The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  21

  Waiting for the results of the examination, a thousand or two thousand people sit in the gloomy light of the great hall, and new ones are constantly coming to join them. These people squat, lie on the ground, or sit on benches: people with bundles, bedding, and crates, with samovars, people without any baggage at all, children running about, crying babies, people who have lain down on the floor and gone to sleep, people with frail parents, people who understand not a word of English, people who don’t know whether the person who’s supposed to pick them up here is really coming, people who are filled with hope, with despair, people who are homesick, frightened, people who don’t know what’s in store for them, people who are wondering where they’ll find the twenty-five dollars for their immigration fee, people who suddenly want to go back, or who are just glad that the ground beneath their feet is no longer swaying, people with long or short pants, with headscarves, skirts, suits, hats, with fringe, shoes, or slippers, gloves or cuffs, with braids, beards, mustaches, curls, parted hair, people with many, few, or no children — countless people, all of whom are waiting for the moment when eventually their names will be called and they will learn whether they are allowed to stay or will be sent back to Europe. The young man, who is also one of those waiting, thinks: This is probably more or less the way it’s going to be one day at the Last Judgment.

  And then, suddenly, a loud clattering and jangling fills the hall; everyone falls silent for a moment, looks over, and sees a large Chinese vase lying shattered on the ground — a girl has dropped it in one of the very few places in the hall not covered with people or clothes or bundles, but only with stone tiles, she has dropped this vase that she carried in her arms ever since her departure from a small town outside Bucharest or Warsaw, or outside Vienna or Odessa or Athens or Paris — all the long way via Bremen, Antwerp, Danzig, Marseille, Piraeus, or Barcelona: The vase has shattered into bits here in the arrival hall, the final stop before New York, for the girl has just — for the first time in her life — seen a man with dark skin, who happened to be walking across the room with a broom in his hand, and she must have thought it was the Devil. The girl’s mother now looks as if she would like best to strike her child dead, and the girl looks as though she wishes she were dead. Then the noise recommences — the crying, talking, and shouting — the children go back to running around, the adults wait, and a boy, having been given an ice cream by a relative who got permission to visit him, places the ice cream on the bench, and there it melts, because the boy doesn’t know what ice cream is.

  Hey look, the inspector wrote a letter on your back in chalk — mine too?

  The boy turns his back to his friend so he can see whether he too has a mark on him, one that may possibly decide if he will be permitted to stay or be sent back to Europe.

  No, there’s nothing on your back.

  What sort of letter is it, do you think?

  Dunno.

  So do I have to go back now, or do you?

  No idea.

  Two little girls are crouching on the floor.

  I’m thirsty.

  Grandmother says that when you get to Battery Park, there are a lot of fountains there.

  Good, I’ll have a drink then.

  No, you mustn’t drink, whatever happens.

  How come?

  She says that then you’ll forget everything you ever knew about where you come from.

  Then I’ll forget the garden?

  Yes.

  And the fireplace?

  Yes.

  And Grandfather?

  Yes.

  And Grandmother?

  Yes.

  And the cat?

  Yes.

  Everything?

  Yes.

  How does Grandmother know?

  Someone told her.

  22

  One evening, after one day, there is no dinner on the table; when mother and daughter try to open the door to Grandmother’s room, it isn’t possible, because her body is lying in front of it. Vos iz mit dir? Mamele, vos iz mit dir? Mamele, what’s the matter? Simon the coachman is called, and he breaks open the door with an axe, with Mother standing beside him, one hand pressed to her mouth; her daughter calls her grandmother’s name, but no one answers.

  What else have you got to do today?

  I have a guest to look after.

  Do you have a lot of guests?

  Is the lonely soul not a guest in the body? Today it’s here, and by tomorrow it’s on its way again.

  When the hole in the door is finally big enough, the two women stick their hands through, reaching for Grandmother, but she is already cold, as cold as only something dead feels.

  23

  At the many small, rectangular teller windows in the great hall at Ellis Island, a Loshel becomes a Louis, a Davnar a David, an Arden an Alvin, a Chaia a Clara. And he, Johann, becomes a Joe. Did he really want to go that far? And why is he doing this? Others learn at similar rectangular windows that their families will be permitted to stay here but they themselves must go back, or that because of them, the whole family will be sent back along with them, returning home to a place where they no longer want to make their home, where they’ll starve or be beaten to death. Then they start shouting or cling to one another, while others just stand there quietly, weeping or falling silent altogether.

