Austerlitz

The narrative turns to Austerlitz’s time in Prague:

The state archives building in Prague (pictured) reminds Austerlitz at once of a prison, an opera house, and a psychiatric institution. After struggling to communicate in Czech, Austerlitz meets an anglophone archivist, Tereza Ambrosová—a pale, 40-year-old woman. In her office, Tereza soothes Austerlitz after he becomes flustered trying to explain his mission. She assures him she’ll be able to complete a records search for the name Austerlitz by the following afternoon.

The next day, Austerlitz returns to the archives building, where he takes photos and Tereza gives him a short list of all Prague residents with his last name. He decides to visit an apartment where a former opera singer named Agáta Austerlitzová lived in 1938 because it’s the nearest address on the list. As Austerlitz walks through a labyrinth of alleys to the apartment, the sights and sounds evoke a flurry of long-repressed memories.

A woman named Vera Ryšanová answers the door of the apartment. She was friends and neighbors with Austerlitz’s parents—Agáta Austerlitzová and Maximilian Aychenwald—and was Austerlitz’s nanny. In shock, the two embrace.

Vera invites Austerlitz into the apartment, which she hasn’t changed since Austerlitz was last there. Vera begins telling Austerlitz about his parents, who lived together but never married. Maximilian dreamed of saving Czechoslovakia from the fascism overtaking Europe, and Agáta sang in the opera. Vera bonded with the couple over a shared love of French culture. When Vera switches from French to Czech—just as she and Austerlitz would when he was a child—he suddenly understands the language again.

Vera’s recollections of the time she and Austerlitz spent together dredge up many forgotten memories, such as how he would fall asleep to the sound of Vera reading in the next room: “I can still feel […] the sense of my consciousness dissolving among the poppies and leafy tendrils etched into the opaque glass of the door before I caught the slight rustle of the page turning” (174). Vera tells Austerlitz that since she’s become housebound, she’s increasingly begun recollecting their time together. Those memories blend with images from her own childhood; reminiscing makes Vera feel as she did when, as a child, she saw a diorama of a young Goethe in the Zillertal Alps, frozen in the moment of embarking through the Syrian desert.

The following morning, Austerlitz visits the Estates Theater, where Vera said Agáta made her opera debut in 1938. He struggles to remember the night of the dress rehearsal until someone sends a ripple through the stage curtain, conjuring visions of that lost night: He remembers waiting in bed for his mother to return from her shows. The smell of the theater would be on her when she kissed him goodnight. On their second meeting, Vera confirms the details of Austerlitz’s memory.

On his third day in Prague, Austerlitz visits the Seminar Garden, where he and Vera frequented. Looking out at the city, he sees the traces of its past, how it’s “veined with the curving cracks and rifts of past time, like the varnish on a painting” (179). He notices a similar pattern in the exposed roots of a chestnut tree (pictured), through which he liked to climb as a child.

After Austerlitz concludes this part of his story in the winter of 1997, he and the narrator sit in a deep silence before the gas fireplace on Alderney Street.