Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

The second movement of Mozart’s D-minor Piano Concerto, K. 466. The aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

The A-minor Chopin Mazurka.

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of.

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. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades’ worth of dust; pages that were written to deceive alongside other pages that were striving for truth; things itemized, other things passed over, all lying together higgledy-piggledy; the contradictions and the denials, silent fury and mute adoration together in one envelope, in one folder; what is forgotten just as creased and yellowed as what, dimly or distinctly, one still remembers.

Chopin’s A-minor Mazurka.

After that he plays the Impromptu in A-flat Major by Schubert, and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy, the Partita in E Minor, and the third movement of Mozart’s B-flat Piano Concerto.

The dead go trembling up to heaven, while the two human bodies turn themselves into landscapes that may not be seen, only grasped, contours tracked with innumerable paths, where one may not run away;

week ago, she didn’t exist, at least not in his world.

What one generation sought to forget imposed itself on the next as a taboo, and what the older generation missed out on was performed, with a fifteen-year delay, by the younger generation, who never stopped to ask themselves why.

Twenty years I was married to Karl, she says, we had two daughters together, and even so, I’d never say I knew him.

She knows that only a very thin layer of soil is spread over the bones, the ashes of the incinerated victims, that there is no other walking, ever, for a German than over skulls, eyes, mouths, and skeletons, that each step stirs these depths, and these depths are the measure of every path, whether one wants to or not.

Be young, say the dead.

How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past?

From now on our love will decline even as it lives, he had written to her in November, following the second spate of tears.

The future trails its loose ends into the present until it becomes the present, settles on one or other human flesh, and its flourishing or brazen regime abruptly begins.

Continuity leads to destruction, Brecht had said once at a rehearsal. Continuity leads to destruction, the budding author Hans had written in his notebook in the dark theater.

How long does it take for the dead to be forgotten? Twenty-seven million Soviet dead. The dead, linked umbilically to the living by their hope for punishment to be exacted. Everything measured itself against these victims, whether it was his father’s silence or his own rebelliousness. Aged eighteen, he had wanted to prove to himself and to mankind that he would have behaved differently. But would he have? Or was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy? Did you have any control over what you saw in the mirror? Or was one helplessness merely succeeded by another? Any confession of guilt meant saying I, and not “human beings” or “one.” And there was no shopping street in the Western world where you could purchase such an I.

Neo-Nazis had stormed the church, armed with iron bars and bicycle chains. Jews out. Sieg Heil. Katharina’s friend Sibylle hid under the altar, Katharina herself slipped out through a vestry door. The punks were illegal, the Neo-Nazis were illegal, pale youths on both sides, Ludwig could have been among their number. Each lot looking for a different world where they counted for something. For good or ill. Iron bars. Bicycle chains. The police stood around outside but didn’t get involved, Katharina said. Let them smash each other’s heads in. Continuity leads to destruction.

Later, as a pale youth, Hans had decided in favor of that part of Germany that had Anti-Fascism written on its red banners. The dead meant something to him. It was their price that had driven his hopes upwards, into the incalculable.

There are always two sides to everything. No more than two? Culpability and heroism meet under one name more often than one might think.

Hans’s fellow writer, Christa Wolf, put out the appeal “For Our Country” with other artists at the end of November. It’s not too late for us to present a Socialist alternative to West Germany, in equal neighborliness with other European nations. We can still appeal to the anti-Fascist and humanitarian ideals that were our starting point.

He remembers the bodies in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, scooped by a bulldozer into a mass grave. He remembers his father, who renounced him at their farewell.

He remembers how, following Brecht’s death, he had managed to snag one of the master’s sought-after plaster death masks, only then, like all the other souvenir hunters, to have to return it to Helene Weigel. In the yard, Weigel made a pile of all the collected illegal copies of her husband’s death mask and chopped them up with an ax.

Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner. Is this home?

Do the Wessies really believe in money as a measure of worth? think the young things, and shake their heads, and their long, dangling hair worn loose shakes along, adding to the expression of their puzzlement.

You can now buy red stars in flea markets; shortly before their ultimate withdrawal from the land their grandfathers took, the Soviet grandsons capitulate to German money.

When Katharina calls Hans in his study, he always answers right away, because the telephone is right next to him, and he’s never working. They’ve stopped paying for extra programs, he says, and his book is withered before it could be born.

Katharina’s father sits in his darkened room in Leipzig and says death has lost its terror for him.

Early in December 1991, Hans is dismissed, along with all the other 13,000 employees of the broadcasting services of a state that no longer exists.

The silence lasts just one second in which at midnight between 1991 and 1992 the East German frequencies give up the ghost. Hans is sitting in front of the radio at Katharina’s and takes in the very short silence with which his past life is lopped off. It was a little like that moment in La bohème where Mimì dies, and none of her friends notices. It is his first time celebrating New Year’s with Katharina, because Ingrid has to keep company with her mother, who is poorly. Katharina is in jeans and slippers. But at least she’s sprinkled some confetti on the table and poured some Rotkäppchen. It just happens so casually, says Hans. Because dying isn’t much really. It’s just something ceasing to be.

Three years before the first meeting of two men in the conspirative apartment Sunshine, the government walled up time to win time and walled up the people to win the people. In the teeth of advice from the Soviets.