The Appointment, by Herta Muller. A Puke(TM) Audiobook

The Appointment,
by Herta Muller.

I've been summoned.
Thursday, at ten sharp.
Lately I'm being summoned more and more often: ten sharp on Tuesday, ten sharp on Saturday, on Wednesday, Monday.
As if years were a week, I'm amazed that winter comes so close on the heels of late summer.
On my way to the tram stop, I again pass the shrubs with the white berries dangling through the fences.
Like buttons made of mother-of-pearl and sewn from underneath, or stitched right down into the earth, or else like bread pellets.
They remind me of a flock of little white-tufted birds turning away their beaks, but they're really far too small for birds.
It's enough to make you giddy.
I'd rather think of snow sprinkled on the grass, but that leaves you feeling lost, and the thought of chalk makes you sleepy.
The tram doesn't run on a fixed schedule.
It does seem to rustle, at least to my ear, unless those are the stiff leaves of the poplars I'm hearing.
Here it is, already pulling up to the stop: today it seems in a hurry to take me away.
I've decided to let the old man in the straw hat get on ahead of me.
He was already waiting when I arrived-who knows how long he'd been there.
You couldn't exactly call him frail, but he's hunchbacked and weary, and as skinny as his own shadow.
His backside is so slight it doesn't even fill the seat of his pants, he has no hips, and the only bulges in his trousers are the bags around his knees.
But if he's going to go and spit, right now, just as the door is folding open, I'll get on before he does, regardless.
The car is practically empty; he gives the vacant seats a quick scan and decides to stand.
It's amazing how old people like him don't get tired, that they don't save their standing for places where they can't sit.
Now and then you hear old people say: There'll be plenty of time for lying down once I'm in my coffin.
But death is the last thing on their minds, and they're quite right.
Death never has followed any particular pattern.
Young people die too.
I always sit if I have a choice.
Riding in a seat is like walking while you're sitting down.
The old man is looking me over; I can sense it right away inside the empty car.
I'm not in the mood to talk, though, or else I'd ask him what he's gaping at.
He couldn't care less that his staring annoys me.
Meanwhile half the city is going by outside the window, trees alternating with buildings.
They say old people like him can sense things better than young people.
Old people might even sense that today I'm carrying a small towel, a toothbrush, and some toothpaste in my handbag.
And no handkerchief, since I'm determined not to cry.
Paul didn't realize how terrified I was that today Albu might take me down to the cell below his office.
I didn't bring it up.
If that happens, he'll find out soon enough.
The tram is moving slowly.
The band on the old man's straw hat is stained, probably with sweat, or else the rain.
As always, Albu will slobber a kiss on my hand by way of greeting.
Major Albu lifts my hand by the fingertips, squeezing my nails so hard I could scream.
He presses one wet lip to my fingers, so he can keep the other free to speak.
He always kisses my hand the exact same way, but what he says is always different: Well well, your eyes look awfully red today.
I think you've got a mustache coming.
A little young for that, aren't you.
My, but your little hand is cold as ice today-hope there's nothing wrong with your circulation.
Uh-oh, your gums are receding.
You're beginning to look like your own grandmother.
My grandmother didn't live to grow old, I say.
She never had time to lose her teeth.
Albu knows all about my grandmother's teeth, which is why he's bringing them up.
As a woman, I know how I look on any given day.
I also know that a kiss on the hand shouldn't hurt, that it shouldn't feel wet, that it should be delivered to the back of the hand.
The art of hand kissing is something men know even better than women-and Albu is hardly an exception.
His entire head reeks of Avril, a French eau de toilette that my father-in-law, the Perfumed Commissar, used to wear too.
Nobody else I know would buy it.
A bottle on the black market costs more than a suit in a store.
Maybe it's called Septembre, I'm not sure, but there's no mistaking that acrid, smoky smell of burning leaves.
Once I'm sitting at the small table, Albu notices me rubbing my fingers on my skirt, not only to get the feeling back into them but also to wipe the saliva off.
He fiddles with his signet ring and smirks.
Let him: it's easy enough to wipe off somebody's spit; it isn't poisonous, and it dries up all by itself.
It's something everybody has.
Some people spit on the pavement, then rub it in with their shoe since it's not polite to spit, not even on the pavement.
Certainly Albu isn't one to spit on the pavement-not in town, anyway, where no one knows who he is and where he acts the refined gentleman.
My nails hurt, but he's never squeezed them so hard my fingers turned blue.
Eventually they'll thaw out, the way they do when it's freezing cold and you come into the warm. The worst thing is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face.
It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot.
But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough.
I've been listening to the alarm clock since three in the morning ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp.
Whenever Paul is asleep, he kicks his leg from one side of the bed to the other and then recoils so fast he startles himself, although he doesn't wake up.
It's become a habit with him.
No more sleep for me.
I lie there awake, and I know I need to close my eyes if I'm going back to sleep, but I don't close them.
I've frequently forgotten how to sleep, and have had to relearn each time.
It's either extremely easy or utterly impossible.
In the early hours just before dawn, every creature on earth is asleep: even dogs and cats only use half the night for prowling around the dumpsters.
If you're sure you can't sleep anyway, it's easier to think of something bright inside the darkness than to simply shut your eyes in vain.
Snow, whitewashed tree trunks, white-walled rooms, vast expanses of sand-that's what I've thought of to pass the time, more often than I would have liked, until it grew light.
This morning I could have thought about sunflowers, and I did, but they weren't enough to dislodge the summons.
And with the alarm clock ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp, my thoughts raced to Major Albu even before they shifted to me and Paul.
Today I was already awake when Paul started thrashing in his sleep.
By the time the window started turning gray, I had already seen Albu's mouth looming on the ceiling, gigantic, the pink tip of his tongue tucked behind his lower teeth, and I had heard his sneering voice: Don't tell me you're losing your nerve already-we're just warming up.
Paul's kicking wakes me only when I haven't been summoned for two or three weeks.
Then I feel happy, since it means I've learned how to sleep again.
Whenever I've relearned how to sleep, and I ask Paul in the morning what he was dreaming, he can't remember anything.
I show him how he tosses about and splays his toes, and then how he jerks his legs back and crooks his toes.
Moving a chair from the table to the middle of the kitchen, I sit down, stick my legs in the air, and demonstrate the whole procedure.
It makes Paul laugh, and I say: You're laughing at yourself.
Who knows, maybe I dreamed I was taking you for a ride on my motorcycle.
His thrashing is like a forward charge disrupted by an immediate call to retreat.
I presume it comes from drinking.
Not that I say this to him.
Nor do I explain that it's the night drawing the shakes out of his legs.
That's what it must be-the night, seizing him by the knees and tugging at the shakes, pulling them down through his toes into the pitch-black room, and finally tossing them out into the blackness of the street below, in the early hours just before daybreak, when the whole city is slumbering away.
Otherwise Paul wouldn't be able to stand up straight when he woke.
But if night wrenches the shakes out of every drunk in the city, it must be tanked up to high heaven come morning, given the number of drinkers.
Just after four, the trucks begin delivering goods to the row of shops down below.
They completely shatter the silence, making a huge racket for the little they deliver: a few crates of bread, milk, and vegetables, and large quantities of plum brandy.
Whenever the food runs out, the women and children manage to cope: the lines disperse, and all roads lead home.
But when the brandy runs out, the men curse their lot and pull out their knives.
The salespeople say things to calm them down, but that only works while the customers are still inside the store.
The moment they're out the door they continue prowling the city on their quest.
The first fights break out because they can't find any brandy, and later because they're stone drunk.
The brandy comes from the hilly region between the Carpathians and the arid plains.
The plum trees there are so dense you can barely make out the tiny villages hiding in their branches.
Whole forests of plum trees, drenched with blue in late summer, the branches sagging with the weight of the fruit.
The brandy is named after the region, but nobody calls it by its proper name.
It doesn't really even need a name, since there's only one brand in the whole country.
People just call it Two Plums, from the picture on the label.
Those two plums leaning cheek to cheek are as familiar to the men as the Madonna and Child are to the women.
People say the plums represent the love between bottle and drinker.
The way I see it, those cheek to cheek plums look more like a wedding picture than a Madonna and Child.
None of the pictures in church shows the Child's head level with his mother's.
The Child's forehead is always resting against the Virgin's cheek, with his own cheek at her neck, and his chin on her breast.
Moreover, the relationship between drinkers and bottles is more like the one between the couples in wedding pictures: they bring each other to ruin, and still they won't let go.
In our wedding picture, I'm not carrying flowers and I'm not wearing a veil.
The love in my eyes is gleaming new, but the truth is, it was my second wedding.
The picture shows Paul and me standing cheek to cheek like two plums.
Ever since he started drinking so much, our wedding picture has proven prophetic.
Whenever Paul's out on the town, barhopping late into the night, I'm afraid he'll never come home again, and I stare at our wedding picture until it starts to change shape.
When that happens our two faces start to swim, and our cheeks shift around so that a little bit of space opens up between them.
Mostly it is Paul's cheek that swims away from mine, as if he were planning to come home late.
But he does come home.
He always has, even after the accident.
Occasionally a shipment of buffalo-grass vodka comes in from Poland-yellowish and bittersweet.
That gets sold first.
Each bottle contains a long, sodden stem that quivers as you pour the vodka but never buckles or slips out of the bottle.
Drinkers say: That stem sticks in its bottle just like your soul sticks in your body, that's how the grass protects your soul.
Their belief goes together with the burning taste in your mouth and the roaring drunk inside your head.
The drinkers open the bottle, the liquid glugs into their glasses, and the first swallow slides down their throats.
The soul begins to feel protected; it quivers but never buckles and never slips out of the body.
Paul keeps his soul protected too; there's never a day where he feels like giving up and packing it all in.
Maybe things would be fine if it weren't for me, but we like being together.
The drink cakes his day, and the night takes his drunkenness.
When I worked the early morning shift at the clothing factory, I heard the workers say: With a sewing machine, you oil the cogs, with a human machine, you oil the throat.
Back then Paul and I used to cake his motorcycle to work every morning at five on the dot.
We'd see the drivers with their delivery trucks parked outside the stores, the porters carrying crates, the vendors, and the moon.
Now all I hear is the noise; I don't go to the window, and I don't look at the moon.
I remember that it looks like a goose egg, and that it leaves the city on one side of the sky while the sun comes up at the other.
Nothing's changed there; that's how it was even before I knew Paul, when I used to walk to the tram stop on foot.
On the way I thought: How bizarre that something so beautiful could be up in the sky, with no law down here on earth forbidding people to look at it.
Evidently it was permissible to wangle something out of the day before it was ruined in the factory.
I would start to freeze, not because I was underdressed, but simply because I couldn't get enough of the moon.
At that hour the moon is almost entirely eaten away; it doesn't know where to go after reaching the city.
The sky has to loosen its grip on the earth as day begins to break.
The streets run steeply up and down, and the streetcars travel back and forth like rooms ablaze with light.
I know the trams from the inside too.
The people getting on at this early hour wear short sleeves, carry worn leather bags, and have goose pimples on both arms.
Each newcomer is measured and judged with a casual glance.
This is a strictly working-class affair.
Better people take their cars to work.
But here, among your own, you make comparisons: that person's better off than me, that one looks worse.
No one's ever in the exact same boat as you-that would be impossible.
There's not much rime, we're almost at the factories, and now all the people who've been sized up leave the tram, one after the other.
Shoes polished or dusty, heels new and straight or worn down to an angle, collars freshly ironed or crumpled, hair parted or not, fingernails, watch-straps, belt buckles: every single detail provokes envy or contempt.
Nothing escapes this sleepy scrutiny, even in the pushing crowd.
The working class ferrets out the differences: in the cold light of morning there is no equality.
The sun is in the streetcar, along for the ride, and outside as well, pulling back the white and red clouds in anticipation of the scorching midday heat.
No one is wearing a jacket: the freezing cold in the morning counts as fresh air, because with noon will come the clogging dust and infernal heat.
If I haven't been summoned, we can sleep in for several hours.
Daytime sleep is not deep black; it's shallow and yellow.
Our sleep is restless, the sunlight falls on our pillows.
But it does make the day a little shorter.
We'll be under observation soon enough; the day's not going to run away.
They can always accuse us of something, even if we sleep till nearly noon.
As it is, we're always being accused of something we can no longer do anything about.
You can sleep all you want, but the day's still out there waiting, and a bed is not another country.
They won't let us rest till we're lying next to Lilli.
Of course Paul also has to sleep off his drunk.
It takes him until about noon to get his head square on his shoulders and relocate his mouth so he can actually speak and not just slur his words in a voice thick with drink.
His breath still smells, though, and when he steps into the kitchen I feel as if I were passing the open door of the bar downstairs.
Since spring, drinking hours have been regulated, and consumption of liquor is prohibited before eleven.
But the bar still opens at six-brandy is served in coffee cups before eleven; after that they bring out the glasses.
Paul drinks and is no longer himself, then he sleeps it off and is back to being himself.
Around noon it looks as if everything could turn out all right, but once again it turns out ruined.
Paul goes on protecting his soul until the buffalo grass is high and dry, while I brood over who he and I really are until I can no longer think straight.
At lunchtime we're sitting at the kitchen table, and any mention of his having been drunk yesterday is the wrong thing to say.
Even so, I occasionally toss out a word or two: Drink won't change a thing.
Why are you making my life so difficult? You could paint this entire kitchen with what you put away yesterday.
True, the flat is small, and I don't want to avoid Paul; but when we stay at home, we spend too much of the day sitting in the kitchen.
By mid-afternoon he's already drunk, and in the evening it gets worse.
I put off talking because it makes him grumpy.
I keep waiting through the night, until he's sober again and sitting in the kitchen with eyes like onions.
But then whatever I say goes right past him.
I'd like for Paul to admit I'm right, just for once.
But drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves-and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission.
The minute Paul wakes up, his thoughts turn to drinking, though he denies it.
That's why there's never any truth.
If he's not sitting silently at the table, letting my words go right past him, he says something like this, meant to last the entire day: Don't fret, I'm not drinking out of desperation.
I drink because I like it.
That may be the case, I say, since you seem to think with your tongue.
Paul looks out the kitchen window at the sky, or into his cup.
He dabs at the drops of coffee on the table, as if to confirm that they're wet and really will spread if he smears them with a finger.
He takes my hand, I look out the kitchen window at the sky, into the cup, I too dab at the odd drop of coffee on the table.
The red enamel tin stares at us and I stare back.
But Paul does not, because that would mean doing something different today from what he did yesterday.
Is he being strong or weak when he remains silent instead of saying for once: I'm not going to drink today.
Yesterday Paul again said: Don't you fret, your man drinks because he likes it.
His legs carried him down the hall-at once too heavy and too light-as if they contained a mix of sand and air.
I placed my hand upon his neck and stroked the stubble I love to touch in the mornings, the whiskers that grow in his sleep.
He drew my hand up under his eye, it slid down his cheek to his chin.
I didn't take away my fingers, but I did think to myself: I wouldn't count on any of this cheek-to-cheek business after you've seen that picture of the two plums.
I like to hear Paul talk that way, so late in the morning, and yet I don't like it either.
Whenever I take a step away from him, he nudges his love up to me, so naked, so close that he doesn't need to say anything else.
He doesn't have to wait, I'm ready with my approval, not a single reproach on the tip of my tongue.
The one in my head quickly fades.
It's good I can't see myself, since my face feels stupid and pale.
Yesterday morning, Paul's hangover once again yielded up an unexpected pussycat gentleness that came padding on soft paws.
Your man-the only people who talk like that have shallow wits and too much pride tucked around the corners of their mouths.
Although the noontime tenderness paves the way for the evening's drinking, I depend on it, and I don't like the way I need it.
Major Albu says: I can see what you're thinking, there's no point in denying it, we're just wasting time.
Actually, it's only my time being wasted; after all, he's doing his job.
He rolls up his sleeve and glances at the clock.
The time is easy to see, but not what I'm thinking.
If Paul can't see what I'm thinking, then certainly this man can't.
Paul sleeps next to the wall, while my place is toward the front edge of the bed, since I'm often unable to sleep.
Still, whenever he wakes up he says: You were caking up the whole bed and shoved me right up against the wall.
To which I reply: No way, I was on this little strip here no wider than a clothesline, you were the one taking up the middle.
One of us could sleep in the bed and the other on the sofa.
We've tried it.
For two nights we took turns.
Both nights I did nothing but toss around.
My brain was grinding down thought after thought, and toward morning, when I was half asleep, I had a series of bad dreams.
Two nights of bad dreams that kept reaching out and clutching at me all day long.
The night I was on the sofa, my first husband put the suitcase on the bridge over the river, gripped me by the back of my neck, and roared with laughter.
Then he looked at the water and whistled that song about love falling apart and the river water turning black as ink.
The water in my dream was not like ink, I could see it, and in the water I saw his face, turned upside down and peering up from the depths, from where the pebbles had seeded.
Then a white horse ate apricots in a thicket of trees.
With every apricot it raised its head and spat out the stone like a human being.
And the night I had the bed to myself, someone grabbed my shoulder from behind and said: Don't turn around, I'm not here.
Without moving my head, I just squinted out of the corners of my eyes.
Lilli's fingers were gripping me, her voice was that of a man, so it wasn't her.
I raised my hand to touch her and the voice said: What you can't see you can't touch.
I saw the fingers, they were hers, but someone else was using them.
Someone I couldn't see.
And in the next dream, my grandfather was pruning back a hydrangea that had been frost-burnt by the snow.
He called me over: Come take a look, I've got a lamb here.
Snow was falling on his trousers, his shears were clipping off the heads of the frost-browned flowers.
I said: That's not a lamb.
It's not a person, either, he said.
His fingers were numb and he could only open and close the shears slowly, so that I wasn't sure whether it was the shears that were squeaking or his hand.
I tossed the shears into the snow.
They sank in so that it was impossible to tell where they had fallen.
He combed the entire yard looking for them, his nose practically touching the snow.
When he reached the garden gate I stepped on his hands so he'd look up and not go wandering off through the gate, searching the whole white street.
I said: Stop it, the lamb's frozen and the wool got burnt in the frost.
By the garden fence was another hydrangea, one that had been pruned bare.
I gestured to it: What's wrong with that one.
That one's the worst, he said.
Come spring it'll be having little ones.
We can't have that.
The morning after the second night, Paul said: If we're in each other's way, at least it means we each have someone.
The only place you sleep alone is in your coffin, and that'll happen soon enough.
We should stay together at night.
Who knows the dreams he had and promptly forgot.
He was talking about sleeping, however, not dreaming.
At half past four in the morning I saw Paul asleep in the gray light, a twisted face above a double chin.
And at that early hour, down by the shops, people were cursing out loud and laughing.
Lilli said: Curses ward off evil spirits.
Idiot, get your foot out of the way.
Move, or do you have shit in your shoes.
Open those great flapping ears of yours and you'll hear what I'm saying, but watch you don't blow away in this wind.
Never mind your hair, we haven't finished unloading.
A woman was clucking, short and hoarse like a hen.
A van door slammed.
Lend a hand, you moron.
If you want a rest you should check into a sanatorium.
Paul's clothes were strewn on the floor.
The new day was already in the wardrobe mirror, the day on which I have been summoned, today.
I got up, careful to place my right foot on the floor before my left, as I always do when I've been summoned.
I can't say for sure I really believe in it, but how could it hurt.
What I'd like to know is whether other people's brains control their good fortune as well as their thoughts.
My brain's only good for a little fortune.
It's not up to shaping a whole life.
At least not mine.
I've already come to terms with what fortune I have, even though Paul wouldn't consider it very good at all.
Every other day or so I declare: I'm doing just fine.
Paul's face is right in front of me, quiet and still, gaping at what I've just said, as if our having each other didn't count.
He says: You feel fine because you've forgotten what that means for other people.
Others might mean their life as a whole when they say: I'm doing just fine.
All I'm talking about is my good fortune.
Paul realizes that life is something I haven't come to terms with and I don't simply mean I haven't done so yet, that it's only a matter of time.
Just look at us, says Paul, how can you go on about being fortunate.
Quick as a handful of flour hitting a windowpane, the bathroom light cast a face into the mirror, a face with froggy creases over its eyes which looked like me.
I held my hands in the water, it felt warm; on my face it felt cold.
Brushing my teeth, I look up and see toothpaste come frothing out of my eyes-it's not the first time I've had this happen.
I feel nauseous, I spit out what's in my mouth and stop.
Ever since my first summons, I've begun to distinguish between life and fortune.
When I go in for questioning, I have no choice but to leave my good fortune at home.
I leave it in Paul's face, around his eyes, his mouth, amid his stubble.
If it could be seen, you'd see it on his face like a transparent glaze.
Every time I have to go, I want to stay behind in the flat, like the fear I always leave behind and which I can't take away from Paul.
Like the fortune I leave at home when I'm away.
He doesn't know how much my good fortune has come to rely upon his fear.
He couldn't bear to know that.
What he does know is obvious to anyone with eyes: that whenever I've been summoned, I put on my green blouse and eat a walnut.
The blouse is one I inherited from Lilli but its name comes from me: the blouse that grows.
If I were to take my good fortune with me, it would weaken my nerves.
Albu says: You don't mean you're losing your nerve already-we're just warming up.
I'm not losing my nerve, not at all: in fact, I'm overloaded with nerves.
And every one of them is humming like a moving streetcar.
They say that walnuts on an empty stomach are good for your nerves and your powers of reason.
Any child knows that, but I'd forgotten it.
What sparked my memory wasn't the fact that I was being summoned so often-it was sheer chance.
One time I had to be at Albu's at ten sharp, like today; by half past seven I was all set to go.
Getting there takes an hour and a half at most.
I give myself two hours, and if I'm early I walk a while around the neighborhood.
I prefer it that way.
I've always arrived on time: I can't imagine they'd put up with any lateness.
It was because I was all set to go by half past seven that I got to eat the walnut.
I'd been ready that early for previous summonses, but on that particular morning the walnut was lying there on the kitchen table.
Paul had found it in the elevator the day before.
He'd put it in his pocket, since you don't just leave a walnut sitting there.
It was the first one of the year, with a little of the moist fuzz left from the green husk.
I weighed it in my hand: it seemed a little light for a good fresh nut, as if it might be hollow.
I couldn't find a hammer, so I split it open with the stone that used to be in the hall but has since moved to a corner of the kitchen.
The brain of the nut was loose inside.
It tasted of sour cream.
That day my interrogation was shorter than usual, I kept my nerve, and once I was back on the street, I thought to myself: That was thanks to the nut.
Ever since then I've believed in nuts, that nuts help.
I don't really believe it, but I want to have done whatever I can that might help.
That's why I stick to my stone for cracking nuts, and always do it in the morning.
Once the nut's been cracked, it loses its power if it lies open overnight.
Of course it would be easier on Paul and the neighbors-not to mention myself-if I split them open in the evening, but I can't have people telling me what time to crack nuts.
I brought the stone from the Carpathians.
My first husband had been on military service since March.
Every week he wrote me a whining letter and I responded with a comforting card.
Summer came, and I tried to figure out exactly how many letters and cards we would have to exchange before he returned.
My father-in-law wanted to take his place and sleep with me, so I soon had enough of his house and garden.
I packed my rucksack and early one morning, after he'd gone to work, I stashed it in the bushes near a gap in the fence.
A few hours later I strolled out to the road, with nothing in my hands.
My mother in law was hanging out the laundry and had no idea what I was up to.
Without saying a word, I pushed the rucksack through the gap in the fence and walked to the station.
I took a train into the mountains and joined up with some people who'd just graduated from the music academy.
Every day we trekked and stumbled from one glacial lake to the next until it grew dark.
Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned.
Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around-portents of dangerous times to come.
As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed.
Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff our life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds.
The music graduates sang as the lake pictured them, upside down, taking their measure as potential corpses.
Hiking, resting, or eating, they sang in chorus.
It wouldn't have surprised me to hear them harmonize while they slept at night, just as they did at those bleak altitudes where the sky blows into your mouth.
I had to stay with the group because death makes no allowance for the wanderer who strays alone.
The lakes made our eyes grow bigger by the day; in every face I could see the circles widening, the cheeks losing ground.
And every day our legs grew shorter.
Nevertheless, on the last day I wanted to take something back home with me, so I picked through the scree until I found a rock that looked like a child's foot.
The musicians looked for small flat pebbles they could rub in their hands as worry-stones.
Their stones looked like coat buttons, and I had more than enough of those every day in the factory.
But those musicians put their faith in worry-stones the way I now put mine in nuts.
I can't help it: I've put on the blouse that grows, I bang twice with the stone, rattling all the dishes in the kitchen, and the walnut is cracked.
And as I'm eating it, Paul comes in, startled by the banging.
He's wearing his pajamas and downs one or two glasses of water, two if he was as blind drunk as he was last night.
I don't need to understand each individual word.
I know perfectly well what he says while drinking water: You don't really believe that nut helps, do you.
Of course I don't really believe it, just as I don't really believe in all the other routines I've developed.
Consequently I'm all the more stubborn.
Let me believe what I want.
Paul lets that one go, since we both know it's not right to quarrel before the interrogation, you need to keep a clear head.
Most of the sessions are torturously long despite the nut.
But how do I know they wouldn't be worse if I didn't eat the nut? Paul doesn't realize that the more he pooh-poohs all my routines, with that wet mouth of his and the glass he's draining before clearing it off the table, the more I rely on them.
People who are summoned develop routines that help them out a little.
Whether these routines really work or not is beside the point.
It's not people, though, it's me who's developed them; they came sneaking up on me, one by one.
Paul says: The things you waste your time on.
What he does, instead, is consider what questions they'll ask me when I'm summoned.
This is absolutely necessary, he claims, whereas what I do is crazy.
He'd be right if the questions he's preparing me for really were the ones I was asked.
Up to now they've always been completely different.
It's too much to expect my routines to really help me.
Actually they don't help me so much as help move life along from one day to the next.
There's no point expecting them to fill your head with lucky thoughts.
There's a lot to be said for moving life along, but there's essentially nothing to say when it comes to luck, because as soon as you open your mouth you jinx it away.
Not even the luck you've missed out on can bear being talked about.
The routines I've developed are about moving from one day to the next, and not about luck.
I'm sure Paul's right: the walnut and the blouse that grows only add to the fear.
And what sense is there in shooting for good fortune when all that does is add to the fear.
I am constantly dwelling on this, and as a result I don't expect as much as other people.
Nobody covets the fear that others make for themselves.
But with luck it's just the opposite, which is why good fortune is never a very good goal.
On the green blouse that grows there's a large mother-of pearl button which I picked out from a great many buttons at the factory and took for Lilli.
At the interrogation I sit at the small table, twisting the button in my fingers, and answer calmly, even though every one of my nerves is jangling.
Albu paces to and fro; having to formulate the right questions wears at his calm, just as having to give the right answers wears at mine.
As long as I keep my composure there's the chance he'll get something wrong maybe everything.
Back home I change into my gray blouse.
This one's called the blouse that waits.
It's a gift from Paul.
Of course I often have misgivings about these names.
But they've never done any harm, not even on days when I haven't been summoned.
The blouse that grows helps me, and the blouse that waits may be helping Paul.
His fear on my behalf is as high as the ceiling, just as mine is for him when he sits around the flat, waiting and drinking, or when he's barhopping in town.
It's easier if you're the one going out, if you're the one taking your fear away and leaving your fortune at home, and if there's someone waiting for you to come back.
Sitting at home, waiting, stretches time to the brink and tightens fear to the point of snapping.
The powers I've bestowed on my routines verge on the superhuman.
Albu yells: You see, everything is connected.
And I twist the large button on my blouse and say: In your mind they are, in my mind they aren't.
Shortly before he got off, the old man in the straw hat turned his watery eyes away from me.
Now there's a father with a child on his lap sitting on the seat facing me, his legs stretched out into the aisle.
Watching the city go by outside the window isn't something he can be bothered with.
The child sticks a forefinger up his father's nose.
Crooking a finger and hunting for snot is something kids learn early.
Later they're told not to pick anyone's nose but their own, and then only if no one's watching.
This father doesn't think that later has arrived yet; he smiles, perhaps he's enjoying it.
The tram halts in the middle of the tracks, between stops, the driver gets out.
Who knows how long we'll be stranded.
It's early in the morning and already he's sneaking a break when he should be driving his route.
Everyone here does what he wants.
The driver strolls over to the shops, tucking in his shirt and adjusting his trousers so no one will notice he's abandoned his tram in mid-route.
He acts like someone who's so bored that he finally got up off his couch just to poke his nose into the sunshine.
If he's planning to buy anything in one of the shops over there, he'll either have to say who he is or else he'll have to wait in line.
If all he's after is a cup of coffee, I hope he doesn't sit down to drink it.
He doesn't dare touch brandy, even if he does keep his window open.
Every one of us sitting on the tram has the right to reek of brandy except for him.
But he's behaving as if it were the other way round.
My summons puts me in the same position as far as brandy is concerned.
I'd rather have his reason for abstaining than my own.
Who knows when he'll be back.
Ever since I began leaving my good fortune at home, the kiss on my hand doesn't paralyze me as much as it used to.
I crook up my finger joints so that my knuckles keep Albu from speaking.
Paul and I have rehearsed this kiss.
In order to approximate the importance of the signet ring on Albu's middle finger, to see how it affects the finger-squeeze, I made a ring out of a strip of rubber and a coat button.
We took turns wearing it, and we laughed so much we completely forgot why we were going through the exercise in the first place.
I learned not to crook my hand up all at once but gradually.
That way the knuckles can block his gums and keep him from speaking.
Sometimes when Albu is kissing my hand, I think of my rehearsal with Paul.
Then the pain at my fingernails and the slobber on my hand aren't so humiliating.
You learn as you go, but I can't show that I'm learning, and whatever happens I cannot laugh.
If you're walking or driving around the leaning tower, where Paul and I live, you can't really keep more than the entranceway and the lower stories under surveillance.
From the sixth floor up the flats are too high, so that you'd need sophisticated technology to see anything in detail.
What's more, about halfway up the building, the facade angles out toward the front.
If you stare up at it long enough you'll feel your eyes rolling back into your forehead.
I've tried it often; your neck grows tired.
The leaning tower has looked like that for twelve years now, says Paul, from the day it was built.
Whenever I want to explain where I live, all I have to do is say: In the leaning tower.
Everyone in the city knows where it is.
They ask: Aren’t you afraid it might collapse.
I'm not afraid, I say, it was built with reinforced concrete.
Whenever I refer to the tower, people look down at the floor, as if looking at me might make them dizzy, so I say: Everything else in this city will collapse first.
At that they nod, to relax the veins that are twitching in their necks.
The fact that our flat is high up is an advantage for us, but it also has the disadvantage that Paul and I can't see exactly what's going on down below.
From the seventh floor you can't make out anything smaller than a suitcase, and when do you see anyone carrying a suitcase.
Individual items of clothing blur into big splotches of color, and faces turn into little pale patches between the hair and the clothes.
You could guess at what the nose, eyes, or teeth inside those patches might look like, but why bother.
Old people and children can be recognized by the way they walk.
There are dumpsters located on the grass between our building and the shops, with a walkway running alongside them.
Two narrow footpaths leave the paved sidewalk and circle around the group of bins, without quite meeting.
From up here the bins look like ransacked cupboards with the doors torn off.
Once a month someone sets them on fire, the smoke rises and the garbage is consumed.
If your windows aren't shut, your eyes start stinging and your throat gets sore.
Most things happen outside the entrances to the shops, but unfortunately all we can see are the rear service doors.
No matter how often we count them, we can never match up the twenty-seven doors in back with the eight front doors belonging to the grocer, the bread shop, the greengrocer, the pharmacy, the bar, the shoemaker, the hairdresser, and the kindergarten.
The whole rear wall is riddled with doors; nevertheless, the delivery trucks stop mostly in the street, out front.
The old shoemaker was complaining he had too little room and too many rats.
His shop consists of a workbench enclosed in a small space that is partitioned from the rest of the room by a makeshift wall of wooden planks.
The man I took over from was the one who fixed the place up, the shoemaker said.
Back then the building was new.
The space was boarded off then too, but he couldn't think of anything to do with all those planks, or maybe he just didn't want to; anyway, he didn't use them at all.
I knocked in a few nails and ever since I've been hanging the shoes up by their laces, thongs, or heels, they don't get gnawed on anymore.
I can't have the rats eating everything after all, I have to pay for the damage.
Especially in winter, when they're hungrier.
Behind those planks there's a great big hall.

Once, back in the early days, during a holiday, I came down to the shop, loosened two of the boards behind the bench, and squeezed through with a flashlight.
There's nowhere you can put your feet, the whole floor skitters and squeaks, he said, it's full of rats' nests.
Rats don't need a door, you know, they just tunnel through the ground.
The walls are covered with electrical sockets, and the back wall has four doors leading out to the bins.
But you can't budge them so much as an inch to drive the rats out even for a couple hours.
The door to my workplace is just a cheap piece of tin-in fact, more than half the doors in back of the shops aren't doors at all, they're just tin plates they built into the wall to save on concrete.
The sockets are probably there in case of war.
There'll always be war all right, he laughed, but not here.
The Russians have got us where they want us with treaties, they won't be showing up here.
Whatever they need, they've shipped off to Moscow: they eat our grain and our meat and leave us to go hungry and fight over the shortages.
Who'd want to conquer us, all it would do is cost them money.
Every country on earth is happy not to have us, even the Russians.
The driver returns, eating a crescent roll, in no particular hurry.
His shirt has slipped back outside his trousers, as if he'd been driving the whole time.
His cheeks are stuffed with food, he runs his hand through his hair, clutching a half-eaten roll and making more of a face than the effort of chewing calls for.
Now he tidies up on the step up to the car, although not for us.
For us he puts on a grouchy face so no one in the tram will dare utter a word.
He climbs in, his other hand holding a second roll, while a third is poking out of his shirt pocket.
Slowly the tram starts moving.
The father with the boy has taken his legs out of the aisle and stretched them between the seats.
His son is licking the pane, but instead of pulling the boy away, the man is holding the little one's neck so his little bright-red tongue can reach the window.
The boy turns his head, stares, grabs his father's ear, and babbles.
The father doesn't bother to wipe the dribble off the boy's chin.
Maybe he's actually listening.
But his thoughts are clearly elsewhere as he stares out through the saliva smeared on the windowpane, as if it were perfectly normal for windows to drool.
The hair at the back of his head is shorn close, like on a pelt.
Running through it is the bald line of a scar.
For a whole week, when summer came and people began running around in short sleeves, Paul and I were suspicious of a man who to this day walks over from the shops every morning at ten to eight, empty-handed.
Every day he steps off the paved sidewalk and follows the paths around the dumpsters and then steps back on the sidewalk and returns to the shops.
At one point Paul couldn't stand it any longer, he stuffed some paper in a plastic bag and set out to follow the man.
He didn't come back until lunch, equipped with a long white loaf of the kind you can carry under your arm.
With that he headed for the street the next morning at a quarter past seven, and at ten to eight, after the man had completed his circuit of the dumpsters, Paul returned with the same loaf of bread now broken in two.
Evidently the man is about forty, wears a cross on a gold chain, has an anchor tattooed on one inner arm and the name Ana on the other.
He lives in a bright-green row house on Mulberry Street and every morning, before he makes his circuit of the dumpsters, he drops off a blubbering boy at the kindergarten.
There's no reason for him to pass by our tower on his way home from the kindergarten, unless he just wants a change of pace.
Though it's hardly a change if you take the same detour every single day.
Paul says: The man walks by the trash cans because they're near a bar he just passed that's nagging at him.
The brandy-like smell of fermenting garbage somehow eases his guilty conscience, so he does an about-face and orders his first brandy of the day in the bar.
The rest of the glasses follow automatically.
Around nine o'clock he's joined by another man wearing a short-sleeved brown summer suit, who only drinks two cups of coffee but stays at the man's table until five to twelve, when it's time to pick up the child.
The boy is still crying at noon, when he sees the man waiting for him.
To my nose the trash cans don't stink of brandy, but drinkers may have a different sense of smell.
Still, why does the man insist on craning his neck and looking up while he's making his rounds down there.
And who is that person who keeps him company in the bar.
I suspect Paul has himself in mind when he says that the man is lifting his head up to heaven as he heads home, in order to stave off the guilt he feels at hitting the booze.
And why does the child cry when he sees him, maybe he doesn't belong to the man at all.
Paul has no idea but says: Who'd borrow a kid.
Obviously Paul never does the shopping, or else he'd know that people really do borrow children to get larger rations of meat, milk, and bread in the shops.
Why does Paul say this drinker goes to such and such a place every morning when in fact he only followed the man for one morning and part of an afternoon.
It could all be coincidence rather than habit.
Albu is trained to notice such things.
At varying intervals, and just to confuse me, he asks the same thing at least three times before he's satisfied with the answer.
Only then does he say: You see, things are getting connected.
Paul says I should follow the alcoholic myself if I'm not satisfied with his report.
But I'd rather not.

A bag in your hand and a loaf under your arm doesn't make you invisible; it could easily give you away.
I no longer stand beside our window at ten to eight, although every morning it occurs to me that the man is walking around down there, craning his neck.
Nor do I say anything anymore, because Paul digs in so, insisting he's right, as if he needs this drinker in his life more than he needs me.
As if our life would be easier if the man caught between his child and his drink were simply a tormented father.
That may all be true, I say, but he still might be doing a little spying on the side.
Now the driver has scratched the salt off his second crescent roll.
The coarse grains burn your tongue and ruin the enamel on your teeth.
And salt makes you thirsty, maybe he doesn't want to be drinking water all the time, because he can't go to the toilet while he's on duty, and because the more you drink the more you sweat.
My grandfather told me that in the camp they used salt from evaporated water to clean their teeth.
They would take it in their mouth and rub it over their teeth with the tip of their tongue.
But that salt was as fine as dust.
After the driver finished his first roll he swigged something from a bottle.
Water, I hope.
A truck full of sheep crosses the intersection.
The sheep are crammed in so tight they can't fall over no matter how bumpy the ride.
No heads, no bellies, just black and white wool.
Only when we take the turn do I notice a dog's head in their midst.
And a man in a small green climbing cap, the kind that shepherds wear, sitting in the cab, next to the driver.
They're probably moving the flock to a new pasture-you don't need a dog at the slaughterhouse.
Some things aren't bad until you start talking about them.
I've learned how to hold my tongue before it gets me into trouble, but usually it's already too late, because sooner or later I always want to have my say.
Whenever Paul and I don't understand something that troubles other people, we start to quarrel.
Things quickly escalate until they get out of hand, and every salvo calls for an even more thunderous one in return.
I think we see in that alcoholic man the things that most torment us, and these things are different for each of us, despite our common love.
Evidently drinking troubles Paul more than my being summoned.
He drinks the most whenever I'm summoned, and on those days especially I have no right to reproach him for his drinking, even though his being drunk troubles me more than..
My first husband also had a tattoo.
He returned home from the army with a rose threaded through a heart inked on his chest.
My name beneath the stem.
But I left him nevertheless.
Why in the world have you gone and ruined your skin.
The only place that rosy heart might possibly look right is on your gravestone.
Because the days were long and I was thinking of you, he explained, and everybody else was getting one.
Apart from the chicken-hearts.
We had our share of those, just like anywhere else.
I didn't leave him for some other man, as he suspected, I just wanted to leave him.
He wanted an itemized list of the reasons why.
I couldn't spell out a single one.
Are you disappointed in me, he asked.
Or have I changed.
No, we were both exactly the same as when we met.
Love can't go on just running in place, but that's what our love had been doing for two and a half years.
He looked at me, and when I said nothing, he declared: You're one of those who needs a good beating now and then, only I wasn't up to giving it to you.
He meant it, since he knew he could never raise a hand against me.
I believed it too.
Up to that day on the bridge he wasn't even capable of slamming a door in anger.
It was already half past seven in the evening.
He asked me to dash out with him to buy a suitcase before the shops closed.
He was planning to leave the next day for a two-week trip to the mountains.
He expected me to miss him.
But two weeks is nothing.
Even our two and a half years weren't much.
We left the store and walked through the city in silence.
He was carrying the new suitcase.
The shop had been about to close and the salesgirl hadn't cleaned out the case, it was stuffed full of paper and had a price tag dangling from the handle.
The previous day there had been a down pour, the high, silty water was tearing at the willows along the river.
Halfway across the bridge he stopped and squeezed my arm.
He was kneading my flesh so hard, down to the bone, that I shuddered, and he said: Look at all that water.
If I come back from the mountains and find you've left me, I'll jump right in.
The suitcase was suspended between us; behind him I could see water, and branches, and muddy scum.
I yelled: You can jump right now, with me watching.
Then you won't have to bother going to the mountains.
I took a deep breath and lowered my head.
It wasn't my fault if he thought I wanted a kiss.
He parted his lips, but I repeated: Go on and jump.
I'll take full responsibility.
Then I jerked my arm away so both his hands were free and he could jump.
I was numb with the fear that he'd actually do it.
Then I walked on, taking short steps, without looking back, so he wouldn't have to feel awkward, and so I'd be far enough away from the body.
I'd nearly reached the far side of the bridge when he came panting after me and shoved me up against the railing, crushing my belly.
He grabbed me by the back of my neck and forced my head down toward the water as far as his arm would let him.
The whole weight of my body was hanging over the railing, my feet were off the ground, he kept his knees clamped tight around my calves.
I shut my eyes and waited for a final word before I plummeted.
He kept it short and said: All right.
Who can say why instead of loosening his knees to let me drop he relaxed his grip on my neck, lowered me to the ground, and took a step away.
I opened my eyes and slowly they rolled back down from my forehead and into my face.
The sky hung there reddish blue, no longer firmly anchored, and the river was spooling brown eddies of water.
I started to run before he registered that I was still alive.
I never wanted to stop again.
The terror came jolting up into my mouth, giving me the hiccups.
A man wheeled his bike past me, ringing the bell, and called out: Hey, sweetie, keep your mouth closed or else your heart'll catch a chill.
Reeling, I stopped in my tracks, my legs shaking, my hands heavy. I was burning and freezing and hadn't run far at all, just a short distance, but I felt as though I'd raced halfway around the globe.
I could still feel his viselike grip cutting into my neck.
The man wheeled his bike into the park, the tires left long ripples snaking through the sand behind him, the tarmac ahead was completely deserted.
The park was a sheer wall of blackish green, the sky clutching at the trees.
The bridge made me horribly anxious and I couldn't help looking back.
And there stood the suitcase, right in the middle of the bridge, exactly where it had been left.
And he was standing right on the spot where I had run away from death, his face turned to the water.
Between hiccups I could hear him whistling.
Very melodically, without missing a beat, a tune he had learned from me.
My hiccups vanished, frozen between one wave of terror and the next.
I raised a hand to my throat and felt my larynx bobbing.
Everything happened in a twinkling, the time it takes for one person to assault another.
And there he stood on the bridge, whistling
O the tree has its leaves,
the tea has its water,
money has its paper,
and my heart has snow that's fallen astray.
Now I think it was a lucky thing that he grabbed me by the neck.
That way no one could accuse me of provoking him.
But he came very close to committing murder.
All because he wasn't up to giving me a good beating, and because he despised himself for that.
The father had nodded off and was holding the child so loosely I could see him falling any moment.
Then the boy kicked him in the stomach with his shoes.
The father gave a start and pulled the boy back onto his lap.
The boy's little sandals are dangling like little toys, as if his parents had dressed him that morning in some of his playthings.
Their new soles had yet to step on the street.
The father has handed the boy a handkerchief to play with.
It's knotted, and must have a hard object wrapped into the knot, which the child is now using to hit the windowpane.
Coins maybe, keys, nails, or else screws the father doesn't want to lose.
The driver hears the banging; he turns around and says: Go on, keep it up, those windows cost money, you know.
Don't worry, says the father, we're not going to break it.
He taps on the pane and points outside and says to the boy: See that, there's a baby inside there who's even smaller than you.
