Read Online Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck - Free Book Online Page B

working on in time for the third anniversary. In the entire Eastern Zone there are no screws to be had, unbelievable, he says, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. On some summer evening during one of the last twenty years her husband tells one of the guests how at the end of the war the Russians had converted the garden to a paddock for their horses, how everything had been trampled, how he had even seen the gardener cry, he says all these things, and his wife says nothing, she is just wiping her hands on a napkin, and their friend, who after all can only judge what has been said to him, now makes his contribution to the subject by repeating in his turn: Humor is when you laugh all the same, and while he is saying this, he fishes another crab out of the pot. If it had not been for that one night, that one night in the walk-in closet that her husband had designed especially for her, she might perhaps still believe that when her husband slid the contract of sale over to her to sign he was buying her a piece of eternity and that this eternity did not have a single hole in it anywhere.
     
     
    Even today when she hears someone speak of the war she thinks first of the war that her own body began to wage against her just as the first bombs fell on Germany. Despite the shrinking supplies of food, her body had, utterly illogically, grown fat all at once while others who had been fat beforehand, her sisters for example, first grew slender with all the excitement and then the hunger, and then they grew thin and then haggard. The 6th Army capitulated outside of Stalingrad, and already the morning of that day she was overcome by hot flashes, the sweat covered the space between her lips and nose like a moustache of tiny droplets, this sweat was embarrassing, but it would have embarrassed her even more to wipe it away, the Russians were marching toward Poland, and she felt dizzy, often several times a day, so that she had to steady herself by grasping table edges and door handles so as not to fall down, and finally, just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, even weeping returned to her body, taking hold of it and refusing to leave again, like a long-forgotten creditor come to collect on a debt she no longer recalled. She who had always cut such a boyish figure now stood there every morning before the mirror sweating, she steadied herself on the edge of the sink so as not to fall down, she wiped her tears, avoiding the sight of that round, milky face with which she shared no memories; compared to this face the colored glass in the windows to the right and left of the mirror looked so much more familiar—glass that her husband had put there just because she wanted him to.
     
     
    She was feeling so poorly during this period that she’d had to ask one of her nieces to come stay with her to help out around the house while her husband was closing down his office in Berlin, packing up the construction plans and organizing a fireproof hiding place for his documents. How good it was that the telephone sat so close beside her bed in its niche, for now she generally kept to her bed even during the day. As she held the receiver to her ear, listening to her husband tell her who had been buried in the rubble, which building had collapsed and how crowded it was down in the cellar, she gazed at the colorful feathers of the little bird that sat forged to her balcony railing, and behind the bird the leafless branches of the trees, and through the branches of the trees the Märkisches Meer glittering. Only after the battle at Seelower Höhen had she sent her niece to stay with relatives in the West to shield her from an encounter with the Slavic hordes, while she herself took refuge behind the double door of the walk-in closet with the last of the provisions and a bit of water. And then the Russian came.
     
     
    She doesn’t want to think that word, that word he called her, that unthinkable word with which he drilled a hole in her