The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck Read Free Book Online Page A

daughter’s happiness. Sometimes the price one pays for something
continues to grow after the fact, becoming too expensive long after it has been
paid. A transaction like this is a living equilibrium, she’s grasped this in the
course of the three years since her son-in-law’s disappearance. Profit and loss must
avail themselves of a salesman if they are to work together, but fundamentally their
dealings are with one another; at some point they balance each other out again. In
the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a letter falls from an opening hand into a hand
that someone is holding out. A man wanting to deliver a letter on Shabbat is not
permitted to, according to the Talmud, because that would be work. It would be work
to walk from the street into a building, in other words mixing indoors and outdoors.
On Shabbat people are to rest, and the three spaces — Outside, Inside,
Wilderness — are to be kept separate from each other. But if the messenger
walks up to the recipient’s window opening onto the street and lets the letter fall
into the recipient’s hand, the messenger would not be leaving his space — the
street — and the recipient would be remaining in his own — the building;
what’s more, the dropping of the letter would not be a giving, nor would its receipt
in the open hand be a taking. How heatedly she and her husband had debated with her
parents about how the Talmud pointed the way here to deceit, to the violation of the
rules that were supposed to be its jurisdiction. Her father said it was a matter of
how the boundaries were defined, that it wasn’t possible to comply with a
prohibition unless you knew exactly where it started and ended. In any case, it
wasn’t a parable, her husband had said, but rather in the end pure mathematics. Her
mother had laughed and opined: thank goodness it was a letter the messenger was
dropping and not an egg. She herself had declared the messenger’s hesitation
pedantic, making her father smile at her indignation, saying: you don’t understand
what’s meant. At the time she didn’t want to understand what was meant, her father
was still alive, and as long as that was the case she — even as a grown woman
— was the one permitted to be in error. In the sunlit silence of a Sabbath, a
letter falls from an opening hand into a hand that someone is holding out.
    How happy a person must be, she’s come to think — now
that twenty years have passed since her husband’s fatal beating, three since her
daughter’s abandonment, one and a half since her father’s death and burial —
how happy a person must be who can manage to comport himself as impassively as the
messenger in this story, simply letting things happen as they will and nonetheless
delivering what has been entrusted to him. When in her home she finds traces of dirt
on a knife that her elderly mother has cleaned, she feels only disgust. Her
daughter, on the other hand, moves so lethargically about the shop that she often
feels an impulse to drag her by the hair back to work. But she observes even her own
body with impatience as it struggles to hoist the ten-kilogram sacks of flour onto
the cart, and the farmers who sometimes help her and sometimes don’t are called
Marek, Krzystof, or often — hearing the name is still difficult for her
— Andrei.
    18
    So what began with the hands is now ending with the hands. Should
she perhaps give a present to the man who thought she was for sale? Certainly not,
she thinks, and, after he’s gone, she takes the money from the chest of drawers,
leaves the room, goes downstairs, out of the building (which looks no different from
others), and onto the street. She gives the money to the first beggar woman she sees
squatting beside the road, and for two days afterward life really does look just the
same as before. But on the third day, a Sunday, the officer comes into the shop
again as if nothing ever happened, he wants to buy matches, he says, the same as
always, in the