Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

She remembers the cut-off pigtail, and the demonstration and the shame she felt at going out in public looking so mutilated. But she had forgotten that her mother had set her on her shoulders and carried her past the podium to comfort her. Strange, she thinks, all these years a little bit of my life has gone on existing in this stranger’s head. And now he’s given it back to me.

Outside the Lindencorso Hotel, a few tourists are standing around looking lost, and they ask Hans in English: Where in heaven’s name are they? In Berlin, Hans replies. Yes, yes, Berlin, but East or West? Katharina laughs. With the Brandenburg Gate in front of you, how can you not tell if you’re in East or West Berlin? East, Hans says. The Americans appear nervous and start chattering among themselves. Then they must have passed the border without remarking it. How

Up until now, Katharina has lived with a view of the Wall, and of the birds learning to fly over the international border. When she walked on the metal grid of a U-Bahn air shaft, she could hear the clatter of a West Berlin train underfoot, then maybe feel a puff of Western air that escaped from the air shaft and mingled with the Socialist weather. She could see how many minutes of break she had left from looking at the great digital clock on the West Berlin Morgenpost that loomed luminously over the Wall, and if ever she forgot her keys, then she would while away the time before her mother’s return by counting the double-decker buses from the thirteenth-floor corridor window as the buses passed back and forth in front of the Springer publications building, which was something like the citadel of the class enemy.

She can picture her father as she’s speaking to him, the receiver pressed to his ear, nodding from time to time. Phoning can be better than speaking in person. Sibylle

Would there have been these innumerable letters without the Wall? Did writing have something to do with the abruptness of separation?

Along with the ancient pleasure palace, then, everything that the building had had to offer across German history was also demolished. Was that destruction an end — or just a transformation?

Of course, he knows that the ruins and hopes of the past must stand in some relation to the ruins and hopes of the present, when they suddenly loom up like that. And probably that’s why he hasn’t managed to get out of the postwar era for a long time now in his writing.

Her big father sits at the wheel of the little Trabant and tells her, sitting beside him, that monogamy is just an arrangement, nothing more. Basically, it was invented to secure the inheritance in a patriarchal system.

But when he wakes up to go home, seven years have passed, he was seven years in service to a witch, who transformed him into a hunchbacked dwarf with a huge nose, so that his own mother doesn’t recognize him, and nothing is as it was. Nothing is as it was. See Venice and die. Did they all understand it better than Katharina, who understands now that it was farewell when she went away? She returned to Berlin, but Berlin is now a different city.