Herta Müller - The Appointment

What I used to like most about summer was playing with the son of the gatekeeper at the bread factory. We’d go to a path that ran alongside the broad avenue and was shaded by the same tall trees. The path was full of ruts and holes; we’d find the places where the dust was thickest. The boy was lame from birth, he would drag along behind me. We’d sit inside the deepest pothole, he’d bend his right leg and stiffly stretch his thin left one out in front. He was glad to be sitting down. He had nimble hands, curly hair, and a sallow complexion. We would become completely absorbed in our game, swirling the dust into snakes that went slithering all over one another.

That’s how blindworms crawl through the flour, he said, that’s why bread has holes.

No, the holes are because of the yeast.

They’re because of the snakes, you can ask my father.

The snakes could have easily gone on slithering through the pothole for half the day, until his father came to fetch him, carrying a bag from the bread factory. But as soon as my dress got dirty I’d feel bad, so I would run home and leave the boy to fend off the blindworms on his own.

One day a different gatekeeper was keeping watch at the entrance to the bread factory. Two weeks later the boy’s father returned, but without the boy. They had operated on that stiff leg and given the boy too much anesthetic. He never woke up. I would go to the path full of ruts and holes, where the trees stood huddled together casting their shade all the way to the avenue. I would keep to myself, avoiding the other children, as if the trees had promised that the boy would be coming here to play, even though he had died. I would sit down in the dirt and swirl up a snake, as thin and long as his stretched-out leg. The scraggly grass along the path. The tears dripping from my chin, forming a pattern on the snake. They’d taken the boy away from me, maybe he was looking down from heaven, maybe he realized that now I really did want to go on playing.

Lately when I go walking around town in the mornings it’s Lilli I miss. She’s the one they’ve taken away from me now.

The days when I’m summoned seem very short. Albu always has something in mind, even if I don’t know exactly what he wants from me. All I need is the large button on my blouse and a clever lie. Of course when I’m wandering around town, I don’t know exactly what I want from myself — even less than I know what Albu wants from me.

A little before eight this morning I watched the swallows: sometimes I think they’re really driving or swimming instead of flying. That was a dumb thing to do, with Albu expecting me at ten sharp. I don’t want to think about swallows. I don’t want to think about anything at all, there’s nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned. Last summer Paul still had his red motorbike, a Czech Java. Once or twice a week we’d go for a ride out of town, to the river. The lane through the beanfields — now that was happiness, good fortune, luck. The bigger the sky grew overhead, the more light-headed I felt. Whole jumbles of red flowers on each side, quivering as we flew past. You couldn’t exactly see that every single flower had two round ears and open lips, but I knew it all the same. The beans went on forever, but not in visible rows like cornfields. Even after all the stalks have dried out and the wind has tattered the leaves, a late-summer cornfield always looks like it’s just been combed. I never get light-headed in cornfields, even when the sky starts flying. Only a beanfield could strike me dumb with happiness, so much that I kept having to close my eyes from time to time. When I’d open them a moment later, I found I’d already missed a lot: the swallows were long since soaring in new orbits.

I held on tight to Paul’s ribs and whistled the song about leaves and snow. I couldn’t hear myself over the motorcycle. Usually I never whistle, because you have to have learned that as a child, and I never did. In fact, I still don’t know how. And ever since my first husband whistled on the bridge, I flinch whenever I hear someone whistle. But in the beanfields it was me who was whistling. So it must have been luck, a bit of good fortune, because nothing else I do comes out half as well as my whistling in the beanfield. Surrounded by string beans, I was literally struck dumb with happiness. With the river it’s different, the river never brings me happiness, though the smooth water always works to calm me down even when my thoughts stray to the bridge. But you can’t find happiness in being calm. By the time we reached the riverbank, I was ill at ease and Paul was impatient. He was looking forward to the river, I was looking forward to the ride back through the beans. He stepped into the water up to his ankles and showed me a black dragonfly, its abdomen hanging between its wings like a spiral made of glass. I pointed out the glossy dark clusters of blackberries beside me on the bank. And across the river the black starlings were settling onto pale rectangular bales of straw in a field of stubble. But I didn’t point those out, because I was looking at the sky, focusing on the little flecks of swallows, unable to understand how the color black is doled out and shared with the scorched yellow of a summer day. I laughed in my befuddlement, picked up a piece of tree bark from the grass, and threw it right at Paul’s feet. Then I said: You know, those swallows can’t really fly as fast as it seems, they’re just trying to trick us.

Paul fished for the bark with his toes and pushed it under the water. When he removed his foot, the wood bobbed right back up, shiny and black. He said:

Um-hmm.

He glanced up just long enough for me to see the dark daubs inside his eyes. Why ask what black fruit he has lurking in his eyes if he won’t even talk about the swallows and if his thoughts are so far removed from his toes. A breeze was rustling in the ash trees, I listened to the leaves, perhaps Paul was listening to the water. But he didn’t want to talk.

The next day in the factory I tried using the Um-hmm on Nelu when he came to my desk, pinching a sheet of paper between his thumb and coffee cup. He started rambling about button sizes for the ladies’ coats we were making for France that month. The tips of his mustache flapped around his mouth like swallow wings. I let him speak several sentences right into my face. When he came to the weekly schedule, I counted how many chin hairs he had missed while shaving. I raised my eyes and sought his. As soon as our pupils met I came right out with it:

Um-hmm.

Nelu was silent and walked over to his desk. I also tried out other words, such as Ah and Oh. But nothing could beat Um-hmm.

When I was confronted about the notes, he denied having informed on me. Anyone can deny things. It was just after I had separated from my first husband; white linen suits were being packed up for Italy. After we went on a ten-day business trip together, Nelu expected to keep on sleeping with me. But I’d made up my mind to marry a Westerner, and I slipped the same note into ten back pockets: Marry me, ti aspetto, signed with my name and address. The first Italian who replied would be accepted.

At the meeting, which I was not allowed to attend, my notes were judged to be prostitution in the workplace. Lilli told me Nelu had argued for treason, but had failed to convince them. Since I wasn’t a Party member and since it was my first offense, they decided to give me a chance to mend my ways. I wasn’t fired, which was a defeat for Nelu. The man in charge of ideological affairs personally delivered two written reprimands to my office. I had to sign the original for the records, the copy remained on my desk.

I’ll frame it, I said.

Nelu didn’t see what there was to joke about. He sat on his chair, sharpening a pencil.