Herta Müller: The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

When the doctor came everyone took a step away from the tinsmith, as if the horror were only just arriving. Silence twisted every face, as though the doctor were bringing death itself.

The doctor undressed the tinsmith and examined the pots. Tugging on the lifeless hands he said, how can a person solder with just three fingers on each hand. When the doctor dropped the tinsmith’s pants onto the floor two apricots fell out of the pocket. They were round and smooth, the same yellow as the soldering flame that no longer chewed the pots. The apricots raced under the table, glowing as they went.

The string hung around the neck of the tinsmith as it always did, but the wedding ring had disappeared.

For several days and nights the air under the trees had a bitter smell. Adina saw the empty string in the veins of whitewashed walls and in the cracks of asphalt streets. The first afternoon she suspected the seamstress, and that first evening she suspected the man who smelled like grass. The next day she suspected the barber and in the night, which sank into the evening without any twilight, she suspected the doctor.

Two days after the tinsmith hanged himself, Adina’s mother crossed the beet fields to the village with the sheep, whose gleaming white walls could be seen from the outskirts of town. Because it was almost Easter, she bought a lamb. The women in the village told Adina’s mother that a child nobody had ever seen before had been at the tinsmith’s and stolen the ring right off his neck. The tinsmith’s ring was gold and could have been sold to pay for a funeral pall. As it was, the money in his worktable drawer barely paid for a rough narrow box. That’s not a coffin, said the women, it’s a wooden suit.

* * *

The man leading the horse stops at the edge of town and is hidden for a moment by a passing bus. Then the bus is gone, the man stands in the dust, and the horse walks around him. The man steps over the halter, slings it around a tree trunk and ties it off tight. At the shop he pushes through the door and makes his way past the waiting heads to join the bread line.

Before he disappears among the screaming heads, the man glances back. The horse lifts its hooves and stands on three legs for longer than it takes a bus to pass, then rubs its flank against the tree trunk.

Adina feels dust in her eye. The horse’s head becomes a blur sniffing at the tree bark. The dust in Adina’s eye is a tiny fly on her fingertip. The horse munches on a branch, the acacia leaves rustle beneath his muzzle, the scraggy wood has thorns and crackles in his throat.

Warm air spills onto the street from the store where the man disappeared. The buses kick up great wheels of dust in their wake. The sun hitches a ride with every bus, fluttering on the corners like an open shirt. The morning smells of gasoline and dust and worn-out shoes. And when someone passes by carrying bread, the sidewalk smells of hunger.

Hunger sharpens elbows for shoving and teeth for screaming. The shop has fresh bread. The elbows inside the shop are countless, but the bread is counted.

* * *

Where the dust flies highest the street is narrow, the apartment buildings crooked and jammed together. The grass grows thick along the pathways, and when it blooms, brash and brazen, it’s always tattered by the wind. The more brazen the spikes, the greater the poverty. Here summer threshes itself, mistaking torn clothing for chaff. The eyes lurking at the windows matter as much to the gleaming panes as the flying seeds to the grass.

Children pluck grass straws with milky stems out of the earth and make a game of sucking them dry. And in their play is hunger. Their lungs cease to grow, the grass milk feeds their dirty fingers and the wart clusters, but not their baby teeth, which fall out. The teeth don’t wiggle long, they drop into the children’s hands while they’re talking. The children toss them over their shoulders and behind their backs into the grass, today one, tomorrow another. As each tooth flies, they shout:

Mouse o mouse bring me a brand-new tooth,

And you can have my old one.

Only after the tooth has disappeared in the grass do they look back and call it childhood.

The mouse takes the teeth and lines its burrows under the apartment building with little white tiles. It does not bring the children new teeth.

* * *

The school is located at the bottom of the street, at the top of the street is a broken phone booth. The balconies on the buildings in between are made of rusty corrugated sheet metal and can’t hold anything more than a few tired geraniums and a little laundry fluttering from a line. And clematis, which climbs high and attaches itself to the rust.

No dahlias bloom here, where everything is rusting and breaking and falling apart, and where the clematis unravels its own summer, blue and hypocritical, saving its most beautiful blooms for the rubble.

At the top of the street the clematis creeps into the broken phone booth, it lies down on the glass splinters but does not get cut. It twines around the dial and stops it from spinning.

The one-eyed numbers on the dial pronounce their own names when Adina passes slowly by: one, two, three.

A fool’s summer during marches, a soldier’s summer beyond the long plain in the south. Ilie is wearing a uniform. In his mouth he has a straw of summer grass, and in his pocket a calendar with a winter full of crossed-out days. And a picture of Adina. On the plain are a hill, a wall, and the barracks. The grass straw comes from the hill, wrote Ilie on the back of the picture.

Whenever Adina sees tall grass, she thinks about Ilie and looks for his face. In her head she carries a mailbox. Whenever she opens it, the box is empty, Ilie seldom writes letters. Writing letters makes me remember where I am, he wrote. Paul said, people seldom write letters when they know for sure that they are loved.

* * *

For as long as the clematis was green, a man lay in the telephone booth. His forehead was so short that his hair began right above his eyebrows. Because his forehead’s so empty, said the passersby, because his brain’s made of brandy and brandy evaporates, and when it does there’s nothing left.

The man lay in the booth, and his shoes rested on their heels. Anyone walking by could see the soles but not the shoes. The man drank and talked out loud to himself when he wasn’t sleeping. People sped up when they came to the booth, and kept a distance from its shadow. They clutched their hair as though not to lose their thoughts. They spit absentmindedly on the sidewalk or into the grass because their mouths had a bitter taste. When the man talked to himself out loud, the passersby averted their eyes, and when he slept, some ventured closer to kick the soles of his shoes with the tips of theirs until he groaned. None of them ever wanted to rouse a corpse, but each of them hoped that day had come.

A bottle was propped against the man’s stomach, his fingers were around the neck, he held the bottle firmly, and didn’t loosen his grip even in his sleep.

* * *

Until one day the man did loosen his grip, and the bottle fell over. A woman kicked the soles of his shoes. After that the caretaker came from the nearest apartment building, then a child, then a policeman. The man in the phone booth no longer groaned, his death smelled of plum brandy.

The caretaker tossed the dead man’s empty bottle into the grass and said, if there really is such a thing as a soul then his was in that bottle and it was the last thing he swallowed. And that means that his soul is whatever his stomach didn’t manage to digest. The policeman whistled and stopped a horse cart on the street. The driver set down his whip and climbed out. He lifted the dead man by the arms while the caretaker lifted him by the shoes. They carried the stiff weight through the sun like a board, then they swung the board onto the cart, on top of the green cabbage heads. The driver covered the dead man with a horse blanket and picked up his whip. He tapped the horse and clicked his tongue, twisting his mouth.