The End of Days

JENNY ERPENBECK

The End of Days

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

a new directions book

We left from here for Marienbad only last summer.
And now — where will
we be going now?

—W. G. Sebald,
Austerlitz

BOOK I

1

The Lord gave, and the
Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that
wasn’t right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start
with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom
of the pit, waiting to be covered up. Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl
running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her
satchel bouncing up and down as she runs ever farther; three handfuls of dirt, and
the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and
the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was
interred; three handfuls tossed down into the grave, and now even the grown woman
who would have come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking
some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother — she too was slowly
being suffocated by the dirt falling into her mouth. Beneath three handfuls of dirt,
an old woman lay there in the grave: a woman who herself had begun to move slowly,
one to whom another young woman, or a son, at times might have said: oh, Mother
— now she, too, was waiting to have dirt thrown on top of her until eventually
the grave would be full again, in fact even a bit fuller than full, since after all
the mound of earth on a grave is always round on top because of the body underneath,
even if the body lies far below the surface where no one can see. The body of an
infant that has died unexpectedly produces hardly any roundness at all. But really
the mound ought to be as huge as the Alps, she thinks, even though she’s never seen
the Alps with her own eyes.

She sits on the very same footstool she always used to
sit on as a child when her grandmother was telling stories. This footstool was the
one thing she asked for when her grandmother offered to give her something for her
new home. She sits in the hallway on this footstool, leaning against the wall, her
eyes closed, not touching the food and drink a friend has set before her. For seven
days she will sit like this. Her husband tried to pull her to her feet, but he
couldn’t manage it against her will. When the door clicked shut behind him, she was
glad. Just this past Friday, the infant’s great-grandmother had stroked the sleeping
child’s head, calling her
meydele
, little girl. She herself, by giving
birth to the child, had turned her grandmother into a great-grandmother and her
mother into a grandmother, but now all these transformations have been reversed. The
day before yesterday, her mother — who at the time could still be called a
grandmother — had brought a woolen blanket for her to wrap herself in when she
went walking in the park with her baby on cold days. Then, in the middle of the
night, her husband had shouted at her to do something. But she hadn’t known what to
d
o in a situation like this. After his shouting, and after
the few minutes in the middle of the night when she hadn’t known what to do, after
the moment when her husband, too, hadn’t known what to do, he had not spoken another
word to her. In her distress, she’d run to her mother (who now was no longer a
grandmother), and her mother had told her to go back home and wait, she would send
help. While her husband was pacing up and down the living room, she hadn’t dared to
touch her child again. She had carried all the buckets of water out of the house and
emptied them, had draped a sheet over the hallway mirror, flung open the windows in
the room where the child lay, to let the night in, and then sat down beside the
cradle. With these gestures she had called to mind that part of life inhabited by
human beings. But what had happened right here in her own home, not quite one hour
before, was something no human hand could grasp.

That’s just how it had been when her child was born, not even
eight months before. After a night, a day, and another night during which the child
hadn’t arrived, she had wanted to die. That’s how far she had withdrawn from life
during those hours: from her husband, who was waiting outside; from her mother, who
sat on a chair in the corner of the room; from the midwife, who was fussing about
with bowls of water and towels; and above all, from this child that supposedly was
there inside her but had wedged itself into invisibility. In the morning, after the
birth, she watched from her bed as everyone simply went about doing what was needed:
Her mother, who had now been transformed into a grandmother, received a friend
arriving to offer congratulations, and her grandmother, now transformed into a
great-grandmother, brought amulets printed with Psalm 21 to hang around the room and
a cake fresh from the oven, and her husband had gone to the inn to drink the child’s
health. She herself was holding the baby in her arms, and the baby was wearing the
linens that she, her mother and her grandmother had embroidered in the months
preceding the birth.

There were even rules for what was happening now. The people
her mother had sent arrived at dawn, took the baby from its cradle, wrapped it in a
cloth, and laid it on a large bier. The bundle was so small and light that one of
them had to hold it in place as they descended the stairs, otherwise it would have
rolled off.
Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter
. Do me a favor,
don’t go falling down the stairs. A favor. She knew the baby had to be buried before
the day was out.

*

Now she sits here on this little wooden footstool that her
grandmother gave her on her wedding day, she sits with her eyes closed, just as she
has seen others sitting in times of mourning. Sometimes it was she who brought food
to mourners; now a girlfriend has set bowls of food at her feet. Just as she emptied
out all the water in the house the night before — they say the Angel of Death
would wash his sword in it — just as she covered the mirrors and opened the
window because she’d seen others do so before her (but also so the child’s soul
wouldn’t turn back, so it would fly off forever) — in just this way she will
now sit here for seven days: because she has seen others sitting like this, but also
because she wouldn’t know where else to go while she is refusing to enter that
inhuman place her child’s room became last night. The customs of man are like
footholds carved into inhumanity, she thinks, something a person who’s been
shipwrecked can clutch at to pull himself up, and nothing more. How much better it
would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.

Maybe the blanket was too thick, that could have been the
cause. Or because the baby was sleeping on its back. Maybe it choked. Or it was sick
and no one knew. Or the reason was that you could hardly hear the baby crying
through the closed doors. She hears her mother’s footsteps in the baby’s room and
knows what she is doing: She is taking the blankets out of the cradle and pulling
off the pillowcases, she is stripping the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden
frame and pushing the cradle into a corner. With an armful of bed linens, she now
emerges from the room, passing the footstool where her daughter is sitting with her
eyes shut, and carries everything down to the laundry. Was it that she’d been too
young to know what to do? Her mother never told her about all these things. Or
because her husband was equally helpless. Because in truth she had been left all on
her own with this child, this creature that had to be kept alive. Because no one had
told her beforehand that life does not work like a machine. Her mother comes back.
As she walks past, she removes the sheet covering the hall mirror, folds it up, and
carries it into the baby’s room. She lays it at the bottom of the suitcase she’s
brought along for just this purpose, then takes the child’s things from their drawer
and puts them in the suitcase with the sheet. During the months that preceded the
child’s birth, all of them — the pregnant woman, her mother, and her
grandmother — sewed, knitted and embroidered these jackets, dresses, and caps.
Her mother now shuts the empty drawer. On top of the chest is the toy with little
silver bells. When she picks it up, the bells make a jingling sound. They jingled
yesterday as well, when her daughter was still a mother playing with her child. The
jingling hasn’t changed in the twenty-four hours that have passed since then. Her
mother now places the toy on top of everything else in the suitcase, shutting it and
picking it up before exiting the room and carrying it down the hall past her
daughter to bring it to the cellar. Maybe it was because the child hadn’t yet been
baptized and its parents had married in haste with only a civil ceremony. Today, the
child was buried in accordance with Jewish custom, and in accordance with Jewish
custom she will now sit for seven days upon this footstool; but her husband will not
speak to her. Surely he’s now at church, praying for the soul of their child. And
where can their child’s soul go now? To purgatory? Paradise? Hell? Or was it —
as some people say — that their child was one of those who needed only a short
while to complete something begun in an earlier life, something of which the parents
knew nothing, which is why the child so quickly returned to where it came from? Her
mother comes back, goes into the baby’s room and shuts the windows. Maybe on the
other side of life there is nothing at all? The apartment is now perfectly still. In
fact, that’s what she would prefer.

Around nightfall, her breasts begin to grow hard and
ache. She still has milk — milk for a baby lying in the ground. She’d like
best to die now of this overabundance. When her baby was still gasping for air and
then turning blue, she had imagined making the child a gift of all the years of life
still remaining to her, haggling with the God of her forefathers, exchanging her own
life for the life that had emerged from her. But God, if he existed, had rejected
her gift. She remained alive. Now she remembers once more how after her marriage her
grandmother never again permitted her to come along on visits to her grandfather.
Only after her baby arrived and she insisted on showing it to him did she learn that
on her wedding day her grandfather had sat shiva for her, his granddaughter, the
living bride who had married a goy; despite his weakness he had sat there on his bed
for seven days. From above, seen from the heaven her grandfather believes in, she
too has already crossed the border from life to death and no longer possesses
anything she might barter to strike a deal with God. When night comes, she pushes
aside the bowls of food and lies down to sleep beside the footstool. She doesn’t
hear her mother go to bed. She doesn’t even hear her husband come home. Sometime
during this night it is exactly twenty-four hours since the unexpected death, in a
small Galician town — 50.08333 degrees latitude north, 25.15000 degrees
longitude east — of an infant child.

2

An old man lies in bed in a dark cottage and does not speak. He’s
been lying like this for a long time now, day in and day out, he knows people are
saying he’s on his deathbed, but while for some people dying is a narrow antechamber
to be crossed in a single leap or stride, the dying in which he lies is so huge that
he cannot find his way across, perhaps because he is already so weak.

His wife sits beside him, she sits for a long time without saying
anything; meanwhile it’s already dark again outside. The Lord gave, and the Lord
took away, she says at last.

That spring his wife had often sat knitting beside him, and although his
eyes were no longer so good, he had seen that the garments she was working on were
very small. And then one day she had taken the provisions that were to have lasted
an entire week, baked a cake and left the house with it. There was no egg in the
soup on the Sabbath. There was no need for him to ask, nor for her to explain.

Early this morning while it was still dark, still half asleep, he heard
his wife and daughter whispering in the parlor; then, after lunch, his wife left the
house and didn’t return until nightfall, sitting down beside him and saying at last
after a long silence: The Lord gave, and the Lord took away.

The old couple hadn’t been invited to their granddaughter’s wedding. On
the day their granddaughter married a goy, the old man sat up in his bed and stayed
sitting like that for seven days, sitting shiva for this living bride as was
customarily done only for the dead.

Now his wife sits in silence beside him, her elderly, bed-ridden
husband, and shakes her head. God knows what our
meydele
was thinking,
marrying her daughter to a goy, the old man says.

3

She takes the blankets out of the cradle, takes off the
pillowcases, strips the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden frame, and pushes the
cradle into a corner. The misfortune had begun many years before, when her daughter
was still an infant. When they heard the noise outside, her husband had immediately
sent the wet nurse up to the nursery with the baby, telling her to bolt the door and
not open it under any circumstances if there was a knock, and to close the shutters
tightly. Then the two of them ran from window to window downstairs to see what was
going on: A crowd appeared to be forming in the surrounding streets, and across the
way, on the square, some were running, some were shouting, but what they were
shouting was unclear. She and her husband hadn’t managed to get the downstairs
shutters closed before the first stones struck the house. Her husband tried to see
who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the
window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was
more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing
stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing
just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase
behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s
Collected
Works
that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished
school.
No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. /
O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide
. Hereupon
her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to
seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei
running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing
an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock,
and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready
beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail
them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the
nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter
beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the
stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she
didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let
in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her
husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down
below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor,
the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the
wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars
of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of
them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without
stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs, tearing down the
wallpaper as they ran and banging holes in the wall with the axe. She and her
husband stood behind the attic door, which was very thin, they’d locked it but
hadn’t found furniture heavy enough to barricade the door, and now they heard the
men’s footsteps on the last steep flight of stairs.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and
give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with
thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover
strength, before I go hence, and be no more.
O Lord in heaven. If the way
below was barred to them, there had to be an escape route above. They began to push
the roof shingles away with their hands, creating an opening. But the door behind
them that was momentarily holding off their pursuers was thin, just a few boards.
Her husband helped her pull herself up and clamber through the opening onto the
roof. And then she tried to pull him up after her. And that’s when the thin door
could no longer withstand the attackers’ blows. And then she was pulling him up by
one arm while the men below were pulling him down by the other. Lot refused to
surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob
seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the
hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least
him
to strike at, spit
on, trample, and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the
house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with
blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people,
and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door
to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to
withdraw.
Make no tarrying, O my God.
She doesn’t have the strength of
angels, she doesn’t succeed in pulling her husband up to where she is. As she holds
tight to her husband’s arm, she implores Andrei, whom she has known since he was a
baby, to have mercy, and she implores the men she doesn’t know to have mercy as
well, including the one holding the axe, but while she is still holding tight to her
husband’s hand, her husband down below is being first insulted and then beaten by
the men she doesn’t know and also by Andrei, whom she has known since he was a baby,
Mercy, and finally before her eyes they begin to swing the axe. She does not let go.
First she is holding her husband by the hand, and then all she is holding is a clump
of flesh, for there is no longer anything alive left that she might pull up to where
she crouches in the open air. Then she is a Jewish widow holding Death by the hand.
She lets go, gets up, and looks down at the small town beneath her and the open
landscape. It’s broad daylight, there are thatch roofs and roofs covered in
shingles, there are streets, squares, and fountains, and in the distance fields and
woods, cows standing in a meadow, a coach driving down a dirt road, in front of the
house people stand looking up at her, unmoving now and silent. Then, suddenly, she
sees that it is snowing. Everything will freeze, she thinks, and a good thing too,
she thinks, snow, snow. Losing consciousness, she tumbles, rolls down off the
sloping roof, and falls, as luck would have it, on the heap of clothes, linens, and
curtains thrown out onto the street by the men, and she remains lying there in the
heap of rags, amid blood consisting of the raspberry jam she herself made the summer
before, the jar shattered when it was thrown, and now she lies there, her limbs
broken, her eyes closed, and none of the people standing there silently in the
square comes closer or checks to see if she is still alive. She is alive, but at
this moment she herself does not yet know it. The flurries have been further stirred
up by her fall, more feathers float into the air from the slashed comforters,
delicate goose down drifts around, slowly descending upon the branches of the trees:
snow, snow, just like in winter.