.

As we approached

we saw little groups of people emerging from the darkness

and heading for the same place.

We reached the entrance, which was lit by a single bulb.

I waited with Agata for several hours

in the jostling crowd

and then

she went in

where no Czech could follow her.

That night

a man from the Office for Confiscated Jewish Goods

came to seal off your apartment.

Then removal men came to take everything away.

The furniture, the books, the carpets,

the house plants.

I tried to save a few pictures.

Your family photos.

They wouldn't let me in.

Then came a worker from the sanitation department.

I still see him in my dreams,

fumigating the empty rooms with white and toxic clouds.

The train from Prague stopped at Lovosice.

No taxis at the station.

It was an hour and a half walk to the fort.

I followed the road, expecting to see the huge fortifications

loom above the horizon.

But the fort is nestled in a marshy hollow

and appears only at the last minute.

When Agata was deported here in 1942

60,000 Jews were crowded into the old barracks,

which were now empty.

The geometric grid of streets

reminded me of The City of the Sun,

Campanella's utopian city,

surrounded by seven walls and ruled by a metaphysician.

A model world governed by reason and laws believed to be eternal.

Vera told me Terezin was an ordinary town again.

But I saw no one that morning.

Anyway, I couldn't imagine

people making their homes in these shabby buildings

with bricked-up windows.

Most sinister were these portals, which seemed to conceal a darkness

where none had ever ventured.

This morning, before waking,

I saw inside one of these barracks,

strung from floor to ceiling with cobwebs.

In my semi-sleep,

I tried to fix this image made of grey dust,

striving... to make out what was hidden there.

But a second image intruded.

The Antikos Bazar on Terezin's main square.

I waited in vain for someone to open up.

The things in the shop window had outlived their owners.

A stuffed squirrel stared at me with its glass eye.

Timeless, frozen forever.

I spent the rest of the day at the Ghetto Museum,

scrutinizing the surprising number of photographs,

searching for a familiar face that would recall my mother.

Back in Prague, I went to say goodbye to Vera.

I won't go with you to the station tomorrow.

I went with Agata and you

the day you left for London

with your little green knapsack.

Once your train was out of sight,

Agata turned to me and said,

"Last summer, we went to Marienbad from here.

"And now...

"where are we going?"

And I saw myself in Marienbad.

Not in 1938, with Vera and my parents - that memory was gone -

but in August 1972

when my apparent turn of fortune struck me with blind panic.

I returned to London.

I had come by plane, I went back by train,

from the same station as in 1939,

crossing Germany like the terrified child I'd been.

The two journeys merged into one.

The adult looked out the window

and the child saw the endless dark forest,

storing away all the nightmares

that would haunt him his whole life.

Then I learned the Nazis had made a propaganda film

shot in the Ghetto in late 1944.

It was staged on a scenario by the SS.

Vera thought that by then Agata had been sent to Auschwitz.

But I was sure to find her in one of these pictures.

I obtained a copy.

I watched it over and over.

But it moved too fast.

I didn't have enough time to recognize somebody

in the series of fleeting faces.

I had a slow-motion copy made

and watched it endlessly, discovering previously hidden things.

The inmates put on a piece Pavel Haas wrote at Terezin.

100 people were conscripted as an audience.

There!

This woman's face...

It's hard to see.

I can't remove the numbers.

But the necklace looked familiar.

I went back to Prague to show Vera.

She wasn't at all sure.

She told me to go to the National Theatre archives.

I spent several days there.

Here at last!

There was no name on it, but Vera was certain. It's Agata.

Striking, isn't it?

Then, rather surprisingly,

Austerlitz gives the picture to the narrator as a souvenir

and sets out to track down his father.

After some time, the narrator receives another postcard

- Austerlitz railway station in the 1910 floods -

suggesting they meet in Paris at a caf� on Blvd Blanqui.

[ Auguste Blanqui ] [ Permanent insurgent ]

The revolutionary Blanqui

formed some curious ideas as an old man

in a book he wrote in jail:

Eternity through the Stars.

"What I am writing now in jail in Fort du Taureau,

"I've already written and will be writing for all eternity.

"It is newness ever-old and oldness ever-new.�

Vera remembered the addresses my father sent us.

A hotel at Od�on, and one here,

near Blvd Blanqui.

For months I've been roaming around here, hoping to meet him.

Just like that.

Like Blanqui, thinking he is jailed for eternity,

Austerlitz is a prisoner of his memories.

Visiting the Paris Zoo with the narrator,

he feels sympathy once more for the captive animals,

as he had with Marie de Verneuil, right here, 30 years ago.

Marie and I ended up in a wasteland near the station,

where a travelling circus had set up.

The feelings I had as I listened to that alien music,

conjured from the air by out-of-tune instruments,

still mystify me.

An impassive white goose stood in the ring.

It was immobile, its neck craned towards the roof.

It listened until the last note,

as it it knew its own fate and that of its present companions.

The circus tent was pitched right here.

Before that, a warehouse stood here,

in which the Germans set up a camp for Jewish detainees

to sort the loot from Jewish homes.

Louis XVI dressers, Meissen porcelain,

Persian carpets, libraries, rare stamps, furs,

radios, cutlery sets.

The inmates came from Drancy.

