Jenny Erpenbeck

Roman

Kairos

daphne

A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they're both speaking to time. 

Laura Dobie

Katharina's memories of her two days with Hans in Berlin seem to overlay everything she experiences in Budapest like fine sand.

On their way, Hans pulls Katharina into an entryway, and holds her in his arms for a long time. Today and tomorrow, and then she'll be gone. Then the thing that today still passes for "now" will be over. The waiting on the steps of the press, the asphalt perfect for roller-skating, the school, the playground, the conversation beside the fast-moving water, and now their embrace: step by step, block by block, he's been walking through her childhood with her. Step by step and block by block, he has also created memories for them both. Memories as iron rations for the lonely week ahead.

Behind the steel barrier that runs parallel to the train tracks, and that on this side too is a steel barrier, the S-Bahn presumably continues to run, in the familiar way, towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. Or not? Does the East, which so far has been her element, cease to exist the moment she can no longer see it? Has she, Katharina, displaced it from present to past with those few strides to the other side of Friedrichstrasse station? Or is this gray station endowed with the power to hold two different sorts of time, two Competing presents, twO everyday realities, one serving as the other's netherworld? But then where is she, when she stands on the borderline? Is it called no-man's-land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who he is?

Would there have been these innumerable letters without the Wall? Did writing have something to do with the abruptness of separation?

Katharina thinks of the masks and the costumes she saw in the store. Is it only possible to really be yourself when no one knows who you are? And if the fulfillment of desires here is only a matter of the price, doesn't all desire convert into the one desire, for cash?

Katharina is at home on the wrong side. Not in her own eyes, but in the eyes of the world, which all of a sudden are all on this country, which for twenty-eight years was obscured by the Wall. Through the hole in the Wall, itS presence was torn out into this world as by a vast sucking pressure, in the first few days she even had the sense she could hear the whooshing of time. Has the present gone for good, never to be seen again? And what's left behind?

“It will never be like this again,” thinks Hans. “It will always be this way,” thinks Katharina

Kairos quotes

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