It was in September of the same year that I received a postcard from Austerlitz giving me his new address (6 rue des cinq Diamants, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement), which I knew was in the nature of an invitation to visit him as soon as it could be arranged. When I arrived at the gare du Nord, high summer temperatures still prevailed, at the end of a drought which had been parching large parts of the country for over two months, and they did not begin to drop until October. The thermometer rose to over twenty-five degrees quite early in the morning, and towards midday the city was groaning beneath the heavy haze of lead and petrol fumes weighing down like a bell jar on the entire Ile de France. The blue-gray air was motionless and took one’s breath away. The traffic inched along the boulevards, the tall stone façades quivered like mirages in the shimmering light, the leaves of the trees in the Tuileries and the Jardin du Luxembourg were scorched, the passengers in the Métro trains and the endless underpasses through which a hot desert wind blew were exhausted. I met Austerlitz, as agreed, on the day after my arrival, in the Le Havane bistro bar on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, not far from the Glacière Métro station. As I entered the bar, which was rather dark even in the middle of the day, a television screen measuring at least two square meters and fixed high on the wall was just transmitting pictures of the great palls of smoke which had been stifling the towns and villages of Indonesia for weeks on end, and dusting gray ash over the heads of all who for any reason ventured out of doors, wearing masks to protect their faces. We both watched these calamitous images from the other end of the earth for some time before Austerlitz, as usual without any preamble, continued his story. When I was first in Paris at the end of the 1950s, he said, turning to me, I had a room in the apartment of an elderly lady of almost transparent appearance called Amélie Cerf, who lived at Number 6, rue Émile Zola, not far from the pont Mirabeau, a shapeless concrete block which I still sometimes see in my nightmares today. On my return now I had really meant to find somewhere to stay in the same street, but then after all I decided to rent a place here in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, since my father, Maximilian Aychenwald, whose last known address was in the rue Barrault, must have frequented this area at least for a while before, as it seems, he disappeared irrevocably and without trace. At any rate, my inquiries at the house in the rue Barrault, most of which is now empty, were fruitless, and so were my inquiries at various agencies in the prefecture, partly because of the proverbially unhelpful attitude of Parisian officials, which was even more marked than usual on account of the interminable hot summer weather, and partly because I myself found it increasingly difficult to go from one bureau to another making what I was coming to conclude were useless requests for further information. Soon I was merely wandering without any aim or plan in mind down the streets leading away from the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, up to the place d’Italie on one side and back down to the Glacière on the other, always thinking, against all reason, that I might suddenly see my father appear out of nowhere, coming towards me or stepping out of an entrance.
