The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

by Herta Müller

  A man wearing a light blue smock takes Adina by the shoulders and shoves her to the door, chasing her out with the words law and brandy and police. Her shoes drag, the dried dirt from the barracks flakes off in little pieces and the wet dirt from the park breaks off in big clumps. Her nightgown is sticking out a couple inches under her coat. The cashier holds the door open. Who do you think you are, Adina screams, don’t touch me, you hear, get your hands off me.

  * * *

  Adina rings three times. The door to the apartment opens, a glaring square of light blinds her face. She steps through the entry hall carrying a bare branch. Go into the kitchen, says Paul, Anna’s still asleep in the other room. Adina nods once and twice and three times, he follows her and notices her nightgown sticking out under her coat. Adina hands him the bare branch and laughs, explodes with laughter, these are going to be lilacs, she says. She sits at the kitchen table, in front of a cup splattered with coffee that’s sitting next to a key. Adina looks at the wall clock, lays a bill on the table and clutches her face. Here are my eyes, she says, here is my forehead and here is my mouth. She unbuttons her coat. And this is my nightgown, she says. And that’s a wall clock, and a key on the table, and outside a day is just around the corner, and I’m not crazy, it’s eight in the morning, it’s eight in the morning every day, I want to get drunk right this minute and not wait till ten. She pushes the coffee cup to the edge of the table.

  Paul stuffs the money into her coat pocket, sets a glass and then a bottle in front of her. He pours some brandy and presses the glass into her hand. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t cry, her eyes water and her mouth is mute. He holds her head in his hands. Anna stands in the doorway, dressed but unshowered and uncombed. She picks up the key, puts on her shoes, tiptoes through the hall. The door closes with a bang.

  You can stay, says Paul. I have to go to work. The door closes with a bang.

  * * *

  There in the hall are Adina’s shoes. And there in the room is her coat draped over the chair, her stockings on the floor. The bare branch that’s going to be lilacs is in a vase beside the bed. The bed is still warm from Anna.

  The hand kiss

  Adina pulls her stockings over her legs, but her legs aren’t really inside the stockings. She puts on her coat, but her arms are not really in the coat. Her nightgown though is sticking out from underneath. She hikes it up so it isn’t showing. Key, money, and flashlight are stashed inside her coat pocket. The sun is lying on the kitchen table, under the table is dirt from her shoes, the clock is ticking on the wall and listening to itself. It’s almost noon. Adina slips into her shoes, her toes aren’t really in the shoes, they’re in the clock as she tiptoes out of the kitchen before both hands meet at the top where it is noon. The door opens and closes.

  * * *

  Adina’s breath keeps just ahead of her as she walks, she clutches at it with her hand but it eludes her grasp. An old woman with a cane and a cloth sack is leaning against a garbage bin by the side of the road. Her sack is half full. Her cane has a nail on the bottom. The woman thrusts her head and her cane inside the garbage bin and spears dry bread with the nail.

  The corner of the building is one big window. Through the glass Adina sees a man covered with a white cloth. The man is young and thin, his sack of hair won’t be heavy when he dies, Adina thinks, no heavier than the sack full of speared bread. Scissors open and close, snippets of hair fall onto the cloth. The barber cuts, the barber talks. The barber is drawing out the time, extending it past the winter, just like Adina is drawing out the way home, because the fox is rummaging under the table, because a tree is standing right here in the middle of the asphalt, in front of the windowpane where hair is being cut, and because the tree itself is bare.

  * * *

  The trolleybus bends its black accordion. The bellows open and close. The horns overhead search out the way, the driver chews on an apple. A man jumps on before the steps fold out. His pant legs flutter, his shoes shine. He’s wearing a windbreaker. The accordion squeals, tree trunks drift through the windowpane, coats pass slowly, and the traffic squeezes upward into the glass. The only thing the bus takes with it, at least for a little while, is a coffin that’s lashed to the top of a red car—the road keeps the tree trunks at a distance as the coffin slides from one windowpane to the next. Some housing blocks ride by, fronted by a sidewalk that quickly turns into a wall. The coffin passes through the last window, and the man in the windbreaker watches it drift behind. Adina moves to the back of the bus. When the door opens, the man in the windbreaker pinches Adina’s bottom. She stands on the stairs, pushes him away, she stumbles off, the door closes, dust flies.

  The face of the man drives on. He shows her his fist in the window, then opens his fingers and blows her a kiss.

  * * *

  The fox is no longer rummaging underneath the table. The full fur is lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. Adina sets her keys down on the table. She stands inside the room, but the room is only there for itself. The hind legs and tail have been shoved so close against the pelt that the cuts are invisible. Adina slides the left hind leg away with the tip of her shoe, then the right hind leg, then the tail. The right foreleg is still attached and pulls the stomach and the head along. The left foreleg leaves stomach and head where they lie. It has been cut off as well. The bed is unmade.

  The kitchen, the apples, the bread.

  Adina stands in the bathtub, and the bath is only there for itself. A cigarette butt is floating in the toilet bowl. It has been lying in the water for hours, swollen to bursting. Adina places the money and the flashlight on the table. She takes off her coat and stockings. She climbs into bed. Her toes are cold, her nightgown, the bed is cold. Her eyes are cold. She hears her heart beating on the pillow. She sees the table, the money, the flashlight, the chair, they are spinning inside her eyes. The alarm ticks and ticks until the light at the window disappears.

  * * *

  Something rings, not the alarm. Adina finds her toes and the floor next to the bed. She turns on the light, opens the door. A bright square falls into the stairwell, she laughs and holds out her cheek. Paul’s mouth is cold. He is holding a bare branch, these are going to be lilacs, he says. She takes the branch in her hand and points a finger at the fox. Paul lifts each cut-off leg one at a time. As of today that makes three, she says, along with the tail. She looks at him and pulls the scarf off his neck. The back of his neck is shaved. I was at the barber’s, he says.

  She lays his scarf on the bed. In every room I’ve lived in, that fox was always in front of the wardrobe, even in the dormitory, where space was so cramped, she says, since there were four of us in one room. There was a cat in that dormitory who used to come up the front stairs and wander through all the rooms to the end of the hall. He was fat and nearly blind and no longer caught mice, but he would sniff out every bit of bacon and eat it. That cat never set foot in our room: he could smell the fox.

  She holds the bare branch in her mouth. Don’t make such a face, he says, or there won’t be any lilacs. She goes into the kitchen, the vase has a brown ring from the last bunch of chrysanthemums. I saw Clara in the hospital yesterday, he says, while Adina sniffs at the branch, she was waiting where they do abortions. The faucet squeals, he stands in the door to the kitchen, there are bubbles on the water, she fills the vase up to the brown ring. She carries it past him back into the room and he follows.

  * * *

  One paw left, says Paul, that fox could drive a person insane. He places the branch in the water and sits down next to her. You’re standing here right between the bed and the chair and suddenly you’re in the middle of the woods, that fox is so close there’s no need for any binoculars. The bare branch casts a bare shadow on his cheek. Incidentally, he says, this morning the gatekeeper got hold of the binoculars. But he wasn’t looking at the woods out in back, he was watching the front entrance. He didn’t even bother to lower them when I was standing right next to him, he just turned toward m
e and said, Sir, I’m looking at your eye and it’s as big as a door. The bare shadow on Paul’s face looks like a wrinkle. Then a man came, Paul went on, and gave the gatekeeper some money, since it wasn’t a visiting day, and the gatekeeper let the man look through the binoculars, while I took off my coat and grabbed my white jacket. Paul touches Adina’s fingertips with his own. How do you tell a man, he asks, who slips the porter money so he can go upstairs and take a mesh bag with a fresh loaf of bread that his wife died during the night because the electricity went out. He pulls Adina closer. You walk slowly, he says, because you can smell the fresh-baked bread. Adina feels his chin moving close to her head, sees snippets of hair lying in his ear. And you hope for his sake that when he looked through the binoculars they somehow had enough power to take away the fear for one whole day. She pulls her knees up inside her nightgown and rests her feet on his knee. But you hope in vain, he says, because you can tell by the man’s steps that in a few minutes he’s going to lose his mind.

