The Appointment (3 page)

You don’t mean you’re losing your nerve already—we’re just warming up.

I’m not losing my nerve, not at all: in fact, I’m overloaded with nerves. And every one of them is humming like a moving streetcar.

They say that walnuts on an empty stomach are good for your nerves and your powers of reason. Any child knows that, but I’d forgotten it. What sparked my memory wasn’t the fact that I was being summoned so often—it was sheer chance. One time I had to be at Albu’s at ten sharp, like today; by half past seven I was all set to go. Getting there takes an hour and a half at most. I give myself two hours, and if I’m early I walk a while around the neighborhood. I prefer it that way. I’ve always arrived on time: I can’t imagine they’d put up with any lateness.

It was because I was all set to go by half past seven that I got to eat the walnut. I’d been ready that early for previous summonses, but on that particular morning the walnut was lying there on the kitchen table. Paul had found it in the elevator the day before. He’d put it in his pocket, since you don’t just leave a walnut sitting there. It was the first one of the year, with a little of the moist fuzz left from the green husk. I weighed it in my hand: it seemed a little light for a good fresh nut, as if it might be hollow. I couldn’t find a hammer, so I split it open with the stone that used to be in the hall but has since moved to a corner of the kitchen. The brain of the nut was loose inside. It tasted of sour cream. That day my interrogation was shorter than usual, I kept my nerve, and once I was back on the street, I thought to myself:

That was thanks to the nut.

Ever since then I’ve believed in nuts, that nuts help. I don’t really believe it, but I want to have done whatever I can that might help. That’s why I stick to my stone for cracking nuts, and always do it in the morning. Once the nut’s been cracked, it loses its power if it lies open overnight. Of course it would be easier on Paul and the neighbors—not to mention myself—if I split them open in the evening, but I can’t have people telling me what time to crack nuts.

I brought the stone from the Carpathians. My first husband had been on military service since March. Every week he wrote me a whining letter and I responded with a comforting card. Summer came, and I tried to figure out exactly how many letters and cards we would have to exchange before he returned. My father-in-law wanted to take his place and sleep with me, so I soon had enough of his house and garden. I packed my rucksack and early one morning, after he’d gone to work, I stashed it in the bushes near a gap in the fence. A few hours later I strolled out to the road, with nothing in my hands. My mother-in-law was hanging out the laundry and had no idea what I was up to. Without saying a word, I pushed the rucksack through the gap in the fence and walked to the station. I took a train into the mountains and joined up with some people who’d just graduated from the music academy. Every day we trekked and stumbled from one glacial lake to the next until it grew dark. Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around—portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds. The music graduates sang as the lake pictured
them, upside down, taking their measure as potential corpses. Hiking, resting, or eating, they sang in chorus. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear them harmonize while they slept at night, just as they did at those bleak altitudes where the sky blows into your mouth. I had to stay with the group because death makes no allowance for the wanderer who strays alone. The lakes made our eyes grow bigger by the day; in every face I could see the circles widening, the cheeks losing ground. And every day our legs grew shorter. Nevertheless, on the last day I wanted to take something back home with me, so I picked through the scree until I found a rock that looked like a child’s foot. The musicians looked for small flat pebbles they could rub in their hands as worry-stones. Their stones looked like coat buttons, and I had more than enough of those every day in the factory. But those musicians put their faith in worry-stones the way I now put mine in nuts.

I can’t help it: I’ve put on the blouse that grows, I bang twice with the stone, rattling all the dishes in the kitchen, and the walnut is cracked. And as I’m eating it, Paul comes in, startled by the banging. He’s wearing his pajamas and downs one or two glasses of water, two if he was as blind drunk as he was last night. I don’t need to understand each individual word. I know perfectly well what he says while drinking water:

You don’t really believe that nut helps, do you.

Of course I don’t really believe it, just as I don’t really believe in all the other routines I’ve developed. Consequently I’m all the more stubborn.

Let me believe what I want.

Paul lets that one go, since we both know it’s not right to quarrel before the interrogation, you need to keep a clear head. Most of the sessions are torturously long despite the nut. But
how do I know they wouldn’t be worse if I didn’t eat the nut? Paul doesn’t realize that the more he pooh-poohs all my routines, with that wet mouth of his and the glass he’s draining before clearing it off the table, the more I rely on them.

People who are summoned develop routines that help them out a little. Whether these routines really work or not is beside the point. It’s not people, though, it’s me who’s developed them; they came sneaking up on me, one by one.

Paul says:

The things you waste your time on.

What he does, instead, is consider what questions they’ll ask me when I’m summoned. This is absolutely necessary, he claims, whereas what I do is crazy. He’d be right if the questions he’s preparing me for really were the ones I was asked. Up to now they’ve always been completely different.

It’s too much to expect my routines to really help me. Actually they don’t help me so much as help move life along from one day to the next. There’s no point expecting them to fill your head with lucky thoughts. There’s a lot to be said for moving life along, but there’s essentially nothing to say when it comes to luck, because as soon as you open your mouth you jinx it away. Not even the luck you’ve missed out on can bear being talked about. The routines I’ve developed are about moving from one day to the next, and not about luck.

I’m sure Paul’s right: the walnut and the blouse that grows only add to the fear. And what sense is there in shooting for good fortune when all that does is add to the fear. I am constantly dwelling on this, and as a result I don’t expect as much as other people. Nobody covets the fear that others make for themselves. But with luck it’s just the opposite, which is why good fortune is never a very good goal.

On the green blouse that grows there’s a large mother-of-pearl button which I picked out from a great many buttons at the factory and took for Lilli.

At the interrogation I sit at the small table, twisting the button in my fingers, and answer calmly, even though every one of my nerves is jangling. Albu paces to and fro; having to formulate the right questions wears at his calm, just as having to give the right answers wears at mine. As long as I keep my composure there’s the chance he’ll get something wrong—maybe everything. Back home I change into my gray blouse. This one’s called the blouse that waits. It’s a gift from Paul. Of course I often have misgivings about these names. But they’ve never done any harm, not even on days when I haven’t been summoned. The blouse that grows helps me, and the blouse that waits may be helping Paul. His fear on my behalf is as high as the ceiling, just as mine is for him when he sits around the flat, waiting and drinking, or when he’s barhopping in town. It’s easier if you’re the one going out, if you’re the one taking your fear away and leaving your fortune at home, and if there’s someone waiting for you to come back. Sitting at home, waiting, stretches time to the brink and tightens fear to the point of snapping.

The powers I’ve bestowed on my routines verge on the superhuman. Albu yells:

You see, everything is connected.

And I twist the large button on my blouse and say: In your mind they are, in my mind they aren’t.

Shortly before he
got off, the old man in the straw hat turned his watery eyes away from me. Now there’s a father with a child on his lap sitting on the seat facing me, his legs stretched out into
the aisle. Watching the city go by outside the window isn’t something he can be bothered with. The child sticks a forefinger up his father’s nose. Crooking a finger and hunting for snot is something kids learn early. Later they’re told not to pick anyone’s nose but their own, and then only if no one’s watching. This father doesn’t think that later has arrived yet; he smiles, perhaps he’s enjoying it. The tram halts in the middle of the tracks, between stops, the driver gets out. Who knows how long we’ll be stranded. It’s early in the morning and already he’s sneaking a break when he should be driving his route. Everyone here does what he wants. The driver strolls over to the shops, tucking in his shirt and adjusting his trousers so no one will notice he’s abandoned his tram in mid-route. He acts like someone who’s so bored that he finally got up off his couch just to poke his nose into the sunshine. If he’s planning to buy anything in one of the shops over there, he’ll either have to say who he is or else he’ll have to wait in line. If all he’s after is a cup of coffee, I hope he doesn’t sit down to drink it. He doesn’t dare touch brandy, even if he does keep his window open. Every one of us sitting on the tram has the right to reek of brandy except for him. But he’s behaving as if it were the other way round. My summons puts me in the same position as far as brandy is concerned. I’d rather have his reason for abstaining than my own. Who knows when he’ll be back.

Ever since I
began leaving my good fortune at home, the kiss on my hand doesn’t paralyze me as much as it used to. I crook up my finger joints so that my knuckles keep Albu from speaking. Paul and I have rehearsed this kiss. In order to approximate the importance of the signet ring on Albu’s middle finger, to see how it affects the finger-squeeze, I made a ring out of a strip of
rubber and a coat button. We took turns wearing it, and we laughed so much we completely forgot why we were going through the exercise in the first place. I learned not to crook my hand up all at once but gradually. That way the knuckles can block his gums and keep him from speaking. Sometimes when Albu is kissing my hand, I think of my rehearsal with Paul. Then the pain at my fingernails and the slobber on my hand aren’t so humiliating. You learn as you go, but I can’t show that I’m learning, and whatever happens I cannot laugh.

If you’re walking or driving around the leaning tower, where Paul and I live, you can’t really keep more than the entranceway and the lower stories under surveillance. From the sixth floor up the flats are too high, so that you’d need sophisticated technology to see anything in detail. What’s more, about halfway up the building, the façade angles out toward the front. If you stare up at it long enough you’ll feel your eyes rolling back into your forehead. I’ve tried it often; your neck grows tired. The leaning tower has looked like that for twelve years now, says Paul, from the day it was built. Whenever I want to explain where I live, all I have to do is say: In the leaning tower. Everyone in the city knows where it is. They ask:

Aren’t you afraid it might collapse.

I’m not afraid, I say, it was built with reinforced concrete. Whenever I refer to the tower, people look down at the floor, as if looking at me might make them dizzy, so I say:

Everything else in this city will collapse first.

At that they nod, to relax the veins that are twitching in their necks.

The fact that our flat is high up is an advantage for us, but it also has the disadvantage that Paul and I can’t see exactly what’s going on down below. From the seventh floor you can’t make out anything smaller than a suitcase, and when do you
see anyone carrying a suitcase. Individual items of clothing blur into big splotches of color, and faces turn into little pale patches between the hair and the clothes. You could guess at what the nose, eyes, or teeth inside those patches might look like, but why bother. Old people and children can be recognized by the way they walk. There are dumpsters located on the grass between our building and the shops, with a walkway running alongside them. Two narrow footpaths leave the paved sidewalk and circle around the group of bins, without quite meeting. From up here the bins look like ransacked cupboards with the doors torn off. Once a month someone sets them on fire, the smoke rises and the garbage is consumed. If your windows aren’t shut, your eyes start stinging and your throat gets sore. Most things happen outside the entrances to the shops, but unfortunately all we can see are the rear service doors. No matter how often we count them, we can never match up the twenty-seven doors in back with the eight front doors belonging to the grocer, the bread shop, the greengrocer, the pharmacy, the bar, the shoemaker, the hairdresser, and the kindergarten. The whole rear wall is riddled with doors; nevertheless, the delivery trucks stop mostly in the street, out front.

The old shoemaker was complaining he had too little room and too many rats. His shop consists of a workbench enclosed in a small space that is partitioned from the rest of the room by a makeshift wall of wooden planks. The man I took over from was the one who fixed the place up, the shoemaker said. Back then the building was new. The space was boarded off then too, but he couldn’t think of anything to do with all those planks, or maybe he just didn’t want to; anyway, he didn’t use them at all. I knocked in a few nails and ever since I’ve been hanging the shoes up by their laces, thongs, or heels, they don’t get gnawed on anymore. I can’t have the rats eating everything—after
all, I have to pay for the damage. Especially in winter, when they’re hungrier. Behind those planks there’s a great big hall. Once, back in the early days, during a holiday, I came down to the shop, loosened two of the boards behind the bench, and squeezed through with a flashlight. There’s nowhere you can put your feet, the whole floor skitters and squeaks, he said, it’s full of rats’ nests. Rats don’t need a door, you know, they just tunnel through the ground. The walls are covered with electrical sockets, and the back wall has four doors leading out to the bins. But you can’t budge them so much as an inch to drive the rats out even for a couple hours. The door to my workplace is just a cheap piece of tin—in fact, more than half the doors in back of the shops aren’t doors at all, they’re just tin plates they built into the wall to save on concrete. The sockets are probably there in case of war. There’ll always be war all right, he laughed, but not here. The Russians’ve got us where they want us with treaties, they won’t be showing up here. Whatever they need, they’ve shipped off to Moscow: they eat our grain and our meat and leave us to go hungry and fight over the shortages. Who’d want to conquer us, all it would do is cost them money. Every country on earth is happy not to have us, even the Russians.