Put the hair back, it belongs to me.
I was startled at the nerve in my own voice, after I spoke I figured I’d be punished. He curled his fingers back in and stared at the pattern of holes stenciled in the tips of his shoes—probably to decide what to do next. And I stared at the light coming through the window. Over there lay the nibbled pencil, and Albu’s fingers were on my shoulder. He actually did put the hair back. Then he yelled:
Keep those stubs on the table.
He stood at the window with his back to me, shaking his head, in the glare his hair looked like a fine big mane that covered his neck. He laughed out loud in the direction of the tree, turned to face me, and sat down on the windowsill. He rested one shoe on its heel so the tip was pointing straight up, revealing the clean sole, and couldn’t stop laughing. A laughing fit just like the ones I had. His ear looked green, taken into possession by the foliage. What was he laughing about, the greenish tinge prefigured his passing from the world, not mine. A little wind, and the tree would have drowned out that fit of laughter. In his place I wouldn’t have laughed just then.
Now the tram is at the bus station, everyone is shoving and I’m standing in the middle of the car. The man with the briefcase shouts over the passengers to the driver: Jesus Christ, take a look at all these stupid people. And the man behind him scratches his chin and says: Watch it, silkworm, or I’ll curl your mustache with my heel and you’ll be taking your teeth home in your handkerchief. The man with the briefcase doesn’t have a mustache but the man who just spoke does. Now both of them are outside. The man with the briefcase is facing the roughneck, who wags his forefinger as if threatening a child and gives a coarse laugh. His arms are long and muscular, his teeth white, he means business. Before the day’s over he’ll have found someone he can beat senseless. The man with the briefcase thinks he’s above getting into a fight like that, better to get away in one piece than risk bloodying your clothes—even if the price is a bit of humiliation. And the blood would be his, since in the heat of his rage he was bound to be defeated. So he shrugs his shoulders and saunters off in the opposite direction from me. It turns out he doesn’t work where I’ve been summoned. A pity, if he did at least I’d know someone there, maybe not very well, but at least differently than the way I know Albu. Someone who’d let himself be humiliated, who’d been trodden into the dust and didn’t do a thing about it. The driver yells: Let’s go or it’ll be Christmas before I get out of here. The cherry eater’s already outside, she walks to a bin and tosses the crumpled paper bag inside. Some man throws a cap in through the window, right in the driver’s face. The man’s hair is tangled, his trousers are wet with piss, his shirt is bloody. He has a fresh gash on his forehead. He has a large sack next to him that’s tied tight but is squirming around. The driver tosses the cap back out the window: Keep your lice. Hold on to it for me, would you, the man laughs, I’m getting in. Not in here you’re not, the conductor says, I’m not a toilet cleaner, this is a streetcar. I’m a father, the man says, reeling, since seven minutes past two last night, I have a son, my wife’s at the maternity hospital. And what’s in the sack, the driver asks. A lamb, the man says, I’m going to give it to the doctor and kiss his golden hands. The man fumbles with his cap but can’t find his head, so he stuffs the cap into his pants pocket. Out of the question, the driver says, if your son pissed in my car I wouldn’t kick him out since he can’t even walk yet. But that doesn’t go for you. The man drags his sack across the rails and pushes against the door. The passengers getting out push him away with their elbows. The man plants one foot squarely on the step. The driver gets up and pushes him down. He falls. Hey, boss, better not leave me here, you better take me with you, may your son go blind . . . The driver spits on the step, shuts the door, and drives off. The lamb in the sack cries out briefly, perhaps the wheels passed over it. On either side of me are people who wanted to get off, but no one says a word. The driver says: I’ll let you all off at the next stop—it’s not far. That’s easy for him to say, but now I’ll have to hurry. At the next stop it’s already a quarter to ten.
