The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The forelock

The newspaper feels rough to the touch, but the dictator’s forelock stands out smooth and glossy, slick and shiny with pomade. The big flattened curl pushes all the smaller curls to the back of the head, where they get swallowed by the paper. On the rough newsprint are the words: The beloved son of the people.

Everything that shines also sees.

The forelock shines. It peers into the country every day, and it sees. Every day the dictator’s framed image takes up half the table. And the face below the curl takes up both hands when Adina rests them side by side. She looks straight into the void, and swallows her own breath.

The black inside the dictator’s eye mirrors the shape and size of Adina’s thumbnails, if she crooks her thumbs just slightly. The black inside the eye stares out of the newspaper every day, peering into the country.

* * *

The optic nerve runs deep into the land. Towns and villages are squeezed together in one place, torn apart in another. Roads lose themselves in the fields, stopping at graves or by bridges or in front of trees. And trees strangle one another where they were never planted. Dogs stray, and where there are no houses they have long forgotten how to bark. They lose their winter coats, then their summer coats, they’re alternately shy and then savage when least expected. They are afraid and their paws smack their foreheads while they run, before they bite.

And wherever the light from the black inside the eye falls, people feel the place where they are standing, the ground beneath their feet, they feel it rising steeply up their throat and sloping sharply down their back.

* * *

The light from the black inside the eye falls on the café, too, and on the park, and on the iron tables and chairs that are wrought into leaves and stems, as thin and white as twine. Except they’re heavier than they seem when a person tries to lift or slide them, because eyes are focused on the water and fingers are not expecting iron.

The path next to the café runs along the river, the river runs along the path. Fishermen stand on the riverbank and all of a sudden there it is, in the water — the black inside the eye. Shining.

Everything that shines also sees.

Poplars cast their shadows down the stairs along the riverbank, the shadows break up on the steps and do not enter the water. When the streetcar crosses the bridge, new shadows push the smaller ones out into the current, just like the dictator’s forelock pushes his smaller curls to the back of his head.

Poplar light mixes with poplar shade until the whole city is covered in stripes. Stone slabs, walls, clumps of grass, river and banks.

No one is walking by the water, even though it’s a summer day, a summer practically made for strolling aimlessly along the river.

The fishermen don’t trust the striped summer. They know the poplar shadows on the ground are the same thing as the poplars in the sky, knives.

Fish won’t come anywhere near that, say the fishermen. When a dark stripe from the poplars falls on the fishing rods, the men move to sunnier grass and cast their lines into a brighter patch of water.

A woman walks along the river, carrying a pillow tied up with string. She carries it in front of her, cradling it in both arms, the wind is beating from behind. Perhaps there’s a child inside, a sleeping infant with two heads, one on each end, where the strings have more slack. The woman’s arms are brown, but her calves are as white as the pillow. One of the fishermen eyes her calves. Her buttocks sway as she walks. The fisherman’s gaze falls into the water, wearied and shriveled by the poplars’ headstand. His eyes detect the slightest hint of evening. In the middle of the day it sneaks down the ridge of his nose. His fingers pull a cigarette from his pocket and hold it to his lips. The fire flares at one corner of his mouth, his hand grows big and covers the flame, the wind is picking up.

The fishermen cast their lines into the river and pull out drowned grass, decaying socks and waterlogged underpants. And once a day, when the rods are bent and the lines drunk from imbibing the river bottom, an oily fish. Or maybe a dead cat.

Even the tiniest touch of evening felt on the ridge of their noses steals everything. And what it can’t steal, it forbids. Including happiness, say the fishermen. The striped summer takes all the joy out of fishing.

The poplars are full of pods that are neither fruit nor seed but galls, misshapen thimbles for flies and aphids. The bugs drop out of the poplars surrounding the café and crawl across the newspaper. Adina’s fingertips shove them into the dictator’s forelock, the flies crawl along his ear hairs, the aphids feel the bright glossy shine and play dead.

