The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  4

  He wasn’t the only human being in the world who had an inkling of how everything was connected to everything else, otherwise, he’d have chosen dying over freezing and watching his family freeze, starving and watching his family starve. A remarkable phenomenon of the cycle of tremors beginning with the 1895 Easter earthquake in Laibach is that some of the aftershocks continued for quite some time afterward, taking a significant toll in certain areas, and displaying phenomena similar to those of the main tremor. The earthquake of April 5, 1897, though not particularly strong, was distinguished by the motion of the ground being less pronounced than the shock’s acoustic effects. In any case, he would have to remain alive until at least the first of the next month, because then his wife would receive his salary. One month’s salary, if she stretched it skillfully, would last a week. What would happen during the remaining three weeks of that month and the weeks of the following one, and what in the world would happen after that — this he did not know. The tremor consisted of two shocks from below, the first of which was stronger; each lasted for approximately 2 sec. with a 1 sec. interval between; according to observations, the shaking appeared to be directed from north to south and was accompanied by a sound like that of a cart being driven into a building’s entryway; this preceded the tremor by several seconds and was longer in duration. Clocks and lamps vibrated.

  He cuts the tips off his gloves so he can hold the pen better. When the ink begins to solidify in the cold, he breathes on the nib.

  5

  In November, the war was declared over, and in December her friend’s fiancé finally returned home. One afternoon he was suddenly standing there at the door, and at first the girls didn’t even realize that they knew him, that’s how much he’d changed. Even weeks after his return they saw how it pained him when someone scattered crumbs for the pigeons in the park. When they asked him about the war, he refused to answer, he’d just take one of the cigarette stubs he’d collected somewhere out of his jacket pocket and start smoking. When they told him they wanted to go out, he didn’t mind, he just stayed home. And when in January the curfew was changed from ten p.m. to eight, they would often simply remain in her friend’s apartment to save the twenty heller coin they’d have to slip the concierge to be let in after curfew. They would drink and talk, sometimes she even stayed the night, sleeping on a mattress in the vestibule. On those few evenings when she went out without her friend, she refused to let anyone touch, much less kiss her.

  6

  At night, the younger daughter sits in the street, waiting for midnight to come. Indeed, she’s been sitting like this for years, sometimes with her mother, sometimes with her sister, and often alone. This waiting began soon after the start of the war — first for bread, meat, and fat, and later also for sugar, milk, potatoes, eggs, and coal. The war is over, and still she’s sitting here, just the same as before, in this dark forest of bodies that has been growing up all around her for the past five years, stretching its limbs further with each passing night into alleyways and streets, around corners, up steps, and across the squares of Vienna, while she herself has grown within it, grown to five foot seven now, shooting up like a beanpole despite the starvation, and for years spending night after night waiting amid thousands of others who, by waiting, were fighting for survival: in front of market halls, Ankerbrot bakeries, butcher shops, and flour distribution centers, waiting in front of the various points of sale maintained by the milk industry, and also in front of shops offering carbide, candles, shoes, coffee, or soap; they stood, lay, and sat everywhere: either in silence or murmuring, the blood of Vienna beginning to stir as morning approached, to push and shove, to kick and curse, to elbow its way forward, to complain, persevere, bite, or scratch until the obstacle fell away flailing, then was pushed aside, pushing others, screeching, crying, mocking, and falling into despair. Five foot seven, while others had become weak or old during these same nights, while some had gone insane or fallen into a stupor — a few had even died while they were waiting. She sits here on her folding chair, enjoying the fact that the cobblestones are so uneven that she can rock back and forth on the chair, she sits wrapped in a blanket, waiting for midnight when her mother will relieve her.

  7

  Sometimes when his wife retires so early in the evening, he goes over after she’s fallen asleep and watches her. In three homes, ordinary Swiss clocks whose pendulums swung in a north-south orientation stopped. When she sleeps, she does not speak. That’s all right, she says to him when she is awake, when he — after remarking that the sky is either overcast, blue, cloudy, or perfectly clear — announces that now he’ll be coming home earlier, because the office will no longer be heated after two in the afternoon. But when she’s asleep he likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature — such as war, famine, or even a civil servant’s salary that fails to increase along with the galloping inflation — can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray, there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across angular jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words, there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it’s just that a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it’s never been noticed that this is a language in the first place — and in fact, the only language valid across the world and for all time. If a person were to study a sufficient number of faces, he would surely be able to observe wrinkles, twitching eyelids, lusterless teeth, and draw conclusions about the death of a Kaiser, unjust reparations payments, or a stabilizing social democracy. His wife doesn’t ask why he brought Notes on Earthquakes in Styria home with him, why he spends evening after evening reading this book and copying out the most important passages; the thing is, it describes in meticulous detail exactly the sorts of processes he is now able to see with completely different eyes: How one and the same cause can have a thousand different effects on different regions and locations. It feels to him as if the top layer is crumbling away all at once from everything he sees and encounters, a layer that once prevented him from comprehending, and finally he is able to recognize what lies below. Minds = landscape, he notes between one passage and the next. What a happy coincidence that these observations happened to fall into his hands: the hands of one who has taken it upon himself to investigate this primeval tongue — that’s what he’s calling it — for as long as his strength holds up. Persons standing upon solid ground detected a faint vibration of the earth. Nothing else is keeping him here in this miserable life in which a civil servant, ninth class, is forced to stand by and watch his family starve.

  8

  Good, now wash your hands and you’ll be ready.

  Is there water left?

  Yes.

  Well, all right then.

  The water half-filling the bucket is covered in a thin layer of ice.

  What a disaster.

  Not to worry.

  The old woman pokes her hands through the layer of ice into the water and washes them.

  Goodness gracious, that’s cold.

