The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  When F. tried to pin the blame on me . . .

  And since then never again. I demand . . .

  Delayed detonation, surely you can . . .

  Why all this beating around the bush?

  Lü., his closest friend . . .

  With me? Never!

  This beating around the bush . . .

  Br., just one . . .

  F. is sowing suspicions . . .

  Cannot work like this . . .

  Not in the hinterlands!

  A functionary who writes on the side, not an author.

  A clear path.

  I ask myself why Br. is not presenting an argument.

  And I ask myself why F. is unleashing his cynical . . .

  Taken into consideration as well.

  Why is F. so intensely pessimistic?

  Have any of you . . . how two-faced?

  Neither a productive nor a constructive . . .

  Br.’s sectarianism to closer scrutiny.

  Rather, on the contrary, quite harmful.

  Just look at the introduction and the sentences altered in the Russian version.

  That isn’t true.

  The introduction is . . .

  That isn’t true!

  Not forward-thinking.

  Empty allegations and underhanded . . .

  The introduction is not the same.

  Do you mean to claim . . .

  I’m not alleging anything, I’d just like . . . it’s not the same as in the Russian version.

  Do you mean to claim that . . .

  Nothing more to say on the subject.

  Declare my resignation.

  I too lay down my post.

  Why don’t we just go ahead and dissolve . . .

  Perhaps we should . . .

  I really have nothing more to say on the subject.

  We might in fact in the presence of . . .

  A reprimand might be . . .

  But not in the presence of . . .

  Why in the world?

  Of a Party representative.

  Leave me out of it.

  During this period I supported myself by working at a stationery shop. In none of these accounts has she written that she often used to nap during her lunch hour on the paper-filled shelves in the back room of this small shop. The cousin who owned the shop had given her permission. The large sheets of paper were fresher than any bedsheet, and just as if she were getting into bed, she always took off her shoes before she filed herself away in one of these compartments. She was constantly tired during those first few months when she was no longer living with her mother and sister, constantly tired because she was spending her nights writing her novel. She had so often wished for her father to return to life, and perhaps she succeeded, perhaps her words did bring him back to life again, assuming they were the right words.

  Several times a quiet young man had purchased red paper from her, then asked her to cut it to leaflet size right there in the shop with the big cutting machine. Silently, he had watched her set up the machine and then turn the big crank to slice through an entire stack of paper at one go. I first made contact with the Communist Party of Austria through Comrade G. At some point she had spotted a wayward handbill, now printed, lying in the gutter, and had recognized its color. She picked up the leaflet and began to read.

  Comrade G. didn’t come into the shop again all summer, but when he appeared in September, he looked at her not with two open eyes but only one and a half. He now resembled the enormous weary lizard that had been put on display in the Schönbrunn Menagerie, one of the few post-war acquisitions.

  While he was standing beside her at the cutting machine, watching her arrange the stack of paper, she asked:

  An accident?

  Someone knocked me down and beat me.

  Really?

  A soldier.

  A soldier?

  Yes.

  Why?

  The putsch.

  She’d read about it. On Hörligasse, a handful of Communists had even been killed, but here in the Alser District, life had gone on as before.

  And your eye?

  It won’t stop watering.

  I’m sorry.

  While she was cranking the wheel that pressed the stack of paper together, it occurred to her that from now on it would never again be possible to tell for sure whether this quiet man perhaps had reason to weep, or whether it was just his eye shedding tears on its own.

  Would you like to come some time?

  While she was slicing through the stack of paper at one go, he wiped his damp cheek with the back of his hand and told her that his Communist cell always met on Wednesdays.

  I see.

  So it was possible to sacrifice your health and possibly even your life for something other than love, you could keep yourself preserved until it was time to throw your life and body into the jaws of time for a good cause.

  But in Hungary it’s all over already, she said, meaning the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

  We’re learning, he said, and the world still has no idea what is happening here, but soon it will be astonished.

  It would also never again be possible to tell for sure whether he was laughing so hard there were tears rolling down his cheeks or just laughing, she thought, and she began to wrap the freshly sliced stack of paper in paper.

  The comrade who is me and Comrade B. are walking down Tverskaya when the comrade who is me sees him. He is walking on the other side of the street. He waves to the comrade who is me. The comrade who is me waves as well, and I ask, Shouldn’t we call him over to our side of the street? For God’s sake, what if someone sees us! If someone sees us, he’ll see he was only waving to the comrade who is me. I beckon, and he comes over, B. turns away. We stroll up and down Strastnoy several times. The conversation is superficial. We discuss lighting, the use of a greenish light. His tone is cordial. We spend approximately a quarter hour together. Then he says goodbye. Should it now be considered an error that the comrade who is me and Comrade B. spoke to him? In any case, we spoke to him.

  One Wednesday, for the first time in her life, she met people who didn’t just grumble about how awful everything was, but instead clearheadedly investigated why this machine known as progress kept undermining the well-being of mankind.

  Otherwise, what was the point of being young in a time like this when progress itself was still young, one of them asked — a man the others called Comrade H. — and with a quick toss of his head, he flipped a strand of hair off his forehead, a gesture she would later come to know so well.

  It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

  Now that mankind had finally, thanks to the inventions of the modern age, acquired the means to raise itself above the limitations imposed by the need for survival, it was now time for them to ensure that mankind was actually taking advantage of these means, cried a pudgy comrade known as A. and he got to his feet to describe the rising up of humanity with a powerful sweep of his arm. And not, he went on, so as to pile up immeasurable wealth for just a few individuals, not so as to conquer new markets and cheaper sites of production through the subjugation of the colonies, to simply redistribute natural resources in the next war. No! We are standing at a beginning, he exclaimed, not somewhere in the middle, but right at the starting point — and again he scooped up a mighty armful of air and shoved this air across to the middle of the table, dispersing the cloud of smoke that had gathered there and sending it swirling in all directions. Then he sat down again to roll himself a fresh cigarette.

  It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

  Comrade U., who spoke quietly so that people would listen to her, said, nearly whispering, that the distribution of the generated revenues would have to be regulated, since the moment it was possible for an individual to enrich himself, that’s what he’d do.

  Precisely, H. said, adding that it was in any case high time to take private ownership to the cleaners, time for mankind to become one with itself, on a truly massi
ve scale! Those who have never been allowed to use their teeth for anything more than biting their tongues should now be fed and allowed to digest and grow — even to take a crap! he shouted, laughing as he bared his own teeth. Flesh to flesh, he cried, flipping back his strand of hair.

  Beautiful Z. smiled, and Comrade U., once more speaking at the edge of audibility, opined that Comrade H. was perhaps going a bit too far, but that in principle he was probably not wrong: the massively widespread alienation of labor could only be a preliminary phase that would eventually lead to a world in which the masses would also benefit from these massive quantities of labor.

  Well, that’s no laughing matter, G. said, and his eye started watering again, making it impossible to tell whether he was laughing so hard there were tears rolling down his cheeks or perhaps crying, or neither of the two; no laughing matter, he said, and besides: If we can tame Nature, which completely surrounds us, surely we can prevent human selfishness from casting us back into an animal state.

  No, youth no longer existed so one could squander one’s youth, or simply wait for the years to pass until one could eventually slip into old age as into rags that others had worn to shreds. It no longer existed for being ground down to make up for the failings of an older generation. Now the point of youth was to be thrown away: for a new world such as the world had never seen before.

  They were all in a good mood, they were singing and drinking coffee.

  When I was there, all they were doing was dancing. I can’t dance, it was a dull two hours for me.

  We showed up and played cards. We didn’t have any particular conversations.

  They were already having coffee. There was no discussion of politics at all.

  V. sometimes turned up at my apartment, which I took to mean that he liked to smoke and drink for free. I saw no political motivation for his behavior.

  And so V. was in my room on several occasions, mainly we talked about bygone days. In early November 1935 I had one last brief encounter with him on the street.

  After the fall of 1931 I never saw him again. We weren’t at all close, neither personally nor politically.

  Once he came and sat with me as I was drinking a glass of beer. He made a very bad impression on me. I never saw him again.

  He can’t hold his drink at all. Usually the first glass is enough for him.

  Sometimes he’s just pretending!

  That’s right, I’ve seen that.

  Did Comrade Br. ever run into Comrade T. at V.’s apartment?

  Not that I recall, but it’s always possible. I’d rather err on the side of assuming he did.

  Why do you consider this a possibility?

  According to what I’ve heard, the two of them knew each other.

  S., L., M., and O. were once there too. A female journalist from Sweden was there, then K. and Sch. Once H. with his wife, and besides them, Comrade R., and Ö. with his wife — I think that’s all of them.

  I was there once, too.

  Oh, right, Fr. and also C.

  Pretty much everyone was tipsy.

  I consider it my duty to emphatically put a stop to these evenings, no matter how festive. When alcohol is being consumed, it is impossible to monitor whether a political remark is being made that can no longer be monitored.

  I was at his apartment once on New Year’s Eve when the entire place was full and there were a large number of comrades in attendance.

  Was I there?

  No.

  Was I there?

  No.

  Me?

  No.

  Once I went to his apartment because he had invited me ten times.

  I was off traveling all the time, so I didn’t have any sort of relationship with V. at all.

  That V. managed to escape being unmasked by us as two-faced until the very end is of course quite disconcerting. The moral I draw from this is that his behavior was not entirely correct.

  One evening after a meeting, she had told H. about her Sisyphus, and he had talked to her about his plays. A few days later the two of them went together to a gathering of so-called revolutionary writers, and suddenly everything that had been separate for so long and separately had made no sense fell into place. After all what did having a world view mean if not learning to see? Was it possible to change the world if you found the right words? Could the world be changed only if you happened to find them?

  The question of whether Comrade O., who had written something about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, was permitted to describe the Freikorps soldier as meticulously as she did his victim was really about whether she was allowed to know in advance what she was writing or whether, on the contrary, it was her duty to be constantly searching. It was also a question about the irreversibility of good and evil, in short, fundamentally, about whether people could be educated, about whether hope had boundaries or not. Whether this or that classic author, while writing, was a participant in his time or whether he stood outside it as an observer was as much a question of life and death as the question of whom the factories belonged to. Was a revolutionary poem in sonnet form a capitulation to the enemy, a retreat in disguise, and was poet J. — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — perhaps trying to imprison the revolution in fourteen lines? Everything would have been different if the social-democratic pigs hadn’t locked up our leadership back in June. Sitting in this gathering, she had felt for the first time in her life that literature itself was something real, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt. Here the words themselves were something you could touch, there was no transition from literature to what was called reality — instead, the sentences themselves were a reality. Van Gogh had cut off his own ear, why shouldn’t it hurt just as much when a figure in a play cut off someone else in the middle of a speech? Was it in order to write that the Communists had come into this world? Did every word matter?

  Unfortunately I was often not present at these gatherings, because I was one of the ones who didn’t get invited. My temperament is fairly volatile at times, and Comrade F. took such offense at my outbursts that he called me a worm. If I were to sink to that level, I might say he was a hopeless drunk. I won’t say that, because I don’t want to sink to his level. Of course I make mistakes. I would like to practice ruthless self-criticism. I am insanely despised by Comrade M. and also by Comrade C., whose garrulousness is quite distressing to me, by the way. Now I’m having to prove that I am clean; M. doesn’t have to prove that he is right. It upsets me when Comrade M. forgets my name when he’s reading out the list of contributors. What an expression of disrespect. Of course, I don’t mean to say I think he’s engaging in this sort of politicking as an agent of fascism. I repeat that I cannot prove anything. I had an argument with Comrade C. I began to commit errors. Suddenly, I was taking offense at personal styles of communication, which I never would have done before. Gossip here, gossip there, and then there was the matter at hand. If I remember correctly, it seemed as if C. was constantly pregnant with miscarriages. I insist that by saying these things I am not revealing anything. I’m fighting to have someone finally tell me in a straightforward manner what is going on. What sorts of allegations do you have against me? I am fighting for my honor. I demand that Comrade M. stand up and explain why I wasn’t invited to contribute. Let Comrade M. stand up and let Comrade C. be called in as well. I know my own errors perfectly well. But I don’t want to hear the excuse that I didn’t turn in my articles on time. I met V. here in Moscow and could smell right away that he stank, like a dog that’s always pushing its way into things and can’t look you in the eye. Besides, he told lies. I immediately reported this to the cadre leadership. Every comrade has flaws, if a person says he has no flaws, this means he hasn’t done any self-criticism. By the way: V. always regarded me with the greatest contempt and condescension, which is something I cannot abide, especially when there’s no call for it. In my view, it ought to be possible to eliminate a fellow like that from the
territory of the Soviet Union. What is going on? If I speak openly now, from comrade to comrade, I might wind up making a remark that will break my neck. Wouldn’t it be better for us to help one another? I came to Moscow, and a tall fellow with curly hair came to see me. An individual too dim-witted to engage in any sort of work but who is easy prey for any counterrevolutionary element. He brought me a few poems. They were so unbelievably bad that I felt sick to my stomach. I don’t ask to be given a medal of honor, all I ask is that if I am going to be politically isolated, a political explanation be given. I’m not the only one who comes into this room and can’t shake the feeling that a couple of the people here are keeping secrets from a third individual, or a fourth, a fifth, or sixth. The cell must demand absolute openness. At the moment there is only a single person not trying to play me for a sucker, and that is me.