by Constantin Ţoiu (b. 1923)
excerpt He continued to walk towards the former Senate Square, his hand pressed against his jaw, still paralyzed from the aggression of the figurant, and the bizarre appearance of "his General" in that particular place. One blow after another. It was too much… It was indeed too much, even for ten hours, the time elapsed since he had gone into the basement of Brummer's antique shop.He found the door to the apartment building open. He crossed the spacious, neon-lit entrance hall. The doorman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep in the small room whose window was covered with rough cloth with a hole cut into it, and a piece of suiting sewn just above the hole, which could open or close this observation point. He took the service elevator and got out on the ninth floor, close to the door of the one-room apartment. By taking the other elevator he would have reached the far end of the hallway and would have had to walk all the way to the door, risking an undesired encounter. As usual when Luisa had been warned about his coming over, he found the door standing ajar. It was an "Anglo-Saxon" thing. She had been nourishing a secret admiration for the British ways ever since she had spent several months in England, in the autumn of 1949, with her husband who was a press attaché. Kiril was amazed to notice with some of the Marxists in official positions this contradiction between their public and private life. In the same way, their democracy now became something of an abstraction, with no real connection to real people. What should have been natural genteelness – like this habit of opening the door when expecting a visitor, an intentional exaggeration of any person's right to be spared at least the easily avoidable obstacles – had acquired with Luisa the air of borrowed habits, typical of the snob, innate traitor of his own class. In the countryside, the open door of a house where you are expected goes unnoticed. Middle class mimesis always lends that spectacular inconsistency to moral values, oscillatory as a result of social climbing. Cavadia often returned to this idea he was so fond of: a capacity for solid ethics is only to be found with the extremes of the social organism – the lower classes and the genuine aristocracy. Axente, on the other hand, used to say: in the process of fighting the bourgeoisie, and constantly rubbing against it, the most ridiculous thing would be for us to assume the nature of the enemy we annihilate! Kiril remembered that the former mechanic had told him this while fixing a padlock – he had even retained the name: it was an obsolete Phoebus – and he had noticed that the man spoke best while fixing something, completely engrossed in the things he was mending, as if his spirit needed to keep sight of a rigorous mechanism in order to free itself from all the hesitations of life and speech…Upon closing the door of the service elevator on the ninth floor, Kiril saw the promising patch of light that the half-open door cast on the corridor. Luckily Luisa's mother, the old midwife, the shoemaker, was not at home. For the first time he came into the house at such a late hour on his feet, walking straight and without taking any precautions, as if he were entering his own home. The Japanese screen was folded like a harmonica in a corner. No wild geese, no tranquil pond. The "dog bed" with its perfectly stretched, army-style blanket was in plain sight, across the room from the fridge rattling duly in the opposite corner, on the same side as the screen, thus making the all-too-familiar hallway where the old lady slept look larger and more spacious. Luisa, as she appeared from the right, coming in through the door that led to the kitchen, surprised him on the threshold of the vestibule, inspecting the hallway. And then, as he suddenly caught sight of her in her immaculate starched night gown that she had probably put on especially for him after his phone call woke her – no night gown looks like that after it had been slept in, even for fifteen minutes – he experienced one of those moments of suspension: in his mind there flashed, absurdly and incredibly clearly, the face of the figurant, that bloke in his long underpants coming towards him along the bank of the Dambovitza, and hitting him so furiously before he, the General, showed up. A moment of prodigious recollection which resembles, on anyone's face, forgetfulness itself, accompanied by the frozen expression one displays when desperately, but futilely, trying to remember something. Luisa was anxiously asking him if he was feeling all right, if he was sick. Kiril, still stunned by the punch he had received, and by the way "his General" had broken the deal, was staring at her, trembling imperceptibly. His memory, due to this freezing of the nervous system, had gone wayward, like a defective mechanism, bringing up absurd images; like the suddenly stiff face of an uncle on his father's side who had come from out of town to visit with them and who, upon tasting the green walnut comfiture his mother had offered him, had all of a sudden frozen with the teaspoon at his lips, his eyes glassy and whistling something very strange through clenched teeth – Mr. Merishor, the father, had gestured to them to keep silent, the way one should do when coming across a sleepwalker in balance on the edge of a wall – then the uncle had come to and picked up the conversation as if nothing had happened; he suffered from a less severe form of falling sickness, came the explanation. As long as he had pressed his handkerchief against his jaw, in the street and in the elevator, the bleeding had stopped; then, while he stood in the doorway, a little stream of blood started oozing on the corner of his mouth and was now trickling down his chin. Luisa screamed; she had only just seen it; she dug her hands into her hair, then brought them in a genuinely theatrical gesture down to her cheeks, pressing them forcefully, lost for words. Kiril tried to calm her down, speaking with difficulty, as one does after having a tooth pulled out. She rushed into the bathroom, soaked a handkerchief in cold water, returned in a hurry, cleaned away the blood by pressing the handkerchief on the wound, caressing him, soothing him. But what was it all about?! she wanted to know, prey to the typical womanly panic upon seeing a wound. Kiril dismissed the issue with a wave of his hand – he would tell her later. He was feeling better. The punch he had received on the quay seemed to have entered a system of comprehension. Exhausted, he embraced his girlfriend and recognized her sweetish, heavy tuberose perfume. He silently endured the delicately sweet, yet commanding fragrance of the cologne. Disloyal like the man who, while embracing one woman, is thinking of another, who once meant something to him… All that is left of a romance before it fades into routine… Kiril remembered smelling, one night long before, in July, Rita's perfume. That fragrance with no equivalent in nature – "a game rather of the spirit". The aroma of old lingered for a while, hesitant proof to an existence that is slowly blending into dream. The crystal stopper was sparkling in its usual place on the light-flooded night table, like a corpus delicti beyond any doubt, the night of the ten chimes of Dr. Merishor's grandfather clock. Everything, in this moment of forgetfulness and remembrance, assumed the appearance of Estera's freckled body piously kneeling by the march from the "Famous fanfares" collection. He was now kissing the woman in his arms with a feigned, but duly childish and romantic diligence which gave the moment a luster of false innocence. Kiril broke away from the embrace, blinking fast – a clear sign of his feelings of guilt – and looked as furtively as he could into Luisa's violet, desire-soaked eyes. He apologized, not so much to her as to himself, to his integrity buried away in the hostile, cold and dead season. He felt like kneeling at the roots of his integrity, too tender and devoid of its deserved warmth, for him to dare to… He would have dug the earth with his fingers to help it grow as free as possible. In the corner of his mouth blood was again trickling down…"…Your blood is sweet and good!" she was whispering light-headedly, kissing him greedily. "Your blood is so sweet, so good and hot… I love your blood… Give me all your blood!"Slowly, she pulled him towards the iron bed in the hallway, which the wild-geese-patterned Japanese screen, now folded, revealed completely. The idea of rolling about in the "midwife's dog bed" hurt Kiril's decency; for a few seconds he tried to resist. He gave in, however, like a great wounded abandoning himself to her comforts. Constantin Ţoiu (b. 1923) "knows well the importance of the psychological dimension in literature. Facts are always accompanied by an echo in the soul, capable of endowing them with an acute human significance. But beyond the raw truths presented in the radioscopic, unmerciful light of an intellectual, Cartesian lucidity that refuses fanatical blindness and sentimental excuses, the novelist's testimony wins confidence due to its superior realism." (Ov. S. Crohmălniceanu) When it was first published, at the height of the communist regime (1976), the novel aroused interest, especially among knowing readers, who were familiar – to a certain degree – with the totalitarian abuses of the 1950s.
by Constantin Ţoiu (b. 1923)
by Constantin Ţoiu (b. 1923)