by Herta Müller
Your father is nothing like the man on the white horse, I said, but both of them are Communists. One at the blast furnace in the city, the other traipsing through village streets in shiny riding boots. One slaving away in the service of glowing steel, raising its worth above all reason, the other riding people down, hounding them into a corner and reeking of perfume.
At my wedding my grandfather danced only one waltz with me. He pressed his mouth to my ear and said: Back in 1951 that bastard already stank of perfume, and now he’s joining the family. Wants to have his fun with us again, does he. Wants to eat here with us, does he. Fine, he can have a plate at his seat of honor. I have a little something for him back at home, a little poison for his food. He said the words so calmly, keeping time to the waltz and breathing lightly—for all the world a man who kept his promises. My long dress swayed and billowed, but inside I was as stiff as a fence-post. Grandfather stepped on my hem a few times and apologized. I only said:
It doesn’t matter.
Though it mattered a lot that I was sick of that long dress. I wished he would step on it until I was no longer inside it. After the dance he led me back to my seat beside my husband at the head of the table. Three chairs down, my father-in-law was bending over his daughter’s shoulder, her earring had come unfastened. My grandfather stroked my sleeve.
And you intend to stay with him.
I had no chance to ask whether he meant my father-in-law or my husband. He walked off through the hall, he meant both. I searched for him with my eyes. My husband tugged at my hand so that my eyes would turn back to him. And when they did, and when my fingers were nestled between his hands and resting on his black trousers, I wanted him to go on holding me forever and live with me as if he had three hands. Whatever was gnawing at my grandfather was no fault of ours. Then the music started up again, the meal was served. The waiters ran with the dishes between the tables, coming in at the door through which my grandfather had left and not returned, not even for the banquet.
My father-in-law had eaten, his hands were shiny with grease, his fingernails looked varnished, his cheeks hot, not a trace of poison in his weasel-like eyes. His plate was littered with the chicken bones he had sucked clean. The band started playing again. The chef appeared wearing a white apron, a blue kerchief, and a white cap like a sailor’s, and carried the wedding cake to the bridal table. It was in the form of a filigreed house, three stories with windows and curtains made of icing and two wax doves on the roof. The chef handed me the knife, it was my job to slice up the house, cutting through the thick white crusts into the brown walls, until each plate had a piece. My father-in-law’s soup bowl and his plate from the main course had been cleared away with all the rest. He held out his dessert plate:
Only a thin slice, please.
But his thumb and index finger were asking for a big piece. Suddenly my hearing failed me and I couldn’t breathe; just as if my food had been poisoned, my heart began to feel furry. I went in search of my grandfather. He wasn’t outside, he wasn’t in the kitchen, or hiding with the instruments in the musicians’ storeroom. He was sitting by the barrels of wine and brandy, waiting for nothing and nobody, and when I started to sit down beside him, he said:
You’ll get your dress dirty here.
I leaned against the fire escape in the corner.
He was sprinkling himself with perfume while we were herded to the station. We rode for two weeks in the train before we stopped—some four hundred and fifty families dumped out in front of a wooden marker set in the middle of nowhere. Rows of stakes in dead straight lines, sky above, clay below, with nothing between but the damned crazy thistles and us. The sun scorched everything in sight. For several days your grandmother and I did nothing but dig ourselves a hole in the ground in front of our stake and cover it with thistles. They tore your skin when you picked them. The wind from the east was searing, and then the thirst, no water for three kilometers. We set out for the river with pots and bowls, but by the time we got back to our hole in the ground all the water had spilled out. We had scabies and lice, your grandmother had to have her head shaved, I did too. Only it’s different for women, even thistles have that bit of white down—it was flying around everywhere, the wind never let up. Your grandmother said: See, there’s the white horse, it’s following us, next we’ll be growing hooves and a hide. She lashed out at something only she could see and hunched her shoulders and shouted: Get away, there. She started wandering, even the longest days weren’t long enough for her to find her way back through all the holes in the earth. I’d call out: Anastasia, Anastasia. You could hear her name bouncing off every thistle leaf, but she didn’t answer. The shouting made the thirst unbearable. When I did find her she’d be eating muddy clay as if she were lapping up water. Often she’d laugh with her brown, broken teeth, first her gums were cracked, then they shriveled up, and then they disappeared so that there was nothing left to bleed. Eyes like an owl’s, and that grinding in her mouth, a ghost squatting in the mud. I was about to die of thirst, and she wasn’t embarrassed in the least, she just clawed at the earth and swallowed it. I slapped her hands, hit her across the mouth. She was so afraid of the thistledown, she’d plucked out her lashes and eyebrows. Her eyes were as naked as her head, two drops of water. Dear God, I was so thirsty I wanted to drink them. I made it my task to keep her from dying, to keep her there with whatever strength I had, because love was out of the question. I struck her harder and harder, because she didn’t know her own name, how old she was, where she came from or who she was with. We were both one step away from death, she was mercilessly mad and good, and I was too goddamned clearheaded and bad. She had taken leave of herself and left me to the world: Death was calling Anastasia even louder than I was. That great deceiver, and she was under his spell. But you can’t just take things as they come. I had to hit her, many people looked on, and nobody intervened. Other people weren’t any better than I was, but what does that concern me. I was rough, and she never stopped being good, that’s all. I wasn’t right in the head. I gloated as I shoved her by the back of her neck and yelled: No one’s turning into a horse around here, we’re going to dry out like two bean pods, just wait and see. There aren’t enough trees around to make a single coffin—you’ll have to be mine and I’ll be yours. Sometimes she’d shuffle along and squeeze her eyes shut, other times she’d droop and stare at me and ask: Are you a guard, do you get paid. Thank God she didn’t realize the scoundrel who was talking like that was her own husband. No sooner was she in her grave than the first winter arrived. She had it good, she didn’t see the next wave of white down, the blizzards that came lashing across the steppe worse than any snow that ever covered the earth. It never settled, it was always moving. Whetted sharp by the sun, it came in waves and waves of little knives. And in the summer the clay started to run because of the heat, yellow and yellow-red and gray. Sometimes bluish white, as if you’d swum to the end of the sky, then you felt even dizzier than you already were. Snow burns in a different way than clay, even if you turn your back to it, it sucks the water out of your eyes. Many of us lost our wits, one at a time or in couples, it didn’t matter anymore. Shortly after she died a tractor came to fill in our foxholes. We had to put up buildings—after all, we were human beings, they said. We could forget about returning home. Perhaps it was better like that, I had to tread a lot of clay, and dry the bricks, the weather was wet, winter was coming. I had no time for thoughts. I bartered her moldy clothes for seven planks. Like everybody else I built a house, can you imagine, it had to be eight meters by four meters and contain 2,300 bricks. Every brick thirty-eight centimeters long, twenty wide, and twelve thick. And every wall as thick as the brick was long, though in that weather everything turned out crooked and warped. And for the roof there was straw, thistles, grass, but the wind kept blowing it all away. You had to paint a marker outside on the wall—a square, zigzags, a circle—in place of a house number, because numbers weren’t allowed. To master death I painted a horse. I kne
w right up to the end that none of us would turn into a horse. But every winter the snow turned the whole place into one gigantic white horse. I held on in that house for four years, don’t ask me how. Now you should go, said my grandfather, if you love his son, you should go.
Was it his fault, I asked.
He looked up.
You’re asking the wrong question.
Was it my fault, I asked.
Is there anything he can do about it, said my grandfather. No, there isn’t.
When I went back into the hall I felt I needed someone to help me crawl out of my skin. But nobody did, so I just wolfed something down. The wedding cake still had two windows left in half a wall, I ate a curtain. My husband was dancing with his mother and her white patent leather bag that dangled down his back. My father was dancing with my mother’s white French twist. My father-in-law was dancing with his daughter and her white shoes. I looked down at myself and saw that white was taking over my family. Who could do anything about it. Someone should be able to.
A horse is coming into camp
with a window in its head.
Do you see the tower looming high and blue . . .
my grandfather would sometimes sing as he worked in the garden. It was not a wedding song.
The tram has stopped at the signal pole. Another red light, says the driver. Who’s it for, anyway. Nobody sets foot in the street for days on end, but they go and put in traffic lights and sit in their offices on their big fat asses. None of them bothers to come into town to look at their lights. They even get bonuses for having them installed, and I lose mine because I can’t make the route on time.
The people standing in the car watch the light but don’t say anything. One of them sneezes. Once, twice, three times. Traffic lights don’t make you sneeze—it’s the sun, that’s what’s set him off, four times, five. I can’t stand it when someone sneezes so many times, it’s always these small, scrawny men who can’t stop and don’t have any manners. With clods like these you’re lucky if they cover their mouth the first time; after that you can forget it. You hope each sneeze is the last one, but then you can’t help waiting for the next. Your brain gets addled, you start counting the sneezes, and that only encourages them. Now this guy’s sneezing for the sixth time, why doesn’t he hold his nose and take seven quick breaths, or hold his breath and count to sixty, then it’ll all be over. He apparently doesn’t know that trick, but I can’t exactly tell him how by shouting from one end of the car to the other. Actually, holding your breath doesn’t work for sneezing, that’s for hiccups. He ought to rub his nose until it doesn’t tickle anymore, that’s the cure for sneezing. His eyes are as big as chestnuts, they’ll pop out if he doesn’t stop. But what do I care. His neck is bulging and turning red, his ears are burning. Here’s number seven, atchoo, my head’s spinning just from watching him . . . and why can’t he make some other sound than atchoo. Finally he’s stopped. No, here comes number eight. There won’t be anything left of him, he’ll sneeze himself away until all that remains is a ball of snot.
Paul placed the photo in the drawer and asked:
What did your father-in-law do back in the fifties.
He was a Party operative, I said, in charge of expropriation. My grandfather owned some vineyards on the hills in the neighboring village. The Perfumed Commissar confiscated my grandfather’s gold coins and jewelry and placed him and my grandmother on the list for deportation to the Baragan Steppe. When my grandfather came back, his house belonged to the state. He had to go to court several times until they let him move back in, the bread factory had converted the rooms into offices. There was always a lot of talk about the house, mostly over dinner, but very little about my grandmother, things like:
She decided to die quickly, she didn’t live past that horrible first summer. She couldn’t wait, so she didn’t live to see the mud hut.
The Perfumed Commissar didn’t go back to that town until my wedding. And that was a rash thing to do, as it turned out. He probably thought no one would remember him, or maybe he just didn’t think at all. After all, to him the deportees were nothing more than a nuisance. He might have remembered some of the people who’d worked for him. But the rest of the rabble he only knew from the lists and not by their faces. For him my grandmother was simply a name; he selected her and then she died, just like many others. When he came back it was to celebrate the wedding. My grandfather recognized him immediately from his walk and from his voice—despite the new name. The name he’d used in the fifties was for official purposes, later he went back to his real name. The commissar’s father had been a coachman who made his living with a cart and two bay horses. He delivered wood and coal as well as lime and cement. On occasion he also delivered coffins to the cemetery, if people couldn’t afford the elegantly carved hearse. He swept up more horse manure in one day than he saw money in his lifetime. Whenever the cart was fully loaded, his sons had to run along behind him, to spare the horses, and when the cart stopped they had to unload or shovel or carry sacks. That white horse was a sign that my father-in-law had left the world of draft horses behind, he climbed out of the muck straight onto its back. Looking extremely out of place, he used to ride through the village, hating anyone richer than a carter. The perfume became his second skin. A perfumed Communist, who ever heard of such a thing, I asked Paul. What’s a Communist, anyway.
Me, said Paul. I was well brought up, I did my homework like a good boy, and one day my father called me into the kitchen. His shaving bowl was on the table, and there was hot water on the stove. He lathered up my face until the soap got in my nostrils and then he fetched his razor. I could have counted all the whiskers on my face with one hand. But I was proud of myself, I started shaving and I joined the Party; as far as my father was concerned the two things went together. He explained that he had been born before his time and had no choice but to go along with whatever came. First he was a fascist; later he said he’d been in the Communist underground. As for me, he said, I was born when I was born and I had to stay ahead of my time. The few who really were Communists back then are right when they say: There used to be so few of us, but many are left. They needed these many, who hatched out of their old lives like wasps. Anyone poor enough became a Communist. So did many rich people who didn’t want to end up in a camp. Now my father’s dead, and if there’s a heaven up there, you can be sure he’s claiming to be a Christian. The motorcycle belonged to him. My mother was a machine fitter. Now she’s retired and every Wednesday she meets her wrinkly old brigade in the café next to the hardware store in the marketplace. When I was little I used to walk through town with my father and he showed me his picture as a Hero of Labor on the plaque of honor in the People’s Park. I preferred to look at the squirrels. The squirrels were all named Mariana and had to shell pumpkin seeds because people didn’t have any nuts to feed them. You could buy pumpkin seeds at the entrance to the park. That’s extortion, said my father, one whole leu for a handful of pumpkin seeds. He didn’t buy me any.
Squirrels know how to feed themselves, he said.
I had to call Mariana with empty hands, and the squirrels came in vain. As I called I kept my hands in my trouser pockets. At the plaque of honor by the main pathway, my father said:
Don’t look left and don’t look right, son, just keep your eyes fixed straight ahead but remember to stay flexible.
Then he gave my cap a tug to one side so it slanted across my left ear, leaving my right uncovered, and we went on our way. At the crossroads he blinked and said:
First look left and then look right, son, to see if a car’s coming. That’s important when you’re crossing a street but it’s a dangerous way to think.
He only visited me once here in the city. He was proud of my living in a high-rise, it was so different from our house, with the mountain looming right in front of your nose, up here you have air and a view. He went out onto the balcony, but he never got a chance to appreciate the view. He stumbled on my tools and the aerials an
d asked:
What’s this. You’re selling things on the black market.
When he realized the aerials were designed to pick up foreign stations, he started talking about me as if I were some other person:
So my son has a taste for money. That’s making a mockery of socialism. And what will come next. Sheer unadulterated capitalism. He can make aerials till he’s blue in the face but he’ll never belong to the people who flaunt their money hand over fist.
I said: It’s not mocking anything to earn money, and it’s not against the law.
To which he said: It’s not exactly legal, either, but you didn’t worry about that, did you.
And what do you mean by capitalism, I said. I’m not earning dollars, and besides, the Yugoslavs and Hungarians have socialism just like we do, even on television.
Lately the Party’s had more profiteers than fighters, he said, and generally speaking, money ruins character.
But it’s your own son you’re talking about, and I’m the only one you’ve got. Besides, what have you achieved except a career melting iron for tractors and pitchforks for shoveling manure. We still don’t have heaven on earth. But your brain is in full red bloom. When you stand before the Lord God Almighty, he’ll see that glow on your forehead and ask: Well, little sinner, what have you brought me. Two corroded lungs, some herniated discs, chronic conjunctivitis, poor hearing, and a shabby suit, you’ll say. And what have you left behind on earth. And you’ll say: My Party book, a peaked cap, and a motorcycle.
My father just laughed: Hah hah hah, that’s only if you wind up playing God. But, you know, even in heaven I’d be ashamed of you, since we’d have a bird’s-eye view of all those rooftops with your black-market antennas.