Free The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

with a client. When I reached the little canal that crosses the road, an open-top American limousine studded with lights and gleaming with chrome glided past me across the carriageway as if it had come out of nowhere, and in it sat a pimp in a white suit, wearing gold-framed sunglasses and on his head a ludicrous Tyrolean hat. And as I stood gazing in amazement after this almost supernatural apparition, a dark-skinned man shot round the corner towards me, sheer terror in his face, and, swerving to avoid me, left me full in the path of his pursuer, who, judging by appearances, was a countryman of his. This pursuer, whose eyes were shining with rage and blood lust, was probably a chef or kitchen porter, since he was wearing an apron and holding a long, glinting knife in one hand, which passed by me so close that I imagined I felt it piercing between my ribs. Disturbed by the impression this experience made on me, I lay on my bed in my hotel room. I did not have a good night. It was so oppressive and sultry that one could not leave the windows closed; but if one opened them, one heard the din of traffic from the crossroads and every few minutes the dreadful squeal of the tram as it ground round the terminus track-loop. I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis when I stood before the large group portrait, The Anatomy Lesson. Although I had gone to The Hague especially to see this painting, which would continue to occupy me considerably over the years to come, I was so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts as I looked at the body being dissected under the eyes of the Guild of Surgeons. Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it took me a full hourto recover, in front of Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields. The flatland stretching out towards Haarlem is seen from above, from a vantage point generally identified as the dunes, though the sense of a bird’s-eye view is so strong that the dunes would have to be veritable hills or even modest mountains. The truth is of course that Ruisdael did not take up a position on the dunes in order to paint; his vantage point was an imaginary position some distance above the earth. Only in this way could he see it all together: the vast cloudscape that occupies two thirds of the picture; the town, which is little more than a fraying of the horizon, except for St Bavo’s cathedral, which towers above all the other buildings; the dark basks and bushes; the farm in the foreground; and the bright field where the sheets of white linen have been laid out to bleach and where, by my count, seven or eight people no taller than a quarter of an inch are going about their work. After I left the gallery, I sat for a while on the sunlit steps of the palais which Governor Johann Maurits, as the guidebook I had bought informed me, had built in his homeland whilst he was in Brazil for seven years, and fitted out as a cosmographic residence reflecting the wonders of the remotest regions of the earth, in keeping with his personal motto: “Even unto the limits of our world”. Report has it that when the house was opened in May 1644, three hundred years before I was born, eleven Indians the Governor had brought with him from Brazil performed a dance on the cobbled square in front of the new building, conveying to the townspeople some sense of the foreign lands to which the power of their community now extended. These dancers, about whom nothing else is known, have long since disappeared, as soundless as shadows, as silent as the heron I sawwhen I set off once more, flying just above the shining surface of the water, the beat of its wings calm and even, undisturbed by the traffic creeping along the bank of the Hofvijver. Who can say how things were in ages past? Diderot, in one of his travel journals, described Holland as the Egypt of Europe, where one might cross the