The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (20 page)

The darkness is locked inside the stairwell and reeks of boiled cabbage. Even though the door to the building is open Adina cannot find the elevator. For the first few stairs the darkness clings to her legs, weighing them down. The flashlight’s pale circle catches on the banister, then leaps soundlessly through the rails onto the wall. Her shoes clatter inside her head. On the second floor is a drying room, a handful of light from outside falls on a line of white diapers. The garbage chute next to the drying room is gray, like an arm made of cloth. On the third floor is a bare geranium in a plastic pot smelling of moldy earth and boiled cabbage. On the fourth floor she hears shoes squeaking. A pair of pant legs comes down the stairs, and a shirt bright enough to provide a little gleam. Adina raises her flashlight. The pale circle jumps onto the man’s shoulder, half of his face, one eye, one ear, the white tips of his collar. And in the light, between his collar and his ear, is a birthmark. The edge of his nose. Then his chin which snaps the circle of light in two.

The market hall, Adina thinks, two nuts, his hand squeezing one against the other, and his voice asking what’s your name. By this point he’s reached the third floor, he’s leaving and at the same time staying behind inside Adina’s head. Back then it was summer, what are we going to do now, he asked. He’s also the one who told the joke about the little Romanian. Abi said that his birthmark twitched on his jugular vein.

On the fifth floor the doorbell rings, Adina lifts her finger off the button, the bell goes silent, I know what I know, those were Clara’s words, the door creaks, and Clara’s rumpled hair is in the doorway.

Adina pushes in the door toward Clara’s cheek, and Clara’s hair moves back. Adina steps right past it, as though it were part of the doorway, and heads straight through the entrance hall. The door to the kitchen is open, the room smells of coffee.

*   *   *

Two cups on the tray, two spoons, grains of sugar scattered on the nightstand. The bed is unmade, the pattern in the damask pillowcase is like a breathy whisper.

He was here, says Adina, the man in the stairwell just now, that was Pavel. Clara’s rumpled hair is dangling around her eyes, she pulls it back, her ears glow red beneath her thin fingers. You rarely see each other and rarely means every day, Adina’s breath dogs every word, I know why you’ve been hiding him, she says, don’t lie to me, your lawyer works for the Securitate. A hand towel is draped over the chair, right below Clara’s arm, her thin fingers fasten the white round buttons on her blouse. Even if you don’t say anything you’re lying, says Adina. Red carnations are soaking in the vase, their stems touching, the water murky around the leaves.

I could never do anything to hurt you, says Clara, and neither could he. A pair of panty hose lies on the sewing machine. Adina clutches her chin and walks into the kitchen.

Clara leans against the refrigerator, puts a finger to her mouth. Pavel is a good person, she says, with closed lips. The coffeepot is askew on the burner, the stove top flecked with drops of coffee. He gave me his word, says Clara, he knows the only way I can love him is if nothing happens to you. A dish towel lies crumpled under the table. And my fox, says Adina, did he tell you why they’re cutting up my fox. You realize that your good man is just carrying out orders, he’s fucking you on assignment, in fact he wanted both of us, she says, one in the summer and one in the winter, he wakes up every morning and has two wishes in his head just like he has two eyes—for men it’s his fist that gets hard and for women it’s his cock.

Outside the apartment window a velvet skirt is hanging on the line, it’s red and dry on top, black and wet on the bottom from the water dripping incessantly from the hem. And I’m sure that your good person promised all the others that he’d protect them too. Clara bites her lip, stares out the window straight past Adina. You don’t know him, she says, pressing her hair against her head.

And you go to bed with a man like that, says Adina. The lid is off the sugar bowl, the sugar rock hard where the coffee spilled on it. The wind blows through the tree outside. You don’t even know him, says Clara, the dented green ball is still stuck in the fork of the branches. I don’t know you, says Adina. The dented green ball is submitting to another winter. The person I know isn’t you, she says, I thought I knew you. Clara has scrunched up her toes, the cold rises off the floor tiles, coloring her knee blue, and passes into her stomach. You’re sleeping with a criminal, Adina shouts, you’re just like him, you’re wearing him on your face, do you hear me, you’re exactly the same. Clara warms one cold foot with the other. I don’t ever want to see you again, Adina shouts, not ever. Her hands flail about, her eyes are gaping open, her gaze is a hunter that pounces out of her eyes and hits his mark. Her wet mouth screams and spews embers from her tongue. Her anger is hate, as black as her coat.

Stay here, says Clara. Adina brushes aside the thin fingers clutching at her coat and jerks away her sleeve. Don’t touch me, she shouts, I can’t bear the sight of your hands. Clara’s hair stays in the kitchen, the hallway doesn’t let her toes take a single step. The door slams shut.

*   *   *

The stairs race up along the wall, the flashlight tosses away its light. Adina’s hand glides down the railing, clinging to it for support, the fourth floor, the third floor. The garbage chute rumbles, she hears something falling inside the shaft, something falling inside her head. Then the shattering of glass two floors below.

From underneath, the dented green ball in the fork of the tree is so small and dark it seems there’s nothing up there, nothing except once again the eye. Coats pass by, inside them are not people but November. It’s only the second week and already the month is so old and melancholy that evening arrives together with the morning.

*   *   *

My mother was always already my grandmother, Clara once said, not because of her age but because of how she handled it. She started to grow old, said Clara, when I was still a child. She hugged me tight and whispered in my ear, where are you my child, why are you so far away. And as she was growing old, her husband was staying young, said Clara, he got younger and younger compared to her. As if he were secretly watching her wilt away and preserving himself at her expense. And as if she, too, were allowing herself to wither for his sake. I don’t want to be that way, said Clara, no one should be that way. And then his life sped up. What worked with her became his weakness. And then summer came to the city as though it were his first. He couldn’t survive that first summer without her and died right after she did.

*   *   *

The stadium gate is open. Police and dogs are waiting in the parking lot. Men come surging out of the gate singing and shouting. Inside the stadium the Danes couldn’t stop the Romanian ball and the Romanian ball won. Light rises from the stadium’s earthen wall as though the moon had lost its way. Who the hell are the Danes now, the men shout as they carry their tricolor flags with their three distinct stripes. The hungry red, the mute yellow, and the spied-on blue stripes in the cut-off land. Who the hell’s heard of the Danes now, the men’s lips speak words like world and World Cup, their singing creeps up their throats, like the brambles on the earthen wall of the stadium. What the hell do the Danes want here. The long-distance runner looks on indifferently. When crowds go wild he stands all alone, a stranger.

Awaken, Romanian, wake from thy deadly slumber, sings an elderly man. The old anthem is forbidden, the man stands on the curb and sees the muzzle of a dog and the shoes of a policeman. He lifts his chin high and sings to distance himself from his fear. He tears his fur cap off his head, waves it, hurls it to the ground and tramples it with his shoes. And tramples and tramples and sings and sings so that the song can be heard in the soles of his shoes. And the song is forbidden and the song smells of brandy. The flags overhead are raving mad, the heads of the men below are drunk, the shoes confused. The flags accompany the men on the street as they walk into the night.

The old man’s voice falters. My god, he says, standing by the bare acacia, what we could be in the world, and here we don’t even have bread to eat. A policeman with a dog goes up to him, and another policeman. The man throws up his arms and shouts up to heaven, God forgive us for being Romanians. His eyes shine in the sparse light, a hasty shine in the corner of the eye. The dog yelps and pounces on his neck. Two, three, five policemen carry him away.

The parking lot rises and falls, and with it the bare acacia. The steps from the street bounce across his face. The parking lot is standing on its head. The sky is the Danube down below, the asphalt is the night above. In the upside-down gaze, white light spreads over the city, there below the earthen wall, up in the sky, in the cut-off land.

The head of the old man hangs all the way down.

The wasp game

By morning loneliness has already left its mark on the face of the child with eyes set far apart and narrow temples. He’s sitting on a bench right in the middle of other children but he is alone. His eyes are red, the brown rings of his pupils faded.

Twice during class Adina is tempted to call the child to the blackboard. She can tell by the way he’s staring out the window that his thoughts aren’t stopping at the pane. His gaze is clearly one with much to think about. Instead she calls on the child sitting right in front of the absent boy. And then on the one sitting next to him. The boy’s eyes are so far apart they don’t notice.

*   *   *

After class the child sits on the window ledge and yawns. He tells Adina that last night his mother took him to some place in back of the cathedral, two streets past the bridge. That’s where the Hungarian priest lives, he says, a lot of people were praying and singing. There were police and soldiers there too, but they weren’t praying and singing, just watching. It was cold and dark, says the child. My mother told me that you don’t ever feel cold when you pray and sing. That’s why the people weren’t cold. And also because of the candles. Their faces and hands were all lit up, my hands were lit up too, says the child. When you hold a candle in front of your chin the light shines through your throat and through your hand. The child raises his left hand and splays the fingers against the glass. The policemen and the soldiers were cold, says the child. Adina sees the gray wart clusters on his fingers. The poplars jag upward into the sky, sharp and bare. My mother said that even where nobody’s around there can still be someone there, just like sometimes in summer you see a shadow where there isn’t anything or anybody, says the child. My mother said that places like that are drawers you don’t see and can’t open. She said there are drawers like that in the tree trunks, in the grass, in the fence, in the walls. With a piece of greenish chalk in his right hand the boy traces his left hand on the windowpane. And each of these drawers has an ear inside, my mother said. He takes his hand off the window, leaving the outline of a see-through hand. These ears are always listening, my mother said. Whenever anybody comes to visit us my mother puts the phone in the refrigerator, says the boy. He laughs, the laughter flits away from his face. He rests his head on the hand holding the chalk. I never put the phone in the refrigerator, he says.

The boy draws green fingernails on the see-through fingers. Below the fingernails he chalks in a few green warts where the outline was wobbly.

The sky is gray, but gray is not a color, because everything is gray. The apartment blocks in the distance are also gray, but a different gray than the day, differently colorless.

You don’t have any warts, Comrade Teacher, the boy says to Adina, because when you grow up the warts go away, they pass on to the children. My mother once told me that when your warts go away then your troubles start to come.

Warm steam comes out of the child’s mouth. It is invisible. Outside, under the jagged poplars, it would be visible. It would hover silently in the air for a moment before drifting away. What the mouth had just said would be seen in the air. But that wouldn’t change anything. Because what would be seen in the air would be there just for itself and not available. The way everything in the streets is just for itself and not available, the way the city is just for itself, the people in the city just for themselves. The only thing that’s there for everybody is this splitting cold.

The greenish berries stayed on the windowpane, clustered on the see-through fingers.

*   *   *

The wedding procession is small. First comes the tractor, then the musicians, then the rest. The civil registry office is in the House of Youth, just one block beyond the earthen wall of the stadium. Six policemen are walking alongside the procession. Weddings are forbidden, they claim, because assemblies are forbidden. So they simply invited themselves as guests.

The stadium gate is closed, the Danes are back in Denmark, but the forbidden song has spread and is now being sung throughout the city.

During the night the dogs were barking everywhere, all throughout the city streets, sounding closer than they usually do in a snowless winter, when the night is its own echo. And people were on the move as the night progressed, when the only thing keeping it in the city was the cold. And they stayed out later than the last way home. They cut across streets carrying their flashlights. And where they stopped the flashlights went out and match flames flared and died away on their fingers. And candles were lit.

*   *   *

Adina follows herself home. At the corner, by the thick spool of wire, a rusty streak is crawling across the road, it’s the metal seeping away from the wire due to all the freezing and thawing, and with no snow to keep it hidden. The dog OLGA barks in front of the wooden shed, green berries light up in her eyes. OLGA, Adina says out loud. Inside the dog’s head is a drawer that doesn’t open. The day is locked up inside this skull, rolled back into this nightly barking. The path knows its own way and has no distance. Each of Adina’s steps is alike and each is wobbly.