‘Here’s another now!’ exclaimed Petre and went up to the form in the snow. ‘What is with you, good beople?’
I climbed down, gingerly. My whole body was aching. On the ground was a blond young man, with a carefully trimmed beard and a wound below his shoulder. My eyes remained glued on his clothing: an elegant, seemingly brand-new suit, whose pieces I could not quite name, and tall, highly polished black boots. Beside him a hat had been cast aside, but there was nothing other than that. I saw he was breathing. There was no doubt that he was alive.
‘It was the devil himself made me leave the house today, to get away from my wife’s brattle, and now I’ve met the devil himself, God forgive me. What to do?’
He suddenly turned around and looked at me suspiciously.
‘It wasn’t you, was it?’
He bent his forefinger, as if pulling a trigger.
‘I? God forbid! I don’t know one end of a gun from another.’
‘Come off it! You can’t fool me. Where’s your bistol?’
‘What do you mean? I don’t have a pistol,’ I said, feeling like a bad actor in a good play.
‘What are you jabbering on about?’ Petre began to shout. ‘I’ll bunch you in the head, see if I don’t!’
And he brandished his fists at me.
‘I have never held a pistol in my life, understand that once and for all! I have never seen this... this boy in my life. He should be taken to hospital as a matter of urgency. I think he has fainted. I do not even know where I am. I do not recognize anything. I think I must have fainted myself. Maybe I fell. Maybe I was struck. I do not understand anything of this. Anything at all!’
Unfortunately my voice trembled. Petre gave me a strange look: ‘You’re not in your right mind! You’re lunatic. You escabed from the madhouse, didn’t you? I read in the newsbaber that they make you swallow quicksilver, so that your beard and your moustache fall out. You fell to fighting, like our Lahovary on Filibescu Street, tried to kill each other in a duel, with swords and bistols! The devil take me if I can understand what’s wrong with such beople!’
For a time he trampled the snow with the toe of his boot, without taking his eyes off me: ‘I’m taking you to the Bolice. Let them deal with you. Even though I’ve seen that there aren’t too many cobbers around the blace at the weekend, we’ll find one to lock you in a cell sure enough.’
Then he tried to heave the young man into the sleigh. He struggled with the body for a while and in the end yelled at me, releasing a white plume from his mouth, as if he were smoking: ‘Why don’t you helb me? I can’t lift him by myself!’
I grasped the blond young man by the shoulders, as instructed by Petre. He was heavy. Petre looked at me scornfully. We laid him on a plaid rug, on top of the logs. Petre tidied him up, as if he were arranging goods for display, put his hat on his head, rummaged in the inside pocket of his coat, whence he removed a deer-skin wallet, which he immediately concealed in his own pocket. All of a sudden I realized what had been niggling me ever since Petre said he intended to take me to the Police.
‘What do you mean there are not many people there at the weekend? What day is it today? Isn’t it Monday? Today was Monday!’
Petre did not deign to reply. He seemed clear in his mind. The horse was moving at a trot and the surroundings were innocent enough, and yet I was about to lose my mind. The trees arched whitely overhead, then the open road, the sun, again clumps of woodland and a lone bird fluttering without a care. We soon reached the main road, where many different tracks could be seen mingling together.
‘It’s Friday,’ he condescended to say – seemingly mollified.
Having risen before dawn, after a night of restless sleep and exhausted by my own agitation, I think I then fell asleep.
‘Just a hob, a skib and a jumb and we’ll be there!’
My opening eyes were seized by the most astonishing scene I had ever beheld. The sun was high in the sky. The light suffused a bustling street: carriages to which were harnessed pairs of glossy horses, an ox cart creaking under a gigantic barrel, hansoms, irritable coachmen, one- and two-storey buildings in whose windows glinted the rays of the sun, shops with gaily painted signs. The people were seemingly all dressed in the same fashion, one matching the other. The ladies wore hats swathed in scarves tied beneath the chin; their waists were unnaturally slender and their heavy garments reached to the ground. The men all had bowler hats and canes. Two officers in braided uniforms saluted somebody in a carriage. A hubbub, a merry buzz, with clattering hooves muffled by the snow, coachmen’s cries, and jingling harness bells. The snow on the road was sullied as if with ashes and churned by the horses’ hooves, but the pavements were white.
I felt rested and joyful. It was as if I found myself in the world of a young and active God, having lived in an increasingly ruinous world that had lost its God or which had been lost by God. It was as if I were seeing, after many long years, a sky I no longer knew existed. It was as if I had been resurrected, after a living death. It was as if I were under a protective wing. A good feeling, one of love for all that I saw, tightened my throat. My heart was beating wildly and I felt the pain that had long ago inured me to the thought of death. Something had happened without my knowledge. I did not understand why, but my eyes filled with tears. Might I be dreaming? When you dream, however, you do not necessarily realize it is a dream, but when you are awake you know for sure. I did not need to pinch myself to be sure that all I was seeing was real. Reality has an unmistakable consistency. When you go to work in the morning, nobody has to tell you that you are not asleep or that you are alive. I was in a world that was alive and awake. It looked familiar to me. I knew that I knew it, but I did not know how I knew it. I knew it and yet I did not really know it. I asked myself where I had ended up. I did not ask myself how. I shall think about it when I feel able; for the time being, I am not able. Like never before, I felt the urge to look, to feast my eyes on the spectacle of everyday life. Petre said something to me. I did not hear him, because my eyes, which focused on the details as if through a huge magnifying glass, had replaced all my other senses. Suddenly, one image struck my retina like a hammer. It was a building I seemed to recognize: Bucharest’s National Theatre, on Victory Avenue. In the plaza in front of the building small hansoms covered with tarpaulins stood in a row, and the snugly dressed coachmen were talking among themselves. Snow-laden trees marked the semi-circle of the plaza. So, I was on Victory Avenue. I had, in a way, come home and my parents’ house must have been but a few steps away.
‘Good God, where have you brought me?’ I groaned.
‘To the bolice station. I told you!’ came the immediate reply from up on the box. ‘Whether they’ll send you back to the madhouse, that I can’t say, but at least there’ll be beople to take care of you. I couldn’t leave you lying there, like him, who got shot with the bistol.’
Petre’s harsh but not hostile voice brought me back to reality: to the new reality. I plunged back into the unruly city. To the left, on the blank lateral wall of a splendid building, beneath the oddly squashed outline of a roof whose chimneys were smoking, I saw an advertisement in capital letters: L’INDÉPENDANCE ROUMAINE. The letters U and M, which were below a chimney, were blackened with soot. Bells were ringing somewhere nearby. Then I heard, like an echo, the chimes of clock, of the sort that provides entertainment to those new to the city.
‘They still haven’t appointed a new director at L’Endebandans, to reblace Mr Lahovary,’ said Petre, who was suddenly talkative. ‘I read it yesterday in Universul. Whoever they bring in, the baber won’t change its bolicy. True, they bretend they’re not caught up in bolitics. But that’s what they all say!’
The street advanced in time with our sleigh, strangely fast. We reached an intersection that I was seemingly seeing for the first time, we crossed it with difficulty, since sleighs and carriages were passing along the boulevard and were not prepared to wait, and then we turned right, coming to an immediate stop. We we
re plunged within the shadow of a wall. I recalled the unconscious young man and wondered whether he might have died in the meantime. I looked at him and he seemed to groan. There was something terribly childlike about his face, and his blond, longish hair covering part of his cheek.
An imposing, yellowish, two-storey building loomed before us, and above the entrance, beneath the coat of arms, was embedded a clock, whose hands showed half past two. And beneath the clock, large stone letters read: PREFECTURE OF THE CAPITAL’S POLICE.
5.
