Jenny Erpenbeck
The End of Days

We left from here for Marienbad only last summer.

And now — where will we be going now?

— W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

BOOK I

1

The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn’t right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up. Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs ever farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred; three handfuls tossed down into the grave, and now even the grown woman who would have come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother — she too was slowly being suffocated by the dirt falling into her mouth. Beneath three handfuls of dirt, an old woman lay there in the grave: a woman who herself had begun to move slowly, one to whom another young woman, or a son, at times might have said: oh, Mother — now she, too, was waiting to have dirt thrown on top of her until eventually the grave would be full again, in fact even a bit fuller than full, since after all the mound of earth on a grave is always round on top because of the body underneath, even if the body lies far below the surface where no one can see. The body of an infant that has died unexpectedly produces hardly any roundness at all. But really the mound ought to be as huge as the Alps, she thinks, even though she’s never seen the Alps with her own eyes.


She sits on the very same footstool she always used to sit on as a child when her grandmother was telling stories. This footstool was the one thing she asked for when her grandmother offered to give her something for her new home. She sits in the hallway on this footstool, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, not touching the food and drink a friend has set before her. For seven days she will sit like this. Her husband tried to pull her to her feet, but he couldn’t manage it against her will. When the door clicked shut behind him, she was glad. Just this past Friday, the infant’s great-grandmother had stroked the sleeping child’s head, calling her meydele, little girl. She herself, by giving birth to the child, had turned her grandmother into a great-grandmother and her mother into a grandmother, but now all these transformations have been reversed. The day before yesterday, her mother — who at the time could still be called a grandmother — had brought a woolen blanket for her to wrap herself in when she went walking in the park with her baby on cold days. Then, in the middle of the night, her husband had shouted at her to do something. But she hadn’t known what to do in a situation like this. After his shouting, and after the few minutes in the middle of the night when she hadn’t known what to do, after the moment when her husband, too, hadn’t known what to do, he had not spoken another word to her. In her distress, she’d run to her mother (who now was no longer a grandmother), and her mother had told her to go back home and wait, she would send help. While her husband was pacing up and down the living room, she hadn’t dared to touch her child again. She had carried all the buckets of water out of the house and emptied them, had draped a sheet over the hallway mirror, flung open the windows in the room where the child lay, to let the night in, and then sat down beside the cradle. With these gestures she had called to mind that part of life inhabited by human beings. But what had happened right here in her own home, not quite one hour before, was something no human hand could grasp.


That’s just how it had been when her child was born, not even eight months before. After a night, a day, and another night during which the child hadn’t arrived, she had wanted to die. That’s how far she had withdrawn from life during those hours: from her husband, who was waiting outside; from her mother, who sat on a chair in the corner of the room; from the midwife, who was fussing about with bowls of water and towels; and above all, from this child that supposedly was there inside her but had wedged itself into invisibility. In the morning, after the birth, she watched from her bed as everyone simply went about doing what was needed: Her mother, who had now been transformed into a grandmother, received a friend arriving to offer congratulations, and her grandmother, now transformed into a great-grandmother, brought amulets printed with Psalm 21 to hang around the room and a cake fresh from the oven, and her husband had gone to the inn to drink the child’s health. She herself was holding the baby in her arms, and the baby was wearing the linens that she, her mother and her grandmother had embroidered in the months preceding the birth.


There were even rules for what was happening now. The people her mother had sent arrived at dawn, took the baby from its cradle, wrapped it in a cloth, and laid it on a large bier. The bundle was so small and light that one of them had to hold it in place as they descended the stairs, otherwise it would have rolled off. Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter. Do me a favor, don’t go falling down the stairs. A favor. She knew the baby had to be buried before the day was out.


*


Now she sits here on this little wooden footstool that her grandmother gave her on her wedding day, she sits with her eyes closed, just as she has seen others sitting in times of mourning. Sometimes it was she who brought food to mourners; now a girlfriend has set bowls of food at her feet. Just as she emptied out all the water in the house the night before — they say the Angel of Death would wash his sword in it — just as she covered the mirrors and opened the window because she’d seen others do so before her (but also so the child’s soul wouldn’t turn back, so it would fly off forever) — in just this way she will now sit here for seven days: because she has seen others sitting like this, but also because she wouldn’t know where else to go while she is refusing to enter that inhuman place her child’s room became last night. The customs of man are like footholds carved into inhumanity, she thinks, something a person who’s been shipwrecked can clutch at to pull himself up, and nothing more. How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.


Maybe the blanket was too thick, that could have been the cause. Or because the baby was sleeping on its back. Maybe it choked. Or it was sick and no one knew. Or the reason was that you could hardly hear the baby crying through the closed doors. She hears her mother’s footsteps in the baby’s room and knows what she is doing: She is taking the blankets out of the cradle and pulling off the pillowcases, she is stripping the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden frame and pushing the cradle into a corner. With an armful of bed linens, she now emerges from the room, passing the footstool where her daughter is sitting with her eyes shut, and carries everything down to the laundry. Was it that she’d been too young to know what to do? Her mother never told her about all these things. Or because her husband was equally helpless. Because in truth she had been left all on her own with this child, this creature that had to be kept alive. Because no one had told her beforehand that life does not work like a machine. Her mother comes back. As she walks past, she removes the sheet covering the hall mirror, folds it up, and carries it into the baby’s room. She lays it at the bottom of the suitcase she’s brought along for just this purpose, then takes the child’s things from their drawer and puts them in the suitcase with the sheet. During the months that preceded the child’s birth, all of them — the pregnant woman, her mother, and her grandmother — sewed, knitted and embroidered these jackets, dresses, and caps. Her mother now shuts the empty drawer. On top of the chest is the toy with little silver bells. When she picks it up, the bells make a jingling sound. They jingled yesterday as well, when her daughter was still a mother playing with her child. The jingling hasn’t changed in the twenty-four hours that have passed since then. Her mother now places the toy on top of everything else in the suitcase, shutting it and picking it up before exiting the room and carrying it down the hall past her daughter to bring it to the cellar. Maybe it was because the child hadn’t yet been baptized and its parents had married in haste with only a civil ceremony. Today, the child was buried in accordance with Jewish custom, and in accordance with Jewish custom she will now sit for seven days upon this footstool; but her husband will not speak to her. Surely he’s now at church, praying for the soul of their child. And where can their child’s soul go now? To purgatory? Paradise? Hell? Or was it — as some people say — that their child was one of those who needed only a short while to complete something begun in an earlier life, something of which the parents knew nothing, which is why the child so quickly returned to where it came from? Her mother comes back, goes into the baby’s room and shuts the windows. Maybe on the other side of life there is nothing at all? The apartment is now perfectly still. In fact, that’s what she would prefer.


Around nightfall, her breasts begin to grow hard and ache. She still has milk — milk for a baby lying in the ground. She’d like best to die now of this overabundance. When her baby was still gasping for air and then turning blue, she had imagined making the child a gift of all the years of life still remaining to her, haggling with the God of her forefathers, exchanging her own life for the life that had emerged from her. But God, if he existed, had rejected her gift. She remained alive. Now she remembers once more how after her marriage her grandmother never again permitted her to come along on visits to her grandfather. Only after her baby arrived and she insisted on showing it to him did she learn that on her wedding day her grandfather had sat shiva for her, his granddaughter, the living bride who had married a goy; despite his weakness he had sat there on his bed for seven days. From above, seen from the heaven her grandfather believes in, she too has already crossed the border from life to death and no longer possesses anything she might barter to strike a deal with God. When night comes, she pushes aside the bowls of food and lies down to sleep beside the footstool. She doesn’t hear her mother go to bed. She doesn’t even hear her husband come home. Sometime during this night it is exactly twenty-four hours since the unexpected death, in a small Galician town — 50.08333 degrees latitude north, 25.15000 degrees longitude east — of an infant child.

2

An old man lies in bed in a dark cottage and does not speak. He’s been lying like this for a long time now, day in and day out, he knows people are saying he’s on his deathbed, but while for some people dying is a narrow antechamber to be crossed in a single leap or stride, the dying in which he lies is so huge that he cannot find his way across, perhaps because he is already so weak.

His wife sits beside him, she sits for a long time without saying anything; meanwhile it’s already dark again outside. The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, she says at last.

That spring his wife had often sat knitting beside him, and although his eyes were no longer so good, he had seen that the garments she was working on were very small. And then one day she had taken the provisions that were to have lasted an entire week, baked a cake and left the house with it. There was no egg in the soup on the Sabbath. There was no need for him to ask, nor for her to explain.

Early this morning while it was still dark, still half asleep, he heard his wife and daughter whispering in the parlor; then, after lunch, his wife left the house and didn’t return until nightfall, sitting down beside him and saying at last after a long silence: The Lord gave, and the Lord took away.

The old couple hadn’t been invited to their granddaughter’s wedding. On the day their granddaughter married a goy, the old man sat up in his bed and stayed sitting like that for seven days, sitting shiva for this living bride as was customarily done only for the dead.

Now his wife sits in silence beside him, her elderly, bed-ridden husband, and shakes her head. God knows what our meydele was thinking, marrying her daughter to a goy, the old man says.

3

She takes the blankets out of the cradle, takes off the pillowcases, strips the cradle’s fabric canopy from its wooden frame, and pushes the cradle into a corner. The misfortune had begun many years before, when her daughter was still an infant. When they heard the noise outside, her husband had immediately sent the wet nurse up to the nursery with the baby, telling her to bolt the door and not open it under any circumstances if there was a knock, and to close the shutters tightly. Then the two of them ran from window to window downstairs to see what was going on: A crowd appeared to be forming in the surrounding streets, and across the way, on the square, some were running, some were shouting, but what they were shouting was unclear. She and her husband hadn’t managed to get the downstairs shutters closed before the first stones struck the house. Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs, tearing down the wallpaper as they ran and banging holes in the wall with the axe. She and her husband stood behind the attic door, which was very thin, they’d locked it but hadn’t found furniture heavy enough to barricade the door, and now they heard the men’s footsteps on the last steep flight of stairs. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more. O Lord in heaven. If the way below was barred to them, there had to be an escape route above. They began to push the roof shingles away with their hands, creating an opening. But the door behind them that was momentarily holding off their pursuers was thin, just a few boards. Her husband helped her pull herself up and clamber through the opening onto the roof. And then she tried to pull him up after her. And that’s when the thin door could no longer withstand the attackers’ blows. And then she was pulling him up by one arm while the men below were pulling him down by the other. Lot refused to surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least him to strike at, spit on, trample, and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people, and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to withdraw. Make no tarrying, O my God. She doesn’t have the strength of angels, she doesn’t succeed in pulling her husband up to where she is. As she holds tight to her husband’s arm, she implores Andrei, whom she has known since he was a baby, to have mercy, and she implores the men she doesn’t know to have mercy as well, including the one holding the axe, but while she is still holding tight to her husband’s hand, her husband down below is being first insulted and then beaten by the men she doesn’t know and also by Andrei, whom she has known since he was a baby, Mercy, and finally before her eyes they begin to swing the axe. She does not let go. First she is holding her husband by the hand, and then all she is holding is a clump of flesh, for there is no longer anything alive left that she might pull up to where she crouches in the open air. Then she is a Jewish widow holding Death by the hand. She lets go, gets up, and looks down at the small town beneath her and the open landscape. It’s broad daylight, there are thatch roofs and roofs covered in shingles, there are streets, squares, and fountains, and in the distance fields and woods, cows standing in a meadow, a coach driving down a dirt road, in front of the house people stand looking up at her, unmoving now and silent. Then, suddenly, she sees that it is snowing. Everything will freeze, she thinks, and a good thing too, she thinks, snow, snow. Losing consciousness, she tumbles, rolls down off the sloping roof, and falls, as luck would have it, on the heap of clothes, linens, and curtains thrown out onto the street by the men, and she remains lying there in the heap of rags, amid blood consisting of the raspberry jam she herself made the summer before, the jar shattered when it was thrown, and now she lies there, her limbs broken, her eyes closed, and none of the people standing there silently in the square comes closer or checks to see if she is still alive. She is alive, but at this moment she herself does not yet know it. The flurries have been further stirred up by her fall, more feathers float into the air from the slashed comforters, delicate goose down drifts around, slowly descending upon the branches of the trees: snow, snow, just like in winter.

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.

6

Now he knows where to find the agency, the bald-headed man gave him the address. When he goes out onto the street, it suddenly occurs to him that the first child of one of his colleagues also died young. One day, shortly after the baby’s death, his colleague asked him if he wanted to see the grave. Yes, he said, although he didn’t really want to, and so the two of them walked across the cemetery during their lunch break. His colleague showed him the child’s name on an iron plaque on a wall to the left, the mound of earth in front of it, and the stone border with the little railing. Not even a year and a half later, this same colleague became a father again, and the newborn was given the name of the deceased child as its middle name when it was baptized. He goes into the bank to withdraw the sum his journey will cost. At the exchange office next door, he obtains the twenty dollars in American currency he’ll need to enter the country, as the bald-headed man instructed him. He remembers how his wife laughed when he would imitate for her what she looked like when she was sleeping. They laughed at the same jokes over and over, laughing again and again at next to nothing; when his mother-in-law was with them, she rarely understood what they were going on about and would just shrug. Soon his train will pass over the very rails he looked after until now, one hour and twenty minutes is what this leg of the journey will take, that’s all — the stretch of track for which he used to be responsible is tiny compared to the length of the entire journey he now intends to embark on. When he embraced his wife, her bosom fit perfectly below the curve of his ribs. Sometimes they would just stand there like that, happy; sometimes they would make faces together in the mirror; once he had stuck the tip of his mustache in her ear; another time, rubbed his nose against hers. The journey will take him by land to Bremen, and there, the bald-headed man explained to him, he will board a ship; the ship is called Speranza. Then they asked themselves whether other people also did things like that when they were alone.


On his way to the station he sees his apartment building on the other side of the street and briefly stops. Something is taking place there that used to be called his life, all he has to do is cross the street and go upstairs, and he will be back where he belongs: beside his wife. Even from where he is standing he can hear the shrieks and wails coming from inside. Not his wife’s voice — that much is certain — and if he’s not mistaken, not the voice of his mother-in-law either. Who is shedding tears over his child? The door opens, and a woman he doesn’t know comes out of the house in low-heeled shoes, her coat buttoned all the way up, her scarf covering her hair; as she walks, she wipes her tears, she hasn’t noticed him on the other side of the street, and even if she did, she’d have no idea why he was standing there, and by the time she reaches the next corner, it won’t even be possible to tell that she’s been crying. When she turns off the street, an old man is coming from the other direction and almost bumps into her, he is holding a bowl. The old man nods to the woman, then continues slowly on his way to the building’s front door, which he pushes open with his shoulder so that the contents of his bowl — perhaps soup that he wants to bring to the woman in mourning — will not spill. He, the highest ranking mourner, standing a stone’s throw away, sees the stooped shoulders of the old man, and knows who it is: Simon, the coachman from the Jewish quarter who is usually off carting wood shavings, rubbish, and milk, he’s often seen him from behind sitting atop his coach box. All the people here seem to know what their duty is, he’s the only one asking himself what to do. If his mother were still alive, she would be praying the rosary with him now, he would be sitting beside the tiny coffin in the parlor and would be the father of the dead child. Is it a sign of cowardice if one leaves one’s life behind, or a sign of character if one has the strength to start anew?

7

The question of whether the nursery should remain sealed up forever is one she doesn’t have to answer, since it’s obvious she must give up the entire apartment. The only option that remains to her is moving back in with her mother. Hadn’t it pleased her when her husband married her — a Jew — without his parents’ consent, and above all that his passion for her was so strong it made him forget his own origins? This time, she’s the one he’s taken a mind to abandon, he is leaving her behind without her consent. She knows that his absence will be no greater and no smaller than his love for her and their child — and what she’s seeing reflected now in the line of death is in the end nothing more than the bond joining him to her.

You mustn’t forget, child, that he used you to pay his debts.

That’s not the only use I was to him: For example, I got in the way of his professional advancement. He would have spent all eternity in the eleventh pay grade for my sake.

But it wasn’t all eternity.

That’s because of the baby.

That’s what you think. It just didn’t occur to him beforehand that he hadn’t done himself any favors by marrying you.

Is that supposed to console me?

Yes.

So now you also want to rob me of the days when I was happy.

I’m just saying: You never had as much as you imagine you’re losing now.

Do you think I’d feel better if I saw things that way?

That’s what I’m hoping.

So then I’d just put on my apron again and remind myself how much a herring weighs compared to three apples.

At least with herring and apples you know where you stand.

It’s obviously been a long time since you loved someone.

That’s unfair and you know it.

I don’t want to talk anymore.

