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:
Where were you.
As so often before, he’ll say:
In my shirt and right with you.
The red Java is glistening with a fresh coat of paint. Quite by accident, just out of boredom, the old man glances at the bush and bends down to Paul’s ear. Now Paul stands up and sees me. Why is he buttoning up his shirt.
The trick is not to go mad.
Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceauçescu’s Securitate. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the European Literature Prize, she also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her previous novel,
The Land of Green Plums.