The Passport

by Herta Müller

  His bicycle is light. Windisch holds it close to him, as he wheels it along. When the bicycle is going through the grass, Windisch can’t hear his footsteps.

  That night, all the windows had been dark. Windisch had stood in the long hallway. A flash of lightning tore open the earth. A roll of thunder pressed the house down into the crevice. Windisch’s wife didn’t hear the key turning in the lock.

  Windisch had stood in the hall. The thunder was so far above the village, beyond the gardens, that there was a cold stillness in the night. The pupils in his eyes were cold. Windisch had the feeling that the night was going to shatter, that all at once it would be dazzlingly bright above the village. Windisch stood in the hall and knew that if he had not gone into the house, he would have seen, across all the gardens, the narrow end of all things and his own end everywhere.

  Behind the door Windisch heard the stubborn, regular moaning of his wife. Like a sewing machine.

  Windisch flung the door open. He switched on the light. His wife’s legs, raised on the sheet, were like open window sashes. They twitched in the light. Windisch’s wife opened her eyes wide. Her gaze was not dazzled by the light. It was merely fixed.

  Windisch bent down. He unlaced his shoes. He looked beneath his arm at his wife’s thighs. He saw her pulling a slimy finger out of the hair. She didn’t know where to put the hand with the finger. She laid it on her naked stomach.

  Windisch looked down at his shoes and said: “So that’s how it is with your bladder, my lady.” Windisch’s wife put the hand with that finger to her face. She pushed her legs down to the foot of the bed. She pressed them closer and closer together, until Windisch could see only a single leg and the two soles of her feet.

  Windisch’s wife turned her face to the wall and wept loudly. She wept for a long time with the voice of her younger years. She wept briefly and softly with the voice of her own age. She whimpered three times with the voice of another woman. Then she was silent.

  Windisch switched off the light. He climbed into the warm bed. He felt her slime, as if she had emptied her stomach into the bed.

  Windisch heard sleep pressing her down far below this slime. Only her breath hummed. He was tired and empty. And far from all things. The sound of her breath seemed to be at the end of all things, at his own end.

  That night her sleep was so distant, that no dream could find her.

  BLACK SPOTS

  The skinner’s windows are behind the apple tree. They are brightly lit. “He’s got his passport,” thinks Windisch. The windows glare and the glass is naked. The skinner has sold everything. The rooms are empty. “They’ve sold the curtains,” says Windisch to himself.

  The skinner is leaning against the tiled stove. There are white plates on the floor. Cutlery is lying on the window sill. The skinner’s black coat is hanging on the door handle. The skinner’s wife bends over the large suitcases as she passes. Windisch can see her hands. They throw shadows against the empty walls of the room. They grow long and bend. Her arms are rippled like branches over water. The skinner is counting his money. He lays the bundles of notes in the pipes of the tiled stove.

  The cupboard is a white rectangle, the beds are white frames. The walls in between are black patches. The floor slopes. The floor rises. It rises high against the wall. And stops at the door. The skinner is counting the second bundle of money. The floor will cover him. The skinner’s wife blows the dust from the grey fur cap. The floor will lift her to the ceiling. By the tiled stove, the clock has struck a long white patch against the wall. Windisch closes his eyes. “Time is at an end,” he thinks. He hears the white patch of the clock on the wall ticking and sees a clock-face of black spots. Time has no clock hand. Only the black spots are turning. They crowd together. They push themselves out of the white patch. Fall along the wall. They are the floor. The black spots are the floor in the other room.

  Rudi is kneeling on the floor in the empty room. Before him coloured glass lies in long rows. In circles. Beside Rudi is the empty suitcase. A picture is hanging on the wall. It isn’t a picture. The frame is made of green glass. Inside the frame is frosted glass with red waves.

  The owl flies over the gardens. Its cry is high. Its flight is deep. Its flight is full of night. “A cat,” thinks Windisch, “a cat that flies.”