  Adina covers her face with one hand. Looking through her fingers she can see how light the twigs are, and how dark the branch is in the water.

  Paul flicks the flashlight on and off. He picks the bill up off the table, this morning you wanted to give that to me, he says, smoothing it out with his hand. There’s a face on the bill, dirty, crumpled and soft. Paul takes the longest twig and drills a hole in the face, then skewers the bill on the bare branch. One more paw, he says, and then.

  The lost shovel

  The left knee lifts, the right knee falls. The grass is trampled, the ground is soft. The muck skids off underfoot, the clunky boots chafe against the ankles. The laces are made of mud, twice torn and twice knotted between morning and noon. The socks are wet. The grime on the hands dries in the wind. The cap has fallen into the dirt.

  The cigarette gets grimier from hand to hand, the smoking is interrupted by orders—one cigarette lit four times and put out three times between morning and noon while thin flights of smoke pass from mouth to mouth. The last man flings away the butt, still glowing.

  At neck height the trench is deep enough. The light over the grass is as low as the tank in the forest, as the forehead over the eyes. And the day gets pulled into the ground somewhere between the forest and the hill.

  It’s evening, the soldiers watch from the corners of their eyes, the officer with the gold tooth gives an order and steps out to piss, he walks past the tank and then into the wood, three trees deep. The soldiers stop digging, they listen in silence for the officer’s stream to hit the ground. But the branches crack, and the crows squawk as they fly to their roosts. The crows feel the fog slowly draping the trees. Maybe they sense the snow up in the flat ridge, the snow of the days ahead. Snow that is coarse and dry and stays put. Snow so white that their black beaks are always open and freezing because they can’t find anything to eat except frozen corn.

  The men don’t hear the officer’s stream hitting the ground.

  The officer buttons his pants, pulls his cap down lower on his head, his scarf tighter around his neck. He picks up a withered branch and scrapes the dirt off his boots.

  * * *

  Fall in, count off, every voice is tired in its own way, every breath from every mouth is its own steamy animal. Two ranks, the tall and the short.

  Right shoulder, shovels, shouts the officer. He inspects the ranks. DOLGA where is your shovel. Ilie raises his hand to his cap, clicks one shoe against the other, Comrade Officer Sir, my shovel has disappeared. The officer raises his forefinger, his gold tooth is brighter than his face, find it, he says, or you’re not coming back to the unit. Right face, march, left right. The soldiers march up the hill alongside the tracks left by the tank. The hilltop swallows them from below, the sky from above.

  * * *

  Ilie no longer hears their lockstep, he searches the trench as they march alongside, the trench is darker than the ground. His hands ache from the shovel because it’s no longer pressing against them, because they are no longer digging, because his calluses are softening into skin and they burn. His shoes find nothing but grass and dirt, his eyes nothing but the hill. The hill has moved into the night, and the forest is a dark corner without trees.

  Behind that hill, thinks Ilie, is the flat plain. Perhaps at night it’s made of water, of smooth, level water, so that he might make his escape. He would be black like the riverbank and the place where he jumped wouldn’t see him and the water would carry him away. If I swim for a long time, he thinks, my eyes will get used to the night, they can lead me across many things, and once I have crossed everything there is to cross my hands will touch a different riverbank, a different country. But first I’ll have to take off these clunky boots, he thinks, before I get to the top of the hill. I’ll have to get rid of them before I jump, I can’t lose time untying laces on the riverbank. And when tomorrow comes, just as early and just as dreary as today did, to the sound of a command and a gold tooth that’s been awake for hours, tomorrow when the column follows the tank tracks up the hill, the boots will be there, and the trees will once again be in the forest and so will the crows.

  Meanwhile in a mailbox far away is a letter for Adina. Inside the letter is a picture of him, with a weak smile and no grass straw in his mouth.

  * * *

  By the time the column reaches the hilltop Ilie is afraid of stepping out of his own soles. The plain is black, but the ground isn’t made of water. He trudges alongside the tank ruts and is afraid of turning around to face himself. The trench has witnessed everything, and tomorrow the officer with the gold tooth will know, and that is treason. The officer’s mouth will scream, his tooth will glow. And the hilltop will stand there mute and no longer remember that it spent the night inside Ilie’s forehead, and that it was responsible for driving his see-through skull to thoughts of escape, all out of fear.

  * * *

  Now every step bores a hole in the stomach, every breath sticks a stone in the throat. Broken corn leaves scratch behind the knees, the grass comes up to the naked buttocks. Ilie has to take a shit. He raises his head and pushes. He tears a leaf off the stalk, a narrow, long corn leaf. The corn leaf breaks, his fingers stink. The cornfield stinks, and so does the forest. And the night and the moon that isn’t there stink as well.

  Ilie sobs and curses, mother of all soldiers and officers and tanks and trenches. And he curses, invoking the gods and everything the world has ever borne.

  His curses are cold. They are not for eating and not for sleeping. Only for blundering about and freezing, they climb up between the cornstalks and choke on themselves. They are for churning up and laying down flat, an instant of rage and a long time keeping still.

  Once a curse is lifted, it never existed.

  I can’t stand looking at the water when it’s so cold out

  I know what I know, Clara says out loud, the streetcar whooshes close to the barrier, Ilie is sensitive, she says. The bridge shudders, the trees push into the park. I knew he wouldn’t be able to withstand the fox, she says quietly, sinking her red fingernails into her hair, and I also know he won’t try to escape. The wind fans her hair out over her forehead. You don’t know that, says Adina, how can you know that. She sees Clara’s cheek, the sharp black corners of her eyes.

  Without the fishermen the river is just a stripe of water in the city, with its smelly, lazy gullet lurking midway between the reflection and the river bottom.

  Clara’s shoes clatter on the pavement. Adina stops but Clara doesn’t notice and takes another three steps, walking on the middle of the paving stones. Then she turns around and says to Adina, come on, I can’t stand looking at the water when it’s so cold out. Her hair is dark like the grassy weeds in the river. It’s the kind of cold that makes you naked, says Adina. Clara tugs Adina’s arm, I feel dizzy, she says. Then she takes a few steps down the footpath, away from the bank. Adina tosses a dried leaf into the water. But it’s not the river that’s making you nauseous, is it, she says. She watches the leaf get so wet an
d heavy the little waves can no longer move it along. Paul saw you in the hospital, she says.

  I know, says Clara, and I knew he’d tell you all about it, too. She sinks her red fingernails into her pocket and pushes her coat out to form a belly. I was pregnant, she says. The curved white wrists resurface, but not the fingernails. How did you manage an abortion, Adina asks. A wet leaf sticks to Clara’s thin heel, Pavel knows the doctor, she says.

  The grass in the park is frozen and matted down, it lies in thick empty clumps along the path. Even without their leaves the branches overhead are listening in.

  Clara picks up a grass straw, she doesn’t have to pull, it’s just lying there, unattached. The straw has snapped in the middle and doesn’t stay upright between her fingers. Adina turns around, but the cracking sound she hears is only a twig breaking under her shoe and not some stranger’s footstep. Is he a doctor, asks Adina, and Clara says, he’s a lawyer. Adina turns around, but the noise is only an acorn falling on the path and not some stranger’s footstep. Why didn’t you tell me, asks Adina. Clara pitches the grass straw, it’s too light to fly and lands on her shoe. Because he’s married, she says. They hear steps on the path and sand chafing against the stones, a woman walks by wheeling a bicycle with a sack slung across the handlebars. Why are you hiding him from me, asks Adina. Because he’s married, says Clara. The woman looks back. We rarely see each other, says Clara. How long have you known him, asks Adina.

  * * *

  Nine soldiers and one officer are standing outside the cinema. The officer hands out tickets. The soldiers compare seats and rows. The poster shows a laughing soldier and a closed railroad gate stretching from one cheek to the other. A blue sky is over the soldier’s cap, and under his face is the title of the film: THEY SHALL NOT PASS.

  Clara elbows Adina and points her chin at the soldiers, look at them, the way they’re standing there, she says. Adina’s eyes stray into the dark green yews, I see them, she said, Ilie isn’t with them.