Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

Sailing is a beautiful thing. Because they loved the water so much, he and his wife had camped out for many years near the harbor before they seized the opportunity to set themselves up here. They were allowed to renovate the workshop down by the water to turn it into a weekend dwelling, but had kept a few useful items such as the workbench with its vice, the shelf for the fishing rods and a small washbasin. Among the nails, ropes and chisels, screwdrivers and rubber boots they had made themselves at home, television, table and bed, everything they needed was here, and now from here they could see their boat bobbing between two buoys near the dock. Sailing is a beautiful thing. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the mistress of the house was working abroad and neither she nor her father were taking care of the property, his wife had begun to decorate the small bit of lawn between the shed and the shoreline with stones, had planted asparagus beside the fence and also hung little baskets of flowers from the lower branches of the trees to the right and left of the garden swing, as she had done before in the campground. Beginning in springtime when the boat was put into the water, they would go sailing in virtually all weathers. They might also, for a change, go out in the paddleboat that was hanging on the back wall of the shed. The mistress of the house had given them permission. But they knew nothing more beautiful than just letting the wind carry them along. Sailing is a beautiful thing.

When he is sailing, everything seems so quiet. Even when the wind drives into the sails and tugs at the sheets, even then. You don’t hear the sound of your own blood either, he thinks, unless you hold your hand to your ear, and he holds his hand to his ear. When they are sailing, he and his wife exchange only the most necessary words. Sailing is like a service. What sort of service he really couldn’t say, and just as little does he know who has called for this silence that he and his wife maintain without ever having spoken of it. When he is sailing, the water seems infinite to him. Even when the shoreline is always in view. Even when they sail in circles or from one end of the lake to the other and then back again, over and over. Probably the sense of infinity comes from the motion, he thinks, but this is yet another thing he has never discussed with his wife. Should I call my sister or not, his wife had asked him, and he had said: You have to decide that on your own. Lord only knows. Now the water is lying black before his feet and lapping at the shore, and behind him his wife is sobbing. Perhaps this sobbing is only an inward-turned lapping of the water that is now, as she weeps, running from her eyes and nose, he thinks, and can’t help grinning once more. That one time, when he tried to swim to the opposite shore of the river, the water had been so black and had made faint splashing noises like this. He hadn’t gotten terribly far that night. Just like today. Today he stands grinning at the end of the dock and is already caught again, already nabbed once more from behind, without ropes — that time just by shouts from the shore, threats and curses, and tonight by sounds, that time without a boat under his rear end, swimming, and tonight standing at the end of the dock. His wife who didn’t cry even that first time when she sat across from him in the visitation room at the prison now is crying.

At the time he had known that he had to turn back. His friend hadn’t turned back. On this river, where swimming was forbidden, the water flowed downstream just like other rivers, he and his friend had often swum for pleasure in other rivers, had dived down to the bottom or let themselves be swirled around by the current. Still swimming that night, he had felt surprise that this thing that was utterly prohibited here was nonetheless so much like all the other swimming. Even today he knows that sooner or later he must turn back, return to the circle of light beneath the lantern where his crying wife is sitting on the garden swing. When he learned to ride a motorcycle, not even sixteen years old, he practiced together with his friends in a place close by here, on an unfinished bit of autobahn up in the woods, one of those strips of concrete leading from nowhere to nowhere that you could find everywhere in these parts if you knew your way around. A sandy path suddenly turns into highway and then just as suddenly reverts to a path again or else just stops somewhere right at the edge of the woods as if there were a wall. Back then, when he borrowed a motorcycle from an older friend for the first time to practice on this autobahn in the woods, he knew how to step on the gas but had forgotten to ask how to brake. When the autobahn then ended at the edge of the woods as if there were a wall, he had ridden at full tilt into the woods and swerved wildly around the oaks and pines with the wide mirrors his friend had mounted on the handlebars, not knowing how to stop a machine of this sort. Shit, he had thought, and steered and steered, searching for the way out of these woods more with his gut than with his eyes. It never occurred to him to just take his foot off the gas. Sometimes it happens that a joke has a hard seed inside and when he bares his teeth to laugh he finds himself biting down too hard and then he can’t let go. Shit. His wife is still crying. Shit, he thinks, standing with his back to her. Whether a single word can itself be a thought is something he doesn’t know, but in any case this one word is everything he is thinking, thinking more with his gut than his head. If so, it’s probably the sort of thought that suddenly appears without warning, just like the woods he’d gone zooming into that time, and then just as suddenly it’s over again. It’s just that the route between the oaks and pine trees planted much too close together appears infinitely long when you are swerving between their trunks, and the forest’s shade does not cool you as you careen through it, instead it burns from within. Shit. When after infinitely many twists and turns he felt the autobahn beneath his tires again just as suddenly as it had vanished before, he was grateful to Hitler for the first time in his life. All the mirrors were still intact.

Turning back, then, is an art he has mastered, or else it’s mastered him, Lord only knows. Whether you swim straight ahead or turn back, the swimming is still the same. His friend, with whom he had gotten drunk on that night and then, as if it were just a joke, jumped side by side into the river, did not turn back. Either he hadn’t heard the shouts from behind him as he swam, or he took them for part of the joke, or else — and this too is possible — he simply hadn’t wanted to turn back. The swimming is always the same. His friend had never reached the opposite shore, or this one either. Sailing, he had practiced flipping the boat with his wife. Make the boat capsize, spin it on a longitudinal axis along with its crew and then right it again. Hold tight to the mast to stay on board as the boat surfaces again. Sailing is a beautiful thing. Lord only knows.

Only for the past week has his wife known she has a sister. One week ago the telephone rang. A friend from school whom the woman had neither seen nor spoken to in thirty or forty years. What a surprise, so you’re still, how did you, and who gave you, they’re talking about a reunion, no really, and so-and-so, and that girl who, and what’s the name of the one who prematurely, oh, so he’s already, how terribly sad, and did he, and how many children, work, husband, sailing, weekend property, does she actually have the address, and besides, what ever. Besides, what ever became of your sister. What sister. And is your stepfather still alive. What stepfather. Oh wait, you still don’t know, this friend says now, all of this on the telephone, I mean, your father wasn’t even, what, the woman says, gazing out at the water, as she holds the receiver to her ear, the sailboat is bobbing near the dock between two buoys, oh, I’m so sorry I, the voice of her friend is now saying inside the telephone receiver, but her husband cannot hear this. Her husband hears only how his wife, after pausing to listen to the telephone, just says: What sister, and a few moments later after a brief pause says: What stepfather. And then finally only says or asks: What? He had laid the telephone cable himself, back before the end of the GDR, running it down from the house all the way to the workshop. The father of the mistress of the house had given them permission to have their own extension off the main line. They themselves had been waiting thirteen years to have telephone service installed in their own apartment in the district capital. If there’s a telephone somewhere, it will ring.