Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

They saw. They saw so long and so much that all the storerooms behind their eyes were filled with what it would have been better not to have seen. He has no memory of how he and his friend later crawled out of their hiding place, how they climbed down the variously tall piles of wood and escaped to freedom. If you had to go by what a person remembers, he would consider it possible that they never did get back outside again but were still squatting to this day beneath the roof of the shed, which meanwhile is entirely covered with the leaves and dry branches that have fallen. That one can be more thoroughly tied to a place through shared cupidity and shame than by shared happiness is something he wishes he’d never had to learn.

There was only one thing that he couldn’t understand at the time: that his friend only ever spent her vacations in the place where he lived. He lives there still, even though his hands are starting to turn into the hands of an old man. Only after his coming-of-age ceremony when he visited her in Berlin, on that one special weekend not long after his Jugendweihe, the one single time when the direction was reversed, when he was the one making the journey and she the one who lived there, had he understood, but by then it was too late. You sunshine of my heart, one of her schoolmates had written to her, always the same form of address: You sunshine of my heart, and then all sorts of other things on little scraps of paper that she kept in her pencil case. She laughed at him when he found the notes by accident one day and asked who else besides him was allowed to call her the sunshine of his heart. That was just someone kidding around, she said, just a joke, but when he didn’t let up and wasn’t prepared to start laughing, she became annoyed and for the first time ever she said aloud something that apparently had already been self-evident to her even then but to him was not at all self-evident, even now: that when she was in Berlin, which was where she lived, she could do whatever she liked.

From that point on it was never again possible for him — neither during her next vacation stay nor any of those that followed — to wait for her beside the long table while she sat eating breakfast with her family, suddenly he saw himself as a servant standing there, like someone serving himself up on a platter from head to foot with parsley in his mouth and a baked apple stuff ed between his toes. Would you care to eat me, madam? From then on the amphibian he had been up till then had chosen a life on land, and the amphibian that she was chose a life in the water, or the other way around, in any case the result of her late-Medieval evolution was that at some point or other, without her ever having to explain anything more to him, she showed up at his door with a male friend, a friend she wanted to introduce to him, her childhood friend, as she now described him. He, her childhood friend, had stood there in the doorway of his house with a plug made of a torn-off bit of tissue sticking out of his nose, because just before she had knocked on the door he had suddenly gotten a nosebleed and had doctored himself provisionally in this way. The knock she had used on his door was still the same secret knock they had used as children. He had opened the door and seen his friend standing there with her companion. Good day, would you like to come in. The friend from Berlin had looked at the bloody snippet of paper sticking out of the nose of his girlfriend’s childhood friend. I don’t want to disturb you. Later she didn’t knock on his door so often when she walked by his house in the company of one or the other boyfriend she’d brought out to the country with her, but when she saw his legs sticking out from under a car in the workshop he had set up next to his house, she would always shout out a greeting to him. When eventually she had married one of these boyfriends, it gradually, over the years, became self-evident that he would help her husband drag the rowboat out of the water in winter and turn it upside-down, hang the paddleboat on the rear wall of the woodshed, and in springtime help the subtenants put up the dock, and occasionally, when she and her husband had no time to come out to the country, he would even clip the hedge, rake the leaves and take care of all the other tasks for which the gardener was now much too old. The hourly wage they paid him was far higher than what was customary in the region.

Can you grab that box of books, sure, but I still have my left hand free, here are the shoes, OK, the coffee grinder is staying here, sure, makes sense, it’s all rusted anyhow, I laid out the clothing and coats from the closet on the bed, they won’t fit in any of the suitcases, they’ll have to be hung up, no problem, have you got the bed linens, yes, then just leave the key for the wall cabinets in the lock, who knows if someone else will ever need it, what does it matter, did you go down to the cellar to turn off the electricity and water, no, we’d better not, in case the gardener ever turns up again after all, and close the shutters in the bathing house, OK I’ll run down there, but leave the paddleboat where it is, I told the tenants they can take it if they want. The towels, what should I do with them, give them away if you don’t need them, can you give me a hand with this lamp, that’s all that will fit, you’re probably right.

When she moved out, the house still belonged to her and her father since they weren’t allowed to sell it as long as the question of its ownership was still up in the air. It belonged to her and to her father, and the telephone still worked. The electricity and water had been turned off when the speculator whom her father had engaged to invest the property for him interrupted the renovation work and left the house to its own devices — but if she had returned, she would have been able to start everything back up again with just a few simple adjustments. Only much later did this speculator call him again to ask him to dig up the soil of the road beside the house and cut through the electrical cable, and to dismantle the water line as well so that her father wouldn’t be responsible for the costs that might arise if someone were to decide to install himself in the empty house. Only the telephone line was left undisturbed, since the subtenants had, with her father’s permission, run an extension cable down to the workshop.

By doing work of this sort on the properties all around the lake, he’d sometimes made some extra income on the side in recent years. It used to be people had looked down on clandestine employment—“shoddy” was the word automatically assigned to such labor: additions to buildings made without permits and so forth — but now the shoddy work to be done was generally a matter of closing things up and tearing things down. Before this he had, at the request of Daniel’s half-brother, dug up the sandy road in front of Daniel’s bungalow to cut the electrical cable and disconnect the water supply. After the Schmeling house burned down, he helped with the clean-up operation, and the property suddenly became very cheap after the fire, but still not cheap enough for him, and at his age it wouldn’t have been worth it, in any case, to buy an undeveloped property, and he didn’t have anyone to leave it to. The next storm will rip the tarp back off the roof again, because it just isn’t possible to drive nails into straw — what he is tying to the roof of the bathing house with string is as shoddy as it gets, he thinks as he pulls the strings taut. When a decision has been made about his own house — for here too someone has filed a claim for the restitution of the property — he will find himself a small apartment in the district capital, something with central heating, convenient to shopping and not too expensive.