When I got out of the train in Lovošice after about an hour, I felt as if I had been travelling for weeks, going further and further east and further and further back in time.

measures to be taken by the State Police. The Jew concerned in the transaction! Agáta had cried, adding: Really, the way these people write!

I believe, Vĕra told me, said Austerlitz, that even the last remaining German sceptics were overcome by a kind of euphoria, such as one feels at high altitude, in these years when victory followed upon victory, while we, the oppressed, lived below sea level, as it were, and had to watch as the SS pervaded the economy of the entire country, and one

first because it quite often took me until midnight to master a single page, and a good deal was lost in this lengthy process,

I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum from room to room and back again, ignorant as I feared I had been through my own fault, far exceeded my comprehension.

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.

I see Victor Hugo’s sombre pen-and-ink drawings of the Rhine castles, and Joseph Mallord Turner sitting on a folding stool not far from the murderous town of Bacharach, swiftly painting his watercolours; I see the deep waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the people of Llanwddyn submerged in them; and I see, said Austerlitz, the great army of mice, a grey

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.

to my surprise, Austerlitz articulated these heterogeneous German compounds unhesitatingly and without the slightest trace of an accent