Don’t get so excited. It’s just pepper.
If that’s just pepper, then I’m a nightingale.
It’s ground pepper, my dear.
Since when does pepper have legs, he asked.
After the divorce, I had stuffed my clothes and things into two sacks and moved out. Since that day on the bridge I never used suitcases. My husband followed me to the gate with the stone from the Carpathians in a plastic bag. I nearly forgot it, and now I absolutely need it for cracking nuts. I felt ageless, for the most part I couldn’t tell whether I was free or lonely. Being alone was neither a burden nor a pleasure. I didn’t regret anything from my three years of marriage except that I had stayed two too many. I got my hair cut short, bought clothes. I also bought bedding for my newly rented flat, and started paying installments on a refrigerator and a couple of rugs. I wanted a change, and quickly, while this new phase was still fresh and leading me in a particular direction. Lilli never needed to change, she had no need of vanity; after all, what can happen to a cool tobacco flower. When love was over, she came out the other side looking great. Lilli knew all about squandered feelings, but she also knew that there’d soon be another pair of eyes hungering after her. I wanted to reshape myself with my own hands, but for that your hands need to be holding a wallet full of bills. I bought everything on impulse, without thinking. Compared to today, my worries were tiny, that was before I wrote the notes. I’d go through my paycheck in just two or three afternoons and then borrow money. Not only from Nelu, also from people I knew only slightly. The borrowed money ran through my fingers just as quickly, and went toward clothes. In the morning I’d come into the office and the first thing I’d do was place my handbag mirror on my desk. In between going over the lists of buttons I would constantly check my appearance. Every day Nelu praised me more. But you can’t get a haircut every day, so to maintain my conviction that things weren’t so bad, the only thing left was new clothes. For a day, at least, they were newer than my face. Of course I worried about my debts, but still I kept on buying. My eyes were wide and feverish, only my throat felt constricted. The spur of the moment was always more powerful than my guilty conscience. In the afternoon sun on the Korso, people turned to look at Lilli because she was beautiful and at me because I was walking arm in arm with her and singing loudly:
O the tree has its leaves,
the tea has its water,
money has its paper,
and my heart has snow that’s fallen astray.
We acted as if we were drunk, I staggered and sang, Lilli staggered and laughed so hard she was crying. Until I said:
A dress doesn’t run up debts, neither does a shoe. Neither do I. But money does. With some people, money grows back like whiskers on a chin, but my chin stays pretty smooth. Let’s say there’s a little money in my bag, then I can say I have something. Next thing you know it’s in the cash register and suddenly I no longer have anything even though it’s right there where I can see it, just a few inches away from my bag. The money’s still worth the same amount, it’s just that it’s no longer mine, what do you make of that.
Once you’re old it starts growing of its own accord, Lilli said, but is that a good reason to want to be old. Don’t worry, none of the people you’ve borrowed from is going to lose sleep over a couple of bills. After all, you’re not running away.
Lilli was mistaking the vanity I’d recently been unable to suppress with independence. After all, I wasn’t going to run away. At least not from the factory, though perhaps from my common sense, that little iron doll in my head, like that rusty St. Anthony lying on the tablecloth at the end of New Year’s Eve.
As long as I lived with my in-laws, whenever I stood in the garden I couldn’t get over my stunned shock that the wild roses my father-in-law had hastily grafted would flower each summer in knotty buds of velvet. The new canes never reverted. Grafting roses seemed to me like having a face-lift on your hips. I put all sorts of flowers in the room, but never a grafted rose. Who could say it wouldn’t go on changing after it had been cut. The leaves were the only thing I could change about myself after the separation, no matter how hard I tried. After the long married squabbles there were days when no one shouted at me. Every day brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended—later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother. That’s when I visited her for the last time and saw her stripped of all secrets, the only person left in the house, utterly alone. And I didn’t feel any sympathy. In contrast to her, I did not postpone this yearning in myself. I’m not that tough, and above all I was younger than she: in her case, everyone close to her had died, and I had flown the nest. I could see myself in her as she resigned herself to the new circumstances—as if I were the mother and she the child. She would stand in the light of the window and seem like such a stranger it drove you crazy, she would stand by the dish rack in the kitchen and seem so familiar you wanted to run. And as she moved about the house she would alternate between one state and the other. But I realized that this craving for solitude was better suited to later life, and that it had affected me too young, too early.
I lived in a room rented from a skinny man who was always smiling. His smile seemed to be a facial feature rather than an expression. His shoulders were hunched, his collarbones rounded: it was like finding a birdcage at my door whenever he came for the rent. The skin on his face was transparent, as if his bones were rubbing it thin: no wrinkles, and yet very old. I made up some excuse for the fifth time and asked him in for a cup of tea. He declined, nodding and chirping, and I wondered how much longer this birdman would put up with me. Wouldn’t he be angry if he got so worked up his skin wore through completely.
Leading a life of unkempt solitude was definitely not the right thing for me. But with Nelu I had stumbled into a real mess, I was trapped in his hatred. We had spent ten days on official business in a small town between the Danube and the Carpathians. He had been designated to make the trip and could choose someone to travel with him, he suggested me. The idea of going somewhere was fine as far as I was concerned. I hadn’t imagined that Button Central, as the town was nicknamed in the factory, would be particularly attractive, but I certainly hadn’t envisaged this wasteland consisting of ten rows of grimy prefab houses surrounded by concrete slabs and building sites overgrown with grass, where nothing was being built and nothing cleared away. Because it was home to the largest button factory in the country, the place was officially designated a town and not a village. A winding asphalt road ran for three kilometers through a field of nettles, from the hotel to the factory gates. In the wind the nettles rose and fell, a sea of blackish green you had to swim across. Early each morning we took that road, which was continuously losing itself and starting over. The nettles grew higher than our heads and even on the ninth day I could easily have lost my way. It wasn’t the first time Nelu had been there, he was as familiar with the nettles as he was with the button factory. Our shoes were muddied by the mixture of dust and dew. At eight we wiped them with Nelu’s handkerchief, outside the entrance, then made the rounds of the offices and departments with lists and swatches of cloth. By five in the afternoon I was half blind from looking at buttons made of plastic, mother-of-pearl, horn, or yarn, with two, three, or four holes, and buttons with stems wrapped in linen and velvet. Seen in these quantities, the buttons were like pills in a drug factory. Instead of being sent to the clothing factories to be sewn into clothes, they should have been packaged in boxes and sent out to the pharmacies, to be taken three times a day after meals. In the afternoons, the nettle road was just as blackish green as it was in the mornings. The dew had dried, the dust was white. Birds were squawking, who knows where they were hiding, there were none in the air. On the way back to the hotel we talked about seasonal buttons, prices, and delivery schedules.
From the front rooms of the hotel
you could see the red, single-story railway station. A white goat was grazing beside the tracks, tied to a stake. Inside the circle of its tether it was nibbling blue chicory and scorched grass. Or simply standing there looking down the tracks. The coming night swallowed ground, stake, and tether. Only the goat remained, a shimmering patch. High up on the gable shone the bright face of the station clock.
This was now the second night I had been lying in my bed, staring at the clock. The freight trains were rolling right across the sky, there was no chance of getting any sleep. From the first day on everything was all business and no pleasure—even the night, which was packed with trains. In between the trains there was a racket coming from the hall, men’s voices speaking Russian. Already on the second night I had taken the heavy cut-glass vase and placed it beside my pillow, just in case. The tap water tasted of chlorine, and the chlorine tasted of the sleep I wasn’t getting. I drank without thirst, only so as to have to get up and then lie down again. In the evenings we ate in the restaurant. Along the wall next to our round table was a long banquet table. I counted thirty-four people seated around it, small men with broad cheekbones, eyes and hair as black as night, wearing summer suits made of gray cloth and white collarless shirts.
They all sit together, the waiter said, so they can spend the evening talking about how to piss on horseback or sew buttons with a sickle. A delegation from Azerbaijan, they’ve already spent one week here in the button factory on an official exchange, on top of that they’ll spend next week on a goodwill visit.
Where, I asked.
