Read Online The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald - Free Book Online Page B

entire length of a mountain range just as remote and just as unfamiliar. It must have been a distance of a thousand miles or more, through ravines, gorges and valleys, across ridges, slopes and drifts, along the edges of great forests, over wastes of rock, shale and snow. And I recalled that in my dream, once I had reached the end of my journey, I looked back, and that it was six o’clock in the evening. The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted. It was a scene that felt familiar in an inexplicable way, and for weeks it was on my mind until at length I realized that, down to the last detail, it matched the Vallüla massif, which I had seen from the bus, through eyes drooping with tiredness, a day or so before I started school, as we returned home from an outing to the Montafon. I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhapsthere is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
    Just as these things have always been beyond my understanding, so too I found it impossible to believe, as I sat on Gunhill in Southwold that evening, that just one year earlier I had been looking across to England from a beach in Holland. On that occasion, following a bad night spent at Baden in Switzerland, I had travelled via Basle and Amsterdam to The Hague, where I had taken a room in one of the less salubrious hotels near the station. I no longer remember whether it was the Lord Asquith, the Aristo, or the Fabiola. At all events, in the lobby of this establishment, which would deeply have depressed even the humblest of travellers, there sat two gentlemen, no longer in their first youth, who must have been partners for a long time; and between them, in the stead of a child, as it were, was an apricot-coloured poodle. After I had rested a little in the room I was allotted, I went for a stroll, looking for a bite to eat, up the road that runs from the station to the city centre, past the Bristol Bar, Yuksel’s Café, a video library, Aran Turk’s pizza place, a Euro-sex-shop, a halal butcher’s, and a carpet store, above whose display a rudimentary fresco in four parts showed a caravan crossing the desert. The name Perzenpaleis was lettered in red on the façade of the run-down building, the upper-storey windows of which were all white-washed over.

    As I was looking up at this façade, a man with a dark beard, wearing a suit jacket over a long tunic, slipped past me through a doorway, so close that our elbows touched. Through that doorway, for an unforgettable moment that seemed to exist outside time, I glimpsed the wooden rack on which perhaps a hundred pairs of well-worn shoes had been placed beside and above one another. Only later did I see the minaret rising from the courtyard of the building into the azure Dutch evening sky. For an hour or more I walked around this somehow extraterritorial part of town. Most of the windows in the side streets were boarded up, and slogans like Help de regenwouden redden or Welcome to the Royal Dutch Graveyard were graffiti’d on the sooty brick walls. No longer able to decide on a place to eat, I bought a carton of chips at McDonald’s, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel. Outside the entrances of the entertainment and dining establishments on the road to the station, small groups of oriental men had now gathered, most of themsmoking in silence while the odd one appeared to be doing a deal