Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

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.

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.

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.