The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (21 page)

Then her shoes begin to hurry, her head is empty, even though the fox is lurking inside. The fox is always lurking inside her head.

*   *   *

Whenever Adina comes from the street into her apartment, her cold fingertips flush with heat as soon as she looks in the bathroom. Afterward her shoe shoves the tail and two hind legs away from the fur. Every day.

A cigarette is floating in the toilet bowl, not yet swollen from the water. Adina now shifts her foot to the fox’s right foreleg. It moves together with the tip of her shoe, leaving the neck exactly where it was.

Her heart pounds and the pounding rises into her mouth as her fingers shove the cut appendages back against the belly.

*   *   *

Pavel could have been a groomsman, but ever since the game against the Danes the crowds haven’t put away their flags and don’t go home at night. So he had to decline since he’s on duty day and night. Where the hell do they come from anyway, he said, they all have thin skin and don’t get any sun. Judging from the way they look they must live up where the planet starts to shrink.

The clarinets rip through the wedding song, the violins can barely hold on to the thin melody between the apartment blocks, where the narrow space creates an echo. The accordion opens and closes in step. Clara pulls her thin heel out of a crack in the asphalt. The groom’s carnation is broken, the stem sticks out of his buttonhole.

The tractor’s bucket is in the air, the teeth in front covered with soil. The wedding couple is standing inside the giant shovel. The bride’s veil flutters, her white carnations quiver at every pothole. Her white sleeves are dirty. The dwarf is wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black bow tie. His new shoes have heels as high as two broken bricks. Grigore wears a large hat, the gatewoman a headscarf with a red silk fringe. The gateman is carrying a ring cake. His eyes are moist, he sings:

Your childhood now has passed away

From this day on it’s always May

*   *   *

The bride is Mara. For two years she’s been waiting for this day, and now assemblies are forbidden.

We’re getting married, not doing anything political, the groom told the policemen.

The bite on Mara’s leg has long since healed. For weeks she showed it off every morning in the office. First it was red, then it grew bigger and turned blue. When it turned green the bite was larger than ever. Then the teeth vanished into her skin. And the wound turned yellow, frayed away, shrank and disappeared.

Mara had troubles with her fiancé. He wanted to break off the engagement. She had to show him the spot every evening, and he got used to it. But he refused to believe the bite came from the director. He said, if I could only be sure those teeth weren’t GRIGORE’S.

*   *   *

Snow geese need the snow that doesn’t come. At least not here. They contort their necks and open their beaks. They scream. They flounder on the flat ground. After the night frost has melted they splay their wings. It’s difficult, but they take a running start and lift off when they spread out their webbing. The air flaps and ripples close to the grass, then the air over the trees, like leaves whooshing in the bare forest. Once in flight across the sky, the snow geese spread out in formation and let the plain, the field and the corn fall away from their wings, smaller and smaller. There is no snow, but once they’ve been to a place, the terrain is mapped inside them forever, a white sphere. And down below the blackish green hill rises out of the ground. Feathers fly in their wake for a long time after they have passed.

The crows stay in the forest because the forest is black. The branches pretend to be dead.

The soldiers play the wasp game. They stand in a circle. Whoever is the crane fly has to stand in the middle and cover his eyes tight with his hands so he can’t see. There can’t be any gap. All the others are the wasps. They all hum in a circle around the crane fly and one of them stings him with a blow to the hand. The crane fly has to guess which wasp stung him. If he takes too long to guess he gets stung again, and again. The crane fly tries to guess, the crane fly is afraid. He keeps his hands pressed to his head, each hit hurts more and more. Every time he gets stung the crane fly falls to the ground. Then he has to get up and look at all the wasps and guess which one stung him, over and over until he can’t get up anymore. And even longer. And meanwhile the wasps’ lips quiver and hum.

When the crane fly can no longer stand, he is allowed to be a wasp.

Every crane fly stays lying in the dirt well after the last sting, without moving. The officer with the gold tooth nudges him with the tip of his boot. When the crane fly finally stands up to join the wasps, his eyes are ringed with bruises, and every bone aches.

Today Ilie is lucky, he doesn’t have to be the crane fly.

*   *   *

Every Sunday afternoon during the summer I give my son a ten-lei coin, the officer says. His eyes are glued to the sky, he’s following the snow geese, there’s snow in the mountains, he says, they’re changing their course.

He swallows. My son, he says, doesn’t let the coin out of his hand even when he’s putting on his white sandals. Then we take our car into town. I go to the summer garden and drink beer and my son takes my ID and goes around the corner to the Party Cafeteria, he really likes cake. The officer smacks his gold tooth. The cakes are in the display case, which is so tall that last summer it was still only at eye height for him. Since then he’s grown a lot, says the officer, next summer he’ll be able to see the cakes better. His favorite is the one with the bright green icing, he says. But he’s scared of the bees in the cafeteria so he closes his eyes. And the cook says to him every time, bees make the cake sweet.

The officer exhales, his breath gray in the air. They’re really wasps, not bees, he says, and they like the raspberry icing best. Every summer the cook’s hand is swollen blue from all the stings, it’s creepy. When he serves he has to drape a white towel over his hand. That’s the odd thing, says the officer, the bees always buzzing around the beer in the summer garden don’t sting. His gold tooth shines. But with the cakes in the Party Cafeteria it’s the wasps, he says.

Ilie looks up at the blackish-green hill and senses for just a moment that the officer’s face is very pale, and that the gold tooth is a yellow beak. The beak of a snow goose.

*   *   *

When the tank has been sitting in the forest for weeks, when the trenches have been finished for days, when the officer with the gold tooth is weary from spending half the season in the barrack and sick of looking at the sandbags in the yard, the column marches out along the path up to the field and through the broken corn and over the hill to play the wasp game.

The snow geese flounder on the ground. They bring the cold with them, who knows where from, they screech and pull in their wings. They always fly far away. There they eat snow. They always come back, but they never eat grass or corn. When they aren’t flying they keep away from the forest and stand there and look up at the sky.

The wasp game is a good equalizer, a beautiful contest, says the officer. He doesn’t play with the men, he only watches. The rules of the game shine on his gold tooth. Turn around, he says to the crane fly. And now hum, he says to the wasps. He has them hum for as long as he wants. Sting, sting, he shouts, and sting hard like a wasp, not like a flea.

The spreading city

The woman with the chestnut-red hair done up in big waves is cleaning her windows. Beside her is a bucket of steaming water. She reaches into the bucket and picks up a sopping gray rag, she reaches onto the windowsill and picks up a moist gray rag, then she pulls a dry white cloth off her shoulder. After that she bends over and picks up some crumpled pieces of newsprint. The windowpanes shine, her hair opens up into two sections, divided by the open casements. When she closes the casements she closes her hair.

The frost has darkened the petunias, knotting their leaves and stems in a tangle of black. When the weather warms the frozen petunias will stick to one another.

The woman waits until the sun above the stadium sends out warm rays for two weeks in a row, then she goes to the market to buy new petunias. They are packed in newspaper and perched on the windowsill. The woman digs out the old black plants, using a large knife to pry the deep roots out of the window box. Then she takes a very large nail and aerates the soil, and unwraps the new petunias one by one. Their roots are short and hairy. She widens the holes in the dirt with the nail and sticks the hair inside the holes. She closes the holes with her fingers. Then she waters the new white petunias so much that the flower box drips for two days.

The first night helps rearrange the stems and leaves of the freshly planted petunias, so they no longer can be seen in the morning when the big-waved hair appears in the window. The daylight brings warmth, the petunias bloom for themselves. Every day the marks of winter crawl farther and farther below the white flowers and underneath the city.

*   *   *

The poplars and acacias let their bare bark shimmer green before they sprout leaves. Then the cold is gone and everything is exposed. That’s when the dictator climbs into the helicopter and flies over the country. Over the plains, over the Carpathians. His old man’s legs are riding high in the sky, up where the wind emerges to dry the winter out of the fields.

