Herta Müller - The Appointment

Life is really full of shit,

There’s no choice but to piss on it.

I could hear the people outside, Paul was shouting too. In here it was safe. You can’t become any less than the stuff that stinks beneath your feet. When the fat man spoke of God, did he mean that you could become drunk off the acrid fumes in here. I breathed deeply, I refused to hurry, and despite the risk of slipping, I shut my eyes. Not until I was back outside did I become a piece of human filth. I walked through the market next to Paul, the rows of people with their junk were beginning to scatter. Cigarette stubs lay strewn among the patterned imprints of molded rubber soles. The dust swirled up to our necks, I should have thanked Paul for helping with the door, but I couldn’t get a word out. My gold ring was sold — six thousand lei was a fortune for me — and in all that filth. The dust was moving in the same direction as our feet, leading us on. The wind picked up in longish gusts and then dropped off. The wire fence that enclosed the market caught scraps of paper and old clothes. Paul folded his tarp smaller and smaller until it turned into a blue briefcase, which he wedged into one of the panniers on his motorcycle. Then Paul spat on his fingers and counted the money into my open palm, my elbow lost track and yielded to his touch. He finished counting out the banknotes, and I waited for his fingers to migrate from our business dealings to my pulse.

My beach ball and the brooch were still lying on the newspaper, not a single person had shown any interest, I wanted to walk away and leave them lying there. Paul blew up the beach ball and tossed it into the air. It flew away from me, like a huge scoop of watermelon breaking free from the ground and the dirty Sunday. It was so beautiful, now that it no longer belonged to me. And I, I wanted to hunker down and laugh with my eyes and cry with my mouth. It was the first moment of my ass-backward happiness with Paul. And right in the middle of it he asked:

What does a person do on a Sunday with full pockets and an empty heart?

He picked up the brooch and polished it on his trouser leg — a glass cat with a curved, copper-wire mustache. He fastened it to his shirt. As Paul pushed the motorbike along through the marketplace, the mustache twitched and the cat started to breathe.

If you like we can ride up to the old game preserve, he said, they have a restaurant in the park where you can sit outside.

Only if you throw the cat away, I said, you look like a vagrant.

I don’t think so, he said, but still he tossed it away in the dust behind him, just missing a man who simply glanced up briefly as he hurried past with the long strides of someone who was running late.

His mother-in-law’s waiting for him with chicken soup, said Paul, no need to hurry, by now it’ll be cold anyway.

He had sold my wedding ring in this dust and wind, did he think I was some big-hearted floozy he could go out with and blow all that money. I knew the small botanical garden inside the former game preserve and I knew the Latin names for a few of the plants from walks I had taken there with my husband and his parents. Back then I was living at their place, downstairs in a room that opened onto the yard, so you could enter the room right from the garden path. In winter, instead of warmth, the coal-burning stove blew air as thick as incense up to the ceiling. From spring until late autumn, there were trails of ants along the walls and window frames, clusters of ants in the corners of rooms and drawers, and busy lone ants on the table and in the bed. Even in the kitchen. My mother-in-law doled out the soup. When her husband pushed his bowl over to be served, she would use the ladle to swirl the contents of the pot for a while, as if searching for chunks of vegetables. Actually she was stirring the ants to the sides. Despite her efforts some would still be floating in her husband’s bowl. He would nudge them to the edge with his spoon and act as if the whole thing was completely out of the ordinary.

Where did these come from.

My mother-in-law said:

Don’t get so excited. It’s just pepper.

If that’s just pepper, then I’m a nightingale.

It’s ground pepper, my dear.

Since when does pepper have legs, he asked.

After the divorce, I had stuffed my clothes and things into two sacks and moved out. Since that day on the bridge I never used suitcases. My husband followed me to the gate with the stone from the Carpathians in a plastic bag. I nearly forgot it, and now I absolutely need it for cracking nuts. I felt ageless, for the most part I couldn’t tell whether I was free or lonely. Being alone was neither a burden nor a pleasure. I didn’t regret anything from my three years of marriage except that I had stayed two too many. I got my hair cut short, bought clothes. I also bought bedding for my newly rented flat, and started paying installments on a refrigerator and a couple of rugs. I wanted a change, and quickly, while this new phase was still fresh and leading me in a particular direction. Lilli never needed to change, she had no need of vanity; after all, what can happen to a cool tobacco flower. When love was over, she came out the other side looking great. Lilli knew all about squandered feelings, but she also knew that there’d soon be another pair of eyes hungering after her. I wanted to reshape myself with my own hands, but for that your hands need to be holding a wallet full of bills. I bought everything on impulse, without thinking. Compared to today, my worries were tiny, that was before I wrote the notes. I’d go through my paycheck in just two or three afternoons and then borrow money. Not only from Nelu, also from people I knew only slightly. The borrowed money ran through my fingers just as quickly, and went toward clothes. In the morning I’d come into the office and the first thing I’d do was place my handbag mirror on my desk. In between going over the lists of buttons I would constantly check my appearance. Every day Nelu praised me more. But you can’t get a haircut every day, so to maintain my conviction that things weren’t so bad, the only thing left was new clothes. For a day, at least, they were newer than my face. Of course I worried about my debts, but still I kept on buying. My eyes were wide and feverish, only my throat felt constricted. The spur of the moment was always more powerful than my guilty conscience. In the afternoon sun on the Korso, people turned to look at Lilli because she was beautiful and at me because I was walking arm in arm with her and singing loudly:

O the tree has its leaves,

the tea has its water,

money has its paper,

and my heart has snow that’s fallen astray.

We acted as if we were drunk, I staggered and sang, Lilli staggered and laughed so hard she was crying. Until I said:

A dress doesn’t run up debts, neither does a shoe. Neither do I. But money does. With some people, money grows back like whiskers on a chin, but my chin stays pretty smooth. Let’s say there’s a little money in my bag, then I can say I have something. Next thing you know it’s in the cash register and suddenly I no longer have anything even though it’s right there where I can see it, just a few inches away from my bag. The money’s still worth the same amount, it’s just that it’s no longer mine, what do you make of that.

Once you’re old it starts growing of its own accord, Lilli said, but is that a good reason to want to be old. Don’t worry, none of the people you’ve borrowed from is going to lose sleep over a couple of bills. After all, you’re not running away.

Lilli was mistaking the vanity I’d recently been unable to suppress with independence. After all, I wasn’t going to run away. At least not from the factory, though perhaps from my common sense, that little iron doll in my head, like that rusty St. Anthony lying on the tablecloth at the end of New Year’s Eve.