The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  On his way to the station he sees his apartment building on the other side of the street and briefly stops. Something is taking place there that used to be called his life, all he has to do is cross the street and go upstairs, and he will be back where he belongs: beside his wife. Even from where he is standing he can hear the shrieks and wails coming from inside. Not his wife’s voice — that much is certain — and if he’s not mistaken, not the voice of his mother-in-law either. Who is shedding tears over his child? The door opens, and a woman he doesn’t know comes out of the house in low-heeled shoes, her coat buttoned all the way up, her scarf covering her hair; as she walks, she wipes her tears, she hasn’t noticed him on the other side of the street, and even if she did, she’d have no idea why he was standing there, and by the time she reaches the next corner, it won’t even be possible to tell that she’s been crying. When she turns off the street, an old man is coming from the other direction and almost bumps into her, he is holding a bowl. The old man nods to the woman, then continues slowly on his way to the building’s front door, which he pushes open with his shoulder so that the contents of his bowl — perhaps soup that he wants to bring to the woman in mourning — will not spill. He, the highest ranking mourner, standing a stone’s throw away, sees the stooped shoulders of the old man, and knows who it is: Simon, the coachman from the Jewish quarter who is usually off carting wood shavings, rubbish, and milk, he’s often seen him from behind sitting atop his coach box. All the people here seem to know what their duty is, he’s the only one asking himself what to do. If his mother were still alive, she would be praying the rosary with him now, he would be sitting beside the tiny coffin in the parlor and would be the father of the dead child. Is it a sign of cowardice if one leaves one’s life behind, or a sign of character if one has the strength to start anew?

  7

  The question of whether the nursery should remain sealed up forever is one she doesn’t have to answer, since it’s obvious she must give up the entire apartment. The only option that remains to her is moving back in with her mother. Hadn’t it pleased her when her husband married her — a Jew — without his parents’ consent, and above all that his passion for her was so strong it made him forget his own origins? This time, she’s the one he’s taken a mind to abandon, he is leaving her behind without her consent. She knows that his absence will be no greater and no smaller than his love for her and their child — and what she’s seeing reflected now in the line of death is in the end nothing more than the bond joining him to her.

  You mustn’t forget, child, that he used you to pay his debts.

  That’s not the only use I was to him: For example, I got in the way of his professional advancement. He would have spent all eternity in the eleventh pay grade for my sake.

  But it wasn’t all eternity.

  That’s because of the baby.

  That’s what you think. It just didn’t occur to him beforehand that he hadn’t done himself any favors by marrying you.

  Is that supposed to console me?

  Yes.

  So now you also want to rob me of the days when I was happy.

  I’m just saying: You never had as much as you imagine you’re losing now.

  Do you think I’d feel better if I saw things that way?

  That’s what I’m hoping.

  So then I’d just put on my apron again and remind myself how much a herring weighs compared to three apples.

  At least with herring and apples you know where you stand.

  It’s obviously been a long time since you loved someone.

  That’s unfair and you know it.

  I don’t want to talk anymore.

  She’d always thought that when two people were united, it was a matter of crossing over a border you didn’t cross with anyone else, of leaving the world behind and from then on sharing everything. Now she sees that this border is malleable and can shift about at times like this. Imperceptibly, the border has slid inward, and now it is once more separating him from her. Before, she was his freedom; now he’s begun to seek his freedom elsewhere.

  8

  If only he knew where he could find death; he’s hoping for an easy one now that he’s been lying here so long waiting for it. As light as a kiss. As easy as plucking a hair out of the milk. A neighbor woman told him, without his asking, that the infant suffocated. Suffocation, it says in the Talmud, is the hardest among the 903 deaths. Suffocation is like a briar that has gotten caught in wool, you tear it out with all your strength and throw it over your shoulder. Like a thick rope pulled through an opening that is too small.

  Whoso findeth, his friend congratulated him at his wedding fifty-two years before, and this finding continues today — find: the wisdom in the Torah, a good wife, a peaceful life, down to the last shovelful of earth on the coffin; find: a death easy as a kiss, like the kiss with which the Lord awoke Adam to life, he blew breath into his nose, and one day, if you’re lucky, he’ll gently, lightly kiss it away again. Finding is also what you need to do, he thinks, grinning his toothless graybeard grin, when you have an urgent need for the privy. I’ve got to go, he shouts into the next room, for without the help of his wife — who was his bride the day his friend wished him good fortune using the word findeth fifty-two years before — without her help, he can no longer get up.

  9

  Gray is the water — gray — and he throws up, why is it throwing when you throw up, he thinks, raising his head briefly, but then he’s sick to his stomach again, he’s never felt nausea like this in all his life. Once his wife told him that as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke, and she herself — like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in — had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar. When she lost her way on the outskirts of town, her one fear was that she might come too close to the border and suddenly fall off the edge. My little grain of sugar. And all the while, as she later learned at school, her horizon was nothing more than an imaginary line extending clear to the other side of Russia. As long as one remained in a single spot, this was genuinely difficult to understand, even for him, the young civil servant for whom the railway — meaning the locomotion of human beings — was a matter of professional concern. It’s really only here, on this swaying ship, that he is truly internalizing what it means for the Earth to be a sphere. Not only is he made dizzy by its roundness as he circles it, unable to endure this circling; at the same time, the horizon keeps retreating before him, in motion, retreating ever farther, as though the swaying ship were remaining fixed in place to defy him, keeping him, the traveler, always the same distance from his destination, as though the journey’s end were running away from him as he himself runs away, each canceling the other out as he continues to move. The water is gray, and he is overcome with nausea, just as sick to his stomach as several others standing there beside him, throwing up as well. The wind is blowing from the direction in which the ship is sailing, it tugs at the tails of his Imperial and Royal coat, chilling the spine of this man who until recently was a civil servant with a lifetime appointment, who meanwhile, bent over the back railing, is bequeathing to his native land in farewell everything with which it nourished him. After two or three days the nausea will let up, someone says behind him, it’s the gentleman with whom he is sharing his second-class cabin, a Swiss gentleman who is just taking a stroll across the deck and, seeing his need, gives him a handkerchief, assuring him that after this initial period things will improve. The gentleman is apparently accustomed to traveling, he lets the wind tousle his shock of hair and now pulls out an apple, saying that on the contrary, the fresh air whets his appetite, he takes a bite and offers the young man an apple too, no thank you, the man says, turning to face the sea once more, I understand, says the bearer of apples, and tosses the second round thing down from the gallery to the travelers of the lowest class in the cargo hold, who surely are hungry but lack access to a railing of their own where they might thr
ow up when nausea overtakes them.

  10

  And her? For approximately three years she weighs herring and apples, hands bread, milk, and matches across the counter.

  You can’t keep staring people in the face like that.

  There’s nothing else to look at.

  It isn’t proper. Only children stare like that.

  No one’s complained.

  Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often now, or Mr. Veitel.

  I see you’re keeping track.

  I wouldn’t say that, but I do have a good sense of my customers.

  And I don’t.

  You do fundamentally.

  I don’t have to do this.

  Why are you always so quick to take offense?

  I’m not offended, but if my help isn’t wanted here I can go elsewhere.

  Really, so where would you go?

  Her daughter says nothing.

  That’s not how I meant it, you know that.

  I don’t know anything at all.

  They used to get their eggs from Johanna Sawitzki, but meanwhile it turns out that Karel’s eggs are fresher. The price of kerosene for lamps has fallen because it’s hard to sell Galician petroleum as fast as it degrades after being brought to the surface. For herring and sour pickles purchased together, they give their customers a better price than Levi.

  In all the time you stand around waiting for customers you might have mopped the floor. For example.

  Sure.

  Child, this is your shop too, you’re a grown woman now.

  It was never my choice.

  So now it’s my fault?

  What was the point of learning all that Goethe by heart at school?

  Be glad you got to go to school at all.

  Now the lie the shopkeeper had always sold her daughter as the truth has come to life after all. Now her daughter has taken her place as the abandoned wife, while she herself has become what in truth she always was, if only in secret: a widow.

  11

  Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often, or Mr. Veitel, that may well be. But now there’s the officer who’s taken to stopping in for matches every day at precisely the hour when her mother is off making her rounds of the farms for milk and eggs. He’ll say, perhaps, that he likes how she’s wearing her hair, and she’ll ask him, perhaps, if they use real bullets for their maneuvers. Or he’ll say that it really ought not to rain when they’re practicing their formations, and she’ll say no one melts in a little rain and laugh, and he’ll says it’s pretty the way she laughs. And once, as she’s handing him the matches across the counter, he suddenly pulls off his white leather glove before taking the matches and ever so briefly touches her hand, saying softly: I’m on fire, and she says: That’ll be one groschen, the same as always, because she thinks she must have misheard. The next time, he says nothing at all and keeps his glove on, perhaps because her mother is standing right beside her, because on Sunday the farmers from whom she gets the eggs and milk are all at church. But then, at the beginning of the next week, when she is all alone behind the counter again, he wordlessly hands her a slip of paper along with the coin, gazing openly at her, and only after he is gone does she unfold the paper and read. All there is on the paper is: a street, a house number, a day, and a time. Aha, she thinks, and then she thinks that she wasn’t mistaken after all. And later, in the evening, lying alone in her bed in which she lay as a little girl — the bed to which she returned after the death of her child so as to sleep herself old in it and, who knows, perhaps even die in it someday — later, in the evening, that hour of evening that might as well be night, she cannot think of a good reason not to go at the appointed hour to where the officer will be awaiting her.

  Indeed, why not? Her husband is gone, she no longer has a child, and there’s no need to tell her mother. She wants to go. When she thinks of the warm, dry, almost coarse hand of the officer, she feels almost dizzy with desire. Her desire branches out to the farthest reaches of her body, she is dizzy down into the joints of her fingers and toes, and between her legs. So this is what happens when temptation stops being just a word and enters into a life, when it slips beneath the skirt of a woman randomly chosen, seizing hold of her mortal body with terrible force. Exalted is the person who is tempted, for that person alone has the opportunity to resist, her grandfather explained to her years before, when, as an adolescent, she was sitting on the footstool and her mother had taken the horse and cart into the countryside to buy merchandise.

  And what do you get for overcoming the temptation?

  The resisting itself is the reward.

  That means I’m paying myself.

  Only if you resist.

  If I resist.

  The Lord wants you to demonstrate that you are worthy of him.

  That’s all He wants?

  That’s all He wants.

  So really it’s all about me.

  All about you, as a part of the whole.

  Then I myself am His test.

  What do you mean?

  If I don’t resist, it means He didn’t do his job well.

  When her grandfather laughed, she could look inside his mouth and see how few teeth he had left.

  It would most certainly be lamentable if He — who holds together the waters of the sea as if in a water skin — felt the need to test Himself using a slip of a thing like you.

  But why else would He need my renunciation?

  By then her legs were already so long that, crouching on the stool, she could effortlessly prop her chin on her knees. Because of her marriage to the goy, her grandfather sat shiva for her as though she had died. From then until his own death a year and a half ago, she never saw him again. Her grandfather disowned her, but even after this disowning, her life continued to go on and was still continuing today. What rules governed this life — this life that for him was no longer a life — was something she had no one to ask. From then on, her life was simply her life, that’s all.

  12

  Once, they have to put on life jackets, because the ship is traveling through thick fog, and there’s a risk of colliding with another ship; once it is storming so violently that an old woman tears the locket from the chain around her neck and throws it into the water with loud prayers, to reconcile God with the ship; once someone is heard playing the violin on one of the lower decks — a piece from the operetta Die Fledermaus — but the former civil servant doesn’t recognize the music, even though he studied in Vienna. If he were to perish of the nausea that refuses to leave him, who would get his pocket watch and the coat with the gold buttons? The gentleman traveling with him shows a Polish child a banana and explains how such a thing is peeled. The gentleman bites off the little black tip of the banana himself and spits it into the sea. But the child doesn’t want the banana. After two days, three, four, the young man’s nausea still hasn’t subsided. Only after an endlessly long twelve and a half days does he behold one morning, standing amid the throng suddenly crowding the deck, the Statue of Liberty, and this is definitely better than never having seen it. On their voyage, the gentleman told him of a German captain whose ship was so dilapidated that instead of venturing across the ocean with his passengers, he tacked up and down off the coast of Scotland, just far enough out that the land was out of sight. Nine days later he unloaded the emigrants in a small harbor, telling them that this was America. In both places, English was spoken, a language none of the new arrivals understood, and the men wore skirts, as was no doubt the latest fashion in New York — so it was nearly a week before the last of the emigrants understood that they were still in Europe. But by then the dilapidated captain had long since vanished along with the money they’d paid him for their passage to the New World.

  Now, men, women, and children are weeping, overcome, they keep pointing out the gigantic likeness of the woman to one another, some fling their arms around whoever happens to be standing close by; an elderly woman tries to embrace the Austrian, but he fends her off. All he’d done before h
e left was send his father a postcard. Why join the ranks of humankind now? Maybe he’s just a cold person, he thinks for the first time ever, and wonders whether arriving in a foreign country is enough to turn one into a different man in the same skin. A child points to the statue and asks: Who’s that? And he says: Columbus.

  13

  The building she’s walking into looks no different from other buildings. It is Wednesday afternoon, the front door is still gleaming in the sun; she told her mother she was visiting a friend. She delayed her arrival by five minutes to be absolutely certain she wouldn’t get there ahead of him. Before she lifts her hand to knock on the apartment door, he opens it, having heard her footsteps on the stairs. He draws her inside and immediately turns this drawing into an embrace, then the kiss, then she touches his teeth with her tongue, then she feels the corners of her mouth grow wet with his saliva, then she pushes him away, then he grasps her firmly, pressing the inside of his arm to her mouth, and she bites his arm because she doesn’t know what else to do with it, and he says: Ah, she bites harder and he repeats: Ah, and she is seized with the desire to bite into him all the way to the bone; then he pushes her away, seizes her, and spins her around so he can open her dress, which is fastened up the back with a long row of hooks, and then her corset as well, meanwhile she bows her head to remove the pins from her hair, and this controlled, quiet activity is the preparation for something that — as has apparently been agreed — will be neither controlled nor quiet. The room he invited her to is small and furnished, the curtains yellowed, and the enamel is flaking off the wash basin sitting on a chest of drawers; but she sees none of this, instead she sees that the officer’s close-fitting trousers display a noticeable bulge at the crotch, she runs her fingers across this bulge, feeling astonishment not only that this is allowed, but that she knows it is. A number of things are different this afternoon than they were with her husband, the officer’s aroused member bends up rather than down, he licks her breasts, which her husband never did, and when she is lying on top of him, he slaps her buttocks resoundingly with his palm. Every single moment this afternoon is too late for her to leave again. But when the two hours he rented the room for are almost up, he kisses her cheek and says: Alas, my sweet, it’s time to go. She watches him as he gets up, his legs are sinewy and long, far longer than those of her husband. He bends over to sort out their things — his and hers — that are lying in a heap on the floor, tossing the dress, corset, and stockings onto the bed for her and slipping into his close-fitting trousers. They no longer display a bulge. He doesn’t know that she has already borne a child, and she would like to tell him so, but how? She too gets up and pulls on her stockings, meanwhile he is digging about in his wallet. Maybe she’ll have another one after all, a child by him, she thinks and smiles. She slips into her corset, deftly hooking it shut. With or without a wedding — what does she care about that — now he’s finally found the banknote he wants to give her — she’d be happy in any case. She pulls the dress on over her head, it rustles, and only when she has emerged again from the dress does she see the hand he is holding out to her with the money, his dry, warm hand that was the start of everything, she sees his hand with the banknote and almost wants to laugh, asking: What’s the idea? But he doesn’t laugh in return, instead he says, perhaps: For you. Or possibly something like: Don’t make a fuss. Or: Keep the change. Or: You certainly earned it, my lovely. He says some sentence of this sort to her, and she looks at him as if seeing him for the first time.