by Herta Müller
When the officer has made it home, his wife can hear his boots scraping up the steps between the lions. She says to my mother: DANUBE DELTA. My mother fetches a pot of hot water from the kitchen, which she carries to the bathroom and pours into a basin set on the floor. Then she tops it off with cold water so it’s nice and lukewarm. The officer’s wife waits in the front hall. Before her husband can turn the key, she opens the door from inside. She takes the briefcase out of his hand and the cap off his head and says DANUBE DELTA. The officer mutters and nods. His wife heads for the bathroom, he follows, by the time he gets there his wife is already perched on the closed toilet seat. The officer removes his boots and sets them outside the door. His wife says, let’s see your stork. The officer undresses and hands her his uniform, she folds the pants and drapes them over her arm. He takes off his underpants, spreads his legs and crouches so that he’s straddling the basin, then lowers himself to his knees and gazes at the blue tiles above the mirror. His penis dangles in the water. If his testicles sink, his wife says, good. If they float, she bursts into tears and screams, you’ve fucked yourself empty, even your boots are limp. The officer sinks his face between his knees, looks at his floating testicles and says, I swear my love, I swear.
The servant’s daughter stared for a moment at the leafless shrub brushing against her coat and said, my mother doesn’t know what it is he swears, meanwhile the mirror fogs up and the man keeps swearing. Then, long after his wife is quiet, he starts to cry. With him it’s just a yammer, with her it’s more. My mother sits in her place in the living room, at the long end of the table, facing the bathroom, ashamed to the back of her eyes. She hides her hands under the table because they’re shaking. If she so much as moves her slipper, the woman says, Lenuza, you stay put. And to the officer she says, now stick your stork back in your pants. The man stands up and puts on his underwear. His wife carries his pants on her arm through the living room, always clinging first to the edge of the table, then to my mother’s shoulder. She says, Lenuza, clean up, then her hand goes back to the table and follows it like a guardrail over to the bedroom door. Her husband traipses after her, boots in hand. And my mother cleans up the bathroom and switches off the light.
The servant’s daughter blew warm breath onto her hands. My coat doesn’t have any pockets, she said, it came from the officer’s wife. She rubbed her fingers on her coat, hitting the buttons with her nails, a sound like stones hitting stones.
I have a hard time believing the whole business, said the servant’s daughter. But my mother’s never lied before. She hears them behind the bedroom door, the officer snores and his wife hums:
Roses in bloom
Come again soon
Lovely once more
Roses in bloom
* * *
My mother knows the song, the woman sings it in the kitchen every day. My mother walks on her tiptoes but the floorboards creak. The wife can tell when my mother is by the front door ready to lock up and then she says, don’t forget to lock up twice Lenuza. The wife is afraid of the stone angel, that it might enter the house during the night. That’s why she has her lions. Now and then the wife says to my mother, his angel can’t get past my two lions. The officer bought the angel to ward against his wife’s lions. But my mother says the lions and the angel won’t hurt each other because they all come from the same stonecutter. The officer realizes that, said the servant’s daughter, but his wife doesn’t.
* * *
In the morning, when the officer is in his cap and boots, his wife stands in the hall and brushes his uniform jacket. He bends down slowly to pick up his briefcase, she bends down with him and keeps brushing. The brush is so small that at first my mother couldn’t see it in the wife’s hand. My mother wondered why she crooked her hand when she stroked her husband’s jacket. Then one time the woman dropped the brush. Her hands are so small, until that moment my mother thought they weren’t capable of hiding anything. The officer’s wife is very tall, said the servant’s daughter, I’ve never seen hands that small on such a tall woman. After the officer leaves, his wife watches him through the window. Two houses later she loses sight of him but she waits until he reemerges, first at the entrance to the bridge and then once more on the bridge itself. The woman says she’s more worried something might happen to her husband when he’s sober, in the morning while he’s crossing the bridge, than on his way back home.
Then there’s the story with the perfume flask, said the servant’s daughter. The wife carries it stashed in her purse, even though the flask has been empty for years. The bottle has a rose etched into the glass, and a stopper that used to be gold-plated, by now the plating has worn off, but you can still see a few Cyrillic letters engraved on the side—it must have been Russian perfume. Years ago a Russian officer was in the house, but no one ever mentions him. He had blue eyes. Occasionally the wife says that the handsomest officers have blue eyes. Her husband has brown eyes and occasionally says to his wife, I see you’re reeking of roses again. The servant’s daughter slowly moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. There must be something special about that flask, she said, something sad. Something that opens a wish and closes a door, because it’s not her husband’s absence that makes her so lonely, it’s the empty perfume bottle in her purse. Sometimes, she said, her mother feels the woman’s head is sinking farther and farther into her neck, as if a staircase were running from her throat to her ankle and she were climbing down the steps carrying her own head. Perhaps because my mother lives in the cellar, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife spends half the day sitting at the table, and her eyes are piercingly empty, like dried-out sunflower disks. The servant’s daughter wiped her nose, rubbing her red nostrils with a crumpled handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief back in her purse like a snowball. She explained that every year the officer’s wife buys her mother a pair of genuine lambskin gloves, and every week she gives her coffee beans and Russian tea.
But because my mother scrimps and saves, said the servant’s daughter, she always gives me the tea and coffee. She can’t give me the gloves, though, otherwise the officer’s wife would notice. She did manage to have the ones from the year before last disappear by claiming that the postman’s dog had gotten hold of them and chewed them up so much they were no longer fit to wear. The postman denied it but he couldn’t prove anything.
The servant’s daughter told Adina that her mother had also gotten her the job at the school, thanks to the officer’s wife.
* * *
Two fishermen are standing next to each other on the riverbank. One of them takes off his cap, his hair is packed down, the band has left a ring pressed into the back of his head. Underneath one cap he has another—a cap of white hair. The other man is eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks, they float on the river, white inside and black outside. He holds out a handful to the man with the white cap of hair and says, take some to pass the time. The man brushes them away. They’re too much like melon seeds, he says. When I came back from the front, everything they ate here at home was like one big cemetery. Sausage, cheese, bread, even milk and cucumbers were all buried under lids or shut away behind a cupboard door, just like a grave. Now, after all these years I don’t know. He bends down, picks up a small rock, turns it over in his hand and shuts his right eye. He flings the rock into the river so that it skips four times, dancing on the water before it sinks. I no longer feel the same disgust, he says, but I’m still afraid of the insides of melons because they remind me of coffins. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds lowers his head, his mouth is narrow, his eyes skewed. He moves both rods to sunnier grass.
The sun is high in the sky, on top of the city. The rods cast shadows, the afternoon leans against the shadows. As soon as the day tips over, Adina thinks, and the sunlight goes skidding away, it will cut deep trenches in the fields around the city and the corn will snap in two.
When they don’t speak, the fishermen don’t move. If they aren’t talking
with each other, they’re not alive. Their silence has no reason, the words simply falter. The clock inside the cathedral tower advances, the bell chimes, another hour is empty and gone, it could be today, it could be tomorrow. Nobody on the banks of the river hears the chiming, the sound quiets when it reaches the water and whimpers until it’s gone.
The fishermen measure the day by the heat of the sky and can tell by looking at the smoke above the wire factory if it’s raining elsewhere. And by feeling the burn on their shoulders they can sense how long the sun will keep growing and when it will sink and shatter.
Anyone who truly knows the river has seen heaven from the inside, say the fishermen. As the city starts getting dark, there’s a moment when the clock in the tower can no longer measure time. Its face turns white and casts a sheen into the park. When that happens, the fine-toothed acacia leaves look like combs. The clock hands skip ahead, but the evening refuses to believe what they’re saying. The white sheen does not last long.
But while it does last, all the fishermen lie down beside one another on their stomachs and gaze into the river. And during that time, say the fishermen, the river shows anyone who truly knows it a foul, rotten gullet. That is heaven from the inside. The gullet is in the middle of the current, not on the river bottom. It holds so many clothes that they reach from one bridge to the other. The gullet itself is naked, it holds the clothes in its hands. They are the clothes of the drowned, say the fishermen.
The fishermen don’t stare at the gullet for long, after a few brief glances most lay their faces in the grass and laugh so hard their legs shake. But the fisherman with the white cap of hair doesn’t laugh. When the others ask why his legs are shaking even though he isn’t laughing, he says, when I lay my face in the grass, I see my own brain, naked in the water.
* * *
A Gypsy boy is standing inside the café next to the table farthest in back. He holds an empty beer glass over his face, the foam trickles down in a thread, his mouth swallows before the foam reaches his lips. Stop that, says Adina out loud, you’re drinking with your forehead, like you don’t have a mouth. Then the boy is at her table, give me a leu he says, holding his hand out over the newspaper. Adina sets a coin down next to the glass, the boy covers it with his hand and drags it off the table. May God keep you beautiful and good, he says. And though he speaks of God, all Adina sees of his face in the sunlight are two whitish-yellow eyes. Have some lemonade, she says.
A fly is swimming in the glass, he fishes it out with a spoon, blows it onto the ground and stashes the spoon in his pocket.
Shoshoi, the waitress yells.
The boy’s throat is dry, a gurgling comes from inside his shirt. He raises the glass and drains it in one gulp, through his face and all the way to his whitish-yellow eyes. He stashes the glass in his pocket as well.
Shoshoi, the waitress screams.
Clara once explained that shoshoi in Romani means HARE, that Gypsies are afraid of hares. It’s more that they’re afraid of superstitions, said Paul, and as a result they’re always afraid.
* * *
Once, he went on, an elderly Gypsy was being discharged from the hospital. Paul jotted down what the man was allowed to eat. But the man didn’t know how to read. So Paul read the list out loud, including the word HARE. I cannot take this piece of paper, the man said. You are a gentleman, you have to write out another one. Paul scratched through the word HARE, the man shook his head. That won’t do, he said, it’s still there. You may be a doctor but you are not a gentleman. You don’t understand how your own heart beats inside you. Inside the hare beats the heart of the earth, that’s why we are Gypsies, because we understand that, sir, that’s why we’re always on the run.
* * *
The Gypsy boy dashes off, the poplar stripes slice him as he runs, his soles fly up to his back as splashes of white. The waitress chases after the soles. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds watches the splashing soles. Like gravel hitting water, he says.
The wind blows in the brush, the boy’s eyes lurk among the leaves. The waitress stands in the grass, panting, alert, the leaves fan back and forth, she doesn’t see the boy. The waitress lets her head droop, removes her sandals and slowly heads back through the poplar stripes to the café, stepping barefoot in small strides over the stone slabs. The shadows from her sandals dangle below her hand. The shadows don’t reveal how high the heels are or how thin the laces, or how the buckles sparkle once just beneath her ring and again on the stone. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds says in her direction, with those legs you’d be better off running after me. Without shoes look how sturdy they are, take off those high heels and you’re a peasant woman.
The fisherman who’s afraid of melons scratches his crotch and says, once during the war I wound up in this small village. I’ve forgotten the name. I looked through a window and saw a woman at a sewing machine. She was sewing a white lace curtain, the cloth was spilling over onto the floor. I knocked and said WATER. She came to the door, dragging her curtain with her. The water bucket had a ladle, I drank one ladleful after another. I was only looking at the water, but in the water I could see her bare calves, all pudgy and white. The water was cold and the roof of my mouth was hot, my throat was pounding in my ears. The woman pulled me to the floor, she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her dress. The lace scratched, and her stomach had no bottom. She didn’t say a word. I often think about the fact I never heard her voice. I didn’t say anything either. Not until I was back on the street did I say to myself, WATER.
The fisherman with the sunflower seeds bites a thread off the hem of his shirt and says, it all depends on the calves. When I’m on top of my wife she complains the neighbors are going to pound on the wall in the middle of the night and call out, stop beating her. There’s nothing behind the complaining, I’ve known for a long time that everything under her nightshirt has gone cold, only her mouth screams. I lie on top of her and get used to the dark, I see her wide open eyes, her forehead way up high, looking grayish yellow like the moon, and her sagging chin. I see her twisting her mouth. I could use my nose and peck her right in her gaping eyes but I don’t. She groans like someone trying to move a wardrobe, not like someone who enjoys it. Her ribs are so hard that her heart’s all withered up inside, and her legs are getting thinner every day. She doesn’t have any meat on her calves. All the flesh on her body goes to her stomach, which is growing rounder and rounder and spreading out like a fat sheep.
The fisherman takes off one shoe, turns it over, shakes out a cherry pit. Sometimes the moon shines between the ceiling and the wall of our room, he says, so the moonlight has a crease, and I can see the pattern of the wineglasses in the cabinet and the fringe of the carpet. My eyes trace the fringe of the carpet as I let the day pass through my head. The fisherman with the cap of white hair plucks a grass straw and sticks it in his mouth. As he chews the straw wags back and forth. But letting the day pass through your head—the poplars, the river—doesn’t take very long, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds. Today I have the waitress to think about so tonight it will last longer.
The fisherman with the grass straw laughs, and says, and the Gypsy. Tonight it will last longer, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds, and I’ll take even longer to fall asleep. You know, every night I can hear the crickets outside. The whole bed shakes each time the nightshirt turns over. The crickets chirp, they pull one long note like a dark string, they eat up all my peace and quiet. I sense that they could be right underneath our room, so I hold my breath. I have the feeling they’re carrying our entire apartment block on their backs through the grass, across the long flat plain, all the way to the Danube. When I fall asleep I dream I’m stepping out of the apartment onto the street. But there isn’t any street and I’m standing there barefoot in my pajamas, next to the water, freezing. I have to escape, I have to flee across the Danube to Yugoslavia. And I don’t know how to swim.
* * *
On the other side of the river two
men are sitting on a bench. Both are wearing suits. The sunlight shines right through their ears, which look like leaves next to each other. One wears a tie flecked with reddish blue. At the end of the bench is a patch of shadow that could be a coat, without sleeves, without a collar, without pockets, it’s no longer there when the light moves to the next branch. Both men are eating sunflower seeds. The husks fly quickly into the water. The wind moves the branch, the coat shrinks.
* * *
The fisherman with the white cap of hair glances toward the two men, then spits out the grass straw. Do you know those two birds over there, he asks. Anyway I really don’t know how to swim, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds. He shrugs his shoulders and continues quietly.
There was this one dream about the Danube, he says, which my wife was also in. When I reached the water she was already there. She didn’t recognize me. She asked me the way you’d ask a stranger, are you trying to make it across the border too? She was leaving the gravel bank, heading away from the water. There were willows and hazelnut bushes. The current’s strong, she called out, I have to eat something first. She went rummaging through the underbrush, but there was nothing except river grass, so she picked through the branches and tore the hazelnuts off together with the stems and leaves. The hazelnuts weren’t ripe, they still had their green outer shells. So she pounded them with a round stone. She ate, and a milky liquid flowed from her mouth. I looked away, into the water. Our Father who art in Heaven and on Earth. The words came out of my mouth like the pounding from the stone. I couldn’t pray anymore, I felt foolish. The Lord was listening to the stone and the hazelnuts, not to me. I turned to her and screamed so loud my voice stung my eyes, I can’t do it, come back here to me, I can’t make it across, I tell you I don’t know how to swim.
