Book: KAIROS
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Published by: Granta
Price: Rs 599
A portion of the Berlin wall divided the Church of Reconciliation from its parish. It was faithless. At least 136 people were gunned down escaping the cloistered, dull East to the Coke-soaked, bohemian West to reinstate love for the former. A nation, then, exists as a dialectic in the Marxist sense, a synthesis of opposing thoughts. The citizen-State tension keeps it afloat. None of this is mentioned and, yet, East Germany feels like doomed love: hopeless, infrequent, vicious. Jenny Erpenbeck, as a third-person, omniscient narrator, fuses romance and elegy (or ‘Ostalgie’). Here, as in her previous works, the pre-Wende zeitgeist marauds the margins.
In 1989, a wall is demolished and East Germany flies up in smoke. It uproots the cursed romance at the heart of Kairos. Erpenbeck’s International Booker-winning novel is a tale of romantic warfare as the citizen-State contract develops a spectacular rupture. A teenage girl and a 50-something man make love at first encounter, one’s every misty breath rolling off the other’s body. Mozart plays for them. They drink deeply from chalices of wine and the well of rich German literature, often referring to Bertolt Brecht. Readers might be aware that Brecht was a legendary, but morally grey, writer, submitting to the State at its peak and dissenting in opportune times. A poem of his, “When I’d reported to the couple, thus”, translated by Tom Kuhn (“She hasn’t once/ Shown so much since the day she was seduced!”), would be an excellent foreword to this novel as life under German communism laces barbs around a heart.
The couple’s affair is rooted in intellectual stimulation, with numerous arcane discussions obfuscating the older lover’s manipulative tendencies, much like the GDR was admired as a patron of the arts but frequently, and violently, blacklisted writers for straying from the communist goal (such as the singer-songwriter, Wolf Biermann, who crooned, “You, don’t let yourself become hardened in these hard times.”). The lovers call their bond “our miracle”. The State doesn’t figure in the novel at all, except through gorgeous, telling descriptions of buildings and beaches, but every scene brims with a Stasi-like predilection for moral failure. Its future is a regime of lush decay.
Erpenbeck possesses a charming fidelity to the shapelessness of thought. She provides ample awnings for commentary on culture, the psychedelic hopefulness of youth, and the cyclic nature of history. The two are opposites: the man is harangued by a failing marriage and a stillborn novel, while the woman experiments with sex and jobs in the arts. The translator, Michael Hoffman, also translated Berlin Alexanderplatz, the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin. That one was about Nazi Germany and reeked of an end-times hopelessness. Kairos’s male protagonist was a Nazi trainee as a boy, and he lives again in faintly similar times — and he detests it. He luxuriates in the reflection of his own cultural touchstones in her more malleable, scintillating flesh in the very same way that propagandists — of whichever political faction — eye young adults to join their agitation.
The book has a meticulous structure. It has two equal halves separated by a brief intermission. An image: the front of a train becomes its back when the engine switches sides, signalling an end of romance. Other images: idyllic, soaring romance in the first half versus breakdown in the second; café dates going from cheery to cruel; hugs degrading from being uncontrolled to merely perfunctory. Further, during the decline of their romance, he sends her cassettes recording his resignations about her, which she responds to in writing. Who knew love could be as arduous as homework, or, better yet, bureaucracy? Each tape has sides A and B. The book’s halves are separated by a page titled “Intermezzo”, the interlude between two musical acts. As is well-documented, such as in Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (Maxim Leo, translated by Shaun Whiteside) and in In Times of Fading Light (Eugen Ruge, translated by Anthea Bell), East Germany was a country that condensed around each citizen. This control is replicated in scenes of intimacy that involve sadism, with him flogging her with the leash of her own incomprehensibly staunch devotion. He demands that she diarise her life for him to read, an effortless referent to the surveillance maintained by the State through mics and wires. Both produce archives: a box of love letters, and a box of official filings about oneself. A voyeur’s idea of a biography. The writer is a ghost, a dead nation’s spirit now regarding its history through envy and revulsion.
The most crucial dimension of the dialectic is in their thoughts and conversations. The novel doesn’t use inverted quotes to separate dialogue. Utterances and the unuttered storm together in the common sky of their bedrooms, as did counterculture and propaganda in the flyers of the day. “It will never be like this again”, thinks the man after a night together; “It will always be this way”, thinks the girl. This approaches a form of epistolary writing that is as earnest as a whispered word and, yet, as cold as a text message. I once read that Stalin told Gorky that he hated music and, by extension, consuming culture, because it made revolution impossible. Here it rounds people up, engulfs, partitions, and lashes them. Erpenbeck’s accumulated genius in how magnificently these requiems — of people and their country — unspool is simply divine.
