The End of Days (11 page)

Now all at once she understands why she is sitting here with this man,
on whose face what goes by the name of heartache — in her own case, too
— makes so pitiful an impression. Now the inside of the sphere that always
seemed infinite to her suddenly contains this shabby little door. You know what, she
says, pulling her hands away from the sobbing man, it would be the easiest thing in
the world to insult your fiancée in a way she will remember all her life. Really? he
says, looking up, and meanwhile she is drying off her hands on her skirt under the
table.

Her mother says: I’m going to bed now, she gathers up her
sewing things, puts them back in their basket, brings the basket back out to the
cold parlor. Her father calls: I’m coming, too. Her sister has already been lying in
bed for half an hour, but despite the darkness she’s still awake. Her father picks
up the carbide lamp by its handle.

Do you really think? he says.

Of course.

And if something goes wrong?

They’ll certainly know what to do on Alserstrasse if anything goes
wrong.

Healing and Comfort for the Sick.

And if everything goes right, she thinks, we’ll soon enough be
continuing our journey on the quietest car of the New Viennese Tramway Society.

All right, I’m going to call her and tell her.

But just one sentence.

Just one sentence.

He settles up, she says goodbye to the waiter, that’s how easy it is to
pass from one world to the next. The telephone booth is just across the street, and
when the youth puts his weight on the floor of the booth, the light goes on —
a soul would be telephoning in the dark, she thinks. Just one sentence. She waits
outside in the snow, watching the lovesick young man speaking in the light: he
speaks, listens, responds again, listens, contradicts. She’d better drag him back
out of this cell, otherwise he might slide back over to the other side again; the
glass panes of the booth are already fogging up with his hot breath when she pulls
open the door.

In the receiver a female voice is exclaiming: For the love of God, speak
with my daughter tomorrow!

Tomorrow will be too late!

But I’m telling you she isn’t here!

Please tell her that even in death I was —

You still have your whole life ahead of you!

Now he falls silent. He says nothing at all. His hair is thin, at
twenty-five, he might already have a bald spot. Then she calmly takes the receiver
from his hand, and in his place she says into it:

Don’t you understand? He has to die.

We have to go stand in line at five o’clock. . . . You don’t always
have to be looking men in the face like that. . . . I have to do all the work
myself. . . . Your grandmother has to take responsibility for herself.

And the young man?

He’s got to die now, that’s all there is to it, and she has to ride in
his sled with him, all the way to hell.

She says the one thing and only thinks the rest, then she hangs up the
telephone.

The mother hears the father shutting the kitchen door so that
the warmth from the stove will keep until morning, then he goes out to the stairs,
the toilet is half a flight down. It flushes with water from the tap in the hall.
The mother turns over on her other side. The older girl has only just gotten back on
her feet again, and already it’s anyone’s guess what she’s up to. She sacrificed
herself for this daughter, who almost died as a baby, and this is the thanks she
gets.

The younger daughter doesn’t like it when her sister’s bed stays empty
overnight. If her sister were to move out altogether, as she sometimes threatens
when she’s fighting with their mother, there’d be just one advantage: they’d stop
referring to her, the younger sister, as the little one. The teacher said on Friday
that Austria is now only one-tenth its original size. She, on the other hand, has
grown during the war years, she’s now five foot seven. So the borders of the country
she lives in have nothing at all to do with her own size, but it’s probably best if
she doesn’t point this out in class tomorrow.

The father turns out the light and lies down in the dark bed beside the
mother. The blue-tinged shadows around the chin of his older daughter these past few
weeks involuntarily remind him of something he doesn’t want to be reminded of, but
his thoughts don’t much care whether or not he wishes to think them; when the time
is right they make their way, like it or not, through the thicket of all the things
he has ever thought or seen.

And now here they are in front of the opera house, Salome has
already been served Jochanaan’s head on a silver platter, the bloody papier-mâché
head with wool hair that is now back in its place in the dark properties closet, on
the shelf beside the wooden platter someone painted silver. They have agreed to take
a taxi to Alserstrasse. They will isolate the precise moment when the taxi stops in
front of the hospital and remove it forever from amid all the other time that
exists. The taxi drives up Burgring, takes a left onto Volksgartenstrasse, then
heads north up the avenue known first as Museumsstrasse, then Auerspergstrasse and
finally Landesgerichtsstrasse where Alserstrasse turns off to the left. The trip
takes no longer than five and a half minutes, during which not a word is spoken in
the back seat of the taxi. In front of the entrance to the hospital the taxi driver
stops, just as his passengers requested.

23

Action for the Victims of the Three Nights of Blood in
Lemberg: Hermine and Ignaz Klinger, 100 crowns; in remembrance of my beloved
mother Terka Korsky, 120 crowns; Frau Kamler, 10 crowns; in total 230
crowns
. This is printed on the piece of newspaper the old woman is rolling
up to light the fire. She had the right idea. Starting with the goy for her
daughter, then the train ticket she gave the young family for their trip to Vienna
to see the Corpus Christi procession, and then her own flight. The sticks from the
Vienna Woods are covered with lichen that produces foul-smelling fumes when burned.
Nights of blood. Andrei. The nursemaid who refused to open the door for her and her
husband. The Almighty took her husband’s life instead of the life of their
daughter.

Where could Father be?

In America, or France.

Don’t you care?

Only God can know where he is. Go wash your hands.

Let her daughter go on thinking that for some reason or other she was
incapable of holding onto the girl’s father. She had held onto him, held him to the
end, when he was nothing more than a bit of flesh. But should she have said that to
her daughter, should she have told her that she too, the mother, had also been in
danger of becoming nothing more than a bit of flesh, and the daughter, too, and that
under similar circumstances the daughter’s own girls — the big one and the
little one — might themselves be only flesh? For someone who didn’t know, did
it make a difference whether a person was dead or just very far away? The murderers’
guilt now looked like her own guilt, but was that important? In Lemberg not long ago
the Poles celebrated their victory over the Ukranians on the main square, while two
blocks away the Jewish quarter was set on fire. They celebrated for three nights.
Jewish children who tried to run away were tossed back into the burning buildings by
the legionnaires, but on the other side of the barricades there was accordion music.
Es vert mir finster in di oygn
, everything’s going black before my
eyes. In Vienna she doesn’t have much company, but she is alive. Her daughter is
alive, and so are the two girls.

24

Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Wahring,
fire burns in Ottakring, you’re a nice smoked herring!
That the promises
were not kept. That no one who asks wants to hear the answer. That her own interior
would have always remained an exterior, even with her tongue inside another during a
kiss. To dissolve the borders, that’s all she wanted. Why was it not possible for
her to love her friend and also her friend’s beloved; what exactly was being
forbidden her, and by whom? Why was she not permitted to plunge into love as into a
river, and why, if she was being forbidden to swim in these waters, was there no one
else swimming there? Why did her mother call her a whore? Why wasn’t she allowed to
tell anyone that her grandmother was Jewish? Was there really so little love in the
world that it wasn’t enough to glue things together? Why were there differences, why
this hierarchy of worth? Or was it only her own deficiencies making everything fall
apart? In any case, it was high time for her to subtract herself from the world.

The Mauser C96 is a weapon that was not regularly used during
the First World War but nonetheless enjoyed great popularity. The special feature of
the C96 is that the magazine is located not within the weapon’s grip but in front of
the trigger. On Sunday, January 26, 1919, at approximately 11:17 p.m., seated in a
taxi that has just arrived in front of Alserstrasse 4, the Vienna General Hospital,
48.21497 degrees latitude north, 16.35231 degrees longitude east, Herr Ferdinand G.,
a medical student in his third semester, acting in accordance with a mutual
agreement, places the muzzle of this handy weapon against the temple of a young
woman with whom he is only fleetingly acquainted, and at the very moment that a dog
barks outside somewhere — in response to this barking, as it were — he
pulls the trigger.

Finally, she doesn’t have to be trapped in this skin any
longer. Finally, this random individual has opened the shabby door with a gunshot,
and she is released into the open air.
Healing and Comfort for the Sick.
A
dead woman has infinite relatives; she is now infinitely loved and can love anyone
she likes, all the while dissolving entirely, with her dead thoughts, in all the
others. Did anyone ever see such soft lips on a man before? She now floats upon
these lips, utterly interspersed with the one she loves, drifting far away, the two
of them are the water and also the dark blue sky above it, and all who were trapped
behind the two endless rows of windows have now flung them open and are breathing
deeply in and out.

But then a second shot is fired, and the blood of this
happenstance individual splatters on her face, someone’s happenstance blood is
making her hair wet, or is it her own blood? Only now does she realize her skull is
exploding with pain, but why hasn’t it exploded; isn’t she supposed to be dead?
Someone opens the door: the taxi driver holds out an arm to the one shot dead so
that she can get out, cold Viennese air floods her skull, swirling past her
thoughts, she has been laid bare all the way beneath her skin. For the Lord God’s
sake, she hears the driver say, and now she also hears the shabby Viennese weeping
of this happenstance individual, who apparently was not capable of skillfully
shooting her and himself as they agreed. Before her closed eyes, a treacherously
slippery South Africa appears, she places her foot upon it and slips and then falls
and falls and falls.
If only I had known there’s no floor left once you go
through the door
, she thinks, and then she stops thinking, just as she
imagined she would.

Her mother sleeps, her father sleeps, her sister is dreaming
fitfully but is asleep as well. In a portfolio on the kitchen table, in the dark
kitchen, lie her father’s papers, but no one is reading them in the middle of the
night, no one is wondering what happened on August 20, 1897, in Wetzelsdorf at the
foot of the Buchkogel:
The birds in their cages fell down from their perches,
people leapt horrified out of bed, all were seized by a general terror. At the
same time a violent downpour began.
In the bedroom shared by the two girls,
hidden behind the wardrobe, is a thick notebook containing the older girl’s
diary.

25

Just before four in the morning, the police bang on the door so
loudly that the glass set into its upper half rattles; the girl’s mother is the
first to wake up. The following three days, her older daughter remains unconscious,
and except for the rising and falling of her rib cage, she lies perfectly immobile
in the hospital bed; even without moving, she is wrestling inside with death, they
say. Her mother complains to the nurses that her daughter has to lie in a room with
twelve beds under these conditions. Her father says: Let it be. Her mother complains
about the stink and the cries of the other patients. Her father says: Listen. Her
mother asks the doctor, who at one point carelessly referred to her daughter as a
suicide: Don’t you ever wash your hands?

Her father sits in silence beside his older daughter’s deathbed.

Did you see the dirt under his fingernails?

No.

I don’t want someone like that touching my child.

A man makes a coat out of an old piece of cloth.

When the coat is in tatters, he makes a vest from the coat.

When the vest is in tatters, he makes a scarf from the
vest.

When the scarf is in tatters, he makes a cap from the scarf.

When the cap is in tatters, he makes a button from the cap.

From the button the man makes a nothing at all.

And then from the nothing at all he makes this song.

On Wednesday night, sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m.,
between the first and second rounds the nurse makes through the twelve-bed room, the
young woman finally stops breathing. An official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese
of Vienna enters the young woman’s name in the large Registry of Deaths the next
morning. When the younger sister stops by on her way home from school that afternoon
to pay a visit, she finds an empty bed, and when she asks where her sister is, she
is told that her sister has been brought downstairs to the storeroom for the
dead.