Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

The salesman glances up from his book only briefly, 280 shillings, he says, and goes on reading. And so the man buys his mother the miniature In Steadfast Loyalty as a souvenir from Vienna, and since the time he’s spent in the shop, though considerable, is less than an hour, he doesn’t hear the next striking of the miniature grandfather clock that displayed the wrong time when he entered. On his trip back to Berlin, he thinks briefly of the Goethe edition — there’s an empty couchette on the night train where he might have stowed it — but the spine of Volume 9 was damaged, and besides, who knows whether he’d still have time to read an edition of collected works, he isn’t getting any younger.

Saturday is Frau Hoffmann’s ninetieth birthday. Her place at the table between Frau Millner and Frau Schröder is set with a bouquet of flowers from the Home’s administration and a little bottle of sparkling wine. When she sits down, all those who are still in a position to sing begin singing when Sister Renate gives the signal: How glad we are that you were born, your bir-ir-irthday is today. Frau Hoffmann takes note of the fact that it’s her birthday and thanks everyone. Frau Millner nods to her, or maybe she’s just nodding because her toast with honey tastes so good, while Frau Schröder is concentrating exclusively on not spilling her coffee. On the way back to her room, Sister Renate says: Today your son’s coming to take you on an outing, isn’t that right, Frau Hoffmann? Oh, I didn’t realize that, Frau Hoffmann says. But then before her son arrives she wants to comb her hair and wipe the jam stain off her jacket. But even just raising her arm to the level of her head is difficult for her, my own body is already too large for me, she says to Sister Renate; don’t worry, the nurse says, I’ll pretty you up, she takes the comb from Frau Hoffmann’s hand, draws it a couple of times through her sparse gray hair saying, at eleven I’ll come back and bring you downstairs, all right? Sure, Frau Hoffman says, I’m sure that will be fine.

And then she is sitting beside her son in who knows what sunshine, beneath who knows what blue sky with plenty of good fresh air, in the middle of the world.

It’s so wonderful you’re here, she says.

I’m glad to see you, too.

It’s such a great help to me, but you don’t know anything about it, and it’s good you don’t know, it isn’t good to know more.

Her son is silent.

Tell me, was your trip nice?

Her son tells her about Vienna, the Naschmarkt and Café Museum.

I have such a longing.

Her son says: I brought you something.

Pretty, she says, inspecting Kaiser William II and Kaiser Franz Joseph.

It’s from a shop on Mondscheingasse, do you know it?

You know, I want to live and I cannot. When I die, a place will be empty, that’s all, and a new place will be occupied.

I love you, her son says, taking his mother’s hand,

Really? That’s nice, she says.

Her hand lies cold and bony in his large, warm hand.

You know, she says, I am afraid that everything will be lost — that the trace will be lost.

What trace? her son asks.

I don’t know anymore: from where or to where.

Her son is silent.

A few clouds are crossing the broad sky. Two airplanes flying high in the air have made trails up there that are gradually turning back into sky. The son recalls that until only a few years ago there would sometimes be an earsplitting crack in the middle of a silence like this when supersonic aircraft broke the sound barrier during a military maneuver. Now the Russians — generally referred to as our friends — have long since gone home, and the training grounds of the National People’s Army have been relocated; and probably it is no longer legal to break through the sound barrier just as part of some drill. Now everything is quiet, and the sky is almost as empty as it was in the age of the hunter-gatherers.

I think that if we try playing, it will be a peculiar sort of game, his mother says.

Four weeks before the Berlin Wall fell, his mother received the National Prize First Class for her life’s work. She walked to the front of the auditorium on his arm to receive the certificate and the little box. Now he is sitting with her on a bench at the edge of the woods, the leaves rustle behind them, and before them lies a wide, gently sloping field, upon which the blue-green wheat is still only knee high. When the wind sweeps across it, it looks almost like water.

I just wanted to tell you, his mother says, this is my good, good lovely farewell.

Oh, mother, he says, stroking her back.

My fear of the future, she says, has not yet failed.

A couple of his mother’s friends wanted to come to celebrate her birthday, but he told them no. Because he was ashamed for his mother? Or because he was of the opinion that his mother should be preserved in her friends’ memories just as she used to be? Whom was he doing a favor: her, her friends, or himself?

It sinks down over you from above to below — you don’t know what side it’s coming from. I don’t know, and you probably don’t know either.

No, I don’t know.

Never has he known as little as he does now. The only thing he knows is that his not-knowing is of a very different sort than hers. His mother’s not-knowing is as deep as a river on whose distant shore there must be a very different sort of world than the one he lives in.

I don’t know how you recognize a human being.

I don’t know from whom I can demand everything.

Do they come to us or from us?

I don’t know what is coming.

I don’t know anything.

I don’t know when big is. When is little?

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know where I was at home.

There is so much I don’t know.

I don’t know what is happening.

It begins slowly, and then it ends slowly. I don’t know which I like better.

I don’t know if my heart will beat again.

I don’t know the big difference.

I don’t know.

I don’t know and I don’t understand either.

I know what I know — but it isn’t all tied up with names.

I think this is all make-believe.

I think that’s it.

In this land to which his mother is crossing over, no longer able to understand anything she once understood, she will no longer need any words, this much he understands. For one brief, sharp, clear moment, he understands what it would be like if he could arrive there along with her: The wheat field would be there right from the start, just like the rustling of the leaves at his back, the silence would be filled to the brim — that deafening crack living only in his memory, absent now — and the memory that filled out this silence would be just as real as the footsteps of all the human beings walking upon the earth at this moment, along with their falling down, their jumping, crawling, and sleeping at this very moment, just as real as all that mutely lay or flowed within the earth: the springs, the roots, and the dead; the cry of the cuckoo off to one side would be just as real as the stones crunching beneath the sole of his shoe, as the coolness of the evening and the light falling through the leaves to the ground before him, as his hand that he is using to stroke his mother’s back, feeling her bones beneath her thin, old skin, bones that will soon be laid bare — briefly, sharply, clearly, he knows for one instant what it would feel like if the audible and the inaudible, things distant and near, the inner and outer, the dead and the living were simultaneously there, nothing would be above anything else, and this moment when everything was simultaneously there would last forever. But because he is a human being — a middle-aged man, with a wife, two children, a profession — because he still has some time ahead of him, time during which he can look up something he doesn’t know in an encyclopedia or ask one of his colleagues, this knowing free of language passes from him just as suddenly as it arrived. He’ll be prevented from seeing this other world with the eyes of his mother for a good earthly time, by the absence of the most crucial thing: the going away.