Not a Novel by Jenny Erpenbeck

Author:Jenny Erpenbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229333
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2020-08-03T19:46:34+00:00

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All translations of Geschichte vom alten Kind are quoted from Jenny Erpenbeck, The Old Child & Other Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2005).

1 Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, trans. David McLintock (New York: Knopf, 1985), 3.

On “The Book Of Words”

Bamberg Lecture II

What are my eyes for if they can see but nothing? What are my ears for if they can hear but nothing? Why all this strangeness inside my head?

All of it must be thought into nothingness, one whorl of gray matter at a time, until in the end a spoonful of me will be left glistening at the bottom. I must seize memory like a knife and turn it against itself, stabbing memory with memory. If I can.

Father and mother. Ball. Car. These might be the only words that were still intact when I learned them. Then even they got turned around, ripped out of me and stuck back in upside-down, making the opposite of ball ball, the opposite of father and mother father and mother. What is a car? All the other words had silent halves dragging them down from the start like lead weights around ankles, just as the moon lugs its dark half around with it even when it’s full. But it keeps circling in its orbit all the same. For me, words used to be stable, fixed in place, but now I’m letting them all go, if need be I’ll cut off a foot if that’s the only way to get rid of them. Ball. Ball.

Lullaby and goodnight. My mother is putting me to bed. She strokes my head as she sings. White, dry hand stroking the head of a child. With roses bedight. Eyes the color of water gazing at me; already my eyelids are falling shut. With lilies o’erspread, she sings. But lilies are for funerals. Not these lilies, she’d say if she saw the words were making me cry again, they aren’t real lilies at all, they’re just lilies-of-the-valley for faeries to sleep under. But tonight it’s already too late for crying, I’ve traveled too far into the land of sleep to turn around, and they aren’t lilies-of-the-valley, they’re real lilies that someone I don’t know is going to lay on my coffin and nail it shut as I sleep. Lay thee down now and rest, she sings. She pulls the blanket up to my chin and turns out the light. The coffin nails scrape my skin, lots of little bloody wounds. May thy slumbers be blessed. And what if they aren’t blessed? Then I’ll remain lying here in my coffin-bed forever. May thy slumbers be blessed. And the drops of blood will turn to stone. Mother.

Under the military dictatorship in Argentina, from 1976 to 1983, tens of thousands of opponents of the regime were disappeared, as the expression went. They were tortured and murdered, only a few of those who were arrested ever returned. These so-called subversives included many young people, students, young mothers and fathers, pregnant women.

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