Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

You aren’t going to marry a man like that, her mother said and locked her up in the oven for several days. But when it turned out she was already pregnant, her mother let her out of the oven again and said: You could have had the postman, the forester, the head fisheries inspector. In order to earn money for his family, her husband had begun to maintain the equipment and machinery of the farmers, including the clover press. From then on he played his music only for his own pleasure and for hers, for the pleasure of his wife. But after he’d cut off four fingers of his left hand on the clover press, he could play neither fiddle nor accordion. Along with his fingers, the clover press had cut off his music from him. This music that he’d played until his accident came from the Ukraine, from where he’d arrived as a vagabond. After his injury, his hand always felt cold, and so she’d sewed a fur-lined mitten that he wore year in and year out from September until well into May. With this mitten on his hand and his hand in his lap, her husband had often sat there in his final years, just as she was doing now, although he was still young. When he died, still in his early forties, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away the fur mitten. But when she had to flee, it got left behind in the house.

She can go swimming here just like at home, and swimming has remained easy for her, unlike walking, for which her bones haven’t been strong enough for some time now. At night, when she takes down her gray knot of hair before going to bed, her hair is still damp. In summer, when she was young, she swam and dove her way through the Masurian lakes, fished in them too, and in winter she went ice-skating, the blades would be screwed into the soles of her boots. She reached out her hands to touch the waters of these lakes, washed herself in them, drank from them, ate their fish and scratched up their ice, she’d worked over the lakes the way her daughter, who so loved to bake, later worked over the cake dough she would knead four hundred times with both hands before putting it in the oven. To this day her shins are blue and purple from the lace-up boots, which had to be laced especially tight for ice-skating, blue and purple and shiny as stone from the hours and hours of being laced up, hours and hours of racing across frozen lakes that let out dark cries of jubilation beneath the cuts the girl was carving into them with her skates. Now her crooked legs with their shins that still shine blue and purple lie upon the red vinyl of the ottoman, which is intended for one to prop one’s feet on, and they are nonetheless still her legs. She doesn’t know what the lake here looks like in winter, the mistress of the house keeps referring to the house as her “summer place.” In the winter it’s just the gardener living in his room, otherwise the house is empty, and then it’s closed up for the winter, the shutters are placed over their windows, the night storage heater turned down to its lowest setting. And then everyone leaves for the city. Her husband went fishing even in winter, he was always one of the first on the ice, when it was still cracking, a small, dark figure crouching there at dawn, motionless. In winter they heated their house with wood, they would light the stove with pine shavings, but as soon as the fire was burning well they would switch over to beech and oak, the hard wood burned longer. When the pump in the yard froze solid, they would fetch their water from the lake, from a hole that her husband hacked in the ice near the shore. It’s quite possible, she thinks, that ottomans for propping one’s feet on were invented only after people had begun to choose their seasons. Invented here, in this season where she will now be a visitor for the rest of her life.

The youngest of her three grandchildren, who had a squint her whole childhood and had to go to school bald her first day because of scabies, this most infelicitous youngest child who fell into the water when trying to jump the creek and came home with her clothes all green, this youngest daughter married the son of the mistress of the house and is now, a towel across her shoulders, clattering down the stone steps to the lake in wooden sandals, humming under her breath and turning to give a quick wave before she disappears behind the large fir bush. Sometimes she sits down beside her grandmother and chats for a bit while painting her toenails red. When her, the grandmother’s teeth come unglued during a meal, she feels more ashamed before her granddaughter than the mistress of the house. Back where she learned about growing old from old people, there were no false teeth. When you got old, your mouth collapsed. But nowadays in the place where she is a visitor, even faces are made ready for winter.

Being a visitor isn’t easy. In her village it was customary to reject a gift exactly three times before accepting it, and when you accepted it, you yourself brought a present the next time, which the other person would then reject exactly three times before accepting it, and so on. A flowering plant in exchange for strawberries, a bottle of home-fermented wine for a piece of freshly slaughtered pork, apples for pears. To this day her friend, the only one from their village who also wound up in Berlin after the war, brings her a little pot filled with clover every New Year’s Eve in which a tiny chimney sweep made of wire is standing, and she herself has just the same sort of little clover pot with the chimney sweep stuck into it as a gift for her friend. The pots with their sweeps are exchanged at midnight, and on New Year’s morning her girlfriend carries home the pot she has received as a present in the same bag she used to carry her pot there. Since her granddaughter got married, she has been bringing her, her grandmother, along with her on summer vacations to visit her mother-in-law, and this mother-in-law is approximately the same age as her daughter would be now, the daughter who left for her work detail and remained there for all eternity. And when she, the grandmother, asks her granddaughter what she should bring as a hostess gift, the granddaughter always replies: But you’re part of the family. But she isn’t so sure she belongs to this family in which she has been warmly received by her granddaughter’s mother-in-law for the last five summers now but always greeted using the formal mode of address, always Sie and never du. This mother-in-law sometimes recommends a salve to help with her rheumatism, asks her about her apartment in Berlin, says she could have this or that dress of hers altered by her seamstress to fit the grandmother, but she has never once called her du . For the fifth summer in a row, her granddaughter’s mother-in-law uses formal address as she says: Do have a few more potatoes, would you like some more vegetables or a slice of meat, and she doesn’t know whether it counts as more polite here to simply say yes or to go ahead and help herself out of the pots and bowls as though she were at home here, or whether she shouldn’t, as she would at a stranger’s house, say no three times before she accepts. The visitor doesn’t understand that her granddaughter’s mother-in-law is waiting for her, the grandmother, as the older of the two, to suggest that they call each other du .

In fact she even finds it easier to be a stranger among strangers since being a stranger is so familiar to her, she got used to it on one and then the other side of the big gate that separated her farm from the road above. For as long as her family still owned the farm, this big wooden gate was always kept closed unless they were just carting out milk or bringing in the hay. But when suddenly she had cause to seek employment as a dairymaid on her own farm, she knocked on this same gate from the outside and asked the Poles who had meanwhile taken over the farm whether they could hire her. Being at home had already been the first half of this strangeness without her having realized it back then, when she was still at home, chapter one so to speak, and then going away was only the other half, chapter two, strangeness seen from the outside, both halves equal in size, mutually corresponding, but all of it at once — in other words: shutting a gate and being either inside or outside — all of this is very familiar to her. Germany started the war and then lost it, if it had begun it and won, then others would have lost instead. She has learned how to lose; chapter one: having, and chapter two: losing, she kept losing and losing until she’d mastered it. It may be that when one has learned a thing, something else disappears from one’s head. When her granddaughter once asked her whether she wasn’t sad about it — about the house, the cows, all their possessions — she no longer even understood the question. She had rescued the children, that’s all there was to say about it.