From The Old Child & Other Stories, by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions).
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
Siberia
My father's mother once dragged her
adversary out of the house by the hair. By the hair she grabbed hold of
her, says my father, and whirled her around in the hall once or twice
before throwing her out. His father, my grandfather, didn't have a
chance. And his father's mistress wasn't half so impressive as the
woman he had married. Tremendous, says my father, is what his mother
was. Just think, he says: She survived Siberia. Siberia! Survived all
those things nearly all the others died of: four weeks in a boxcar,
drinking water out of puddles, sleeping on top of corpses, raped
thirteen times, the cold, the work and not enough to eat, two bouts of
typhus, she'd had to bite into rotten herring for the salt to save her
life, and then the trip back to Germany under the name of a dead
person, smuggled among the wounded on a medical transport, head shaved
and scabrous, traveling homeward in the place of one who'd already
died. Out of the question, my father says, that someone like his mother
would have wasted her breath discussing the woman she found in her
place when she returned home. By the hair she'd grabbed hold of her,
her husband's mistress, screaming: you parasite, you vermin, so you
thought you'd make your nest here? and then whirled her around by the
hair, whirled her twice around the hall and slammed her against the
wall so that the Jesus hanging there was knocked crooked.
And
after all that, my father says, after all of it: Not a single bad thing
to say about the Russians. Just think. Not one bad thing about the
Russians. The prisoners had been fed, not much and only soup, watery
soup, but all the same there was food, she always said—while the
families of the victors themselves had nothing to eat in their own
country. Her guards' children had died, but she survived, those were
his mother's words, my father says.
Her grand entrance, he
says, you can't imagine such a thing. Like a barbarian warrior she came
late one night perched high atop a tank truck: his mother, high up in
the air, straddling a milk tank, one leg on either side, and her face
covered in welts from the trees lining the Brandenburg roads. She'd
slid down from this milk truck straight into his life, and still he
didn't recognize her, my father says, hadn't even known he was missing
a mother, since he'd gotten by for three years without one. But all the
same it was impressive, he'd stood there in the courtyard overwhelmed
by how impressive she was. She was like a vision, he says. My mother: a
vision. She'd called him by his name, she knew his name and knew that
it was him, and then she slid down from the tank to the ground, landing
on both feet, squatted down on the sand in front of him, and said his
name over and over. But he didn't know who the woman was, didn't know
she was his mother. And so he didn't say a word, but then she took him
in her arms, clasped her powerful arms around him, and she smelled of
vanilla, filthy as she was, vanilla. Then she got up, he says, and ran
quickly the few steps into the house, into the hallway, and from the
hallway to the kitchen door. In the kitchen she found the two of them
sitting there. Nothing out of the ordinary, my father says, they were
just eating, after all it was noon.
Although she'd been
through so much, she’d returned home bursting with strength. Probably
she'd needed this strength, my father says, to push the war away from
her. Perhaps the difficulty was that things simply went on, that she
knew what she might have lost, but it wasn't lost, it was still there.
I think now, my father says, that her strength was just a measure of
how hard she'd had to struggle. Clearly, he says, it must have been a
struggle for his mother to value life just because she'd been sent to
Siberia three years before. That's no doubt why she was always so
tempestuous, because she herself didn't know if she could hold back the
earthquake that had shaken her life.
A fury, she was, his
mother, a force of nature. I'll never forget, he says, the way she
grabbed the other woman by the shoulders without a word, her eyes like
daggers, and shook her hard, because her rage was so balled up behind
her teeth that she couldn't get out a single word. And how the words
then burst out of her and she slapped the woman, screaming: You whore,
you spineless whore, what are you doing in my house, grabbed the woman
by her hair and dragged her out of the kitchen into the hall, whirled
her around, addressing her as a parasite and vermin, and finally threw
her out the door and down the steps—those couple of steps, my father
says, whose banister is now so rusted it's all about to fall off
altogether. The woman clutched at that banister, trying to catch
herself, she says, but she couldn't, because of the force with which
his mother had hurled her. The contrast was striking, my father says,
on the one hand this voice, this tremendous voice, and on the other
just the sounds of their struggle. She didn't dare utter a single word,
the other woman, he says.
She was an unprepossessing woman,
his father's mistress, certainly no beauty, and she never said much,
not even during the time she lived with them, before his mother's
return from Siberia. She didn't dare speak to him, the son, he says,
she just cooked and straightened the house, always in silence. Your
shrinking violet, his mother always called her later, talking to his
father, but his father never protested. My mother was beautiful,
always, my father says. You can see that in the pictures. Before she
was interned, her face was smooth and round as an apple, shiny somehow,
with lots of healthy flesh beneath the skin, round and firm. But during
her captivity, her skin became transparent, as you can see in the later
photographs, and when he compares the pictures he finds this even more
beautiful. Suddenly you could look right into her, the flesh beneath
her skin melted away, but what was inside her blossomed out. If you can
imagine what I mean. She looked, my father says, as if everything she'd
experienced had made her skin thinner, rubbed away at her surface and
brought to light what lay beneath it. He can still remember, he says,
how when he was a child and she and she told him stories, he would
always imagine he could look through her skin and see everything she
had experienced. Siberia is a beautiful place, she would say again and
again, and then he would look through her and see Siberia with perfect
clarity: a cold, marvelous expanse, forests opening out behind his
mother's cheeks and stretching on and on, endless reaches of desolate
wilderness, was bodies of water. In spring it always took a long time
for the ground to thaw, but it was good earth, fertile, she often said,
and lots of room, plenty of space everywhere. If she hadn't had to come
back to her family, she would have liked to stay there, she sometimes
said.
If she hadn't had us to come back to, she wouldn't have
come back at all, my father says. We were her objective, and so it was
obvious that when she'd reached her objective she had to be at home.
Physically she was far weaker than my father's mistress, but she hadn't
had any other choice but to take control of her life again. If you
haven't seen it with your own eyes, my father says, it isn't possible
to believe how much strength a person can summon in order to pull
something out of the past into the present. She'd slapped the other
woman in the kitchen as if this were a way to revive her past, which
had drowned. Wake it up with a few powerful slaps and call it back to
life. That was something he was never able to forget, my father says:
the simplicity and clarity of my mother's response. Quite simply she
had used her own body to eject that other body, replaced one flesh with
another, asserted her physicality in the space where another had been.
Later, he often thought of how, when the other woman was gone, she took
the food the woman had prepared for her husband off the table and
tipped it into the ashcan. She'd taken the onions and potatoes and fat
and begun to cook. His father hadn't said a word.
After his
father's wife came home from Siberia, my father says, he had scarcely
any chance to see his mistress and therefore began to write her
letters. I followed him, saw how he hid the letters in a crack in a
stone wall, where she later fished them out. His shrinking violet, my
father says. Fishing letters out of dark crevices suited her character,
it seemed to be enough for her. Nothing like his mother's greatness. A
coward is what she was, not once did she dare come to the house, just
laid down her arms without a fight. His father knew what he was doing
when he wrote his letters shorthand, because if they had been legible,
he, the son, would surely have to read them and reported their contents
to his mother. To this day, my father says, he doesn't know and can't
imagine what his father could have had to say to this woman that was so
urgent—this woman who wasn't even willing to fight for him. All it had
taken was being thrown down the stairs to make her give up. Certain
things cannot be attained without a physical struggle, and love is
foremost among them, that is what his mother taught him. He believes,
he says, that in the end his father realized how much more impressive
his wife was than his mistress. Otherwise, he would have taken some
sort of action, my father says. In the end his father was glad his wife
had returned home. Otherwise, even with his one leg, it would have been
easy for him to defend the mistress, wouldn't it have been? Even with
just the one leg, he was still much stronger than his wife. But he
didn't want to fight, that's all, my father says. Because he didn't
want to fight, that's all, my father says. Because he didn't think it
was worth it. That's why. The one unfortunate thing the two of them had
in common was their cowardice. It was a mystery to him, the son, even
then, what his father was unable to discuss with his mother. He himself
was constantly asking his mother for advice. Life experience, he says,
his mother had more of it than anyone. Naturally, he says, after all
that time.
His father never talked to him in those days, says
my father, but recently, as if he had a perfect right to do so, he's
been showing up in his dreams. Just last night, he says, his father
took him by the hand and went out with him in a boat on a lake. But the
lake kept getting larger and larger as his father towed, until finally
the shoreline vanished and it turned into a sea. And there, in the
middle of the sea, his father attempted to talk to him. But he, the
son, had been unable to hear anything because a strong wind kept
sweeping his father's words from his lips and spraying them across the
water in all directions. He saw his father's words flying into
strangers' windows and out of strangers' doors, chasing clouds of dust
through the streets and stripping the trees to their skeletons, saw
them being inhaled and filling strangers' lungs, resting upon tongues
of water and then flying on, a journey without end. At last his father
fell silent, and then the wind died down, leaving only the sound of the
water knocking softly against the boat, and finally there was perfect
silence, a silence white as a sheet of paper, and upon this sheet of
paper he could still read the sentence his father had spoken into the
silence of a dream: The truth, his father said, is made of different
stuff than a joint of pork. At that moment, he, the son, realized that
the boat was frozen fast in the water, and he and his father had to get
out and cross the ice on foot to return home. Since morning, he hasn't
been able to escape the notion that truth is a wind that is rocking
that boat on some sea somewhere for all eternity, now that it's gotten
warmer and the boat has been released from the ice and is drifting
away. His dreams have become inhospitable ever since his father began
to visit him in his sleep, my father says.
My mother was
clever, my father says. Siberia is a beautiful place, she often said,
and so to this day he thinks of Siberia as beautiful. The land is
fertile, good soil for wheat, so good you don't even have to fertilize.
Twice a year they can bring in the harvest, there in Siberia, if they
aren't too lazy. The soil has that much to give. His mother, my father
says, always had an eye for beauty, a capacity he's always envied her
for. It simply didn't interest her whether or not his father continued
his relations with his sweetheart. Once she had dragged the woman out
of the kitchen, thrown her out of the house and down the stairs, the
matter ceased to interest her. She'd torn the woman's claims off her
body like a stolen dress, pulled her desires up over her head like a
skin and then given her a kick—but with that, my father says, she
considered the matter settled. She wasn't at all the sort to hold a
grudge, my father says, and had no need to. She cast a bright light on
all things just and unjust, that was her nature, her intelligence quite
simply radiated a dazzling light—and of course, though she never
wasted so much as a thought on the matter, it caused the objects of her
scrutiny to stand out in sharp relief. His mother was clever, my father
says. Surely she realized that everything this light had touched was
left blind.
He, the son, had been unable to stop himself from
spying on his father. After his mother's return, his father seemed to
him like someone who'd been shot at but not killed. The comparison
isn't good, my father says, because in the end it was just the reverse:
his mother had returned from her internment with an enormous will to
live, but his father had no longer been able to take pleasure in life.
After his leg was gone and he'd been released from military service, he
hadn't spoken much in any case, but after his wife's return he became
nearly dumb. Like a ghost his father seemed to him, my father says, as
if you could have put your right hand through him like air. Without
touching flesh, without touching anything at all that might have
offered resistance. It was uncanny, my father said. He remembers quite
clearly how he was practically obsessed with spying on his father,
trying to find out something; at the time he didn't know quite what,
and he still doesn't know. A real mania for surveillance took hold of
him. Mania, he says, is no doubt the right word for what became his
principal occupation. The war had taught them a contempt for waste. And
what a waste it was, he says, that his mother had returned to this
man—returned from Siberia to this man. All his mother's qualities that
pleased him so much were swallowed up by his father, his father who
appeared to be nothing but a big, deep, silent hole, a garbage depot.
And this he found infuriating, the son: to watch how this man, through
his silence, turned all his wife's gifts into garbage.
Often he
spied on his father as he sat in the shed, sat utterly immobile between
the stacks of firewood, holding a letter in his hand and reading. Of
course she replied to his letters, the shrinking violet, my father
says. But beyond that, nothing. She didn't fight for him. Just wrote
letters. Utterly immobile he sat there, his father, reading her
response and drinking. He would wedge the bottle of schnapps between
the pieces of wood and set the glass beside him on the chopping block.
The little glass with the pale blue stripe. He always filled the glass
to the stripe, never above it, and he always drank while he was
reading, but the glass was never filled above the pale blue stripe. In
the end, my father says, this mistress was responsible for my father's
premature death. Reading her letters out in the woodshed is how he
began to drink, never more than one little glass at a time, but still
drinking. It wasn't the leg, my father says. When you have a wife like
my mother, he says, you don't have to worry about going through life on
a single leg. Not, it wasn't the leg at all, my father says. It was
those damn letters.
Then things got bad, he says. One evening
his father got so drunk he fell into the mirror, the big mirror that
used to hand in the hallway across from the Jesus. He cut his face and
arm, and everything was full of blood. He and his mother put his father
on a sled and pulled him behind them all night long until they reached
the town where the hospital was. His mother always did what was needed,
but never discussed this. She was a strong woman, he says. My mother,
he says, always smelled nice even when she was dirty I could touch her,
and when she got angry she would start screaming. A passionate woman,
he says, whereas his father always avoided anything that might prove
difficult. After the war, at least. He has no memory, he says, of what
his father had been like before the war. He doesn't want to do him an
injustice, but after the war, in any case, his father was simply tired
all the time and nothing more. In the end, the best thing that could
have happened to him was for his wife to come home and take charge of
their son's upbringing. Even that had been too much for his father: to
take his own child in hand, my father, who was still quite small at the
time. It was too much for him, let alone for his mistress. One day, for
example, my father wanting to exert his childish will, started
screaming at the top of his lungs and broke a glass, then picked up the
shards and threatened to swallow them. His father had merely glanced up
at him briefly and said only a single sentence, and after this sentence
had gone back to working on the plumbing. The war is over, he'd said,
and then calmly back to work, allowed his child to go on standing there
beside him with the shards in his hand while he paid no more attention
to what was happening. A far cry from his mother's greatness. In this
first moment, when he saw this woman seize his father's mistress, saw
her unhesitatingly take hold of what displeased her, whirl it from wall
to wall and throw it out, in this moment he was able to recognize his
own make-up, my father says. Without knowing this woman was his mother,
he nonetheless recognized her. She was in my bones, my mother, he says.
His mother had had to go through a great deal because of the
war, but she loved life, perhaps even more so because of the war. All
the dead bodies she'd seen had made her enamored of life. His father,
however, he's since come to believe, was one of the ones who, because
of the war, switched over to the side of death, despite having
survived. When he returned from the war, it was as if he’d been
infected with death, as if his kin no longer contained living matter,
as is usually the case, but on the contrary helped shield him from the
living. He can still remember, he says, the way his father pushed his
mother’s hand away when she wanted to touch him. He spent the rest of
his life retreating, as though that were his special illness. With his
last breath, he was still pushing away his mother’s hand.
But
the day he became bedridden, the other woman began coming to stand on
the opposite side of the street. Apparently she knew his father was
dying, but she never came any closer. He can remember how, himself just
a child at the time, he watched her through the curtains of the
sickroom. She stood there in a bright print dress, looking over at our
house. His father was by this time no longer clear in the head. He kept
moving his finger across the bedclothes as though searching for a spot
on a map, and kept saying he wanted to go back there some day. With his
father’s voice behind him and the woman in the print dress before him,
these two impressions joined forces within him, the son, to make it
seem as if his father’s illness was a journey whose itinerary was
printed on the dress of the woman standing outside. Repeat might not be
the right word after all, my father says.
My father and I are
sitting in the hall, beneath the Jesus, and everything that used to be
in the cupboards is lying spread around us on the floor. We are sitting
among linens and clothes, boxes and folders, books, vases, and old
chinaware. We turn pages, open, lay to one side, pick up, unfold, and
lay to one side. Everything is full of dust. The rubber bands my
grandmother used to bundle her photographs together are so dry they
disintegrate when we take the pictures in our hands. Boxes have
collapsed under their own weight, trunks are missing their keys, coats
have been eaten by moths, suitcases smell bad when we open them, the
bed linens are all ironed. It’s strange, my father says, that after the
death of his father his mother continued to run the household just as
she had done when he was alive. His life was frozen inside hers. And
now it’s all rotting, all of it together.
Turn pages and open, lay to one side, pick up, unfold, lay to one side, hold out, crumple, tear up, lay to one side.
I’m afraid, my father says, that I might find the letters.
Susan Bernofsky is the recipient of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award for her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The Old Child & Other Stories, which was published by New Directions in 2005.
By Jenny Erpenbeck, Translated by Susan Bernofsky, From The Old Child, copyright © 1991, 2001 by Jenny Erpenbeck, Translation copyright © 2005 by Susan Bernofsky. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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