Herta Müller: The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The frost has darkened the petunias, knotting their leaves and stems in a tangle of black. When the weather warms the frozen petunias will stick to one another.

The woman waits until the sun above the stadium sends out warm rays for two weeks in a row, then she goes to the market to buy new petunias. They are packed in newspaper and perched on the windowsill. The woman digs out the old black plants, using a large knife to pry the deep roots out of the window box. Then she takes a very large nail and aerates the soil, and unwraps the new petunias one by one. Their roots are short and hairy. She widens the holes in the dirt with the nail and sticks the hair inside the holes. She closes the holes with her fingers. Then she waters the new white petunias so much that the flower box drips for two days.

The first night helps rearrange the stems and leaves of the freshly planted petunias, so they no longer can be seen in the morning when the big-waved hair appears in the window. The daylight brings warmth, the petunias bloom for themselves. Every day the marks of winter crawl farther and farther below the white flowers and underneath the city.

* * *

The poplars and acacias let their bare bark shimmer green before they sprout leaves. Then the cold is gone and everything is exposed. That’s when the dictator climbs into the helicopter and flies over the country. Over the plains, over the Carpathians. His old man’s legs are riding high in the sky, up where the wind emerges to dry the winter out of the fields.

Wherever a glacial lake flashes in the sun, the servant’s daughter said to Adina, and the reflection shines back up into his eyes, he reaches out his hand. He shifts his old legs and says, corn doesn’t grow in water, that lake has to be dried out.

He has a house in every city, and every city shrinks between his temples as his helicopter touches down. Wherever he lands, he spends the night. Wherever he spends the night, a bus with boarded-up windows passes slowly through the streets. The bus is full of wire cages. It stops in front of every building to collect all the roosters and dogs and haul them away. Nothing is allowed to awaken the dictator except for light, said the servant’s daughter, any crowing or barking throws him off. For instance, she said, say he’s scheduled to give a speech from the balcony of the opera. And suddenly his old legs stop in the middle of town and he has to close his eyes for a moment simply because some rooster jarred his sleep by crowing, or because some dog barked. Then when he opens his eyes and the black inside sees the opera standing there, he might stretch out his hand and say, housing blocks don’t grow in an opera, that opera has to be torn down.

He hates opera, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife heard from the wife of an officer in the capital that the dictator once went to the opera. And that he said, this is nothing but a stage full of people and instruments, you can hardly hear a thing. One guy plays while the others all just sit there, he said. Then he stretched out his hand. And the next day the orchestra was dissolved.

According to the wife from the capital the dictator puts on new underclothes every morning, said the servant’s daughter. Also a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, new socks, new shoes, all sealed in transparent bags, so that no one can put poison on them. And every morning in the winter he has a new coat, a new scarf, a new fur cap or a new hat. As if the clothes from the day before had become too small because his power grew in the night while he slept.

In life his face is shrinking but on the pictures it gets bigger and bigger, his forelock is graying but in the pictures it’s blacker and blacker.

The dictator’s discarded clothes wander through the land like darkness while the old man’s legs are sleeping. And black caps worn during the day bring out the moon at night, according to the servant’s daughter.

And these moons are always white, never yellow. Or at most they are half-white, with a mouth gaping and yawning into the sky. A moon that makes dogs howl and drives their glowing eyes deep into their head when the cathedral bell prepares to strike twelve. A moon with a cheek looming a little too close on the way home. A highwayman of the night, a gap in the darkness behind the last streetcar.

Where a person climbs out at night and never comes home, there are empty paving stones in the morning.

* * *

Outside the window a last bit of light sneaks along its hidden path. The floor is dark, the fox is brighter, stretching out its cut-off paws. A person could fling open the window and if the wind blew inside, the wall would start to flutter, it could be pushed in with a finger just like a curtain, just like standing water. Ilie knows this, he thinks every day about his watery plain, his soft way out. He has chewed his grass straw and swallowed it. He has taken his mouth out of the picture, placed a mark on his cheek like liver mortis, a mark Adina cannot touch with her finger.

Adina lifts her hands off the table. Where they were resting the table is warm. And down on the floor, where the fox is the hunter, her fingers slide the cut-off legs against the fur. And after her hands have once again warmed the table, they clasp her forehead. Her hands sense that her forehead is as warm as the table, but unlike the table it no longer knows anything about inhabiting a place, abiding.

The bell rings in several long bursts, startling the apartment. Adina peers through the peephole. Clara is standing outside the door, I can see your eye, she says, open up. Adina moves away, the door’s eye is empty, then covered by Clara’s eye. Clara’s fist bangs on the door, I know you’re there, she says. Adina leans against the wall. In the hallway the buckles on Clara’s purse clink against the floor. Paper crinkles.

A note passes through the crack of the door.

Adina reads:

PEOPLE ARE BEING ARRESTED THERE ARE LISTS YOU HAVE TO HIDE NO ONE WILL LOOK FOR YOU AT MY PLACE

The neighbor’s door opens and closes. Clara’s high heels clatter on the stairs. Adina drags the note away from the door with the tip of her shoe. She bends over, reads it one more time. She crumples the note, throws it into the toilet. It floats, the water swamps the paper but doesn’t swallow it. Then Adina’s hand reaches into the water, takes the note, smooths it out, folds it, sticks it in her coat pocket.

The wardrobe is open. The suitcase on the carpet is open. A nightgown goes flying past the suitcase and lands on the fox. A sweater and a pair of pants land in the suitcase. A towel, a knot of panty hose and panties, a toothbrush, a nail clipper, a comb.

* * *

The hospital blocks the end of the street, presenting a row of small lit windows, a chain of moons that merge into the sky without transition, without a single star. A car pulls up with two men inside and a tiny child’s shoe swinging from the rearview mirror. The headlights angle their beams onto the ground. Adina turns her face away. When the motor stops, her heart can surely be heard pounding through her coat. The beams cut the suitcase from her hand. The men go in the hospital.

The entrance to the hospital has a tall flight of stairs with bushes planted on both sides. Adina stashes her suitcase in the bushes. The bushes are bare. While she’s reaching into the shrubbery her hand jerks twice, but it’s just a forgotten leaf, moist and withered. The suitcase is far below the stairs, the wind is dark, heavier than the leaves. She climbs the steps.

Adina waits with her hands hidden in her coat. She doesn’t give the gateman her name, he’ll see me when he gets here, she says. The gateman telephones. Her right hand feels the wet note in her coat pocket.

The gateman paces up and down. He peers through the glass booth — a few stairs, a bit of night and a faded sound settle in his eyes, which having felt the power of the binoculars can withstand anything. His shoes creak. Two wrinkles run from his cheeks all the way inside his mouth. The ceiling lamp does not shed light, it only watches. The bushes are brighter in the gateman’s eyes than they are outside, because the centers of his eyes are glowing, and each has a lightbulb right in the middle.