The woman was approaching the end of her Friday prayer, the longest of all the prayers of the days of the week. Epiharia was a model parishioner, for although she was not yet twenty-five, she came before the altar every day, and the priest praised her and cited her as an example to the lazy and slack. In secret, she wanted to become a nun. She knew the prayer almost by heart, and murmured it in a low voice, glancing at the little book she held only to check. “And since it is so, multiply, O Lord, my labours, my temptations and my pains,” said the woman, although at the same time she thought that this was not what she wished at all, “but also multiply and make abundant my patience, my strength, my contentment and my blessedness” – this was more like it – in all the trials that might befall me...” The door opened and an unknown man entered. Epiharia lowered her eyes to her little book: “in all the trials that might befall me.” The man walked forward, looking around him, at the saints on the walls, painted, as the young woman said to herself, with priceless grace. “For, I know that I am weak, unless Thou givest me strength; fearful, unless Thou makest me bold; blind, unless...” Now she could see him and instead of praying, she allowed herself to be drawn by the sly sins of this world and watched as he went up to the altar. Without making the sign of the cross! “Evil, unless Thou makest me good; lost, unless Thou seekest me.” The man too looked lost, his face was as handsome as an angel’s and he was dressed like... like a beggar at the church gate. Where could he have left his hat? He wasn’t holding it and nor had he hung it on the hooks above the chairs... “With Thy abundant and divine power, and with the gift of Thy Holy Cross, to which I bow and which I glorify, now and forever and ever, Amen.” She had fluffed a few of the words, but she was no longer able to concentrate on her prayers. She watched from the corner of her eye as the stranger stood next to the icon of the Mother of God, brought there long ago, in the reign of Constantine Brâncoveanu, as a blessing to all those who crossed the threshold of the church. People came to pray to the icon, some of them in misfortune, some of them for health, some for wealth or for children, and they knelt, their eyes lowered, their pious lips barely touching the saint’s silver casing. But see that man, standing up, looking her straight in the eye, and not for a moment or two, but for minutes on end. How can you look the Mother of God in the eye? What can he be thinking? No, it is not fitting to judge a man standing before the altar, maybe he is an unfortunate wretch, a man without means, God alone judges us, each and every one, wherever we might be. But it is as if some people, like this man, make you feel, I don’t know, they make you feel spiritually straitened. “Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us sinners, your servants” – and here Epiharia made a broad, emphatic sign of the cross, her hand coming to rest on her left shoulder – “Amen.” When her mind reached the word sinners, as if bidden, the man turned toward her. Taking fright, she averted her gaze and looked to the side, at the shield of St George, who for centuries had been slaying the same Dragon with the same spear.
‘Good evening... erm, madam.’
‘The Lord be with you!’
Epiharia had a round childlike face, white skin, and a dimple, also round, beneath her lower lip. Only a single lock of her hair was visible, as her headscarf covered her ears, and was wound beneath her chin and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her expression was serious. The man looked weary. His voice (praise God!) was devoid of hidden thoughts, a downcast voice, and so the woman once more felt her soul at peace.
‘Where might a man without money or belongings spend the night? Might he do so here?’
‘Only if you wish to spend the night with a saint,’ said Epiharia, without thinking of anything bad, but then quickly made the sign of the cross because of the unseemly implication and begged God’s forgiveness aloud for being rash and foolish.
Now the stranger was smiling. He was a different man!
‘No, but I would like to find somewhere. I am... I am unwell. I am ill.’
For as long as he smiled he was as young as a cherub. Without the smile he was much older. You would have thought his voice was bleeding. He looked like a man who had fallen on hard times, as she had rightly divined, and so she had done well not to judge him.
‘Shall I take you to our deacon? He lives two houses further down the street, over there, past that light-brown carriage, or rather the cherry-red carriage. Can you see it? But he has many children; he too is needy. If you can’t find him, come back here to me – my name is Epiharia – and we’ll think of something else.’
The stranger left, but no more than five minutes passed before he came back, making a gesture of helplessness. Nobody had answered his knock on the door. The woman had another solution: ‘We have the key to the house where the painters from the Stork’s Nest stay in summer. In June they started repainting the band of murals with the saints below the roof, but they broke off in November. I can ask the priest for the key, he has it because some of them came here to our church, to do some painting, and they worked now here, now there...’
‘That would be wonderful!’
‘But you ought to know that there is a problem...’
Now the man looked older and a furrow formed between his eyebrows again.
‘It’s a summer-house and there is no stove, nor firewood, nor bedclothes. But you know that man is capable of great control. Simeon the Stylite lived for a great long time atop his pillar. And one day he invited St Theodosius to come see him. On top of the pillar, that is! I can give you a plaid rug, from the priest...’
Off she went, chubby and full of kindness. An hour must have elapsed before she returned. She found the man sitting in the choir stall, his eyes closed. She had brought a large key and explained, with great indulgence for the stranger’s ignorance, how he should get to the house and what he should do to avoid freezing during the night. She placed in his arms a threadbare blanket and gave him a large chunk of bread from the priest, wrapped in a cloth. She also gave him an icon lamp, to shed light. She did not tell him that the priest had urged her in a low voice not to let herself be beguiled by all the city’s ne’er-do-wells; that was of no concern to the stranger. The man thanked her and smiled with teeth as white as fresh snow, although he seemed quite unclear about what she was telling him. But the woman was quite certain that the Good Lord would guide his steps to the right place, as certain as she was that in every path through life it is fated that we should lose our way: for, she herself had once gone astray.
