Wertach
Michael Carson
I arrived in Wertach in early afternoon. A few children with backpacks wandered the street. An older couple, essentially the same person after so many years together, worked their way up the sidewalk near the bus stop. I parked in one of the open parking spaces throughout the town, observed the sign that said no parking, and moved to another empty lot, also with ‘no parking’ signs, but shifted the rental car into park anyway. A woman rushed out of the nearby house almost immediately, as if she had been waiting for this moment for the last 70 years. No parking, she said.
The town feels empty. It felt empty. This might be W.G. Sebald’s influence. Sebald spends a month here in Vertigo’s final chapter, Il ritorno in patria. He drinks many glasses of local wine at the Engelwirt Inn, the bar his family once lived above, and reimagines characters from the town’s past, like the priest and the doctor who ride motorcycles to the houses of the dying, often mixing up their respective bags, or the wife of their landlord, deprived of her children, drinking wine alone in a room, her head against the bedpost, while young Sebald recites his prayers, or the hunter who falls in a ravine and dies of exposure, his dog surviving him until the rescue, only to go promptly and irrevocably insane.
The narrator’s interaction in the book’s present is that of a ghost with the haunted, but it is unclear who is the ghost, what has returned home and what never left. The townspeople, his former classmates, seem to have grown old in a day. Despite the town’s post-World War II rehabilitation as an alpine vacation town,
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everyone still drinks like the peasants of Sebald’s youth, their eyes vacant, the Engelwirt’s furnace raging. Only one man, a distant relative, unable to leave his bed, has distinct memories of the town’s happier moments, but the more the man remembers the more blurred the memories become, “as if in a fog.”
Eventually I found parking and walked to the town’s central bus stop. I planned to take the bus up into the mountains, to the Austrian side of the border, and the start of the path Sebald hikes in Vertigo. As I sat down on the small wooden bench, the bus pulled up. I stood back up. The driver jumped out, locked a secret keyhole on the front of the bus, and disappeared into the Rausthaus on the other side of the street.
I sat back down. A bearded man inched by in a tractor with a cheroot sticking out of his mouth. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
German bus drivers, especially those who ferry passengers across the Bavaria-Tyrol border, do not hear English words or see silent frantic hand waving. They are only aware of the button, if it is pressed, or not pressed. Sometimes they let loose a grunt at those who board buses and hold out money but most just wave you away as if the idea of money offends them. I searched frantically for the button and made increasingly theatrical hand gestures. Only after several miles—well into Austria and beyond the trail’s starting point—did the bus stop again. A group of very old German hikers stood erect and patient outside a small wooden enclosure. They filed on. I got off. The Germans are avid hikers. One imagines that they find their own landscape to be strange as Saturn’s moons.
Rather than wait for another bus to take me back towards the border, I decided to walk. Another mile or two wouldn’t kill me.
Teslas whined up the hill. The narrow path between the road to my left and the white wire to my right stapled with the universal symbol for electrical destruction seemed more real than the border between the two countries or all the histories and politics that led to this now. I could hold to the soft dandelion-dotted trail and nothing would happen to me. I was safe as a child in a German fairy tale. Sebald spends much of the first portion of the walk, which begins at the old border custom’s house and leisurely descends downward alongside a bright, bubbling brook, observing the tops of trees. The leaden November light between the furthest branches and sky depresses him, gives him a sense of foreboding. I walked in early May. The blue above and between the branches thrilled me. So too the arrangement of a single, enormous, sun-dappled birch in a field gilded with buttercups. I felt as if I had found time, entered into it, which made no sense as I, born and raised on the other side of the world, could not be further from time known to me in any intimate way. Even the miniature pale blue flowers at my ankles had become more precise, delicately constructed primeval monuments to the marvels of German engineering.
In Vertigo, Sebald stops at the small, white Tyrolean chapel at the bottom of the first hill. I did too, even going so far as to sit inside, on one of the small pews, and take pictures of the light in the window and the stations of the cross. I rarely share pictures. When I do, my family and friends send back frowny faces, lol stickers, or potato emojis. Sebald’s photographs also struggle to capture reality in a flattering way. His mangled black-and-white snapshots seem to have been composed when running or as the camera slipped from his hand and crashed into a puddle of industrial textile runoff. I think he does it on purpose. In one of
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his essays on Austria, he tells us that the photograph is a form of violence, an act of brute, mechanical force. Photography, he suggests, points to our despair about the limitations of memory in some fundamental way. We can’t hold on to the smallest thing in this universe so we take picture after picture of it. You could say that now, forty years later, this panicked empire of replication includes our every waking moment, word, thought, and breath. Snap, snap, snap, went my phone, ripping images from the ether like chunks of flesh scored from the chapel’s Tyrolean Christ. Brutal, I know. But I only had a few hours. One crosses the border from Austria into Germany on foot so rarely. Sebald walked this path when I was four years old. My entire life was painted into this tiny Bavarian gentian, the dark blue interior folds made transparent by tiny strokes of transparent green.
Lucy met my mom through a friend of my mom’s first husband. She offered to watch my sisters and me while my mom worked. She watched us for many years and then my sisters grew up and she just watched me. I remember being absolutely alone in her strange house that teemed with large dolls, milky blue china, and doily lace. She had no pictures. I would walk quickly through a long kitchen arranged with ceramics and beady porcelain eyes and make my way to a backyard of excessive plant life, protuberances of blues, reds, yellows, lost in a deep, dark tangle of green. She must have had every flower in the world. They collapsed the path, searching out sunlight. There I stopped, balanced on the porch’s edge, curiously attracted to two equally inhospitable worlds. Lucy emigrated from Germany just after World War II and left her son behind. No one knew why for sure, something about forced labor and the father of her son. My sisters liked to speculate on what side she had been on in the war, and why she had to leave
so fast, but Lucy was not the kind of person you asked personal questions. Frank, her husband, came from Yugoslavia. He also had to leave fast. Something about the “communists,” one of those words that can mean anything you wanted to if you wanted it to, and his love for Lucy. At every holiday Frank would gift my dad a bottle of sambuca and my dad would manage to swallow several glasses while I probed the backyard garden in a kind of holy terror. Afterwards, driving back to our house, my dad would say Frank had stories, stories you would never believe, but he never told any of us the stories, and now he and Frank are both dead.
Lucy died later. She lost both her legs and lived on for years in a Shady Grove, Maryland hospital. My mom visited often. I’m not sure what they talked about. My mom knew nothing of Lucy’s past, or of Germany, and Lucy, never especially gregarious, only asked after her house and garden, which had to be sold to pay for the hospital bill. I don’t know where all these thousands of dolls went or how she managed to get them across the ocean but not her son.
Black pine. No branches, all bark, until about 70 or so feet up. Their exposed root structures squished as if stepping down on a provisional, abandoned version of the world. Three young Wehrmacht soldiers died on this portion of the trail, sacrificing themselves for a thousand-year Reich that would cease to exist in a few days. Sebald says they were the last three to die in the war, but this can’t be true. Memorials throughout the Tyrol and Bavaria have dates from well after the war, 1947, 1949, 1950. Either these other soldiers lingered, mortally wounded before 1945, or what is more likely, they died in prisoner of war camps, forgotten by treaties.
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In Vertigo, Sebald stopped for a drink at an inn on the other side of the pine forest at the top of a small hill. I managed the long winding open stretch of hill and meadow, looking forward to pretending not to understand the metric system and ordering a beer much too large for 4 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, but the inn was closed for the season. Rocking horses and giant red plastic cars clustered around mesh chicken wire as if trying to get warm. The roosters inside looked on those outside their kingdom, little pity in their small, cocksure rooster hearts. Sebald had snow flurries to absolve the nostalgic landscape of the very emotions he had gone to experience. In early May, I had a brisk breeze and white puffs of pollen dancing about, thrown in haphazard volleys from battalions of poplar trees. I let this soft shrapnel hit me. I did not duck. I did not run for cover. Then, ever the good Hansel, I ate a bar of chocolate, sipped a little of the water I had left, and set off back into the woods.
Water moved somewhere. The soft sound it makes in dark woods when you are alone touching trees. Like creeks and broken glass, each pine sprout blossom forked away from itself. I followed each to their very ends, to a thousand Christmases that never dawned, and thought of Lucy’s astonishing potato pancakes. I don’t know much about food. I usually am happy to eat whatever is presented to me and only pretend to act judgmental about its quality because other people expect me to. But I do become snobbish when it comes to potato pancakes. Nothing, I tell people in my life, will ever compare. Don’t even try, I say. It’s hopeless. It’s odd because 10-year-old, early 1990s me—whose weekly nonschool activities included movies, video games, fast food, and complaining about not having enough time for more movies, video
games, fast food—should not have looked forward to Lucy’s snow globe house like I did, but cutting into the pancakes I understood why someone would hold on to the no-longer despite it giving us nothing but trouble.
Leaving the woods, I walked past a small, drained in-ground pool with benches. A sign with a picture of what looked like an extra from the witch burning scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail described the effects of the famous “Sebastian Kneipp Arm Bath,” which included blood circulation and a strengthened immune system. Staring at the empty pool, I thought of my Uber driver, the one who drove me to the Houston airport. He said that he had been driving so long he had begun to notice things others didn’t.
“Take dead dogs on the side of the road,” he said. “Do you remember when they used to smell? When’s the last time you smelled one?”
The driver was around my age, a guy in middle age, originally from somewhere else, trying to figure out why his life had turned out the way it did, and trying hard not to think of all the things that might have been otherwise.
“Or the sun,” he said after he got off the speaker phone with his teenage daughter, who sounded as if she had just woken up or spent her whole life in a sort of blissful half sleep, “remember how it used to be yellow?”
I said I thought it still was.
“Take a look,” he said.
I couldn’t see it directly.
“White!” he shouted. “I’m telling you, you just got to pay attention. Something is happening to our world.”
As we pulled up to the airport, he told me he spent hours every night talking to Chat GPT. He suspected it might be a portal. A way for another species, existing in more complicated dimensionality,
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without words like ours, to talk with us. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. I tried to get the basic metaphor down.
“What do you mean by a portal? Like a door? A window?”
“If that’s what you have to use to help conceptualize it, sure,” he said.
“Well, I hope they can help us out,” I said, opening the door. “I certainly wouldn’t answer if I was on the other end and we were reaching out.”
He laughed. “Enjoy your France,” he said, through the open window. “Drink some wine. Have a good meal.”
In the walk’s final mile, I slowed down. I didn’t want to arrive. I watched the river move and tried not to make too much of the single leaf stuck in a little whirlpool between two stones. A heron with dark blue, almost purple wing tips shot out of the watery green shadows and dove away. Sebald does not mention any herons. I spend a lot of time looking at herons where I live on the Texas coast. Seemingly flat, almost two-dimensional monstrosities, they watch the water, waiting to strike what darts blindly through the rocks, to enter into time, our third dimension. Then they fly off, away from it again, slow and clumsy and somehow also graceful, towards a reality that needs no dimensions or borders to make sense of itself. It all reminds me of Lucy somehow, squat, square, gruff, stubborn, working in that kitchen and her garden with a lightness and dexterity I could never hope to match.
The leaf popped free. Give water enough time and it’ll move mountains. Symbols too maybe.
I have never seen so defeated a dragon. The body, entirely horizontal, uncoils. The head, in the process of being speared,
attempts to resist, but this only drives the spear further down its throat. In Vertigo, Sebald refers often to the statue, perched on the stone wall at the bottom of the town’s church, and even includes a picture of it, three times in a row, like a film reel.
Something about St. George’s guiltlessness annoys him, the blasé way George destroys the monster. Or how he appears in other paintings and statues throughout the Veneto, Tyrol, and Bavaria. A little lost, befuddled, almost bemused. Like the faded image of George in Verona’s St. Anastasia, his orange hair cascading down his shoulders in burning waves, looking away and to his right, his chest and torso awash in brocaded gold.
