by Herta Müller
I didn’t want to go on, but he wasn’t through. He looked at the clock and said: Hopefully there aren’t many people in the city who think they need those foreign TV stations. Once they get their aerials, that’ll be it.
I said: You’re a mean old man, and you’re jealous, even of me.
My father was out of breath and didn’t respond, he pulled his cap down over his left ear, so that it looked exactly as it had on me as a child at the plaque of honor. Only now he was doing it to himself. He looked at the clock and said: No point to any of this, I’m hungry.
Your father was bitter, I said, else he wouldn’t have been so pig-headed, but he wasn’t a danger to others. My father-in-law clawed his way up the ladder. He’ll never tell a living soul why he fell from grace, there are only rumors. But everybody remembers exactly how the Perfumed Commissar rode from house to house, tying his white horse in the shade of the trees and how he wrapped his whip around the horse’s mane. And that the horse was called Nonjus. My grandfather said the farmers were made to bring hay and buckets of fresh water. The white horse ate and drank, while its rider searched the houses for grain and gold. He had papers with the field plots carefully mapped and numbered. After each expropriation he’d go back to his horse and unwrap the colorful woven leather whipcord. There was a silken tassel at the end of the cord and the base of the haft had a screw-on cap made of horn. He’d open this to get his pen. Then he’d take a sheet of paper out of his jacket and cross off a number. Whenever he rode through the village, the dogs would chase after him, barking. They sensed that the man on the horse was putting an end to the peaceful ways of the village. He hated those mutts, he’d crack his whip and that would goad them even more. They were little creatures, like barking cats, but they would race like the wind alongside the horse’s hooves. Sometimes it took three, four, or even ten tries, but eventually the whip would catch them on the neck or between the ears. People would wait until late afternoon to remove the dogs from the street, when they knew he was finished riding for the day. The mutts lay stretched out stone dead, with their light-colored stomachs swelling up in the sun and their eyes and snouts covered in flies. First he rounded up the farmers with large holdings and turned them over to the security services, after that he went after the medium-sized farmers, then he moved on to the smallholders. He was a hard worker, after a while he was rounding up too many farmers, and ones who were too poor at that, so the gentlemen in the city sent whole groups of them back to the village on the next train.
One morning the white horse lay dead in the stable after eating poisoned bran. Day and night, local men were interrogated and beaten in the parish hall by two village ruffians who spelled each other in shifts. Three men were accused and arrested. All three are dead now, but none of them did it. One night the two thugs loaded the horse onto a trailer and hauled it off to be buried in the valley between the village and the town on the other side of the vineyards. My father-in-law accompanied them. He and one of the thugs sat on the trailer with a hurricane lamp perched next to the horse’s carcass. They had to drink brandy because the horse stank so much. The other thug was at the steering wheel, sober. They drove up into the hills. It had been raining heavily, the tractor got bogged down in the soft earth. The next day the driver told how the crickets, frogs, and other night creatures in the soggy grass were screaming like mad throughout the night, and the horse’s carcass stank to high heaven. The devil had us bagged up good and proper, he said. During the night, the great Communist started to rave. He stomped off aimlessly into the mud, sobbing and cursing. He kept throwing up, his eyes were practically popping out of his head, there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. When the grave had been dug and the horse had been unloaded from the tractor rig, he threw himself to the ground and flung his arms around the horse’s neck and refused to let go. The two thugs had to drag him into the driver’s cab and tie him to the seat. And there he sat as they drove back, tied up, filthy, covered in vomit, and completely silent. When the tractor was halfway home and they were again on top of a hill, the driver untied him and asked: How about a short break. He shook his head absently. The moon shone in his eyes, which were glowing blank as snow. As the tractor chugged on he began to pray. He stammered out one Lord’s Prayer after another, until the first of the village houses came into sight. To this day the people in the village are convinced that that burial was his undoing. The dandified Communist wasn’t the only one that night to feel the full measure of the fear that lies inside us all. Once the devil had them bagged up, his two hired thugs also heard the bell toll. The driver started going to church and would talk about what happened the night of the burial to anybody who’d listen. The Perfumed Commissar was transferred out of the district. The rumor that the driver not only buried the horse but had poisoned it as well never died down. The man disappeared for a while, and people in the village thought he had been arrested, as he deserved to be. But he showed up later on, and a few days after that he was missing his right hand. Since everyone in that village knew him he wanted to disappear, so he applied for the job of sexton in another village, and was taken on. There he told people he had lost his hand during the war. The hand itself turned up in the flour bin in his kitchen after he had moved away. For some years after the war, only cripples were taken on as sextons, so he had hacked off his own hand.
Paul was making coffee, water was hissing on the stove, and a blackbird flew up to the kitchen window, settled on the metal ledge, and pecked at its own shadow.
There used to be two of them, said Paul, but then one day I saw one lying near the front door covered with ants.
Paul stirred the coffee, the spoon clinked, I put my forefinger to my lips.
Shhh.
No, we can go on talking, it’ll fly away in a minute anyway.
But he laid down the spoon without a sound. On the table in front of my hands: the red coffee tin, the jam the color of egg yolk, and the white slices of bread. Outside the sheer wall of sky, the pale yellow beak and the feathers made of pitch. Everything was looking at everything else. Paul poured the coffee into the cups, the steam drifted up to his neck. I tapped the cup and pointed a hot finger to the window—the blackbird flew away, the coffee was still too hot.
The Perfumed Commissar, I said, was transferred to the nursery gardens, where he remained. But the effect of the white horse has not worn off, to this day he’s above being a foot soldier and hasn’t had to do a stroke of work. They couldn’t use him in a top managerial position or as a worker, so they made him a supervisor, and that’s what he’s remained. He learned the Latin plant names by heart till he could rattle them off fluently as prayers. On Sundays he would go for walks with his wife, daughter, and son, and later with me too. He’d break off a small stick—it had to be a straight one—strip the leaves, point it at some periwinkle growing by the path and say Vinca minor, and reel off everything he knew about the plant. Next to a bench he’d say Aruncus dioicus, and tell us everything he knew about goatsbeard. And on the next path Epimedium rubrum and plumbagum. His Hosta fortunei grew beside a hollow. You were expected to stop and listen. My husband told me he used to be even stricter. If he or his sister laughed, he wouldn’t speak to them for days. During my last summer with them, I was going to fetch some daisies from the back garden to put in a vase. I saw my father-in-law talking out loud to himself by the walnut tree, not only saying the words but using his hands and even stamping his feet. He was completely absorbed and didn’t notice me till I was right beside him. He realized I must have been watching him, gave an unembarrassed smile, and asked me what I should have asked him:
Has the sun given you a headache.
No, I was going to pick some daisies.
Are you really all right.
Yes, how about you.
How about me, my nose is still in the middle of my face, isn’t it.
So is mine, but you ask me all the same.
I can’t complain, he said.
I wondered whether there were t
wo versions of him—one close up and peaceful, the other far off and full of dead people murmuring. To chase them away he had to shake off his burden. In secret, if he could. Or if that wasn’t possible, then openly, but in terms designed to make people admire rather than pity him. And the best way to manage that was dancing. There were only the two of us at home, he and I. My husband and mother-in-law had gone into town on some errand that afternoon. I never did pick any more daisies, not for fear of him, but because I was afraid of the white daisies.
He worked in the garden but all the Latin names in the world couldn’t give him a green thumb; apart from grafting roses, he hadn’t learned a thing from working in the nursery. Two years ago they received an important order, a factory director had died and there was a big state funeral, the nursery was to furnish twenty wreaths as big as cartwheels. My father-in-law wanted to make an impression and use something special. So he prescribed tiger lilies and ferns instead of the traditional carnation and ivy wreaths. But what they unloaded from the car at the Heroes’ Cemetery was nothing but a lot of wilted brown stalks. Thirty years in the business and he didn’t even know that tiger lilies wilt within half an hour. He should have been sacked, but he had the chief engineer on his side. Twenty-eight years younger than he, she was well-built, fresh out of school, full of energy, and could run around nonstop and give orders better than he could. The working days were long, the sky warm, the summer green. As June turned to July and the foliage grew thick on the shrubs, my father-in-law started fondling the new chief engineer. She didn’t protest, either. There weren’t very many aphids or mites that year, so they had time for each other. Comrade Louse Inspector convinced the director of the funeral service that tiger lilies generally have a long life. She said that all the talk in specialist circles that summer was of a form of mildew from the south of France that attacked cemeteries, since graves aren’t sprayed out of respect for the dead. When freshly cut flowers come into contact with this mildew, they wither in no time at all, every last one of them. Exactly the same thing would have happened with carnations, she told the director. And he put his faith in her expertise, for his own, although he was about to retire, also barely extended beyond the difference between chamomiles and carnations.
I’d really like to know how many people from our apartment block, from the shops down below, from the factory, or from the whole city have ever been summoned. Albu’s office building must have something going on every day of the week, behind every door in the corridor. I can’t see the man with the briefcase who ran off to find his aspirin. Maybe the tram left without him, or maybe it was too full for him to get back on. He’ll just have to wait for the next one—if he has the time. A woman has sat down beside me, her behind is broader than the seat, what’s more she’s sitting with her legs astride a bag. Her thigh is rubbing against me, she rummages in her bag and pulls out a little cone made of newspaper. It’s soggy and full of blood-red bumps—cherries, of all things, cherries. She reaches in with one hand and spits the stones into the other. She doesn’t linger over each individual cherry, she doesn’t suck them clean, she leaves a little meat on every stone. What’s her rush, nobody’s going to swipe her cherries and gobble them up. I wonder if she’s ever been summoned for questioning, or whether she might be sometime in the future. Her hand is soon so full of cherry stones she can’t close her fingers. She can drop them inconspicuously on the floor, even spit them out for all I care. There are people standing in the aisle all the way up to the driver, it probably wouldn’t bother them, either. The driver won’t discover the stones until this evening, he’ll be annoyed because he has to sweep out the car, but there’ll be plenty of other things left over from the day’s run, too. What on earth was the old officer thinking of with Lilli. Cherry season comes every year and lasts from May through September, and it’ll be that way as long as the world exists, no matter what. How does that help him, there aren’t any cherries in prison. It’s good the car’s so crowded, I’ll have more than enough space when I get to Albu’s. And on the way back, if I do come home today. The trams don’t run so often in the evening. I’ll wait, climb on board along with a few others, and sit down in that awful yellow light. Maybe some of them will have a few cherries later on, a few after dessert, for instance. As far as I’m concerned, they can go right ahead.
It wasn’t until two days later that I went to my landlord. I paid him what I owed, two thousand lei. The skin on his hands was as thin as the skin on his face. I counted the notes right into the palm of his hand, and he pretended he was counting them in his head but in fact you could hear him whispering. One crumpled note fell on the floor, I picked it up but didn’t smooth it out. I put it back in his hand, upside down, and noticed that the landlord had a weak grip. The old man was even worse at taking than I had been at the flea market. What was he thinking about when he said:
Oh Lord, my hands are dirty from peeling potatoes, I’m making mashed potatoes today. Do you like mashed potatoes.
I’ve already eaten.
With schnitzel and salad.
At that moment I saw he had a wooden handle sticking out of his jacket pocket, it belonged to a knife. When I’d rung the bell, he’d slipped the potato knife in his pocket instead of leaving it in the kitchen. Either because he was expecting somebody and wanted to keep the knife handy or because he forgot he was holding it and only when he was about to open the door did he realize that a knife could alarm a visitor. I quickly handed him the money so I could be on my way. But then we struck a deal. He smiled and chirped and bought the refrigerator and carpets off me for a hundred more than I had paid him. He went back to the kitchen for the extra money. And when he returned with the additional hundred lei, the knife was still in his jacket, either because he’d forgotten it or wanted to keep it handy.
I’m moving in with a man and a motorcycle, I said.
The one from the flea market, he said.
You know him, I asked.
If it’s the same one.
Were you at the flea market too.
And at the game preserve, he said. I won’t look for a new tenant until winter, the room will be more expensive then. Not for you, if it doesn’t work out, you can come back.
Is that why you bought the carpets and the refrigerator.
I bought them because I needed to.
For a moment I thought he said: Because I needed you. I said:
I’ll be living in the leaning tower.
He knew where that was.
My first morning in the leaning tower, Paul and I talked and talked till the sun was at high noon. I was amazed at all the mothers and fathers we had to bring in just to explain where we were each coming from on our way to meeting the other. Handkerchiefs, strollers, baby carriages, peach trees, cuff links, ants—even dust and wind carried weight. It’s easy to talk about bad years if they are past. But when you have to say who you are right at this very moment, it’s hard to get more out than an uneasy silence.
That afternoon Paul went to the shop and bought himself a bottle of yellow-green buffalo-grass vodka. The sun was going west, the vodka was going straight to Paul’s head. An ant scurried across the kitchen table, Paul waved a match over it.
Where do the ants go, to the forest.
Where has the forest gone, into wood.
Where has the wood gone, into fire.
Where has the fire gone, into my heart.
Suddenly the match flared alight. It was black magic, because Paul was holding the box in his other hand under the table. The match curled up, the flame licked at his thumb. Paul blew, looked into the thread of smoke.
My heart has stopped,
and the ants keep going.
Paul wasn’t drunk, only tipsy. He was high, but it was more an external thing. Having ants go marching through your heart is no laughing matter as far as I’m concerned, but Paul laughed out loud so that even my tongue started to tickle. Paul’s light-headedness was contagious, back then there wasn’t any trace of darkness in the vodka
, and I wasn’t afraid of his drinking. Paul didn’t drink that much during the first six months—by the end of the evening half the blade of grass would still be wet. And during the first few weeks, when he came home from work he went straight out onto the balcony and his aerials: the sparks that fly when you’re welding and how quickly they fade. Where has the fire gone, I always saw the match and the ants in our hearts. Now and then Paul would whistle to himself, a song so out of tune it sounded more like grinding metal than music. Each week he’d finish a whole antler of an aerial—and then there were nearly enough for a Sunday at the flea market and a heap of money. But Paul never got the chance to sell them. Two young men came knocking at the door.
Black-marketeering, they said. And infiltration of the state through foreign TV channels.
Without asking, they packed all the tools and iron tubing into some sacks they’d brought along and carried them down on the elevator to a small truck that we could see from the kitchen window. They left the finished aerials out in the stairwell. Paul said:
Once you’ve got everything, close the door behind you.
He took the brandy into the kitchen and locked himself in. I sat leaning against the wall in the stairwell so as not to be in the way and watched the two men at work. They carried the aerials down the stairs, without taking the elevator, two at a time, one in each hand. A quick clatter of steps and then the echo, wary poachers with stolen antlers. They never left each other’s side, together they came and went three times. On their last trip one of them snorted with exertion, I saw his shirt was sticking to his back, and he said:
We have to.
Do your job, I said, just don’t tell me any stories.
I let them take away all the antlers, then they were gone and I had to pound on the kitchen door before Paul opened it. The brandy was gone and Paul was pacing back and forth between the main room and the balcony with more feet than he had, and shouted:
