The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  One evening it was her turn to read a few pages aloud from her Sisyphus manuscript for the first time. Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — her name for him to this day — voiced the criticism that the book centered around a petit-bourgeois main character. Was it not precisely this petit-bourgeois indecisiveness that had caused the June Uprising to fail? Did she mean to identify with it? What about progress? But Comrade O, the only older woman in this circle, replied in her hoarse voice that it was progress when one paid heed to the truth, as this young author was most certainly doing. Before striding off upon a new path, must one not have acquired a profound understanding of what was wrong with the old one? Sallow, mustached K. replied with a certain acerbity: Of course you can invest a great deal of effort into always trying to understand everything, but we would still be tugging away at the Gordian Knot if it hadn’t occurred to someone to just slice through it. J., a poet — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — said that he particularly liked the leisurely pace of her storytelling, and the many repetitions, because they reflected the stagnation from which the book’s hero suffered. Exactly, H. said: for once a story was being told via the language as well and not just the plot — and if they, the revolutionary authors, really were hoping to create a new Adam, the only clay they had at their disposal was language! His strand of hair fell in his face, but he didn’t notice. Hereupon Comrade T., raising her voice more than was necessary to be heard in this small gathering, declared that when an author resorted to gimmicks to make the reader pay attention to the writing, the text lost all power to point to something beyond itself, and she found that a shame. Not a shame, sallow, mustached K. added, but possibly dangerous, because a person who is enjoying something stays right where he is and stops moving forward. Had she been writing at the brink of an abyss, and just in time found friends who could drag her back from its edge? Had her text, which she had written in isolation, now been transformed into something that — through all these critiques and expressions of support — would bind her to these friends more intimately than a kiss might among young people who were merely eighteen years old? She was hurt by what Comrade T. said, while H.’s words, spoken this time without flipping the hair out of his face, sent happiness coursing dizzily through her body down to her fingertips, but neither Comrade T. nor H. was indifferent to what she thought and wondered. Indifference did not exist within this circle; here, every word mattered. It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

  By joining the Communist Party, she had catapulted herself into the middle of this life. She, too, was now one of those in whose bodies and souls the present had finally found itself after centuries of inertia and was beginning to race forward; it was a present far too large and swift for one person alone, but together they would be able to hold their ground upon the crest of time, even when it was traveling at a gallop. In her account of her life, all of this is represented by a single sentence: In 1920 I joined the Communist Party of Austria; I was vouched for by Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, and Comrade U., who at the time ran the local group Vienna-Margareten.

  She is required to list those who vouched for her, even though U. — who has since been expelled from the Party and condemned to death in absentia for high treason by the Soviet courts — now lives in Paris. In other words, she was vouched for by a leftist sectarian back when she was young. Did they mean to pin her down as the young person she had been, her very youth now a cause for reproach?

  In her first account of her life, the name U. had still been worth dropping. Comrade U., now a respected functionary of the Communist International, and Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, vouched for me when I joined the Communist Party of Austria in 1920.

  In the second account, written when she was applying to be accepted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she had simply said: Comrade G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, and Comrade U. vouched for me.

  By that time, the respected functionary of the Communist International was no longer taking part in Comintern assemblies and held no position of any sort; a rumor was circulating that she had conspired with Kirov’s murderers, but no one knew exactly how.

  Now, in this third account of her life, she explains: At the time I was influenced by U., an enemy of the people, and while I was not an active participant in the debates being held at the time, I did, like her, take an approving stance in our group’s discussions of the meaning of the June Uprising of 1919, thereby unintentionally contributing to the formation of factions which caused damage to the Austrian Communist Party.

  And so the past moved through the movements taking place in the present. But could looking at things in a certain way really change the things themselves?

  When her father died shortly after the end of the war, she was convinced that he had died of the war, even though he’d been nowhere near the front: what had killed him was profound exhaustion after years of struggling to support a family under catastrophic circumstances.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had shouted after her down the stairs when she was moving out of her parents’ apartment the spring after her father’s death that her father obviously hadn’t been able to stomach seeing his older daughter doing everything in her power to go to the dogs.

  Her little sister, to be sure, did not share her mother’s opinion that the older girl was to blame for their father’s death, but she was just as disinclined to agree with her sister that their father had privately capitulated. It was out of protest against the modern age, she told her older sister, an insurrection of his heart against life’s unreasonable demands — in other words, it was basically his strength and radicalism that drove him to his death, and these are both things you inherited, she said.

  The older girl replied that she was unfortunately unable to believe that retreating could count as a protest.

  But it does, the younger one said, it really does! Only through his death, she said, did their father finally succeed in returning to where he’d basically wanted to be ever since 1917: at the side of the late Kaiser, and in his own way he had declared the modern age bankrupt.

  Unfortunately, the modern age doesn’t give a damn about his opinion, the older girl said.

  Death can also be a sort of strike!

  Hmm, the big sister said, I don’t know.

  But then the two girls had already reached the entrance to the building, and the older one didn’t want to go upstairs for fear of running into their mother.

  And so each of them — she herself, her mother, and her sister, too — described her father’s death in quite different terms, even though the fact of his death confronted all of them in equal measure; each of them assigned it a different cause and meaning, as though it could be spoken of only in terms of this or that story, as a sort of dead stub that in some form or other had fused with each of their lives. Each called his death by another name, and probably this naming helped them to at least obscure the fact hidden behind the name, if not forget it outright, to prevent this gaping maw from possibly luring those who remained alive down into the underworld.

  The doctors, though, following the dictates of their profession, recorded with the utmost objectivity nothing more than the scientific explanation for her father’s end in the Registry of Deaths: myocardial insufficiency.

  She couldn’t help thinking of this the first time she read the Manifesto of the Communist Party, when she began to hope that perhaps there was a doctor who could treat the severe illnesses from which mankind as a whole was suffering.

  *

  As she heads to the common kitchen to fetch some hot water from the samovar for her tea, a wind rises up far away on a bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.75195 degrees longitude east, collecting a few grains of sand that get caught amid the blades of grass, while other grains of sand lying beside the tufts are carried off. For weeks now it hasn’t rained there. A beetle, emerging from nowhere, on its way n
owhere, passes the time by creeping up one of the grass blades, where, having reached the top, it turns around again and goes on its way facing down. The blade of grass bent a little beneath the weight of the beetle when it reached the tip — bent almost imperceptibly, since the beetle’s weight was so slight, but still it was something. Now that the six-legged visitor has returned to earth and is once more making its laborious way among the other stalks belonging to this tuft of grass, the stalk is standing erect again, trembling ever so slightly from time to time in the tranquil air we describe as a lull.

  The Jews, she thinks on her way back to her room, knew what they were doing when they decided never to call God by his name. Lenin once wrote that a glass was not only indisputably a cylinder made of glass, it was also a drinking vessel; it was not just a heavy object such as might be used for throwing, but could also serve as a paperweight, or to hold a trapped butterfly. Lenin had read Hegel, and Hegel in turn had said that truth was the whole. She always used to drink tea with her husband late into the night. Now she is sitting here alone. Could it be a mistake to have Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks right there on her shelf? Has Lenin been outlawed yet? Could he have been a classic author when she set out to get her tea, but already a criminal by the time she returns with her cup? He lies across the Neva from her in his coffin made of glass; if he were to turn over, everyone would see.

  This was a weekend in early spring, perhaps around Easter. A lake outside Berlin.

  Utterly disgraceful, someone should put a stop to it, such a ne’er-do-well.

  We wanted to paddle across in our kayak.

  Serves him right.

  I remember that the weather was not on our side that day.

  Turned out to lack all talent.

  It seemed as if winter was moving in on us again.

  We did ask ourselves what detours had brought him here and wondered about the strange writer’s life he was leading. Then we said: Why get involved with filth like that?

  It snowed that last night, there was even sleet. Thin sheets of ice were floating around on the lake, but they broke apart as soon as the prow of our boat touched them.

  A handful of comrades thought he had a gift.

  That evening he read us his latest story in parting.

  Gifted — that can mean all sorts of things.

  The next day we went our separate ways.

  We cannot continue to employ the designation “gifted” if he is being expelled from the organization as a writer of trash.

  Hurriedly, and in fine spirits, our friend strolled off. One week later he left for Moscow.

  Only a single person said he agreed with me, in a whisper: it was him. Dear comrade, I said, if you share this opinion, do stand up and say so aloud. He said that he would, but soon after he disappeared.

  He stopped just the one time, to turn around and wave to us.

  Shocking what he tried to pull.

  I shall always see his face before me.

  Tried to incite me to . . .

  His solid, almost stocky figure.

  To say that the book is garbage . . .

  His closely shorn, stubbly hair.

  Unmasked in his dream of being a writer, just in time.

  Those watchful eyes . . .

  Banished from literature.

  . . . that were now filled with joyful expectation.

  The case involving the existence of a group in Moscow with an absolute idiot at its head — the individual in question — has now been rectified.

  3

  A good friend of her husband’s, the theater director N., had given her and her husband a letter of introduction to Yagoda, the head of the secret service, when they emigrated to the Soviet Union. Her husband didn’t want to use it, why not, she said, he said: cronyism isn’t Socialism, and he flipped the strand of hair out of his face, she said, that isn’t cronyism, it’s just one comrade lending another a helping hand. If we do our work well, we won’t need any help, her husband said, then he tore up the letter and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Meanwhile Yagoda has been relieved of his duties, arrested, and — recently, during the third show trial — indicted, then condemned to death and executed. Perhaps Yagoda’s successors are coming up the stairs this very moment. Did her husband really tear up the letter of introduction, or did she — as she sometimes imagined, dreamed, or perhaps even really remembered during the nights following his arrest — retrieve the scraps of paper from the wastebasket, glue them together, and put the document back in the drawer? Then it would be found now and would provide a justification for her arrest. She absolutely must finish the account of her life before she is arrested. Then this piece of writing can do battle with that letter, assuming someone really has found it, or will find it and wish to use it as evidence against her and her husband: paper against paper.

  *

  With the roller to the side of her typewriter, she scrolls back up the last eight lines, then strikes the “X” key over and over until the paragraph she has just written becomes illegible. Then she goes on writing.

  Active in.

  While fighting.

  Journey to.

  At work on.

  He, he, and she.

  Hitler’s victory in the election most certainly spelled defeat for the German working classes, but at the time could one really describe it as a defeat for the Communist Party of Germany, as her husband had done?

  Sch., the man in the yellow suit jacket — now a delegate to the Communist International — had replied to her husband: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.

  We didn’t lose the workers to social democracy, we lost them to the Fascists, her husband had said, and then asked: Why? Because of this question — which he had ultimately been asking himself, not the delegate to the Communist International — he had been severely chastised by the Party, and demoted to performing lower-level Party work.

  Her husband had spent one year in Berlin without papers collecting membership dues from a group of five Party members.

  Shortly after her husband had left for Germany, she went for a walk on frozen Lake Neusiedl with her friend G. and asked him whether they ought to wish that Marx had been wrong, in other words that when capitalism went to seed, it wasn’t because the petit bourgeois had slid down into the proletariat, but because the proletariat had slid upwards into the petite bourgeoisie and in their new capacity as petit bourgeois had voted for Hitler.

  But what about the working classes?

  Marx was not mistaken, her friend G. said. The working classes had voted for Hitler, but H. was still wrong in his theory that the Communist Party had been defeated.

  But Hitler is leading the workers into the next war to defend the interests of Big Capital, leading them to the slaughter! Haven’t people always said: A vote for Hitler is a vote for war?

  The worse this war turns out to be, G. said, the better for us. For the masses to turn away from him and come running into our arms, we need the crimes he is about to commit to be as huge as possible.

  She looked down to contemplate this sentence, looked at the thin layer of snow lying upon the ice, and thought about how shallow the water in this lake was. The lake was enormous, but when you swam in it during the summer, there was no point where the water reached higher than your neck.

  She didn’t see her husband again until 1934, in Prague, and from there the two of them applied for a visa to the Soviet Union. Shortly after their arrival in Moscow, they heard Dimitrov speak at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. In his speech he said the same thing as her husband two years before: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.

  But what was right could o
nly be right when it was uttered and codified by the Party, that’s what the Party was there for: to be the wisdom of many, not the wisdom of one. An individual might lose his head, but not an entire Party.

  *

  Instead of taking on Hitler jointly, Communists and Social Democrats jointly erred; on the basis of two carefully differentiated, but equally faulty, assessments of the situation, they apparently arrived at two carefully differentiated but equally faulty positions. The Social Democrats described the Communists as radicalinskis, as terrorists and subversives, while the Communists decried the Social Democrats as the murderers of the workers, the slaves of Big Capital and Social Fascists. Once labels of this sort were applied, an alliance was no longer possible. But did all these words matter?