Herta Müller - The Appointment

Hey, miss, she said, in case you haven’t gotten fucked today because your husband’s banging whores after work, why don’t you go to the bar and get yourself one of those guys with a big cock. He’ll knock those fancy ideas out of you.

You must be joking, I said, I’d rather wait until my man comes home, he’s got a cock the size of a telephone pole that hoists me right up to heaven.

Of course they hadn’t been necking: they did that someplace else. She turned spiteful so fast she must have felt as if I’d caught her in the act. And he must have felt the same way, or else he wouldn’t have sat there small and dumb as a turd. He was probably on duty, and she was helping him pass the time. Before she rolled up the window, I said:

From what I hear, the ones who aren’t getting any are all wearing seashell necklaces this summer, or is that just dried pigeon shit.

Her seashell necklace really did look exactly like that. Walking away, I could hear my own footsteps; I felt a little nauseous. The door to the bar was open, instead of looking inside I looked at the linden trees, which I knew weren’t drunk. But I couldn’t help hearing the drunken voices. The smell of brandy, coffee, smoke, disinfectant, and the dust of summer followed close behind me.

For the first time there was no music playing at the shoemaker’s. The cassette recorder with the batteries held in place by a piece of elastic was not in its usual place on the table. A young man sat behind the workbench, his teeth protruding so that his lips never fully closed over his mouth. Since he wasn’t wearing an apron I supposed he was the shoemaker’s son-in-law, the accordion player. I asked after the old shoemaker. The young man crossed himself four times and said:

Dead.

Where is he buried, I asked.

He fished about in a drawer, I assumed for a piece of paper, but he pulled out a cigarette.

Are you here to look for graves or to have your shoes fixed.

I unwrapped the shoes from the newspaper, he blew the smoke straight out and watched my fingers, as if the shoes might explode at any moment.

Had he been sick, I asked.

He nodded.

What did he have.

No money, said the young man.

Did he kill himself.

How do you get that.

I don’t know, I’m asking you.

He shook his head.

A young man can’t be blamed for an old man’s dying, I thought, but he could at least have some sympathy. All that matters to this wry-face is that a place became available in a row of shops where customers pass by from morning till night.

He stubbed out the cigarette in a tin can and said:

The grave’s on Mulberry Street, is that good enough, or am I supposed to know which row it’s in.

That’s good enough for more than you think.

My feelings exactly, he said. Ever since I came here in March I’ve had to talk about the old shoemaker.

I thought you were his son-in-law, I said.

God forbid. My first day here this guy shows up with so many black and yellow bruises he looked like a canary, and starts clearing out the workshop right under my nose. All the leather, hammers, pegs and lasts, buckles and nails, he took the whole works, even the emery paper and polishes and brushes. These things don’t come with the workshop, he told me. What do you mean, I said: I didn’t bring anything with me, I left everything to the person who took over my place in Josefstadt district. He said he could sell the stuff to me if I wanted. You know, at home they were waiting for me to start earning something, they didn’t have enough money in the house to buy a loaf of bread. But I’m not so crazy as to pay for what’s already mine.

The old man had a lot of customers, I said, that means he must have had some money, too.

His daughter drank her way through the money, the young man said, and she beat up on the son-in-law, which is why he looked the way he did. When he was clearing out the place, I asked him if he was also a shoemaker. He spread out his pitiful white fingers and said: Are you kidding, do I look like you. So I asked the man what he wanted the stuff for. To play the accordion, he said. Oh, I said, so that’s how you got the bruises. No, he said, my wife gave me those. I wondered whether I should go to the bar and get the two policemen who are always sitting there. But the locals still don’t know me, so that would have only caused trouble. The accordion player might have said it was me who had turned him into a canary. On second thought I really should have given him another black eye, he deserved it.

The only trees on Mulberry Street are acacias. There’s an alcoholic who lives at one end of the street. At the other end lies Lilli. And now the shoemaker as well. The old man was short and skinny, but he had big hands and rounded fingernails that the leather had discolored a beautiful brown so they looked like ten roasted pumpkin seeds. Whenever I went to his shop he would run his hand over his head as if he still had his hair. The sweat would bead up on his bald spot while the cassette recorder played folk music at low volume, and his head shone like the glass balls people place in the flower beds around their houses. It looked like it might shatter the instant he banged into something.

So, you’ve danced those shoes to pieces again, he joked. Actually I don’t know if he was joking. All I know is that just before I went and met the new shoemaker, I had danced, really for the first time in my life, to a song in which death comes like a special prize following a life that’s been paid for dearly. After that evening in the restaurant I had never again danced with my first husband, and before that song I had never danced with Paul. I shouldn’t have gone to the shoemaker’s after dancing with Paul, I should have at least waited one more day, then the old man would still have been alive. It was my fault that he was dead.

Until his wife wound up in the asylum, the shoemaker had been a musician like his brother, brother-in-law, and son-in-law, who still play every evening in the restaurant on the Korso. Real musicians, he once said to me, they play from the soul — not from notes.

I don’t like to dance and never wanted to be with another man who did. The first thing I did when I met Paul was to bring up the question of dancing.

Paul said: Is it that important, I don’t like dancing, women like dancing more than men. All the men I know feel they have to dance, said Paul. They dance with a woman half the night in order to fuck her afterwards for fifteen minutes.

What do you mean, my first husband likes dancing, I said, he loves it. You say it doesn’t matter much, but you’ve never been married. Anytime there was music playing my husband became impossible to understand. He was addicted to dancing and I hated it and that tore us apart, and not just a little. Whenever there was music we were worlds apart. I turned into myself, became distant and dull, whereas he came out of himself and was in high spirits like a frisky monkey. We would argue, but we would have been better off if we’d kept silent, so that the rift would have remained small. But then when we were silent we would have been better off saying something, no matter how rude, since it’s easier to get over a quarrel you’ve just had than the injuries you start listing in silence. The scene in the restaurant must have been near the beginning of September; we’d both taken our vacation. We didn’t have enough money to go to the Black Sea or the Carpathians. So we were going to treat ourselves to a night on the town, and on the weekend we went out to a restaurant. My husband wanted to go to the Palace, on the Korso, where the shoemaker’s family played the best music in the city. I thought it was too expensive. So that left the Central, where you can eat and dance for two hundred lei. Other people must have been watching their money as well, since the place was packed. The meat tasted a little sour, the coleslaw smelt like the powder you put out for flea beetles. Because white wine is pretty transparent it’s easy to water down, so that was all they had. Most people were enjoying the food, using the bread to wipe their plates clean. They were chewing away like rabbits so they could get onto the dance floor as quickly as possible. And there I was, grumbling and dragging the dinner out. My husband ate faster than I did, although he was actually lingering over his dinner compared to the others. The orchestra was pretty lame but that was fine with me since I didn’t want to dance. And it was fine with my husband because any music was good enough for him. I looked at the dance floor and saw that the people there felt the same way he did. Because they were all keeping an eye on their money, they had to make sure the evening was worth it, so they were all cheering. The men were crowing, the women were purring one moment and then yoo-hooing the next. At the end of a set they all looked up wide-eyed and laughed and their movements slowed until they were rocking back and forth like huge birds coming in to land. My husband had finished his meal and wiped his mouth with the napkin. His nose was bobbing inside his wineglass and looked warped. Above the table he remained stiff, but beneath the table his feet were tapping so that the floor was shaking. I said: