Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
We have to get to the West, his friend had said then one evening when there was only a week’s time left before the exam. We’ll repeat the year there. Students from the East were held back a year when they continued their studies in the West, and that was precisely the year they had lost to their carnival and corpses. A new beginning, his friend had said. Here there was no chance: Here the files on their entire cohort—and along with them time—kept steadily advancing. Then they had thought about where their escape could be undertaken most easily. Neither he nor his friend were familiar with the terrain around the “green” unmarked border, and they didn’t have a balloon, so they decided to try the Elbe. It was still so cold, his friend had said, that the border guards wouldn’t seriously be expecting anyone to try swimming the river. We’ll get drunk first so we don’t feel the cold, and then we’ll just zip across, his friend, the Saxon, had said. Neither he nor his friend had brought up their women. Although this now appears to him beyond comprehension, he would say that at the moment he had simply forgotten all about his fiancée. One week later they packed up a pipe wrench and three bottles of wine, got on a train with their bicycles, rode the train for an hour and a half, and then from a tiny train station bicycled out to the meadows along the Elbe. There they got drunk in the dark and then, on the eve of their exams in statistics and structural physics, just as planned, they climbed down into the river to swim back a year in time.
The next time he saw his fiancée—today his wife—it was in the courtroom. She had been called as a witness and asked whether she’d known of his intention to flee the country. And she had, quite truthfully, said no. Compared with this moment, all questions regarding structural physics suddenly appeared facile, and it was clear to him that he had swum into his test rather than away from it. The swimming though is always just the same. Later he asked his fiancée to bring him a book about structural physics, he studied the book and then conducted tutorials on this subject for his fellow prisoners. The percentage of men from the construction sector that were sitting in prison just then was higher than usual: During the construction of the Berlin Wall, a number of workers had attempted to reach the other side of the very structure they were building. After serving his time in prison, he went to see his former professor and asked for permission to take the exam even though he was no longer enrolled. He passed with flying colors but never took up his studies again.
Now his wife seems to have grown calmer, he hears glasses clicking together which means she has no doubt gotten up and begun to clear the table. When he turns around he glimpses her through the curtain of willow twigs, she is just disappearing into the toolshed with a tray in her hand. His eyes come to rest on the white hanging baskets made of plastic that she has hung in the trees, these baskets are illuminated by the lantern and in their artificiality appear even further removed from the night than the light itself. The shed in which he and his wife have made themselves at home among the tools stands surrounded by darkness. Their arrangement with the mistress of the house has been only provisionally in effect ever since the heirs of the former owner of this piece of land filed for the return of their property, and so both the vacation quarters themselves and the subtenant relationship are now only makeshifts, as the mistress of the house put it. When the ownership of these heirs has been legally confirmed, they will have to leave, both he and his wife, this is what has been agreed. But when that will be is something no one knows. Subtenant sounds like a euphemism for a sort of weed, his wife had remarked after their conversation with the mistress of the house, and somehow ever since he has associated the notion weed with the happiness he experiences here when he is sailing. Happiness grows out of disorder, just as infinity grows out of the finite lake on which he is now turning his back. He and his wife spend their weekends in a toolshed, tie up their sailboat to a dock that doesn’t belong to them, and are nonetheless, he would say, utterly and completely happy on this parcel of land that they have conditionally borrowed.
If he had succeeded in escaping then, he probably would have managed to complete his studies in West Germany. In any case, the Museum for City History had bought his drawings of the corpses right away after the catacombs were opened, the corpses relocated and the church rebuilt. But after his time in prison, as was only to be expected in the East, he had been sent to work in production to purify himself: He was assigned to a furniture factory. In fact this was supposed to be only a transitional position, a makeshift solution. Half a year later he would have been allowed to take up his studies again, even here, but he himself had made the decision to remain in the factory as an ordinary worker. The makeshift had lasted his entire life until now, when it was time for him to retire. Whenever the topic came up in conversation, he would always say that he’d simply realized that he preferred this practical work to his studies. Lord only knows. Feeling the unsteady boards of the dock beneath his footsteps, he thinks that it would be lovely if he and his wife would succeed in dying before the matter of the inherited property was finally settled. Then the person giving the speech at the funeral would be able to say that until the very end they had been able to pursue what they loved: sailing.
