The Appointment (18 page)

But the mouse wound up in the pickles on its own, I said. And even if someone in the canning factory did put it in the jar on purpose, it wasn’t meant for you. After all, anyone could have bought the pickles.

Anyone could have, but I was the one who did.

As if she was trying to defend Albu, Lilli ran her fingers through the hair at the back of her neck. Her hair was fluffed up behind her, and we sat facing each other in silence, our eyes refusing to meet. Out of nowhere, Lilli said:

I really have to pay my electric bill tomorrow.

Lilli and I had grown used to being together with silences that ran longer than the acceptable conversational lulls. And when one of us resumed talking, she would say whatever came into her head. When you know each other well enough, the mouse after the finger and the silence after the mouse and the electric bill after the silence are all one and the same thing. Then you go on talking, about something you never actually mention. And your forehead and mouth are as far apart as they can be.

There were two
lines in front of the wooden cabins at the flea market; a young policeman was making sure nobody did his business outside, against the fence. The first toilet was missing a door and was unoccupied, but even so there were two lines. A man came out of the second carrying the door in his arms. He handed it to another man who’d been fidgeting outside the first toilet for some time; this man backed his way inside, putting the door up after him. Only then did the man who’d already been to the toilet button up his fly. His shoes were sprinkled.

Why don’t you let him go first, a woman in sunglasses asked, he’s still a little boy. A boy wearing shorts and sandals was lifting her dress and crying, she slapped him on the hands:

Leave my dress alone, stop it.

Let him cry, one man said, then he won’t have to pee so often.

He took a matchbox out of his pocket and rattled it in front of the boy’s face:

I’ll let you have these.

The boy shook his head.

What’s your name.

Zuckerfloh, the child said.

Your name isn’t Zuckerfloh, the man said, that’s not what they call you, and he rattled the matchbox. Then he said to the mother:

Don’t worry, it’s only sunflower seeds.

The woman took hold of the boy by the scruff of his neck:

Go on, tell him what your name is.

The child raised his arm to shield his face. Then it was too late, the water ran down his legs onto his sandals. I turned around and went back to Paul:

I can’t get a door.

He had sold the last two aerials and was lounging on his bike. He tossed the bare string into the air.

What do you say to that.

Paul had stashed the money for my ring in his trouser pocket, where it was safe. He walked with me back to the cabins. There were still two lines. The door was a piece of sheet metal the size of a tabletop. Flies were buzzing, the people in lines were quarreling, you could see their gold-and-black molars, the worn-down stumps and gaps between the teeth. Paul pushed his way forward. Deals were struck:

You’ll get my door. Then I’ll get it. Then he will.

But as soon as the next person had relieved himself and carried out the door, whatever deals had been made were instantly forgotten. People were desperate, there was shouting. The policeman was leaning against the fence, munching cookies and cleaning one fingernail after the other with a red plastic comb.

Stop shouting, he ordered without looking up.

Why don’t you help the people who need it, said a woman with a ponytail. I’m pregnant, I can’t stand up any longer, my feet are ready to drop off.

Where are you pregnant, an old woman asked, giving the
policeman a look. Maybe in your ass, because you sure don’t have much of a belly.

I’m not a referee, the policeman said.

The pregnant woman: Christ Almighty, it’s easier to have twins than get hold of this door.

And it’s better to have twins than two peg legs, the policeman laughed. I’ll make sure you get the door before your feet really do break off.

He slipped the comb into his jacket, crammed a piece of cookie into his mouth, and stood in front of the occupied toilet.

That’s right, pregnant or not, she gets the door next, she’s been standing here for ages.

The pregnant woman promised Paul her door. When she came out of the toilet, she let go of the sheet metal before she could see who was tugging at it. The fat man who was supposed to be behind Paul waved his hands and swore, it was his door now. Paul never took his eyes off the toilet, and when the door started to wobble from inside, Paul grabbed hold of it and hoisted it away.

Hey, not while I’m at my devotions, not so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you’re communing with God, and outside you find that all hell’s broken loose.

