The End of Days (25 page)

Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck

BOOK: The End of Days

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The salesman glances up from his book only briefly, 280 shillings,
he says, and goes on reading. And so the man buys his mother the miniature
In
Steadfast Loyalty
as a souvenir from Vienna, and since the time he’s spent
in the shop, though considerable, is less than an hour, he doesn’t hear the next
striking of the miniature grandfather clock that displayed the wrong time when he
entered. On his trip back to Berlin, he thinks briefly of the Goethe edition —
there’s an empty couchette on the night train where he might have stowed it —
but the spine of Volume 9 was damaged, and besides, who knows whether he’d still
have time to read an edition of collected works, he isn’t getting any younger.

Saturday is Frau Hoffmann’s ninetieth birthday. Her place at
the table between Frau Millner and Frau Schröder is set with a bouquet of flowers
from the Home’s administration and a little bottle of sparkling wine. When she sits
down, all those who are still in a position to sing begin singing when Sister Renate
gives the signal:
How glad we are that you were born, your bir-ir-irthday is
today.
Frau Hoffmann takes note of the fact that it’s her birthday and
thanks everyone. Frau Millner nods to her, or maybe she’s just nodding because her
toast with honey tastes so good, while Frau Schröder is concentrating exclusively on
not spilling her coffee. On the way back to her room, Sister Renate says: Today your
son’s coming to take you on an outing, isn’t that right, Frau Hoffmann? Oh, I didn’t
realize that, Frau Hoffmann says. But then before her son arrives she wants to comb
her hair and wipe the jam stain off her jacket. But even just raising her arm to the
level of her head is difficult for her, my own body is already too large for me, she
says to Sister Renate; don’t worry, the nurse says, I’ll pretty you up, she takes
the comb from Frau Hoffmann’s hand, draws it a couple of times through her sparse
gray hair saying, at eleven I’ll come back and bring you downstairs, all right?
Sure, Frau Hoffman says, I’m sure that will be fine.

And then she is sitting beside her son in who knows what
sunshine, beneath who knows what blue sky with plenty of good fresh air, in the
middle of the world.

It’s so wonderful you’re here, she says.

I’m glad to see you, too.

It’s such a great help to me, but you don’t know anything about it, and
it’s good you don’t know, it isn’t good to know more.

Her son is silent.

Tell me, was your trip nice?

Her son tells her about Vienna, the Naschmarkt and Café
Museum.

I have such a longing.

Her son says: I brought you something.

Pretty, she says, inspecting Kaiser William II and Kaiser Franz
Joseph.

It’s from a shop on Mondscheingasse, do you know it?

You know, I want to live and I cannot. When I die, a place will be
empty, that’s all, and a new place will be occupied.

I love you, her son says, taking his mother’s hand,

Really? That’s nice, she says.

Her hand lies cold and bony in his large, warm hand.

You know, she says, I am afraid that everything will be lost —
that
the trace
will be lost.

What trace? her son asks.

I don’t know anymore: from where or to where.

Her son is silent.

A few clouds are crossing the broad sky. Two airplanes flying high in
the air have made trails up there that are gradually turning back into sky. The son
recalls that until only a few years ago there would sometimes be an earsplitting
crack in the middle of a silence like this when supersonic aircraft broke the sound
barrier during a military maneuver. Now the Russians — generally referred to
as
our friends
— have long since gone home, and the training grounds
of the National People’s Army have been relocated; and probably it is no longer
legal to break through the sound barrier just as part of some drill. Now everything
is quiet, and the sky is almost as empty as it was in the age of the
hunter-gatherers.

I think that if we try playing, it will be a peculiar sort of game, his
mother says.

Four weeks before the Berlin Wall fell, his mother received the
National Prize First Class for her life’s work. She walked to the front of the
auditorium on his arm to receive the certificate and the little box. Now he is
sitting with her on a bench at the edge of the woods, the leaves rustle behind them,
and before them lies a wide, gently sloping field, upon which the blue-green wheat
is still only knee high. When the wind sweeps across it, it looks almost like
water.

I just wanted to tell you, his mother says, this is my good, good lovely
farewell.

Oh, mother, he says, stroking her back.

My fear of the future, she says, has not yet failed.

A couple of his mother’s friends wanted to come to celebrate her
birthday, but he told them no. Because he was ashamed for his mother? Or because he
was of the opinion that his mother should be preserved in her friends’ memories just
as she used to be? Whom was he doing a favor: her, her friends, or himself?

It sinks down over you from above to below — you don’t know what
side it’s coming from. I don’t know, and you probably don’t know either.

No, I don’t know.

Never has he known as little as he does now. The only thing he knows is
that his not-knowing is of a very different sort than hers. His mother’s not-knowing
is as deep as a river on whose distant shore there must be a very different sort of
world than the one he lives in.

I don’t know how you recognize a human being.

I don’t know from whom I can demand everything.

Do they come to us or from us?

I don’t know what is coming.

I don’t know anything.

I don’t know when big is. When is little?

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know where I was at home.

There is so much I don’t know.

I don’t know what is happening.

It begins slowly, and then it ends slowly. I don’t know which I like
better.

I don’t know if my heart will beat again.

I don’t know the big difference.

I don’t know.

I don’t know and I don’t understand either.

I know what I know — but it isn’t all tied up with
names.

I think this is all make-believe.

I think that’s it.

In this land to which his mother is crossing over, no longer able to
understand anything she once understood, she will no longer need any words, this
much he understands. For one brief, sharp, clear moment, he understands what it
would be like if he could arrive there along with her: The wheat field would be
there right from the start, just like the rustling of the leaves at his back, the
silence would be filled to the brim — that deafening crack living only in his
memory, absent now — and the memory that filled out this silence would be just
as real as the footsteps of all the human beings walking upon the earth at this
moment, along with their falling down, their jumping, crawling, and sleeping at this
very moment, just as real as all that mutely lay or flowed within the earth: the
springs, the roots, and the dead; the cry of the cuckoo off to one side would be
just as real as the stones crunching beneath the sole of his shoe, as the coolness
of the evening and the light falling through the leaves to the ground before him, as
his hand that he is using to stroke his mother’s back, feeling her bones beneath her
thin, old skin, bones that will soon be laid bare — briefly, sharply, clearly,
he knows for one instant what it would feel like if the audible and the inaudible,
things distant and near, the inner and outer, the dead and the living were
simultaneously there, nothing would be above anything else, and this moment when
everything was simultaneously there would last forever. But because he is a human
being — a middle-aged man, with a wife, two children, a profession —
because he still has some time ahead of him, time during which he can look up
something he doesn’t know in an encyclopedia or ask one of his colleagues, this
knowing free of language passes from him just as suddenly as it arrived. He’ll be
prevented from seeing this other world with the eyes of his mother for a good
earthly time, by the absence of the most crucial thing: the going away.

I dreamed that I was dreaming.

And suddenly it was no longer a dream.

Frau Buschwitz is already asleep when the son brings his mother
back to her room that evening. On the table at his mother’s bedside is a rinsed-out
glass soda bottle with modeling clay stuck to it. The clay has been shaped into a
red “90,” surrounded by a yellow ring, outside the ring are sausage-shaped green and
blue rays. The bottle holds a single rose, and leaning up against it is a birthday
card with the words
Happy Birthday! — from Herr Zander and his wife
.
Who are Herr Zander and his wife? her son asks. Good friends, his mother replies.
Aha, her son says. Before he leaves, he takes the miniature and leans it against the
bottle, too.
In Steadfast Loyalty.

Lately, his mother says, I find myself wanting to address the burden
with its proper title, the burden title.

Will you be all right? her son asks.

Oh yes, his mother says. I forced a century to its arms. For the moment,
I mean.

I’ll let the nurse know it’s time to help you change and go to bed, all
right?

I don’t know, his mother says, what it can mean that we are so
sad.

I’ll be going then, Mother, her son says.

Of course, Son, his mother says, go ahead, and put your hat on.

At 52.58867 degrees latitude north, 13.39529 degrees
longitude east.

When the phone rings at six in the morning, the son knows it can only be
for him. Between four and five in the morning, unfortunately, it must be so
difficult for him, but perhaps better this way for his mother, all of us in the hand
of God.

For one week more he will awaken every morning at precisely 4:17 a.m.,
every morning, precisely at the moment of the greatest silence, just before the
birds begin to sing. For the first time in his life, he will have dreams during
these nights that he still remembers when he wakes up.

His mother is lying there just barely underground, her head is still
sticking out: Are you the one who was with me in Ufa, she asks. Yes, he answers and
lifts up the ten centimeters of earth like a blanket to place a photograph of his
two children upon her breast.

And then he wakes up, it’s perfectly quiet, and then all at once the
birds begin to sing, it is 4:17 a.m.

Many mornings he will get up at this early hour that belongs only to him
and go into the kitchen, and there he will weep bitterly as he has never wept
before, and still, as his nose runs and he swallows his own tears, he will ask
himself whether these strange sounds and spasms are really all that humankind has
been given to mourn with.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their support of my work, I would like to thank
Wolf-Erich Eckstein from the Archives of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna,
the Vienna Stadt- und Landesarchiv, the Archives of the Akademie der Künste Berlin,
the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv and “Haus Immanuel” in Berlin-Niederschönhausen.

And for their help with the translation, thanks are due also
to
Sebastian Schulman, Rose Waldman, Zackary Sholem Berger, Gal Kober, Tali
Konas, Philippe Roth, Edoardo Ballerini, as well as to Richard Gehr, Amanda Hong,
Helen Graves, and my valiant editor Declan Spring.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a
newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may
be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from
the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

First published in cloth by New Directions in 2014

Design by Erik Rieselbach

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Erpenbeck, Jenny, 1967–

[Aller Tage abend. English]

The end of days / Jenny Erpenbeck ; translated from the
German by Susan Bernofsky.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8112-2192-4

ISBN 978-0-8112-2193-1 (e-book)

I. Bernofsky, Susan, translator. II. Title.

PT2665.R59A6413 2014