Austerlitz

Over coffee with the narrator in Paris, Austerlitz recalls that when he recently passed through the gare d’Austerlitz (pictured), he imagined how his father (who lived close to it) might have fled Paris when the Germans took the city. Since his student days when he studied the station, the gare d’Austerlitz has seemed the most mysterious of Paris’s Métro stations to Austerlitz. The rusty iron hooks and dark stains in the scaffolding (pictured) gave him the uneasy feeling he’d found the site of a crime gone unpunished. Austerlitz hopes finding both his father and Marie de Verneuil will reveal the meaning of these strange memories of the station. He tells the narrator he learned from one of the city records centers that in 1942 his father was interned at the Vichy-controlled Gurs camp in the Pyrenees. Austerlitz plans to visit the camp.

As they part, Austerlitz gives the narrator a key to his house on Alderney Street in London. Austerlitz invites him to study his black and white photographs there, which he says will become the only remains of his life. He encourages the narrator to visit a small Jewish cemetery hidden by lime trees (pictured) that adjoins his garden. During his recent discovery of the cemetery—which he identifies as the source of the moths that used to fly into his house—Austerlitz felt as if he’d entered an idyll: “In the bright spring light shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees you might have thought, […] that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time” (306).

Strongly affected by this story of the cemetery, the narrator stops in Antwerp on his return from Paris to revisit the nocturama and the fortress at Breendonk. The day the narrator visits the fortress is unseasonably hot, just like the day 30 years prior. Furthermore, he’s again unable to enter the dark gate into the fortress. However, unlike before, there are a number of visitors, including a group of schoolchildren. In the intervening years, the nearby city of Mechelen has spread over the country toward the fortress.

Sitting opposite the fortress by the moat, the narrator reads a book Austerlitz gave him in Paris—Heshel’s Kingdom. The book describes the author Dan Jacobson’s (a colleague of Austerlitz’s he never met) search for his grandfather, a Lithuanian Rabbi called Heshel who died prematurely after World War I. His death prompted his wife, Menuchah, to emigrate with her children to the mining town of Kimberley, South Africa. To Jacobson, Kimberley’s unfenced, abyssal mining pits symbolized the irrecoverable loss of his family and people.

Jacobson writes that the Russians built a ring of 12 fortresses around the town of Kaunas, Lithuania where his grandfather had his picture taken—the picture featured on the cover of Heshel’s Kingdom. The fortresses proved useless in World War I and were captured by the Germans in 1941. Fort IX became a Wehrmacht command post, where 30,000 people were killed and buried outside the walls, under what is now an oat field. Even after the Germans knew the war was unwinnable, they continued sending trains of Jews to Kaunas. The prisoners scratched their names and messages in the dungeon walls, including “nous sommes neuf cents Français [we are 900 French]” (310). The narrator reads through the 15th chapter of Heshel’s Kingdom before returning to Mechelen at dusk.