by Herta Müller
My head was spinning that Sunday after the flea market when I sat behind Paul on a motorcycle for the first time in my life. The streets were arching upwards. In the city center large families were leaving the church in scattered clusters that lingered outside the door. After all the singing and praying the adults had much to discuss, while the children were once again free to fidget and laugh. An old lady wearing black with white stockings was walking down the lane lined with sycamores as if she were passing through a valley. She was calling out:
Georgiana.
But nobody was answering. A few trees farther down, though, I saw a girl standing next to a large trash bin. She was wearing a red ribbon in her hair and was singing a song. The old lady seemed at a loss, caught between the adults who were walking at a pace set by their chatting, and the child who didn’t come when she was called. I turned to look back as we rode past until I ran out of neck to twist. The black clothes disappeared, and I felt the thrumming of the motorbike in every finger.
My father went to church every Sunday his whole life long. If Mama or Grandfather or I didn’t go with him, he went by himself. On his way home, Papa would stop at the bar behind the park and treat himself to a brandy and a foreign cigarette. By one o’clock on the dot he’d be sitting at the table ready for Sunday dinner. He kept going to church even in the last years of his life, when his very bones were rotten with sin. In his place I would have stayed at home, if I had that much sin to account for. I can’t believe that on Sunday he’d promise God he’d finish with the woman with the braid—given that he’d already arranged to meet her the very next day. I’d seen it: on Mondays the woman came to the market without her child. She had spent Sunday with her husband, just as my father did with his wife, counting the hours. But by Monday evening neither God Almighty nor the devil himself could keep them apart. For Sunday dinner we had two chickens, whatever was left over we saved for supper. My father ate the combs from both chickens because he needed them for his Monday sin. And I shared the brain with Grandfather, so that I’d learn to hold my tongue like him. It’s possible that Papa prayed to God for indulgence, since the Lord had to know there wasn’t much going on with Mama. Jesus was hanging just to the right of the church door, high enough for the grown-ups to kiss his feet as they came in and out of the church. Children were lifted by their hips. For as long as it was necessary, my mother or my grandfather held me up, but never my father. Jesus had lost his toes, they’d been completely kissed away. When I was little my father said to me:
These kisses don’t go away. They light up around your mouth when you die, on Judgment Day. Then it’s easy to see who you are and you can enter Paradise.
What color do they light up, I asked.
Yellow.
And the kisses we give each other.
They don’t light up, because they go away, he said.
Everyone who lived near St. Theodore’s church was carrying a little dust from Jesus’ toes on their lips. When I wanted to take the place of the woman with the braid, and my father clove to her flesh, I hoped her kisses wouldn’t go away. That on Judgment Day they would light up darkly among all the glowing toe-kisses and give away the deceiver.
Lilli once said her mother no longer went to church because nowadays the masses all began with an intercession for the Head of State.
That’s all well and good, I said, but she puts up with her husband taking his old bones to his weekly meeting next to the newsstand.
She puts up with it, said Lilli, because she has to.
My head was still flooded with the ride, even though Paul and I had been sitting for some time at the park. On the last stretch where the road ran through the forest the lower branches snatched at our hair. The trees were humming with green, the whole sky was made of leaves. I had scrunched up my neck and implored him:
Not so fast.
Paul brought his chair up close to mine and kissed me with his mouth ringed with beer froth. I was dazed from the ride and now this kiss on top of that. My heart was swinging back and forth by the thinnest of threads. I wanted to keep a clear head, but happiness didn’t give me enough time. Much too slowly I began to grasp that happiness can be found even at a flea market—no matter that the place was filthy and full of junk and people from whom all I wanted was their money. That happiness doesn’t need time so much as luck. One moment my fingers were cradling Paul’s warm chin, the next they were clasping the cold neck of the beer bottle. Since we knew so little about each other we talked a lot, although mostly not about ourselves. Paul downed six whole bottles and was able to put away even more later that afternoon as families started coming into the woods. After eating Sunday dinner in their apartment blocks they wanted to hold on to the sky for just a little while longer, before the next week of confinement in the factories. An elderly couple took the two free seats at our table. Their wedding rings were thick and engraved with floral patterns, after the current fashion.
I’m asking you for the last time, said the woman.
I don’t know, said the man.
Who does, then.
Not me.
What do you mean you don’t. Don’t pretend to be dumber than you are.
Don’t spit when you’re talking. I’ve forgotten, for God’s sake.
What you’ve forgotten is your mind. You forgot that the day you were born.
That’s for sure, otherwise I wouldn’t have hooked up with your little birdbrain.
No, you’d still be in a mud hut with your mother.
You’re a fine one to talk, sweetie.
Don’t you sweetie me. Nobody else would put up with you.
Heavens, next thing you’ll start crying for me.
What were you thinking just now.
What do you want me to say.
You must’ve been thinking of something.
No, I wasn’t thinking of anything.
I don’t believe you.
It’s true.
You lie every time you open your mouth.
That’s right, even when I’m fucking you.
That goes without saying.
All the same, you seem to want me often enough.
Because that’s all you’re good for.
Listen to you, you’re nothing but a hole with a perm.
So tell me what happened, or keep quiet.
Stop it, I don’t know.
Then who does . . .
After that it started all over again, round and round like a whirlpool, the tone became sharper, the mud hut became a chicken coop and the hole with a perm became a mattress with fringe. Their eyes shot poison at each other. The woman interrogated him as if they were the only two people there, while the man stared off into space as if he were all alone. The sun was still milky-white, you could hear the tall trees rustling, the sky was bearing down so low there was barely room for it among all the foliage, shoes were crunching through the gravel. He was clearly sick of her and at the same time completely dependent on her. And she never let any of us out of her sight. Even Paul and I were trapped, we said nothing, we refrained from looking at each other so she wouldn’t think we were exchanging signals. Cut off from each other like that, listening and at the same time acting as if we were deaf, we couldn’t imagine what she expected of him. Paul took his hand off the table, the woman noted the movement, glanced at me and waited to see what I would do. I leaned in Paul’s direction, and he put his hand on my knee and said:
Come on.
I sat up straight. The woman was waiting for Paul’s hand to reappear on the table. Paul must have sensed that and left his hand on my knee. With the other he beckoned the waiter over.
This is on me, for selling the wedding ring—may it have a happy future, I said.
I wanted to downplay my happiness. By chance the other two were quiet just then, they were listening to us the way Paul and I had listened to them. I was glad that they too were hearing something they didn’t understand. Paul took some money out of his pocket, he wouldn’t touch any of min
e. The woman looked at her wedding ring, and Paul and I said in unison:
Goodbye.
We sounded like two wind-up talking dolls. The woman waved in reply, barely lifting her hand off the table. The man looked as if he needed us as allies and said:
All the best.
In his position he seemed more in need of luck than we were. We rode back through the trees to the leaning tower. That night was the first I spent at Paul’s, and from then on I stayed.
We made love that first night until our bodies felt both older and younger, panting to the point of bursting and sighing calmly. Afterwards I heard barking, as if stray dogs were roaming the heavens. Then the street slumbered on to the ticking of the clock and everything below was silent. A gray dawn broke, still no light on the clock dial. Soon the trucks began making deliveries to the shops in the street. I got up and sneaked out of the room, carrying my clothes. I felt goose bumps as I stood in the hall, pulling my clothes over skin that was still warm from the bed. I wanted to put my shoes on quickly and leave before Paul woke up. But I didn’t. Stay here just like the shoes, just like the cupboard hanging on the wall in the kitchen, and the sharp, bright swath of sunlight that’s growing by the minute and crawling up the back of the chair onto the table. Stay here because all the papers being drafted, stamped, and signed, inside the factory dictate that every Saturday is followed by a Monday. I poured myself a glass of water and drank the mealy taste of my tongue. But I was not going to stay here like some bargain picked up at the flea market, in that case it would better to get up and get out. If you leave you can always come back. A red enameled tin can was standing on the table, I opened it, smelled the ground coffee, closed the lid, put the can back down and saw my greasy fingerprints, as well as what I had dreamed during the night:
My father was lying on a wooden table in the yard at home, he was wearing a white Sunday shirt, next to his left ear was a peach from one of the trees he had planted years before. A barrel-chested man with a birdlike face who in the dream was not my landlord was cutting out a square between the tips of my father’s collar and his stomach, he was cutting through my father’s shirt, from the third to the fifth button, very precisely as though the man had measured my father’s chest with a ruler. He lifted a small whitewashed door of flesh.
I said: He’s starting to bleed.
The man said: That’s from his wife’s melon. You see, she’s crippled, she can’t grow anymore and isn’t any bigger than an egg. We’re taking her out and putting in a peach.
He removed the melon from Papa’s chest and replaced it with the peach. The peach was ripe, with red cheeks, but you could tell from the fuzzy hair it hadn’t been washed.
It belongs to the woman with the braid, I said, it will never grow, she doesn’t keep it fresh.
You’ve got to admit if there’s one thing she knows about it’s vegetables.
A peach is a fruit, I said.
We’ll see, he said.
The man put the small door back on Papa’s chest, it fit perfectly. He walked to the wall of the house, turned on the faucet and washed his hands with the garden hose.
Isn’t the small door going to be stitched in, I asked.
No, he said.
What if it falls out.
The seal’s airtight, it will heal over, I’ve done this before, he said; after all, I am a professional cabinetmaker.
After Paul and I had made love past all the waves of weariness, he fell into a peaceful slumber, while I fell into a sleep that was brimming with images. The small door of flesh might have come from the removable toilet door, the surgeon-landlord may have appeared since I now had money to pay what I owed. My father and the woman with the braid had no business here, and my wish to take her place had no right to show up on my first night with Paul.
The red coffee can was sparkling too much, the sun was making it giddy, the tin must be the one that’s daydreaming instead of me.
Paul sneaked up behind me and clapped his hands over my eyes.
I’ve been thinking, you should move in with me.
I hadn’t heard him coming and felt as if I’d been caught with my father.
No, I said.
But inside I had accepted, as if I had no choice. When he uncovered my eyes, a woman was shaking out two white pillows in the window across the way, and I said:
Yes.
I had my doubts. And the very next moment I took four heaping spoonfuls of coffee from the tin and put them in the pot, and Paul said:
Good.
It was a beautiful word to say, because it couldn’t be bad. Paul put a jar of apricot marmalade on the table and cut far too many slices of bread.
In the mornings I usually grab something to eat as I’m heading out the door, so that I can get something in my stomach without actually sitting down to a real breakfast. But this time I remained seated. I told him about my father and the small door of skin, and about the melon and the peach. I left out the woman with the braid. Nor did I mention the fact that the red coffee tin reflected the dream. Nor that I was wary of the tin just as I would be of a stranger. With people to whom I take an immediate dislike, the wariness soon wears off unless I talk about it, that’s how it was with Nelu when I started work at the factory. But the reason I’m shy of objects is because I like them. I transfer the thoughts that are against me onto them. Then these thoughts go away, unless I talk about them—just like my wariness of people. Maybe it all collects in your hair.
After I separated from my husband, in the quiet days when no one was shouting at me anymore, I started noticing other people’s wariness of strangers. I saw how they combed their hair in public. In the factory, in the city, in the streets, and trams, buses, and trains, while waiting in front of a counter or standing in a line for milk and bread. People comb their hair at the movies before the light goes out, and even in the cemetery. While they’re parting their hair you can see their wariness of others collecting in their combs. But they can’t comb it out completely if they go on talking about it. The fear of strangers sticks to the comb and makes it greasy. People who talk about it can’t get rid of their fear of strangers; their combs are always clean. I thought back: Mama, Papa, Grandfather, my father-in-law, my husband—all had filthy combs, Nelu too, and Albu. Lilli and I sometimes had clean ones and sometimes they were sticky. That’s right, that’s exactly how it was with our fear of strangers, our talking and our keeping quiet.
Paul and I were drinking coffee, the sun was sprawled across the table. I had told him my dream and nothing more, nothing at all about the combs. Paul was wary of my dream, he avoided my gaze and stared out the window.
Weak nerves, he said. At any rate, your surgeon promised the door would heal over.
Out beyond the glass in the window three swallows flew across a patch of sky. Either they were flying an advance party or they were a separate unit and had nothing to do with the countless birds that followed. I should never have started counting but already I was moving my lips.
Are you wondering how many there are, Paul asked.
I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.
Paul fetched a picture from the other room, it hadn’t been on the wall, otherwise I would have seen it. Still, it was framed, and a cockroach lay pressed under the glass.
When my father died I had the photo framed and hung it in the room. After only two days the cockroach showed up and joined the family. The cockroach is right, when somebody dies you start acting out of fear for yourself, as if you’d loved the deceased more than the living. Then I took it down.
In addition to the cockroach I saw Paul’s mother, with dimples in her cheeks, one arm placed on the left hip of her summer
dress, the other around her husband’s hip. Paul’s father was wearing a peaked cap, a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wide knee-length shorts, long calf-length socks, and sandals. He had curled one arm around his wife’s shoulder, the other was on his right hip. They were both the same height, pressed against each other, their arms on their hips like two handles. At that point I wasn’t yet thinking about plums leaning cheek to cheek. In front of the proud parents stood a stroller—one of the first models with a shade you could roll up and down. Here it was rolled up, and inside the stroller sat Paul, the starched brim of his bonnet arching across his forehead like a crescent moon, a bow dangling beneath his chin, all the way down to his stomach. His left ear was poking out of the bonnet. One tiny hand was holding up a toy shovel. A blanket had been kicked almost completely out of the stroller. In the distance you could see a hill, plum trees in white blossom, and, at the top of the picture, the metal works, blurry like the smoke from its chimneys. A family of workers in a happy world of industry, a picture fit for the paper. Then, sitting at the table in the sunshine, I had to tell Paul about my perfumed father-in-law on the white horse, a picture also from the fifties.