With an armful of linens she now leaves the baby’s room and walks past the footstool where her daughter is sitting. It was no accident that she married her daughter to a Christian. When her daughter was old enough to ask questions, she told her that her father had just gone off one day and never returned. Why did he leave? Where did he go? Will he come back again some day?
New panes of glass were set into the bookcase. She sold the house in the ghetto and moved to the center of town, where she took over her husband’s business and set aside everything she could spare for her daughter’s dowry. For many years now she has known something that her daughter will soon be forced to learn: A day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days.
4
So now something he has suspected his entire life, especially these past three years, has become glaringly obvious: If you get even the slightest bit off track, the consequences in the end are just as inescapable as if you’d gone and leapt headfirst into this or that abyss. As an Imperial and Royal civil servant responsible for a thirty-five-kilometer stretch of the Galician Railway of Archduke Karl Ludwig, he knew that everything depended on his ability not only to produce order, but to maintain it where it already existed. But in his own life, life had always intervened. During the year he spent as a trainee not yet receiving a salary, his hunger had caused him to incur debts. So by the time the year ended and he assumed his post as a regular civil servant of the eleventh — i.e. lowest — pay-grade, he was already deep in debt. His hunger, to be sure, was a sign he was still alive, as was his freezing during that first winter — but now his debts would count as a demerit when he underwent his Confidential Qualification, an evaluation carried out behind closed doors by his superiors. Thus, it was impossible to say when he would be promoted from the eleventh to the tenth pay-grade and be able to start paying back what he owed; no one would discuss this with him. In short, he had no prospect of making the leap back to ordinary life. Hunger and freezing guaranteed more hunger and freezing, that’s how it was when life got the upper hand even once. Then he’d met the Jewish shopkeeper and her daughter, whose skin was so white it would have blinded him like snow if he’d been a bug crawling around on it. If only he’d been able to see where the track was and where it wasn’t when he proposed to her. There’s no paying down debts with a Jewish dowry, even if you pay them down. And there are differences. You can recognize them by the silence surrounding you at the clubhouse or the office. This silence has to do with consequences, with the end in general — he’s come to understand this, having finally grasped it now that the end is staring him in the face. Why was the baby so quiet all of a sudden?
His father hadn’t come when they got married at the civil registry office, nor for the birth of their child. He said the trip was too long and too expensive. It had been three years since he’d seen him last, and if all went well, he might never have to see him again. The morning after the child’s birth, he’d gone to an inn alone and toasted the newborn with strangers, and while he was swirling the schnapps around in his mouth with his tongue before swallowing it, savoring the taste, it occurred to him that his tiny daughter also had a tongue in her mouth, she’d come equipped with her own insides when she slipped out of her mother, emerging from her mother’s concavity with concavities of her own. He, the civil servant, eleventh class, had begotten a living thing, and no Confidential Qualification was required to verify this fact.
Two hundredweights of twine are required to adorn the Brody station with flowers in honor of the Kaiser, whose train will be passing through. Thick oak planks fifteen centimeters across to replace the ties between the tracks. Six hundred gulden a year is the salary of a civil servant eleventh class, while a civil servant tenth class receives eight hundred and if he’s lucky another two hundred as a bonus. But what to do with all the things that resisted calculation? How much time was there really between the second when a child was alive and the next, when it was no longer alive? Was it even time separating one such moment from another? Or did it have to be given a different name, except that no one had found the right name for it yet? How could you calculate the force dragging a child over to the realm of the dead?