Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

Time to go. Let’s go .

Every Sunday she went to the Vienna Woods to get firewood. She would take the tram to the end of the line at Rodaun or Hacking, along with a great many others. Like her, they would carry baskets, rucksacks, or satchels on their backs; from there, she’d enter the woods to collect kindling, perhaps breaking off a branch here and there that was not too heavy.

My cousin helping me out with coal — wouldn’t that be nice. Hat, coat, glove. Good.

Returning home in the evening, she sometimes had to let a tram or two pass before managing to squeeze into one of the overcrowded cars, so she often remained standing at the tram stop in the dark for over an hour, freezing, while in the illuminated tram people stood or sat, with the wood they had gathered sprouting awkwardly from their rucksacks and panniers.

And the basket. And the rucksack.

From the outside, a tram like that resembled an aquarium, and when the car lurched into motion or braked, all the people behind the fogged-up glass swayed back and forth with their bundles of twigs like one huge organism.

Oh, it’s all getting tangled up. What a disaster. The boots. Now look, it’s falling out the top. Oh, this shvakhkeyt , this weakness. Well.

Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers, ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.

All right, that’s good now. Oh, I almost forgot the key. That would have been something.

You just have to start walking, then a street name scrawled on a scrap of paper with a building and apartment number will turn into a route to follow: with buildings on either side, with weather (cold and damp), with the sound of footsteps sinking into slush and snow, and with other people on this or that errand, willing or unwilling; a route that leads you past dimly lit taverns and shops whose windows are almost empty or sealed up with shutters. The low, stooped building where the old woman lives has a stone angel keeping watch over the entryway. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. After fleeing the provinces and spending her first few days in Vienna in her daughter’s apartment, the old woman told her older granddaughter about the two angels that prophesied the fall of Sodom to Lot and conducted him to safety. These angels were so beautiful that the citizens of Sodom wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from their limbs and devour them. Sheyn vi di zibn veltn. As beautiful as the seven worlds. Now, as the older granddaughter presses down on the door handle, trying to remember how her grandmother said this sentence to her, it suddenly seems unfamiliar, and she wonders whether she just dreamed it. As beautiful . The building’s dark entryway stinks, above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. In the stairwell, it seems that some of the windows facing the courtyard are broken and have been replaced with wooden panels. The beautiful man; oh, his lips, the wings of his nose, his eyelashes. Has beauty never had any other purpose than to cause those who wish to possess it to rise up against each other, and, in the end, between them, tear the beautiful object to shreds, or, failing that, destroy each other instead? She rings the bell and also knocks on the door, but no one answers. As a girl, she had marched to the Rathaus , demanding that the war come to an end. Now she is in the middle of her own war, one in which — even at so great a distance from bombs, grenades and poison gas — she is still finding it infinitely difficult to survive each day from beginning to end, and then all through the night.

What in the Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening?

Of the fourteen persons who fell victim to lightning in 1898, two were killed by lighting bolts striking inside buildings, two under trees, one under a wayside shrine where he’d taken cover, and seven out in the open, including two reapers working in the fields. In two cases, I was unable to determine the precise circumstances. Outside the town of Laufen an der Sann, lightning struck a woman who was carrying a hoe on her back. The woman was paralyzed, and a mark was left behind on her back in the shape of the hoe.

After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her mother threaded new shoelaces in her younger daughter’s shoes. After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her father spread out his files on the kitchen table and started reading. On Sunday evening, after her older sister had gone out, the younger girl did her mathematics homework, her mother got her sewing kit from the cold parlor and began to darn socks, and her father experimented with whether he could read better with his glasses on or without, he pushed the glasses down and looked over the top of them, then pushed them back up and finally said: This typeface really isn’t easy to read. The younger girl then put more wood on the fire, and the wood hissed because it was so damp. Her mother said: Go wash your hands, otherwise you’ll make your notebook dirty. The younger girl washed her hands in the bucket. The mother bit off the thread. The father turned the page of the file. The younger girl wiped her hands on her dress, sitting back down at the table. Her mother looked for a different color of thread in her sewing basket. Her father laid his glasses to one side and went on reading. The young girl dipped her pen into the inkwell and solved her arithmetic problem. Her mother coughed. Her father turned over another page of the file.

Margaretenstrasse, Heumühlgasse (down one or the other of those streets), then Rechte Wienzeile, across the Naschmarkt, Linke Wienzeile, somewhere or other, Girardigasse, Gumpendorfer Strasse, Stiegengasse, Windmühlgasse; everywhere, the snow is piled up shoulder-height on either side — Theobaldgasse, Rahlgasse — just as high on the right as on the left — Mariahilfer Strasse, Babenberger Strasse, Opernring — and it’s slippery, as smooth as glass. Does she really want to turn onto Opernring? Or would it be better to take a left onto Burgring? Today, it is exactly one week since she waited on Alserstrasse with the man she loves for the 7031. How long does a week last? Crossing the street to the left, toward the Museum of Fine Arts, would mean picking her way between two gigantic heaps of snow with a frozen puddle in between, so she turns to the right. In the opera house on the other side of the street, music and listening to music are locked up together. Why is she walking around outside? To exhaust herself to the point where she can neither see nor hear? Is she indulging in a stroll? Strolling to her demise? Two pounds of butter, someone whispers at her cold back. How much? She keeps going. Two pounds of butter and fifty decagrams of veal. The man’s whisperings insinuate themselves beneath the broad brim of her hat, slipping into her ear from behind. Two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles. Although the entire world lies open before her, which she thought might put an end to her hearing, she can hear what the man is offering in exchange for her person. Is she interested? Or would she rather return home, where what is called her life is taking place: her father reading his files, her little sister doing her homework, her mother calling her, her older daughter, a whore. Salome is being performed tonight. How long has it been since her parents went out together? Does she know a good reason not to accept? Or is she not so sure? When she turns around, she sees a young man, perhaps only slightly older than she is; he has no hat on, even though it’s the middle of winter, so she sees his thin hair, by the time he’s twenty-five he’ll have a bald spot, she thinks, and she’s surprised to see beads of sweat on his forehead in the middle of winter.