the Emigrants by W. G. Sebald Page B

Because of this handicap, no doubt, he had already taken a quick glance at the latecomer outside the glazed door before he crossed the hall, a glance that was the more penetrating for being brief. Without a word he escorted me up a fine mahogany staircase to the top floor, where he showed me to a spacious room overlooking the back garden. I put down my bag, opened one of the high windows, and looked out into the heaving shadows of a cypress that soared up from the depths. The air was filled with its scent and with an unceasing rushing sound, made not by the wind in the trees, as I supposed at first, but by the Ithaca Falls, which were a short distance away, though invisible from my window. Before I arrived in the town it had been impossible to imagine that in the Lake Cayuga region more than a hundred such falls have been tumbling into the deep-carved gorges and valleys ever since the Ice Age. I lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by the long journey. The powdery veils that rose silently from the roar of the Falls drifted into my sleep like white curtains blown into a room black with night. The next morning I searched the telephone books in vain for the Samaria Sanatorium or the Professor Fahnstock mentioned by Aunt Fini. Nor was I any more successful when I called on a psychiatric practice, and when I asked the blue-rinsed lady at reception she visibly paled with horror at the words private mental home. As I was leaving the hotel to make enquiries in town, I met the crooked porter in the front garden, coming up the path with a broom. He listened to my request for information most attentively and then, leaning on his broom, thought in silence for a good minute. Fahnstock, he exclaimed at length, so loudly that he might have been talking to a deaf person, Fahnstock died in the Fifties. Of a stroke, if I am not mistaken. And in a few words that came with a rattle from his constricted chest he went on to tell me that Fahnstock had had a successor, one Dr Abramsky, though Abramsky had not taken any more patients into the sanatorium since the late Sixties. What he did nowadays in that old place on his own, said the porter, turning abruptly to go, no one knew. And from the door he called after me: I have heard say he's become a beekeeper.
    The old porter's information enabled me to find the sanatorium without difficulty that afternoon. A long drive swept through a park that must have covered almost a hundred acres and led up to a villa built entirely of wood. With its covered verandahs and balconies it resembled a Russian dacha, or one of those immense pinewood lodges stuffed with trophies that Austrian archdukes and princes built all over their hunting grounds in Styria and the Tyrol in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate their aristocratic guests and the accredited barons of industry. So clear were the signs of decay, so singularly did the window panes flash in the sunlight, that I did not dare go any closer, and instead began by looking around the park, where conifers of almost every kind - Lebanese cedars, mountain hemlocks, Douglas firs, larches, Arolla and Monterey pines, and feathery swamp cypresses - had all grown to their full size. Some of the cedars and larches were forty metres tall, and one of the hemlocks must have been fifty. There were woodland meadows between the trees where bluebells, white cardamines and yellow goats-beard grew side by side. In other parts of the park there were many different ferns, and the new greenery of dwarf Japanese maples, lit up by rays of sunlight, swayed over the fallen leaves underfoot. I had been strolling around the arboretum for almost an hour when I came upon Dr Abramsky busy fitting out new beehives outside his apiary. He was a stocky man close to sixty, and wore threadbare trousers. From the right pocket of his patched-up jacket protruded a goose wing, such as might once have been used as a hand brush. What struck one immediately about Dr Abramsky