Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck Page B

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. But now, on his journey through Germany, this journey that was the war, an unsavory dirty past that until then had been unknown to these Soviet men was catching up with them and dragging them deeper in this foreign land. And yet, if you stopped to consider that since the beginning of the war Poland had all but ceased to exist, there was now a border where Russia and Germany met.
     
     
    Amid all this silence the woman goes on the attack again, she attacks him right in the middle—stop dreaming all the time, his mother always said to him—she seizes his cock right through his trousers and pushes the youth to the ground, she’s much stronger than he is, and now she throws herself on top of him, there’s nowhere to take cover here, she wants to cover him, this mare, with experienced hands she tears open his trousers and spears herself on him, riding him deeper, then she grabs him in a chokehold and squeezes his throat, whispering curses, he has stopped resisting—if that’s what she wants—he drives his barb into her flesh, she holds his mouth shut and spits on his face, she rubs herself against him, he thrusts, she tears open her blouse and slaps her breasts in his face, and he—hears himself moaning, hears himself saying No in Russian, and she says Yes , so he keeps thrusting, thrusts the mare in two, victory grinding itself against defeat, defeat against victory, and sweat and juices between the peoples, and spurting, spurting until all life has been spurted out, the final cry the same in all languages. Now death has finally been brought to its knees, youth and age as well, no point at all thinking of what was and what will be, now there is nothing left any more, nothing at all, nothing, nothing, just weary breath still drifting between mouths, a leftover scrap of something, limp as the summer dresses hanging beside the heads of the Red Army officer and this woman, who cannot be recognized in the darkness. Last summer, when perhaps she or some other woman wore these dresses, the war had not yet