by Herta Müller
Liviu visits the city three times a year. He doesn’t feel at home in Paul’s apartment, where he lived for some time, or in the city where he lived for a long time. In the morning he asks for brandy and calls it PLUM MILK.
When Liviu visits, Paul says that he moves like a trapped dog inside the apartment and like a runaway dog when he’s out in town. And that Liviu is hanging by a thread, and that this thread is about to snap, and that Liviu knows it and so he talks and talks until his voice is hoarse.
Liviu tells Paul and Adina about the nights in his village, where only two corners are lit—at the houses of the mayor and the policeman. Two yards, two sets of steps, two gardens where even the foliage is guarded by light. Singled out and quiet. Everything else is buried in darkness. The dogs run off into the night and bark only in places where the bulbs have long burned out, where the trees lead the houses toward the Danube as they lean out over the water.
You can’t see the water, says Liviu, and you don’t hear it in the village. You only hear it in the middle of your head, but the pressure’s so strong you can’t feel your feet. As though you could drown right there on dry ground, he says, right inside your own ears.
Every now and then you hear shots in the distance, Liviu explains. No louder than a cracking branch. Only different, very different. When that happens the dogs go quiet for a moment and then start barking even louder. That means someone was trying to swim upriver during the night and cross the Danube where it forms the border. On his own. When you hear that sound you know it’s all over. He stares at the edge of the table, presses one hand against the back of the chair and closes his eyes for a moment. So I drink, says Liviu. The plum milk burns, my eyes jitter so the lightbulb starts to float, or the candle when there’s no electricity. I keep drinking until I forget the shots, says Liviu. Until the plum milk makes my legs go wavy. And I keep forgetting, he says, until there’s nothing more to think about, until there’s absolutely no escaping the fact that the Danube has cut off the village from the rest of the world.
Out in the country you’re a boy from the city, and here in town you’re a peasant, says Paul. You ought to come back. The city knows who we are, you and I, out there you have thousands of village policemen guarding just a few hundred strips of asphalt.
Paul starts singing and Liviu hums along:
Face without face
Forehead of sand
Voice without voice
What could I trade with you
One call a brother
For a single cigarette
Liviu climbs onto the chair and swats the hanging lampshade with his hand. The cord swings back and forth. Along with its shadow.
My only thought is this
What could I sell to you
My coat is old and rumpled
With just one button left
Paul’s eyes are half closed and Liviu’s have swum out of his head with all the singing. But maybe they aren’t his eyes at all—perhaps it’s just his mouth that’s so wet.
Night comes and sews a sack
Sews a sack of darkness
Liviu catches the lampshade with his hand. He stops singing, and Paul bangs more loudly on the table.
Stepmothergrass has bitter blades
The freight train whistles at the station
Little child where are your parents
Sitting on the asphalt is a barefoot shoe
* * *
Paul looks out the window at the antennas of the neighboring apartment block. He stands up and shoves his chair to the table. Then he glances up at Liviu, who laughs without making a sound. Too bad lamp cords don’t just hang down from the sky, Liviu says into the silence, because then anyone could go outside and hang himself wherever he wanted.
Don’t look at me like that, Liviu says to Paul. The sentence drops right into Paul’s face. Paul leaves the room, Liviu climbs off the chair. When he’s back on the floor he says to Adina as well as to himself, if you ask me Paul isn’t much of a doctor.
Paul sits alone in the kitchen, talking to himself but loud enough so the others can hear. Tonight, he says, a couple came to the hospital. The man had a small hatchet stuck in his head. The handle was on top and looked like it was growing out of his hair. There wasn’t a drop of blood to be seen. The doctors gathered around the man. The woman said it happened a week ago. The man laughed and said he felt good. One female doctor said all we can do is cut off the handle, the blade can’t be removed because the brain has gotten used to it. The doctors went ahead and removed the blade. And the man died.
Adina and Liviu briefly exchange glances.
* * *
The carrots on the table are wooden, the onions stunted. The tinsmith is standing behind a pile of nuts. But he isn’t wearing his leather apron and there isn’t any string around his neck, his wedding ring is on his finger. He sticks his hand into the nuts, they rattle like gravel. Neither hand is missing a finger. The man with the nuts is not the tinsmith with the fruit in the newspaper cones. The man with the nuts doesn’t say, eat slowly so you can savor every bite for a long time.
But he could be.
The man has the tinsmith’s eyes, he looks at the scale, the bird head weights go up and down. The beaks come to a stop and the eyes know the price. Adina opens her bag, the nuts tumble inside. Two fall to the ground. Adina bends over.
A man with a reddish-blue flecked tie beats her to it. Adina bumps against his shoulder, he’s already picked up the nuts that rolled away. Adina notices a birthmark on his neck, as big as the tip of her finger. The man tosses both nuts into her bag, evidently they didn’t want to stay with you, he says, you know there’s a reason people say DUMB NUT, can I have one. She nods. He reaches into her bag and takes two. He closes his hand and squeezes one against the other as he walks alongside her. The shell cracks, he opens his hand. One nut is whole, the other broken. Adina looks at the white brain in his palm. The man drops pieces of shell onto the ground and eats the nutmeat. His birthmark hops, his forehead glistens, he sticks the other nut in his jacket pocket. What’s your name, he asks. A milky residue is on his teeth, the nuts rattle in her bag with every step. Adina clutches the bag under her arm, what does that have to do with nuts, she says. What are we going to do now, he says. Nothing, says Adina.
She turns and walks away from him.
* * *
Pavel stands by the left side entrance to the market hall and watches Adina leave, the light twists strings of dust before his eyes. His cheeks move, his tongue uncovers chewed bits of nut lodged between his teeth, his birthmark has stopped hopping. He takes the remaining nut out of his pocket and lays it on the asphalt. He places the edge of his heel right over the shell. Then he steps on the nut with all his weight. And the shell cracks. Pavel bends over, picks the brain out of the shell, then chews and swallows.
* * *
Parked outside the right entrance to the market hall is a black car with a yellow license plate. The number on the plate is low—a number of privilege. The man in the car is resting his head on the steering wheel and staring absently into the market hall. He watches an old woman. The concrete table cuts her stomach off from her legs. The old woman is sifting red paprika, which trickles out of the sieve like red spiderwebs, always landing in the same place. The mountain under the sieve grows quickly.
The young lady isn’t exactly approachable, says Pavel. Doesn’t matter, says the man in the car, that doesn’t matter. The old woman knocks on the sieve. She smooths down the mountain peak, her hands are as red as the paprika. And her shoes.
Pavel’s tongue searches for the bits of nut stuck in his teeth, get in, says the man in the car, we’re leaving.
* * *
The sun is resting on the mailboxes in the stairwell. The rambling roses cast shadows on the wall. Their flowers are small and grow in tight clumps.
The eye of the mailbox is not black and empty, it is white. A white mailbox eye is a letter from a soldier, a letter from Ilie. But Adina’s name isn’t o
n the envelope, just like it wasn’t there the week before. Once again there is no stamp, no postmark, no sender. And once again inside the envelope is a torn piece of graph paper the size of a hand, with the same sentence in the same writing: I FUCK YOU IN THE MOUTH.
Adina crumples the envelope together with the note and feels dry paper sticking in her throat. The elevator is dark, no glowing green eye means no electricity. The stairwell smells of boiled cabbage. The nuts rattle as she walks. In the darkness Adina starts to count out loud, instead of the stairs she counts her left shoe and then her right. Each shoe raises and lowers itself, without her doing anything. Until every number is nothing more than her voice.
* * *
The bag with the nuts is on the kitchen table, the crumpled paper is on the nuts, next to the bag is an empty bowl. The drawer is half open, knife fork knife fork fork fork, together the tines make up a comb. Adina opens the drawer all the way, large knives and among them the hammer.