  And then: Hat, scarf, glove.

  Oh, your boots.

  I almost forgot my feet. . . .

  And with all the snow.

  What a disaster. Don’t worry, I’ll manage, I’ll be fine.

  There’s no rush. Oh, the card.

  I almost forgot the card.

  Thirty decagrams of meat.

  Well, we’ll see.

  Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.

  Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes
even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.

  Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.

  Look all you like, but no pawing.

  Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?

  No matter. Zol es brennen, to hell with it.

  Meanwhile, most of the sellers had armed themselves against these Galician refugees and their barbaric ways by posting signs: Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.

  If only there were still merchandise left.

  In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.

  That’s still perfectly good. What are they thinking? They’re experts at throwing things away, these goyim.

  9

  At the end of January her friend suddenly falls desperately ill. Lying in bed with a fever of 104°, she keeps talking about a pit filled with human flesh and a small child standing beside the pit who wants to gobble up all the meat. Her friend’s fiancé doesn’t know what to do; together they carry the sick woman down the stairs and bring her in a taxi to the barracks that was set up the year before in the General Hospital’s courtyard to accommodate those stricken by the epidemic. The next day they are not allowed in to see her, nor the day after that, and what’s more, a pulmonary infection has now made her illness worse, they’re told; on the fourth day they learn that the patient’s situation is very grave indeed, and on the fifth the doctor informs them that her friend died of the Spanish flu that very morning, at 3:20 a.m.

  What’s going to happen to her now? her fiancé asks.

  The 7031 will come for her tonight around eleven, the doctor says.

  Who?

  You must have been away at war a long time if you’ve never heard of it.

  Yes, the fiancé says.

  Explain it to him, the doctor says to her and leaves.

  We’re going to stay here and wait, she says.

  For what?

  For the 7031.

  They remain standing there until after nightfall, leaning against the wall of the hospital building, above their heads are two endless rows of windows, but no one is looking out to where they stand down below: everyone behind these windows is asleep or terminally ill, no one can get up and look out — the dead windows retreat before their eyes in two rows, growing narrower as they recede, impenetrably sealed. The arc lamps illuminate the street only until ten in the evening, after this it is completely dark. Every once in a while, one of them crouches, or walks a few steps. The fiancé smokes until his jacket pockets are empty. When it begins to snow, the two take shelter beneath the archway that four days ago was an entryway and soon will be an exit. Healing and Comfort for the Sick is written on a plaque above the arch. And then, shortly before midnight, the streetcar bearing the number 7031 really does arrive with its twelve horizontal slots for the dead, custom built the year before (when the horse carts could no longer keep pace with the city’s mortality rate). There is a silent loading up of several coffins — their mutual friend is silently lying in one of them — no one is standing on the running board of the car to catch a bit of air, and the end of the car, which used to contain doors for the living, has been nailed shut by the New Viennese Tramway Society. The two mourners are left behind in Alserstrasse, and their leave-taking from their friend is the silent, electrically operated driving off of streetcar number 7031. Above the conductor — who doesn’t even glance at the bereaved because he is busy operating the starting lever and making sure the switches for the rails are correctly set — an illuminated sign displays the car’s destination: Gate IV, Central Cemetery, Vienna.

  10

  The tremors were regular and soundless; they consisted of a slow swaying motion whose direction (judging by pictures set in motion on the wall), was north to south. Isolated small cracks are reported to have appeared on ceilings. As life continued, his wife’s manner — which at first he had found charming, a sort of childish stubbornness — solidified and became something different. This metamorphosis took place in stages, but the exact point when what might be described as severity began to dominate is something he can, in retrospect, no longer say.

  Early on in their marriage, she had sometimes asked him to extend his lunch hour, so that after they ate they would still have time to take a walk — oh, just blow off the office, she’d say, making a blowing sound — or when they read Faust together, dividing up the roles, she would want him to read Gretchen’s lines, and once, to please her, he’d had to put on his dress uniform, when no one but she and the children was there to see it. Her requests had been laughable, they’d both laughed at them; fulfilling one of these requests had been simple enough, but it was also simple to say no to her and laugh all the same.

  Together with the child’s grandmother, they had decided that half a year after their marriage — for which he’d had to declare himself unaffiliated with any faith — he would officially return to the Catholic church, just as — together with the child’s grandmother — they’d decided to baptize the child on its first birthday. Even so, as far as he could remember, they had their first argument over why she, the child’s mother, shouldn’t have her name entered into the baptismal registry, not even with the supplement Israelite. After all, if it weren’t for her, the child wouldn’t even be alive! He hadn’t been able to think of any way to save the child. And it had turned out that all that was needed was a handful of snow, nothing more than that!

  Her bringing up the handful of snow disconcerted him.

  The baptism wasn’t my idea in the first place, he said, it was your mother’s.

  So then marry my mother!

  To this he gave no response.

  Money is what she gives me. Money, she said.

  Surely there are worse things than a mother giving her daughter money.

  Money, she said once more with contempt in her voice, but then she fell silent. He never learned what she’d have wanted from her mother in place of the money.

  For years they depended on the money they accepted from her mother, just to pay the rent; but when their second child came along, they couldn’t afford a maid or nanny, and there came a point when they could no longer even afford to buy tickets when traveling theater companies came to town.

  One thing his wife realized long ago was that she couldn’t reproach him for his failure to rise through the ranks. She had to swallow her vexation, mulling it over in silence, and was increasingly to be found in a sour mood, impatient with the girls and with him.

  The impression was that of a heavily laden cart driving rapidly across the rooftops, and only after this was a wavelike motion of the earth perceptible. There were even tremors high up in the mountains. The livestock in their alpine pastures stopped grazing, looking up with curiosity and unease. The merry little calves began leaping around.