by Herta Müller
Ever since I began leaving my good fortune at home, the kiss on my hand doesn’t paralyze me as much as it used to. I crook up my finger joints so that my knuckles keep Albu from speaking. Paul and I have rehearsed this kiss. In order to approximate the importance of the signet ring on Albu’s middle finger, to see how it affects the finger-squeeze, I made a ring out of a strip of rubber and a coat button. We took turns wearing it, and we laughed so much we completely forgot why we were going through the exercise in the first place. I learned not to crook my hand up all at once but gradually. That way the knuckles can block his gums and keep him from speaking. Sometimes when Albu is kissing my hand, I think of my rehearsal with Paul. Then the pain at my fingernails and the slobber on my hand aren’t so humiliating. You learn as you go, but I can’t show that I’m learning, and whatever happens I cannot laugh.
If you’re walking or driving around the leaning tower, where Paul and I live, you can’t really keep more than the entranceway and the lower stories under surveillance. From the sixth floor up the flats are too high, so that you’d need sophisticated technology to see anything in detail. What’s more, about halfway up the building, the façade angles out toward the front. If you stare up at it long enough you’ll feel your eyes rolling back into your forehead. I’ve tried it often; your neck grows tired. The leaning tower has looked like that for twelve years now, says Paul, from the day it was built. Whenever I want to explain where I live, all I have to do is say: In the leaning tower. Everyone in the city knows where it is. They ask:
Aren’t you afraid it might collapse.
I’m not afraid, I say, it was built with reinforced concrete. Whenever I refer to the tower, people look down at the floor, as if looking at me might make them dizzy, so I say:
Everything else in this city will collapse first.
At that they nod, to relax the veins that are twitching in their necks.
The fact that our flat is high up is an advantage for us, but it also has the disadvantage that Paul and I can’t see exactly what’s going on down below. From the seventh floor you can’t make out anything smaller than a suitcase, and when do you see anyone carrying a suitcase. Individual items of clothing blur into big splotches of color, and faces turn into little pale patches between the hair and the clothes. You could guess at what the nose, eyes, or teeth inside those patches might look like, but why bother. Old people and children can be recognized by the way they walk. There are dumpsters located on the grass between our building and the shops, with a walkway running alongside them. Two narrow footpaths leave the paved sidewalk and circle around the group of bins, without quite meeting. From up here the bins look like ransacked cupboards with the doors torn off. Once a month someone sets them on fire, the smoke rises and the garbage is consumed. If your windows aren’t shut, your eyes start stinging and your throat gets sore. Most things happen outside the entrances to the shops, but unfortunately all we can see are the rear service doors. No matter how often we count them, we can never match up the twenty-seven doors in back with the eight front doors belonging to the grocer, the bread shop, the greengrocer, the pharmacy, the bar, the shoemaker, the hairdresser, and the kindergarten. The whole rear wall is riddled with doors; nevertheless, the delivery trucks stop mostly in the street, out front.
The old shoemaker was complaining he had too little room and too many rats. His shop consists of a workbench enclosed in a small space that is partitioned from the rest of the room by a makeshift wall of wooden planks. The man I took over from was the one who fixed the place up, the shoemaker said. Back then the building was new. The space was boarded off then too, but he couldn’t think of anything to do with all those planks, or maybe he just didn’t want to; anyway, he didn’t use them at all. I knocked in a few nails and ever since I’ve been hanging the shoes up by their laces, thongs, or heels, they don’t get gnawed on anymore. I can’t have the rats eating everything—after all, I have to pay for the damage. Especially in winter, when they’re hungrier. Behind those planks there’s a great big hall. Once, back in the early days, during a holiday, I came down to the shop, loosened two of the boards behind the bench, and squeezed through with a flashlight. There’s nowhere you can put your feet, the whole floor skitters and squeaks, he said, it’s full of rats’ nests. Rats don’t need a door, you know, they just tunnel through the ground. The walls are covered with electrical sockets, and the back wall has four doors leading out to the bins. But you can’t budge them so much as an inch to drive the rats out even for a couple hours. The door to my workplace is just a cheap piece of tin—in fact, more than half the doors in back of the shops aren’t doors at all, they’re just tin plates they built into the wall to save on concrete. The sockets are probably there in case of war. There’ll always be war all right, he laughed, but not here. The Russians’ve got us where they want us with treaties, they won’t be showing up here. Whatever they need, they’ve shipped off to Moscow: they eat our grain and our meat and leave us to go hungry and fight over the shortages. Who’d want to conquer us, all it would do is cost them money. Every country on earth is happy not to have us, even the Russians.
The driver returns, eating a crescent roll, in no particular hurry. His shirt has slipped back outside his trousers, as if he’d been driving the whole time. His cheeks are stuffed with food, he runs his hand through his hair, clutching a half-eaten roll and making more of a face than the effort of chewing calls for. Now he tidies up on the step up to the car, although not for us. For us he puts on a grouchy face so no one in the tram will dare utter a word. He climbs in, his other hand holding a second roll, while a third is poking out of his shirt pocket. Slowly the tram starts moving. The father with the boy has taken his legs out of the aisle and stretched them between the seats. His son is licking the pane, but instead of pulling the boy away, the man is holding the little one’s neck so his little bright-red tongue can reach the window. The boy turns his head, stares, grabs his father’s ear, and babbles. The father doesn’t bother to wipe the dribble off the boy’s chin. Maybe he’s actually listening. But his thoughts are clearly elsewhere as he stares out through the saliva smeared on the windowpane, as if it were perfectly normal for windows to drool. The hair at the back of his head is shorn close, like on a pelt. Running through it is the bald line of a scar.
For a whole week, when summer came and people began running around in short sleeves, Paul and I were suspicious of a man who to this day walks over from the shops every morning at ten to eight, empty-handed. Every day he steps off the paved sidewalk and follows the paths around the dumpsters and then steps back on the sidewalk and returns to the shops. At one point Paul couldn’t stand it any longer, he stuffed some paper in a plastic bag and set out to follow the man. He didn’t come back until lunch, equipped with a long white loaf of the kind you can carry under your arm. With that he headed for the street the next morning at a quarter past seven, and at ten to eight, after the man had completed his circuit of the dumpsters, Paul returned with the same loaf of bread, now broken in two. Evidently the man is about forty, wears a cross on a gold chain, has an anchor tattooed on one inner arm and the name Ana on the other. He lives in a bright-green row house on Mulberry Street and every morning, before he makes his circuit of the dumpsters, he drops off a blubbering boy at the kindergarten. There’s no reason for him to pass by our tower on his way home from the kindergarten, unless he just wants a change of pace. Though it’s hardly a change if you take the same detour every single day. Paul says:
The man walks by the trash cans because they’re near a bar he just passed that’s nagging at him. The brandy-like smell of fermenting garbage somehow eases his guilty conscience, so he does an about-face and orders his first brandy of the day in the bar. The rest of the glasses follow automatically. Around nine o’clock he’s joined by another man wearing a short-sleeved brown summer suit, who only drinks two cups of coffee but stays at the man’s table until five to twelve, when it’s time to pick up the child. The boy is still crying at noon,
when he sees the man waiting for him.
To my nose the trash cans don’t stink of brandy, but drinkers may have a different sense of smell. Still, why does the man insist on craning his neck and looking up while he’s making his rounds down there. And who is that person who keeps him company in the bar. I suspect Paul has himself in mind when he says that the man is lifting his head up to heaven as he heads home, in order to stave off the guilt he feels at hitting the booze. And why does the child cry when he sees him, maybe he doesn’t belong to the man at all. Paul has no idea but says:
Who’d borrow a kid.
Obviously Paul never does the shopping, or else he’d know that people really do borrow children to get larger rations of meat, milk, and bread in the shops.
Why does Paul say this drinker goes to such and such a place every morning when in fact he only followed the man for one morning and part of an afternoon. It could all be coincidence rather than habit. Albu is trained to notice such things. At varying intervals, and just to confuse me, he asks the same thing at least three times before he’s satisfied with the answer. Only then does he say:
You see, things are getting connected.
Paul says I should follow the alcoholic myself if I’m not satisfied with his report. But I’d rather not. A bag in your hand and a loaf under your arm doesn’t make you invisible; it could easily give you away.
I no longer stand beside our window at ten to eight, although every morning it occurs to me that the man is walking around down there, craning his neck. Nor do I say anything anymore, because Paul digs in so, insisting he’s right, as if he needs this drinker in his life more than he needs me. As if our life would be easier if the man caught between his child and his drink were simply a tormented father.
That may all be true, I say, but he still might be doing a little spying on the side.
Now the driver has scratched the salt off his second crescent roll. The coarse grains burn your tongue and ruin the enamel on your teeth. And salt makes you thirsty, maybe he doesn’t want to be drinking water all the time, because he can’t go to the toilet while he’s on duty, and because the more you drink the more you sweat. My grandfather told me that in the camp they used salt from evaporated water to clean their teeth. They would take it in their mouth and rub it over their teeth with the tip of their tongue. But that salt was as fine as dust. After the driver finished his first roll he swigged something from a bottle. Water, I hope.
A truck full of sheep crosses the intersection. The sheep are crammed in so tight they can’t fall over no matter how bumpy the ride. No heads, no bellies, just black and white wool. Only when we take the turn do I notice a dog’s head in their midst. And a man in a small green climbing cap, the kind that shepherds wear, sitting in the cab, next to the driver. They’re probably moving the flock to a new pasture—you don’t need a dog at the slaughterhouse.
Some things aren’t bad until you start talking about them. I’ve learned how to hold my tongue before it gets me into trouble, but usually it’s already too late, because sooner or later I always want to have my say. Whenever Paul and I don’t understand something that troubles other people, we start to quarrel. Things quickly escalate until they get out of hand, and every salvo calls for an even more thunderous one in return. I think we see in that alcoholic man the things that most torment us, and these things are different for each of us, despite our common love. Evidently drinking troubles Paul more than my being summoned. He drinks the most whenever I’m summoned, and on those days especially I have no right to reproach him for his drinking, even though his being drunk troubles me more than . . .
My first husband also had a tattoo. He returned home from the army with a rose threaded through a heart inked on his chest. My name beneath the stem. But I left him nevertheless.
Why in the world have you gone and ruined your skin. The only place that rosy heart might possibly look right is on your gravestone.
Because the days were long and I was thinking of you, he explained, and everybody else was getting one. Apart from the chickenhearts. We had our share of those, just like anywhere else.
I didn’t leave him for some other man, as he suspected, I just wanted to leave him. He wanted an itemized list of the reasons why. I couldn’t spell out a single one.
Are you disappointed in me, he asked. Or have I changed.
No, we were both exactly the same as when we met. Love can’t go on just running in place, but that’s what our love had been doing for two and a half years. He looked at me, and when I said nothing, he declared:
You’re one of those who needs a good beating now and then, only I wasn’t up to giving it to you.
He meant it, since he knew he could never raise a hand against me. I believed it too. Up to that day on the bridge he wasn’t even capable of slamming a door in anger.
It was already half past seven in the evening. He asked me to dash out with him to buy a suitcase before the shops closed. He was planning to leave the next day for a two-week trip to the mountains. He expected me to miss him. But two weeks is nothing. Even our two and a half years weren’t much.
We left the store and walked through the city in silence. He was carrying the new suitcase. The shop had been about to close and the salesgirl hadn’t cleaned out the case, it was stuffed full of paper and had a price tag dangling from the handle. The previous day there had been a downpour, the high, silty water was tearing at the willows along the river. Halfway across the bridge he stopped and squeezed my arm. He was kneading my flesh so hard, down to the bone, that I shuddered, and he said:
Look at all that water. If I come back from the mountains and find you’ve left me, I’ll jump right in.
The suitcase was suspended between us; behind him I could see water, and branches, and muddy scum. I yelled:
You can jump right now, with me watching. Then you won’t have to bother going to the mountains.
I took a deep breath and lowered my head. It wasn’t my fault if he thought I wanted a kiss. He parted his lips, but I repeated:
Go on and jump. I’ll take full responsibility.
Then I jerked my arm away so both his hands were free and he could jump. I was numb with the fear that he’d actually do it. Then I walked on, taking short steps, without looking back, so he wouldn’t have to feel awkward, and so I’d be far enough away from the body. I’d nearly reached the far side of the bridge when he came panting after me and shoved me up against the railing, crushing my belly. He grabbed me by the back of my neck and forced my head down toward the water as far as his arm would let him. The whole weight of my body was hanging over the railing, my feet were off the ground, he kept his knees clamped tight around my calves. I shut my eyes and waited for a final word before I plummeted. He kept it short and said:
All right.
Who can say why instead of loosening his knees to let me drop he relaxed his grip on my neck, lowered me to the ground, and took a step away. I opened my eyes and slowly they rolled back down from my forehead and into my face. The sky hung there reddish blue, no longer firmly anchored, and the river was spooling brown eddies of water. I started to run before he registered that I was still alive. I never wanted to stop again. The terror came jolting up into my mouth, giving me the hiccups. A man wheeled his bike past me, ringing the bell, and called out:
Hey, sweetie, keep your mouth closed or else your heart’ll catch a chill.
Reeling, I stopped in my tracks, my legs shaking, my hands heavy. I was burning and freezing and hadn’t run far at all, just a short distance, but I felt as though I’d raced halfway around the globe. I could still feel his viselike grip cutting into my neck. The man wheeled his bike into the park, the tires left long ripples snaking through the sand behind him, the tarmac ahead was completely deserted. The park was a sheer wall of blackish green, the sky clutching at the trees. The bridge made me horribly anxious and I couldn’t help looking back. And there stood the suitcase, right in the middle of the bridge, exactly where it had been left. A
nd he was standing right on the spot where I had run away from death, his face turned to the water. Between hiccups I could hear him whistling. Very melodically, without missing a beat, a tune he had learned from me. My hiccups vanished, frozen between one wave of terror and the next. I raised a hand to my throat and felt my larynx bobbing. Everything happened in a twinkling, the time it takes for one person to assault another. And there he stood on the bridge, whistling
O the tree has its leaves,
the tea has its water,
money has its paper,
and my heart has snow that’s fallen astray.
Now I think it was a lucky thing that he grabbed me by the neck. That way no one could accuse me of provoking him. But he came very close to committing murder. All because he wasn’t up to giving me a good beating, and because he despised himself for that.
