Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
Land of ours that blooms and blossoms,
Listen, darling, listen,
Was given to us for time eternal.
Hear me, darling, listen.
Child, thy land is guarded well,
Sleep, my angel, slumber.
Red Army men watch over you.
Sleep, my darling, slumber.
5
When she gets up again to fetch more hot water from the samovar in
the common kitchen for her tea, she runs into Indian comrade Al in the hallway. He
greets her but today he doesn’t initiate a conversation. No doubt he, too, has heard
about her husband’s arrest. Last month, when he was still new in Moscow, she and her
husband had gotten into conversation with him while they were cooking, first he had
leaned up against the kitchen table, still standing, then at some point hopped up on
the table’s edge, his legs dangling, and finally he’d drawn his legs up beneath him,
still talking, like a very-much-alive Buddha sitting there on this worn-out tabletop
where the Russians had no doubt cut their
pelmeni
in the age of the Czars,
and later Chinese comrades had rolled hard-boiled duck eggs in ashes, and Frenchmen
dipped meat in a marinade of garlic and oil. She herself, on the occasion of the
Seventh World Congress two years before, had used this table to make apple strudel
for her Danish, Polish, and American friends. This congress had been like a powerful
amorous coupling, all of them melting into one another, conjoined in their common
battle for a humanity finally coming to its senses. After these meetings, she and
her husband would often go on deliberating deep into the night, lying in bed,
discussing what this new world order should look like, whether it was still an order
at all, and what new bonds should replace the old bonds of coercion.
Then L. shoved his way in and started shouting at me. I told
him to shut up, then he pushed me over to the side and started grabbing at the
front of my shirt.
M. says I grabbed hold of him by the shirt.
Everyone knows this is untrue. I’ve never grabbed anyone’s shirt, what an
idea!
There were eight comrades standing around. I said
to L., Don’t touch me. L. shouted back, Don’t touch me. So then I repeated, Take
your paws off me.
All of a sudden Comrade M. said, Get your stinking
paws off me.
Then L started saying, You’ll be sorry you did
that, I’m going to report you to a Party cell.
Then M. shouted, Maybe they’ll wash your stinking
paws in innocence for you!
Comrade L. has a booming voice, and he really let
rip: Just you wait and see what I do with people like you!
Ridiculous!
In the room she has shared with her husband for the past
three years, in whose emptiness she is now setting foot once more, the yellow wall
hanging with the embroidered sun from their first Soviet vacation still hangs on the
wall. Every morning she leaves the house before dawn and gets in line in front of
Lubyanka 14 — the headquarters of the secret police — to ask about her
husband; and after this, she goes to Butyrka Prison. In both places the counter
clerks slam down their windows in her face. She has already written to Pieck, to
Dimitrov, Ulbricht, and Bredel, but no one is able or willing to give her any
information as to whether her husband will return, whether his arrest was a mistake,
whether he’s being put on trial, whether they’re planning to send him into exile, or
shoot him. Or whether he’s already been shot. Suddenly she remembers how her
friend’s lover sat beside her that night, his tears dripping quietly to the floor
before his feet. Only now does she know as much about life as he knew then. With the
arrest of the person who was closer to her than any other, her own life has become
fundamentally inaccessible to her.
I petition you for acceptance into the Soviet Federation and request
that you give me the opportunity to prove myself as a Soviet.
6
When the elevator stops on her floor at around four in the
morning, just before sunrise, she doesn’t hear it, because she has fallen asleep
over the papers on her desk. Her forehead is resting on the word
vigilance
when the officers come into the room to arrest her. The small dark-blue suitcase
that has long stood in readiness beside the door is forgotten. When silence returns
to the building, the suitcase is still standing there beside the door. It contains a
photograph of a young woman with a large hat, stamped on the back by the owner of a
photography studio on Landstrasser Hauptstrasse in Vienna; further, a notebook
filled with writing, several letters, an Austrian passport, a dirty red handbill,
membership papers for the Communist Party of Austria, a handwritten excerpt
concerning “Earthquakes in Styria,” a typescript wrapped in paper, a recipe for
challah, and at the very bottom, a small dress for a doll, sloppily and shoddily
sewn of pink silk.
And now at last she knows whose voices she has been hearing
all this time, she encounters them once more at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius.