Also in the button factory, he said and winked. Mind you, the goodwill started on the very first day. Ever since they’ve been here, five girls from the button factory have been sneaking in after midnight to the back rooms on the ground floor. Outside the rooms it’s all push and shove, and inside they’re wailing away like bagpipes. The moment one of them’s shot his bolt, the next climbs up on top. Just listening to all that sperm being sprayed around makes you crazy. This’ll mean a litter of little ones in town, let me tell you, a whole nest of snotty, flat-nosed, half-Asiatics.
It was always the same man doing the talking at the long table, he spoke curtly and quickly as if he were berating the others, but without any sign of anger in his face. The rest would listen, occasionally all of them would laugh, including the one who had just been speaking harshly. The man frequently looked over at me. I allowed his eyes to meet mine since I had nothing better to do. Nelu went over the season’s buttons one more time. I would gladly have said something about the Azerbaijanis, but no sooner had I remarked how many there were of them than Nelu informed me:
You shouldn’t count people. They can sense you’re doing it.
What if they do, why shouldn’t you count them—after all, they’re there. It would have been easier to talk about the fields of nettles or the station goat, but they didn’t interest him as much as the Azerbaijanis. Nelu looked pretty well rested to me. So he can sleep despite the noise of the trains, I thought, he and the goat. A clockwork man who sleeps by night so he can do his job during the day—the perfect man for business trips. The whole point of this trip had been ridiculous from the start. Ordering buttons from a road of nettles that flooded your vision so that you lost sight of the mountains of clothes waiting at the factory. On the third night I started staring at the station clock at eleven, and was still staring at two on the dot. The trains would first whoosh in the distance like trees, then they sounded like iron in the sky, and finally they came crashing through your head loud enough to split it in two. A wounded silence followed, then dogs started barking until the next train came along. My brain slowly pieced itself back together. At one moment, when no train was passing, I heard somebody knocking at my door. I took the vase from beside my pillow and yelled:
Pashyol tovarish—I yelled in Russian for whoever was knocking to get lost.
It’s me.
There in the doorway stood Nelu, in his pajamas, barefoot.
I’ve been knocking for some time.
I thought you were able to sleep. I can’t sleep a wink here next to this station.
He sat on the bed with his head in his hands. I opened the window and saw the shimmering patch of the goat asleep in the dark, a red train signal just beyond the clock, and away in the distance a green one. Nelu lay down.
It’s because of you that I can’t sleep.
The window stayed open, we pulled the covers over us. I knew that our hungry groaning would be coming along soon, like the trains on the tracks. It was all right with me. Actually one day and one night in that wasteland was enough to bring me to the point where I would have opened the door for any one of the Azerbaijanis. I might have greeted him first with the vase, but in the end I would have let him in between my legs. Nelu panted, clutched at my breasts, we lay skin to skin near that railway station, and he talked of feelings, of love. I let him talk.
I let him talk because I thought I could straighten him out once we were back home. Maybe my feelings just needed more time.
Nelu came every evening around eleven. The ceiling light was off, the bulb above the sink was on. The curve of a neck merged with a shoulder, the lines of his angled arms and legs began to blur, two white eyes caught in the light, that was Nelu. All the rest was darkness. What that desolate town had worn down, love would now restore. He wanted me all night long, his flesh and brain were in complete agreement, they met at the place where thinking stops. But I got nothing out of it, I whimpered without ever forgetting where I was. I looked at the station clock and it gazed back. Inside my skull everything stayed as bright as that segmented dial on the gable. On my own I would never have taken that step to counter the desolation. And if I had, then it would have been with an Azerbaijani. He would have made the night speed by, one night or all the nights that were still to come. But in the restaurant, at the long table, I wouldn’t have recognized him. Every evening at dinner I would have felt as if I was looking for one particular button among thirty-four identical ones. So a new one might just as well have come every night, for all they differed in appearance. At most the only way I might have been able to tell who it was would have been from the way he spoke, the way he moved. Or maybe they were all the same in bed, too. After the trip I would never again see the man I had spent ten nights with, or any of the ten men I had spent one night with. Nelu had started it, it wasn’t my doing. About two o’clock every night I sent him back to his room. Even on the last night he was reluctant to go, but he was well-behaved and obedient, not wanting to spoil a good thing.
