Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

And her? For approximately three years she weighs herring and apples, hands bread, milk, and matches across the counter.

You can’t keep staring people in the face like that.

There’s nothing else to look at.

It isn’t proper. Only children stare like that.

No one’s complained.

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often now, or Mr. Veitel.

I see you’re keeping track.

I wouldn’t say that, but I do have a good sense of my customers.

And I don’t.

You do fundamentally.

I don’t have to do this.

Why are you always so quick to take offense?

I’m not offended, but if my help isn’t wanted here I can go elsewhere.

Really, so where would you go?

Her daughter says nothing.

That’s not how I meant it, you know that.

I don’t know anything at all.

They used to get their eggs from Johanna Sawitzki, but meanwhile it turns out that Karel’s eggs are fresher. The price of kerosene for lamps has fallen because it’s hard to sell Galician petroleum as fast as it degrades after being brought to the surface. For herring and sour pickles purchased together, they give their customers a better price than Levi.

In all the time you stand around waiting for customers you might have mopped the floor. For example.

Sure.

Child, this is your shop too, you’re a grown woman now.

It was never my choice.

So now it’s my fault?

What was the point of learning all that Goethe by heart at school?

Be glad you got to go to school at all.

Now the lie the shopkeeper had always sold her daughter as the truth has come to life after all. Now her daughter has taken her place as the abandoned wife, while she herself has become what in truth she always was, if only in secret: a widow.

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often, or Mr. Veitel, that may well be. But now there’s the officer who’s taken to stopping in for matches every day at precisely the hour when her mother is off making her rounds of the farms for milk and eggs. He’ll say, perhaps, that he likes how she’s wearing her hair, and she’ll ask him, perhaps, if they use real bullets for their maneuvers. Or he’ll say that it really ought not to rain when they’re practicing their formations, and she’ll say no one melts in a little rain and laugh, and he’ll says it’s pretty the way she laughs. And once, as she’s handing him the matches across the counter, he suddenly pulls off his white leather glove before taking the matches and ever so briefly touches her hand, saying softly: I’m on fire, and she says: That’ll be one groschen, the same as always, because she thinks she must have misheard. The next time, he says nothing at all and keeps his glove on, perhaps because her mother is standing right beside her, because on Sunday the farmers from whom she gets the eggs and milk are all at church. But then, at the beginning of the next week, when she is all alone behind the counter again, he wordlessly hands her a slip of paper along with the coin, gazing openly at her, and only after he is gone does she unfold the paper and read. All there is on the paper is: a street, a house number, a day, and a time. Aha, she thinks, and then she thinks that she wasn’t mistaken after all. And later, in the evening, lying alone in her bed in which she lay as a little girl — the bed to which she returned after the death of her child so as to sleep herself old in it and, who knows, perhaps even die in it someday — later, in the evening, that hour of evening that might as well be night, she cannot think of a good reason not to go at the appointed hour to where the officer will be awaiting her.

Indeed, why not? Her husband is gone, she no longer has a child, and there’s no need to tell her mother. She wants to go. When she thinks of the warm, dry, almost coarse hand of the officer, she feels almost dizzy with desire. Her desire branches out to the farthest reaches of her body, she is dizzy down into the joints of her fingers and toes, and between her legs. So this is what happens when temptation stops being just a word and enters into a life, when it slips beneath the skirt of a woman randomly chosen, seizing hold of her mortal body with terrible force. Exalted is the person who is tempted, for that person alone has the opportunity to resist, her grandfather explained to her years before, when, as an adolescent, she was sitting on the footstool and her mother had taken the horse and cart into the countryside to buy merchandise.

And what do you get for overcoming the temptation?

The resisting itself is the reward.

That means I’m paying myself.

Only if you resist.

If I resist.

The Lord wants you to demonstrate that you are worthy of him.

That’s all He wants?

That’s all He wants.

So really it’s all about me.

All about you, as a part of the whole.

Then I myself am His test.

What do you mean?

If I don’t resist, it means He didn’t do his job well.

When her grandfather laughed, she could look inside his mouth and see how few teeth he had left.

It would most certainly be lamentable if He — who holds together the waters of the sea as if in a water skin — felt the need to test Himself using a slip of a thing like you.

But why else would He need my renunciation?

By then her legs were already so long that, crouching on the stool, she could effortlessly prop her chin on her knees. Because of her marriage to the goy, her grandfather sat shiva for her as though she had died. From then until his own death a year and a half ago, she never saw him again. Her grandfather disowned her, but even after this disowning, her life continued to go on and was still continuing today. What rules governed this life — this life that for him was no longer a life — was something she had no one to ask. From then on, her life was simply her life, that’s all.

Once, they have to put on life jackets, because the ship is traveling through thick fog, and there’s a risk of colliding with another ship; once it is storming so violently that an old woman tears the locket from the chain around her neck and throws it into the water with loud prayers, to reconcile God with the ship; once someone is heard playing the violin on one of the lower decks — a piece from the operetta Die Fledermaus — but the former civil servant doesn’t recognize the music, even though he studied in Vienna. If he were to perish of the nausea that refuses to leave him, who would get his pocket watch and the coat with the gold buttons? The gentleman traveling with him shows a Polish child a banana and explains how such a thing is peeled. The gentleman bites off the little black tip of the banana himself and spits it into the sea. But the child doesn’t want the banana. After two days, three, four, the young man’s nausea still hasn’t subsided. Only after an endlessly long twelve and a half days does he behold one morning, standing amid the throng suddenly crowding the deck, the Statue of Liberty, and this is definitely better than never having seen it. On their voyage, the gentleman told him of a German captain whose ship was so dilapidated that instead of venturing across the ocean with his passengers, he tacked up and down off the coast of Scotland, just far enough out that the land was out of sight. Nine days later he unloaded the emigrants in a small harbor, telling them that this was America. In both places, English was spoken, a language none of the new arrivals understood, and the men wore skirts, as was no doubt the latest fashion in New York — so it was nearly a week before the last of the emigrants understood that they were still in Europe. But by then the dilapidated captain had long since vanished along with the money they’d paid him for their passage to the New World.