Jenny Erpenbeck - Visitation

Between the excoriated trunks of the tall trees, monkeys are leaping about. The strongest of them are allowed to take their share of the booty before the others. If you feed them, they’ll think you’re weaker than they are and attack you violently when you stop giving them food or aren’t quick enough about it. Just stop calmly where you are and walk backward. Into the car, Ludwig says to Elliot and Elisabeth. Anna says: And leave the windows rolled up.

Arthur says to him, Ludwig, his son: Let me take a turn, and he picks up the spade himself and tosses the earth back into the hole all around the root ball. Ludwig places his arm around Anna, his future wife, and the two of them look at the broad, glittering surface of the lake. Home. Why does everyone like looking at the water so much, Doris asks. I don’t know, Anna replies. Doris says, maybe because there’s so much empty sky above a lake, because everyone likes to see nothing sometimes. You can let go now, Arthur says to Doris.

The eucalyptus trees dry out the ground all the way down, they rob all the other plants of water. And after every forest fire, it is their seeds that are the first to sprout, crowding out all other growth. By regularly shedding its dry branches, the eucalyptus saves water and encourages the development of the fires that are so beneficial not to the individual tree but to the distribution of the species as a whole. Thanks to the high oil content of its wood, its trunks are quicker to catch fire than other trees. Between the regrown trunks, the forest floor is bare, the earth burned reddish by the blaze. The leaves of the eucalyptus trees rustle louder than those of any other tree Ludwig has ever heard.

When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it, grandmother Hermine says to little Doris. My cousins? Doris asks. You never know, says Arthur and smiles at his future daughter-in-law, Anna. Hermine says: They’re still swimming around in Abraham’s sausage pot. Can you eat them? Doris asks. Nonsense, says Ludwig, her uncle, and says: Come give me a hand. The two of them trample the earth firm around the trunk of the tree. With one pair of big shoes, purchased in 1932 for 35 marks, and one pair of small bare feet. Home.

Elliot and baby Elisabeth are running from the stream of the sprinkler that keeps turning to one side and then the other, they let themselves be sprayed with water and then race off again. Elliot tears a leaf from the fig tree and uses it to wave the drops in Elisabeth’s direction. Elisabeth tears off a leaf too and holds it in front of her face to hide from her big brother.

Doris picks up a few acorns and tosses them in the lake. Look, fish, she says, pointing out, for the benefit of her uncle Ludwig, the circular waves. Petri Heil. Tomorrow will be the topping out ceremony at the architect’s.

Ludwig calls: What are you two playing over there? Baby Elisabeth holds the fig leaf before her face and whispers: The expulsion to Paradise.

Hermine and Arthur, his parents.

He himself, Ludwig, the firstborn.

His sister Elisabeth, married to Ernst.

Their daughter, his niece, Doris.

Then his wife Anna.

And now the children: Elliot and baby Elisabeth, named for his own sister.

Doris, says Grandfather Arthur, it’s time for us to go fill a bucket to water the tree so it will grow well.

Ludwig knows that because of the dry branches that frequently fall it is not without its dangers to lie down to rest in a eucalyptus grove. But he loves to hear the leaves rustle. Back home he liked to play the piano. Back home he was a cloth maker like his father. Here he has opened an auto repair shop and specializes in clutches and brakes. Here his gardener must allow an official to stick a pencil into his curly hair. The pencil stays put. Here-upon the gardener gets a big C stamped in his passport and is forbidden to enter public parks. Since he, Ludwig, arrived here he hasn’t so much as touched a piano. Baby Elisabeth plays his playing here, she takes lessons and is learning quickly as if she, even before she was born, had been able to take this with her from home, something that carries no weight: music.

Tell me again what the mountains at the bottom of the lake are called, Doris asks her grandfather. What mountains, Arthur asks in response. Ludwig says, the gardener from the neighbors’ on the left just told Doris about them: Gurkenberg and Black Horn, Keperling, Hoffte, the Nackliger and Bulzenberg. And Mindach’s Hill. Nackliger, the girl repeats, giggling. Elisabeth says, I wish my memory were as good as my brother’s. From across the way you can hear the carpenters banging, they are all but done with the attic. Heil . They want to put up a thatch roof, says Arthur, his father. Might not be a bad idea for your bathing house either, he says. We’ll see, says Ludwig.

He and his father appraise, along with the carpenter, the place where the bathing house will stand. It is to be built ten meters from the water, not parallel to the shore but positioned at a slight angle, facing the lake as if it were a stage. On the property of the coffee and tea importer, on the right-hand side behind the fence, the brick walls of the future ground floor are already in place, with square holes for the windows and an exit door cut all the way to the ground to provide access to the planned terrace, and through these holes you can see, depending where you are standing, either the interior of the house or, looking out, the lake and trees. Ludwig folds up the plan. And inside at least a pair of bunk beds and a washstand, says his father. We’ll never be spending the night here, Father, says Ludwig. Arthur says: But it won’t take up much space.

With the folded-up plan Ludwig manages to smite a mosquito that has just settled on his father’s arm. To the left, the banging has stopped now, on the right you can hear the scraping of the masons’ trowels against naked brick. Time to call it a day. This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5 m long, 3.8 m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.

Eight iron trestles topped with flat panels, each constructed of ten boards nailed together, with one such panel between each pair of trestles, the dock is twelve meters long, painted black with pine tar so the wood will last longer. Anna picks up baby Doris before she steps onto the dock because she’s afraid the child might fall in the water. Doris wraps her legs around Anna’s body. Heil . Elisabeth says, let her be, she won’t fall.

Come on, I’ll put you to bed, it’s still light out, that’s just how it is in summer, and Elliot, he’s older than you, but I don’t want to, come along now, but only if you carry me, all right; baby Elisabeth wraps her legs around Anna’s body, Anna carries the girl, body to body, carries this child or that. Perhaps he married Anna because he liked the way her body jutted forward to support the weight of a little girl.

When it’s winter here, that means it’s summer back home and vice versa. On the skat cards belonging to Ludwig’s parents, Arthur and Hermine, there was always half a king on one side of the line, and a second half on the other. One might assume it would be with just the same precision that he, Ludwig, who like his father was a cloth maker, was now being mirrored at the equator, reflecting back the image of an auto mechanic. If you look at it this way, the rustling of the eucalyptus trees is just like in the song about the linden tree beside the fountain, and the water of the lake seeps through the Earth’s center to become the ocean, it’s not by chance we refer to it as groundwater. Elisabeth even resembles Elisabeth.