Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
7
Sometimes when his wife retires so early in the evening, he goes
over after she’s fallen asleep and watches her.
In three homes, ordinary Swiss
clocks whose pendulums swung in a north-south orientation stopped.
When she
sleeps, she does not speak. That’s all right, she says to him when she is awake,
when he — after remarking that the sky is either overcast, blue, cloudy, or
perfectly clear — announces that now he’ll be coming home earlier, because the
office will no longer be heated after two in the afternoon. But when she’s asleep he
likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom
of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how
processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature — such as war, famine,
or even a civil servant’s salary that fails to increase along with the galloping
inflation — can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray,
there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across angular
jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw
in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words,
there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it’s just that
a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it’s never
been noticed that this is a language in the first place — and in fact, the
only language valid across the world and for all time. If a person were to study a
sufficient number of faces, he would surely be able to observe wrinkles, twitching
eyelids, lusterless teeth, and draw conclusions about the death of a Kaiser, unjust
reparations payments, or a stabilizing social democracy. His wife doesn’t ask why he
brought
Notes on Earthquakes in Styria
home with him, why he spends evening
after evening reading this book and copying out the most important passages; the
thing is, it describes in meticulous detail exactly the sorts of processes he is now
able to see with completely different eyes: How one and the same cause can have a
thousand different effects on different regions and locations. It feels to him as if
the top layer is crumbling away all at once from everything he sees and encounters,
a layer that once prevented him from comprehending, and finally he is able to
recognize what lies below.
Minds = landscape
, he notes between one passage
and the next. What a happy coincidence that these observations happened to fall into
his hands: the hands of one who has taken it upon himself to investigate this
primeval tongue — that’s what he’s calling it — for as long as his
strength holds up.
Persons standing upon solid ground detected a faint vibration
of the earth.
Nothing else is keeping him here in this miserable life in
which a civil servant, ninth class, is forced to stand by and watch his family
starve.
8
Good, now wash your hands and you’ll be ready.
Is there water left?
Yes.
Well, all right then.
The water half-filling the bucket is covered in a thin layer of ice.
What a disaster.
Not to worry.
The old woman pokes her hands through the layer of ice into the water
and washes them.
Goodness gracious, that’s cold.
And then: Hat, scarf, glove.
Oh, your boots.
I almost forgot my feet. . . .
And with all the snow.
What a disaster. Don’t worry, I’ll manage, I’ll be fine.
There’s no rush. Oh, the card.
I almost forgot the card.
Thirty decagrams of meat.
Well, we’ll see.
Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second
year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable
shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back
home.
Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even
slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.
Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.
Look all you like, but no pawing.
Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something
intended for her stomach.
Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes,
insects,
lice
. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to
introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?
No matter.
Zol es brennen
, to hell with it.
Meanwhile, most of the sellers had armed themselves against these
Galician refugees and their barbaric ways by posting signs:
Touching the
merchandise is strictly prohibited.
If only there were still merchandise left.
In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch
her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she
left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the
barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent,
and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card.
When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage
leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the
vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.
That’s still perfectly good. What are they thinking? They’re experts at
throwing things away, these goyim.
9
At the end of January her friend suddenly falls desperately ill.
Lying in bed with a fever of 104°, she keeps talking about a pit filled with human
flesh and a small child standing beside the pit who wants to gobble up all the meat.
Her friend’s fiancé doesn’t know what to do; together they carry the sick woman down
the stairs and bring her in a taxi to the barracks that was set up the year before
in the General Hospital’s courtyard to accommodate those stricken by the epidemic.
The next day they are not allowed in to see her, nor the day after that, and what’s
more, a pulmonary infection has now made her illness worse, they’re told; on the
fourth day they learn that the patient’s situation is very grave indeed, and on the
fifth the doctor informs them that her friend died of the Spanish flu that very
morning, at 3:20 a.m.
What’s going to happen to her now? her fiancé asks.
The 7031 will come for her tonight around eleven, the doctor says.
Who?
You must have been away at war a long time if you’ve never heard of
it.
Yes, the fiancé says.
Explain it to him, the doctor says to her and leaves.
We’re going to stay here and wait, she says.
For what?
For the 7031.
They remain standing there until after nightfall, leaning against the
wall of the hospital building, above their heads are two endless rows of windows,
but no one is looking out to where they stand down below: everyone behind these
windows is asleep or terminally ill, no one can get up and look out — the dead
windows retreat before their eyes in two rows, growing narrower as they recede,
impenetrably sealed. The arc lamps illuminate the street only until ten in the
evening, after this it is completely dark. Every once in a while, one of them
crouches, or walks a few steps. The fiancé smokes until his jacket pockets are
empty. When it begins to snow, the two take shelter beneath the archway that four
days ago was an entryway and soon will be an exit.
Healing and Comfort for the
Sick
is written on a plaque above the arch. And then, shortly before
midnight, the streetcar bearing the number 7031 really does arrive with its twelve
horizontal slots for the dead, custom built the year before (when the horse carts
could no longer keep pace with the city’s mortality rate). There is a silent loading
up of several coffins — their mutual friend is silently lying in one of them
— no one is standing on the running board of the car to catch a bit of air,
and the end of the car, which used to contain doors for the living, has been nailed
shut by the New Viennese Tramway Society. The two mourners are left behind in
Alserstrasse, and their leave-taking from their friend is the silent, electrically
operated driving off of streetcar number 7031. Above the conductor — who
doesn’t even glance at the bereaved because he is busy operating the starting lever
and making sure the switches for the rails are correctly set — an illuminated
sign displays the car’s destination: Gate IV, Central Cemetery, Vienna.
10
The tremors were regular and soundless; they consisted of a
slow swaying motion whose direction (judging by pictures set in motion on the
wall), was north to south. Isolated small cracks are reported to have appeared
on ceilings.
As life continued, his wife’s manner — which at first he
had found charming, a sort of childish stubbornness — solidified and became
something different. This metamorphosis took place in stages, but the exact point
when what might be described as severity began to dominate is something he can, in
retrospect, no longer say.
Early on in their marriage, she had sometimes asked him to extend his
lunch hour, so that after they ate they would still have time to take a walk —
oh, just blow off the office, she’d say, making a blowing sound — or when they
read
Faust
together, dividing up the roles, she would want him to read
Gretchen’s lines, and once, to please her, he’d had to put on his dress uniform,
when no one but she and the children was there to see it. Her requests had been
laughable, they’d both laughed at them; fulfilling one of these requests had been
simple enough, but it was also simple to say no to her and laugh all the same.
Together with the child’s grandmother, they had decided that half
a year after their marriage — for which he’d had to declare himself
unaffiliated with any faith — he would officially return to the Catholic
church, just as — together with the child’s grandmother — they’d decided
to baptize the child on its first birthday. Even so, as far as he could remember,
they had their first argument over why she, the child’s mother, shouldn’t have her
name entered into the baptismal registry, not even with the supplement
Israelite
. After all, if it weren’t for her, the child wouldn’t even be
alive! He hadn’t been able to think of any way to save the child. And it had turned
out that all that was needed was a handful of snow, nothing more than that!
Her bringing up the handful of snow disconcerted him.
The baptism wasn’t my idea in the first place, he said, it was your
mother’s.
So then marry my mother!
To this he gave no response.
Money is what she gives me. Money, she said.
Surely there are worse things than a mother giving her daughter
money.
Money, she said once more with contempt in her voice, but then she fell
silent. He never learned what she’d have wanted from her mother in place of the
money.
For years they depended on the money they accepted from her mother, just
to pay the rent; but when their second child came along, they couldn’t afford a maid
or nanny, and there came a point when they could no longer even afford to buy
tickets when traveling theater companies came to town.
One thing his wife realized long ago was that she couldn’t reproach him
for his failure to rise through the ranks. She had to swallow her vexation, mulling
it over in silence, and was increasingly to be found in a sour mood, impatient with
the girls and with him.
The impression was that of a heavily laden cart driving rapidly
across the rooftops, and only after this was a wavelike motion of the earth
perceptible. There were even tremors high up in the mountains. The livestock in
their alpine pastures stopped grazing, looking up with curiosity and unease. The
merry little calves began leaping around.
Why did he just drop his coat instead of putting it on the hanger? Why
did their older daughter quarrel with the younger one, instead of playing with her,
why did the little one always start wailing like that when she bumped herself, why
didn’t he go down to the cellar for firewood when he saw that more was needed, why
didn’t he bring the clock to be repaired, or do something about the lost key? If he
insisted on taking the girls to church every Sunday, why didn’t he come straight
home for lunch afterward instead of strolling around with them? You forget that I’ve
spent the entire morning standing in the kitchen cooking!
A piece of glass fell from a lamp’s cracked chimney, and an umbrella
hanging from a nail fell to the floor. Whitewash fell from the ceiling of the
church.
For a brief time he had nurtured the hope that by moving to Vienna they
would all be moving to an easier life, but then there’d been four years of war, a
capitulation, and four months of hunger, and now all their provisions — their
supplies of wood, groceries, hope — were running out, the emptiness in the
pantry and storeroom equally great, the dirt floor showing through. Here in Vienna,
his wife was reproaching him for one last thing: having married her, a Jewish vixen
from the provinces, and not even a rich one at that. Something he had always refused
to believe was apparently proving true after all: she was trapped in her Mosaic
origins as if in a cage, knocking herself black and blue against its bars.
11
Perhaps her father hadn’t gotten farther than Vienna when he
abandoned his family. Perhaps she would run into him here at the market one day, and
he would say: So there you are. When, as a little girl, she had tried to imagine
where her father might be instead of with his family, she had always visualized
someone who had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or
in France. Not that she’d believed her. But maybe her father really was right here
in Vienna after all. Sometimes she forgets she was still an infant when he left.
Even if he were to suddenly come walking down the street toward her, he wouldn’t be
able to recognize her. Sometimes she asks herself how many people walk past each
other in a big city like this without even dreaming that they might actually be
related to one another. Sometimes she does, in fact, run into her mother at the
market, and then they exchange a few words.