Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

I dreamed that I was dreaming.

And suddenly it was no longer a dream.

Frau Buschwitz is already asleep when the son brings his mother back to her room that evening. On the table at his mother’s bedside is a rinsed-out glass soda bottle with modeling clay stuck to it. The clay has been shaped into a red “90,” surrounded by a yellow ring, outside the ring are sausage-shaped green and blue rays. The bottle holds a single rose, and leaning up against it is a birthday card with the words Happy Birthday! — from Herr Zander and his wife . Who are Herr Zander and his wife? her son asks. Good friends, his mother replies. Aha, her son says. Before he leaves, he takes the miniature and leans it against the bottle, too. In Steadfast Loyalty.

Lately, his mother says, I find myself wanting to address the burden with its proper title, the burden title.

Will you be all right? her son asks.

Oh yes, his mother says. I forced a century to its arms. For the moment, I mean.

I’ll let the nurse know it’s time to help you change and go to bed, all right?

I don’t know, his mother says, what it can mean that we are so sad.

I’ll be going then, Mother, her son says.

Of course, Son, his mother says, go ahead, and put your hat on.

At 52.58867 degrees latitude north, 13.39529 degrees longitude east.

When the phone rings at six in the morning, the son knows it can only be for him. Between four and five in the morning, unfortunately, it must be so difficult for him, but perhaps better this way for his mother, all of us in the hand of God.

For one week more he will awaken every morning at precisely 4:17 a.m., every morning, precisely at the moment of the greatest silence, just before the birds begin to sing. For the first time in his life, he will have dreams during these nights that he still remembers when he wakes up.

His mother is lying there just barely underground, her head is still sticking out: Are you the one who was with me in Ufa, she asks. Yes, he answers and lifts up the ten centimeters of earth like a blanket to place a photograph of his two children upon her breast.

And then he wakes up, it’s perfectly quiet, and then all at once the birds begin to sing, it is 4:17 a.m.

Many mornings he will get up at this early hour that belongs only to him and go into the kitchen, and there he will weep bitterly as he has never wept before, and still, as his nose runs and he swallows his own tears, he will ask himself whether these strange sounds and spasms are really all that humankind has been given to mourn with.

For their support of my work, I would like to thank Wolf-Erich Eckstein from the Archives of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna, the Vienna Stadt- und Landesarchiv, the Archives of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv and “Haus Immanuel” in Berlin-Niederschönhausen.

JE

And for their help with the translation, thanks are due also to

Sebastian Schulman, Rose Waldman, Zackary Sholem Berger, Gal Kober, Tali Konas, Philippe Roth, Edoardo Ballerini, as well as to Richard Gehr, Amanda Hong, Helen Graves, and my valiant editor Declan Spring.

SB