At five in the morning before we boarded the train for home, the goat was wandering around the stake. I gave it a piece of bread, which it gobbled up without first sniffing. The minute I was in the train compartment I fell asleep, catching up on all those nights, oblivious to the sound of the train’s motion or anything else around me. When the train arrived at Central Station and Nelu woke me, my head was leaning against his shoulder, how had that happened. We walked through the noise of the city morning to the bus stop. Nelu was carrying his bag by his side, I carried mine between us to prevent him from putting his free arm around me. Outside the red station back at Button Central, as the goat was eating the bread in the cold morning air and Nelu was putting on his jacket, I knew no love lay in store for us.
The next few days at the office, before we went home, I said:
No, I’m not coming home with you. And no, you’re not coming to my place.
Why, Nelu asked.
Whether ten days or three years, men were always demanding a reason. Nelu said it was impossible for there not to be one. After I separated from my husband, I wanted a life that went with my short hair. As long as I was still young, I wanted to go to the kind of beautiful country the clothes were exported to. I wanted to be worth clothes like that, and even prettier ones, and I wanted a generous husband to buy them for me. Three girls from the nursery gardens had married Italians. My father-in-law asked them about it and told us at home how it wa
s done. Evidently there were men who craved the flesh of girls from these parts, usually bachelors, respected businessmen, who didn’t get around to marrying until their mothers were in their graves. They were the kind of mild-mannered, persnickety gentlemen in whom you could hardly tell caring demeanor from approaching senility, well-groomed men getting on in years. Perhaps I would acquire Lilli’s taste yet, if it meant getting out of this place. You didn’t necessarily need to be a beauty, all you needed was the freshness of youth. And a modest manner. Marriages were allowed two years after you applied. Then you moved straight into the bosom of a family, straight from being bare-assed poor to having a marble vase on the table set with knives and forks—solid silver if you were lucky. I just wanted to kill the two years until I could go. It was all about Italy, it had nothing to do with him.
It’s not because of you, I said. You’re not the reason. Neither am I. We were just on a business trip.
His face froze up. Then his eyeballs glistened and turned into little squares. Out shot his arm, and he slapped me. He was better at that than he was at making coffee, tying shoelaces, or sharpening pencils. The blow was well aimed, and my head throbbed. I laughed, although my laughter faded. All right, maybe there was some justice in knocking my head against the doorframe. But it was unjust of him to report me one week later for those notes addressed to Italy. And to go one step further with the notes for Sweden, which he wrote himself and put in trouser pockets so that I got fired. That was persecution. And as for the notes for France . . .
We’re there, Grandma, says the driver. Now all the old lady has to do is stand up and in ten or fifteen shakes of her head she’ll be at the door. From the back of the car comes a clanking of pails and a shuffling of shoes. I’d be happy to get out here and buy myself something, maybe a single apple, you don’t have to stand in line for that. If I were quick about it I wouldn’t even miss the tram. It’s almost nine o’clock, but not ten sharp, not yet. A grass-green summer apple, even if the early ones do tend to be wormy and covered with splotches like birthmarks. When you bite into them the juice spurts out and your mouth puckers up. An apple like that would suit the blouse that grows. I could eat it on the tram or right after I got off, just before ten. Or I could save it for later. I could put it in my pocket so Albu wouldn’t see it. If Albu keeps me there I won’t be getting anything to eat for a long time. But what if the apple cancels out the nut and somehow causes Albu to do exactly that. I could imagine the toothbrush and toothpaste might infect the apple. Then no matter how hungry I was I wouldn’t be able to stomach the apple. The man with the briefcase jumps up from his seat and walks up to the driver: I’m just going to buy myself some aspirin, you’ll be here a little while, won’t you. Not very long, says the driver, I wouldn’t mind a few tomatoes, but we’re running late. If you wait, I’ll bring you some, says the man with the briefcase. The driver opens his bottle: No, I’ll make up time on the next go-round, then I’ll be able to get them myself. Before drinking he wipes the top of the bottle with his hand, as if the last person to drink from it had been someone other than him.