Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
19
Time to go. Let’s go
.
Every Sunday she went to the Vienna Woods to get firewood. She would
take the tram to the end of the line at Rodaun or Hacking, along with a great many
others. Like her, they would carry baskets, rucksacks, or satchels on their backs;
from there, she’d enter the woods to collect kindling, perhaps breaking off a branch
here and there that was not too heavy.
My cousin helping me out with coal — wouldn’t that be nice.
Hat, coat, glove. Good.
Returning home in the evening, she sometimes had to let a tram or
two pass before managing to squeeze into one of the overcrowded cars, so she often
remained standing at the tram stop in the dark for over an hour, freezing, while in
the illuminated tram people stood or sat, with the wood they had gathered sprouting
awkwardly from their rucksacks and panniers.
And the basket. And the rucksack.
From the outside, a tram like that resembled an aquarium, and when the
car lurched into motion or braked, all the people behind the fogged-up glass swayed
back and forth with their bundles of twigs like one huge organism.
Oh, it’s all getting tangled up. What a disaster. The boots. Now
look, it’s falling out the top. Oh, this
shvakhkeyt
, this weakness.
Well.
Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people
more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers,
ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also
looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping
off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and
stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all
human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them
from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each
other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.
All right, that’s good now. Oh, I almost forgot the key. That would
have been something.
20
You just have to start walking, then a street name scrawled on a
scrap of paper with a building and apartment number will turn into a route to
follow: with buildings on either side, with weather (cold and damp), with the sound
of footsteps sinking into slush and snow, and with other people on this or that
errand, willing or unwilling; a route that leads you past dimly lit taverns and
shops whose windows are almost empty or sealed up with shutters. The low, stooped
building where the old woman lives has a stone angel keeping watch over the
entryway.
How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts.
After
fleeing the provinces and spending her first few days in Vienna in her daughter’s
apartment, the old woman told her older granddaughter about the two angels that
prophesied the fall of Sodom to Lot and conducted him to safety. These angels were
so beautiful that the citizens of Sodom wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh
from their limbs and devour them.
Sheyn vi di zibn veltn.
As beautiful as
the seven worlds. Now, as the older granddaughter presses down on the door handle,
trying to remember how her grandmother said this sentence to her, it suddenly seems
unfamiliar, and she wonders whether she just dreamed it. . . .
As
beautiful
. The building’s dark entryway stinks, above one of the doors on the
ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. In the stairwell, it
seems that some of the windows facing the courtyard are broken and have been
replaced with wooden panels. The beautiful man; oh, his lips, the wings of his nose,
his eyelashes. Has beauty never had any other purpose than to cause those who wish
to possess it to rise up against each other, and, in the end, between them, tear the
beautiful object to shreds, or, failing that, destroy each other instead? She rings
the bell and also knocks on the door, but no one answers. As a girl, she had marched
to the
Rathaus
, demanding that the war come to an end. Now she is in the
middle of her own war, one in which — even at so great a distance from bombs,
grenades and poison gas — she is still finding it infinitely difficult to
survive each day from beginning to end, and then all through the night.
21
What in the Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening?
Of the fourteen persons who fell victim to lightning in 1898, two
were killed by lighting bolts striking inside buildings, two under trees, one
under a wayside shrine where he’d taken cover, and seven out in the open,
including two reapers working in the fields. In two cases, I was unable to
determine the precise circumstances. Outside the town of Laufen an der Sann,
lightning struck a woman who was carrying a hoe on her back. The woman was
paralyzed, and a mark was left behind on her back in the shape of the
hoe.
After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her mother threaded new
shoelaces in her younger daughter’s shoes. After the older girl went out on Sunday
evening, her father spread out his files on the kitchen table and started reading.
On Sunday evening, after her older sister had gone out, the younger girl did her
mathematics homework, her mother got her sewing kit from the cold parlor and began
to darn socks, and her father experimented with whether he could read better with
his glasses on or without, he pushed the glasses down and looked over the top of
them, then pushed them back up and finally said: This typeface really isn’t easy to
read. The younger girl then put more wood on the fire, and the wood hissed because
it was so damp. Her mother said: Go wash your hands, otherwise you’ll make your
notebook dirty. The younger girl washed her hands in the bucket. The mother bit off
the thread. The father turned the page of the file. The younger girl wiped her hands
on her dress, sitting back down at the table. Her mother looked for a different
color of thread in her sewing basket. Her father laid his glasses to one side and
went on reading. The young girl dipped her pen into the inkwell and solved her
arithmetic problem. Her mother coughed. Her father turned over another page of the
file.
22
Margaretenstrasse, Heumühlgasse (down one or the other of those
streets), then Rechte Wienzeile, across the Naschmarkt, Linke Wienzeile, somewhere
or other, Girardigasse, Gumpendorfer Strasse, Stiegengasse, Windmühlgasse;
everywhere, the snow is piled up shoulder-height on either side —
Theobaldgasse, Rahlgasse — just as high on the right as on the left —
Mariahilfer Strasse, Babenberger Strasse, Opernring — and it’s slippery, as
smooth as glass. Does she really want to turn onto Opernring? Or would it be better
to take a left onto Burgring? Today, it is exactly one week since she waited on
Alserstrasse with the man she loves for the 7031. How long does a week last?
Crossing the street to the left, toward the Museum of Fine Arts, would mean picking
her way between two gigantic heaps of snow with a frozen puddle in between, so she
turns to the right. In the opera house on the other side of the street, music and
listening to music are locked up together. Why is she walking around outside? To
exhaust herself to the point where she can neither see nor hear? Is she indulging in
a stroll? Strolling to her demise? Two pounds of butter, someone whispers at her
cold back. How much? She keeps going. Two pounds of butter and fifty decagrams of
veal. The man’s whisperings insinuate themselves beneath the broad brim of her hat,
slipping into her ear from behind. Two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal,
ten candles. Although the entire world lies open before her, which she thought might
put an end to her hearing, she can hear what the man is offering in exchange for her
person. Is she interested? Or would she rather return home, where what is called her
life is taking place: her father reading his files, her little sister doing her
homework, her mother calling her, her older daughter, a whore.
Salome
is
being performed tonight. How long has it been since her parents went out together?
Does she know a good reason not to accept? Or is she not so sure? When she turns
around, she sees a young man, perhaps only slightly older than she is; he has no hat
on, even though it’s the middle of winter, so she sees his thin hair, by the time
he’s twenty-five he’ll have a bald spot, she thinks, and she’s surprised to see
beads of sweat on his forehead in the middle of winter.
Two pounds of butter, he repeats, looking at her, fifty decagrams of
veal, ten candles.
He says her price right to her face.
And why not twelve candles, she says and starts to laugh.
The time when it went without saying that the freshly fallen
snow would promptly be carted from the streets of the Viennese city center to the
Danube and dumped into the channel that had been knocked clear of ice is long past.
Thanks to the war, something is missing: men, the freshly fallen men. The most that
happens now is that the snow gets pushed aside, shoveled into heaps by a couple of
war invalids, women and children; on warmer days these heaps of snow begin to melt
until they are ringed with puddles that freeze over during the night in precisely
those spots where the path was to remain clear. The layer of ice covering the
sidewalks of Vienna, in heavily traveled spots above all, has grown so hard and
thick in the course of the winter that no one even tries to chop it up any longer.
Pedestrians wishing to cross from Babenberger Strasse to the Museum of Fine Arts or
to walk down Burgring on the left away from the city center must take particular
care not to fall. Captain Eduard Gabler, for instance, suffered a compound fracture
of his forearm just yesterday when he fell on the ice walking at Freudenauer
Winterhafen; Private Franz Adler also broke his forearm, on Marxergasse; factory
owner Mortiz Gerthofer suffered an exposed fracture of his right shin on
Nobilegasse; and nurse Frieda Bertin fell on Mariahilfer Strasse, not at all far
from here, suffering a severe contusion of the left hip. Where one crosses
Babenberger Strasse toward the Art History Museum, away from the city center, the
ice between two heaps of snow has long since been polished smooth by the heavy
pedestrian traffic, even though yesterday’s snowfall briefly covered it up. But
because of the countless shoes, and also several bare feet, that have passed over
this spot since then, the snow has become inseparably conjoined with the ice over
the course of the morning, itself becoming ice. This ice appears black —
though of course there is no deep body of water beneath its surface — and it
displays the approximate contours of the African continent on a smaller scale.
Seamstress Cilli Bujanow nearly slipped on this bit of ice around 2:30 in the
afternoon, but was propped up by Lieutenant Colonel of the Chamber of Finances
Alfred Kern, who happened to be walking behind her, sparing her the fall.
Seven-year-old Leopoldine Thaler practiced skating on the puddle as she passed,
eleven-year-old pupil David Robitschek attempted to shatter the ice by jumping up
and down on it (unsuccessful), a stray dog of unknown provenance urinated on the
right-hand heap of snow, causing a portion of the ice, corresponding roughly to the
region of former German East Africa, to melt and also dyeing the area yellow
approximately as far down as the Niger. By six, this bit too has frozen again,
although the surface of the ice in this area is slightly roughened. The young lady
who at approximately 6:00 p.m. at first considers crossing Babenberger Strasse here
and then walking to the left toward of the Museum of Fine Arts would be compelled
— before reaching the rougher area north of the Equator that promises
salvation in the form of a firm foothold — to step on the treacherously
slippery territory of South Africa, but at the last minute, she loses her nerve, and
instead heads off to the right in the direction of Opernring.
So you aren’t one after all, the pale lad asks long after she
has stopped laughing. No, she says. She’s surprised at how hard the young man is
sweating even though he doesn’t have his coat buttoned. She wouldn’t mind being
cheap if it meant she wouldn’t be on her own forever with all the time in the world.
How many people can simultaneously be in possession of all the time in the world?
Would she like to . . . ? She decides to join him for a glass of wine. That is . . .
She has no idea how grateful . . . In the café he seizes her hands and holds them to
his face, using them to wipe the tears from his eyes and the mucus from his nose,
perhaps she’ll excuse him, he’s never been with one before, but just now he wanted,
perhaps she will understand, you see his fiancée just, that is, no longer, and sent
him packing, although for two years now, an engagement after all, or doesn’t that
mean . . .
How long does a life last, anyhow?
Seventy or eighty years?
Doesn’t she already know more than she can bear?
. . . his fiancée would see all right if he carried on just like she
did, preferably with lots of girls . . . really, though, someone ought to kill
her.
Oh dear, the young woman thinks, her hands already dripping with tears.
Does he know her, this man? Does he know what she has wished for? Does he know what
a burden she is finding life, which from inside always looked to her like a sphere
with perfectly smooth, black walls, and you keep running and running and there isn’t
even a shabby little door to let you out?
He’d have shot her if only she’d come out of her building, he
says. But she knew what he was capable of, so she stayed where she was, and what was
he supposed to do now . . . he never thought . . . after all he was . . . and he’d
always treated her . . . and never once . . . He’d have shot her? she asked.
How?
Right here, he says, slipping his fingers into the right-hand pocket of
his coat, it’s my father’s Mauser.