Free The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller Page B

the shells into the afternoon. They land on the ground, on the threshold. The woman who shares the gatehouse duty sits beside him, knitting. She wears a green smock. She has a gap in the middle of her teeth. She counts the spools of wire and wire mesh out loud, through the gap in her teeth. A striped cat is sprawled at her feet.
    The phone rings in the gatehouse. The gateman hears it ring and listens with his temples, without turning his head. He keeps his eyes on the people passing through the spools of wire. The gatewoman lifts her knitting needle to the gap between her teeth, then sticks it down her smock and scratches between her breasts. The cat twitches her ears and watches. The cat’s eyes are golden grapes. The spool tally gets caught in the gap between the woman’s teeth and inside the eyes of the cat. The telephone is shrill. The ringing catches on the wool, the yarn climbs into the gatewoman’s hand. The ringing climbs into the cat’s stomach. The cat climbs over the gateman’s shoe and runs into the factory yard. The gateman doesn’t answer the phone.
    When she’s inside the factory yard, the cat is all rust and wire mesh. On top of the factory roof she is all corrugated tin, and outside the offices she is all asphalt. By the washroom, sand. And in the workrooms the cat is all shafts and cogs and oil.
    The gateman can see heads emerging among the spools. Sparrows come flitting out of the wire. The gateman glances up at the sky. A single sparrow flying in the sun is something light, only a flock is heavy. The corrugated tin slices the afternoon at an angle. The twittering of the sparrows is hoarse.
    The heads come nearer, on their way out of the factory, leaving the wire behind. The gateman can already make out their necks. He paces up and down. He yawns, his tongue is thick, it squeezes his eyes shut during the empty time when the sun sends streaks of moisture down his chin. When the gateman stands in the sunlight, a bald spot appears, sleeping under strands of hair. The gateman still doesn’t see the hands and bags of the passing heads.
    For the gateman, yawning is waiting. When the workers leave the wire, their bags become his bags. The bags are searched. The bags are light, and swing from the hands holding them. Unless there’s iron stashed inside, in which case they hang stiffly. The gateman notices that. The women’s purses also hang stiffly if they are carrying something made of iron. Anything that can be stolen from the factory is made of iron.
    The gateman’s hands don’t rummage through every bag, they simply know which to search when the faces pass by, because there is a change in the air. A change he can sense in his face, somewhere between his nose and his mouth. The gateman lets himself be inhaled by this air, lets his intuition decide between one bag and another.
    His decision also depends on the gatehouse shade, and on the taste of the sunflower seeds in his mouth. If a few kernels are rancid his tongue turns bitter. His cheekbones clench up, his eyes grow stubborn. His fingertips tremble. But after the first bag his fingers gain confidence. His palm presses against the foreign objects, his grabbing becomes greedy. Rummaging through a bag is for him the same thing as grabbing a face. He can cause the faces to go from chalk to blush. And they don’t recover. When he waves them on, the faces leaving the gate are either caved in or swollen up. And they stay distraught long after they’ve left. Their vision and hearing stay blurred, so that the sun seems like a giant version of the gateman’s hand. And their noses are no longer enough, they have to gasp for air in the streetcar, with mouths and eyes in faces that are no longer their own.
    As he searches, the gateman hears their empty swallowing. Throats turn dry as a vise, fear rummages through stomachs, and passes out of their bowels as foul air that lingers at knee height. The gatekeeper can smell the fear. And if he spends longer