The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (15 page)

*   *   *

Mara comes out of the main shop floor, having brought three knives for David. The blades are freshly sharpened. David uses one to cut through a bacon rind and doesn’t wipe it off. So the gateman won’t see it was just sharpened, he says, placing it in his bag. He puts the other two knives in the drawer, I’ll take one tomorrow and the other the day after, he says.

Eva rinses out the water glasses, her fingers squeak on the wet surface. The dwarf doesn’t have to sweep the hall today, says Mara, so he’ll be one of the first to get to the showers, we better hurry. Anca grabs her purse without buttoning her coat.

David buttons his coat and takes his bag.

David walks to the gate carrying the greasy knife in his bag. Mara, Eva and Clara walk past the giant spools into the rear yard, a flock of sparrows comes fluttering out of the wire. The attic window below the edge of the roof is ajar.

Clara feels a knot in her throat, her tongue rises to her eyes. She gags, her eyes lose focus. When she looks up, the attic window is a string of windows suspended in the air. Mara and Eva are far ahead, past the spools, perhaps already on the rungs of the iron ladder.

*   *   *

At least for a few more days, as long as the sun casts its cold light on these stairs even just for a moment, the eyes of the three women gather in the attic window every afternoon at four o’clock. Soon the sun will no longer touch the staircase at all. It will move across the wall, dull and pale, in far too narrow an arc. And then for months the steam in the little hallway outside the shower will be so blindingly thick no eye can see through it. The women’s curiosity does not subside right away, for another few days it climbs into the women’s heads and the women keep climbing the iron rungs. They crowd around the window, waiting in vain for the light that no longer comes. By the time the first men enter the shower the sun has already stolen past the wall. The women look at one another. They turn around, jammed so close together they seem to have no arms. Then they give up. Mara quietly closes the attic window and slides the little rusty latch. For several months the window will stay locked.

*   *   *

Down in the yard Clara bends over, props her head against a wire spool and straddles the rusty path. She vomits bread and bacon. Her hands are cold, she wipes her mouth with her handkerchief. She glances up at the attic window, Eva’s and Mara’s heads are a blur, Clara can’t make out their faces. The striped cat sits down twice between Clara’s shoes, eating what she threw up, even licking the wire. Her stripes come floating out of her fur.

*   *   *

Adina leans against the bare acacia by the factory entrance, the wire spools are stacked higher than the fence, smoke rises from the gatehouse chimney but does not fray above the crooked street, the gray wool rises and then falls back on the roof. The wind carries steam from the brewery, the air smells like cold sweat, the cooling tower is cut off by the clouds.

*   *   *

Two weeks ago the officer’s wife gave the servant’s daughter a coat with a fox fur collar, with two legs for tying under the chin. The legs have little paws and brown, shiny claws. The steam from the brewery smells like the fox collar, which had made Adina sneeze. The servant’s daughter said it was naphthalene. If a fur doesn’t smell like naphthalene, she said, come summer the fox rot will eat right through the pelt. And then the hair doesn’t just fall off one strand at a time, it stays on the hide as though it were still growing and waits. Then just when you go to pick up the fur it comes off in big clumps like sudden hair loss. And you’re left holding a bare hide, like skin on bones, all covered with tiny sandy grains, with grit. The servant’s daughter smiled and fingered the paws of her fox collar.

*   *   *

Clara approaches the gate. The gatewoman is holding the cat on her lap, stroking its striped fur. David’s knife is on the table, the gateman saw that it had been freshly sharpened in the factory. The gateman’s coat slips off his shoulder, his hand sticks Clara’s gummed-up handkerchief quickly back into her purse. A truck rattles through the gate, the wheels rattle as it moves onto the street, and the stacked wire spools rattle above and below as well. The driver’s face jiggles in the rearview mirror. Farther away is the white curtain of haze from the brewery. Through the rattling Clara hears someone calling her name.

*   *   *

Adina walks through a cloud of dust. Her kiss lands just under Clara’s eye, her hands are blue from the cold wind, her nose is damp. Let’s go to my place right away, she says, I have to show you something.

*   *   *

Clara bends over and picks up all the pieces of the fox fur, gray light falls through the window. The empty table is dark and shiny. Everything I need to eat is in the kitchen, Adina says, bread, sugar, flour. Clara runs her fingertips over the fox’s tail, then over the cut on the leg. They can poison me whenever they want, says Adina. Clara sets the fur back on the floor. Without taking off her coat she sits on the unmade bed and stares at the gap between the fox’s belly and its right hind leg, at the empty band of floor the width of her hand. She shoves the tail against the rest of the fur, it looks as if it were growing there, the cut is completely invisible.

Clara’s thin, pointy fingers peek out of her coat sleeves, the red dabs of nail polish shine. Adina rests her hands on the table and kicks off her shoes. When Clara moves her hands it’s easy to see the rust stains on the inside of her fingers.

*   *   *

I was just about ten years old, Adina tells Clara, when my mother took me to a nearby village to buy that fur. We crossed the bridge without water, the one the slaughterhouse workers use every morning. But on that morning the sky wasn’t red, it was heavy and all torn up. The men on the bridge didn’t have red cockscombs. It was a few days before Christmas, there was frost everywhere but no snow. Only a little dusting here and there, flakes whirling in the wind, in the furrows on the field. I was so anxious and excited I hadn’t slept the whole night. I’d wanted a fox for so long that the joy of getting it the next day was half turned to fear. The morning was icy cold and there wasn’t a single sheep out. And I thought as we were walking that where there aren’t any sheep out there can’t be any village. The field was flat, with just a few low bushes, so the sky seemed to come at us from all directions. It came all the way down to my mother’s headscarf and I was afraid we’d lost our way. I walked and walked but didn’t get tired. Maybe sleepy, because I felt a tired tickling in my forehead, but that tiredness kept me going. When we reached the village there wasn’t anyone on the street. All the windows had Christmas trees. Their branches were so close to the windowpanes that you could make out the individual needles, as if they’d been set up for the people passing by outside and not the people in the house. And since no one else was passing by, they were there just for my mother and me. My mother didn’t realize it, though. But I carried those trees with me, from one window to the next, all by myself.

Then we stopped. My mother knocked on a window. I still remember that it didn’t have any Christmas tree. We went into the yard. And then down a long open walkway where you couldn’t see the walls on account of all the fox furs.

After that we went in the main room, which had a cast-iron stove and a bed, no chair. The hunter came inside carrying one of the pelts. He said, this is the biggest one. He slid his hands under the fox so that the legs hung down while he moved the arms. The legs shook like they were running. And behind the legs the tail wiggled as if it belonged to a different, smaller animal. I asked if I could see his rifle. The hunter laid the fox on the table and smoothed out its fur. He said, you don’t shoot a fox. A fox will step into a trap. The man’s hair and beard and the hairs on his hands were as red as the fox. His cheeks too. Even back then, fox and hunter were one and the same.

*   *   *

Clara takes off her coat and steps out of the room. In the bathroom she gags and throws up. Adina looks at the coat lying on the bed, which still seems to contain an arm, as if a hand were reaching under the blanket. Water rushes inside the bathroom.

*   *   *

Clara comes back into the room with her blouse unbuttoned, quickly puts on her coat and says, I feel sick, I threw up. Her purse is on the pillow. Her mouth is half open, her tongue white and dry, like a piece of bread in her mouth.

You’re afraid, says Adina, you look like death. Clara is startled, her gaze is straight and cutting. She looks at Adina and sees a face that has gone somewhere far away. A face all twisted into separate parts, the cheeks off by themselves and the lips off by themselves, lifeless and eager at the same time. A face that’s as empty from the side as it is from the front, like a picture with nothing on it.

*   *   *

Clara searches the empty face for a child who is walking alongside a woman and who is nevertheless all alone, because she’s carrying Christmas trees from one house to the next. A child like the one in her belly, she thinks, as alone as a child that no one knows about.

Adina wants to be the hunter, thinks Clara.

Anyway you seem more afraid than I am, says Adina. Stop looking, don’t look at the fox anymore.

Clara’s eyes are skewed, with tiny red veins in the shadow of her nose. She looks absently at the picture on the wall, the clunky shoes in the grass, the soldier’s uniform, the grass straw in Ilie’s mouth. You better not tell Ilie, says Clara, he won’t be able to stand it.

