by Herta Müller
* * *
An aphid settles on the dictator’s forehead and plays dead.
* * *
Adina often comes to this café, because it overlooks the river, because every year the park grows longer by the length of an arm, and because the new growth on the trees stays soft and bright even late in the summer. And because she can look at the old branches and see the past year still swaying. The bark is dark and tough, the leaves coarsely ribbed, summer won’t be over anytime soon. The frost doesn’t come until October. Then it cuts down the leaves in a single night, as though some major accident occurred.
The breath of fear looms in the park, it slows the mind and makes people see their lives in everything others say and do. No one ever knows if a given thought will become a spoken sentence or a knot in the throat. Or merely the flaring of nostrils, in and out.
The breath of fear sharpens hearing.
At the wire factory, smoke flies out of the chimneys and frays until all that’s left are the summer old folk floating over the city. And the clothes in the rotten gullet of the river down below.
Once Adina has gotten used to the breath of fear, she can feel her knee as something separate from the wrought-iron chair. The quiet streets of power hitch themselves to the streetcar crossing the bridge over the river. And they’re drawn from their quiet neighborhood into the center of the city, into the outskirts of town, into the filthy streets of the servants. Where it’s clear from the dried mud that all the children have left home and all the husbands are lying in the earth. The gaps in the windows are sealed with old newspapers, and the widows have fled with outstretched arms to the streets of power.
If a person sits long enough in the café, the fear settles down and waits. And the next day it’s already right there at the same table. It’s an aphid inside your head that won’t crawl away. If a person sits too long the fear just plays dead.
* * *
Clara lifts her dress as she joggles the chair, she’s just shaved her legs, her skin is so smooth it’s freckled red at every pore. Yesterday Mara had to count spools of wire, she says, and today the director called her into his office. He stood by the window and counted the spools again himself. After he’d finished he said, you have legs like a deer. Mara turned red and said thank you. And the director said, I mean as hairy as a deer’s.
* * *
Four women are rowing on the water, their arm muscles swell and bulge. A fifth woman holds a megaphone to her mouth, she shouts into the cone across the water, without looking at the rowers.
Clara passes through the poplar stripes on her way into town. Her shoes clatter along the river. The forelock sees the shouts from the megaphone as they land in between Clara’s steps.
The fisherman with the white cap of hair whistles a song.
* * *
The man with the reddish-blue flecked tie gets up off the bench. As he walks he spits a sunflower husk into the river, and combs his hair while climbing the steps. He stands on the bridge, then sets off in pursuit of Clara’s legs, her flying summer dress. As he walks he lights a cigarette.
* * *
Paul hands Adina a white envelope and holds the newspaper in front of his face, the nail on one thumb is torn. The skin on his index finger is yellow, he’s smoked so much it’s growing a tobacco leaf. Adina opens the envelope, it’s from Liviu, a wedding invitation with two interlocking rings.
Liviu is a schoolmate of Paul’s who for the past two years has been teaching in a small village in the south, in the part of the country cut off by the Danube, where the fields bump against the sky and the withered thistles toss their white fluff into the river. The farmers in the village drink plum brandy before breakfast, before heading out to the field, Liviu said. And the women force-feed the geese with fattened maize. And the policeman, the pastor, the mayor and the teacher all have gold teeth in their mouths.
The Romanian farmers eat and drink too much because they have too little, said Liviu, and they talk too little because they know too much. And they don’t trust strangers even if they eat and drink the exact same things, because strangers don’t have any gold teeth. Strangers here are very much alone, said Liviu.
That’s why Liviu is marrying a teacher from the village, a woman who belongs.
As good as a piece of bread
A man whistles a song as he leads his horse down the side of the road. The song is slower than his own steps, and the horse’s gait does not throw off his timing. As he walks the man keeps his eyes on the ground. The dust every morning is older than the day.
Adina can feel the song in the soles of her feet, the man sings straight from his mouth into her head:
The worries refuse to leave me alone
Must I sell my field and my house and my home
* * *
A short man, a thin rope, a big horse.
A thin rope for a horse is a thick rope for a man. A man with a rope is a hanged man. Like the tinsmith from the outskirts of town.
On a day like every day, when the streetcar rolled past his display window with the stovepipes, grave crosses and watering cans the way it always did, the tinsmith was a hanged man.
* * *
The passengers hovered behind the streetcar windows, each holding a lamb because it was almost Easter.
The fire had stopped chewing his pots, but death didn’t bite the tinsmith in the ass the way he always said. Instead, it squashed his neck.
His few fingers had taken a rope and made a noose. It was the man from the slaughterhouse who found him, the one who’d thrown the barber’s cat out the door. He had ordered a stovepipe from the tinsmith and went to pick it up. He was coming from the barber. His hair was freshly cut, and his chin was freshly shaved, he smelled of grass oil. Lavender was what the barber called it, but all the men the barber shaved had shiny faces and smelled like grass.
