Herta Müller: The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

* * *

Whenever Adina comes from the street into her apartment, her cold fingertips flush with heat as soon as she looks in the bathroom. Afterward her shoe shoves the tail and two hind legs away from the fur. Every day.

A cigarette is floating in the toilet bowl, not yet swollen from the water. Adina now shifts her foot to the fox’s right foreleg. It moves together with the tip of her shoe, leaving the neck exactly where it was.

Her heart pounds and the pounding rises into her mouth as her fingers shove the cut appendages back against the belly.

* * *

Pavel could have been a groomsman, but ever since the game against the Danes the crowds haven’t put away their flags and don’t go home at night. So he had to decline since he’s on duty day and night. Where the hell do they come from anyway, he said, they all have thin skin and don’t get any sun. Judging from the way they look they must live up where the planet starts to shrink.

The clarinets rip through the wedding song, the violins can barely hold on to the thin melody between the apartment blocks, where the narrow space creates an echo. The accordion opens and closes in step. Clara pulls her thin heel out of a crack in the asphalt. The groom’s carnation is broken, the stem sticks out of his buttonhole.

The tractor’s bucket is in the air, the teeth in front covered with soil. The wedding couple is standing inside the giant shovel. The bride’s veil flutters, her white carnations quiver at every pothole. Her white sleeves are dirty. The dwarf is wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black bow tie. His new shoes have heels as high as two broken bricks. Grigore wears a large hat, the gatewoman a headscarf with a red silk fringe. The gateman is carrying a ring cake. His eyes are moist, he sings:

Your childhood now has passed away

From this day on it’s always May

* * *

The bride is Mara. For two years she’s been waiting for this day, and now assemblies are forbidden.

We’re getting married, not doing anything political, the groom told the policemen.

The bite on Mara’s leg has long since healed. For weeks she showed it off every morning in the office. First it was red, then it grew bigger and turned blue. When it turned green the bite was larger than ever. Then the teeth vanished into her skin. And the wound turned yellow, frayed away, shrank and disappeared.

Mara had troubles with her fiancé. He wanted to break off the engagement. She had to show him the spot every evening, and he got used to it. But he refused to believe the bite came from the director. He said, if I could only be sure those teeth weren’t GRIGORE’S.

* * *

Snow geese need the snow that doesn’t come. At least not here. They contort their necks and open their beaks. They scream. They flounder on the flat ground. After the night frost has melted they splay their wings. It’s difficult, but they take a running start and lift off when they spread out their webbing. The air flaps and ripples close to the grass, then the air over the trees, like leaves whooshing in the bare forest. Once in flight across the sky, the snow geese spread out in formation and let the plain, the field and the corn fall away from their wings, smaller and smaller. There is no snow, but once they’ve been to a place, the terrain is mapped inside them forever, a white sphere. And down below the blackish green hill rises out of the ground. Feathers fly in their wake for a long time after they have passed.

The crows stay in the forest because the forest is black. The branches pretend to be dead.

The soldiers play the wasp game. They stand in a circle. Whoever is the crane fly has to stand in the middle and cover his eyes tight with his hands so he can’t see. There can’t be any gap. All the others are the wasps. They all hum in a circle around the crane fly and one of them stings him with a blow to the hand. The crane fly has to guess which wasp stung him. If he takes too long to guess he gets stung again, and again. The crane fly tries to guess, the crane fly is afraid. He keeps his hands pressed to his head, each hit hurts more and more. Every time he gets stung the crane fly falls to the ground. Then he has to get up and look at all the wasps and guess which one stung him, over and over until he can’t get up anymore. And even longer. And meanwhile the wasps’ lips quiver and hum.

When the crane fly can no longer stand, he is allowed to be a wasp.

Every crane fly stays lying in the dirt well after the last sting, without moving. The officer with the gold tooth nudges him with the tip of his boot. When the crane fly finally stands up to join the wasps, his eyes are ringed with bruises, and every bone aches.

Today Ilie is lucky, he doesn’t have to be the crane fly.

* * *

Every Sunday afternoon during the summer I give my son a ten-lei coin, the officer says. His eyes are glued to the sky, he’s following the snow geese, there’s snow in the mountains, he says, they’re changing their course.

He swallows. My son, he says, doesn’t let the coin out of his hand even when he’s putting on his white sandals. Then we take our car into town. I go to the summer garden and drink beer and my son takes my ID and goes around the corner to the Party Cafeteria, he really likes cake. The officer smacks his gold tooth. The cakes are in the display case, which is so tall that last summer it was still only at eye height for him. Since then he’s grown a lot, says the officer, next summer he’ll be able to see the cakes better. His favorite is the one with the bright green icing, he says. But he’s scared of the bees in the cafeteria so he closes his eyes. And the cook says to him every time, bees make the cake sweet.

The officer exhales, his breath gray in the air. They’re really wasps, not bees, he says, and they like the raspberry icing best. Every summer the cook’s hand is swollen blue from all the stings, it’s creepy. When he serves he has to drape a white towel over his hand. That’s the odd thing, says the officer, the bees always buzzing around the beer in the summer garden don’t sting. His gold tooth shines. But with the cakes in the Party Cafeteria it’s the wasps, he says.

Ilie looks up at the blackish-green hill and senses for just a moment that the officer’s face is very pale, and that the gold tooth is a yellow beak. The beak of a snow goose.

* * *

When the tank has been sitting in the forest for weeks, when the trenches have been finished for days, when the officer with the gold tooth is weary from spending half the season in the barrack and sick of looking at the sandbags in the yard, the column marches out along the path up to the field and through the broken corn and over the hill to play the wasp game.

The snow geese flounder on the ground. They bring the cold with them, who knows where from, they screech and pull in their wings. They always fly far away. There they eat snow. They always come back, but they never eat grass or corn. When they aren’t flying they keep away from the forest and stand there and look up at the sky.

The wasp game is a good equalizer, a beautiful contest, says the officer. He doesn’t play with the men, he only watches. The rules of the game shine on his gold tooth. Turn around, he says to the crane fly. And now hum, he says to the wasps. He has them hum for as long as he wants. Sting, sting, he shouts, and sting hard like a wasp, not like a flea.

The woman with the chestnut-red hair done up in big waves is cleaning her windows. Beside her is a bucket of steaming water. She reaches into the bucket and picks up a sopping gray rag, she reaches onto the windowsill and picks up a moist gray rag, then she pulls a dry white cloth off her shoulder. After that she bends over and picks up some crumpled pieces of newsprint. The windowpanes shine, her hair opens up into two sections, divided by the open casements. When she closes the casements she closes her hair.