You’re not saying anything

The stairwell has no window, the stairwell has no daylight. The stairwell has no electricity, the elevator is stuck between the upper floors. Pavel’s lighter sparks but doesn’t cast light. The key finds the keyhole. The door handle doesn’t click and the door doesn’t creak as it opens. Inside the apartment the door to the main room is open, letting a bright square of light into the front hall. Inside the room the sewing machine is humming.

Pavel takes off his shoes and tiptoes into the kitchen in stocking feet. Outside the kitchen window pant legs are fluttering in the wind. Pavel doesn’t see the clothesline. The buckles on his briefcase are cold. He places a package of Jacobs coffee and a tub of breakfast margarine on top of the kitchen cupboard. He counts out twelve packs of cigarettes and sets them beside the coffee. He opens the refrigerator and puts the meat inside. Next to the refrigerator is an umbrella. He picks it up.

Pavel tiptoes toward the room. The little wheel on the sewing machine is turning, the belt moves, the thread creeps off the bobbin, Clara pumps her feet in a steady rhythm. Pavel stands in the doorway and pops open the umbrella. There’s a ferocious storm outside, dear lady, he says, might I stay the night. Clara’s eyes laugh, her mouth stays serious. Certainly, dear sir, please do come in and get out of those wet clothes. The umbrella drops to the floor and the sewing machine wheel stops in mid-stitch.

*   *   *

Clara’s hand is in his underpants. Her hair cascades across his face. Oh sir, I see you’re frozen quite stiff, says her mouth. Her thighs are hot and her belly deep and his penis thrusts.

*   *   *

The refrigerator resumes humming, the electricity has come back on. Clara sniffs at the package, switches on the light, the package crackles as her fingers open the coffee, she holds a coffee bean up to his birthmark, are you coming from work, she asks, the coffee grinder cuts off her voice. The flame licks at the pot, the water starts to bubble. She drops three spoonfuls of coffee into the water without wetting the spoon. The spoon handle clinks against the stove, could you ever do anything to Adina, she asks. The coffee rises and foams, Clara skims off some of the foam with the spoon. What do you mean, he asks. She lets a little foam into each of the two cups. What do you mean, he asks. The foam in the spoon is as bright as sand. Could you ever poison Adina, she asks, lifting the pot from the stove.

A black thread of coffee trickles into the foam. No, he says. The foam rises up to the cup handles. Because she’s my friend, says Clara. He carries the cups to the table, outside the window the pants are fluttering in the wind. That’s one reason, he says, picking up a sugar cube, what is she after anyway, doesn’t she realize where she’s living. She’s not after anything, she simply says things because she’s angry, says Clara. The sugar cube tears the layer of foam and sinks into the cup.

*   *   *

Whenever my father got angry, says Pavel, he just turned silent. You couldn’t argue with him. He would go for days without saying a word. It made my mother furious. Once she dragged him away from the table and pressed his face against the mirror and shook him by the hair. Just take a look at yourself, she screamed, but he didn’t even blink. As if his eyes went straight through the mirror without seeing his own reflection. His face became a stone. And when she let go of his hair his head sprang back. Then my father did look in the mirror and saw me standing there. In a very quiet voice he said, always pay attention to a person’s tongue because every person carries red hot coals in his mouth. And one angry word can ruin more in one breath than two feet can trample over an entire lifetime. Pavel’s spoon clinks against his cup.

You choose who you’re going to pick on, says Clara, but they just say out loud what all of us think, including you. He stirs his coffee, the foam floats onto the rim. We’re all victims, he says. His lighter clicks, he holds the flame for her, she pulls the ashtray from the edge of the table close to her hand. You ask what Adina’s after, says Clara, what do you think she’s after, she wants to live.

Clara rolls the cigarette in her hand. He sips the coffee, sees her eyes above the rim of the cup. What are you going to do with the person who finally shoots Ceaușescu, she asks. She swallows her breath without exhaling the smoke.

Pavel has a knot in his throat and coffee grounds on his tongue. That depends, he says. On what, she asks. He doesn’t answer.

Clara stands by the window, sees the pants fluttering and the ball stuck in the fork of the tree, the green ball that had been hidden by the swaying foliage all summer long. And had remained wedged there for two bare winters because no child dared climb up the smooth trunk onto the thin branches.