How agreeable it is to be without a body in cold like this. At night in this place
far beyond the end of the world, ores are separated from their slag, everything
worthless is incinerated, blazing up in flames higher than St. Stephen’s Cathedral:
brilliantly colorful formations, bright as the horizon itself, fountains of light
more beautiful than anything she has ever seen before, how glorious, this burning of
slag in the middle of nowhere, the most beautiful of all things ever.
During the day, the living hack away at the ore-rich clay, carting it
off in their tipping wagons, and at night they set these fires. And in these fires,
all the sentences the dead spoke back when they themselves were still alive are
incinerated — sentences spoken in fear, out of conviction, in anger, out of
indifference, or love. Why are you here? she asks a person she knows once uttered
the words:
We see each other quite clearly in the course of these
exchanges.
I was thirsty, he says, so I drank water that hadn’t been boiled
and died of typhus. And you? she asks a person she knows once referred to a mutual
colleague as a
writer of trash
. I froze to death. And you?
What if
someone sees us?
that person had asked. I died of hunger. Some sentence
flies up to the sky, possessing no more, no less weight than the person who once
spoke it. And you? I went mad, and only death brought me back to my senses, he says,
laughing, and here, seven hundred feet above the steppe, his laughter has a furry
consistency. Another bit of air says, All I remember is leaning up against something
because I was too weak to go on walking, and someone looked into my eyes as he
walked past, since I still had eyes. I’m glad, she hears a woman’s voice saying
— hears without ears, just as she sees without eyes — I’m glad, she
hears the voice saying, that my tears finally abandoned me along with my eyes,
because when I was arrested, my own child renounced me, calling me an
enemy of
the people
, and so I tore up my shirt, twisted it into a noose, and hung
myself from a latch.
We see each other quite clearly in the course of these
exchanges.
Perhaps someone should investigate the strength of the draft created
when a soul flits about like this. Perhaps someday flowers will bloom even here, in
the middle of the wasteland, perhaps even tulips, perhaps someday the presence of
innumerable butterflies will be just as real as the absence of butterflies of any
sort today, at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. Now, like all the rest of the
dead, she has all the time in the world to wait for the arrival of different times.
For the living, to be sure — who have no other time at their disposal than the
one in which they happen to possess a body — the only bit of color they’re
able to behold here at night, together with the dead, are these flames.
7
Last summer, when she was still alive, she, along with the other
women, had to dig several large trenches just outside the camp, so when winter came
and the ground froze, they would have somewhere to be buried. All of them —
she and her friends, her enemies, and also those who were indifferent to them
— they all dug graves to be kept in reserve.
On one particular day during the summer of ’41, she drove her pickaxe
into the earth at a specific point and began to dig her own grave, without knowing,
of course, that this was the exact place on all this infinite earth destined to
become her dwelling for the eternal winter. The coordinates 45.61404 degrees
latitude north and 70.75195 degrees longitude east would be what people would use to
describe this otherwise nameless place, where on a summer’s day, at forty degrees
Celsius, she would drive her pickaxe into the dry sand, making grass, tiny insects,
and dust fly around, for the earth here was completely dry far down into its
depths.
How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts.
One night during the winter of ’41, while everyone was
asleep, the woman on duty pulled the cold right leg of a dead woman out from beneath
the warm leg of a sleeping woman, she dragged the lifeless body out of the barrack,
and brought it to the barrack for the dead. At such temperatures it takes less than
two days for a body like this, including all the flesh covering its bones, to freeze
into a skeleton.
Many years ago one person said a word, and then another said
another word, words moved the air, words were written down on paper with ink and
clipped into binders. Air was balanced out with air, and ink with ink. It’s a shame
that no one can see the boundary where words made of air and words made of ink are
transformed into something real: as real as a bag of flour, a crowd in which revolt
is stirring, just as real as the sound with which the frozen bones of Comrade H.
slid down into a pit in the winter of ’41, sounding like someone tossing wooden
domino tiles back into their box. When it’s cold enough, something that was once
made of flesh and blood can sound just like wood.
INTERMEZZO
Comrade Ö., who always used to refer privately — i.e. in
conversation with his wife — to Comrade H. as a
narrow-lipped
hysteric
, places her dossier on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the
stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade B.
Comrade B., opening the file, remembers that he once visited H. and his
wife at their dacha many years ago and that the wife had baked an excellent apple
strudel. But an apple strudel cannot be sufficient grounds for sparing a
counterrevolutionary element. For this reason he places the dossier on the left-hand
stack, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade S.
Comrade S. wonders whether, if Comrade H. were to be arrested —
and was she still a comrade to begin with? — she might say something
disadvantageous about him in the hope of saving her own skin. Had he ever said
anything to her that might somehow incriminate him? Since he cannot remember
anything of the sort, he places her file on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the
stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade L.
Comrade L. reads the account Comrade H. has written of her life, which
is included in her dossier, up to the point where it becomes clear that the Comrade
H. who was recently arrested is her husband. This H. once literally accused him
during a debate of
having no balls
. For this reason, without hesitation, he
places the account of the life of Comrade H. — the wife of Comrade H. and
someone he never actually met in person — back in her dossier, he closes it
and places it on the left-hand stack on his desk, not the stack to his right.
The stack on the left is forwarded to Comrade F.
Comrade F. knows Comrade H. quite well, and also knows her husband, who
has already been arrested. He considers it utterly implausible that the two of them
could be Trotskyist spies as has been alleged. The stack on the right-hand side of
his desk already contains five dossiers of good friends on whose behalf he means to
intercede directly with Stalin. More than five can’t possibly work, of this he’s
quite aware.
He gets up and takes a bottle of vodka from the shelf. While he is
filling his glass all the way to the rim, placing it against his lower lip and
knocking it back, he thinks about how during one of the last Writers Union debates
he was described as a
hopeless drunk
.
He goes back to his desk and places the dossier of Comrade H. to the
left. Later he forwards all the files from the left-hand stack to his Soviet Comrade
Shu.
Soviet Comrade Shu. is required — according to NKVD Order No.
00439, Order No. 00485 and other orders relating to national arrest quotas —
to make fifty arrests from each of the following groups: Germans, Poles, Koreans,
Greeks, and Iranians by the end of this month, October 1938. To assemble these
lists, he proceeds alphabetically, in other words begins with the letter A. for each
nationality.
Working through the Iranian contingent, he gets to the letter N.
With the Greeks, to S.
With the Koreans, to L.
With the Poles to D.
And with the Germans to F.
As he is preparing these lists, he makes a minor error, confusing the
name Comrade H. used to enter the Soviet Union with her real name. In the fake
German passport she used to enter the Soviet Union four years ago, her name was Lisa
Fahrenwald, F. for short.
But she’s still lucky to have wound up at the end of the list, because
the first ten persons in each contingent fall into Category 1. For Category 1 the
sentence is:
death by firing squad.
But for Category 2 — in other words, for the remaining forty
persons on each list, including H., who figures here mistakenly under the name Lisa
Fahrenwald — the sentence is only:
prison camp, eight to
ten years.
But things might also have gone quite differently.
Comrade Ö., who always used to refer to Comrade H. privately
— i.e. in conversation with his wife — as a
narrow-lipped
hysteric
, would still have placed her dossier on the left-hand stack on his
desk, not the stack to his right. And the stack on the left would still have been
forwarded to Comrade B.
But if Comrade B. had, for example, not only remembered Comrade H.’s
excellent apple strudel but also stopped to consider that if she were to be
interrogated, she would quite likely mention him as an acquaintance if not a friend
on the basis of his visit to their dacha; he would probably have found it advisable
to place her dossier on the right-hand stack.
But if this thought had not occurred to him, if Comrade H.’s dossier had
remained there on the left-hand stack, then after the file was forwarded, Comrade S.
might perhaps have remembered that right after the assembly that past March at which
their Party group had responded to Bukharin’s conviction, he had been standing with
Comrade H. and his wife and in a moment of high spirits he’d told a political
joke.
Three prisoners are sitting in a cell and they get to
talking.
Why are you in prison?
I was for Bukharin.
What about you?
I was against Bukharin.
And you?
I am Bukharin.
The three of them had shared a laugh. But what if Comrade H. — was
she still a comrade to begin with? — happened to remember during an
interrogation that he had told this joke, that would certainly be his downfall. And
so Comrade S. would have chosen the right-hand stack and not the one to his
left.
Only if his memory had failed him would the file marked H. still have
wound up on the left-hand stack and been forwarded to Comrade L.
Comrade L. might, who knows, suddenly have started musing while he was
flipping through the file: Wasn’t this H. the woman whose splendid red hair he had
often admired from afar during assemblies without ever having been introduced to
her? He would casually have asked his secretary, who was just coming in with more
files, if she knew what H. looked like, and his secretary would have said: Oh, one
of those Jewish carrot-tops. Hereupon, and after the secretary’s departure, he would
have placed the account of H.’s life on the right-hand stack.
Although she was apparently the wife of Comrade H., who once publicly
accused him of
having no balls
.
But as far as he knew, H. had been arrested.
After this he would have paused for a moment before continuing to sort
the files and tried to imagine what H., the
Jewish carrot-top
with the
milky skin, might look like between her legs — was her hair down there red as
well, or maybe blond?
But if, for example, his secretary had
not
come into the
room just at the moment when Comrade L. was holding H.’s dossier in his hands, the
file would most probably have wound up on the left-hand stack on Comrade L.’s desk
and been forwarded to Comrade F.
Now Comrade F. knows Comrade H. quite well, and also knows her husband,
who has already been arrested. He considers it utterly implausible that the two of
them could be Trotskyist spies as has been alleged. The stack on the right-hand side
of his desk already contains five dossiers of good friends on whose behalf he means
to intercede directly with Stalin. More than five can’t possibly work, of this he’s
quite aware.
Perhaps he gets up and takes a bottle of vodka from the shelf. And
thinks, as he fills his glass all the way to the rim, places it against his lower
lip, and knocks it back, how during one of the last Writers Union debates he was
described as a
hopeless drunk
.
Perhaps he goes back to his desk, looks through the files of his friends
once more, finally taking one of them and placing it on the other stack, to his
left, while placing H.’s file on the stack to the right.
And a short time later, he forwards only the files from the left-hand
stack to his Soviet Comrade Shu.
And if not? What if he didn’t trade H. for one of his five friends but
instead passed her on to Comrade Shu.?
Then Comrade Shu. might, upon making a careful study of H.’s file, have
been able or, indeed, compelled to see that Lisa Fahrenwald — F. for short
— was actually Comrade H., and so she would not have been included in the
contingent of German comrades on this day, neither in Category 1 nor in Category
2.
One week later, when it was time for letters H. through M. to be
arrested, H. would — exceptionally — have been spending the night at the
home of her old friend O. after running into her by chance at Café Krasni Mak and
talking about her loneliness, something she was only able to discuss openly with a
friend she had known so many years.
I’ve never been so lonely in all my life since they arrested H., she
would have told her friend. At this, O. would have taken her by the arm and led her
out of the café, she would have strolled with her down Arbat all the way to the
apartment house where her room was. Late at night, H. would have told her friend
about nine-year-old Sasha and the paper airplanes and begun to cry. Hereupon O.
would have put a mattress on the floor for her in the alcove of her tiny room and
kept her friend H. with her overnight.
For this reason, the NKVD officials would not have found her at home
that night, the night when it was the turn of the letter H., and that was that; the
following week, it would already have been the turn of the letter N, for example,
Neuwiedner, and meanwhile Comrade H.’s application for Soviet citizenship would have
been approved, forever removing her from Comrade Shu.’s jurisdiction.
By the end of 1938, the arrest of secret police chief Yezhov
would have put an end to the era of the arrests of people by contingent, though many
of those arrested under Yezhov would never reappear. Comrade H. would have written
many more letters in an attempt to discover how and where her husband was, but not
one of these letters would have ever been answered. She would have asked about him
many more times, and many more times seen and heard one or another official slam his
window peevishly down before her. Others fared better with their questions and
learned at one or the other window that their husbands or sons were in a different
prison, or already in exile, where, to be sure, they would possibly starve to death
or freeze. Then they would start shouting or speaking entreatingly, while others
just stood there quietly weeping, or fell silent altogether.
As for earning her living, she couldn’t have taken work as a seamstress
like the wife of V., who had also been arrested; it had been established once and
for all that she was untalented in this regard,
sloppy
and
shoddy
.
Nor could she apply to become a teacher at the Liebknecht German School in Moscow,
since the school had been closed half a year before after the arrest of nearly its
entire faculty. At the Marx-Engels Institute, Radio Moscow, the publishing house
that printed German-language books in the Soviet Union, and even the
Deutsche
Zentral-Zeitung
— everywhere, everyone knew that she was the wife of
H., who’d been arrested.
She was most certainly not a whore.
Right?
For two pairs of shoes? One liter of cream? For fifteen potatoes or one
half pound of fat?
Esteemed Comrade Dimitrov, please help me. Give me work. Don’t let
me drown.
Would it really be so awful to sell her body and its orifices for an
hour or half an hour at a time to keep this body alive?
She would never have learned to whom, in the end, she owed the position
she found herself being offered at the eleventh hour: translating Soviet poetry for
the journal
Internationale Literatur
.
Where was a poem while it was being translated from one language to
another? Only in the few hours she spent in this no-man’s-land of words would she
occasionally manage to think of something other than the man she loved and her
misfortune.
She would have translated — for starvation wages, but still
— and the Germans would have started the war, her husband would have remained
missing, and sometimes she would have washed windows here and there to earn a little
on the side, and the Germans would have attacked the Soviet Union despite the
Non-aggression Pact, and even now her husband would not have returned home, the
Germans would have bombed Kiev, and she would have waited and waited, and Dimitrov
would have offered to let her write for the underground radio station
Institut
101
, there would have been air raids over Moscow, and she would have
written for the radio, and Moscow would have used boards and paint as camouflage,
making itself unrecognizable to the Germans — she spoke German — they
had covered up the Moskva with boards as though it were no longer a river, and
whitewashed the walls of the Kremlin to look like ordinary apartment buildings,
making the golden cupolas suddenly green, at night the air-raid alerts sent her to
the metro station, and then she would have gone on waiting until the beginning of
October ’41, and then at the radio station she would have encountered someone whose
poems she knew and thought highly of.
So pleased to meet you.
You speak Russian very well.
Oh, I don’t know.
Truly.
Someone who was a Soviet poet, and she’d have sworn he almost . .
. and with her body . . . and he would have . . . and then the two of them . . . and
then, oh . . . simply given away, what? . . . all her orifices, thinking constantly
of her husband . . . of course it was out of the question, certainly impossible . .
. and therefore at the crack of dawn, even before he . . . and all this time there
were air raids over Moscow, and later the doctor would have said: a kidney
infection, and then she would have evacuated, Kursk Station: four suitcases, war, a
train to Ufa. And only there, in the Urals, would she have, not a kidney infection
but her sixth month, Moscow stands firm, and the Soviet poet has left for Tashkent,
yes, well, the baby, a boy, never an opportunity to tell the poet, never any
letters, she never saw him again; Comrade O. produced a cradle for the baby, she
wrote more radio programs . . . scorched earth . . . writing German for Germans;
never an opportunity to tell him, never any letters, he was never there. And her
husband, H.? Writing to fend off the German Fascists . . . never give the enemy a
handhold, never overvalue the private fate of the individual . . . nursed the child
for a year and a half while others starved, H. lost forever? And then the breaking
free: the immense exertion, the greater the sacrifice made for the cause, the more
just the cause must be. The crying baby — truly, it should have been his
child, the child of her H. A good article, genuinely important, antifascism and war,
a genuinely good program, and her H., genuinely lost forever? A Russian
niania
for the baby . . . how do you write your way into the hearts of
the German Fascists . . . the battle of encirclement, Stalingrad stands firm . . .
and if you get in, turn their hearts around inside their bodies? Her child, at
three, more Russian than German. And finally the war would have been over, back to
Moscow with her four suitcases. And her beloved H. still lost forever in all
likelihood, and the distant poet probably still writing poems, in Russian. And her
child would have asked, in Russian, where the end of the world was. Her comrades’
invitation, and she thought, why not back to Berlin if it came to that? Her letter
to her mother had long since come back to her stamped
Evacuated to the
East
, so she had no family left in Vienna, and probably nowhere else either. In
all probability. So: Belorussky Station, to Berlin. Culture work. Rebuilding. And
the child: he was still much too young for her to explain to him who his father, or
who his real father — even this father too far away to tell him how his son,
and that to begin with . . . besides which, she never wrote any letters, not a
single word. A new beginning. Rubble.
Sisyphus
, finally out of her suitcase
and in print.