The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  With an armful of linens she now leaves the baby’s room and walks past the footstool where her daughter is sitting. It was no accident that she married her daughter to a Christian. When her daughter was old enough to ask questions, she told her that her father had just gone off one day and never returned. Why did he leave? Where did he go? Will he come back again some day?

  New panes of glass were set into the bookcase. She sold the house in the ghetto and moved to the center of town, where she took over her husband’s business and set aside everything she could spare for her daughter’s dowry. For many years now she has known something that her daughter will soon be forced to learn: A day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days.

  4

  So now something he has suspected his entire life, especially these past three years, has become glaringly obvious: If you get even the slightest bit off track, the consequences in the end are just as inescapable as if you’d gone and leapt headfirst into this or that abyss. As an Imperial and Royal civil servant responsible for a thirty-five-kilometer stretch of the Galician Railway of Archduke Karl Ludwig, he knew that everything depended on his ability not only to produce order, but to maintain it where it already existed. But in his own life, life had always intervened. During the year he spent as a trainee not yet receiving a salary, his hunger had caused him to incur debts. So by the time the year ended and he assumed his post as a regular civil servant of the eleventh — i.e. lowest — pay-grade, he was already deep in debt. His hunger, to be sure, was a sign he was still alive, as was his freezing during that first winter — but now his debts would count as a demerit when he underwent his Confidential Qualification, an evaluation carried out behind closed doors by his superiors. Thus, it was impossible to say when he would be promoted from the eleventh to the tenth pay-grade and be able to start paying back what he owed; no one would discuss this with him. In short, he had no prospect of making the leap back to ordinary life. Hunger and freezing guaranteed more hunger and freezing, that’s how it was when life got the upper hand even once. Then he’d met the Jewish shopkeeper and her daughter, whose skin was so white it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. If only he’d been able to see where the track was and where it wasn’t when he proposed to her. There’s no paying down debts with a Jewish dowry, even if you pay them down. And there are differences. You can recognize them by the silence surrounding you at the clubhouse or the office. This silence has to do with consequences, with the end in general — he’s come to understand this, having finally grasped it now that the end is staring him in the face. Why was the baby so quiet all of a sudden?

  His father hadn’t come when they got married at the civil registry office, nor for the birth of their child. He said the trip was too long and too expensive. It had been three years since he’d seen him last, and if all went well, he might never have to see him again. The morning after the child’s birth, he’d gone to an inn alone and toasted the newborn with strangers, and while he was swirling the schnapps around in his mouth with his tongue before swallowing it, savoring the taste, it occurred to him that his tiny daughter also had a tongue in her mouth, she’d come equipped with her own insides when she slipped out of her mother, emerging from her mother’s concavity with concavities of her own. He, the civil servant, eleventh class, had begotten a living thing, and no Confidential Qualification was required to verify this fact.

  Two hundredweights of twine are required to adorn the Brody station with flowers in honor of the Kaiser, whose train will be passing through. Thick oak planks fifteen centimeters across to replace the ties between the tracks. Six hundred gulden a year is the salary of a civil servant eleventh class, while a civil servant tenth class receives eight hundred and if he’s lucky another two hundred as a bonus. But what to do with all the things that resisted calculation? How much time was there really between the second when a child was alive and the next, when it was no longer alive? Was it even time separating one such moment from another? Or did it have to be given a different name, except that no one had found the right name for it yet? How could you calculate the force dragging a child over to the realm of the dead?

  He can still remember the moment when he imagined for the first time what the white cleft between his bride’s legs must look like, fleshy and firm, and when he spread it apart with his fingers, the tiny red rooster’s comb would appear. Later, when she was his wife, he loved the sounds their two sweaty bodies made when they rubbed together and pulled apart again, slapping and smacking, their mouths, tongues, and lips all flowing together, sucking at one another to transform two formerly separate beings into a single moist concavity of flesh. Flesh, flesh — sometimes the word alone was enough to arouse him. But ever since the night before, when he took the lifeless child from his wife’s arms and laid it back in its cradle, he knows how cold something dead feels, colder than he would have ever expected. He doesn’t know how he can forget this. He, the civil servant, eleventh class, has begotten something dead, and no Confidential Qualification is needed to confirm this.

