Herta Müller - The Appointment

Paul’s clothes were strewn on the floor. The new day was already in the wardrobe mirror, the day on which I have been summoned, today. I got up, careful to place my right foot on the floor before my left, as I always do when I’ve been summoned. I can’t say for sure I really believe in it, but how could it hurt.

What I’d like to know is whether other people’s brains control their good fortune as well as their thoughts. My brain’s only good for a little fortune. It’s not up to shaping a whole life. At least not mine. I’ve already come to terms with what fortune I have, even though Paul wouldn’t consider it very good at all. Every other day or so I declare:

I’m doing just fine.

Paul’s face is right in front of me, quiet and still, gaping at what I’ve just said, as if our having each other didn’t count. He says:

You feel fine because you’ve forgotten what that means for other people.

Others might mean their life as a whole when they say: I’m doing just fine. All I’m talking about is my good fortune. Paul realizes that life is something I haven’t come to terms with — and I don’t simply mean I haven’t done so yet, that it’s only a matter of time.

Just look at us, says Paul, how can you go on about being fortunate.

Quick as a handful of flour hitting a windowpane, the bathroom light cast a face into the mirror, a face with froggy creases over its eyes which looked like me. I held my hands in the water, it felt warm; on my face it felt cold. Brushing my teeth, I look up and see toothpaste come frothing out of my eyes — it’s not the first time I’ve had this happen. I feel nauseous, I spit out what’s in my mouth and stop. Ever since my first summons, I’ve begun to distinguish between life and fortune. When I go in for questioning, I have no choice but to leave my good fortune at home. I leave it in Paul’s face, around his eyes, his mouth, amid his stubble. If it could be seen, you’d see it on his face like a transparent glaze. Every time I have to go, I want to stay behind in the flat, like the fear I always leave behind and which I can’t take away from Paul. Like the fortune I leave at home when I’m away. He doesn’t know how much my good fortune has come to rely upon his fear. He couldn’t bear to know that. What he does know is obvious to anyone with eyes: that whenever I’ve been summoned, I put on my green blouse and eat a walnut. The blouse is one I inherited from Lilli, but its name comes from me: the blouse that grows. If I were to take my good fortune with me, it would weaken my nerves. Albu says:

You don’t mean you’re losing your nerve already — we’re just warming up.

I’m not losing my nerve, not at all: in fact, I’m overloaded with nerves. And every one of them is humming like a moving streetcar.

They say that walnuts on an empty stomach are good for your nerves and your powers of reason. Any child knows that, but I’d forgotten it. What sparked my memory wasn’t the fact that I was being summoned so often — it was sheer chance. One time I had to be at Albu’s at ten sharp, like today; by half past seven I was all set to go. Getting there takes an hour and a half at most. I give myself two hours, and if I’m early I walk a while around the neighborhood. I prefer it that way. I’ve always arrived on time: I can’t imagine they’d put up with any lateness.

It was because I was all set to go by half past seven that I got to eat the walnut. I’d been ready that early for previous summonses, but on that particular morning the walnut was lying there on the kitchen table. Paul had found it in the elevator the day before. He’d put it in his pocket, since you don’t just leave a walnut sitting there. It was the first one of the year, with a little of the moist fuzz left from the green husk. I weighed it in my hand: it seemed a little light for a good fresh nut, as if it might be hollow. I couldn’t find a hammer, so I split it open with the stone that used to be in the hall but has since moved to a corner of the kitchen. The brain of the nut was loose inside. It tasted of sour cream. That day my interrogation was shorter than usual, I kept my nerve, and once I was back on the street, I thought to myself:

That was thanks to the nut.

Ever since then I’ve believed in nuts, that nuts help. I don’t really believe it, but I want to have done whatever I can that might help. That’s why I stick to my stone for cracking nuts, and always do it in the morning. Once the nut’s been cracked, it loses its power if it lies open overnight. Of course it would be easier on Paul and the neighbors — not to mention myself — if I split them open in the evening, but I can’t have people telling me what time to crack nuts.

I brought the stone from the Carpathians. My first husband had been on military service since March. Every week he wrote me a whining letter and I responded with a comforting card. Summer came, and I tried to figure out exactly how many letters and cards we would have to exchange before he returned. My father-in-law wanted to take his place and sleep with me, so I soon had enough of his house and garden. I packed my rucksack and early one morning, after he’d gone to work, I stashed it in the bushes near a gap in the fence. A few hours later I strolled out to the road, with nothing in my hands. My mother-in-law was hanging out the laundry and had no idea what I was up to. Without saying a word, I pushed the rucksack through the gap in the fence and walked to the station. I took a train into the mountains and joined up with some people who’d just graduated from the music academy. Every day we trekked and stumbled from one glacial lake to the next until it grew dark. Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around — portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds. The music graduates sang as the lake pictured them, upside down, taking their measure as potential corpses. Hiking, resting, or eating, they sang in chorus. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear them harmonize while they slept at night, just as they did at those bleak altitudes where the sky blows into your mouth. I had to stay with the group because death makes no allowance for the wanderer who strays alone. The lakes made our eyes grow bigger by the day; in every face I could see the circles widening, the cheeks losing ground. And every day our legs grew shorter. Nevertheless, on the last day I wanted to take something back home with me, so I picked through the scree until I found a rock that looked like a child’s foot. The musicians looked for small flat pebbles they could rub in their hands as worry-stones. Their stones looked like coat buttons, and I had more than enough of those every day in the factory. But those musicians put their faith in worry-stones the way I now put mine in nuts.

I can’t help it: I’ve put on the blouse that grows, I bang twice with the stone, rattling all the dishes in the kitchen, and the walnut is cracked. And as I’m eating it, Paul comes in, startled by the banging. He’s wearing his pajamas and downs one or two glasses of water, two if he was as blind drunk as he was last night. I don’t need to understand each individual word. I know perfectly well what he says while drinking water:

You don’t really believe that nut helps, do you.

Of course I don’t really believe it, just as I don’t really believe in all the other routines I’ve developed. Consequently I’m all the more stubborn.

Let me believe what I want.

Paul lets that one go, since we both know it’s not right to quarrel before the interrogation, you need to keep a clear head. Most of the sessions are torturously long despite the nut. But how do I know they wouldn’t be worse if I didn’t eat the nut? Paul doesn’t realize that the more he pooh-poohs all my routines, with that wet mouth of his and the glass he’s draining before clearing it off the table, the more I rely on them.