Herta Müller - The Appointment

Well, isn’t that great, now the blister has burst.

Hey, the man says, look at this, we know her.

His brown dyed hair has a silvery sheen close to the scalp, the way it did after the night had been danced away and the light was glaring and Martin no longer counted as part of the paraputch. And her face is lopsided, the way it was after Martin had treated her so horribly in the bathroom.

Oh, Anastasia says, your hair is short.

What are you doing with five melons.

You’ve counted them, he laughs, we’re celebrating, you can imagine where.

I imagined the paraputch.

And how are you, she asks.

Fine, I say.

So are we, he says, maybe we’ll get together sometime.

Maybe, I say.

A truck roars by, Anastasia says:

We better get going.

Then Martin kisses my hand in farewell, and I turn toward the street, where two baby shoes are dangling by their laces right in front of a driver’s forehead. And when the car moves past I see an open garage across the street, an old man wearing shorts, and a red Java. And who should be coming out of the back garden, ducking under the clothesline and heading into the garage but Paul. By Anastasia’s watch it is five past ten.

Paul and the old man are laughing, I look to see if his thin legs have marble veins and check the aerial on the roof. It’s one of Paul’s. Paul picks up a wrench without even having to look for it, he just reaches over to the shelf. In the evening, when he claimed to be out drinking, I believed him. Why not, his being drunk was real enough, no deceit there. I never asked who he was drinking with or who was paying. Why would I. At home Paul drinks by himself. After the accident he said:

Drinkers recognize each other right away, from one table to the next, by their looks, the way the glasses speak to each other. I don’t want anything to do with drinking buddies. I’ll drink with others, but I prefer to sit by myself.

But then Paul threw our bedding out the window into the night, beginning with our pillows. I saw them lying down below, white and small like two handkerchiefs. I laughed as I took the elevator down, barefoot, and brought them back up. By the time I was back with the pillows, the quilts were down on the ground. And when I brought those back up, I was crying because they were so big, and because I had given in to some fool’s nighttime whim. Herr Micu’s bedroom window was dimly lit by a bedside lamp. It was late but still Wednesday, the day of the weekly lottery disaster. Who knows what kind of consolation Herr Micu was doling out to get his wife to accept the next day, maybe sex, a bit of physical love.

Young men tire you out, Lilli said, but older men can make women’s flesh light and smooth during sex.

Throwing bedding out the window was physical too. It wasn’t love, but it was more physical than throwing out dresses. The Sunday dress that Frau Micu had worn on Wednesday as she waited to become rich was now back in the closet. But she was still wearing her body. When Frau Micu leans on the wall inside the entryway, not knowing herself as she is now but convinced she knows who she was twenty years ago, I want to run away. Her sad flesh doesn’t face the sun oblivious to the world, the way my Mama’s did, it looks ready to be touched. Herr Micu once said to Paul:

Every time we have sex it’s a spoonful of sugar for her shattered nerves, the only thing I can use to keep my wife from taking leave of her senses.

Her senses, Paul asked.

Her senses, I said taking leave of her senses, I’m not saying I can restore her mind.

If the bedside lamp was lit not for sex but to light the day’s final entry in the notebook, I didn’t want his pen to witness the quilts and pillows. I didn’t turn on the light in the entrance hall but carried the things to the elevator like a thief. When I got upstairs with the quilts, Paul was lying on the white pillow in his pajamas like a striped piece of paper. He pulled his knees up to his stomach and asked:

Did anyone see you.

I covered him up, then laid the second quilt on my part of the bed and smoothed the creases, as if on the cloth lay the woman I wanted to be from tomorrow on — one who would no longer put up with any mad drunkenness. Paul looked up at the bedroom ceiling and said:

I’m sorry.

I’d never heard anything like that before. Not even when an apology was grinding his teeth or twisting his mouth — he always kept them bottled up inside his face, he never let them out. What earthly connection could there have been between that and the next day, when I thought up a lie and stepped out of the noisy row of shops into the stillness of the pharmacy carrying a mesh bag full of potatoes and said:

My grandfather caught a splinter in the eye when he was chopping wood and he’s lost it, the right eye. He lives a long way away and can’t come to town. He hasn’t been out of the house since, not even to church or the hairdresser’s. He’s ashamed to be seen, I’d like to buy him a glass eye.

There’s nothing to worry about if you’re lying about the dead — none of it can come true. With good lies, with Albu, I know when it’s working because from one word to the next I believe it myself. Chopping wood was pretty lame, I’ve told so many lies out of fear and for others that if there’s no fear, or when it’s just for myself, I can’t do it. The pharmacist stood there wearing her own dress under her white coat, like two women, one inside the other, an older and a younger version. The woman in the dress knew pain, the woman in the coat knew how to treat it. But neither one knew how to gauge a good lie. Nevertheless, the pharmacist lowered her eyes and said:

You can buy one even without a prescription. Don’t worry, it’ll fit. You can’t exchange it, though. Pick one out of the window. You can have two if you want.

She laughed.

Even three, God knows there are enough of them there collecting dust.

I took a dark blue glass eye, now there was a gap in the display. My grandfather had brown eyes with that subdued gleam you can’t get with glass because it hasn’t suffered. The eye I bought was a plum in water, but the water was ice. An eye that wanted to match Lilli’s but fell short of being amazing. Of course no hand or machine could have even come close to capturing her tobacco flower nose.

Before I bought the potatoes I had been to the candy section in the grocery store. In glass jars stacked on top of each other I saw dead wasps clinging to red candies, then rusty razor blades, then broken cookies, then boxes of matches, then green candies stuck together, also with wasps. And the bottles along the shelf against the wall alternated in color, milky-yellow egg liqueur, pink raspberry juice, greenish rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover as clear as water. Each item seemed to think it was really something else. The shop assistant gave the impression of a person put together with matches, razor blades, candy stuck together with wasps, and cookies, all on the verge of falling apart.

A hundred grams of the sweet razor blades, I said.

You better get out of here, he yelled. Go buy something at the pharmacy that’ll get you your wits back.

It was true, all the goods were addling my brain. I went to the greengrocer’s and was glad that the potatoes, as they went from the crate onto the scales, didn’t turn into shoes or stones. I was holding three kilos of potatoes and my head was full of the irreversibility of things. Then I went into the pharmacy and bought the glass eye. Once they stop summoning me, Paul can attach a little ring to it and I’ll wear it as a necklace. So I thought at the time.

Whenever I hear the elevator descending to fetch Albu’s henchmen, I can hear his voice quietly in my head: Tuesday at ten sharp, Saturday at ten sharp, Thursday at ten sharp. How often, after closing the door, have I said to Paul: