Herta Müller - The Appointment

One day the cleaning lady will come into the office after work and she’ll be wiping away blood instead of dust, I said to Lilli. It won’t be long now. One of these days I’m going to lose control and kill the son of a bitch.

Lilli brushed me off with a wave of her hand and said:

Don’t you dare. Why not just leave a knife on his desk and tell him how good it would feel against his throat, that it doesn’t hurt at all. Then move away a little, like on the bridge, so he won’t feel awkward. He’s doing everything he can to make you lose control, and you’re letting him, you’re positively asking for it. Keep a hold on yourself and you won’t lose your grip. It just takes practice.

Lilli’s plum-blue eyes met my own and her gaze won. And her smooth neck. I knew from the bridge how fast you can lose your grip, how quickly you can send another person to his death when he starts to weigh on you, like stones piled on your heart. And I knew this would happen again, with Nelu.

Lilli dismissed me with a wave of her hand, then blushed. Her nose was twitching, but it stayed cool and white. At that moment I hated everything about Lilli, as she stood there before me, but even so I couldn’t help thinking:

That nose is as beautiful as a tobacco flower.

Lilli considered me an instigator. I had frightened her, and now she was using the bridge against me. I could see signs of hate lurking in her features; I wish I’d never found out how much that made her look like her mother. At the funeral you could hear the earth ringing on the coffin, then it closed over Lilli, and that mother of hers snapped at me, with Lilli’s mouth.

That’s right, keep a hold on yourself — Lilli thought — it just takes practice. She could see the threads running through my tangled thoughts more clearly than I could. And I imagined I could see through her own tangle more clearly than she did. There was a time when we could have swapped places, she and I. Instead, she traded with her mother. Keep a hold on yourself, she thought, and you’ll make it across the border. Don’t lose your grip, the bullets only hit you if you let them know you’re worried. It just takes practice, and she wanted to learn. Back when she told me to keep a hold on myself with Nelu, Lilli was just starting to sleep with a sixty-six-year-old officer. A couple of weeks later they decided to flee across the Hungarian border. He was arrested and she was shot dead. Too clever for her own good, Lilli.

Once she took me to the summer garden of the officers’ mess and introduced me to her officer. He was wearing civilian clothes, a short-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes and lightweight gray trousers that reached high up under his arms. He had no ribs and no hips. In his deep, quiet voice he said: It’s a pleasure to meet you, miss.

He kissed my hand. A finely practiced kiss from the old royal age, dry and light and in the middle of my hand. Young men in uniform were sitting at the surrounding tables. Naturally Lilli attracted their attention, the uniformed men were mad about beautiful women, they threw match heads at Lilli. They figured out that she was the officer’s skirt, not me.

It had been a long time since the last war. Idleness threatened to erode military discipline, which had to be shored up with so-called precision work, namely, the conquest of beautiful women. Beauty was graded according to the face, the curve of the backside, the shapeliness of the calves seen together, and the breasts. The breasts were dubbed apples, pears, or windfall peaches, depending on the position of the nipples. The conquest of women has taken the place of maneuvers, the soldiers were told. Everything between her neck and thighs has to be just right. The legs and face aren’t so important: once you’ve got her legs apart and you’re going at it, you can always shut your eyes if you don’t want to look at her face. With breasts, though, it’s a different matter. Apples are good, pears are okay, but windfalls are always overripe and beneath consideration for soldiers. Each conquest, so they said, keeps your body’s joints oiled and helps maintain your inner balance. And that improves the harmony of your marriage. The old officer had thoroughly educated Lilli about the best tactics for combating idleness in peacetime. He too had been on constant maneuvers, Lilli said, until his wife died. She was fifty and he was six years older. After she died he no longer had to pretend that the satisfying work that produced his sweet weariness was done in the field rather than other women’s beds. He visited the cemetery every day; chasing after women now seemed stale.

All the women I knew suddenly sounded like cackling hens and tasted like sour fruit, he said, especially the very young ones. Life became a mincing parade of calves drawn taut by stiletto heels marching across the asphalt, from the barracks to the officers’ mess and back. Between the sheets the women were all barefoot, moist, and groaning. Any moment was as good as another for dying, he was afraid they might do it underneath him.

Taken each on his own, every uniformed man in that summer garden was a loser, even with the pears and the windfalls. And Lilli had small firm summer apples. After only a few words Lilli would have sent any one of them packing. They guessed as much, which was why they practiced the conquest of Lilli together, as a regimental exercise. In their view, Lilli’s officer no longer needed to oil his joints, he was past precision work, it was time he was relieved. They pressured him to give others a go at Lilli’s gorgeous flesh. As they tossed one match head after the other, the wedding rings they wore on their fingers glinted in the sun, while their eyes, fixed on their target, flashed like greased bullets. The old man set the ashtray next to his hand and said:

They’re sick. We should have gone somewhere else.

He gathered the match heads from the table and tossed them into the ashtray. His hands were as white and slender as a pharmacist’s. Neither he nor Lilli made a move to get up. They weren’t pretending to be calm; they were merely being patient. I couldn’t understand it, you only have that kind of patience if you know you won’t need it long. The officer’s temples were pulsing, but his face was still smooth, dappled beneath the sunshade like blotchy paper. The way Lilli looked at him, utterly without reserve, was new to me. Her gaze and his — like plums falling into still water. When he leaned in to take Lilli’s hand, his belly slid forward like a ball. Another two matches landed on the table. Now he’ll get angry, I thought. But he merely gathered these as well, using his free hand, while he was so sure of Lilli’s hand that he suddenly started to sing to her, softly:

A horse is coming into camp

with a window in its head.

Do you see the tower looming high and blue…

The fact that he’d sing at all, so deep, although without revealing anything of his inner self, was moving enough. But the idea that he knew the song in the first place cut me to the quick. My grandfather used to sing the same song; he had learned it in the camp. The officer was obviously counting on Lilli and me being too young to know it. My God, it would have tied his tongue if I had joined in. As it was, the song sounded awkward, here at the table, simply because I was sitting between them, listening. I looked up and saw where the umbrella fabric had worn through at the spokes. We ourselves were caught in the spokes of a great wheel, and I was violating a secret. For the officer, Lilli wasn’t just another pleasant pastime, he loved her. And when he stopped singing, I left Lilli sitting beside him in the officers’ mess and went walking through town in a daze. Already then they must have been thinking about getting out. He had two grown-up sons in Canada, that’s where he wanted to take her.