Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

Now, men, women, and children are weeping, overcome, they keep pointing out the gigantic likeness of the woman to one another, some fling their arms around whoever happens to be standing close by; an elderly woman tries to embrace the Austrian, but he fends her off. All he’d done before he left was send his father a postcard. Why join the ranks of humankind now? Maybe he’s just a cold person, he thinks for the first time ever, and wonders whether arriving in a foreign country is enough to turn one into a different man in the same skin. A child points to the statue and asks: Who’s that? And he says: Columbus.

The building she’s walking into looks no different from other buildings. It is Wednesday afternoon, the front door is still gleaming in the sun; she told her mother she was visiting a friend. She delayed her arrival by five minutes to be absolutely certain she wouldn’t get there ahead of him. Before she lifts her hand to knock on the apartment door, he opens it, having heard her footsteps on the stairs. He draws her inside and immediately turns this drawing into an embrace, then the kiss, then she touches his teeth with her tongue, then she feels the corners of her mouth grow wet with his saliva, then she pushes him away, then he grasps her firmly, pressing the inside of his arm to her mouth, and she bites his arm because she doesn’t know what else to do with it, and he says: Ah, she bites harder and he repeats: Ah, and she is seized with the desire to bite into him all the way to the bone; then he pushes her away, seizes her, and spins her around so he can open her dress, which is fastened up the back with a long row of hooks, and then her corset as well, meanwhile she bows her head to remove the pins from her hair, and this controlled, quiet activity is the preparation for something that — as has apparently been agreed — will be neither controlled nor quiet. The room he invited her to is small and furnished, the curtains yellowed, and the enamel is flaking off the wash basin sitting on a chest of drawers; but she sees none of this, instead she sees that the officer’s close-fitting trousers display a noticeable bulge at the crotch, she runs her fingers across this bulge, feeling astonishment not only that this is allowed, but that she knows it is. A number of things are different this afternoon than they were with her husband, the officer’s aroused member bends up rather than down, he licks her breasts, which her husband never did, and when she is lying on top of him, he slaps her buttocks resoundingly with his palm. Every single moment this afternoon is too late for her to leave again. But when the two hours he rented the room for are almost up, he kisses her cheek and says: Alas, my sweet, it’s time to go. She watches him as he gets up, his legs are sinewy and long, far longer than those of her husband. He bends over to sort out their things — his and hers — that are lying in a heap on the floor, tossing the dress, corset, and stockings onto the bed for her and slipping into his close-fitting trousers. They no longer display a bulge. He doesn’t know that she has already borne a child, and she would like to tell him so, but how? She too gets up and pulls on her stockings, meanwhile he is digging about in his wallet. Maybe she’ll have another one after all, a child by him, she thinks and smiles. She slips into her corset, deftly hooking it shut. With or without a wedding — what does she care about that — now he’s finally found the banknote he wants to give her — she’d be happy in any case. She pulls the dress on over her head, it rustles, and only when she has emerged again from the dress does she see the hand he is holding out to her with the money, his dry, warm hand that was the start of everything, she sees his hand with the banknote and almost wants to laugh, asking: What’s the idea? But he doesn’t laugh in return, instead he says, perhaps: For you. Or possibly something like: Don’t make a fuss. Or: Keep the change. Or: You certainly earned it, my lovely. He says some sentence of this sort to her, and she looks at him as if seeing him for the first time.

He just nods to her and places the money on the chest of drawers, then spins her around with her back to him, as if she were a child that hasn’t yet learned to get dressed on its own, he hooks her dress up the back as she stands there — seemingly immersed now in thoughts of her own — so that she can show herself on the street without attracting notice. As he leaves, he pulls on his white leather gloves and says:

Wait for a few minutes before you go down.

She neither looks at him nor responds, just stands there in the middle of the room, staring at the floor, staring as if the floor were opening to reveal an abyss he was unable to see.

When her husband — who despite his serious illness had lived longer than many healthy men — finally died, the old woman accepted her daughter’s invitation, gave away all her chickens, packed up the Holy Scripture, the seven-armed candelabra, and her two sets of plates, and went to live with her. She left behind the semidarkness in which she’d been spending her life, along with a few pieces of furniture, their feet all scraped and scratched — her husband had taken a saw to them whenever they began to rot, shortening them by a centimeter or two — and left behind the dirt floor that was just the same as outside, her granddaughter had scratched letters into it with a stick when she was little. Soon the thatch roof would weigh down the now abandoned house, pressing it into the ground, and covering it until it decomposed.

Here in her daughter’s apartment, all the rugs, tablecloths, and Chinese porcelain were sold long ago, after the goy ran off with her granddaughter’s dowry, but her daughter has kept the apartment — the floorboards are oak, worn to a shiny smoothness, the door handles are brass, and the light slants in through glass windows. Every morning the old woman walks through all the rooms with a goose feather, wiping away the dust gathering on the few pieces of furniture, then she takes her apron off and sits down on the sofa to read the Torah. Turn it, and again turn it; for the all is therein, and thy all is therein: and swerve not therefrom, for thou canst have no greater excellency than this . The only dowry she and her husband had been able to give her daughter when she married the prosperous merchant’s son was their passion for the study of the Holy Books. For nights on end, the two young people, having put their daughter to bed, would sit up with her and her husband, debating whether the realm of God could truly be found here on Earth if one only knew how to look — whether, in other words, the riddle of life was concealed here in the human realm, or whether it existed only in the beyond. Whether as a matter of principle there were two different worlds or just the one. Only through a life spent in holiness, her husband said, could man succeed in uniting what had been sundered: the world to come and earthly life. But what was a life spent in holiness, his son-in-law asked, adding that all these matters depended on human interpretations of the Holy Scripture — which meant that a man’s striving for the right life could be in error as well. Yes, her daughter had responded, you ought to be looking at everything mankind actually experiences on earth, it’s not just a matter of what Holy Scripture says. The mother herself had believed in an eternal life existing on Earth, after all that’s what she saw before her: She herself was there, and her old man, her daughter with her husband, and the tiny newborn girl that was sleeping soundly, her head thrust back. But after her daughter’s husband had been beaten to death, there were no longer any conversations of this sort, her daughter had left the ghetto and when her own daughter was grown, she’d married her to a goy. Now the goy had gone off, her granddaughter was back to living with her mother as she had done in childhood, and when the mother wasn’t there, the grandmother took care of her, just like before. A human life, then, was long enough to foil an escape plan.