Herta Müller - The Appointment

Paul was making coffee, water was hissing on the stove, and a blackbird flew up to the kitchen window, settled on the metal ledge, and pecked at its own shadow.

There used to be two of them, said Paul, but then one day I saw one lying near the front door covered with ants.

Paul stirred the coffee, the spoon clinked, I put my forefinger to my lips.

Shhh.

No, we can go on talking, it’ll fly away in a minute anyway.

But he laid down the spoon without a sound. On the table in front of my hands: the red coffee tin, the jam the color of egg yolk, and the white slices of bread. Outside the sheer wall of sky, the pale yellow beak and the feathers made of pitch. Everything was looking at everything else. Paul poured the coffee into the cups, the steam drifted up to his neck. I tapped the cup and pointed a hot finger to the window — the blackbird flew away, the coffee was still too hot.

The Perfumed Commissar, I said, was transferred to the nursery gardens, where he remained. But the effect of the white horse has not worn off, to this day he’s above being a foot soldier and hasn’t had to do a stroke of work. They couldn’t use him in a top managerial position or as a worker, so they made him a supervisor, and that’s what he’s remained. He learned the Latin plant names by heart till he could rattle them off fluently as prayers. On Sundays he would go for walks with his wife, daughter, and son, and later with me too. He’d break off a small stick — it had to be a straight one — strip the leaves, point it at some periwinkle growing by the path and say Vinca minor, and reel off everything he knew about the plant. Next to a bench he’d say Aruncus dioicus, and tell us everything he knew about goatsbeard. And on the next path Epimedium rubrum and plumbagum. His Hosta fortunei grew beside a hollow. You were expected to stop and listen. My husband told me he used to be even stricter. If he or his sister laughed, he wouldn’t speak to them for days. During my last summer with them, I was going to fetch some daisies from the back garden to put in a vase. I saw my father-in-law talking out loud to himself by the walnut tree, not only saying the words but using his hands and even stamping his feet. He was completely absorbed and didn’t notice me till I was right beside him. He realized I must have been watching him, gave an unembarrassed smile, and asked me what I should have asked him:

Has the sun given you a headache.

No, I was going to pick some daisies.

Are you really all right.

Yes, how about you.

How about me, my nose is still in the middle of my face, isn’t it.

So is mine, but you ask me all the same.

I can’t complain, he said.

I wondered whether there were two versions of him — one close up and peaceful, the other far off and full of dead people murmuring. To chase them away he had to shake off his burden. In secret, if he could. Or if that wasn’t possible, then openly, but in terms designed to make people admire rather than pity him. And the best way to manage that was dancing. There were only the two of us at home, he and I. My husband and mother-in-law had gone into town on some errand that afternoon. I never did pick any more daisies, not for fear of him, but because I was afraid of the white daisies.

He worked in the garden but all the Latin names in the world couldn’t give him a green thumb; apart from grafting roses, he hadn’t learned a thing from working in the nursery. Two years ago they received an important order, a factory director had died and there was a big state funeral, the nursery was to furnish twenty wreaths as big as cartwheels. My father-in-law wanted to make an impression and use something special. So he prescribed tiger lilies and ferns instead of the traditional carnation and ivy wreaths. But what they unloaded from the car at the Heroes’ Cemetery was nothing but a lot of wilted brown stalks. Thirty years in the business and he didn’t even know that tiger lilies wilt within half an hour. He should have been sacked, but he had the chief engineer on his side. Twenty-eight years younger than he, she was well-built, fresh out of school, full of energy, and could run around nonstop and give orders better than he could. The working days were long, the sky warm, the summer green. As June turned to July and the foliage grew thick on the shrubs, my father-in-law started fondling the new chief engineer. She didn’t protest, either. There weren’t very many aphids or mites that year, so they had time for each other. Comrade Louse Inspector convinced the director of the funeral service that tiger lilies generally have a long life. She said that all the talk in specialist circles that summer was of a form of mildew from the south of France that attacked cemeteries, since graves aren’t sprayed out of respect for the dead. When freshly cut flowers come into contact with this mildew, they wither in no time at all, every last one of them. Exactly the same thing would have happened with carnations, she told the director. And he put his faith in her expertise, for his own, although he was about to retire, also barely extended beyond the difference between chamomiles and carnations.

I’d really like to know how many people from our apartment block, from the shops down below, from the factory, or from the whole city have ever been summoned. Albu’s office building must have something going on every day of the week, behind every door in the corridor. I can’t see the man with the briefcase who ran off to find his aspirin. Maybe the tram left without him, or maybe it was too full for him to get back on. He’ll just have to wait for the next one — if he has the time. A woman has sat down beside me, her behind is broader than the seat, what’s more she’s sitting with her legs astride a bag. Her thigh is rubbing against me, she rummages in her bag and pulls out a little cone made of newspaper. It’s soggy and full of blood-red bumps — cherries, of all things, cherries. She reaches in with one hand and spits the stones into the other. She doesn’t linger over each individual cherry, she doesn’t suck them clean, she leaves a little meat on every stone. What’s her rush, nobody’s going to swipe her cherries and gobble them up. I wonder if she’s ever been summoned for questioning, or whether she might be sometime in the future. Her hand is soon so full of cherry stones she can’t close her fingers. She can drop them inconspicuously on the floor, even spit them out for all I care. There are people standing in the aisle all the way up to the driver, it probably wouldn’t bother them, either. The driver won’t discover the stones until this evening, he’ll be annoyed because he has to sweep out the car, but there’ll be plenty of other things left over from the day’s run, too. What on earth was the old officer thinking of with Lilli. Cherry season comes every year and lasts from May through September, and it’ll be that way as long as the world exists, no matter what. How does that help him, there aren’t any cherries in prison. It’s good the car’s so crowded, I’ll have more than enough space when I get to Albu’s. And on the way back, if I do come home today. The trams don’t run so often in the evening. I’ll wait, climb on board along with a few others, and sit down in that awful yellow light. Maybe some of them will have a few cherries later on, a few after dessert, for instance. As far as I’m concerned, they can go right ahead.

It wasn’t until two days later that I went to my landlord. I paid him what I owed, two thousand lei. The skin on his hands was as thin as the skin on his face. I counted the notes right into the palm of his hand, and he pretended he was counting them in his head but in fact you could hear him whispering. One crumpled note fell on the floor, I picked it up but didn’t smooth it out. I put it back in his hand, upside down, and noticed that the landlord had a weak grip. The old man was even worse at taking than I had been at the flea market. What was he thinking about when he said: