The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

by Herta Müller

  Awaken, Romanian, wake from thy deadly slumber, sings an elderly man. The old anthem is forbidden, the man stands on the curb and sees the muzzle of a dog and the shoes of a policeman. He lifts his chin high and sings to distance himself from his fear. He tears his fur cap off his head, waves it, hurls it to the ground and tramples it with his shoes. And tramples and tramples and sings and sings so that the song can be heard in the soles of his shoes. And the song is forbidden and the song smells of brandy. The flags overhead are raving mad, the heads of the men below are drunk, the shoes confused. The flags accompany the men on the street as they walk into the night.

  The old man’s voice falters. My god, he says, standing by the bare acacia, what we could be in the world, and here we don’t even have bread to eat. A policeman with a dog goes up to him, and another policeman. The man throws up his arms and shouts up to heaven, God forgive us for being Romanians. His eyes shine in the sparse light, a hasty shine in the corner of the eye. The dog yelps and pounces on his neck. Two, three, five policemen carry him away.

  The parking lot rises and falls, and with it the bare acacia. The steps from the street bounce across his face. The parking lot is standing on its head. The sky is the Danube down below, the asphalt is the night above. In the upside-down gaze, white light spreads over the city, there below the earthen wall, up in the sky, in the cut-off land.

  The head of the old man hangs all the way down.

  The wasp game

  By morning loneliness has already left its mark on the face of the child with eyes set far apart and narrow temples. He’s sitting on a bench right in the middle of other children but he is alone. His eyes are red, the brown rings of his pupils faded.

  Twice during class Adina is tempted to call the child to the blackboard. She can tell by the way he’s staring out the window that his thoughts aren’t stopping at the pane. His gaze is clearly one with much to think about. Instead she calls on the child sitting right in front of the absent boy. And then on the one sitting next to him. The boy’s eyes are so far apart they don’t notice.

  * * *

  After class the child sits on the window ledge and yawns. He tells Adina that last night his mother took him to some place in back of the cathedral, two streets past the bridge. That’s where the Hungarian priest lives, he says, a lot of people were praying and singing. There were police and soldiers there too, but they weren’t praying and singing, just watching. It was cold and dark, says the child. My mother told me that you don’t ever feel cold when you pray and sing. That’s why the people weren’t cold. And also because of the candles. Their faces and hands were all lit up, my hands were lit up too, says the child. When you hold a candle in front of your chin the light shines through your throat and through your hand. The child raises his left hand and splays the fingers against the glass. The policemen and the soldiers were cold, says the child. Adina sees the gray wart clusters on his fingers. The poplars jag upward into the sky, sharp and bare. My mother said that even where nobody’s around there can still be someone there, just like sometimes in summer you see a shadow where there isn’t anything or anybody, says the child. My mother said that places like that are drawers you don’t see and can’t open. She said there are drawers like that in the tree trunks, in the grass, in the fence, in the walls. With a piece of greenish chalk in his right hand the boy traces his left hand on the windowpane. And each of these drawers has an ear inside, my mother said. He takes his hand off the window, leaving the outline of a see-through hand. These ears are always listening, my mother said. Whenever anybody comes to visit us my mother puts the phone in the refrigerator, says the boy. He laughs, the laughter flits away from his face. He rests his head on the hand holding the chalk. I never put the phone in the refrigerator, he says.

  The boy draws green fingernails on the see-through fingers. Below the fingernails he chalks in a few green warts where the outline was wobbly.

  The sky is gray, but gray is not a color, because everything is gray. The apartment blocks in the distance are also gray, but a different gray than the day, differently colorless.

  You don’t have any warts, Comrade Teacher, the boy says to Adina, because when you grow up the warts go away, they pass on to the children. My mother once told me that when your warts go away then your troubles start to come.

  Warm steam comes out of the child’s mouth. It is invisible. Outside, under the jagged poplars, it would be visible. It would hover silently in the air for a moment before drifting away. What the mouth had just said would be seen in the air. But that wouldn’t change anything. Because what would be seen in the air would be there just for itself and not available. The way everything in the streets is just for itself and not available, the way the city is just for itself, the people in the city just for themselves. The only thing that’s there for everybody is this splitting cold.

  The greenish berries stayed on the windowpane, clustered on the see-through fingers.

  * * *

  The wedding procession is small. First comes the tractor, then the musicians, then the rest. The civil registry office is in the House of Youth, just one block beyond the earthen wall of the stadium. Six policemen are walking alongside the procession. Weddings are forbidden, they claim, because assemblies are forbidden. So they simply invited themselves as guests.

  The stadium gate is closed, the Danes are back in Denmark, but the forbidden song has spread and is now being sung throughout the city.

  During the night the dogs were barking everywhere, all throughout the city streets, sounding closer than they usually do in a snowless winter, when the night is its own echo. And people were on the move as the night progressed, when the only thing keeping it in the city was the cold. And they stayed out later than the last way home. They cut across streets carrying their flashlights. And where they stopped the flashlights went out and match flames flared and died away on their fingers. And candles were lit.

  * * *

  Adina follows herself home. At the corner, by the thick spool of wire, a rusty streak is crawling across the road, it’s the metal seeping away from the wire due to all the freezing and thawing, and with no snow to keep it hidden. The dog OLGA barks in front of the wooden shed, green berries light up in her eyes. OLGA, Adina says out loud. Inside the dog’s head is a drawer that doesn’t open. The day is locked up inside this skull, rolled back into this nightly barking. The path knows its own way and has no distance. Each of Adina’s steps is alike and each is wobbly.

  Then her shoes begin to hurry, her head is empty, even though the fox is lurking inside. The fox is always lurking inside her head.

  * * *

  Whenever Adina comes from the street into her apartment, her cold fingertips flush with heat as soon as she looks in the bathroom. Afterward her shoe shoves the tail and two hind legs away from the fur. Every day.

  A cigarette is floating in the toilet bowl, not yet swollen from the water. Adina now shifts her foot to the fox’s right foreleg. It moves together with the tip of her shoe, leaving the neck exactly where it was.

  Her heart pounds and the pounding rises into her mouth as her fingers shove the cut appendages back against the belly.

  * * *

  Pavel could have been a groomsman, but ever since the game against the Danes the crowds haven’t put away their flags and don’t go home at night. So he had to decline since he’s on duty day and night. Where the hell do they come from anyway, he said, they all have thin skin and don’t get any sun. Judging from the way they look they must live up where the planet starts to shrink.

  The clarinets rip through the wedding song, the violins can barely hold on to the thin melody between the apartment blocks, where the narrow space creates an echo. The accordion opens and closes in step. Clara pulls her thin heel out of a crack in the asphalt. The groom’s carnation is broken, the stem sticks out of his buttonhole.

  The tractor’s bucket is in the air, the teeth in front covered with soil. The wedding couple is standing inside the giant shov
el. The bride’s veil flutters, her white carnations quiver at every pothole. Her white sleeves are dirty. The dwarf is wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black bow tie. His new shoes have heels as high as two broken bricks. Grigore wears a large hat, the gatewoman a headscarf with a red silk fringe. The gateman is carrying a ring cake. His eyes are moist, he sings:

  Your childhood now has passed away

  From this day on it’s always May

  * * *

  The bride is Mara. For two years she’s been waiting for this day, and now assemblies are forbidden.

  We’re getting married, not doing anything political, the groom told the policemen.

  The bite on Mara’s leg has long since healed. For weeks she showed it off every morning in the office. First it was red, then it grew bigger and turned blue. When it turned green the bite was larger than ever. Then the teeth vanished into her skin. And the wound turned yellow, frayed away, shrank and disappeared.

  Mara had troubles with her fiancé. He wanted to break off the engagement. She had to show him the spot every evening, and he got used to it. But he refused to believe the bite came from the director. He said, if I could only be sure those teeth weren’t GRIGORE’S.

  * * *

  Snow geese need the snow that doesn’t come. At least not here. They contort their necks and open their beaks. They scream. They flounder on the flat ground. After the night frost has melted they splay their wings. It’s difficult, but they take a running start and lift off when they spread out their webbing. The air flaps and ripples close to the grass, then the air over the trees, like leaves whooshing in the bare forest. Once in flight across the sky, the snow geese spread out in formation and let the plain, the field and the corn fall away from their wings, smaller and smaller. There is no snow, but once they’ve been to a place, the terrain is mapped inside them forever, a white sphere. And down below the blackish green hill rises out of the ground. Feathers fly in their wake for a long time after they have passed.

  The crows stay in the forest because the forest is black. The branches pretend to be dead.

  The soldiers play the wasp game. They stand in a circle. Whoever is the crane fly has to stand in the middle and cover his eyes tight with his hands so he can’t see. There can’t be any gap. All the others are the wasps. They all hum in a circle around the crane fly and one of them stings him with a blow to the hand. The crane fly has to guess which wasp stung him. If he takes too long to guess he gets stung again, and again. The crane fly tries to guess, the crane fly is afraid. He keeps his hands pressed to his head, each hit hurts more and more. Every time he gets stung the crane fly falls to the ground. Then he has to get up and look at all the wasps and guess which one stung him, over and over until he can’t get up anymore. And even longer. And meanwhile the wasps’ lips quiver and hum.

  When the crane fly can no longer stand, he is allowed to be a wasp.

  Every crane fly stays lying in the dirt well after the last sting, without moving. The officer with the gold tooth nudges him with the tip of his boot. When the crane fly finally stands up to join the wasps, his eyes are ringed with bruises, and every bone aches.

  Today Ilie is lucky, he doesn’t have to be the crane fly.

  * * *

  Every Sunday afternoon during the summer I give my son a ten-lei coin, the officer says. His eyes are glued to the sky, he’s following the snow geese, there’s snow in the mountains, he says, they’re changing their course.

  He swallows. My son, he says, doesn’t let the coin out of his hand even when he’s putting on his white sandals. Then we take our car into town. I go to the summer garden and drink beer and my son takes my ID and goes around the corner to the Party Cafeteria, he really likes cake. The officer smacks his gold tooth. The cakes are in the display case, which is so tall that last summer it was still only at eye height for him. Since then he’s grown a lot, says the officer, next summer he’ll be able to see the cakes better. His favorite is the one with the bright green icing, he says. But he’s scared of the bees in the cafeteria so he closes his eyes. And the cook says to him every time, bees make the cake sweet.

  The officer exhales, his breath gray in the air. They’re really wasps, not bees, he says, and they like the raspberry icing best. Every summer the cook’s hand is swollen blue from all the stings, it’s creepy. When he serves he has to drape a white towel over his hand. That’s the odd thing, says the officer, the bees always buzzing around the beer in the summer garden don’t sting. His gold tooth shines. But with the cakes in the Party Cafeteria it’s the wasps, he says.

  Ilie looks up at the blackish-green hill and senses for just a moment that the officer’s face is very pale, and that the gold tooth is a yellow beak. The beak of a snow goose.

  * * *

  When the tank has been sitting in the forest for weeks, when the trenches have been finished for days, when the officer with the gold tooth is weary from spending half the season in the barrack and sick of looking at the sandbags in the yard, the column marches out along the path up to the field and through the broken corn and over the hill to play the wasp game.

  The snow geese flounder on the ground. They bring the cold with them, who knows where from, they screech and pull in their wings. They always fly far away. There they eat snow. They always come back, but they never eat grass or corn. When they aren’t flying they keep away from the forest and stand there and look up at the sky.

  The wasp game is a good equalizer, a beautiful contest, says the officer. He doesn’t play with the men, he only watches. The rules of the game shine on his gold tooth. Turn around, he says to the crane fly. And now hum, he says to the wasps. He has them hum for as long as he wants. Sting, sting, he shouts, and sting hard like a wasp, not like a flea.

  The spreading city

  The woman with the chestnut-red hair done up in big waves is cleaning her windows. Beside her is a bucket of steaming water. She reaches into the bucket and picks up a sopping gray rag, she reaches onto the windowsill and picks up a moist gray rag, then she pulls a dry white cloth off her shoulder. After that she bends over and picks up some crumpled pieces of newsprint. The windowpanes shine, her hair opens up into two sections, divided by the open casements. When she closes the casements she closes her hair.

  The frost has darkened the petunias, knotting their leaves and stems in a tangle of black. When the weather warms the frozen petunias will stick to one another.

  The woman waits until the sun above the stadium sends out warm rays for two weeks in a row, then she goes to the market to buy new petunias. They are packed in newspaper and perched on the windowsill. The woman digs out the old black plants, using a large knife to pry the deep roots out of the window box. Then she takes a very large nail and aerates the soil, and unwraps the new petunias one by one. Their roots are short and hairy. She widens the holes in the dirt with the nail and sticks the hair inside the holes. She closes the holes with her fingers. Then she waters the new white petunias so much that the flower box drips for two days.

  The first night helps rearrange the stems and leaves of the freshly planted petunias, so they no longer can be seen in the morning when the big-waved hair appears in the window. The daylight brings warmth, the petunias bloom for themselves. Every day the marks of winter crawl farther and farther below the white flowers and underneath the city.

  * * *

  The poplars and acacias let their bare bark shimmer green before they sprout leaves. Then the cold is gone and everything is exposed. That’s when the dictator climbs into the helicopter and flies over the country. Over the plains, over the Carpathians. His old man’s legs are riding high in the sky, up where the wind emerges to dry the winter out of the fields.

  Wherever a glacial lake flashes in the sun, the servant’s daughter said to Adina, and the reflection shines back up into his eyes, he reaches out his hand. He shifts his old legs and says, corn doesn’t grow in water, that lake has to be dried out.

  He has a house in every city, and
every city shrinks between his temples as his helicopter touches down. Wherever he lands, he spends the night. Wherever he spends the night, a bus with boarded-up windows passes slowly through the streets. The bus is full of wire cages. It stops in front of every building to collect all the roosters and dogs and haul them away. Nothing is allowed to awaken the dictator except for light, said the servant’s daughter, any crowing or barking throws him off. For instance, she said, say he’s scheduled to give a speech from the balcony of the opera. And suddenly his old legs stop in the middle of town and he has to close his eyes for a moment simply because some rooster jarred his sleep by crowing, or because some dog barked. Then when he opens his eyes and the black inside sees the opera standing there, he might stretch out his hand and say, housing blocks don’t grow in an opera, that opera has to be torn down.

  He hates opera, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife heard from the wife of an officer in the capital that the dictator once went to the opera. And that he said, this is nothing but a stage full of people and instruments, you can hardly hear a thing. One guy plays while the others all just sit there, he said. Then he stretched out his hand. And the next day the orchestra was dissolved.

  According to the wife from the capital the dictator puts on new underclothes every morning, said the servant’s daughter. Also a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, new socks, new shoes, all sealed in transparent bags, so that no one can put poison on them. And every morning in the winter he has a new coat, a new scarf, a new fur cap or a new hat. As if the clothes from the day before had become too small because his power grew in the night while he slept.