Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

The housekeeper found her at the foot of the stairs when she arrived that morning. At around 10:30 — but perhaps it had happened earlier — her son at school had just finished his essay on Goethe’s poem “ Willkommen und Abschied .” The moment at which his entire life changed did not look any different from all the other moments before or after it. Probably, the housekeeper says, his mother had just changed her clothes upstairs and wanted to go down to her study. Those stairs are treacherous, the housekeeper says. As a small child, he had only slid down the banister when his mother wasn’t looking. He could fall, could break a leg or his neck. Do me a favor, don’t go falling down the stairs , his mother always said. Certainly she herself never went sliding down the banister, she always just walked up, walked down, step after step — but the stairs are treacherous, as the housekeeper says.

What actually happened to your relatives, her son had asked her when he was already a bit older. There were air raids on Vienna, she said. It would have been easier to answer questions about so many other things, but he’d never asked about them. She would have liked to tell him what sort of apples she used for her strudel. Now she’d taken a tumble. Now she was falling down a flight of stairs, and these stairs no longer led to the ground floor of her house, no longer to her study, no longer to the front door, no longer to the kitchen; for her, since she believed in nothing supernatural, these stairs led only from the upper floor of her house down to nothingness. Never would she have thought that the border between what is and what isn’t could gape open so abruptly.

Really? her little sister asks.

And that it has to happen right in the middle of life, on a stupid flight of stairs.

You were just plowing on ahead like always.

Don’t be silly. I weigh too much, that’s all.

It shows that things are good with you.

Never again permit myself to be blackmailed by hunger.

You won that one.

And now I’m going to die because I’m such a blimp.

Nonsense.

I go to a resort to take it off every year.

So as not to let yourself be blackmailed by food.

Once I lost twenty-six pounds.

That’s quite a lot.

And now?

The housekeeper says she made sure that the men who came to get his mother were gentle with her. One of her legs had gotten caught in the railing, and she was lying head-down, but that’s all the detail she was willing to give. When he left for school, he’d still had a mother. When he left for school, his mother, still in her bathrobe, had run after him as far as the garden gate. As always, even when it wasn’t yet above fifty degrees, or already under fifty. Meanwhile he’s almost twice as tall as when he first started school, but that doesn’t stop her from running after him as far as the garden gate holding his cap: Put your hat on, sweetheart. It didn’t stop her from running after him until today. Beyond where the street curves, his mother couldn’t see him any longer, and he would take the cap off again. He never felt cold, but his mother didn’t believe him. The housekeeper says she wants to go home now, she’s in a state from all that’s happened, but if he needs help, tomorrow or whenever, he knows where to find her. To go home now. He nods and pulls the door shut behind her.

How is he ever supposed to go up these steps again? The carpeting covering the steps is scraped in one spot, is that the spot? Or were those scratches always there? Did his mother slip or stumble? On which of these steps was her head lying when she stopped breathing? But even if he knew everything about the final moments of his mother’s life, he still wouldn’t know what it meant now for her to be dead. Yesterday the great artist H., recipient of the Comrade G. Medal, the Badge of Honor of the Great Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold, and the Goethe Prize, as well as a number of other highly prestigious awards bestowed by our Republic, was suddenly and unexpectedly taken from us. We shall eternally hold our stalwart Comrade H., the courageous antifascist faithfully devoted to the workers’ cause, in reverent memory.

She falls and, falling, asks herself whether this fall is really going to end with her breaking her neck.

You know, I never heard back from them about the streetcar stop on Kastanienallee at the corner of Schönhauser.

Be patient, they’ll get back to you, her husband says, brushing the strand of hair back from his face.

If they’d just move the streetcar stop forward a little, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam there day after day.

She falls, and while she is falling she feels ashamed for falling.

Come on, that could happen to anyone.

I also wrote to them about conditions at the Landsberg retirement home. They need to hire more staff, the old people there are really suffering, someone told me.

That was the right thing to do.

And about the Intourist trips to Finland — they’re so disorganized!

Is Finland pretty?

Of course. And just imagine, you can’t order any replacement parts direct from the factory that makes all the carburetors and filters for our Republic.

Really!

That’s got to change.

Most definitely.

She is tumbling out of this world in which so much remains to be done before everything is as it should be. When she isn’t here any longer, who will care for this State that is her State and still in short trousers?

Stepping over the invisible body of his mother — or rather, through it — he now ascends the stairs after all, to the upper floor. Starting now, every time he goes up the stairs, he will be walking over his mother’s invisible body, or through it. Actually all his mother did was switch sides. But he doesn’t know where the sides are. Time and eternity: there’s no just stepping into eternity. You can only get there by falling. And how do you fall?

The bathrobe his mother was still wearing when she said goodbye to him at the garden gate is now hanging in the bathroom. On the hook she always hangs it on when she gets dressed. Always hung it on when she got dressed. Without knowing why, he puts his hand into the pocket of the bathrobe and finds a used tissue. This tissue still exists in the present out of which his mother has fallen. If I catch you one more time climbing around in the ruins! Without him, she would be all alone in the world! Now it’s the other way around. He goes down the stairs again, through his invisible mother.

There was scarcely any other author who succeeded in portraying our Socialist reconstruction as vividly as our great writer H., whose life came to a tragic end so abruptly and unexpectedly the day before last.

Actually everything’s just as it was before. In the parlor, the bouquet on the table is still perfectly fresh. He sits down on the sofa on which the Minister of Culture has sat many times before, and the daughter of the President, a good friend of his mother’s; and the head of the so-called “Salad Brigade” at the fish-processing facility at Sassnitz has sat here too (the Salad Brigade that was named in his mother’s honor), as has one of the first great activists, Adolf Hennecke, who lives only two houses down; eight-year-old pioneers sat here on this sofa in front of his famous mother and wanted to know how one becomes a writer; a woman sick with rheumatism sat down exactly where he is sitting now to ask whether his mother could possibly write a letter asking for her to be allowed to go to the health resort in Sochi; the head of the Writers’ Union sat here as well, and on another occasion the artistic director of the theater Volksbühne Berlin, along with the famous actor who played the lead in his mother’s famous play, and from time to time the famous sculptor sat here too, who received the Patriotic Order of Merit at the same time she did, and just recently the famous composer sat here, who wants to write an opera based on a text by her.