Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

Though Mother is long reluctant to let us out of the home, Leo and I are sent to the day nursery when we are four or five. We do not need to go till after morning prayers. It is all very straightforward. The Sister is already in the yard. You go up to her and say: Frau Adelinde, may I have a ball, please? Then you take the ball across the yard and down the steps to the playground. The playground is at the bottom of the broad moat that circles the old castle, where there are now colourful flower beds and vegetable patches. Right above the playground, in a long suite of rooms in the almost completely deserted castle, lives Regina Zufrass. As everyone knows, she is a terribly busy woman and is always hard at work, even on Sundays. Either she is looking after her poultry or you see her in amongst the beanpoles or she is mending the fence or rummaging in one of the rooms, which are far too big for her and her husband. We even saw Regina Zufrass up on the roof once, fixing the weather vane, and we watched with bated breath, expecting her to fall off at any moment and land on the balcony with every bone in her body broken. Her husband, Jofferle, jobs as a waggoner in the village. Regina is none too pleased with him, and he for his part, so they say, is frightened to go home to her. Often people have to be sent to look for him. They tend to find him drunk, sprawled out beside the overturned hay-cart. The horses have long been used to all this and stay patiently by the up-ended waggon. At length the hay is loaded back on and Jofferle is fetched home by Regina. The next day, the green shutters at their windows remain shut, and when we children are eating our sandwiches down in the playground we wonder what can be going on in there. And then, every Thursday morning Mama draws a fish on the waxed paper she wraps the sandwiches in, so that we won't forget to buy half a dozen barbels from the fish man on our way home from the kindergarten. In the afternoon, Leo and I walk hand in hand along the Saale, on the bank where there is a dense copse of willows and alders, and rushes grow, past the sawmill and across the little bridge, where we stop to look down at the golden ringlets round the pebbles on the riverbed before we go on to the fish man's cottage, which is surrounded by bushes. First we have to wait in the parlour while the fish man's wife fetches the fish man. A fat-bellied white coffeepot with a cobalt blue knob is always on the table, and sometimes it seems as if it fills the whole room. The fish man appears in the doorway and takes us straight out through the slightly sloping garden, past his radiant dahlias, down to the Saale, where he takes out the barbels one by one from a big wooden crate in the water. When we eat them for supper we are not allowed to speak because of the bones, and have to keep as quiet as fish ourselves. I never felt particularly comfortable about those meals, and the skewed fish-eyes often went on watching me even in my sleep.

In summer, on the Sabbath, we often take a long walk to Bad Bocklet, where we can stroll around the colonnaded hall and watch the fashionably dressed people taking coffee; or, if it is too hot for a walk, we sit in the late afternoon with the Liebermanns and the Feldhahns in the shade of the chestnut trees by the bowling alley in Reuss's beer garden. The men have beer and the children have lemonade; the women can never decide what they want, and only take a sip of everything, while they cut up the Sabbath loaves and salted beef. After supper, some of the men play billiards, which is thought very daring and progressive. Ferdinand Lion even smokes a cigar! Afterwards they all go to the synagogue together. The women pack the things up and as dusk falls they make their way home with the children. Once, on his way home, Leo is wretched because of his new sailor's outfit, made of starched bright blue and white cotton — mainly because of the fat tie and the bibbed collar that hangs over his shoulders, sporting crossed anchors which Mother sat up very late embroidering the night before. Not until we are sitting on the front steps, by which time it is already dark, watching the storm clouds shift in the sky, does he gradually forget his misery. Once

Father is home, the candle made of many interwoven strands of wax is lit to mark the end of the Sabbath. We smell the little spice-box and go upstairs to bed. Soon dazzling white lightning is flashing across the sky, and the crashes of thunder set the whole house shaking. We stand at the window. There are moments when it is brighter than daylight outside. Clumps of hay are afloat on the swirling waters in the gutters. Then the storm passes over, but presently returns once more. Papa says it cannot make it over Windheim woods.

On Sunday afternoon Papa does his accounts. He takes a small key out of a leather pouch, unlocks the gleaming walnut bureau, opens the centre section, puts the key back into the pouch, sits down with a certain ceremony, and, settling himself, takes out the hefty account book. For an hour or so he makes entries and notes in this book and a number of smaller ones, and on pieces of paper cut to various sizes; softly moving his lips, he adds up long columns of figures and makes calculations, and, depending on what the results are like, his face will brighten up or cloud over for a time. A great many special things are kept in the numerous drawers of the bureau — deeds, certificates, correspondence, Mamas jewellery, and a broad ribbon to which large and small pieces of silver are attached by narrow braids of silk, as if they were medals or decorations: the hollegrasch coins that Leo is given by his godfather Selmar in Leutershausen every year, which I covetously marvel at. Mama sits in the living room with Papa, reading the Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten — all the things she did not get round to reading during the week, for preference the spa columns and a miscellany feature. Whenever she comes across something incredible or remarkable she reads it out to Papa, who has to stop his adding up for a while. Perhaps because I couldn't get the story of Paulinchen, the girl who went up in flames, out of my head at that time, I can hear Mama even now telling Papa in her very own theatrical way (in her youth she had dreamt of being an actress) that ladies' dresses could now be fireproofed, for an exceedingly low cost, by immersing the material they were to be made from in a solution of zinc chloride. Even the finest of materials, I still hear Mama informing Papa, can be held to a naked flame after it has been thus treated, and it will char to ash without catching fire. If I am not with my parents in the living room on those eternally long Sundays, I am upstairs in the green room. In summer, when it is hot, the windows are open but the shutters are closed, and the light that enters makes a slanted Jacob's ladder pattern in the twilight around me. It is very quiet in the house, and throughout the neighbourhood. In the afternoon, the carriages out on excursions from the spa at Kissingen pass through the village. You can hear the horses' hooves from a long way off. I open one of the shutters a little and look down the road. The coaches drive via Steinach to Neustadt and Neuhaus and on to Salzburg castle, and in them the summer spa clientèle sit facing each other, grand ladies and gentlemen and, not infrequently, real Russian celebrities. The ladies are very finely turned out in feather bonnets and veils and with parasols of lace or brightly coloured silk. The village boys turn cartwheels right in front of the carriages, and the elegant passengers toss them copper coins by way of reward.

Autumn arrives, and the autumn holidays are approaching. First comes Rosh Hashanah, bringing in the New Year. The day before, all the rooms are swept, and on the eve Mama and Papa go to the synagogue, wearing their festive best: Papa in his frock coat and top hat, Mama in her deep blue velvet dress and the bonnet made entirely of white lilac blossom. Meanwhile, at home, Leo and I spread a starched linen cloth on the table and place the wine glasses on it, and under our parents' plates we put our New Year letters, written in our finest hand. A week and a half later is Yom Kippur. Father, in his death robes, moves about the house like a ghost. A mood of rue and penitence prevails. None of us will eat until the stars rise. Anbeiƒen. And four days later it is already the Feast of Tabernacles. Franz has put up the trellis for the sukkah under the elder, and we have decorated it with colourful garlands of glossy paper and long chains of threaded rosehips. From the ceiling hang ruddy-cheeked apples, yellow pears and golden-green grapes which Aunt Elise sends us every year from Mainstockheim in a little box lined with wood-shavings. On the two main and four half feast days we shall take our meals in the sukkah, unless the weather is exceptionally bad and cold. Then we stay in the kitchen, and only Papa will sit out in the bower, eating all by himself — a sign that winter is gradually coming. It is also at this time of the year that a wild boar the Prince Regent has shot in the Rhön is brought to Steinach, where its bristles are singed off outside the smithy on a wood fire. At home we study the May & Edlich catalogue from Leipzig, a thick compendious volume that reveals the entire wondrous world of merchandise, page after page, classified and described. Out of doors the colours gradually fade away. Our winter clothes are fetched out. They smell of naphthalene. Towards the end of November the Young Progressives' Club holds a masked ball at Reuss's. Frau Miintzer from Neustadt has made Mama a dress of raspberry-coloured silk for the occasion. The gown is long and flounced very elegantly at the hem. The children are allowed to watch the opening of the ball from the doorway to the next room. The hall is abuzz with festive murmuring. To set the mood, the band plays tunes from operettas, softly, till Herr Hainbuch, who works for the forestry commission, climbs onto the dais and, by way of an official start to the occasion, delivers a speech in praise of the fatherland. Glasses are raised, a flourish from the band, the masks gaze seriously into each other's eyes, another flourish, and the landlord, Herr Reuss, carries in a black box with a tulip-shaped metal funnel — the new gramophone, which pours forth real music without one's needing to do a thing. "We are speechless with wonder. The ladies and gentlemen take their positions for a polonaise. Silberberg, the cobbler, quite unrecognizable in his tails, black tie, tie pin and patent leather shoes, walks ahead, conducting with a baton. Behind him come the couples, wheeling and twirling about the hall in every conceivable kind of way. The loveliest of them all, by far, is Aline Feldhahn as the Queen of the Night, in a dark dress bestrewn with stars. She is partnered by Siegfried Frey, wearing his hussar's uniform. Aline and Siegfried later married and had two children, but Siegfried, who was said to have a taste for dissipation, suddenly disappeared, and neither Aline nor old Löb Frey nor anyone else ever found out what became of him. Kathinka Strauss, though, claimed that Siegfried emigrated, to Argentina or Panama.