When the Time Comes Quotes

“In the clay vessel where the putrid-smelling bone stock was rendered from the bones of slaughtered animals, to be painted on the horses with a black crow's feather around the eyes & nostrils and on the belly, to protect them from the mosquitoes and horseflies...”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“The corpse fluid had dripped onto the brown Carinthian suit of one of the pallbearers, & he vomited beside a funeral wreath propped up against a garden fence. On its black ribbon, in golden letters, was written A Last Goodbye.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“Before the presents, Maximilian and his brother Reinhard would bathe together in the smoke kitchen in a wood tub held together by iron rings. Cursing when one of them had peed in the bathwater, they would lather themselves with a bar of turpentine soap with a stag stamped on its surface, dry their lean white bodies, the genitals still hairless, with a coarse towel beside the glowing red griddle of the wood-burning stove, and put on clean underwear, ironed shirts, and gray wool socks.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“A twisted countenance overcame her in death. Her cheeks and mouth were deeply sunken. Liver mortis dotted her face and hands. Moreover, the process of decomposition was so advanced, it was impossible to expect that the funeral guests remain seated, praying their rosary before her open coffin.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“For three days the child lay in his parents' house, surrounded by spring flowers, narcissus, tulips, and Christmas roses, in a sealed coffin, small & white.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“In the black eye sockets of the dead, and over the thousands of molehills spread throughout the plains, the snow fell noiselessly. Only the bandy-legged wolf, wandering over my footprints among the crosses on the graves, did not leap over the cemetery walls, on this long night.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“The wet skeletons of two young hedgehogs still lay on the floor of Hell.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“While Jonathan lay on his deathbed in his parents' house, his bluish red rope burns and strangulation bruises covered with a fresh garland of carnations, purple and aromatic, from the garden, and his corpse had turned wax-yellow and his fingernails blue, his mother, in a black dress, kept vigil through the night, near the two candles that lit up his face to the left and right of the sofa, never once closing her eyes.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“After Jonathan, wearing only his pajamas, jumped out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night & met with Leopold, who awaited him in the garden, the two went to the stable and put a three-meter-long hemp rope in a bricklayer's bag splattered with quicklime. On a September night, under the light of the moon, they walked with the rope up the village street, passing the calvary, not noticing the devil's red wings, which were stretched to the point of tearing—Lucifer was sweating blood—and then up the hill of the parish house into the barn. In the empty barn full of dusty cobwebs—the parish house was unoccupied at the time—they climbed a wooden ladder to the crossbeam. The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards and who now stood in the entranceway of the parish house, gasping and smelling the blood sweated out by the devil in the calvary. With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin, who shined the beam of his flashlight across their four dangling legs twenty-four hours later, and were cut down with a butcher's knife by Adam the Third.”
― josef winkler, When the Time Comes