The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  The younger daughter doesn’t like it when her sister’s bed stays empty overnight. If her sister were to move out altogether, as she sometimes threatens when she’s fighting with their mother, there’d be just one advantage: they’d stop referring to her, the younger sister, as the little one. The teacher said on Friday that Austria is now only one-tenth its original size. She, on the other hand, has grown during the war years, she’s now five foot seven. So the borders of the country she lives in have nothing at all to do with her own size, but it’s probably best if she doesn’t point this out in class tomorrow.

  The father turns out the light and lies down in the dark bed beside the mother. The blue-tinged shadows around the chin of his older daughter these past few weeks involuntarily remind him of something he doesn’t want to be reminded of, but his thoughts don’t much care whether or not he wishes to think them; when the time is right they make their way, like it or not, through the thicket of all the things he has ever thought or seen.

  And now here they are in front of the opera house, Salome has already been served Jochanaan’s head on a silver platter, the bloody papier-mâché head with wool hair that is now back in its place in the dark properties closet, on the shelf beside the wooden platter someone painted silver. They have agreed to take a taxi to Alserstrasse. They will isolate the precise moment when the taxi stops in front of the hospital and remove it forever from amid all the other time that exists. The taxi drives up Burgring, takes a left onto Volksgartenstrasse, then heads north up the avenue known first as Museumsstrasse, then Auerspergstrasse and finally Landesgerichtsstrasse where Alserstrasse turns off to the left. The trip takes no longer than five and a half minutes, during which not a word is spoken in the back seat of the taxi. In front of the entrance to the hospital the taxi driver stops, just as his passengers requested.

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  Action for the Victims of the Three Nights of Blood in Lemberg: Hermine and Ignaz Klinger, 100 crowns; in remembrance of my beloved mother Terka Korsky, 120 crowns; Frau Kamler, 10 crowns; in total 230 crowns. This is printed on the piece of newspaper the old woman is rolling up to light the fire. She had the right idea. Starting with the goy for her daughter, then the train ticket she gave the young family for their trip to Vienna to see the Corpus Christi procession, and then her own flight. The sticks from the Vienna Woods are covered with lichen that produces foul-smelling fumes when burned. Nights of blood. Andrei. The nursemaid who refused to open the door for her and her husband. The Almighty took her husband’s life instead of the life of their daughter.

  Where could Father be?

  In America, or France.

  Don’t you care?

  Only God can know where he is. Go wash your hands.

  Let her daughter go on thinking that for some reason or other she was incapable of holding onto the girl’s father. She had held onto him, held him to the end, when he was nothing more than a bit of flesh. But should she have said that to her daughter, should she have told her that she too, the mother, had also been in danger of becoming nothing more than a bit of flesh, and the daughter, too, and that under similar circumstances the daughter’s own girls — the big one and the little one — might themselves be only flesh? For someone who didn’t know, did it make a difference whether a person was dead or just very far away? The murderers’ guilt now looked like her own guilt, but was that important? In Lemberg not long ago the Poles celebrated their victory over the Ukranians on the main square, while two blocks away the Jewish quarter was set on fire. They celebrated for three nights. Jewish children who tried to run away were tossed back into the burning buildings by the legionnaires, but on the other side of the barricades there was accordion music. Es vert mir finster in di oygn, everything’s going black before my eyes. In Vienna she doesn’t have much company, but she is alive. Her daughter is alive, and so are the two girls.

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  Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Wahring, fire burns in Ottakring, you’re a nice smoked herring! That the promises were not kept. That no one who asks wants to hear the answer. That her own interior would have always remained an exterior, even with her tongue inside another during a kiss. To dissolve the borders, that’s all she wanted. Why was it not possible for her to love her friend and also her friend’s beloved; what exactly was being forbidden her, and by whom? Why was she not permitted to plunge into love as into a river, and why, if she was being forbidden to swim in these waters, was there no one else swimming there? Why did her mother call her a whore? Why wasn’t she allowed to tell anyone that her grandmother was Jewish? Was there really so little love in the world that it wasn’t enough to glue things together? Why were there differences, why this hierarchy of worth? Or was it only her own deficiencies making everything fall apart? In any case, it was high time for her to subtract herself from the world.

  The Mauser C96 is a weapon that was not regularly used during the First World War but nonetheless enjoyed great popularity. The special feature of the C96 is that the magazine is located not within the weapon’s grip but in front of the trigger. On Sunday, January 26, 1919, at approximately 11:17 p.m., seated in a taxi that has just arrived in front of Alserstrasse 4, the Vienna General Hospital, 48.21497 degrees latitude north, 16.35231 degrees longitude east, Herr Ferdinand G., a medical student in his third semester, acting in accordance with a mutual agreement, places the muzzle of this handy weapon against the temple of a young woman with whom he is only fleetingly acquainted, and at the very moment that a dog barks outside somewhere — in response to this barking, as it were — he pulls the trigger.

  Finally, she doesn’t have to be trapped in this skin any longer. Finally, this random individual has opened the shabby door with a gunshot, and she is released into the open air. Healing and Comfort for the Sick. A dead woman has infinite relatives; she is now infinitely loved and can love anyone she likes, all the while dissolving entirely, with her dead thoughts, in all the others. Did anyone ever see such soft lips on a man before? She now floats upon these lips, utterly interspersed with the one she loves, drifting far away, the two of them are the water and also the dark blue sky above it, and all who were trapped behind the two endless rows of windows have now flung them open and are breathing deeply in and out.

  But then a second shot is fired, and the blood of this happenstance individual splatters on her face, someone’s happenstance blood is making her hair wet, or is it her own blood? Only now does she realize her skull is exploding with pain, but why hasn’t it exploded; isn’t she supposed to be dead? Someone opens the door: the taxi driver holds out an arm to the one shot dead so that she can get out, cold Viennese air floods her skull, swirling past her thoughts, she has been laid bare all the way beneath her skin. For the Lord God’s sake, she hears the driver say, and now she also hears the shabby Viennese weeping of this happenstance individual, who apparently was not capable of skillfully shooting her and himself as they agreed. Before her closed eyes, a treacherously slippery South Africa appears, she places her foot upon it and slips and then falls and falls and falls. If only I had known there’s no floor left once you go through the door, she thinks, and then she stops thinking, just as she imagined she would.

  Her mother sleeps, her father sleeps, her sister is dreaming fitfully but is asleep as well. In a portfolio on the kitchen table, in the dark kitchen, lie her father’s papers, but no one is reading them in the middle of the night, no one is wondering what happened on August 20, 1897, in Wetzelsdorf at the foot of the Buchkogel: The birds in their cages fell down from their perches, people leapt horrified out of bed, all were seized by a general terror. At the same time a violent downpour began. In the bedroom shared by the two girls, hidden behind the wardrobe, is a thick notebook containing the older girl’s diary.

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  Just before four in the morning, the police bang on the door so loudly that the glass set into its upper half rattles; the girl’s mother is the first to wake up. The following three days, her older daughter remains unconscious
, and except for the rising and falling of her rib cage, she lies perfectly immobile in the hospital bed; even without moving, she is wrestling inside with death, they say. Her mother complains to the nurses that her daughter has to lie in a room with twelve beds under these conditions. Her father says: Let it be. Her mother complains about the stink and the cries of the other patients. Her father says: Listen. Her mother asks the doctor, who at one point carelessly referred to her daughter as a suicide: Don’t you ever wash your hands?

  Her father sits in silence beside his older daughter’s deathbed.

  Did you see the dirt under his fingernails?

  No.

  I don’t want someone like that touching my child.

  A man makes a coat out of an old piece of cloth.

  When the coat is in tatters, he makes a vest from the coat.

  When the vest is in tatters, he makes a scarf from the vest.

  When the scarf is in tatters, he makes a cap from the scarf.

  When the cap is in tatters, he makes a button from the cap.

  From the button the man makes a nothing at all.

  And then from the nothing at all he makes this song.

  On Wednesday night, sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m., between the first and second rounds the nurse makes through the twelve-bed room, the young woman finally stops breathing. An official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vienna enters the young woman’s name in the large Registry of Deaths the next morning. When the younger sister stops by on her way home from school that afternoon to pay a visit, she finds an empty bed, and when she asks where her sister is, she is told that her sister has been brought downstairs to the storeroom for the dead.

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  And her murderer is still alive, her mother says, the murderer of my daughter did quite nicely for himself, and now the girl is dead.

  Leave it alone, her father says, and who’s saying he’s even going to pull through?

  Leave it alone, that’s all you have to say when our child lets a person like that shoot her?

  A person like what? asks their younger daughter, who will soon be known only as their daughter.

  I tell you, if you start gallivanting around like your sister, I’ll give you what for.

  They say she hardly knew him, her father says.

  So she hardly knew him — apparently it was enough to have him whack her.

  The younger girl is silent. Her sister once forbade her to poke into her secrets and possibly betray them to her parents or to anyone else whose business they were not, and the prohibition is still alive and well. What good would it do now after the fact if she told her parents that she saw her sister walking through the streets of Vienna with a man on Sunday, a week and a half ago?

  Until Sunday, a week and a half ago, everything was fine, her father says. True enough, says her mother.

  She did, however, sometime on Monday just before dawn . . . her father says . . . and even on Tuesday, says the younger daughter . . . no one in the world . . . her father says, and on Wednesday I . . . and then that night, the younger one says, exactly, on Friday it seemed as if . . . her father says, on Saturday, fresh snowfall, says her father, the younger sister says: And then came Sunday. . . .

  Would you two stop, her mother says now to her husband and daughter, you’re not going to bring her back with talk like that.

  How awful that you never truly know what’s going on, her father says.

  Her mother says: Be grateful.

  What in the good Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening, her father asks and begins to cry.

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  Not until Friday afternoon — in the Pathological Institute they are investigating the path of the bullet and whether the young woman didn’t perhaps shoot herself after all — does her father set off for Margareten. (Her mother says she has her hands full with all the formalities, someone’s got to see to it that life goes on.) The dark entryway stinks, and above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. The girl’s grandmother doesn’t say anything when she learns what has happened, but her entire body begins to tremble. The girl’s father remembers the first time he came into her shop and saw her daughter, whose skin was so white, it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. He remembers that not long afterward, the shopkeeper showed him her daughter’s bed, and a cat lay curled up on it asleep. He just nods to her in silence and turns to go, opening the apartment door himself and then shutting it behind him. A number of the windows that in better days used to look out on the courtyard from the stairwell have been nailed up with boards.

  When the investigations have been completed on Monday, the official enters cerebral hemorrhage under “cause of death” in the Registry of Deaths, and on Tuesday the funeral is held in the Catholic section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery, at Gate III. At the edge of the dark pit, the sacristan says a prayer, father and younger sister cross themselves, and the mother keeps her hands in her coat pockets. Yene velt. The world to come. The grandmother might have come to see that her granddaughter at least made it as far as the Catholic cemetery, but no doubt she prefers to keep them waiting instead. Once again she is leaving her daughter to deal with the most difficult things alone, just as in the old days, when she couldn’t even teach her to walk.

  Perhaps, the younger girl thinks, everything would have gone differently if she had swallowed the glass marbles as her sister commanded, jumped down from Simon’s wall, or allowed her sister to cause her death in some other way. Had her sister now gone in her place? Had she not been thinking of her at all when she died? Her father takes a handful of earth and throws it into the grave. When the snow fell — the snow that is making the heap of freshly dug earth, the dark hillock stand out — his daughter was still alive.

  Over there, on the other side of the high wall, is the Israelite Cemetery; no tree rises into the air there, the sky is unimpeded, someone who doesn’t know better might expect there would be streetcar tracks on the other side, or open fields, but her mother knows it is on purpose no trees were planted, for if one day the roots of the trees were to go zigzagging between the remaining bones of a person buried there, prying them apart, the person would no longer be whole when his name was called for the Last Judgment.

  When they return from the cemetery, their daughter eats her own portion of mutton, then she eats her father’s portion, since he says he can’t get it down, and finally she eats the portion belonging to her dead sister. (Her mother didn’t report that they are now one person fewer, therefore she was given the twelve-and-a-half decagrams of meat due the deceased along with the rest of the family’s rations when she exchanged the still-valid stamps at the Grosser Markt early that morning.) God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us food. It’s only now that her sister lies buried that the younger daughter is so hungry.

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  But then the cousin, who has never before come to visit, rings the bell, just to say that. Well, what? That the girl’s grandmother, the very day she learned of her older granddaughter’s death, fell down the cellar steps and, as he put it, landed badly, and now — well, they probably understand what he meant. So it really does look as if things won’t start looking up again until they are as black as pitch. Her mother rises to her feet and starts stacking the dirty plates. When she set the table, it was in the belief that she had a mother who was still alive. Does it make a difference to someone who doesn’t know the truth whether a person is dead or just very far away? The cousin says it took him several days to track down the family’s address, and the funeral has already taken place as Jewish law demands. Is there still a war on, the daughter thinks, is that why so many are dying all at once? I can’t imagine what she wanted in the cellar, her father says, she must have run out of coal long ago. Ver veyst, the cousin says, who knows. Now, the father thinks, he will have to stay alive until after the first of the month, and also the first of the next month, and the month after that, so
that the dying doesn’t get the upper hand, so that everything will remain balanced and not suddenly begin to tip; the father thinks this but says nothing. Gate IV, Field 3, Row 8, Plot 12, the cousin writes on a scrap of paper which, after he’s left, her mother puts in the kitchen drawer.

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  In the middle of a snowy field — a few gravestones here and there — at the very back of the Israelite section of the cemetery, it would be easy to find the hillock of freshly disturbed dirt. Gate I, Gate II, Gate III and finally Gate IV. According to the beliefs a person held while alive, he or she will come to lie in the ground near either one or the other tram stop. Less than a minute and a half’s ride separates deceased Protestants, Catholics, and Israelites. From her grandmother’s grave, a mourner could easily glance over at the high wall surrounding the Catholic cemetery at the tall, snow-covered trees, and in this silence, even at a distance, she’d be able to hear the sound the snow makes when, having grown too heavy for its own good, it slides from a branch, making the branch spring quickly back into the air.