The Fox Was Ever the Hunter Read Online Free

apartment block weave a covering full of holes, a colander of dirty leaves and dirty stars. The night pushes the roses out of the city.

 
    The forelock
    The newspaper feels rough to the touch, but the dictator’s forelock stands out smooth and glossy, slick and shiny with pomade. The big flattened curl pushes all the smaller curls to the back of the head, where they get swallowed by the paper. On the rough newsprint are the words: The beloved son of the people.
    Everything that shines also sees.
    The forelock shines. It peers into the country every day, and it sees. Every day the dictator’s framed image takes up half the table. And the face below the curl takes up both hands when Adina rests them side by side. She looks straight into the void, and swallows her own breath.
    The black inside the dictator’s eye mirrors the shape and size of Adina’s thumbnails, if she crooks her thumbs just slightly. The black inside the eye stares out of the newspaper every day, peering into the country.
    *   *   *
    The optic nerve runs deep into the land. Towns and villages are squeezed together in one place, torn apart in another. Roads lose themselves in the fields, stopping at graves or by bridges or in front of trees. And trees strangle one another where they were never planted. Dogs stray, and where there are no houses they have long forgotten how to bark. They lose their winter coats, then their summer coats, they’re alternately shy and then savage when least expected. They are afraid and their paws smack their foreheads while they run, before they bite.
    And wherever the light from the black inside the eye falls, people feel the place where they are standing, the ground beneath their feet, they feel it rising steeply up their throat and sloping sharply down their back.
    *   *   *
    The light from the black inside the eye falls on the café, too, and on the park, and on the iron tables and chairs that are wrought into leaves and stems, as thin and white as twine. Except they’re heavier than they seem when a person tries to lift or slide them, because eyes are focused on the water and fingers are not expecting iron.
    The path next to the café runs along the river, the river runs along the path. Fishermen stand on the riverbank and all of a sudden there it is, in the water—the black inside the eye. Shining.
    Everything that shines also sees.
    Poplars cast their shadows down the stairs along the riverbank, the shadows break up on the steps and do not enter the water. When the streetcar crosses the bridge, new shadows push the smaller ones out into the current, just like the dictator’s forelock pushes his smaller curls to the back of his head.
    Poplar light mixes with poplar shade until the whole city is covered in stripes. Stone slabs, walls, clumps of grass, river and banks.
    No one is walking by the water, even though it’s a summer day, a summer practically made for strolling aimlessly along the river.
    The fishermen don’t trust the striped summer. They know the poplar shadows on the ground are the same thing as the poplars in the sky, knives.
    Fish won’t come anywhere near that, say the fishermen. When a dark stripe from the poplars falls on the fishing rods, the men move to sunnier grass and cast their lines into a brighter patch of water.
    A woman walks along the river, carrying a pillow tied up with string. She carries it in front of her, cradling it in both arms, the wind is beating from behind. Perhaps there’s a child inside, a sleeping infant with two heads, one on each end, where the strings have more slack. The woman’s arms are brown, but her calves are as white as the pillow. One of the fishermen eyes her calves. Her buttocks sway as she walks. The fisherman’s gaze falls into the water, wearied and shriveled by the poplars’ headstand. His eyes detect the slightest hint of evening. In the middle of the day it sneaks down the ridge of his nose. His fingers pull a cigarette from his pocket