. . .   But the habit
of often falling down in the street and
often sitting with bandaged hands
by the open window between the potted
fuchsias, waiting for the
pain to subside and for hours
doing nothing but looking out,
early on induced me to imagine
a silent catastrophe that occurs
almost unperceived.
What I thought up at the time,
while gazing down into the herb garden
in which the nuns under their white
starched hoods moved so slowly
between the beds as though a moment ago
they had still been caterpillars, this
I have never got over.
The emblem for me of the
scarcely identifiable disaster
since that time has been a stunted
Tatar with a red headcloth
and a white slightly curved
feather. In anthropology
this figure is often associated
with certain forms of self-mutilation
and described as that of the adept who
ascends a snow-covered mountain and long
tarries there, as they say, in tears.
In a sheltered corner
of his heart, so lately
I have read, he carries
a little horse made
of clay. Magical
crosswords he mumbles,
talks of scissor blades,
a thimble, a needle's
eye, a stone in the memory,
a place of pilgrimage, and
of a small die, ice-coloured,
with a dash of Berlin blue.
A long series of tiny shocks,
from the first and the second pasts,
not translated into the spoken
language of the present, they
remain a broken corpus guarded
by Fungisi and the wolf's shadow.

from 'Dark Night Sallies Forth,' II
Sebald, W. G. After Nature. Translated by Michael Hamburger.
New York: Random House, 2002.