Paul placed the
photo in the drawer and asked:
What did your father-in-law do back in the fifties.
He was a Party operative, I said, in charge of expropriation. My grandfather owned some vineyards on the hills in the neighboring village. The Perfumed Commissar confiscated my grandfather’s gold coins and jewelry and placed him and my grandmother on the list for deportation to the Baragan Steppe. When my grandfather came back, his house belonged to the state. He had to go to court several times until they let him move back in, the bread factory had converted the rooms into offices. There was always a lot of talk about the house, mostly over dinner, but very little about my grandmother, things like:
She decided to die quickly, she didn’t live past that horrible first summer. She couldn’t wait, so she didn’t live to see the mud hut.
The Perfumed Commissar didn’t go back to that town until my wedding. And that was a rash thing to do, as it turned out. He probably thought no one would remember him, or maybe he just didn’t think at all. After all, to him the deportees were
nothing more than a nuisance. He might have remembered some of the people who’d worked for him. But the rest of the rabble he only knew from the lists and not by their faces. For him my grandmother was simply a name; he selected her and then she died, just like many others. When he came back it was to celebrate the wedding. My grandfather recognized him immediately from his walk and from his voice—despite the new name. The name he’d used in the fifties was for official purposes, later he went back to his real name. The commissar’s father had been a coachman who made his living with a cart and two bay horses. He delivered wood and coal as well as lime and cement. On occasion he also delivered coffins to the cemetery, if people couldn’t afford the elegantly carved hearse. He swept up more horse manure in one day than he saw money in his lifetime. Whenever the cart was fully loaded, his sons had to run along behind him, to spare the horses, and when the cart stopped they had to unload or shovel or carry sacks. That white horse was a sign that my father-in-law had left the world of draft horses behind, he climbed out of the muck straight onto its back. Looking extremely out of place, he used to ride through the village, hating anyone richer than a carter. The perfume became his second skin. A perfumed Communist, who ever heard of such a thing, I asked Paul. What’s a Communist, anyway.
Me, said Paul. I was well brought up, I did my homework like a good boy, and one day my father called me into the kitchen. His shaving bowl was on the table, and there was hot water on the stove. He lathered up my face until the soap got in my nostrils and then he fetched his razor. I could have counted all the whiskers on my face with one hand. But I was proud of myself, I started shaving and I joined the Party; as far as my father was concerned the two things went together. He
explained that he had been born before his time and had no choice but to go along with whatever came. First he was a fascist; later he said he’d been in the Communist underground. As for me, he said, I was born when I was born and I had to stay ahead of my time. The few who really were Communists back then are right when they say: There used to be so few of us, but many are left. They needed these many, who hatched out of their old lives like wasps. Anyone poor enough became a Communist. So did many rich people who didn’t want to end up in a camp. Now my father’s dead, and if there’s a heaven up there, you can be sure he’s claiming to be a Christian. The motorcycle belonged to him. My mother was a machine fitter. Now she’s retired and every Wednesday she meets her wrinkly old brigade in the café next to the hardware store in the marketplace. When I was little I used to walk through town with my father and he showed me his picture as a Hero of Labor on the plaque of honor in the People’s Park. I preferred to look at the squirrels. The squirrels were all named Mariana and had to shell pumpkin seeds because people didn’t have any nuts to feed them. You could buy pumpkin seeds at the entrance to the park. That’s extortion, said my father, one whole leu for a handful of pumpkin seeds. He didn’t buy me any.
Squirrels know how to feed themselves, he said.
I had to call Mariana with empty hands, and the squirrels came in vain. As I called I kept my hands in my trouser pockets. At the plaque of honor by the main pathway, my father said:
Don’t look left and don’t look right, son, just keep your eyes fixed straight ahead but remember to stay flexible.
Then he gave my cap a tug to one side so it slanted across my left ear, leaving my right uncovered, and we went on our way. At the crossroads he blinked and said:
First look left and then look right, son, to see if a car’s coming. That’s important when you’re crossing a street but it’s a dangerous way to think.
He only visited me once here in the city. He was proud of my living in a high-rise, it was so different from our house, with the mountain looming right in front of your nose, up here you have air and a view. He went out onto the balcony, but he never got a chance to appreciate the view. He stumbled on my tools and the aerials and asked:
What’s this. You’re selling things on the black market.
When he realized the aerials were designed to pick up foreign stations, he started talking about me as if I were some other person:
So my son has a taste for money. That’s making a mockery of socialism. And what will come next. Sheer unadulterated capitalism. He can make aerials till he’s blue in the face but he’ll never belong to the people who flaunt their money hand over fist.
I said: It’s not mocking anything to earn money, and it’s not against the law.
To which he said: It’s not exactly legal, either, but you didn’t worry about that, did you.
And what do you mean by capitalism, I said. I’m not earning dollars, and besides, the Yugoslavs and Hungarians have socialism just like we do, even on television.
Lately the Party’s had more profiteers than fighters, he said, and generally speaking, money ruins character.
But it’s your own son you’re talking about, and I’m the only one you’ve got. Besides, what have you achieved except a career melting iron for tractors and pitchforks for shoveling manure. We still don’t have heaven on earth. But your brain is in full red bloom. When you stand before the Lord God Almighty,
he’ll see that glow on your forehead and ask: Well, little sinner, what have you brought me. Two corroded lungs, some herniated discs, chronic conjunctivitis, poor hearing, and a shabby suit, you’ll say. And what have you left behind on earth. And you’ll say: My Party book, a peaked cap, and a motorcycle.
My father just laughed: Hah hah hah, that’s only if you wind up playing God. But, you know, even in heaven I’d be ashamed of you, since we’d have a bird’s-eye view of all those rooftops with your black-market antennas.
I didn’t want to go on, but he wasn’t through. He looked at the clock and said: Hopefully there aren’t many people in the city who think they need those foreign TV stations. Once they get their aerials, that’ll be it.
I said: You’re a mean old man, and you’re jealous, even of me.
My father was out of breath and didn’t respond, he pulled his cap down over his left ear, so that it looked exactly as it had on me as a child at the plaque of honor. Only now he was doing it to himself. He looked at the clock and said: No point to any of this, I’m hungry.
Your father was bitter, I said, else he wouldn’t have been so pig-headed, but he wasn’t a danger to others. My father-in-law clawed his way up the ladder. He’ll never tell a living soul why he fell from grace, there are only rumors. But everybody remembers exactly how the Perfumed Commissar rode from house to house, tying his white horse in the shade of the trees and how he wrapped his whip around the horse’s mane. And that the horse was called Nonjus. My grandfather said the farmers were made to bring hay and buckets of fresh water. The white horse ate and drank, while its rider searched the houses for grain and gold. He had papers with the field plots carefully mapped and numbered. After each expropriation he’d go back
to his horse and unwrap the colorful woven leather whipcord. There was a silken tassel at the end of the cord and the base of the haft had a screw-on cap made of horn. He’d open this to get his pen. Then he’d take a sheet of paper out of his jacket and cross off a number. Whenever he rode through the village, the dogs would chase after him, barking. They sensed that the man on the horse was putting an end to the peaceful ways of the village. He hated those mutts, he’d crack his whip and that would goad them even more. They were little creatures, like barking cats, but they would race like the wind alongside the horse’s hooves. Sometimes it took three, four, or even ten tries, but eventually the whip would catch them on the neck or between the ears. People would wait until late afternoon to remove the dogs from the street, when they knew he was finished riding for the day. The mutts lay stretched out stone dead, with their light-colored stomachs swelling up in the sun and their eyes and snouts covered in flies. First he rounded up the farmers with large holdings and turned them over to the security services, after that he went after the medium-sized farmers, then he moved on to the smallholders. He was a hard worker, after a while he was rounding up too many farmers, and ones who were too poor at that, so the gentlemen in the city sent whole groups of them back to the village on the next train.
One morning the white horse lay dead in the stable after eating poisoned bran. Day and night, local men were interrogated and beaten in the parish hall by two village ruffians who spelled each other in shifts. Three men were accused and arrested. All three are dead now, but none of them did it. One night the two thugs loaded the horse onto a trailer and hauled it off to be buried in the valley between the village and the town on the other side of the vineyards. My father-in-law accompanied them. He and one of the thugs sat on the trailer
with a hurricane lamp perched next to the horse’s carcass. They had to drink brandy because the horse stank so much. The other thug was at the steering wheel, sober. They drove up into the hills. It had been raining heavily, the tractor got bogged down in the soft earth. The next day the driver told how the crickets, frogs, and other night creatures in the soggy grass were screaming like mad throughout the night, and the horse’s carcass stank to high heaven. The devil had us bagged up good and proper, he said. During the night, the great Communist started to rave. He stomped off aimlessly into the mud, sobbing and cursing. He kept throwing up, his eyes were practically popping out of his head, there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. When the grave had been dug and the horse had been unloaded from the tractor rig, he threw himself to the ground and flung his arms around the horse’s neck and refused to let go. The two thugs had to drag him into the driver’s cab and tie him to the seat. And there he sat as they drove back, tied up, filthy, covered in vomit, and completely silent. When the tractor was halfway home and they were again on top of a hill, the driver untied him and asked: How about a short break. He shook his head absently. The moon shone in his eyes, which were glowing blank as snow. As the tractor chugged on he began to pray. He stammered out one Lord’s Prayer after another, until the first of the village houses came into sight. To this day the people in the village are convinced that that burial was his undoing. The dandified Communist wasn’t the only one that night to feel the full measure of the fear that lies inside us all. Once the devil had them bagged up, his two hired thugs also heard the bell toll. The driver started going to church and would talk about what happened the night of the burial to anybody who’d listen. The Perfumed Commissar was transferred out of the district. The rumor that the driver not only buried
the horse but had poisoned it as well never died down. The man disappeared for a while, and people in the village thought he had been arrested, as he deserved to be. But he showed up later on, and a few days after that he was missing his right hand. Since everyone in that village knew him he wanted to disappear, so he applied for the job of sexton in another village, and was taken on. There he told people he had lost his hand during the war. The hand itself turned up in the flour bin in his kitchen after he had moved away. For some years after the war, only cripples were taken on as sextons, so he had hacked off his own hand.
Paul was making coffee, water was hissing on the stove, and a blackbird flew up to the kitchen window, settled on the metal ledge, and pecked at its own shadow.
There used to be two of them, said Paul, but then one day I saw one lying near the front door covered with ants.
Paul stirred the coffee, the spoon clinked, I put my forefinger to my lips.
Shhh.
No, we can go on talking, it’ll fly away in a minute anyway.
But he laid down the spoon without a sound. On the table in front of my hands: the red coffee tin, the jam the color of egg yolk, and the white slices of bread. Outside the sheer wall of sky, the pale yellow beak and the feathers made of pitch. Everything was looking at everything else. Paul poured the coffee into the cups, the steam drifted up to his neck. I tapped the cup and pointed a hot finger to the window—the blackbird flew away, the coffee was still too hot.
The Perfumed Commissar, I said, was transferred to the nursery gardens, where he remained. But the effect of the white horse has not worn off, to this day he’s above being a foot soldier and hasn’t had to do a stroke of work. They couldn’t use
him in a top managerial position or as a worker, so they made him a supervisor, and that’s what he’s remained. He learned the Latin plant names by heart till he could rattle them off fluently as prayers. On Sundays he would go for walks with his wife, daughter, and son, and later with me too. He’d break off a small stick—it had to be a straight one—strip the leaves, point it at some periwinkle growing by the path and say
Vinca minor,
and reel off everything he knew about the plant. Next to a bench he’d say
Aruncus dioicus,
and tell us everything he knew about goatsbeard. And on the next path
Epimedium rubrum
and
plumbagum.
His
Hosta fortunei
grew beside a hollow. You were expected to stop and listen. My husband told me he used to be even stricter. If he or his sister laughed, he wouldn’t speak to them for days. During my last summer with them, I was going to fetch some daisies from the back garden to put in a vase. I saw my father-in-law talking out loud to himself by the walnut tree, not only saying the words but using his hands and even stamping his feet. He was completely absorbed and didn’t notice me till I was right beside him. He realized I must have been watching him, gave an unembarrassed smile, and asked me what I should have asked him: