The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

A fox will step into a trap

The gateman paces up and down at the entrance to the factory, his coat draped over his shoulders. The sun casts a cold light on his face. As he waits to inspect the bags he eats sunflower seeds. His coat drags on the ground.

* * *

Mara comes out of the main shop floor, having brought three knives for David. The blades are freshly sharpened. David uses one to cut through a bacon rind and doesn’t wipe it off. So the gateman won’t see it was just sharpened, he says, placing it in his bag. He puts the other two knives in the drawer, I’ll take one tomorrow and the other the day after, he says.

Eva rinses out the water glasses, her fingers squeak on the wet surface. The dwarf doesn’t have to sweep the hall today, says Mara, so he’ll be one of the first to get to the showers, we better hurry. Anca grabs her purse without buttoning her coat.

David buttons his coat and takes his bag.

David walks to the gate carrying the greasy knife in his bag. Mara, Eva and Clara walk past the giant spools into the rear yard, a flock of sparrows comes fluttering out of the wire. The attic window below the edge of the roof is ajar.

Clara feels a knot in her throat, her tongue rises to her eyes. She gags, her eyes lose focus. When she looks up, the attic window is a string of windows suspended in the air. Mara and Eva are far ahead, past the spools, perhaps already on the rungs of the iron ladder.

* * *

At least for a few more days, as long as the sun casts its cold light on these stairs even just for a moment, the eyes of the three women gather in the attic window every afternoon at four o’clock. Soon the sun will no longer touch the staircase at all. It will move across the wall, dull and pale, in far too narrow an arc. And then for months the steam in the little hallway outside the shower will be so blindingly thick no eye can see through it. The women’s curiosity does not subside right away, for another few days it climbs into the women’s heads and the women keep climbing the iron rungs. They crowd around the window, waiting in vain for the light that no longer comes. By the time the first men enter the shower the sun has already stolen past the wall. The women look at one another. They turn around, jammed so close together they seem to have no arms. Then they give up. Mara quietly closes the attic window and slides the little rusty latch. For several months the window will stay locked.

* * *

Down in the yard Clara bends over, props her head against a wire spool and straddles the rusty path. She vomits bread and bacon. Her hands are cold, she wipes her mouth with her handkerchief. She glances up at the attic window, Eva’s and Mara’s heads are a blur, Clara can’t make out their faces. The striped cat sits down twice between Clara’s shoes, eating what she threw up, even licking the wire. Her stripes come floating out of her fur.

* * *

Adina leans against the bare acacia by the factory entrance, the wire spools are stacked higher than the fence, smoke rises from the gatehouse chimney but does not fray above the crooked street, the gray wool rises and then falls back on the roof. The wind carries steam from the brewery, the air smells like cold sweat, the cooling tower is cut off by the clouds.

* * *

Two weeks ago the officer’s wife gave the servant’s daughter a coat with a fox fur collar, with two legs for tying under the chin. The legs have little paws and brown, shiny claws. The steam from the brewery smells like the fox collar, which had made Adina sneeze. The servant’s daughter said it was naphthalene. If a fur doesn’t smell like naphthalene, she said, come summer the fox rot will eat right through the pelt. And then the hair doesn’t just fall off one strand at a time, it stays on the hide as though it were still growing and waits. Then just when you go to pick up the fur it comes off in big clumps like sudden hair loss. And you’re left holding a bare hide, like skin on bones, all covered with tiny sandy grains, with grit. The servant’s daughter smiled and fingered the paws of her fox collar.

* * *

Clara approaches the gate. The gatewoman is holding the cat on her lap, stroking its striped fur. David’s knife is on the table, the gateman saw that it had been freshly sharpened in the factory. The gateman’s coat slips off his shoulder, his hand sticks Clara’s gummed-up handkerchief quickly back into her purse. A truck rattles through the gate, the wheels rattle as it moves onto the street, and the stacked wire spools rattle above and below as well. The driver’s face jiggles in the rearview mirror. Farther away is the white curtain of haze from the brewery. Through the rattling Clara hears someone calling her name.

* * *

Adina walks through a cloud of dust. Her kiss lands just under Clara’s eye, her hands are blue from the cold wind, her nose is damp. Let’s go to my place right away, she says, I have to show you something.

