Kairos

The following is from Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos . Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words , and Visitation , which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.” The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in Berlin. Few are chosen, and those few are old. All except for her, but strangely no one seems surprised to find her standing in line. Does she still resemble her passport photograph? She doesn’t think so, but the emigration official hands her her passport back and sends her on her way. Through a tunnel and then up to the platform, and now she’s suddenly on the other side of the steel barrier. She knows what it looks like when seen from the East. You’re almost forced to look at it when you stand on the eastbound platform, waiting for the train heading toward Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. But now all of a sudden what was inside is now outside, and what was once ordinary is now cut off from her and no longer visible. Suddenly everything is inverted, topsy-turvy, now she’s behind the picture, behind what was once the surface of some unreachable beyond. The white line, a foot and a half from the edge of the platform was not to be breached before the train had come to a complete stop, says the voice on the P.A. Katharina and all those others waiting follow the rule, they don’t cross the line, they even prefer to stand in the middle of the platform. On the short side of the station a glass front cuts off the top of the building from the air outside, which in principle is still Eastern air, but because it gives access to the West is sort of Western air too, and outside the glass front is an iron platform, where soldiers patrol back and forth […]

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