The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  He just nods to her and places the money on the chest of drawers, then spins her around with her back to him, as if she were a child that hasn’t yet learned to get dressed on its own, he hooks her dress up the back as she stands there — seemingly immersed now in thoughts of her own — so that she can show herself on the street without attracting notice. As he leaves, he pulls on his white leather gloves and says:

  Wait for a few minutes before you go down.

  She neither looks at him nor responds, just stands there in the middle of the room, staring at the floor, staring as if the floor were opening to reveal an abyss he was unable to see.

  14

  When her husband — who despite his serious illness had lived longer than many healthy men — finally died, the old woman accepted her daughter’s invitation, gave away all her chickens, packed up the Holy Scripture, the seven-armed candelabra, and her two sets of plates, and went to live with her. She left behind the semidarkness in which she’d been spending her life, along with a few pieces of furniture, their feet all scraped and scratched — her husband had taken a saw to them whenever they began to rot, shortening them by a centimeter or two — and left behind the dirt floor that was just the same as outside, her granddaughter had scratched letters into it with a stick when she was little. Soon the thatch roof would weigh down the now abandoned house, pressing it into the ground, and covering it until it decomposed.

  Here in her daughter’s apartment, all the rugs, tablecloths, and Chinese porcelain were sold long ago, after the goy ran off with her granddaughter’s dowry, but her daughter has kept the apartment — the floorboards are oak, worn to a shiny smoothness, the door handles are brass, and the light slants in through glass windows. Every morning the old woman walks through all the rooms with a goose feather, wiping away the dust gathering on the few pieces of furniture, then she takes her apron off and sits down on the sofa to read the Torah. Turn it, and again turn it; for the all is therein, and thy all is therein: and swerve not therefrom, for thou canst have no greater excellency than this. The only dowry she and her husband had been able to give her daughter when she married the prosperous merchant’s son was their passion for the study of the Holy Books. For nights on end, the two young people, having put their daughter to bed, would sit up with her and her husband, debating whether the realm of God could truly be found here on Earth if one only knew how to look — whether, in other words, the riddle of life was concealed here in the human realm, or whether it existed only in the beyond. Whether as a matter of principle there were two different worlds or just the one. Only through a life spent in holiness, her husband said, could man succeed in uniting what had been sundered: the world to come and earthly life. But what was a life spent in holiness, his son-in-law asked, adding that all these matters depended on human interpretations of the Holy Scripture — which meant that a man’s striving for the right life could be in error as well. Yes, her daughter had responded, you ought to be looking at everything mankind actually experiences on earth, it’s not just a matter of what Holy Scripture says. The mother herself had believed in an eternal life existing on Earth, after all that’s what she saw before her: She herself was there, and her old man, her daughter with her husband, and the tiny newborn girl that was sleeping soundly, her head thrust back. But after her daughter’s husband had been beaten to death, there were no longer any conversations of this sort, her daughter had left the ghetto and when her own daughter was grown, she’d married her to a goy. Now the goy had gone off, her granddaughter was back to living with her mother as she had done in childhood, and when the mother wasn’t there, the grandmother took care of her, just like before. A human life, then, was long enough to foil an escape plan.

  When evening comes, the old woman sets aside her book, putting on her apron again. If there is meat, she begins her cooking by going down to the courtyard and cleaning her sharp knife by thrusting it into the ground, then pulling it out again, because in this household you can’t count on anyone but her to respect the prescribed separation of dishes and implements. The kid may not be cooked in its mother’s milk, that’s all there is to it.

  15

  On Ellis Island, a tiny bit of land within eyeshot of Manhattan, the new arrivals are inspected to determine their suitability for a life of freedom. Their eyes are checked, their lungs, their throats, their hands, and finally their entire exposed bodies, men and women separately, children separately from their parents.

  When they check your eyes, watch out for the man with the hook!

  Why?

  When he comes to check you, he can make your eye fall out.

  No way.

  It’s true, a man told me about it, he said his eye fell right into his jacket pocket.

  When it’s his turn, he’s brought into the examination room and told to undress completely. He doesn’t understand the instructions in English, but even after an interpreter translates them for him, he doesn’t move. Have the Americans lost their minds? Or do they really think of it as a second birth when you set foot in their country? In any case, his examinations at the Technical University in Vienna — which certainly weren’t easy — had gone differently.

  Come on, they say, meaning: Hurry up.

  There’s no help for it: More naked than he ever stood before his wife, he must now, like it or not, stand here in the light and present himself to an entire group of doctors. If only you could know in advance where the path you choose freely will lead. His coat and clothing are meanwhile being disinfected, when he gets them back after the examination they are crumpled. Shame, then, is the price one pays for this life of freedom, or is this itself the freedom: that shame no longer matters? Then America really must be Paradise.

  16

  Her husband has known for a year and a half what comes after death, and soon she will, too. Her daughter, on the other hand — although she’s been a widow longer — has a good part of her path still before her. Keeping the shop is a struggle. What will become of her granddaughter when she is all alone in the world someday?

  Two ships lie in the harbor. She holds her ears with their sagging lobes close to her husband’s mouth — his whisper is so soft, she can scarcely hear the rest of the story, but she herself has read it often. One of the two ships has just returned from a long voyage, the other is just preparing for a long voyage. She tries to give her husband — for whom speaking is an exertion — something to drink, but he refuses to swallow, and so the water runs down his stubbly chin onto the pillow.

  Jubilation and blessings accompany the ship as it sails off — while the arriving ship goes unremarked. But is it not this ship that deserves jubilation?

  What a shame that she was able to raise only the one daughter with him. Two other children died shortly after birth. When on some evenings she wept over the ones that had died, he would sit down beside her with a nod.

  The newly arrived ship lies safely in the harbor. But nothing is known of the one just setting sail. What will be its fate? Who knows whether it will successfully withstand the storms awaiting it?

  Her daughter recently remarked that perhaps it would make more sense to close the store and rent out part of the apartment instead.

  Or would you rather have some soup? she asks him.

  The pillow is still damp with the water she tried to give him when he stops being able to breathe.

  17

  The shopkeeper can still clearly remember the day the goy first came into the shop and saw her daughter, who had just turned sixteen. Since he displayed serious interest, she summoned him not long afterward to have tea with her in their apartment while the girl was at school. She showed him the living room and the bookcase with Goethe’s Collected Works, spoke of the dowry, and finally even brought him into her daughter’s room, where the dress the girl had worn the day before was still draped over the back of the big armchair, one of the shoes beside it had fallen over, and the housecat lay curled up on the bed, asleep.

  I’m sure you realize we are o
f Jewish descent.

  Yes, I know.

  There’s still time for you to turn back.

  She had sold many a bit of merchandise in her life. She knew when it was too late for a customer to walk away from the deal. The more freedom you gave him to choose, the more likely he was to choose exactly what he was supposed to.

  What are you saying?

  For a while both of them remained standing beside the bed of the absent girl, looking at the cat, which, from time to time, extended its claws in a dream and then pulled them back in again beneath the fur.

  That morning, for the sake of her daughter’s happiness, she had sold her daughter’s happiness. Sometimes the price one pays for something continues to grow after the fact, becoming too expensive long after it has been paid. A transaction like this is a living equilibrium, she’s grasped this in the course of the three years since her son-in-law’s disappearance. Profit and loss must avail themselves of a salesman if they are to work together, but fundamentally their dealings are with one another; at some point they balance each other out again. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out. A man wanting to deliver a letter on Shabbat is not permitted to, according to the Talmud, because that would be work. It would be work to walk from the street into a building, in other words mixing indoors and outdoors. On Shabbat people are to rest, and the three spaces — Outside, Inside, Wilderness — are to be kept separate from each other. But if the messenger walks up to the recipient’s window opening onto the street and lets the letter fall into the recipient’s hand, the messenger would not be leaving his space — the street — and the recipient would be remaining in his own — the building; what’s more, the dropping of the letter would not be a giving, nor would its receipt in the open hand be a taking. How heatedly she and her husband had debated with her parents about how the Talmud pointed the way here to deceit, to the violation of the rules that were supposed to be its jurisdiction. Her father said it was a matter of how the boundaries were defined, that it wasn’t possible to comply with a prohibition unless you knew exactly where it started and ended. In any case, it wasn’t a parable, her husband had said, but rather in the end pure mathematics. Her mother had laughed and opined: thank goodness it was a letter the messenger was dropping and not an egg. She herself had declared the messenger’s hesitation pedantic, making her father smile at her indignation, saying: you don’t understand what’s meant. At the time she didn’t want to understand what was meant, her father was still alive, and as long as that was the case she — even as a grown woman — was the one permitted to be in error. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.

  How happy a person must be, she’s come to think — now that twenty years have passed since her husband’s fatal beating, three since her daughter’s abandonment, one and a half since her father’s death and burial — how happy a person must be who can manage to comport himself as impassively as the messenger in this story, simply letting things happen as they will and nonetheless delivering what has been entrusted to him. When in her home she finds traces of dirt on a knife that her elderly mother has cleaned, she feels only disgust. Her daughter, on the other hand, moves so lethargically about the shop that she often feels an impulse to drag her by the hair back to work. But she observes even her own body with impatience as it struggles to hoist the ten-kilogram sacks of flour onto the cart, and the farmers who sometimes help her and sometimes don’t are called Marek, Krzystof, or often — hearing the name is still difficult for her — Andrei.

  18

  So what began with the hands is now ending with the hands. Should she perhaps give a present to the man who thought she was for sale? Certainly not, she thinks, and, after he’s gone, she takes the money from the chest of drawers, leaves the room, goes downstairs, out of the building (which looks no different from others), and onto the street. She gives the money to the first beggar woman she sees squatting beside the road, and for two days afterward life really does look just the same as before. But on the third day, a Sunday, the officer comes into the shop again as if nothing ever happened, he wants to buy matches, he says, the same as always, in the back room her mother is wrapping merchandise in newsprint, it rustles, then he reaches across the counter to grab his recent lover by the chin, forcing her to look him in the eye and says, not even lowering his voice, he has a friend who would also be interested.

  Rustling newspaper.

  The day, the time, the building that looks like any other.

  Rustling newspaper.

  If she doesn’t want anyone to hear of this, he says, she should keep the appointment.

  Silence.

  Child, can you give me a hand here?

  Yes, Mother.

  Admit it, you enjoyed it too.

  What a disaster — child, where are you? My hand’s about to fall off.

  Coming!

  19

  After the inspection of the immigrating flesh, the mind, too, is checked; man, woman, and child must answer thirty questions, and only persons giving acceptable answers will be allowed to cross over to the mainland. Madness, melancholia, anarchism — all these and others like them will be rejected. Were you ever in prison? Do you practice polygamy? In his now rumpled coat, the Austrian asks himself whether in America, as a result of this strict examination at the border, there are no longer deficiencies of any sort, no longer any cripples or incurable diseases, no madness, no insubordination, perhaps even no death?

  20

  So that’s how it was when you fell off the edge of the palatschinke, a grain of sugar, and disappeared. Already after her second customer she started using the money to buy something for herself, a pair of stockings, after all it was her own body she was offering up for sale. After the third, a scarf — leave the curtains open, I want to look at you — after the fourth — listen, can’t you struggle a little — and the fifth — bring your mouth here — and the sixth — you Jewish sow: four, five, and six together, a new pair of shoes. It hurt, it disgusted her, it was ludicrous, sometimes her skin felt like it was cracking open in delicate spots and burning, but bit by bit taking leave of her senses became her job. Now she knew what the men were hiding from their families, and the ones she ran into on the street wearing their uniforms, or in top hats, or work smocks — never again was she able to see them as anything other than what they all finally were: naked. What she could buy with the money she earned in this way — considering that she would never again be at one with any person in the world, not even with herself — was absurdly little. But the less a dress, a hat, or piece of jewelry stood in any sort of relationship to what she was giving of herself, the easier it became for her to sell herself the next time. Eventually her true worth, which now only she would know, would be impossible to measure. How delightful the gods find these penitent sinners; / lifting prodigal children in arms made of fire / with jubilant cries up to Heaven above. Her mother never asked where all the new things she wore came from, but even without being asked, she told her she had found the shoes for a good price here or there, already used, or that a girlfriend had given her one or the other trinket, that she found the ring in the street. Hadn’t her mother also lied to her about the death of her father throughout her childhood and youth?