The End of Days

1

In January 1919, the gold buttons on the father’s coat still display the double-headed eagle and the Kaiser’s crown, but the Kaiser has been dead two years now, and the eagle’s Hungarian half has long since flown away. But the coat still keeps him warm, so he remains wrapped in Imperial and Royal finery, sitting day after day in his underheated, now-democratic office in the Meteorological Institution in Vienna; and after work he goes from there to the under-heated coffeehouse Vindobona for two games of chess with his friend and colleague, sitting in his coat there as well. Even at home in the evenings he doesn’t take off this coat, for the wood that mother and daughter gather in the Vienna Woods twice a week is damp, and when it’s stuffed into the kitchen stove it hisses more than it burns. The heating stoves in the parlor, the bedroom and the room shared by the two girls have remained cold for a long time. The father sits down at the table in his coat with the gold buttons, there are boiled potatoes for dinner, one each, for father, mother, and the younger daughter.

Where’s the big one?

She’s not home.

Do you remember when you were her age? That’s when things started between us.

That’s enough now.

2

You look like a whore, the mother had said to her older daughter the previous summer when she shortened her skirt to above the knee and wanted to leave the house like that.

What do you know about whores? her daughter had shouted and slammed the door so hard on her way out, the panes of glass in the upper half rattled. After her daughter left, the mother sat there weeping for half an hour, but then she hiked her own skirt up to above her knees and looked at her legs in the mirror. After four years of war, Vienna had gone to seed, and so had she. She’d been so filled with hope when she had traveled here all alone. Once her husband’s transfer was certain, she’d come to look for an apartment. She still remembers the first time she walked into this building smelling of limestone and dust, a limestone and dust smell that only the buildings of a metropolis can have. It was shadowy and cool in the building’s entryway, while outside, the heat was so thick you could cut it with a knife. If her husband had come with her, he would have quickly slipped his hand into her armpit when no one was looking, and she would have said, cut it out, and laughed. Before she climbed the two flights of stairs to inspect the apartment, she had run her hand over the head of the eagle at the bottom of the banister, perhaps it would bring her luck. Two bedrooms with a view of the public baths across the way, the kitchen and one bedroom facing the courtyard — the girls could play down there — a shared water tap and a separate toilet in the stairwell. The apartment was affordable, one month’s rent in advance. Then she went home again to pack for the move. The last thing she packed was the footstool her grandmother had given her for her household; the first thing she would do when she arrived would be to place this footstool in the vestibule of the new apartment, and from then on Vienna would be her home. When her mother wrote her two or three years later that for the maneuvers taking place on the border they were now using live ammunition, perhaps a war was coming, she hadn’t worried. They had fled from the provinces to Vienna as if taking refuge on an enormous ship, but it would never have occurred to them to suspect that this ship was already beginning to sink. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice were names that had often been given to Jews here in Vienna, but she hadn’t known that. God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us food. Perhaps the eagle at the bottom of the banister was really a vulture that had been waiting all these years for her demise; in any case she’s been fighting back for years now, refusing to let her family be turned into fodder, but this requires all her strength — strength she has, and also strength she hasn’t had for a long time now. She’s stopped plucking the hairs on her legs, her toenails are hard, her calves full of blue veins. In the parks of Vienna, the grass grows knee-high in summer, open squares are used to grow carrots, potatoes, and turnips, the countryside is sweeping its way across Vienna, wiping away the city, and no one much cares as long as he himself survives, there isn’t enough life left to spend correcting and clipping away at life. And try your arm, as a boy beheads thistles, against oak-trees and mountain heights. In summer, Arenberg Park is barely distinguishable from the meadows surrounding Brody near the Russian border, but now she’s grown up and has other things to do than breaking off a hazel switch and scything the grass with it as she crosses a field (as she used to so as not to overlook the edge of the palatschinke). They didn’t escape to Vienna to starve there. But no one can predict when it will be revealed that a wish is going to be left unfulfilled.

I’ve got just a few more things to copy out, he tells his wife.

That’s all right, she says, and leaves the kitchen.

As the following chronicle documents, the Styrian ground shook for thirty days. The most extensive of these shocks were recorded on days when disturbances that originated in the area around Laibach were felt in our region as well.

The little one — she’s still called this by her parents even though she’s over thirteen now and nearly five foot seven — is out in the vestibule preparing for her nighttime shift standing in line; she clamps a blanket under her arm, and her mother straps the folding chair to her back. A lange loksh. After she leaves, her mother goes to sleep for a few hours before midnight when it’s her turn to take her daughter’s place in line. With any luck, after standing in line all night long, they’ll be given cow udder at seven in the morning. Udder is edible if you boil it in milk.

The big one’s bed is empty.

3

Most definitely she was not a whore. Already the year before last she’d have been able to sell herself for two pairs of shoes, and recently also for one liter of cream, fifteen potatoes, or a half pound of fat. Again and again she’d had her price whispered in her ear by one or the other black marketeer, a price that — like all prices — was constantly in flux according to the prevailing rates of exchange, a flux that invariably maintained a downward trend. She could have sold herself long ago to keep her family from freezing at home, or for her sister, who was growing faster than she should. Perhaps in the end her mother was angry with her for doing exactly the opposite of what she reproached her daughter for: still trying to be young without selling herself. On the banks of the Danube one night the previous summer, she’d let someone unbutton her blouse for the first time, a younger schoolmate had slipped his hand under the fabric and touched her breasts, but that’s all she’d permitted, after all, he was practically a child. Another night the previous summer, her father’s friend had met her once in secret and said he found her red hair more alluring than anything he’d seen in all his life, and then he’d kissed her hair and finally her shoulder, but that’s all she’d permitted, after all, he was too old. Possibly the man destined for her was just falling in battle on the banks of the Marne or the Soca, bleeding to death in the barbed wire outside Verdun, or losing his legs. This war was shooting her youth to pieces as she was still marching through it. Her best friend had gotten engaged to a university student who had been called up; for two years he had fought battle after battle and now he lay in a field hospital with gas poisoning. Someone should declare war on war, but how that was supposed to work, she didn’t know, and neither did her friend. In the food lines she’d seen mothers hold up their starving children in front of the soldiers on duty, threatening to hang them from the window frame and themselves as well, or to take care of the entire family at once by drowning everyone in the Danube; one of them had even laid her infant down in the street, refusing to pick the baby up again because she didn’t know how she could go on feeding it. Once, when the daughter was to return home empty-handed after hours of waiting, she felt such fury that she called on the other women to march on the Rathaus with her to complain, she’d waved her handkerchief in the air above her head like a flag, and sure enough, hundreds of desperate women fell into step behind her — a girl of only fourteen. But for several hours, no one came out of the Rathaus to negotiate with them, and the women — who still had to find something to feed their families that day — gradually scattered and dispersed. She, on the other hand, had sat down right where she was and wept, using the handkerchief that had served as her flag to blow her nose and dry her tears. She hadn’t told her mother of this defeat, but instead had resolved that very day to make herself independent of hunger, to stop letting her own body blackmail her into failure, and the less she ate — this is something she’d already noticed — the clearer her thoughts became. In the end her perceptions were so heightened that during the nights of that last summer, lying with her best friend on the banks of the Danube pretending to be young, she heard not only the river’s current but even the fish and snakes gliding beneath the water’s surface, clairvoyant with hunger she knew how the creatures in the river’s depths coiled around each other, snapping and hissing.

4

He wasn’t the only human being in the world who had an inkling of how everything was connected to everything else, otherwise, he’d have chosen dying over freezing and watching his family freeze, starving and watching his family starve. A remarkable phenomenon of the cycle of tremors beginning with the 1895 Easter earthquake in Laibach is that some of the aftershocks continued for quite some time afterward, taking a significant toll in certain areas, and displaying phenomena similar to those of the main tremor. The earthquake of April 5, 1897, though not particularly strong, was distinguished by the motion of the ground being less pronounced than the shock’s acoustic effects. In any case, he would have to remain alive until at least the first of the next month, because then his wife would receive his salary. One month’s salary, if she stretched it skillfully, would last a week. What would happen during the remaining three weeks of that month and the weeks of the following one, and what in the world would happen after that — this he did not know. The tremor consisted of two shocks from below, the first of which was stronger; each lasted for approximately 2 sec. with a 1 sec. interval between; according to observations, the shaking appeared to be directed from north to south and was accompanied by a sound like that of a cart being driven into a building’s entryway; this preceded the tremor by several seconds and was longer in duration. Clocks and lamps vibrated.

He cuts the tips off his gloves so he can hold the pen better. When the ink begins to solidify in the cold, he breathes on the nib.

5

In November, the war was declared over, and in December her friend’s fiancé finally returned home. One afternoon he was suddenly standing there at the door, and at first the girls didn’t even realize that they knew him, that’s how much he’d changed. Even weeks after his return they saw how it pained him when someone scattered crumbs for the pigeons in the park. When they asked him about the war, he refused to answer, he’d just take one of the cigarette stubs he’d collected somewhere out of his jacket pocket and start smoking. When they told him they wanted to go out, he didn’t mind, he just stayed home. And when in January the curfew was changed from ten p.m. to eight, they would often simply remain in her friend’s apartment to save the twenty heller coin they’d have to slip the concierge to be let in after curfew. They would drink and talk, sometimes she even stayed the night, sleeping on a mattress in the vestibule. On those few evenings when she went out without her friend, she refused to let anyone touch, much less kiss her.

6

At night, the younger daughter sits in the street, waiting for midnight to come. Indeed, she’s been sitting like this for years, sometimes with her mother, sometimes with her sister, and often alone. This waiting began soon after the start of the war — first for bread, meat, and fat, and later also for sugar, milk, potatoes, eggs, and coal. The war is over, and still she’s sitting here, just the same as before, in this dark forest of bodies that has been growing up all around her for the past five years, stretching its limbs further with each passing night into alleyways and streets, around corners, up steps, and across the squares of Vienna, while she herself has grown within it, grown to five foot seven now, shooting up like a beanpole despite the starvation, and for years spending night after night waiting amid thousands of others who, by waiting, were fighting for survival: in front of market halls, Ankerbrot bakeries, butcher shops, and flour distribution centers, waiting in front of the various points of sale maintained by the milk industry, and also in front of shops offering carbide, candles, shoes, coffee, or soap; they stood, lay, and sat everywhere: either in silence or murmuring, the blood of Vienna beginning to stir as morning approached, to push and shove, to kick and curse, to elbow its way forward, to complain, persevere, bite, or scratch until the obstacle fell away flailing, then was pushed aside, pushing others, screeching, crying, mocking, and falling into despair. Five foot seven, while others had become weak or old during these same nights, while some had gone insane or fallen into a stupor — a few had even died while they were waiting. She sits here on her folding chair, enjoying the fact that the cobblestones are so uneven that she can rock back and forth on the chair, she sits wrapped in a blanket, waiting for midnight when her mother will relieve her.

7

Sometimes when his wife retires so early in the evening, he goes over after she’s fallen asleep and watches her. In three homes, ordinary Swiss clocks whose pendulums swung in a north-south orientation stopped. When she sleeps, she does not speak. That’s all right, she says to him when she is awake, when he — after remarking that the sky is either overcast, blue, cloudy, or perfectly clear — announces that now he’ll be coming home earlier, because the office will no longer be heated after two in the afternoon. But when she’s asleep he likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature — such as war, famine, or even a civil servant’s salary that fails to increase along with the galloping inflation — can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray, there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across angular jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words, there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it’s just that a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it’s never been noticed that this is a language in the first place — and in fact, the only language valid across the world and for all time. If a person were to study a sufficient number of faces, he would surely be able to observe wrinkles, twitching eyelids, lusterless teeth, and draw conclusions about the death of a Kaiser, unjust reparations payments, or a stabilizing social democracy. His wife doesn’t ask why he brought Notes on Earthquakes in Styria home with him, why he spends evening after evening reading this book and copying out the most important passages; the thing is, it describes in meticulous detail exactly the sorts of processes he is now able to see with completely different eyes: How one and the same cause can have a thousand different effects on different regions and locations. It feels to him as if the top layer is crumbling away all at once from everything he sees and encounters, a layer that once prevented him from comprehending, and finally he is able to recognize what lies below. Minds = landscape, he notes between one passage and the next. What a happy coincidence that these observations happened to fall into his hands: the hands of one who has taken it upon himself to investigate this primeval tongue — that’s what he’s calling it — for as long as his strength holds up. Persons standing upon solid ground detected a faint vibration of the earth. Nothing else is keeping him here in this miserable life in which a civil servant, ninth class, is forced to stand by and watch his family starve.

8

Good, now wash your hands and you’ll be ready.

Is there water left?

Yes.

Well, all right then.

The water half-filling the bucket is covered in a thin layer of ice.

What a disaster.

Not to worry.

The old woman pokes her hands through the layer of ice into the water and washes them.

Goodness gracious, that’s cold.

And then: Hat, scarf, glove.

Oh, your boots.

I almost forgot my feet.

And with all the snow.

What a disaster. Don’t worry, I’ll manage, I’ll be fine.

There’s no rush. Oh, the card.

I almost forgot the card.

Thirty decagrams of meat.

Well, we’ll see.

Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.

Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.

Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.

Look all you like, but no pawing.

Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?

No matter. Zol es brennen, to hell with it.

Meanwhile, most of the sellers had armed themselves against these Galician refugees and their barbaric ways by posting signs: Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.

If only there were still merchandise left.

In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.

That’s still perfectly good. What are they thinking? They’re experts at throwing things away, these goyim.

9

At the end of January her friend suddenly falls desperately ill. Lying in bed with a fever of 104°, she keeps talking about a pit filled with human flesh and a small child standing beside the pit who wants to gobble up all the meat. Her friend’s fiancé doesn’t know what to do; together they carry the sick woman down the stairs and bring her in a taxi to the barracks that was set up the year before in the General Hospital’s courtyard to accommodate those stricken by the epidemic. The next day they are not allowed in to see her, nor the day after that, and what’s more, a pulmonary infection has now made her illness worse, they’re told; on the fourth day they learn that the patient’s situation is very grave indeed, and on the fifth the doctor informs them that her friend died of the Spanish flu that very morning, at 3:20 a.m.

What’s going to happen to her now? her fiancé asks.

The 7031 will come for her tonight around eleven, the doctor says.

Who?

You must have been away at war a long time if you’ve never heard of it.

Yes, the fiancé says.

Explain it to him, the doctor says to her and leaves.

We’re going to stay here and wait, she says.

For what?

For the 7031.

They remain standing there until after nightfall, leaning against the wall of the hospital building, above their heads are two endless rows of windows, but no one is looking out to where they stand down below: everyone behind these windows is asleep or terminally ill, no one can get up and look out — the dead windows retreat before their eyes in two rows, growing narrower as they recede, impenetrably sealed. The arc lamps illuminate the street only until ten in the evening, after this it is completely dark. Every once in a while, one of them crouches, or walks a few steps. The fiancé smokes until his jacket pockets are empty. When it begins to snow, the two take shelter beneath the archway that four days ago was an entryway and soon will be an exit. Healing and Comfort for the Sick is written on a plaque above the arch. And then, shortly before midnight, the streetcar bearing the number 7031 really does arrive with its twelve horizontal slots for the dead, custom built the year before (when the horse carts could no longer keep pace with the city’s mortality rate). There is a silent loading up of several coffins — their mutual friend is silently lying in one of them — no one is standing on the running board of the car to catch a bit of air, and the end of the car, which used to contain doors for the living, has been nailed shut by the New Viennese Tramway Society. The two mourners are left behind in Alserstrasse, and their leave-taking from their friend is the silent, electrically operated driving off of streetcar number 7031. Above the conductor — who doesn’t even glance at the bereaved because he is busy operating the starting lever and making sure the switches for the rails are correctly set — an illuminated sign displays the car’s destination: Gate IV, Central Cemetery, Vienna.