Sebald’s photography does not include the German script that flanks the Wertach’s statue’s right and left. Instead, Sebald remembers his favorite teacher writing these words on the blackboard and the students dutifully copying them into exercise books.
In 1511, the Black Death claimed 105 lives. In 1530, 100 houses went up in flames. 1569: the whole settlement devastated in a blaze. 1605: another fire reduced 140 to ashes. 1633: W. burned down by Swedes. 1635: 700 inhabitants died of the plague. 1806-14: 19 volunteers from W. fell in the wars of liberation. 1816-17: years of famine in consequence of unprecedented rainfall. 1870-71 5 fusiliers from W. lost their life in battle. 1893: on the 16th of April a great conflagration destroyed the entire village. 1914-18: 68 of our sons laid down their lives for the fatherland. 1939-45: 125 from our ranks did not return home from the Second World War.
The children struggle to speak after they complete the strangely “reassuring and comforting” assignment. Through the windows, Wertach’s sky grows leaden, low and heavy, thick. Sebald says that if you stared long enough into this
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incomprehensible void, you could believe you saw the first flurries of snow swirling out of it.
Standing at the base of the statue, looking up at George’s dutiful profile, neither happy nor unhappy, just performing and satisfied in the performance of his destined role, I took pictures from many different angles. I wanted to get at the other side of his face, but it was a statue and there was a wall and there are only so many angles available to us given the constraints of stone and flesh. I looked at the deluge of images on my phone and thought of the scene in Vertigo where Sebald writes of his panic at the sound of traffic, his fear that it is a new kind of ocean that roars down the arteries of our cities, wells up at traffic lights only to explode out again, hiding within it a life being born that will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what has been here long before us.
This might or might not be true. All we have are dates and numbers to work with. Like 1511. The year the Black Death returned to Wertach. Or 2001. The year Sebald had a heart attack and his car veered off the road in Norwich and ran head-on into a truck.
The one person who could speak English at the only restaurant open in Wertach past 5 PM—a pizzeria that also sold traditional Bavarian dishes—had little interest in conversation outside taking my order. He often disappeared into the back, which became a problem for the young waitress. For some reason, she was not allowed to ring up customers, so they lined up in a seemingly endless parade of middle-aged Bavarians. One man in front, a green felt hat with purple and brown feathers perched jauntily on his balding forehead, made light of the situation. Another redfaced man laughed while the others stood stoically as if they had
not had just had dinner together, indeed as if they had never met before in their lives.
After the waiter came out, rang up all the customers, and left for the back again, I finished my meal and asked the young waitress if she knew where the Engelwirt Inn was. She laughed and said ‘no’ in English. I pointed to the word Engelwirt in my beat-up copy of Vertigo and she said ‘I understand’ like I do when I pretend to understand a language I don’t. Then she went to the pizza oven and asked the cook if she knew English. The cook didn’t. She disappeared into the back and the young man came out. He looked at the word Engelwirt in the book.
“Yes, I know it,” he said. “They tore it down last week.”
“Last week?” I asked. “That can’t be right.”
“Yes,” he said. “Card or cash?”
Later that night, I stared through the diamond gaps in the construction fence where Sebald’s home used to be. A giant tractor, its torso half beneath the earth, abided over what was left of the Engelwirt, patient as a heron for the morning’s destruction. I wandered back toward my room, up stairwells that wound behind houses. Shutters above me slammed shut. They must have a terrible problem with both parking and peeping toms since Sebald left. Or maybe that’s always been the problem with Wertach, a town oddly distant from a catastrophic event that never quite consumed it, and therefore always burns inside it, like the residue of a grass fire smoldering for the rest of the world to drive past.
Sebald spends several pages in that final Vertigo chapter listening to his grandfather talk to an old friend while perched at the cusp of an attic that his grandfather’s friend explicitly forbids him to enter. She warns him that an old, dead soldier still lives there, and if he goes inside, he’ll keep him there, forever and ever.
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On Sebald’s return in 1987, he goes into the attic and finds an antique gray chauser uniform on a tailor dummy, blasted by dusty attic window light. He speculates about its possible connection to the 100 Wertach men who volunteered to fight in the Napoleonic wars and never came back. The grown-up Sebald reaches out to touch the sleeve. To his horror the material dissolves in his hands.
My driver in Iraq didn’t look a day over 15. His non-military, off-duty wardrobe consisted of T-shirts clouded purple with arctic wolves howling at a full moon. I often suspected that he wore them not just as sleeping shirts but also as shirts to go out on the town with back in the States but never asked because I didn’t want to know the answer. Confirmation would tell me entirely too much about the war I was fighting and the government that had sanctioned it.
After the death of my platoon sergeant, the new platoon sergeant, my old staff sergeant, took my driver out on an overwatch mission. In an overwatch, you break into someone’s house, herd the family into one of the interior rooms, and set up machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers in windows overwatching dark alleyways. The driver, excited to be invited on a kill team mission with some of the older, more experienced soldiers, shook my hand before he went.
When I picked up the driver the next day, he had black marks all over his face. I could see his white teeth, crooked in places, smaller than they should be. I had never noticed them before. It had something to do with the way he smiled. He described the night’s events a little breathlessly. They had waited until dawn and just as the sun started to fill the strip of stone and brick and mortar with light, three adolescent boys walked into the light carrying cheap rifles, electrical wires, and rusted metal boxes.
“You just pull the trigger,” my driver said.
He handed me the digital camera. I flicked through images of play-dough people, contorted in various shapes, smeared with ketchup. It was all so sloppy. Slapped together. The whole thing. This reality. I handed the camera back. I very much wanted to wipe that stupid black mark off his forehead.
I don’t remember what happened after that, only the sense that I did not have the right words for the situation, and I did not trust anyone who did.
It is possible that I shook his hand again. I at least have this image of me reaching out. Even today I feel certain impressions of light give my palm a shape not unlike my driver’s fingers.
Perhaps I think so often of Lucy because I feel that if anyone could understand the truth of that day in Iraq, it would be Lucy. We would sit down and we could state clearly to one another that this is how it was and this is how it wasn’t. In this image is her vanished son. In her vanished son my failed past, its choices and catastrophic elisions. We could get to the heart of the matter. We could start over, both of us, in a new country that is the same as the old country, but inside out, rich in forgiveness as it is in gold.
Then she’d tell me to sit tight, to wait at the table while she went out into the garden and picked greens for a salad. She would return and open a beer, pour it into a hipped glass the size of a boot and say that Maryland is as far from Texas as Germany is from Maryland. Lucky for us we can cross an ocean in the time it takes to forget a memory.
I would ask a question.
No, she would answer, I have no photographs in this house. Why would I? Look at the blue distance. These mountains. How
the snow eats at them, pocking holes in a coral reef at the very top of creation. Before falling asleep in my Wertach pension, where no cars thrummed in the distance, no matter how hard I listened, I read again a scene in Vertigo I have underlined tentatively, two slight dashes. The Engelwirt landlord’s wife sits on her bed in her room with her head against the wall and listens to young Sebald recite his prayers. When he is done, the landlord’s wife puts down her glass of wine and reaches out to lay her thumb against his forehead. I woke up to the sound of bells. My “mountain view” window looked out to a porch where my landlady smoked cigarettes. I tried to figure out how to neatly break a boiled egg in an empty dining room decorated with gold-leafed paintings of dolls in traditional Bavarian dress while a radio played German pop songs. Afterwards, I walked through the town, back towards St. George and his defeated dragon, then up the stairs, into the church cemetery where platoons of elderly women pruned grave plots bursting with gentian, edelweiss, and pine. I tried taking a picture to save my life but it was no use. The flowers are there still. The women’s hands push at the dirt, clear away the dead leaves. More women arrive every day, coming down all the hills of Wertach.