The End of Days (3 page)

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 now 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.

On his way to the station he sees his apartment building on
the other side of the street and briefly stops. Something is taking place there that
used to be called his life, all he has to do is cross the street and go upstairs,
and he will be back where he belongs: beside his wife. Even from where he is
standing he can hear the shrieks and wails coming from inside. Not his wife’s voice
— that much is certain — and if he’s not mistaken, not the voice of his
mother-in-law either. Who is shedding tears over his child? The door opens, and a
woman he doesn’t know comes out of the house in low-heeled shoes, her coat buttoned
all the way up, her scarf covering her hair; as she walks, she wipes her tears, she
hasn’t noticed him on the other side of the street, and even if she did, she’d have
no idea why he was standing there, and by the time she reaches the next corner, it
won’t even be possible to tell that she’s been crying. When she turns off the
street, an old man is coming from the other direction and almost bumps into her, he
is holding a bowl. The old man nods to the woman, then continues slowly on his way
to the building’s front door, which he pushes open with his shoulder so that the
contents of his bowl — perhaps soup that he wants to bring to the woman in
mourning — will not spill. He, the highest ranking mourner, standing a stone’s
throw away, sees the stooped shoulders of the old man, and knows who it is: Simon,
the coachman from the Jewish quarter who is usually off carting wood shavings,
rubbish, and milk, he’s often seen him from behind sitting atop his coach box. All
the people here seem to know what their duty is, he’s the only one asking himself
what to do. If his mother were still alive, she would be praying the rosary with him
now, he would be sitting beside the tiny coffin in the parlor and would be the
father of the dead child. Is it a sign of cowardice if one leaves one’s life behind,
or a sign of character if one has the strength to start anew?

7

The question of whether the nursery should remain sealed up
forever is one she doesn’t have to answer, since it’s obvious she must give up the
entire apartment. The only option that remains to her is moving back in with her
mother. Hadn’t it pleased her when her husband married her — a Jew —
without his parents’ consent, and above all that his passion for her was so strong
it made him forget his own origins? This time, she’s the one he’s taken a mind to
abandon, he is leaving her behind without her consent. She knows that his absence
will be no greater and no smaller than his love for her and their child — and
what she’s seeing reflected now in the line of death is in the end nothing more than
the bond joining him to her.

You mustn’t forget, child, that he used you to pay his debts.

That’s not the only use I was to him: For example, I got in the way of
his professional advancement. He would have spent all eternity in the eleventh pay
grade for my sake.

But it wasn’t all eternity.

That’s because of the baby.

That’s what you think. It just didn’t occur to him beforehand that he
hadn’t done himself any favors by marrying you.

Is that supposed to console me?

Yes.

So now you also want to rob me of the days when I was happy.

I’m just saying: You never had as much as you imagine you’re losing
now.

Do you think I’d feel better if I saw things that way?

That’s what I’m hoping.

So then I’d just put on my apron again and remind myself how much a
herring weighs compared to three apples.

At least with herring and apples you know where you stand.

It’s obviously been a long time since you loved someone.

That’s unfair and you know it.

I don’t want to talk anymore.

She’d always thought that when two people were united, it was a matter
of crossing over a border you didn’t cross with anyone else, of leaving the world
behind and from then on sharing everything. Now she sees that this border is
malleable and can shift about at times like this. Imperceptibly, the border has slid
inward, and now it is once more separating him from her. Before, she was his
freedom; now he’s begun to seek his freedom elsewhere.

8

If only he knew where he could find death; he’s hoping for an easy
one now that he’s been lying here so long waiting for it.
As light as a kiss. As
easy as plucking a hair out of the milk.
A neighbor woman told him, without
his asking, that the infant suffocated. Suffocation, it says in the Talmud, is the
hardest among the 903 deaths.
Suffocation is like a briar that has gotten caught
in wool, you tear it out with all your strength and throw it over your shoulder.
Like a thick rope pulled through an opening that is too small.

Whoso findeth
, his friend congratulated him at his wedding
fifty-two years before, and this finding continues today — find: the wisdom in
the Torah, a good wife, a peaceful life, down to the last shovelful of earth on the
coffin; find: a death easy as a kiss,
like the kiss with which the Lord awoke
Adam to life
, he blew breath into his nose, and one day, if you’re lucky,
he’ll gently, lightly kiss it away again. Finding is also what you need to do, he
thinks, grinning his toothless graybeard grin, when you have an urgent need for the
privy. I’ve got to go, he shouts into the next room, for without the help of his
wife — who was his bride the day his friend wished him good fortune using the
word
findeth
fifty-two years before — without her help, he can no
longer get up.

9

Gray is the water — gray — and he throws up, why
is it throwing when you throw up, he thinks, raising his head briefly, but then he’s
sick to his stomach again, he’s never felt nausea like this in all his life. Once
his wife told him that as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat
as a
palatschinke
, and she herself — like all the other inhabitants
of the border town she lived in — had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of
this pancake like a grain of sugar. When she lost her way on the outskirts of town,
her one fear was that she might come too close to the border and suddenly fall off
the edge.
My little grain of sugar
. And all the while, as she later learned
at school, her horizon was nothing more than an imaginary line extending clear to
the other side of Russia. As long as one remained in a single spot, this was
genuinely difficult to understand, even for him, the young civil servant for whom
the railway — meaning the locomotion of human beings — was a matter of
professional concern. It’s really only here, on this swaying ship, that he is truly
internalizing what it means for the Earth to be a sphere. Not only is he made dizzy
by its roundness as he circles it, unable to endure this circling; at the same time,
the horizon keeps retreating before him, in motion, retreating ever farther, as
though the swaying ship were remaining fixed in place to defy him, keeping him, the
traveler, always the same distance from his destination, as though the journey’s end
were running away from him as he himself runs away, each canceling the other out as
he continues to move. The water is gray, and he is overcome with nausea, just as
sick to his stomach as several others standing there beside him, throwing up as
well. The wind is blowing from the direction in which the ship is sailing, it tugs
at the tails of his Imperial and Royal coat, chilling the spine of this man who
until recently was a civil servant with a lifetime appointment, who meanwhile, bent
over the back railing, is bequeathing to his native land in farewell everything with
which it nourished him. After two or three days the nausea will let up, someone says
behind him, it’s the gentleman with whom he is sharing his second-class cabin, a
Swiss gentleman who is just taking a stroll across the deck and, seeing his need,
gives him a handkerchief, assuring him that after this initial period things will
improve. The gentleman is apparently accustomed to traveling, he lets the wind
tousle his shock of hair and now pulls out an apple, saying that on the contrary,
the fresh air whets his appetite, he takes a bite and offers the young man an apple
too, no thank you, the man says, turning to face the sea once more, I understand,
says the bearer of apples, and tosses the second round thing down from the gallery
to the travelers of the lowest class in the cargo hold, who surely are hungry but
lack access to a railing of their own where they might throw up when nausea
overtakes them.

10

And her? For approximately three years she weighs herring and
apples, hands bread, milk, and matches across the counter.

You can’t keep staring people in the face like that.

There’s nothing else to look at.

It isn’t proper. Only children stare like that.

No one’s complained.

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often now, or Mr. Veitel.

I see you’re keeping track.

I wouldn’t say that, but I do have a good sense of my customers.

And I don’t.

You do fundamentally.

I don’t have to do this.

Why are you always so quick to take offense?

I’m not offended, but if my help isn’t wanted here I can go
elsewhere.

Really, so where would you go?

Her daughter says nothing.

That’s not how I meant it, you know that.

I don’t know anything at all.

They used to get their eggs from Johanna Sawitzki, but meanwhile it
turns out that Karel’s eggs are fresher. The price of kerosene for lamps has fallen
because it’s hard to sell Galician petroleum as fast as it degrades after being
brought to the surface. For herring and sour pickles purchased together, they give
their customers a better price than Levi.

In all the time you stand around waiting for customers you might have
mopped the floor. For example.

Sure.

Child, this is your shop too, you’re a grown woman now.

It was never my choice.

So now it’s my fault?

What was the point of learning all that Goethe by heart at school?

Be glad you got to go to school at all.

Now the lie the shopkeeper had always sold her daughter as the truth has
come to life after all. Now her daughter has taken her place as the abandoned wife,
while she herself has become what in truth she always was, if only in secret: a
widow.

11

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often, or Mr. Veitel, that may well be.
But now there’s the officer who’s taken to stopping in for matches every day at
precisely the hour when her mother is off making her rounds of the farms for milk
and eggs. He’ll say, perhaps, that he likes how she’s wearing her hair, and she’ll
ask him, perhaps, if they use real bullets for their maneuvers. Or he’ll say that it
really ought not to rain when they’re practicing their formations, and she’ll say no
one melts in a little rain and laugh, and he’ll says it’s pretty the way she laughs.
And once, as she’s handing him the matches across the counter, he suddenly pulls off
his white leather glove before taking the matches and ever so briefly touches her
hand, saying softly: I’m on fire, and she says: That’ll be one groschen, the same as
always, because she thinks she must have misheard. The next time, he says nothing at
all and keeps his glove on, perhaps because her mother is standing right beside her,
because on Sunday the farmers from whom she gets the eggs and milk are all at
church. But then, at the beginning of the next week, when she is all alone behind
the counter again, he wordlessly hands her a slip of paper along with the coin,
gazing openly at her, and only after he is gone does she unfold the paper and read.
All there is on the paper is: a street, a house number, a day, and a time. Aha, she
thinks, and then she thinks that she wasn’t mistaken after all. And later, in the
evening, lying alone in her bed in which she lay as a little girl — the bed to
which she returned after the death of her child so as to sleep herself old in it
and, who knows, perhaps even die in it someday — later, in the evening, that
hour of evening that might as well be night, she cannot think of a good reason not
to go at the appointed hour to where the officer will be awaiting her.