A State of Love

Imagine our life as a stochastic process. One thing leads to another, and it is just a matter of chance that we find ourselves in a place, far away from another, having taken a path that was equally probable yet with vastly different way points. We call these choices or circumstances. What if at the end we realize not everything was that random after all? Would that knowledge be any more comforting? Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos opens and concludes with this unanswerable question of life. And what you find in between are slices of life in East Germany. They are cut neat by a master metzgerin and served cold in the guise of passionate love, retribution and endurance, mirroring the complicated relationship between the GDR — a state meant for, of, and by the people — and its citizens.

Hans is almost sixty and Katharina is nineteen. Hans is erudite and established, Katharina is bustling with youthful innocence and guile. Hans finds in Katharina a pill for a renewal in life that he cannot just miss. Katharina finds in Hans a chance to experience life in extreme refinement. It is no great epiphany for the readers that this union is already hurtling towards a fall. It will only be another three and a half years till the Berlin wall falls and they both lose their countries in their own way.

Erpenbeck's craft is dense and demands effort on the reader's part. Replete with cultural references from music to political speech, philosophy and mythology, events of historic proportions and everyday living have been dealt with equal charm, elegance and brutal truth all at the same time. The book is written in third person, often in a stream of consciousness. The text is stifling, and controlling, just like the personal lives of our protagonists, or the sanctioned living in a socialist state. Love finds expression in ways that invite patronization, and every deviation carries consequences — where submission masquerades as choice. But life finds a way around the prescribed way of life, forbidden happiness seeps in through shopping binge in the west or escapades within a family vacation. Eventually, every brick in the wall seems to step aside and march through its own rite of passage toward light, as the old order has been rendered meaningless, but what home do these bricks find now?

In Erpenbeck's novel, places and rituals are as much characters as the people. The Alex (Alexanderplatz square), the restaurant Ganymede, the Cafe Arkade, Han's marital bed, monthly anniversaries of fortune and betrayal, the high-rise studio apartment with two former owners, the order of coffee and korn, Han's desk and the pictures of Marx, Engels and Lenin hanging over it, floorboards of apartments where love settles, a hug with a coat worn the wrong way, the spiral staircase of Katharina's Frankfurt theater, sixty minute recordings in side A and side B of tape-cassettes sent in instalments, Eberswalde frankfurters, rotkappchen as a panacea for every high and low - they all live and breathe a life as real as Hans and Katharina.

Erpenbeck is an equal master of setting the pace through scenes. She might be taking us through the sex shop, Katharina's first breach of a frontier in a world of flesh. But soon after, she is leading us through young Han's eyes, what it means to leave your home and your rocking horse. She can build anticipation through vertical bars of Katharina's brass bed and break a glass in slow motion as Katharina cuts a piece of cake, set on a table for an evening with Hans, the day after.

One could argue that the torturous passage of time when love has been condemned to die and yet it must re-attempt to live, is overdone. But such is the passage of time, a human birth takes all the forty weeks, give or take a few. There is no optimum amount of pain to be endured, just as much as is ordained.