The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The grass straw in the mouth

A woman stands in the window in the apartment opposite Adina’s, watering her petunias. She’s no longer young but not yet old, Paul said about her years ago, when he still lived with Adina. Even then the woman had chestnut-red hair done up in big waves. And the windowpane already had a slanted crack. Five years have passed without leaving any mark on the woman’s face. Her hair hasn’t stiffened or grown paler. And every year the white petunias are different and yet the same.

Back then the white petunias were already drooping, all the woman could see when she watered were their bent stems. She couldn’t see their white funnels.

People who looked up from the street and saw little spots of white high among the windows and didn’t know they were petunias thought they were seeing children’s socks or handkerchiefs, fluttering in the summer breeze all the way into the fall.

Adina stands on the fox pelt in front of her half-opened wardrobe. She’s looking for her gray wool skirt. Her skirts are all on hangers, the thin summer ones in front of the winter skirts. When the seasons change, the clothes switch places in the wardrobe, and Adina can see how long Ilie’s been away. His clothes don’t change hangers or drawers or shelves. They just lie there as though he were no longer alive. A picture on the wall shows him standing with his shoes in the grass. But the grass doesn’t belong to him and the shoes don’t belong to him. Nor do his pants, jacket or cap.

* * *

One day two summers ago a loud voice called up to Adina from down below. Adina went to the window. Ilie was standing on the other side of the housing settlement, below the apartment with the petunias. He lifted his head and shouted: who are they blooming for. And Adina shouted back: for themselves.

* * *

Adina steps into her gray skirt. Her foot slips on the fox’s tail, which slides away from the rest of the fur. The tail has come off where the stripe running down the back is the lightest, right where it tapers into a narrow point. Adina turns the fur over and examines the underside, the skin is as white and wrinkled as old dough. The fur on top and the skin below are warmer than the floor, and warmer than her hands.

It’s rotted off, decayed, thinks Adina. She shoves the tail against the fur so it looks like the tail has grown back. From the picture frame, in the clothes that don’t belong to him, with eyes that aren’t his own, Ilie watches her hands. In his mouth he has a grass straw.

Rot and decay are wet, thinks Adina. But a fur dries out, just like a grass straw. In the picture the grass straw is the only thing that belongs to Ilie. The grass straw makes his face look old. Adina goes into the kitchen. From that window too she sees the woman watering her white petunias.

The petunias open in the morning when the light comes and close in the evening when the sky turns gray. They have a clock inside that measures dark and light. Every day they wind their funnels open and shut, until finally they overwind them right into October.

A knife is lying on the kitchen table, next to some quince peels and half a quince. The side that’s cut open has dried in the air just like the underside of fox fur, and the flesh is as brown as the hairs from the fox. A cockroach is nibbling at the snake made of quince peels.

* * *

To peel a quince like that you would have to hold the quince in one hand and a knife in the other, Adina thinks. You’d have to peel a quince and then you would have to eat some of the peeled quince, which would pucker your gums. You would have to bite, chew, swallow and close your eyes until the quince traveled all the way from your hand into your stomach.

Adina lays her hands on the kitchen table and lays her face on top of them. She holds her breath.

You’d have to remember that no one would ever leave half a quince just lying there, otherwise it would dry out like a fur, or like a grass straw. And if you ate a whole quince, if an entire quince had traveled from hand to stomach, Adina says to her hands on the table, then you would open your eyes and be a different person.

A woman who never eats quince like that.