Next day, Austerlitz continued, I went back to the state archives building in the Karmelitská, where, in order to compose myself a little, I first took some photographs of the great inner court and the stairway leading up to the galleries, which in its asymmetrical construction reminded me of the follies built by so many English noblemen in their parks and gardens. In the end I went up this stairway, pausing on each landing for a while to look through one of the irregular openings in the wall and down at the empty yard, which I saw traversed only once by one of the archive’s gray-coated porters, whose right leg flexed slightly inward as he walked. When I entered Tereza Ambrosová’s office she was just watering her geranium cuttings, which stood in an assortment of flowerpots on the sill between the inner and outer windows. They do better in this overheated atmosphere than in the cold springtime air at home, said Mrs. Ambrosová. We haven’t been able to regulate the steam heating for a long time, so it’s often like a hothouse in here, particularly at this time of year. That may be why you felt unwell yesterday, she said, adding, I’ve already made a note of the addresses of all those named Austerlitz in the register. As I suspected, they didn’t come to more than half a dozen. Mrs. Ambrosová put her green watering can down and gave me a sheet of paper from her desk. Austerlitz Leopold, Austerlitz Viktor, Austerlitz Tomáš, Austerlitz Jeroným, Austerlitz Edward, and Austerlitz František were listed one beneath another, and at the end there was an Austerlitzová Agáta, evidently a single woman. The names were followed by the professions of their bearers—dealer in textiles en gros, rabbi, bandages manufacturer, principal clerk, silversmith, printing works proprietor, and finally opera singer—together with the number of the city district and the street: VII U vozovky, II Betlemská, and so on. Mrs. Ambrosová suggested that before crossing the river I might begin my inquiries in the Lesser Quarter, which wasn’t ten minutes’ walk away from here, she said. I could try the šporkova, a small street a few paces uphill from the Schönborn Palace, where the register of inhabitants for 1938 said that Agáta Austerlitzová had been living at Number 12 in that year. And so, said Austerlitz, no sooner had I arrived in Prague than I found myself back among the scenes of my early childhood, every trace of which had been expunged from my memory for as long as I could recollect. As I walked through the labyrinth of alleyways, thoroughfares, and courtyards between the Vlašská and Nerudova, and still more so when I felt the uneven paving of the šporkova underfoot as step by step I climbed uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life. It was true that I could recognize nothing for certain, yet I had to keep stopping now and then because my glance was caught by a finely wrought window grating, the iron handle of a bell pull, or the branches of an almond tree growing over a garden wall. Once I stood for a considerable time outside the vaulted entrance to a building, said Austerlitz, looking up at a half-relief set in the smooth plaster above the keystone of the arch. The cast was no more than a square foot in size, and showed, set against a spangled sea-green background, a blue dog carrying a small branch in its mouth, which I could tell, by the prickling of my scalp, it had brought back out of my past. Then there was the cool air as I entered the front hall of Number 12 šporkova, the metal box for the electrics built into the wall beside the entrance with its lightning symbol, the octofoil mosaic flower in shades of dove gray and snow white set in the flecked artificial-stone floor of the hall, the smell of damp limewash, the gently rising flight of stairs, with hazelnut-shaped iron knobs placed at intervals in the handrail of the banisters—all of them signs and characters from the type case of forgotten things, I thought, and was overcome by such a state of blissful yet anxious confusion that more than once I had to sit down on the steps in the quiet stairwell and lean my head against the wall.
It may have been as much as an hour before I finally rang the bell of the right-hand flat on the top floor, and then half an eternity seemed to pass before I heard movement inside, the door was opened, and I found myself facing Vera Ryšanová, who—as she was soon to tell me—had been my mother Agáta’s neighbor and my nurserymaid in the thirties when she, Vera, had been studying Romance languages at Prague University.
