Austerlitz

After a paragraph break (one of the few in Austerlitz), the narrator and Austerlitz leave the latter’s house on Alderney Street and walk to an overgrown cemetery—Tower Hamlets. Austerlitz continues his story:

When he returns from his journey across Germany, Austerlitz visits Tower Hamlets during the day to soothe himself. At night, Austerlitz experiences severe anxiety attacks, during which a black mist clouds his vision and he feels his body fragmenting from its core. Discovering the source of his lifelong distress has done little to quell it: “reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed” (245).

During one anxiety attack, Austerlitz falls and hits his head, causing a three-week coma. When he awakes in the hospital (pictured), he spends a winter convalescing without a thought in his head.

Austerlitz leaves the hospital a year after returning from Prague. Following his doctor’s suggestion, he finds work at a nursery garden outside of London, where he works for the next two years. Both his duties and the company of his cheerful fellow gardeners (pictured), who have their own trauma, soothe Austerlitz.

During these years, Austerlitz spends his free time deciphering a tome by H. G. Adler about Theresienstadt (the layout of which is pictured in a diagram).