Read Online Vertigo by W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse - Free Book Online

25-centimetre stab wounds in the neck, and another year after that a 22-year-old heroin addict, Claudio Costa, was found dead with thirty-nine knife wounds. It was now the late autumn of 1980. The waiter brought me the bill. It was folded and I opened it out. The letters and numbers blurred before my eyes.The 5th of November, 1980. Via Roma. Pizzeria Verona. Di Cadavero Carlo e Patierno Vittorio.Patierno and Cadavero. -

    The telephone rang. The waiter wiped a glass dry and held it up to the light. Not until I felt I could stand the ringing no longer did he pick up the receiver. Then, jamming it between his shoulder and his chin, he paced to and fro behind the bar as far as the cable would let him. Only when he was speaking himself did he stop, and at these times he would lift his eyes to the ceiling. No, he said, Vittorio wasn't there. He was hunting. Yes, that was right, it was him, Carlo. Who else would it be? Who else would be in the restaurant? No, nobody. Not a soul all day. And now there was only one diner. Un inglese, he said, and looked across at me with what I took to be a touch of contempt. No wonder, he said, the days were getting shorter. The lean times were on the way. L'inverno è alle porte. si, si, l'inverno, he shouted once more, looking over at me again. My heart missed a beat. I left 10,000 lire on the plate, folded up the paper, hurried out into the street and across the piazza, went into a brightly lit bar and had them call a taxi, returned to my hotel, packed my things in a rush, and fled by the night train to Innsbruck. Prepared for the very worst, I sat in my compartment unable to read and unable to close my eyes, listening to the rhythm of the wheels. At Rovereto an old Tyrolean woman carrying a shopping bag made of leather patches sewn together joined me, accompanied by her son, who might have been forty. I was immeasurably grateful to them when they came in and sat down. The son leaned his head back against the seat. Eyelids lowered, he smiled blissfully most of the time. At intervals, though, he would be seized by a spasm, and his mother would then make signs in the palm of his left hand, which lay in her lap, open, like an unwritten page. The train hauled onwards, uphill. Gradually I began to feel better. I went out into the corridor. We were in Bolzano. The Tyrolean woman and her son got out. Hand in hand the two of them headed towards the underpass. Even before they had vanished from sight, the train started off again. It was now beginning to feel distinctly colder. The train moved more slowly, there were fewer lights, and the darkness was thicker. Franzensfeste station passed. I saw scenes of a bygone war: the assault on the pass - Vall'Inferno - the 26th of May, 1915. Bursts of gunfire in the mountains and a forest shot to shreds. Rain hatched the window-panes. The train changed track at points. The pallid glow of arc-lamps suffused the compartment. We stopped at the Brenner. No one got out and no one got in. The frontier guards in their grey greatcoats paced to and fro on the platform. We remained there for at least a quarter of an hour. Across on the other side were the silver ribbons of the rails. The rain turned to snow. And a heavy silence lay upon the place, broken only by the bellowing of some nameless animals waiting in a siding to be transported onwards.
    In the summer of 1987, seven years after I fled from Verona, I finally yielded to a need I had felt for some time to repeat the journey from Vienna via Venice to Verona, in order to probe my somewhat imprecise recollections of those fraught and hazardous days and perhaps record some of them. On this occasion in the midst of the holiday season, the night train from Vienna to Venice, on which in the late October of 1980 I had seen nobody except a pale-faced schoolmistress from New Zealand, was so overcrowded that I had to stand in the corridor all the way or crouch uncomfortably among suitcases and rucksacks, so that instead of