The entrance to the hospital has a tall flight of stairs with bushes planted on both sides. Adina stashes her suitcase in the bushes. The bushes are bare. While she’s reaching into the shrubbery her hand jerks twice, but it’s just a forgotten leaf, moist and withered. The suitcase is far below the stairs, the wind is dark, heavier than the leaves. She climbs the steps.
Adina waits with her hands hidden in her coat. She doesn’t give the gateman her name, he’ll see me when he gets here, she says. The gateman telephones. Her right hand feels the wet note in her coat pocket.
The gateman paces up and down. He peers through the glass booth — a few stairs, a bit of night and a faded sound settle in his eyes, which having felt the power of the binoculars can withstand anything. His shoes creak. Two wrinkles run from his cheeks all the way inside his mouth. The ceiling lamp does not shed light, it only watches. The bushes are brighter in the gateman’s eyes than they are outside, because the centers of his eyes are glowing, and each has a lightbulb right in the middle.
* * *
Paul comes down the stairs, his white cap is a large petunia that swallows his left ear. Adina places the wet note in his hand. The paper is crumpled, with more ridges and wrinkles than his outstretched thumb.
As Paul reads, the gateman studies the night as is his habit, all ears and furtive eyes. Outside, wind rattles the metal sign. Wait inside the car, says Paul, standing on the granite floor in his white cloth shoes. He places two keys in her palm, they are wrapped in white sterile gauze. So they don’t clink, he says, when you get outside count the windows, my car’s parked just past the tenth one. Take off your white shoes, says Adina, they’re too visible. He looks at the floor, I know that once I’m outside I’m no longer a doctor, he says. His white coat is made of chalk, freshly starched and ironed.
* * *
Her hands are no longer afraid of the shrub, even if the leaves inside are wet and withered. Adina is carrying her suitcase in front of her, with both hands, so that it disappears inside her coat. On the path that can’t be seen in the dark she counts the windows above the shrubbery, from one to the next she can make out the individual branches in the wind.
The car door clicks. Adina puts her suitcase on the backseat. She wonders where the little nail clipper has crawled to among all the thick clothing. Next to the suitcase is Anna’s scarf. A car pulls up to the entrance. Two policemen come out the front doors, two dogs out the back. They smell the asphalt, sniff at the steps. Sitting in the car, Adina would like to shrink, to be as tiny as the nail clipper in her suitcase.
* * *
Paul comes out of the bright doorway and goes down the stairs, his shoes are dark. Like a night watchman he paces past the bushes, looking up at the windows. His pants blend in with the pavement.
He knocks on the window, the door opens, his legs are his only luggage. What are the police looking for, and the dogs, Adina asks. He turns the key, the car hums. Every night they bring the wounded from the border, he says, most are dead. First we’re driving to Abi’s then out to Liviu’s in the country.
The street runs by, the city is a black thimble with steep sides, the housing blocks as narrow as foreheads. There’s a workshop next to the morgue, says Paul, where the coffins are sealed and sent home under police watch. No one ever bothers to look inside, says Paul.
* * *
The window a few stories up is lit. Paul doesn’t ring, he only knocks once on the door, Abi opens, laughs and raises his eyebrows, he smells of brandy. Adina hands him the note, Paul grabs him by the arm, come on, he says, we’re driving out to the country. Abi’s eyes are blank, too large and too small for his face, he nods. Then he breaks away, no, I’m not going, he says, and I don’t want to know what place you’re thinking of. Good luck, he says. What’s that supposed to mean. Good luck, the village is a small place.
* * *
At the black street corners people are walking, carrying flashlights. The night takes away their clothes, Paul drives slowly, Paul drives quietly.
For a while Adina imagines that because the forbidden song has spread, the city has no limits. That the streets extend farther and farther out into the country and wherever they go they take the city with them. That somewhere out in the dark fields, when the road turns, the bells will ring because the forest beyond the frozen corn is really a city park, beyond which is the cathedral tower, and that the river is creeping right down the middle of what only seems to be an empty field.
And she imagines that the dictator has seen the spreading city from high in the air, and that he’s ordered the army to surround it. And that the soldiers are shoveling away, cutting off the spreading city, building a moat without a single bridge. That Ilie too is digging and digging and signaling to her, raising and lowering his fingers like waves, stepping on his spade with his boots, pushing it into the city’s edge and thinking about the Danube.
And she imagines Paul climbing into the car wearing his white shoes, and driving and driving until the city stops and the last light at the edge of town is extinguished, and then not saying another word. And that while down below a field is blundering about with no sense of boundaries, Paul is intent on gazing at the sky, in search of a white moon.
The chamber pot
Paul’s hand passes across Adina’s face.
She startles. We’re here, says Paul. Adina feels a trickle of sand inside her head. She pulls Paul’s heavy hand off her cheek, was I asleep, she asks as she opens her eyes, her face is awry, her cheeks caved in.
The bench outside Liviu’s house is lower on one end. There is a puddle where the legs are sinking into the mud. The window looms dark behind the fence. The gate is locked.
In the south, in the part of the country cut off by the Danube, the houses are lined up along the road, road and village are one and the same. Here the settlement doesn’t spread, each fence is connected to the next, each house has a garden in back, and each garden ends with a clearly defined border. There’s no place for dogs to roam, no place for them to bark. The villagers keep lots of dogs, Liviu told Paul and Adina during the summer, but not on account of robbers, theft is not a problem. It’s so they won’t hear the gunshots. And they keep geese instead of roosters, he said, because geese gaggle throughout the night. But it doesn’t work because the villagers have gotten so used to the barking and gaggling that they no longer hear it, while they do hear the gunshots.
Adina listens, the geese gaggle short and low in the yard, and in the yard next door, and in the yard across the road. The geese are kept in pens covered with boards. They can be heard stamping their feet and beating their wings against the wood. They’re so cramped they knock into one another and are never able to truly fall asleep. A roadside village is long and narrow like a sock, like the neck of a goose.
* * *
During the summer Liviu became a bridegroom. He married a teacher from the village because he was an outsider and all on his own. His wife is young, not even close to his age. Liviu listens in silence, just for himself, because his wife is used to women doing the talking while the men sit nearby, just for themselves. She grew up with the gunshots, with the dogs and with the geese.
During the summer, when Adina and Paul went to Liviu’s wedding, this young woman in her white veil and long dress had the face of a lamb. A lamb that had yet to eat grass, Paul said at the time. Everyone hugged and kissed her while Liviu just shook their hands and looked away. At the wedding she ate a lot, while Liviu chewed his food absentmindedly. Liviu danced as if he had stones in his pockets, while she danced as if her white dress were a flying feather. She didn’t speak much, and whenever she did she smiled. The village policeman got so drunk he was laughing all alone at his own jokes, repeating the same sentence that no one understood. And the village priest set his cap on the neck of a bottle, there were soup noodles stuck in his gray beard. After the meal he lifted his cassock up to his knee and danced with the policeman. Liviu looked at Adina and Paul, when are you two getting married, he asked. Paul said, soon. Adina could feel the lie running across her face. She pointed at the policeman and asked the lamb, are you related. Liviu didn’t say anything, the young lamb smiled and said, that’s the way it is here in the country, the policeman’s included along with everyone else.