With God, said the policeman, or else just with some jackass who just went inside the shithouse and who happens to look exactly like you.

Paul shoved me into the cabin and positioned the sheet of metal in front. It turned out there was no roof, and heaven sent down its meddlesome green flies. Two filthy boards for standing on lay over a hole in the ground. It would have been easy to slip. I searched for two dry spots. Written on the wall in red paint was:

Life is really full of shit,
There’s no choice but to piss on it.

I could hear the people outside, Paul was shouting too. In here it was safe. You can’t become any less than the stuff that stinks beneath your feet. When the fat man spoke of God, did he mean that you could become drunk off the acrid fumes in here. I breathed deeply, I refused to hurry, and despite the risk of slipping, I shut my eyes. Not until I was back outside did I become a piece of human filth. I walked through the market next to Paul, the rows of people with their junk were beginning to scatter. Cigarette stubs lay strewn among the patterned imprints of molded rubber soles. The dust swirled up to our necks, I should have thanked Paul for helping with the door, but I couldn’t get a word out. My gold ring was sold—six thousand lei was a fortune for me—and in all that filth. The dust was moving in the same direction as our feet, leading us on. The wind picked up in longish gusts and then dropped off. The wire fence that enclosed the market caught scraps of paper and old clothes. Paul folded his tarp smaller and smaller until it turned into a blue briefcase, which he wedged into one of the panniers on his motorcycle. Then Paul spat on his fingers and counted the money into my open palm, my elbow lost track and yielded to his touch. He finished counting out the banknotes, and I waited for his fingers to migrate from our business dealings to my pulse.

My beach ball and the brooch were still lying on the newspaper, not a single person had shown any interest, I wanted to walk away and leave them lying there. Paul blew up the beach ball and tossed it into the air. It flew away from me, like a huge scoop of watermelon breaking free from the ground and the dirty Sunday. It was so beautiful, now that it no longer belonged to
me. And I, I wanted to hunker down and laugh with my eyes and cry with my mouth. It was the first moment of my ass-backward happiness with Paul. And right in the middle of it he asked:

What does a person do on a Sunday with full pockets and an empty heart?

He picked up the brooch and polished it on his trouser leg—a glass cat with a curved, copper-wire mustache. He fastened it to his shirt. As Paul pushed the motorbike along through the marketplace, the mustache twitched and the cat started to breathe.

If you like we can ride up to the old game preserve, he said, they have a restaurant in the park where you can sit outside.

Only if you throw the cat away, I said, you look like a vagrant.

I don’t think so, he said, but still he tossed it away in the dust behind him, just missing a man who simply glanced up briefly as he hurried past with the long strides of someone who was running late.

His mother-in-law’s waiting for him with chicken soup, said Paul, no need to hurry, by now it’ll be cold anyway.

He had sold my wedding ring in this dust and wind, did he think I was some big-hearted floozy he could go out with and blow all that money. I knew the small botanical garden inside the former game preserve and I knew the Latin names for a few of the plants from walks I had taken there with my husband and his parents. Back then I was living at their place, downstairs in a room that opened onto the yard, so you could enter the room right from the garden path. In winter, instead of warmth, the coal-burning stove blew air as thick as incense up to the ceiling. From spring until late autumn, there were trails of ants along the walls and window frames, clusters of ants in
the corners of rooms and drawers, and busy lone ants on the table and in the bed. Even in the kitchen. My mother-in-law doled out the soup. When her husband pushed his bowl over to be served, she would use the ladle to swirl the contents of the pot for a while, as if searching for chunks of vegetables. Actually she was stirring the ants to the sides. Despite her efforts some would still be floating in her husband’s bowl. He would nudge them to the edge with his spoon and act as if the whole thing was completely out of the ordinary.

Where did these come from.

My mother-in-law said:

Don’t get so excited. It’s just pepper.

If that’s just pepper, then I’m a nightingale.

It’s ground pepper, my dear.

Since when does pepper have legs, he asked.

