JENNY ERPENBECK
The End of Days
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
a new directions book
We left from here for Marienbad only last summer.
And now — where will we be going now?
—W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
BOOK I
1
The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn’t right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up. Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs ever farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred; three handfuls tossed down into the grave, and now even the grown woman who would have come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother — she too was slowly being suffocated by the dirt falling into her mouth. Beneath three handfuls of dirt, an old woman lay there in the grave: a woman who herself had begun to move slowly, one to whom another young woman, or a son, at times might have said: oh, Mother — now she, too, was waiting to have dirt thrown on top of her until eventually the grave would be full again, in fact even a bit fuller than full, since after all the mound of earth on a grave is always round on top because of the body underneath, even if the body lies far below the surface where no one can see. The body of an infant that has died unexpectedly produces hardly any roundness at all. But really the mound ought to be as huge as the Alps, she thinks, even though she’s never seen the Alps with her own eyes.
She sits on the very same footstool she always used to sit on as a child when her grandmother was telling stories. This footstool was the one thing she asked for when her grandmother offered to give her something for her new home. She sits in the hallway on this footstool, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, not touching the food and drink a friend has set before her. For seven days she will sit like this. Her husband tried to pull her to her feet, but he couldn’t manage it against her will. When the door clicked shut behind him, she was glad. Just this past Friday, the infant’s great-grandmother had stroked the sleeping child’s head, calling her meydele, little girl. She herself, by giving birth to the child, had turned her grandmother into a great-grandmother and her mother into a grandmother, but now all these transformations have been reversed. The day before yesterday, her mother — who at the time could still be called a grandmother — had brought a woolen blanket for her to wrap herself in when she went walking in the park with her baby on cold days. Then, in the middle of the night, her husband had shouted at her to do something. But she hadn’t known what to do in a situation like this. After his shouting, and after the few minutes in the middle of the night when she hadn’t known what to do, after the moment when her husband, too, hadn’t known what to do, he had not spoken another word to her. In her distress, she’d run to her mother (who now was no longer a grandmother), and her mother had told her to go back home and wait, she would send help. While her husband was pacing up and down the living room, she hadn’t dared to touch her child again. She had carried all the buckets of water out of the house and emptied them, had draped a sheet over the hallway mirror, flung open the windows in the room where the child lay, to let the night in, and then sat down beside the cradle. With these gestures she had called to mind that part of life inhabited by human beings. But what had happened right here in her own home, not quite one hour before, was something no human hand could grasp.
That’s just how it had been when her child was born, not even eight months before. After a night, a day, and another night during which the child hadn’t arrived, she had wanted to die. That’s how far she had withdrawn from life during those hours: from her husband, who was waiting outside; from her mother, who sat on a chair in the corner of the room; from the midwife, who was fussing about with bowls of water and towels; and above all, from this child that supposedly was there inside her but had wedged itself into invisibility. In the morning, after the birth, she watched from her bed as everyone simply went about doing what was needed: Her mother, who had now been transformed into a grandmother, received a friend arriving to offer congratulations, and her grandmother, now transformed into a great-grandmother, brought amulets printed with Psalm 21 to hang around the room and a cake fresh from the oven, and her husband had gone to the inn to drink the child’s health. She herself was holding the baby in her arms, and the baby was wearing the linens that she, her mother and her grandmother had embroidered in the months preceding the birth.
There were even rules for what was happening now. The people her mother had sent arrived at dawn, took the baby from its cradle, wrapped it in a cloth, and laid it on a large bier. The bundle was so small and light that one of them had to hold it in place as they descended the stairs, otherwise it would have rolled off. Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter. Do me a favor, don’t go falling down the stairs. A favor. She knew the baby had to be buried before the day was out.
*
Now she sits here on this little wooden footstool that her grandmother gave her on her wedding day, she sits with her eyes closed, just as she has seen others sitting in times of mourning. Sometimes it was she who brought food to mourners; now a girlfriend has set bowls of food at her feet. Just as she emptied out all the water in the house the night before — they say the Angel of Death would wash his sword in it — just as she covered the mirrors and opened the window because she’d seen others do so before her (but also so the child’s soul wouldn’t turn back, so it would fly off forever) — in just this way she will now sit here for seven days: because she has seen others sitting like this, but also because she wouldn’t know where else to go while she is refusing to enter that inhuman place her child’s room became last night. The customs of man are like footholds carved into inhumanity, she thinks, something a person who’s been shipwrecked can clutch at to pull himself up, and nothing more. How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.
