The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  Was the first word I spoke German or Russian?

  What was the name of my niania?

  Along with his mother, the way she looked at him died, and everything beyond what he himself remembers. He will now never be old enough to learn the things she hadn’t yet told him, even if he lives to be eighty.

  Do you really not have a photograph of my father?

  His invisible mother sits with her back to him in silence, giving no answer.

  10

  Was her son even listening when she told him about all the new things they were trying to do here?

  In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.

  Why is she only now remembering what her grandmother told her half a lifetime ago?

  But then one of them must be intending to deliver the letter and the other to receive it, she had replied to her grandmother.

  That’s right.

  And having these intentions is not work?

  If only she could remember her grandmother’s reply to this question, all would be well again.

  But she can’t remember.

  She falls.

  11

  Often he’d been afraid that he would lose her. Sometimes she would have fainting fits, just keeling over suddenly, breathing with such difficulty that he thought she might suffocate. At moments like this, she would look different, too, not like his mother at all. Surviving, that meant for him above all that she was turning back into the mother he knew.

  Could he himself have been responsible for what she called her “fits”?

  As a child he had sometimes forgotten how easily she could get worked up. Once, for example, he took her linen-cupboard key from its secret hook because he needed a pillowcase for a carnival costume. How dare he go through her linens without asking permission? Or when he and his friends exploded homemade fireworks in the garden. Or jumped off the roof of the terrace with an umbrella to learn how to fly. Or once he had hidden in a crate up in the attic and waited to see if his mother would find him — though he knew even then that she never went up to the attic. When at last he came out of hiding, there were two Volkspolizei officers standing in the hall, and his mother was sitting in tears on the lowest step of the stairs.

  The stairs.

  And three years ago the major incident, as his mother always calls it. Always called it. His first girlfriend was just visiting him when his mother returned home from a trip. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. His mother suddenly came into his room without knocking, and after one look at the young couple kissing, she’d slammed the door shut again. He had gotten his girlfriend out of the house as quickly as he could, and she never again came to see him, but nevertheless this major incident was perhaps related to his mother’s first heart attack. Only a few weeks later she collapsed in her study and was taken away with sirens howling.

  *

  Whenever his mother was at the hospital being examined, or off at a resort, or on a journey, he had taken to just staying home with the housekeeper, who would cook for him after school and then leave. The housekeeper smelled of perspiration. When he was younger, his mother had hired this or that nanny to live with him in the house while she was on the road — because she had readings or premieres of her plays in other cities, or was traveling to Poland with Writers Union delegations, or to Czechoslovakia or Hungary. One of the nannies used to spray saliva when she read to him, another pinched his cheek when she said hello, the third refused to return to his bedside out of principle when he was afraid of the dark and cried out for her.

  This housekeeper smelled of perspiration.

  At least he doesn’t have to worry about his mother any longer.

  It’s quite certain now that she will never again turn back into the mother he knows.

  And his father?

  He fell in the battle of Kharkov.

  12

  As if one final moment existed within another, simultaneously present, she can remember exactly what that morning was like when she said goodbye to her grandmother. One day before she traveled to Prague under a false name. The miniature grandfather clock was just striking eleven with tinny strokes; her grandmother wrapped a pair of challahs in a cloth for her and gave her a slip of paper on which she’d written the recipe. The skin on her grandmother’s hands was so thin the veins showed through, violet.

  But time has blurred all those things that happened for the last time without it being called the last time. At some point her mother had pinned up her hair for her for the last time. At some point she herself had washed the dishes for the last time while her sister sat at the kitchen table doing her homework. At some point she sat in Krasni Mak for the last time. At many points during her life she had done something for the last time without knowing it. Did that mean that death was not a moment but a front, one that was as long as life? And so was she tumbling not only out of this world, but out of all possible worlds? Was she tumbling out of Vienna, out of Prague and Moscow, out of Berlin, out of the Socialist sister countries and the western world? Tumbling out of the entire world, out of all the time there ever was, would be, is? But now what will happen to her son?

  13

  At the funeral, the urn containing his mother’s ashes sits on a pedestal up front between two flags. The red flag on the left is draped as if it were blowing to the left, and the national flag on the right as if it were blowing to the right. Whose idea was it to drape the flags to look as if a storm were rising from the urn? Ridiculous, his mother would have said.

  His mother had just recently been to the hairdresser’s to have her color touched up. Now her freshly coiffed hair has been incinerated, and her face is also ash, her shoulders, too, are there in this bronze-colored canister, and her hands as well with their fleshy fingertips, her round knees, her feet, and even her toes, painted mother-of-pearl. He’s never seen his mother naked, but he’s seen how she looks when she is asleep, or how she crosses one leg over the other when she is sitting, he’s seen how she waits, how she pours herself a glass of water, how she gets up, puts on a coat, how she reaches for her handbag, how she walks. The body of his mother was the landscape he knew best among all the landscapes in the world.

  14

  In front of her, an ancient woman is shaking what looks like a child’s rattle made of ivory, with silver bells. She stops. Shakes. Stops. When the bells have rung for the third time, she goes into the theater.

  15

  In the middle, leaning up against the pedestal with the urn, is his wreath with the ribbon printed in black script: For my mother. In front of it: the wreath sent by the Central Committee of the Party: Our estimable comrade; the wreath from the Council of Ministers: Stalwart in the struggle; the wreath from the People’s Parliament: With Socialist salutations; the wreath from the Magistrate of Berlin, the capital of the GDR: To an honorary citizen of our city; the wreath sent by the Writers Union: To a great writer; and: Unforgotten, the wreath of the Cultural Association of the GDR.

  Who arranged the ribbons in such a way that you can read all the farewells?

  A fortnight ago it was still a fortnight before he would be sitting here in front of her urn, but he hadn’t known it yet.

  Just to the right of the urn is a little stand with a velvet cushion on which his mother’s medals are displayed: The Comrade G. Medal, the Patriotic Order of Merit, the Goethe Prize, and, twice, the Workers’ Pennant.

  Ten days ago it was ten days before.

  And just to the right of the urn, a table with her books.

  The music they are playing is by Beethoven, according to the program. Who picked the music?

  So did time keep rushing ever more rapidly away until it was gone? Why hadn’t he noticed? Why hadn’t his mother?

  16

  It is she herself who slices through the paper, splitting the entire stack from top to bottom at one go.

  17

  The Minister of Culture gives the first speech.

 
; In Ufa his wife gave me the first two diapers for you.

  Then there’s music again, this time the dirge: Victims immortal, you sank into dust. We stand here and mourn as our hearts say we must.

  I like the lyrics better in Russian.

  Then the second speech, given by the President of the Academy of Arts.

  He’s one of those functionaries who write on the side.

  One week ago today, his mother was still alive. The lees of her life were already slipping away, but she had moved around just as deliberately as ever. He had never once, for example, seen his mother running. From a distance, she had always looked like an old woman, bent over and somehow crooked, even when she was just fifty.

  18

  What are all these people waiting in line for? Are they giving away darkness for free? But that won’t curb anyone’s hunger.

  19

  At the end they play a piece by Haydn, during which everyone stands up, and her son goes to the front of the room in order to carry his wreath himself, as arranged with the funeral director. The urn, the velvet cushion with his mother’s medals, the books, the flags, and the official wreaths are picked up by soldiers of the Guards Regiment and carried, at the head of the funeral procession, to the gravesite. The son, in his role as first mourner, walks right behind the soldier carrying the urn, but because the urn-bearer is leading the procession so slowly, he has to pay attention not to step on the man’s heels. Is the Guards Regiment trying to compel the guests to assume a mournful state with this slow pace? Is the Guards Regiment standing guard over the mourners’ sentiments to ensure that the officially prescribed levels of grief are maintained?

  20

  From the darkness a small hand reaches out to her, something yellow in its palm. Ah, finally Sasha is handing her the lemon she’s been waiting for all this time.

  21

  When they reach the grave, the flag bearers dip their two flags while the urn is lowered into the pit. Forward, brothers and sisters, and the Last Judgment let us face. Oops, must have misheard — he knows perfectly well that the trumpets of the working class call the brothers and sisters to the last fight, not the Last Judgment. But isn’t the last fight death? The Internationa-a-le. Unites. The hu. Man race.

  The son now takes up position, as arranged, to the left of the grave, behind him the table with his mother’s books. On the other side of the grave, the velvet cushion with the medals has been set on a pedestal again, and between the medals and the grave stands a cemetery worker offering the mourners rose petals from five baskets.

  Anyone who joins this line must first pass by the cushion with his mother’s medals, then the cemetery worker, then the grave with the little bronze-colored pot at the bottom, finally arriving before him, the only son of the deceased.

  The son shakes hands.

  He shakes the hand of the President’s daughter and the hand of the President himself, shakes the hand of the artistic director of the Volksbühne Berlin, shakes many hands of famous writers, famous sculptors, and famous composers, he shakes the hand of the woman with rheumatism, the hand of the Deputy Ambassador of the Soviet Union in Berlin, Capital of the GDR, and also the hand of the brigade leader of the Salad Division of the fish-processing plant Sassnitz; he shakes the small hands of pioneers, the young hands of women who perhaps want to be writers themselves some day, and the old hands of comrades who knew his mother from Moscow, Prague, or Ufa.

  At the very end of the reception line, he holds out his hand to a man he doesn’t know, and this man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, the mouth of the man looks exactly like his own mouth that he sees every morning in the mirror. With exactly the same sort of raspy voice he himself has, the man, after clearing his throat, utters his heartfelt condolences, except that his heartfelt condolences sound different from those of the others — they’re called soboleznovaniya — reminding the son so abruptly of his own Russian childhood, it’s as if his memory were a curtain suddenly ripping in two.

  22

  Thank you, he says, and the man nods to him, but then others arrive wanting to shake the son’s hand, and by the time the line is finally at an end and the funeral director places his mother’s medals back in their proper boxes, handing them to him, and a soldier of the Guards Regiment places his mother’s books in a bag, carrying them away, and a gravedigger begins to fill up the pit again with pale Brandenburg sand, and one or another of his mother’s friends, their eyes filled with tears, strokes the son’s head one last time as they are leaving, by the time the group of mourners has finally dispersed and departed, the stranger is nowhere to be seen, and he, the sole survivor, the son of the deceased who has not yet even reached the age of maturity, takes streetcar No. 46 back to the house where he has lived until now together with his mother, and where there is now no one awaiting him.

  Please take off your shoes in the hall. Walking through his invisible mother, he climbs the stairs, goes into his mother’s dressing room, takes the key from its secret hook, and unlocks the linen cabinet. Inside are duvet covers, pillowcases, towels, and sheets.

  At the very bottom, under the sheets, is a sealed letter.

  Russian stamps, a Vienna address in his mother’s handwriting, and above it a stamped message adorned with a swastika: Evacuated to the East.

  At some point his mother slid this letter under the sheets.

  Now he has retrieved it.

  He looks at the envelope, turns it over, and on the back is an address in Cyrillic script.

  He slides the letter back under the sheets.

  But now the hiding place is no longer a hiding place.

  Does she really not have a photograph of his father?

  On the evening of this day he takes out the atlas from his mother’s bookshelf.

  Where is Kharkov anyhow?

  23

  The next morning is Sunday.

  The next morning his mother is still dead.

  If only she would stop being dead soon, he thinks.

  If only the stairs didn’t exist, his mother would still be alive, he thinks.

  If only they hadn’t moved into this house with a staircase.

  If only his mother hadn’t liked this house so much.

  If only she hadn’t liked this place so much where she would break her neck.

  Those stairs are treacherous.

  In his mother’s atlas, still lying open on his table from the night before, he flips from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, featuring the major city Kharkov, back to the page that shows Berlin. Scientific convention has assigned Berlin, this city where his mother was until recently still alive and where she is now dead, the coordinates 52.58373 degrees latitude north and 13.39667 degrees longitude east (coordinates that were assigned to this place before her death and remain assigned to it now). And since, after all, human beings can’t go strolling around on the moon and falling down dead there, it stands to reason that two of the coordinates in his atlas must be the coordinates of the place where he himself will stop living. Where his bones will rot. A place he doesn’t know yet — and by the time he does, it won’t do him any good.

  Mama, does that mean that some day my body will be my corpse?

  With all its birthmarks and scars, with the skin, hair, and veins I know so well already? Does that mean I’m basically sharing my entire life with my corpse? Is that how it is, Mama? You grow up, you get old, and when the corpse is ready, it’s time to die?

  Since his mother is no longer winding the clock on the wall, it’s quieter in the house than ever.

  So now in this world that has been surveyed to within an inch of its life, he is alone.

  Alone.

  Alone with shelves filled with books, cabinets containing drawers filled with files and notes; alone with chairs, beds, tables, sofas, cupboards, coat hooks and lamps; alone with the chandelier, with rugs, a rattan trunk, winter coats, with his mother’s typewriter; alone with bottle openers, aspirin, bed linens, scouring powder, tools, shoes, and pots, with
ironing board, laundry rack, tea table, and the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun, with broom and mop, his mother’s combs, brushes, and makeup, with shower gel and skin creams, dishes, knives, and forks, flower vases, paper clips, envelopes, his mother’s diaries and manuscripts, records and a record player, eight bottles of wine, a music box, chains, rings, and brooches, two cans of lentils, a refrigerator containing half a stick of butter, three tubs of yogurt, two slices of cheese; he’s alone with a revolving chair, countless drawings and lithographs in varying formats, several paintings, one of them a portrait of his mother; alone with ten apples, a loaf of bread, with sundry pencils, pens, erasers, and stacks of white paper; alone with twine, coasters, potholders, with coins and bills from many lands, with mirrors, extension cords, and a tabletop fountain that no longer works; alone with two potted rubber trees, several coverlets, woolen blankets, pillows, with empty suitcases, handbags, house slippers, nutcrackers, tablecloths and carbon paper, towels, eyeglasses, sweaters, stockings and blouses, underwear; alone with his mother’s cardigans and scarves; alone with his own first sweater and cap from when he himself was still an infant, and a little cutting board he painted back in kindergarten in Moscow.