Herta Müller - The Appointment

Make me transparent, she said, I’m sure you can do that.

I couldn’t, I only sketched the side closest to me, her rear arm was hidden when Lilli said:

Now it’s your turn.

We never got around to it, we heard steps in the corridor, Lilli ran down the stairs. Her sandals had only two slender straps, her ankles were nimble, her dress fluttered. From below, Lilli’s thighs went all the way up to her throat. In the yard we giggled, she louder than me, but then she was crying, in fact she might have been crying from the moment she started giggling. I took a gulp of air and she laughed for real, dried her eyes, and said:

It’s only water. Do you remember Anton, who sold leather goods.

The one with the wart on the side of his nose.

No, that was the photographer.

The one who moved to the country.

Yes. He had water in his lungs, and it didn’t clear up. He died here in the hospital, the day before yesterday, I didn’t know a thing about it. Do you remember how we were caught.

No, I’d even forgotten his name was Anton.

There was a knock at the door, it was two inspectors, I was in my underwear. They gulped just like you did right now. They sat down on a pile of leather jackets, rested their chins on their hands, and whispered to each other. And Anton started holding leather skirts up to me as if I was a customer. He kept trying bigger and bigger skirts, making sure none of them actually fit me. Then he measured my hip size in hand spans, my backside, and the length halfway down to my knee. If you’re as slim as this one, you only need one calfskin to make a skirt, he said, winking at the inspectors. He wrote down the measurements in centimeters on a chocolate box that had been lying there ever since I knew him, and he shoved the pencil behind his ear. You don’t have any stomach to speak of, two darts in back will do it, that’s it, no other seam. Then he passed around the chocolates. One of the inspectors took a handful, and his companion told Anton to take a walk for an hour. As for me, they wanted me to stay. Anton closed the chocolate box and threw the two of them out, saying:

I’d sooner kill the pair of you.

That’s why he had to move out to the country.

Would you have liked to keep on going.

Yes.

But at the time you said, Now I’ve got him off my back.

And that was true.

But then you missed him after all.

Not in the slightest, Lilli said.

The cherry eater sitting next to me found a space in her crowded bag where she could drop all the stones, she crumpled up the newspaper cone and crammed it inside. She wiped her hands against each other and then on her dress. The stains don’t show against the red flower pattern. I see an arm reaching up toward the handrail, holding the briefcase, now I see a head as well. Where has he been hiding all this time — he obviously managed to make it back onto the tram after all. So he doesn’t have as much free time as I thought. Or maybe the pushing and shoving doesn’t bother him. Some people get pushy in the hope of starting a fight. And there are plenty of dodderers who just let people walk right over them without saying a word. The cherry eater has stood up and squeezed herself into the aisle. I have to get off at the next stop too, a lot of people are getting off there. The long-distance buses are waiting around the corner. All the people with baskets, cans, and bags are getting out at the Central Bus Station to travel on to their villages. The man with the briefcase is getting out there as well, either to continue on to the country or else because he lives in the neighborhood. It’s possible we’re headed in the same direction, he may even work at the place where I’ve been summoned. Or maybe he’s just moving to the door now in order to get out several stops later — a lot of people do that. The cherry eater smiles at me with dark blue gums. She pushes through to the door at the back. If I have to I’ll push my way to the front door, it’s a little closer. Is the woman planning to plant her cherry stones. My grandfather said there are wild seeds in the Baragan Steppe that won’t germinate unless a bird eats them and shits them out. But cherry stones have to dry in the sun before they’re planted, otherwise they won’t grow into trees. If all her stones were to grow, she’d be carrying a cherry orchard home in her bag. The passengers are leaning forward, backward, all together, the bag with the stones right in their middle. The driver rings the bell and shouts out the window: You want to die, why don’t you go to your bedroom instead of loafing around here on the tracks. Then he shouts into the car: Does every idiot have to get up in the morning. Is the driver talking to himself or to all of us. Besides, what does he know: I for one would be happy to stay in bed, although there’s no question that Albu gets up in the morning.

In the evenings when I’d walk home from the bus depot it would be so dark I couldn’t make out anything beyond the avenue at first, then my eyes would grow used to the night and I would see more and more. I would count the entryways to the apartment buildings, blended together and then separated as the same long building went on and on and the numbers above the entrances grew and grew. When I turned onto our street, I would outline the roof of the bread factory, holding a little stone in my hand, recovering every weather vane and chimney from the falling night, in order to counter the deceit of the entryways. I had tried counting to distract myself from the dark, out of boredom. But the numbers preferred my being confused to my being secure. So before they could turn the entire street against me I played at tracing things. After I saw the woman with the braid on the bus, I stopped distracting myself by counting entryways, and the time passed anyway. Except that one day, after I’d already been away from the small town so long that I no longer recognized the weather vanes on the bread factory, I turned onto a side street behind the post office and said to myself:

Keep those stubs on the table.

It started to rain. A man walking in front of me opened his umbrella, and I stopped where I was. When the umbrella reached the other end of the street and dwindled to the size of a hat, I traced it with my finger and the sketching started all over again. Keep those stubs on the table, Albu had said, because I’d been twisting the large button on my blouse. I placed my hands on the table but forgot to keep them there and he said it again. That was the day Albu found a hair on my shoulder. He grazed his fingers across my cheek as he took it. His cologne smelled very close, the smoothly shaven pores under his chin, with smaller and smaller specks running up his cheeks like polished wood. He held the hair in two fingers and stretched out his three others and was about to let it fall to the floor. He can do what he wants to any hair on my head, wrap them around his index finger and pull me wherever he wants. But if a hair has fallen out it should stay where it is. Albu was almost certainly after something else when he stood up and pulled his shirt cuff over his watch. He would never have even seen a hair on Lilli’s shoulder. Has he finally forgotten what he’s after, as I have the name of his bitter perfume, or has he decided on a different tactic. But I could never mistake the smell of his cologne, whether it’s called Avril or Septembre, I twisted my large button again and said:

Put the hair back, it belongs to me.

I was startled at the nerve in my own voice, after I spoke I figured I’d be punished. He curled his fingers back in and stared at the pattern of holes stenciled in the tips of his shoes — probably to decide what to do next. And I stared at the light coming through the window. Over there lay the nibbled pencil, and Albu’s fingers were on my shoulder. He actually did put the hair back. Then he yelled: