When I met Austerlitz again for morning coffee on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, shortly before I left Paris, he told me that the previous day he had heard, from one of the staff at the records center in the rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, that Maximilian Aychenwald had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camp at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out. Curiously enough, said Austerlitz, a few hours after our last meeting, when he had come back from the Bibliothèque Nationale and changed trains at the gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father.
As I might know, he said, part of the railway network had been paralyzed by a strike last Wednesday, and in the unusual silence which, as a consequence, had descended on the gare d’Austerlitz, an idea came to him of his father’s leaving Paris from this station, close as it was to his flat in the rue Barrault, soon after the Germans entered the city. I imagined, said Austerlitz, that I saw him leaning out of the window of his compartment as the train left, and I saw the white clouds of smoke rising from the locomotive as it began to move ponderously away. After that I wandered round the deserted station half dazed, through the labyrinthine underpasses, over footbridges, up flights of steps on one side and down on the other.
That station, said Austerlitz, has always seemed to me the most mysterious of all the railway terminals of Paris. I spent many hours in it during my student days, and even wrote a kind of memorandum on its layout and history. At the time I was particularly fascinated by the way the Métro trains coming from the Bastille, having crossed the Seine, roll over the iron viaduct into the station’s upper story, quite as if the façade were swallowing them up. And I also remember that I felt an uneasiness induced by the hall behind this façade, filled with a feeble light and almost entirely empty, where, on a platform roughly assembled out of beams and boards, there stood a scaffolding reminiscent of a gallows with all kinds of rusty iron hooks, which I was told later was used as a bicycle store. When I first set foot on this platform years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the vacation period, however, there was not a bicycle to be seen, and perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because of the plucked pigeon feathers lying all over the floorboards, an impression forced itself upon me of being on the scene of some unexpiated crime. What is more, said Austerlitz, that sinister wooden structure still exists. Even the gray pigeon feathers have not yet blown away. And there are dark patches, of leaked axle grease, perhaps, or carbolineum, or something altogether different, one can’t tell. Moreover, I was disturbed by the fact that, as I stood on the scaffolding that Sunday afternoon looking up through the dim light at the ornate ironwork of the north façade, two tiny figures which I had noticed only after some time were moving about on ropes, carrying out repair work, like black spiders in their web.—I don’t know, said Austerlitz, what all this means, and so I am going to continue looking for my father, and for Marie de Verneuil as well.