The waitress lowers the tray, sees the face on the table, her cheekbones twitch, her ears burn. She averts her eyes so quickly that a blue vein of fear snaps across her temples as she sets the glass right on top of the dictator’s forehead. The lemonade is thinly streaked with yellow swirls, the forelock appears inside the glass. Adina clinks her spoon, the spoon shines, the lemonade shines, everything that shines also sees. A hot needle of light flashes across her forehead, the streetcar passes over the bridge, setting off waves in the river. Adina leaves her spoon in her drink, she doesn’t touch the glass and lets her hand rest just like the spoon. Adina is waiting for Clara and Paul. She turns her head away.

Beyond the flat roof of the café is the park, beyond the park the rooftops are pointed. Here are the streets of the directors and inspectors, the mayors, secret police and army officers. The quiet streets of power, where even the wind is afraid when it starts to blow. And when it does blow it is afraid to eddy. And when it blusters it would rather break its own ribs than a branch. Dry leaves scratch across the walkways, quickly covering all tracks. If someone sets foot on these streets who does not live on one of them, who does not belong, it is for these streets as though nothing was there.

The quiet streets of power abide in the breeze that forks the branches in the park and festoons them with leaves and picks up their rustling, the breeze that carries the clatter of footsteps along the river path, the breeze that causes people on both banks to lift their feet when they walk across the grass, even if it’s mowed, and raise their knees into their throats. Those who come here on foot prefer to pass unnoticed, with high, slow steps. Meanwhile inside their throats they are running, rushing. Once they reach the bridge, the city cloaks them in mindless noise, and they can breathe more easily, as the streetcar whooshes by, tugging their heads out of the silence.

The masters of the quiet streets are never seen in their houses or gardens. Behind the fir trees, servants come and go up and down the stone steps. When they walk on the lawn, they draw their insides into their throats for fear of squashing the grass. When they cut the grass, a mirror appears in the whites of their eyes, where sickles and rakes gleam like scissors and combs. The servants don’t trust their own skins, because whenever they reach for something their hands cast a shadow. Their heads know that they were born with dirty hands in dirty streets, and that their hands will never grow clean here in the silence. Only old. The clock ticks on the wall, the curtains billow, and when the servants open their masters’ refrigerators and look inside, a square of light falls on their feet, their eyes are startled, and their cheeks shiver at the thoughts that pass through their minds. The meat is packed in cellophane, the cellophane is coated with frost, the frost is white like stone, like the marble in the garden.

In the gardens of the quiet streets there are no gnomes with caps. Nothing but sad, barefoot stones. Naked lions, white as snow-covered dogs, and naked wingless angels, like snow-covered children. Yet even here, when the winter proceeds along its orbit around the sun, the snow crusts yellow and breaks without melting.

The servants live in the cellars underneath the houses, more likely to brush against pill bugs and mice than if they lived on the floorboards overhead. The servants’ husbands are all lying in the earth, the servants’ children have all left home. The servants are widows.

* * *

One of the servants has a daughter who teaches at the same school as Adina. And one day when they were walking by the river the daughter said, my mother works in the yellow house behind the round garden. And she raised her hand over her head and pointed out a house on the other side. Her eyes were dull, or perhaps her gaze was simply frozen, because the day was so cold and the water so close. She giggled as they crossed the bridge, then a streetcar passed and quashed the giggling. In the evening, said the servant’s daughter, when it’s already dark, the master of the house comes back from the Military Casino at Freedom Square, he’s an officer and spends his days there drinking. In the evening he doesn’t so much find his way back home as it finds him. Before he leaves, the waitresses put his officer’s cap on his head backward. So he teeters through the streets with the visor sticking out in back, until the way finds him. And every evening when he gets home, said the servant’s daughter, he and his wife go through the same ritual: DANUBE DELTA. The cathedral bell interrupted the servant’s daughter, she looked up and burst into laughter, the bell’s chiming clung to her lips. From the reflection in the display windows Adina once again sensed how close they were to the water. The servant’s daughter bent over to check her shoes, Adina could see the soles mirrored in her eyes. I don’t like these heels, the servant’s daughter said. She made a face and said DANUBE DELTA, and resumed her story.

When the officer has made it home, his wife can hear his boots scraping up the steps between the lions. She says to my mother: DANUBE DELTA. My mother fetches a pot of hot water from the kitchen, which she carries to the bathroom and pours into a basin set on the floor. Then she tops it off with cold water so it’s nice and lukewarm. The officer’s wife waits in the front hall. Before her husband can turn the key, she opens the door from inside. She takes the briefcase out of his hand and the cap off his head and says DANUBE DELTA. The officer mutters and nods. His wife heads for the bathroom, he follows, by the time he gets there his wife is already perched on the closed toilet seat. The officer removes his boots and sets them outside the door. His wife says, let’s see your stork. The officer undresses and hands her his uniform, she folds the pants and drapes them over her arm. He takes off his underpants, spreads his legs and crouches so that he’s straddling the basin, then lowers himself to his knees and gazes at the blue tiles above the mirror. His penis dangles in the water. If his testicles sink, his wife says, good. If they float, she bursts into tears and screams, you’ve fucked yourself empty, even your boots are limp. The officer sinks his face between his knees, looks at his floating testicles and says, I swear my love, I swear.

The servant’s daughter stared for a moment at the leafless shrub brushing against her coat and said, my mother doesn’t know what it is he swears, meanwhile the mirror fogs up and the man keeps swearing. Then, long after his wife is quiet, he starts to cry. With him it’s just a yammer, with her it’s more. My mother sits in her place in the living room, at the long end of the table, facing the bathroom, ashamed to the back of her eyes. She hides her hands under the table because they’re shaking. If she so much as moves her slipper, the woman says, Lenuza, you stay put. And to the officer she says, now stick your stork back in your pants. The man stands up and puts on his underwear. His wife carries his pants on her arm through the living room, always clinging first to the edge of the table, then to my mother’s shoulder. She says, Lenuza, clean up, then her hand goes back to the table and follows it like a guardrail over to the bedroom door. Her husband traipses after her, boots in hand. And my mother cleans up the bathroom and switches off the light.

The servant’s daughter blew warm breath onto her hands. My coat doesn’t have any pockets, she said, it came from the officer’s wife. She rubbed her fingers on her coat, hitting the buttons with her nails, a sound like stones hitting stones.

I have a hard time believing the whole business, said the servant’s daughter. But my mother’s never lied before. She hears them behind the bedroom door, the officer snores and his wife hums:

Roses in bloom

Come again soon

Lovely once more

Roses in bloom

* * *

My mother knows the song, the woman sings it in the kitchen every day. My mother walks on her tiptoes but the floorboards creak. The wife can tell when my mother is by the front door ready to lock up and then she says, don’t forget to lock up twice Lenuza. The wife is afraid of the stone angel, that it might enter the house during the night. That’s why she has her lions. Now and then the wife says to my mother, his angel can’t get past my two lions. The officer bought the angel to ward against his wife’s lions. But my mother says the lions and the angel won’t hurt each other because they all come from the same stonecutter. The officer realizes that, said the servant’s daughter, but his wife doesn’t.

* * *

In the morning, when the officer is in his cap and boots, his wife stands in the hall and brushes his uniform jacket. He bends down slowly to pick up his briefcase, she bends down with him and keeps brushing. The brush is so small that at first my mother couldn’t see it in the wife’s hand. My mother wondered why she crooked her hand when she stroked her husband’s jacket. Then one time the woman dropped the brush. Her hands are so small, until that moment my mother thought they weren’t capable of hiding anything. The officer’s wife is very tall, said the servant’s daughter, I’ve never seen hands that small on such a tall woman. After the officer leaves, his wife watches him through the window. Two houses later she loses sight of him but she waits until he reemerges, first at the entrance to the bridge and then once more on the bridge itself. The woman says she’s more worried something might happen to her husband when he’s sober, in the morning while he’s crossing the bridge, than on his way back home.

Then there’s the story with the perfume flask, said the servant’s daughter. The wife carries it stashed in her purse, even though the flask has been empty for years. The bottle has a rose etched into the glass, and a stopper that used to be gold-plated, by now the plating has worn off, but you can still see a few Cyrillic letters engraved on the side — it must have been Russian perfume. Years ago a Russian officer was in the house, but no one ever mentions him. He had blue eyes. Occasionally the wife says that the handsomest officers have blue eyes. Her husband has brown eyes and occasionally says to his wife, I see you’re reeking of roses again. The servant’s daughter slowly moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. There must be something special about that flask, she said, something sad. Something that opens a wish and closes a door, because it’s not her husband’s absence that makes her so lonely, it’s the empty perfume bottle in her purse. Sometimes, she said, her mother feels the woman’s head is sinking farther and farther into her neck, as if a staircase were running from her throat to her ankle and she were climbing down the steps carrying her own head. Perhaps because my mother lives in the cellar, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife spends half the day sitting at the table, and her eyes are piercingly empty, like dried-out sunflower disks. The servant’s daughter wiped her nose, rubbing her red nostrils with a crumpled handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief back in her purse like a snowball. She explained that every year the officer’s wife buys her mother a pair of genuine lambskin gloves, and every week she gives her coffee beans and Russian tea.

But because my mother scrimps and saves, said the servant’s daughter, she always gives me the tea and coffee. She can’t give me the gloves, though, otherwise the officer’s wife would notice. She did manage to have the ones from the year before last disappear by claiming that the postman’s dog had gotten hold of them and chewed them up so much they were no longer fit to wear. The postman denied it but he couldn’t prove anything.

The servant’s daughter told Adina that her mother had also gotten her the job at the school, thanks to the officer’s wife.

* * *

Two fishermen are standing next to each other on the riverbank. One of them takes off his cap, his hair is packed down, the band has left a ring pressed into the back of his head. Underneath one cap he has another — a cap of white hair. The other man is eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks, they float on the river, white inside and black outside. He holds out a handful to the man with the white cap of hair and says, take some to pass the time. The man brushes them away. They’re too much like melon seeds, he says. When I came back from the front, everything they ate here at home was like one big cemetery. Sausage, cheese, bread, even milk and cucumbers were all buried under lids or shut away behind a cupboard door, just like a grave. Now, after all these years I don’t know. He bends down, picks up a small rock, turns it over in his hand and shuts his right eye. He flings the rock into the river so that it skips four times, dancing on the water before it sinks. I no longer feel the same disgust, he says, but I’m still afraid of the insides of melons because they remind me of coffins. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds lowers his head, his mouth is narrow, his eyes skewed. He moves both rods to sunnier grass.

The sun is high in the sky, on top of the city. The rods cast shadows, the afternoon leans against the shadows. As soon as the day tips over, Adina thinks, and the sunlight goes skidding away, it will cut deep trenches in the fields around the city and the corn will snap in two.

When they don’t speak, the fishermen don’t move. If they aren’t talking with each other, they’re not alive. Their silence has no reason, the words simply falter. The clock inside the cathedral tower advances, the bell chimes, another hour is empty and gone, it could be today, it could be tomorrow. Nobody on the banks of the river hears the chiming, the sound quiets when it reaches the water and whimpers until it’s gone.

The fishermen measure the day by the heat of the sky and can tell by looking at the smoke above the wire factory if it’s raining elsewhere. And by feeling the burn on their shoulders they can sense how long the sun will keep growing and when it will sink and shatter.

Anyone who truly knows the river has seen heaven from the inside, say the fishermen. As the city starts getting dark, there’s a moment when the clock in the tower can no longer measure time. Its face turns white and casts a sheen into the park. When that happens, the fine-toothed acacia leaves look like combs. The clock hands skip ahead, but the evening refuses to believe what they’re saying. The white sheen does not last long.

But while it does last, all the fishermen lie down beside one another on their stomachs and gaze into the river. And during that time, say the fishermen, the river shows anyone who truly knows it a foul, rotten gullet. That is heaven from the inside. The gullet is in the middle of the current, not on the river bottom. It holds so many clothes that they reach from one bridge to the other. The gullet itself is naked, it holds the clothes in its hands. They are the clothes of the drowned, say the fishermen.

The fishermen don’t stare at the gullet for long, after a few brief glances most lay their faces in the grass and laugh so hard their legs shake. But the fisherman with the white cap of hair doesn’t laugh. When the others ask why his legs are shaking even though he isn’t laughing, he says, when I lay my face in the grass, I see my own brain, naked in the water.

* * *

A Gypsy boy is standing inside the café next to the table farthest in back. He holds an empty beer glass over his face, the foam trickles down in a thread, his mouth swallows before the foam reaches his lips. Stop that, says Adina out loud, you’re drinking with your forehead, like you don’t have a mouth. Then the boy is at her table, give me a leu he says, holding his hand out over the newspaper. Adina sets a coin down next to the glass, the boy covers it with his hand and drags it off the table. May God keep you beautiful and good, he says. And though he speaks of God, all Adina sees of his face in the sunlight are two whitish-yellow eyes. Have some lemonade, she says.

A fly is swimming in the glass, he fishes it out with a spoon, blows it onto the ground and stashes the spoon in his pocket.

Shoshoi, the waitress yells.

The boy’s throat is dry, a gurgling comes from inside his shirt. He raises the glass and drains it in one gulp, through his face and all the way to his whitish-yellow eyes. He stashes the glass in his pocket as well.

Shoshoi, the waitress screams.

Clara once explained that shoshoi in Romani means HARE, that Gypsies are afraid of hares. It’s more that they’re afraid of superstitions, said Paul, and as a result they’re always afraid.

* * *

Once, he went on, an elderly Gypsy was being discharged from the hospital. Paul jotted down what the man was allowed to eat. But the man didn’t know how to read. So Paul read the list out loud, including the word HARE. I cannot take this piece of paper, the man said. You are a gentleman, you have to write out another one. Paul scratched through the word HARE, the man shook his head. That won’t do, he said, it’s still there. You may be a doctor but you are not a gentleman. You don’t understand how your own heart beats inside you. Inside the hare beats the heart of the earth, that’s why we are Gypsies, because we understand that, sir, that’s why we’re always on the run.

* * *

The Gypsy boy dashes off, the poplar stripes slice him as he runs, his soles fly up to his back as splashes of white. The waitress chases after the soles. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds watches the splashing soles. Like gravel hitting water, he says.

The wind blows in the brush, the boy’s eyes lurk among the leaves. The waitress stands in the grass, panting, alert, the leaves fan back and forth, she doesn’t see the boy. The waitress lets her head droop, removes her sandals and slowly heads back through the poplar stripes to the café, stepping barefoot in small strides over the stone slabs. The shadows from her sandals dangle below her hand. The shadows don’t reveal how high the heels are or how thin the laces, or how the buckles sparkle once just beneath her ring and again on the stone. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds says in her direction, with those legs you’d be better off running after me. Without shoes look how sturdy they are, take off those high heels and you’re a peasant woman.

The fisherman who’s afraid of melons scratches his crotch and says, once during the war I wound up in this small village. I’ve forgotten the name. I looked through a window and saw a woman at a sewing machine. She was sewing a white lace curtain, the cloth was spilling over onto the floor. I knocked and said WATER. She came to the door, dragging her curtain with her. The water bucket had a ladle, I drank one ladleful after another. I was only looking at the water, but in the water I could see her bare calves, all pudgy and white. The water was cold and the roof of my mouth was hot, my throat was pounding in my ears. The woman pulled me to the floor, she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her dress. The lace scratched, and her stomach had no bottom. She didn’t say a word. I often think about the fact I never heard her voice. I didn’t say anything either. Not until I was back on the street did I say to myself, WATER.

The fisherman with the sunflower seeds bites a thread off the hem of his shirt and says, it all depends on the calves. When I’m on top of my wife she complains the neighbors are going to pound on the wall in the middle of the night and call out, stop beating her. There’s nothing behind the complaining, I’ve known for a long time that everything under her nightshirt has gone cold, only her mouth screams. I lie on top of her and get used to the dark, I see her wide open eyes, her forehead way up high, looking grayish yellow like the moon, and her sagging chin. I see her twisting her mouth. I could use my nose and peck her right in her gaping eyes but I don’t. She groans like someone trying to move a wardrobe, not like someone who enjoys it. Her ribs are so hard that her heart’s all withered up inside, and her legs are getting thinner every day. She doesn’t have any meat on her calves. All the flesh on her body goes to her stomach, which is growing rounder and rounder and spreading out like a fat sheep.

The fisherman takes off one shoe, turns it over, shakes out a cherry pit. Sometimes the moon shines between the ceiling and the wall of our room, he says, so the moonlight has a crease, and I can see the pattern of the wineglasses in the cabinet and the fringe of the carpet. My eyes trace the fringe of the carpet as I let the day pass through my head. The fisherman with the cap of white hair plucks a grass straw and sticks it in his mouth. As he chews the straw wags back and forth. But letting the day pass through your head — the poplars, the river — doesn’t take very long, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds. Today I have the waitress to think about so tonight it will last longer.

The fisherman with the grass straw laughs, and says, and the Gypsy. Tonight it will last longer, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds, and I’ll take even longer to fall asleep. You know, every night I can hear the crickets outside. The whole bed shakes each time the nightshirt turns over. The crickets chirp, they pull one long note like a dark string, they eat up all my peace and quiet. I sense that they could be right underneath our room, so I hold my breath. I have the feeling they’re carrying our entire apartment block on their backs through the grass, across the long flat plain, all the way to the Danube. When I fall asleep I dream I’m stepping out of the apartment onto the street. But there isn’t any street and I’m standing there barefoot in my pajamas, next to the water, freezing. I have to escape, I have to flee across the Danube to Yugoslavia. And I don’t know how to swim.

* * *

On the other side of the river two men are sitting on a bench. Both are wearing suits. The sunlight shines right through their ears, which look like leaves next to each other. One wears a tie flecked with reddish blue. At the end of the bench is a patch of shadow that could be a coat, without sleeves, without a collar, without pockets, it’s no longer there when the light moves to the next branch. Both men are eating sunflower seeds. The husks fly quickly into the water. The wind moves the branch, the coat shrinks.

* * *

The fisherman with the white cap of hair glances toward the two men, then spits out the grass straw. Do you know those two birds over there, he asks. Anyway I really don’t know how to swim, says the fisherman with the sunflower seeds. He shrugs his shoulders and continues quietly.

There was this one dream about the Danube, he says, which my wife was also in. When I reached the water she was already there. She didn’t recognize me. She asked me the way you’d ask a stranger, are you trying to make it across the border too? She was leaving the gravel bank, heading away from the water. There were willows and hazelnut bushes. The current’s strong, she called out, I have to eat something first. She went rummaging through the underbrush, but there was nothing except river grass, so she picked through the branches and tore the hazelnuts off together with the stems and leaves. The hazelnuts weren’t ripe, they still had their green outer shells. So she pounded them with a round stone. She ate, and a milky liquid flowed from her mouth. I looked away, into the water. Our Father who art in Heaven and on Earth. The words came out of my mouth like the pounding from the stone. I couldn’t pray anymore, I felt foolish. The Lord was listening to the stone and the hazelnuts, not to me. I turned to her and screamed so loud my voice stung my eyes, I can’t do it, come back here to me, I can’t make it across, I tell you I don’t know how to swim.

* * *

An aphid settles on the dictator’s forehead and plays dead.

* * *

Adina often comes to this café, because it overlooks the river, because every year the park grows longer by the length of an arm, and because the new growth on the trees stays soft and bright even late in the summer. And because she can look at the old branches and see the past year still swaying. The bark is dark and tough, the leaves coarsely ribbed, summer won’t be over anytime soon. The frost doesn’t come until October. Then it cuts down the leaves in a single night, as though some major accident occurred.

The breath of fear looms in the park, it slows the mind and makes people see their lives in everything others say and do. No one ever knows if a given thought will become a spoken sentence or a knot in the throat. Or merely the flaring of nostrils, in and out.

The breath of fear sharpens hearing.

At the wire factory, smoke flies out of the chimneys and frays until all that’s left are the summer old folk floating over the city. And the clothes in the rotten gullet of the river down below.

Once Adina has gotten used to the breath of fear, she can feel her knee as something separate from the wrought-iron chair. The quiet streets of power hitch themselves to the streetcar crossing the bridge over the river. And they’re drawn from their quiet neighborhood into the center of the city, into the outskirts of town, into the filthy streets of the servants. Where it’s clear from the dried mud that all the children have left home and all the husbands are lying in the earth. The gaps in the windows are sealed with old newspapers, and the widows have fled with outstretched arms to the streets of power.

If a person sits long enough in the café, the fear settles down and waits. And the next day it’s already right there at the same table. It’s an aphid inside your head that won’t crawl away. If a person sits too long the fear just plays dead.

* * *

Clara lifts her dress as she joggles the chair, she’s just shaved her legs, her skin is so smooth it’s freckled red at every pore. Yesterday Mara had to count spools of wire, she says, and today the director called her into his office. He stood by the window and counted the spools again himself. After he’d finished he said, you have legs like a deer. Mara turned red and said thank you. And the director said, I mean as hairy as a deer’s.

* * *

Four women are rowing on the water, their arm muscles swell and bulge. A fifth woman holds a megaphone to her mouth, she shouts into the cone across the water, without looking at the rowers.

Clara passes through the poplar stripes on her way into town. Her shoes clatter along the river. The forelock sees the shouts from the megaphone as they land in between Clara’s steps.

The fisherman with the white cap of hair whistles a song.

* * *

The man with the reddish-blue flecked tie gets up off the bench. As he walks he spits a sunflower husk into the river, and combs his hair while climbing the steps. He stands on the bridge, then sets off in pursuit of Clara’s legs, her flying summer dress. As he walks he lights a cigarette.

* * *

Paul hands Adina a white envelope and holds the newspaper in front of his face, the nail on one thumb is torn. The skin on his index finger is yellow, he’s smoked so much it’s growing a tobacco leaf. Adina opens the envelope, it’s from Liviu, a wedding invitation with two interlocking rings.

Liviu is a schoolmate of Paul’s who for the past two years has been teaching in a small village in the south, in the part of the country cut off by the Danube, where the fields bump against the sky and the withered thistles toss their white fluff into the river. The farmers in the village drink plum brandy before breakfast, before heading out to the field, Liviu said. And the women force-feed the geese with fattened maize. And the policeman, the pastor, the mayor and the teacher all have gold teeth in their mouths.

The Romanian farmers eat and drink too much because they have too little, said Liviu, and they talk too little because they know too much. And they don’t trust strangers even if they eat and drink the exact same things, because strangers don’t have any gold teeth. Strangers here are very much alone, said Liviu.

That’s why Liviu is marrying a teacher from the village, a woman who belongs.