The End of Days

1

We must bid farewell to Comrade H., who soon would have completed her sixth decade of life.

He points to one of the wreaths.

All her life she devoted her abilities to serving the working classes and her Party. In her we are losing an exemplary champion of proletarian-revolutionary art.

He writes the text that is to be printed on the ribbon: For my mother.

In black script or gold?

Black.

Born in Brody, the daughter of an Austrian civil servant, she grew up in Vienna and in 1920 became a member of the Communist Party. In 1933 she emigrated to Moscow by way of Prague. There she contributed to the understanding between peoples as a translator of Soviet poetry for the journal Internationale Literatur and immediately after Hitler’s treacherous attack on the Soviet Union began her active antifascist work for the underground radio station operated by Radio Moscow.

Sure, he says, why not have rose petals to toss into the grave?

After returning from exile, she moved to Berlin and here, in her tireless efforts on behalf of world peace and Socialism, she began to publish her first autonomous literary works.

How many?

How many are there usually?

One basket, two baskets, five baskets — depends how many mourners you’re expecting.

Let’s make it five, he says.

Thereafter she made significant contributions to the development of art and culture in the GDR with her important novels, works for theater, stories, reportage and radio plays. This great artist was nearly unmatched in her ability to bring the attention of our People to the world’s most righteous strivings.

2

As she falls, she knows that she is falling, she knows that the railing is already too far away to reach with her left hand (much less the right), and suddenly she remembers the railing on the stairs in Vienna and how huge the eagle at the end of the banister had looked to her as a girl, how the stairwell always smelled of whitewash and dust, all of this occurs to her as she falls, as if memory, too, were a form of falling. Now she really is a “fallen woman” for the first time in her life, and if it weren’t less a laughing matter than a dying one, she’d have to laugh. Did her mother think of her in her final moments? Is this her final moment? Back when she heard Khrushchev’s secret speech broadcast on a West Berlin radio station, she’d suffered a heart attack and survived, so how can she be on the point of death now just because she’s been knocked literally off her feet between one step and the next? The first chapter a tragedy, the second always a farce — had she only read Marx so she’d understand now that this really was the end for her? How do you recognize your final moment? Is it that more thoughts can be thought in it than any other? What is this abyss gaping open before her and swallowing up all the thoughts a person can think, and where was it before? If she tumbles out of life, what will happen to her son?

3

On the morning his mother is incinerated, her son spends two hours at home sitting at the desk in the desk chair where his mother always sat when she was working, and he waits for the time to pass.

Her work was honored with many prestigious prizes and awards by our Republic, including the Comrade-G. Medal, the Great Patriotic Order of Merit, and the Goethe Prize.

The desk chair is covered with blue leatherette and can spin on its axis. Sometimes as a child he would sit on it, spinning in circles until he was dizzy. He doesn’t think his mother ever used this chair to spin on.

Her work in defense of the beautiful and true is her legacy to us all and will inspire us in our struggle to achieve the reunification of our homeland and world peace.

4

Dear Mother, she had written near the end of the war, things are very good with me. I have a son now, he is three years old and is named Sasha. How long had it been since her mother had sent the little box with the gold buttons from her father’s civil-service uniform to her in Moscow? And she hadn’t even thanked her. She’d thought that her mother had just wanted to get rid of her last remaining souvenir of her husband, that her mother didn’t know what it truly meant to love. Then, with the start of the war and her relocation to Ufa, her contact with Vienna had broken off. Only near the end of the war, in Moscow — when she learned through her work at the radio station what had been happening to the Jews in countries defeated by Germany — did she ask herself when her mother’s package had arrived: in 1939 perhaps, or 1940? Dear Mother, things are very good with me. I have a son now, he is three years old and is named Sasha. The letter had come back to her stamped Evacuated to the East. And now, sealed and multiply stamped as it had been when it was returned to her, it lay at the very bottom of her linen cabinet, underneath the sheets. Her son would find this letter sooner or later. Now, she has no secrets left. She cannot protect her son any longer, nor herself.

5

The housekeeper found her at the foot of the stairs when she arrived that morning. At around 10:30 — but perhaps it had happened earlier — her son at school had just finished his essay on Goethe’s poem “Willkommen und Abschied.” The moment at which his entire life changed did not look any different from all the other moments before or after it. Probably, the housekeeper says, his mother had just changed her clothes upstairs and wanted to go down to her study. Those stairs are treacherous, the housekeeper says. As a small child, he had only slid down the banister when his mother wasn’t looking. He could fall, could break a leg or his neck. Do me a favor, don’t go falling down the stairs, his mother always said. Certainly she herself never went sliding down the banister, she always just walked up, walked down, step after step — but the stairs are treacherous, as the housekeeper says.

6

What actually happened to your relatives, her son had asked her when he was already a bit older. There were air raids on Vienna, she said. It would have been easier to answer questions about so many other things, but he’d never asked about them. She would have liked to tell him what sort of apples she used for her strudel. Now she’d taken a tumble. Now she was falling down a flight of stairs, and these stairs no longer led to the ground floor of her house, no longer to her study, no longer to the front door, no longer to the kitchen; for her, since she believed in nothing supernatural, these stairs led only from the upper floor of her house down to nothingness. Never would she have thought that the border between what is and what isn’t could gape open so abruptly.

Really? her little sister asks.

And that it has to happen right in the middle of life, on a stupid flight of stairs.

You were just plowing on ahead like always.

Don’t be silly. I weigh too much, that’s all.

It shows that things are good with you.

Never again permit myself to be blackmailed by hunger.

You won that one.

And now I’m going to die because I’m such a blimp.

Nonsense.

I go to a resort to take it off every year.

So as not to let yourself be blackmailed by food.

Once I lost twenty-six pounds.

That’s quite a lot.

And now?

7

The housekeeper says she made sure that the men who came to get his mother were gentle with her. One of her legs had gotten caught in the railing, and she was lying head-down, but that’s all the detail she was willing to give. When he left for school, he’d still had a mother. When he left for school, his mother, still in her bathrobe, had run after him as far as the garden gate. As always, even when it wasn’t yet above fifty degrees, or already under fifty. Meanwhile he’s almost twice as tall as when he first started school, but that doesn’t stop her from running after him as far as the garden gate holding his cap: Put your hat on, sweetheart. It didn’t stop her from running after him until today. Beyond where the street curves, his mother couldn’t see him any longer, and he would take the cap off again. He never felt cold, but his mother didn’t believe him. The housekeeper says she wants to go home now, she’s in a state from all that’s happened, but if he needs help, tomorrow or whenever, he knows where to find her. To go home now. He nods and pulls the door shut behind her.

How is he ever supposed to go up these steps again? The carpeting covering the steps is scraped in one spot, is that the spot? Or were those scratches always there? Did his mother slip or stumble? On which of these steps was her head lying when she stopped breathing? But even if he knew everything about the final moments of his mother’s life, he still wouldn’t know what it meant now for her to be dead. Yesterday the great artist H., recipient of the Comrade G. Medal, the Badge of Honor of the Great Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold, and the Goethe Prize, as well as a number of other highly prestigious awards bestowed by our Republic, was suddenly and unexpectedly taken from us. We shall eternally hold our stalwart Comrade H., the courageous antifascist faithfully devoted to the workers’ cause, in reverent memory.

8

She falls and, falling, asks herself whether this fall is really going to end with her breaking her neck.

You know, I never heard back from them about the streetcar stop on Kastanienallee at the corner of Schönhauser.

Be patient, they’ll get back to you, her husband says, brushing the strand of hair back from his face.

If they’d just move the streetcar stop forward a little, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam there day after day.

She falls, and while she is falling she feels ashamed for falling.

Come on, that could happen to anyone.

I also wrote to them about conditions at the Landsberg retirement home. They need to hire more staff, the old people there are really suffering, someone told me.

That was the right thing to do.

And about the Intourist trips to Finland — they’re so disorganized!

Is Finland pretty?

Of course. And just imagine, you can’t order any replacement parts direct from the factory that makes all the carburetors and filters for our Republic.

Really!

That’s got to change.

Most definitely.

She is tumbling out of this world in which so much remains to be done before everything is as it should be. When she isn’t here any longer, who will care for this State that is her State and still in short trousers?

9

Stepping over the invisible body of his mother — or rather, through it — he now ascends the stairs after all, to the upper floor. Starting now, every time he goes up the stairs, he will be walking over his mother’s invisible body, or through it. Actually all his mother did was switch sides. But he doesn’t know where the sides are. Time and eternity: there’s no just stepping into eternity. You can only get there by falling. And how do you fall?

