Austerlitz

At the now empty hotel bar, Austerlitz continues his story:

While at Stower Grange, he becomes close friends with a younger boy, Gerald Fitzpatrick, after finding Gerald trying to start a fire in a hall, saying he wouldn’t mind if the whole school burned down.

Austerlitz begins watching over Gerald, who suffers from extreme homesickness. Gerald helps Austerlitz with his first photographs, whose subjects are the unique geometry of everyday objects (four of which are pictured). Austerlitz loves photography for its resemblance to memory in exposing the contours of the world: “the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long” (94). The narrator recalls Austerlitz sent him a photograph of the Stower Grange rugby team (pictured), in which Austerlitz features, after their meeting that night.

Austerlitz loves visiting Gerald’s family home in Wales—called Andromeda Lodge—because it is the antithesis of the house in Bala. Gerald’s great-grandfather made Andromeda Lodge into a mix of a natural history museum and an exotic paradise, putting on display the preserved specimens and plant cuttings he brought back from his travels around the world as a naturalist. A colony of white cockatoos that nests in the orangery entrances Austerlitz because of how closely the birds resemble humans, especially in their tendency to form ever-changing factions and to pair off into harmonious couples.

During his frequent visits to Andromeda Lodge, Austerlitz meets Gerald’s uncle, Evelyn, and great-uncle, Alphonso. Though only 50, Evelyn has a spinal disease and stays in constant motion to prevent losing more mobility. Gerald thinks Evelyn’s extreme stinginess is to blame for this condition. In contrast, Alphonso is a hale 60 year old who spends his time exploring nature or painting watercolors en plein air. While painting, he wears glasses with gray silk lenses to soften the landscape.

This sort of dreamlike atmosphere suffuses much of Austerlitz’s visits to Andromeda Lodge. From his blue-ceilinged room, he beholds the way a fine mist blurs the valley below on summer days:

All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely—I remember this well—it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity (111).

Austerlitz notices the valley never appears the same way twice and that his thoughts become incoherent in front of it.

One night, Alphonso takes Gerald and Austerlitz outside to teach them about the vast array of moths, which “came flying in as if from nowhere, describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops, until like snowflakes they formed a silent storm around the light” (106). Austerlitz thinks of all he learned about moths that night when he finds them clinging, motionless, to the walls of his London apartment. Lost, they remain where they’ve landed until they die unless Austerlitz returns them outside.

Austerlitz and the narrator realize the bar is closing and the two part, planning to meet the following day. The narrator takes a room in the hotel and spends the night writing down everything Austerlitz said.