The End of Days (21 page)

Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck

BOOK: The End of Days

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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.

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?

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.

Alone.

Will he have to pick up her glasses to remember her eyes, her
wallet to remember her fingers, a pair of shoes to see her feet eternally in their
shoes, and her woolen blanket to remember until the end of days how her body looked
when she was napping after lunch? How many objects and coverings will be needed if
she is to retain at least a life of memory inside him? But probably there isn’t
anything his mother’s hands, reaching out from the realm of the dead, will be able
to grasp so firmly — no object, no piece of furniture, or item of clothing
— as she grasps him, the one to whom she first bequeathed her heartbeat, and
then, when he was still small, whose diapers she changed and whose nose she wiped,
whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, and whom later, as
he grew, she taught language and read to, whose hand she held to cross larger
streets, whose hair she combed, whose sweater she pulled on over his head and whose
shoes she tied, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, whom
she consoled when he fell down, whose temperature she took and whom she taught to
ride a bicycle, to whom she said what she found good and proper and what wrong, what
she found tedious, amusing, interesting, whom she looked at again and again,
watching and observing him, whom she scolded, shouted at and cursed, and often also
praised and kissed. For the first time now, he tries to see himself through his
mother’s eyes, from the outside, as it were, but this is difficult. Strange, he
thinks, that we use
blind spot
to designate a place that cannot clearly be
seen because it is too close. Still, memory no doubt prefers to be able to exchange
the bit of blindness for a living body.

During spring break he’ll start cleaning out the house, and
in the summer he’s supposed to move to a Home where he’ll spend the final year
before he comes of age, his legal guardian told him.

When the doorbell rings, he knows that on a Sunday it can be neither the
mailman nor the housekeeper.

The man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, and 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, says
good day
in Russian.

In the pause that follows, German silence and Russian silence
intermingle.

And then the boy’s father grabs him by his shock of hair and pulls him
in for a hug.

Like an exhausted boxer, the boy remains briefly in his embrace before
pushing away.

From the hall you can see into his mother’s study.

Is that where she wrote? his father asks.

Yes.

Would you make us some tea?

The boy nods.

While the boy puts on the kettle, takes out cups and tea from the
cupboard, and finally pours the water, his father leans against the doorpost,
watching his son move around busily, picking things up and putting them down.

When the tea is ready, the boy’s father picks up the teapot and leads
the way.

Let’s sit in here, his father says, walking into his mother’s study.

This is the first time for as long as the boy can remember that a
visitor is taking a seat not in the parlor but at the little tea table in his
mother’s study. On the wall is the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun.

Do you really live in Kharkov?

Why Kharkov?

The boy shrugs. He sits bent over in his chair, the cup in his
hands.

At first the father hears only a regular dripping sound, then he sees
the rings forming in his son’s teacup, a new ring each time a tear falls from the
tip of the boy’s nose into the tea.

When I met your mother, she was going through some difficult times.

Everything started when I asked whether her husband had returned home
yet and she burst into tears.

I wanted to give her my handkerchief, but there was still a knot in
it.

The knot was so tight that I couldn’t get it open right away.

That was how it started. . . .

Maybe you need one yourself?

Yes, please.

The father pulls a pressed handkerchief out of his front pocket and
gives it to his son.

What was the knot supposed to remind you of?

That there was an assembly that night.

And then?

I forgot the assembly.

INTERMEZZO

If she’d gone downstairs just five minutes later, she’d have missed the
entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to
someone else instead; or if she’d taken that step with her right foot instead of her left,
she wouldn’t have lost her footing; or if she’d been thinking not about this and that but
about that and this, she’d have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some
death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will
have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for
him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A
different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from —
sooner or later, here or there — stumbling right into it, flailing, falling,
plummeting, sinking?

In the fall of ’89, the partition between the Eastern and Western parts of
Germany collapses: it gets flattened, breached and scorned, and the mob that’s been working
itself into a frenzy stampedes out of its own country and flings itself into the arms of its
capitalist brothers and sisters — joy, rapture and sweet oblivion — an entire
body politic is emptied out, thrown up (why is it throwing when you throw up), surrendering
all power, all sovereignty, then collapsing, spent. Now another wind is blowing, something
that used to be called a life is now called forty years of waiting that have only now proved
worthwhile. What’s a five-year plan? Everything is being called by different names, new
“shores” on the horizon. Words, which long ago stopped being as real as a bag of flour or a
pair of shoes, have failed, becoming economically unsustainable. Twenty sorts of butter,
whereas before there was just one, rents are now being multiplied by ten, different plays
are being put on at the theater, the Russians are closing their barracks and selling their
forefathers’ fur hats, uniform jackets, and medals from the Great Patriotic War at the
Strasse des 17. Juni
flea market. On June 17, 1953, workers in East Berlin staged
a revolt against the excessive quotas being imposed on them, but they were unsuccessful,
while the miner and early activist Adolf Hennecke (pioneer of the quota) was now living in a
villa in Pankow. Down with privileges! In 1990, former government ministers, currently
unemployed, lean on their garden fences, chatting with retirees out walking their dogs.
Whether they will be allowed to hold on to these properties is being looked into. The
Easterners head to the West to collect their welcome payments, and return home Westerners.
East is no longer anything more than a point on the compass. The publishing house that
printed the books of the
estimable author
goes bankrupt. The readers have other
things to do than read these days, first they want a trip to the Canaries.
It is not
enough to be eighteen years old.
The century that used to be so young is now terribly
old. His mother, too, is old.

Her son comes to visit her on Sunday at four.

She says she’s realized that she’s been hiding things and she no longer
remembers where. She says she’s no longer herself.

The housekeeper brings coffee and cake on a tray, then she goes back out
again.

Mother to son: Should I kill myself?

Her son says: Of course not, Mother.

He says: Oh, Mother.

He says: How can you ask such a thing?

The son visits his mother on Sunday at four, his mother has a forearm that is
completely black and blue. He asks: Did you fall?

No, his mother says. She says that her skin just turns black and blue like
that in certain spots all by itself.

In the kitchen, the housekeeper tells the son that she doesn’t think that’s
true, but his mother never tells her anything.

The son comes to visit his mother on Sunday at four. As the housekeeper is
taking his coat, she says that his mother has only been awake for half an hour since when
she arrived in the morning to start work, she’d found his mother sitting fully dressed on
the edge of the bed, where she’d apparently been since the evening before. So she put her to
bed for the day.

Thank you, the son says. Thank you so much for all your trouble.

Then the housekeeper calls the son at 7:30 in the morning, saying his mother
is not at home. Is she with him? The son says: No. He says: I’ll be right over.

The son cancels a meeting, tells his older child that he’ll have to take the
bus to school and that he should get a move on since it is already late, asks his wife to
take their younger child to school, and his wife says: Are you out of your mind? I’ve got
make-up at 8:30, oh right, the father says, and calls his daughter’s school to say she’s
ill, when he hangs up, his daughter says: It’s bad to tell lies, and her father says: Get a
book, read, and wait until I get home.

Then the son drives to his mother’s house.

The housekeeper says: What am I supposed to do?

The son: It’s not your fault.

The son goes searching for his mother in all the surrounding streets.
Somewhere or other, she is sitting on the curb in her nightshirt, crying.

That night, when the children are in bed, the son says to his wife:

Things can’t go on like this with my mother.

His wife says: I don’t know what you mean.

My mother owns a large house.

His wife says: Forget it.

The man says: I know it wouldn’t be easy for you.

The woman: She kept trying to turn the children against me. If you’re in the
mood for a war, sure, let’s go move in with her.

The man: But she can’t look after herself anymore.