Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

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

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

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

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