The Intruder

excerpt  I wasn't wrong. In every woman, more than in a man, lies a history. But I have never in my life heard a shorter one, although the events in it could very well be enough for someone, their entire life. Could Nutzi have felt that I wasn't able to listen any more, or to understand? "I felt that you were singing for me," she said, filling the two small glasses with that deftness, so pleasant, of a woman's hand, "although you avoided looking in that direction, and minded your own business… Now I understand that you had seen me before and I am not surprised that I didn't notice you; since I separated from my husband and he took my child, I have eyes for no man, whoever he might be, this is how terrible and spiteful I have become. 'Nutzi', says madam Sorana, 'don't resist in vain, my dear, whatever we might do'…Pay attention to what she said: 'Whatever we might do, the male is on our tracks'…'But how do you keep out of it?' I said. Would you like a drink?"I took the glass, and we clinked: "My respects, miss," I said in the same manner, and I drank down the liqueur. She only dipped her lips, but one could tell that she liked it; it was perhaps the only kind of alcohol she was good at. "'You keep out but you tell me not to do so, although you can remarry'…'My dear,' she said, 'there is nothing more… more…' I don't know how she put it, 'than the love of a man. The illusion, my dear, doesn't satisfy me any longer. And a man sees an illusion in a woman, and when the illusion is gone, ha, ha,' you heard her laughing, 'it's our fault!'...'It doesn't satisfy me either, Mrs. Sorana,' I said, 'it's just that the child breaks my heart." "Now it is my turn to say I don't understand, miss Nutzi, usually, when men get a divorce, they run away from children, they leave them to the ex wife…" Nutzi kept silent and, with an unexpected gesture, she drew the curtain from the window. But she didn't switch on the light. "Then I found out," she then said, "that he had some relatives in the countryside who wanted to foster a child; he came to the trial as a Party activist and the lawyer declared with witnesses that I was unable to raise the child, that I had no job and that I lived in promiscuity. This is what he said; I later asked Mrs. Sorana what this meant. It was because I had an unwholesome house, but he didn't say that he took me from our beautiful house in Oltenitza and brought me to his filthy hut on 13^th September Street, where we lived together with his parents, with his father who was afflicted with consumption. Still, I was the guilty one, and before I realized what he was up to, I found that I had lost the trial and the child. But he didn't tell me that, he told me: 'Don't worry, what am I, a mother, to raise children? Would you like me to give him to the other woman? I'll leave him to you!' The witnesses told the truth, but they didn't say that the promiscuity was his, not mine. It was true that I didn't have any job, and only afterwards did I go to Apaca and get a qualification in ready-made clothes, but when I lived with him from his salary, I will never in my life forget that he left me two hundred lei to live with for one week, and he took the rest, five-six thousand lei… He knew very well that you could live on two hundred lei for only two days, not seven, but he said he didn't give me more so that I wouldn't give it to my mother! My mother! He thought mother fell into his hand, but my father had a sailor's pension, and they had plenty of everything; poor fellow! Afterwards they threw him out of the party and he took up carpentry again in Militari village, so the nutcase went back to what he was good at…" "Why did they throw him out of the party?" I asked her. "They caught him! He thought it would work forever; he was taking money, together with somebody else, from the building site, from those who applied there, in order to hire them. Ten thousand lei for each of them. And he was also stupid, because he took money from more people than they could hire, and they waited for a while, and then went to the prosecutor's office and made a complaint against him, saying that he didn't hire them and didn't give them the money back either. The prosecutor wanted to hush it up, but they didn't give up, and had it printed in a newspaper… Yes, he would do a lot of such things!" Here, Nutzi stopped her narrative and burst out laughing. "I wonder how they kept him for two years, maybe what he told me he was doing there, at the department, was to the liking of some of those people who kept him there, for otherwise, he would have been fired long ago: only the recruitment issue could not be hushed up and then they raised the problem." "But what was he doing?"Nutzi kept quiet for a few moments, looking aside, so as to remember. Not something remote, but something nearby, of which she had remembered a while ago and laughed. And she said: "Whenever he would arrest a kulak, he would ask him to eat his fur cap! 'Eat your fur cap,' he told them, 'or else, I'll put you in jail and you'll rot in there; I'll be damned!'" "And that guy?" "He would eat it, what else could he do? But he didn't get away afterwards! And he wasn't like that when I married him, until he was appointed there, at the department. One day, I don't know what I was looking for in the wardrobe, and I glanced at the place where I had a box, in which I kept some glass pearl necklaces and some gold pins from my father, I liked to open the lid and take them in my hand. They were placed above the birth certificate and the marriage license. When I looked there, I saw that the marriage license was missing. 'Where is the marriage license?' I asked him. 'Did you take it?' 'Why should I take it? What do I need it for?' he said. 'It's missing,' I said. 'Who could have taken it?' Well, just like that, with me in the house, he had filed for divorce, he had met a woman over there, at the department, he didn't care for me any more, it had gone too far. I had a child, I went to her place, I didn't want to start a scandal, I realized it made no sense, but I wanted to see what it was all about, so as to know what I should do, because my parents-in-law seemed to be on my side: 'He's young, my dear girl,' my mother-in-law told me, 'don't worry, he'll calm down, he will not divorce.' When, actually, that woman was also pregnant by him; she was a shop assistant in a bookstore and I asked her what she gained from ruining my home, and she answered: 'At least I was capable of this; just as you wanted to have a man, so did I.' This is what she told me! I returned home and I found my house full of smoke, he was playing backgammon, with all sorts of friends of his from the neighborhood, the room was packed with empty bottles of beer and the smoke was so thick, that you could cut it with a knife. 'Petrica,' but he interrupted me immediately 'Stay here, next to me,' he said, 'because I have to pay for forty bottles of beer, you could bring me luck.' He didn't care! After the divorce, I wanted to see my child, but they didn't let me, he married the other one and brought her there, they were given an apartment, and they left me, out of pity, to stay on with his parents. And one day, his brother came to me. 'Dear Nutzi,' he said, 'I feel pity for you, that nutcase left you and he took your child, too. Get dressed and come with me!' I got dressed and we left. We went to a friend of his, whose wife worked as a forewoman at Apaca; both of them held some positions in the People's Council. 'Couldn't you, Viorica,' said my brother-in-law, 'take her in, so as to learn something, to get some training? My brother left her, some sly boots grabbed him, and I sympathize with her,' that is – with me, 'she doesn't want to go back to Oltenitza, she has a BucharestID, it's a pity for her to be left like that!' 'Let her come tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock, and wait for me at the gate of the factory,' said Viorica, the forewoman from Apaca. 'We'll see what we can do!' And so, I got a job there. After less than six months, I started making money, and it was also his brother who found this room for me; he's an honest man, around fifty, he has children of my age. How can two brothers be so different, one like this, the other like that, I don't understand; if one wanted to make them different on purpose, one couldn't have done a better job."Nutzi stopped and I realized that the silence that lay between us got bigger, while at the beginning – when I entered her room and, grabbing her by the shoulders, I was about to rape her – nothing had made me feel uncomfortable. The story she told me, instead of making her different, mixed her with other women… She got married, she got divorced, she had a rather batty husband, who got what he deserved in his turn… And she, Nutzi, had finally gained from all this (if I ignored the child, for whom I didn't get the impression that she had fought like a lioness – shouldn't a mother fight for her child like a lioness!?), she had a room of her own, in downtown Bucharest, well furnished and then she was young (now I found her young!), she had a job, and above all, she had made friends with a special woman, the lady with the terrace… But perhaps this is what she had wanted, to mingle with other women. She then kept completely silent and I started to think, first remotely, as if from another world, then, closer and closer: I am alone with a woman in the room… I am alone with a woman in the room… And suddenly, I looked at her as if I wanted to realize if it was true or not. It was. I saw her getting up from the bed, turning aside a little, and with gestures that were exactly as I pictured, that is, real because they belonged to a woman who was here close to me, and unreal because I had seen this under my eyelids, each and every time when, in the evening, I would fall asleep, and thought of how it would be if I were alone with a woman, how she would lie on the bed and stay like that, her face upwards. In the room, for someone who would have come from the light outside, it was completely dark, but our eyes got used to it – I realized that later, when I switched on the light – and we could perfectly see all things. This is how I saw her – after a while during which I couldn't stop watching her – raising her chin slightly upwards, quietly, parting her lips and her chest started moving up and down as if she had fallen asleep unexpectedly and completely forgot of my presence there. Never before can I remember any other occasion when I had so much time to notice these things in a woman. I might have seen them more once, but I don't remember anything… Everything is like water behind me, and beyond the water was that woman, her head leaning backwards, quietly breathing, her entire being waiting… I stood up and drew near the bed. And, with utmost care, lest something should happen, the same way I once went with some boys in a wheat field to show me a nest with the eggs in it, of an I don't know what unusual bird, and, our hearts throbbing, we lifted the wheat ears to see it, I lifted the woman's dress slowly, and uncovered her. That moment, the silence seemed to increase, the same way as late at night, in a room, the sleep of those inside makes you hear the silence even more: Nutzi was wheezing. Not for a moment did it cross my mind to move that body from where it was; it seemed to me untouchable, although I knew that in the next seconds it would happen…Then, she stopped breathing that deeply and suddenly started shivering. But she suppressed it, she wanted to remain as she was, without making any move so as not to ruin the poise of her body, as if this was the way it should be, and it couldn't have been otherwise. However, her body was so lively and that shiver seemed to ignite her, she hissed and suddenly burst out crying… I gave out a peal then. I was holding her and the room resounded with my laughter which was now low and hoarse, like a neigh. This never happened to me afterwards, only with her did I have that savage laughter which was reiterated on the following dates.  Marin Preda (1922-1980) was perhaps The Novelist of the communist era; as in the case of many of his contemporaries, he followed a give-and-take policy in relation to censorship that would enable the publication of some "delicate" literature while shelving other "problematic" issues. The Intruder (EPL, 1968), the reality-based story of a worker who becomes disabled after entering a toxic tank in order to rescue his friends, was regarded by some critics as an offspring of French existentialism, while others dismissed the idea as ridiculous.


by Marin Preda (1922-1980)