The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  19

  Time to go. Let’s go.

  Every Sunday she went to the Vienna Woods to get firewood. She would take the tram to the end of the line at Rodaun or Hacking, along with a great many others. Like her, they would carry baskets, rucksacks, or satchels on their backs; from there, she’d enter the woods to collect kindling, perhaps breaking off a branch here and there that was not too heavy.

  My cousin helping me out with coal — wouldn’t that be nice. Hat, coat, glove. Good.

  Returning home in the evening, she sometimes had to let a tram or two pass before managing to squeeze into one of the overcrowded cars, so she often remained standing at the tram stop in the dark for over an hour, freezing, while in the illuminated tram people stood or sat, with the wood they had gathered sprouting awkwardly from their rucksacks and panniers.

  And the basket. And the rucksack.

  From the outside, a tram like that resembled an aquarium, and when the car lurched into motion or braked, all the people behind the fogged-up glass swayed back and forth with their bundles of twigs like one huge organism.

  Oh, it’s all getting tangled up. What a disaster. The boots. Now look, it’s falling out the top. Oh, this shvakhkeyt, this weakness. Well.

  Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers, ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.

  All right, that’s good now. Oh, I almost forgot the key. That would have been something.

  20

  You just have to start walking, then a street name scrawled on a scrap of paper with a building and apartment number will turn into a route to follow: with buildings on either side, with weather (cold and damp), with the sound of footsteps sinking into slush and snow, and with other people on this or that errand, willing or unwilling; a route that leads you past dimly lit taverns and shops whose windows are almost empty or sealed up with shutters. The low, stooped building where the old woman lives has a stone angel keeping watch over the entryway. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. After fleeing the provinces and spending her first few days in Vienna in her daughter’s apartment, the old woman told her older granddaughter about the two angels that prophesied the fall of Sodom to Lot and conducted him to safety. These angels were so beautiful that the citizens of Sodom wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from their limbs and devour them. Sheyn vi di zibn veltn. As beautiful as the seven worlds. Now, as the older granddaughter presses down on the door handle, trying to remember how her grandmother said this sentence to her, it suddenly seems unfamiliar, and she wonders whether she just dreamed it. . . . As beautiful. The building’s dark entryway stinks, above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. In the stairwell, it seems that some of the windows facing the courtyard are broken and have been replaced with wooden panels. The beautiful man; oh, his lips, the wings of his nose, his eyelashes. Has beauty never had any other purpose than to cause those who wish to possess it to rise up against each other, and, in the end, between them, tear the beautiful object to shreds, or, failing that, destroy each other instead? She rings the bell and also knocks on the door, but no one answers. As a girl, she had marched to the Rathaus, demanding that the war come to an end. Now she is in the middle of her own war, one in which — even at so great a distance from bombs, grenades and poison gas — she is still finding it infinitely difficult to survive each day from beginning to end, and then all through the night.

  21

  What in the Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening?

  Of the fourteen persons who fell victim to lightning in 1898, two were killed by lighting bolts striking inside buildings, two under trees, one under a wayside shrine where he’d taken cover, and seven out in the open, including two reapers working in the fields. In two cases, I was unable to determine the precise circumstances. Outside the town of Laufen an der Sann, lightning struck a woman who was carrying a hoe on her back. The woman was paralyzed, and a mark was left behind on her back in the shape of the hoe.

  After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her mother threaded new shoelaces in her younger daughter’s shoes. After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her father spread out his files on the kitchen table and started reading. On Sunday evening, after her older sister had gone out, the younger girl did her mathematics homework, her mother got her sewing kit from the cold parlor and began to darn socks, and her father experimented with whether he could read better with his glasses on or without, he pushed the glasses down and looked over the top of them, then pushed them back up and finally said: This typeface really isn’t easy to read. The younger girl then put more wood on the fire, and the wood hissed because it was so damp. Her mother said: Go wash your hands, otherwise you’ll make your notebook dirty. The younger girl washed her hands in the bucket. The mother bit off the thread. The father turned the page of the file. The younger girl wiped her hands on her dress, sitting back down at the table. Her mother looked for a different color of thread in her sewing basket. Her father laid his glasses to one side and went on reading. The young girl dipped her pen into the inkwell and solved her arithmetic problem. Her mother coughed. Her father turned over another page of the file.

  22

  Margaretenstrasse, Heumühlgasse (down one or the other of those streets), then Rechte Wienzeile, across the Naschmarkt, Linke Wienzeile, somewhere or other, Girardigasse, Gumpendorfer Strasse, Stiegengasse, Windmühlgasse; everywhere, the snow is piled up shoulder-height on either side — Theobaldgasse, Rahlgasse — just as high on the right as on the left — Mariahilfer Strasse, Babenberger Strasse, Opernring — and it’s slippery, as smooth as glass. Does she really want to turn onto Opernring? Or would it be better to take a left onto Burgring? Today, it is exactly one week since she waited on Alserstrasse with the man she loves for the 7031. How long does a week last? Crossing the street to the left, toward the Museum of Fine Arts, would mean picking her way between two gigantic heaps of snow with a frozen puddle in between, so she turns to the right. In the opera house on the other side of the street, music and listening to music are locked up together. Why is she walking around outside? To exhaust herself to the point where she can neither see nor hear? Is she indulging in a stroll? Strolling to her demise? Two pounds of butter, someone whispers at her cold back. How much? She keeps going. Two pounds of butter and fifty decagrams of veal. The man’s whisperings insinuate themselves beneath the broad brim of her hat, slipping into her ear from behind. Two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles. Although the entire world lies open before her, which she thought might put an end to her hearing, she can hear what the man is offering in exchange for her person. Is she interested? Or would she rather return home, where what is called her life is taking place: her father reading his files, her little sister doing her homework, her mother calling her, her older daughter, a whore. Salome is being performed tonight. How long has it been since her parents went out together? Does she know a good reason not to accept? Or is she not so sure? When she turns around, she sees a young man, perhaps only slightly older than she is; he has no hat on, even though it’s the middle of winter, so she sees his thin hair, by the time he’s twenty-five he’ll have a bald spot, she thinks, and she’s surprised to see beads of sweat on his forehead in the middle of winter.

  Two pounds of butter, he repeats, looking at her, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles.

  He says her price right to her face.

  And why not twe
lve candles, she says and starts to laugh.

  The time when it went without saying that the freshly fallen snow would promptly be carted from the streets of the Viennese city center to the Danube and dumped into the channel that had been knocked clear of ice is long past. Thanks to the war, something is missing: men, the freshly fallen men. The most that happens now is that the snow gets pushed aside, shoveled into heaps by a couple of war invalids, women and children; on warmer days these heaps of snow begin to melt until they are ringed with puddles that freeze over during the night in precisely those spots where the path was to remain clear. The layer of ice covering the sidewalks of Vienna, in heavily traveled spots above all, has grown so hard and thick in the course of the winter that no one even tries to chop it up any longer. Pedestrians wishing to cross from Babenberger Strasse to the Museum of Fine Arts or to walk down Burgring on the left away from the city center must take particular care not to fall. Captain Eduard Gabler, for instance, suffered a compound fracture of his forearm just yesterday when he fell on the ice walking at Freudenauer Winterhafen; Private Franz Adler also broke his forearm, on Marxergasse; factory owner Mortiz Gerthofer suffered an exposed fracture of his right shin on Nobilegasse; and nurse Frieda Bertin fell on Mariahilfer Strasse, not at all far from here, suffering a severe contusion of the left hip. Where one crosses Babenberger Strasse toward the Art History Museum, away from the city center, the ice between two heaps of snow has long since been polished smooth by the heavy pedestrian traffic, even though yesterday’s snowfall briefly covered it up. But because of the countless shoes, and also several bare feet, that have passed over this spot since then, the snow has become inseparably conjoined with the ice over the course of the morning, itself becoming ice. This ice appears black — though of course there is no deep body of water beneath its surface — and it displays the approximate contours of the African continent on a smaller scale. Seamstress Cilli Bujanow nearly slipped on this bit of ice around 2:30 in the afternoon, but was propped up by Lieutenant Colonel of the Chamber of Finances Alfred Kern, who happened to be walking behind her, sparing her the fall. Seven-year-old Leopoldine Thaler practiced skating on the puddle as she passed, eleven-year-old pupil David Robitschek attempted to shatter the ice by jumping up and down on it (unsuccessful), a stray dog of unknown provenance urinated on the right-hand heap of snow, causing a portion of the ice, corresponding roughly to the region of former German East Africa, to melt and also dyeing the area yellow approximately as far down as the Niger. By six, this bit too has frozen again, although the surface of the ice in this area is slightly roughened. The young lady who at approximately 6:00 p.m. at first considers crossing Babenberger Strasse here and then walking to the left toward of the Museum of Fine Arts would be compelled — before reaching the rougher area north of the Equator that promises salvation in the form of a firm foothold — to step on the treacherously slippery territory of South Africa, but at the last minute, she loses her nerve, and instead heads off to the right in the direction of Opernring.

  So you aren’t one after all, the pale lad asks long after she has stopped laughing. No, she says. She’s surprised at how hard the young man is sweating even though he doesn’t have his coat buttoned. She wouldn’t mind being cheap if it meant she wouldn’t be on her own forever with all the time in the world. How many people can simultaneously be in possession of all the time in the world? Would she like to . . . ? She decides to join him for a glass of wine. That is . . . She has no idea how grateful . . . In the café he seizes her hands and holds them to his face, using them to wipe the tears from his eyes and the mucus from his nose, perhaps she’ll excuse him, he’s never been with one before, but just now he wanted, perhaps she will understand, you see his fiancée just, that is, no longer, and sent him packing, although for two years now, an engagement after all, or doesn’t that mean . . .

  How long does a life last, anyhow?

  Seventy or eighty years?

  Doesn’t she already know more than she can bear?

  . . . his fiancée would see all right if he carried on just like she did, preferably with lots of girls . . . really, though, someone ought to kill her.

  Oh dear, the young woman thinks, her hands already dripping with tears. Does he know her, this man? Does he know what she has wished for? Does he know what a burden she is finding life, which from inside always looked to her like a sphere with perfectly smooth, black walls, and you keep running and running and there isn’t even a shabby little door to let you out?

  He’d have shot her if only she’d come out of her building, he says. But she knew what he was capable of, so she stayed where she was, and what was he supposed to do now . . . he never thought . . . after all he was . . . and he’d always treated her . . . and never once . . . He’d have shot her? she asked. How?

  Right here, he says, slipping his fingers into the right-hand pocket of his coat, it’s my father’s Mauser.

  Now all at once she understands why she is sitting here with this man, on whose face what goes by the name of heartache — in her own case, too — makes so pitiful an impression. Now the inside of the sphere that always seemed infinite to her suddenly contains this shabby little door. You know what, she says, pulling her hands away from the sobbing man, it would be the easiest thing in the world to insult your fiancée in a way she will remember all her life. Really? he says, looking up, and meanwhile she is drying off her hands on her skirt under the table.

  Her mother says: I’m going to bed now, she gathers up her sewing things, puts them back in their basket, brings the basket back out to the cold parlor. Her father calls: I’m coming, too. Her sister has already been lying in bed for half an hour, but despite the darkness she’s still awake. Her father picks up the carbide lamp by its handle.

  Do you really think? he says.

  Of course.

  And if something goes wrong?

  They’ll certainly know what to do on Alserstrasse if anything goes wrong.

  Healing and Comfort for the Sick.

  And if everything goes right, she thinks, we’ll soon enough be continuing our journey on the quietest car of the New Viennese Tramway Society.

  All right, I’m going to call her and tell her.

  But just one sentence.

  Just one sentence.

  He settles up, she says goodbye to the waiter, that’s how easy it is to pass from one world to the next. The telephone booth is just across the street, and when the youth puts his weight on the floor of the booth, the light goes on — a soul would be telephoning in the dark, she thinks. Just one sentence. She waits outside in the snow, watching the lovesick young man speaking in the light: he speaks, listens, responds again, listens, contradicts. She’d better drag him back out of this cell, otherwise he might slide back over to the other side again; the glass panes of the booth are already fogging up with his hot breath when she pulls open the door.

  In the receiver a female voice is exclaiming: For the love of God, speak with my daughter tomorrow!

  Tomorrow will be too late!

  But I’m telling you she isn’t here!

  Please tell her that even in death I was —

  You still have your whole life ahead of you!

  Now he falls silent. He says nothing at all. His hair is thin, at twenty-five, he might already have a bald spot. Then she calmly takes the receiver from his hand, and in his place she says into it:

  Don’t you understand? He has to die.

  We have to go stand in line at five o’clock. . . . You don’t always have to be looking men in the face like that. . . . I have to do all the work myself. . . . Your grandmother has to take responsibility for herself.

  And the young man?

  He’s got to die now, that’s all there is to it, and she has to ride in his sled with him, all the way to hell.

  She says the one thing and only thinks the rest, then she hangs up the telephone.

  The mother hears the father shutting the kitchen door so that the warmth from the stove
will keep until morning, then he goes out to the stairs, the toilet is half a flight down. It flushes with water from the tap in the hall. The mother turns over on her other side. The older girl has only just gotten back on her feet again, and already it’s anyone’s guess what she’s up to. She sacrificed herself for this daughter, who almost died as a baby, and this is the thanks she gets.