Vertigo

  On the following morning, the light still burning in the kitchen, my grandfather came in from clearing paths and told us that word had just reached him from Jungholz that Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine. He had evidently fallen while crossing by the narrow footbridge which was dangerous even in summer, and as good as impassable in winter, said my grandfather, waiting as he did every day till my mother was not watching to pour down the sink the milky coffee which was always kept for him on the hotplate of the range. In my grandfather's opinion it was out of the question that Schlag, who must have known his own territory like the back of his hand, should have ended up on the other side purely by mistake. By the same token, nobody knew what the hunter, if he had deliberately gone out of his way, had been doing there, over the Austrian border, at this time of year of all times and with the weather closing in. Whichever way you looked at it, concluded my grandfather, it was a queer and perplexing business. I, for my part, was not able to get the matter out of my mind all day long. When I was at my schoolwork, all I had to do was lower my eyelids a little and I beheld Schlag the hunter lying dead at the bottom of the ravine. And so it was no surprise to me when, at midday, I came upon him on my way home from school. I had heard the jingling of a horse's harness for some time before, out of the grey air and the gently swirling snow, a woodcutters' sledge drawn by the heavy bay belonging to the proprietor of the sawmill, appeared, bearing upon it what was plainly the body of a man under a wine-coloured horse blanket. The sledge, led by the saw-mill proprietor and accompanied by the Jungholz gendarme, halted at the crossroads at the very moment when Dr Piazolo approached, as if by prearrangement, ploughing through the knee-deep snow astride his Ztindapp. Dr Piazolo, who had evidently already been informed of the tragedy that had occurred, switched the engine off and walked over to the sledge. He drew the blanket down halfway, and beneath it, in what one might say was a peculiarly relaxed posture, there indeed lay the body of the hunter Hans Schlag from KoEgarten on the Neckar. His grey-green attire was hardly disturbed, quite as though nothing had happened. One might have supposed that Schlag had simply fallen asleep, had it not been for the dreadful pallor of his face and the wild hair and beard, streaked with frost and hard as ice. Dr Piazolo had taken off his black motorcycle gloves and, with a cautiousness uncharacteristic in him, was feeling different parts of the body, gone rigid with the cold and rigor mortis, which had set in some time ago. He voiced a suspicion that the hunter, who did not seem to have been injured, had to all appearances initially survived the fall from the footbridge. It was quite possible, he said, that the hunter had lost consciousness through sheer fright at the moment when he slipped, and that his fall had been broken by the saplings growing in the ravine. Death probably did not occur until some time afterwards, as a result of exposure. The gendarme, who had followed Dr Piazolo's conjectures and concurred with them, now reported for his part that the unfortunate Waldmann, who now lay as stiff as a poker at the feet of the hunter, had in point of fact still been alive when the tragedy was discovered. In his opinion, the gendarme said, the hunter had put the dachshund in his rucksack before crossing the bridge, and the rucksack had somehow been dislodged during the fall, for it was found a short distance away, with a trail leading from it across to Schlag, by whose side the dachshund had dug through the-snow into the forest floor, which was frozen only on the surface. Strangely enough, as soon as the hunter and his dog had been approached, Waldmann had suddenly gone raving mad, even though there was little more than a breath of life left in him, and he had to be shot there and then. Dr Piazolo bent down once more over the hunter, fascinated, it seemed, by the fact that the snowflakes lay on his face without melting. Then he carefully pulled the horse blanket up over the motionless figure, whereupon, triggered by God knows what slight touch or movement, the repeating watch in the hunter's waistcoat pocket played a bar or so of the song "Ob immer Treu und Redlichkeit". The men looked at each other with expressions of bewilderment. Dr Piazolo shook his head and climbed onto his motorcycle. The sledge moved on and, still unobserved, I slowly walked the rest of my way home. I have since learned that an autopsy was carried out on the body of Schlag the hunter, who apparently had no relatives of any sort, at the district hospital; it did not, however, yield any further insight beyond the cause of death already established by Dr Piazolo, except for the fact, described in the post-mortem report as curious, that a sailing ship was tattooed on the left upper arm of the dead man.

  Shortly before Christmas, a few days after the encounter with the dead hunter, I succumbed to a grave illness which Dr Piazolo and a physician from the nearest town, whom he consulted, diagnosed as diphtheria. Confined to my bed, I lay there, my throat becoming increasingly sore until at length it felt raw and torn open inside and I was fearfully convulsed every few minutes by a cough that racked my chest and my whole body. My limbs, once the illness had me in its grip, seemed so heavy to me that I could no longer raise either my head or my legs or arms, indeed not even my hands. Deep within my body I felt an immense pressure, as if my organs were being put through a mangle.

  Again and again I saw before me the village blacksmith with his tongs pulling my heart, licked by blue flames like St Elmo's fire, out of the glowing embers and plunging it into a bucket of ice-cold water. The headache alone forced me sometimes to the limits of consciousness, but it was not until the illness reached its climax, when my temperature had risen to a fraction below the critical point, that delirium saved me from the worst extremes of pain. As though in the middle of a desert I lay in a shimmer of heat, my lips cracked and grey and flaking and in my mouth the foul taste of the rotting skin in my throat. My grandfather dripped luke-warm water into my mouth, and I felt it slowly trickling down across the scorched patches inside my throat. Time and again, in my delirium, I saw myself gingerly stepping past Frau Sallaba, who sat weeping on the stairs that led down into the cellar, and there, in the furthermost, darkest corner, opening the door of the cupboard where preserved eggs were kept for winter months in a large earthenware crock. I put my hand and forearm through the chalky surface of the water almost to the bottom of the container, and to my horror I felt that what was stored in this pot was not eggs safely sequestered, each one of them, in its shell, but something soft, something that slipped through my fingers and which I instantly knew could only be eyeballs gouged from their sockets. Dr Piazolo, who at the onset of my illness had ordered my room to be turned into a quarantine ward which only my grandfather and mother were allowed to enter, had me swathed from head to toe in dampened warm sheets, which at first proved beneficial, but, because of the constriction, soon gave rise in me to panic and fear. Twice a day my mother had to wash the floor with vinegar water, and until dusk fell the windows of my sickward were kept wide open so that at times the snow drifted in almost as far as the middle of the room, and my grandfather would sit by my bed in his overcoat with his hat on his head. The illness ran its course over two weeks, until after Christmas, even when Epiphany had come round I could scarcely eat anything other than spoonfuls of bread and milk. The door to the quarantine ward was now left ajar, and some of those who lived and worked in our house took turns to put in an appearance at the threshold, including Romana a couple of times, gaping at this boy who, by dint of a miracle, had just escaped with his life. It was already Lent before I was allowed to go into the garden occasionally. For the time being, a return to school was ruled out. In the spring, for two hours a day, I was placed in the care of my teacher, Fràulein Rauch. Fràulein Rauch was the daughter of the chief forester, so every afternoon I went across to the shingled villa which stood in a small arboretum and was both the forestry commission's district office and the chief forester's home. There, when the weather was cold, I would sit with my teacher on the bench by the stove and on sunny days outside in the revolving summer-house under the trees, completely devoted to the tasks I was set, filling my exercise book
s with a web of lines and numbers in which I hoped to entangle Fràulein Rauch for ever.

  I had spent the better part of a month, till the beginning of December, in W., and for more or less the entire time I had been the only guest at the Engelwirt inn. Only occasionally did one of those solitary commercial travellers appear, who spend the evenings in the bar room finishing off their day's work, calculating percentages and rates of commission. As I too was forever bent over my papers, they may well, at first, have taken me for another salesman but, after a closer look at my outward appearance, they probably decided that mine was a different and perhaps more dubious profession. Disturbed not so much by this scrutiny as by the first preparations that were being made in the house for the beginning of the winter season, I resolved to leave, particularly as my writing had reached the point at which I either had to continue for ever or break off. The following day, after changing several times and spending lengthy periods waiting on the platforms of draughty provincial stations - I cannot remember anything about this journey other than the grotesque figure of a middleaged chap of gigantic proportions who was wearing a hideous, modishly styled Trachten suit and a broad tie with multi-coloured bird feathers sewn onto it, which were ruffled by the wind - on that day, with W. already far behind me, I sat in the Hook of Holland express travelling through the German countryside, which has always been alien to me, straightened out and tidied up as it is to the last square inch and corner. Everything appeared to be appeased and numbed in some sinister way, and this sense of numbness soon came over me also. I did not care to open the newspapers that I had bought, or to drink the mineral water that was there before me. Stretches of grassland swept past on either side and ploughed fields in which the pale green winter wheat had emerged according to schedule; neatly delineated fir-tree plantations, gravel pits, football pitches, industrial estates, and the ever-expanding colonies of family homes behind their rustic fences and privet hedges, all of them painted in that slightly greyish shade of white which has become the preferred colour of the nation. As I looked out, it made me uneasy that not a soul was to be seen anywhere, though enough vehicles were speeding along the wet roads veiled in dense mists of spray. Even in the streets of the towns, there were far more cars than people. It was as if mankind had already made way for another species, or had fallen under a kind of curfew. The silence of my fellow passengers sitting motionless in the air-conditioned express carriage did nothing to dispel such conjectures, but as I looked out at the passing landscape which had been so thoroughly parcelled up and segmented, the words "south-west Germany", "south-west Germany" were running over and over in my mind, till after a couple of hours of mounting irritation I came to the conclusion that something like an eclipse of my mental faculties was about to occur.

