Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  The girls, separated now and crying, went over to the old façade of the Verona tailor and up to the butcher’s. The half-skinned cow that had always been hanging on a steel hook was now mixed into the cubes of pavement, mutilated a second time. The indifferent lamb’s heads, covered in blood, stared into the azure sky with the same hallucinatory horror as Nea Titi’s human eyes. Sausages, headcheese, salamis and horseshoe-shaped pastramis lay everywhere, swarming with flies, like an animal’s organs in Arcimboldo. A delicate hand, as though painted by a Renaissance artist, rested, cut off at the wrist, on a slab of bacon tied with string. From the stump, like jellyfish filaments, the ends of veins and nerves emerged. On one finger, a ring with a white stone glistened. Maria’s heart stopped. She ran to the hand, getting her dress caught on a bundle of wires. She bent down, without touching it, choking with emotion. It was the butterfly! It was the mammoth-hair ring, on the withered finger, with its nail lacquered dark red, of Mioara Mironescu. Maria screamed as loud she was able to and Vasilica ran over. “Lelică, Lelică, it’s Mrs. Mioara’s hand!” The young girl’s hysteria grew into a fit, making her howl like an animal wrapped around Vasilica’s shoulders. Her sister tried to pull her away, to stop looking, to forget … But then, with a sharp contraction of her muscles, Maria stopped struggling. With her face ravaged, and something manic in her eyes, she grabbed the pale hand and brought it to her lips. She took the ring off of the finger and slipped it into her shirt, by her breast. A street vendor passed, in traditional apron and pants, with his Oltean hat around his neck, looking for something. A clerk with a white purse paused to look at them and passed on. The girls looked down. They took each other’s hands again, and walked through the ruined houses, trying to glimpse, in the piles of bricks and broken furniture, any vestige of their former lives. When they came to the back, to the service entrance, where the apprentices usually entered the building, they were moved by what they saw. Maria would never forget it, and she would tell the story many times, in the peace of her kitchen invaded by poplar tufts and wasps, cooking potatoes for Mircea and gazing at the dusty crenellations of the mill wall. And now, on the tram, when lazy, soft snowflakes suddenly began to fall, Maria remembered the morning after the bombing and smiled with emotion. The tram turned and rang its bell as it moved from station to station toward the university. Everyone wore heavy coats. Men wore Russian fur hats with the flaps down, or curly hats of wool. One or two had fedoras. The women held on to each other for warmth, laughing and joking, showing their missing teeth through their nauseatingly painted lips. Only Maria wore the same summer dress and the same headscarf with images of Sinaia. The other women were well cocooned, with rubber galoshes over their boots, as was the fashion in ’55. People at the stations froze in the snow, waiting for the tram. Some cars, Pobedas and Warszawas, attempted to lug their heavy carcasses, like beetles, over the white surface of the boulevard. In comparison, the black Volgas looked like limousines. Pushing away any thoughts of Costel, whom she was meeting that night at the International Fraternity Cinema, Maria sank again into the past, while the tram accelerated, creaking in every joint, past the statue of C. A. Rosetti, who reigned from his bronze chair over the leafless trees and snow of his little park.

  Only the doorframe of the service entrance was standing. Behind it, the pile of rubble rose taller than a person. And within the wood frame, on the doorstep, his bare gray head in his hands, in his peasant dress and boots from the First World War, sat Tătica. Badislav Dumitru, known as Babuc, believed he had lost both of his daughters in a single night. “The poor man sat there on the doorway, and cried,” Maria would say dozens of times. “Poor Tătica! As mean as he was to you, as stingy as he could be, he wasn’t bad in his heart. He just worked hard and suffered a lot when he was a child. He was left without parents when he was very little and raised by his older brother, who beat him with a stick for any thing he did. When the war came, he was drafted, wounded, and decorated, and he came back to the village a sergeant. After that he married Mămica and took her from Dârvari, both of them dirt poor. They had eight kids. Four lived – Anica, Vasilica, me, and Uncle Florea. The others died from tuberculosis, which is how it was back then. But as simple as they were, country people, I remember how they would talk over any decision, Tătica and Mămica, anything. I would wake up at night, at their feet where I slept, and I’d hear them talking: ‘Maria, look, tomorrow we’re supposed to plow the hill. Don’t you think it’s too early? Should we leave it two or three days?’ And Tătica listened to what Mămica said and didn’t do anything they didn’t both agree on. And he didn’t yell at her, and he never hit her once, like everyone does in the country. And you know he didn’t get married again after my poor mamma died, at 54, and he never even looked at another woman. Instead, he turned bitter and stingy. Lord, how I cried once when he stopped by, you were little then, on the way back from the market, and he gave you a little 25 bani pretzel, small as a pinky ring and so hard you couldn’t eat it, and then when I was looking for the garlic in his bag and I found a big, puffy pretzel, covered in salt and poppy seeds … He had bought the little pretzel with the change he got from a leu and given it to his grandkid, since you had teeth and could chew. And anything you asked for, ‘Tătica, can you give me a bag of nuts?’ ‘I don’t have enough, taică, how am I going to have enough?’ And when we got married, he didn’t even give us a spoon … Well, that’s how he was, but he raised us all, for better or for worse, and we never lacked for anything. He never beat you when you were little and playing in the yard in Tântava. He only spanked you once, when you put the cat on his head and it scratched his face, do you remember? Otherwise, you just had to worry about his mouth: ‘Haoleu, if this kid was mine, I’d love to put a stick on him.’ That time, after the bombing, was the first time I ever saw him cry. He was in despair. When he saw that our house was destroyed, he thought we were dead. He had heard about the bombings in the middle of the night. Up to then, the planes had gone to Ploieşti, where the refineries were. They passed right over the village, over Tântava, you could see them, like silver butterflies … Often they dropped bunches of scrap metal that the kids collected from the fields. But our neighbor across the road, the one who died, Fănel, Ochişor’s kid, he had a radio, he was well set, and other people had them too, and that’s how the whole village heard about the disaster. Most of them had children or relatives in Bucharest. You can imagine what they felt like, what grief was there. Tătica got dressed and left in the middle of the night, walking along the road, to find out what happened to us. He walked 25 kilometers to Bucharest. He got there around six in the morning. He had already been sitting there for two hours when we found him, with his head in his hands and the woven bag beside him. That day made up for a lot.”

  The girls had ran toward him, screaming, hopping along on the high heels that made their ankles bend. Tătica, raising his eyes red with tears, did not recognize them. Vasilica and Maria, his little girls in aprons and shirts they had made by hand, after they had woven the fabric themselves, had transformed into two demoiselles with curly hair, straight dresses tight at the hips, and strings of beads around their necks … When he hugged them, thanking God, while they cried, rubbing his prickly beard, overwhelmed by love and tenderness, the old man smelled perfume. A passing, absurd thought darkened his joy for a moment: had his daughters gone astray? In the village, there had been three sisters who went to live at Crucea de Piatră, and sometimes they came home gussied up with ointments and stinking of cologne. All the lads of the village, as many as hadn’t been drafted (before the end of the war, news of their son’s death on the front would reach 187 mothers in Tântava), whistled at them and shouted rude things. But no, Anica had been to Bucharest two days ago and found them toiling in the workshop, at their sewing machines. Embarrassed by the thought, Tataie hugged the girls tighter against his chest. He picked up his bag and the three of them went back to the street, forcing themselves not to look at the misery around them. The old man stopped worry
ing and cheered up. He walked, as he would until he was 87, until just a few days before he died, with enormous steps, so that the girls had to trot along on either side, barely avoiding being left behind. A man with a cart stopped by them, after they had come out of the bombed neighborhood. He was from Bolintin and knew Tătica somehow or other. They got into the cart and bumped along streets they had never been down before, until the picturesque and familiar scene of Obor, swarming with peasants, gypsies and lowlifes, opened before them. A blue smoke and the smell of grilling sausages filled the whole market. On Moşilor, and Oborul Nou, clots of carts and automobiles passed, advancing like snails in the sea of people. The middle-class houses and mud huts had almost all been made into bars. Among the many taverns full of peasants, there were signs for stores, and squalid workshops with heaps and piles of scythes, lines of shovels, chains and ropes … A Transylvanian man sold glazed bowls for ten meters along a shopfront, and after him there were babas hawking wooden spoons. A gypsy sat on a patch of grass and made rings from silver coins. Some stray children, stinking like corpses, stood around him, watching him blow fire through a bronze pipe.

