Free The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck Page B

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