Herta Müller - The Appointment

She’s a bit of a cold fish, said my father-in-law, but there comes a point when they all unbutton their blouses.

Seven or eight times a year, when the relatives came, my father-in-law would flip the picture in the living room, to show the original paraputch: his parents with their six children. Mother and father sitting on the coach box, each holding a little girl. The boys were sitting in twos on the backs of the two chestnut horses. Every other day of the year the picture showed a white horse, on which sat a young man in glistening riding boots, carrying a short crop. This was my father-in-law, although not exactly. At that time he had a different name.

I danced with my husband, asking him not to spin me around, and we bobbed back and forth. When his father was present he kept his composure. I danced with the son-in-law, who after having thrown up was no longer as drunk as when he had arrived. He dragged his feet and lost a sock during the foxtrot. Martin picked it up and hung it on a branch of the chandelier. Then I danced with his father-in-law or uncle, and after that with the brothers of my father-in-law, and later with Martin. The old men had firm grips and didn’t talk while they danced, I had to allow them to spin me around in silence. When my father-in-law planted himself in front of me with open arms and his tie loosened at the collar, I said:

Come and sit here at the table with me, we can talk too.

Talk, he said. Dancing keeps you young.

He had just been to the bathroom and his perfume was wafting around him. He picked out one of the liqueur cherries from a small dish perched on the corner of the table. They tasted of compote and made you drunk. I had already eaten a few too many and they had clouded my head. My father-in-law popped the cherry in his mouth and sucked the red juice from his forefinger. With his other hand he signaled me to get up. He sucked on the cherry stone and pressed his hand into the small of my back, making me aware of what he had in his trousers. I was no more curious then than I was a year later when his son reported for military service, when I was putting the towels in the cupboard and he knelt down behind me and kissed my calves.

Come on, you’ll see, it will help you get over his absence.

I pressed my legs firmly together and closed the cupboard and said:

I can’t stand you.

He could of course have asked why, then he would have gotten an earful. But what he said was:

There you have it. You rack your brains to come up with ways of helping the children, and this is what you get for your pains.

He wanted to take his son’s place. That time when I offered myself to my father in place of the woman with the braid, it seemed both urgently necessary and quite possible. This time it was neither. I never let on to my husband and my mother-in-law, nor did they ever find out what I knew about the white horse, the Perfumed Commissar, and his change of name. He had already reinvented himself once, he had practice doing that. Hell would have frozen over before I would forget that. But I didn’t make any fuss, I kept my mouth shut as usual, so that their misfortune didn’t come home to roost for the whole paraputch.

By three in the morning the early hours of the New Year had already put a whole year’s worth of wrinkles on our faces. The urge to grope the flesh that had married into the family gave way to yawning. The married couples, who by mutual agreement had turned a blind eye to each other’s whereabouts that night, were regrouping. My mother-in-law was arguing with her husband because the crystal carafe was broken. The eldest daughter was arguing with her drunken husband because he had burnt two holes in his trousers with his cigarette. My husband was reproaching me for having toasted in the New Year with Martin before doing so with him, and for not even having noticed. The wizened wife was moaning that her husband had lost one of his gold cuff links. He showed all of us the one he still had on his right cuff, we searched the bathroom, the living room, and the hall and found old trouser buttons, coins, hairpins, perfume bottle caps, and lined them all up on the tablecloth. The youngest brother was arguing with his fat wife, because she had mislaid the car key. She emptied her handbag onto the table. A handkerchief, two aspirins, and a tiny St. Anthony made of rusting iron came tumbling out. He’ll help us, she said and kissed the saint.

Why don’t you eat him, said her husband, then perhaps you can work a miracle and open the car door with your finger.

Martin rested his chin on the table and gave the women’s calves another ogle. Nobody took any notice, at that time of night he no longer counted as one of the family. In the glare you could make out half a finger’s breadth of shiny silver in his hair, which was otherwise dyed brown.

Nobody found the cuff link, everyone stopped looking and went into the hall to put on their coats and shoes. Anastasia appeared with a rusty pair of tweezers from the bathroom. Her hands were dripping, the hair around her forehead was wet, and on her chin clung a drop of water.

How come you’re drinking out of your hands, asked my mother-in-law, there are plenty of glasses.

Anastasia started crying:

I’ve really got to tell all of you this, that widower was absolutely horrible, the way he treated me in the bathroom, it was very rude, completely unacceptable.

The pair of tweezers lay with the other finds on the table, looking very like the small St. Anthony, but no one kissed it. Anastasia slipped on her coat and wrenched open the door.

Wait a moment, said my father-in-law, the others are all heading out as well.

I don’t need anyone to see me home, she said.

The brother who had lost his cuff link pointed at her feet: You’re not going in your stockings, are you.

Anastasia found the car key in her shoe.

The St. Anthony brought us luck after all, said my father-in-law to his wizened daughter-in-law.

Nobody believes in it, anyway, she said.

And then she hugged Anastasia:

Martin was just trying his luck, don’t take it to heart. Who knows, something might have come of it.

By then Martin had already disappeared, no one knew how or when. He’d left his scarf hanging in the hall.

After everybody had gone, my father-in-law flipped the picture back around. My mother-in-law unhooked the sock from the chandelier, opened the windows and doors onto the street and garden. The snowy cold night blew inside. The chandelier swayed in the draft, my father-in-law’s tie fluttered, as did his son’s hair. Then the white horse stepped toward me from the wall, coming to fetch all these people who were so exhausted from partying on the first day of January. I retreated into the hall. My father-in-law yawned and yanked his tie over his head. His wife was bending over the carpet, picking up bread and cake crumbs and cherry stones.

The dishes have to be cleared before we can turn in, she said.

I had no intention of helping. Her husband laid his tie on the table, widening the knotted loop into a perfect circle like you see in display windows.

I said a hasty good night.

Whatever you dream about tonight will come true, he said.

That new year began with the whole paraputch talking about the missing cuff link. It isn’t here in the house, it probably fell in the toilet, after all, things like that do happen. I knew better and told my husband that the gold cuff link was lying on the bedside table in his parents’ jewelry box.

What are you snooping around for, he asked.

Because a cuff link can’t walk, I said. The next time I peeked in the jewelry box, it had disappeared. At Easter my father-in-law was swaggering about with a gold tie pin:

From my dear wife.

She wasn’t that dear a wife to him, she knew that. He had a mistress my age in the garden shop, a specialist in mites and aphids. Since no one could say her official title of Comrade Engineer for Combating Parasites in Cultivated Plants without laughing, everyone called her Comrade Louse Inspector. On Sundays my mother-in-law was happy that her husband couldn’t go to the nursery. But at Easter her face was soft and mellow as dough. She couldn’t get enough of looking at him, to see him so moved by his tie pin that on Sunday he didn’t sneak off to the bathroom to phone his lover. My mother-in-law took a deep breath and said: