Austerlitz (Penguin Essentials)

And indeed the letterbox was always empty up to the winter of 1941, when Agáta was still living in the Šporkova, so that as she said to me once, oddly, it was as if those messages in which we placed our last hopes were misdirected or swallowed up by the evil spirits abroad in the air all around us.

At least, I no longer knew in what period of my life I was living as I journeyed down the Rhine valley.

The first thing that caught my eye on this excursion was the great number of grey, brown and green loden coats and hats, and how well and sensibly everyone was dressed in general, how remarkably solid were the shoes of the pedestrians of Nuremberg.

and it dawned upon me, said Austerlitz, that what I now saw going past outside the train was the original of the images that had haunted me for so many years.

a lady of uncertain age in a lilac blouse,

Austerlitz, there was no more movement at all apart from the whitewash peeling off the walls and the spiders spinning their threads, scuttling on crooked legs across the floorboards, or hanging expectantly in their webs.

But neither Agáta nor Vĕra nor I myself emerged from the past. Sometimes it seemed as if the veil would part; I thought, for one fleeting instant, that I could feel the touch of Agáta’s shoulder or see the picture on the front of the Charlie Chaplin comic which Vĕra had bought me for the journey, but as soon as I tried to hold one of these fragment

As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that evening in the Šporkova when the eyes of the Rose Queen’s page looked through me.

but it only dissolved all the more and was overlaid by the memory, surfacing in my mind at the same time, of the shining glass in the display windows of the ANTIKOS BAZAR on the west side of the town square, where I had stood for a long time around midday in what proved to be the vain hope that someone might arrive and open this curious emporium.