Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

We have been going to school for a few years now. It is a school where we are all taught together in one form, exclusively for Jewish children. Our teacher, Salomon Bein, whose excellence the parents miss no opportunity to praise, imposes strict discipline, and sees himself first and foremost as a loyal servant of the state. Together with his lady wife and his unmarried sister Regine, he lives in the schoolhouse. In the mornings, when we cross the yard, he is already there in the doorway, spurring latecomers along by shouting hopp! hopp! and clapping his hands. In the classroom, after the blessing — Thou who hast made the day, O Lord — and after we have sharpened our slate pencils and cleaned our quill pens, jobs I dislike and which Herr Bein supervises closely, we are delegated to various tasks in rotation. Some are assigned to practise their handwriting; others have to do sums; yet others have to write an essay, or draw in their local history books. One group has visual instruction. A scroll is fetched out from the back of the cupboard and hung in front of the blackboard. The whole picture is of nothing but snow, with one coal-black raven in the middle. During the first one or two periods, especially in winter when the daylight never really brightens, I am always very slow about my work. I look out through the blue panes and see the deaf and dumb daughter of Stern, the flour merchant, on the other side of the yard, sitting at her work bench in her little room. She makes artificial flowers out of wire, crèpe and tissue paper, dozens of them, day in, day out, year in, year out. In nature study we learn about real flowers: larkspur, Turk's cap lily, loosestrife and lady's smock. We also learn about red ants and whales, from the animal kingdom. And once, when the village street is being newly surfaced, the teacher draws a picture on the blackboard, in coloured chalks, of the Vogelsberg as an erupting volcano, and explains where the blocks of basalt come from. He also has a collection of colourful stones in his minerals cabinet — rose quartz, rock crystal, amethyst, topaz and tourmaline. We draw a long line to mark how much time it has taken for them to form. Our entire lives would not even show as the tiniest dot on that line. Even so, the hours at school stretch as vast as the Pacific Ocean, and it takes an eternity till Moses Lion, who is sent to fetch wood almost every day by way of punishment, comes back up from the wood store with a basketful. Then, before we know it, Hanukkah is upon us, and it is Herr Bein's birthday. The day before, we decorate the walls of the classroom with branches of fir and little blue and yellow flags. We place the present on the teacher's desk. I remember that on one occasion it was a red velvet blanket, and once a copper hot-water bottle. On the morning of the birthday we all gather early in the classroom, in our best clothes. Then the teacher arrives, followed by his wife and the slightly dwarfish Fràulein Regine. We all stand up and say: Good morning, Herr Bein! Good morning, Frau Bein! Good morning, Fraulein Regine! Our teacher, who has of course long since known what was being prepared, affects to be completely surprised by his present and the decorations. He raises a hand to his forehead, several times, shaking his head, as if he does not know what to say, and, deeply touched, walks up and down the class, thanking each one of us effusively. There are no lessons today; instead, stories and German legends of old are read aloud. We also have a guessing game. For instance, we have to guess the three things that give and take in infinite plenty. Of course no one knows the answer, which Herr Bein then tells us in tones of great significance: the earth, the sea, and the Reich. Perhaps the best thing about that day is that, before we go home, we are allowed to jump over the Hanukkah candles, which have been fixed to the threshold with drops of wax. It is a long winter. At home, Papa does exercises with us in the evening. The geese are gone from their hutch. Soon after, parts of them are preserved in boiling hot fat. Some village women come to slice the quills from the feathers. They sit in the spare room, each with a heap of down in front of her, slicing almost the whole night long. It looks as if snow has fallen. But the next morning, when we get up, the room is so clean, so devoid of feathers, that you'd think nothing had ever happened. Early in the year, spring cleaning has to be done in preparation for Passover. It is worse at school. Frau Bein and Fràulein Regine are at it for at least a week. The mattresses are taken out to the yard, the bedding is hung over the balcony, the floors are newly waxed, and all the cooking utensils are immersed in boiling water. We children have to sweep the classroom and wash the shutters with soapsuds. At home, too, all the rooms and chests are cleared out. The bustle is dreadful. The evening before Passover, Mama sits down for a while for the first time in days. Meanwhile, Father's job is to go around the house with a goose feather checking to see that not a single crumb of bread is still to be found.

It is autumn again, and Leo is now at grammar school in Miinnerstadt, a two-hour walk from Steinach, where he is living at Lindwurm the hatter's. His meals are sent to him twice a week — half a dozen little pots, stacked in a carrier. Lindwurm's daughter only has to warm them up. Inconsolable at having to go to school alone from now on, I fall ill. At least every other day I run a temperature and sometimes I am quite delirious. Dr Homburger prescribes elder juice and cold compresses. My bed has been made up on the sofa in the yellow room. For almost three weeks I lie there. Time and again I count the pieces of soap in the pyramid stacked on the marble top of the washstand, but I never arrive at the same total twice. The little yellow dragons on the wallpaper haunt me even in my dreams. I am often in great turmoil. When I wake up, I see the jars of preserves ranged on the chest and in the cold compartments of the tiled stove. I try in vain to work out what they mean. They don't mean anything, says Mama, they're just cherries, plums and pears. Outside, she tells me, the swallows are already gathering. At night, in my sleep, I can hear the swishing flight of great flocks of migrating birds as they pass over the house. When at last my condition improves somewhat, the windows are opened wide one bright Friday afternoon. From my position on the sofa I can see the whole Saale valley and the road to Höhn, and I can see Papa returning from Kissingen by that road, in the calèche. Just a little later, still wearing his hat on his head, he comes into my room. He has brought me a wooden box of sweets with a peacock butterfly painted on it. That evening, a hundredweight of apples, goldings and red calvilles, are laid down for winter on the floor of the next room. Their scent puts me to a more peaceful sleep than I have known for a long time, and when Dr Homburger examines me the next morning he pronounces me perfectly healthy again. But then, when the summer holidays are starting nine months later, it is Leo's turn. He has a lung complaint, and Mama insists that it comes from his airless lodgings at Lindwurm's, and the lead vapours from the hatter's workshop. Dr Homburger agrees. He prescribes a mixture of milk and Selters water, and orders Leo to spend a lot of time in the healthy air of the Windheim pine forests. Now a basket of sandwiches, curd cheese and boiled eggs is made up every morning. I pour Leo's health drink through a funnel into green bottles. Frieda, our cousin from Jochsberg, goes to the woods..with us, as supervisor, as it were. She is already sixteen, very beautiful, and has a very long, thick, blonde plait. In the afternoon, Carl Hainbuch, the chief forester's son, invariably just happens to make an appearance, and walks for hours beneath the trees with Frieda. Leo, who reveres his cousin more than anyone, sits on the very top of one of the erratic boulders, watching the romantic scene with displeasure. What interests me most are the countless glossy black stag beetles in the Windheim woods. I track their crooked wanderings with a patient eye. At times it looks as if something has shocked them, physically, and it seems as if they have fainted. They lie there motionless, and it feels as if the world's heart had stopped. Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay's feather in her hand?