  Sunlight falls on the rough pine floor of the inn where he is sitting. . . . When he arrived before dawn, there were still a couple of Russian deserters lying under the tables asleep. While he was downing his first glass of spirits, and then the second, and the third, they woke up, gathered their bundles, and left in the company of a short, bald-headed man who’d appeared at daybreak, apparently by prearrangement. Neither the bald-headed man nor the others spoke much, nonetheless it was clear that these Russians — a sort you often saw in public houses like this — were men who’d made up their minds not to turn back. . . . After his experience of the night before, the civil servant, eleventh class, finds himself suddenly understanding what it means to cross a border like that, what it means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. It’s as if the top layer were crumbling away from everything he sees and encounters, this layer that had previously gotten in the way of his comprehension, and now, like it or not, he is forced to recognize what lies below and to endure this recognition — but he can’t imagine how.

  Sometimes, looking at his baby, he had wondered where it came from, where it had been before its mother conceived it. Now he wishes it made no difference whether the child had appeared — remaining only for the most infinitesimally fleeting bit of time — or had never appeared at all. But no, there was a difference. Using his thumb, he rubs a shiny coat button shiny. Since there was no measurement that applied to the difference between life and death, the dying of this tiny child was as absolute as any other dying. Never before has measuring — his profession, after all — seemed so superfluous to him as on that morning. Should he pull everyday life back on over his head now that he has understood it is nothing more than a garment?

  He’d shouted at his wife because — although she’d picked up the baby, trying to comfort it — she hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known any remedy for death, but he had also shouted because he too had known no remedy for death.

  He, the civil servant of the lowest possible class, had been no match for Death.

  And now?

  The short, bald-headed man returns to the pub, sits at a table near the Imperial and Royal civil servant he’d seen there earlier that morning when he came for the Russians, and nods. The civil servant had carelessly tossed his coat with the gold buttons over an empty chair; if it were not for this coat, the bald-headed man wouldn’t have known that this person he saw sitting here ought to have been sitting in an office by this hour. The civil servant is unshaven, the tips of his mustache soiled, he is wearing no necktie, and there is a full glass of spirits before him yet again as he gazes out the window at the street, where some mongrel is running in circles trying to catch its own tail, occasionally sliding on a frozen puddle, the mongrel stumbles around before finding its footing and then goes back to hunting down its own scruffy posterior. The bald man orders a snack — pickled herring along with a beer — and settles d
own contentedly. He isn’t ruling out the possibility of striking yet another deal here this very morning.

  5

  It’s true, she is awake, and now there is this next day, and this day, too, she will spend sitting on the footstool. During the night or early that morning, her mother apparently cleared away the bowls of food, untouched by the mourner. She hears someone clattering around in the kitchen, water splashing, something being pushed aside on the table, footsteps crossing the floor, the clink of porcelain. In the baby’s room, in any case, there is nothing left to do. It wasn’t as she had feared yesterday: that while she was sleeping she would forget what had happened and the memory would come crashing down on her with all its weight when she woke up. No, all through her sleep she had known that her child was no longer alive, and when she woke up, she knew it still, sleep had been no more and no less leaden than wakefulness, so she had been spared seeing her worn-out workaday reality collapse once more. When she rises to sit again upon the footstool, everything goes quiet in the kitchen, as if her mother is listening to see what she is up to now that she’s stirring again. Why has life at home become so much like hunting? In the parlor, the miniature grandfather clock strikes six with bright, tinny strokes, then all is perfectly quiet once more. Her husband, it would appear, is still out. Yesterday, when they returned to the house after the funeral and she sat down on the stool, he had tried to lift her up, and when he didn’t succeed, he ran out of the house. She hasn’t seen him since. Will the same thing now happen to her as happened to her mother? When, as a little girl, she tried to imagine where her father might be instead of with his family, she always envisioned someone who had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or in France. But she didn’t believe it. Her mother always spoke of her father’s absence as something definitive, irreversible, never allowing her daughter the faintest hope that he might return home, or even prove to be nearby — in the district capital, for instance, with another wife and new children. Sometimes, introducing herself, she had the impression people were caught off guard when she said her name. In America, her mother said, or in France. But she herself never imagined her father as a living man, neither in America nor France, nor saw him living nearby; she only ever envisioned him as someone who had, for instance, hanged himself; and if anything was nearby, it was the forest where his body had swung, maybe she’d already walked right past the tree he’d tied his noose to.

  Do you need anything, her mother asks. Behind her, the sun is shining into the kitchen, which is why her mother looks like a silhouette. The daughter shakes her head. On this second day of sitting, she and her mother don’t say much. No one knows her mother better than she does, and no one knows her better than her mother, so there’s not much to say. She sits there, thinking about the fact that a part of her is now lying in the ground and beginning to rot, then she looks at her skin, which is still surrounded by air, alive. A friend comes to visit, she has more bowls with her, and says: You’ll have a second child, and a third and a fourth. She says: We’ll see. One of the bowls her friend has brought has eggs in it, she knows this is customary, but doesn’t want to eat them. One neighbor doesn’t even knock, she just bursts in, violently weeping, and doesn’t even scrape the snow from her shoes before falling along with her tears at the mourner’s feet, Praised be our sole Judge, she cries, and then gets up again to fling her arms around the neck of the mourner’s mother, sobbing, why oh why, shaking her head, and then she stops saying anything at all because she is weeping so hard her voice is not available for use. Simon, the coachman, comes, he stops just inside the hallway door and says he’s sorry and that he’s brought a bit of soup and that his wife sends her condolences, unfortunately she can’t come herself because she’s so sick. Another of her friends comes and says: Right from the beginning I thought it was pale. Then another: Why didn’t you send for the doctor? Did it really happen that fast? A third: When they’re so young, the slightest little thing is enough to do them in, who knows what the Lord in His infinite greatness was thinking! A fourth: Where in the world is your husband?

  In the evening her grandmother arrives, sits down on the floor beside her, takes her stocking feet in her lap and warms them with her hands, only then is the granddaughter able to cry for the first time since the death of her child. On the third day this, that, and the other visitor comes. As if approaching an altar, friends and former neighbors from the ghetto come to stand before the footstool with its mourner, bringing her food and words of comfort, they themselves know what it means to lose a child, or else they don’t know, and no doubt quite a few of them are pleased that it happened to be the one who married the goy, etc., but that’s not what they say, instead they say, for example: But of course the main thing is that you yourself are still alive. As for her, she is incapable of crying when visitors are there, and by the third day she is very weary of being the recipient of all the comfort and support it is the sacred duty of these visitors to bestow on her, she doesn’t know how she can bear it that her child’s death still persists, that from now on it will persist for all eternity and never diminish, but she doesn’t speak of this to anyone. On the evening of the third day she knows that if her husband has not yet returned, he is not going to. She asks her mother what it is like to live without a husband. Her mother says: Hard. One of her friends says: You’ll see, tomorrow at the latest he’ll be back, he’s probably just drowning his sorrows. Her grandmother sits down beside her and sings her a lullaby. Has the time in which she was a grown woman now come to an end? If she has missed the road leading forward, will time simply reverse itself and go back again? On the fourth day, her own mourning seems alien to her and she thinks that perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether a being is on one side of the border or the other. On the fifth day, her mother says, we have to think about what comes next. On the sixth day, the clock strikes all the hours contained in a day, with its bright, tinny chime. Might it be time now to go looking for her father, if he happens not to have hanged himself? On the morning of the seventh day, her mother helps her to get up and leads her to the table in the kitchen. Only after the daughter has sat down does her mother say to her: We have to start economizing. On this seventh day the daughter realizes for the first time that she herself is also a daughter, one who has been alive all this time and whose life is only now, with a short delay of seventeen years, breaking down. No one can predict when it will be revealed that a wish is going to be left unfulfilled. Her mother sits down beside her, takes her hands, and says: Your father was beaten to death by the Poles.

  6

  Now he knows where to find the agency, the bald-headed man gave him the address. When he goes out onto the street, it suddenly occurs to him that the first child of one of his colleagues also died young. One day, shortly after the baby’s death, his colleague asked him if he wanted to see the grave. Yes, he said, although he didn’t really want to, and so the two of them walked across the cemetery during their lunch break. His colleague showed him the child’s name on an iron plaque on a wall to the left, the mound of earth in front of it, and the stone border with the little railing. Not even a year and a half later, this same colleague became a father again, and the newborn was given the name of the deceased child as its middle name when it was baptized. He goes into the bank to withdraw the sum his journey will cost. At the exchange office next door, he obtains the twenty dollars in American currency he’ll need to enter the country, as the bald-headed man instructed him. He remembers how his wife laughed when he would imitate for her what she looked like when she was sleeping. They laughed at the same jokes over and over, laughing again and again at next to nothing; when his mother-in-law was with them, she rarely understood what they were going on about and would just shrug. Soon his train will pass over the very rails he looked after until now, one hour and twenty minutes is what this leg of the journey will take, that’s all — the stretch of track for which he used to be responsible is tiny compared to the length of the entire journey he n
ow intends to embark on. When he embraced his wife, her bosom fit perfectly below the curve of his ribs. Sometimes they would just stand there like that, happy; sometimes they would make faces together in the mirror; once he had stuck the tip of his mustache in her ear; another time, rubbed his nose against hers. . . . The journey will take him by land to Bremen, and there, the bald-headed man explained to him, he will board a ship; the ship is called Speranza. . . . Then they asked themselves whether other people also did things like that when they were alone.