[...] After the conjuror’s exit the lights slowly dimmed, and when our eyes were used to the darkness we saw a quantity of stars traced in luminous paint inside the top of the tent, giving the impression that we were really out of doors. We were still looking up with a certain sense of awe at this artificial firmament which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, was almost close enough for us to touch its lower rim, when the whole circus troupe came in one by one, the conjuror and his wife, who was very beautiful, with their equally beautiful, black-haired children, the last of them carrying a lantern and accompanied by a snow-white goose. Each of these artistes had a musical instrument. If I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, they played a transverse flute, a rather battered tuba, a drum, a bandoneon, and a fiddle, and they all wore Oriental clothing with long, fur-edged cloaks, while the men had pale green turbans on their heads. At a signal between themselves they began playing in a restrained yet penetrating manner which, although or perhaps because I have been left almost untouched by any kind of music all my life, affected me profoundly from the very first bar. I cannot say what it was that the five circus performers played that Saturday afternoon in the circus tent beyond the gare d’Austerlitz for their tiny audience, drawn from heaven knows where, said Austerlitz, but it seemed to me, he added, as if the music came from somewhere very distant, from the East, I thought, from the Caucasus or Turkey. Nor can I say what was suggested to my mind by the sounds produced by the players, none of whom, I am sure, could read musical notation. Sometimes I seemed to hear a long-forgotten Welsh hymn in their melodies, or then again, very softly yet making the senses swirl, the revolutions of a waltz, a ländler theme, or the slow sound of a funeral march, which put me in mind of the curiously halting progress of a uniformed guard of honor escorting a body to its last resting place, and of how, in their ceremonious manner, they pause every time before taking the next step, with one foot suspended an inch above the ground for the briefest of moments. I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life. Why certain tonal colors, subtleties of key, and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never understand, said Austerlitz, but today, looking back, it seems to me as if the mystery which touched me at the time was summed up in the image of the snow-white goose standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions. (Austerlitz)