Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time.

pages that were written to deceive alongside other pages that were striving for truth;

he’s afraid of being an old man in her young eyes.

The way her bare shoulder feels in his cupping hand during the prayer, the one curve under the other, is something he won’t forget as long as he lives.

When there is silence where before there was sighing and lamentation, two bodies lie stretched out side by side in the dark. It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina. Then sleep puts an end to all thinking, and what happened to them both today is inscribed permanently — while they lie together, breathing peacefully — on each one’s cerebral cortex. I/

And he’s brought her one of his books, so that she can see the sort of things he writes. His first present to her. She should wait before looking at the dedication.

She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us. He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong. She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means. He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later. And she, he’s putting himself in my hands. All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.

Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected? Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.

Well, and how do I look when I walk? she asks Hans as he arrives at the top of the stairs, she’s holding the note in her hand still. Beautiful, he says, ravishing, but with a glance at the other apartment door, he shakes his head quickly when she makes to kiss him. Only when they’re inside and the door’s closed does he whisper in her ear what he’d had in mind when he was observing her: how her gait told him she was impatient to see him. And no one else knew where you were going. As he speaks, his mouth is so close to her that his words seem to touch her.

Was he just looking for a more attractive mirror for himself in her young flesh? In his solitude, someone who can answer back to him? Or did he really share all that out of love? She was the cause of his banishment. Love, love, love, he says to himself, all at once the word seems quite empty.

Ashes, he thinks, a reverence-worthy icon turns to ashes in his hands. In his own handwriting, he is forced to see what a fool he was in the autumn, and now, until a few days ago, in winter. And in all of her letters she remembers to put in the line saying she loves him, even though her heart was long since elsewhere. The lie is the borderline where everything that once was happiness turns into wretchedness. And the wretchedness will be substantial and endure for a long time. The shadow may be far longer than the object that casts it.

the two Goya figures up to their knees in the mire of battle, swinging at each other with clubs. He now is both figures, he is both sides, he is the one who loves and the one who hates. The one who has faith and who has lost it, who desires and who is disgusted by his lover. On the left edge of the poster it says: Can you bury what once was? And on the right it says: No.

You deserve to go to hell for tossing our miracle in the shit. “We” no longer exist. “We” are over. Our “together” is over. We now stand in opposition to each other. You and me. Whatever I wrote to you I wrote for someone else, someone I believed in. Someone who no longer exists, maybe never did exist. You terrify me.

So far as I am concerned, your deception is the greatest and most critical defeat of my life. I have no choice, I must deal with it. Sooner or later you will lose interest. I wonder if you’ll even answer my questions, given the pressure you’re under from elsewhere.

What you experienced was the pleasure of a romance: adventure, melancholy, spiritual torment. The fear of being discovered only heightened your pleasure. You were playing with big ideas. You took sentimentality for passion. Feeling rotten for a guilty conscience. Supposed you were even capable of love.

Doesn’t it make you puke when you think how perfect you seemed to me, all the time you were hanging up your soul here and there, as on different cloakroom hooks? Save me the speech about remorse. You regret the consequences, but not the fact that you lacked moral discipline. You probably thought you could play us both.

the concept of the nation, her father had said, was only devised to mobilize people for war without having to pay them.