The face of the man drives on. He shows her his fist in the window, then opens his fingers and blows her a kiss.
* * *
The fox is no longer rummaging underneath the table. The full fur is lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. Adina sets her keys down on the table. She stands inside the room, but the room is only there for itself. The hind legs and tail have been shoved so close against the pelt that the cuts are invisible. Adina slides the left hind leg away with the tip of her shoe, then the right hind leg, then the tail. The right foreleg is still attached and pulls the stomach and the head along. The left foreleg leaves stomach and head where they lie. It has been cut off as well. The bed is unmade.
The kitchen, the apples, the bread.
Adina stands in the bathtub, and the bath is only there for itself. A cigarette butt is floating in the toilet bowl. It has been lying in the water for hours, swollen to bursting. Adina places the money and the flashlight on the table. She takes off her coat and stockings. She climbs into bed. Her toes are cold, her nightgown, the bed is cold. Her eyes are cold. She hears her heart beating on the pillow. She sees the table, the money, the flashlight, the chair, they are spinning inside her eyes. The alarm ticks and ticks until the light at the window disappears.
* * *
Something rings, not the alarm. Adina finds her toes and the floor next to the bed. She turns on the light, opens the door. A bright square falls into the stairwell, she laughs and holds out her cheek. Paul’s mouth is cold. He is holding a bare branch, these are going to be lilacs, he says. She takes the branch in her hand and points a finger at the fox. Paul lifts each cut-off leg one at a time. As of today that makes three, she says, along with the tail. She looks at him and pulls the scarf off his neck. The back of his neck is shaved. I was at the barber’s, he says.
She lays his scarf on the bed. In every room I’ve lived in, that fox was always in front of the wardrobe, even in the dormitory, where space was so cramped, she says, since there were four of us in one room. There was a cat in that dormitory who used to come up the front stairs and wander through all the rooms to the end of the hall. He was fat and nearly blind and no longer caught mice, but he would sniff out every bit of bacon and eat it. That cat never set foot in our room: he could smell the fox.
She holds the bare branch in her mouth. Don’t make such a face, he says, or there won’t be any lilacs. She goes into the kitchen, the vase has a brown ring from the last bunch of chrysanthemums. I saw Clara in the hospital yesterday, he says, while Adina sniffs at the branch, she was waiting where they do abortions. The faucet squeals, he stands in the door to the kitchen, there are bubbles on the water, she fills the vase up to the brown ring. She carries it past him back into the room and he follows.
* * *
One paw left, says Paul, that fox could drive a person insane. He places the branch in the water and sits down next to her. You’re standing here right between the bed and the chair and suddenly you’re in the middle of the woods, that fox is so close there’s no need for any binoculars. The bare branch casts a bare shadow on his cheek. Incidentally, he says, this morning the gatekeeper got hold of the binoculars. But he wasn’t looking at the woods out in back, he was watching the front entrance. He didn’t even bother to lower them when I was standing right next to him, he just turned toward me and said, Sir, I’m looking at your eye and it’s as big as a door. The bare shadow on Paul’s face looks like a wrinkle. Then a man came, Paul went on, and gave the gatekeeper some money, since it wasn’t a visiting day, and the gatekeeper let the man look through the binoculars, while I took off my coat and grabbed my white jacket. Paul touches Adina’s fingertips with his own. How do you tell a man, he asks, who slips the porter money so he can go upstairs and take a mesh bag with a fresh loaf of bread that his wife died during the night because the electricity went out. He pulls Adina closer. You walk slowly, he says, because you can smell the fresh-baked bread. Adina feels his chin moving close to her head, sees snippets of hair lying in his ear. And you hope for his sake that when he looked through the binoculars they somehow had enough power to take away the fear for one whole day. She pulls her knees up inside her nightgown and rests her feet on his knee. But you hope in vain, he says, because you can tell by the man’s steps that in a few minutes he’s going to lose his mind.
Adina covers her face with one hand. Looking through her fingers she can see how light the twigs are, and how dark the branch is in the water.
Paul flicks the flashlight on and off. He picks the bill up off the table, this morning you wanted to give that to me, he says, smoothing it out with his hand. There’s a face on the bill, dirty, crumpled and soft. Paul takes the longest twig and drills a hole in the face, then skewers the bill on the bare branch. One more paw, he says, and then.
The lost shovel
The left knee lifts, the right knee falls. The grass is trampled, the ground is soft. The muck skids off underfoot, the clunky boots chafe against the ankles. The laces are made of mud, twice torn and twice knotted between morning and noon. The socks are wet. The grime on the hands dries in the wind. The cap has fallen into the dirt.
The cigarette gets grimier from hand to hand, the smoking is interrupted by orders — one cigarette lit four times and put out three times between morning and noon while thin flights of smoke pass from mouth to mouth. The last man flings away the butt, still glowing.
At neck height the trench is deep enough. The light over the grass is as low as the tank in the forest, as the forehead over the eyes. And the day gets pulled into the ground somewhere between the forest and the hill.
It’s evening, the soldiers watch from the corners of their eyes, the officer with the gold tooth gives an order and steps out to piss, he walks past the tank and then into the wood, three trees deep. The soldiers stop digging, they listen in silence for the officer’s stream to hit the ground. But the branches crack, and the crows squawk as they fly to their roosts. The crows feel the fog slowly draping the trees. Maybe they sense the snow up in the flat ridge, the snow of the days ahead. Snow that is coarse and dry and stays put. Snow so white that their black beaks are always open and freezing because they can’t find anything to eat except frozen corn.
The men don’t hear the officer’s stream hitting the ground.
The officer buttons his pants, pulls his cap down lower on his head, his scarf tighter around his neck. He picks up a withered branch and scrapes the dirt off his boots.
* * *
Fall in, count off, every voice is tired in its own way, every breath from every mouth is its own steamy animal. Two ranks, the tall and the short.
Right shoulder, shovels, shouts the officer. He inspects the ranks. DOLGA where is your shovel. Ilie raises his hand to his cap, clicks one shoe against the other, Comrade Officer Sir, my shovel has disappeared. The officer raises his forefinger, his gold tooth is brighter than his face, find it, he says, or you’re not coming back to the unit. Right face, march, left right. The soldiers march up the hill alongside the tracks left by the tank. The hilltop swallows them from below, the sky from above.