10

The tremors were regular and soundless; they consisted of a slow swaying motion whose direction (judging by pictures set in motion on the wall), was north to south. Isolated small cracks are reported to have appeared on ceilings. As life continued, his wife’s manner — which at first he had found charming, a sort of childish stubbornness — solidified and became something different. This metamorphosis took place in stages, but the exact point when what might be described as severity began to dominate is something he can, in retrospect, no longer say.

Early on in their marriage, she had sometimes asked him to extend his lunch hour, so that after they ate they would still have time to take a walk — oh, just blow off the office, she’d say, making a blowing sound — or when they read Faust together, dividing up the roles, she would want him to read Gretchen’s lines, and once, to please her, he’d had to put on his dress uniform, when no one but she and the children was there to see it. Her requests had been laughable, they’d both laughed at them; fulfilling one of these requests had been simple enough, but it was also simple to say no to her and laugh all the same.

Together with the child’s grandmother, they had decided that half a year after their marriage — for which he’d had to declare himself unaffiliated with any faith — he would officially return to the Catholic church, just as — together with the child’s grandmother — they’d decided to baptize the child on its first birthday. Even so, as far as he could remember, they had their first argument over why she, the child’s mother, shouldn’t have her name entered into the baptismal registry, not even with the supplement Israelite. After all, if it weren’t for her, the child wouldn’t even be alive! He hadn’t been able to think of any way to save the child. And it had turned out that all that was needed was a handful of snow, nothing more than that!

Her bringing up the handful of snow disconcerted him.

The baptism wasn’t my idea in the first place, he said, it was your mother’s.

So then marry my mother!

To this he gave no response.

Money is what she gives me. Money, she said.

Surely there are worse things than a mother giving her daughter money.

Money, she said once more with contempt in her voice, but then she fell silent. He never learned what she’d have wanted from her mother in place of the money.

For years they depended on the money they accepted from her mother, just to pay the rent; but when their second child came along, they couldn’t afford a maid or nanny, and there came a point when they could no longer even afford to buy tickets when traveling theater companies came to town.

One thing his wife realized long ago was that she couldn’t reproach him for his failure to rise through the ranks. She had to swallow her vexation, mulling it over in silence, and was increasingly to be found in a sour mood, impatient with the girls and with him.

The impression was that of a heavily laden cart driving rapidly across the rooftops, and only after this was a wavelike motion of the earth perceptible. There were even tremors high up in the mountains. The livestock in their alpine pastures stopped grazing, looking up with curiosity and unease. The merry little calves began leaping around.

Why did he just drop his coat instead of putting it on the hanger? Why did their older daughter quarrel with the younger one, instead of playing with her, why did the little one always start wailing like that when she bumped herself, why didn’t he go down to the cellar for firewood when he saw that more was needed, why didn’t he bring the clock to be repaired, or do something about the lost key? If he insisted on taking the girls to church every Sunday, why didn’t he come straight home for lunch afterward instead of strolling around with them? You forget that I’ve spent the entire morning standing in the kitchen cooking!

A piece of glass fell from a lamp’s cracked chimney, and an umbrella hanging from a nail fell to the floor. Whitewash fell from the ceiling of the church.

For a brief time he had nurtured the hope that by moving to Vienna they would all be moving to an easier life, but then there’d been four years of war, a capitulation, and four months of hunger, and now all their provisions — their supplies of wood, groceries, hope — were running out, the emptiness in the pantry and storeroom equally great, the dirt floor showing through. Here in Vienna, his wife was reproaching him for one last thing: having married her, a Jewish vixen from the provinces, and not even a rich one at that. Something he had always refused to believe was apparently proving true after all: she was trapped in her Mosaic origins as if in a cage, knocking herself black and blue against its bars.

11

Perhaps her father hadn’t gotten farther than Vienna when he abandoned his family. Perhaps she would run into him here at the market one day, and he would say: So there you are. When, as a little girl, she had tried to imagine where her father might be instead of with his family, she had always visualized someone who had hanged himself. Father might be in America, her mother had said. Or in France. Not that she’d believed her. But maybe her father really was right here in Vienna after all. Sometimes she forgets she was still an infant when he left. Even if he were to suddenly come walking down the street toward her, he wouldn’t be able to recognize her. Sometimes she asks herself how many people walk past each other in a big city like this without even dreaming that they might actually be related to one another. Sometimes she does, in fact, run into her mother at the market, and then they exchange a few words.

Well, child, how are you and the family?

Good.

Do you have enough to eat?

Yes.

Ever since her mother came to Vienna — supposedly because she was afraid of the war — that’s all her daughter feels like saying. There comes a time when a daughter should reply to her mother’s question as to how she is doing with only a simple: good.

They say an aid shipment just came in from Switzerland: 1500 tons of flour, the mother says.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we.

Your cousin’s helping you out with coal?

Uh-huh.

There comes a time when a mother should reply to her daughter’s question as to how she is doing with only a simple: good. Two years ago, this cousin brought the old woman with him when he fled to Vienna, he and his wife opened a shop for pipes, paper, and toys. Sometimes her mother helped out in their shop and received a potato, a bit of offal, a small piece of cornbread in return.

How are the girls?

Good.

When she herself was still a child and perhaps really might have needed her mother, her mother had driven off in her cart every day to the farms, leaving her with her grandparents. There was no father to look after her. Her grandmother had taught her to walk — she’d learned that from her grandmother when she went to say goodbye to her before leaving for Vienna. You took your very first steps between our crooked mud walls, and now you can go so much farther — all the way to Vienna, her grandmother had said. But no sooner had her grandmother died than her mother followed her to Vienna, and supposedly it was because the war frightened her.

Well then.

All right.

The moment when the old woman might tell her daughter about how the Poles had beaten her husband to death would never come.

You never — you never realize., the mother says.

Realize what?

You never realize how fast the time goes.

Uh-huh.

Her mother had never really spoken to her about where her father might be. Possibly he was in America, possibly in France. Her father must have had his reasons for leaving his wife so early on.

All right.

Be well, child.

The goy is fine, but now her daughter has been left hanging between two worlds, dangling, flailing, she has no choice but to brace her feet against her mother, pushing herself away from her — her mother, whose features as she ages are now so clearly marked as

belonging to the race of David that she is often harassed on the street, skipped over at the soup kitchen, and insulted by her neighbors.

You, too.

If her mother hadn’t married her to a goy, she wouldn’t be someone’s mistake for her entire adult life.

12

Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.

The future is not lowering its prices, certainly not in times like these; but you can only buy it with the past. Lot’s wife, who was too weak to leave her homeland without a final glance, who turned back knowing that the place she would see was destined for destruction, was turned into a woman of salt. This daughter is smarter. When her mother came to join her in Vienna as a refugee the first year of the war, she had kept her in her own apartment for only a few days and then as quickly as possible found one for her far enough away from her own. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. Her daughters were being given a Christian upbringing and weren’t sent to visit their grandmother even once. The forest provides wood for the axe that will chop it down. Each living being exhausts its own resources for those who will come after, that’s what growth is. The old woman made her daughter the gift of a path leading away from her. At the moment, this path appears to be destroying her child, but it’s quite possible that her granddaughters will reach the goal. Some are destined to stay behind, some to depart, and yet others to arrive.

That’s how life works.

Fifteen hundred tons of flour from Switzerland, the mother said.

Well, we’ll see.

13

They returned from Alserstrasse to the apartment on foot, and now they are waiting for time to pass — all at once it’s become so slow. He sits beside her in the kitchen, bent over, his elbows propped on his knees, gazing at the floor in silence. Only when she hears the regular dripping does she look at him and see that tears are running down his cheeks to the tip of his nose, collecting there, and dripping to the floor tiles at his feet. Then she wants to go home. And then he says she should stay. What, stay? Stay overnight with him — who is now alone? He grabs her by the shoulders and weeps into the crook of her neck, or was it really a kiss? What? Happiness cuts shame, shame covers unhappiness, unhappiness unfurls happiness. Hope pushes aside grief, proving to be so much stronger — so strong that it surprises even the seventeen-year-old herself, this is the intensity of women fighting over bread in front of the Anker bakery — the old ones are often stronger than the younger ones, though they are so much closer to dying. Suddenly alert with hopefulness, she says: Yes, and follows the man, not heading for the vestibule this time, as she’s always done when spending the night here, but instead lying down next to him at his request, obediently lying down in the bed of her friend, lying for the first time beside the man whom she has loved ever since he returned home from the war that past December like someone she’d never seen before. What? She lies down in the place of her dearest friend, who has been dead only since the morning, 3:20 a.m. The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days. Inconsolable, she will now — what? — inherit what belonged to her friend, who yesterday was still warm; she will metamorphose into her friend and continue her conversations in her body with their beloved. Has anyone before seen such soft lips on a man who was forced to kill so as not to be killed himself, has anyone seen such shiny, wetly gleaming teeth, and a nose whose nostrils flare with arousal, has anyone seen such long lashes shading a pair of eyes — such beautiful shadows — these lashes brought home unsinged from all the fires? Ever since the moment when he was standing there unexpectedly at the door, she has known that this is the man who was destined for her all along, and now at long last he knows it too, at long last he is lying beside her just as she imagined countless times, breathing so close beside her that she can inhale his breath, and if it weren’t so dark, she would surely be able to see him gazing at her through the night, gazing all the way through her. What?

14

In the local scythe factory — situated not on the Judenburg Terrace but directly on the left bank of the Mur — fifteen cm. lengths of stacked steel were thrown in a northeasterly direction. In a smithy in Purbachgraben, approximately one hundred m. from the right bank of the Mur — where the limestone massif of the Liechtenstein Mountain descends to the Judenburg Terrace — tools on the west wall were thrown to the east. In Aichdorf a small bell tolled (plane of oscillation: east/west). In Fohnsdorf, a man was thrown out of bed in an eastwardly direction. Several persons staggered or fell in an eastwardly direction, e.g., a schoolboy on the road between Rikersdorf and Allerheiligen, who simultaneously heard a howling sound and a thunder-like crash; a local apprentice on a ladder; and in the building next door, a schoolboy on the stairs. Taking into account the objects’ inertia, these findings correlate well with the observations of several witnesses, who were sitting quietly at the time and had the impression that the main thrust came from the east.

15

When her mother comes to relieve her at midnight, the younger daughter doesn’t say that she just saw her older sister with a man. The two of them walked right past her where she stood hidden among the crowd of people. And she, the little sister, didn’t dare call out her sister’s name, her sister was walking with her head down, tight-lipped, not speaking to the man who was walking at her side. So this is how her sister spends the nights she’s not at home. Years ago, when the younger sister had stumbled across her older sister’s diary and read a little bit of it, her sister had suddenly come into the room, but she hadn’t shouted or struck her sister when she saw what she was doing, she just calmly removed the book from her hands and said to her:

Do you think I was happy when you were born?

Maybe.

Do you remember the glass marbles you always played with?

Yes.

Do you remember the time I told you to try swallowing them?

Maybe.

Why do you think I wanted you to do that?

Dunno.

Do you remember the wall behind the house where Simon the coachman lives?

Yes.

Do you remember the time I told you to try jumping down from it?

Maybe.

Why do you think I would have said that?

Dunno.

If you ever touch this book again, you will no longer be my sister. Do you understand?

Yes.

And so now her tight-lipped sister had walked down the street beside a tight-lipped man without realizing her little sister had seen her. Even a public place like this, even in the middle of the night, could reveal something that was none of anyone else’s business, just like an open book, in a city as large as Vienna there was no avoiding someone’s reading it. She had been standing there for the past five hours so that her sister would be able to eat cow udder the next day in order to survive, and also so that she herself would be able to eat it to survive, along with her mother and father. Her sister, in turn, while she, the little sister, was at school, would accompany her mother to the Vienna Woods to collect firewood, for hours she and their mother would march through the frigid woods and exhaust themselves lugging armfuls of filthy waterlogged sticks, only so that the younger sister — and she herself, of course, and their mother and father — would not freeze in their own home. Nonetheless, it was perfectly possible that if this very same sister knew that her younger sister had watched her walking through the nocturnal Viennese streets at the side of a man, she would wish her dead, perhaps with more success this time. How many fronts like these were there in a life that might cost a person her life? How arduous it was surviving all the battles in which one would not fall.

16

But then, the man falls asleep as soon as he is lying beside her, the warmth of his body next to the warmth of her body, the man does not touch her the entire night, not even in a dream. All night long she hears him breathing next to her; from breath to breath, she knows with increasing certainty there is no point putting out a hand to touch him. The weeping that has been stuck in her throat ever since the departure of the 7031 now breaks to the surface, but now they are tears of a different sort: This weeping for her dead friend gets twisted — still in her throat — into a weeping out of jealousy, tears of mourning become tears of fury at the man she loves, who has invited her to share his bed but now is refusing to console her for the loss he has suffered. By the end of the night, she is weeping only out of shame. She has now received an answer once and for all to a question that, left to her own devices, she would not have asked for a long time, perhaps never. An answer she would never willingly have asked for, namely that the man is friendly but does not love her, that his mourning for the deceased is genuine and deep, while her own duplicitous nature has no counterpart anywhere in the world. If he shared her sentiments, how little would she care what her father, mother, and friends had to say about it, but now this defeat has condemned her irrevocably. Sleeping, he had encouraged her to hope, and sleeping, he has struck her down in crushing defeat. Lonelier than ever, she arises at dawn from the side of the sleeping man; no one who knew what she had hoped for could ever wish to consort with her again; she herself has no choice but to go on enduring her body, which has led her so badly astray, if only she had gone home the night before, as she’d originally intended, the way home would have been nothing more than walking, setting one foot before the other. But now she knows what it means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. She gathers up her things and leaves the apartment without waking him.

17

At some point, nearly morning, she finally. what time though, dunno, around six or maybe seven? Dunno. Was she crying? I don’t think so. I was just surprised when she refused to get up, even at nine she was still, she didn’t get up all morning, her eyes were shut, but she wasn’t sleeping. And not a bite of anything. Not even coffee. All day long just lying there. I’m going to lie here and never get up again, she said to me. Really. She wouldn’t come to the woods on Tuesday either. No one on earth. On Wednesday I got the eggs from Mizzi but she didn’t want hers. And then the night after, her hair! Exactly, I didn’t go out for my chess game; I really thought we’d be off to Steinhof to commit her. So did I. Her beautiful hair. But on Friday she seemed better. Yes, that was my impression too. Completely calm. There was a fresh snowfall on Saturday, her first time downstairs. I draped my coat over her, and downstairs she said it made her dizzy to look at the falling snow. I said: so don’t look. And I said: eat something proper, then you’ll be able to stand on your feet again. And she opened her mouth and let the snowflakes fall into it. Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t help laughing. Me neither.

And then it was Sunday.