Wherever a glacial lake flashes in the sun, the servant’s daughter said to Adina, and the reflection shines back up into his eyes, he reaches out his hand. He shifts his old legs and says, corn doesn’t grow in water, that lake has to be dried out.

He has a house in every city, and every city shrinks between his temples as his helicopter touches down. Wherever he lands, he spends the night. Wherever he spends the night, a bus with boarded-up windows passes slowly through the streets. The bus is full of wire cages. It stops in front of every building to collect all the roosters and dogs and haul them away. Nothing is allowed to awaken the dictator except for light, said the servant’s daughter, any crowing or barking throws him off. For instance, she said, say he’s scheduled to give a speech from the balcony of the opera. And suddenly his old legs stop in the middle of town and he has to close his eyes for a moment simply because some rooster jarred his sleep by crowing, or because some dog barked. Then when he opens his eyes and the black inside sees the opera standing there, he might stretch out his hand and say, housing blocks don’t grow in an opera, that opera has to be torn down.

He hates opera, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife heard from the wife of an officer in the capital that the dictator once went to the opera. And that he said, this is nothing but a stage full of people and instruments, you can hardly hear a thing. One guy plays while the others all just sit there, he said. Then he stretched out his hand. And the next day the orchestra was dissolved.

According to the wife from the capital the dictator puts on new underclothes every morning, said the servant’s daughter. Also a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, new socks, new shoes, all sealed in transparent bags, so that no one can put poison on them. And every morning in the winter he has a new coat, a new scarf, a new fur cap or a new hat. As if the clothes from the day before had become too small because his power grew in the night while he slept.

In life his face is shrinking but on the pictures it gets bigger and bigger, his forelock is graying but in the pictures it’s blacker and blacker.

The dictator’s discarded clothes wander through the land like darkness while the old man’s legs are sleeping. And black caps worn during the day bring out the moon at night, according to the servant’s daughter.

And these moons are always white, never yellow. Or at most they are half-white, with a mouth gaping and yawning into the sky. A moon that makes dogs howl and drives their glowing eyes deep into their head when the cathedral bell prepares to strike twelve. A moon with a cheek looming a little too close on the way home. A highwayman of the night, a gap in the darkness behind the last streetcar.

Where a person climbs out at night and never comes home, there are empty paving stones in the morning.

*   *   *

Outside the window a last bit of light sneaks along its hidden path. The floor is dark, the fox is brighter, stretching out its cut-off paws. A person could fling open the window and if the wind blew inside, the wall would start to flutter, it could be pushed in with a finger just like a curtain, just like standing water. Ilie knows this, he thinks every day about his watery plain, his soft way out. He has chewed his grass straw and swallowed it. He has taken his mouth out of the picture, placed a mark on his cheek like liver mortis, a mark Adina cannot touch with her finger.

Adina lifts her hands off the table. Where they were resting the table is warm. And down on the floor, where the fox is the hunter, her fingers slide the cut-off legs against the fur. And after her hands have once again warmed the table, they clasp her forehead. Her hands sense that her forehead is as warm as the table, but unlike the table it no longer knows anything about inhabiting a place, abiding.

The bell rings in several long bursts, startling the apartment. Adina peers through the peephole. Clara is standing outside the door, I can see your eye, she says, open up. Adina moves away, the door’s eye is empty, then covered by Clara’s eye. Clara’s fist bangs on the door, I know you’re there, she says. Adina leans against the wall. In the hallway the buckles on Clara’s purse clink against the floor. Paper crinkles.

A note passes through the crack of the door.

Adina reads:

PEOPLE ARE BEING ARRESTED THERE ARE LISTS YOU HAVE TO HIDE NO ONE WILL LOOK FOR YOU AT MY PLACE

The neighbor’s door opens and closes. Clara’s high heels clatter on the stairs. Adina drags the note away from the door with the tip of her shoe. She bends over, reads it one more time. She crumples the note, throws it into the toilet. It floats, the water swamps the paper but doesn’t swallow it. Then Adina’s hand reaches into the water, takes the note, smooths it out, folds it, sticks it in her coat pocket.