Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
To see their tiny blooms
O May, how I am longing
To stroll about again.
They were five years old, or six, or seven when they learned
this song. Now they sit here singing it with voices that have grown old, locked up
in old age as if in a prison, they’re still the same ones who were once five, six,
and seven, but they’re also irredeemably removed from this age, perhaps they won’t
even live to see the end of the month they’re singing about, perhaps by the time the
gardener is raking the autumn leaves of the trees that are just now starting to bud,
they’ll be lying in the ground. On Tuesday from ten to eleven, they have singing
group. That’s all there is on Tuesday, there’s no Herr Zabel stopping by in the
afternoon, and her son doesn’t come either, he said he’ll pick her up on Saturday
and take her on an outing. What is a Tuesday? For lunch, poached eggs, and a piece
of cake with whipped cream is served with the coffee, outside it begins to drizzle
and keeps on into the evening. At some point Frau Hoffmann asks Sister Katrin to
open the window and stays there drawing in the damp, warm air in deep breaths, it
smells of leaves, just like the night she slept out in the open beside the Danube
with her girlfriend. Frau Buschwitz goes to sleep with her headphones on, as she
does so often.
We set out to, we’ll take care of everything.
And then it all became so shabby.
We tried to take care of everything, but we went about it wrong.
If Frau Hoffmann died tonight, these would be her last words, but there
wouldn’t be anyone there to hear them.
On Wednesday Frau Millner says to Sister Renate at breakfast
that she always eats two slices of toast. I know, Sister Renate says, loud enough
for even Frau Millner, who is hard of hearing, to hear. Frau Millner says: One with
jam and one with honey. I know, says Sister Renate. Her husband, though, only used
to eat one. Well, if he wasn’t hungrier than that, Sister Renate says. Yes, but that
was a mistake, Frau Millner says, otherwise he might still be alive today. Eating
keeps body and soul together, Sister Renate says. Exactly, Frau Millner says.
What is a Wednesday?
Beside Frau Millner, Frau Hoffman sits with her eyes shut, counting the
seconds, because she knows that the executions start at eight o’clock. Every minute
a group of ten prisoners is shot. She silently counts to ten, nodding along with the
numbers, and then waits for the next minute to begin. She doesn’t have to look at
the clock to know when a minute is over. Finally she has grown old enough to be able
to move freely in time.
One. Two. Three.
Frau Schmidt: The Russians blew up Strassmannstrasse 2 because we didn’t
clear away the tank barricades quickly enough. We couldn’t move any faster, we were
at the end of our strength.
Four. Five. Six.
Frau Podbielski: Sometimes I would mix the insides of plum pits into the
dough for the honey cake, did you know you can crack open the pits of plums just
like nuts?
Seven. Eight. Nine.
Frau Giesecke: When it was
subbotnik
, my children always helped
gather the pieces of balled-up paper from the bushes.
The day room is full of stories not being told.
Ten.
Even during the week when Frau Hoffmann is going to die, the
day after her ninetieth birthday, time is a porridge made of time, it’s rubbery,
refuses to pass, has to be killed, spent, served, and still keeps dragging on. What
is a Thursday, a Friday? Sometimes in the afternoon this person comes by, this one
or that one, and sits, and holds her hand — why? — takes her by the bony
shoulder and says: Keep your chin up! Or did no one come at all? The days when
someone comes and the days when she just sits there all collapse into a single day,
time is a porridge made of time. Who are you? All that remains of life now is what’s
left at the very bottom when all the other reserves have been used up: Then the iron
reserves make their appearance.
Knit one, purl one, the instructor is helping her.
I’m such an awful sheep.
But you’re doing very well, Frau Hoffmann.
I never understood how it works.
Stick the needle in here and then pull the yarn through.
Oh, I see.
Bravo, Frau Hoffmann.
You know, it’s not that I’m a — what’s the word — a
daydreamer. It’s not that. It’s something else: fear.
The iron reserves, fear.
Fear of doing something wrong again.
Fear of the day, fear of the night, fear of the storm and
strangers coming to visit, fear of the poison in her food and the nurse who acts
friendly but in truth is out to steal her gold bracelet, fear of where the
wheelchair she’s sitting in is being pushed, and by whom? Fear of the doctor and of
the pain, fear of her son who brought her here, fear of life and fear of death, fear
of all the time she still has to live through.
But Frau Hoffmann, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
I have such a great fear of doing something wrong that I always do
something wrong.
But look, you’ve already knitted an entire row perfectly, Frau
Hoffmann.
No, no, something is always wrong. I know that, there’s no changing
it.
Here, now you turn the whole thing over and start again from the
beginning.
Is this the right way?
As right as right can be.
It’ll hold together?
Of course, why shouldn’t it?
Approximately eighty years ago, an arts and crafts teacher in Vienna
declared the work of one of her pupils
sloppy
and
shoddy
. Is it
possible that this pupil was given so long a life for the sole purpose of having the
sentence uttered by that loathsome Viennese woman finally canceled out, buried by a
new sentence uttered by a new teacher? Has she been in the world all these many
years just so these two sentences — to give just one example — can
confront each other within her, and the good one defeat the bad? Might everything
that’s ever been said and that will be said everywhere in the world constitute a
living whole, growing sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, always
balancing out in the end? So was this the end?
Knit one, purl one.
I see.
Now turn it over and start again from the beginning.
That’s all there is to it?
That’s all there is to it.
3
A man sits in Vienna at the Café Museum over a glass of
mineral water, trying to think what he might bring back for his mother to give her
pleasure, his mother who was a child in Vienna. Should he buy her a little bronze
St. Stephen’s Cathedral, or a real Sacher torte from Hotel Sacher, or just bring her
a twig from a tree on Arenbergplatz, not far from the apartment where she used to
live? He can’t imagine that his mother was once a child. A year and a half ago, when
he came to bring her to the Home and found her already waiting for him in her hat
and coat on a chair in the vestibule, she introduced herself to him as a major in
the Imperial and Royal army, ready to march off into battle. Beside her stood a
small, dark-blue suitcase, and in her lap she held the little box with the gold
buttons. He knew the box well, he’d used these buttons in Ufa to buy two or
sometimes even three kilograms of air from his
niania
; he’d polished them
when he was bored waiting for his mother, often staring at the double-headed eagle.
Here in Vienna this eagle spread its wings not only atop the Hofburg, it was
everywhere in the city, glancing at the same time to the right and the left: on
cast-iron railings, on fountains, above the entryways to buildings, and even on the
shop sign of the
Trafik
where he’d just bought himself a pack of cigarettes
— and this although the Kaiser had been dead for three-quarters of a century
now. Everywhere here this eagle was still spreading its wings above its two heads,
as if to hold them together.
Did time in Vienna really pass so slowly?
Or not at all?
In the Eastern part of Germany, a state had been founded and had
remained a state for forty years, had been a quotidian reality for forty years, with
new buildings springing up, schoolchildren, the victory of Socialism, please wait to
be seated, Heroes of Labor, 10-pfennig streetcar tickets, I’ll petition the
authorities, run down to the
Konsum
and get yourself an ice cream,
Karl-Marx-Allee at the corner of Andreasstrasse, the gathering place for May 1,
picking cherries in Werder, Ernst Busch singing of the Peasant’s War, the lift is
stuck again, Socialist sister countries, dear Comrades — and at some point,
after an entire lifetime of life, everyday reality and state had broken apart, had
disappeared, been stamped into the ground, wiped off the map, crumbled, been swept
aside by the People — but in Vienna, it seemed to him, everything that had
always been there had simply endured. Bombs falling on Vienna at the end of the war,
as his mother always insisted — this is something he cannot for the life of
him imagine, since all the buildings he’s seen here are so vast, so unscathed.
Although he’s traveled to Frankfurt am Main many times since
the opening of the border, and also to London, Trieste, and once even to New York
with his wife and children to see the Statue of Liberty, the man still privately
thinks of Vienna as “the West.” Like it or not, the scent of coffee at Café Museum
reminds him of the packages his first girlfriend used to receive from her relatives
in the Federal Republic; he can’t stop calling the current era
Age of the
Winners
, and again and again finds himself marveling at how so-called
modernity appears to derive its superiority solely from the fact that it’s been
around for a good hundred and fifty years now. Like it or not, when he looks at the
people here, he sees they are used to driving fast cars, that they know what a tax
return is, and have no cause to hesitate before ordering a glass of prosecco with
their breakfast. Just the way they let the door slam behind them when they walk in
shows him how sure they are of being in the right world everywhere in the world. Now
he too is sitting in this right world, he even has the right money in his wallet,
although he’s drinking water to conserve his “West money.”
No dogs allowed.
The signs with the images of the dogs prohibited from entering butcher shops,
restaurants and swimming pools existed in East Germany as well, and probably they
existed everywhere in the world. The border that used to separate him from the West
has long since fallen — but now it seems to have slipped inside him,
separating the person he used to be from the one he’s supposed to be now, or allowed
to be. I don’t know how you recognize a human being, his mother said to him last
time he visited. He doesn’t want prosecco with his breakfast, like it or not. And he
couldn’t care less if the others can tell by his way of looking around, by his hair
and cheeks, that he comes from the land that has finally, rightly so, thank God,
high time now, been wiped off the face of the earth, the land of — what
madness — publicly owned enterprises, red carnations for your lapel on May 1,
rigged elections, old men wearing berets left over from the Spanish Civil War, and
dialectics taught at school.
A Man
—
how proud that sounds.
Getting off the night train at six in the morning, he saw people sleeping on pieces
of cardboard in the station. In what world had he spent the last forty years? What
happened to that world? Will he have the heart of a dog now for the rest of his
life?
Later he leaves the café in his own company, meaning to
stroll for a little while before his appointment that isn’t until the afternoon,
they’re selling horse meat at the Naschmarkt, herbs, apples, and flowers; he
promenades across the square then strolls across to the Rechte Wienzeile; it’s still
too early in the day for the porn cinema there, he has no desire to desire anything,
blindly he strolls down a side street, makes a right turn without a plan, and
onward: streetcar tracks, the entryways of the buildings giving off a smell of
quicklime and dust as though it were summer already, he passes grimy shop windows,
walking ever farther down this street. He’s happy not to have to go look at anything
a foreigner in Vienna is supposed to see, he likes walking like this through
everyday reality. In a spot where a very long time ago an angel kept watch over a
building’s front entrance, the low building no longer stands, instead there’s a
modern five-story hotel. Indeed, the building where his great-grandmother once lived
fell victim to one of the few bombs dropped in the final days of the war, in March
1945, but by then his great-grandmother had already been dead for more than four
years, her apartment had been emptied out and passed on to others. But he knows
neither who his great-grandmother was, nor where she lived, he steps to one side
when the revolving door deposits a group of tourists onto the sidewalk. As far as
this descendent of a Viennese resident is concerned, Vienna has been washed clean of
stories, it took less than a human lifetime for the city to lose all connection to
him. Less than a human lifetime for homeland and origins to diverge. He is free,
doubly free; he carries around within him a vast dark land: all the stories his
mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he carries with him even
those stories his mother never knew or heard of, he can’t get rid of them, but he
can’t lose them either, since he doesn’t even know them, since all of this lies
buried deep within him; for when he slipped from his mother’s womb, he was already
filled with interior spaces that didn’t belong to him, and he can’t just look inside
to inspect his own interior. His father once spent three weeks in Berlin almost
forty years ago, but he didn’t know about it, how could he have? His father later
spent an eternity living in Vorkuta, and twelve years ago he died there, but the son
knows neither of these things. The son can make his home anywhere in the world, in
Berlin for example. If he knew what questions to ask, knew what, where, and to whom,
then an official of the Jewish Community of Vienna would surely be able to dig up
one or the other list and inform him that his great-grandmother was brought to Opole
in the district of Lublin with the first transport of February ’41, that his
grandmother moved six times within Vienna and then was sent via Minsk to Maly
Trostenets in July ’42, and that his aunt spent many months hiding in a friend’s
apartment and then was sent in ’44 to Auschwitz. But given what he knows, he finds
Vienna just as dusty as any other metropolis. Kettenbrückengasse, Mariahilfer
Strasse, Siebensterngasse, Mondscheingasse. There on the
otherer
side, as
his mother would say, is a second-hand shop; who knows, maybe he’ll find something
here that he can bring her.