18

On Sunday, thank God, the older girl finally wants to go out for a little walk again. Are you going to see your friend? her mother asks. Yes, she says. Her mother shuts the door behind her; before the door closes, the girl hears her mother calling to her father: Don’t you think it’s strange that her friend didn’t come to see her even once? Well, how could she? Maybe on the 7031? It’s her parents’ own fault they know so little about their daughter. It’s not as if anyone ever asked her if she wanted a sister in the first place, or whether she liked Vienna so much the first time they visited that she wanted to move there. When a handicrafts teacher at the lyceum had used the words sloppy and shoddy to describe a doll’s dress she had sewn with great effort, she’d understood that even after years in Vienna she was still a foreigner here and would remain one. She still remembers her grandmother coming to stay with them right after she fled Galicia; for several days the kitchen had smelled like in the old days, smelled of pear compote and challah, but when the provisions her grandmother had brought with her were exhausted, her mother had immediately found the old woman another apartment and forbidden her daughters to visit her there. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. Only then did she realize that she, too, was of Jewish descent, but her father still took her and her sister to services at a Christian church Sunday after Sunday, they sat in the civil servants’ pew with other civil servants and their families. For more than ten years now, her father had been telling his colleagues that his wife wasn’t so steady on her feet and therefore attended a church closer to their home, and in this way — this much one must grant him — he had advanced to the ninth pay grade, but even for a civil servant of that grade, it was no great feat these days to starve to death as miserably as the monkeys, camels, and donkeys in the Schönbrunn Menagerie. Did keeping her misguided love a secret from her friend make her just as halfhearted and deceitful as her parents? It had done no good to keep the truth to herself either, for a truth remained even if it was never spoken aloud, day after day it went on doing what it had to. Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, Arenbergpark, Neulinggasse — which eventually turns into Gusshausstrasse on the way to the district called Margareten and then later becomes Schleifmühlgasse — and finally Margaretenstrasse itself — the scrap of paper on which her mother had written down her grandmother’s address had been right there in the kitchen drawer.

19

Time to go. Let’s go.

Every Sunday she went to the Vienna Woods to get firewood. She would take the tram to the end of the line at Rodaun or Hacking, along with a great many others. Like her, they would carry baskets, rucksacks, or satchels on their backs; from there, she’d enter the woods to collect kindling, perhaps breaking off a branch here and there that was not too heavy.

My cousin helping me out with coal — wouldn’t that be nice. Hat, coat, glove. Good.

Returning home in the evening, she sometimes had to let a tram or two pass before managing to squeeze into one of the overcrowded cars, so she often remained standing at the tram stop in the dark for over an hour, freezing, while in the illuminated tram people stood or sat, with the wood they had gathered sprouting awkwardly from their rucksacks and panniers.

And the basket. And the rucksack.

From the outside, a tram like that resembled an aquarium, and when the car lurched into motion or braked, all the people behind the fogged-up glass swayed back and forth with their bundles of twigs like one huge organism.

Oh, it’s all getting tangled up. What a disaster. The boots. Now look, it’s falling out the top. Oh, this shvakhkeyt, this weakness. Well.

Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers, ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.

All right, that’s good now. Oh, I almost forgot the key. That would have been something.

20

You just have to start walking, then a street name scrawled on a scrap of paper with a building and apartment number will turn into a route to follow: with buildings on either side, with weather (cold and damp), with the sound of footsteps sinking into slush and snow, and with other people on this or that errand, willing or unwilling; a route that leads you past dimly lit taverns and shops whose windows are almost empty or sealed up with shutters. The low, stooped building where the old woman lives has a stone angel keeping watch over the entryway. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. After fleeing the provinces and spending her first few days in Vienna in her daughter’s apartment, the old woman told her older granddaughter about the two angels that prophesied the fall of Sodom to Lot and conducted him to safety. These angels were so beautiful that the citizens of Sodom wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from their limbs and devour them. Sheyn vi di zibn veltn. As beautiful as the seven worlds. Now, as the older granddaughter presses down on the door handle, trying to remember how her grandmother said this sentence to her, it suddenly seems unfamiliar, and she wonders whether she just dreamed it. As beautiful. The building’s dark entryway stinks, above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. In the stairwell, it seems that some of the windows facing the courtyard are broken and have been replaced with wooden panels. The beautiful man; oh, his lips, the wings of his nose, his eyelashes. Has beauty never had any other purpose than to cause those who wish to possess it to rise up against each other, and, in the end, between them, tear the beautiful object to shreds, or, failing that, destroy each other instead? She rings the bell and also knocks on the door, but no one answers. As a girl, she had marched to the Rathaus, demanding that the war come to an end. Now she is in the middle of her own war, one in which — even at so great a distance from bombs, grenades and poison gas — she is still finding it infinitely difficult to survive each day from beginning to end, and then all through the night.

21

What in the Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening?

Of the fourteen persons who fell victim to lightning in 1898, two were killed by lighting bolts striking inside buildings, two under trees, one under a wayside shrine where he’d taken cover, and seven out in the open, including two reapers working in the fields. In two cases, I was unable to determine the precise circumstances. Outside the town of Laufen an der Sann, lightning struck a woman who was carrying a hoe on her back. The woman was paralyzed, and a mark was left behind on her back in the shape of the hoe.

After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her mother threaded new shoelaces in her younger daughter’s shoes. After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her father spread out his files on the kitchen table and started reading. On Sunday evening, after her older sister had gone out, the younger girl did her mathematics homework, her mother got her sewing kit from the cold parlor and began to darn socks, and her father experimented with whether he could read better with his glasses on or without, he pushed the glasses down and looked over the top of them, then pushed them back up and finally said: This typeface really isn’t easy to read. The younger girl then put more wood on the fire, and the wood hissed because it was so damp. Her mother said: Go wash your hands, otherwise you’ll make your notebook dirty. The younger girl washed her hands in the bucket. The mother bit off the thread. The father turned the page of the file. The younger girl wiped her hands on her dress, sitting back down at the table. Her mother looked for a different color of thread in her sewing basket. Her father laid his glasses to one side and went on reading. The young girl dipped her pen into the inkwell and solved her arithmetic problem. Her mother coughed. Her father turned over another page of the file.

22

Margaretenstrasse, Heumühlgasse (down one or the other of those streets), then Rechte Wienzeile, across the Naschmarkt, Linke Wienzeile, somewhere or other, Girardigasse, Gumpendorfer Strasse, Stiegengasse, Windmühlgasse; everywhere, the snow is piled up shoulder-height on either side — Theobaldgasse, Rahlgasse — just as high on the right as on the left — Mariahilfer Strasse, Babenberger Strasse, Opernring — and it’s slippery, as smooth as glass. Does she really want to turn onto Opernring? Or would it be better to take a left onto Burgring? Today, it is exactly one week since she waited on Alserstrasse with the man she loves for the 7031. How long does a week last? Crossing the street to the left, toward the Museum of Fine Arts, would mean picking her way between two gigantic heaps of snow with a frozen puddle in between, so she turns to the right. In the opera house on the other side of the street, music and listening to music are locked up together. Why is she walking around outside? To exhaust herself to the point where she can neither see nor hear? Is she indulging in a stroll? Strolling to her demise? Two pounds of butter, someone whispers at her cold back. How much? She keeps going. Two pounds of butter and fifty decagrams of veal. The man’s whisperings insinuate themselves beneath the broad brim of her hat, slipping into her ear from behind. Two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles. Although the entire world lies open before her, which she thought might put an end to her hearing, she can hear what the man is offering in exchange for her person. Is she interested? Or would she rather return home, where what is called her life is taking place: her father reading his files, her little sister doing her homework, her mother calling her, her older daughter, a whore. Salome is being performed tonight. How long has it been since her parents went out together? Does she know a good reason not to accept? Or is she not so sure? When she turns around, she sees a young man, perhaps only slightly older than she is; he has no hat on, even though it’s the middle of winter, so she sees his thin hair, by the time he’s twenty-five he’ll have a bald spot, she thinks, and she’s surprised to see beads of sweat on his forehead in the middle of winter.

Two pounds of butter, he repeats, looking at her, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles.

He says her price right to her face.

And why not twelve candles, she says and starts to laugh.

