Herta Müller - The Appointment

Good God Almighty, is nothing sacred. If you two want to quarrel, at least don’t do it here.

My heart was thumping inside my head. I took a breath in order to change my tone, and said, as if I were sweetness and light itself:

We’re sorry.

I walked off, leaving Nelu standing there. The earth had still not settled on one of the other graves in Lilli’s row. A new wooden cross and beside it a plate, smeared with food, and I simply couldn’t believe that I had apologized for Nelu as well as myself.

You give the dead food to take on their way to heaven, to distract the evil spirits. On the first night, the soul sneaks around them, past hell, to God. Lilli’s mother will give her a plate too. During the night, the cemetery cats will enjoy a feast on her rectangular mound of soil. The echo of my steps on the paved path was louder than the spadework at the grave. I held my hands to my ears and started running toward the gate. If I didn’t want to understand Lilli’s love for the old men, it was because…

A bus was waiting at the entrance to the cemetery gate. My father was sitting asleep at the wheel, with his face buried in his hands — despite the fact that he’d been dead for years. Since his death I had frequently spotted him sitting at the wheel of a moving bus or one that was parked. The reason he died was to get away from Mama and me; he wanted to go on driving undisturbed through the streets, without having to hide from us. And so he just keeled over right before our eyes and died. We shook him, his arms swung limply back and forth and then went rigid. His face drew taut against his cheekbones, his forehead felt like vinyl — cold, with a coldness that shouldn’t occur in humans, it’s too unforgettable. I kept caressing his brow and prying his eyes open so that they’d roll back around, so that the light would enter and force him to live. But every touch seemed indecent. I kept tugging at him while Mama turned away as if he’d never belonged to her at all. His keeling over showed us exactly how a person can shun help, how a person can simply decide to grow cold like that, with utter disregard for anyone else. From one moment to the next, he had unhitched himself from Mama and me and left us to ourselves. Then the doctor arrived. He laid Papa on the couch and asked:

Where’s the old man.

My grandfather is at his brother’s in the country, I said, they don’t have a telephone and the postman only comes once a week. He won’t be back until the day after tomorrow.

The doctor wrote the word stroke on an official form, stamped it, signed it, and left. With his hand on the door, he said:

It’s hard to believe — your husband was in great condition, but his brain just switched off, like a lightbulb.

A glass of sparkling water, which the doctor had requested but not drunk, was standing on the table, fizzing away. When he keeled over, Papa had brought the chair down with him. Now the backrest was lying on the floor and the seat was vertical. It was upholstered in a reddish-gray houndstooth check. Mama tiptoed into the kitchen with the glass of water, glancing back at the couch as if her husband were taking his afternoon nap. She didn’t spill a single drop. From the kitchen came the one brief sound of a glass being set down. After that she came back into the room and sat down at the table where the glass had been. And then there were two people in that room who weren’t fully alive and one who was dead. Three people who for years had been lying every time they referred to themselves as “we,” or said “our” about a water glass, a chair, or a tree in the garden.

Since then, whenever I met my father in the streets, he seemed as unfamiliar as he did lying on the couch. I saw him everywhere, even at the entrance to the cemetery. All the buses throughout the country looked alike, they all had the same worn steps, the same rusty fenders, and at least half a year’s accumulated dust on the roof, fine as flour. I peered in through the windows and suddenly saw the backrests of the vacant seats turn into passengers, and the windshield break out in little freckles, as Papa called the squashed bugs that dried in various shades of red and yellow. I saw women wearing white stockings and embroidered shoes and men with pinched faces and walking sticks — all Lilli’s relations. Her father came from a valley in the hilly region, a mere wisp of a village, where the plum trees were drenched with blue and the branches sagged. The driver had to wait until Lilli was at last completely covered by earth. Lilli’s soul would soon be in the care of the cemetery cats, but it would take half the night before the driver would return his farmers with their overtired faces safely to their plum trees.

While I was going to the girls’ high school in our small town, and still living with my parents, I used to enjoy meeting my father for his last ride of the day, when he ran the empty bus back to the depot. In the near darkness of the streets, as the bus rattled along on its way, we felt no need to talk. The seats, the doors, the hand straps, the steps, every single part was loose, but somehow the bus as a whole held together. Every evening, after a long day’s driving, Papa would tighten up the most important screws and tune the engine for the next morning. Riding to the depot, he would honk as he turned the corners and sail through the red lights. We would laugh when we had a close shave, when the lights of a truck passed within a hairsbreadth. As soon as we reached the depot he’d let me off at the big iron gates. I’d walk on and he’d take the bus inside, since he still had things to do. An hour and a half later he would show up at our house.

One evening a bug flew into my eye while I was walking home along the avenue. I stopped under a streetlamp, pulled down my lid and held it to my lashes. Then I blew my nose. It was a trick my grandfather had learned in the camp. I must have done it right, because when I was done the fly was caught in the corner of my eye, and I was able to wipe it away. But my eye was watering, and I needed a handkerchief. At that point I realized I’d left my bag in the bus. Papa wouldn’t see it, he never thought of anything but the engine. So I turned back.

I entered the depot from the side. I knew my way well enough, but not in the dark, so I kept to the main building, where an ornate shaded lamp was burning beside the loading dock. I quickly found the bus. In the grass next to the front wheel I saw two empty wicker baskets. And inside the bus, on the seat next to the driver, I saw a braid of hair bouncing up and down. Then I made out cheeks, a nose, a throat. My dad was kissing the throat. He was sitting beneath a woman who was arching her head up as if she wanted to climb her own neck all the way to the ceiling. Her back was bent like a reed. I knew the woman, we had gone to the same girls’ school. She had been in a different grade, but we were the same age. For the last three years she’d been selling vegetables in the market. Her braid went tossing back and forth until finally my father pulled her mouth to his. I wanted to run away like the wind, and at the same time I wanted to keep staring at them forever. A swarm of flies hung around the shaded lamp like a swatch of gauze. The poplar outside the depot looked like a real tree up to the eaves, but there the gutter cut off the light and it became a black tower, swaying and rustling. But the crickets were even louder, and nothing cut them off, from the grass all the way up to the sky, so that I could see Papa’s open mouth but not hear him. I lost track of how long I had been watching or how long the sin lasted. I wanted to make it home on time, to beat him there by a decent interval. The shortest route led through a hole in the fence behind the main building.

Farther away from the depot, the buildings along the avenue seemed to dissolve in the light of the streetlamps. The thick, whitewashed tree trunks shimmered and reeled, or was it me not walking straight. After what I’d seen, I could no longer allow myself to be frightened of the night lurking among the trees. And besides, I knew that even during the day, when the sun was glaring, the white gravestones in the children’s section of the cemetery would reel exactly the same way as the whitewashed tree trunks were doing in the moonlight. I knew that, because the boy I had made the dust snakes with was lying in the cemetery behind the bread factory. In the heat of the dog days, when children had to stay indoors, his stone looked as drunk as the avenue did at night. The markers around him tottered and swayed, especially the portraits on the gravestones, the ones showing children with soft toys and pacifiers. The boy with the largest gravestone was sitting astride a snowman.