Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
Yes.
Everything?
Yes.
How does Grandmother know?
Someone told her.
22
One evening, after one day, there is no dinner on the table; when
mother and daughter try to open the door to Grandmother’s room, it isn’t possible,
because her body is lying in front of it.
Vos iz mit dir? Mamele, vos iz mit
dir? Mamele,
what’s the matter? Simon the coachman is called, and he breaks
open the door with an axe, with Mother standing beside him, one hand pressed to her
mouth; her daughter calls her grandmother’s name, but no one answers.
What else have you got to do today?
I have a guest to look after.
Do you have a lot of guests?
Is the lonely soul not a guest in the body? Today it’s here, and by
tomorrow it’s on its way again.
When the hole in the door is finally big enough, the two women stick
their hands through, reaching for Grandmother, but she is already cold, as cold as
only something dead feels.
23
At the many small, rectangular teller windows in the great hall at
Ellis Island, a Loshel becomes a Louis, a Davnar a David, an Arden an Alvin, a Chaia
a Clara. And he, Johann, becomes a Joe. Did he really want to go that far? And why
is he doing this? Others learn at similar rectangular windows that their families
will be permitted to stay here but they themselves must go back, or that because of
them, the whole family will be sent back along with them, returning home to a place
where they no longer want to make their home, where they’ll starve or be beaten to
death. Then they start shouting or cling to one another, while others just stand
there quietly, weeping or falling silent altogether.
24
Only after her grandmother’s funeral does her mother tell her that
she, the daughter, took her very first steps holding her grandmother’s hand.
And where were you?
I was making all the preparations for us to move while also keeping the
shop open.
No one was helping you?
No.
Why not?
We were moving in the wrong direction.
So a mother knows more about a child than a child could ever know about
herself. If her own child were still alive, she, as the child’s mother, would surely
have been the one to teach her how to put one foot in front of the other — and
on some morning or other when her husband was at the office, the child, holding her
hand, would have managed the journey from wardrobe to chest without falling for the
first time ever, or if the weather were fair, perhaps the route would have led from
the front door to the corner. As a mother, she would know this and never forget, and
then one day she would perhaps tell her child, or perhaps not, with or without a
reason. But now her secrets and memories are hers alone, and no one’s going to ask
her, even many years later, about the things she keeps to herself. Her grandmother’s
house, where, she’s just been told, she learned to walk, has now collapsed —
she saw it herself not long ago. The roof crashed down into the parlor, turning what
was formerly a room into a garbage heap. Chickens now mince about on the heap,
poking the rotting thatch with their beaks on their chicken-life-long search for
worms and bugs. If she were to remain in this town of modest size her whole life,
she would, sooner or later, come out of a building that looks like any other and
find herself right in front of her mother, or perhaps a neighbor or friend, even
that would be enough. No, unable to find herself, she has no need to wait for others
to give her up for lost. She’s already free down to her bones; already it’s a matter
of complete indifference what she does.
With the same hands she used when she was learning to walk to
hold tight to her grandmother so as not to lose her balance, she now packs a few
necessities in a suitcase, carries it to the station, and pays for the ticket. In a
second-class compartment she travels over rails whose maintenance used to be the
responsibility of one who was called her husband in her earlier life, putting this
leg of the journey behind her takes only an hour and twenty minutes; then she
travels for an additional two hours, not getting out until Lemberg — capital
of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria — ninety kilometers southeast of the
small border town where she was first a girl, then a young woman, and then, for a
brief period, even a mother and wife. She copies out an address from a notice
hanging at the station, carries her suitcase there, pays half the first month’s rent
in advance, presses down a door handle, and in this way enters her new lodgings.
Here no one knows who held her hand when she learned to walk upright at only eleven
months, nor does anyone know that the Poles are to blame for her inability to
remember a father, nor even that she can still recite all of Goethe’s poem “The God
and the Bayadère” by heart. Here she will use her right hand, and of course also her
left, as well as her mouth and the other orifices of her body for no other purpose
than to keep this body alive, along with the hands, the mouth, and the rest to which
these orifices are attached. To be sure, she will do this under a new name —
one that, in her opinion, seems reasonably appropriate to her new life, and if
anyone asks her name, she says it’s
Missy von Lemberg
and laughs.
25
Admittedly, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy assembled almost as many
different ethnic groups under its crown as he was seeing here in the great hall.
From Bosnia to the most remote Polish-speaking provinces, the doors of a tobacco
shop were invariably adorned with black and yellow stripes, with the Kaiser’s
portrait occupying a place of honor on the wall. Yet, for all the intermingling of
different languages and dialects, German remained the language of bureaucracy. The
Kaiser, though, hadn’t selected the individuals to be let in; rather, he’d swallowed
up entire peoples indiscriminately, making all of them part of his realm.
Melancholia, madness, and unlawfulness remained at home — even after home
became suddenly known as Austria or Hungary — and it did the monarchy no harm.
Europe’s peoples, with or without wars, had always crisscrossed the continent,
intermixing and seeking out new homes whenever their one bit of land produced too
little or life became unbearable for some reason. But perhaps a coastline like this
was a more naturally defined border. Here you could send the people you didn’t want
back out on the water, even if it meant they would perish back home or simply drown
at sea like surplus kittens.
26
For the first time ever she wishes she were of limited
intelligence — limited enough that she might bring herself to call her
daughter an ingrate. Her apartment now has so many spare rooms that it’s worth her
while to rent them out. She gives up the shop, takes her leave of the farmers, and
sells horse and cart to Simon, the coachman. She removes all personal items from the
rooms and even clears out the cellar a little at a time, reasoning that in two or
three years she may no longer have the strength for work like this. She now finally
gives away many things that she intended to save although she had no plans for their
use, such as the cradle in which her grandchild slept for eight months, the ivory
toy with the little silver bells, even the woolen shawl she gave her daughter to
wrap around her shoulders, which had never once been used, since her daughter hadn’t
had the chance to go out for walks with her baby in the park. She keeps the
footstool, for without it she can no longer reach the top shelf of her bookcase
where volumes 1 to 20 of Goethe’s
Collected Works
still are and will
remain, including Volume 9, which was struck by Andrei’s stone years before. (And so
the bad memory remains preserved among the good, one as incorporeal as the others.)
She also keeps her mother’s silver candelabra, it stands now on the windowsill in
the parlor, but she never lights the candles on a Sabbath or on any other day.
27
It’s August, and he sets foot on solid ground again on the
other side of the world. Heat is collecting between the buildings; his wife would
have called this air thick enough to cut, he would have stolen a glance at the
ink-colored shadows beneath her arms on her otherwise light-blue dress and when no
one was looking, slipped his hand in, and she would have said, cut it out, and
laughed. Now he is seeing here for the first time peddlers with nothing but soiled
undershirts covering their sweaty torsos, calling out their fruit, meat, or fish,
holding up a sample in the air, the customers in these parts seem not to be put off
by the casually rampant hair on chests, the backs of necks, and arms, exposed
unbidden to their view. He himself goes into a hotel in search of a clean lavatory,
on the ferry from Ellis Island to Battery Park, his hair was blown into disarray; he
looks at himself in the mirror, seeing the same man who was in the mirror back in
Europe, and he arranges the strands of this man’s hair, dabs a bit of pomade on his
mustache, drapes the coat made of good Imperial and Royal cloth over his arm, puts
the suitcase in his other hand, and sends the man out again into the open air,
already almost perfectly American. The slip of paper his traveling companion gave
him when they parted has directions and an address written on it. Here and there he
catches a glimpse of the enormous figure as he walks, but viewed from between the
buildings, she looks almost like a castaway signaling for help with her torch,
possibly out of fear of sinking, for the island on which she’s been stranded is
hardly bigger than a handkerchief compared to the size of her feet. He turns right,
as instructed on the paper, and immediately finds the recommended entrance to an
underground tunnel; he’s to travel on something called a
subway
to Harlem,
which is where his traveling companion has his factory; the deeper he descends, the
hotter and staler the subterranean air, back in the monarchy they used to sing a
tune by Mozart:
Forever true and honest be / unto the chilly grave, / and stray
not by a finger’s breadth / from God’s anointed way
— here, by
contrast, even the dead must be sweating in the depths of their graves. He tries to
remember the rest of the verses to the song, but then the car, drawn by horses,
arrives in the station, the unfortunate beasts are wearing blinders even though it’s
already quite dark underground, Simon the coachman would shake his head. He himself,
the traveler, is scarcely less deaf and dumb than the horses, he neither speaks nor
understands a single English word, he doesn’t know whose image is on the coin he
uses to pay his fare, and he takes the gum-chewing of his fellow passengers for an
illness. And now, having come to understand that the world of numerals conceals more
than it displays, he reads: 96th, 110th, 116th Street. Only once before had he known
this little where he stood: during his childhood when his father would beat him
Sunday after Sunday, without his ever being told the reason, not even later, when he
was made to thank his father for the beating, addressing him as “Sir” and with his
title, Superior Customs Officer. His mother had failed to protect her son from her
own husband, she had watched his beating, but only stood there in the corner without
stirring from the spot, quietly weeping. Whenever her weeping became too loud, she
got a beating as well. As a child, he didn’t know whom to hate more: his father, who
did his best to beat him to death every Sunday, or his mother, who just stood there
and didn’t know what to do. His wife, too, hadn’t known what to do on the night in
question.
Back home, his mother died even before he finished his degree
at the Technical University in Vienna — died of a stroke, he read in the
telegram he received there. Even today the word makes him want to ask: a stroke with
what weapon — a bad joke, but he knew the power of his father’s fists. Bruises
like the ones his father surely gave his mother continue to change color in the
coffin, he’d heard once from a friend who was studying medicine, in the ground they
turn first green and then finally yellow, as though this metamorphosis of colors
were standing in, if only briefly, for the sorts of development of which the person
who’d been struck dead by violent hands was no longer capable. At the time, he’d
been about to sit for his exams for his intermediate degree in weights and measures,
and for this reason he did not attend the funeral, to which his father raised no
objection. Somewhere he’d once learned or read that New York was built on stone,
perhaps this is why he wants to stay here, for on rocky ground he can be quite sure
of not following in anyone’s footsteps: neither those of his father, the Superior
Customs Officer, nor those of his timorous mother.
28
Now it’s like this: The one hand knows that a man’s member doesn’t
hurt when you squeeze it, even applying a fair bit of pressure, it’s just a muscle.
Another hand has known for a long time that caution is required when pouring water
over the kasha in the pot, because the water can splash up and possibly scald you.
One hand grasps the handle of a drill in a factory eight hundred times a day. One
hand washes the other, another gets slipped through a person’s hair, another drops a
quarter into a gas meter. One hand pulls a sheet taut, another wipes crumbs from the
table, a third flips a light switch. One pair of eyes sees dust motes rising in a
beam of light, another peers into men’s wide-open mouths, another notices a little
can of oil. Ears hear a door being slammed, sirens, someone coughing; feet slide
into silk stockings, elbows are massaged, toenails are cut, filed, and polished,
feet are so blistered they won’t fit in the shoes; gray, black, brown hair; rings
under eyes; calluses; two weary breasts; almost a proper bald spot; toothache;
tongue; a voice like silk. What under other circumstances might have been or become
a family has now been torn so far asunder that being drawn and quartered by horses
would be nothing in comparison. Nonetheless, one or the other of them — here,
there or yonder — sometimes thinks the very same thought: Why was the baby so
quiet all of a sudden?