The End of Days (2 page)

With an armful of linens she now leaves the baby’s room and walks past
the footstool where her daughter is sitting. It was no accident that she married her
daughter to a Christian. When her daughter was old enough to ask questions, she told
her that her father had just gone off one day and never returned. Why did he leave?
Where did he go? Will he come back again some day?

New panes of glass were set into the bookcase. She sold the house in the
ghetto and moved to the center of town, where she took over her husband’s business
and set aside everything she could spare for her daughter’s dowry. For many years
now she has known something that her daughter will soon be forced to learn: A day on
which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days.

4

So now something he has suspected his entire life, especially
these past three years, has become glaringly obvious: If you get even the slightest
bit off track, the consequences in the end are just as inescapable as if you’d gone
and leapt headfirst into this or that abyss. As an Imperial and Royal civil servant
responsible for a thirty-five-kilometer stretch of the Galician Railway of Archduke
Karl Ludwig, he knew that everything depended on his ability not only to produce
order, but to maintain it where it already existed. But in his own life, life had
always intervened. During the year he spent as a trainee not yet receiving a salary,
his hunger had caused him to incur debts. So by the time the year ended and he
assumed his post as a regular civil servant of the eleventh — i.e. lowest
— pay-grade, he was already deep in debt. His hunger, to be sure, was a sign
he was still alive, as was his freezing during that first winter — but now his
debts would count as a demerit when he underwent his Confidential Qualification, an
evaluation carried out behind closed doors by his superiors. Thus, it was impossible
to say when he would be promoted from the eleventh to the tenth pay-grade and be
able to start paying back what he owed; no one would discuss this with him. In
short, he had no prospect of making the leap back to ordinary life. Hunger and
freezing guaranteed more hunger and freezing, that’s how it was when life got the
upper hand even once. Then he’d met the Jewish shopkeeper and her daughter, whose
skin was so white it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling
around on it. If only he’d been able to see where the track was and where it wasn’t
when he proposed to her. There’s no paying down debts with a Jewish dowry, even if
you pay them down. And there are differences. You can recognize them by the silence
surrounding you at the clubhouse or the office. This silence has to do with
consequences, with the end in general — he’s come to understand this, having
finally grasped it now that the end is staring him in the face. Why was the baby so
quiet all of a sudden?

His father hadn’t come when they got married at the civil
registry office, nor for the birth of their child. He said the trip was too long and
too expensive. It had been three years since he’d seen him last, and if all went
well, he might never have to see him again. The morning after the child’s birth,
he’d gone to an inn alone and toasted the newborn with strangers, and while he was
swirling the schnapps around in his mouth with his tongue before swallowing it,
savoring the taste, it occurred to him that his tiny daughter also had a tongue in
her mouth, she’d come equipped with her own insides when she slipped out of her
mother, emerging from her mother’s concavity with concavities of her own. He, the
civil servant, eleventh class, had begotten a living thing, and no Confidential
Qualification was required to verify this fact.

Two hundredweights of twine are required to adorn the
Brody station with flowers in honor of the Kaiser, whose train will be passing
through. Thick oak planks fifteen centimeters across to replace the ties between the
tracks. Six hundred gulden a year is the salary of a civil servant eleventh class,
while a civil servant tenth class receives eight hundred and if he’s lucky another
two hundred as a bonus. But what to do with all the things that resisted
calculation? How much time was there really between the second when a child was
alive and the next, when it was no longer alive? Was it even time separating one
such moment from another? Or did it have to be given a different name, except that
no one had found the right name for it yet? How could you calculate the force
dragging a child over to the realm of the dead?

He can still remember the moment when he imagined for the first time
what the white cleft between his bride’s legs must look like, fleshy and firm, and
when he spread it apart with his fingers, the tiny red rooster’s comb would appear.
Later, when she was his wife, he loved the sounds their two sweaty bodies made when
they rubbed together and pulled apart again, slapping and smacking, their mouths,
tongues, and lips all flowing together, sucking at one another to transform two
formerly separate beings into a single moist concavity of flesh. Flesh, flesh
— sometimes the word alone was enough to arouse him. But ever since the night
before, when he took the lifeless child from his wife’s arms and laid it back in its
cradle, he knows how cold something dead feels, colder than he would have ever
expected. He doesn’t know how he can forget this. He, the civil servant, eleventh
class, has begotten something dead, and no Confidential Qualification is needed to
confirm this.

Sunlight falls on the rough pine floor of the inn where he is
sitting. . . . When he arrived before dawn, there were still a couple of Russian
deserters lying under the tables asleep. While he was downing his first glass of
spirits, and then the second, and the third, they woke up, gathered their bundles,
and left in the company of a short, bald-headed man who’d appeared at daybreak,
apparently by prearrangement. Neither the bald-headed man nor the others spoke much,
nonetheless it was clear that these Russians — a sort you often saw in public
houses like this — were men who’d made up their minds not to turn back. . . .
After his experience of the night before, the civil servant, eleventh class, finds
himself suddenly understanding what it means to cross a border like that, what it
means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. It’s as if the top layer were
crumbling away from everything he sees and encounters, this layer that had
previously gotten in the way of his comprehension, and now, like it or not, he is
forced to recognize what lies below and to endure this recognition — but he
can’t imagine how.

Sometimes, looking at his baby, he had wondered where it came
from, where it had been before its mother conceived it. Now he wishes it made no
difference whether the child had appeared — remaining only for the most
infinitesimally fleeting bit of time — or had never appeared at all. But no,
there was a difference. Using his thumb, he rubs a shiny coat button shiny. Since
there was no measurement that applied to the difference between life and death, the
dying of this tiny child was as absolute as any other dying. Never before has
measuring — his profession, after all — seemed so superfluous to him as
on that morning. Should he pull everyday life back on over his head now that he has
understood it is nothing more than a garment?

He’d shouted at his wife because — although she’d picked up the
baby, trying to comfort it — she hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known any
remedy for death, but he had also shouted because he too had known no remedy for
death.

He, the civil servant of the lowest possible class, had been no match
for Death.

And now?

The short, bald-headed man returns to the pub, sits at a
table near the Imperial and Royal civil servant he’d seen there earlier that morning
when he came for the Russians, and nods. The civil servant had carelessly tossed his
coat with the gold buttons over an empty chair; if it were not for this coat, the
bald-headed man wouldn’t have known that this person he saw sitting here ought to
have been sitting in an office by this hour. The civil servant is unshaven, the tips
of his mustache soiled, he is wearing no necktie, and there is a full glass of
spirits before him yet again as he gazes out the window at the street, where some
mongrel is running in circles trying to catch its own tail, occasionally sliding on
a frozen puddle, the mongrel stumbles around before finding its footing and then
goes back to hunting down its own scruffy posterior. The bald man orders a snack
— pickled herring along with a beer — and settles down contentedly. He
isn’t ruling out the possibility of striking yet another deal here this very
morning.

5

It’s true, she is awake, and now there is this next day, and this
day, too, she will spend sitting on the footstool. During the night or early that
morning, her mother apparently cleared away the bowls of food, untouched by the
mourner. She hears someone clattering around in the kitchen, water splashing,
something being pushed aside on the table, footsteps crossing the floor, the clink
of porcelain. In the baby’s room, in any case, there is nothing left to do. It
wasn’t as she had feared yesterday: that while she was sleeping she would forget
what had happened and the memory would come crashing down on her with all its weight
when she woke up. No, all through her sleep she had known that her child was no
longer alive, and when she woke up, she knew it still, sleep had been no more and no
less leaden than wakefulness, so she had been spared seeing her worn-out workaday
reality collapse once more. When she rises to sit again upon the footstool,
everything goes quiet in the kitchen, as if her mother is listening to see what she
is up to now that she’s stirring again. Why has life at home become so much like
hunting? In the parlor, the miniature grandfather clock strikes six with bright,
tinny strokes, then all is perfectly quiet once more. Her husband, it would appear,
is still out. Yesterday, when they returned to the house after the funeral and she
sat down on the stool, he had tried to lift her up, and when he didn’t succeed, he
ran out of the house. She hasn’t seen him since. Will the same thing now happen to
her as happened to her mother? When, as a little girl, she tried to imagine where
her father might be instead of with his family, she always envisioned someone who
had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or in France.
But she didn’t believe it. Her mother always spoke of her father’s absence as
something definitive, irreversible, never allowing her daughter the faintest hope
that he might return home, or even prove to be nearby — in the district
capital, for instance, with another wife and new children. Sometimes, introducing
herself, she had the impression people were caught off guard when she said her name.
In America, her mother said, or in France. But she herself never imagined her father
as a living man, neither in America nor France, nor saw him living nearby; she only
ever envisioned him as someone who had, for instance, hanged himself; and if
anything was nearby, it was the forest where his body had swung, maybe she’d already
walked right past the tree he’d tied his noose to.

