Things That Disappear, page 1
Also by Jenny Erpenbeck
The Book of Words
The End of Days
Go, Went, Gone
Kairos
Not a Novel
The Old Child and Other Stories
Visitation
Jenny Erpenbeck
Things that Disappear
translated from the German by Kurt Beals
Copyright © 2009 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co.
Translation copyright © 2025 by Kurt Beals
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or be used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies or develop machine-learning language models, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Some of these pieces previously appeared in Urbainable/Stadthaltig (Akademie der Künste), Heat, The Paris Review, The Point, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review
The poem on p. 55 appears in The Gallows Songs: Christian Morgenstern’s “Galgenlieder,” translated by Max Knight (University of California Press, 1966). Used by permission of Insel Verlag.
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1647 in 2025
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Erpenbeck, Jenny, 1967– author | Beals, Kurt translator
Title: Things that disappear / Jenny Erpenbeck ; translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
Other titles: Dinge, die verschwinden. English
Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025029634 | ISBN 9780811238113 paperback | ISBN 9780811238120 ebook
Subjects: LCGFT: Essays
Classification: LCC PT2665.R59 D5613 2025
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025029634
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Things that Disappear
I Palace of the Republic
When the Palace of the Republic opened, I was in third grade. My teacher was named Fräulein Kies, and Fräulein Kies held an envelope bearing an image of the new palace up above her head and explained to us what a first day cover was. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the phrase “first day cover” had the same number of syllables, and almost exactly the same vowels, as “nine day wonder.” Fräulein Kies said that each of us was going to get one of those first day covers, and that we should take good care of it, because one day we’d be proud that we were there when the new palace opened. After Fräulein Kies presented those first day covers to us, we went on a class field trip to the newly opened palace of the people.
At the time, I still wanted to study archaeology and learn to excavate palaces, so I especially liked the various types of marble that were used downstairs by the coatroom. Upstairs, in the painting gallery, everything was carpeted. Higher up, near the ceiling, there were glass lamps that hung down like air bubbles, so you could imagine you were under water. Those lamps had been provided by the company where my aunt Sigrid worked. The same company provided the utensils for the palace’s café—in other words, the spoons that I used in the following years of my life, at first to stir my cocoa, and later my coffee, and the knives and forks in the wine bar that I used to cut into a ham hock or Hawaiian schnitzel when my first boyfriend took me out to eat. It was in the Palace of the Republic that I pinched my finger between two balls while bowling, that I resolved to become a pianist after attending a famous pianist’s concert in the theater on the fifth floor, that I dragged the heavy, wrought iron stools in the wine bar overlooking the Spree into position to make myself comfortable.
When it became clear, years later, that the palace was gradually losing its republic, I slipped one of the spoons that my aunt had provided into my pocket for safekeeping. Just three days ago, when I drove past the palace, I could see all the way through it from one side to the other. The demolition started in the middle, perhaps for structural reasons, so the parts with some substance remaining now frame the middle, which is basically made only of air. I thought of Fräulein Kies again, and I wondered if she was calling herself Frau Kies by now, even if no man had ever married her.
II Bulky Trash
As soon as the owner of an old wardrobe/television/bicycle pushes it off the ramp, as soon as it’s “in there,” as they say at the Berlin Sanitation Department’s waste disposal sites, it no longer belongs to him; instead, it becomes the property of the department. The Berlin Sanitation Department takes possession of the item for one sole purpose: to remove it from the city and destroy it appropriately. The moment private owners relinquish their ownership, the items are henceforth referred to only by the material they’re made of. Wood to wood, metal to metal, and so on—these are the names the city uses when it snatches up the old stuff, devours it, along with any function and use value it might still have, along with any surplus value and history it might have had, because only when the old thing has completely disappeared does a resident of this city, a consumer in the marketplace, buy something new.
If that bike over there hadn’t already been labeled “metal,” it would certainly still be rideable. But I tell you, that don’t even cross our minds, there’d be a line all the way from here to Kreuzberg, say the men who lock the containers and cart them away. In the old days, people used to put their old wardrobes out on the street, and they’d always be gone in no more than a night. There were lines due to shortages during the war, and even later in the East, but that’s where they’re supposed to stay: in history books, in black-and-white photos, in eyewitness accounts. In the West, there were always bananas, and that’s how it’s supposed to stay. We’re just tryin’ to do our job, too, the men say. And if we had a bunch of folks crawlin’ around here—trash pickers, I call ’em—there wouldn’t be any room for the folks who just wanna throw stuff away. Not even the men themselves are allowed to pick out anything that’s “in there.” What if, say, you end up with a one of a kind Biedermeier wardrobe? Nope, not even then. So if I were to climb into the dumpster (crawl around in the trash), I’d be able to touch an abandoned piece of furniture like that, but in legal terms, it still would have disappeared completely? Yup. I wouldn’t even be allowed to buy the wardrobe from you? Nope. Well, I mean, on a personal level you might, human error, you know, that’s been known to happen. But it ain’t allowed.
What I don’t ask, but would still like to know, is whether the beauty of a wardrobe like that emerges again after it’s been chopped to pieces and flies up to heaven, as souls are said to do, and whether the wood itself would be a few grams lighter than before.
People from faraway lands often sit in front of the waste disposal sites, waiting to take televisions, fridges, and speakers before they’re thrown away, before they disappear. Unfortunately, I haven’t found out yet whether there’s even a word for Biedermeier in their languages, and if so, what it is. Now my last hope lies in so-called human error.
III Memories
The farewells are what I remember. How thin and white R. looked beneath his shock of hair when I said goodbye to him for the last time and he nodded to me without lifting his head from the pillow, just briefly closing his eyes. How I didn’t go back to his bed, but simply closed the door behind me. The next day I had to pick up his things from the hospital, including the razor I’d charged for him the day before. The razor was charged, but R. was dead.
When I left my grandmother’s house, she was standing at the window of a dark room, waving as I walked away, her silhouette illuminated only by the light that burned behind her in the hallway where we had just said our goodbyes. Two days later she fell, and when I saw her again, her face motionless and her eyes closed, she was lying in a coma in the hospital, where some time later she died.
I remember how R. would nod after he had examined something—a car, a new apartment—I remember how he would hum along under his breath when there was gypsy music playing in a Hungarian restaurant, I remember how he would hunch his shoulders when he was carrying a tray back to the kitchen. I still recall how my grandmother used to say “Oh dear, oh dear” when she was in a hurry and didn’t know what to do first, I remember her hands with their gnarled fingernails and her laughter. I already find it hard to recall whether her mouth was open or closed when she laughed, but at least I know how it sounded, and how her laughter gradually faded into laughter at herself.
There’s very little that I can touch, see, and hear with my memory anymore. The thoughts of someone who no longer exists can be translated into my thoughts, and the actions of that person into my actions, but the tangible part of those memories will probably fall to pieces sooner or later. When reality no longer grows back, it will become a skeleton, individual bones with a great deal of soil in between. Recently, it’s often happened that I find myself sitting across from someone who’s still perfectly alive, yet looking at him as if he had already disappeared. At those moments, half hopeful, half ashamed, I pick out single frames of the film while it’s still r unning, as if I could select my memories in advance and learn them by heart, so that I could be sure to recall them later. As for myself, I’ve already considered whether anyone will remember the way I blow my nose, or the way I watch a boxing match on TV, or my knees.
IV Nursery School
It all started when the nursery school that my son had been attending sold off one half of its yard, so the fence was moved back closer to the school building. After the jungle gym was relocated, chunks of concrete from its base were left lying in the abandoned sandbox, a wastebasket quickly filled up with dirt and trash because no one was emptying it anymore, and recently a mother found a couple of rather enormous teeth in there. She was standing there with the teeth in her hand when I came to pick up my son, and she asked me if she ought to go to the police now and report it. I looked at the teeth and they looked too big to have come from a person, or even from a dog. It seemed possible to me that, as the site was growing wild, deeper layers had come to the surface and found their way to the trash, so the teeth might have belonged to a cow, or to a giant, antediluvian lizard.
The next message that we parents received concerned the decision made by the responsible authorities to close the nursery school down entirely. True, the sinks are wobbly, the coatrack where my son hangs his jacket looks just as faded as the one where I hung my own red vinyl coat when I still wore a child’s size 4—the coat hooks are still attached to those little plastic pictures of animals and fruits that used to be produced in Zschopau—and the boiler room has flooded twice. The building would have to be gutted and fully renovated, they said, and it would cost at least half a million euros. As we nod, we imagine in our minds’ eyes all of the things that make it necessary to demolish what’s already here because they’d just be too expensive: sinks made of lapis lazuli, mahogany flooring, forty black and forty white slaves and an equal number of eunuchs to serve the children, and play sand delivered fresh each morning from the Gobi Desert. Of course, utopias sometimes cause the disappearance of what was there before, but in this unusual case it is the impracticability of a utopia that makes the demolition necessary. We parents hear the school’s prime location in the Mitte district of Berlin described as a helicopter landing pad, and it isn’t entirely clear whether this is meant as a joke, a technical term, or a real federal government building project.
As he bids farewell to his old nursery school, my son gives his favorite tree—a thoroughly mediocre pine tree—a goodbye kiss on its rough bark. We’ve already been informed that this pine tree, as well as an apple tree and a few bushes, will have to be removed while school is still in session to prevent any delays in the demolition. At least my son’s nursery school teacher—who will probably have to take early retirement under the circumstances—taught us one life lesson: Eat up, eat up, while you can, / just don’t eat your fellow man. / Or your fellow woman, nay, / let her live another day. / But if you eat them, no great loss— / Just be sure to brush and floss!
V Miezel
On the way to see Maria, known as Miezel, I have to drive through the valley, first down to the lowest and coldest point along the route—the road makes a sharp curve there, so it’s easy to skid in the winter—then back up at the other end of the valley, then a right at the Kreuzwirt tavern, past the forest that Miezel helped plant thirty years ago—at night you can often see deer in the meadow that borders the forest, standing there as if petrified, blinded by the headlights. Today, in the sunlight, I see two figures coming toward me there: an overweight mother with her equally overweight, grown-up daughter, holding each other’s hands.
The journey to see Miezel has become a very long one since I moved back to Berlin. Normally, her silhouette approaches the frosted glass panes of the door, hunched over like a crescent moon. Then Maria, known as Miezel, opens the door to me. In the time I’ve known her, she’s grown ever thinner and more frail. Still, her hair is only gray in a few places. She wears an apron over her skirt, and slippers on her feet because of the corns. “Pain,” she says, and smiles, “constant pain!”— she smiles and shakes her head as if in amazement, her feet are bony like the rest of her body, and whenever she bumps into anything, her skin immediately turns blue in that spot, since the veins are just beneath the surface.
Miezel lives in the castle where she served as a maid all her life, on the ground floor, right next to the entrance. Until just a few years ago, she was still carrying suitcases up to the third floor. She cooked, cleaned, and tended the garden for the masters of the estate. She opens the door for guests, workmen, the chimney sweep, and the postman. The bricklayer and the gardener take their lunch break in her kitchen. Miezel drinks raspberry syrup mixed with tap water, she cooks her food on an iron stove, and any leftover provisions that aren’t suitable for the compost are thrown onto the fire. Miezel has never flown in an airplane. She always used to walk the three kilometers to the village on foot, back before she started to get dizzy so often. She never learned to ride a bicycle, and never used an escalator. When the masters aren’t at home, she tends the castle, and her only companions are the dormouse, the Aesculapian snake, and the red salamander. The house where she was born is at the foot of the hill where the castle stands. Miezel can see it from her window.
One of the two rooms she’s lived in for thirty years is the front parlor. She keeps fruit and cake there in a cool and shady place, the baskets and trays are laid out on a huge black table with lathe-turned legs that once belonged to someone or other who lived in these rooms before. The other room is the one where Miezel sleeps, her dresses and aprons are hung there in a shallow closet, and there’s a TV, too, and an armchair, its upholstery already worn rather bare in the spots where Miezel places her hands on the armrests. She brings in the coffee pot, and I can see that a coffee pot like that holds weight.
Back when I was her neighbor, she would always carry something in her hands when she came to visit me—a head of lettuce, or two or three apples, or some mushrooms, or a plate of cakes. “A few Buchteln,” she’d say, Austrian sweet rolls. The things she brought were things she’d planted, cooked, baked, or found in the woods herself. Later, when she couldn’t go into the woods or work in the garden anymore, or even cook or bake, she made me open-faced sandwiches. White bread with cheese or salami, with slices of egg or halved sour pickles on top. She arranged the slices of egg on the bread with her bony hands, and if I didn’t manage to eat it all, I had to take the rest home with me wrapped in aluminum foil—for this evening, for tomorrow—along with a package of cookies for my child.
When I ring her doorbell today, it’s a long time before the door is opened. Her caretaker must not be very familiar with the keys yet. High up in the sky, far above the big cherry tree, a hawk is circling. Inside, in her dimly lit kitchen, Miezel is seated at the table; her caretaker has set her there and pushed the chair close to the table so that she can hold herself upright. Miezel sits there, but she’s so weak that she can’t even manage to open her eyes. I look out her window. Through the bare trees, I can see as far as the house where her mother was a maid and her father was a servant. Miezel sits there motionless. Which means that when I leave, I can only hug her from the side.
VI Junk
Of course it’s nice when the eye can be at peace, when it doesn’t get tangled up in knickknacks, when the drawers open silently and then close again as if by magic. It’s nice to have bare tables where no dust falls, only light. It’s nice when everything is made of glass and you can see through everything, because nothing else is there. Emptiness is nice. Who doesn’t like to make a purchase when the salesman places a single pair of trousers on a frosted glass counter that’s lit from below? Then those trousers are the last thing on earth that casts a shadow, and the counter with its bluish shimmer turns out to be an altar that leads from Berlin to Vienna, and from Vienna to Tokyo, and from Tokyo to New York, and from New York perhaps to heaven or hell, gradually narrowing as it disappears from view.