She’d always thought that when two people were united, it was a matter of crossing over a border you didn’t cross with anyone else, of leaving the world behind and from then on sharing everything. Now she sees that this border is malleable and can shift about at times like this. Imperceptibly, the border has slid inward, and now it is once more separating him from her. Before, she was his freedom; now he’s begun to seek his freedom elsewhere.

8

If only he knew where he could find death; he’s hoping for an easy one now that he’s been lying here so long waiting for it. As light as a kiss. As easy as plucking a hair out of the milk. A neighbor woman told him, without his asking, that the infant suffocated. Suffocation, it says in the Talmud, is the hardest among the 903 deaths. Suffocation is like a briar that has gotten caught in wool, you tear it out with all your strength and throw it over your shoulder. Like a thick rope pulled through an opening that is too small.

Whoso findeth, his friend congratulated him at his wedding fifty-two years before, and this finding continues today — find: the wisdom in the Torah, a good wife, a peaceful life, down to the last shovelful of earth on the coffin; find: a death easy as a kiss, like the kiss with which the Lord awoke Adam to life, he blew breath into his nose, and one day, if you’re lucky, he’ll gently, lightly kiss it away again. Finding is also what you need to do, he thinks, grinning his toothless graybeard grin, when you have an urgent need for the privy. I’ve got to go, he shouts into the next room, for without the help of his wife — who was his bride the day his friend wished him good fortune using the word findeth fifty-two years before — without her help, he can no longer get up.

9

Gray is the water — gray — and he throws up, why is it throwing when you throw up, he thinks, raising his head briefly, but then he’s sick to his stomach again, he’s never felt nausea like this in all his life. Once his wife told him that as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke, and she herself — like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in — had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar. When she lost her way on the outskirts of town, her one fear was that she might come too close to the border and suddenly fall off the edge. My little grain of sugar. And all the while, as she later learned at school, her horizon was nothing more than an imaginary line extending clear to the other side of Russia. As long as one remained in a single spot, this was genuinely difficult to understand, even for him, the young civil servant for whom the railway — meaning the locomotion of human beings — was a matter of professional concern. It’s really only here, on this swaying ship, that he is truly internalizing what it means for the Earth to be a sphere. Not only is he made dizzy by its roundness as he circles it, unable to endure this circling; at the same time, the horizon keeps retreating before him, in motion, retreating ever farther, as though the swaying ship were remaining fixed in place to defy him, keeping him, the traveler, always the same distance from his destination, as though the journey’s end were running away from him as he himself runs away, each canceling the other out as he continues to move. The water is gray, and he is overcome with nausea, just as sick to his stomach as several others standing there beside him, throwing up as well. The wind is blowing from the direction in which the ship is sailing, it tugs at the tails of his Imperial and Royal coat, chilling the spine of this man who until recently was a civil servant with a lifetime appointment, who meanwhile, bent over the back railing, is bequeathing to his native land in farewell everything with which it nourished him. After two or three days the nausea will let up, someone says behind him, it’s the gentleman with whom he is sharing his second-class cabin, a Swiss gentleman who is just taking a stroll across the deck and, seeing his need, gives him a handkerchief, assuring him that after this initial period things will improve. The gentleman is apparently accustomed to traveling, he lets the wind tousle his shock of hair and now pulls out an apple, saying that on the contrary, the fresh air whets his appetite, he takes a bite and offers the young man an apple too, no thank you, the man says, turning to face the sea once more, I understand, says the bearer of apples, and tosses the second round thing down from the gallery to the travelers of the lowest class in the cargo hold, who surely are hungry but lack access to a railing of their own where they might throw up when nausea overtakes them.

10

And her? For approximately three years she weighs herring and apples, hands bread, milk, and matches across the counter.

You can’t keep staring people in the face like that.

There’s nothing else to look at.

It isn’t proper. Only children stare like that.

No one’s complained.

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often now, or Mr. Veitel.

I see you’re keeping track.

I wouldn’t say that, but I do have a good sense of my customers.

And I don’t.

You do fundamentally.

I don’t have to do this.

Why are you always so quick to take offense?

I’m not offended, but if my help isn’t wanted here I can go elsewhere.

Really, so where would you go?

Her daughter says nothing.

That’s not how I meant it, you know that.

I don’t know anything at all.

They used to get their eggs from Johanna Sawitzki, but meanwhile it turns out that Karel’s eggs are fresher. The price of kerosene for lamps has fallen because it’s hard to sell Galician petroleum as fast as it degrades after being brought to the surface. For herring and sour pickles purchased together, they give their customers a better price than Levi.

In all the time you stand around waiting for customers you might have mopped the floor. For example.

Sure.

Child, this is your shop too, you’re a grown woman now.

It was never my choice.

So now it’s my fault?

What was the point of learning all that Goethe by heart at school?

Be glad you got to go to school at all.

Now the lie the shopkeeper had always sold her daughter as the truth has come to life after all. Now her daughter has taken her place as the abandoned wife, while she herself has become what in truth she always was, if only in secret: a widow.

11

Mrs. Gmora doesn’t come as often, or Mr. Veitel, that may well be. But now there’s the officer who’s taken to stopping in for matches every day at precisely the hour when her mother is off making her rounds of the farms for milk and eggs. He’ll say, perhaps, that he likes how she’s wearing her hair, and she’ll ask him, perhaps, if they use real bullets for their maneuvers. Or he’ll say that it really ought not to rain when they’re practicing their formations, and she’ll say no one melts in a little rain and laugh, and he’ll says it’s pretty the way she laughs. And once, as she’s handing him the matches across the counter, he suddenly pulls off his white leather glove before taking the matches and ever so briefly touches her hand, saying softly: I’m on fire, and she says: That’ll be one groschen, the same as always, because she thinks she must have misheard. The next time, he says nothing at all and keeps his glove on, perhaps because her mother is standing right beside her, because on Sunday the farmers from whom she gets the eggs and milk are all at church. But then, at the beginning of the next week, when she is all alone behind the counter again, he wordlessly hands her a slip of paper along with the coin, gazing openly at her, and only after he is gone does she unfold the paper and read. All there is on the paper is: a street, a house number, a day, and a time. Aha, she thinks, and then she thinks that she wasn’t mistaken after all. And later, in the evening, lying alone in her bed in which she lay as a little girl — the bed to which she returned after the death of her child so as to sleep herself old in it and, who knows, perhaps even die in it someday — later, in the evening, that hour of evening that might as well be night, she cannot think of a good reason not to go at the appointed hour to where the officer will be awaiting her.


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.

16

Her husband has known for a year and a half what comes after death, and soon she will, too. Her daughter, on the other hand — although she’s been a widow longer — has a good part of her path still before her. Keeping the shop is a struggle. What will become of her granddaughter when she is all alone in the world someday?

Two ships lie in the harbor. She holds her ears with their sagging lobes close to her husband’s mouth — his whisper is so soft, she can scarcely hear the rest of the story, but she herself has read it often. One of the two ships has just returned from a long voyage, the other is just preparing for a long voyage. She tries to give her husband — for whom speaking is an exertion — something to drink, but he refuses to swallow, and so the water runs down his stubbly chin onto the pillow.

Jubilation and blessings accompany the ship as it sails off — while the arriving ship goes unremarked. But is it not this ship that deserves jubilation?

What a shame that she was able to raise only the one daughter with him. Two other children died shortly after birth. When on some evenings she wept over the ones that had died, he would sit down beside her with a nod.

The newly arrived ship lies safely in the harbor. But nothing is known of the one just setting sail. What will be its fate? Who knows whether it will successfully withstand the storms awaiting it?

Her daughter recently remarked that perhaps it would make more sense to close the store and rent out part of the apartment instead.

Or would you rather have some soup? she asks him.

The pillow is still damp with the water she tried to give him when he stops being able to breathe.

17

The shopkeeper can still clearly remember the day the goy first came into the shop and saw her daughter, who had just turned sixteen. Since he displayed serious interest, she summoned him not long afterward to have tea with her in their apartment while the girl was at school. She showed him the living room and the bookcase with Goethe’s Collected Works, spoke of the dowry, and finally even brought him into her daughter’s room, where the dress the girl had worn the day before was still draped over the back of the big armchair, one of the shoes beside it had fallen over, and the housecat lay curled up on the bed, asleep.

I’m sure you realize we are of Jewish descent.

Yes, I know.

There’s still time for you to turn back.

She had sold many a bit of merchandise in her life. She knew when it was too late for a customer to walk away from the deal. The more freedom you gave him to choose, the more likely he was to choose exactly what he was supposed to.

What are you saying?

