The Fox Was Ever the Hunter Read Online Free PDF

were running from her throat to her ankle and she were climbing down the steps carrying her own head. Perhaps because my mother lives in the cellar, said the servant’s daughter. The officer’s wife spends half the day sitting at the table, and her eyes are piercingly empty, like dried-out sunflower disks. The servant’s daughter wiped her nose, rubbing her red nostrils with a crumpled handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief back in her purse like a snowball. She explained that every year the officer’s wife buys her mother a pair of genuine lambskin gloves, and every week she gives her coffee beans and Russian tea.
    But because my mother scrimps and saves, said the servant’s daughter, she always gives me the tea and coffee. She can’t give me the gloves, though, otherwise the officer’s wife would notice. She did manage to have the ones from the year before last disappear by claiming that the postman’s dog had gotten hold of them and chewed them up so much they were no longer fit to wear. The postman denied it but he couldn’t prove anything.
    The servant’s daughter told Adina that her mother had also gotten her the job at the school, thanks to the officer’s wife.
    *   *   *
    Two fishermen are standing next to each other on the riverbank. One of them takes off his cap, his hair is packed down, the band has left a ring pressed into the back of his head. Underneath one cap he has another—a cap of white hair. The other man is eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks, they float on the river, white inside and black outside. He holds out a handful to the man with the white cap of hair and says, take some to pass the time. The man brushes them away. They’re too much like melon seeds, he says. When I came back from the front, everything they ate here at home was like one big cemetery. Sausage, cheese, bread, even milk and cucumbers were all buried under lids or shut away behind a cupboard door, just like a grave. Now, after all these years I don’t know. He bends down, picks up a small rock, turns it over in his hand and shuts his right eye. He flings the rock into the river so that it skips four times, dancing on the water before it sinks. I no longer feel the same disgust, he says, but I’m still afraid of the insides of melons because they remind me of coffins. The fisherman with the sunflower seeds lowers his head, his mouth is narrow, his eyes skewed. He moves both rods to sunnier grass.
    The sun is high in the sky, on top of the city. The rods cast shadows, the afternoon leans against the shadows. As soon as the day tips over, Adina thinks, and the sunlight goes skidding away, it will cut deep trenches in the fields around the city and the corn will snap in two.
    When they don’t speak, the fishermen don’t move. If they aren’t talking with each other, they’re not alive. Their silence has no reason, the words simply falter. The clock inside the cathedral tower advances, the bell chimes, another hour is empty and gone, it could be today, it could be tomorrow. Nobody on the banks of the river hears the chiming, the sound quiets when it reaches the water and whimpers until it’s gone.
    The fishermen measure the day by the heat of the sky and can tell by looking at the smoke above the wire factory if it’s raining elsewhere. And by feeling the burn on their shoulders they can sense how long the sun will keep growing and when it will sink and shatter.
    Anyone who truly knows the river has seen heaven from the inside, say the fishermen. As the city starts getting dark, there’s a moment when the clock in the tower can no longer measure time. Its face turns white and casts a sheen into the park. When that happens, the fine-toothed acacia leaves look like combs. The clock hands skip ahead, but the evening refuses to believe what they’re saying. The white sheen does not last long.
    But while it does last, all the fishermen lie down beside one another on their stomachs and gaze into the