The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  Spare the child all of that.

  Your father fell at the Battle of Kharkov.

  Or something like that.

  Wolves, foxes, and ghosts.

  Not one word more.

  BOOK IV

  1

  We must bid farewell to Comrade H., who soon would have completed her sixth decade of life.

  He points to one of the wreaths.

  All her life she devoted her abilities to serving the working classes and her Party. In her we are losing an exemplary champion of proletarian-revolutionary art.

  He writes the text that is to be printed on the ribbon: For my mother.

  In black script or gold?

  Black.

  Born in Brody, the daughter of an Austrian civil servant, she grew up in Vienna and in 1920 became a member of the Communist Party. In 1933 she emigrated to Moscow by way of Prague. There she contributed to the understanding between peoples as a translator of Soviet poetry for the journal Internationale Literatur and immediately after Hitler’s treacherous attack on the Soviet Union began her active antifascist work for the underground radio station operated by Radio Moscow.

  Sure, he says, why not have rose petals to toss into the grave?

  After returning from exile, she moved to Berlin and here, in her tireless efforts on behalf of world peace and Socialism, she began to publish her first autonomous literary works.

  How many?

  How many are there usually?

  One basket, two baskets, five baskets — depends how many mourners you’re expecting.

  Let’s make it five, he says.

  Thereafter she made significant contributions to the development of art and culture in the GDR with her important novels, works for theater, stories, reportage and radio plays. This great artist was nearly unmatched in her ability to bring the attention of our People to the world’s most righteous strivings.

  2

  As she falls, she knows that she is falling, she knows that the railing is already too far away to reach with her left hand (much less the right), and suddenly she remembers the railing on the stairs in Vienna and how huge the eagle at the end of the banister had looked to her as a girl, how the stairwell always smelled of whitewash and dust, all of this occurs to her as she falls, as if memory, too, were a form of falling. Now she really is a “fallen woman” for the first time in her life, and if it weren’t less a laughing matter than a dying one, she’d have to laugh. Did her mother think of her in her final moments? Is this her final moment? Back when she heard Khrushchev’s secret speech broadcast on a West Berlin radio station, she’d suffered a heart attack and survived, so how can she be on the point of death now just because she’s been knocked literally off her feet between one step and the next? The first chapter a tragedy, the second always a farce — had she only read Marx so she’d understand now that this really was the end for her? How do you recognize your final moment? Is it that more thoughts can be thought in it than any other? What is this abyss gaping open before her and swallowing up all the thoughts a person can think, and where was it before? If she tumbles out of life, what will happen to her son?

  3

  On the morning his mother is incinerated, her son spends two hours at home sitting at the desk in the desk chair where his mother always sat when she was working, and he waits for the time to pass.

  Her work was honored with many prestigious prizes and awards by our Republic, including the Comrade-G. Medal, the Great Patriotic Order of Merit, and the Goethe Prize.

  The desk chair is covered with blue leatherette and can spin on its axis. Sometimes as a child he would sit on it, spinning in circles until he was dizzy. He doesn’t think his mother ever used this chair to spin on.

  Her work in defense of the beautiful and true is her legacy to us all and will inspire us in our struggle to achieve the reunification of our homeland and world peace.

  4

  Dear Mother, she had written near the end of the war, things are very good with me. I have a son now, he is three years old and is named Sasha. How long had it been since her mother had sent the little box with the gold buttons from her father’s civil-service uniform to her in Moscow? And she hadn’t even thanked her. She’d thought that her mother had just wanted to get rid of her last remaining souvenir of her husband, that her mother didn’t know what it truly meant to love. Then, with the start of the war and her relocation to Ufa, her contact with Vienna had broken off. Only near the end of the war, in Moscow — when she learned through her work at the radio station what had been happening to the Jews in countries defeated by Germany — did she ask herself when her mother’s package had arrived: in 1939 perhaps, or 1940? Dear Mother, things are very good with me. I have a son now, he is three years old and is named Sasha. The letter had come back to her stamped Evacuated to the East. And now, sealed and multiply stamped as it had been when it was returned to her, it lay at the very bottom of her linen cabinet, underneath the sheets. Her son would find this letter sooner or later. Now, she has no secrets left. She cannot protect her son any longer, nor herself.

  5

  The housekeeper found her at the foot of the stairs when she arrived that morning. At around 10:30 — but perhaps it had happened earlier — her son at school had just finished his essay on Goethe’s poem “Willkommen und Abschied.” The moment at which his entire life changed did not look any different from all the other moments before or after it. Probably, the housekeeper says, his mother had just changed her clothes upstairs and wanted to go down to her study. Those stairs are treacherous, the housekeeper says. As a small child, he had only slid down the banister when his mother wasn’t looking. He could fall, could break a leg or his neck. Do me a favor, don’t go falling down the stairs, his mother always said. Certainly she herself never went sliding down the banister, she always just walked up, walked down, step after step — but the stairs are treacherous, as the housekeeper says.

  6

  What actually happened to your relatives, her son had asked her when he was already a bit older. There were air raids on Vienna, she said. It would have been easier to answer questions about so many other things, but he’d never asked about them. She would have liked to tell him what sort of apples she used for her strudel. Now she’d taken a tumble. Now she was falling down a flight of stairs, and these stairs no longer led to the ground floor of her house, no longer to her study, no longer to the front door, no longer to the kitchen; for her, since she believed in nothing supernatural, these stairs led only from the upper floor of her house down to nothingness. Never would she have thought that the border between what is and what isn’t could gape open so abruptly.

  Really? her little sister asks.

  And that it has to happen right in the middle of life, on a stupid flight of stairs.

  You were just plowing on ahead like always.

  Don’t be silly. I weigh too much, that’s all.

  It shows that things are good with you.

  Never again permit myself to be blackmailed by hunger.

  You won that one.

  And now I’m going to die because I’m such a blimp.

  Nonsense.

  I go to a resort to take it off every year.

  So as not to let yourself be blackmailed by food.

  Once I lost twenty-six pounds.

  That’s quite a lot.

  And now?

  7

  The housekeeper says she made sure that the men who came to get his mother were gentle with her. One of her legs had gotten caught in the railing, and she was lying head-down, but that’s all the detail she was willing to give. When he left for school, he’d still had a mother. When he left for school, his mother, still in her bathrobe, had run after him as far as the garden gate. As always, even when it wasn’t yet above fifty degrees, or already under fifty. Meanwhile he’s almost twice as tall as when he first started school, but that doesn’t stop her from running after him as far as the garden gate holding his cap: Put your hat on, sweetheart. It
didn’t stop her from running after him until today. Beyond where the street curves, his mother couldn’t see him any longer, and he would take the cap off again. He never felt cold, but his mother didn’t believe him. The housekeeper says she wants to go home now, she’s in a state from all that’s happened, but if he needs help, tomorrow or whenever, he knows where to find her. To go home now. He nods and pulls the door shut behind her.

  How is he ever supposed to go up these steps again? The carpeting covering the steps is scraped in one spot, is that the spot? Or were those scratches always there? Did his mother slip or stumble? On which of these steps was her head lying when she stopped breathing? But even if he knew everything about the final moments of his mother’s life, he still wouldn’t know what it meant now for her to be dead. Yesterday the great artist H., recipient of the Comrade G. Medal, the Badge of Honor of the Great Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold, and the Goethe Prize, as well as a number of other highly prestigious awards bestowed by our Republic, was suddenly and unexpectedly taken from us. We shall eternally hold our stalwart Comrade H., the courageous antifascist faithfully devoted to the workers’ cause, in reverent memory.

  8

  She falls and, falling, asks herself whether this fall is really going to end with her breaking her neck.

  You know, I never heard back from them about the streetcar stop on Kastanienallee at the corner of Schönhauser.

  Be patient, they’ll get back to you, her husband says, brushing the strand of hair back from his face.

  If they’d just move the streetcar stop forward a little, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam there day after day.

  She falls, and while she is falling she feels ashamed for falling.

  Come on, that could happen to anyone.

  I also wrote to them about conditions at the Landsberg retirement home. They need to hire more staff, the old people there are really suffering, someone told me.

  That was the right thing to do.

  And about the Intourist trips to Finland — they’re so disorganized!

  Is Finland pretty?

  Of course. And just imagine, you can’t order any replacement parts direct from the factory that makes all the carburetors and filters for our Republic.

  Really!

  That’s got to change.

  Most definitely.

  She is tumbling out of this world in which so much remains to be done before everything is as it should be. When she isn’t here any longer, who will care for this State that is her State and still in short trousers?

  9

  Stepping over the invisible body of his mother — or rather, through it — he now ascends the stairs after all, to the upper floor. Starting now, every time he goes up the stairs, he will be walking over his mother’s invisible body, or through it. Actually all his mother did was switch sides. But he doesn’t know where the sides are. Time and eternity: there’s no just stepping into eternity. You can only get there by falling. And how do you fall?

  The bathrobe his mother was still wearing when she said goodbye to him at the garden gate is now hanging in the bathroom. On the hook she always hangs it on when she gets dressed. Always hung it on when she got dressed. Without knowing why, he puts his hand into the pocket of the bathrobe and finds a used tissue. This tissue still exists in the present out of which his mother has fallen. If I catch you one more time climbing around in the ruins! Without him, she would be all alone in the world! Now it’s the other way around. He goes down the stairs again, through his invisible mother.

  There was scarcely any other author who succeeded in portraying our Socialist reconstruction as vividly as our great writer H., whose life came to a tragic end so abruptly and unexpectedly the day before last.

  Actually everything’s just as it was before. In the parlor, the bouquet on the table is still perfectly fresh. He sits down on the sofa on which the Minister of Culture has sat many times before, and the daughter of the President, a good friend of his mother’s; and the head of the so-called “Salad Brigade” at the fish-processing facility at Sassnitz has sat here too (the Salad Brigade that was named in his mother’s honor), as has one of the first great activists, Adolf Hennecke, who lives only two houses down; eight-year-old pioneers sat here on this sofa in front of his famous mother and wanted to know how one becomes a writer; a woman sick with rheumatism sat down exactly where he is sitting now to ask whether his mother could possibly write a letter asking for her to be allowed to go to the health resort in Sochi; the head of the Writers’ Union sat here as well, and on another occasion the artistic director of the theater Volksbühne Berlin, along with the famous actor who played the lead in his mother’s famous play, and from time to time the famous sculptor sat here too, who received the Patriotic Order of Merit at the same time she did, and just recently the famous composer sat here, who wants to write an opera based on a text by her.

  Now he, her seventeen-year-old son, is sitting on this sofa in front of the bouquet that has not yet even begun to wilt, gazing at his invisible mother, who sits in the armchair she always sat in when visitors came.

  And my father?

  He fell in the battle of Kharkov.

  As darkness gradually falls, he tries to imagine the enormous quantity of time he will now spend without his mother. Along with her life, the memories he might have of her have stopped growing as well. Be grateful for what you’ve got, his mother always said. But sooner or later, because of his forgetfulness, he will lose his mother all over again — this time piecemeal.

  The big window that leads from the parlor out to the terrace is now entirely dark.

  On many evenings of many years, from spring into fall, he had sat with his mother on this terrace. Here she told him of Valentinovka, where they used to spend their Moscow summers: she, his father, who fell at the battle of Kharkov, and her friend O. The leaves here smell exactly like the leaves there, she’d always said. Only in Valentinovka there was a little river across the way where she used to go swimming every morning before breakfast. No doubt because of these stories his mother liked to tell, he always imagines trees when someone speaks of Moscow, and yellow leaves that have come to rest on a damp meadow, he sees not the Kremlin and its golden towers but a small, sun-dappled river, sees weeds beneath the surface being swept gently back and forth by the current, and minnows.

  Was his mother so afraid of storms back then? For as long as he’s known her, she’s been terrified not only of thunder and lightning but also of wind that might suddenly gust through the house, smashing everything to pieces. Did you close the terrace door tightly? Yes. And the dining room window? Yes. Then I’ll go upstairs. Okay. The terrace door? I said yes. Then she would go upstairs to her bedroom, closing the door there carefully as well, and she wouldn’t come out again until all that remained of the storm was the rain.

  But on warm evenings he and his mother would often sit until nightfall on the terrace. She would read, and he would do his homework or write the monthly report for his Free German Youth class group.

  Can you help me?

  What sort of outing was it?

  We went to the Pergamon Museum.

  So write: We went to the Pergamon Museum.

  That’s not enough.

  Oh, I see. So write that you investigated the history of the class struggle by studying the ancient society of slave holders.

  That’s good.

  Did you notice how tall the steps are that lead up to the Pergamon Altar?

  Yes.

  That’s how they build things when people are supposed to be in awe of their own gods.

  Should I write that?

  No.

  His mother was sitting outside, close to the light, and he ducked into the house for a minute to fetch something, a glass of water, a pad of paper, a ruler. As he returned, he saw her from behind from deep in the interior of the dark house. His mother had a book on her knees, but she wasn’t reading, she just sat there gazing out into the night. She didn’t turn around to look at hi
m. After all, she knew he was on his way back. She had a thick jacket on since it was already quite chilly.

  Why did you call me just plain Sasha and not Alexander?

  Why didn’t you ever go up to the attic?

  What are the best apples to use for strudel?

  Along with his mother, the answers to all these questions have died as well.

  Was there still snow on the ground that April in Ufa when I was born?