IN THE VILLAGE
they say the daughter of the house has been seen at night sitting with a few boys out on the pier where the steamboat docks, smoking and drinking. Especially when the moon is full she likes to clamber over the railing of the little balcony beside her window with her parents and grandmother none the wiser, she climbs down the window frame of the downstairs window, then steps into the interlaced hands of the gardener held up to assist her, and later she ascends again by the same method.
The subtenants are glad the gardener remains sitting quietly on the threshold with the cold cigar stump in his mouth when they start to saw down the big fir bush, what they’re after is to lay the telephone wire in as direct a line as possible from the house down to the workshop so that this cable they have purchased themselves will reach. In any case the fir bush has become yellowed and unattractive in recent years, besides which it’s been hollow inside for some time now. When they are removing the huge stump with its roots, they discover a crate filled with porcelain. Not bad, all the things that grow in a garden, the young householder says when they show him the crate. A miracle of nature, he says. The gardener nods. The householder picks up the crate and carries it to his car.
SOMETIMES HE CLIMBS UP
a ladder to straighten the tarp with which he covered the thatch roof of the bathing house the previous fall. Perhaps he would use a similar gesture to draw up the covers at night to tuck in his friend if she were now his wife and lying in bed beside him as had been agreed on so many years ago. On the side facing the lake, the roof has begun to rot. There isn’t much sense to what he’s doing, it’s possible the roof will even rot faster under the tarp, but he still can’t bring himself to just abandon the roof to the wind. Under the tarp it will still hold together for a little while longer and look like a roof.
If his father hadn’t sent him to run home from the construction site that day to get some beer, he wouldn’t have come down the path just as she was picking raspberries with her father on the slope across from their house. Her father had waved him over and asked whether he wouldn’t like to have some raspberries too, and he’d said yes. From then on, the first time he plucked raspberries with her, until today, when he climbs up on the ladder to straighten the tarp on the roof of the bathing house, life has taken its course. Sometimes he asks himself whether, if their two fathers had not acted as if in cahoots that day to make them playmates, his life would still have become his life. But life would no doubt have filled up with various other sorts of would-haves and probably been just as much his life as this one. At the time, when he was five years old and she had just turned four, their fathers or who knows who had made a decision once and for all about the gestures with which he now, in his mid-fifties already and perched atop a ladder, is tugging straight a tarp that’s gotten rumpled in the wind.
I dare you to crawl out farther on this branch, let’s go for a swing, did you know you can smoke cattails, let’s use the tiles to build a house in the water, I found a bullet casing, me too, let’s go for a swing, if you put a board over the tire you’ll have a raft, you have to use elderberry stalks to make a blowpipe, they’re hollow on the inside, the gardener said so, let’s go to Liedtke Park, it’s all wild and there are apples growing that don’t belong to anyone, let’s go for a swing, c’mere, I’ll give you a boost, how far down can you dive, my ship has a rudder made of metal, let’s say the bedroom is from the pillow there to the blanket, let’s go for a swing, can you ride no-hands, did you know that little boy Daniel got up on the windowsill and peed out the window, oh no, my oar just fell in the water, give me a kiss.
Over there between the roots of the big oak tree that he can see perfectly well from up on the ladder is where they’d buried the little chest that contained, as treasure, the aluminum pennies from his sister’s wedding, and when they dug the hole they found the pewter pitchers that someone else had put in the ground at exactly that spot. When he stands on the ladder now, he isn’t looking at the roots of the oak tree, but presumably the little chest is still there in the ground, or, if it’s rotted since then, at least the pennies are still there. Did you know that Daniel is dead? Did you know he died even before his father tried to shoot his mother dead? Do you remember how he used to go diving with us, among the pikes in the reeds, and how cold the pikes were when they bumped our legs with their fish mouths? Not long after the border was opened, he went diving in the Caribbean and drowned. No, really. As if opening the border just gave him more possible ways to die. The trip was his would-have. Now he’ll be a little boy forever. After the night when Daniel’s father, who had cancer and was on his deathbed, shot at Daniel’s mother, she too lay on her deathbed. No, really. As if dying in such a family just eats its way through everything. Did you read the newspapers when for days the front page showed the bungalow where Daniel peed out the window that time? Now the window is dark and empty, the whole bungalow has been dark since the shooting. They say the argument was about the bungalow itself. Daniel’s father shot at Daniel’s mother from the bed. It was about the inheritance for Daniel’s younger half-brother. The one from the West. No, really. So opening the borders apparently also gave Daniel’s parents more possible ways to die.
In order to stretch the tarp over the roof last fall, he had set foot on the property of his childhood friend for the first time since helping her pack up and empty out the house years before. He hopped over the little wall made of fieldstone and worked his way through the bushes because the gate he’d always entered as a child was locked now. He had sat with her on the bricked pillars to either side of the gate so they could stick their tongues out at passers-by. When he now thinks back to that weekend when she emptied out and left the house, or even to his visit in Berlin when he was fourteen years old, or, even further back, to that afternoon in the woodshed when she and he had seen something it would have been better for them not to see, it strikes him as strange that, independent of what is happening, one day is always followed by another, and to this day he doesn’t know what it actually is that is continuing. Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different from what we’re hoping for—something that transcends everything that’s ever happened—since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it. The house too is still standing there, and he doesn’t know what it is that is still standing. And he himself. And no doubt she as well, somewhere in the world.
At our house we have gooseberries and currants and apples in the garden, but the gooseberries and currants are already done for the year, he’d said, and her father had given him permission to show her his garden that afternoon. At our house there are just roses, she’d said when she stood there in his garden, then she bit into an unripe apple. That is when what he now, in retrospect, would call his childhood first began, from vacation to vacation it would begin when she arrived and end when she departed. On the day when his sister stepped out onto the road in her wedding dress to walk to the church to be married, and a pot of pennies was dumped out over her for luck, and afterward he and his friend picked all the lightweight coins from the sand, aluminum money that weighed almost nothing—on that day, while the wedding party was already drawing farther away and they were still dragging their hands through the pale sand, she and he had spoken for the first time of marriage.
You can break open hazelnuts with a heavy stone, they’re still white on the inside, let’s go for a swing, I can ride around the puddle to the left with my front wheel and to the right with the back one, let’s make up a secret language, kissing should be called twittering, no really, let’s go for a swing, you can’t talk while you’re fishing, squeeze the lilac leaf all the way flat between your hands, that’s how it makes the best whistle, the gardener said so, let’s go for a swing, c’mere, we’ll bury the mole under the tree right here, you can eat the little hearts on the shepherd’s purse, let’s go hide under the fir bush, give me a—I want to twitter, me too.
His parents always left the house early, at six in the morning, at eight his friend had breakfast, at eight-thirty he was allowed to come over. On cool mornings, the handle of the gate with the pillars to the right and left of it still had dew on it when he pressed it down. As he walked past the kitchen window, he would knock on the greenish panes so that the cook would unlock the door for him, then he would go inside and wait in the living room next to the long table at which his friend and her family and the friends of her family were sitting, he would stand there, leaning up against the cold stove, waiting until she finished eating. Afterward they would play in her garden or his, go swimming from his or her dock, hide in the secret closet in her room under the coats and dresses or go to his house, where the television would be on even during the day, and watch the black and white cowboys galloping across a black and white plain and eventually their black and white falling down and dying.
He’d read once that embryos in the womb go through all the stages of evolution, that they begin as fish and amphibians, and later get fur, then for a while have the spinal columns of pigs and only afterward are born as human beings. Perhaps, he thinks, a second primeval era begins after birth, this time the speeded-up history of mankind but now going under the name of childhood, as if the time of the hunter-gatherers had to be shared by everyone once more, as the basis from which the various sorts of adults could develop. After all, fish and amphibians gave rise, in the course of evolution, to a large variety of creatures, some had developed into land animals which in the end became monkeys and cats, and others chose to spend their lives in the water and later became dolphins or whales. If this is how things were, then he had made her acquaintance in the Stone Age and shared his life with her until approximately the late Middle Ages, and after all this was a period lasting two and a half million years.
Perhaps—at least this is how it looks to him today—such a primeval era that two people spend together is a more indissoluble bond than a promise would be. The eyes with which he and she saw something that day in the woodshed that it would have been better for them not to see, are still right there in their heads after all, even though these heads are meanwhile, seen in purely spatial terms, far removed from one another. The seeing from that day still persists. In the woodshed, he and she had made themselves a hiding place up on top of all the wood, in the one meter of space remaining between the stacked logs and the roof of the shed. They had used logs to divide the space up there into rooms, lined the rooms with leftover bits of carpet, here and there nailed scraps of cloth to the wood, and hung up a flashlight to provide illumination—and so, crawling around, they had a whole apartment to keep house in. From his ladder, he can see the roof of the woodshed, which meanwhile is entirely covered with the leaves and dry branches that have fallen.
My cousin, Nicole, is here for a visit, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked
. René, the nephew of the director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires, was a bit older than they were, the child of vacationers, and whenever he was there, he would always come looking for them in the shed and crawl up to sit with his head ducked down in their hiding place, full of suggestions of things they should try.
My cousin, Nicole, is here for a visit, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked, she’s only twelve like you, but I’m sure she’d sleep with me too.
Every electrical outlet has three cables, a blue one, a red one and a yellow one. The blue and red ones are necessary for the electricity to flow, and the yellow one, even though it’s never connected anywhere, is there too, and it’s called the ground.
My cousin, Nicole, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked, she’s only twelve like you, but I’m sure she’d sleep with me too. If you hide behind the wood, you can watch, do you want to?
By this time they’d long since learned what it looks like when blood flows out of a cut, they had even sliced open their own arms with a pocket knife so they would be blood brothers, and they also knew what it looks like when a person shits and the sausage first starts coming very slowly out of the hole and then quickly pops out and falls, under the willow tree beside the water first he, then she had squatted down so that the other could watch. And since seeing had always only been seeing, neither touching nor smelling nor tasting nor even hearing—for hearing, your hand would still vibrate when you held it to the cloth cover of the radio’s loudspeaker—since seeing itself could never be filled with even the tiniest bit of reality, the storerooms behind their eyes had, at the time, seemed infinitely large to both of them, and that was no doubt why both she and he immediately responded to their neighbor’s suggestion by saying yes.
Of course they could have given a nudge to the pile of logs separating them from the bedroom of their hiding place when René asked his cousin Nicole if she knew how children were made. Even somewhat later, as René was explaining this to his cousin Nicole, who didn’t yet know about it, they might still have burst suddenly out of hiding and declared it all one big joke. But when René, who was already somewhat older, asked Nicole whether she wouldn’t like to try out what he had just been explaining to her and she said no, and then kept saying no again and again while he held her down and used his body to press her legs apart, and both of them were still naked from swimming, and when Nicole, who was only twelve and weaker than René, who was already going to be starting an apprenticeship after this summer, started crying, and he held her mouth shut and then began to jerk back and forth on top of her, he and she were still watching through the tiny slit that allowed them enough space between the logs to see everything that was happening. First it had been too soon to burst out of hiding, and then it was too late, and the dividing line between too early and too late was so sharp that it couldn’t even have been called a no man’s land. Behind the wooden wall where René had walled in the two seers, it was dark and cramped, and if they had so much as shifted position, everything would have collapsed.
They saw. They saw so long and so much that all the storerooms behind their eyes were filled with what it would have been better not to have seen. He has no memory of how he and his friend later crawled out of their hiding place, how they climbed down the variously tall piles of wood and escaped to freedom. If you had to go by what a person remembers, he would consider it possible that they never did get back outside again but were still squatting to this day beneath the roof of the shed, which meanwhile is entirely covered with the leaves and dry branches that have fallen. That one can be more thoroughly tied to a place through shared cupidity and shame than by shared happiness is something he wishes he’d never had to learn.