The time when it went without saying that the freshly fallen snow would promptly be carted from the streets of the Viennese city center to the Danube and dumped into the channel that had been knocked clear of ice is long past. Thanks to the war, something is missing: men, the freshly fallen men. The most that happens now is that the snow gets pushed aside, shoveled into heaps by a couple of war invalids, women and children; on warmer days these heaps of snow begin to melt until they are ringed with puddles that freeze over during the night in precisely those spots where the path was to remain clear. The layer of ice covering the sidewalks of Vienna, in heavily traveled spots above all, has grown so hard and thick in the course of the winter that no one even tries to chop it up any longer. Pedestrians wishing to cross from Babenberger Strasse to the Museum of Fine Arts or to walk down Burgring on the left away from the city center must take particular care not to fall. Captain Eduard Gabler, for instance, suffered a compound fracture of his forearm just yesterday when he fell on the ice walking at Freudenauer Winterhafen; Private Franz Adler also broke his forearm, on Marxergasse; factory owner Mortiz Gerthofer suffered an exposed fracture of his right shin on Nobilegasse; and nurse Frieda Bertin fell on Mariahilfer Strasse, not at all far from here, suffering a severe contusion of the left hip. Where one crosses Babenberger Strasse toward the Art History Museum, away from the city center, the ice between two heaps of snow has long since been polished smooth by the heavy pedestrian traffic, even though yesterday’s snowfall briefly covered it up. But because of the countless shoes, and also several bare feet, that have passed over this spot since then, the snow has become inseparably conjoined with the ice over the course of the morning, itself becoming ice. This ice appears black — though of course there is no deep body of water beneath its surface — and it displays the approximate contours of the African continent on a smaller scale. Seamstress Cilli Bujanow nearly slipped on this bit of ice around 2:30 in the afternoon, but was propped up by Lieutenant Colonel of the Chamber of Finances Alfred Kern, who happened to be walking behind her, sparing her the fall. Seven-year-old Leopoldine Thaler practiced skating on the puddle as she passed, eleven-year-old pupil David Robitschek attempted to shatter the ice by jumping up and down on it (unsuccessful), a stray dog of unknown provenance urinated on the right-hand heap of snow, causing a portion of the ice, corresponding roughly to the region of former German East Africa, to melt and also dyeing the area yellow approximately as far down as the Niger. By six, this bit too has frozen again, although the surface of the ice in this area is slightly roughened. The young lady who at approximately 6:00 p.m. at first considers crossing Babenberger Strasse here and then walking to the left toward of the Museum of Fine Arts would be compelled — before reaching the rougher area north of the Equator that promises salvation in the form of a firm foothold — to step on the treacherously slippery territory of South Africa, but at the last minute, she loses her nerve, and instead heads off to the right in the direction of Opernring.

So you aren’t one after all, the pale lad asks long after she has stopped laughing. No, she says. She’s surprised at how hard the young man is sweating even though he doesn’t have his coat buttoned. She wouldn’t mind being cheap if it meant she wouldn’t be on her own forever with all the time in the world. How many people can simultaneously be in possession of all the time in the world? Would she like to.? She decides to join him for a glass of wine. That is. She has no idea how grateful. In the café he seizes her hands and holds them to his face, using them to wipe the tears from his eyes and the mucus from his nose, perhaps she’ll excuse him, he’s never been with one before, but just now he wanted, perhaps she will understand, you see his fiancée just, that is, no longer, and sent him packing, although for two years now, an engagement after all, or doesn’t that mean.

How long does a life last, anyhow?

Seventy or eighty years?

Doesn’t she already know more than she can bear?

. his fiancée would see all right if he carried on just like she did, preferably with lots of girls. really, though, someone ought to kill her.

Oh dear, the young woman thinks, her hands already dripping with tears. Does he know her, this man? Does he know what she has wished for? Does he know what a burden she is finding life, which from inside always looked to her like a sphere with perfectly smooth, black walls, and you keep running and running and there isn’t even a shabby little door to let you out?

He’d have shot her if only she’d come out of her building, he says. But she knew what he was capable of, so she stayed where she was, and what was he supposed to do now. he never thought. after all he was. and he’d always treated her. and never once. He’d have shot her? she asked. How?

Right here, he says, slipping his fingers into the right-hand pocket of his coat, it’s my father’s Mauser.

Now all at once she understands why she is sitting here with this man, on whose face what goes by the name of heartache — in her own case, too — makes so pitiful an impression. Now the inside of the sphere that always seemed infinite to her suddenly contains this shabby little door. You know what, she says, pulling her hands away from the sobbing man, it would be the easiest thing in the world to insult your fiancée in a way she will remember all her life. Really? he says, looking up, and meanwhile she is drying off her hands on her skirt under the table.

Her mother says: I’m going to bed now, she gathers up her sewing things, puts them back in their basket, brings the basket back out to the cold parlor. Her father calls: I’m coming, too. Her sister has already been lying in bed for half an hour, but despite the darkness she’s still awake. Her father picks up the carbide lamp by its handle.

Do you really think? he says.

Of course.

And if something goes wrong?

They’ll certainly know what to do on Alserstrasse if anything goes wrong.

Healing and Comfort for the Sick.

And if everything goes right, she thinks, we’ll soon enough be continuing our journey on the quietest car of the New Viennese Tramway Society.

All right, I’m going to call her and tell her.

But just one sentence.

Just one sentence.

He settles up, she says goodbye to the waiter, that’s how easy it is to pass from one world to the next. The telephone booth is just across the street, and when the youth puts his weight on the floor of the booth, the light goes on — a soul would be telephoning in the dark, she thinks. Just one sentence. She waits outside in the snow, watching the lovesick young man speaking in the light: he speaks, listens, responds again, listens, contradicts. She’d better drag him back out of this cell, otherwise he might slide back over to the other side again; the glass panes of the booth are already fogging up with his hot breath when she pulls open the door.

In the receiver a female voice is exclaiming: For the love of God, speak with my daughter tomorrow!

Tomorrow will be too late!

But I’m telling you she isn’t here!

Please tell her that even in death I was —

You still have your whole life ahead of you!

Now he falls silent. He says nothing at all. His hair is thin, at twenty-five, he might already have a bald spot. Then she calmly takes the receiver from his hand, and in his place she says into it:

Don’t you understand? He has to die.

We have to go stand in line at five o’clock. You don’t always have to be looking men in the face like that. I have to do all the work myself. Your grandmother has to take responsibility for herself.

And the young man?

He’s got to die now, that’s all there is to it, and she has to ride in his sled with him, all the way to hell.

She says the one thing and only thinks the rest, then she hangs up the telephone.

The mother hears the father shutting the kitchen door so that the warmth from the stove will keep until morning, then he goes out to the stairs, the toilet is half a flight down. It flushes with water from the tap in the hall. The mother turns over on her other side. The older girl has only just gotten back on her feet again, and already it’s anyone’s guess what she’s up to. She sacrificed herself for this daughter, who almost died as a baby, and this is the thanks she gets.

The younger daughter doesn’t like it when her sister’s bed stays empty overnight. If her sister were to move out altogether, as she sometimes threatens when she’s fighting with their mother, there’d be just one advantage: they’d stop referring to her, the younger sister, as the little one. The teacher said on Friday that Austria is now only one-tenth its original size. She, on the other hand, has grown during the war years, she’s now five foot seven. So the borders of the country she lives in have nothing at all to do with her own size, but it’s probably best if she doesn’t point this out in class tomorrow.

The father turns out the light and lies down in the dark bed beside the mother. The blue-tinged shadows around the chin of his older daughter these past few weeks involuntarily remind him of something he doesn’t want to be reminded of, but his thoughts don’t much care whether or not he wishes to think them; when the time is right they make their way, like it or not, through the thicket of all the things he has ever thought or seen.

