by Herta Müller
In life his face is shrinking but on the pictures it gets bigger and bigger, his forelock is graying but in the pictures it’s blacker and blacker.
The dictator’s discarded clothes wander through the land like darkness while the old man’s legs are sleeping. And black caps worn during the day bring out the moon at night, according to the servant’s daughter.
And these moons are always white, never yellow. Or at most they are half-white, with a mouth gaping and yawning into the sky. A moon that makes dogs howl and drives their glowing eyes deep into their head when the cathedral bell prepares to strike twelve. A moon with a cheek looming a little too close on the way home. A highwayman of the night, a gap in the darkness behind the last streetcar.
Where a person climbs out at night and never comes home, there are empty paving stones in the morning.
* * *
Outside the window a last bit of light sneaks along its hidden path. The floor is dark, the fox is brighter, stretching out its cut-off paws. A person could fling open the window and if the wind blew inside, the wall would start to flutter, it could be pushed in with a finger just like a curtain, just like standing water. Ilie knows this, he thinks every day about his watery plain, his soft way out. He has chewed his grass straw and swallowed it. He has taken his mouth out of the picture, placed a mark on his cheek like liver mortis, a mark Adina cannot touch with her finger.
Adina lifts her hands off the table. Where they were resting the table is warm. And down on the floor, where the fox is the hunter, her fingers slide the cut-off legs against the fur. And after her hands have once again warmed the table, they clasp her forehead. Her hands sense that her forehead is as warm as the table, but unlike the table it no longer knows anything about inhabiting a place, abiding.
The bell rings in several long bursts, startling the apartment. Adina peers through the peephole. Clara is standing outside the door, I can see your eye, she says, open up. Adina moves away, the door’s eye is empty, then covered by Clara’s eye. Clara’s fist bangs on the door, I know you’re there, she says. Adina leans against the wall. In the hallway the buckles on Clara’s purse clink against the floor. Paper crinkles.
A note passes through the crack of the door.
Adina reads:
PEOPLE ARE BEING ARRESTED THERE ARE LISTS YOU HAVE TO HIDE NO ONE WILL LOOK FOR YOU AT MY PLACE
The neighbor’s door opens and closes. Clara’s high heels clatter on the stairs. Adina drags the note away from the door with the tip of her shoe. She bends over, reads it one more time. She crumples the note, throws it into the toilet. It floats, the water swamps the paper but doesn’t swallow it. Then Adina’s hand reaches into the water, takes the note, smooths it out, folds it, sticks it in her coat pocket.
The wardrobe is open. The suitcase on the carpet is open. A nightgown goes flying past the suitcase and lands on the fox. A sweater and a pair of pants land in the suitcase. A towel, a knot of panty hose and panties, a toothbrush, a nail clipper, a comb.
* * *
The hospital blocks the end of the street, presenting a row of small lit windows, a chain of moons that merge into the sky without transition, without a single star. A car pulls up with two men inside and a tiny child’s shoe swinging from the rearview mirror. The headlights angle their beams onto the ground. Adina turns her face away. When the motor stops, her heart can surely be heard pounding through her coat. The beams cut the suitcase from her hand. The men go in the hospital.
The entrance to the hospital has a tall flight of stairs with bushes planted on both sides. Adina stashes her suitcase in the bushes. The bushes are bare. While she’s reaching into the shrubbery her hand jerks twice, but it’s just a forgotten leaf, moist and withered. The suitcase is far below the stairs, the wind is dark, heavier than the leaves. She climbs the steps.
Adina waits with her hands hidden in her coat. She doesn’t give the gateman her name, he’ll see me when he gets here, she says. The gateman telephones. Her right hand feels the wet note in her coat pocket.
The gateman paces up and down. He peers through the glass booth—a few stairs, a bit of night and a faded sound settle in his eyes, which having felt the power of the binoculars can withstand anything. His shoes creak. Two wrinkles run from his cheeks all the way inside his mouth. The ceiling lamp does not shed light, it only watches. The bushes are brighter in the gateman’s eyes than they are outside, because the centers of his eyes are glowing, and each has a lightbulb right in the middle.
* * *
Paul comes down the stairs, his white cap is a large petunia that swallows his left ear. Adina places the wet note in his hand. The paper is crumpled, with more ridges and wrinkles than his outstretched thumb.
As Paul reads, the gateman studies the night as is his habit, all ears and furtive eyes. Outside, wind rattles the metal sign. Wait inside the car, says Paul, standing on the granite floor in his white cloth shoes. He places two keys in her palm, they are wrapped in white sterile gauze. So they don’t clink, he says, when you get outside count the windows, my car’s parked just past the tenth one. Take off your white shoes, says Adina, they’re too visible. He looks at the floor, I know that once I’m outside I’m no longer a doctor, he says. His white coat is made of chalk, freshly starched and ironed.
* * *
Her hands are no longer afraid of the shrub, even if the leaves inside are wet and withered. Adina is carrying her suitcase in front of her, with both hands, so that it disappears inside her coat. On the path that can’t be seen in the dark she counts the windows above the shrubbery, from one to the next she can make out the individual branches in the wind.
The car door clicks. Adina puts her suitcase on the backseat. She wonders where the little nail clipper has crawled to among all the thick clothing. Next to the suitcase is Anna’s scarf. A car pulls up to the entrance. Two policemen come out the front doors, two dogs out the back. They smell the asphalt, sniff at the steps. Sitting in the car, Adina would like to shrink, to be as tiny as the nail clipper in her suitcase.
* * *
Paul comes out of the bright doorway and goes down the stairs, his shoes are dark. Like a night watchman he paces past the bushes, looking up at the windows. His pants blend in with the pavement.
He knocks on the window, the door opens, his legs are his only luggage. What are the police looking for, and the dogs, Adina asks. He turns the key, the car hums. Every night they bring the wounded from the border, he says, most are dead. First we’re driving to Abi’s then out to Liviu’s in the country.
The street runs by, the city is a black thimble with steep sides, the housing blocks as narrow as foreheads. There’s a workshop next to the morgue, says Paul, where the coffins are sealed and sent home under police watch. No one ever bothers to look inside, says Paul.
* * *
The window a few stories up is lit. Paul doesn’t ring, he only knocks once on the door, Abi opens, laughs and raises his eyebrows, he smells of brandy. Adina hands him the note, Paul grabs him by the arm, come on, he says, we’re driving out to the country. Abi’s eyes are blank, too large and too small for his face, he nods. Then he breaks away, no, I’m not going, he says, and I don’t want to know what place you’re thinking of. Good luck, he says. What’s that supposed to mean. Good luck, the village is a small place.
* * *
At the black street corners people are walking, carrying flashlights. The night takes away their clothes, Paul drives slowly, Paul drives quietly.
For a while Adina imagines that because the forbidden song has spread, the city has no limits. That the streets extend farther and farther out into the country and wherever they go they take the city with them. That somewhere out in the dark fields, when the road turns, the bells will ring because the forest beyond the frozen corn is really a city park, beyond which is the cathedral tower, and that the river is creeping right down the middle of what only seems to be an empty field.
And she imagines that the dictator has seen the spreading ci
ty from high in the air, and that he’s ordered the army to surround it. And that the soldiers are shoveling away, cutting off the spreading city, building a moat without a single bridge. That Ilie too is digging and digging and signaling to her, raising and lowering his fingers like waves, stepping on his spade with his boots, pushing it into the city’s edge and thinking about the Danube.
And she imagines Paul climbing into the car wearing his white shoes, and driving and driving until the city stops and the last light at the edge of town is extinguished, and then not saying another word. And that while down below a field is blundering about with no sense of boundaries, Paul is intent on gazing at the sky, in search of a white moon.
The chamber pot
Paul’s hand passes across Adina’s face.
She startles. We’re here, says Paul. Adina feels a trickle of sand inside her head. She pulls Paul’s heavy hand off her cheek, was I asleep, she asks as she opens her eyes, her face is awry, her cheeks caved in.
The bench outside Liviu’s house is lower on one end. There is a puddle where the legs are sinking into the mud. The window looms dark behind the fence. The gate is locked.
In the south, in the part of the country cut off by the Danube, the houses are lined up along the road, road and village are one and the same. Here the settlement doesn’t spread, each fence is connected to the next, each house has a garden in back, and each garden ends with a clearly defined border. There’s no place for dogs to roam, no place for them to bark. The villagers keep lots of dogs, Liviu told Paul and Adina during the summer, but not on account of robbers, theft is not a problem. It’s so they won’t hear the gunshots. And they keep geese instead of roosters, he said, because geese gaggle throughout the night. But it doesn’t work because the villagers have gotten so used to the barking and gaggling that they no longer hear it, while they do hear the gunshots.
Adina listens, the geese gaggle short and low in the yard, and in the yard next door, and in the yard across the road. The geese are kept in pens covered with boards. They can be heard stamping their feet and beating their wings against the wood. They’re so cramped they knock into one another and are never able to truly fall asleep. A roadside village is long and narrow like a sock, like the neck of a goose.
* * *
During the summer Liviu became a bridegroom. He married a teacher from the village because he was an outsider and all on his own. His wife is young, not even close to his age. Liviu listens in silence, just for himself, because his wife is used to women doing the talking while the men sit nearby, just for themselves. She grew up with the gunshots, with the dogs and with the geese.
During the summer, when Adina and Paul went to Liviu’s wedding, this young woman in her white veil and long dress had the face of a lamb. A lamb that had yet to eat grass, Paul said at the time. Everyone hugged and kissed her while Liviu just shook their hands and looked away. At the wedding she ate a lot, while Liviu chewed his food absentmindedly. Liviu danced as if he had stones in his pockets, while she danced as if her white dress were a flying feather. She didn’t speak much, and whenever she did she smiled. The village policeman got so drunk he was laughing all alone at his own jokes, repeating the same sentence that no one understood. And the village priest set his cap on the neck of a bottle, there were soup noodles stuck in his gray beard. After the meal he lifted his cassock up to his knee and danced with the policeman. Liviu looked at Adina and Paul, when are you two getting married, he asked. Paul said, soon. Adina could feel the lie running across her face. She pointed at the policeman and asked the lamb, are you related. Liviu didn’t say anything, the young lamb smiled and said, that’s the way it is here in the country, the policeman’s included along with everyone else.
* * *
Paul picks up a few pebbles. He tosses them at the window, they scratch against the glass and then rustle when they land on the dry leaves. They’re sound asleep, says Paul. The dogs bark louder, the geese are mute. Paul scales the fence and raps on the window with his fingers. A light snaps on in the last window.
Liviu’s head is squashed from sleep. The casement creaks open, it’s me, says Paul. He raises his chin, his face can’t be seen in the dark, we have to hide, he says. Liviu recognizes Paul’s voice.
They roll the car into the barn. Liviu covers it with straw and uses sacks to hide the wheels. White wings and feathers shine through the cracks of the pen, the geese inside gaggle, their beaks bang against the wood.
The lamb comes to the stairs wearing her nightgown and shoes that are too large for her bare feet. She points her flashlight at the barn, but the circle of light gets stopped by its own reflection in a puddle.
* * *
Inside the kitchen, in the light, the lamb smiles. We were just talking about you yesterday, says Liviu. We were just talking about you, says the lamb, and here you show up on our doorstep. Adina sets her bag down next to the oven, Paul reaches in his jacket and sets a toothbrush on the table, that’s all the luggage I have, he says.
* * *
The lamb shows Adina into a dark room and closes the flowered curtains, patterned with the same dense bouquets of roses as on the tablecloth. Here’s the flashlight, she says, don’t turn the big light on, that can be seen from outside. She squeezes some clothes together inside the wardrobe, everyone knows which room we sleep in, I’ve made some space for your clothes, she says.
* * *
It’s the same room, the same bed as in the summer. As they lay in bed early in the morning after the wedding Adina asked Paul, why did you lie. Paul sighed, mosquitoes flitted around the light. Why does Liviu think we’re still together. Paul yawned and said, is that so important.
It had rained the previous morning, the day of the wedding. After that it was scorching hot, the night didn’t cool things off, they had to keep the window open. Adina turned off the light, the crickets chirped their jittery notes throughout the village. Paul fell asleep before he could close his mouth. As he slept he took the covers off his legs and snored all the way into his toes. He and Liviu had had plenty to drink, and had gotten into a long discussion with a toothless accountant about the falling protein content in the milk from the national cows. The mosquitos didn’t like the smell of brandy and only attacked Adina’s face. The folk music was still turning inside her head.
During that mosquito night Adina dreamed that she was dancing in the yard with the toothless accountant. A spoon was lying on the ground, and the accountant kept stepping on it. She pulled him away, closer to the edge of the garden. But there was another spoon near the edge of the garden, and he kept stepping on that one as well. And a withered lady who was even older than the accountant sat with her back to the table and watched them. Now dance decently, she told the accountant, the lady comes from the city.
* * *
The flashlight rummages through the dark bag, the comb is on top, the nail clipper on the bottom, the toothbrush between the stockings. The nightgown feels cold to the touch. Their armpits smell of sweat, and so do their feet. Paul holds his toothbrush handle in his mouth. Liviu places a white chamber pot next to the bed, don’t go out in the yard, he says, not during the day either.
Paul lets the toothbrush drop from his mouth onto the table, he walks around the table, shines the flashlight on one of the tablecloth bouquets. Dogs bark outside, Paul sniffs the roses on the curtain, may I set my shoes next to yours, he asks, then shines the light on Adina’s shoes and sets his beside hers. He lies down on the bed fully dressed and laughs.
I have to go, says Adina, she takes the chamber pot, there’s no face inside the bed, only Paul’s clothes. I wanted to go earlier, while we were in the barn, she says. I went three times on the way here, I was so scared, says Paul. She shines the light in the chamber pot, it’s brand-new, the worst thing is the sound, she says. Well I am a musician, says Paul. She shoves the chamber pot between her legs, I’ll whistle, he says, my grandfather didn’t get along with his brother-in-law, he would stop his horses in front of the man
’s house and whistle until they pissed, then he’d drive on. Paul hears a rushing sound, and Adina feels a warm mist against her calves. A newspaper is lying on the table. Adina covers the chamber pot with it and listens. Hanging behind the curtain is wind, it shakes the bare branches. I imagined the sound differently, says Paul.
We had a summer latrine and a winter one and four chamber pots, says Adina. The summer latrine was behind our grapevines in a dry little patch, the winter one was tucked away by the entrance to the cellar. The summer latrine was made of boards, the winter one was made of stone. My chamber pot was red, my mother’s green and my father’s was blue. The fourth was made of glass, it was the prettiest but it was never used. That’s only for guests, my mother said. We never had guests, only visitors who stopped in for just a while. The seamstress came two or three times a year to bring my mother a dress, she would eat two rolls without sitting down and after that she would leave. And now and then in the fall, when my father managed to get plum brandy from the village where they had the sheep, the barber would come over. He would drink three glasses without sitting down and after that he would leave. My father suggested a couple times that the barber could give him a quick haircut. The barber said, I can only do that in the shop. I need a mirror, when I cut hair I have to be able to see myself as well as you.
All the people who visited us lived in the same dirty outskirts of town. No one was a guest, no one stayed overnight, says Adina. Paul says nothing. He’s fallen asleep in his clothes, without a face.
The fingernails grow
I remembered it and then I forgot it, says a woman’s voice next to the window. The rose bouquets in the curtains are larger during the day. The geese outside also sound different than at night, their honking is brighter. Adina watches them form a long white line from one end of the village to the other, all the way into the field, where the frozen corn swallows them one by one and doesn’t let them get away, as long as their feathers are warm. And Adina thinks: from one end of the village to the other, the people are lined up at their windows watching the corn swallow the geese. They aren’t startled, because they’re used to the gunshots. They’re simply astonished to see the frozen cornstalks straying into the village, from one end to the other.