Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

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

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

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