Free The Appointment by Herta Müller

wide. I had hurt her feelings. A vein swelled inside her throat, her mouth hardened as if she were going to shout. But Lilli took my hand and pulled me down to her, so that I too was crouching, holding on to her hip. A man with an armload of coat hangers came shuffling past, pretending not to see us. Lilli whispered:
    When he lies down, the setting sun goes flat as a pillow.
    I was looking at Lilli’s feet. When the second toe’s longer than the big toe, they call it a widow’s toe. Lilli’s was like that. She said:
    He calls me Cherry.
    The name didn’t fit her blue eyes. The man with the coat hangers was moving further and further away. After he closed the door of the packing hall behind him, Lilli said:
    The wind plucks cherries off the branch. Isn’t it great: you’re the one with such dark eyes and I’m the one he calls Cherry.
    Sunlight fell in the corridor, while fluorescent lights were burning overhead. We were two tired children, sitting there like that.
    Was he in a camp, I asked.
    Lilli didn’t know.
    Will you ask him.
    Lilli nodded.
    Strange, not a single sound came from the factory yard, and in the corridor it was so still you could hear the crackle of the fluorescent lights.
    Now I believe the old officer needed to search out Lilli because he’d already come to terms with her death—even before he met her. That when he first saw her he halted like a stopwatch and said: This is the one for me. Despite the fact that he was retired, he was still drawn to the officers’ mess, to the uniforms—though his own had been laid aside, it had melded with his skin. Deep down he wanted to remain a soldier. He wanted to take Lilli where people would see him in the uniform he had once worn, despite the short-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes he now had on. To show off his conquest in the soldiers’ garden, and, when he was alone with Lilli, to work his late craving for love to a fervor that outdid Lilli’s beauty. A man of his kind knew plenty about soldiers, dogs, and bullets at the border. But his fear that Death might desire Lilli as greatly as he did yielded to the conviction that Lilli could look Death in the eye and stare Death down, both for his sake as well as her own. He saw too much, and was blinded. He risked Lilli, who meant more to him than reason can bear.
    Everyone getting on in years thinks of times gone by. Thesnot-nosed border guard who shot Lilli resembled the old officer in his own memories of youth. The guard was a young farmer, or a laborer. Maybe he began his studies a month or so afterward, and went on to become a teacher or doctor or priest or engineer. Who knows. When he fired, he was just a man on duty, a miserable sentry under a vast heaven where the wind whistled loneliness day and night. Lilli’s living flesh gave him shivers, and her death was heaven-sent, an unexpected gift of ten days’ leave. Perhaps he wrote unhappy letters like my first husband. Perhaps a woman like me was waiting, someone who, although she couldn’t measure up to the dead woman, could nonetheless laugh and caress her man in the grip of love until he felt like a human being. Perhaps at that moment it was the thought of his good fortune that pulled the trigger, and then the shot rang out. From far away there was barking, followed by shouting. Lilli’s officer was handcuffed, taken away to a tin hut, and guarded by the youth who had fired the shot, immersed in thoughts of his good fortune. Lilli lay where she had fallen. The hut was open at the front. On the floor was a water tank, a bench along the wall, in the corner a stretcher. The guard took a deep drink of water, washed his face, pulled his shirt out of his trousers, wiped himself dry, and sat down. The prisoner was not allowed to sit, although he was permitted to look over at the grass where Lilli lay. Five dogs came running, their legs flying over the grass, which was as high as their throats. Trailing far behind, a number of hard-driven soldiers ran