Paul and I were drinking coffee, the sun was sprawled across the table. I had told him my dream and nothing more, nothing at all about the combs. Paul was wary of my dream, he avoided my gaze and stared out the window.
Weak nerves, he said. At any rate, your surgeon promised the door would heal over.
Out beyond the glass in the window three swallows flew across a patch of sky. Either they were flying an advance party or they were a separate unit and had nothing to do with the countless birds that followed. I should never have started counting but already I was moving my lips.
Are you wondering how many there are, Paul asked.
I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.
Paul fetched a picture from the other room, it hadn’t been on the wall, otherwise I would have seen it. Still, it was framed, and a cockroach lay pressed under the glass.
When my father died I had the photo framed and hung it in the room. After only two days the cockroach showed up and joined the family. The cockroach is right, when somebody dies you start acting out of fear for yourself, as if you’d loved the deceased more than the living. Then I took it down.
In addition to the cockroach I saw Paul’s mother, with dimples in her cheeks, one arm placed on the left hip of her summer dress, the other around her husband’s hip. Paul’s father was wearing a peaked cap, a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wide knee-length shorts, long calf-length socks, and sandals. He had curled one arm around his wife’s shoulder, the other was on his right hip. They were both the same height, pressed against each other, their arms on their hips like two handles. At that point I wasn’t yet thinking about plums leaning cheek to cheek. In front of the proud parents stood a stroller—one of the first models with a shade you could roll up and down. Here it was rolled up, and inside the stroller sat Paul, the starched brim of his bonnet arching across his forehead like a crescent moon, a bow dangling beneath his chin, all the way down to his stomach. His left ear was poking out of the bonnet. One tiny hand was holding up a toy shovel. A blanket had been kicked almost completely out of the stroller. In the distance you could see a hill, plum trees in white blossom, and, at the top of the picture, the metal works, blurry like the smoke from its chimneys. A family of workers in a happy world of industry, a picture fit for the paper. Then, sitting at the table in the sunshine, I had to tell Paul about my perfumed father-in-law on the white horse, a picture also from the fifties.
Your father is nothing like the man on the white horse, I said, but both of them are Communists. One at the blast furnace in the city, the other traipsing through village streets in
shiny riding boots. One slaving away in the service of glowing steel, raising its worth above all reason, the other riding people down, hounding them into a corner and reeking of perfume.
At my wedding my grandfather danced only one waltz with me. He pressed his mouth to my ear and said: Back in 1951 that bastard already stank of perfume, and now he’s joining the family. Wants to have his fun with us again, does he. Wants to eat here with us, does he. Fine, he can have a plate at his seat of honor. I have a little something for him back at home, a little poison for his food. He said the words so calmly, keeping time to the waltz and breathing lightly—for all the world a man who kept his promises. My long dress swayed and billowed, but inside I was as stiff as a fence-post. Grandfather stepped on my hem a few times and apologized. I only said:
It doesn’t matter.
Though it mattered a lot that I was sick of that long dress. I wished he would step on it until I was no longer inside it. After the dance he led me back to my seat beside my husband at the head of the table. Three chairs down, my father-in-law was bending over his daughter’s shoulder, her earring had come unfastened. My grandfather stroked my sleeve.
And you intend to stay with him.
I had no chance to ask whether he meant my father-in-law or my husband. He walked off through the hall, he meant both. I searched for him with my eyes. My husband tugged at my hand so that my eyes would turn back to him. And when they did, and when my fingers were nestled between his hands and resting on his black trousers, I wanted him to go on holding me forever and live with me as if he had three hands. Whatever was gnawing at my grandfather was no fault of ours. Then the music started up again, the meal was served. The waiters ran with the dishes between the tables, coming in at the door
through which my grandfather had left and not returned, not even for the banquet.
My father-in-law had eaten, his hands were shiny with grease, his fingernails looked varnished, his cheeks hot, not a trace of poison in his weasel-like eyes. His plate was littered with the chicken bones he had sucked clean. The band started playing again. The chef appeared wearing a white apron, a blue kerchief, and a white cap like a sailor’s, and carried the wedding cake to the bridal table. It was in the form of a filigreed house, three stories with windows and curtains made of icing and two wax doves on the roof. The chef handed me the knife, it was my job to slice up the house, cutting through the thick white crusts into the brown walls, until each plate had a piece. My father-in-law’s soup bowl and his plate from the main course had been cleared away with all the rest. He held out his dessert plate:
Only a thin slice, please.
But his thumb and index finger were asking for a big piece. Suddenly my hearing failed me and I couldn’t breathe; just as if my food had been poisoned, my heart began to feel furry. I went in search of my grandfather. He wasn’t outside, he wasn’t in the kitchen, or hiding with the instruments in the musicians’ storeroom. He was sitting by the barrels of wine and brandy, waiting for nothing and nobody, and when I started to sit down beside him, he said:
You’ll get your dress dirty here.
I leaned against the fire escape in the corner.
He was sprinkling himself with perfume while we were herded to the station. We rode for two weeks in the train before we stopped—some four hundred and fifty families dumped out in front of a wooden marker set in the middle of nowhere. Rows of stakes in dead straight lines, sky above, clay below, with
nothing between but the damned crazy thistles and us. The sun scorched everything in sight. For several days your grandmother and I did nothing but dig ourselves a hole in the ground in front of our stake and cover it with thistles. They tore your skin when you picked them. The wind from the east was searing, and then the thirst, no water for three kilometers. We set out for the river with pots and bowls, but by the time we got back to our hole in the ground all the water had spilled out. We had scabies and lice, your grandmother had to have her head shaved, I did too. Only it’s different for women, even thistles have that bit of white down—it was flying around everywhere, the wind never let up. Your grandmother said: See, there’s the white horse, it’s following us, next we’ll be growing hooves and a hide. She lashed out at something only she could see and hunched her shoulders and shouted: Get away, there. She started wandering, even the longest days weren’t long enough for her to find her way back through all the holes in the earth. I’d call out: Anastasia, Anastasia. You could hear her name bouncing off every thistle leaf, but she didn’t answer. The shouting made the thirst unbearable. When I did find her she’d be eating muddy clay as if she were lapping up water. Often she’d laugh with her brown, broken teeth, first her gums were cracked, then they shriveled up, and then they disappeared so that there was nothing left to bleed. Eyes like an owl’s, and that grinding in her mouth, a ghost squatting in the mud. I was about to die of thirst, and she wasn’t embarrassed in the least, she just clawed at the earth and swallowed it. I slapped her hands, hit her across the mouth. She was so afraid of the thistledown, she’d plucked out her lashes and eyebrows. Her eyes were as naked as her head, two drops of water. Dear God, I was so thirsty I wanted to drink them. I made it my task to keep her from dying, to keep her there with whatever strength I had,
because love was out of the question. I struck her harder and harder, because she didn’t know her own name, how old she was, where she came from or who she was with. We were both one step away from death, she was mercilessly mad and good, and I was too goddamned clearheaded and bad. She had taken leave of herself and left me to the world: Death was calling Anastasia even louder than I was. That great deceiver, and she was under his spell. But you can’t just take things as they come. I had to hit her, many people looked on, and nobody intervened. Other people weren’t any better than I was, but what does that concern me. I was rough, and she never stopped being good, that’s all. I wasn’t right in the head. I gloated as I shoved her by the back of her neck and yelled: No one’s turning into a horse around here, we’re going to dry out like two bean pods, just wait and see. There aren’t enough trees around to make a single coffin—you’ll have to be mine and I’ll be yours. Sometimes she’d shuffle along and squeeze her eyes shut, other times she’d droop and stare at me and ask: Are you a guard, do you get paid. Thank God she didn’t realize the scoundrel who was talking like that was her own husband. No sooner was she in her grave than the first winter arrived. She had it good, she didn’t see the next wave of white down, the blizzards that came lashing across the steppe worse than any snow that ever covered the earth. It never settled, it was always moving. Whetted sharp by the sun, it came in waves and waves of little knives. And in the summer the clay started to run because of the heat, yellow and yellow-red and gray. Sometimes bluish white, as if you’d swum to the end of the sky, then you felt even dizzier than you already were. Snow burns in a different way than clay, even if you turn your back to it, it sucks the water out of your eyes. Many of us lost our wits, one at a time or in couples, it didn’t matter anymore. Shortly after she died a tractor came to fill in our foxholes.
We had to put up buildings—after all, we were human beings, they said. We could forget about returning home. Perhaps it was better like that, I had to tread a lot of clay, and dry the bricks, the weather was wet, winter was coming. I had no time for thoughts. I bartered her moldy clothes for seven planks. Like everybody else I built a house, can you imagine, it had to be eight meters by four meters and contain 2,300 bricks. Every brick thirty-eight centimeters long, twenty wide, and twelve thick. And every wall as thick as the brick was long, though in that weather everything turned out crooked and warped. And for the roof there was straw, thistles, grass, but the wind kept blowing it all away. You had to paint a marker outside on the wall—a square, zigzags, a circle—in place of a house number, because numbers weren’t allowed. To master death I painted a horse. I knew right up to the end that none of us would turn into a horse. But every winter the snow turned the whole place into one gigantic white horse. I held on in that house for four years, don’t ask me how. Now you should go, said my grandfather, if you love his son, you should go.
Was it his fault, I asked.
He looked up.
You’re asking the wrong question.
Was it my fault, I asked.
Is there anything he can do about it, said my grandfather. No, there isn’t.
When I went back into the hall I felt I needed someone to help me crawl out of my skin. But nobody did, so I just wolfed something down. The wedding cake still had two windows left in half a wall, I ate a curtain. My husband was dancing with his mother and her white patent leather bag that dangled down his back. My father was dancing with my mother’s white French twist. My father-in-law was dancing with his daughter and her
white shoes. I looked down at myself and saw that white was taking over my family. Who could do anything about it. Someone should be able to.
A horse is coming into camp
with a window in its head.
Do you see the tower looming high and blue . . .
my grandfather would sometimes sing as he worked in the garden. It was not a wedding song.
The tram has
stopped at the signal pole. Another red light, says the driver. Who’s it for, anyway. Nobody sets foot in the street for days on end, but they go and put in traffic lights and sit in their offices on their big fat asses. None of them bothers to come into town to look at their lights. They even get bonuses for having them installed, and I lose mine because I can’t make the route on time.
The people standing in the car watch the light but don’t say anything. One of them sneezes. Once, twice, three times. Traffic lights don’t make you sneeze—it’s the sun, that’s what’s set him off, four times, five. I can’t stand it when someone sneezes so many times, it’s always these small, scrawny men who can’t stop and don’t have any manners. With clods like these you’re lucky if they cover their mouth the first time; after that you can forget it. You hope each sneeze is the last one, but then you can’t help waiting for the next. Your brain gets addled, you start counting the sneezes, and that only encourages them. Now this guy’s sneezing for the sixth time, why doesn’t he hold his nose and take seven quick breaths, or hold his breath and count to sixty, then it’ll all be over. He apparently doesn’t know
that trick, but I can’t exactly tell him how by shouting from one end of the car to the other. Actually, holding your breath doesn’t work for sneezing, that’s for hiccups. He ought to rub his nose until it doesn’t tickle anymore, that’s the cure for sneezing. His eyes are as big as chestnuts, they’ll pop out if he doesn’t stop. But what do I care. His neck is bulging and turning red, his ears are burning. Here’s number seven,
atchoo,
my head’s spinning just from watching him . . . and why can’t he make some other sound than
atchoo.
Finally he’s stopped. No, here comes number eight. There won’t be anything left of him, he’ll sneeze himself away until all that remains is a ball of snot.