  24

  Only after her grandmother’s funeral does her mother tell her that she, the daughter, took her very first steps holding her grandmother’s hand.

  And where were you?

  I was making all the preparations for us to move while also keeping the shop open.

  No one was helping you?

  No.

  Why not?

  We were moving in the wrong direction.

  So a mother knows more about a child than a child could ever know about herself. If her own child were still alive, she, as the child’s mother, would surely have been the one to teach her how to put one foot in front of the other — and on some morning or other when her husband was at the office, the child, holding her hand, would have managed the journey from wardrobe to chest without falling for the first time ever, or if the weather were fair, perhaps the route would have led from the front door to the corner. As a mother, she would know this and never forget, and then one day she would perhaps tell her child, or perhaps not, with or without a reason. But now her secrets and memories are hers alone, and no one’s going to ask her, even many years later, about the things she keeps to herself. Her grandmother’s house, where, she’s just been told, she learned to walk, has now collapsed — she saw it herself not long ago. The roof crashed down into the parlor, turning what was formerly a room into a garbage heap. Chickens now mince about on the heap, poking the rotting thatch with their beaks on their chicken-life-long search for worms and bugs. If she were to remain in this town of modest size her whole life, she would, sooner or later, come out of a building that looks like any other and find herself right in front of her mother, or perhaps a neighbor or friend, even that would be enough. No, unable to find herself, she has no need to wait for others to give her up for lost. She’s already free down to her bones; already it’s a matter of complete indifference what she does.

  With the same hands she used when she was learning to walk to hold tight to her grandmother so as not to lose her balance, she now packs a few necessities in a suitcase, carries it to the station, and pays for the ticket. In a second-class compartment she travels over rails whose maintenance used to be the responsibility of one who was called her husband in her earlier life, putting this leg of the journey behind her takes only an hour and twenty minutes; then she travels for an additional two hours, not getting out until Lemberg — capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria — ninety kilometers southeast of the small border town where she was first a girl, then a young woman, and then, for a brief period, even a mother and wife. She copies out an address from a notice hanging at the station, carries her suitcase there, pays half the first m
onth’s rent in advance, presses down a door handle, and in this way enters her new lodgings. Here no one knows who held her hand when she learned to walk upright at only eleven months, nor does anyone know that the Poles are to blame for her inability to remember a father, nor even that she can still recite all of Goethe’s poem “The God and the Bayadère” by heart. Here she will use her right hand, and of course also her left, as well as her mouth and the other orifices of her body for no other purpose than to keep this body alive, along with the hands, the mouth, and the rest to which these orifices are attached. To be sure, she will do this under a new name — one that, in her opinion, seems reasonably appropriate to her new life, and if anyone asks her name, she says it’s Missy von Lemberg and laughs.

  25

  Admittedly, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy assembled almost as many different ethnic groups under its crown as he was seeing here in the great hall. From Bosnia to the most remote Polish-speaking provinces, the doors of a tobacco shop were invariably adorned with black and yellow stripes, with the Kaiser’s portrait occupying a place of honor on the wall. Yet, for all the intermingling of different languages and dialects, German remained the language of bureaucracy. The Kaiser, though, hadn’t selected the individuals to be let in; rather, he’d swallowed up entire peoples indiscriminately, making all of them part of his realm. Melancholia, madness, and unlawfulness remained at home — even after home became suddenly known as Austria or Hungary — and it did the monarchy no harm. Europe’s peoples, with or without wars, had always crisscrossed the continent, intermixing and seeking out new homes whenever their one bit of land produced too little or life became unbearable for some reason. But perhaps a coastline like this was a more naturally defined border. Here you could send the people you didn’t want back out on the water, even if it meant they would perish back home or simply drown at sea like surplus kittens.

  26

  For the first time ever she wishes she were of limited intelligence — limited enough that she might bring herself to call her daughter an ingrate. Her apartment now has so many spare rooms that it’s worth her while to rent them out. She gives up the shop, takes her leave of the farmers, and sells horse and cart to Simon, the coachman. She removes all personal items from the rooms and even clears out the cellar a little at a time, reasoning that in two or three years she may no longer have the strength for work like this. She now finally gives away many things that she intended to save although she had no plans for their use, such as the cradle in which her grandchild slept for eight months, the ivory toy with the little silver bells, even the woolen shawl she gave her daughter to wrap around her shoulders, which had never once been used, since her daughter hadn’t had the chance to go out for walks with her baby in the park. She keeps the footstool, for without it she can no longer reach the top shelf of her bookcase where volumes 1 to 20 of Goethe’s Collected Works still are and will remain, including Volume 9, which was struck by Andrei’s stone years before. (And so the bad memory remains preserved among the good, one as incorporeal as the others.) She also keeps her mother’s silver candelabra, it stands now on the windowsill in the parlor, but she never lights the candles on a Sabbath or on any other day.

  27

  It’s August, and he sets foot on solid ground again on the other side of the world. Heat is collecting between the buildings; his wife would have called this air thick enough to cut, he would have stolen a glance at the ink-colored shadows beneath her arms on her otherwise light-blue dress and when no one was looking, slipped his hand in, and she would have said, cut it out, and laughed. Now he is seeing here for the first time peddlers with nothing but soiled undershirts covering their sweaty torsos, calling out their fruit, meat, or fish, holding up a sample in the air, the customers in these parts seem not to be put off by the casually rampant hair on chests, the backs of necks, and arms, exposed unbidden to their view. He himself goes into a hotel in search of a clean lavatory, on the ferry from Ellis Island to Battery Park, his hair was blown into disarray; he looks at himself in the mirror, seeing the same man who was in the mirror back in Europe, and he arranges the strands of this man’s hair, dabs a bit of pomade on his mustache, drapes the coat made of good Imperial and Royal cloth over his arm, puts the suitcase in his other hand, and sends the man out again into the open air, already almost perfectly American. The slip of paper his traveling companion gave him when they parted has directions and an address written on it. Here and there he catches a glimpse of the enormous figure as he walks, but viewed from between the buildings, she looks almost like a castaway signaling for help with her torch, possibly out of fear of sinking, for the island on which she’s been stranded is hardly bigger than a handkerchief compared to the size of her feet. He turns right, as instructed on the paper, and immediately finds the recommended entrance to an underground tunnel; he’s to travel on something called a subway to Harlem, which is where his traveling companion has his factory; the deeper he descends, the hotter and staler the subterranean air, back in the monarchy they used to sing a tune by Mozart: Forever true and honest be / unto the chilly grave, / and stray not by a finger’s breadth / from God’s anointed way — here, by contrast, even the dead must be sweating in the depths of their graves. He tries to remember the rest of the verses to the song, but then the car, drawn by horses, arrives in the station, the unfortunate beasts are wearing blinders even though it’s already quite dark underground, Simon the coachman would shake his head. He himself, the traveler, is scarcely less deaf and dumb than the horses, he neither speaks nor understands a single English word, he doesn’t know whose image is on the coin he uses to pay his fare, and he takes the gum-chewing of his fellow passengers for an illness. And now, having come to understand that the world of numerals conceals more than it displays, he reads: 96th, 110th, 116th Street. Only once before had he known this little where he stood: during his childhood when his father would beat him Sunday after Sunday, without his ever being told the reason, not even later, when he was made to thank his father for the beating, addressing him as “Sir” and with his title, Superior Customs Officer. His mother had failed to protect her son from her own husband, she had watched his beating, but only stood there in the corner without stirring from the spot, quietly weeping. Whenever her weeping became too loud, she got a beating as well. As a child, he didn’t know whom to hate more: his father, who did his best to beat him to death every Sunday, or his mother, who just stood there and didn’t know what to do. His wife, too, hadn’t known what to do on the night in question.

  Back home, his mother died even before he finished his degree at the Technical University in Vienna — died of a stroke, he read in the telegram he received there. Even today the word makes him want to ask: a stroke with what weapon — a bad joke, but he knew the power of his father’s fists. Bruises like the ones his father surely gave his mother continue to change color in the coffin, he’d heard once from a friend who was studying medicine, in the ground they turn first green and then finally yellow, as though this metamorphosis of colors were standing in, if only briefly, for the sorts of development of which the person who’d been struck dead by violent hands was no longer capable. At the time, he’d been about to sit for his exams for his intermediate degree in weights and measures, and for this reason he did not attend the funeral, to which his father raised no objection. Somewhere he’d once learned or read that New York was built on stone, perhaps this is why he wants to stay here, for on rocky ground he can be quite sure of not following in anyone’s footsteps: neither those of his father, the Superior Customs Officer, nor those of his timorous mother.

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