Each morning I found it harder and harder to go to work. Paul would grip his Java firmly in both hands outside the factory gate, smile, wait for me to kiss his forehead and say:
You have to act like Nelu isn’t there.
Easy for him to say. But how to spend eight hours on end acting as if two mustache tips were simply floating in midair behind a desk.
Nelu’s so full of it, I said, that you can’t see through him.
And the motorbike roared, kicking up snow around the
wheels, or dust. When Paul was halfway down the street I tried coaxing him back to the gate with my eyes, each morning I wanted to say something more to him, something he could take to last him the whole day among the machines. But we always repeated the same words.
Paul: You have to act like Nelu isn’t there.
Me: I’ll be thinking of you. Don’t get worked up if they steal your clothes.
The quick getaway. And the wind when he turned the corner, his jacket arching back like a cat ready to pounce. Every morning I had to force myself to step inside the factory. The mere sight of Nelu was enough to drive me crazy. Neither of us greeted the other, though after an hour or two Nelu would try to break the silence, claiming that we couldn’t possibly stay in the same room together for eight hours at a stretch without saying something. I didn’t feel the need to say anything, but he couldn’t stand the silence. He talked about the production schedule, I said:
Um-hmm.
Um-hmm, and Oh, and Ah.
When that didn’t work, I turned chatty. I picked up the little vase on his desk, peered through the thick glass on the bottom and studied the reddish-green rose stem inside the water. I said:
Come on now, why talk about the schedule when there’s no point in meeting the targets. If we ever did, they’d be raised the next day. That schedule of yours is a disease of state.
Nelu plucked a hair from his mustache and rubbed it between his fingers so that it curled up. He said:
Do you like it.
If you pull out one a day, pretty soon your face will look like a cucumber, I said.
Don’t get too excited. You’re obviously thinking of pubic hair.
But not yours, I said.
Do you know why Italians always carry a comb in their pocket—because otherwise they can’t find their pricks when they have to piss.
You’ve got a comb too, but even that won’t help you. You don’t have what it takes to be an Italian.
I’ve seen what it takes, unlike you I’ve been to Italy.
Um-hmm. And did you do a little spying there too, I asked.
It’s true I was thinking of pubic hair, Nelu forced me to think of his all the time he was talking about the schedule. He placed that hair right in the middle of my desk, too, where there was a nick in the wood. Not one I had made. He’d probably gone and measured the desk to locate the spot furthest from my reach. I didn’t want to touch that curly hair of his, but I didn’t have my ruler handy to flick it off the table right then and there. So once again I wound up doing something he really enjoyed seeing, I blew the hair away. The sight of me pursing my lips gave him something to laugh at. I had to blow three or four times before the hair flew off the table. He made me obscene.
One day the cleaning lady will come into the office after work and she’ll be wiping away blood instead of dust, I said to Lilli. It won’t be long now. One of these days I’m going to lose control and kill the son of a bitch.
Lilli brushed me off with a wave of her hand and said:
Don’t you dare. Why not just leave a knife on his desk and tell him how good it would feel against his throat, that it doesn’t hurt at all. Then move away a little, like on the bridge, so he won’t feel awkward. He’s doing everything he can to make you lose control, and you’re letting him, you’re positively
asking for it. Keep a hold on yourself and you won’t lose your grip. It just takes practice.
Lilli’s plum-blue eyes met my own and her gaze won. And her smooth neck. I knew from the bridge how fast you can lose your grip, how quickly you can send another person to his death when he starts to weigh on you, like stones piled on your heart. And I knew this would happen again, with Nelu.
Lilli dismissed me with a wave of her hand, then blushed. Her nose was twitching, but it stayed cool and white. At that moment I hated everything about Lilli, as she stood there before me, but even so I couldn’t help thinking:
That nose is as beautiful as a tobacco flower.
Lilli considered me an instigator. I had frightened her, and now she was using the bridge against me. I could see signs of hate lurking in her features; I wish I’d never found out how much that made her look like her mother. At the funeral you could hear the earth ringing on the coffin, then it closed over Lilli, and that mother of hers snapped at me, with Lilli’s mouth.
That’s right, keep a hold on yourself—Lilli thought—it just takes practice. She could see the threads running through my tangled thoughts more clearly than I could. And I imagined I could see through her own tangle more clearly than she did. There was a time when we could have swapped places, she and I. Instead, she traded with her mother. Keep a hold on yourself, she thought, and you’ll make it across the border. Don’t lose your grip, the bullets only hit you if you let them know you’re worried. It just takes practice, and she wanted to learn. Back when she told me to keep a hold on myself with Nelu, Lilli was just starting to sleep with a sixty-six-year-old officer. A couple of weeks later they decided to flee across the Hungarian border.
He was arrested and she was shot dead. Too clever for her own good, Lilli.
Once she took me to the summer garden of the officers’ mess and introduced me to her officer. He was wearing civilian clothes, a short-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes and lightweight gray trousers that reached high up under his arms. He had no ribs and no hips. In his deep, quiet voice he said: It’s a pleasure to meet you, miss.
He kissed my hand. A finely practiced kiss from the old royal age, dry and light and in the middle of my hand. Young men in uniform were sitting at the surrounding tables. Naturally Lilli attracted their attention, the uniformed men were mad about beautiful women, they threw match heads at Lilli. They figured out that she was the officer’s skirt, not me.
It had been a long time since the last war. Idleness threatened to erode military discipline, which had to be shored up with so-called precision work, namely, the conquest of beautiful women. Beauty was graded according to the face, the curve of the backside, the shapeliness of the calves seen together, and the breasts. The breasts were dubbed apples, pears, or windfall peaches, depending on the position of the nipples. The conquest of women has taken the place of maneuvers, the soldiers were told. Everything between her neck and thighs has to be just right. The legs and face aren’t so important: once you’ve got her legs apart and you’re going at it, you can always shut your eyes if you don’t want to look at her face. With breasts, though, it’s a different matter. Apples are good, pears are okay, but windfalls are always overripe and beneath consideration for soldiers. Each conquest, so they said, keeps your body’s joints oiled and helps maintain your inner balance. And that improves the harmony of your marriage. The old officer had
thoroughly educated Lilli about the best tactics for combating idleness in peacetime. He too had been on constant maneuvers, Lilli said, until his wife died. She was fifty and he was six years older. After she died he no longer had to pretend that the satisfying work that produced his sweet weariness was done in the field rather than other women’s beds. He visited the cemetery every day; chasing after women now seemed stale.
All the women I knew suddenly sounded like cackling hens and tasted like sour fruit, he said, especially the very young ones. Life became a mincing parade of calves drawn taut by stiletto heels marching across the asphalt, from the barracks to the officers’ mess and back. Between the sheets the women were all barefoot, moist, and groaning. Any moment was as good as another for dying, he was afraid they might do it underneath him.
Taken each on his own, every uniformed man in that summer garden was a loser, even with the pears and the windfalls. And Lilli had small firm summer apples. After only a few words Lilli would have sent any one of them packing. They guessed as much, which was why they practiced the conquest of Lilli together, as a regimental exercise. In their view, Lilli’s officer no longer needed to oil his joints, he was past precision work, it was time he was relieved. They pressured him to give others a go at Lilli’s gorgeous flesh. As they tossed one match head after the other, the wedding rings they wore on their fingers glinted in the sun, while their eyes, fixed on their target, flashed like greased bullets. The old man set the ashtray next to his hand and said:
They’re sick. We should have gone somewhere else.
He gathered the match heads from the table and tossed them into the ashtray. His hands were as white and slender as a pharmacist’s. Neither he nor Lilli made a move to get up. They
weren’t pretending to be calm; they were merely being patient. I couldn’t understand it, you only have that kind of patience if you know you won’t need it long. The officer’s temples were pulsing, but his face was still smooth, dappled beneath the sunshade like blotchy paper. The way Lilli looked at him, utterly without reserve, was new to me. Her gaze and his—like plums falling into still water. When he leaned in to take Lilli’s hand, his belly slid forward like a ball. Another two matches landed on the table. Now he’ll get angry, I thought. But he merely gathered these as well, using his free hand, while he was so sure of Lilli’s hand that he suddenly started to sing to her, softly:
A horse is coming into camp
with a window in its head.
Do you see the tower looming high and blue . . .
The fact that he’d sing at all, so deep, although without revealing anything of his inner self, was moving enough. But the idea that he knew the song in the first place cut me to the quick. My grandfather used to sing the same song; he had learned it in the camp. The officer was obviously counting on Lilli and me being too young to know it. My God, it would have tied his tongue if I had joined in. As it was, the song sounded awkward, here at the table, simply because I was sitting between them, listening. I looked up and saw where the umbrella fabric had worn through at the spokes. We ourselves were caught in the spokes of a great wheel, and I was violating a secret. For the officer, Lilli wasn’t just another pleasant pastime, he loved her. And when he stopped singing, I left Lilli sitting beside him in the officers’ mess and went walking through town in a daze. Already then they must have been thinking about
getting out. He had two grown-up sons in Canada, that’s where he wanted to take her.
The sun was beating down, the leaves fluttered green and yellow in the linden trees, but only the yellow ones drifted to the ground. However I looked at it, green stood for Lilli and yellow for him.
This man’s too old for Lilli.
I bumped into other pedestrians, didn’t see them in time. That afternoon I was utterly alone, and remained so until the next morning in the factory when Lilli called me over to talk about the officer.
Since the business with the notes I was no longer allowed in the packing hall. Lilli was waiting in the corridor as I climbed the stairs. We went to a corner in the back, she squatted on her heels, I leaned my shoulder against the wall and said:
His face is young, but his stomach’s round as a ball, like the setting sun.
At this Lilli stiffened, anchored her fingertips on the floor, and opened her eyes wide. I had hurt her feelings. A vein swelled inside her throat, her mouth hardened as if she were going to shout. But Lilli took my hand and pulled me down to her, so that I too was crouching, holding on to her hip. A man with an armload of coat hangers came shuffling past, pretending not to see us. Lilli whispered:
When he lies down, the setting sun goes flat as a pillow.
I was looking at Lilli’s feet. When the second toe’s longer than the big toe, they call it a widow’s toe. Lilli’s was like that. She said:
He calls me Cherry.
The name didn’t fit her blue eyes. The man with the coat hangers was moving further and further away. After he closed the door of the packing hall behind him, Lilli said:
The wind plucks cherries off the branch. Isn’t it great: you’re the one with such dark eyes and I’m the one he calls Cherry.
Sunlight fell in the corridor, while fluorescent lights were burning overhead. We were two tired children, sitting there like that.
Was he in a camp, I asked.
Lilli didn’t know.
Will you ask him.
Lilli nodded.
Strange, not a single sound came from the factory yard, and in the corridor it was so still you could hear the crackle of the fluorescent lights.
Now I believe the old officer needed to search out Lilli because he’d already come to terms with her death—even before he met her. That when he first saw her he halted like a stopwatch and said: This is the one for me. Despite the fact that he was retired, he was still drawn to the officers’ mess, to the uniforms—though his own had been laid aside, it had melded with his skin. Deep down he wanted to remain a soldier. He wanted to take Lilli where people would see him in the uniform he had once worn, despite the short-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes he now had on. To show off his conquest in the soldiers’ garden, and, when he was alone with Lilli, to work his late craving for love to a fervor that outdid Lilli’s beauty. A man of his kind knew plenty about soldiers, dogs, and bullets at the border. But his fear that Death might desire Lilli as greatly as he did yielded to the conviction that Lilli could look Death in the eye and stare Death down, both for his sake as well as her own. He saw too much, and was blinded. He risked Lilli, who meant more to him than reason can bear.
Everyone getting on in years thinks of times gone by. The
snot-nosed border guard who shot Lilli resembled the old officer in his own memories of youth. The guard was a young farmer, or a laborer. Maybe he began his studies a month or so afterward, and went on to become a teacher or doctor or priest or engineer. Who knows. When he fired, he was just a man on duty, a miserable sentry under a vast heaven where the wind whistled loneliness day and night. Lilli’s living flesh gave him shivers, and her death was heaven-sent, an unexpected gift of ten days’ leave. Perhaps he wrote unhappy letters like my first husband. Perhaps a woman like me was waiting, someone who, although she couldn’t measure up to the dead woman, could nonetheless laugh and caress her man in the grip of love until he felt like a human being. Perhaps at that moment it was the thought of his good fortune that pulled the trigger, and then the shot rang out. From far away there was barking, followed by shouting. Lilli’s officer was handcuffed, taken away to a tin hut, and guarded by the youth who had fired the shot, immersed in thoughts of his good fortune. Lilli lay where she had fallen. The hut was open at the front. On the floor was a water tank, a bench along the wall, in the corner a stretcher. The guard took a deep drink of water, washed his face, pulled his shirt out of his trousers, wiped himself dry, and sat down. The prisoner was not allowed to sit, although he was permitted to look over at the grass where Lilli lay. Five dogs came running, their legs flying over the grass, which was as high as their throats. Trailing far behind, a number of hard-driven soldiers ran after them. By the time they reached Lilli, it was not only her dress that was in tatters. The dogs had torn Lilli’s body to shreds. Under their muzzles Lilli lay red as a bed of poppies. The soldiers drove off the dogs and stood around in a circle. Then two of them went to the hut, took a drink of water, and carried back the stretcher.