by Herta Müller
I took some newspaper and wrapped up the sandals, but then changed my mind and put them in a plastic bag, since I didn’t want to walk past the red car carrying a bundle of papers. I wanted to do something special for Paul, because I had laughed too long. And I wanted to know what the two faces in the car looked like. In the end I couldn’t say whether it was the faces or Paul’s sandals that drew me out into the street.
There are people who distinguish not only between objects and thoughts, but also between thoughts and feelings. I wonder how. It’s inconceivable that the swallows strung out among the clouds above the beanfield should have exactly the same wingtips as Nelu’s mustache, but that’s only a misperception. As with all misperceptions, I can’t tell whether it’s the objects themselves or the thoughts about them that account for the error. But since that’s the way it is, the mind has to share in the burden and take on as many misperceptions as the earth has trees. I folded two fifty-leu notes into small squares, and picked them up in one hand along with the plastic bag. The elevator door opened, my face bounced into the mirror before I followed with my feet. The floor clanked as the elevator started down.
I walked right up to the red car, I wanted both of them to see that the world is full of misperceptions and that I could come down to them instead of their coming up. Through the open window of the car I asked:
Have you got a light.
I wanted to add: That’s okay, I don’t really smoke, I just wanted to know if you had a light. I had imagined they would both give me a light right away, in order to get rid of me, but I was wrong. Everything turned out differently. The man shook his head, and the woman snapped at me:
Can’t you see we’re not smoking.
He pounded the steering wheel and laughed as if she’d scored a big hit. The letters A and N flashed on his signet ring, and the woman’s hair gleamed crow-black in the sun while she whispered something in his ear. Her face was an oily tan from sunbathing, and around her neck hung a speckled seashell necklace. I said:
You could have been smoking before, and you might light up again after I’m gone. Or perhaps I should say you might go on necking.
Hey, miss, she said, in case you haven’t gotten fucked today because your husband’s banging whores after work, why don’t you go to the bar and get yourself one of those guys with a big cock. He’ll knock those fancy ideas out of you.
You must be joking, I said, I’d rather wait until my man comes home, he’s got a cock the size of a telephone pole that hoists me right up to heaven.
Of course they hadn’t been necking: they did that someplace else. She turned spiteful so fast she must have felt as if I’d caught her in the act. And he must have felt the same way, or else he wouldn’t have sat there small and dumb as a turd. He was probably on duty, and she was helping him pass the time. Before she rolled up the window, I said:
From what I hear, the ones who aren’t getting any are all wearing seashell necklaces this summer, or is that just dried pigeon shit.
Her seashell necklace really did look exactly like that. Walking away, I could hear my own footsteps; I felt a little nauseous. The door to the bar was open, instead of looking inside I looked at the linden trees, which I knew weren’t drunk. But I couldn’t help hearing the drunken voices. The smell of brandy, coffee, smoke, disinfectant, and the dust of summer followed close behind me.
For the first time there was no music playing at the shoemaker’s. The cassette recorder with the batteries held in place by a piece of elastic was not in its usual place on the table. A young man sat behind the workbench, his teeth protruding so that his lips never fully closed over his mouth. Since he wasn’t wearing an apron I supposed he was the shoemaker’s son-in-law, the accordion player. I asked after the old shoemaker. The young man crossed himself four times and said:
Dead.
Where is he buried, I asked.
He fished about in a drawer, I assumed for a piece of paper, but he pulled out a cigarette.
Are you here to look for graves or to have your shoes fixed.
I unwrapped the shoes from the newspaper, he blew the smoke straight out and watched my fingers, as if the shoes might explode at any moment.
Had he been sick, I asked.
He nodded.
What did he have.
No money, said the young man.
Did he kill himself.
How do you get that.
I don’t know, I’m asking you.
He shook his head.
A young man can’t be blamed for an old man’s dying, I thought, but he could at least have some sympathy. All that matters to this wry-face is that a place became available in a row of shops where customers pass by from morning till night.
He stubbed out the cigarette in a tin can and said:
The grave’s on Mulberry Street, is that good enough, or am I supposed to know which row it’s in.
That’s good enough for more than you think.
My feelings exactly, he said. Ever since I came here in March I’ve had to talk about the old shoemaker.
I thought you were his son-in-law, I said.
God forbid. My first day here this guy shows up with so many black and yellow bruises he looked like a canary, and starts clearing out the workshop right under my nose. All the leather, hammers, pegs and lasts, buckles and nails, he took the whole works, even the emery paper and polishes and brushes. These things don’t come with the workshop, he told me. What do you mean, I said: I didn’t bring anything with me, I left everything to the person who took over my place in Josefstadt district. He said he could sell the stuff to me if I wanted. You know, at home they were waiting for me to start earning something, they didn’t have enough money in the house to buy a loaf of bread. But I’m not so crazy as to pay for what’s already mine.
The old man had a lot of customers, I said, that means he must have had some money, too.
His daughter drank her way through the money, the young man said, and she beat up on the son-in-law, which is why he looked the way he did. When he was clearing out the place, I asked him if he was also a shoemaker. He spread out his pitiful white fingers and said: Are you kidding, do I look like you. So I asked the man what he wanted the stuff for. To play the accordion, he said. Oh, I said, so that’s how you got the bruises. No, he said, my wife gave me those. I wondered whether I should go to the bar and get the two policemen who are always sitting there. But the locals still don’t know me, so that would have only caused trouble. The accordion player might have said it was me who had turned him into a canary. On second thought I really should have given him another black eye, he deserved it.
The only trees on Mulberry Street are acacias. There’s an alcoholic who lives at one end of the street. At the other end lies Lilli. And now the shoemaker as well. The old man was short and skinny, but he had big hands and rounded fingernails that the leather had discolored a beautiful brown so they looked like ten roasted pumpkin seeds. Whenever I went to his shop he would run his hand over his head as if he still had his hair. The sweat would bead up on his bald spot while the cassette recorder played folk music at low volume, and his head shone like the glass balls people place in the flower beds around their houses. It looked like it might shatter the instant he banged into something.
So, you’ve danced those shoes to pieces again, he joked. Actually I don’t know if he was joking. All I know is that just before I went and met the new shoemaker, I had danced, really for the first time in my life, to a song in which death comes like a special prize following a life that’s been paid for dearly. After that evening in the restaurant I had never again danced with my first husband, and before that song I had never danced with Paul. I shouldn’t have gone to the shoemaker’s after dancing with Paul, I should have at least waited one more day, then the old man would still have been alive. It was my fault that he was dead.
Until his wife wound up in the asylum, the shoemaker had been a musician like his brother, brother-in-law, and son-in-law, who still play
every evening in the restaurant on the Korso. Real musicians, he once said to me, they play from the soul—not from notes.
I don’t like to dance and never wanted to be with another man who did. The first thing I did when I met Paul was to bring up the question of dancing.
Paul said: Is it that important, I don’t like dancing, women like dancing more than men. All the men I know feel they have to dance, said Paul. They dance with a woman half the night in order to fuck her afterwards for fifteen minutes.
What do you mean, my first husband likes dancing, I said, he loves it. You say it doesn’t matter much, but you’ve never been married. Anytime there was music playing my husband became impossible to understand. He was addicted to dancing and I hated it and that tore us apart, and not just a little. Whenever there was music we were worlds apart. I turned into myself, became distant and dull, whereas he came out of himself and was in high spirits like a frisky monkey. We would argue, but we would have been better off if we’d kept silent, so that the rift would have remained small. But then when we were silent we would have been better off saying something, no matter how rude, since it’s easier to get over a quarrel you’ve just had than the injuries you start listing in silence. The scene in the restaurant must have been near the beginning of September; we’d both taken our vacation. We didn’t have enough money to go to the Black Sea or the Carpathians. So we were going to treat ourselves to a night on the town, and on the weekend we went out to a restaurant. My husband wanted to go to the Palace, on the Korso, where the shoemaker’s family played the best music in the city. I thought it was too expensive. So that left the Central, where you can eat and dance for two hundred lei. Other people must have been watching their money as well, since the place was packed. The meat tasted a little sour, the coleslaw smelt like the powder you put out for flea beetles. Because white wine is pretty transparent it’s easy to water down, so that was all they had. Most people were enjoying the food, using the bread to wipe their plates clean. They were chewing away like rabbits so they could get onto the dance floor as quickly as possible. And there I was, grumbling and dragging the dinner out. My husband ate faster than I did, although he was actually lingering over his dinner compared to the others. The orchestra was pretty lame but that was fine with me since I didn’t want to dance. And it was fine with my husband because any music was good enough for him. I looked at the dance floor and saw that the people there felt the same way he did. Because they were all keeping an eye on their money, they had to make sure the evening was worth it, so they were all cheering. The men were crowing, the women were purring one moment and then yoo-hooing the next. At the end of a set they all looked up wide-eyed and laughed and their movements slowed until they were rocking back and forth like huge birds coming in to land. My husband had finished his meal and wiped his mouth with the napkin. His nose was bobbing inside his wineglass and looked warped. Above the table he remained stiff, but beneath the table his feet were tapping so that the floor was shaking. I said:
Maybe we’re on a trip after all, the floor is shaking just like in a dining car. You people could dance to anything—a squeaky door or crickets chirping or whatever. Actually I shouldn’t have said you people, including him with everyone else, seeing that he had to content himself with looking on and was suffering. He shoved his wineglass to the middle of the table, looked at me with long, narrow eyes, fixed so hard the corners looked like keyholes. He pursed his lips, whistled, and beat out the rhythm on the table with both hands. I said:
Now it’s worse than a dining car, you must be going through withdrawal.
In a moment he’d need me to dance. In fact, he needed me now. The way he unpursed his lips, smiled briefly, and then went right on whistling. This compulsion to be so dashingly polite. His restraint, his avoiding any argument, just so I’ll do what I’m told. The waiter cleared the table. Only our two glasses remained, trembling and transparent, as if they weren’t really there, while we sat behind them, tingling with anticipation—I was spoiling for a fight, he was waiting for a dance. Eventually he won because he kept control of himself and because he let pass all the moments that could have led to an argument, in the end the whole thing seemed too stupid to me, anyway. Why had we spent all that money—we’d be missing it the very next day. He might as well get some compensation for the awful meal. I took his hand and led him onto the dance floor. We danced a path for ourselves through the couples, until we were right up next to the orchestra. He spun me around, the keys of the accordion blurred together like a Venetian blind.
You’re dragging, my arm is falling asleep, he said.
I can’t weigh less than I do.
Even the fattest women are light when they dance. But you’re not dancing, you’re just letting yourself droop.
He pointed out the fattest dancer in the restaurant, a matronly woman whom I had already noticed when we were eating. While she was at the table, I couldn’t see much of her white dress with the black chess pieces, only that she pushed her plate practically to the middle of the table in order to be able to see it past her breasts. At the ends of her short, fat arms, her knife and fork barely reached the food.
That dress is billowing because it has deep pleats down the sides, not because she’s so light on her feet. After all, I do know a thing or two about clothes, I said.
But not about women, he said.
The chess pieces came flying away from the white pleats. Snow and thistledown, my father-in-law’s white horse, the wedding cake, the icing that scratched the tip of my nose. My head felt heavy. Even if I had to dance, I had no right to reproach my husband with his father, the Perfumed Commissar. I pulled myself together, but I did what I had not intended not to do. It’s easy to tell other people not to do certain things, especially your nearest and dearest, but it’s harder to tell yourself. As we danced past the swimming accordion keys, my brain went on tormenting me with scenes from the past, while my husband was enjoying being so near to the matronly woman. He touched the arm of the man who was leading the chess pieces and crowing out loud: Your partner dances well.
You bet she does. And I lead well, he said.
Then the matronly woman’s dancing partner crowed once more, the matronly woman purred, and my husband crowed along with them.
If you crow like that once more, I said, I’m going to take off and run as far away as I can.
He crowed once again, but I kept my feet on the floor, and the matronly woman purred, and I didn’t budge.
People were constantly switching partners. They paired off without a word being spoken. They were either following some intimate law between man and woman or else leaving it all up to chance. No requests were made and no consents were given. I lost the rhythm.
You’re nothing more than a wisp but your bones turn to lead whenever you dance, said my husband.
Why don’t you grab that tank, I said, then you’ll have something to hold on to.
The old woman with the doddering head nudges me with her finger: Tell me, maybe you have an aspirin. No. But the driver has water, doesn’t he, or maybe I didn’t see right—no, he has a bottle. He has a bottle, I say. Her eyes had once been larger. As is often the case with old people, hers are webbed over with a very thin membrane like raw egg white growing in from the sides. Her two oval earrings, set with green stones, tremble along with her head. The constant shaking has stretched the holes in her earlobes into long slits that have practically been torn open. Toothpaste and a toothbrush are about all I could give her. The driver might have some aspirin, I say. The man with the briefcase reaches into his pocket: I think I have one left. A shriveled strip of cellophane crackles as he smoothes it flat: No—they’re all gone, now I remember, I took the last one this morning. There’s a pharmacy at the market, says the young man by the door. The old woman turns her head, I need the tablet now, not when we get to the marketplace. She moves up the tram from one row of seats to the next, steadying herself with both hands, until she reaches the middle of the car. The dr
iver sees her in his mirror: Sit down, Grandma, you’ll cause an accident. You should have taken the tram going the other way, it would have been quicker. The old woman totters up to him. What do you mean, I asked you and you said this was the right way. Do you at least have an aspirin.
If you’re not in love, then dancing is worse than the crowd of people in the tram, I had said to my father-in-law. And if you are in love, then you have something better to do, a different way of stretching your legs, which can make you just as dizzy.
What do you mean, something better to do, he said, dancing isn’t work, it’s pleasure, if not an innate gift, a predisposition. And it’s part of your culture. In the Carpathians they have different dances than they do in the hill country, and the ones by the sea are different from those along the Danube, and in the city they dance differently than they do in the country. You’re supposed to learn to dance as a child. Your parents and family are supposed to teach you. Yours must have neglected their duty, and if you didn’t learn you’ve really missed out.