The boy drops the handkerchief and says: Mami.
He sees a woman with a stroller.
And the father says: Our Mami doesn't wear sunglasses.
If she did, she wouldn't be able to see how blue your eyes are.
Whenever Paul asks me about my first husband, I say: I've forgotten all that, I don't remember a thing.
I think I have more secrets from Paul than he does from me.
Lilli once said that secrets don't go away when you tell them, what you can tell are the shells, not the kernel.
That may have been true for her, but for me, if I don't keep something concealed, then I've already exposed the kernel.
You call it shells, I said, when something goes as far as it did on the bridge.
But you tell the story the way it suits you, Lilli said.
How is it supposed to suit me, it doesn't suit me at all.
Of course it makes you look bad, and him as well, Lilli said, but it suits you because you can talk about it however you like.
Not however I like.
I tell it the way it was.
You just don't believe I'm telling you anything you wouldn't tell me.
That's why you're going on about shells.
The point is that no matter how often I tell these stories, they stay the same, like the secret about my stepfather.
The last thing I need is to drive myself crazy wondering about the alcoholic by the trash cans.
And who knows what he's thinking; after all, he's been seeing me next to the window for days on end as well.
Finally, since we've never managed to agree about the alcoholic, Paul and I have given up puzzling about the people down below.
Whether they move in a square or in circles or straight ahead, it's impossible to know them.
Even if you go down to the street and walk right next to them, what can you tell.
The fact that their gait looks alien, as if their toes were in back, has nothing to do with their feet, only with me.
Of course we're still constantly looking out our window.
And even though there's nothing puzzling about a car parked, to no apparent purpose, behind the shops, or else perched halfway on the sidewalk in front of our apartment house, where no normal person is allowed to park-this is more than enough to keep us busy.
I prefer looking out the kitchen window.
There the swallows fly through a vast stretch of sky in circles of their own invention.
This morning they were flying low, and I chewed my walnut and could tell by looking at them that it was a whole new day.
Since I've been summoned, it will have to stay a window day, even if I can see half a tree to one side of the Major's table.
The tree must have grown the length of an arm since my first interrogation.
In winter it's the bare wood that marks the time, in summer it's the foliage.
The leaves nod or shake their head, depending on the wind, but I can't rely on that.
When the question is short, it means Albu wants the answer right away.
Short questions aren't necessarily the easiest.
I'll have to think about it.
You mean you'll have to think up some lie, he says.
Of course you could have one all ready and waiting, but that takes brains.
Which you don't have, sad to say.
All right, so I'm dumb, but not so dumb as to say something that might hurt me.
Nor am I dumb enough to let myself feel pressured when Albu's trying to gauge if I'm lying or telling the truth.
Sometimes his eyes are cool, sometimes they burn into me so that…

Sometimes Lilli is inside me and gazes too long into Albu's eyes.
I shuffle my shoes under the table, then it's not so quiet.
O the tree has its leaves, the tea has its water, money has its paper, and my heart has snow that's fallen astray.
A winter and summer song, but for outside.
In here you can quickly fall into a trap with foliage and snow.
I don't know the tree's name, otherwise I'd sing ash, acacia, poplar in my head, and not just tree.
I twist at the button on the blouse that grows.
I never get as close to the branches as the Major, not from my small table.
We both look at the tree at the same time.
I would like to ask: What sort of tree is that.
It would be a distraction.
He wouldn't answer me, that's for sure, just scrape his chair forward and, with his trouser cuffs loose about his ankles, he might fiddle with his signet ring or play with the stub of his pencil and turn the question around: Why do you need to know that.
What could I say then.
He doesn't know why I always wear the same blouse, just as he always wears his signet ring.
He also doesn't know why I twist the large button.
And I don't know why he always keeps that chewed pencil stub, no longer than a match, lying on his table.
Men wear signet rings, women wear earrings.
Wedding rings make you superstitious, you never take them off until you die.
If the man dies, the widow takes his ring and wears it next to hers, day and night, on her ring finger.
Like all married people, Albu wears his narrow wedding ring at work.
But jewelry at a job like that, tormenting people.
It's not an ugly ring by any means, and if it weren't his it would be beautiful.
The same is true of his eyes, cheeks, earlobes.
I'm sure Lilli would gladly have stretched out her hands to stroke him; maybe even have introduced him to me one day as her lover.
He's good-looking, I'd have had to say.
Lilli's beauty was a given, what your eyes saw wasn't to blame for dazzling them so.
Her nose, the curve of her neck, her ear, her knee, in your amazement you wanted to protect them, cover them with your hand, you were afraid for them, and your thoughts turned to death.
But it never occurred to me that such skin might someday wrinkle.
Between her being young and being dead, it never crossed my mind that Lilli might age.
With Albu's skin, age is simply there, as if his flesh had nothing to do with it.
His age is a rank to which he has been promoted in recognition of his sterling work.
From this point on, nothing more will change, he will maintain his superiority, with nothing else to come but death.
I wish it would come soon.
Albu's good looks are flawless, tailor-made for interrogations, his personal appearance is never at risk, not even when he’s slobbering on my hand.
Perhaps it is his very distinction that forbids him to mention Lilli.
The chewed pencil on his table doesn't suit him, or anyone else his age.
Surely Albu doesn't need to save on pencils.
Perhaps he's proud that his grandson is teething.
A photo of his grandson might serve instead of the pencil stub, except that here, as in all offices, it's probably forbidden to put family pictures on display.
Perhaps a stub like that works well for his upright script.
Or maybe a longer pencil would rub at his signet ring.
Or maybe the stub is supposed to let me know exactly how much is being written about people like me.
We know everything, Albu says.
Maybe so--and here I agree with Lilli-about the shells of the dead.

But nothing about their secrets, nothing about the kernels, about Lilli, whom Albu never mentions.
Nothing about good fortune or common sense, which together may cause something tomorrow that I cannot foresee today.
And nothing about what chance may bring the day after tomorrow; after all, I am alive.
There's nothing special about the fact that Albu and I are looking at the tree together.
Our eyes fall on other things at the same time as well: my table or his, a section of wall, the door, or the floor.
Or he looks at his pencil and I look at my finger.
Or he looks at his ring and I look at my large button.
Or he looks at my face and I look at the wall.
Or I look at his face and he looks at the door.
Constantly looking each other in the face is tiring, particularly for me.
The only things I trust here are the ones that don't change.
But the tree is growing: it gave the blouse its name.
I may leave my happiness a