The bathrobe his mother was still wearing when she said goodbye to him at the garden gate is now hanging in the bathroom. On the hook she always hangs it on when she gets dressed. Always hung it on when she got dressed. Without knowing why, he puts his hand into the pocket of the bathrobe and finds a used tissue. This tissue still exists in the present out of which his mother has fallen. If I catch you one more time climbing around in the ruins! Without him, she would be all alone in the world! Now it’s the other way around. He goes down the stairs again, through his invisible mother.

There was scarcely any other author who succeeded in portraying our Socialist reconstruction as vividly as our great writer H., whose life came to a tragic end so abruptly and unexpectedly the day before last.

Actually everything’s just as it was before. In the parlor, the bouquet on the table is still perfectly fresh. He sits down on the sofa on which the Minister of Culture has sat many times before, and the daughter of the President, a good friend of his mother’s; and the head of the so-called “Salad Brigade” at the fish-processing facility at Sassnitz has sat here too (the Salad Brigade that was named in his mother’s honor), as has one of the first great activists, Adolf Hennecke, who lives only two houses down; eight-year-old pioneers sat here on this sofa in front of his famous mother and wanted to know how one becomes a writer; a woman sick with rheumatism sat down exactly where he is sitting now to ask whether his mother could possibly write a letter asking for her to be allowed to go to the health resort in Sochi; the head of the Writers’ Union sat here as well, and on another occasion the artistic director of the theater Volksbühne Berlin, along with the famous actor who played the lead in his mother’s famous play, and from time to time the famous sculptor sat here too, who received the Patriotic Order of Merit at the same time she did, and just recently the famous composer sat here, who wants to write an opera based on a text by her.

Now he, her seventeen-year-old son, is sitting on this sofa in front of the bouquet that has not yet even begun to wilt, gazing at his invisible mother, who sits in the armchair she always sat in when visitors came.

And my father?

He fell in the battle of Kharkov.

As darkness gradually falls, he tries to imagine the enormous quantity of time he will now spend without his mother. Along with her life, the memories he might have of her have stopped growing as well. Be grateful for what you’ve got, his mother always said. But sooner or later, because of his forgetfulness, he will lose his mother all over again — this time piecemeal.

The big window that leads from the parlor out to the terrace is now entirely dark.

On many evenings of many years, from spring into fall, he had sat with his mother on this terrace. Here she told him of Valentinovka, where they used to spend their Moscow summers: she, his father, who fell at the battle of Kharkov, and her friend O. The leaves here smell exactly like the leaves there, she’d always said. Only in Valentinovka there was a little river across the way where she used to go swimming every morning before breakfast. No doubt because of these stories his mother liked to tell, he always imagines trees when someone speaks of Moscow, and yellow leaves that have come to rest on a damp meadow, he sees not the Kremlin and its golden towers but a small, sun-dappled river, sees weeds beneath the surface being swept gently back and forth by the current, and minnows.

Was his mother so afraid of storms back then? For as long as he’s known her, she’s been terrified not only of thunder and lightning but also of wind that might suddenly gust through the house, smashing everything to pieces. Did you close the terrace door tightly? Yes. And the dining room window? Yes. Then I’ll go upstairs. Okay. The terrace door? I said yes. Then she would go upstairs to her bedroom, closing the door there carefully as well, and she wouldn’t come out again until all that remained of the storm was the rain.

But on warm evenings he and his mother would often sit until nightfall on the terrace. She would read, and he would do his homework or write the monthly report for his Free German Youth class group.

Can you help me?

What sort of outing was it?

We went to the Pergamon Museum.

So write: We went to the Pergamon Museum.

That’s not enough.

Oh, I see. So write that you investigated the history of the class struggle by studying the ancient society of slave holders.

That’s good.

Did you notice how tall the steps are that lead up to the Pergamon Altar?

Yes.

That’s how they build things when people are supposed to be in awe of their own gods.

Should I write that?

No.

His mother was sitting outside, close to the light, and he ducked into the house for a minute to fetch something, a glass of water, a pad of paper, a ruler. As he returned, he saw her from behind from deep in the interior of the dark house. His mother had a book on her knees, but she wasn’t reading, she just sat there gazing out into the night. She didn’t turn around to look at him. After all, she knew he was on his way back. She had a thick jacket on since it was already quite chilly.

Why did you call me just plain Sasha and not Alexander?

Why didn’t you ever go up to the attic?

What are the best apples to use for strudel?

Along with his mother, the answers to all these questions have died as well.

Was there still snow on the ground that April in Ufa when I was born?

Was the first word I spoke German or Russian?

What was the name of my niania?

Along with his mother, the way she looked at him died, and everything beyond what he himself remembers. He will now never be old enough to learn the things she hadn’t yet told him, even if he lives to be eighty.

Do you really not have a photograph of my father?

His invisible mother sits with her back to him in silence, giving no answer.

10

Was her son even listening when she told him about all the new things they were trying to do here?

In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.

Why is she only now remembering what her grandmother told her half a lifetime ago?

But then one of them must be intending to deliver the letter and the other to receive it, she had replied to her grandmother.

That’s right.

And having these intentions is not work?

If only she could remember her grandmother’s reply to this question, all would be well again.

But she can’t remember.

She falls.

11

Often he’d been afraid that he would lose her. Sometimes she would have fainting fits, just keeling over suddenly, breathing with such difficulty that he thought she might suffocate. At moments like this, she would look different, too, not like his mother at all. Surviving, that meant for him above all that she was turning back into the mother he knew.

Could he himself have been responsible for what she called her “fits”?

As a child he had sometimes forgotten how easily she could get worked up. Once, for example, he took her linen-cupboard key from its secret hook because he needed a pillowcase for a carnival costume. How dare he go through her linens without asking permission? Or when he and his friends exploded homemade fireworks in the garden. Or jumped off the roof of the terrace with an umbrella to learn how to fly. Or once he had hidden in a crate up in the attic and waited to see if his mother would find him — though he knew even then that she never went up to the attic. When at last he came out of hiding, there were two Volkspolizei officers standing in the hall, and his mother was sitting in tears on the lowest step of the stairs.

The stairs.

And three years ago the major incident, as his mother always calls it. Always called it. His first girlfriend was just visiting him when his mother returned home from a trip. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. His mother suddenly came into his room without knocking, and after one look at the young couple kissing, she’d slammed the door shut again. He had gotten his girlfriend out of the house as quickly as he could, and she never again came to see him, but nevertheless this major incident was perhaps related to his mother’s first heart attack. Only a few weeks later she collapsed in her study and was taken away with sirens howling.

*

Whenever his mother was at the hospital being examined, or off at a resort, or on a journey, he had taken to just staying home with the housekeeper, who would cook for him after school and then leave. The housekeeper smelled of perspiration. When he was younger, his mother had hired this or that nanny to live with him in the house while she was on the road — because she had readings or premieres of her plays in other cities, or was traveling to Poland with Writers Union delegations, or to Czechoslovakia or Hungary. One of the nannies used to spray saliva when she read to him, another pinched his cheek when she said hello, the third refused to return to his bedside out of principle when he was afraid of the dark and cried out for her.

This housekeeper smelled of perspiration.

At least he doesn’t have to worry about his mother any longer.

It’s quite certain now that she will never again turn back into the mother he knows.

And his father?

He fell in the battle of Kharkov.

12

As if one final moment existed within another, simultaneously present, she can remember exactly what that morning was like when she said goodbye to her grandmother. One day before she traveled to Prague under a false name. The miniature grandfather clock was just striking eleven with tinny strokes; her grandmother wrapped a pair of challahs in a cloth for her and gave her a slip of paper on which she’d written the recipe. The skin on her grandmother’s hands was so thin the veins showed through, violet.

But time has blurred all those things that happened for the last time without it being called the last time. At some point her mother had pinned up her hair for her for the last time. At some point she herself had washed the dishes for the last time while her sister sat at the kitchen table doing her homework. At some point she sat in Krasni Mak for the last time. At many points during her life she had done something for the last time without knowing it. Did that mean that death was not a moment but a front, one that was as long as life? And so was she tumbling not only out of this world, but out of all possible worlds? Was she tumbling out of Vienna, out of Prague and Moscow, out of Berlin, out of the Socialist sister countries and the western world? Tumbling out of the entire world, out of all the time there ever was, would be, is? But now what will happen to her son?

13

At the funeral, the urn containing his mother’s ashes sits on a pedestal up front between two flags. The red flag on the left is draped as if it were blowing to the left, and the national flag on the right as if it were blowing to the right. Whose idea was it to drape the flags to look as if a storm were rising from the urn? Ridiculous, his mother would have said.

His mother had just recently been to the hairdresser’s to have her color touched up. Now her freshly coiffed hair has been incinerated, and her face is also ash, her shoulders, too, are there in this bronze-colored canister, and her hands as well with their fleshy fingertips, her round knees, her feet, and even her toes, painted mother-of-pearl. He’s never seen his mother naked, but he’s seen how she looks when she is asleep, or how she crosses one leg over the other when she is sitting, he’s seen how she waits, how she pours herself a glass of water, how she gets up, puts on a coat, how she reaches for her handbag, how she walks. The body of his mother was the landscape he knew best among all the landscapes in the world.

14

In front of her, an ancient woman is shaking what looks like a child’s rattle made of ivory, with silver bells. She stops. Shakes. Stops. When the bells have rung for the third time, she goes into the theater.

15

In the middle, leaning up against the pedestal with the urn, is his wreath with the ribbon printed in black script: For my mother. In front of it: the wreath sent by the Central Committee of the Party: Our estimable comrade; the wreath from the Council of Ministers: Stalwart in the struggle; the wreath from the People’s Parliament: With Socialist salutations; the wreath from the Magistrate of Berlin, the capital of the GDR: To an honorary citizen of our city; the wreath sent by the Writers Union: To a great writer; and: Unforgotten, the wreath of the Cultural Association of the GDR.

Who arranged the ribbons in such a way that you can read all the farewells?

A fortnight ago it was still a fortnight before he would be sitting here in front of her urn, but he hadn’t known it yet.

Just to the right of the urn is a little stand with a velvet cushion on which his mother’s medals are displayed: The Comrade G. Medal, the Patriotic Order of Merit, the Goethe Prize, and, twice, the Workers’ Pennant.

Ten days ago it was ten days before.

And just to the right of the urn, a table with her books.

The music they are playing is by Beethoven, according to the program. Who picked the music?

So did time keep rushing ever more rapidly away until it was gone? Why hadn’t he noticed? Why hadn’t his mother?

16

It is she herself who slices through the paper, splitting the entire stack from top to bottom at one go.

17

The Minister of Culture gives the first speech.

In Ufa his wife gave me the first two diapers for you.

Then there’s music again, this time the dirge: Victims immortal, you sank into dust. We stand here and mourn as our hearts say we must.

I like the lyrics better in Russian.

Then the second speech, given by the President of the Academy of Arts.

He’s one of those functionaries who write on the side.

One week ago today, his mother was still alive. The lees of her life were already slipping away, but she had moved around just as deliberately as ever. He had never once, for example, seen his mother running. From a distance, she had always looked like an old woman, bent over and somehow crooked, even when she was just fifty.

18

What are all these people waiting in line for? Are they giving away darkness for free? But that won’t curb anyone’s hunger.

19

At the end they play a piece by Haydn, during which everyone stands up, and her son goes to the front of the room in order to carry his wreath himself, as arranged with the funeral director. The urn, the velvet cushion with his mother’s medals, the books, the flags, and the official wreaths are picked up by soldiers of the Guards Regiment and carried, at the head of the funeral procession, to the gravesite. The son, in his role as first mourner, walks right behind the soldier carrying the urn, but because the urn-bearer is leading the procession so slowly, he has to pay attention not to step on the man’s heels. Is the Guards Regiment trying to compel the guests to assume a mournful state with this slow pace? Is the Guards Regiment standing guard over the mourners’ sentiments to ensure that the officially prescribed levels of grief are maintained?

20

From the darkness a small hand reaches out to her, something yellow in its palm. Ah, finally Sasha is handing her the lemon she’s been waiting for all this time.

21

When they reach the grave, the flag bearers dip their two flags while the urn is lowered into the pit. Forward, brothers and sisters, and the Last Judgment let us face. Oops, must have misheard — he knows perfectly well that the trumpets of the working class call the brothers and sisters to the last fight, not the Last Judgment. But isn’t the last fight death? The Internationa-a-le. Unites. The hu. Man race.

The son now takes up position, as arranged, to the left of the grave, behind him the table with his mother’s books. On the other side of the grave, the velvet cushion with the medals has been set on a pedestal again, and between the medals and the grave stands a cemetery worker offering the mourners rose petals from five baskets.

Anyone who joins this line must first pass by the cushion with his mother’s medals, then the cemetery worker, then the grave with the little bronze-colored pot at the bottom, finally arriving before him, the only son of the deceased.

The son shakes hands.

He shakes the hand of the President’s daughter and the hand of the President himself, shakes the hand of the artistic director of the Volksbühne Berlin, shakes many hands of famous writers, famous sculptors, and famous composers, he shakes the hand of the woman with rheumatism, the hand of the Deputy Ambassador of the Soviet Union in Berlin, Capital of the GDR, and also the hand of the brigade leader of the Salad Division of the fish-processing plant Sassnitz; he shakes the small hands of pioneers, the young hands of women who perhaps want to be writers themselves some day, and the old hands of comrades who knew his mother from Moscow, Prague, or Ufa.

At the very end of the reception line, he holds out his hand to a man he doesn’t know, and this man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, the mouth of the man looks exactly like his own mouth that he sees every morning in the mirror. With exactly the same sort of raspy voice he himself has, the man, after clearing his throat, utters his heartfelt condolences, except that his heartfelt condolences sound different from those of the others — they’re called soboleznovaniya — reminding the son so abruptly of his own Russian childhood, it’s as if his memory were a curtain suddenly ripping in two.

22

Thank you, he says, and the man nods to him, but then others arrive wanting to shake the son’s hand, and by the time the line is finally at an end and the funeral director places his mother’s medals back in their proper boxes, handing them to him, and a soldier of the Guards Regiment places his mother’s books in a bag, carrying them away, and a gravedigger begins to fill up the pit again with pale Brandenburg sand, and one or another of his mother’s friends, their eyes filled with tears, strokes the son’s head one last time as they are leaving, by the time the group of mourners has finally dispersed and departed, the stranger is nowhere to be seen, and he, the sole survivor, the son of the deceased who has not yet even reached the age of maturity, takes streetcar No. 46 back to the house where he has lived until now together with his mother, and where there is now no one awaiting him.

Please take off your shoes in the hall. Walking through his invisible mother, he climbs the stairs, goes into his mother’s dressing room, takes the key from its secret hook, and unlocks the linen cabinet. Inside are duvet covers, pillowcases, towels, and sheets.

At the very bottom, under the sheets, is a sealed letter.

Russian stamps, a Vienna address in his mother’s handwriting, and above it a stamped message adorned with a swastika: Evacuated to the East.

At some point his mother slid this letter under the sheets.

Now he has retrieved it.

He looks at the envelope, turns it over, and on the back is an address in Cyrillic script.

He slides the letter back under the sheets.

But now the hiding place is no longer a hiding place.

Does she really not have a photograph of his father?

On the evening of this day he takes out the atlas from his mother’s bookshelf.

Where is Kharkov anyhow?

23

The next morning is Sunday.

The next morning his mother is still dead.

If only she would stop being dead soon, he thinks.

If only the stairs didn’t exist, his mother would still be alive, he thinks.

If only they hadn’t moved into this house with a staircase.

If only his mother hadn’t liked this house so much.

If only she hadn’t liked this place so much where she would break her neck.

Those stairs are treacherous.

In his mother’s atlas, still lying open on his table from the night before, he flips from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, featuring the major city Kharkov, back to the page that shows Berlin. Scientific convention has assigned Berlin, this city where his mother was until recently still alive and where she is now dead, the coordinates 52.58373 degrees latitude north and 13.39667 degrees longitude east (coordinates that were assigned to this place before her death and remain assigned to it now). And since, after all, human beings can’t go strolling around on the moon and falling down dead there, it stands to reason that two of the coordinates in his atlas must be the coordinates of the place where he himself will stop living. Where his bones will rot. A place he doesn’t know yet — and by the time he does, it won’t do him any good.

Mama, does that mean that some day my body will be my corpse?

With all its birthmarks and scars, with the skin, hair, and veins I know so well already? Does that mean I’m basically sharing my entire life with my corpse? Is that how it is, Mama? You grow up, you get old, and when the corpse is ready, it’s time to die?

Since his mother is no longer winding the clock on the wall, it’s quieter in the house than ever.

So now in this world that has been surveyed to within an inch of its life, he is alone.

Alone.

Alone with shelves filled with books, cabinets containing drawers filled with files and notes; alone with chairs, beds, tables, sofas, cupboards, coat hooks and lamps; alone with the chandelier, with rugs, a rattan trunk, winter coats, with his mother’s typewriter; alone with bottle openers, aspirin, bed linens, scouring powder, tools, shoes, and pots, with ironing board, laundry rack, tea table, and the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun, with broom and mop, his mother’s combs, brushes, and makeup, with shower gel and skin creams, dishes, knives, and forks, flower vases, paper clips, envelopes, his mother’s diaries and manuscripts, records and a record player, eight bottles of wine, a music box, chains, rings, and brooches, two cans of lentils, a refrigerator containing half a stick of butter, three tubs of yogurt, two slices of cheese; he’s alone with a revolving chair, countless drawings and lithographs in varying formats, several paintings, one of them a portrait of his mother; alone with ten apples, a loaf of bread, with sundry pencils, pens, erasers, and stacks of white paper; alone with twine, coasters, potholders, with coins and bills from many lands, with mirrors, extension cords, and a tabletop fountain that no longer works; alone with two potted rubber trees, several coverlets, woolen blankets, pillows, with empty suitcases, handbags, house slippers, nutcrackers, tablecloths and carbon paper, towels, eyeglasses, sweaters, stockings and blouses, underwear; alone with his mother’s cardigans and scarves; alone with his own first sweater and cap from when he himself was still an infant, and a little cutting board he painted back in kindergarten in Moscow.

Alone.

Will he have to pick up her glasses to remember her eyes, her wallet to remember her fingers, a pair of shoes to see her feet eternally in their shoes, and her woolen blanket to remember until the end of days how her body looked when she was napping after lunch? How many objects and coverings will be needed if she is to retain at least a life of memory inside him? But probably there isn’t anything his mother’s hands, reaching out from the realm of the dead, will be able to grasp so firmly — no object, no piece of furniture, or item of clothing — as she grasps him, the one to whom she first bequeathed her heartbeat, and then, when he was still small, whose diapers she changed and whose nose she wiped, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, and whom later, as he grew, she taught language and read to, whose hand she held to cross larger streets, whose hair she combed, whose sweater she pulled on over his head and whose shoes she tied, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, whom she consoled when he fell down, whose temperature she took and whom she taught to ride a bicycle, to whom she said what she found good and proper and what wrong, what she found tedious, amusing, interesting, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, whom she scolded, shouted at and cursed, and often also praised and kissed. For the first time now, he tries to see himself through his mother’s eyes, from the outside, as it were, but this is difficult. Strange, he thinks, that we use blind spot to designate a place that cannot clearly be seen because it is too close. Still, memory no doubt prefers to be able to exchange the bit of blindness for a living body.

During spring break he’ll start cleaning out the house, and in the summer he’s supposed to move to a Home where he’ll spend the final year before he comes of age, his legal guardian told him.

When the doorbell rings, he knows that on a Sunday it can be neither the mailman nor the housekeeper.

The man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, and the mouth of the man looks exactly like his own mouth that he sees every morning in the mirror. With exactly the same sort of raspy voice he himself has, the man, after clearing his throat, says good day in Russian.

In the pause that follows, German silence and Russian silence intermingle.

And then the boy’s father grabs him by his shock of hair and pulls him in for a hug.

Like an exhausted boxer, the boy remains briefly in his embrace before pushing away.

From the hall you can see into his mother’s study.

Is that where she wrote? his father asks.

Yes.

Would you make us some tea?

The boy nods.

While the boy puts on the kettle, takes out cups and tea from the cupboard, and finally pours the water, his father leans against the doorpost, watching his son move around busily, picking things up and putting them down.

When the tea is ready, the boy’s father picks up the teapot and leads the way.

Let’s sit in here, his father says, walking into his mother’s study.

This is the first time for as long as the boy can remember that a visitor is taking a seat not in the parlor but at the little tea table in his mother’s study. On the wall is the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun.

Do you really live in Kharkov?

Why Kharkov?

The boy shrugs. He sits bent over in his chair, the cup in his hands.

At first the father hears only a regular dripping sound, then he sees the rings forming in his son’s teacup, a new ring each time a tear falls from the tip of the boy’s nose into the tea.

When I met your mother, she was going through some difficult times.

Everything started when I asked whether her husband had returned home yet and she burst into tears.

I wanted to give her my handkerchief, but there was still a knot in it.

The knot was so tight that I couldn’t get it open right away.

That was how it started.

Maybe you need one yourself?

Yes, please.

The father pulls a pressed handkerchief out of his front pocket and gives it to his son.

What was the knot supposed to remind you of?

That there was an assembly that night.

And then?

I forgot the assembly.