The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  The head of any dialectically functional human being contains all thoughts. It’s just a question of which thought I let out. Obviously man is guilty. Yet the thought also arises that man is innocent. I cannot escape this dilemma by constantly harping on the young poet D., who is innocent. It keeps coming down to the same thing: on one hand, innocent D., and on the other a random arrest. The man is innocent, and I see that he is innocent, I try to help prove his innocence, and then he is arrested, and this means that the arrest was random. But since an arrest is never random, it is therefore proven that the man is not innocent. Therefore I am willing to concede the point to you, in a case where you are in the wrong.

  On this bit of steppe, 45.61404 degrees latitude north, 70.751954 degrees longitude east, there are only three months a year without frost. In only a few weeks, the grass will lose this green tint it displays, it will turn brown, and when the wind blows one stalk against the other, it will rustle faintly. Before the first snow falls, tiny ice crystals will cover the blades, and even the little stones on the surface of the steppe will without exception be covered with hoarfrost and freeze together. Once the frost sets in, it will no longer be possible for the wind to blow the stones about.

  The weekend before his arrest, her husband had gone to a meeting and, upon returning, in distinct contrast to his usual habit, had said nothing at all about what had been discussed there. It was nearly dawn when he got home, and he did not laugh away her fears, baring his teeth and flipping back his strand of hair; she had seen him this tight-lipped only once before, that time two years earlier when he had learned that his application for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been approved, but hers had not.

  Now that her husband has been taken away, she knows that when she sits here putting her life to paper, she is playing not just with her own life, but with his as well, not just with her own death, but also with his; or is she playing against death — or does all this pro and contra make no difference at all? She knows that with every word she writes or leaves unwritten she is playing with the lives of her friends, just as her friends in turn, when they are asked about her, are forced to play with hers. G., the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement, had to the bitter end refused to sacrifice his friendship with the Trotskyist A.

  I understand that Comrade H. has been living for approximately three years together with his wife, Comrade H., in Moscow. He met her before this, but three years ago is when they entered into wedlock. Did Comrade H. question other comrades with regard to his wife’s earlier life, or was she his only source of information?

  My wife, Comrade H., as many of you know, has been a member of the Communist Party of Austria since 1920.

  Immediately before her departure to Moscow, she had contact in Prague with the Trotskyite A.

  I can’t respond to that, I was still in Berlin at the time.

  We have not only the right but also the duty to speak about everything we know.

  Only in his later work did A. develop Trotskyist tendencies. I can assure you that Comrade H. did not identify with him and, above all, where his assessment of the Soviet Union was concerned, she vehemently disagreed.

  It seems to me her relationship with A. went beyond mere friendship. In any case, the two of them embraced when they parted on the evening in question, according to the report of Comrade Sch.

  I can’t respond to that.

  Answer this question: Could Trotskyite, semi-Trotskyite, or oppositional leanings be observed in her?

  No, not at that time.

  What does “not at that time” mean? I have to say I don’t have the impression that this testimony is completely truthful. What’s hiding behind it? Why does Comrade H. not speak freely about the case of his wife Comrade H. in this context? Why does he have to be prompted by additional questions to speak of it?

  There was no question of any opposition on her part in the sense in which we use this term in the Party.

  I hope that it is clear to all our comrades how crucial it is for us to spare no effort in critical situations. These criminals who have been torturing our comrades in Germany and sending us their spies must be met with wave after wave of destruction. What if scoundrels or counterrevolutionaries like A. had managed to point a gun at Comrade Stalin? Comrades, we are faced with the question: peace or war?

  Would her motherly friend O. — with whom they shared a dacha summer after summer, often staying on into September — conceal or admit under interrogation that they had all expressed doubts regarding the guilt of the young poet D. after his arrest? Might the wife of the author V. (V. had been recently condemned on charges of engaging in Trotskyist activities and shot), who was now supporting herself as a seamstress and had come to her room for a fitting, really have dug around in her papers when she stepped out to the toilet? Why had R., with whom she and her husband had enjoyed so many excellent conversations about literature early in their Moscow days, been sent off to an outpost in the German Volga Republic exactly one week before her husband’s arrest? Who was responsible for cutting the final sentence of the review she had written in July for the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung so that her critique of the book by mustached K. was transformed into its opposite? And was that good or bad fortune? She’s long since stopped getting together with the friends she used to play cards with sometimes in those first years after they arrived, and the literary working groups were dissolved two years ago. Even the assemblies of German Party members have been discontinued. Her friend C., who used to cry her eyes out in front of her all the time over her inability to have children, recently refused to so much as nod in greeting when she walked past Café Krasni Mak and saw her — the wife of H., who has been arrested — sitting at the window.

  And she herself?

  During the rehearsals for the last play her husband wrote before his arrest, five of the eight actors were arrested over a period of several days, after which rehearsals were canceled until further notice. Comrade Fr., the wife of one of these actors, came up to her yesterday at the café, holding the hand of Sasha, her nine-year-old son, and entreated her to take the two of them in for at least a night. I can’t, she responded. Without another word, the woman turned and went out again, holding her child by the hand. I can’t. Only a few weeks before, her husband had been folding paper airplanes for Sasha during breaks in rehearsal. It seems to her unimaginably long ago now that she learned from the poet Mayakovski: It is not enough to be eighteen years old.

  In their fight against the Fascists’ despotism and contempt for human dignity, they had all risked their lives, wrestling with the death that is fascism, and many of them fell victim to it. But if the young, beautiful Soviet Union was, by contrast, Life itself (as she believes even now), then death could no longer serve as a currency here. This fmeant that if even only a single person who fought against despotism lost his life to despotism here, then his death was in vain — deeply, profoundly, in vain — and nothing that remained here deserved the name Life, even if, seen from the outside, it resembled life.

  But if in the land of the future, death were still the currency with which you paid a debt you didn’t know you had — in other words if it hadn’t been possible even here to abolish the rift between human beings that goes by the names trade, commerce, and deception, if even here there were still the same accursed two sides to humanity, unbridgeable, just as in any transaction in the old world, that would mean the sale had already gone through, and all her comrades — including her and her husband — were long since betrayed and sold and now served only to bring the seller a good price: one consisting of themselves, paid not just once or twice or even three times, but ten, a hundred, perhaps even a thousand times over.

  *

  So have things really come so far now that all she can do is hope that the members of the secret police who seized her husband and took him away in the name of political vigilance are merely traitors, enemies of the people, that they are Hitler’s people — possibly even high-ran
king ones? Not only her husband but in fact every last one of the comrades whose arrests she’s been hearing about is someone she’s known well for years. She’s now almost certain: if Hitler himself proves to be her adversary even here in the capital of the Soviet Union, only then can the antifascists’ hope for a better world possibly survive their torture and death. Or is it perhaps that Stalin himself — disguised as Hitler, who in turn is disguised as Stalin, doubly masked, doubly veiled, and thus genuinely duplicitous — that Stalin himself is acting as his own agent and, out of fear that in a good world the hope for a better one might be lost forever, out of fear of stagnation, is now trying to murder the Communist movement back into hopefulness? Or perhaps that all of them together are dreaming a nightmare from which there will never be an awakening, and in this nightmare Stalin, the good father, creeps into the rooms where his children are sleeping with a knife in his hands.

  Land of ours that blooms and blossoms,

  Listen, darling, listen,

  Was given to us for time eternal.

  Hear me, darling, listen.

  Child, thy land is guarded well,

  Sleep, my angel, slumber.

  Red Army men watch over you.

  Sleep, my darling, slumber.

  5

  When she gets up again to fetch more hot water from the samovar in the common kitchen for her tea, she runs into Indian comrade Al in the hallway. He greets her but today he doesn’t initiate a conversation. No doubt he, too, has heard about her husband’s arrest. Last month, when he was still new in Moscow, she and her husband had gotten into conversation with him while they were cooking, first he had leaned up against the kitchen table, still standing, then at some point hopped up on the table’s edge, his legs dangling, and finally he’d drawn his legs up beneath him, still talking, like a very-much-alive Buddha sitting there on this worn-out tabletop where the Russians had no doubt cut their pelmeni in the age of the Czars, and later Chinese comrades had rolled hard-boiled duck eggs in ashes, and Frenchmen dipped meat in a marinade of garlic and oil. She herself, on the occasion of the Seventh World Congress two years before, had used this table to make apple strudel for her Danish, Polish, and American friends. This congress had been like a powerful amorous coupling, all of them melting into one another, conjoined in their common battle for a humanity finally coming to its senses. After these meetings, she and her husband would often go on deliberating deep into the night, lying in bed, discussing what this new world order should look like, whether it was still an order at all, and what new bonds should replace the old bonds of coercion.

  Then L. shoved his way in and started shouting at me. I told him to shut up, then he pushed me over to the side and started grabbing at the front of my shirt.

  M. says I grabbed hold of him by the shirt. Everyone knows this is untrue. I’ve never grabbed anyone’s shirt, what an idea!

  There were eight comrades standing around. I said to L., Don’t touch me. L. shouted back, Don’t touch me. So then I repeated, Take your paws off me.

  All of a sudden Comrade M. said, Get your stinking paws off me.

  Then L started saying, You’ll be sorry you did that, I’m going to report you to a Party cell.

  Then M. shouted, Maybe they’ll wash your stinking paws in innocence for you!

  Comrade L. has a booming voice, and he really let rip: Just you wait and see what I do with people like you!

  Ridiculous!

  In the room she has shared with her husband for the past three years, in whose emptiness she is now setting foot once more, the yellow wall hanging with the embroidered sun from their first Soviet vacation still hangs on the wall. Every morning she leaves the house before dawn and gets in line in front of Lubyanka 14 — the headquarters of the secret police — to ask about her husband; and after this, she goes to Butyrka Prison. In both places the counter clerks slam down their windows in her face. She has already written to Pieck, to Dimitrov, Ulbricht, and Bredel, but no one is able or willing to give her any information as to whether her husband will return, whether his arrest was a mistake, whether he’s being put on trial, whether they’re planning to send him into exile, or shoot him. Or whether he’s already been shot. Suddenly she remembers how her friend’s lover sat beside her that night, his tears dripping quietly to the floor before his feet. Only now does she know as much about life as he knew then. With the arrest of the person who was closer to her than any other, her own life has become fundamentally inaccessible to her.

  I petition you for acceptance into the Soviet Federation and request that you give me the opportunity to prove myself as a Soviet.

  6

  When the elevator stops on her floor at around four in the morning, just before sunrise, she doesn’t hear it, because she has fallen asleep over the papers on her desk. Her forehead is resting on the word vigilance when the officers come into the room to arrest her. The small dark-blue suitcase that has long stood in readiness beside the door is forgotten. When silence returns to the building, the suitcase is still standing there beside the door. It contains a photograph of a young woman with a large hat, stamped on the back by the owner of a photography studio on Landstrasser Hauptstrasse in Vienna; further, a notebook filled with writing, several letters, an Austrian passport, a dirty red handbill, membership papers for the Communist Party of Austria, a handwritten excerpt concerning “Earthquakes in Styria,” a typescript wrapped in paper, a recipe for challah, and at the very bottom, a small dress for a doll, sloppily and shoddily sewn of pink silk.

  And now at last she knows whose voices she has been hearing all this time, she encounters them once more at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. How agreeable it is to be without a body in cold like this. At night in this place far beyond the end of the world, ores are separated from their slag, everything worthless is incinerated, blazing up in flames higher than St. Stephen’s Cathedral: brilliantly colorful formations, bright as the horizon itself, fountains of light more beautiful than anything she has ever seen before, how glorious, this burning of slag in the middle of nowhere, the most beautiful of all things ever.

  During the day, the living hack away at the ore-rich clay, carting it off in their tipping wagons, and at night they set these fires. And in these fires, all the sentences the dead spoke back when they themselves were still alive are incinerated — sentences spoken in fear, out of conviction, in anger, out of indifference, or love. Why are you here? she asks a person she knows once uttered the words: We see each other quite clearly in the course of these exchanges. I was thirsty, he says, so I drank water that hadn’t been boiled and died of typhus. And you? she asks a person she knows once referred to a mutual colleague as a writer of trash. I froze to death. And you? What if someone sees us? that person had asked. I died of hunger. Some sentence flies up to the sky, possessing no more, no less weight than the person who once spoke it. And you? I went mad, and only death brought me back to my senses, he says, laughing, and here, seven hundred feet above the steppe, his laughter has a furry consistency. Another bit of air says, All I remember is leaning up against something because I was too weak to go on walking, and someone looked into my eyes as he walked past, since I still had eyes. I’m glad, she hears a woman’s voice saying — hears without ears, just as she sees without eyes — I’m glad, she hears the voice saying, that my tears finally abandoned me along with my eyes, because when I was arrested, my own child renounced me, calling me an enemy of the people, and so I tore up my shirt, twisted it into a noose, and hung myself from a latch.

  We see each other quite clearly in the course of these exchanges.

  Perhaps someone should investigate the strength of the draft created when a soul flits about like this. Perhaps someday flowers will bloom even here, in the middle of the wasteland, perhaps even tulips, perhaps someday the presence of innumerable butterflies will be just as real as the absence of butterflies of any sort today, at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. Now, like all the rest of the dead, she has all the time in the world to wai
t for the arrival of different times. For the living, to be sure — who have no other time at their disposal than the one in which they happen to possess a body — the only bit of color they’re able to behold here at night, together with the dead, are these flames.

  7

  Last summer, when she was still alive, she, along with the other women, had to dig several large trenches just outside the camp, so when winter came and the ground froze, they would have somewhere to be buried. All of them — she and her friends, her enemies, and also those who were indifferent to them — they all dug graves to be kept in reserve.

  On one particular day during the summer of ’41, she drove her pickaxe into the earth at a specific point and began to dig her own grave, without knowing, of course, that this was the exact place on all this infinite earth destined to become her dwelling for the eternal winter. The coordinates 45.61404 degrees latitude north and 70.75195 degrees longitude east would be what people would use to describe this otherwise nameless place, where on a summer’s day, at forty degrees Celsius, she would drive her pickaxe into the dry sand, making grass, tiny insects, and dust fly around, for the earth here was completely dry far down into its depths.