Maybe the blanket was too thick, that could have been the cause. Or because the baby was sleeping on its back. Maybe it choked. Or it was sick and no one knew. Or the reason was that you could hardly hear the baby crying through the closed doors. She hears her mother’s footsteps in the baby’s room and knows what she is doing: She is taking the blankets out of the cradle and pulling off the pillowcases, she is stripping the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden frame and pushing the cradle into a corner. With an armful of bed linens, she now emerges from the room, passing the footstool where her daughter is sitting with her eyes shut, and carries everything down to the laundry. Was it that she’d been too young to know what to do? Her mother never told her about all these things. Or because her husband was equally helpless. Because in truth she had been left all on her own with this child, this creature that had to be kept alive. Because no one had told her beforehand that life does not work like a machine. Her mother comes back. As she walks past, she removes the sheet covering the hall mirror, folds it up, and carries it into the baby’s room. She lays it at the bottom of the suitcase she’s brought along for just this purpose, then takes the child’s things from their drawer and puts them in the suitcase with the sheet. During the months that preceded the child’s birth, all of them — the pregnant woman, her mother, and her grandmother — sewed, knitted and embroidered these jackets, dresses, and caps. Her mother now shuts the empty drawer. On top of the
chest is the toy with little silver bells. When she picks it up, the bells make a jingling sound. They jingled yesterday as well, when her daughter was still a mother playing with her child. The jingling hasn’t changed in the twenty-four hours that have passed since then. Her mother now places the toy on top of everything else in the suitcase, shutting it and picking it up before exiting the room and carrying it down the hall past her daughter to bring it to the cellar. Maybe it was because the child hadn’t yet been baptized and its parents had married in haste with only a civil ceremony. Today, the child was buried in accordance with Jewish custom, and in accordance with Jewish custom she will now sit for seven days upon this footstool; but her husband will not speak to her. Surely he’s now at church, praying for the soul of their child. And where can their child’s soul go now? To purgatory? Paradise? Hell? Or was it — as some people say — that their child was one of those who needed only a short while to complete something begun in an earlier life, something of which the parents knew nothing, which is why the child so quickly returned to where it came from? Her mother comes back, goes into the baby’s room and shuts the windows. Maybe on the other side of life there is nothing at all? The apartment is now perfectly still. In fact, that’s what she would prefer.
Around nightfall, her breasts begin to grow hard and ache. She still has milk — milk for a baby lying in the ground. She’d like best to die now of this overabundance. When her baby was still gasping for air and then turning blue, she had imagined making the child a gift of all the years of life still remaining to her, haggling with the God of her forefathers, exchanging her own life for the life that had emerged from her. But God, if he existed, had rejected her gift. She remained alive. Now she remembers once more how after her marriage her grandmother never again permitted her to come along on visits to her grandfather. Only after her baby arrived and she insisted on showing it to him did she learn that on her wedding day her grandfather had sat shiva for her, his granddaughter, the living bride who had married a goy; despite his weakness he had sat there on his bed for seven days. From above, seen from the heaven her grandfather believes in, she too has already crossed the border from life to death and no longer possesses anything she might barter to strike a deal with God. When night comes, she pushes aside the bowls of food and lies down to sleep beside the footstool. She doesn’t hear her mother go to bed. She doesn’t even hear her husband come home. Sometime during this night it is exactly twenty-four hours since the unexpected death, in a small Galician town — 50.08333 degrees latitude north, 25.15000 degrees longitude east — of an infant child.
2
An old man lies in bed in a dark cottage and does not speak. He’s been lying like this for a long time now, day in and day out, he knows people are saying he’s on his deathbed, but while for some people dying is a narrow antechamber to be crossed in a single leap or stride, the dying in which he lies is so huge that he cannot find his way across, perhaps because he is already so weak.
His wife sits beside him, she sits for a long time without saying anything; meanwhile it’s already dark again outside. The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, she says at last.
