The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Author:W. G. Sebald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions

After these nocturnal entries, the next of any length was written on the day they arrived in Constantinople. Yesterday morning left Piraeus, Ambros recorded on the 15th of September. Somewhat the worse for wear, he wrote, after the laborious overland journey. Calm voyage. Resting for hours under the awning on deck. Never seen water as blue. Truly ultramarine. This morning through the Dardanelles. Great flocks of cormorants. In the early afternoon, far ahead, the capital of the Orient appeared, like a mirage at first, then the green of trees and the colourful jostling houses gradually becoming more distinct. The masts of ships, crowding and swaying gently in a breeze, and the minarets, seeming to sway a little as well. - The Trieste captain paid, we take rooms at the Pera Palas for the time being. We enter the lobby as afternoon tea is being served. Cosmo writes in the register: Frères Solomon, New York, en route pour la Chine. Pera, the reception clerk tells me when I enquire, pera means beyond. Beyond Stamboul. Mellow orchestral music drifts through the foyer. Behind the drawn tulle curtains of the ballroom glide the shadows of dancing couples. Quand l'amour meurt, sings a woman, her voice meandering eerily. The stairs and rooms magnificent. Carpeted landscapes beneath high ceilings. Immense tubs in the bathrooms. From the balcony, a view across the Golden Horn. Evening falls. We watch the dark descending from the outlying hills upon the low roofs, rising from the depths of the city atop the lead-grey cupolas of the mosques till at length it reaches to the tips of the minarets, which gleam especially brightly one last time before the light goes. At this point, Ambros's entries continue regardless of the dates in his diary. No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. The crowns of pines high aloft. Acacias, cork oaks, sycamores, eucalypts, junipers, laurels, a paradise of trees, shady slopes and groves with tumbling streams and springs. Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You go to a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life. For every one who departs this life, they say, a cypress is planted. In their dense branches the turtle doves nest. When night falls they stop cooing and partake of the silence of the dead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.