Is this it? Am I to wake up now? Nearly ten o’clock, and up for hours, I have not yet awoken. The flat seems unfamiliar to me, larger than it was before my trip South. Blank white sky outside, and cold. In the other room, on the other side of the bevelled glass, the light above the bed is on, and Austerlitz lies open upside down on the pillow.
I was reading, not long ago. I was turning the pages quickly, not long ago. I read, I was carried along by the movement of sentences, one after another, without paragraphs. I read: Austerlitz bore me, I was carried along by my reading, until -. Until what? I thought, I have a post to finish in the other room. The day said, finish the post, accomplish something. And I said, but I am reading of the labyrinth inside the building in Antwerp, of Austerlitz’s Welsh childhood, of the rooms kept locked upstairs and his love of houses with open windows.
I said, I barely slept; they are going to bed ever later upstairs, and I, who am too easily awoken, have to stay awake with them, the students who are on their holidays. How was I to sleep?, I asked. Should I sleep now? But I had been reading Austerlitz, turning the pages. I’d been reading quickly, and after all, there were very few words on the page, and very big gaps between lines, I’d been carried along by reading, on this, my week of Sebald, my ten days of Sebald. I’d been reading, and hoped the generosity of his book should carry over to my writing, to the furtherance of my post, which I have not up yet (this is not it).
I passed from room to room in my old dressing gown. From room to room, from reading to writing and the bevelled glass, installed to let light from one end of the flat to the other, in between. The students have not yet awoken: good. Hours left until I have to be in: good. But what was I to write? Of R.M. and I walking in Christchurch College gardens (is that what they were called), or reading Hello! in the late-opening cafe? Of my last night in Oxford, on my own, after everyone had left? Of the crumbs of Lavash bread all over the floor of my room? Of the alcoholics of the Cowley Road?
Reading Sebald the whole time (The Emigrants, and then Vertigo), it was that my experience was being narrated as I had it, that he (the narrator), set back within me, was speaking for me of my own experience. Or that what was mine was not mine. I thought (he thought): I should look more carefully at these buildings around me. I thought (he thought): I should engage in conversation with strangers and half-strangers. And didn’t a parking attendant address me as I sat yesterday morning outside Blackwells on Broad Street, waiting for it to open? And didn’t a taxi driver remind me that there was nothing we could do about the cold weather, the sleet and the rain? At least it’s bright, he said.
And now? Who is writing, him or me, one or the other? Who writes, he set back in me, or I as the one who remembers what it was to have lived Sebaldly, or at least like his narrator? Cycling home from the station, I took an unfamiliar route in honour of the author of Austerlitz. Uphill in his honour, because I thought: this city should become like the building in Antwerp where corridors lead nowhere and there are bricked in rooms without doors.
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