I. Friend
Now I’m going to make you disappear in this text. It’s as simple as that. In you go. But why, my friend asks, that’s what I’m asking you, I say, what’s this all about, she says, yes, I say, that’s what I’d like to know, too. In you go, I say, then shut the lid, then everything is calm and quiet. Calm and quiet sometimes occur in friendships, and there are different kinds: calm after the storm, calm before the storm, or simply calm. This last sort of calm has something to do with the disappearance of the friendship, that much is certain; perhaps this calm is not calm at all, but silence, and perhaps this silence itself is the cause of the silence, in which case the disappearance would be something circular.
When I’m riding my bike, little in-sects sometimes fly into my mouth or up my nose. And before I know it, they’re in my throat, and my throat gulps them down, and there’s nothing I can do but try after the fact to think of the insects as food, so that it doesn’t bother me that they’ve ended up inside me. In the case of one of those little flies or mosquitoes, you could certainly say that it disappeared into my mouth or nose, but really it’s still there, just out of sight. Whenever a little mosquito or fly disappears into my mouth and my throat gulps it down against my will, I ask myself whether just slipping out of sight is enough in itself to count as disappearance, or whether a more thorough dissolution is required.
The other question that inevitably occurs to me each time something disappears is whether anything was there to begin with—and if so, what. In the case of a friendship, for example, which is invisible from the start, it may be that the bond whose disappearance I mourn was only an appearance anyway, that in essence there were just two lonely sets of the most eclectic odds and ends that intersected for a while and are now drifting apart again.
The most encouraging reading would be that the more thoroughly a friendship disappears, the more securely it is preserved. That silence takes up just as much space and connects us just as firmly to one another as all the walks, conversations, shopping trips, afternoons spent at playgrounds, glasses of wine, and cups of coffee put together. That the answers that were not given remain faithful to me, through their absence, for all eternity. That although the disappearance has entered my body against my will, in retrospect it can be seen as nourishment, at least until I have had my fill.
II. Men
For a few weeks, there was a strong smell of cats emanating from the middle apartment on the third floor, then it grew into a stench, the windows in the hallway were left wide open during the day and even at night, and finally the animal welfare agency, acting on a tip from some neighbors, broke down the door and freed three cats that had gone mad—two more already had their insanity behind them, they were dead. On occasions like that, the animal welfare men wear helmets made of metal mesh, as if they were dressed for fencing, because the abandoned animals in their rage make no distinction between one person and another. The cats’ owner, it was said, had probably simply forgotten about his animals.
In Wagner’s Ring cycle, the forgetful hero Siegfried, wrapped in his airy invisibility cloak, travels swiftly from marriage to marriage; today he would probably be called a marriage swindler. A man is already thundering down the stairs, fleeing across the courtyard, when a woman shouts after him: “Get lost!”—as if these words, of all things, could persuade her beloved to stay. The fact that disappearing from one place means appearing in another can hardly be shown more beautifully than in the film The Man Who Walked Through the Wall, in which the tax official Buchsbaum (Heinz Rühmann) discovers one day that he is able to pass in and out of closed rooms, to move through walls as if through water. In essence, he disappears from his life as a third-tier tax official and reappears as a supernatural being. Rarely has the change of circumstances, or the change of state that necessarily accompanies the disappearance and reappearance of both people and things, gone more smoothly.
An acquaintance of mine had a child who was only three months old when her husband told her he was leaving. Then he left. Thirteen years later, he came back and befriended his daughter. Another friend had phases like that in her life, too, sometimes the moon was in its first quarter, sometimes it was full, sometimes it wasn’t visible at all. The father of her child had actually acknowledged his son in advance, but he never made an appearance after the birth. When the child was one and a half, the father unexpectedly showed up at the door. For a few months he played with his son, went on outings, and even bought a Christmas tree. Then he disappeared as suddenly as he had come, and he has not been seen again; the child is seven now. In any case, disappearance is surely no less powerful than love, but it remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.
III. Things
Each time I take a long trip, I lose at least one scarf or hat, sometimes even a pair of sunglasses or a watch. I’ve also lost a number of things when moving house: a piece of molding from an old rustic wardrobe, a few blinds, and once I even lost the typewriter I used to write my first works. Although the hotel rooms I left were small, and the apartments I left were clearly empty, the things were still missing later; somehow, somewhere, they had disappeared in the no-man’s-land between departure and arrival, it happened so regularly that I began to expect it when packing my suitcase or my boxes, as if it were a sacrifice, a price I had to pay for the change in my circumstances, and in that respect, despite all the randomness, it was still appropriate. However, in the course of my everyday life, the number of things around me never decreased, but rather increased, the piles grew higher, the folders thicker, I could imagine that a fire would break out and I would tuck my diaries, letters, and photo albums under my arm and run out of the house, but fortunately no fire broke out.
Recently, a Russian woman came to visit me. She moved to Germany a year ago with four children. A piano, how lovely! she says as she enters my apartment. Books, how lovely! A few steps farther on, she points to a few of my son’s drawings hanging on the wall and says: Lovely! She adds: It’s lovely to have something like that. At first, I don’t understand what she means; after all, she has four children herself. Well, she says and smiles, you can’t take it all with you. Sure, sure, I say. So, she says, still smiling, we made a big bonfire, we all sat around it, then we took page after page in our hands, we looked at everything again and remembered who drew this or that, how old he or she was at the time, we enjoyed it together one last time, and then we burned it all. It was a lovely bonfire, we were singing. I don’t say anything now. You can’t take it all with you, she repeats and says with a smile: We left with four children and two large suitcases. That was all.
IV. Youth
And I can’t raise my arms so well anymore, she says, and her eyes survey her body as if it were something alien. She looks just the same as always, maybe a little older than she did thirty years ago, but definitely not like an old woman. You know, I’ll be seventy next week, she says, speaking in a voice that sounds just the way her voice sounded thirty years ago. Next week I’m going to the Baltic Sea for a spa treatment, she says. I’m sure it will be nice. “To the Baltic Sea,” she says, no differently than she might have said it to a lover thirty years ago.
Where does all the time go, I once read in the letters of a girl who had to live apart from her parents for two years in fascist Germany. A year later she was dead, killed by the Nazis. Where does all the time go?
The illnesses that begin to afflict us take us by surprise, they set our bodies in motion in different ways than we intend, slowing them down, speeding them up, disturbing their rhythm. They take us by surprise. The years leave their marks on our skin, which was still a child’s skin only recently, they leave the brown marks of old age, they make small letters blur before our eyes, they take us by surprise, and because it all happens so slowly, we don’t even understand when the transition took place, slowly the years carry men’s youth away, one hair at a time, they gradually, very gently, crease women’s skin, and we, we remain in that skin, we see with those eyes, which now perceive small letters as an illegible blur, but we don’t see signs of aging in our own thoughts, and that’s why we’re taken by surprise when the years have slipped over us like a dress, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could take them off again, that’s why our arms appear to grow more unfamiliar to us the older they get, to grow more distant the more they try to force us to acknowledge their closeness by confronting us with pain and impossibilities, that’s why we’re taken by surprise when our own exhaustion makes us faint, and when we consider the fact that death is drawing nearer to us, one friend at a time, we’d prefer to forget that our lives often last longer than our ability to grow older.
(Translated from the German by Kurt Beals)
Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of Kairos, The End of Days, and other works of fiction; her piece in this issue is an excerpt from the nonfiction book Things That Disappear, forthcoming this fall from New Directions. Kurt Beals, her translator, is Visiting Associate Professor of German and Humanities Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of Richmond.