The Appointment by Herta Müller Page A

in the wake of my gray platforms and I was lucky to have escaped in the nick of time. Nothing was too far-fetched for that place, it could make evening come before the afternoon; it could pull the sun over and make it hang suspended in the sky behind the factory, glowing like a ball of fire, and then have it set inside the buildings, dark as a breadpan, before the day was done. I thought of the early evening hours after Papa’s funeral. We came home from the cemetery, my grandfather went into the yard, turned on the faucet, and hauled the garden hose over to the peach trees. Mama called:
    Not in your best suit, go and change.
    I ran after him. Because of the drought, he said, as if the peaches would have died of thirst during the next quarter of an hour. The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said:
    You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. Andbefore you’ve even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it’s all just the farty sputter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It’s not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.
    Now my grandfather had stretched his legs for the second time. I wanted to get on the train so as to ride through the cornfields before they turned black. Past the little railway stations that looked like doghouses. Be far away when Mama set the last plate on the table. Through all the years it must have been my brother’s plate and my brother’s hunger that kept her eating. That explains why she could cope so well alone, as if her table had never had more than a single plate.
    When I looked at the light-blue train ticket, I knew how fortunate I’d been that my father hadn’t tangled me up inside his love. His spunk was smarter than his brain. My good fortune that the promise of forbidden flesh meant more to him than the wetness of my half-eaten pear. Even in her wildest nightmares Mama didn’t deserve to have me, in my youth, take her place and transport my father back to their first years of love, simply to secure our family against the woman with the long braid.
    Things worked out differently for Lilli. Her mother’s second husband was the first man Lilli could get her hands on.
    He never became repulsive to me, Lilli said, but in time he did come to seem ordinary. The fact that we’d be at it as soon as my mother left the house became more of a habit than using the door handle.
    Lilli’s secret became history when she met the night porter with the war wound on the back of his neck. Until he retired, Lilli would join him after midnight and they would lie behind the wall of keys in the foyer. Later she spent her evenings in the storage room of a leather shop where the clothes were stacked up to the window, until the shopkeeper moved to the countrywith his wife. After that she made rounds at the hospital, until her night-duty doctor went to visit his brother-in-law in Buenos Aires and never came back. Later Lilli moved her love up to the afternoon and into the darkroom of a photographer she’d fallen for.
    Having to hurry turns me on, said Lilli.
    Sinning with her stepfather was ancient history, but Lilli’s eyes still sharpened like cut glass when she said:
    My mother sleeps with her second husband but tucks herself in with the death of her first.
    Keeping a secret and having to hurry were more important to Lilli than feelings. Except for the old officer, every man with whom she began something had a wife at home. The first year, with her stepfather, was the riskiest and most beautiful. Later Lilli admitted that there was nothing so great about things being secret. That’s just how it always turned out. The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse, she said.
    Lilli was German. Just after he married, her father was drafted and then blown to pieces by a mine during the war. Lilli’s