The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller Read Free Book Online Page A

in her eye. The horse’s head becomes a blur sniffing at the tree bark. The dust in Adina’s eye is a tiny fly on her fingertip. The horse munches on a branch, the acacia leaves rustle beneath his muzzle, the scraggy wood has thorns and crackles in his throat.
    Warm air spills onto the street from the store where the man disappeared. The buses kick up great wheels of dust in their wake. The sun hitches a ride with every bus, fluttering on the corners like an open shirt. The morning smells of gasoline and dust and worn-out shoes. And when someone passes by carrying bread, the sidewalk smells of hunger.
    Hunger sharpens elbows for shoving and teeth for screaming. The shop has fresh bread. The elbows inside the shop are countless, but the bread is counted.
    *   *   *
    Where the dust flies highest the street is narrow, the apartment buildings crooked and jammed together. The grass grows thick along the pathways, and when it blooms, brash and brazen, it’s always tattered by the wind. The more brazen the spikes, the greater the poverty. Here summer threshes itself, mistaking torn clothing for chaff. The eyes lurking at the windows matter as much to the gleaming panes as the flying seeds to the grass.
    Children pluck grass straws with milky stems out of the earth and make a game of sucking them dry. And in their play is hunger. Their lungs cease to grow, the grass milk feeds their dirty fingers and the wart clusters, but not their baby teeth, which fall out. The teeth don’t wiggle long, they drop into the children’s hands while they’re talking. The children toss them over their shoulders and behind their backs into the grass, today one, tomorrow another. As each tooth flies, they shout:
    Mouse o mouse bring me a brand-new tooth,
    And you can have my old one.
    Only after the tooth has disappeared in the grass do they look back and call it childhood.
    The mouse takes the teeth and lines its burrows under the apartment building with little white tiles. It does not bring the children new teeth.
    *   *   *
    The school is located at the bottom of the street, at the top of the street is a broken phone booth. The balconies on the buildings in between are made of rusty corrugated sheet metal and can’t hold anything more than a few tired geraniums and a little laundry fluttering from a line. And clematis, which climbs high and attaches itself to the rust.
    No dahlias bloom here, where everything is rusting and breaking and falling apart, and where the clematis unravels its own summer, blue and hypocritical, saving its most beautiful blooms for the rubble.
    At the top of the street the clematis creeps into the broken phone booth, it lies down on the glass splinters but does not get cut. It twines around the dial and stops it from spinning.
    The one-eyed numbers on the dial pronounce their own names when Adina passes slowly by: one, two, three.
    A fool’s summer during marches, a soldier’s summer beyond the long plain in the south. Ilie is wearing a uniform. In his mouth he has a straw of summer grass, and in his pocket a calendar with a winter full of crossed-out days. And a picture of Adina. On the plain are a hill, a wall, and the barracks. The grass straw comes from the hill, wrote Ilie on the back of the picture.
    Whenever Adina sees tall grass, she thinks about Ilie and looks for his face. In her head she carries a mailbox. Whenever she opens it, the box is empty, Ilie seldom writes letters. Writing letters makes me remember where I am, he wrote. Paul said, people seldom write letters when they know for sure that they are loved.
    *   *   *
    For as long as the clematis was green, a man lay in the telephone booth. His forehead was so short that his hair began right above his eyebrows. Because his forehead’s so empty, said the passersby, because his brain’s made of brandy and brandy evaporates, and when it does there’s nothing left.
    The man lay in the booth, and his shoes rested on their heels. Anyone