Herta Müller - The Appointment

It’s about half past eight.

I had wanted to do something for Paul, not in ten days’ time, as the young shoemaker suggested, but that very day, between seven and just about half past eight. I had failed. The pharmacist was sitting in the window next to a stack of tiny boxes with Chinese writing on them, barefoot, her back to the street. Each box was filled so tight you couldn’t have squeezed a coat button inside. They looked like those condom wrappers that had the word Butterfly printed next to all the Chinese characters. Lilli had once said:

The Chinese are crafty bastards. They export the good rubbers to America for the Chinese in New York’s Chinatown. The ones with the holes they send to us and the Bulgarians.

Each of the boxes was jammed with wads of cotton wool, and inside each was one glass eye. The pharmacist was arranging the eyes in a row along the bare wood of the windowsill: light brown, dark brown, green flecked, light blue, and dark blue. The light brown eyes would have been right for Paul; I counted them. Then I counted my own dark brown ones. There were more of Paul’s. Behind the window, in the deep red glow of the sun, the pharmacist started on her second row. She was sitting in an aquarium. I tapped on the window, she turned her head, brushed the hair from her forehead, and kept going. Her eyes were gray flecked with green.

The white sofa in the sky, the pharmacist in the aquarium, the linden seeds, Paul’s sandals like mittens on the young shoemaker’s hands, Mulberry Street lined with acacias — after the old shoemaker died everything seemed out of control. The wind might not have managed to scatter the crazy dahlia seeds, but it had sown a feeling of vertigo among the shoelaces and toothpaste, cigarettes and thumbtacks, headscarf and hat. And now blindness was being peddled on this red evening in the city, with glass eyes for everyone. But death comes knocking especially for those who think they can dance their fill of the world in order to be happy. Yes, that’s the way we’d like it: we’d wear the crown and have our fill of the world. But isn’t it the other way around, that the world has its fill of us, and not we of it.

Not that everybody is included in this us. Not everyone goes mad, just as not everyone gets summoned. Lilli wasn’t summoned, although for weeks after the first notes I was convinced she would be. I wanted to prepare her for the feeling you get at your first interrogation, the way the roof of your mouth rises up and glues itself onto your brain. That’s how it feels the second time as well, and every time after that, but in time you stop being frightened. Lilli wasn’t worried.

I’ve never even seen your notes.

As if that was a reason not to be summoned. As if those who know nothing except how fear can set your heart racing weren’t the easiest prey. With the roof of your mouth inside your brain you give yourself away. They’d probably questioned Nelu and the girls from the packing hall about me. Nelu hated me, and the girls didn’t know me well enough to care. I didn’t care about them, either, but the fact that their words froze in their throats the minute a door in the corridor was cracked open did not bode well.

Lilli was right, she was never summoned. That was lucky, even though she could have stood up for me. She couldn’t have stood up for herself. The only thing Lilli asked me about the interrogations was:

How old is your major.

What’s that supposed to mean — my major, I said, and I pretended he was ten years younger than he really was.

About forty.

Oh, heavens, said Lilli, once she had ruled him out for herself. I knew for a fact that Albu would have started feeling Lilli up the very first time. She would have gone along or turned him away, in either case he would have exacted some fearful revenge. A few days after that conversation, Lilli mentioned that her parents had had a fight. Her mother didn’t want to let her stepfather out of the house. The reason was a rendezvous, but not with a woman. It was about a newsstand in the park, where her stepfather was supposed to show up at five in the afternoon. Lilli’s mother said:

Today you’re staying home for once. I’ll call the switchboard and tell them you’re sick. With all the kids crawling around the city, you ought to put your foot down, let them find someone younger.

She blocked his way. Lilli’s stepfather took his wallet and shoved her aside:

Where’d you get that idea — put my foot down, and how pray tell am I going to do that. You act big at home all right, he shouted, but at the market you’re pretty quick to shove the melon at me to hold so that camel of a lieutenant can kiss your hand. And then you even say to him — imagine, the lady saying to the man — The honor’s mine. Here you come on so brave and courageous, but when someone like that shows up, you’re so scared you can’t even swallow your own spit. Better go take your heart pills instead.

I was wondering about the games that life plays, and on my way back from the shoemaker I went through all the possible ways of getting fed up with the world. The first and the best: don’t get summoned and don’t go mad, like most people. The second possibility: don’t get summoned, but do lose your mind, like the shoemaker’s wife and Frau Micu who lives downstairs by the main entrance. The third: do get summoned and do go mad, like the two women in the mental home. Or else the fourth: get summoned but don’t go mad, like Paul and myself. Not particularly good, but in our case the best option. A squashed plum was lying on the pavement, the wasps were eating their fill, the newly hatched ones as well as the older wasps. What must it be like when a whole family can fit on a single plum. The sun was being pulled out of the city into the fields. At first glance its makeup looked a little too garish, especially for the hour; at second glance it appeared to have been shot — red as a bed of poppies, Lilli’s officer had said. Yes, that’s the fifth possibility: to be very young, and unbelievably beautiful, and not insane, but dead. You don’t have to be named Lilli to be dead.

I carried the worn-out sandals back home. The red car was no longer parked on the sidewalk. Looking at the bare asphalt you couldn’t even tell it had been there, and the cigarette butts lying on the ground had no idea what had happened. Cats were rummaging through the garbage for something to eat before night revoked all territorial boundaries and strange cats with a green light in their eyes would show up and help themselves, before the wails of hunger and the howls of coupling became one. Compared with this summer evening, my face was cool. From the apartment block next door I heard a shattering of dishes: someone had dropped something. People were eating. The rising moon was half full, two faces were beginning to peek through — a goat’s and a dog’s. The moon would have to choose which face was better suited for this night, time was pressing. Flowers were flowing out of window boxes on the second story. A whirligig was spinning and whirring in the petunias, by the time the moon chose its face they would have been given water for growing. I’d done a lot that day, and despite the failures I had managed to hit upon the best option for Paul and me:

Neither one of us will go mad.

My ass-backward happiness was banging at my temples, demanding to get in, I wasn’t the dumbest woman in the world. The shops had already closed, and there was a light on in our kitchen window. Paul would be waiting with two pairs of new shoes, ready to ask which he should wear and which he should put in his tool cabinet. He should wear whichever pair looks better. Of course he might pick the ones I think are uglier, he doesn’t always see what I see, just like with the photo of Lilli. It’s the only picture I have of her, and I confess I look at it often. I look at it and talk about her beauty, everyone agrees on that, but Paul frowns.