The End of Days

by Jenny Erpenbeck

  Why did he just drop his coat instead of putting it on the hanger? Why did their older daughter quarrel with the younger one, instead of playing with her, why did the little one always start wailing like that when she bumped herself, why didn’t he go down to the cellar for firewood when he saw that more was needed, why didn’t he bring the clock to be repaired, or do something about the lost key? If he insisted on taking the girls to church every Sunday, why didn’t he come straight home for lunch afterward instead of strolling around with them? You forget that I’ve spent the entire morning standing in the kitchen cooking!

  A piece of glass fell from a lamp’s cracked chimney, and an umbrella hanging from a nail fell to the floor. Whitewash fell from the ceiling of the church.

  For a brief time he had nurtured the hope that by moving to Vienna they would all be moving to an easier life, but then there’d been four years of war, a capitulation, and four months of hunger, and now all their provisions — their supplies of wood, groceries, hope — were running out, the emptiness in the pantry and storeroom equally great, the dirt floor showing through. Here in Vienna, his wife was reproaching him for one last thing: having married her, a Jewish vixen from the provinces, and not even a rich one at that. Something he had always refused to believe was apparently proving true after all: she was trapped in her Mosaic origins as if in a cage, knocking herself black and blue against its bars.

  11

  Perhaps her father hadn’t gotten farther than Vienna when he abandoned his family. Perhaps she would run into him here at the market one day, and he would say: So there you are. When, as a little girl, she had tried to imagine where her father might be instead of with his family, she had always visualized someone who had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or in France. Not that she’d believed her. But maybe her father really was right here in Vienna after all. Sometimes she forgets she was still an infant when he left. Even if he were to suddenly come walking down the street toward her, he wouldn’t be able to recognize her. Sometimes she asks herself how many people walk past each other in a big city like this without even dreaming that they might actually be related to one another. Sometimes she does, in fact, run into her mother at the market, and then they exchange a few words.

  Well, child, how are you and the family?

  Good.

  Do you have enough to eat?

  Yes.

  Ever since her mother came to Vienna — supposedly because she was afraid of the war — that’s all her daughter feels like saying. There comes a time when a daughter should reply to her mother’s question as to how she is doing with only a simple: good.

  They say an aid shipment just came in from Switzerland: 1500 tons of flour, the mother says.

  Well, we’ll see, won’t we.

  Your cousin’s helping you out with coal?

  Uh-huh.

  There comes a time when a mother should reply to her daughter’s question as to how she is doing with only a simple: good. Two years ago, this cousin brought the old woman with him when he fled to Vienna, he and his wife opened a shop for pipes, paper, and toys. Sometimes her mother helped out in their shop and received a potato, a bit of offal, a small piece of cornbread in return.

  How are the girls?

  Good.

  When she herself was still a child and perhaps really might have needed her mother, her mother had driven off in her cart every day to the farms, leaving her with her grandparents. There was no father to look after her. Her grandmother had taught her to walk — she’d learned that from her grandmother when she went to say goodbye to her before leaving for Vienna. You took your very first steps between our crooked mud walls, and now you can go so much farther — all the way to Vienna, her grandmother had said. But no sooner had her grandmother died than her mother followed her to Vienna, and supposedly it was because the war frightened her.

  Well then.

  All right.

  The moment when the old woman might tell her daughter about how the Poles had beaten her husband to death would never come.

  You never — you never realize . . . , the mother says.

  Realize what?

  You never realize how fast the time goes.

  Uh-huh.

  Her mother had never really spoken to her about where her father might be. Possibly he was in America, possibly in France. Her father must have had his reasons for leaving his wife so early on.

  All right.

  Be well, child.

  The goy is fine, but now her daughter has been left hanging between two worlds, dangling, flailing, she has no choice but to brace her feet against her mother, pushing herself away from her — her mother, whose features as she ages are now so clearly marked as

  belonging to the race of David that she is often harassed on the street, skipped over at the soup kitchen, and insulted by her neighbors.

  You, too.

  If her mother hadn’t married her to a goy, she wouldn’t be someone’s mistake for her entire adult life.

  12

  Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.

  The future is not lowering its prices, certainly not in times like these; but you can only buy it with the past. Lot’s wife, who was too weak to leave her homeland without a final glance, who turned back knowing that the place she would see was destined for destruction, was turned into a woman of salt. This daughter is smarter. When her mother came to join her in Vienna as a refugee the first year of the war, she had kept her in her own apartment for only a few days and then as quickly as possible found one for her far enough away from her own. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. Her daughters were being given a Christian upbringing and weren’t sent to visit their grandmother even once. The forest provides wood for the axe that will chop it down. Each living being exhausts its own resources for those who will come after, that’s what growth is. The old woman made her daughter the gift of a path leading away from her. At the moment, this path appears to be destroying her child, but it’s quite possible that her granddaughters will reach the goal. Some are destined to stay behind, some to depart, and yet others to arrive.

  That’s how life works.

  Fifteen hundred tons of flour from Switzerland, the mother said.

  Well, we’ll see.

  13

  They returned from Alserstrasse to the apartment on foot, and now they are waiting for time to pass — all at once it’s become so slow. He sits beside her in the kitchen, bent over, his elbows propped on his knees, gazing at the floor in silence. Only when she hears the regular dripping does she look at him and see that tears are running down his cheeks to the tip of his nose, collecting there, and dripping to the floor tiles at his feet. Then she wants to go home. And then he says she should stay. What, stay? Stay overnight with him — who is now alone? He grabs her by the shoulders and weeps into the crook of her neck, or was it really a kiss? What? Happiness cuts shame, shame covers unhappiness, unhappiness unfurls happiness. Hope pushes aside grief, proving to be so much stronger — so strong that it surprises even the seventeen-year-old herself, this is the intensity of women fighting over bread in front of the Anker bakery — the old ones are often stronger than the younger ones, though they are so much closer to dying. Suddenly alert with hopefulness, she says: Yes, and follows the man, not heading for the vestibule this time, as she’s always done when spending the night here, but instead lying down next to him at his request, obediently lying down in the bed of her friend, lying for the first time beside the man whom she has loved ever since he returned home from the war that past December like someone she’d never seen before. What? She lies down in the place of her dearest friend, who has been dead only since the morning, 3:20 a.m. The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days. Inconsolable, she will now — what? — inherit what belonged to her friend, who yesterday was still warm; she will metamorphose into her friend and continue her conversations in her body with their beloved. Has anyone b
efore seen such soft lips on a man who was forced to kill so as not to be killed himself, has anyone seen such shiny, wetly gleaming teeth, and a nose whose nostrils flare with arousal, has anyone seen such long lashes shading a pair of eyes — such beautiful shadows — these lashes brought home unsinged from all the fires? Ever since the moment when he was standing there unexpectedly at the door, she has known that this is the man who was destined for her all along, and now at long last he knows it too, at long last he is lying beside her just as she imagined countless times, breathing so close beside her that she can inhale his breath, and if it weren’t so dark, she would surely be able to see him gazing at her through the night, gazing all the way through her. What?

  14

  In the local scythe factory — situated not on the Judenburg Terrace but directly on the left bank of the Mur — fifteen cm. lengths of stacked steel were thrown in a northeasterly direction. In a smithy in Purbachgraben, approximately one hundred m. from the right bank of the Mur — where the limestone massif of the Liechtenstein Mountain descends to the Judenburg Terrace — tools on the west wall were thrown to the east. In Aichdorf a small bell tolled (plane of oscillation: east/west). In Fohnsdorf, a man was thrown out of bed in an eastwardly direction. Several persons staggered or fell in an eastwardly direction, e.g., a schoolboy on the road between Rikersdorf and Allerheiligen, who simultaneously heard a howling sound and a thunder-like crash; a local apprentice on a ladder; and in the building next door, a schoolboy on the stairs. Taking into account the objects’ inertia, these findings correlate well with the observations of several witnesses, who were sitting quietly at the time and had the impression that the main thrust came from the east.

  15

  When her mother comes to relieve her at midnight, the younger daughter doesn’t say that she just saw her older sister with a man. The two of them walked right past her where she stood hidden among the crowd of people. And she, the little sister, didn’t dare call out her sister’s name, her sister was walking with her head down, tight-lipped, not speaking to the man who was walking at her side. So this is how her sister spends the nights she’s not at home. Years ago, when the younger sister had stumbled across her older sister’s diary and read a little bit of it, her sister had suddenly come into the room, but she hadn’t shouted or struck her sister when she saw what she was doing, she just calmly removed the book from her hands and said to her:

  Do you think I was happy when you were born?

  Maybe.

  Do you remember the glass marbles you always played with?

  Yes.

  Do you remember the time I told you to try swallowing them?

  Maybe.

  Why do you think I wanted you to do that?

  Dunno.

  Do you remember the wall behind the house where Simon the coachman lives?

  Yes.

  Do you remember the time I told you to try jumping down from it?

  Maybe.

  Why do you think I would have said that?

  Dunno.

  If you ever touch this book again, you will no longer be my sister. Do you understand?

  Yes.

  And so now her tight-lipped sister had walked down the street beside a tight-lipped man without realizing her little sister had seen her. Even a public place like this, even in the middle of the night, could reveal something that was none of anyone else’s business, just like an open book, in a city as large as Vienna there was no avoiding someone’s reading it. She had been standing there for the past five hours so that her sister would be able to eat cow udder the next day in order to survive, and also so that she herself would be able to eat it to survive, along with her mother and father. Her sister, in turn, while she, the little sister, was at school, would accompany her mother to the Vienna Woods to collect firewood, for hours she and their mother would march through the frigid woods and exhaust themselves lugging armfuls of filthy waterlogged sticks, only so that the younger sister — and she herself, of course, and their mother and father — would not freeze in their own home. Nonetheless, it was perfectly possible that if this very same sister knew that her younger sister had watched her walking through the nocturnal Viennese streets at the side of a man, she would wish her dead, perhaps with more success this time. How many fronts like these were there in a life that might cost a person her life? How arduous it was surviving all the battles in which one would not fall.

  16

  But then, the man falls asleep as soon as he is lying beside her, the warmth of his body next to the warmth of her body, the man does not touch her the entire night, not even in a dream. All night long she hears him breathing next to her; from breath to breath, she knows with increasing certainty there is no point putting out a hand to touch him. The weeping that has been stuck in her throat ever since the departure of the 7031 now breaks to the surface, but now they are tears of a different sort: This weeping for her dead friend gets twisted — still in her throat — into a weeping out of jealousy, tears of mourning become tears of fury at the man she loves, who has invited her to share his bed but now is refusing to console her for the loss he has suffered. By the end of the night, she is weeping only out of shame. She has now received an answer once and for all to a question that, left to her own devices, she would not have asked for a long time, perhaps never. An answer she would never willingly have asked for, namely that the man is friendly but does not love her, that his mourning for the deceased is genuine and deep, while her own duplicitous nature has no counterpart anywhere in the world. If he shared her sentiments, how little would she care what her father, mother, and friends had to say about it, but now this defeat has condemned her irrevocably. Sleeping, he had encouraged her to hope, and sleeping, he has struck her down in crushing defeat. Lonelier than ever, she arises at dawn from the side of the sleeping man; no one who knew what she had hoped for could ever wish to consort with her again; she herself has no choice but to go on enduring her body, which has led her so badly astray, if only she had gone home the night before, as she’d originally intended, the way home would have been nothing more than walking, setting one foot before the other. But now she knows what it means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. She gathers up her things and leaves the apartment without waking him.

  17

  At some point, nearly morning, she finally . . . what time though, dunno, around six or maybe seven? Dunno. Was she crying? I don’t think so. I was just surprised when she refused to get up, even at nine she was still, she didn’t get up all morning, her eyes were shut, but she wasn’t sleeping. And not a bite of anything. Not even coffee. All day long just lying there. I’m going to lie here and never get up again, she said to me. Really. She wouldn’t come to the woods on Tuesday either. No one on earth. On Wednesday I got the eggs from Mizzi but she didn’t want hers. And then the night after, her hair! Exactly, I didn’t go out for my chess game; I really thought we’d be off to Steinhof to commit her. So did I. Her beautiful hair. But on Friday she seemed better. Yes, that was my impression too. Completely calm. There was a fresh snowfall on Saturday, her first time downstairs. I draped my coat over her, and downstairs she said it made her dizzy to look at the falling snow. I said: so don’t look. And I said: eat something proper, then you’ll be able to stand on your feet again. And she opened her mouth and let the snowflakes fall into it. Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t help laughing. Me neither.

  And then it was Sunday.

  18

  On Sunday, thank God, the older girl finally wants to go out for a little walk again. Are you going to see your friend? her mother asks. Yes, she says. Her mother shuts the door behind her; before the door closes, the girl hears her mother calling to her father: Don’t you think it’s strange that her friend didn’t come to see her even once? Well, how could she? Maybe on the 7031? It’s her parents’ own fault they know so little about their daughter. It’s not as if anyone ever asked her if she wanted a sister in the first place, or whether she liked Vienna so much the first time
they visited that she wanted to move there. When a handicrafts teacher at the lyceum had used the words sloppy and shoddy to describe a doll’s dress she had sewn with great effort, she’d understood that even after years in Vienna she was still a foreigner here and would remain one. She still remembers her grandmother coming to stay with them right after she fled Galicia; for several days the kitchen had smelled like in the old days, smelled of pear compote and challah, but when the provisions her grandmother had brought with her were exhausted, her mother had immediately found the old woman another apartment and forbidden her daughters to visit her there. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. Only then did she realize that she, too, was of Jewish descent, but her father still took her and her sister to services at a Christian church Sunday after Sunday, they sat in the civil servants’ pew with other civil servants and their families. For more than ten years now, her father had been telling his colleagues that his wife wasn’t so steady on her feet and therefore attended a church closer to their home, and in this way — this much one must grant him — he had advanced to the ninth pay grade, but even for a civil servant of that grade, it was no great feat these days to starve to death as miserably as the monkeys, camels, and donkeys in the Schönbrunn Menagerie. Did keeping her misguided love a secret from her friend make her just as halfhearted and deceitful as her parents? It had done no good to keep the truth to herself either, for a truth remained even if it was never spoken aloud, day after day it went on doing what it had to. Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, Arenbergpark, Neulinggasse — which eventually turns into Gusshausstrasse on the way to the district called Margareten and then later becomes Schleifmühlgasse — and finally Margaretenstrasse itself — the scrap of paper on which her mother had written down her grandmother’s address had been right there in the kitchen drawer.