It was late in the fall of 1996, and I was, as usual, getting ready to leave my office and head to the subway. I usually take the B train, but on that evening my colleague decided to drive me, perhaps because he had started to tell me about his father, who had just died, and, with the minutes ticking, offered to drive me all the way to 110th Street. I’d heard he was shaken by his father’s death, but I also knew he was keeping it to himself. Late that afternoon, while walking past his open door, I had caught him standing in his office, with his back turned to me, gazing out at the leafless trees in a stance so aimless and unguarded that he reminded me of those frozen characters in Edward Hopper’s paintings who are forever staring out their window at basically nothing at all. I chose to walk by without disturbing him. He was, I was sure, thinking of his father, and I felt for him. But after slipping by his door, I decided to take a few steps back and peered into his office. “You OK?” I finally asked. He looked at me, then smiled, aware of my hesitation. “Me OK,” he replied. Then, with one thing leading to the other, he opened up and told me a great deal about his father while driving me home. I’ll never forget the story.
After being married all his life, his widowed father found the courage one day to reach out to a woman he had loved in high school, more than fifty years before. She too had been recently widowed, which he knew, since all through their married lives each had been keeping secret tabs on the other. The two were not a whit less in love than when they were high school sweethearts. I asked my colleague whether he had known about his father’s first love. No, no one even suspected. The man had been a devoted and faithful husband all of his married life, the perfect family man, and a model Orthodox Jew. And yet, I said, he must have lived with this big, gaping hole in his heart, despite the wife he must have cherished, the children he loved, the circle of friends that had gathered around him, and the business he’d built up. All exemplary, he added. And yet…, he said. The two needed to do a lot of catching up. Yes, but while a part of them might certainly have wished they’d stuck together and not been married to the wrong partners—and his mother was the wrong partner, as he later found out from his father’s letters and journals—another part, while grateful for their final reunion, could not help thinking of the life they’d missed out on, of all the years spent apart, and of how impossible it would be now to even attempt to make up for lost time. Could one ever banish the thought that one has led the wrong life? How could one be happy when faced with daily reminders of so many wasted years?
He mused aloud about the matter for a while when he parked the car outside my home. When he’d last seen his father, they were like lovebirds together, he said. They were so grateful for this second go at life that they took what they could and enjoyed the present without regrets, because all they had was the present. No point thinking of the years behind them, and certainly no point thinking of the future. “But under those conditions,” I said, “I wouldn’t know how to live in the present only. My mind would be constantly tossing and turning back and forth in time, like someone trying to fit into clothes he wore decades earlier, or trying on hand-me-downs worn by a very fat uncle. I’d probably end up ruining the small gift given me in my final years.”
As my colleague was not reluctant to observe, “My father lived the wrong life, you see, yet I am the product of that wrong life.” He smiled.
The candor with which he described his father’s life disturbed me. Was there such a thing as a wrong life? I asked.
He looked at me. Yes, there was, he said, and went no further.
But if I was interested in reading about misspent lives, he said, perhaps I should pick up W. G. Sebald.
This was the first time that I’d ever heard of Sebald. Had it not been for that car ride that evening, or for that conversation about my colleague’s father, chances are I would have discovered Sebald under entirely different circumstances and, in light of those circumstances, given him a reading totally unlike the one that followed this conversation.
I bought The Emigrants that same evening at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side and was unable to put it down. Most people read Sebald in light of the Holocaust. I read him in the key of misspent lives.
On finishing W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants a few days after the car ride, I could not stop thinking of the last of the four tales in the book. Here, the grown Max Ferber, who as a boy was shipped off to Manchester from Germany without his parents, has had a relatively successful life as an artist in England, his adoptive home, but he is permanently scarred because of what the Nazis had done to his mother. Life after the Holocaust was, as the French call it, not a vie, but a survie, not living, but surviving. The road originally intended was never traveled. What took its place was a makeshift path, which one would still have to call a life, and maybe even a good life, but it was never going to be the real life. Cut short, this might-have-been life didn’t necessarily die or wither; it just lingered there, unlived and beckoning. Tree stumps don’t always die, but they no longer thrive; it’s the offshoots that do the work of the tree.
The parallels between my colleague’s father and Max Ferber were compelling. Both men ended up living lives that always felt partially misspent: one with the wrong spouse, the other in the wrong country, with the wrong language, the wrong people. Both made the best of what they were given. But the similarities between Sebald’s characters and Sebald’s own life are equally striking. Sebald was himself a German who had been living and teaching at a university in England since the 1960s—not an exile but an expatriate who, in so many intangible ways, remained a displaced soul. He was not Jewish, but he seemed to write about individuals who were Jewish or had close ties to those Jews whose lives had been so thrown off course by the war, by loss, horror, exile, or, to use Sebald’s term, by transplantation, that it was no longer clear to them not just where or why but how, exactly, they belonged on this loose bolide called planet Earth, or whether “belongingheit” could ever be applied to them again, because this too was true: they had no notion of where they stood vis-à-vis this ungraspable other thing called time. Was time fast-forwarding or turning back on them, or was it simply standing still, year after year after year, until it ran out? Or, to look at things differently, were they out of step with time, because time’s covenants no longer held for them? These survivors too looked out of windows with despair and melancholy in their eyes, wearing that glazed and vacant stare that tells you that, without dying, they have in fact outlived their time. They’re not ghosts, but they are not of us. “And so they are always coming back to us, the dead,” he writes—words Sebald repeats in one way or another in almost everything he writes. It bespeaks his inability to understand how porous is the membrane between what might have been and might yet be, between how things never go away but aren’t coming back either, between life and that other thing we don’t know the first thing about. As Jacques Austerlitz of Austerlitz says:
I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember … I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all.
But it was not Max Ferber who ignited something in my mind. It was, instead, another character, Dr. Henry Selwyn, whose mesmerizing tale left a lasting impression on me. In Selwyn’s story, the narrator remembers that years earlier, in 1970, he had befriended his English landlord, Dr. Henry Selwyn, and that, in the course of several conversations, the landlord had managed to reveal a number of facts about his earlier life: how, contrary to appearances, he was not really a Briton but a Lithuanian whose family had immigrated to England in 1899, when he was seven years old; how the ship on which the family sailed had ended up, not in America, where it was originally destined to sail, but, by accident, in England; how, growing up in England, young Selwyn had felt the need to conceal his Jewish identity from everyone, including, for a while, his wife, who is essentially estranged from him, though they continue to live under the same roof; and how, as a young man in 1913, he had met a sixty-five-year-old Swiss mountain guide named Johannes Naegeli. This mountain guide died soon after Selwyn returned to England at the start of World War I and “was assumed … [to have] fallen into a crevasse in the Aare glacier[s].” Young Selwyn, fighting on the British side, was devastated by the news of the missing Austrian guide, for he seemed to have been exceptionally fond of the older man. Fifty-seven years later, in 1970, Dr. Selwyn tells his tenant, “It was as if I was buried under snow and ice.”
If the plot of this tale remains irreducibly simple, the situation grows increasingly complex when it becomes clear that the story is built on highly unstable temporal plates hurtling against one another like blocks of glacial debris. At one moment a plate may be buried deep underneath the others; at another it bursts forth and buries everything else. Fifty-seven years later the subject of the mountain guide suddenly erupts in the course of a dinner conversation; the guide, it would seem, is far more alive to Dr. Selwyn now than is his wife, who shares his home.
Three aspects struck me in this story.
First, the Holocaust.
Dr. Selwyn’s accidental migration to England took place long before the Holocaust, and therefore the Holocaust, as it affects Dr. Selwyn or his relatives in England, is irrelevant—except that the Holocaust, which hovers over the other three tales of The Emigrants, suddenly begins to cast a retrospective shadow over Selwyn’s tale and, by implication, over his entire life, as if the Holocaust were not absent from his life but simply overlooked, as if it were inherent to it and had been hinted at all along but that we as readers had just failed to notice, because Selwyn as a character never quite saw things in light of the Holocaust either, because Sebald himself had never put the pieces together until he’d written the other three tales, as if, to echo Selwyn’s own words, the Holocaust were buried under ice, and no one saw it. The Holocaust is never brought up once in this first tale.
If Jacques Austerlitz in Austerlitz eventually finds out that he is Jewish and, like Ferber, saved by Kindertransport, in The Emigrants there is no amnesia to delay the discovery of Selwyn’s Jewish roots. Sebald simply does not mention his Jewishness except almost as an inadvertent aside. And yet the whole tale is written in the retrospective key of the Holocaust.
I look for hints of what happened in Selwyn’s life during World War II, yet the subject has been perfectly elided and screened off; I comb the text for what it does not say, will not say, refuses to say, is too timid or too repressed or scared to say, but I find nary a clue. Anyone seeing a film set in 1932 Berlin will automatically be filled with disquieting forebodings when watching two Jewish lovers in the film kissing debonairly in a secluded spot in the Tiergarten. Something is about to happen or may indeed not happen to them, but watching the lovers without intimations of what lies ahead makes no sense and is critically insufficient. The viewer nurses these disturbing feelings because he watches the goings-on of the lovers prospectively—and the film director, naturally, and without ever suggesting the Holocaust, exploits and stokes these misgivings. In a similar vein, it is impossible to read or say anything about the sharp-eyed, supremely Gallic Irène Némirovsky today without invoking retrospectively the Holocaust.
Dr. Selwyn may have escaped the Holocaust, but on closing all four tales of The Emigrants, we sense that he lives with the “memory” of this event that never happened to him but that would more than likely have happened to him had he not left Lithuania in 1899 as a child.
But far, far more uncannily yet, we also feel that the Holocaust, despite Selwyn’s move to England, is not necessarily done with him yet. Retrospectively, the Shoah could come to exact its due in good time, for there is no statute of limitations for what hasn’t happened—and the Shoah is in no hurry. This is not about past and present and future: this is irrealis time. It’s not about what did not, will not occur, but about what could still but might never occur. If time exists at all, it operates on several planes simultaneously, where foresight and hindsight, prospection and retrospection, are continuously coincident.
Selwyn was spared by accident; history could easily decide to rectify the mistake. Something that never happened and couldn’t have happened to him and had altogether stopped happening thirty years earlier continues to radiate, to pulsate, to reach into the 1970s like a totally defunct star millions of light-years away whose light is still traveling in outer space and hasn’t even reached our beloved planet Earth yet.
This is not about the Holocaust happening all over again in the late twentieth century; it is not about facts, or even about speculative facts, but about counterfactual—i.e., irrealis—facts. It is about turning the clock back to 1899 while simultaneously living in the late twentieth century. How historians explain time is one thing; how we live time is quite another.
Freud, of course, understood this kind of counterfactual mechanism when he realized that with screen memories “there was no childhood memory, but only a phantasy put back into childhood.” The later intrudes upon the earlier. The later alters the earlier. The later and the earlier trade places. There is no earlier or later. There is no then and now.
Second: the failed migration to America.
The promise of settling in New York was never realized for the Selwyns. Selwyn’s parents settled in England, made the best of things, and indeed prospered, but their prospective life in New York was neither realized nor quite expunged from their minds. For them, even if they are dead now, things are still being worked out on some sort of parallel time warp, and the ship that made the mistaken stop in England may still eventually decide to leave England and cross the Atlantic with young Selwyn and his family aboard, even if he’s much older now than were his parents at the time, even if their ship ended up in a scrapyard before the Second World War. The voyage out feels like a promissory note that has yet to but may never come due, not unlike those bonds sold by the Trans-Siberian Railway at the turn of the nineteenth century that you can still buy for next to nothing at the stall of any bouquiniste along the Seine in Paris: these bonds are very real, but they cannot be realized. They have become irrealis bonds, the way their bearers are irrealis people, the way the voyage to America is irrealis, the way the Holocaust and its impact have no time markers and are therefore free-floating on the spectrum of time.
And herein lies the real tragedy. The dead don’t just die; death may not be the ultimate undoing. There is an after-omega. And it may be worse. “It truly seemed to me, and still does,” as Sebald writes in The Emigrants, “as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.” Or in the heartbreaking words of the author’s father in Göran Rosenberg’s latest book, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, “We have already died once,” but the rebirth, as the rebirth of Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, Tadeusz Borowski, and Jean Améry, proved to be a rebirth into something else, not life. Survival is too costly. In their case, the implacable Shoah has a persistent, long reach, and there are things that are worse than death. For what the Shoah does if it doesn’t kill you the first time around is utterly demolish, in the words of Jean Améry, your trust in the world. Without trust in the world, you are, like the dead, simply hovering in the twilight. There is no place to call home, and you will always keep getting off at the wrong station on the long road from Auschwitz, from Lithuania, or from wherever you came.
Sebald’s narrator is deliberately silent on the subject of the Holocaust, just as he is very opaque about the failed voyage to New York. I have no sense of why that is, nor am I convinced that I am not pushing my reading of this tale. What begins to grow clear, once you collapse Max Ferber’s and Dr. Selwyn’s accounts and have laid out the names of the temporal plates like suspects on a police station bulletin board, is that language lacks the correct verbal tense or the correct mood or the correct verbal aspect to convey the haunting and unwieldy counterfactual reality of a might-have-been that never really happened but isn’t unreal for not happening and might still happen, though we feel it might still but cannot happen.
This is the very reflux of time, the cynosure of counterfactual thinking. Call it “retro-prospection” collapsed into a single and unthinkable gesture.
It is the script of roads not taken and of lives that have been cast adrift, unlived, or misspent and are now marooned in space and time. The life we’re still owed or that fate dangles before us and that we project at every turn and feed upon and, like a virus or a suppressed gene, gets passed on from one day to the other, from person to person, from one generation to the next, from author to reader, from memory to fiction, from time to desire and back to memory, fiction, and desire, and never goes away because the life we’re still owed and cannot live transcends and outlasts everything, because it is part yearned for, part remembered, and part imagined, and it cannot die and it cannot go away because it never, ever really was.
This script is ultimately what we leave behind, what still remains and still pulsates after we stop breathing—our Nachlass in time, our unfinished business, our ledgers left open, our accounts receivable, our unrealized fantasies and unlived minutes, the conversations still on hold, the unclaimed luggage in the cloakroom still waiting for us long after we’re gone.
This is Sebald’s universe. Supremely tactful, Sebald never brings up the Holocaust. The reader, meanwhile, can think of nothing else. Sebald barely mentions the accidental move to England, but I have no doubt that Selwyn has been living not just the unintended life, or the accidental life, but the wrong life. The life he lives contends with a counterfactual life occurring in some sort of nebular, spectral, irrealis zone. This sense of having mislaid one’s true life, one’s real self, is finally formulated in Austerlitz, when the eponymous character tells the narrator: “At some time in the past I must have made a mistake or something was done to me and now I am living the wrong life.”
People may take their own lives when they realize they’ve been living the wrong life; or, as is sometimes the case with people whose lives have been devastated by loss and tragedy, they may outlive the course of their years precisely because they’re clinging to the hope of encountering the life they’re still owed. This was the tale of my colleague’s father.
Hardly surprising then that, while vacationing in France, Selwyn’s former tenant, the narrator, should hear that the good old doctor had finally closed the ledger and shot himself.
And here comes the third baffling aspect of Sebald’s tale. Dr. Selwyn’s business is by no means over even after he dies. In 1986, as the narrator is traveling by train through Switzerland, he begins to remember Dr. Selwyn. And as he thinks of Selwyn, he accidentally—actually, the adverb should be coincidentally—spots an article in that day’s newspaper reporting that “the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier seventy-two years later.”
The body that was lost during the summer of 1914 moments before World War I has finally worked its way up to the surface, long after the war became a hazy memory, long after its dead have decomposed, long after the bodies of those who lived through that war only to perish in the Holocaust have completely disappeared. In fact, no one who was old enough to be a soldier in 1914 is alive today. Yet suddenly the frozen, undecomposed body of Johannes Naegeli is now younger than Henry Selwyn, himself dead for sixteen years. When Rip Van Winkle returns, he is not only an anachronism; he has every reason to believe, unless he looks in a mirror, that he is twenty years younger than those of his own generation. Meanwhile, Sebald’s narrator would have loved nothing better than to show the newspaper article to Henry Selwyn, to allow the older doctor to come to a reckoning with his younger self. But therein lies the stunning cruelty of time. A reconciliation, which would in theory have straightened out so many things, cannot take place. Reconciliation, reckoning, reparation, restoration, redemption: these are, at best, paltry figures of speech—words—as are the concepts of “unfinished business” and “open ledgers” and being “indefinitely put on hold.” Time has no use for such words. Because, no matter how crafty the ancient grammarians, we still don’t know how to think of time. Because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do. Because time couldn’t care less how we think of time. Because time is just a limp and rickety metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, nor, for that matter, is it place that is ineradicably wrong. Life itself is wrong.