Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

If he had succeeded in escaping then, he probably would have managed to complete his studies in West Germany. In any case, the Museum for City History had bought his drawings of the corpses right away after the catacombs were opened, the corpses relocated and the church rebuilt. But after his time in prison, as was only to be expected in the East, he had been sent to work in production to purify himself: He was assigned to a furniture factory. In fact this was supposed to be only a transitional position, a makeshift solution. Half a year later he would have been allowed to take up his studies again, even here, but he himself had made the decision to remain in the factory as an ordinary worker. The makeshift had lasted his entire life until now, when it was time for him to retire. Whenever the topic came up in conversation, he would always say that he’d simply realized that he preferred this practical work to his studies. Lord only knows. Feeling the unsteady boards of the dock beneath his footsteps, he thinks that it would be lovely if he and his wife would succeed in dying before the matter of the inherited property was finally settled. Then the person giving the speech at the funeral would be able to say that until the very end they had been able to pursue what they loved: sailing.

IN THE VILLAGE they say the daughter of the house has been seen at night sitting with a few boys out on the pier where the steamboat docks, smoking and drinking. Especially when the moon is full she likes to clamber over the railing of the little balcony beside her window with her parents and grandmother none the wiser, she climbs down the window frame of the downstairs window, then steps into the interlaced hands of the gardener held up to assist her, and later she ascends again by the same method.

The subtenants are glad the gardener remains sitting quietly on the threshold with the cold cigar stump in his mouth when they start to saw down the big fir bush, what they’re after is to lay the telephone wire in as direct a line as possible from the house down to the workshop so that this cable they have purchased themselves will reach. In any case the fir bush has become yellowed and unattractive in recent years, besides which it’s been hollow inside for some time now. When they are removing the huge stump with its roots, they discover a crate filled with porcelain. Not bad, all the things that grow in a garden, the young householder says when they show him the crate. A miracle of nature, he says. The gardener nods. The householder picks up the crate and carries it to his car.

SOMETIMES HE CLIMBS UP a ladder to straighten the tarp with which he covered the thatch roof of the bathing house the previous fall. Perhaps he would use a similar gesture to draw up the covers at night to tuck in his friend if she were now his wife and lying in bed beside him as had been agreed on so many years ago. On the side facing the lake, the roof has begun to rot. There isn’t much sense to what he’s doing, it’s possible the roof will even rot faster under the tarp, but he still can’t bring himself to just abandon the roof to the wind. Under the tarp it will still hold together for a little while longer and look like a roof.

If his father hadn’t sent him to run home from the construction site that day to get some beer, he wouldn’t have come down the path just as she was picking raspberries with her father on the slope across from their house. Her father had waved him over and asked whether he wouldn’t like to have some raspberries too, and he’d said yes. From then on, the first time he plucked raspberries with her, until today, when he climbs up on the ladder to straighten the tarp on the roof of the bathing house, life has taken its course. Sometimes he asks himself whether, if their two fathers had not acted as if in cahoots that day to make them playmates, his life would still have become his life. But life would no doubt have filled up with various other sorts of would-haves and probably been just as much his life as this one. At the time, when he was five years old and she had just turned four, their fathers or who knows who had made a decision once and for all about the gestures with which he now, in his mid-fifties already and perched atop a ladder, is tugging straight a tarp that’s gotten rumpled in the wind.

I dare you to crawl out farther on this branch, let’s go for a swing, did you know you can smoke cattails, let’s use the tiles to build a house in the water, I found a bullet casing, me too, let’s go for a swing, if you put a board over the tire you’ll have a raft, you have to use elderberry stalks to make a blowpipe, they’re hollow on the inside, the gardener said so, let’s go to Liedtke Park, it’s all wild and there are apples growing that don’t belong to anyone, let’s go for a swing, c’mere, I’ll give you a boost, how far down can you dive, my ship has a rudder made of metal, let’s say the bedroom is from the pillow there to the blanket, let’s go for a swing, can you ride no-hands, did you know that little boy Daniel got up on the windowsill and peed out the window, oh no, my oar just fell in the water, give me a kiss.

Over there between the roots of the big oak tree that he can see perfectly well from up on the ladder is where they’d buried the little chest that contained, as treasure, the aluminum pennies from his sister’s wedding, and when they dug the hole they found the pewter pitchers that someone else had put in the ground at exactly that spot. When he stands on the ladder now, he isn’t looking at the roots of the oak tree, but presumably the little chest is still there in the ground, or, if it’s rotted since then, at least the pennies are still there. Did you know that Daniel is dead? Did you know he died even before his father tried to shoot his mother dead? Do you remember how he used to go diving with us, among the pikes in the reeds, and how cold the pikes were when they bumped our legs with their fish mouths? Not long after the border was opened, he went diving in the Caribbean and drowned. No, really. As if opening the border just gave him more possible ways to die. The trip was his would-have. Now he’ll be a little boy forever. After the night when Daniel’s father, who had cancer and was on his deathbed, shot at Daniel’s mother, she too lay on her deathbed. No, really. As if dying in such a family just eats its way through everything. Did you read the newspapers when for days the front page showed the bungalow where Daniel peed out the window that time? Now the window is dark and empty, the whole bungalow has been dark since the shooting. They say the argument was about the bungalow itself. Daniel’s father shot at Daniel’s mother from the bed. It was about the inheritance for Daniel’s younger half-brother. The one from the West. No, really. So opening the borders apparently also gave Daniel’s parents more possible ways to die.

In order to stretch the tarp over the roof last fall, he had set foot on the property of his childhood friend for the first time since helping her pack up and empty out the house years before. He hopped over the little wall made of fieldstone and worked his way through the bushes because the gate he’d always entered as a child was locked now. He had sat with her on the bricked pillars to either side of the gate so they could stick their tongues out at passers-by. When he now thinks back to that weekend when she emptied out and left the house, or even to his visit in Berlin when he was fourteen years old, or, even further back, to that afternoon in the woodshed when she and he had seen something it would have been better for them not to see, it strikes him as strange that, independent of what is happening, one day is always followed by another, and to this day he doesn’t know what it actually is that is continuing. Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different from what we’re hoping for — something that transcends everything that’s ever happened — since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it. The house too is still standing there, and he doesn’t know what it is that is still standing. And he himself. And no doubt she as well, somewhere in the world.