Herta Müller - The Appointment

What is it about her that’s supposed to have been so beautiful, I prefer you, and I’m not just saying that. The most beautiful thing about her is that you liked her so much.

It’s hard to keep a straight face when he says that, and I’ve often had to say:

Paul, you have a good heart but bad taste.

Nevertheless, that night, while Paul was trying on his shoes, I intended to tell him about the glass eyes in the pharmacy window and about the option of not going mad, and most of all that I was not the dumbest woman in the world.

A motorcycle was parked outside our apartment house. The mirror and headlight had been torn off it, the seat had been slashed and the handlebars and pedals bent out of shape. It was Paul’s red Java, I felt the goose bumps break out on my scalp. As I was waiting for the elevator I felt as though I’d left my body and been parceled out among the mailboxes fixed to the wall. But the mailboxes stayed on the wall when the elevator door opened, and it was I who got in, the dumbest woman in the world.

As Paul was riding back from the shop, a gray truck had pulled up behind him, it never left his rearview mirror. Paul pulled over to let it pass. There wasn’t much traffic. He was driving quite slowly, the truck pulled up close to him, so close on the roundabout that it seemed the driver wanted to ram right into the Java. Then the motorbike flew up, and Paul went hurtling through the air, without his bike, and then came falling down like deadwood from a tree. When he dared open his eyes, he saw grass and heard voices. He looked around and saw shoes, pants, skirts, and, very high up, faces. Paul asked:

Where’s the bike.

It was lying by the curb.

Where’s the truck.

No one had seen it.

Where are my shoes.

On your feet, said an old man in shorts.

The ones that were in the bag on the handlebars, where are they.

Good God Almighty, said the old man, it’s a miracle you still have all your teeth, and now you want shoes. You have a guardian angel, isn’t that enough for you.

My guardian angel’s driving that gray truck, said Paul, where did it go.

What truck. You better stop speeding around on that thing.

The legs sticking out of the short pants were like marble, heavily veined and hairless. When the crowd that had gathered saw that Paul still had all his teeth and was coherent, it dispersed. The old man helped him to get up and stand the motorbike upright. Then he handed Paul his handkerchief:

At least wipe the blood off your chin.

Did you see the gray truck, asked Paul.

I saw several.

Did you catch the number.

Fate doesn’t have a number.

But trucks do.

Stick with fate, said the old man, otherwise your guardian angel might take offense.

Meanwhile Paul had wiped the blood from his chin with the freshly ironed handkerchief.

Now Paul was lying on the bed in the dark room. After describing the accident he asked me:

Are you supposed to return a dirty handkerchief, or do you keep it.

I shrugged. The more Paul talked about the old man, the less I thought his presence there was just coincidence. After Paul had sidetracked the conversation into handkerchief etiquette, he took a second detour.

The fact that somebody stole another pair of shoes from me bothers me more than the accident.

I looked out the window, the street lay far below, silent, deserted, and the moon had chosen the goat’s face. If the moon hadn’t made a mistake, the face would last for the night. Halfway out of the window, I said:

The last time I was summoned, Albu smiled a little as he was kissing my hand: You and your husband drive down to the river quite often, don’t you, and accidents do happen on the roads.

The goat’s face was lurking overhead, and the sky was swirling by, and when I stopped looking outside the whole room was reeling. Maybe people are right to keep asking if I’m not afraid the leaning tower might collapse.

Paul had turned the light on:

How come you didn’t tell me this before.

Because I didn’t believe it. Albu was just casting about and settled on an accident. Bloodshot eyes, wrinkled gums, cold hands had all served their turn. Or so I thought.

Outside the night was black and inside it was light, we’d been talking in the dark so long we hadn’t even looked at the wounds on Paul’s forehead, chin, wrists, knees, and elbows. They were caked with dirt and dried blood. I got some cotton wool and alcohol from the bathroom. I wanted to put my arms around Paul but didn’t dare, his scrapes would have hurt even more, on the outside, and nothing would have helped on the inside. He ran his fingers through his hair and then screwed up his face as if even that hurt.

Leave me alone, he said.

Paul dabbed quickly and firmly at the wounds on his knees, elbows, and knuckles. The stinging brought tears to his eyes, he wiped them with the inside of his arm, just before the tears clouded his vision completely. He let me dab at his forehead and chin, because he didn’t want to look in the mirror. My dabs were different, more hesitant, he gave a pained laugh, and in the end I said:

What are you trying to prove. If something hurts you should scream.

And he did scream, though what he really said was:

Take a good look at my face and you’ll see exactly what you’ve been keeping from me.

He grabbed me by the throat and squeezed like a pair of pliers. And I did what he wanted me to do, I stared right at him, my eyes bulging. The wound I had cleaned on his chin was gleaming raw, it stuck in my eye like a spat-out mouthful of watermelon. But then I saw my first husband’s suitcase standing on the bridge. At that point I could have said, should have said, should have been able to say:

Nobody’s ever going to treat me like that again, in the hatred born of love, do you understand, never again, as long as I live. Instead of which I pulled his hands away from my neck. Once you start backing down, you end up with your head over the railing. Hopefully I won’t have to go through the same thing all over. Hopefully I won’t ever feel as contemptible in Paul’s eyes as my first husband had felt in mine.

Beginning tomorrow we’ll travel by bus and tram, said Paul. The jokers will have a harder time of it.

He stumbled into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, closed, there was a glugging sound as Paul drank out of a bottle, I hoped it wasn’t brandy, but it certainly wasn’t water. A glass came clinking out of a shelf and landed on the table. I heard it being filled, it wasn’t one of the big ones. He drank noisily, and I waited. The glass didn’t return to the table, nor was a chair pulled out for sitting. Paul was standing in the kitchen, holding the glass in one of his grazed hands. And if the moon had wandered over there, the face of the goat would be looking helplessly at him, and his wounded face would be looking back.

Perched on the door frame was a mosquito, standing out in the light like a brooch. It was off its guard, I could have killed it. As soon as we turned out the light it would sing and feed until it was all fed up. This was a lucky night; it didn’t even have to bite, it could simply suck up the blood with its proboscis. Unfortunately it had a discerning nose, it would prefer me, Paul’s blood probably reeked too much of brandy for its taste.

There was something fishy about that old man with the handkerchief, Paul shouted from the kitchen. He’s probably laughing himself shitless. I was happy just to be alive, I didn’t catch on, I barely understood what was happening.

The brandy, or the goat’s face, had taken the shock out of Paul, but the mosquito hadn’t done the same for me. I asked:

Can you see the moon through the kitchen window.

The next morning the sun came groping into our bed, two insect bites were itching on my arm, and one on my forehead and one on my cheek. The night before, Paul had been drugged asleep by the brandy, and I had been dragged asleep by a weariness that was faster than the mosquito. I had stopped asking myself questions before going to sleep, questions about how to get through the days, since I didn’t know the answer. What I did know was that questions like that could make you forget how to sleep. The first week after the business with the notes, when I was summoned for three days in a row, I couldn’t sleep a wink. My nerves were razor wire. My body shed weight, it was nothing but taut skin and hollow bones. When I was running around town I had to be careful that I didn’t just turn into smoke and leave my body, the way my breath did in winter, or that I didn’t swallow myself when I yawned. The frozen waste inside me was gaping far wider than I could open my mouth. I began to feel I was being swept along by something lighter than myself, I even began to take pleasure in the sensation, the more numb I grew within. On the other hand, I was afraid that all the specters would come to seem even more attractive, and that I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them or help myself get back. On the third day, as I was heading home from Albu, I found myself walking to the park. I lay with my face in the grass, unable to feel a thing. I couldn’t have cared less if I’d been lying below the grass, dead, I would have welcomed it, and at the same time I liked living so damned much. I wanted to have a good cry and instead wound up laughing myself silly. Good thing the earth sounds so dull and hollow, I laughed until I was tired. When I stood up I was feeling more vain than I had been for a long time: I fixed my dress, tidied my hair, looked to see whether there were any blades of grass stuck in my shoes, whether my hands had turned green and my fingernails dirty. Only then did I leave the park, stepping from a green room onto the sidewalk. At that moment I heard something rustling in my left ear, a beetle had crawled inside. The buzzing was loud and clear, my whole head was echoing with the sound of stilts clattering in an empty hall.