Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

Then the real estate agent and her clients walk across the hall to the cupboard room, and there too she can hear everything that is said, as there is only a thin door separating her from the people. The real estate agent says: They don’t make built-ins like this anymore. That’s true, the clients say, but something smells funny, it smells of cats or martens. I’ve never seen a marten in this house, the real estate agent says with a laugh and then walks on ahead into the study, the milk glass panes inset in the door make a faint clinking sound, and the clients apparently follow, since things now quiet down, some time later the little group returns, the real estate agent is still laughing or again laughing, is this house actually protected as a historic landmark? No, unfortunately not, says the real estate agent, the clients cough, then all of them go back downstairs, and only after absolute quiet has been restored does the former mistress of the house emerge from the closet and look out the window of the Little Bird Room to where the real estate agent and her clients are now walking through the garden, sometimes they stop short, pointing in one or the other direction, for example at the big oak tree that has recently lost one of its largest limbs, or at the roof of the bathing house, they walk slowly as they continue their conversation with a nod or shake of a head until they stop short again here or there to discuss something or other in greater detail.

Following this first visit by the real estate agent and her clients, a wrinkly waterproof cloth now flutters before the kitchen window, bearing the words: For Sale. Along with a telephone number, white against dark blue. Sometimes when it’s windy the cloth tugs at its ropes so forcefully you can hear it inside the house. Later one of the cords supporting the sign comes loose, and then the illegitimate owner sometimes sees the cloth being blown inside out as she is trudging down the slope of Shepherd’s Mountain, it slaps itself in its white-lettered face and then sinks back down again.

The house is now so empty that it wouldn’t weigh much if she were to order it to rise up in the air and float away. The light coming in through the colored windows would accompany the house on this journey, as would the gleam of the floor that has finally been waxed again and the creaking of the stairs at the second, fifteenth and second-to-last steps. Now she thinks of how her grandmother had the bathing house moved that time, she and her childhood friend had followed the workers all the way up the slope: Complete with its thatch roof, windows and shutters, with its awning and the two wooden columns, it had been pulled slowly uphill between the alders, oaks and pines, and when it then stood in its new location at the top of the hill, the view of the lake you now had from its covered entryway was almost more beautiful than before. But now she no longer knows what direction to float off in.

Many more times, as the summer gradually draws to a close, she stands in the Little Bird Room observing the real estate agent out in the garden with this or that client, one client knocks the toe of his shoe against one of the flagstone steps, to check whether the step is wobbly, another one has the real estate agent show him the cesspit, a third jiggles the fence to the next-door property whose posts have rotted, and keeps jiggling it until two of the posts, held together now only by the wire mesh, lean to one side. Since the house and the land are not cheap, she hears a great many more conversations, many more times the shallow closet door is opened, many times the better side of the lake is mentioned, along with Albert Speer, the cats and the martens. Laughter. Is the house protected as a historical landmark? It isn’t. Laughter and coughing. Since the real estate agent is not showing the house exclusively, and it might always happen that one or the other member of the group of heirs to the property might come to check that everything is in order, making the journey from Austria, Switzerland or the Western part of the Federal Republic, or since workers might be sent, or some acquaintance drop by to take a look at things, the real estate agent is not surprised when she doesn’t always find everything exactly as she left it the last time she showed the house.

What is it you want, her husband always said to her when she — now the illegitimate owner — spoke with him about the property: You had your time there. She had been unable to explain to her husband that from the moment it first became apparent that she would not grow old in this house, her past had begun to send out its tendrils everywhere behind her, and that although she had long since become an adult, her beautiful childhood had begun, all these many years later, to outstrip her, growing far taller than she was — it was turning into a beautiful prison that might lock her away forever. As if with ropes, time was tying this place down right where it was, tying the earth down tightly to itself and tying her to this earth, and as for her childhood friend — whom she hadn’t seen in over nine years now and would probably never see again — it was tying the two of them together forever.

She hears the car doors of the new owners slam shut outside on the sandy road, then the car door of the real estate agent, and finally the car door of the architect. The real estate agent has only come along with them in order to take down the waterproof banner she had mounted outside the kitchen window. This time the real estate agent no longer has to walk through the house with her clients, who are now called the new owners, and she no longer has to utter her sentences, for which she, after having had to say them so many times, will now finally receive within the next ten days her commission in the amount of 6 % of the purchase price plus VAT. The new owners and their architect do not enter the house either, instead they walk across the big meadow and from there point first at the lake and then at the bathing house and finally at the place where the house is standing.

Never has the sense of peace inside the house been greater than on the day when, for the last time, she dusts, sweeps, mops and waxes the floors, the day when she opens, one last time, all the windows that can open so as to let fresh air into the house, and then closes the windows one last time, transforming the daylight one last time into light that is green and in parts also dark blue, red and orange, this day on which she draws shut the curtains she has washed in lake water and then hung back up again, closes the door with the milk-colored panes that leads to the study, just as her grandmother had always done when she was writing, and then, withdrawing even further, she also closes the door that leads to the cupboard room. While her grandmother was still on her deathbed and not yet dead, she had picked out her prettiest nightdress, washed it and ironed it so that when the time came she would be ready to give it to her dead grandmother to take with her on her journey. The gentleman from the funeral home had promised to put it on her and to take a photo of her grandmother’s corpse in her pretty nightdress during her laying-out. Surely, then, the funeral director had dressed the deceased in her lacy nightdress before cremating the body, surely he had taken the photo and surely put it for safekeeping in some drawer in his office. In her dreams recently she has often seen her grandmother lying in state before her — strangely with an Indian face. That probably had something to do with the fact that in one of the newspapers she’d used to polish the windows she’d read that among the Aztecs sweeping was considered a sacred act.

Now she closes the door to the Little Bird Room, then closes the door to the bathroom that no longer has a floor, and now she goes down the stairs that creak at the second, the fifteenth and the second-to-last step, closes the black shutters with the crank concealed inside the wall, then closes behind her — still withdrawing — the living room door whose handle gives off a metallic sigh, closes the door to the kitchen, returns bucket, broom, cloth, hand brush, dustpan and scrub-brush to their places and closes the closet door which, she’d always believed as a child, really led to the Garden of Eden, then she steps outside and finally locks the front door of the house, although she doesn’t understand how this can be possible since everything she is now locking away lies so deep within the interior, while the part of the world into which she is withdrawing is so far outside. She locks the door and then walks past the giant rhododendrons to the left of the house, “Mannesmann Air Raid Defense” is written on the bars that cover the cellar windows, she unlocks the gate, locks it again behind her, exits the front garden through the little gate in the fence and puts the worn-out key in her pocket, even though soon the only thing it will be good for is to unlock air. The balance to be paid out to me. Beyond the reach of law. Document bundle B 3. We request acknowledgment.