* * *

Clara bends over and picks up all the pieces of the fox fur, gray light falls through the window. The empty table is dark and shiny. Everything I need to eat is in the kitchen, Adina says, bread, sugar, flour. Clara runs her fingertips over the fox’s tail, then over the cut on the leg. They can poison me whenever they want, says Adina. Clara sets the fur back on the floor. Without taking off her coat she sits on the unmade bed and stares at the gap between the fox’s belly and its right hind leg, at the empty band of floor the width of her hand. She shoves the tail against the rest of the fur, it looks as if it were growing there, the cut is completely invisible.

Clara’s thin, pointy fingers peek out of her coat sleeves, the red dabs of nail polish shine. Adina rests her hands on the table and kicks off her shoes. When Clara moves her hands it’s easy to see the rust stains on the inside of her fingers.

* * *

I was just about ten years old, Adina tells Clara, when my mother took me to a nearby village to buy that fur. We crossed the bridge without water, the one the slaughterhouse workers use every morning. But on that morning the sky wasn’t red, it was heavy and all torn up. The men on the bridge didn’t have red cockscombs. It was a few days before Christmas, there was frost everywhere but no snow. Only a little dusting here and there, flakes whirling in the wind, in the furrows on the field. I was so anxious and excited I hadn’t slept the whole night. I’d wanted a fox for so long that the joy of getting it the next day was half turned to fear. The morning was icy cold and there wasn’t a single sheep out. And I thought as we were walking that where there aren’t any sheep out there can’t be any village. The field was flat, with just a few low bushes, so the sky seemed to come at us from all directions. It came all the way down to my mother’s headscarf and I was afraid we’d lost our way. I walked and walked but didn’t get tired. Maybe sleepy, because I felt a tired tickling in my forehead, but that tiredness kept me going. When we reached the village there wasn’t anyone on the street. All the windows had Christmas trees. Their branches were so close to the windowpanes that you could make out the individual needles, as if they’d been set up for the people passing by outside and not the people in the house. And since no one else was passing by, they were there just for my mother and me. My mother didn’t realize it, though. But I carried those trees with me, from one window to the next, all by myself.

Then we stopped. My mother knocked on a window. I still remember that it didn’t have any Christmas tree. We went into the yard. And then down a long open walkway where you couldn’t see the walls on account of all the fox furs.

After that we went in the main room, which had a cast-iron stove and a bed, no chair. The hunter came inside carrying one of the pelts. He said, this is the biggest one. He slid his hands under the fox so that the legs hung down while he moved the arms. The legs shook like they were running. And behind the legs the tail wiggled as if it belonged to a different, smaller animal. I asked if I could see his rifle. The hunter laid the fox on the table and smoothed out its fur. He said, you don’t shoot a fox. A fox will step into a trap. The man’s hair and beard and the hairs on his hands were as red as the fox. His cheeks too. Even back then, fox and hunter were one and the same.

* * *

Clara takes off her coat and steps out of the room. In the bathroom she gags and throws up. Adina looks at the coat lying on the bed, which still seems to contain an arm, as if a hand were reaching under the blanket. Water rushes inside the bathroom.

* * *

Clara comes back into the room with her blouse unbuttoned, quickly puts on her coat and says, I feel sick, I threw up. Her purse is on the pillow. Her mouth is half open, her tongue white and dry, like a piece of bread in her mouth.

You’re afraid, says Adina, you look like death. Clara is startled, her gaze is straight and cutting. She looks at Adina and sees a face that has gone somewhere far away. A face all twisted into separate parts, the cheeks off by themselves and the lips off by themselves, lifeless and eager at the same time. A face that’s as empty from the side as it is from the front, like a picture with nothing on it.

* * *

Clara searches the empty face for a child who is walking alongside a woman and who is nevertheless all alone, because she’s carrying Christmas trees from one house to the next. A child like the one in her belly, she thinks, as alone as a child that no one knows about.

Adina wants to be the hunter, thinks Clara.

Anyway you seem more afraid than I am, says Adina. Stop looking, don’t look at the fox anymore.

Clara’s eyes are skewed, with tiny red veins in the shadow of her nose. She looks absently at the picture on the wall, the clunky shoes in the grass, the soldier’s uniform, the grass straw in Ilie’s mouth. You better not tell Ilie, says Clara, he won’t be able to stand it.