Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

Book Notes and Quotes of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German

Over breakfast, Hans says: Ingrid and Ludwig are getting in on the one o'clock train. 

While Katharina sips her tea and spreads the second half of her roll with honey, she watches Hans getting up and washing the wineglass from yesterday that has her lipstick stain on it, and putting it back in the cupboard, watches him take her dinner plate and—now that she's finished —her breakfast plate as well, and the cutlery, and wash them and tidy them away. She follows him into the living room and watches as he takes the pencils he let her use for her drawing yesterday and returns them to his desk drawer, and puts the unused sheets of typing paper back on the shelf. He picks up her drawing off the floor, lays it in a folder, and says: I think you'd better hang on to this. He takes the chair he sat in when be was modeling for her, pushes it up against the dining table, and drapes his wife's cardigan over the back of it, just exactly the ways It was yesterday. Then he leaves the room, and she can hear him calling out: Here, you forgot your toothbrush. In the long corridor he passes her with the towel he pushed under them yesterday when they were making love. As she takes receipt of her toothbrush, she sees him drop the towel in the laundry basket. (54)

High up over the roofs of the city they find themselves sitting at a table, look, says Hans, eyeing the sorry-looking waiter, see the poor fellow's Stasi expression. At least in here he's out of the rain, says Katharina. At the next-door table, an elderly couple are asking for separate checks, which makes her snort with indignation.  Then, everything outside falls away into insignificance. It's bliss, says Hans, a state he's rarely experienced before with another person: withdrawal from everything around about into one's own essence. A kind of inner emigration. He says it and empties his glass of korn. Now just a coffee and if she likes, a peach melba for the lady. And she does like. (55)

Then up in the apartment, while Hans has gone to the kitchen to fetch glasses and wine, she sees two or three of her blonde hairs on the blue carpet from last time, which Hans, when he tidied up after them on Sunday, must have overlooked. Now his wite and child are already on the Baltic. Still, Katharina bends down, picks them up, and lets them float into the wastepaper basket. Am I the only one here who tidies up? she hears her mother's voice in her head. No, Mother, you're not, she says, but her mother has already slammed the door shut after her, and Katharina hears her sobbing. Her mother cries, her mother sleeps a lot when she comes home from work and on weekends. Of course, Katharina is able to take a plate out of the kitchen cupboard without making a sound, not the plate and not her footfall when she carries the plate and a pack of biscuits back to her room. Once there, she tears open the pack, and then Moritz the guinea pig squeaks because he thinks he's getting something to eat now. Her father was in Leipzig, Moritz in his cage, and Ralph only appeared on the scene a couple of years later. During those two years her mother was very unhappy, and Katharina attained great expertise in being inaudible and preferably invisible as well. Hans comes back, sets down the glasses, and pours them wine. Almost all the sand has run through the hourglass, he thinks. Just the last few grains. Tomorrow morning she'll pick up her visa, and when she comes back from Cologne, he'll be with the family on holiday on the Baltic, then in September school will start. All the memories he took such trouble to create will just be the altimeter for his plunge back into normality. (60)

Before she goes out the door the next morning, he says: Wait! And he runs over to his bookcase. He comes back with a little book, where, after looking briefly, he finds the passage he was looking for. He puts the book down on the chest in the corridor, presses it flat with one hand, and with the other carefully tears out the page he wants. She glances at it, and he says: Read it later. But she can't wait past the moment when he's waved goodbye to her on the first bend of the stairs and closed the front door behind him. As she walks slowly down the stairs, she holds the page in her hands and reads: You ask, when did they meet?/ A moment ago.— And when will they part? — Soon./ So love seems a support to lovers. Has he gone back to his room and already put the book back? The page she is holding will always be missing from it. That gap, she thinks, is the first trace of her in his world. (61)

For maybe an hour an a half she watches his summer existence from afar. Excitement, happiness, chagrin, fear, envy, doubt, curiosity, desire, pique, and yearning switch through her soul for an hour and half, while she sits in the sand, watching the part of his life that doesn't involve her.  (87)

Katharina writes to Hans: I am only happy when we are together.

And that's the truth.

She writes in her diary: Worked on the model set with Vadim.

And that also is the truth.

She does not write that in the morning, when she gets in, she always looks out for Vadim's bicycle. Nor does she write that she spent two nights with Vadim in October, and one more in early November. She does not write that she likes his arms and wishes she could bite them (not that she ever does). When she stays over at Vadim's she now lies in his bed, but she keeps her clothes on, and he is not allowed to undress her or kiss her.

All this she does not admit to Hans, but above all she will not

admit it to herself.

What is not written down has not taken place. (144)