Free The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck Page A

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