The second hind leg has been cut off and shoved against the fur as if it were still attached. Apart from that everything is the way it was, room, table, bed, kitchen, bread, sugar, flour. Blind air presses against the window outside, blind walls stare at one another. Adina asks herself how the room, the table, the bed can allow this to happen.
Adina sets her alarm clock for early in the morning, the hands revolve, the grass straw turns in Ilie’s mouth. She’s made up her mind to go see him.
* * *
The flashlight isn’t enough to see by, but the circle in front of her shoes is just bright enough to make her avert her eyes. The figures at the streetcar are empty clothes pacing back and forth, with full bags even at this early hour.
The tracks squeal, the streetcar whooshes past the buildings. The bright windows slow down as they pass, the people waiting all know where the door will open when the car comes to a stop. Elbows push. Sleep rides along with the passengers, their winter sweat has a bitter odor. When the streetcar makes a turn the light blinks once or twice, it’s yellow and weak and nonetheless jumps right in your face. Two reddish-brown chickens peek out of a woman’s basket. They crane their necks and hold their beaks half-open as if searching for air. Their eyes are flat and reddish-brown like their feathers. But when they crane their necks, a pinhead shines inside the pupils.
* * *
One spring the seamstress from the outskirts of town bought ten chicks at the market. She didn’t have a broody hen. I sit here and sew and they just grow on their own, she said. As long as they still had their down feathers she kept the chicks in the workshop, where they scampered around or sat on the scraps of fabric and warmed themselves. After they grew bigger they were out in the yard from dawn to dusk. But one chick always stayed in the workshop. It hopped over the scraps on just one leg, the other was crippled. It perched for hours watching the seamstress sew. When she got up it would hop after her. If there weren’t any customers she would talk to it. The chicken had rusty red feathers and rusty red eyes. Since it ran around the least it grew the fastest and became fat the soonest. That chicken was the first one killed, before the summer had really settled in. The other chickens scrabbled around in the courtyard.
The seamstress talked about the crippled chicken for a whole summer. I had to kill it, she said, it was like a child.
* * *
The man on the platform has a large black mustache on his face, a large black velvet hat on his head, and a three-legged sheet-metal stove in front of his stomach. The woman next to him has a floral headscarf, a flowery skirt, and a one-elbow stove pipe under her arm. And the child next to her has a cap with a thick tassel on his head and a stove door in his hand.
* * *
Adina enters the compartment. An old man is sitting across from a mother and father, with their child between them all bundled up.
The night begins to tatter. Adina looks at the viaduct above the tracks, and the stairs leading up to it. Large shapes in dark clothes climb the stairs, the ones already on the viaduct seem small, as if they were walking around heaven, as if anyone who made it there got shrunk by half, like a child shriveled with age, before the workday has even begun.
The stairs on the other side of the viaduct lead down to the factory gate. Even with the trains running through your ears you can still hear the factory.
* * *
Sleep, says the mother, the child leans against her shoulder. The housing blocks loom in the dark. Behind them, at the edge of the city, is the city prison, the watchtowers ride past the window, with an identical soldier frozen inside each one. Another Ilie, thinks Adina, one trusted by the night, by the cold, by authority and power and by his weapon, even when he’s all alone.
* * *
For a year Ilie had to travel to Bucharest every month on duty, always taking this same route out of town, past the prison. The cells are located in back, by the prison yard. People who don’t have family or friends locked up don’t see the cells, Ilie said back then, but those who do have someone there know where to look. For a few hundred meters along this stretch, he said, the faces inside the compartment separate. And it’s obvious which eyes know where to look.
* * *
The trick is to stay asleep, then you won’t feel anything, the father tells the child. The child nods. The woman with the reddish-brown chicks walks past the compartment.
I always used to sleep in the train, says the old man, and in the streetcar too. Every morning I’d ride into town from our village and every evening I’d ride back. For twenty-seven years I had to be on the platform at five in the morning. I knew the way like I know the Lord’s Prayer. Once I bet someone a sheep that I could make it to the station with my eyes closed, and I won that sheep. I found the way blindfolded, and in the middle of winter with ice and snow on top of that. And it’s a long way, too, more than three thousand steps. Back then, he says, I knew every crack in the earth, I knew where there was a hump and where there was a hole. And I knew three streets ahead of time where a dog was going to bark and where a rooster would crow. And if the rooster didn’t crow on Monday I knew it had been killed on Sunday. I always fell asleep at work, the man said, I was a tailor and I could even sleep with a needle in my mouth.
I want an apple, says the child, and the mother says, sleep now, and the father says, oh give him an apple.
But now I’m old, says the man, and I can’t sleep anymore, not even in my bed. That doesn’t matter, he says, doesn’t matter at all.
The child bites into the apple, chews slowly and bores his finger into the hole. Is it good, asks the mother and the child says, it’s cold.
* * *
On Mondays during the winter, Adina’s father would bring a bag full of little apples back from the slaughterhouse. They were so cold that their skins fogged up white the way eyeglasses do. Adina would eat one right away. The first bite hurt, the flesh was so cold it uncoiled into her temples before she could swallow it. And with the second piece the cold filled her whole head. That bite didn’t hurt anymore because her brain was already frozen.
After Adina had eaten the cold apple she took three more into the yard and let them freeze overnight. She set them on a rock, a hand’s width apart, so the dark frost could gnaw all around the peel. In the morning she thawed them in the kitchen. Then they were soft and brown. Frozen apples were Adina’s favorite.
* * *
The child’s father has stepped out of the compartment and has been standing a long time in the corridor with the bare field in his forehead. He has spotted three deer, each time he called to the sleeping mother, and each time she shifted her head and the child but didn’t get up.
Now the other passengers are crowding into the corridor, Adina as well, along with a round woman wearing a fox collar with tied paws, and the thin old man who won a bet and a sheep.
The Danube is riding along with the train, the passengers can see the far bank and the roads on the other side, thin as a thread, and moving cars and forests. Not a single shoe shuffles in the corridor, no one moves, no one speaks. The old man’s eyes, too, widen and press away his wrinkles. The father catches his breath, a forbidden sigh. Then he closes his mouth, look, Yugoslavia, he calls into the compartment. But the mother stays in her seat. Her brother swam across six years ago, he says, now he’s in Vienna. He squints, trying to make out individual waves in the glare, do you have children, he asks. Adina says, no.
* * *
The waiting room has no bench, just a cold cast-iron stove. The cracked concrete floor is strewn with light green spittle and sunflower seeds. Above the stove is a wall newspaper with the dictator’s portrait appearing three times, the black inside the eye is as big as the button on Adina’s coat. It shines. And the spit on the floor shines.