That spring his wife had often sat knitting beside him, and although his eyes were no longer so good, he had seen that the garments she was working on were very small. And then one day she had taken the provisions that were to have lasted an entire week, baked a cake and left the house with it. There was no egg in the soup on the Sabbath. There was no need for him to ask, nor for her to explain.
Early this morning while it was still dark, still half asleep, he heard his wife and daughter whispering in the parlor; then, after lunch, his wife left the house and didn’t return until nightfall, sitting down beside him and saying at last after a long silence: The Lord gave, and the Lord took away.
The old couple hadn’t been invited to their granddaughter’s wedding. On the day their granddaughter married a goy, the old man sat up in his bed and stayed sitting like that for seven days, sitting shiva for this living bride as was customarily done only for the dead.
Now his wife sits in silence beside him, her elderly, bed-ridden husband, and shakes her head. God knows what our meydele was thinking, marrying her daughter to a goy, the old man says.
3
She takes the blankets out of the cradle, takes off the pillowcases, strips the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden frame, and pushes the cradle into a corner. The misfortune had begun many years before, when her daughter was still an infant. When they heard the noise outside, her husband had immediately sent the wet nurse up to the nursery with the baby, telling her to bolt the door and not open it under any circumstances if there was a knock, and to close the shutters tightly. Then the two of them ran from window to window downstairs to see what was going on: A crowd appeared to be forming in the surrounding streets, and across the way, on the square, some were running, some were shouting, but what they were shouting was unclear. She and her husband hadn’t managed to get the downstairs shutters closed before the first stones struck the house. Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs, tearing down the wallpaper as they ran and banging holes in the wall with the axe. She and her husband stood behind the attic door, which was very thin, they’d locked it but hadn’t found furniture heavy enough to barricade the door, and now they heard the men’s footsteps on the last steep flight of stairs. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more. O Lord in heaven. If the way below was barred to them, there had to be an escape route above. They began to push the roof shingles away with their hands, creating an opening. But the door behind them that was momentarily holding off their pursuers was thin, just a few boards. Her husband helped her pull herself up and clamber through the opening onto the roof. And then she tried to pull him up after her. And that’s when the thin door could no longer withstand the attackers’ blow
s. And then she was pulling him up by one arm while the men below were pulling him down by the other. Lot refused to surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least him to strike at, spit on, trample, and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people, and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to withdraw. Make no tarrying, O my God. She doesn’t have the strength of angels, she doesn’t succeed in pulling her husband up to where she is. As she holds tight to her husband’s arm, she implores Andrei, whom she has known since he was a baby, to have mercy, and she implores the men she doesn’t know to have mercy as well, including the one holding the axe, but while she is still holding tight to her husband’s hand, her husband down below is being first insulted and then beaten by the men she doesn’t know and also by Andrei, whom she has known since he was a baby, Mercy, and finally before her eyes they begin to swing the axe. She does not let go. First she is holding her husband by the hand, and then all she is holding is a clump of flesh, for there is no longer anything alive left that she might pull up to where she crouches in the open air. Then she is a Jewish widow holding Death by the hand. She lets go, gets up, and looks down at the small town beneath her and the open landscape. It’s broad daylight, there are thatch roofs and roofs covered in shingles, there are streets, squares, and fountains, and in the distance fields and woods, cows standing in a meadow, a coach driving down a dirt road, in front of the house people stand looking up at her, unmoving now and silent. Then, suddenly, she sees that it is snowing. Everything will freeze, she thinks, and a good thing too, she thinks, snow, snow. Losing consciousness, she tumbles, rolls down off the sloping roof, and falls, as luck would have it, on the heap of clothes, linens, and curtains thrown out onto the street by the men, and she remains lying there in the heap of rags, amid blood consisting of the raspberry jam she herself made the summer before, the jar shattered when it was thrown, and now she lies there, her limbs broken, her eyes closed, and none of the people standing there silently in the square comes closer or checks to see if she is still alive. She is alive, but at this moment she herself does not yet know it. The flurries have been further stirred up by her fall, more feathers float into the air from the slashed comforters, delicate goose down drifts around, slowly descending upon the branches of the trees: snow, snow, just like in winter.
The End of Days Page 1