Do you need anything, her mother asks. Behind her, the sun is
shining into the kitchen, which is why her mother looks like a silhouette. The
daughter shakes her head. On this second day of sitting, she and her mother don’t
say much. No one knows her mother better than she does, and no one knows her better
than her mother, so there’s not much to say. She sits there, thinking about the fact
that a part of her is now lying in the ground and beginning to rot, then she looks
at her skin, which is still surrounded by air, alive. A friend comes to visit, she
has more bowls with her, and says: You’ll have a second child, and a third and a
fourth. She says: We’ll see. One of the bowls her friend has brought has eggs in it,
she knows this is customary, but doesn’t want to eat them. One neighbor doesn’t even
knock, she just bursts in, violently weeping, and doesn’t even scrape the snow from
her shoes before falling along with her tears at the mourner’s feet, Praised be our
sole Judge, she cries, and then gets up again to fling her arms around the neck of
the mourner’s mother, sobbing, why oh why, shaking her head, and then she stops
saying anything at all because she is weeping so hard her voice is not available for
use. Simon, the coachman, comes, he stops just inside the hallway door and says he’s
sorry and that he’s brought a bit of soup and that his wife sends her condolences,
unfortunately she can’t come herself because she’s so sick. Another of her friends
comes and says: Right from the beginning I thought it was pale. Then another: Why
didn’t you send for the doctor? Did it really happen that fast? A third: When
they’re so young, the slightest little thing is enough to do them in, who knows what
the Lord in His infinite greatness was thinking! A fourth: Where in the world is
your husband?

In the evening her grandmother arrives, sits down on the floor beside
her, takes her stocking feet in her lap and warms them with her hands, only then is
the granddaughter able to cry for the first time since the death of her child. On
the third day this, that, and the other visitor comes. As if approaching an altar,
friends and former neighbors from the ghetto come to stand before the footstool with
its mourner, bringing her food and words of comfort, they themselves know what it
means to lose a child, or else they don’t know, and no doubt quite a few of them are
pleased that it happened to be the one who married the goy, etc., but that’s not
what they say, instead they say, for example: But of course the main thing is that
you yourself are still alive. As for her, she is incapable of crying when visitors
are there, and by the third day she is very weary of being the recipient of all the
comfort and support it is the sacred duty of these visitors to bestow on her, she
doesn’t know how she can bear it that her child’s death still persists, that from
now on it will persist for all eternity and never diminish, but she doesn’t speak of
this to anyone. On the evening of the third day she knows that if her husband has
not yet returned, he is not going to. She asks her mother what it is like to live
without a husband. Her mother says: Hard. One of her friends says: You’ll see,
tomorrow at the latest he’ll be back, he’s probably just drowning his sorrows. Her
grandmother sits down beside her and sings her a lullaby. Has the time in which she
was a grown woman now come to an end? If she has missed the road leading forward,
will time simply reverse itself and go back again? On the fourth day, her own
mourning seems alien to her and she thinks that perhaps it doesn’t really matter
whether a being is on one side of the border or the other. On the fifth day, her
mother says, we have to think about what comes next. On the sixth day, the clock
strikes all the hours contained in a day, with its bright, tinny chime. Might it be
time now to go looking for her father, if he happens not to have hanged himself? On
the morning of the seventh day, her mother helps her to get up and leads her to the
table in the kitchen. Only after the daughter has sat down does her mother say to
her: We have to start economizing. On this seventh day the daughter realizes for the
first time that she herself is also a daughter, one who has been alive all this time
and whose life is only now, with a short delay of seventeen years, breaking down. No
one can predict when it will be revealed that a wish is going to be left
unfulfilled. Her mother sits down beside her, takes her hands, and says: Your father
was beaten to death by the Poles.