For a while both of them remained standing beside the bed of the absent girl, looking at the cat, which, from time to time, extended its claws in a dream and then pulled them back in again beneath the fur.


That morning, for the sake of her daughter’s happiness, she had sold her daughter’s happiness. Sometimes the price one pays for something continues to grow after the fact, becoming too expensive long after it has been paid. A transaction like this is a living equilibrium, she’s grasped this in the course of the three years since her son-in-law’s disappearance. Profit and loss must avail themselves of a salesman if they are to work together, but fundamentally their dealings are with one another; at some point they balance each other out again. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out. A man wanting to deliver a letter on Shabbat is not permitted to, according to the Talmud, because that would be work. It would be work to walk from the street into a building, in other words mixing indoors and outdoors. On Shabbat people are to rest, and the three spaces — Outside, Inside, Wilderness — are to be kept separate from each other. But if the messenger walks up to the recipient’s window opening onto the street and lets the letter fall into the recipient’s hand, the messenger would not be leaving his space — the street — and the recipient would be remaining in his own — the building; what’s more, the dropping of the letter would not be a giving, nor would its receipt in the open hand be a taking. How heatedly she and her husband had debated with her parents about how the Talmud pointed the way here to deceit, to the violation of the rules that were supposed to be its jurisdiction. Her father said it was a matter of how the boundaries were defined, that it wasn’t possible to comply with a prohibition unless you knew exactly where it started and ended. In any case, it wasn’t a parable, her husband had said, but rather in the end pure mathematics. Her mother had laughed and opined: thank goodness it was a letter the messenger was dropping and not an egg. She herself had declared the messenger’s hesitation pedantic, making her father smile at her indignation, saying: you don’t understand what’s meant. At the time she didn’t want to understand what was meant, her father was still alive, and as long as that was the case she — even as a grown woman — was the one permitted to be in error. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.


How happy a person must be, she’s come to think — now that twenty years have passed since her husband’s fatal beating, three since her daughter’s abandonment, one and a half since her father’s death and burial — how happy a person must be who can manage to comport himself as impassively as the messenger in this story, simply letting things happen as they will and nonetheless delivering what has been entrusted to him. When in her home she finds traces of dirt on a knife that her elderly mother has cleaned, she feels only disgust. Her daughter, on the other hand, moves so lethargically about the shop that she often feels an impulse to drag her by the hair back to work. But she observes even her own body with impatience as it struggles to hoist the ten-kilogram sacks of flour onto the cart, and the farmers who sometimes help her and sometimes don’t are called Marek, Krzystof, or often — hearing the name is still difficult for her — Andrei.

18

So what began with the hands is now ending with the hands. Should she perhaps give a present to the man who thought she was for sale? Certainly not, she thinks, and, after he’s gone, she takes the money from the chest of drawers, leaves the room, goes downstairs, out of the building (which looks no different from others), and onto the street. She gives the money to the first beggar woman she sees squatting beside the road, and for two days afterward life really does look just the same as before. But on the third day, a Sunday, the officer comes into the shop again as if nothing ever happened, he wants to buy matches, he says, the same as always, in the back room her mother is wrapping merchandise in newsprint, it rustles, then he reaches across the counter to grab his recent lover by the chin, forcing her to look him in the eye and says, not even lowering his voice, he has a friend who would also be interested.

Rustling newspaper.

The day, the time, the building that looks like any other.

Rustling newspaper.

If she doesn’t want anyone to hear of this, he says, she should keep the appointment.

Silence.

Child, can you give me a hand here?

Yes, Mother.

Admit it, you enjoyed it too.

What a disaster — child, where are you? My hand’s about to fall off.

Coming!

19

After the inspection of the immigrating flesh, the mind, too, is checked; man, woman, and child must answer thirty questions, and only persons giving acceptable answers will be allowed to cross over to the mainland. Madness, melancholia, anarchism — all these and others like them will be rejected. Were you ever in prison? Do you practice polygamy? In his now rumpled coat, the Austrian asks himself whether in America, as a result of this strict examination at the border, there are no longer deficiencies of any sort, no longer any cripples or incurable diseases, no madness, no insubordination, perhaps even no death?

