The skinner nodded his head. His face lit up. He looked over his shoulder to the table. He looked, in case his wife was listening. Then he whispered: “Women, Windisch, I tell you, there are women there. The way they walk. They reap faster than the men.” The skinner laughed. “It’s a pity,” he said, “that they’re Wallachians. They’re good in bed, but they can’t cook like our women.”
A tin bowl stood on the table. The skinner’s wife was whisking an eggwhite in the bowl. “I washed two shirts,” she said. “The water was black. That’s how dirty it is there. You don’t see it, because of the forests.”
The skinner looked into the bowl. “At the top, on the highest mountain,” he said, “there’s a sanatorium. That’s where the lunatics are. They walk around behind the fence in blue underpants and thick coats. One of them spends all day looking for fir cones in the grass. He talks to himself. Rudi says he’s a miner. He started a strike.”
The skinner’s wife dipped a finger into the eggwhite. “That’s what you get,” she said and licked the tip of her finger.
“Another one,” said the skinner, “was only in the sanatorium for a week. He’s back in the mine again. He had been struck by a car.”
The skinner’s wife lifted the bowl. “These eggs are old,” she said, “the snow is bitter.”
The skinner nodded. “You can see the cemeteries from the top,” he said, “clinging to the slopes of the mountains.”
Windisch laid his hands on the table beside the bowl. He said: “I wouldn’t like to be buried there.”
The skinner’s wife looked absent-mindedly at Windisch’s hands. “Yes, it must be nice in the mountains,” she said. “Only it’s so far from here. We can’t get there, and Rudi never comes home.”
“Now she’s baking cakes again,” said the skinner, “and Rudi can’t even eat them.”
Windisch drew his hands back from the table.
“The clouds hang low over the town,” said the skinner. “People walk about among the clouds. Every day there’s a thunderstorm. People are struck down by lightning in the fields.
Windisch put his hands in his trouser pockets. He stood up. He went to the door.
“I’ve brought something with me,” said the skinner. “Rudi gave me a little box for Amalie.” The skinner pulled open a drawer. He shut it again. He looked in an empty suitcase. The skinner’s wife looked in his jacket pockets. The skinner opened the cupboard.
Exhausted, the skinner’s wife raised her hands. “We’ll look for it,” she said. The skinner looked in his trouser pockets. “I had the box in my hand only this morning,” he said.
THE CLASP-KNIFE
Windisch is sitting in front of the kitchen window. He’s shaving. He’s painting white foam across his face. The foam crunches on his cheeks. Windisch spreads the snow around his mouth with the tip of his finger. He looks in the mirror. He can see the kitchen door in it. And his face.
Windisch sees that he has painted too much snow on his face. He sees his mouth lying in the snow. He feels that he can’t speak because of the snow in his nostrils and the snow on his chin.
Windisch opens the clasp-knife. He tests the blade of the knife against his finger. He places the blade under his eye. His cheek bone doesn’t move. With his other hand Windisch pulls flat the wrinkles under his eye. He looks out of the window. He sees the green grass.
The clasp-knife jerks. The blade burns.
Windisch has a wound under his eye for many weeks. It’s red. It has a soft edge of pus. And every evening there’s plenty of flour dust in it.
A crust has been growing under Windisch’s eye for several days.
Each morning, Windisch leaves the house with the crust. When he unlocks the mill door, when he has put the padlock in his pocket, Windisch touches his cheek. The crust has gone.
“Perhaps the crust is lying in the pot hole,” he thinks.
When it’s light outside, Windisch goes to the mill pond. He kneels down in the grass. He looks at his face in the water. Small circles eddy in his ear. His hair disturbs the picture.
Windisch has a crooked, white scar under his eye.
A reed is bent. It opens and closes beside his hand. The reed has a brown blade.
THE TEAR
Amalie came out of the skinner’s yard. She walked through the grass. She held the small box in her hand. She smelt it. Windisch saw the hem of Amalie’s dress. It threw a shadow onto the grass. Her calves were white. Windisch saw how Amalie swayed her hips.
The box was tied with silver string. Amalie stood in front of the mirror. She looked at herself. She looked for the silver string in the mirror and tugged at it. “The box was lying in the skinner’s hat,” she said.
White tissue paper rustled in the box. On the white paper lay a glass tear. It had a hole at its tip. Inside, in its stomach, the tear had a groove. Under the tear lay a note. Rudi had written: “The tear is empty. Fill it with water. Preferably with rain water.”
Amalie couldn’t fill the tear. It was summer and the village was parched. And water from the well wasn’t rain water.
Amalie held the tear up to the light at the window. Outside it was hard. But inside, along the groove, it quivered.
For seven days the sky burned itself dry. It had wandered to the end of the village. It looked at the river in the valley. The sky drank water. It rained again.
Water flowed over the paving stones in the yard. Amalie stood by the gutter with the tear. She watched as water flowed into the stomach of the tear.
There was wind in the rain water too. It drove glassy bells through the trees. The bells were dull; leaves whirled inside them. The rain sang. There was sand in the rain’s voice too. And tree-bark.
The tear was full. Amalie brought it into the room with her wet hands and bare, sandy feet.
Windisch’s wife took the tear in her hand. Water shone in it. There was a light in the glass. The water from the tear dripped between Windisch’s wife’s fingers.
Windisch stretched out his hand. He took the tear. The water crawled down his elbow. Windisch’s wife licked her wet fingers with the tip of her tongue. Windisch watched as she licked the finger which she had pulled out of her hair on the night of the thunderstorm. He looked out at the rain. He felt the slime in his mouth. A knot of vomit rose in his throat.
Windisch laid the tear in Amalie’s hand. The tear dripped. The water in it did not fall. “The water is salty. It burns your lips,” said Windisch’s wife.
Amalie licked her wrist. “The rain is sweet,” she said. “The salt has been wept by the tear.”
THE CARRION LOFT
“Schools don’t make any difference either,” said Windisch’s wife. Windisch looked at Amalie and said: “Rudi’s an engineer, but schools don’t make any difference either.” Amalie laughed. “Rudi doesn’t just know the sanatorium from the outside. He was interned,” says Windisch’s wife. “The postwoman told me.”
Windisch pushed a glass back and forward across the table. He looked into the glass and said: “It’s in the family. They have children, and they’re crazy too.”
Rudi’s great-grandmother was called “the caterpillar” in the village. She always had a thin plait hanging down her back. She couldn’t bear a comb. Her husband died young, without falling ill.