Visitation by Erpenbeck Jenny

Author:Erpenbeck, Jenny [Erpenbeck, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2010-09-30T06:00:00+00:00

Back where he was at home there was no such thing. It’s as if his childhood had stopped where his homeland did. Back where his home was, the girls wore two braids on their way to school or else tied these braids into loops with big, red silk ribbons and a triangular neck scarf. When they walked, they held their heads up in a way he has not seen any woman do here in Germany, as if everything that might have weighed them down had been lifted from their shoulders. On summer evenings they went strolling along with their heads held high like this, strolling one last time out to the edge of the field, linking their arms in pairs or even three at a time, chatting and laughing when they saw the boys leaning up against the linden tree, they laughed and went walking past, and the swallows were flying, and the boys were sitting and standing around the linden tree, and sometimes, very rarely, they succeeded in engaging the girls in conversation on their way home, and only one single time did one of the girls take up the boys’ offer and sit down on the bench under the linden tree, the boys had all gotten up at once, gangly and downy, and had nudged and shoved one another while the girl remained sitting there for approximately five minutes exchanging wisecracks with them. In his homeland he had never seen women offering themselves openly on the street or in their apartments like here in Germany, nor had he seen indecent pictures or magazines. In a German photography studio two or three towns back, its display windows shattered and its walls falling in, a creased picture had caught his eye while his men were plundering the shop, this picture lay on the floor and in it he had seen a naked woman threatening another naked woman with a whip. This photograph was as far removed from the mosaics adorning the town hall in the larger town near where he grew up as Russia was from Germany. These mosaics had shown women with sheaves of grain in their arms, young students holding test tubes in their hands, and mothers with babies on their hips. To watch a girl undo her braid while bathing and then see her hair tumble down about her shoulders would have been enough, back home, to fall in love, but these women with whips in their hands he associated with the photo studio itself that had been bombed into rubble and then plundered, as though these women were standing upon layer after layer of things that had been trampled, torn up and worn down, and were whipping one another to set everything ablaze with this last malicious pleasure. His men had taken this picture and many other ones like it and were now carrying them around in their uniform jackets, face to face with the photographs of their wives and children. In school he had learned that the seed for the happy future of mankind was being sowed in the Soviet Union.

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