Everything that shines also sees.
* * *
There’s a bench outside the station, Ilie wrote her in the summer, the bus stop is next to that. The bus is only for officers riding out to their unit from the small town. Still, now and then the driver will give the soldiers a lift, but he prefers to take young women.
Five officers are sitting in the bus. They wear green caps with gray fur earflaps bound with green ties. The officers’ ears are visible below the flaps, rimmed red from the burning frost. The backs of their heads are shaven.
The driver is wearing a hat, and underneath his coat he’s wearing a suit. White cuffs with dark streaks of dirt and thick blue buttons stick out of his coat sleeves. A signet ring gleams on his left hand. Three officers climb in.
Where to, the driver asks. Adina hoists her bag onto the step, to the unit, she says. As he bends over, his blue scarf drops over his hand. He carries her bag into the aisle, our army is always in need of beautiful women, he says. The officers break out in a squall of laughter.
Adina takes the first seat, next to an officer with white-haired temples. The smell of damp winter clothes fills the air. Who is the young lady hoping to visit, asks a voice from the back, and Adina turns her head and sees a gold tooth behind the empty seats. Her black coat is lost in all the green coats. A soldier, she says. Outside the window a factory spews pipes and fencing into an open field. The driver raises his hand and says, we have a lot of those, when we get there the young lady can pick whichever one she wants.
The corn turns away from the window, broken, forgotten in the frost, why just one, says the man with the gold tooth, this country has more than enough to spare. The laughter bursts ahead into a section of forest that is black and bare.
* * *
What’s your soldier’s name, asks the officer next to Adina, his temples are made of paper, his eyes look at her hands, his coat makes his eyeballs shimmer green. She says, his name is Dolga. Crows fly over the field, and the officer says, we have two of those, and the man with the gold tooth laughs so loud that his left earflap comes untied and drops onto his epaulette. He takes off his cap, his hair is matted down, his temples shaven. He reties the earflaps, the strings are short, his fingers are fat, he closes his lips over his gold tooth, the bow gets as small as two fingertips, he sets his cap back on his head.
What’s his first name, asks the officer next to Adina, she draws her fingers up inside her coat sleeve and says, Ilie.
Outside is a ditch overgrown with thin reeds, what does the young lady do for a living, asks the officer next to Adina, twisting his coat button. Behind the bend Adina sees the poplar lane that Ilie described, and a brick wall and the barracks. Teacher, she says.
* * *
Ilie wrote that everything is flat, that when you’re outside you sit or lie in nothingness, and even though the shortest plants can block your view you can stand up and still be looking nowhere.
* * *
From the bus she sees the wind silently tearing at the tree rows. In that case do you know The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War says an officer behind the driver, a book like life itself, young lady, a beautiful book.
They all have bare necks, bare temples, Adina thinks, they’ve been shorn like that for years, none of them is young. But at some point they will laugh and in the middle of their laughter, in the middle of the squall, they will look at one another and see that their stamped-down sacks of cut hair are full and weigh as much as they do.
* * *
Ilie’s hands are jittery, his fingernails dirty and torn. For an hour I had the compartment all to myself, says Adina, there was no sun to be seen, but there were shadows everywhere, then I fell asleep.
I dreamed, says Adina, that a fox was crossing an empty field that had just been plowed. As it moved it stooped down and swallowed some earth. It ate and ate and got fatter and fatter.
Next to the door is a blackboard, and a picture showing a tank at the edge of the forest. Sitting on the tank is a group of soldiers, one of the soldiers is Ilie. The officers are standing in the grass.
You have it good, says Ilie, you can still feel fear, my head is dark, I haven’t had any dreams for a long time. Above and below the tank are portraits of the dictator, the black inside the eye. Here you have to forget yourself day after day, says Ilie, the only thing I remember about me is that I always think of you. The unit’s honors are on display beside the black inside the eye.
Ilie points to the tank. In October, he says, we took the tank out into open terrain. He kisses Adina’s fingers, what terrain, she asks, it’s all flat here. You have to drive out a ways, he says, there’s a hill back there by the forest. To keep the tank from slipping when we went uphill we had to get out and throw rocks under the track from behind and then on the way down we had to throw rocks from in front. Once the tank was down by the edge of the forest we all lay down in the grass. We spent the whole day like that. And in the evening we marched back to the barrack on foot.
His hands are rough, he laughs and swallows his voice, that tank’s still out there by the forest, he says. You know, if the Russians had waited for us they would never have made it to Prague. Now come on and I’ll show you the yard.
* * *
Ilie stops in front of a pile of wet sandbags, they make us drag those from the wall to the fence, the fence to the road, and from the road back to the wall, he says. His footsteps clatter, he points at his clunky boots. As soon as it’s summer I won’t be needing these anymore. And the only soft road I know around here is the Danube.
A soldier walks by carrying a steaming bucket. Adina pulls her coat in close and wraps her arms around herself. So then the summer after that your bones will be lying out in the wheat. Ilie’s face is straining ahead. The poplar lane is shrinking, crawling into the earth because it will soon be dark. But you’ll come with me, he says. His throat is long, his neck and temples shaven bare. He bows in her direction and she shakes her head.
You’ll be flying around in heaven, says Adina, an angel with a bullet wound. Then she looks at the ground. Or else you’ll be down on the pavement, driving a street sweeper in Vienna. And you’ll still be here, says Ilie, waiting for them to cut up the rest of your fox, and then what.
The fox on the table
The alarm ticks and ticks. Three a.m.
Maybe the fox paws have reattached themselves during the night, Adina thinks. She sticks her foot out of the bed and slides the hind legs away from the fur. The tail gives her toes a fright, it’s still so soft and bushy and not shriveled up despite having been cut off.
Adina picks up the two legs and tail and takes them to the kitchen. She sets them on the table and fits them together so it looks like the fox is crawling right through the tabletop, that while its tail and hind legs support it from the top, the rest is rummaging around below.
The moon inside the kitchen window is so bloated it can’t stay there. By six a.m. it has been gnawed by the morning and its face is bleary-eyed. The early buses go whooshing by, or perhaps that’s the moon trying to leave the city and its jagged edge is getting caught on the border of the night. Dogs yelp as if the darkness had been a large sheltering pelt and the deserted streets an untroubled brain. As if the dogs of the night were afraid of the daylight, when people are out and about, and when the hunger that seeks encounters the hunger that strays. When yawn meets yawn and speech meets bark with the same breath inside the mouth.
Adina’s stockings smell of winter sweat, they jerk like the train as she tugs them on over her bare legs. Then she puts her coat on over her nightgown — and with it all the little black coats from the viaduct and the big green coats from the bus. The little train station is still there in the buttons on her coat and so is the black inside the eye. Her coat pocket still contains her flashlight and some money from the trip. Her keys are on the kitchen table. The filth from the barracks yard still clings to her soles. Adina slips into her shoes.