Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days

On his way to the station he sees his apartment building on the other side of the street and briefly stops. Something is taking place there that used to be called his life, all he has to do is cross the street and go upstairs, and he will be back where he belongs: beside his wife. Even from where he is standing he can hear the shrieks and wails coming from inside. Not his wife’s voice — that much is certain — and if he’s not mistaken, not the voice of his mother-in-law either. Who is shedding tears over his child? The door opens, and a woman he doesn’t know comes out of the house in low-heeled shoes, her coat buttoned all the way up, her scarf covering her hair; as she walks, she wipes her tears, she hasn’t noticed him on the other side of the street, and even if she did, she’d have no idea why he was standing there, and by the time she reaches the next corner, it won’t even be possible to tell that she’s been crying. When she turns off the street, an old man is coming from the other direction and almost bumps into her, he is holding a bowl. The old man nods to the woman, then continues slowly on his way to the building’s front door, which he pushes open with his shoulder so that the contents of his bowl — perhaps soup that he wants to bring to the woman in mourning — will not spill. He, the highest ranking mourner, standing a stone’s throw away, sees the stooped shoulders of the old man, and knows who it is: Simon, the coachman from the Jewish quarter who is usually off carting wood shavings, rubbish, and milk, he’s often seen him from behind sitting atop his coach box. All the people here seem to know what their duty is, he’s the only one asking himself what to do. If his mother were still alive, she would be praying the rosary with him now, he would be sitting beside the tiny coffin in the parlor and would be the father of the dead child. Is it a sign of cowardice if one leaves one’s life behind, or a sign of character if one has the strength to start anew?

The question of whether the nursery should remain sealed up forever is one she doesn’t have to answer, since it’s obvious she must give up the entire apartment. The only option that remains to her is moving back in with her mother. Hadn’t it pleased her when her husband married her — a Jew — without his parents’ consent, and above all that his passion for her was so strong it made him forget his own origins? This time, she’s the one he’s taken a mind to abandon, he is leaving her behind without her consent. She knows that his absence will be no greater and no smaller than his love for her and their child — and what she’s seeing reflected now in the line of death is in the end nothing more than the bond joining him to her.

You mustn’t forget, child, that he used you to pay his debts.

That’s not the only use I was to him: For example, I got in the way of his professional advancement. He would have spent all eternity in the eleventh pay grade for my sake.

But it wasn’t all eternity.

That’s because of the baby.

That’s what you think. It just didn’t occur to him beforehand that he hadn’t done himself any favors by marrying you.

Is that supposed to console me?

Yes.

So now you also want to rob me of the days when I was happy.

I’m just saying: You never had as much as you imagine you’re losing now.

Do you think I’d feel better if I saw things that way?

That’s what I’m hoping.

So then I’d just put on my apron again and remind myself how much a herring weighs compared to three apples.

At least with herring and apples you know where you stand.

It’s obviously been a long time since you loved someone.

That’s unfair and you know it.

I don’t want to talk anymore.

She’d always thought that when two people were united, it was a matter of crossing over a border you didn’t cross with anyone else, of leaving the world behind and from then on sharing everything. Now she sees that this border is malleable and can shift about at times like this. Imperceptibly, the border has slid inward, and now it is once more separating him from her. Before, she was his freedom; now he’s begun to seek his freedom elsewhere.

If only he knew where he could find death; he’s hoping for an easy one now that he’s been lying here so long waiting for it. As light as a kiss. As easy as plucking a hair out of the milk. A neighbor woman told him, without his asking, that the infant suffocated. Suffocation, it says in the Talmud, is the hardest among the 903 deaths. Suffocation is like a briar that has gotten caught in wool, you tear it out with all your strength and throw it over your shoulder. Like a thick rope pulled through an opening that is too small.

Whoso findeth , his friend congratulated him at his wedding fifty-two years before, and this finding continues today — find: the wisdom in the Torah, a good wife, a peaceful life, down to the last shovelful of earth on the coffin; find: a death easy as a kiss, like the kiss with which the Lord awoke Adam to life , he blew breath into his nose, and one day, if you’re lucky, he’ll gently, lightly kiss it away again. Finding is also what you need to do, he thinks, grinning his toothless graybeard grin, when you have an urgent need for the privy. I’ve got to go, he shouts into the next room, for without the help of his wife — who was his bride the day his friend wished him good fortune using the word findeth fifty-two years before — without her help, he can no longer get up.

Gray is the water — gray — and he throws up, why is it throwing when you throw up, he thinks, raising his head briefly, but then he’s sick to his stomach again, he’s never felt nausea like this in all his life. Once his wife told him that as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke , and she herself — like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in — had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar. When she lost her way on the outskirts of town, her one fear was that she might come too close to the border and suddenly fall off the edge. My little grain of sugar . And all the while, as she later learned at school, her horizon was nothing more than an imaginary line extending clear to the other side of Russia. As long as one remained in a single spot, this was genuinely difficult to understand, even for him, the young civil servant for whom the railway — meaning the locomotion of human beings — was a matter of professional concern. It’s really only here, on this swaying ship, that he is truly internalizing what it means for the Earth to be a sphere. Not only is he made dizzy by its roundness as he circles it, unable to endure this circling; at the same time, the horizon keeps retreating before him, in motion, retreating ever farther, as though the swaying ship were remaining fixed in place to defy him, keeping him, the traveler, always the same distance from his destination, as though the journey’s end were running away from him as he himself runs away, each canceling the other out as he continues to move. The water is gray, and he is overcome with nausea, just as sick to his stomach as several others standing there beside him, throwing up as well. The wind is blowing from the direction in which the ship is sailing, it tugs at the tails of his Imperial and Royal coat, chilling the spine of this man who until recently was a civil servant with a lifetime appointment, who meanwhile, bent over the back railing, is bequeathing to his native land in farewell everything with which it nourished him. After two or three days the nausea will let up, someone says behind him, it’s the gentleman with whom he is sharing his second-class cabin, a Swiss gentleman who is just taking a stroll across the deck and, seeing his need, gives him a handkerchief, assuring him that after this initial period things will improve. The gentleman is apparently accustomed to traveling, he lets the wind tousle his shock of hair and now pulls out an apple, saying that on the contrary, the fresh air whets his appetite, he takes a bite and offers the young man an apple too, no thank you, the man says, turning to face the sea once more, I understand, says the bearer of apples, and tosses the second round thing down from the gallery to the travelers of the lowest class in the cargo hold, who surely are hungry but lack access to a railing of their own where they might throw up when nausea overtakes them.