by Herta Müller
The Chinese are crafty bastards. They export the good rubbers to America for the Chinese in New York’s Chinatown. The ones with the holes they send to us and the Bulgarians.
Each of the boxes was jammed with wads of cotton wool, and inside each was one glass eye. The pharmacist was arranging the eyes in a row along the bare wood of the windowsill: light brown, dark brown, green flecked, light blue, and dark blue. The light brown eyes would have been right for Paul; I counted them. Then I counted my own dark brown ones. There were more of Paul’s. Behind the window, in the deep red glow of the sun, the pharmacist started on her second row. She was sitting in an aquarium. I tapped on the window, she turned her head, brushed the hair from her forehead, and kept going. Her eyes were gray flecked with green.
The white sofa in the sky, the pharmacist in the aquarium, the linden seeds, Paul’s sandals like mittens on the young shoemaker’s hands, Mulberry Street lined with acacias—after the old shoemaker died everything seemed out of control. The wind might not have managed to scatter the crazy dahlia seeds, but it had sown a feeling of vertigo among the shoelaces and toothpaste, cigarettes and thumbtacks, headscarf and hat. And now blindness was being peddled on this red evening in the city, with glass eyes for everyone. But death comes knocking especially for those who think they can dance their fill of the world in order to be happy. Yes, that’s the way we’d like it: we’d wear the crown and have our fill of the world. But isn’t it the other way around, that the world has its fill of us, and not we of it.
Not that everybody is included in this us. Not everyone goes mad, just as not everyone gets summoned. Lilli wasn’t summoned, although for weeks after the first notes I was convinced she would be. I wanted to prepare her for the feeling you get at your first interrogation, the way the roof of your mouth rises up and glues itself onto your brain. That’s how it feels the second time as well, and every time after that, but in time you stop being frightened. Lilli wasn’t worried.
I’ve never even seen your notes.
As if that was a reason not to be summoned. As if those who know nothing except how fear can set your heart racing weren’t the easiest prey. With the roof of your mouth inside your brain you give yourself away. They’d probably questioned Nelu and the girls from the packing hall about me. Nelu hated me, and the girls didn’t know me well enough to care. I didn’t care about them, either, but the fact that their words froze in their throats the minute a door in the corridor was cracked open did not bode well.
Lilli was right, she was never summoned. That was lucky, even though she could have stood up for me. She couldn’t have stood up for herself. The only thing Lilli asked me about the interrogations was:
How old is your major.
What’s that supposed to mean—my major, I said, and I pretended he was ten years younger than he really was.
About forty.
Oh, heavens, said Lilli, once she had ruled him out for herself. I knew for a fact that Albu would have started feeling Lilli up the very first time. She would have gone along or turned him away, in either case he would have exacted some fearful revenge. A few days after that conversation, Lilli mentioned that her parents had had a fight. Her mother didn’t want to let her stepfather out of the house. The reason was a rendezvous, but not with a woman. It was about a newsstand in the park, where her stepfather was supposed to show up at five in the afternoon. Lilli’s mother said:
Today you’re staying home for once. I’ll call the switchboard and tell them you’re sick. With all the kids crawling around the city, you ought to put your foot down, let them find someone younger.
She blocked his way. Lilli’s stepfather took his wallet and shoved her aside:
Where’d you get that idea—put my foot down, and how pray tell am I going to do that. You act big at home all right, he shouted, but at the market you’re pretty quick to shove the melon at me to hold so that camel of a lieutenant can kiss your hand. And then you even say to him—imagine, the lady saying to the man—The honor’s mine. Here you come on so brave and courageous, but when someone like that shows up, you’re so scared you can’t even swallow your own spit. Better go take your heart pills instead.
I was wondering about the games that life plays, and on my way back from the shoemaker I went through all the possible ways of getting fed up with the world. The first and the best: don’t get summoned and don’t go mad, like most people. The second possibility: don’t get summoned, but do lose your mind, like the shoemaker’s wife and Frau Micu who lives downstairs by the main entrance. The third: do get summoned and do go mad, like the two women in the mental home. Or else the fourth: get summoned but don’t go mad, like Paul and myself. Not particularly good, but in our case the best option. A squashed plum was lying on the pavement, the wasps were eating their fill, the newly hatched ones as well as the older wasps. What must it be like when a whole family can fit on a single plum. The sun was being pulled out of the city into the fields. At first glance its makeup looked a little too garish, especially for the hour; at second glance it appeared to have been shot—red as a bed of poppies, Lilli’s officer had said. Yes, that’s the fifth possibility: to be very young, and unbelievably beautiful, and not insane, but dead. You don’t have to be named Lilli to be dead.
I carried the worn-out sandals back home. The red car was no longer parked on the sidewalk. Looking at the bare asphalt you couldn’t even tell it had been there, and the cigarette butts lying on the ground had no idea what had happened. Cats were rummaging through the garbage for something to eat before night revoked all territorial boundaries and strange cats with a green light in their eyes would show up and help themselves, before the wails of hunger and the howls of coupling became one. Compared with this summer evening, my face was cool. From the apartment block next door I heard a shattering of dishes: someone had dropped something. People were eating. The rising moon was half full, two faces were beginning to peek through—a goat’s and a dog’s. The moon would have to choose which face was better suited for this night, time was pressing. Flowers were flowing out of window boxes on the second story. A whirligig was spinning and whirring in the petunias, by the time the moon chose its face they would have been given water for growing. I’d done a lot that day, and despite the failures I had managed to hit upon the best option for Paul and me:
Neither one of us will go mad.
My ass-backward happiness was banging at my temples, demanding to get in, I wasn’t the dumbest woman in the world. The shops had already closed, and there was a light on in our kitchen window. Paul would be waiting with two pairs of new shoes, ready to ask which he should wear and which he should put in his tool cabinet. He should wear whichever pair looks better. Of course he might pick the ones I think are uglier, he doesn’t always see what I see, just like with the photo of Lilli. It’s the only picture I have of her, and I confess I look at it often. I look at it and talk about her beauty, everyone agrees on that, but Paul frowns.
What is it about her that’s supposed to have been so beautiful, I prefer you, and I’m not just saying that. The most beautiful thing about her is that you liked her so much.
It’s hard to keep a straight face when he says that, and I’ve often had to say:
Paul, you have a good heart but bad taste.
Nevertheless, that night, while Paul was trying on his shoes, I intended to tell him about the glass eyes in the pharmacy window and about the option of not going mad, and most of all that I was not the dumbest woman in the world.
A motorcycle was parked outside our apartment house. The mirror and headlight had been torn off it, the seat had been slashed and the handlebars and pedals bent out of shape. It was Paul’s red Java, I felt the goose bumps break out on my scalp. As I was waiting for the elevator I felt as though I’d left my body and been parceled out among the mailboxes fixed to the wall. But the mailboxes stayed on the wall when the elevator door opened, and it was I who got in, the dumbest woman in the world.
As Paul was riding back f
rom the shop, a gray truck had pulled up behind him, it never left his rearview mirror. Paul pulled over to let it pass. There wasn’t much traffic. He was driving quite slowly, the truck pulled up close to him, so close on the roundabout that it seemed the driver wanted to ram right into the Java. Then the motorbike flew up, and Paul went hurtling through the air, without his bike, and then came falling down like deadwood from a tree. When he dared open his eyes, he saw grass and heard voices. He looked around and saw shoes, pants, skirts, and, very high up, faces. Paul asked:
Where’s the bike.
It was lying by the curb.
Where’s the truck.
No one had seen it.
Where are my shoes.
On your feet, said an old man in shorts.
The ones that were in the bag on the handlebars, where are they.
Good God Almighty, said the old man, it’s a miracle you still have all your teeth, and now you want shoes. You have a guardian angel, isn’t that enough for you.
My guardian angel’s driving that gray truck, said Paul, where did it go.
What truck. You better stop speeding around on that thing.
The legs sticking out of the short pants were like marble, heavily veined and hairless. When the crowd that had gathered saw that Paul still had all his teeth and was coherent, it dispersed. The old man helped him to get up and stand the motorbike upright. Then he handed Paul his handkerchief:
At least wipe the blood off your chin.
Did you see the gray truck, asked Paul.
I saw several.
Did you catch the number.
Fate doesn’t have a number.
But trucks do.
Stick with fate, said the old man, otherwise your guardian angel might take offense.
Meanwhile Paul had wiped the blood from his chin with the freshly ironed handkerchief.
Now Paul was lying on the bed in the dark room. After describing the accident he asked me:
Are you supposed to return a dirty handkerchief, or do you keep it.
I shrugged. The more Paul talked about the old man, the less I thought his presence there was just coincidence. After Paul had sidetracked the conversation into handkerchief etiquette, he took a second detour.
The fact that somebody stole another pair of shoes from me bothers me more than the accident.
I looked out the window, the street lay far below, silent, deserted, and the moon had chosen the goat’s face. If the moon hadn’t made a mistake, the face would last for the night. Halfway out of the window, I said:
The last time I was summoned, Albu smiled a little as he was kissing my hand: You and your husband drive down to the river quite often, don’t you, and accidents do happen on the roads.
The goat’s face was lurking overhead, and the sky was swirling by, and when I stopped looking outside the whole room was reeling. Maybe people are right to keep asking if I’m not afraid the leaning tower might collapse.
Paul had turned the light on:
How come you didn’t tell me this before.
Because I didn’t believe it. Albu was just casting about and settled on an accident. Bloodshot eyes, wrinkled gums, cold hands had all served their turn. Or so I thought.
Outside the night was black and inside it was light, we’d been talking in the dark so long we hadn’t even looked at the wounds on Paul’s forehead, chin, wrists, knees, and elbows. They were caked with dirt and dried blood. I got some cotton wool and alcohol from the bathroom. I wanted to put my arms around Paul but didn’t dare, his scrapes would have hurt even more, on the outside, and nothing would have helped on the inside. He ran his fingers through his hair and then screwed up his face as if even that hurt.
Leave me alone, he said.
Paul dabbed quickly and firmly at the wounds on his knees, elbows, and knuckles. The stinging brought tears to his eyes, he wiped them with the inside of his arm, just before the tears clouded his vision completely. He let me dab at his forehead and chin, because he didn’t want to look in the mirror. My dabs were different, more hesitant, he gave a pained laugh, and in the end I said:
What are you trying to prove. If something hurts you should scream.
And he did scream, though what he really said was:
Take a good look at my face and you’ll see exactly what you’ve been keeping from me.
He grabbed me by the throat and squeezed like a pair of pliers. And I did what he wanted me to do, I stared right at him, my eyes bulging. The wound I had cleaned on his chin was gleaming raw, it stuck in my eye like a spat-out mouthful of watermelon. But then I saw my first husband’s suitcase standing on the bridge. At that point I could have said, should have said, should have been able to say:
Nobody’s ever going to treat me like that again, in the hatred born of love, do you understand, never again, as long as I live. Instead of which I pulled his hands away from my neck. Once you start backing down, you end up with your head over the railing. Hopefully I won’t have to go through the same thing all over. Hopefully I won’t ever feel as contemptible in Paul’s eyes as my first husband had felt in mine.
Beginning tomorrow we’ll travel by bus and tram, said Paul. The jokers will have a harder time of it.
He stumbled into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, closed, there was a glugging sound as Paul drank out of a bottle, I hoped it wasn’t brandy, but it certainly wasn’t water. A glass came clinking out of a shelf and landed on the table. I heard it being filled, it wasn’t one of the big ones. He drank noisily, and I waited. The glass didn’t return to the table, nor was a chair pulled out for sitting. Paul was standing in the kitchen, holding the glass in one of his grazed hands. And if the moon had wandered over there, the face of the goat would be looking helplessly at him, and his wounded face would be looking back.
Perched on the door frame was a mosquito, standing out in the light like a brooch. It was off its guard, I could have killed it. As soon as we turned out the light it would sing and feed until it was all fed up. This was a lucky night; it didn’t even have to bite, it could simply suck up the blood with its proboscis. Unfortunately it had a discerning nose, it would prefer me, Paul’s blood probably reeked too much of brandy for its taste.
There was something fishy about that old man with the handkerchief, Paul shouted from the kitchen. He’s probably laughing himself shitless. I was happy just to be alive, I didn’t catch on, I barely understood what was happening.
The brandy, or the goat’s face, had taken the shock out of Paul, but the mosquito hadn’t done the same for me. I asked:
Can you see the moon through the kitchen window.
The next morning the sun came groping into our bed, two insect bites were itching on my arm, and one on my forehead and one on my cheek. The night before, Paul had been drugged asleep by the brandy, and I had been dragged asleep by a weariness that was faster than the mosquito. I had stopped asking myself questions before going to sleep, questions about how to get through the days, since I didn’t know the answer. What I did know was that questions like that could make you forget how to sleep. The first week after the business with the notes, when I was summoned for three days in a row, I couldn’t sleep a wink. My nerves were razor wire. My body shed weight, it was nothing but taut skin and hollow bones. When I was running around town I had to be careful that I didn’t just turn into smoke and leave my body, the way my breath did in winter, or that I didn’t swallow myself when I yawned. The frozen waste inside me was gaping far wider than I could open my mouth. I began to feel I was being swept along by something lighter than myself, I even began to take pleasure in the sensation, the more numb I grew within. On the other hand, I was afraid that all the specters would come to seem even more attractive, and that I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them or help myself get back. On the third day, as I was heading home from Albu, I found myself walking to the park. I lay with my face in the grass, unable to feel a thing. I couldn’t have cared less if I’d been lying below the grass, dead, I would
have welcomed it, and at the same time I liked living so damned much. I wanted to have a good cry and instead wound up laughing myself silly. Good thing the earth sounds so dull and hollow, I laughed until I was tired. When I stood up I was feeling more vain than I had been for a long time: I fixed my dress, tidied my hair, looked to see whether there were any blades of grass stuck in my shoes, whether my hands had turned green and my fingernails dirty. Only then did I leave the park, stepping from a green room onto the sidewalk. At that moment I heard something rustling in my left ear, a beetle had crawled inside. The buzzing was loud and clear, my whole head was echoing with the sound of stilts clattering in an empty hall.
I was right, the mosquito preferred me, and I had yielded, since it was imperative for Paul and me not to bother each other. I should have told the mosquito not to bite my face. In the light of day the scabs on Paul’s forehead and chin looked like a clogged sieve, where you couldn’t tell what was supposed to stay in and what should pass through.
My cuts were burning last night, Paul said, my mouth was all dried out, I had to keep going to the window so as not to suffocate.
He rubbed his eyes. Traffic could be heard in the street with the shops, soon bottles had started clinking. I crossed to the window: a delivery truck had pulled up out back, and the red car was parked on the sidewalk in the same place as yesterday, only no one was inside. It was just sitting there in the sun, completely empty. To ask what it was doing there would have been as senseless as asking the same thing of the trees, the clouds, or the rooftops. I was just about ready to accept the idea that the unoccupied car should simply be where it was. Up here in the flat Paul’s steps were making the floor creak, while down below on the sidewalk a woman walked into her own shadow. The summer clouds were bright and high, or, rather, soft and close, while Paul and I seemed as if we’d been stored on the wrong shelf, too tired, placed too high off the ground. Neither of us really wanted to stave off defeat—I don’t even think Paul did. Our misfortune went on and on, weighing us down. Happiness had become a liability, and my ass-backward luck a kind of trap. If we tried to protect each other, it would come to nothing. Just as when Paul joined me at the window and I ran the tip of my finger across his chin to keep him from sticking his head out. He sensed the restraint in my affection and leaned outside: he saw the red car. Tenderness has its own meshes, whenever I attempt to spin threads like a spider I get stuck in my own web, in so many little lumpy balls. I yielded the window to Paul, he didn’t think the unoccupied red car was worth more than a passing curse. But then he went downstairs in his slippers, without saying a word, and hauled the Java up in the elevator. We dragged the motorcycle into the apartment. And two days later, on Sunday, Paul pushed it along Mulberry Street to the flea market.
