The Appointment by Herta Müller Page B

mother was two months pregnant. As a war widow she received two care packages every year from the German Red Cross, one of them contained the quilt she had used ever since to cover herself up in bed. Another one had the blue skirt with the accordion pleats that Lilli wore, because it was too tight for her mother. Even if nobody else had a skirt like that, it was still far from pretty. It was made of some hard thin material that glistened as if it had just been drenched in water. You expected it to start dripping around the hem. I said:
    It might work for old women, a little corrugated tin around the hips to hide the widows’ flab.
    So what, it’s practical, and the blue matches my eyes, saidLilli. Whenever she talked about her mother, she would also mention the dead soldier who never had the chance to be her father. Occasionally we’d be in the city, she’d take out her wallet, and I could see the white scalloped edge of a photo sticking out. Once I asked her:
    Who’s that you’ve got inside there.
    Lilli stashed the wallet back in her coat, then said:
    My father.
    Is he a secret, I asked.
    Yes.
    Why talk about him, then.
    Because you came right out and asked.
    First you talked about him and then I asked.
    I never said a thing about the picture.
    Well you might as well go on and show it to me, if he’s right there.
    How can he be right here if he’s dead, she said.
    I fanned my forehead with my hand:
    Are you nuts.
    Lilli took the picture out of the wallet and held it out for me to see. He wasn’t even twenty, he had a wry smile and was wearing a jagged white daisy in the buttonhole of his tunic. Lilli had the same nose and eyes. I reached for the picture, Lilli shoved my hand away:
    You can look but you can’t touch.
    I tapped on Lilli’s forehead with my index finger.
    You’re cuckoo.
    Seen enough.
    No, you keep shaking it.
    Then Lilli turned the photo upside down, so her father seemed to be hanging by his legs. Upside down or not I immediately noticed that the collar insignia and the front of his caphad been inked over—those places were glossy, although the picture itself was matte. Embarrassment usually makes people’s eyes go narrow, but hers were wide open and forgot how to blink. Lilli was spoiling for an argument, but not because of the inked-out spots on the uniform.
    Put it away, I said.
    Why, you’re slurping him up with your eyes.
    I’m sorry, I shouted.
    What does that mean, you’re sorry, she asked.
    Are you jealous.
    Maybe you are, he’s much too young for me.
    Right now he’d be just right.
    I never thought of that.
    But I did, I said.
     
    Every day after
work I was happy to be rid of Nelu. I paced up and down the tram stop in front of the low, grimy buildings, the windows of which protruded slightly over the pavement. Behind the curtains, lights were already burning in the winter afternoon. Patches of ice gleamed in the potholes like spilt milk, trucks were rumbling past, whirling up the snow behind them, and in the whirls, I saw the boy with his dust snakes. He could run better ever since he was dead, and my father could drive better too. But the street swallowed the rumbling and the whirls of snowy dust and then forgot where it was going. I let one tram go by, then two, three. Paul worked an hour and a half longer than I did, anyway. There was nothing to go home to. Other trucks drove by, if I was in luck there’d be a bus among them as well.
    Last summer after work Paul again had to ride his motorbike home barefoot, shirtless, and wearing borrowed trousers.While he was in the shower everything he’d been wearing had disappeared—shirt, trousers, underpants, socks, and sandals. Although a guard had been posted in the changing room ever since spring, it was the fourth time that summer that Paul had finished his shower and found he had nothing more than his bare skin. Stealing isn’t considered such a bad thing in the factory. The factory belongs to the people, you belong to the