Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
Indeed, why not? Her husband is gone, she no longer has a
child, and there’s no need to tell her mother. She wants to go. When she thinks of
the warm, dry, almost coarse hand of the officer, she feels almost dizzy with
desire. Her desire branches out to the farthest reaches of her body, she is dizzy
down into the joints of her fingers and toes, and between her legs. So this is what
happens when temptation stops being just a word and enters into a life, when it
slips beneath the skirt of a woman randomly chosen, seizing hold of her mortal body
with terrible force. Exalted is the person who is tempted, for that person alone has
the opportunity to resist, her grandfather explained to her years before, when, as
an adolescent, she was sitting on the footstool and her mother had taken the horse
and cart into the countryside to buy merchandise.
And what do you get for overcoming the temptation?
The resisting itself is the reward.
That means I’m paying myself.
Only if you resist.
If I resist.
The Lord wants you to demonstrate that you are worthy of him.
That’s all He wants?
That’s all He wants.
So really it’s all about me.
All about you, as a part of the whole.
Then I myself am His test.
What do you mean?
If I don’t resist, it means He didn’t do his job well.
When her grandfather laughed, she could look inside his mouth and see
how few teeth he had left.
It would most certainly be lamentable if He — who holds together
the waters of the sea as if in a water skin — felt the need to test Himself
using a slip of a thing like you.
But why else would He need my renunciation?
By then her legs were already so long that, crouching on the stool, she
could effortlessly prop her chin on her knees. Because of her marriage to the goy,
her grandfather sat shiva for her as though she had died. From then until his own
death a year and a half ago, she never saw him again. Her grandfather disowned her,
but even after this disowning, her life continued to go on and was still continuing
today. What rules governed this life — this life that for him was no longer a
life — was something she had no one to ask. From then on, her life was simply
her life, that’s all.
12
Once, they have to put on life jackets, because the ship is
traveling through thick fog, and there’s a risk of colliding with another ship; once
it is storming so violently that an old woman tears the locket from the chain around
her neck and throws it into the water with loud prayers, to reconcile God with the
ship; once someone is heard playing the violin on one of the lower decks — a
piece from the operetta
Die Fledermaus
— but the former civil servant
doesn’t recognize the music, even though he studied in Vienna. If he were to perish
of the nausea that refuses to leave him, who would get his pocket watch and the coat
with the gold buttons? The gentleman traveling with him shows a Polish child a
banana and explains how such a thing is peeled. The gentleman bites off the little
black tip of the banana himself and spits it into the sea. But the child doesn’t
want the banana. After two days, three, four, the young man’s nausea still hasn’t
subsided. Only after an endlessly long twelve and a half days does he behold one
morning, standing amid the throng suddenly crowding the deck, the Statue of Liberty,
and this is definitely better than never having seen it. On their voyage, the
gentleman told him of a German captain whose ship was so dilapidated that instead of
venturing across the ocean with his passengers, he tacked up and down off the coast
of Scotland, just far enough out that the land was out of sight. Nine days later he
unloaded the emigrants in a small harbor, telling them that this was America. In
both places, English was spoken, a language none of the new arrivals understood, and
the men wore skirts, as was no doubt the latest fashion in New York — so it
was nearly a week before the last of the emigrants understood that they were still
in Europe. But by then the dilapidated captain had long since vanished along with
the money they’d paid him for their passage to the New World.
Now, men, women, and children are weeping, overcome, they keep pointing
out the gigantic likeness of the woman to one another, some fling their arms around
whoever happens to be standing close by; an elderly woman tries to embrace the
Austrian, but he fends her off. All he’d done before he left was send his father a
postcard. Why join the ranks of humankind now? Maybe he’s just a cold person, he
thinks for the first time ever, and wonders whether arriving in a foreign country is
enough to turn one into a different man in the same skin. A child points to the
statue and asks: Who’s that? And he says: Columbus.
13
The building she’s walking into looks no different from
other buildings. It is Wednesday afternoon, the front door is still gleaming in the
sun; she told her mother she was visiting a friend. She delayed her arrival by five
minutes to be absolutely certain she wouldn’t get there ahead of him. Before she
lifts her hand to knock on the apartment door, he opens it, having heard her
footsteps on the stairs. He draws her inside and immediately turns this drawing into
an embrace, then the kiss, then she touches his teeth with her tongue, then she
feels the corners of her mouth grow wet with his saliva, then she pushes him away,
then he grasps her firmly, pressing the inside of his arm to her mouth, and she
bites his arm because she doesn’t know what else to do with it, and he says: Ah, she
bites harder and he repeats: Ah, and she is seized with the desire to bite into him
all the way to the bone; then he pushes her away, seizes her, and spins her around
so he can open her dress, which is fastened up the back with a long row of hooks,
and then her corset as well, meanwhile she bows her head to remove the pins from her
hair, and this controlled, quiet activity is the preparation for something that
— as has apparently been agreed — will be neither controlled nor quiet.
The room he invited her to is small and furnished, the curtains yellowed, and the
enamel is flaking off the wash basin sitting on a chest of drawers; but she sees
none of this, instead she sees that the officer’s close-fitting trousers display a
noticeable bulge at the crotch, she runs her fingers across this bulge, feeling
astonishment not only that this is allowed, but that she knows it is. A number of
things are different this afternoon than they were with her husband, the officer’s
aroused member bends up rather than down, he licks her breasts, which her husband
never did, and when she is lying on top of him, he slaps her buttocks resoundingly
with his palm. Every single moment this afternoon is too late for her to leave
again. But when the two hours he rented the room for are almost up, he kisses her
cheek and says: Alas, my sweet, it’s time to go. She watches him as he gets up, his
legs are sinewy and long, far longer than those of her husband. He bends over to
sort out their things — his and hers — that are lying in a heap on the
floor, tossing the dress, corset, and stockings onto the bed for her and slipping
into his close-fitting trousers. They no longer display a bulge. He doesn’t know
that she has already borne a child, and she would like to tell him so, but how? She
too gets up and pulls on her stockings, meanwhile he is digging about in his wallet.
Maybe she’ll have another one after all, a child by him, she thinks and smiles. She
slips into her corset, deftly hooking it shut. With or without a wedding —
what does she care about that — now he’s finally found the banknote he wants
to give her — she’d be happy in any case. She pulls the dress on over her
head, it rustles, and only when she has emerged again from the dress does she see
the hand he is holding out to her with the money, his dry, warm hand that was the
start of everything, she sees his hand with the banknote and almost wants to laugh,
asking: What’s the idea? But he doesn’t laugh in return, instead he says, perhaps:
For you. Or possibly something like: Don’t make a fuss. Or: Keep the change. Or: You
certainly earned it, my lovely. He says some sentence of this sort to her, and she
looks at him as if seeing him for the first time.
He just nods to her and places the money on the chest of drawers, then
spins her around with her back to him, as if she were a child that hasn’t yet
learned to get dressed on its own, he hooks her dress up the back as she stands
there — seemingly immersed now in thoughts of her own — so that she can
show herself on the street without attracting notice. As he leaves, he pulls on his
white leather gloves and says:
Wait for a few minutes before you go down.
She neither looks at him nor responds, just stands there in the middle
of the room, staring at the floor, staring as if the floor were opening to reveal an
abyss he was unable to see.
14
When her husband — who despite his serious illness had lived
longer than many healthy men — finally died, the old woman accepted her
daughter’s invitation, gave away all her chickens, packed up the Holy Scripture, the
seven-armed candelabra, and her two sets of plates, and went to live with her. She
left behind the semidarkness in which she’d been spending her life, along with a few
pieces of furniture, their feet all scraped and scratched — her husband had
taken a saw to them whenever they began to rot, shortening them by a centimeter or
two — and left behind the dirt floor that was just the same as outside, her
granddaughter had scratched letters into it with a stick when she was little. Soon
the thatch roof would weigh down the now abandoned house, pressing it into the
ground, and covering it until it decomposed.
Here in her daughter’s apartment, all the rugs, tablecloths,
and Chinese porcelain were sold long ago, after the goy ran off with her
granddaughter’s dowry, but her daughter has kept the apartment — the
floorboards are oak, worn to a shiny smoothness, the door handles are brass, and the
light slants in through glass windows. Every morning the old woman walks through all
the rooms with a goose feather, wiping away the dust gathering on the few pieces of
furniture, then she takes her apron off and sits down on the sofa to read the Torah.
Turn it, and again turn it; for the all is therein, and thy all is therein:
and swerve not therefrom, for thou canst have no greater excellency than
this
. The only dowry she and her husband had been able to give her daughter
when she married the prosperous merchant’s son was their passion for the study of
the Holy Books. For nights on end, the two young people, having put their daughter
to bed, would sit up with her and her husband, debating whether the realm of God
could truly be found here on Earth if one only knew how to look — whether, in
other words, the riddle of life was concealed here in the human realm, or whether it
existed only in the beyond. Whether as a matter of principle there were two
different worlds or just the one. Only through a life spent in holiness, her husband
said, could man succeed in uniting what had been sundered: the world to come and
earthly life. But what was a life spent in holiness, his son-in-law asked, adding
that all these matters depended on human interpretations of the Holy Scripture
— which meant that a man’s striving for the right life could be in error as
well. Yes, her daughter had responded, you ought to be looking at everything mankind
actually experiences on earth, it’s not just a matter of what Holy Scripture says.
The mother herself had believed in an eternal life existing on Earth, after all
that’s what she saw before her: She herself was there, and her old man, her daughter
with her husband, and the tiny newborn girl that was sleeping soundly, her head
thrust back. But after her daughter’s husband had been beaten to death, there were
no longer any conversations of this sort, her daughter had left the ghetto and when
her own daughter was grown, she’d married her to a goy. Now the goy had gone off,
her granddaughter was back to living with her mother as she had done in childhood,
and when the mother wasn’t there, the grandmother took care of her, just like
before. A human life, then, was long enough to foil an escape plan.
When evening comes, the old woman sets aside her book,
putting on her apron again. If there is meat, she begins her cooking by going down
to the courtyard and cleaning her sharp knife by thrusting it into the ground, then
pulling it out again, because in this household you can’t count on anyone but her to
respect the prescribed separation of dishes and implements. The kid may not be
cooked in its mother’s milk, that’s all there is to it.
15
On Ellis Island, a tiny bit of land within eyeshot of Manhattan,
the new arrivals are inspected to determine their suitability for a life of freedom.
Their eyes are checked, their lungs, their throats, their hands, and finally their
entire exposed bodies, men and women separately, children separately from their
parents.
When they check your eyes, watch out for the man with the hook!
Why?
When he comes to check you, he can make your eye fall out.
No way.
It’s true, a man told me about it, he said his eye fell right into his
jacket pocket.
When it’s his turn, he’s brought into the examination room and told to
undress completely. He doesn’t understand the instructions in English, but even
after an interpreter translates them for him, he doesn’t move. Have the Americans
lost their minds? Or do they really think of it as a second birth when you set foot
in their country? In any case, his examinations at the Technical University in
Vienna — which certainly weren’t easy — had gone differently.
Come on, they say, meaning: Hurry up.
There’s no help for it: More naked than he ever stood before his wife,
he must now, like it or not, stand here in the light and present himself to an
entire group of doctors. If only you could know in advance where the path you choose
freely will lead. His coat and clothing are meanwhile being disinfected, when he
gets them back after the examination they are crumpled. Shame, then, is the price
one pays for this life of freedom, or is this itself the freedom: that shame no
longer matters? Then America really must be Paradise.