  The compulsive fixation did not wear off until the train pulled into Heidelberg station, where there were so many people crowding the platforms that I feared they were fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste. The last to come into my compartment of those passengers who had just boarded was a young woman wearing a beret of brown velvet whom I instantly recognised, without a shadow of a doubt, as Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who according to the chronicles travelled to Heidelberg as the bride of the Elector Palatine and, during the short period in which she held court there in great splendour, became known as the Winter Queen. No sooner had she sat down and settled herself into her corner than this young woman was deeply immersed in a book entitled The Seas of Bohemia, written by an authoress unknown to me by the name of Mila Stern. Only when we were travelling alongside the Rhine did she occasionally look up from her reading and glance out through the window at the river and the steep slopes of the opposite bank. A stiff northerly wind must have sprung up, because the flags on the barges that were ploughing their way upstream through the grey waters were not flying backwards from the stern but forwards, as in a child's drawing, and this lent the scene something that was at once touching and awry. The light outside had steadily diminished, and the great river valley was now filled with a faint luminescence. I stepped out into the corridor. The slate- and violet-coloured vineyards, hatched into the hillsides, were covered here and there with turquoise bird-netting. Snow now began to drift by, scoring delicate slanting lines over a view which was constantly changing as we slid past yet always remained the same. Suddenly I felt we were on our way to the far north, approaching the furthermost tip of the island of Hokkaido. The Winter Queen, who I believed had brought about this transformation of the Rhine landscape, had also come out into the corridor, and had already been standing watching the beautiful scene for some time at my side before I heard her reciting, entirely to herself, as it seemed to me, the following lines, with a long-lost inflexion in her voice:

  Grasses white as driven snow

  Veils far blacker than a crow

  Gloves as tender as the rose

  Masks for faces no one knows.

  That I did not know what to respond at the time, did not know how this winter verse continued, and, despite the feelings within me, could not say a word but merely stood there stupid and mute, looking out onto a world that was now almost gone in the fading twilight, is something which, since that day, I have often much regretted. Presently the Rhine valley opened out, gleaming apartment blocks appeared on the plain, and the train drew into Bonn, where the Winter Queen, without my having been able to say even a word to her, got out. Time and again since then, I have attempted to find that book, The Seas of Bohemia, but though it is undoubtedly of the greatest importance for me, it is, alas, not listed in any bibliography, in any catalogue, or indeed anywhere at all.

  The following afternoon, back in London, my first port of call was the National Gallery. The painting by Pisanello that I wanted to see was not in its usual place, but owing to renovation work had been hung in a poorly lit room in the basement into which few of the visitors who wandered the gallery every day found their way. It is a small painting, measuring about 30 by 50 centimetres, lamentably imprisoned in a far too heavy Victorian frame. The upper half of the picture is almost completely filled by a golden disc, radiant against the blue of the sky and serving as a background for the Virgin and her Redeemer Child. Lower down runs a line of dark green treetops from one side to the other. On the left stands the patron saint of herds, herdsmen and lepers, St Anthony. He is wearing a dark red cowled habit and a capacious earthen-brown cloak. In his hand he holds a bell. Beside him lies a tame boar, close against the ground in kindly submission. The hermit with a stern expression surveys the shining knight who stands before him, and who, for his part, is all of this world, almost heart-rendingly so. The dragon, a ringed and winged creature, has already breathed its last. The ornate armour, wrought of white metal, draws the evening light unto it. Not the slightest shadow of guilt shows on the youthful face of St George. His neck and throat are bared to us, unprotected. The most remarkable feature, however, is the very finely worked broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with a large feather which the knight wears on his head. I wish I could know how Pisanello conceived the idea of furnishing St George with such inappropriate and positively extravagant headgear. San Giorgio con cappello di paglia -most odd indeed, as the two trusty horses gazing across the knight's shoulder may well be thinking too.

  I made my way back from the National Gallery to Liverpool Street station on foot. As I did not want to walk along the Strand and then down Fleet Street, I negotiated the labyrinth of smaller streets above these busy thoroughfares; Chandos Place, Maiden Lane and Tavistock Street took me to Lincoln's Inn Fields and from there, via Holborn Circus and the Holborn Viaduct, I reached the western perimeter of the City. I cannot have covered much more than three miles, yet I felt as if I had never walked so far in my life than on that afternoon. I became fully aware of my fatigue, however, only as I paused at the threshold of an underground station, from which came the familiar sweetish, dusty warmth of the subterranean world, and, as I stood there, detected, like a scent which might stir the imaginings of an o
arsman far out to sea, the faint perfume of the white, pink and russet-red chrysanthemums being sold at the entrance by a man with something of Prospero about him. I then realised that this was the station where, on my frequent journeys by tube, no one ever embarked or alighted. The train would stop, the doors open; one looked out onto the deserted platform and heard the warning "Mind the gap"; the doors would close again, and the train move off. Whenever I had travelled through that station it had been the same, and on not one occasion did any of the other passengers so much as raise an eyebrow. Evidently it was only I who found this strange circumstance unnerving. So now I stood on the pavement before the entrance to that very station and, if I were not to walk that last tiring stretch, I had only to enter the dark ticket hall where, apart from a black woman sitting in her inspector's box, there was no sign of life. Although I stood there for a considerable time, on the very brink so to speak, and even exchanged a few glances with the black inspector, I did not dare to take the final step.