And now here they are in front of the opera house, Salome has already been served Jochanaan’s head on a silver platter, the bloody papier-mâché head with wool hair that is now back in its place in the dark properties closet, on the shelf beside the wooden platter someone painted silver. They have agreed to take a taxi to Alserstrasse. They will isolate the precise moment when the taxi stops in front of the hospital and remove it forever from amid all the other time that exists. The taxi drives up Burgring, takes a left onto Volksgartenstrasse, then heads north up the avenue known first as Museumsstrasse, then Auerspergstrasse and finally Landesgerichtsstrasse where Alserstrasse turns off to the left. The trip takes no longer than five and a half minutes, during which not a word is spoken in the back seat of the taxi. In front of the entrance to the hospital the taxi driver stops, just as his passengers requested.

23

Action for the Victims of the Three Nights of Blood in Lemberg: Hermine and Ignaz Klinger, 100 crowns; in remembrance of my beloved mother Terka Korsky, 120 crowns; Frau Kamler, 10 crowns; in total 230 crowns. This is printed on the piece of newspaper the old woman is rolling up to light the fire. She had the right idea. Starting with the goy for her daughter, then the train ticket she gave the young family for their trip to Vienna to see the Corpus Christi procession, and then her own flight. The sticks from the Vienna Woods are covered with lichen that produces foul-smelling fumes when burned. Nights of blood. Andrei. The nursemaid who refused to open the door for her and her husband. The Almighty took her husband’s life instead of the life of their daughter.

Where could Father be?

In America, or France.

Don’t you care?

Only God can know where he is. Go wash your hands.

Let her daughter go on thinking that for some reason or other she was incapable of holding onto the girl’s father. She had held onto him, held him to the end, when he was nothing more than a bit of flesh. But should she have said that to her daughter, should she have told her that she too, the mother, had also been in danger of becoming nothing more than a bit of flesh, and the daughter, too, and that under similar circumstances the daughter’s own girls — the big one and the little one — might themselves be only flesh? For someone who didn’t know, did it make a difference whether a person was dead or just very far away? The murderers’ guilt now looked like her own guilt, but was that important? In Lemberg not long ago the Poles celebrated their victory over the Ukranians on the main square, while two blocks away the Jewish quarter was set on fire. They celebrated for three nights. Jewish children who tried to run away were tossed back into the burning buildings by the legionnaires, but on the other side of the barricades there was accordion music. Es vert mir finster in di oygn, everything’s going black before my eyes. In Vienna she doesn’t have much company, but she is alive. Her daughter is alive, and so are the two girls.

24

Redhead, redhead, ding-a-ling, fire burns in Wahring, fire burns in Ottakring, you’re a nice smoked herring! That the promises were not kept. That no one who asks wants to hear the answer. That her own interior would have always remained an exterior, even with her tongue inside another during a kiss. To dissolve the borders, that’s all she wanted. Why was it not possible for her to love her friend and also her friend’s beloved; what exactly was being forbidden her, and by whom? Why was she not permitted to plunge into love as into a river, and why, if she was being forbidden to swim in these waters, was there no one else swimming there? Why did her mother call her a whore? Why wasn’t she allowed to tell anyone that her grandmother was Jewish? Was there really so little love in the world that it wasn’t enough to glue things together? Why were there differences, why this hierarchy of worth? Or was it only her own deficiencies making everything fall apart? In any case, it was high time for her to subtract herself from the world.

The Mauser C96 is a weapon that was not regularly used during the First World War but nonetheless enjoyed great popularity. The special feature of the C96 is that the magazine is located not within the weapon’s grip but in front of the trigger. On Sunday, January 26, 1919, at approximately 11:17 p.m., seated in a taxi that has just arrived in front of Alserstrasse 4, the Vienna General Hospital, 48.21497 degrees latitude north, 16.35231 degrees longitude east, Herr Ferdinand G., a medical student in his third semester, acting in accordance with a mutual agreement, places the muzzle of this handy weapon against the temple of a young woman with whom he is only fleetingly acquainted, and at the very moment that a dog barks outside somewhere — in response to this barking, as it were — he pulls the trigger.

Finally, she doesn’t have to be trapped in this skin any longer. Finally, this random individual has opened the shabby door with a gunshot, and she is released into the open air. Healing and Comfort for the Sick. A dead woman has infinite relatives; she is now infinitely loved and can love anyone she likes, all the while dissolving entirely, with her dead thoughts, in all the others. Did anyone ever see such soft lips on a man before? She now floats upon these lips, utterly interspersed with the one she loves, drifting far away, the two of them are the water and also the dark blue sky above it, and all who were trapped behind the two endless rows of windows have now flung them open and are breathing deeply in and out.

But then a second shot is fired, and the blood of this happenstance individual splatters on her face, someone’s happenstance blood is making her hair wet, or is it her own blood? Only now does she realize her skull is exploding with pain, but why hasn’t it exploded; isn’t she supposed to be dead? Someone opens the door: the taxi driver holds out an arm to the one shot dead so that she can get out, cold Viennese air floods her skull, swirling past her thoughts, she has been laid bare all the way beneath her skin. For the Lord God’s sake, she hears the driver say, and now she also hears the shabby Viennese weeping of this happenstance individual, who apparently was not capable of skillfully shooting her and himself as they agreed. Before her closed eyes, a treacherously slippery South Africa appears, she places her foot upon it and slips and then falls and falls and falls. If only I had known there’s no floor left once you go through the door, she thinks, and then she stops thinking, just as she imagined she would.

Her mother sleeps, her father sleeps, her sister is dreaming fitfully but is asleep as well. In a portfolio on the kitchen table, in the dark kitchen, lie her father’s papers, but no one is reading them in the middle of the night, no one is wondering what happened on August 20, 1897, in Wetzelsdorf at the foot of the Buchkogel: The birds in their cages fell down from their perches, people leapt horrified out of bed, all were seized by a general terror. At the same time a violent downpour began. In the bedroom shared by the two girls, hidden behind the wardrobe, is a thick notebook containing the older girl’s diary.

25

Just before four in the morning, the police bang on the door so loudly that the glass set into its upper half rattles; the girl’s mother is the first to wake up. The following three days, her older daughter remains unconscious, and except for the rising and falling of her rib cage, she lies perfectly immobile in the hospital bed; even without moving, she is wrestling inside with death, they say. Her mother complains to the nurses that her daughter has to lie in a room with twelve beds under these conditions. Her father says: Let it be. Her mother complains about the stink and the cries of the other patients. Her father says: Listen. Her mother asks the doctor, who at one point carelessly referred to her daughter as a suicide: Don’t you ever wash your hands?

Her father sits in silence beside his older daughter’s deathbed.

Did you see the dirt under his fingernails?

No.

I don’t want someone like that touching my child.

A man makes a coat out of an old piece of cloth.

When the coat is in tatters, he makes a vest from the coat.

When the vest is in tatters, he makes a scarf from the vest.

When the scarf is in tatters, he makes a cap from the scarf.

When the cap is in tatters, he makes a button from the cap.

From the button the man makes a nothing at all.

And then from the nothing at all he makes this song.

On Wednesday night, sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m., between the first and second rounds the nurse makes through the twelve-bed room, the young woman finally stops breathing. An official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vienna enters the young woman’s name in the large Registry of Deaths the next morning. When the younger sister stops by on her way home from school that afternoon to pay a visit, she finds an empty bed, and when she asks where her sister is, she is told that her sister has been brought downstairs to the storeroom for the dead.

26

And her murderer is still alive, her mother says, the murderer of my daughter did quite nicely for himself, and now the girl is dead.

Leave it alone, her father says, and who’s saying he’s even going to pull through?

Leave it alone, that’s all you have to say when our child lets a person like that shoot her?

A person like what? asks their younger daughter, who will soon be known only as their daughter.

I tell you, if you start gallivanting around like your sister, I’ll give you what for.

They say she hardly knew him, her father says.

So she hardly knew him — apparently it was enough to have him whack her.

The younger girl is silent. Her sister once forbade her to poke into her secrets and possibly betray them to her parents or to anyone else whose business they were not, and the prohibition is still alive and well. What good would it do now after the fact if she told her parents that she saw her sister walking through the streets of Vienna with a man on Sunday, a week and a half ago?

Until Sunday, a week and a half ago, everything was fine, her father says. True enough, says her mother.

She did, however, sometime on Monday just before dawn. her father says. and even on Tuesday, says the younger daughter. no one in the world. her father says, and on Wednesday I. and then that night, the younger one says, exactly, on Friday it seemed as if. her father says, on Saturday, fresh snowfall, says her father, the younger sister says: And then came Sunday.

Would you two stop, her mother says now to her husband and daughter, you’re not going to bring her back with talk like that.

How awful that you never truly know what’s going on, her father says.

Her mother says: Be grateful.

What in the good Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening, her father asks and begins to cry.

27

Not until Friday afternoon — in the Pathological Institute they are investigating the path of the bullet and whether the young woman didn’t perhaps shoot herself after all — does her father set off for Margareten. (Her mother says she has her hands full with all the formalities, someone’s got to see to it that life goes on.) The dark entryway stinks, and above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. The girl’s grandmother doesn’t say anything when she learns what has happened, but her entire body begins to tremble. The girl’s father remembers the first time he came into her shop and saw her daughter, whose skin was so white, it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. He remembers that not long afterward, the shopkeeper showed him her daughter’s bed, and a cat lay curled up on it asleep. He just nods to her in silence and turns to go, opening the apartment door himself and then shutting it behind him. A number of the windows that in better days used to look out on the courtyard from the stairwell have been nailed up with boards.

When the investigations have been completed on Monday, the official enters cerebral hemorrhage under “cause of death” in the Registry of Deaths, and on Tuesday the funeral is held in the Catholic section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery, at Gate III. At the edge of the dark pit, the sacristan says a prayer, father and younger sister cross themselves, and the mother keeps her hands in her coat pockets. Yene velt. The world to come. The grandmother might have come to see that her granddaughter at least made it as far as the Catholic cemetery, but no doubt she prefers to keep them waiting instead. Once again she is leaving her daughter to deal with the most difficult things alone, just as in the old days, when she couldn’t even teach her to walk.

Perhaps, the younger girl thinks, everything would have gone differently if she had swallowed the glass marbles as her sister commanded, jumped down from Simon’s wall, or allowed her sister to cause her death in some other way. Had her sister now gone in her place? Had she not been thinking of her at all when she died? Her father takes a handful of earth and throws it into the grave. When the snow fell — the snow that is making the heap of freshly dug earth, the dark hillock stand out — his daughter was still alive.

Over there, on the other side of the high wall, is the Israelite Cemetery; no tree rises into the air there, the sky is unimpeded, someone who doesn’t know better might expect there would be streetcar tracks on the other side, or open fields, but her mother knows it is on purpose no trees were planted, for if one day the roots of the trees were to go zigzagging between the remaining bones of a person buried there, prying them apart, the person would no longer be whole when his name was called for the Last Judgment.

When they return from the cemetery, their daughter eats her own portion of mutton, then she eats her father’s portion, since he says he can’t get it down, and finally she eats the portion belonging to her dead sister. (Her mother didn’t report that they are now one person fewer, therefore she was given the twelve-and-a-half decagrams of meat due the deceased along with the rest of the family’s rations when she exchanged the still-valid stamps at the Grosser Markt early that morning.) God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us food. It’s only now that her sister lies buried that the younger daughter is so hungry.

28

But then the cousin, who has never before come to visit, rings the bell, just to say that. Well, what? That the girl’s grandmother, the very day she learned of her older granddaughter’s death, fell down the cellar steps and, as he put it, landed badly, and now — well, they probably understand what he meant. So it really does look as if things won’t start looking up again until they are as black as pitch. Her mother rises to her feet and starts stacking the dirty plates. When she set the table, it was in the belief that she had a mother who was still alive. Does it make a difference to someone who doesn’t know the truth whether a person is dead or just very far away? The cousin says it took him several days to track down the family’s address, and the funeral has already taken place as Jewish law demands. Is there still a war on, the daughter thinks, is that why so many are dying all at once? I can’t imagine what she wanted in the cellar, her father says, she must have run out of coal long ago. Ver veyst, the cousin says, who knows. Now, the father thinks, he will have to stay alive until after the first of the month, and also the first of the next month, and the month after that, so that the dying doesn’t get the upper hand, so that everything will remain balanced and not suddenly begin to tip; the father thinks this but says nothing. Gate IV, Field 3, Row 8, Plot 12, the cousin writes on a scrap of paper which, after he’s left, her mother puts in the kitchen drawer.

29

In the middle of a snowy field — a few gravestones here and there — at the very back of the Israelite section of the cemetery, it would be easy to find the hillock of freshly disturbed dirt. Gate I, Gate II, Gate III and finally Gate IV. According to the beliefs a person held while alive, he or she will come to lie in the ground near either one or the other tram stop. Less than a minute and a half’s ride separates deceased Protestants, Catholics, and Israelites. From her grandmother’s grave, a mourner could easily glance over at the high wall surrounding the Catholic cemetery at the tall, snow-covered trees, and in this silence, even at a distance, she’d be able to hear the sound the snow makes when, having grown too heavy for its own good, it slides from a branch, making the branch spring quickly back into the air.

30

It is cold inside her dead mother’s apartment, cold and dark. Even the water in the bucket is frozen. When she goes to empty it in the courtyard, it falls to the ground as a solid lump of ice. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. With the first installment of his Viennese salary, her husband once took her to the Burgtheater. They sat in the cheapest seats and saw Iphigenia on Tauris. “Farewell,” she remembers. At the time, she imagined she understood better than anyone else in the theater, at that final moment before the curtain closed, what it meant to renounce something. Never did she see her mother reading the Collected Works of Goethe, but now, every one of its volumes is standing there in her grandmother’s bookshelf, tidily arranged next to the miniature grandfather clock, just the same as back home. So that’s why the suitcase her mother brought with her to Vienna was so heavy. Farewell. All her life she’s paid for having snatched her first child back from hell with nothing more than a handful of snow, and only now is it becoming clear that there are things that have no price. No breath of air disturbs the place. / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples with the tide. Was she the one her mother had brought these books to? She also packs the seven-armed candelabra from the sideboard in the suitcase. Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter. Don’t go falling down the stairs. Now it is too late to speak Yiddish with her mother. A number of the windows facing the courtyard in the stairwell have been replaced with wooden panels. She can’t see the angel above the entryway because she doesn’t turn around. She would like to know what exactly her mother had been paying for all her life. At home, in Volume 9, the spine of which is a bit scraped, she finds the play that for the most part she can still recite by heart. She doesn’t make a fire in the stove, she doesn’t wash the dishes, she doesn’t go stand in line, she doesn’t sew, doesn’t darn and doesn’t cry; she sits down quietly in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets, and just as she did back when she was a young girl, she reads Goethe’s play Iphigenia.

31

The father doesn’t die until just over a year later, on December 2, 1920. His wife sells his clothes on the black market, but first she cuts off the gold-colored buttons with the eagle of the monarchy and puts them in a box. The father’s December salary, paid out to the widow as a final installment, is just enough for one midday meal. At least the daughter gets an extra portion of milk with cocoa each day at school, thanks to the Americans.

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In 1944 in a small forest of birch trees, a notebook filled with handwritten diary entries will fall to the ground when a sentry uses his rifle butt to push a young woman forward, and she tries to protect herself with arms she had previously been using to clutch the notebook to her chest. The book will fall in the mud, and the woman will not be able to return to pick it up again. For a while the book will remain lying there, wind and rain will turn its pages, footsteps will pass over it, until all the secrets written there are the same color as the mud.