6.
A soundless voice that I alone hear, stronger than my poor tortured body and my poor terrified brain. I talk to myself in order to grow accustomed to myself, in order not to be so afraid of my fear and in order to be sure I have not lost my mind. I am afraid of them, of myself, of Him who plays with us. I am surrounded by beings that seem to be the fruit of a diseased imagination. But why do they not disappear? Why can I hear them? Why am I unable to use my mind in order to understand how my mind works and whence comes this fear? It is as if I were inhabited by a stranger, who knows many things about me, and who shapes me as he wills. Why do you fight with me? I am beaten in advance; you, or Thou, will have the power. I am defeated in advance. What satisfaction can you gain if you show me that you are more powerful? I know it as well as you do! Yes, you have won.
When something bad happens, you always await the next blow. I huddle up inside myself and wait.
The three-pronged key swiftly did its duty and thus I entered. It was pitch black and I waited for my eyes to grow accustome
d. Then, by groping around, I explored the place. There was a plank bed, like in a mountain cabin: a long platform on which, I think, ten people could have slept, squeezed together. I could have done with ten people. The room was cluttered with things, as in a store, and I kept bumping into them, without seeing them. In one corner I came across some empty buckets and even managed to knock them over. You’re not a chair; you’re not a table. But there was a small window with a broken pane. I placed the rolled-up blanket on the so-called bed and I would have lain down that very instant, had I not been so cold. My whole body ached, from my head to my wet feet. A hot bath, some hot soup, some mulled wine with cinnamon, or at least a cup of tea. I had eaten the bread during the first steps I took, all of it. The icon lamp had gone out. I had to light it; I had to kindle a flame in that icy room. Might the church be unlocked? There must be at least one candle burning there. I went back outside and dragged myself to the church door. It was locked. The windows were high up and there was no question of my reaching them. Shouldn’t the House of the Lord always be open, especially at night, and especially in winter? But no, it seems that we are not welcome all hours. When the Lord is not ready for guests, he knows how to stay aloof. Or maybe He too needs his hours of sleep. I went back, discouraged and more exhausted than ever. Yet again I had to wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the pitch black. I was shut outside the world. I undid the string tying the blanket and out of it fell a little package, wrapped in paper. It was surely a gift from the woman, from Epiharia. I groped for a long time on the cold, dusty, filthy floor. The package must have been very small and light; it made not a sound when it fell. I found it only after I had scratched my hands on some jagged objects or splinters. I went to the threshold, where there was more light, and tore off the paper. Inside the paper she had wrapped a box of matches, with long, thick sticks, and a little crucifix. ‘God is awake,’ I said to myself. ‘God be with you!’ the woman had said. I would have to be careful not to waste the matches. I readied the icon lamp, closed the door, lest a gust of wind blow it out, rubbed my hands together for a long while, so that my fingers would not be numb, and then, groping like a blind man, took a matchstick, carefully scraping it over the knobbly sandpaper. The matchstick snapped. It was only after a number of attempts, with impatient hands, that I succeeded. A flame appeared and gently tilting the lamp I managed to light it, although I burned my fingers in the process. Yet I did not feel the burn; for there was a light, which soothed me. It was my lamp. I was able to see the objects around me: some paintbrushes, empty leather chests, which were old, their lining torn, stones of every size, ragged clothes, an empty, dirty bottle, a broom made of twigs, a hammer, nails, and things to which I could put no name. I used them nonetheless. I warmed my hands on the lamp, and then I gathered the stones to make a hearth, in which I placed the torn paper from the parcel – a piece of newspaper – and the lining torn from the suitcases. I spent a while snapping the twigs from the broom and made a fairly large heap. I did not waste any more of the matches, whose white phosphorus was now more precious than gold, but set fire to a paintbrush, which gave off a revolting, suffocating, unbearable reek of paint, but which burned well. I kindled quite a decent fire and the air lost a little of its chill, while the smoke poured out of the broken windowpane. I gathered all the rags off the floor and laid them on the plank bed, and then, in the overcoat Petre had given me and in the blanket Epiharia had given me, I lay down. I kept the icon lamp burning. Behind me, unintelligible, the longest day of my life faded away.
Life Begins On Friday Page 4