Her hand sets a nut on the table and the hammer hits it lightly. The nut has a crack, three firm blows and the shell breaks apart. And the brain inside the shell.
Cockroaches crawl over the stove. Seven reddish-brown large ones, four dark brown medium ones, nine small black ones the size of apple seeds. They don’t crawl, they march. A soldier’s summer for Ilie, no letter for Adina. On the other wall, inside her room, is a picture that is lit every morning by a band of light—Ilie in his uniform, hair like a hedgehog, grass straw in his mouth, shadow on his cheek, grass on his shoes. Every morning the whole day hangs suspended from this straw of grass.
* * *
Like Liviu, Ilie is in the flat land down south. The Danube is just as close and just as far from each, but they’re in different places. In one place the Danube cuts off part of the country by flowing straight, in the other it cuts off part of the country by flowing crooked. In both places the shots being fired are the same, like a cracking branch, but different. Very different.
* * *
There are August days in this city when the sun is a peeled pumpkin that heats the asphalt from below and the concrete of the apartment blocks from above. Then it’s so hot that heads pass through the day with the top of their skulls detached. At noon even the smallest thoughts crinkle up inside the heads and don’t know where to go. Breath grows heavy in mouths. And all anyone is left with is a stray pair of hands used to press wet bed-sheets against the windowpanes to cool things down. The sheets are already dry before the hands pull back from the glass.
* * *
It was on an August day like that when Ilie stood by the stove squashing cockroaches. But maybe it wasn’t him at all, maybe it was the brutality of the heat inside his head. Death came with a crack for the large ones and silently for the small ones. Ilie counted only the large reddish-brown cockroaches that cracked.
When they’re fully grown they turn red, said Ilie. Cockroaches will outlive everything, cities and villages and the endlessly plowed fields that have no lanes or trees. The miserable maize and the Carpathians and the wind on the stones, and sheep and dogs and humans. They will eat up all this socialism and lug it down to the Danube inside their fattened bellies. And the people on the other side will stand there horrified, blinking in the heat. And they’ll shout across the water, that’s the Romanians for you, they deserved it.
Then Ilie started sobbing and grabbed his face with hands that smelled of cockroach, and Adina dragged him out of the kitchen and gave him a glass of water. He held it in his hand but didn’t drink. Disgusted and freezing despite the heat, he broke out in a cold sweat and pushed Adina away. He was so far removed from himself that he practically choked on his tongue when he said, the world is lucky to have the Danube.
* * *
Adina chews on a nut and looks out the window. The nut tastes bitter at first and then sweet. The sky is not looking down but is turned upward, its vast emptiness clinging to little spots of white, to letters that have all been read by the time it flees the city and escapes—a refugee above the city, bound for the Danube.
A child cries on the street below. Adina’s tongue searches for the bits of nut stuck between her teeth. The shells lie scattered beneath the table.
A different silence
Where are the ball bearings, says the director. A brown moth the size of a fly flits out of his shirt collar and flutters past the geranium on the windowsill, looking for the factory yard below and behind the glass. Mara says, the ball bearings are on order. Outside the director’s curtained window, on the other side of the geranium, shoes go clattering by. Heads of brown hair bob past. The potted geranium hovers first on one head then on the next. The geranium doesn’t wave its red flowers, it just lets its leaves dangle motionless over the hair and point down into the sunken factory yard, into the rust, into the wire. The director doesn’t see the heads of the people passing, only the tops of their hair. And he sees the moth at the windowpane. So, says the director, assuming the ball bearings are on order where are they. He steps so close to the glass that the open curtain brushes his forehead and the geranium grazes his chin. And the moth flips over and flutters past his shorn temples toward the meeting table. The ball bearings are on their way, Comrade Director, says Mara.
The director catches himself looking at the wire, out of habit, but quickly pulls his face back away from the window. He isn’t surprised by the moth. But he had not reckoned with a pair of tall shoes hitting the asphalt like a couple of broken bricks. Nor had he reckoned with short legs that don’t bend as they walk. Or with a back so erect as if stiffened by wire.
These shoes, these legs, this back—all unsettle eyes that wish to remain blank. No matter how many years pass in the factory, no eye looks at the dwarf without seeing some reflection of itself. Without getting in its own way.
The director pulls back his head, his routine broken by the clatter walking with the dwarf.
A dwarf, and still he’s made something of himself, says the director. Another person in his place would be begging on the street. He points at the small picture of the dictator in a frame on the table. A larger portrait hangs on the wall. Both show the black inside the eye. The two pictures look at each other, and their gazes meet between the wall and the table, right in front of the white curtain. Everyone who comes from HIS part of the country, says the director, has a strong will.
* * *
He means the south, the part of the country cut off by the Danube. The flat plain where the stony summers wither among the corn while it grows, and the stony winters freeze among the corn once it’s forgotten. Where cushions of faded thistle fluff drift on the water. Where people count the floating cushions and know that for every person shot trying to escape, the Danube carries a cushion on its waves for three days, and for three nights shows a gleaming light under its waves, like a candle. The people in the south know the number of the dead, even if they don’t know their names or faces.
* * *
Send a notice saying they’re overdue, says the director. The ball bearings are on their way, says Mara. He rubs his neck against his shirt, his collar scratches. Every now and then, says the director, there’s a knock at the door. Not very loud, I can barely hear it. And when I open the door I don’t see anyone unless I look down right away. Then it turns out the foreman has sent the dwarf, and he doesn’t say a word, just hands me a piece of paper. And then he leaves before I can say anything. I don’t call after him because I can’t ever remember his name. After all I can’t call out, HEY DWARF. Mara smiles. You have nice legs, Mara, says the director. The geranium shakes. The director kneels on the carpet. Inside Mara’s skirt his voice is deep. His hands are hard. Her thighs are hot. His teeth on her right thigh are distinct and wet and sharp. And from the portrait on the table, the black inside the eye watches. And blurs. Or is it the moth in the air, just a handbreadth away from Mara’s eyes. Ouch, that hurts, Comrade Director, she says.
* * *
Every week the director comes to the gatehouse, the gatewoman told C
lara. He doesn’t come inside, doesn’t cross the threshold. He just sticks his head in the door and pulls it right back out. He looks at the spools of wire and asks, what’s the name of that dwarf. The gateman also looks at the wire because the director’s eyes pull his own there, and because he believes that the director’s head is completely entangled in the wire. Because whoever looks at the wire can’t help getting fully entangled and is no longer able to listen. Everyone that is except for the gateman and myself, she told Clara, we look at the wire but don’t see it anymore. So the gateman always gives the same answer: Comrade Director, the dwarf’s name is CONSTANTIN. He says it so loud I can hear him even if they’re both off in the yard somewhere, said the gatewoman. And the director always says the same thing back, I try to memorize the name but I always forget it a second later, I can keep track of everything else but I never manage to hold on to the name of that dwarf. The gateman says, the dwarf belongs to the devil, otherwise he wouldn’t be a dwarf. You know, the gatewoman told Clara, whenever the director’s out in the yard a moth comes fluttering out of his shirt collar. As a young man he used to be the director of a hat factory, on the other side of the Carpathians. That’s where the moths come from. After that he was director of a waterworks in the south and then a housing construction firm here in the city. But he’s never managed to get rid of the moths from the hat factory. Anyway every time he asks about the dwarf’s name he reaches into his bag and takes out a pen and a piece of paper and writes it down. He holds the paper and writes the name in big letters that fill the whole sheet, said the gatewoman. Then he puts pen and paper back in his bag and says, now I’ve got it. And the moth flies deep into the yard and gets lost in the wire. Then a week later the director once again sticks his head inside and says, what’s the dwarf’s name, I try to memorize the name but I always forget it a second later. And he takes out an identical piece of paper, and the same moth flies out of his shirt collar, and he writes down the same name all over again. And the moth flies deep into the yard, into the wire.