Wertach
Michael Carson I arrived in Wertach in early afternoon. A few children with backpacks wandered the street. An older couple, essentially the same person after so many years together, worked their way up the sidewalk near the bus stop. I parked in one of the open parking spaces throughout the town, observed the sign that said no parking, and moved to another empty lot, also with ‘no parking’ signs, but shifted the rental car into park anyway. A woman rushed out of the nearby house almost immediately, as if she had been waiting for this moment for the last 70 years. No parking, she said. The town feels empty. It felt empty. This might be W.G. Sebald’s influence. Sebald spends a month here in Vertigo’s final chapter, Il ritorno in patria. He drinks many glasses of local wine at the Engelwirt Inn, the bar his family once lived above, and reimagines characters from the town’s past, like the priest and the doctor who ride motorcycles to the houses of the dying, often mixing up their respective bags, or the wife of their landlord, deprived of her children, drinking wine alone in a room, her head against the bedpost, while young Sebald recites his prayers, or the hunter who falls in a ravine and dies of exposure, his dog surviving him until the rescue, only to go promptly and irrevocably insane. The narrator’s interaction in the book’s present is that of a ghost with the haunted, but it is unclear who is the ghost, what has returned home and what never left. The townspeople, his former classmates, seem to have grown old in a day. Despite the town’s post-World War II rehabilitation as an alpine vacation town,