Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
26
And her murderer is still alive, her mother says, the murderer of
my daughter did quite nicely for himself, and now the girl is dead.
Leave it alone, her father says, and who’s saying he’s even going to
pull through?
Leave it alone, that’s all you have to say when our child lets a person
like that shoot her?
A person like what? asks their younger daughter, who will soon be known
only as their daughter.
I tell you, if you start gallivanting around like your sister, I’ll give
you what for.
They say she hardly knew him, her father says.
So she hardly knew him — apparently it was enough to have him
whack her.
The younger girl is silent. Her sister once forbade her to poke into her
secrets and possibly betray them to her parents or to anyone else whose business
they were not, and the prohibition is still alive and well. What good would it do
now after the fact if she told her parents that she saw her sister walking through
the streets of Vienna with a man on Sunday, a week and a half ago?
Until Sunday, a week and a half ago, everything was fine, her father
says. True enough, says her mother.
She did, however, sometime on Monday just before dawn . . . her father
says . . . and even on Tuesday, says the younger daughter . . . no one in the world
. . . her father says, and on Wednesday I . . . and then that night, the younger one
says, exactly, on Friday it seemed as if . . . her father says, on Saturday, fresh
snowfall, says her father, the younger sister says: And then came Sunday. . . .
Would you two stop, her mother says now to her husband and daughter,
you’re not going to bring her back with talk like that.
How awful that you never truly know what’s going on, her father
says.
Her mother says: Be grateful.
What in the good Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening, her father
asks and begins to cry.
27
Not until Friday afternoon — in the Pathological
Institute they are investigating the path of the bullet and whether the young woman
didn’t perhaps shoot herself after all — does her father set off for
Margareten. (Her mother says she has her hands full with all the formalities,
someone’s got to see to it that life goes on.) The dark entryway stinks, and above
one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment
number. The girl’s grandmother doesn’t say anything when she learns what has
happened, but her entire body begins to tremble. The girl’s father remembers the
first time he came into her shop and saw her daughter, whose skin was so white, it
would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. He
remembers that not long afterward, the shopkeeper showed him her daughter’s bed, and
a cat lay curled up on it asleep. He just nods to her in silence and turns to go,
opening the apartment door himself and then shutting it behind him. A number of the
windows that in better days used to look out on the courtyard from the stairwell
have been nailed up with boards.
When the investigations have been completed on Monday, the
official enters
cerebral hemorrhage
under “cause of death” in the Registry
of Deaths, and on Tuesday the funeral is held in the Catholic section of Vienna’s
Central Cemetery, at Gate III. At the edge of the dark pit, the sacristan says a
prayer, father and younger sister cross themselves, and the mother keeps her hands
in her coat pockets.
Yene velt.
The world to come. The grandmother might
have come to see that her granddaughter at least made it as far as the Catholic
cemetery, but no doubt she prefers to keep them waiting instead. Once again she is
leaving her daughter to deal with the most difficult things alone, just as in the
old days, when she couldn’t even teach her to walk.
Perhaps, the younger girl thinks, everything would have gone differently
if she had swallowed the glass marbles as her sister commanded, jumped down from
Simon’s wall, or allowed her sister to cause her death in some other way. Had her
sister now gone in her place? Had she not been thinking of her at all when she died?
Her father takes a handful of earth and throws it into the grave. When the snow fell
— the snow that is making the heap of freshly dug earth, the dark hillock
stand out — his daughter was still alive.
Over there, on the other side of the high wall, is the Israelite
Cemetery; no tree rises into the air there, the sky is unimpeded, someone who
doesn’t know better might expect there would be streetcar tracks on the other side,
or open fields, but her mother knows it is on purpose no trees were planted, for if
one day the roots of the trees were to go zigzagging between the remaining bones of
a person buried there, prying them apart, the person would no longer be whole when
his name was called for the Last Judgment.
When they return from the cemetery, their daughter eats her
own portion of mutton, then she eats her father’s portion, since he says he can’t
get it down, and finally she eats the portion belonging to her dead sister. (Her
mother didn’t report that they are now one person fewer, therefore she was given the
twelve-and-a-half decagrams of meat due the deceased along with the rest of the
family’s rations when she exchanged the still-valid stamps at the Grosser Markt
early that morning.)
God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us
food
. It’s only now that her sister lies buried that the younger daughter
is so hungry.
28
But then the cousin, who has never before come to visit, rings the
bell, just to say that. Well, what? That the girl’s grandmother, the very day she
learned of her older granddaughter’s death, fell down the cellar steps and, as he
put it, landed badly, and now — well, they probably understand what he meant.
So it really does look as if things won’t start looking up again until they are as
black as pitch. Her mother rises to her feet and starts stacking the dirty plates.
When she set the table, it was in the belief that she had a mother who was still
alive. Does it make a difference to someone who doesn’t know the truth whether a
person is dead or just very far away? The cousin says it took him several days to
track down the family’s address, and the funeral has already taken place as Jewish
law demands. Is there still a war on, the daughter thinks, is that why so many are
dying all at once? I can’t imagine what she wanted in the cellar, her father says,
she must have run out of coal long ago.
Ver veyst
, the cousin says, who
knows. Now, the father thinks, he will have to stay alive until after the first of
the month, and also the first of the next month, and the month after that, so that
the dying doesn’t get the upper hand, so that everything will remain balanced and
not suddenly begin to tip; the father thinks this but says nothing. Gate IV, Field
3, Row 8, Plot 12, the cousin writes on a scrap of paper which, after he’s left, her
mother puts in the kitchen drawer.
29
In the middle of a snowy field — a few gravestones here and
there — at the very back of the Israelite section of the cemetery, it would be
easy to find the hillock of freshly disturbed dirt. Gate I, Gate II, Gate III and
finally Gate IV. According to the beliefs a person held while alive, he or she will
come to lie in the ground near either one or the other tram stop. Less than a minute
and a half’s ride separates deceased Protestants, Catholics, and Israelites. From
her grandmother’s grave, a mourner could easily glance over at the high wall
surrounding the Catholic cemetery at the tall, snow-covered trees, and in this
silence, even at a distance, she’d be able to hear the sound the snow makes when,
having grown too heavy for its own good, it slides from a branch, making the branch
spring quickly back into the air.
30
It is cold inside her dead mother’s apartment, cold and dark. Even
the water in the bucket is frozen. When she goes to empty it in the courtyard, it
falls to the ground as a solid lump of ice.
Fire, locusts, leeches, plague,
foxes, snakes, insects, lice
. With the first installment of his Viennese
salary, her husband once took her to the Burgtheater. They sat in the cheapest seats
and saw
Iphigenia on Tauris
. “Farewell,” she remembers. At the time, she
imagined she understood better than anyone else in the theater, at that final moment
before the curtain closed, what it meant to renounce something. Never did she see
her mother reading the
Collected Works
of Goethe, but now, every one of its
volumes is standing there in her grandmother’s bookshelf, tidily arranged next to
the miniature grandfather clock, just the same as back home. So that’s why the
suitcase her mother brought with her to Vienna was so heavy. Farewell. All her life
she’s paid for having snatched her first child back from hell with nothing more than
a handful of snow, and only now is it becoming clear that there are things that have
no price.
No breath of air disturbs the place. / Deathly silence far and wide. /
O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples with the tide.
Was she
the one her mother had brought these books to? She also packs the seven-armed
candelabra from the sideboard in the suitcase.
Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep
nit arunter
. Don’t go falling down the stairs. Now it is too late to speak
Yiddish with her mother. A number of the windows facing the courtyard in the
stairwell have been replaced with wooden panels. She can’t see the angel above the
entryway because she doesn’t turn around. She would like to know what exactly her
mother had been paying for all her life. At home, in Volume 9, the spine of which is
a bit scraped, she finds the play that for the most part she can still recite by
heart. She doesn’t make a fire in the stove, she doesn’t wash the dishes, she
doesn’t go stand in line, she doesn’t sew, doesn’t darn and doesn’t cry; she sits
down quietly in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets, and just as she did back when she
was a young girl, she reads Goethe’s play
Iphigenia
.
31
The father doesn’t die until just over a year later, on December
2, 1920. His wife sells his clothes on the black market, but first she cuts off the
gold-colored buttons with the eagle of the monarchy and puts them in a box. The
father’s December salary, paid out to the widow as a final installment, is just
enough for one midday meal. At least the daughter gets an extra portion of milk with
cocoa each day at school, thanks to the Americans.
32
In 1944 in a small forest of birch trees, a notebook filled with
handwritten diary entries will fall to the ground when a sentry uses his rifle butt
to push a young woman forward, and she tries to protect herself with arms she had
previously been using to clutch the notebook to her chest. The book will fall in the
mud, and the woman will not be able to return to pick it up again. For a while the
book will remain lying there, wind and rain will turn its pages, footsteps will pass
over it, until all the secrets written there are the same color as the mud.
INTERMEZZO
But if her grandmother had left for the Vienna Woods just half an hour
later to gather firewood; or if the young woman who was so eager to cast her life aside had
not, after leaving her grandmother’s locked door to wander through the city, taken a right
turn from Babenberger Strasse onto Opernring, where she coincidentally encountered her own
death in the form of a shabby young man; or if the fiancée of this shabby young man had not
broken off their engagement until the next day; or if the shabby young man’s father hadn’t
left his Mauser pistol in the unlocked drawer of his desk; if the young woman hadn’t looked
from behind like a girl of easy virtue because her skirt was just too short — why in
the world had she cut it half a year before; or, given how cold it was, if she’d crossed
Babenberger Strasse in the icy spot despite the danger of slipping (instead of protecting
herself from this danger with healthy instincts only to run right into the arms of death
moments later with all her limbs intact), indeed, if she had slipped and fallen, perhaps
even broken a leg, then she would have been brought to the Vienna General Hospital to have
her leg set in plaster, instead of several days later, in the bloom of health, succumbing to
a violent death of her own choosing and winding up in a chilly storage room; or if the
frigid weather sweeping in from Sweden had given way to the warm Gulf stream two days
earlier, then her grandmother wouldn’t have needed to go to the Vienna Woods until that
Wednesday, or the puddle wouldn’t have been frozen, and when the young woman came to the end
of Babenberger Strasse, she would certainly have made the decision to cross the street at
that point and walk past the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts, which would have been closed that
Sunday evening — she’d once seen a picture there of a family consisting of a father,
grandmother, and child — and at that moment, she would have been thinking not about
having herself shot, but about the lemon the father was holding out to the child, that
brightly glowing bit of yellow in the dark painting that, during these hours when the museum
was closed, was now hanging on a wall unseen. Who decides what thoughts time will be filled
with? Only half an hour, or perhaps an entire hour later, becoming conscious that her only
option for a bed that night was at her parents’ apartment, she would have turned around,
would have walked down the Ring, but this time in the direction of home, since she wouldn’t
have had the money for a taxi, and while her homeward journey would still have taken her
past the opera house, the young man would have no longer been waiting there on Opernring, he
would long since have been lying — for the price of two pounds of butter, fifty
decagrams of veal, and ten candles — in the arms of some girl of easy virtue, while
she herself would have gone home unmolested, would to be sure have been obliged to ring the
concierge’s bell, waking her, and then to ask her mother to pay the twenty-heller fee, for
which her mother would have reproached her, but these reproaches would only have
strengthened her resolve to start earning her own money as soon as possible so as to finally
be able to move out of her parents’ apartment and rent a room of her own. But the decisive
moment was probably not the one that had just passed, it was everything that had come
before. There was an entire world of reasons why her life had now reached its end, just as
there was an entire world of reasons why she could and should remain alive.
*
The decision to move out of her parents’ apartment is one she would
have made that evening in any case, whether it was sitting with a broken leg in the waiting
room of the General Hospital, in the Vienna Woods with her grandmother’s rucksack strapped
to her back, or on her grandmother’s sofa, shivering beneath a thin blanket after her
grandmother offered to let her spend the night.
If you can’t go up, you’ll have to go
down — but if you can’t go across, you still have to go across.
Most probably,
though, she’d have been lying at home in her own bed, and in the other bed would be her
sleeping sister: this little sister who was already five foot seven; and if she’d been
certain that her sister’s slumber, though restless, was nonetheless sound, she would have
gotten up again to retrieve her diary from its hiding place behind the wardrobe and with a
small pencil — writing in the dark, blind — she would have written an entry
about everything that had happened. Just as at the age of fourteen, in the midst of hunger,
she had resolved not to let hunger blackmail her any longer, she would now have resolved, in
the midst of her unhappy love, not to let herself be blackmailed by unhappy love. If she had
managed to avoid the one place in Vienna and the one moment of the evening that could have
translated her desire to cast her life away into a death, she would now have realized, while
writing in her diary, that in fact writing was the only thing she wanted to do to make
money, and she would have started to consider how and what she could write, and so for the
first time in this entire week of misery she would have been thinking about something other
than the man she loved and her own shame and unhappiness.
The next morning she would have no longer have been able to
decipher what she’d written, since in the darkness of the night before, she’d have inscribed
half and whole letters one on top of the other in a single line. The shabby young man would
have remained hale and unscathed, and a few years later, at twenty-five, he would already
have developed a bald spot. Her grandmother would not have fallen down the cellar stairs,
and more than a decade later she would have hidden her granddaughter for several days when
she was threatened with arrest; but under these circumstances, her father would not have
postponed his own death and would have died on March 2 of this same year, just five weeks
after this night, of heart failure. Standing beside his grave, his older daughter would
involuntarily have thought for a second time of the lemon the Gothic father held out to his
child — whether it was a boy or girl was uncertain — in the midst of all that
darkness. She would have taken possession of her father’s excerpts from
Notes on
Earthquakes in Styria
and, weeping as she wrote, used them for her very first
article: “May the earth gape open once more and swallow up the war profiteers!” For although
her father died in his bed — of myocardial insufficiency, the doctors said — she
was convinced that in the end he had died of the war.
Her mother would have been paid the March installment of her husband’s salary,
which at that moment was just enough for the current week’s groceries.