The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The hand kiss

Adina pulls her stockings over her legs, but her legs aren’t really inside the stockings. She puts on her coat, but her arms are not really in the coat. Her nightgown though is sticking out from underneath. She hikes it up so it isn’t showing. Key, money, and flashlight are stashed inside her coat pocket. The sun is lying on the kitchen table, under the table is dirt from her shoes, the clock is ticking on the wall and listening to itself. It’s almost noon. Adina slips into her shoes, her toes aren’t really in the shoes, they’re in the clock as she tiptoes out of the kitchen before both hands meet at the top where it is noon. The door opens and closes.

* * *

Adina’s breath keeps just ahead of her as she walks, she clutches at it with her hand but it eludes her grasp. An old woman with a cane and a cloth sack is leaning against a garbage bin by the side of the road. Her sack is half full. Her cane has a nail on the bottom. The woman thrusts her head and her cane inside the garbage bin and spears dry bread with the nail.

The corner of the building is one big window. Through the glass Adina sees a man covered with a white cloth. The man is young and thin, his sack of hair won’t be heavy when he dies, Adina thinks, no heavier than the sack full of speared bread. Scissors open and close, snippets of hair fall onto the cloth. The barber cuts, the barber talks. The barber is drawing out the time, extending it past the winter, just like Adina is drawing out the way home, because the fox is rummaging under the table, because a tree is standing right here in the middle of the asphalt, in front of the windowpane where hair is being cut, and because the tree itself is bare.

* * *

The trolleybus bends its black accordion. The bellows open and close. The horns overhead search out the way, the driver chews on an apple. A man jumps on before the steps fold out. His pant legs flutter, his shoes shine. He’s wearing a windbreaker. The accordion squeals, tree trunks drift through the windowpane, coats pass slowly, and the traffic squeezes upward into the glass. The only thing the bus takes with it, at least for a little while, is a coffin that’s lashed to the top of a red car — the road keeps the tree trunks at a distance as the coffin slides from one windowpane to the next. Some housing blocks ride by, fronted by a sidewalk that quickly turns into a wall. The coffin passes through the last window, and the man in the windbreaker watches it drift behind. Adina moves to the back of the bus. When the door opens, the man in the windbreaker pinches Adina’s bottom. She stands on the stairs, pushes him away, she stumbles off, the door closes, dust flies.

The face of the man drives on. He shows her his fist in the window, then opens his fingers and blows her a kiss.

* * *

The fox is no longer rummaging underneath the table. The full fur is lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. Adina sets her keys down on the table. She stands inside the room, but the room is only there for itself. The hind legs and tail have been shoved so close against the pelt that the cuts are invisible. Adina slides the left hind leg away with the tip of her shoe, then the right hind leg, then the tail. The right foreleg is still attached and pulls the stomach and the head along. The left foreleg leaves stomach and head where they lie. It has been cut off as well. The bed is unmade.

The kitchen, the apples, the bread.

Adina stands in the bathtub, and the bath is only there for itself. A cigarette butt is floating in the toilet bowl. It has been lying in the water for hours, swollen to bursting. Adina places the money and the flashlight on the table. She takes off her coat and stockings. She climbs into bed. Her toes are cold, her nightgown, the bed is cold. Her eyes are cold. She hears her heart beating on the pillow. She sees the table, the money, the flashlight, the chair, they are spinning inside her eyes. The alarm ticks and ticks until the light at the window disappears.

* * *

Something rings, not the alarm. Adina finds her toes and the floor next to the bed. She turns on the light, opens the door. A bright square falls into the stairwell, she laughs and holds out her cheek. Paul’s mouth is cold. He is holding a bare branch, these are going to be lilacs, he says. She takes the branch in her hand and points a finger at the fox. Paul lifts each cut-off leg one at a time. As of today that makes three, she says, along with the tail. She looks at him and pulls the scarf off his neck. The back of his neck is shaved. I was at the barber’s, he says.

She lays his scarf on the bed. In every room I’ve lived in, that fox was always in front of the wardrobe, even in the dormitory, where space was so cramped, she says, since there were four of us in one room. There was a cat in that dormitory who used to come up the front stairs and wander through all the rooms to the end of the hall. He was fat and nearly blind and no longer caught mice, but he would sniff out every bit of bacon and eat it. That cat never set foot in our room: he could smell the fox.

She holds the bare branch in her mouth. Don’t make such a face, he says, or there won’t be any lilacs. She goes into the kitchen, the vase has a brown ring from the last bunch of chrysanthemums. I saw Clara in the hospital yesterday, he says, while Adina sniffs at the branch, she was waiting where they do abortions. The faucet squeals, he stands in the door to the kitchen, there are bubbles on the water, she fills the vase up to the brown ring. She carries it past him back into the room and he follows.

* * *

One paw left, says Paul, that fox could drive a person insane. He places the branch in the water and sits down next to her. You’re standing here right between the bed and the chair and suddenly you’re in the middle of the woods, that fox is so close there’s no need for any binoculars. The bare branch casts a bare shadow on his cheek. Incidentally, he says, this morning the gatekeeper got hold of the binoculars. But he wasn’t looking at the woods out in back, he was watching the front entrance. He didn’t even bother to lower them when I was standing right next to him, he just turned toward me and said, Sir, I’m looking at your eye and it’s as big as a door. The bare shadow on Paul’s face looks like a wrinkle. Then a man came, Paul went on, and gave the gatekeeper some money, since it wasn’t a visiting day, and the gatekeeper let the man look through the binoculars, while I took off my coat and grabbed my white jacket. Paul touches Adina’s fingertips with his own. How do you tell a man, he asks, who slips the porter money so he can go upstairs and take a mesh bag with a fresh loaf of bread that his wife died during the night because the electricity went out. He pulls Adina closer. You walk slowly, he says, because you can smell the fresh-baked bread. Adina feels his chin moving close to her head, sees snippets of hair lying in his ear. And you hope for his sake that when he looked through the binoculars they somehow had enough power to take away the fear for one whole day. She pulls her knees up inside her nightgown and rests her feet on his knee. But you hope in vain, he says, because you can tell by the man’s steps that in a few minutes he’s going to lose his mind.

Adina covers her face with one hand. Looking through her fingers she can see how light the twigs are, and how dark the branch is in the water.

Paul flicks the flashlight on and off. He picks the bill up off the table, this morning you wanted to give that to me, he says, smoothing it out with his hand. There’s a face on the bill, dirty, crumpled and soft. Paul takes the longest twig and drills a hole in the face, then skewers the bill on the bare branch. One more paw, he says, and then.