Herta Müller - The Appointment

Before I was born, my parents had had a boy who turned blue in a fit of laughing. He never became a real son, since he died before he was christened. My parents had no qualms about releasing his grave plot after just two years. It wasn’t until one day when I was eight years old and a boy with grazed knees was sitting across from us in the tram that Mama whispered in my ear:

If your brother had lived, we wouldn’t have had you.

The boy was sucking candy molded in the shape of a duck, it swam in and out of his mouth, outside I saw the houses rising through the windows as we passed. I was sitting next to Mama on a hot wooden seat that was painted green — sitting there in place of my brother.

We had two pictures of me from the maternity home, but not a single one of my brother. One picture shows me on a pillow, next to Mama’s ear. In the other I’m in the middle of a table. With their second child my parents wanted one picture for themselves and one for the gravestone.

I was too old to be frightened of the whitewashed tree trunks on the way home from the depot. But I felt more degraded because of my father than I had in the tram because of Mama. I’m better than that girl with her braid, I thought, why doesn’t Papa take me. She’s dirty, her hands are green from all the vegetables. What does he want with her, she has a good husband. I see him in the mornings on my way to school. He’s young, he lugs those heavy baskets for her from the bus stop to the market, while she just carries a plastic bag. Besides, she has a child, who patiently passes the time in the back of her stall, underneath the concrete roof, playing with a grubby stuffed dog on an upturned wooden crate. Fool that I am, I even bought an armful of horseradish from her the day before yesterday. She dropped the money into a large apron pocket over her belly and stroked the child’s hair. She knew who I was, she must have been thinking about her sin. A fresh cold sore was blossoming on her upper lip, it never occurred to me that she had caught it from Papa. His own was fading, it had been a vivid crimson two weeks earlier. You couldn’t tell by looking at her how happy she would have been to leave the child and his grubby plush dog at home in order to have some fun with my father come evening.

Papa showed up at home carrying my bag over his shoulder, he placed it in front of me and asked:

Since when have you been so careless.

Who’s calling who careless, I asked back.

He pretended not to hear, sat down at the table under the bright light and waited for his food. He cut the salami into pieces thick as a finger and ate four red-hot peppers he’d brought with him, probably from her. It’s possible he even paid for them. And to top it all off he ate six slices of bread and a handful of salt. That long braid must be a real drain on his energy. Maybe the gas fumes in the bus got his blood pumping to his heart too fast, and that made him feel spunky, like back during the war. My grandfather had once shown me a small picture and said:

That’s his tank.

And who’s that, I asked.

Lying in the grass next to my father was a young woman, barefoot, her shoes flung far apart at the base of a shrub. Dandelions were blooming between her calves, her elbow was bent and her head propped on her hand.

A musical girl, Grandfather said, she played his flute. During the war your father was after anything with a slit that didn’t eat grass. Later the letters never stopped coming. I tore them all up so your mother wouldn’t see them. I was amazed how quickly he married her. She wasn’t so much to look at really, but she put a bridle on him, and had him where she wanted from the get-go.

I rode to the depot with him ten more evenings, counting each trip on my fingers. I grabbed his arm, his knee, but he just kept his eyes on the road. I touched his ear, he smiled at me, then looked back at the road. I placed my hand on his, on the wheel. He said:

I can’t drive like this.

On the last trip I offered him a pear I’d already taken a large bite out of, so he wouldn’t have to struggle with the thick, yellow peel. He chewed and smacked his lips, the juice frothing around his teeth, and swallowed with an absent look in his eyes. Papa liked the taste, but I was only eating to entice him. When I couldn’t stomach any more and he turned his mouth to take another bite, I said:

You can have the rest, I’ve had enough.

He could have asked why. He was honking as he turned the corners because he was looking forward to his woman with the long braid. He was sailing through the red lights, not to give us something to laugh about but because he was in a hurry to see her.

When he reached the depot on that last trip, he once again opened the bus door at the gates with a flourish that was part of his sin. He’d eaten the rest of the pear, including the core, and tossed the stalk through the door before I could get out. Now he was ready for forbidden flesh.

After that I stayed home in the evening. At least he might have asked whether I wanted to come along just one more time. I’d used up all ten fingers, but I could easily have started over. Maybe cigarettes would have worked better than my hands or a half-eaten pear. I could have taught him how to inhale the smoke into his lungs; Papa just puffed the smoke out through his mouth — in fact, he only smoked because the foreign cigarettes made him look smart. And since he couldn’t afford them, he rarely smoked at all, but smoking somehow fit him. While he was taking the bus in for the night, I would pick a peach from the pitch-black trees along our fence and plop down on the garden bench. I’d listen to the crickets chirping a song about a bus that changed into a bed in the evenings, intimate and sinful and just for two. Actually for three, since that was the secret I was eating and swallowing.

When I came home from my last ride, after the pear had failed to get me anywhere, Mama asked:

Have you been crying.

Yes, I had been.

There was a dog prowling around the garbage cans, he followed me from the avenue all the way to the bread factory, I told her. Mama said:

It’s in heat and you scared it.

All you think about is being in heat, I yelled: it’s nothing but skin and bones and it’s half-dazed with hunger.

My heart turned so hard, it would have struck her dead if I had thrown it. My tongue dried out, that was how much I hated her when she added, without a trace of shame:

Ah, so that’s why I heard that howling outside.

Outside, as always in dry summers at dusk, there was not a single dog to be heard, nothing except the chirping of crickets, from the ground all the way up to the sky. Mama was simply dressing up my lie with my being scared of a dog in heat. She was lying to keep me from blurting out that it was my father who was in heat, and that I could have made him scared if I had wanted.

How often have I had to lie or keep my mouth shut to protect the people I love most — at the very times I could stand them least — to keep them from plunging headlong into some disaster. Whenever I wanted my hatred to last forever, a feeling of disgust would soften it up. With a hint of love on the one hand, and a heap of self-reproach on the other, I was already surrendering to the next hatred. I’ve always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune.

One evening my mother put on her summer dress with the tight rows of mother-of-pearl buttons and the daring low-cut back, did her hair up in a French twist, fastened it with a few barrettes, and popped a caramel into her mouth. Any time she sucked on sweets while doing herself up, she had something in mind that required some finesse. She put on her white sandals and said:

What a hot day. Now it looks like it’s cooled off a little. I think I’ll go out for a stroll along the avenue.