The Passport

THE SEWING MACHINE

The pebbles are uneven and small. The owl cries behind the trees. It’s looking for a roof. The houses stand white and streaked with lime.

Windisch feels the obstinate member below his navel. The wind knocks on the wood. It’s sewing. The wind is sewing a sack in the earth.

Windisch hears his wife’s voice. She says: “Monster.” Every night when Windisch turns his breath towards her in bed, she says: “Monster.” For two years she has had no uterus in her stomach. “The doctor told me not to,” she says, “I’m not going to let my insides be messed about just to please you.”

When she says it, Windisch feels a cold anger between her face and his. She grasps Windisch by the shoulder. Sometimes it takes a while before she finds his shoulder. When she has found Windisch’s shoulder she says in the darkness close to Windisch’s ear, “You could be a grandfather by now. Our time has past.”

The previous summer, Windisch had been on his way home with two sacks of flour.

Windisch had knocked at a window. The mayor shone his torch through the curtain. “Why do you still knock?” said the mayor. “Put the flour in the yard. The gate is open.” His voice was asleep. That night, there was a thunderstorm. A flash of lightning struck the grass in front of the window. The mayor switched off his torch. His voice woke up and spoke more loudly. “Another five deliveries, Windisch,” said the mayor, “then the money at New Year. And at Easter you’ll have your passport.” There was a roll of thunder and the mayor looked up to the window. “Put the flour underneath the roof,” he said, “it’s going to rain.”

“Twelve deliveries since then, and ten thousand lei, and Easter is long past,” thinks Windisch. It’s a long time since he knocked on the window. He opens the gate. Windisch presses the sack to his stomach and puts it in the yard. Even when it’s not raining, Windisch puts the sack underneath the roof.

His bicycle is light. Windisch holds it close to him, as he wheels it along. When the bicycle is going through the grass, Windisch can’t hear his footsteps.

That night, all the windows had been dark. Windisch had stood in the long hallway. A flash of lightning tore open the earth. A roll of thunder pressed the house down into the crevice. Windisch’s wife didn’t hear the key turning in the lock.

Windisch had stood in the hall. The thunder was so far above the village, beyond the gardens, that there was a cold stillness in the night. The pupils in his eyes were cold. Windisch had the feeling that the night was going to shatter, that all at once it would be dazzlingly bright above the village. Windisch stood in the hall and knew that if he had not gone into the house, he would have seen, across all the gardens, the narrow end of all things and his own end everywhere.

Behind the door Windisch heard the stubborn, regular moaning of his wife. Like a sewing machine.

Windisch flung the door open. He switched on the light. His wife’s legs, raised on the sheet, were like open window sashes. They twitched in the light. Windisch’s wife opened her eyes wide. Her gaze was not dazzled by the light. It was merely fixed.

Windisch bent down. He unlaced his shoes. He looked beneath his arm at his wife’s thighs. He saw her pulling a slimy finger out of the hair. She didn’t know where to put the hand with the finger. She laid it on her naked stomach.

Windisch looked down at his shoes and said: “So that’s how it is with your bladder, my lady.” Windisch’s wife put the hand with that finger to her face. She pushed her legs down to the foot of the bed. She pressed them closer and closer together, until Windisch could see only a single leg and the two soles of her feet.

Windisch’s wife turned her face to the wall and wept loudly. She wept for a long time with the voice of her younger years. She wept briefly and softly with the voice of her own age. She whimpered three times with the voice of another woman. Then she was silent.

Windisch switched off the light. He climbed into the warm bed. He felt her slime, as if she had emptied her stomach into the bed.

Windisch heard sleep pressing her down far below this slime. Only her breath hummed. He was tired and empty. And far from all things. The sound of her breath seemed to be at the end of all things, at his own end.

That night her sleep was so distant, that no dream could find her.