Herta Müller: The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The servant’s daughter blew warm breath onto her hands. My coat doesn’t have any pockets, she said, it came from the officer’s wife. She rubbed her fingers on her coat, hitting the buttons with her nails, a sound like stones hitting stones.

I have a hard time believing the whole business, said the servant’s daughter. But my mother’s never lied before. She hears them behind the bedroom door, the officer snores and his wife hums:

Roses in bloom

Come again soon

Lovely once more

Roses in bloom

* * *

My mother knows the song, the woman sings it in the kitchen every day. My mother walks on her tiptoes but the floorboards creak. The wife can tell when my mother is by the front door ready to lock up and then she says, don’t forget to lock up twice Lenuza. The wife is afraid of the stone angel, that it might enter the house during the night. That’s why she has her lions. Now and then the wife says to my mother, his angel can’t get past my two lions. The officer bought the angel to ward against his wife’s lions. But my mother says the lions and the angel won’t hurt each other because they all come from the same stonecutter. The officer realizes that, said the servant’s daughter, but his wife doesn’t.

* * *

In the morning, when the officer is in his cap and boots, his wife stands in the hall and brushes his uniform jacket. He bends down slowly to pick up his briefcase, she bends down with him and keeps brushing. The brush is so small that at first my mother couldn’t see it in the wife’s hand. My mother wondered why she crooked her hand when she stroked her husband’s jacket. Then one time the woman dropped the brush. Her hands are so small, until that moment my mother thought they weren’t capable of hiding anything. The officer’s wife is very tall, said the servant’s daughter, I’ve never seen hands that small on such a tall woman. After the officer leaves, his wife watches him through the window. Two houses later she loses sight of him but she waits until he reemerges, first at the entrance to the bridge and then once more on the bridge itself. The woman says she’s more worried something might happen to her husband when he’s sober, in the morning while he’s crossing the bridge, than on his way back home.

Then there’s the story with the perfume flask, said the servant’s daughter. The wife carries it stashed in her purse, even though the flask has been empty for years. The bottle has a rose etched into the glass, and a stopper that used to be gold-plated, by now the plating has worn off, but you can still see a few Cyrillic letters engraved on the side — it must have been Russian perfume. Years ago a Russian officer was in the house, but no one ever mentions him. He had blue eyes. Occasionally the wife says that the handsomest officers have blue eyes. Her husband has brown eyes and occasionally says to his wife, I see you’re reeking of roses again. The servant’s daughter slowly moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. There must be something special about that flask, she said, something sad. Something that opens a wish and closes a door, because it’s not her husband’s absence that makes her so lonely, it’s the empty perfume bottle in her purse. Sometimes, she said, her mother feels the woman’s head is sinking farther and farther into her neck, as if a staircase were running from her throat to her ankle and she were climbing down the steps carrying her own head. Perhaps because my mother lives in the cellar, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife spends half the day sitting at the table, and her eyes are piercingly empty, like dried-out sunflower disks. The servant’s daughter wiped her nose, rubbing her red nostrils with a crumpled handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief back in her purse like a snowball. She explained that every year the officer’s wife buys her mother a pair of genuine lambskin gloves, and every week she gives her coffee beans and Russian tea.

But because my mother scrimps and saves, said the servant’s daughter, she always gives me the tea and coffee. She can’t give me the gloves, though, otherwise the officer’s wife would notice. She did manage to have the ones from the year before last disappear by claiming that the postman’s dog had gotten hold of them and chewed them up so much they were no longer fit to wear. The postman denied it but he couldn’t prove anything.

The servant’s daughter told Adina that her mother had also gotten her the job at the school, thanks to the officer’s wife.

* * *

Two fishermen are standing next to each other on the riverbank. One of them takes off his cap, his hair is packed down, the band has left a ring pressed into the back of his head. Underneath one cap he has another — a cap of white hair. The other man is eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks, they float on the river, white inside and black outside. He holds out a handful to the man with the white cap of hair and says, take some to pass the time. The man brushes them away. They’re too much like melon seeds, he says. When I came back from the front, everything they ate here at home was like one big cemetery. Sausage, cheese, bread, even milk and cucumbers were all buried under lids or shut away behind a cupboard door, just like a grave. Now, after all these years I don’t know. He bends down, picks up a small rock, turns it over in his hand and shuts his right eye. He flings the rock into the river so that it skips four times, dancing on the water before it sinks. I no longer feel the same disgust, he says, but I’m still afraid of the insides of melons because they remind me of coffins. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds lowers his head, his mouth is narrow, his eyes skewed. He moves both rods to sunnier grass.

The sun is high in the sky, on top of the city. The rods cast shadows, the afternoon leans against the shadows. As soon as the day tips over, Adina thinks, and the sunlight goes skidding away, it will cut deep trenches in the fields around the city and the corn will snap in two.

When they don’t speak, the fishermen don’t move. If they aren’t talking with each other, they’re not alive. Their silence has no reason, the words simply falter. The clock inside the cathedral tower advances, the bell chimes, another hour is empty and gone, it could be today, it could be tomorrow. Nobody on the banks of the river hears the chiming, the sound quiets when it reaches the water and whimpers until it’s gone.

The fishermen measure the day by the heat of the sky and can tell by looking at the smoke above the wire factory if it’s raining elsewhere. And by feeling the burn on their shoulders they can sense how long the sun will keep growing and when it will sink and shatter.

Anyone who truly knows the river has seen heaven from the inside, say the fishermen. As the city starts getting dark, there’s a moment when the clock in the tower can no longer measure time. Its face turns white and casts a sheen into the park. When that happens, the fine-toothed acacia leaves look like combs. The clock hands skip ahead, but the evening refuses to believe what they’re saying. The white sheen does not last long.

But while it does last, all the fishermen lie down beside one another on their stomachs and gaze into the river. And during that time, say the fishermen, the river shows anyone who truly knows it a foul, rotten gullet. That is heaven from the inside. The gullet is in the middle of the current, not on the river bottom. It holds so many clothes that they reach from one bridge to the other. The gullet itself is naked, it holds the clothes in its hands. They are the clothes of the drowned, say the fishermen.

The fishermen don’t stare at the gullet for long, after a few brief glances most lay their faces in the grass and laugh so hard their legs shake. But the fisherman with the white cap of hair doesn’t laugh. When the others ask why his legs are shaking even though he isn’t laughing, he says, when I lay my face in the grass, I see my own brain, naked in the water.