Read Online Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
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front gate is often still wet with dew when she sets out, she hikes up into the woods and then, with a view of the lake, crosses the fields to return home. Every summer her sisters visit her with their off spring to spend a few weeks on her bit of sod, they swim, eat and swap recipes, they watch their childless sister laugh and let their bodies melt in the shade as they rest after lunch, they are relaxing, people would say, but nonetheless, even though they are refraining from all strenuous activity, these women sometimes do not look at all relaxed, they look more as if they were waiting for something and finding it difficult to wait.
And so the years pass and are like one single year. Whether the cockchafer plague was in ’37 or maybe one year later is something she can no longer say, but she can still remember the sound to this day, the noise it made when she was out for a bicycle ride with her niece, rolling over the beetles that had transformed the sandy road into a dark, teeming surface, she hasn’t forgotten the cracking beneath her tires. All summers like one single summer. Whether it was ’38 or ’39, or perhaps even 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned property next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock—she’s no longer sure quite when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property already belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods across from the house, autumn after autumn hearing the gardener rake up the leaves in the garden, smelling him burning the musty heap, winter after winter speeding across the frozen lake on an ice yacht and afterward taking in the sail with fingers frozen red and quickly ducking into the house: warming her hands at the stove until they hurt; Easter after Easter hiding hard-cooked eggs among the first flowers for her nephews and nieces. All like a single one. Today can be today, but it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that. Have you heard this one? While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned into white hair. Today or yesterday or twenty years ago she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not so simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip off the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat. The best part of a crab though is the meat from its tail, which is referred to as its heart. Before you can eat it, you remove the crab’s entrails and lay them aside.
Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on one of those summer evenings during one of the last twenty years while she is sucking the marrow out of one of the claws, one of their friends, a film director, has just told everyone what a hard time the make-up department has been having making Aryan actors look Semitic so they can play that irksome racketeer Ipplmeier and his vassals. But in the rushes, at least, they looked like the real thing, the director says, heaving a sigh, and her husband says: Hope springs eternal, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on some other summer evening during a different one of the last twenty years, and she cracks the shell of a crab as her husband is telling friends that he must travel to the West and use his own private funds to buy screws for the young republic because it has been expressly demanded of him that he stay within the allotted budget while also completing the building he’s now
And so the years pass and are like one single year. Whether the cockchafer plague was in ’37 or maybe one year later is something she can no longer say, but she can still remember the sound to this day, the noise it made when she was out for a bicycle ride with her niece, rolling over the beetles that had transformed the sandy road into a dark, teeming surface, she hasn’t forgotten the cracking beneath her tires. All summers like one single summer. Whether it was ’38 or ’39, or perhaps even 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned property next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock—she’s no longer sure quite when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property already belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods across from the house, autumn after autumn hearing the gardener rake up the leaves in the garden, smelling him burning the musty heap, winter after winter speeding across the frozen lake on an ice yacht and afterward taking in the sail with fingers frozen red and quickly ducking into the house: warming her hands at the stove until they hurt; Easter after Easter hiding hard-cooked eggs among the first flowers for her nephews and nieces. All like a single one. Today can be today, but it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that. Have you heard this one? While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned into white hair. Today or yesterday or twenty years ago she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not so simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip off the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat. The best part of a crab though is the meat from its tail, which is referred to as its heart. Before you can eat it, you remove the crab’s entrails and lay them aside.
Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on one of those summer evenings during one of the last twenty years while she is sucking the marrow out of one of the claws, one of their friends, a film director, has just told everyone what a hard time the make-up department has been having making Aryan actors look Semitic so they can play that irksome racketeer Ipplmeier and his vassals. But in the rushes, at least, they looked like the real thing, the director says, heaving a sigh, and her husband says: Hope springs eternal, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on some other summer evening during a different one of the last twenty years, and she cracks the shell of a crab as her husband is telling friends that he must travel to the West and use his own private funds to buy screws for the young republic because it has been expressly demanded of him that he stay within the allotted budget while also completing the building he’s now
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