Since that time, which, as I told myself while attempting to decipher, through the sparse stems of the asparagus fern, the letters forming the words morts en déportation, was now half a century ago, since that time, said Austerlitz, not much more than a dozen years had passed before I moved into Amélie Cerf’s apartment in the rue Émile Zola with my few belongings. What, I wondered, are twelve or thirteen such years, if not a single moment of unalterable pain? Was Amélie Cerf, whom I remember as physically almost nonexistent, perhaps the last surviving member of her tribe? Was there no one left to put up a memorial to her in the family mausoleum? Did she ever come to lie in that tomb at all, or did she dissolve into the empty air like Hugo and Lucie?
As for myself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. Without the slightest hesitation, and never making any corrections, he filled in one after another of his index cards in tiny copperplate handwriting, subsequently setting them out in front of him in meticulous order. Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-red chimneys, the bright and icy blue sky, and the snow-white metal weathervane with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure of the sky itself. The reflections in the old glass panes were slightly irregular or undulating, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that at the sight of them, for some reason I could not understand, tears came to my eyes. It was on the same day, added Austerlitz, that Marie de Verneuil, who was working in the records department too and must have noticed my strange fit of melancholy, pushed a note over to me asking me to join her for a cup of coffee. In the state I was in at the time I did not stop to reflect on the unconventionality of her conduct, but nodded in silent acceptance of her invitation and went out with her, almost obediently, one might say, said Austerlitz, downstairs, across the inner courtyard, and through the library gates, down several of the streets so full of pleasant air that fresh and somehow festive morning, and over to the Palais-Royal, where we sat for a long time under the arcades beside a shop window in which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, hundreds and hundreds of tin soldiers in the brightly colored uniforms of the Napoleonic army were drawn up in marching order and battle formation. On that first encounter, and indeed later, Marie told me very little about herself and her background, perhaps because she came from a very distinguished family, while as she probably guessed I was from nowhere, so to speak. Once we had discovered our common interests, our conversation in the café under the arcade, during which Marie alternately ordered peppermint tea and vanilla ice cream, turned mainly on subjects of architectural history, including, as I still remember very clearly, said Austerlitz, a paper mill in the Charente which Marie had visited with a cousin of hers not long before and which by her account of it was one of the strangest places she had ever seen. This enormous building, made of oak beams and sometimes groaning under its own weight, said Marie, stands half hidden among trees and bushes on the bend of a river with waters of a deep, almost unnatural green. Inside the mill two brothers, each proficient in his own skills, one of whom had a squint and the other a crooked shoulder, turn great masses of soaked paper and rags of fabric into clean sheets of blank paper, which are then dried on the racks of a large airing loft at the top of the mill. You are surrounded by a quiet twilight there, said Marie, you see the light of day outside through cracks in the slatted blinds, you hear water running gently over the weir, and the heavy turning of the millwheel, and you wish for nothing more but eternal peace. Everything Marie meant to me from then on, said Austerlitz, was summed up in this tale of the paper mill in which, without speaking of herself, she revealed her inner being to me. In the weeks and months that followed, Austerlitz continued, we often strolled together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Tuileries, and the Jardin des Plantes, walking up and down the esplanade between the well-pruned plane trees with the west front of the Natural History Museum now on our right and now on our left, going into the palm house and coming out of it again, tracing the convoluted paths of the Alpine garden, or traversing the dreary terrain of the old zoo where large animals from the African colonies had once been put on display, said Austerlitz, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, dromedaries, and crocodiles, although most of the enclosures, decked out with pitiful remnants of natural objects—tree stumps, artificial rocks, and pools of water—were now empty and deserted. On these walks it was not unusual for us to hear one of the children whose adult companions still took them to the zoo calling out, in some exasperation: Mais il est où? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort? I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm.