Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
BOOK III
1
A woman sits at a desk writing an account of her life. The desk is
in Moscow. This is the third time in her life she’s been asked to write an account
of it, and it’s entirely possible that this written account will put an end to her
life, possible that this piece of writing will be transformed, if you will, into a
weapon to be used against her. It’s also possible that this piece of writing will be
kept in reserve and that from the moment she turns it in she’ll be obliged to live
up to it, or to prove herself worthy of it, or else confirm the darkest suspicions
that might arise from it. In the last case, the words she’s writing here would also
— after a brief or protracted delay — be something like a misdiagnosed
illness that eventually, inevitably, would kill her. Didn’t her husband always say
that in the theater there’s never a gun hanging on the wall that isn’t going to be
fired off at some point? She remembers Ibsen’s
The Wild Duck
and how she
wept when the shot was finally fired. But perhaps she’ll succeed — after all
that’s why she’s sitting here, her one hope, and the reason she is taking such pains
to find just the right words — perhaps she’ll succeed in writing herself a way
out, in extending her life by means of a few letters more or less, or at least
making her life less onerous; there’s nothing left for her to hope for now than to
succeed in using her writing to write her way back into life. But what are the right
words? Would a truth take her farther than a lie? And which of the many possible
truths or lies should she use? When she doesn’t even know who will be reading what
she writes?
There’s only one thing she doesn’t assume: that this piece of
writing will be nothing more than a sheet of paper with ink on it, slipped into a
folder and forgotten. In a country in which every child and every cleaning woman and
every soldier can recite poems by Lermontov and Pushkin from memory, that would not
be likely.
2
I was born in 1902 in Brody to a civil servant and his wife,
in other words I had a bourgeois background
. And what exactly made this
background bourgeois? Perhaps the fact that when her grandmother fled from Galicia
to Vienna more than twenty years ago, she dragged along an edition of Goethe’s
Collected Works
? Her father’s salary wasn’t enough for her parents to
employ a maid even during their very first years in Vienna. She never had piano
lessons, nor did her sister play the violin. She knows of course that her background
is considered bourgeois because her father, instead of being a factory worker, was
an official at the Meteorological Institution. I earn my money with my buttocks, he
liked to say, meaning all the hours he spent in a chair poring over data. Even so
they’d nearly starved. Despite this fact, both her first account of her life, which
she’d written when she applied for a visa to enter the Soviet Union, and the second
one, composed apropos of her unsuccessful bid to be admitted into the Soviet Union’s
Communist Party, were marred by this bourgeois background of hers, as no doubt this
third one would be as well. Her background stuck to her, there was no helping it,
and she was stuck to it as well. She’d been able to remake her thinking from
scratch, but not her family history.
Never would she possess the same level of freedom as her husband, who
was free for all time,
doubly free
— and in principle free even now
that he was in prison, since he’d completed an apprenticeship as a metalworker
before beginning to write, he’d been a laborer, a
doubly free laborer
; in
other words: possessing nothing that could tie him down, he could go anywhere he
wanted. From a societal perspective, he was immune to blackmail.
The working
class has nothing to lose but their chains
. But did she herself really have
more to lose? Had she perhaps inherited not only the myopia but also the fearfulness
of her father, who all his life was obliged to worry that some trifling offense
might prevent him from rising on schedule from one pay grade to the next and in the
worst-case scenario — a revolution, say — even cause him to lose his
position? Were hands by nature more honest than heads? As a young girl, how she
would have loved to work with her hands, creating something that hadn’t previously
existed — but ever since that day at school when a crafts teacher had held up
the doll’s dress she had made, presenting it for the entire class to see as an
example of what she called
shoddy
and
sloppy
work, since this day
at school she had lost her faith in the work of her hands. If there were such a
thing as being born to grace, there was probably also a gracelessness you could be
born to.
Sloppy
and
shoddy
. She had later made the workers’
struggle her own all the more fervently.
In 1909 my family relocated to Vienna. Prolonged
adversity spurred me to become politically active for the first time at age
fourteen, spearheading an anti-war demonstration in 1916. Since I had not yet
benefited from Marxist schooling, it was merely an outpouring of pacifist
sentiment that prompted my resistance.
In her first account of her life, written as part of her visa
application, she had gone on at this point, writing:
. . . but my resistance
arose out of a passionate hatred of the war. Was the birth of the Soviet Union
in 1917 not also identical with the decision on the part of the Bolsheviks,
alone among all the peoples of the world, to autonomously cast off the burden of
this inhuman war, despite the enormous sacrifices this required?
If the world revolution had succeeded in those days, the uniting of the
proletarians of all countries would have been not only the start of a new world but
also of an eternal peace. What cause could people possibly have to slaughter one
another? What cause could the Austrians have to make the Italians bleed, what cause
the Germans to slit open the French? None at all.
To be sure, there had been peace in 1918, but the European borders were
not dissolved, they were only pushed this way and that. On the other hand,
everything outside the Soviet Union, the border between those who worked and those
who lived off others’ labor, remained right where it was. Ever since the start of
this miserable peace nearly twenty years ago, the young Soviet power stood all on
its own against a united front of European reactionaries — in a new war, the
Soviets would be not one enemy among others, but the sole enemy. And this war would
surely not be long in coming. From where she sat today, she cast a critical glance
at the young peace-loving girl she once had been. She had understood even then that
there was a difference between the blood that flowed during a revolution and the
blood that was spilled in a war. She also knew that all wars are not created
equal.
After the end of the war and my father’s death, still
working in complete political isolation, I began to write antimilitaristic
articles that I submitted to the
Workers’ Journal
—
unsuccessfully at the time — while also writing my first novel,
Sisyphus.
She wasn’t just politically isolated back then — she was
completely alone. And lonely. But she doesn’t write that. Still, something that at
the time was nearly her undoing proved to be a blessing in disguise: recently she
heard that the man she’d once almost killed herself over was a longstanding member
of a Trotskyist group. He’d been known as W. back when she first met him, then she
encountered him again as Comrade E. at an assembly, and later — like so many
of them, herself included — he had meandered through various identities,
becoming Za., whose articles she sometimes read, later going by P. when he was in
hiding, as a comrade once told her, but she hadn’t known what name he’d been using
recently for his work in Leningrad. Over the past few months she’d occasionally
heard mention of the Trotskyist, Zinovievist, and Bukharinist Lü., but it never
occurred to her to suspect this was the same man she’d once been so in love with.
Only a few weeks ago, when she happened to see a photograph of a defendant named Lü.
in the newspaper, she had recognized him.
I demand . . .
During the Spanish Civil War . . .
An unacceptable . . .
Where I was, not at a congress.
I must object most vigorously.
In the trenches . . .
Could also have taken a different path.
When F. tried to pin the blame on me . . .
And since then never again. I demand . . .
Delayed detonation, surely you can . . .
Why all this beating around the bush?
Lü., his closest friend . . .
With me? Never!
This beating around the bush . . .
Br., just one . . .
F. is sowing suspicions . . .
Cannot work like this . . .
Not in the hinterlands!
A functionary who writes on the side, not an
author.
A clear path.
I ask myself why Br. is not presenting an
argument.
And I ask myself why F. is unleashing his cynical .
. .
Taken into consideration as well.
Why is F. so intensely pessimistic?
Have any of you . . . how two-faced?
Neither a productive nor a constructive . .
.
Br.’s sectarianism to closer scrutiny.
Rather, on the contrary, quite harmful.
Just look at the introduction and the sentences
altered in the Russian version.
That isn’t true.
The introduction is . . .
That isn’t true!
Not forward-thinking.
Empty allegations and underhanded . . .
The introduction is not the same.
Do you mean to claim . . .
I’m not alleging anything, I’d just like . . . it’s
not the same as in the Russian version.
Do you mean to claim that . . .
Nothing more to say on the subject.
Declare my resignation.
I too lay down my post.
Why don’t we just go ahead and dissolve . .
.
Perhaps we should . . .
I really have nothing more to say on the
subject.
We might in fact in the presence of . . .
A reprimand might be . . .
But not in the presence of . . .
Why in the world?
Of a Party representative.
Leave me out of it.
During this period I supported myself by working at a
stationery shop.
In none of these accounts has she written that she often
used to nap during her lunch hour on the paper-filled shelves in the back room of
this small shop. The cousin who owned the shop had given her permission. The large
sheets of paper were fresher than any bedsheet, and just as if she were getting into
bed, she always took off her shoes before she filed herself away in one of these
compartments. She was constantly tired during those first few months when she was no
longer living with her mother and sister, constantly tired because she was spending
her nights writing her novel. She had so often wished for her father to return to
life, and perhaps she succeeded, perhaps her words did bring him back to life again,
assuming they were the right words.
Several times a quiet young man had purchased red paper from
her, then asked her to cut it to leaflet size right there in the shop with the big
cutting machine. Silently, he had watched her set up the machine and then turn the
big crank to slice through an entire stack of paper at one go.
I first made
contact with the Communist Party of Austria through Comrade G.
At some
point she had spotted a wayward handbill, now printed, lying in the gutter, and had
recognized its color. She picked up the leaflet and began to read.
Comrade G. didn’t come into the shop again all summer, but
when he appeared in September, he looked at her not with two open eyes but only one
and a half. He now resembled the enormous weary lizard that had been put on display
in the Schönbrunn Menagerie, one of the few post-war acquisitions.
While he was standing beside her at the cutting machine, watching her
arrange the stack of paper, she asked:
An accident?
Someone knocked me down and beat me.
Really?
A soldier.
A soldier?
Yes.
Why?
The putsch.
She’d read about it. On Hörligasse, a handful of Communists had even
been killed, but here in the Alser District, life had gone on as before.
And your eye?
It won’t stop watering.
I’m sorry.
While she was cranking the wheel that pressed the stack of paper
together, it occurred to her that from now on it would never again be possible to
tell for sure whether this quiet man perhaps had reason to weep, or whether it was
just his eye shedding tears on its own.
Would you like to come some time?
While she was slicing through the stack of paper at one go, he wiped his
damp cheek with the back of his hand and told her that his Communist cell always met
on Wednesdays.
I see.
So it was possible to sacrifice your health and possibly even your life
for something other than love, you could keep yourself preserved until it was time
to throw your life and body into the jaws of time for a good cause.
But in Hungary it’s all over already, she said, meaning the Hungarian
Soviet Republic.
We’re learning, he said, and the world still has no idea what is
happening here, but soon it will be astonished.
It would also never again be possible to tell for sure whether he was
laughing so hard there were tears rolling down his cheeks or just laughing, she
thought, and she began to wrap the freshly sliced stack of paper in paper.