Herta Müller - The Appointment

As long as I lived with my in-laws, whenever I stood in the garden I couldn’t get over my stunned shock that the wild roses my father-in-law had hastily grafted would flower each summer in knotty buds of velvet. The new canes never reverted. Grafting roses seemed to me like having a face-lift on your hips. I put all sorts of flowers in the room, but never a grafted rose. Who could say it wouldn’t go on changing after it had been cut. The leaves were the only thing I could change about myself after the separation, no matter how hard I tried. After the long married squabbles there were days when no one shouted at me. Every day brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended — later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother. That’s when I visited her for the last time and saw her stripped of all secrets, the only person left in the house, utterly alone. And I didn’t feel any sympathy. In contrast to her, I did not postpone this yearning in myself. I’m not that tough, and above all I was younger than she: in her case, everyone close to her had died, and I had flown the nest. I could see myself in her as she resigned herself to the new circumstances — as if I were the mother and she the child. She would stand in the light of the window and seem like such a stranger it drove you crazy, she would stand by the dish rack in the kitchen and seem so familiar you wanted to run. And as she moved about the house she would alternate between one state and the other. But I realized that this craving for solitude was better suited to later life, and that it had affected me too young, too early.

I lived in a room rented from a skinny man who was always smiling. His smile seemed to be a facial feature rather than an expression. His shoulders were hunched, his collarbones rounded: it was like finding a birdcage at my door whenever he came for the rent. The skin on his face was transparent, as if his bones were rubbing it thin: no wrinkles, and yet very old. I made up some excuse for the fifth time and asked him in for a cup of tea. He declined, nodding and chirping, and I wondered how much longer this birdman would put up with me. Wouldn’t he be angry if he got so worked up his skin wore through completely.

Leading a life of unkempt solitude was definitely not the right thing for me. But with Nelu I had stumbled into a real mess, I was trapped in his hatred. We had spent ten days on official business in a small town between the Danube and the Carpathians. He had been designated to make the trip and could choose someone to travel with him, he suggested me. The idea of going somewhere was fine as far as I was concerned. I hadn’t imagined that Button Central, as the town was nicknamed in the factory, would be particularly attractive, but I certainly hadn’t envisaged this wasteland consisting of ten rows of grimy prefab houses surrounded by concrete slabs and building sites overgrown with grass, where nothing was being built and nothing cleared away. Because it was home to the largest button factory in the country, the place was officially designated a town and not a village. A winding asphalt road ran for three kilometers through a field of nettles, from the hotel to the factory gates. In the wind the nettles rose and fell, a sea of blackish green you had to swim across. Early each morning we took that road, which was continuously losing itself and starting over. The nettles grew higher than our heads and even on the ninth day I could easily have lost my way. It wasn’t the first time Nelu had been there, he was as familiar with the nettles as he was with the button factory. Our shoes were muddied by the mixture of dust and dew. At eight we wiped them with Nelu’s handkerchief, outside the entrance, then made the rounds of the offices and departments with lists and swatches of cloth. By five in the afternoon I was half blind from looking at buttons made of plastic, mother-of-pearl, horn, or yarn, with two, three, or four holes, and buttons with stems wrapped in linen and velvet. Seen in these quantities, the buttons were like pills in a drug factory. Instead of being sent to the clothing factories to be sewn into clothes, they should have been packaged in boxes and sent out to the pharmacies, to be taken three times a day after meals. In the afternoons, the nettle road was just as blackish green as it was in the mornings. The dew had dried, the dust was white. Birds were squawking, who knows where they were hiding, there were none in the air. On the way back to the hotel we talked about seasonal buttons, prices, and delivery schedules.

From the front rooms of the hotel you could see the red, single-story railway station. A white goat was grazing beside the tracks, tied to a stake. Inside the circle of its tether it was nibbling blue chicory and scorched grass. Or simply standing there looking down the tracks. The coming night swallowed ground, stake, and tether. Only the goat remained, a shimmering patch. High up on the gable shone the bright face of the station clock.

This was now the second night I had been lying in my bed, staring at the clock. The freight trains were rolling right across the sky, there was no chance of getting any sleep. From the first day on everything was all business and no pleasure — even the night, which was packed with trains. In between the trains there was a racket coming from the hall, men’s voices speaking Russian. Already on the second night I had taken the heavy cut-glass vase and placed it beside my pillow, just in case. The tap water tasted of chlorine, and the chlorine tasted of the sleep I wasn’t getting. I drank without thirst, only so as to have to get up and then lie down again. In the evenings we ate in the restaurant. Along the wall next to our round table was a long banquet table. I counted thirty-four people seated around it, small men with broad cheekbones, eyes and hair as black as night, wearing summer suits made of gray cloth and white collarless shirts.

They all sit together, the waiter said, so they can spend the evening talking about how to piss on horseback or sew buttons with a sickle. A delegation from Azerbaijan, they’ve already spent one week here in the button factory on an official exchange, on top of that they’ll spend next week on a goodwill visit.

Where, I asked.

Also in the button factory, he said and winked. Mind you, the goodwill started on the very first day. Ever since they’ve been here, five girls from the button factory have been sneaking in after midnight to the back rooms on the ground floor. Outside the rooms it’s all push and shove, and inside they’re wailing away like bagpipes. The moment one of them’s shot his bolt, the next climbs up on top. Just listening to all that sperm being sprayed around makes you crazy. This’ll mean a litter of little ones in town, let me tell you, a whole nest of snotty, flat-nosed, half-Asiatics.

It was always the same man doing the talking at the long table, he spoke curtly and quickly as if he were berating the others, but without any sign of anger in his face. The rest would listen, occasionally all of them would laugh, including the one who had just been speaking harshly. The man frequently looked over at me. I allowed his eyes to meet mine since I had nothing better to do. Nelu went over the season’s buttons one more time. I would gladly have said something about the Azerbaijanis, but no sooner had I remarked how many there were of them than Nelu informed me:

You shouldn’t count people. They can sense you’re doing it.

What if they do, why shouldn’t you count them — after all, they’re there. It would have been easier to talk about the fields of nettles or the station goat, but they didn’t interest him as much as the Azerbaijanis. Nelu looked pretty well rested to me. So he can sleep despite the noise of the trains, I thought, he and the goat. A clockwork man who sleeps by night so he can do his job during the day — the perfect man for business trips. The whole point of this trip had been ridiculous from the start. Ordering buttons from a road of nettles that flooded your vision so that you lost sight of the mountains of clothes waiting at the factory. On the third night I started staring at the station clock at eleven, and was still staring at two on the dot. The trains would first whoosh in the distance like trees, then they sounded like iron in the sky, and finally they came crashing through your head loud enough to split it in two. A wounded silence followed, then dogs started barking until the next train came along. My brain slowly pieced itself back together. At one moment, when no train was passing, I heard somebody knocking at my door. I took the vase from beside my pillow and yelled: