The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (12 page)

Only the foreman stands at the press and bends over and peers into a different silence, he is searching for the mangled hand.

While the dwarf stands in the yard on his tall half-brick shoes and chews his pear off into space.

*   *   *

Anca places all the pencils in the empty cola can. She wipes the dust off the empty beer can. And Mara stores all the pens in the empty beer can. And Eva waters the white-mottled vine and arranges its leaves below the picture on the wall. The picture shows blooming poppies. And David takes a pencil from the cola can. And Anca says the plant is called MOTHER-IN-LAW’S TONGUE. And David opens the notebook with the crossword puzzles. And Clara sets down the tiny brush and blows on her just-polished fingernails. And David says, the feeling after eating in four letters. And Anca calls out SICK. And Eva shouts DONE. And Mara shouts FULL.

Then the door opens, and Grigore comes into the office. And now for the third time that day Mara sets her foot on the chair and pulls up her skirt, to show Grigore her thigh. And Grigore holds her knee and looks at Mara’s neck where a gold chain is dangling. What a crazy day, says Mara, the director bit me.

Eardrum infection

Face without face

Forehead of sand

Voice without voice

Nothing is left

Except for time

All Paul sees in the audience are eyes. The lights are out and all the eyes look alike, there are a hundred of them, and a few additional eyes belonging to the policemen.

Time without time

What can you change

*   *   *

The heads swaying to the beat of the song are different from the heads keeping watch. The crowd waves its hands, the hands hold flashlights pointed at the band, lighting up their faces. The singing turns to screaming. From the front row Anna can make out the little circles cast by the flashlights on the wall.

My only thought is this

What could I trade with you

One I call a brother

For a single cigarette

*   *   *

The side door is opened from the inside, a beam of light cuts into the auditorium. Dogs bark.

I’ve gone completely crazy

I went and fell in love

With someone who loves me

But my beloved’s stupid

Since she does and since she doesn’t

Really love me yet

*   *   *

And a man is dragged out through the beam of light, his back is arched as he is led away and the door is closed behind him.

My only thought is this

What could I sell to you

My coat is old and rumpled

With just one button left

*   *   *

The lead singer turns around and looks at Paul. Paul looks at Sorin, who taps Abi’s arm with his drumstick.

Night comes and sews a sack

Sews a sack of darkness

*   *   *

The side door is opened from the outside, and heads wearing blue caps take their position in the beam of light. From where she sits in the middle of the auditorium Adina can see their bare ears sticking out from under their caps.

Stepmothergrass has bitter blades

The freight train whistles at the station

*   *   *

The bare ears listen to the sounds within, the dogs bark. Paul’s mouth joins the chorus while his skull whirrs and his toes twitch. The flashlights glow. Then all the doors burst open, boots thunder inside. The stage goes dark and the auditorium goes bright. The screaming faces are suddenly naked in the glare. The policemen with their dogs and a man in a suit are standing in the auditorium. Paul plucks the strings of his guitar but there is no sound. Sorin’s drumsticks too are mute. Because the man in the suit is standing on the stage right next to him shouting, the concert is over, calmly leave the hall.

Paul and Abi and Sorin join the lead singer but they no longer hear one another. Because the song has deflated with a gasp of fear. Fear as big as a mouth, as big as a pair of eyes. As big as the auditorium. And down in front of the stage, in the light, the policemen push, kick and club the singing crowd out through the open doors.

Little child where are your parents

Sitting on the asphalt is a barefoot shoe

*   *   *

The rubber truncheons seek out backs, heads, arms at random. Revolvers and machine pistols hang from leather straps. Adina leans against the wall. The rows of seats are empty. The policemen have had their fill of beating, the dogs their fill of barking. The only sound comes from the policemen’s boots leaving the auditorium. Anna sits down between two empty seats in the front row. The dogs run after the boots.

The man in the suit stands onstage. Tomorrow, eight o’clock, Room Number 2, he says. Paul looks and says, understood. Abi asks why. Sorin coils a cable. Adina stands next to Sorin and watches the cable crawl up his arm. Anna sits on the edge of the stage, holding herself with both arms and staring out at the empty auditorium. And the man in the suit says, we’re the ones who ask the questions. And Paul says, I’m on night duty. And the man in the suit jumps off the stage instead of using the steps and walks through the hall and shouts, then right after you get off work. He slams the door behind him. And Anna kisses Paul. And Paul says, go home, I’ll go to your place tomorrow.

She presses her lips together. Stares at the ground and grinds her shoe against the floor. Paul says, I’ll come after the interrogation, I’ll be there for sure.

Anna walks past Adina, she has no eyes, just a narrow face. And cheeks warped with jealousy, from knowing that Adina lived with Paul for three years. She doesn’t know what to do with her arms so she clasps her fingers together in order to keep going. Lifts each leg a little too high as she climbs down the stairs and into the auditorium. She walks past the empty seats. Slowly, so that her feet don’t show how hard she’s trying to save face by leaving before she gets edged out. Adina hears Anna’s steps and watches Paul’s eyes as they come back away from Anna’s departure. Without turning around, Anna exits the auditorium through one of the side doors.

*   *   *

The bottle of brandy passes from one hand to the next. The voices jumble together. A beautiful evening. In a beautiful country. We can all hang ourselves. It’s against the law to die together. Once we’re dead we’ll leave the hall calmly. I can write out our death certificates, says Paul. Sorin lifts the bottle to his lips and speaks into the bottle’s neck, into the brandy sloshing against his teeth, please make sure mine lists my favorite cause of death: EARDRUM INFECTION.

Paul climbs down the stairs, Adina hops down next to them straight off the stage. Paul wanders between the empty chairs, taking the same path as Anna. Adina follows.

*   *   *

His jacket is so thin she can feel his ribs. The street is so dark that the sky itself is rustling, since the trees can’t be seen. No cars, no people. The asphalt is cold and her soles are thin. Her throat is cold but the path is there, their shoes clatter. And the clattering creeps up to their cheeks. And just beyond Paul’s cheek the stadium rises, quiet and tall, like a mountain. A mountain where the only ball in the air is the moon.

*   *   *

The hospital blocks the path with its black length and height. A few windows are lit, but only for themselves, they do not cast their glow into the night.

Take a look at all those windows, says Paul. Once I counted all one hundred and fifty-four of them. Last summer four people jumped. That doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all. If they don’t jump out the windows they die in their beds. You’d think that would be more important than some song, too. For months we’ve been taking scraps from the stocking factory because we don’t have any bandages or gauze.

Paul kisses Adina, clinging to her mouth. His hands are warm, she closes her eyes, feels his erection pressing against her. She pulls her lips away from his and rests her forehead against his neck. Stands there with her shoes between his, in the middle of the crossing, where the streets cut through each other during the day. His collar crinkles in her ear. But her ears are not with her head, they’re back with the barking dogs. And her eyes are up there with the running moon, searching for holes in the clouds.

You better go now, says Adina.

Then she walks across the asphalt, taking small steps, but there’s nothing there. Just the clatter of her shoes and the heat in her forehead to guide her way. When she reaches the curb she turns around. Paul hasn’t moved, he lingers in the crossing like a shadow, his face a little lighter than the rest of him. He follows her with his eyes.

Then he makes his way toward the lit windows. The wind lifts his hair, the air smells like wet earth and freshly mown grass.

*   *   *

Behind the hospital is a forest. Except it isn’t. It’s a tree nursery that’s been allowed to go wild. The trees are older than the housing blocks that huddle together on the outskirts of town, older than the hospital. It’s still possible to make out the original rows by looking at the bases of the trees and focusing on the few straight trunks that remain. But at treetop level the needles and leaves are all stitched together, and the mix changes daily. What hasn’t changed in years is the thicket behind the hospital where no one tree matches another. And that the patients from the upper floors can see this better than anyone else and that they are disturbed. Paul knows they spend hours staring at the thicket through a pair of binoculars. And that as they do they become monosyllabic, like forest rangers.

It started with a sick forest ranger from the West Carpathians and it never stopped. He was up on the tenth floor. Another ranger from the same forest came to visit and brought him a pair of binoculars. To pass the time, he said. So the sick ranger and the men on the tenth floor started spending their days watching the forest. Until the sick ranger died. When the ranger who had brought the binoculars came with the widow and a coffin, he took the man’s dentures, glasses, nail clipper and hat. But he left the binoculars for the others. And little by little, because they were so attached to the binoculars, they started turning into sick rangers, every one of them, all the way down to the third floor. Now each floor has a timetable that lists when and for how long a given patient may watch the forest.

*   *   *

Once Paul looked at the thicket through the binoculars. He wanted to know what the sick rangers saw. Paul knows the forest because he often walks there after work. Nevertheless he was startled by the giant ball of needles and leaves. And by the helter-skelter undergrowth. And by how the trunks and branches had adapted, as the wild growth chased away whatever was restrained by cultivation, cutting off the light from above and claiming the ground below. The grass, too, was closer in binoculars than it ever is under a pair of shoes.

The sick rangers also said they saw dogs and cats. And men and women coupling in the darker places or in the clearings in the fading twilight. And children stuffing grass in each other’s mouths in the mornings and playing hide-and-seek and forgetting all about the game when they realize no one is looking for them.

Paul hears these children now and then because they climb over three rows of barbed wire into the hospital yard to get to the rusty windowless ambulance cars, and what they’re looking for is pain.

The smallest man carries the biggest cane

The windshield is covered with thick dust.

Her hair is caught under his elbow. His mouth pants as his belly thrusts. She presses her face against the back of the seat. She can hear his watch ticking. The ticking smells of hurried roads, lunch breaks, gasoline. His underwear is on the floor, his pants are draped over the steering wheel. The cornstalks outside are leaning into the window, peering at her face. Her panties are under his shoe.

The silk on the ears is torn and brittle. The leaves give off a dry rattle, the stalks are twiggy and lean and knock against one another. Between the tassels grows colorless sky.

She closes her eyes. The colorless sky above the cornfield breaks into her forehead.

Something clatters outside the car.

She opens her eyes at once and sees a bicycle propped against a cornstalk. A man in the field shoulders a sack and carries it to the bicycle. Someone’s coming, she says.

The cornstalks knock against the man’s head.

Clara’s panties have a tread mark left by the shoe. She puts them on. He won’t bother us, says Pavel, he’s stealing corn. Clara looks at his watch. The man wheels his bicycle through the dry cornstalks.

I have to get back to the factory, says Clara. Pavel tugs his pants off the steering wheel, sunflower seeds drop from his pocket onto his bare knee, how long can you be gone from the courthouse, asks Clara.

The car hums, gray from all the dust. I don’t work at the courthouse, says Pavel. Clara’s dress is crumpled, her back wet with sweat. Aren’t you a lawyer, asks Clara. Yes, he says, but not at the courthouse. The sky broadens because the corn is now running in the opposite direction, what’s left is a low, rattling field that stretches to the horizon. I saw you in a different car, says Clara. He looks out the window and asks, where. By the cathedral, on the street next to the park, the car was black. She sees the sunflower seeds scattered between his shoes. Pavel turns the wheel so lightly his hands don’t seem to do a thing. There are black cars in every factory, he says. She sees the seconds ticking on his watch, but you don’t work in a factory.

He says nothing and shrugs his shoulders. And Clara says nothing and looks out the window.

*   *   *

In Clara’s factory there is a corner where the sky closes all vision, where a bright weariness lurks day after day, waiting to climb into the city. Into the lunch breaks and the empty afternoon days. A weariness that closes the eyes somewhere between the wire and the rust. That throbs in the head when the gateman’s hand is rummaging through a bag. A weariness that places the same aged faces opposite each other in the streetcar between the stops. A weariness that enters an apartment before the person returning home, the way eyes can enter before the head. And that stays in the apartment until the day comes to an end, somewhere between the door to the apartment and the window that looks outside.