30
It is cold inside her dead mother’s apartment, cold and dark. Even the water in the bucket is frozen. When she goes to empty it in the courtyard, it falls to the ground as a solid lump of ice. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. With the first installment of his Viennese salary, her husband once took her to the Burgtheater. They sat in the cheapest seats and saw Iphigenia on Tauris. “Farewell,” she remembers. At the time, she imagined she understood better than anyone else in the theater, at that final moment before the curtain closed, what it meant to renounce something. Never did she see her mother reading the Collected Works of Goethe, but now, every one of its volumes is standing there in her grandmother’s bookshelf, tidily arranged next to the miniature grandfather clock, just the same as back home. So that’s why the suitcase her mother brought with her to Vienna was so heavy. Farewell. All her life she’s paid for having snatched her first child back from hell with nothing more than a handful of snow, and only now is it becoming clear that there are things that have no price. No breath of air disturbs the place. / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples with the tide. Was she the one her mother had brought these books to? She also packs the seven-armed candelabra from the sideboard in the suitcase. Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter. Don’t go falling down the stairs. Now it is too late to speak Yiddish with her mother. A number of the windows facing the courtyard in the stairwell have been replaced with wooden panels. She can’t see the angel above the entryway because she doesn’t turn around. She would like to know what exactly her mother had been paying for all her life. At home, in Volume 9, the spine of which is a bit scraped, she finds the play that for the most part she can still recite by heart. She doesn’t make a fire in the stove, she doesn’t wash the dishes, she doesn’t go stand in line, she doesn’t sew, doesn’t darn and doesn’t cry; she sits down quietly in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets, and just as she did back when she was a young girl, she reads Goethe’s play Iphigenia.
31
The father doesn’t die until just over a year later, on December 2, 1920. His wife sells his clothes on the black market, but first she cuts off the gold-colored buttons with the eagle of the monarchy and puts them in a box. The father’s December salary, paid out to the widow as a final installment, is just enough for one midday meal. At least the daughter gets an extra portion of milk with cocoa each day at school, thanks to the Americans.
32
In 1944 in a small forest of birch trees, a notebook filled with handwritten diary entries will fall to the ground when a sentry uses his rifle butt to push a young woman forward, and she tries to protect herself with arms she had previously been using to clutch the notebook to her chest. The book will fall in the mud, and the woman will not be able to return to pick it up again. For a while the book will remain lying there, wind and rain will turn its pages, footsteps will pass over it, until all the secrets written there are the same color as the mud.
INTERMEZZO
But if her grandmother had left for the Vienna Woods just half an hour later to gather firewood; or if the young woman who was so eager to cast her life aside had not, after leaving her grandmother’s locked door to wander through the city, taken a right turn from Babenberger Strasse onto Opernring, where she coincidentally encountered her own death in the form of a shabby young man; or if the fiancée of this shabby young man had not broken off their engagement until the next day; or if the shabby young man’s father hadn’t left his Mauser pistol in the unlocked drawer of his desk; if the young woman hadn’t looked from behind like a girl of easy virtue because her skirt was just too short — why in the world had she cut it half a year before; or, given how cold it was, if she’d crossed Babenberger Strasse in the icy spot despite the danger of slipping (instead of protecting herself from this danger with healthy instincts only to run right into the arms of death moments later with all her limbs intact), indeed, if she had slipped and fallen, perhaps even broken a leg, then she would have been brought to the Vienna General Hospital to have her leg set in plaster, instead of several days later, in the bloom of health, succumbing to a violent death of her own choosing and winding up in a chilly storage room; or if the frigid weather sweeping in from Sweden had given way to the warm Gulf stream two days earlier, then her grandmother wouldn’t have needed to go to the Vienna Woods until that Wednesday, or the puddle wouldn’t have been frozen, and when the young woman came to the end of Babenberger Strasse, she would certainly have made the decision to cross the street at that point and walk past the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts, which would have been closed that Sunday evening — she’d once seen a picture there of a family consisting of a father, grandmother, and child — and at that moment, she would have been thinking not about having herself shot, but about the lemon the father was holding out to the child, that brightly glowing bit of yellow in the dark painting that, during these hours when the museum was closed, was now hanging on a wall unseen. Who decides what thoughts time will be filled with? Only half an hour, or perhaps an entire hour later, becoming conscious that her only option for a bed that night was at her parents’ apartment, she would have turned around, would have walked down the Ring, but this time in the direction of home, since she wouldn’t have had the money for a taxi, and while her homeward journey would still have taken her past the opera house, the young man would have no longer been waiting there on Opernring, he would long since have been lying — for the price of two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, and ten candles — in the arms of some girl of easy virtue, while she herself would have gone home unmolested, would to be sure have been obliged to ring the concierge’s bell, waking her, and then to ask her mother to pay the twenty-heller fee, for which her mother would have reproached her, but these reproaches would only have strengthened her resolve to start earning her own money as soon as possible so as to finally be able to move out of her parents’ apartment and rent a room of her own. But the decisive moment was probably not the one that had just passed, it was everything that had come before. There was an entire world of reasons why her life had now reached its end, just as there was an entire world of reasons why she could and should remain alive.
*
The decision to move out of her parents’ apartment is one she would have made that evening in any case, whether it was sitting with a broken leg in the waiting room of the General Hospital, in the Vienna Woods with her grandmother’s rucksack strapped to her back, or on her grandmother’s sofa, shivering beneath a thin blanket after her grandmother offered to let her spend the night. If you can’t go up, you’ll have to go down — but if you can’t go across, you still have to go across. Most probably, though, she’d have been lying at home in her own bed, and in the other bed would be her sleeping sister: this little sister who was already five foot seven; and if she’d been certain that her sister’s slumber, though restless, was nonetheless sound, she would have gotten up again to retrieve her diary from its hiding place behind the wardrobe and with a small pencil — writing in the dark, blind — she would have written an entry about everything that had happened. Just as at the age of fourteen, in the midst of hunger, she had resolved not to let hunger blackmail her any longer, she would now have resolved, in the midst of her unhappy love, not to let herself be blackmailed by unhappy love. If she had managed to avoid the one place in Vienna and the one moment of the evening that could have translated her desire to cast her life away into a death, she would now have realized, while writing in her diary, that in fact writing was the only thing she wanted to do to make money, and she would have started to consider how and what she could write, and so for the first time in this entire week of misery she would have been thinking about something other than the man she loved and her own shame and unhappiness.
The next morning she would have no longer have been able to decipher what she’d written, since in the darkness of the night before, she’d have inscribed half and whole letters one on top of
the other in a single line. The shabby young man would have remained hale and unscathed, and a few years later, at twenty-five, he would already have developed a bald spot. Her grandmother would not have fallen down the cellar stairs, and more than a decade later she would have hidden her granddaughter for several days when she was threatened with arrest; but under these circumstances, her father would not have postponed his own death and would have died on March 2 of this same year, just five weeks after this night, of heart failure. Standing beside his grave, his older daughter would involuntarily have thought for a second time of the lemon the Gothic father held out to his child — whether it was a boy or girl was uncertain — in the midst of all that darkness. She would have taken possession of her father’s excerpts from Notes on Earthquakes in Styria and, weeping as she wrote, used them for her very first article: “May the earth gape open once more and swallow up the war profiteers!” For although her father died in his bed — of myocardial insufficiency, the doctors said — she was convinced that in the end he had died of the war.
Her mother would have been paid the March installment of her husband’s salary, which at that moment was just enough for the current week’s groceries.
BOOK III
1
A woman sits at a desk writing an account of her life. The desk is in Moscow. This is the third time in her life she’s been asked to write an account of it, and it’s entirely possible that this written account will put an end to her life, possible that this piece of writing will be transformed, if you will, into a weapon to be used against her. It’s also possible that this piece of writing will be kept in reserve and that from the moment she turns it in she’ll be obliged to live up to it, or to prove herself worthy of it, or else confirm the darkest suspicions that might arise from it. In the last case, the words she’s writing here would also — after a brief or protracted delay — be something like a misdiagnosed illness that eventually, inevitably, would kill her. Didn’t her husband always say that in the theater there’s never a gun hanging on the wall that isn’t going to be fired off at some point? She remembers Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and how she wept when the shot was finally fired. But perhaps she’ll succeed — after all that’s why she’s sitting here, her one hope, and the reason she is taking such pains to find just the right words — perhaps she’ll succeed in writing herself a way out, in extending her life by means of a few letters more or less, or at least making her life less onerous; there’s nothing left for her to hope for now than to succeed in using her writing to write her way back into life. But what are the right words? Would a truth take her farther than a lie? And which of the many possible truths or lies should she use? When she doesn’t even know who will be reading what she writes?
There’s only one thing she doesn’t assume: that this piece of writing will be nothing more than a sheet of paper with ink on it, slipped into a folder and forgotten. In a country in which every child and every cleaning woman and every soldier can recite poems by Lermontov and Pushkin from memory, that would not be likely.
