Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

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.

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.

And her murderer is still alive, her mother says, the murderer of my daughter did quite nicely for himself, and now the girl is dead.

Leave it alone, her father says, and who’s saying he’s even going to pull through?

Leave it alone, that’s all you have to say when our child lets a person like that shoot her?

A person like what? asks their younger daughter, who will soon be known only as their daughter.

I tell you, if you start gallivanting around like your sister, I’ll give you what for.

They say she hardly knew him, her father says.

So she hardly knew him — apparently it was enough to have him whack her.

The younger girl is silent. Her sister once forbade her to poke into her secrets and possibly betray them to her parents or to anyone else whose business they were not, and the prohibition is still alive and well. What good would it do now after the fact if she told her parents that she saw her sister walking through the streets of Vienna with a man on Sunday, a week and a half ago?

Until Sunday, a week and a half ago, everything was fine, her father says. True enough, says her mother.

She did, however, sometime on Monday just before dawn. her father says. and even on Tuesday, says the younger daughter. no one in the world. her father says, and on Wednesday I. and then that night, the younger one says, exactly, on Friday it seemed as if. her father says, on Saturday, fresh snowfall, says her father, the younger sister says: And then came Sunday.

Would you two stop, her mother says now to her husband and daughter, you’re not going to bring her back with talk like that.

How awful that you never truly know what’s going on, her father says.

Her mother says: Be grateful.

What in the good Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening, her father asks and begins to cry.

Not until Friday afternoon — in the Pathological Institute they are investigating the path of the bullet and whether the young woman didn’t perhaps shoot herself after all — does her father set off for Margareten. (Her mother says she has her hands full with all the formalities, someone’s got to see to it that life goes on.) The dark entryway stinks, and above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. The girl’s grandmother doesn’t say anything when she learns what has happened, but her entire body begins to tremble. The girl’s father remembers the first time he came into her shop and saw her daughter, whose skin was so white, it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. He remembers that not long afterward, the shopkeeper showed him her daughter’s bed, and a cat lay curled up on it asleep. He just nods to her in silence and turns to go, opening the apartment door himself and then shutting it behind him. A number of the windows that in better days used to look out on the courtyard from the stairwell have been nailed up with boards.

When the investigations have been completed on Monday, the official enters cerebral hemorrhage under “cause of death” in the Registry of Deaths, and on Tuesday the funeral is held in the Catholic section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery, at Gate III. At the edge of the dark pit, the sacristan says a prayer, father and younger sister cross themselves, and the mother keeps her hands in her coat pockets. Yene velt. The world to come. The grandmother might have come to see that her granddaughter at least made it as far as the Catholic cemetery, but no doubt she prefers to keep them waiting instead. Once again she is leaving her daughter to deal with the most difficult things alone, just as in the old days, when she couldn’t even teach her to walk.

Perhaps, the younger girl thinks, everything would have gone differently if she had swallowed the glass marbles as her sister commanded, jumped down from Simon’s wall, or allowed her sister to cause her death in some other way. Had her sister now gone in her place? Had she not been thinking of her at all when she died? Her father takes a handful of earth and throws it into the grave. When the snow fell — the snow that is making the heap of freshly dug earth, the dark hillock stand out — his daughter was still alive.

Over there, on the other side of the high wall, is the Israelite Cemetery; no tree rises into the air there, the sky is unimpeded, someone who doesn’t know better might expect there would be streetcar tracks on the other side, or open fields, but her mother knows it is on purpose no trees were planted, for if one day the roots of the trees were to go zigzagging between the remaining bones of a person buried there, prying them apart, the person would no longer be whole when his name was called for the Last Judgment.

When they return from the cemetery, their daughter eats her own portion of mutton, then she eats her father’s portion, since he says he can’t get it down, and finally she eats the portion belonging to her dead sister. (Her mother didn’t report that they are now one person fewer, therefore she was given the twelve-and-a-half decagrams of meat due the deceased along with the rest of the family’s rations when she exchanged the still-valid stamps at the Grosser Markt early that morning.) God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us food . It’s only now that her sister lies buried that the younger daughter is so hungry.