They called this camp the "Austerlitz Department Store".

German bigwigs and their wives browsed the wares.

A set of S�vres china.

A Pleyel piano.

Where has it all gone?

No one wants to know now.

It's buried under these foundations.

What is left?

No curved lines.

No trace of the past.

Just straight lines. Smooth, clean, amnesiac.

Everything slides. Nothing holds.

19th-century architecture is mocked

for its garlands and frills,

the elaborate swirls on its capitals.

Dust collectors,

superficial, outdated - all that and more.

But at least,

memories clung to them.

The journey ends at Austerlitz station,

where his father's final trail leads.

There too, Jacques Austerlitz disappears

after handing the narrator the keys to his London home

so he can quietly study the photos he has left,

the sole remaining traces of his life.

With Austerlitz gone,

the narrator tells us the London house

is beside a small Jewish cemetery cramped between properties.

Then he returns to Belgium, where it all began,

and thus the book ends

without saying any more about Austerlitz and his story.

Yet I can't get the book off my mind.

I keep rereading parts

and constantly discover details I hadn't noticed before,

uncovering layer upon layer of ramifications and correspondences.

As if the book kept overflowing its boundaries,

refusing to be closed, prodding the reader with new questions.

Questions not only about Jacques Austerlitz's story,

but about Sebald's writing process,

his secret formula for this alloy of fiction and fact,

of which he gives us the odd playful glimpse

but leaves each of us free to go further, or not.

For me, going further means returning to Prague, my home.

I've always been struck by the precision of his parents' address.

Sebald give the right number: 12 Sporkova St.

An invitation to go and see.

I met many animals on the way

including the blue dog. It's a fox.

Sporkova Street, number 12.

The door was closed.

A nun unlocked it and disappeared inside.

Hello. Sisters of Saint Borromeo.

Hello? Sisters of Saint Borromeo.

Hello? Sisters of Saint Borromeo.

The nun returned.

No Vera ever lived here.

It was a convent. And before that, until 1950,

a Catholic orphanage for girls.

All these girls shared with Austerlitz was being orphans like him.

I showed Agata's portrait to a Czech friend.

She laughed and told me to look in the bookshop window next door.

Then she played me Destinova on the internet.

I found the odd staircase

Austerlitz photographed in the state archives courtyard,

reminding him of a prison yard,

bathed in twilight, inspiring all manner of hallucinations.

No doubt, it was the same staircase,

but the hall was spacious and bright.

It was the Museum of Music.

A piano and rows of chairs were set up for that night's concert.

I thought Sebald had played another prank, but he hadn't.

An elderly guard recognised the picture in the book,

because of the cars in the yard.

That's me at the time.

I found it hard to recognise him

in his archives chief guard uniform.

Everyone had a photo to show, but none quite matched.

I went to the district where Vera saw Agata vanish

into the assembly camp for deportees to Terezin.

The camp was razed and replaced by a hotel.

I found two postcards of the camp's barracks

but they date from the 1930s, before the Nazis.

At the time, they housed a big market selling radios. '

Nearby, the station from where trains left for Terezin still stands.

Now disused, it may be razed and become a museum.

But a few trains still stop here.

Today, the simplest way to reach Terezin is by bus.

It's barely an hour away.

A billboard on the ghetto walls celebrates the 18th-century fort.

"Welcome to Terezin."

Actors dressed like Austerlitz in his page costume joyously gore each other.

Inside, an old electrical transformer built by Jewish inmates

bears the date 1941, the year the ghetto was opened.

Throughout the city, it's the only inscription

which is a testimony from that era.

In a barrack courtyard

I saw the remains of one of the gates that scared Austerlitz.

After his visit, they were replaced when Terezin was flooded.

The Antikos Bazar he lingered outside

is now a grocery store.

I took refuge in the Ghetto Museum.

In a display cabinet I saw the faces of those who died here.

No need to be their child to recognise them.

The Small Fortress was used as a Gestapo jail.

It houses a museum

with a permanent collection...

Unlike the Ghetto, the whole Small Fortress is a museum.

Hence the well-tended look, this "Arbeit Macht Frei"

repainted yearly to welcome visitors.

The Prague Gestapo commanded this part of Terezin.

It was a camp and a place of execution

for partisans and Communists.

Prisoner files were kept in this room,

which Austerlitz never visited,

even though there's a photo of it at the end of the book.

In March 1945 one of these cubbyholes

contained my father's file.

He was imprisoned here aged 18

with his school resistance group. He alone survived.

I was where the book had led me and left me alone

with the tenuous thread of my past.

This is my father dressed up as Robinson Crusoe.

Right foot forward, like Austerlitz in his boyhood photo.

Time's little castaway, frozen forever.

Like this staring squirrel in Greenwich Park,

like this handless clock I photographed

when I was looking for Austerlitz's footsteps at Prague main station.

I filmed it, too,

compelled to find out what the picture was hiding.

An empty room.

A world from which a vital part was torn,

leaving a gap that only words can fill.

I'm increasingly convinced time did not exist at all,

only interlocking spaces

between which the living and the dead move as they like.

And the more I think about it

the more it seems that we the living

are unreal beings in the eyes of the dead,

only sometimes becoming visible.