Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Richard spends the next two weeks reading several books on the subject of the refugees and drawing up a catalog of questions for the conversations he wants to have with them. After breakfast he goes to work, at one p.m. he has lunch and naps for an hour, then he sits down at his desk again or reads until eight or nine p.m. It’s important he ask the right questions. And the right questions aren’t always the ones you put into words.

After less than an hour of listening he is more exhausted than after one of his lectures at the university. When an entire world you don’t know crashes down on you, how do you start sorting it all out?

I don’t understand how anybody can not believe in God, the boy says. When you are in trouble, you believe in God. Life is crazy. When I’m sick, the hospital doesn’t make me healthy again, it’s God. God saved me, he says. . . . He saved me, but he didn’t save the others. So he must have some plan for me, right?

memorandum,

A note or record made for future use

Only now does it occur to him how long his daily life has been lacking sounds other than the ones he himself makes. He was always the most content, back in his old life, when his wife practiced the viola while he was sitting at his desk one room away, working on a lecture or article. The joy of the parallel universe is how he’d described it to her. She, on the other hand, had always insisted — above all in her final years — that the full happiness of marriage required each of the partners to look at one another, but really they had to touch. Unfortunately these discussions had increased neither his nor her happiness.

Learning to stop wanting things is probably one of the most difficult lessons of getting old. But if you don’t learn to do that, it seems to him, your desires will be like a bellyful of stones dragging you down into your grave.

How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else’s?

he thinks at precisely this moment that these four people here, including him, are like the parts of a single body: hand, knee, nose, mouth, feet, eyes, brain, ribs, heart, and teeth, each of them some part or other. What will happen when Sylvia — who sometimes picks up the phone out of the blue and calls him or Thomas or a few other of their Berlin friends — is no longer here?

vestibule

A lobby, or entrance compartment. A hallway entrance/exit to the rest of a building

On every one of his visits, Richard notes that the men feel more at home in these wireless networks than in any of the countries in which they await their future. This system of numbers and passwords extending clear across continents is all the compensation they have for everything they’ve lost forever. What belongs to them is invisible and made of air.

His own to-do list would look something like this: Schedule repairman for dishwasher Urologist appointment Meter reading The to-do list for Karon, on the other hand, would be more like this: Eradicate corruption, cronyism, and child labor in Ghana

Time does something to a person, because a human being isn’t a machine that can be switched on and off. The time during which a person doesn’t know how his life can become a life fills a person condemned to idleness from his head down to his toes.

Could these long years of peacetime be to blame for the fact that a new generation of politicians apparently believes we’ve now arrived at the end of history, making it possible to use violence to suppress all further movement and change? Or have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace — so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world — inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.

No, ich gehe! I want to smash all the German verbs, Rufu says. Smash is a really beautiful verb, Richard replies.