But of course. Down the corridor to the left, the next to last door. But leave your handbag here.
I went down the corridor to the left, I didn’t want to rush, but neither did I want to overdo things by taking too long. Two doors away a telephone was ringing, and it was still ringing later when I returned, no one was answering it. In the inner courtyard there were two pumps, for diesel and gasoline, and one for water. Two gray trucks, a bus with green curtains, a minibus, a blue car, a white one. And two red ones. At the end of the corridor, behind a door, someone was crying. On the sink was a cake of soap with two black hairs stuck to it, below in the trash can was a bloody handkerchief. It was then I felt my heart stick in my throat, my footsteps quickened. No doubt I came back sooner than was necessary.
Now the tram
driver is ringing his bell, there’s a dog running right across the road, a rangy, splotchy creature, all skin and
bones, holding his tail between his legs, and his paws are matted with half-dried mud. God knows where he found mud in this heat. His muzzle is dripping with foam, it’s no point even bothering with the bell, the dog would be better off dead, he could finally stretch out and rest. You see more and more dogs like that, says the young man standing by the door. The man with the briefcase nods: And if they bite you, that’s it, you’re through, you barely have enough time left to send for the priest and confess. It happened to a boy on my street. He was foaming at the mouth just like that dog, nothing to be done about it, rabies, finished. The old woman with the shaky head says: It’s that artificial fertilizer they’re putting on the fields, that’s why all the dogs are turning into runts. They fertilize like mad, but the only things that actually grow are fat rats, deformed birds, and razor grass. Everything else is godforsaken and stunted. Tell me, what am I supposed to do if a dog like that comes after me, at least you young folks can still run. And just a few years back I was still the fastest thing on two legs. My son used to say: You’re like a whirlwind, take it easy. Running away is the wrong thing to do, the young man says. If a dog like that comes at you, you have to stand still and act absolutely sure of yourself, look the beast square in the eye, like you’re trying to hypnotize it. That’s if your eyes are good, but not if you wear glasses, the old woman laughs. Heavens, without my glasses I can’t tell his head from his tail. Maybe it works if you look him square in the tail, the driver laughs, anyway it’d be worth a try. A while back in the park I saw a bird with three feet, the old woman says, I swear I’m not making it up, I was wearing my glasses. I couldn’t believe it, so I asked two youngsters if it was real. And it was. How’s your headache, the man with the briefcase asks. Bad, the old woman says, it’s easy enough for your mind to forget the years you’ve lived through, they’re over and
done with, but your eyes, your feet, your gallbladder, they don’t forget, and it all starts to catch up with you. The driver unbuttons his shirt from top to bottom. Next stop is the marketplace, he says, we’ll be there in a moment.
So you feel
drawn to the south, Albu said. We’ve got pigeons and a fountain in front of the opera house here too. But girls like you want orange trees, and where do they end up, huh, tell me, where do they end up. In a sleazy hotel with rooms let by the hour, with bank robbers wearing fat gold chains and platform shoes, pimps with pockmarked faces and long teeth and—he held up the nibbled pencil—pricks no bigger than that.
So maybe Albu’s own prick is like that and the pencil stub serves as a measure of the world.
What am I taking away from this country by going to another, I asked.
The Major rolled the stub between his thumb and index finger. He spoke gently, as if he was talking to himself and I wasn’t meant to hear: People who don’t love their homeland can’t understand. And people not smart enough to think have no choice but to feel.
Lilli attached great importance to the hands of her men. She wouldn’t have been able to watch those slender fingers rolling the pencil without drawing Albu’s hand closer to her. But whatever might have happened within these walls, Lilli would not have forgotten how irresistible she was, and she would have summoned him to her—outside, somewhere in town, and there she would have had him. A floor, a bench, some patch of grass—there’s always somewhere to lie down if your heart is being torn apart with need. Albu would have dropped all ranks and titles
and thrown his reason to the wind just for a chance to prowl around Lilli’s beautiful flesh. And when he resumed being a major back at his large desk, he himself would have avoided strangers out of fear, and this fear would have caused him to comb out his hair and think up plausible excuses he could tell his boss. He would have to lie, just like I do, in a tousled state of fear. That would serve him right. Of course, I wouldn’t have understood Lilli when she would have told me what happened, looking at me with those plum-blue eyes that grew darker still for older men. She would have unpeeled a little of the secret, but kept the core silent, with that famous tobacco flower in her face. We would have hurt each other, I would have hurt her and she would have hurt me. But to the outsider seeing us together, we would simply have been sitting comfortably in a café. Or we would be out for a walk.
We will never get through at this rate, Albu said.
To clarify the facts of the case, I was supposed to write down every Italian I knew. I was sick and tired of the facts of the case, it was almost evening, I didn’t know any Italians and said so, in vain. He charged about and yelled:
You’re lying.
And yet he acted as if he knew everything. A man like him must have realized I wasn’t lying. So he forced me to keep at it, to follow his facts of the case, until he went off duty. He stretched his legs, loosened his tie, tossed back his head. He combed his hair nervously, checked if there were any hairs in the comb, returned it to his rear pants pocket. He banged his fist on the table and stood in front of me. He shoved my face down against the blank paper, pulled me up from my chair by the ear, that burned like fire. Then he ran his hand into my hair above the temple, twisted my hair around his index finger, and yanked me, as if by a tassel, around the office, over to the window,
and back to the chair. And when I was sitting down facing the paper, I wrote:
Marcello.
I was biting my lips, I couldn’t think of any other name apart from Mastroianni and Mussolini, and those were names he knew as well.
I don’t know his last name.
And where did you meet this Marcello.
At the seashore.
The sea where.
Constantsa.
What were you doing there.
Looking for the harbor.
The harbor’s full of shit. So what about this Marcello.
He came off a boat.
What was the boat’s name.
I didn’t see it.
You didn’t see the boat, he said, but you saw his uniform.
He was wearing regular summer clothes.
But you could smell he was a sailor.
He told me he was.
Albu knew I was lying, he was forcing me to, and I believed my own lies out of sheer desolation. Then he opened the drawer and peeked inside as he put away the pencil. As he closed the drawer he said:
Go home and think about it. I’ll see you tomorrow at ten. Ten sharp, don’t forget. After all, we’ve still got the notes for France and Sweden. You probably had accomplices with those, this is a serious business. Ten sharp.
That was the first time I’d heard anything about notes meant for France. Had Nelu lied to him, or had he actually written another whole set of notes, or was it a girl from the
packing hall. Did Albu have them in his drawer and was he going to show them to me tomorrow. Or was he telling me something he’d made up just before letting me go, something designed to drive me crazy by tomorrow morning. My tongue grew cold, is this never going to end.
When I stepped outside everything was preparing for the night, the sun had already spread itself red across the sky, every shadow in town had lain down. Inside my head was buzzing with thoughts, on top my scalp felt loose, and over my scalp my hair was being blown by the wind. Wind is made for flying, traffic lights for flashing, cars for driving, trees for standing. Does any of this really mean anything, or is it just there for you to wonder about. My tongue was licking at my brain, it tasted sickly sweet, I saw a food stand and imagined either that I was hungry or that I ought to be. I asked for a piece of poppy-seed cake, rummaged in my bag for my wallet, and felt some hard piece of paper that didn’t belong to me. I walked a few yards to a bench, put the cake down on my lap, and took out a little package. It was wrapped in yellow-gray paper, the ends were firmly twisted as if around a piece of candy, there was something hard inside. I opened the little packet and strained my eyes to see what it was. What I saw was not a cigarette or a twig, it wasn’t a parsnip, and it wasn’t a bird’s claw, it was a finger with a bluish-black nail. I quickly stuffed it back in my bag. Sunlight came slanting through the gaps between the boards in back of the food stand, I held the poppy-seed cake in front of my mouth as if I were feeding a sick person. The kiosk came lurching toward me, driven forward by the rays of light. I chewed slowly, I felt the sugar crunching all the way up inside my forehead, I wasn’t thinking of anything; actually, it was as though all of a sudden nothing mattered to me anymore. After all, I was healthy, while the cake was being eaten by some poor
invalid who felt she had to swallow something to stay alive. And I convinced this other person that she liked the taste, until the poppy-seed cake had completely vanished from my hand. Then I rewrapped the finger in the paper and retwisted the ends. I was completely undone. Death, with whom we flirt now and then just to keep it at bay, was advancing, checking for an available time and date—perhaps one was already circled in Albu’s diary. The food stand stayed where it was, the bench was empty, I started walking and walking. I saw different deaths, lean and fat, with bald spots or full heads of hair, parted or fringed, all combing the town to find my date. I saw shirts buttoned and open, long and short trousers, sandals and shoes, paper bags, purses, mesh bags, empty hands. Other people out walking gave their assistance in many different ways to help death find my date.
I went up to five lampposts and looked inside the trash bins, two were half-empty. People toss trash away quickly and carelessly. The nail of the finger was black, its skin was now cold vinyl. How long had I been carrying the finger in my bag. And why out of all people was I supposed to throw it away. The summer road reeked of hot asphalt, the poppy-seed cake made me nauseous, as did the evening air, the reeds, the willows by the river. The water lapped against their roots and burbled, but still it wasn’t deep enough. A few people out for a stroll, immersed in the evening, were walking toward me, their heads bowed. In the water flowing under this bridge and on to the next, the people walking alone turned into couples, the couples became foursomes. And there, along the railing of the bridge, where the suitcase filled with paper once stood, was the place for the finger. I didn’t want to do it but that’s where I went, I held the little package over the water and let it drop. The paper stayed wrapped and the package hit the water. The water rippled
as it accepted the finger but refused to swallow it. The river would have preferred a whole person. For me even that one little piece was too much, and so was the fact that I didn’t know whose it was. Nor whether the whole person was dead, or just his finger.
Albu never refers to the finger. Neither do I. Next day at ten sharp his sly forgetfulness is obvious. It was winking at me with every kiss of the hand. After the finger I no longer visit the bathroom at Albu’s.
Nausea makes me soft, but sometimes it can be contagious, and when I want to infect others with my own revulsion, then I toughen up. The one person I told about the yellow-gray candy wrapper and its contents was Lilli. It was my first day back at the factory after three days with Albu. Nobody asked where I’d been. Nelu filled the time with furtive glances, by making coffee, airing the office and neatly stacking papers. I’d already made up my mind about the button samples he’d laid out on my desk that afternoon in a semicircle. But I couldn’t say that the white ones were as beautiful as tooth enamel, the brown ones as open nutshells, the gray as raindrops in the dust.
After work I took Lilli to the café and got straight to the point. I skipped the outer shell and started right at the core. That’s why Lilli twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger and backed her chair away from me. She thought I wouldn’t notice, but a gap had opened up, I wasn’t blind. Those mean slits of eyes were sharpened into daggers as she asked:
Are you sure it was a human finger.
That stubbornly cold tobacco flower was doing whatever it could to resist catching my nausea. I balled my hand into a fist and, holding it at the corner of the table, extended my index finger over the edge.
All right, what’s this.
Take your finger away, she said.
Can it be mistaken for anything else.
I’ve seen it, take your finger away.
What was it you saw, a cigarette or a bird’s foot.
Isn’t it enough that I believe you, or do I have to say it.
Oh, so you believe me after all. I’m so lucky—how gracious of you.
I was gracious too, and since I didn’t want to torment Lilli any longer, I retracted my finger and refrained from asking whether alley cats ate human fingers. Or how long it took a nail to blacken. Nor did I tell Lilli how afraid I was of the finger-hungry foxgloves in the garden, blooming on their long, slender stems. Or that, in the nausea of my poppy-seed cake, I had considered returning the package to Albu: that too was something I kept to myself. Or that while the package was floating in the river I found myself imagining how at ten sharp the next morning Albu would ask to have it back.
Last winter I bought myself a small jar of pickles at the grocer’s next to the factory, Lilli said, and finished them in two sittings. The last ones I had to fish out with a fork, and when I pulled the fork out it was holding one pickle and one mouse. Isn’t that more horrible than a finger.