When the man who smelled like grass found the hanged tinsmith he said, such a good craftsman and such shoddy work.
Because the tinsmith was hanging all askew, right next to the door, and his body was so close to the floor he could have stood on his tiptoes and stepped out of the noose had he wanted to.
The man who smelled like grass reached over the hanged man’s head and said, pity to waste a good piece of rope, so instead of cutting the rope, he loosened the noose. The hanged man tumbled out, and his leather apron folded as he fell, but he himself did not. When his shoulder hit the ground, his head stayed straight. The man who smelled like grass then untied the knot and coiled the rope, drawing it between his thumb and forefinger and across his palm and over his elbow. When he tied off the short end he said, this rope will come in handy in the slaughterhouse.
The seamstress came in and stashed a pair of pliers and a new shiny nail in her apron pocket. She lowered her head, her tears dripped onto the alarm clock sitting on the table, as the locomotive pictured on the timepiece ticked away. The seamstress looked at the hands on the dial and reached for a watering can, I’ll take that for tending his grave, she said. And the man who smelled like grass said, I don’t know. He searched around for his stovepipe.
And the barber said, the tinsmith came by my place just an hour ago, I gave him a shave. His face was still wet and he went and hanged himself. The barber pocketed a small file into his smock. He looked at the man who smelled like grass and said, whoever cuts down a hanged man fashions his own noose. The man who smelled like grass had three stovepipes tucked under his arm, he showed the barber the rope, look here, nothing’s been cut.
Adina saw a mountain of soldered pots on the floor next to the hanged man. The enamel was chipped and stained. Parsley and lovage, onion and garlic, tomatoes and cucumbers. A clove, a slice, a leaf, everything that summer coaxed out of the earth had left its mark. The vegetables of gardens and fields on the outskirts of every town, and the meat of all the yards and stalls.
When the doctor came everyone took a step away from the tinsmith, as if the horror were only just arriving. Silence twisted every fac
e, as though the doctor were bringing death itself.
The doctor undressed the tinsmith and examined the pots. Tugging on the lifeless hands he said, how can a person solder with just three fingers on each hand. When the doctor dropped the tinsmith’s pants onto the floor two apricots fell out of the pocket. They were round and smooth, the same yellow as the soldering flame that no longer chewed the pots. The apricots raced under the table, glowing as they went.
The string hung around the neck of the tinsmith as it always did, but the wedding ring had disappeared.
For several days and nights the air under the trees had a bitter smell. Adina saw the empty string in the veins of whitewashed walls and in the cracks of asphalt streets. The first afternoon she suspected the seamstress, and that first evening she suspected the man who smelled like grass. The next day she suspected the barber and in the night, which sank into the evening without any twilight, she suspected the doctor.
Two days after the tinsmith hanged himself, Adina’s mother crossed the beet fields to the village with the sheep, whose gleaming white walls could be seen from the outskirts of town. Because it was almost Easter, she bought a lamb. The women in the village told Adina’s mother that a child nobody had ever seen before had been at the tinsmith’s and stolen the ring right off his neck. The tinsmith’s ring was gold and could have been sold to pay for a funeral pall. As it was, the money in his worktable drawer barely paid for a rough narrow box. That’s not a coffin, said the women, it’s a wooden suit.
* * *
The man leading the horse stops at the edge of town and is hidden for a moment by a passing bus. Then the bus is gone, the man stands in the dust, and the horse walks around him. The man steps over the halter, slings it around a tree trunk and ties it off tight. At the shop he pushes through the door and makes his way past the waiting heads to join the bread line.
Before he disappears among the screaming heads, the man glances back. The horse lifts its hooves and stands on three legs for longer than it takes a bus to pass, then rubs its flank against the tree trunk.
Adina feels dust in her eye. The horse’s head becomes a blur sniffing at the tree bark. The dust in Adina’s eye is a tiny fly on her fingertip. The horse munches on a branch, the acacia leaves rustle beneath his muzzle, the scraggy wood has thorns and crackles in his throat.
Warm air spills onto the street from the store where the man disappeared. The buses kick up great wheels of dust in their wake. The sun hitches a ride with every bus, fluttering on the corners like an open shirt. The morning smells of gasoline and dust and worn-out shoes. And when someone passes by carrying bread, the sidewalk smells of hunger.
Hunger sharpens elbows for shoving and teeth for screaming. The shop has fresh bread. The elbows inside the shop are countless, but the bread is counted.
* * *
Where the dust flies highest the street is narrow, the apartment buildings crooked and jammed together. The grass grows thick along the pathways, and when it blooms, brash and brazen, it’s always tattered by the wind. The more brazen the spikes, the greater the poverty. Here summer threshes itself, mistaking torn clothing for chaff. The eyes lurking at the windows matter as much to the gleaming panes as the flying seeds to the grass.
Children pluck grass straws with milky stems out of the earth and make a game of sucking them dry. And in their play is hunger. Their lungs cease to grow, the grass milk feeds their dirty fingers and the wart clusters, but not their baby teeth, which fall out. The teeth don’t wiggle long, they drop into the children’s hands while they’re talking. The children toss them over their shoulders and behind their backs into the grass, today one, tomorrow another. As each tooth flies, they shout:
Mouse o mouse bring me a brand-new tooth,
And you can have my old one.
Only after the tooth has disappeared in the grass do they look back and call it childhood.
The mouse takes the teeth and lines its burrows under the apartment building with little white tiles. It does not bring the children new teeth.
* * *
The school is located at the bottom of the street, at the top of the street is a broken phone booth. The balconies on the buildings in between are made of rusty corrugated sheet metal and can’t hold anything more than a few tired geraniums and a little laundry fluttering from a line. And clematis, which climbs high and attaches itself to the rust.
No dahlias bloom here, where everything is rusting and breaking and falling apart, and where the clematis unravels its own summer, blue and hypocritical, saving its most beautiful blooms for the rubble.
At the top of the street the clematis creeps into the broken phone booth, it lies down on the glass splinters but does not get cut. It twines around the dial and stops it from spinning.
The one-eyed numbers on the dial pronounce their own names when Adina passes slowly by: one, two, three.
A fool’s summer during marches, a soldier’s summer beyond the long plain in the south. Ilie is wearing a uniform. In his mouth he has a straw of summer grass, and in his pocket a calendar with a winter full of crossed-out days. And a picture of Adina. On the plain are a hill, a wall, and the barracks. The grass straw comes from the hill, wrote Ilie on the back of the picture.
Whenever Adina sees tall grass, she thinks about Ilie and looks for his face. In her head she carries a mailbox. Whenever she opens it, the box is empty, Ilie seldom writes letters. Writing letters makes me remember where I am, he wrote. Paul said, people seldom write letters when they know for sure that they are loved.
* * *
For as long as the clematis was green, a man lay in the telephone booth. His forehead was so short that his hair began right above his eyebrows. Because his forehead’s so empty, said the passersby, because his brain’s made of brandy and brandy evaporates, and when it does there’s nothing left.
The man lay in the booth, and his shoes rested on their heels. Anyone walking by could see the soles but not the shoes. The man drank and talked out loud to himself when he wasn’t sleeping. People sped up when they came to the booth, and kept a distance from its shadow. They clutched their hair as though not to lose their thoughts. They spit absentmindedly on the sidewalk or into the grass because their mouths had a bitter taste. When the man talked to himself out loud, the passersby averted their eyes, and when he slept, some ventured closer to kick the soles of his shoes with the tips of theirs until he groaned. None of them ever wanted to rouse a corpse, but each of them hoped that day had come.
A bottle was propped against the man’s stomach, his fingers were around the neck, he held the bottle firmly, and didn’t loosen his grip even in his sleep.
* * *
Until one day the man did loosen his grip, and the bottle fell over. A woman kicked the soles of his shoes. After that the caretaker came from the nearest apartment building, then a child, then a policeman. The man in the phone booth no longer groaned, his death smelled of plum brandy.
The caretaker tossed the dead man’s empty bottle into the grass and said, if there really is such a thing as a soul then his was in that bottle and it was the last thing he swallowed. And that means that his soul is whatever his stomach didn’t manage to digest. The policeman whistled and stopped a horse cart on the street. The driver set down his whip and climbed out. He lifted the dead man by the arms while the caretaker lifted him by the shoes. They carried the stiff weight through the sun like a board, then they swung the board onto the cart, on top of the green cabbage heads. The driver covered the dead man with a horse blanket and picked up his whip. He tapped the horse and clicked his tongue, twisting his mouth.
* * *
The phone booth still smells of plum brandy, and for two days the wind has been making a different sound in the street. The clematis has kept growing and blooming, blue as ever, the one-eyed numbers stare from the dial. Adina dials in her head and talks to the dead man until she’s left the phone booth well behind.
* * *
I’m at the other end of t
he line, he says.
You’re skin and bones, she says, you’re just a board.
Doesn’t matter, he says, I’m a whole person, half crazy and half drunk.
Show me your hands, she says.
Wine in the mouth, cognac in the stomach, brandy in the brain, he says.
She sees his shoes, he drinks standing up.
Stop, she says, you’re drinking with your forehead, like you don’t have a mouth.
* * *
Near the bottom of the street a large spool of wire is rusting away. The grass around it is yellow. Behind the spool is a fence, behind the fence is a yard and a wooden shack. In the yard a dog jerks on his chain, pulling it across the grass. The dog never barks.
No one knows what the dog is guarding. Early in the morning and late in the evening, always after dark, policemen come. They talk to the dog, feed him, and light their cigarettes but do not finish them. According to the children from the apartments there are three policemen. Because their rooms have only candles, the children can see three cigarettes smoldering outside the wooden shack. Their mothers pull them away from the windows. The dog is named Olga, according to the children, but the dog is male, not female.
