I finished reading Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald which is, partly, about how some memories remember you, i.e. the type of memories that sneak up on you. Like those particularly filling ones that come when you stumble on a photo you used to know. Sebald inserts black and white photos -- of a ghostly looking kid in lederhosen, of an unsmiling rowing team in their team sweats -- in the book to evoke that filling-feeling: "...something stirring in them (the photos) as if one caught small sighs of despair... as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives." A good example of this feeling is when the protagonist Austerlitz returns to Wilsonova train-station in Prague and has a sort-of phantom memory of being there decades earlier when he’d, as a toddler, seen his mom for the last time.
So Austerlitz, as an old-man, is back in Prague in the 1990s to find out what had happened to his biological Jewish parents – people he’d almost completely repressed from his memories – during WWII. He describes walking up Nerudova Ulice and past the pink and blue houses, of which I have a photo I took and framed. The photo is face-down in a bag of stuff in my closet which (i.e. the bag o' stuff) I got back from my most recent past-love (there's no elegant name for that; ex-girlfriend is such a shit-term) last year. The bag, I haven’t yet had the wherewithal to look through. I took that photo when I lived in the Czech Republic in 2006. I didn't frame it, actually. She did.
At the top of Nerudova street, Austerlitz describes the view of the Vltava River and its 7 bridges, and the Old Town across the way. All this made me remember the times I brought, on separate occasions, my Canadian visitors (Maya, then Chris, then Al, then Colin) up there to look. On the occasion with my brother, there was someone selling pencil-sketches of the view. I told Chris to pose, to look down at one of the drawings while turning his back on the real actual view, for a photo. We’re meta like that.
Austerlitz walks back down Nerudova (“I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda,” I had then quoted the Simpsons to my brother) to see if he can find out about the names and histories of those long-lost parents who had shipped him to safety in the UK. Already, at this point, my heart is sort of bursting, as the book is not just about Jewish- and German- memory, post-Holocaust, but, much, much more importantly (#irony), about me. Maybe not. Tons of people have been to Prague and to the top of that street.
Eventually, Austerlitz finds the house where he spent his first 4 years, his old nanny still (barely) living there. His mother, the nanny says, had been an opera singer named Agita. Austerlitz's father’s name was *ahem* Maximilian. I also just found out that Sebald, himself, preferred to be called Max, short for his middle name Maximilian. His mom’s name was Rosa, similar to both my own mom’s name and my grandma's.
