Herta Müller - The Appointment

He only visited me once here in the city. He was proud of my living in a high-rise, it was so different from our house, with the mountain looming right in front of your nose, up here you have air and a view. He went out onto the balcony, but he never got a chance to appreciate the view. He stumbled on my tools and the aerials and asked:

What’s this. You’re selling things on the black market.

When he realized the aerials were designed to pick up foreign stations, he started talking about me as if I were some other person:

So my son has a taste for money. That’s making a mockery of socialism. And what will come next. Sheer unadulterated capitalism. He can make aerials till he’s blue in the face but he’ll never belong to the people who flaunt their money hand over fist.

I said: It’s not mocking anything to earn money, and it’s not against the law.

To which he said: It’s not exactly legal, either, but you didn’t worry about that, did you.

And what do you mean by capitalism, I said. I’m not earning dollars, and besides, the Yugoslavs and Hungarians have socialism just like we do, even on television.

Lately the Party’s had more profiteers than fighters, he said, and generally speaking, money ruins character.

But it’s your own son you’re talking about, and I’m the only one you’ve got. Besides, what have you achieved except a career melting iron for tractors and pitchforks for shoveling manure. We still don’t have heaven on earth. But your brain is in full red bloom. When you stand before the Lord God Almighty, he’ll see that glow on your forehead and ask: Well, little sinner, what have you brought me. Two corroded lungs, some herniated discs, chronic conjunctivitis, poor hearing, and a shabby suit, you’ll say. And what have you left behind on earth. And you’ll say: My Party book, a peaked cap, and a motorcycle.

My father just laughed: Hah hah hah, that’s only if you wind up playing God. But, you know, even in heaven I’d be ashamed of you, since we’d have a bird’s-eye view of all those rooftops with your black-market antennas.

I didn’t want to go on, but he wasn’t through. He looked at the clock and said: Hopefully there aren’t many people in the city who think they need those foreign TV stations. Once they get their aerials, that’ll be it.

I said: You’re a mean old man, and you’re jealous, even of me.

My father was out of breath and didn’t respond, he pulled his cap down over his left ear, so that it looked exactly as it had on me as a child at the plaque of honor. Only now he was doing it to himself. He looked at the clock and said: No point to any of this, I’m hungry.

Your father was bitter, I said, else he wouldn’t have been so pig-headed, but he wasn’t a danger to others. My father-in-law clawed his way up the ladder. He’ll never tell a living soul why he fell from grace, there are only rumors. But everybody remembers exactly how the Perfumed Commissar rode from house to house, tying his white horse in the shade of the trees and how he wrapped his whip around the horse’s mane. And that the horse was called Nonjus. My grandfather said the farmers were made to bring hay and buckets of fresh water. The white horse ate and drank, while its rider searched the houses for grain and gold. He had papers with the field plots carefully mapped and numbered. After each expropriation he’d go back to his horse and unwrap the colorful woven leather whipcord. There was a silken tassel at the end of the cord and the base of the haft had a screw-on cap made of horn. He’d open this to get his pen. Then he’d take a sheet of paper out of his jacket and cross off a number. Whenever he rode through the village, the dogs would chase after him, barking. They sensed that the man on the horse was putting an end to the peaceful ways of the village. He hated those mutts, he’d crack his whip and that would goad them even more. They were little creatures, like barking cats, but they would race like the wind alongside the horse’s hooves. Sometimes it took three, four, or even ten tries, but eventually the whip would catch them on the neck or between the ears. People would wait until late afternoon to remove the dogs from the street, when they knew he was finished riding for the day. The mutts lay stretched out stone dead, with their light-colored stomachs swelling up in the sun and their eyes and snouts covered in flies. First he rounded up the farmers with large holdings and turned them over to the security services, after that he went after the medium-sized farmers, then he moved on to the smallholders. He was a hard worker, after a while he was rounding up too many farmers, and ones who were too poor at that, so the gentlemen in the city sent whole groups of them back to the village on the next train.

One morning the white horse lay dead in the stable after eating poisoned bran. Day and night, local men were interrogated and beaten in the parish hall by two village ruffians who spelled each other in shifts. Three men were accused and arrested. All three are dead now, but none of them did it. One night the two thugs loaded the horse onto a trailer and hauled it off to be buried in the valley between the village and the town on the other side of the vineyards. My father-in-law accompanied them. He and one of the thugs sat on the trailer with a hurricane lamp perched next to the horse’s carcass. They had to drink brandy because the horse stank so much. The other thug was at the steering wheel, sober. They drove up into the hills. It had been raining heavily, the tractor got bogged down in the soft earth. The next day the driver told how the crickets, frogs, and other night creatures in the soggy grass were screaming like mad throughout the night, and the horse’s carcass stank to high heaven. The devil had us bagged up good and proper, he said. During the night, the great Communist started to rave. He stomped off aimlessly into the mud, sobbing and cursing. He kept throwing up, his eyes were practically popping out of his head, there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. When the grave had been dug and the horse had been unloaded from the tractor rig, he threw himself to the ground and flung his arms around the horse’s neck and refused to let go. The two thugs had to drag him into the driver’s cab and tie him to the seat. And there he sat as they drove back, tied up, filthy, covered in vomit, and completely silent. When the tractor was halfway home and they were again on top of a hill, the driver untied him and asked: How about a short break. He shook his head absently. The moon shone in his eyes, which were glowing blank as snow. As the tractor chugged on he began to pray. He stammered out one Lord’s Prayer after another, until the first of the village houses came into sight. To this day the people in the village are convinced that that burial was his undoing. The dandified Communist wasn’t the only one that night to feel the full measure of the fear that lies inside us all. Once the devil had them bagged up, his two hired thugs also heard the bell toll. The driver started going to church and would talk about what happened the night of the burial to anybody who’d listen. The Perfumed Commissar was transferred out of the district. The rumor that the driver not only buried the horse but had poisoned it as well never died down. The man disappeared for a while, and people in the village thought he had been arrested, as he deserved to be. But he showed up later on, and a few days after that he was missing his right hand. Since everyone in that village knew him he wanted to disappear, so he applied for the job of sexton in another village, and was taken on. There he told people he had lost his hand during the war. The hand itself turned up in the flour bin in his kitchen after he had moved away. For some years after the war, only cripples were taken on as sextons, so he had hacked off his own hand.