Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

At night, instead of sleeping, she works on the account of her life, which she is using to apply for Soviet citizenship. But what if there is no right answer on this test? Will there eventually be only a single thing left to feel sure of: that each of the comrades dying, here or in Germany, has finally reached his goal, while each who has survived all of this, here or in Germany, purchased his life with treason?

Sometimes she would take her father’s glasses off his nose to clean them. She and her friend had sometimes stood side by side, comparing their legs. Once she had lain awake all night long beside her friend’s fiancé, weeping. For Comrade G. she had sliced through an entire stack of paper at one go. Before she kissed her husband for the first time, she had grabbed him by his shock of hair, pulling him toward her. Was she ever even the same person? Were there any two moments in her life when she was comparable to herself? Was the whole not the truth? Or was everything treason? If the person who is to read this account remains faceless to her, what face should she be showing him? Which is the right blank face for a blank mirror?

My husband was arrested on October 25, 1938.

Comrade Sch. in his yellow suit jacket always used to say contemptuously when two comrades fell in love: They’re privatizing. France, England, and America had meanwhile recognized Hitler’s government. If a person was now in love with the wrong idea, this put him objectively — whether he saw it this way or not — on the side of the Fascists. Friendship, love, and marriage were indeed a sticky subject in times when all signs were pointing to war.

Today we know that enemies of the people have slandered upstanding comrades in the name of political vigilance and brought about their arrests. I am convinced that the case of my husband H. is precisely such an instance and that his innocence will be demonstrated.

When she was a child, her father sometimes made faces for her in the dark, and precisely because she loved him so much, she was never entirely sure that her father was still her father at these times. She had always considered it possible that he might at any moment be transformed from the person she knew so well into something deadly, and then this deadliness would prove to be his actual nature. Just a single moment of truth like this could reveal his entire life to have been dissimulation.

Hadn’t she sat in church on Sunday, a good Christian girl, while the next day, people might perhaps be spitting at her Jewish grandmother when she went to do her shopping at the Naschmarkt?

She’d reproached herself as a duplicitous wretch when she betrayed her best friend with her desires. Always there had been these dependencies, always the fear of desiring too much or not being good enough, leading to lies, to dissimulation, to silence. Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Ottakring, always the fear of giving too much of oneself or too little, Jewish sow , always the rungs separating human beings, the inferiorities, always someone pushing someone else downstairs, someone falling, knocking over the person below. Had not they, the Communists, made it their business to even out the gradient so that everyone could stand freely without falling, without pushing, shoving, being pushed or shoved, free — and without fear?

Never did anyone display a more upright and incorruptible character than my husband. In the three years we spent in the Soviet Union, H.’s every thought was devoted to working in the service of Socialism, combating Fascism, helping the Party.

Only after she had fallen in love with him had she realized what a great longing she’d always had to be knowable to another person: to be one with herself, and at the same time with another. Everything within her that she had secretly identified as wrong, all the trespasses she had committed, imagined, inherited, or desired — he’d laughed away all her shame and, with it, her susceptibility to blackmail. Love had meant saying what was in her heart, and this saying meant freedom, and for the first time her fear of not being good enough had gone away.

And hadn’t Lenin’s principle of criticism and self-criticism within the Party originally presupposed — and also set as its goal — absolute equality among all comrades and their mutual trust? Was it not this principle that was to facilitate growth? The more radically the individual set his own limitations aside, the more firmly the whole cohered. Why had G., then, whom she had always referred to as her clever friend , not sacrificed his friendship with A.?

Truly we are coming to know one another in the course of these exchanges, we see each other quite clearly. This is my profound insight, what I understand here as a Bolshevik, what I experience: Bolshevism’s power, its intellectual power, is so strong that it forces us to speak the truth. As Communists we should show our faces, in other words show the entire person. You can’t just say that you didn’t have time to be vigilant because you had to bring money to your wife at your dacha. When we have been successful in creating a clean atmosphere, we will truly be able to work cleanly and productively.

Until recently, she’d shared her husband’s view that it was crucial they scrutinize their own ranks closely to keep the core stable. She’d reclined on the sofa as he sat in an armchair, reading to her from the thick volume containing the latest report on the court proceedings. After Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev — the original revolutionaries, once lauded as Lenin’s stalwart brothers-in-arms — Bukharin, too, had made a public confession, declaring himself guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he had been condemned to death and shot. In his last plea, he’d said: When you ask yourself, “If you must die, what are you dying for?”— suddenly a pitch-black void appears before you with shocking clarity. There is nothing worth dying for if you want to die unrepentant. He’d taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Soviet Union one last time.

She and her husband had met Bukharin right at the beginning of their time in Moscow. The very day they arrived, he had telephoned the hotel of the Austrian and German comrades who’d just escaped from their own countries — countries where they’d been in hiding — and personally delivered a piece of bread and bacon to each of their rooms.

Now, would she still have a chance to describe the sound the pages of the thick book made as they turned? Page after page, she heard in her husband’s voice the way these living beings were transformed into ghosts.

Only now that she is alone has she begun to ask herself if it is really necessary to radically cut away everything that is weak or gravitates to the fringes. The core of a sphere, her little sister would probably say (she who was always so good at math), is basically just a point, but one whose size approaches infinity on the negative axis. But what was the core? An idea? An individual? Could it be Stalin? Or the utterly disembodied, utterly pure belief in a better world? And whose head was this belief supposed to inhabit if the day came when not a single head remained? An individual could lose his head, she’d thought two years ago, but not an entire Party. Now it was looking as if an entire Party really could lose all its individual heads, as if the sphere itself were spinning all its points away from it, becoming smaller and smaller, just to reassure itself that its center held firm. Approaching infinity on the negative axis.

In Vienna her husband used to laugh whenever a theater critic wrote: He wasn’t playing Othello — he was Othello. Old-fashioned was his word for this mania for perfect illusions. He interpreted the flawless melding of actor and mask as the pinnacle of bourgeois deceit, and now, in the Land of the Future — where the labor of all for all supposedly had been stripped of deception, where individual gain resulted in profit for all, while egotism and tactical maneuvering could be eliminated before they arose — he himself stood accused of duplicity? Had they, as people on the run, changed their names so often their own comrades had lost all memory of what lay behind the names? Why else was there so much talk of costumes and masks? Or had they, locked in battle with an external enemy, begun to turn into this enemy without realizing it? Would this new thing hatching out of them bear them ill will? Had their own growing gone over to the other side unbeknownst to them?