  Rudi holds a spoon of blue glass to his eye. The white of his eye grows large. His pupil is a wet, glistening sphere in the spoon. The floor washes colours to the edge of the room. The time from the other room beats waves. The black spots float along. The light bulb flickers. The light is torn. The two windows swim into one another. The two floors push the walls in front of them. Windisch holds his head in his hand. His pulse is beating in his head. His temple beats in his wrist. The floors lift themselves. They come closer, touch. They sink down into the crack. They will be heavy, and the earth will break. The glass will glow, will become a trembling abscess in the suitcase.

  Windisch opens his mouth. He feels them growing in his face, the black spots.

  THE BOX

  Rudi is an engineer. He worked in a glass factory for three years. The glass factory is in the mountains.

  During those three years the skinner only visited his son once. “I’m going to visit Rudi in the mountains for a week,” the skinner had said to Windisch.

  The skinner came back after three days. He had ruddy cheeks from the mountain air and tired eyes from lack of sleep. “I couldn’t sleep there,” said the skinner. “I didn’t sleep a wink. I could feel the mountains in my head at night.”

  “Everywhere you look,” explained the skinner, “there are mountains. On the way to the mountains are tunnels. They are black as night. The train goes through the tunnels. The whole mountain rattles in the train. You get a buzzing in your ears and throbbing in your head. First pitch black night, then broad daylight,” said the skinner, “and constantly alternating. It’s unbearable. Everyone sits and doesn’t even look out of the window. When it’s light, they read. They take care not to let the books slip from their knees. I had to be careful, not to touch them with my elbows. They leave their books open when it gets dark. I listened, I listened in the tunnels, to hear if they shut their books. I heard nothing. When it was light again, I looked at the books first and then at their eyes. The books were open and their eyes were shut. They opened their eyes after me. I tell you, Windisch,” said the skinner, “I felt proud every time, because I opened my eyes before them. I can sense the end of the tunnel. I’ve got that from Russia,” said the skinner. He held his hand to his forehead. “I have never experienced,” said the skinner, “so many rattling nights and so many bright days. At night, in bed, I heard the tunnels. They roared. Roared like the pit waggons in the Urals.”

  The skinner nodded his head. His face lit up. He looked over his shoulder to the table. He looked, in case his wife was listening. Then he whispered: “Women, Windisch, I tell you, there are women there. The way they walk. They reap faster than the men.” The skinner laughed. “It’s a pity,” he said, “that they’re Wallachians. They’re good in bed, but they can’t cook like our women.”

  A tin bowl stood on the table. The skinner’s wife was whisking an eggwhite in the bowl. “I washed two shirts,” she said. “The water was black. That’s how dirty it is there. You don’t see it, because of the forests.”

  The skinner looked into the bowl. “At the top, on the highest mountain,” he said, “there’s a sanatorium. That’s where the lunatics are. They walk around behind the fence in blue underpants and thick coats. One of them spends all day looking for fir cones in the grass. He talks to himself. Rudi says he’s a miner. He started a strike.”

  The skinner’s wife dipped a finger into the eggwhite. “That’s what you get,” she said and licked the tip of her finger.

  “Another one,” said the skinner, “was only in the sanatorium for a week. He’s back in the mine again. He had been struck by a car.”

  The skinner’s wife lifted the bowl. “These eggs are old,” s
he said, “the snow is bitter.”

  The skinner nodded. “You can see the cemeteries from the top,” he said, “clinging to the slopes of the mountains.”

  Windisch laid his hands on the table beside the bowl. He said: “I wouldn’t like to be buried there.”

  The skinner’s wife looked absent-mindedly at Windisch’s hands. “Yes, it must be nice in the mountains,” she said. “Only it’s so far from here. We can’t get there, and Rudi never comes home.”

  “Now she’s baking cakes again,” said the skinner, “and Rudi can’t even eat them.”

  Windisch drew his hands back from the table.

  “The clouds hang low over the town,” said the skinner. “People walk about among the clouds. Every day there’s a thunderstorm. People are struck down by lightning in the fields.

  Windisch put his hands in his trouser pockets. He stood up. He went to the door.

  “I’ve brought something with me,” said the skinner. “Rudi gave me a little box for Amalie.” The skinner pulled open a drawer. He shut it again. He looked in an empty suitcase. The skinner’s wife looked in his jacket pockets. The skinner opened the cupboard.

  Exhausted, the skinner’s wife raised her hands. “We’ll look for it,” she said. The skinner looked in his trouser pockets. “I had the box in my hand only this morning,” he said.

  THE CLASP-KNIFE

  Windisch is sitting in front of the kitchen window. He’s shaving. He’s painting white foam across his face. The foam crunches on his cheeks. Windisch spreads the snow around his mouth with the tip of his finger. He looks in the mirror. He can see the kitchen door in it. And his face.

  Windisch sees that he has painted too much snow on his face. He sees his mouth lying in the snow. He feels that he can’t speak because of the snow in his nostrils and the snow on his chin.

  Windisch opens the clasp-knife. He tests the blade of the knife against his finger. He places the blade under his eye. His cheek bone doesn’t move. With his other hand Windisch pulls flat the wrinkles under his eye. He looks out of the window. He sees the green grass.

  The clasp-knife jerks. The blade burns.

  Windisch has a wound under his eye for many weeks. It’s red. It has a soft edge of pus. And every evening there’s plenty of flour dust in it.

  A crust has been growing under Windisch’s eye for several days.

  Each morning, Windisch leaves the house with the crust. When he unlocks the mill door, when he has put the padlock in his pocket, Windisch touches his cheek. The crust has gone.

  “Perhaps the crust is lying in the pot hole,” he thinks.

  When it’s light outside, Windisch goes to the mill pond. He kneels down in the grass. He looks at his face in the water. Small circles eddy in his ear. His hair disturbs the picture.

  Windisch has a crooked, white scar under his eye.

  A reed is bent. It opens and closes beside his hand. The reed has a brown blade.

  THE TEAR

  Amalie came out of the skinner’s yard. She walked through the grass. She held the small box in her hand. She smelt it. Windisch saw the hem of Amalie’s dress. It threw a shadow onto the grass. Her calves were white. Windisch saw how Amalie swayed her hips.

  The box was tied with silver string. Amalie stood in front of the mirror. She looked at herself. She looked for the silver string in the mirror and tugged at it. “The box was lying in the skinner’s hat,” she said.

  White tissue paper rustled in the box. On the white paper lay a glass tear. It had a hole at its tip. Inside, in its stomach, the tear had a groove. Under the tear lay a note. Rudi had written: “The tear is empty. Fill it with water. Preferably with rain water.”

  Amalie couldn’t fill the tear. It was summer and the village was parched. And water from the well wasn’t rain water.

  Amalie held the tear up to the light at the window. Outside it was hard. But inside, along the groove, it quivered.

  For seven days the sky burned itself dry. It had wandered to the end of the village. It looked at the river in the valley. The sky drank water. It rained again.

  Water flowed over the paving stones in the yard. Amalie stood by the gutter with the tear. She watched as water flowed into the stomach of the tear.

  There was wind in the rain water too. It drove glassy bells through the trees. The bells were dull; leaves whirled inside them. The rain sang. There was sand in the rain’s voice too. And tree-bark.

  The tear was full. Amalie brought it into the room with her wet hands and bare, sandy feet.

  Windisch’s wife took the tear in her hand. Water shone in it. There was a light in the glass. The water from the tear dripped between Windisch’s wife’s fingers.

  Windisch stretched out his hand. He took the tear. The water crawled down his elbow. Windisch’s wife licked her wet fingers with the tip of her tongue. Windisch watched as she licked the finger which she had pulled out of her hair on the night of the thunderstorm. He looked out at the rain. He felt the slime in his mouth. A knot of vomit rose in his throat.

  Windisch laid the tear in Amalie’s hand. The tear dripped. The water in it did not fall. “The water is salty. It burns your lips,” said Windisch’s wife.

  Amalie licked her wrist. “The rain is sweet,” she said. “The salt has been wept by the tear.”

  THE CARRION LOFT

  “Schools don’t make any difference either,” said Windisch’s wife. Windisch looked at Amalie and said: “Rudi’s an engineer, but schools don’t make any difference either.” Amalie laughed. “Rudi doesn’t just know the sanatorium from the outside. He was interned,” says Windisch’s wife. “The postwoman told me.”

  Windisch pushed a glass back and forward across the table. He looked into the glass and said: “It’s in the family. They have children, and they’re crazy too.”

  Rudi’s great-grandmother was called “the caterpillar” in the village. She always had a thin plait hanging down her back. She couldn’t bear a comb. Her husband died young, without falling ill.

  After the burial, the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went to the inn. She looked each man in the face. “It’s not you,” she said from one table to the next. The landlord went up to her and said: “But your husband is dead.” She held her thin plait in her hand. She wept and ran out into the street.

  Every day the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went into every house and asked if he had been there.

  One winter’s day, when the fog was driving white hoops across the village, the caterpillar went out into the fields. She was wearing a summer dress and no stockings. Only her hands were dressed for snow. She was wearing thick woollen gloves. She walked through the bare thickets. It was late afternoon. The forester saw her. He sent her back to the village.

  The next day the forester came into the village. The caterpillar had lain down on a blackthorn bush. She had frozen to death. He brought her into the village across his shoulder. She was as stiff as a board.

  “That’s how irresponsible she was,” said Windisch’s wife. “She left her three-year-old child alone in the world.” The three-year-old child was Rudi’s grandfather. He was a joiner. He didn’t care about his fields. “He let burdock grow on that good soil,” said Windisch.

  All Rudi’s grandfather thought about was wood. He spent all his money on wood. “He made figures out of wood,” said Windisch’s wife. “He carved faces out of every piece of wood — they were quite monstrous.”

  “Then came the expropriation,” said Windisch. Amalie was painting red nail varnish on her finger nails. “All the farmers were shaking with fear. Some men came from town. They surveyed the fields. They wrote down the names of the people and said: Anyone who doesn’t sign, will be imprisoned. All the gates on the lane were locked,” said Windisch. “The old skinner didn’t lock his gate. He left it wide open. When the men had come, he said: I’m glad you’re taking it. Take the horses too, then I’m rid of them.”

  Windisch’s wife snatched the bottle of nai
l varnish out of Amalie’s hand. “No one else said that,” she said. In her anger, a small blue vein swelled up behind her ear. “Are you listening at all,” she had shouted.

  The old skinner had carved a naked woman out of the lime tree in the garden. He put it in the yard in front of the window. His wife wept. She took the child. She laid it in a wicker basket. “She took the child and the few things she could carry and moved into an empty house at the edge of the village,” said Windisch.

  “The child already had a deep hole in its head from all the wood,” said Windisch’s wife.

  The child is the skinner. As soon as he could walk, he went into the fields every day. He caught lizards and toads. When he was bigger, he crept up the church tower at night. He took the owls that couldn’t fly out of their nests. He carried them home under his shirt. He fed the owls with lizards and toads. When they were fully grown, he killed them. He hollowed them out. He put them in slaked lime. He dried them and stuffed them.

  “Before the war,” said Windisch, “the skinner won a goat at the fair. He skinned the goat alive in the middle of the village. Everyone ran away. The women were sick.”

  “Even today no grass grows on the spot,” said Windisch’s wife, “where the goat bled to death.”

  Windisch leant against the cupboard. “He was never a hero,” sighed Windisch. “He just knackered animals. We weren’t fighting lizards and toads in the war.”

  Amalie was combing her hair in the mirror.

  “He was never in the SS,” said Windisch’s wife, “only in the army. After the war he started hunting owls and storks and blackbirds again and stuffing them. And he slaughtered all the sick sheep and hares in the district. And tanned the hides. His whole loft is full of carrion.”