After the divorce, I had stuffed my clothes and things into two sacks and moved out. Since that day on the bridge I never used suitcases. My husband followed me to the gate with the stone from the Carpathians in a plastic bag. I nearly forgot it, and now I absolutely need it for cracking nuts. I felt ageless, for the most part I couldn’t tell whether I was free or lonely. Being alone was neither a burden nor a pleasure. I didn’t regret anything from my three years of marriage except that I had stayed two too many. I got my hair cut short, bought clothes. I also bought bedding for my newly rented flat, and started paying installments on a refrigerator and a couple of rugs. I wanted a change, and quickly, while this new phase was still fresh and leading me in a particular direction. Lilli never needed to change, she had no need of vanity; after all, what can happen to a cool tobacco flower. When love was over, she came out the other side looking great. Lilli knew all about squandered feelings, but she also knew that there’d soon be another pair of eyes
hungering after her. I wanted to reshape myself with my own hands, but for that your hands need to be holding a wallet full of bills. I bought everything on impulse, without thinking. Compared to today, my worries were tiny, that was before I wrote the notes. I’d go through my paycheck in just two or three afternoons and then borrow money. Not only from Nelu, also from people I knew only slightly. The borrowed money ran through my fingers just as quickly, and went toward clothes. In the morning I’d come into the office and the first thing I’d do was place my handbag mirror on my desk. In between going over the lists of buttons I would constantly check my appearance. Every day Nelu praised me more. But you can’t get a haircut every day, so to maintain my conviction that things weren’t so bad, the only thing left was new clothes. For a day, at least, they were newer than my face. Of course I worried about my debts, but still I kept on buying. My eyes were wide and feverish, only my throat felt constricted. The spur of the moment was always more powerful than my guilty conscience. In the afternoon sun on the Korso, people turned to look at Lilli because she was beautiful and at me because I was walking arm in arm with her and singing loudly:

O the tree has its leaves,
the tea has its water,
money has its paper,
and my heart has snow that’s fallen astray.

We acted as if we were drunk, I staggered and sang, Lilli staggered and laughed so hard she was crying. Until I said:

A dress doesn’t run up debts, neither does a shoe. Neither do I. But money does. With some people, money grows back like whiskers on a chin, but my chin stays pretty smooth. Let’s say
there’s a little money in my bag, then I can say I have something. Next thing you know it’s in the cash register and suddenly I no longer have anything even though it’s right there where I can see it, just a few inches away from my bag. The money’s still worth the same amount, it’s just that it’s no longer mine, what do you make of that.

Once you’re old it starts growing of its own accord, Lilli said, but is that a good reason to want to be old. Don’t worry, none of the people you’ve borrowed from is going to lose sleep over a couple of bills. After all, you’re not running away.

Lilli was mistaking the vanity I’d recently been unable to suppress with independence. After all, I wasn’t going to run away. At least not from the factory, though perhaps from my common sense, that little iron doll in my head, like that rusty St. Anthony lying on the tablecloth at the end of New Year’s Eve.

As long as I lived with my in-laws, whenever I stood in the garden I couldn’t get over my stunned shock that the wild roses my father-in-law had hastily grafted would flower each summer in knotty buds of velvet. The new canes never reverted. Grafting roses seemed to me like having a face-lift on your hips. I put all sorts of flowers in the room, but never a grafted rose. Who could say it wouldn’t go on changing after it had been cut. The leaves were the only thing I could change about myself after the separation, no matter how hard I tried. After the long married squabbles there were days when no one shouted at me. Every day brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended—later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother. That’s when I visited her for the last time and saw her stripped of all
secrets, the only person left in the house, utterly alone. And I didn’t feel any sympathy. In contrast to her, I did not postpone this yearning in myself. I’m not that tough, and above all I was younger than she: in her case, everyone close to her had died, and I had flown the nest. I could see myself in her as she resigned herself to the new circumstances—as if I were the mother and she the child. She would stand in the light of the window and seem like such a stranger it drove you crazy, she would stand by the dish rack in the kitchen and seem so familiar you wanted to run. And as she moved about the house she would alternate between one state and the other. But I realized that this craving for solitude was better suited to later life, and that it had affected me too young, too early.