20

So that’s how it was when you fell off the edge of the palatschinke, a grain of sugar, and disappeared. Already after her second customer she started using the money to buy something for herself, a pair of stockings, after all it was her own body she was offering up for sale. After the third, a scarf — leave the curtains open, I want to look at you — after the fourth — listen, can’t you struggle a little — and the fifth — bring your mouth here — and the sixth — you Jewish sow: four, five, and six together, a new pair of shoes. It hurt, it disgusted her, it was ludicrous, sometimes her skin felt like it was cracking open in delicate spots and burning, but bit by bit taking leave of her senses became her job. Now she knew what the men were hiding from their families, and the ones she ran into on the street wearing their uniforms, or in top hats, or work smocks — never again was she able to see them as anything other than what they all finally were: naked. What she could buy with the money she earned in this way — considering that she would never again be at one with any person in the world, not even with herself — was absurdly little. But the less a dress, a hat, or piece of jewelry stood in any sort of relationship to what she was giving of herself, the easier it became for her to sell herself the next time. Eventually her true worth, which now only she would know, would be impossible to measure. How delightful the gods find these penitent sinners; / lifting prodigal children in arms made of fire / with jubilant cries up to Heaven above. Her mother never asked where all the new things she wore came from, but even without being asked, she told her she had found the shoes for a good price here or there, already used, or that a girlfriend had given her one or the other trinket, that she found the ring in the street. Hadn’t her mother also lied to her about the death of her father throughout her childhood and youth?

21

Waiting for the results of the examination, a thousand or two thousand people sit in the gloomy light of the great hall, and new ones are constantly coming to join them. These people squat, lie on the ground, or sit on benches: people with bundles, bedding, and crates, with samovars, people without any baggage at all, children running about, crying babies, people who have lain down on the floor and gone to sleep, people with frail parents, people who understand not a word of English, people who don’t know whether the person who’s supposed to pick them up here is really coming, people who are filled with hope, with despair, people who are homesick, frightened, people who don’t know what’s in store for them, people who are wondering where they’ll find the twenty-five dollars for their immigration fee, people who suddenly want to go back, or who are just glad that the ground beneath their feet is no longer swaying, people with long or short pants, with headscarves, skirts, suits, hats, with fringe, shoes, or slippers, gloves or cuffs, with braids, beards, mustaches, curls, parted hair, people with many, few, or no children — countless people, all of whom are waiting for the moment when eventually their names will be called and they will learn whether they are allowed to stay or will be sent back to Europe. The young man, who is also one of those waiting, thinks: This is probably more or less the way it’s going to be one day at the Last Judgment.

And then, suddenly, a loud clattering and jangling fills the hall; everyone falls silent for a moment, looks over, and sees a large Chinese vase lying shattered on the ground — a girl has dropped it in one of the very few places in the hall not covered with people or clothes or bundles, but only with stone tiles, she has dropped this vase that she carried in her arms ever since her departure from a small town outside Bucharest or Warsaw, or outside Vienna or Odessa or Athens or Paris — all the long way via Bremen, Antwerp, Danzig, Marseille, Piraeus, or Barcelona: The vase has shattered into bits here in the arrival hall, the final stop before New York, for the girl has just — for the first time in her life — seen a man with dark skin, who happened to be walking across the room with a broom in his hand, and she must have thought it was the Devil. The girl’s mother now looks as if she would like best to strike her child dead, and the girl looks as though she wishes she were dead. Then the noise recommences — the crying, talking, and shouting — the children go back to running around, the adults wait, and a boy, having been given an ice cream by a relative who got permission to visit him, places the ice cream on the bench, and there it melts, because the boy doesn’t know what ice cream is.

Hey look, the inspector wrote a letter on your back in chalk — mine too?

The boy turns his back to his friend so he can see whether he too has a mark on him, one that may possibly decide if he will be permitted to stay or be sent back to Europe.

No, there’s nothing on your back.

What sort of letter is it, do you think?

Dunno.

So do I have to go back now, or do you?

No idea.

Two little girls are crouching on the floor.

I’m thirsty.

Grandmother says that when you get to Battery Park, there are a lot of fountains there.

Good, I’ll have a drink then.

No, you mustn’t drink, whatever happens.

How come?

She says that then you’ll forget everything you ever knew about where you come from.

Then I’ll forget the garden?

Yes.

And the fireplace?

Yes.

And Grandfather?

Yes.

And Grandmother?

Yes.

And the cat?

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?

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