2
I was born in 1902 in Brody to a civil servant and his wife, in other words I had a bourgeois background. And what exactly made this background bourgeois? Perhaps the fact that when her grandmother fled from Galicia to Vienna more than twenty years ago, she dragged along an edition of Goethe’s Collected Works? Her father’s salary wasn’t enough for her parents to employ a maid even during their very first years in Vienna. She never had piano lessons, nor did her sister play the violin. She knows of course that her background is considered bourgeois because her father, instead of being a factory worker, was an official at the Meteorological Institution. I earn my money with my buttocks, he liked to say, meaning all the hours he spent in a chair poring over data. Even so they’d nearly starved. Despite this fact, both her first account of her life, which she’d written when she applied for a visa to enter the Soviet Union, and the second one, composed apropos of her unsuccessful bid to be admitted into the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, were marred by this bourgeois background of hers, as no doubt this third one would be as well. Her background stuck to her, there was no helping it, and she was stuck to it as well. She’d been able to remake her thinking from scratch, but not her family history.
Never would she possess the same level of freedom as her husband, who was free for all time, doubly free — and in principle free even now that he was in prison, since he’d completed an apprenticeship as a metalworker before beginning to write, he’d been a laborer, a doubly free laborer; in other words: possessing nothing that could tie him down, he could go anywhere he wanted. From a societal perspective, he was immune to blackmail. The working class has nothing to lose but their chains. But did she herself really have more to lose? Had she perhaps inherited not only the myopia but also the fearfulness of her father, who all his life was obliged to worry that some trifling offense might prevent him from rising on schedule from one pay grade to the next and in the worst-case scenario — a revolution, say — even cause him to lose his position? Were hands by nature more honest than heads? As a young girl, how she would have loved to work with her hands, creating something that hadn’t previously existed — but ever since that day at school when a crafts teacher had held up the doll’s dress she had made, presenting it for the entire class to see as an example of what she called shoddy and sloppy work, since this day at school she had lost her faith in the work of her hands. If there were such a thing as being born to grace, there was probably also a gracelessness you could be born to. Sloppy and shoddy. She had later made the workers’ struggle her own all the more fervently.
In 1909 my family relocated to Vienna. Prolonged adversity spurred me to become politically active for the first time at age fourteen, spearheading an anti-war demonstration in 1916. Since I had not yet benefited from Marxist schooling, it was merely an outpouring of pacifist sentiment that prompted my resistance.
In her first account of her life, written as part of her visa application, she had gone on at this point, writing: . . . but my resistance arose out of a passionate hatred of the war. Was the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917 not also identical with the decision on the part of the Bolsheviks, alone among all the peoples of the world, to autonomously cast off the burden of this inhuman war, despite the enormous sacrifices this required?
If the world revolution had succeeded in those days, the uniting of the proletarians of all countries would have been not only the start of a new world but also of an eternal peace. What cause could people possibly have to slaughter one another? What cause could the Austrians have to make the Italians bleed, what cause the Germans to slit open the French? None at all.
To be sure, there had been peace in 1918, but the European borders were not dissolved, they were only pushed this way and that. On the other hand, everything outside the Soviet Union, the border between those who worked and those who lived off others’ labor, remained right where it was. Ever since the start of this miserable peace nearly twenty years ago, the young Soviet power stood all on its own against a united front of European reactionaries — in a new war, the Soviets would be not one enemy among others, but the sole enemy. And this war would surely not be long in coming. From where she sat today, she cast a critical glance at the young peace-loving girl she once had been. She had understood even then that there was a difference between the blood that flowed during a revolution and the blood that was spilled in a war. She also knew that all wars are not created equal.
After the end of the war and my father’s death, still working in complete political isolation, I began to write antimilitaristic articles that I submitted to the Workers’ Journal — unsuccessfully at the time — while also writing my first novel, Sisyphus.
She wasn’t just politically isolated back then — she was completely alone. And lonely. But she doesn’t write that. Still, something that at the time was nearly her undoing proved to be a blessing in disguise: recently she heard that the man she’d once almost killed herself over was a l
ongstanding member of a Trotskyist group. He’d been known as W. back when she first met him, then she encountered him again as Comrade E. at an assembly, and later — like so many of them, herself included — he had meandered through various identities, becoming Za., whose articles she sometimes read, later going by P. when he was in hiding, as a comrade once told her, but she hadn’t known what name he’d been using recently for his work in Leningrad. Over the past few months she’d occasionally heard mention of the Trotskyist, Zinovievist, and Bukharinist Lü., but it never occurred to her to suspect this was the same man she’d once been so in love with. Only a few weeks ago, when she happened to see a photograph of a defendant named Lü. in the newspaper, she had recognized him.
I demand . . .
During the Spanish Civil War . . .
An unacceptable . . .
Where I was, not at a congress.
I must object most vigorously.
In the trenches . . .
Could also have taken a different path.
The End of Days Page 11