The sick rangers also said they saw dogs and cats. And men and women coupling in the darker places or in the clearings in the fading twilight. And children stuffing grass in each other’s mouths in the mornings and playing hide-and-seek and forgetting all about the game when they realize no one is looking for them.
Paul hears these children now and then because they climb over three rows of barbed wire into the hospital yard to get to the rusty windowless ambulance cars, and what they’re looking for is pain.
The smallest man carries the biggest cane
The windshield is covered with thick dust.
Her hair is caught under his elbow. His mouth pants as his belly thrusts. She presses her face against the back of the seat. She can hear his watch ticking. The ticking smells of hurried roads, lunch breaks, gasoline. His underwear is on the floor, his pants are draped over the steering wheel. The cornstalks outside are leaning into the window, peering at her face. Her panties are under his shoe.
The silk on the ears is torn and brittle. The leaves give off a dry rattle, the stalks are twiggy and lean and knock against one another. Between the tassels grows colorless sky.
She closes her eyes. The colorless sky above the cornfield breaks into her forehead.
Something clatters outside the car.
She opens her eyes at once and sees a bicycle propped against a cornstalk. A man in the field shoulders a sack and carries it to the bicycle. Someone’s coming, she says.
The cornstalks knock against the man’s head.
Clara’s panties have a tread mark left by the shoe. She puts them on. He won’t bother us, says Pavel, he’s stealing corn. Clara looks at his watch. The man wheels his bicycle through the dry cornstalks.
I have to get back to the factory, says Clara. Pavel tugs his pants off the steering wheel, sunflower seeds drop from his pocket onto his bare knee, how long can you be gone from the courthouse, asks Clara.
The car hums, gray from all the dust. I don’t work at the courthouse, says Pavel. Clara’s dress is crumpled, her back wet with sweat. Aren’t you a lawyer, asks Clara. Yes, he says, but not at the courthouse. The sky broadens because the corn is now running in the opposite direction, what’s left is a low, rattling field that stretches to the horizon. I saw you in a different car, says Clara. He looks out the window and asks, where. By the cathedral, on the street next to the park, the car was black. She sees the sunflower seeds scattered between his shoes. Pavel turns the wheel so lightly his hands don’t seem to do a thing. There are black cars in every factory, he says. She sees the seconds ticking on his watch, but you don’t work in a factory.
He says nothing and shrugs his shoulders. And Clara says nothing and looks out the window.
* * *
In Clara’s factory there is a corner where the sky closes all vision, where a bright weariness lurks day after day, waiting to climb into the city. Into the lunch breaks and the empty afternoon days. A weariness that closes the eyes somewhere between the wire and the rust. That throbs in the head when the gateman’s hand is rummaging through a bag. A weariness that places the same aged faces opposite each other in the streetcar between the stops. A weariness that enters an apartment before the person returning home, the way eyes can enter before the head. And that stays in the apartment until the day comes to an end, somewhere between the door to the apartment and the window that looks outside.
Clara looks at Pavel’s temples. And what if I think the worst, she says.
* * *
Caught in the glass, Pavel’s birthmark is black like the fresh molehills in the grass outside the windshield.
The car searches out the potholes in the road. Pavel tugs on his reddish-blue flecked tie. One of Clara’s hairs is caught on his collar. She picks it off with her fingertips. Pavel presses his neck against her hand and asks, what is it. She says, nothing, a hair. What will you tell your wife. The lane of poplars flies up along the roadside. He says, nothing. How old is your daughter. He says, eight. The poplars drop yellow leaves on both sides of the road. Clara’s fingers become uncertain and drop the hair.
I know what I know, says Pavel.
A crow sits in the wheatgrass, glossy, gleaming.
* * *
Next to the room with the loudspeaker is a little escape ladder leading up to the attic. The ladder has thin iron rungs. Clara follows Eva’s heels as they climb. Mara, Anca and Maria are already there. The undersized attic window isn’t fully closed, just ajar. Eva pushes it all the way open. Down below, on the other side of the yard, are three stairs and an open door. Behind the door is a corridor that connects the men’s changing room on the left with their showers on the right.
Mara’s hair is right in Eva’s face. Anca’s shoulder is digging into Maria’s back, Maria’s barrette is scratching Clara’s ear.
The men climb up the stairs in their work smocks like they do every day, then they walk down the corridor and go into the door on the left. A while later they reemerge naked and walk across the corridor to the door on the right that leads to the showers. The steam from the hot water clouds the corridor. But from May through September the late afternoon sun falls across the factory yard at just the right angle to hit both the stairs and the corridor. Then the light pierces the steam and the naked men are fully visible as they pass from one door to the other.
The naked men scrunch their feet as they walk, stepping gingerly with knotty toes, because the concrete floor is always wet and cold and slippery. They have fat stomachs and withered backs and hunch their shoulders. Their bellies are covered with hair, their thighs thin. Their pubic hair forms thick knots. Their testicles cannot be seen from the attic window. Only their dangling penises.
Blond men have such white cocks, says Mara. Eva leans on Mara’s back and says, all Moldavians have white cocks. Not old George, says Maria. I haven’t seen his yet, says Clara. Her bangs get in her eye, she brushes them back and discovers a thread of corn silk. Eva says, George just went up the stairs, he’ll come out soon. Mara raises her face above Eva’s. Her eyes are big. Clara lets the corn silk fall to the floor.
The dwarf, says Maria, my God, the dwarf has the biggest of all. The shortest man carries the biggest cane.
Clara stands on her tiptoes.
The grass straw in the mouth
A woman stands in the window in the apartment opposite Adina’s, watering her petunias. She’s no longer young but not yet old, Paul said about her years ago, when he still lived with Adina. Even then the woman had chestnut-red hair done up in big waves. And the windowpane already had a slanted crack. Five years have passed without leaving any mark on the woman’s face. Her hair hasn’t stiffened or grown paler. And every year the white petunias are different and yet the same.
Back then the white petunias were already drooping, all the woman could see when she watered were their bent stems. She couldn’t see their white funnels.
People who looked up from the street and saw little spots of white high among the windows and didn’t know they were petunias thought they were seeing children’s socks or handkerchiefs, fluttering in the summer breeze all the way into the fall.
Adina stands on the fox pelt in front of her half-opened wardrobe. She’s looking for her gray wool skirt. Her skirts are all on hangers, the thin summer ones in front of the winter skirts. When the seasons change, the clothes switch places in the wardrobe, and Adina can see how long Ilie’s been away. His clothes don’t change hangers or drawers or shelves. They just lie there as though he were no longer alive. A picture on the wall shows him standing with his shoes in the grass. But the grass doesn’t belong to him and the shoes don’t belong to him. Nor do his pants, jacket or cap.