It’s possible to take long strides, to walk and breathe at the same time. You can’t look down at your shoes or up in the air—otherwise things might start to blur. You have to keep looking all around just as if you were moving slowly, you can make almost as much progress that way as running, yet you don’t exhaust yourself. But for me to walk like that I’d have to have a clear path ahead, the two people in front of me would have to let me pass. They’re carrying watermelons in a mesh bag that’s swinging back and forth between them, blocking the way. Each melon has been notched open. Probably whoever sold them cut a wedge, which he then raised to his lips using the tip of his knife. After tasting each one he plugged it back inside the melon. All these melons must be ripe. Notched melons are quick to ferment, you have to eat them the same day. Do these two have such a big family. Or do they propose to eat nothing but melons morning, noon, and night, five cold melons, with bread so as to avoid diarrhea or a fit of the shivers. Warm melons taste of mud, they have to be chilled. No refrigerator will hold five melons, the best they can do is a bathtub. My grandfather said:
People used to leave melons in their wells. The water bears them up easily, they float. After an hour you can fish them out with a bucket and eat them. At the first bite your mouth hurts as if you were eating snow, but then your tongue gets used to it. Overchilled melons are a trap, they’re mealy sweet, you eat too much, your stomach freezes. Every summer people died from eating those melons out of their wells, even in town. Nobody dies from eating melons out of the tub, although many people die in the bath. Yes, you can have a warm soak in the mornings, chill melons at noon, and slaughter lambs and geese in the afternoon, rinse away the blood, and then take another warm wash in the evenings. All in the same tub. And when you’ve had your fill of melon, lamb, goose, and yourself, then you can fill up the tub one last time and drown yourself in it, my grandfather said, Oh yes, you can do all that.
I’d rather do it in the river, I said.
But right here there isn’t any river. You’d have to drive off looking for one, and by the time they pull you out they probably won’t know who you were. Corpses fished out of rivers are gruesome. Anyone that fed up with life is better off laying out one last set of clean clothes and dying a pleasant death at home, in the bath.
If you count their shadows, there are four of them doing the carrying. Sometimes people need only one melon but they take more because they’re so cheap. They think they’re saving money, and then they let the melons spoil. I walk close behind the mesh bag, making noise to announce my presence, but the cars are louder. Why are they pulling the bag so far apart, it doesn’t make it any lighter.
Excuse me.
No, they can’t hear me, I need to say more than that.
Climbing roses are planted between the houses, the tall dill in the vegetable beds is flowering in the wind, while the fritillarias are sluggish, girding themselves for the heat of the day, the dust makes them drowsy. Clotheslines are stretched between the fruit trees, lots of peach and quince. Housecoats and aprons, still wet in dark patches, catch the dust before they’re dry. I’ve never been here before, not even aimlessly. Lilli’s blue skirt with the accordion pleats belongs here, where the gardens are too small for large trees. If he wants to get annoyed, that’s his business, I tug at the melon man’s sleeve.
Excuse me, I have to get past.
He turns his head and trots on another couple paces and then turns around again. Then he lets go of the bag.
What are you doing, she yells, can’t you say something if you’re going to let go.
She pulls her shoe out from under the melons, takes her foot out of her shoe, then strips off a bandage that’s slipped off her little toe:
Well, isn’t that great, now the blister has burst.
Hey, the man says, look at this, we know her.
His brown dyed hair has a silvery sheen close to the scalp, the way
it did after the night had been danced away and the light was glaring and Martin no longer counted as part of the paraputch. And her face is lopsided, the way it was after Martin had treated her so horribly in the bathroom.
Oh, Anastasia says, your hair is short.
What are you doing with five melons.
You’ve counted them, he laughs, we’re celebrating, you can imagine where.
I imagined the paraputch.
And how are you, she asks.
Fine, I say.
So are we, he says, maybe we’ll get together sometime.
Maybe, I say.
A truck roars by, Anastasia says:
We better get going.
Then Martin kisses my hand in farewell, and I turn toward the street, where two baby shoes are dangling by their laces right in front of a driver’s forehead. And when the car moves past I see an open garage across the street, an old man wearing shorts, and a red Java. And who should be coming out of the back garden, ducking under the clothesline and heading into the garage but Paul. By Anastasia’s watch it is five past ten.
Paul and the old man are laughing, I look to see if his thin legs have marble veins and check the aerial on the roof. It’s one of Paul’s. Paul picks up a wrench without even having to look for it, he just reaches over to the shelf. In the evening, when he claimed to be out drinking, I believed him. Why not, his being drunk was real enough, no deceit there. I never asked who he was drinking with or who was paying. Why would I. At home Paul drinks by himself. After the accident he said:
Drinkers recognize each other right away, from one table to the next, by their looks, the way the glasses speak to each other. I don’t want anything to do with drinking buddies. I’ll drink with others, but I prefer to sit by myself.
But then Paul threw our bedding out the window into the night, beginning with our pillows. I saw them lying down below, white and small like two handkerchiefs. I laughed as I took the elevator down, barefoot, and brought them back up. By the time I was back with the pillows, the quilts were down on the ground. And when I brought those back up, I was crying because they were so big, and because I had given in to some fool’s nighttime whim. Herr Micu’s bedroom window was dimly lit by a bedside lamp. It was late but still Wednesday, the day of the weekly lottery disaster. Who knows what kind of consolation Herr Micu was doling out to get his wife to accept the next day, maybe sex, a bit of physical love.
Young men tire you out, Lilli said, but older men can make women’s flesh light and smooth during sex.
Throwing bedding out the window was physical too. It wasn’t love, but it was more physical than throwing out dresses. The Sunday dress that Frau Micu had worn on Wednesday as she waited to become rich was now back in the closet. But she was still wearing her body. When Frau Micu leans on the wall inside the entryway, not knowing herself as she is now but convinced she knows who she was twenty years ago, I want to run away. Her sad flesh doesn’t face the sun oblivious to the world, the way my Mama’s did, it looks ready to be touched. Herr Micu once said to Paul:
Every time we have sex it’s a spoonful of sugar for her shattered nerves, the only thing I can use to keep my wife from taking leave of her senses.
Her senses, Paul asked.
Her senses, I said taking leave of her senses, I’m not saying I can restore her mind.
If the bedside lamp was lit not for sex but to light the day’s final entry in the notebook, I didn’t want his pen to witness the quilts and pillows. I didn’t turn on the light in the entrance hall but carried the things to the elevator like a thief. When I got upstairs with the quilts, Paul was lying on the white pillow in his pajamas like a striped piece of paper. He pulled his knees up to his stomach and asked:
Did anyone see you.
I covered him up, then laid the second quilt on my part of the bed and smoothed the creases, as if on the cloth lay the woman I wanted to be from tomorrow on—one who would no longer put up with any mad drunkenness. Paul looked up at the bedroom ceiling and said:
I’m sorry.
I’d never heard anything like that before. Not even when an apology was grinding his teeth or twisting his mouth—he always kept them bottled up inside his face, he never let them out. What earthly connection could there have been between that and the next day, when I thought up a lie and stepped out of the noisy row of shops into the stillness of the pharmacy carrying a mesh bag full of potatoes and said:
My grandfather caught a splinter in the eye when he was chopping wood and he’s lost it, the right eye. He lives a long way away and can’t come to town. He hasn’t been out of the house since, not even to church or the hairdresser’s. He’s ashamed to be seen, I’d like to buy him a glass eye.
There’s nothing to worry about if you’re lying about the dead—none of it can come true. With good lies, with Albu, I know when it’s working because from one word to the next I believe it myself. Chopping wood was pretty lame, I’ve told so many lies out of fear and for others that if there’s no fear, or when it’s just for myself, I can’t do it. The pharmacist stood there wearing her own dress under her white coat, like two women, one inside the other, an older and a younger version. The woman in the dress knew pain, the woman in the coat knew how to treat it. But neither one knew how to gauge a good lie. Nevertheless, the pharmacist lowered her eyes and said:
You can buy one even without a prescription. Don’t worry, it’ll fit. You can’t exchange it, though. Pick one out of the window. You can have two if you want.
She laughed.
Even three, God knows there are enough of them there collecting dust.
I took a dark blue glass eye, now there was a gap in the display. My grandfather had brown eyes with that subdued gleam you can’t get with glass because it hasn’t suffered. The eye I bought was a plum in water, but the water was ice. An eye that wanted to match Lilli’s but fell short of being amazing. Of course no hand or machine could have even come close to capturing her tobacco flower nose.
Before I bought the potatoes I had been to the candy section in the grocery store. In glass jars stacked on top of each other I saw dead wasps clinging to red candies, then rusty razor blades, then broken cookies, then boxes of matches, then green candies stuck together, also with wasps. And the bottles along the shelf against the wall alternated in color, milky-yellow egg liqueur, pink raspberry juice, greenish rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover as clear as water. Each item seemed to think it was really something else. The shop assistant gave the impression of a person put together with matches, razor blades, candy stuck together with wasps, and cookies, all on the verge of falling apart.
A hundred grams of the sweet razor blades, I said.
You better get out of here, he yelled. Go buy something at the pharmacy that’ll get you your wits back.
It was true, all the goods were addling my brain. I went to the greengrocer’s and was glad that the potatoes, as they went from the crate onto the scales, didn’t turn into shoes or stones. I was holding three kilos of potatoes and my head was full of the irreversibility of things. Then I went into the pharmacy and bought the glass eye. Once they stop summoning me, Paul can attach a little ring to it and I’ll wear it as a necklace. So I thought at the time.
Whenever I hear the elevator descending to fetch Albu’s henchmen, I can hear his voice quietly in my head: Tuesday at ten sharp, Saturday at ten sharp, Thursday at ten sharp. How often, after closing the door, have I said to Paul:
I’m not going there anymore.
Paul would hold me in his arms and say:
If you don’t go, they’ll come and fetch you, and then they’ll have you for good.
And I would nod.
Now Paul is setting his handkerchief on the ground next to the motorbike. He sits down on it and tightens screws. And I’m standing behind a bush and don’t want to budge, don’t want to go click-click across the asphalt all the way back to the leaning tower that everyone knows. Except Frau Micu, who never walks more than the ten paces from her
apartment to the elevator and the ten to the entrance and not a step further because she forgets the way. She once said:
The world’s a big place, how can I smell where our apartment is from outside.
About the elevator she said:
You step into the car, it’s powered by this cable, not gasoline. You better have a ticket since it’s the first day of the month and the checkers are bound to stop by today. You’ll starve up there on the roof.
She handed me an apricot, I went into the elevator. The stone was pulsing through the flesh of the fruit warmed by her hand. Upstairs I threw the apricot out the window as far as I could. I wasn’t going to be caught by her apricot. But now I wanted to be like Frau Micu, blabbering outrageous things in a soft voice. Didn’t she say:
And then I had Emil again, twice . . .
When I brought up the bedding twice that night, I realized that what she had said was getting to me.
If I do decide to go back to the tower block, I’ll put on the blouse that waits and sit in the kitchen. Whenever someone gets out of the elevator, the doors clatter like stones one floor up and one below. And on our floor they sound like iron. When I hear iron, I’ll go out into the stairwell. Today Albu will come. The first time I was summoned, he showed me his identity card. I got stuck on his photo instead of reading what somebody who squeezes your fingers when he kisses your hand is called by his mother, his wife. There must have been two or three given names, too late, the identity card had been put away. If Albu thinks I ought to disappear, I will tell him the truth:
My grandfather painted the horse outside his house, I’ve been waiting for you here outside the apartment.
And I’ll say the same thing when Paul gets out of the elevator, so that he won’t have to start lying right away, until I ask: