Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. No, she and her husband did not go home to Germany; what they wanted was to bring this country — only coincidentally the one whose language they spoke — back home again in their thoughts. They wanted finally to drag from beneath the German rubble some ground they could keep beneath their feet, ground that would no longer be illusory. Although their bodies would grow old, their hope for mankind’s salvation from greed and envy would, they thought, remain young for a long time, the errors of mortals were mortal, but their work was immortal. And now it is precisely that young doctor whom they allow to examine their aging bodies once a year, that doctor who is taking advantage of the State to become the heir to its founders. It has once more come to pass that the invisible army, now divided, is soundlessly striking its own forces with invisible lances and shields. Perhaps these young people, who know the enemy only from the reports of their elders and have never seen him face to face, will soon be ready to defect and join the ranks of this foe, even if only to have at last the opportunity — after so many years of siege — to take up arms once more.

Have the words in her aging mouth aged as well without her noticing? After supper, the chairs from the garden are set up in the hall so that everyone can join in watching the news on television: she and her husband, their son, their daughter-in-law, her son’s little girl, the visitor, some friends or other who will be spending the night in the bathing house, and sometimes the cook as well. On the seven o’clock news they hear about bringing in the harvest, farmers are standing in the dust between rows of stubble talking about planned production targets, combine harvesters can be seen and also silos. Foreign words that did not grow in the farmers’ mouths are relegating them to the dust of the fields where they must serve as a focal point. Since her return to Germany, all her passion has been devoted to attempting to use the words she’s typed out letter by letter to transform her memories into the memories of others, to transport her life on paper into other lives as if ferrying it across a river. These letters she’s been tapping out have allowed her to draw to the surface many things that seemed worthy of preserving, while pushing other things, painful ones, back into obscurity. Now, later, she no longer knows whether it wasn’t a mistake to pick and choose, since this thing she’d been envisioning all her life was supposed to be a whole world, not a half one.

Yes, she reads several days later in a statement sent to her from the municipal offices, she too is welcome to purchase her house, but not the land on which it is standing, and the bathing house can, if she so desires, be relocated to the meadow at the top of the hill at government expense, as a way of facilitating the doctor’s lake access while at the same time fulfilling the State’s obligations to her. She removes from her typewriter the sheet of paper containing certain words and not containing certain other words, sets it on the not particularly high stack of already written pages of her new book, removes a sheet of laid paper from the drawer, rolls it into the machine and responds to the municipal offices: Yes, she would like to purchase her house and of course would be grateful to have the bathing house relocated to the top of the hill. With Socialist greetings.

NOW THAT THE WALNUT tree whose hollow was filled with concrete continues to stand upright but has stopped bearing nuts over the past three years, the gardener chops it down at the householder’s bidding. He saws up the trunk, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed. During the cherry harvest the gardener falls off the ladder and breaks his leg. For two months he has to lie in bed until his bones have knitted together and he can start learning to walk again. Fortunately the son of the householder has begun this summer to spend his entire vacation time on the property, he has been discharged from the Home and is now living with his parents again — and he has meanwhile grown tall and is strong enough to take over the task of mowing the lawn. But the fungus that attacks every last one of the fruit trees this summer goes unnoticed too long during the gardener’s convalescence, and so when the gardener gets up again for the first time he finds all the apples and pears withered on their stems.

After his fall, the gardener is no longer able to perform heavy labor. All he’s been able to do since then is walk slowly across the property, here and there picking up bits of fallen wood, he trims the dry blossoms from flowers and shrubs, waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives, at the beginning of winter he empties all the water pipes in the house and turns off the main valve. He closes all the shutters, both in the main house and the bathing house down by the lake.

The householder and his son now take over the yearly task of repairing and dismantling the dock. To supplement the heating stove in the house a night storage heater is installed, now the firewood cut in earlier years will readily suffice for charging the stove on chilly spring and autumn days. Apple and pear trees fail to recover from the fungal infestation, even over the next several years. Spider mites attack the cherries. When the garbage pit is expanded, it furthermore becomes clear that the pipes that provide water to the orchard rusted out long ago, but water pipes are not currently available for purchase by private citizens. For the first time there is talk of reducing the size of the leased property.

In the village people are saying that the householder’s son used to bring any number of girls back to the bathing house after a dance or other festivity to spend the night with him, and that the gardener, seated on a bench beneath the eaves of the bathing house, kept watch on such nights to prevent the mistress of the house from discovering these goings-on. People also claim to have heard from the gardener that when this son finally got engaged to a young woman from Berlin, his mother put up the fiancée in the bathing house of all places, so that no one would accuse her of procuring. This gives the village something to laugh about.

After the young householder marries, a daughter is born to the couple, and this baby is scarcely six weeks old when her parents start bringing her to the garden on weekends, and when it is warm enough outside, they place the perambulator with the sleeping infant under the hawthorn tree at the edge of the small meadow. The gardener walks around the property, a burning or already extinguished cigar stump in his mouth, he picks up dry twigs here and there and, when the days grow warmer, he turns on the sprinkler twice a day to water the flowerbeds and meadows, once in the morning and once early in the evening.

When the gardener is no longer able to squeeze shut the handles of the big tree trimming shears, the young woman takes over the task of pruning the shrubs during the spring and summer. The still fruitless trees are finally sawed down by a farmer on the householder’s orders and chopped up, the farmer stacks the logs in the woodshed. The gardener now spends many hours sitting, always with one and the same cold stump of a cigar in his mouth, on the threshold of the apiary. The last bees remaining from what were once twelve entire colonies continue to fly about their hives for a little while after the orchard is cleared, then disperse in search of new breeding grounds in the surrounding woods. Sometimes the little girl and her friend from next door sit down beside the gardener, who shows them millipedes and wood lice living in the old logs, and shows them how to make a blowpipe out of the hollow stalks of the elderberry, or whistle with the help of a lilac leaf.