Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Cologne’s awful, he says. Well, there’s Cologne Cathedral, she says, and I’m sure that’s not awful.

So they are sipping their Bernese butter bouillon, each lifting the quail’s egg in their spoon, marveling at the little wonder. I quail, you quail, he she it quails, he says, and looks at her expectantly.

Does he have any idea how good he looks with a cigarette?

So what does freedom look like?

Does one so quickly get used to being more fortunate than others?

And if the fulfillment of desires here is only a matter of the price, doesn’t all desire convert into the one desire, for cash?

Be young, say the dead.

What are you doing in the present that was our future, ask the dead

A human being, doesn’t that sound splendid.

One gloomy day in February, he takes his knife and carves the date in his own little desk, so as to at least pull one single date from the endless black sea of time and keep it and cherish it.

Will she become a new person now that she has all this freedom?

Or was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy?

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

Am I lacking in dignity, she asked, just because I fancy an unusual-looking pair of shoes?

Not in her own eyes, but in the eyes of the world, which all of a sudden are all on this country, which for twenty-eight years was obscured by the Wall. Through the hole in the Wall, its presence was torn out into this world as by a vast sucking pressure, in the first few days she even had the sense she could hear the whooshing of time.

The bread will taste different, the streets will be full of strangers walking past strange shops, with strange money in their pockets.

she sees how every conceivable need is catered for by some product or other in the shops, the freedom to consume seems like an India rubber wall to her, separating people from any yearnings that might transcend their personal and momentary wishes. Is she about to be another customer?

Is this what freedom feels like? Not having an enemy you can put a name to?

Half their money and their parents’ money has been vaporized in the course of the historical reform, so are they expected on top of that to shell out as much for a piece of cake as they did once for Kant’s Eternal Peace?

We’re young, let’s be beautiful too, they say, what’s the point of a lace bra when we’re old and wrinkled.

It just happens so casually, says Hans. Because dying isn’t much really. It’s just something ceasing to be.

Who would say no to that, really and truly spending a real night between the real paws of the sphinx, quite as if you were its child?

The state shows itself naked to its suppliers, the suppliers show themselves naked to their state. The new country grows in a mutually shared secret.

In the East he was a human being, and in the West he would have been too. Of one kind or another.