Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

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