  They went into a bar and squeezed together on a long bench, at a pine table stained from top to bottom with tomato juice and seeds. After a half-hour battle with the mob at the counter, Tătica came back with two pints of beer and a narrow glass of rachiu. The place smelled like sweat, rancid lard, garlic, and above all sheep – the smell of peasants, impregnated into their skin and clothes, in the rush baskets they carried for eternity. Out of his own bag, the old man took some cheese, tomato and a piece of smoked sausage, and then traded a few slices with another person at the table for a heel of bread. The girls were starving, and they ate almost everything without saying a word. The man from Bolintin had disappeared somewhere in the crowd. “How is Mămica?” Vasilica asked later, looking around through the blue smoke from Plowman or National cigarettes, still chewing with her mouth full. She looked like a rodent, like a clever squirrel, tireless, always moving. She should have been called Martha, to contrast with the dreamer Maria, but the name Martha was completely unknown among the Tântavans. “Eh … you know your mamma, she’s fine …” Babuc spoke huskily, as though his voice weren’t coming from his throat, but from somewhere underground. “When I left she was milking the cow and going ‘haoleu, my heart, haoleu, my heart.’ She had heard about the bombing. To hell with you and your heart, with all your whining and sighing, I’m going crazy, that’s what I told her, but you know your mamma what she’s like. She says ‘I dreamed the girls were crossing black water, and Maria didn’t have any hands, and Vasilica was carrying dahlias, and she was laughing, like this, at the moon … What can it be?’ And crosses and crosses, and she spits down her shirt, and then ‘haoleu my heart, haoleu my heart …’ ” They all laughed, since just like chills, hemorrhoids, and jaundice, struggles of the heart weren’t taken seriously in the country. Sickness meant you lay around, wasted away, and never got up. Cholera, consumption, typhus, and pellagra were sickness. Anything else you walked off. Maria would always remember her mother, also named Maria, whom she sat with for a few days and nights before she came to her end, at fifty-seven years old, in 1960. When she was on her deathbed, in her family house, watched over from the walls by archangels and the almighty Lord himself, with his red book open on her lap, Maria Badislav was a saint. She complained about nothing. Her eyes, with tiny blue veins, shone in their sockets under her thin eyebrows. She passed down her thin and kind face to Maria, and Maria passed it to her grandson Mircea, along with the enchanting power of dreaming. All her life, Maria dreamed in the strong and bright colors of icons. She had dreamed of her husband before she met him (she recognized him on the spot, the morning when he wheeled his cart into her father’s yard to repair one of the axles, he was a turner from Bârvari); she had dreamed of all eight of her children, six girls and two boys, before she bore them, and she knew ahead of time which ones would live and which wouldn’t. “Poor Mămica,” all her kids said, among themselves, when they talked about her. Watched over by a candle that shone like gold in the clay darkness of the house, Maria was just as transparent and could be snuffed out just as quickly. Little Mircea was in the room too, playing explorer on an upside-down chair he dragged here and there. The old clock, with a locomotive on its face and two enormous bells on top, ticked loudly in the room’s quiet. Suddenly the old woman groaned, Maria began to scream, and Babuc rushed in from the porch, where he was warming some food. They grabbed her hands and looked, frightened, into her glassy eyes that no longer saw anyone. Tătica said huskily, “Maria, Maria …” and suddenly, as she half rose up, the old woman sighed from her lungs and in the box of her chest, transparent with suffering. Through the thin linen of her shirt, the three of them saw Maria’s heart unfold like a flowering bud. They saw how its jellylike petals unrolled within the box of her chest and how in the end, on the thick vein that served as its stem, a wondrous, pink, luminous flower flowered under her skin and bones. “Rupture of the heart” would be written under “cause of death” on her death certificate. The doctor, who’d just come from Domneşti, had never seen anything like it. “It’s like an x-ray, look, you can clearly see the lungs, three lobes on the right and two on the left, there is the clavicle, behind are the shoulder blades, and the ribs are whiter at the edges and grayer in the middle … And at the end of the aortal artery, her heart is just shredded to bits …” The peasants filling the room crossed themselves reverently. The priest, a young man with only a few tufts of beard, frowned, not knowing what to do. Miracles, of course, were no longer possible in the workers’ and peasants’ republic. They buried Maria quickly, on a rainy day, with the entire village gathered in the cemetery. The three girls cried as though their souls would break open, while Florea and Tătica, clean-shaven and dressed in black, were quiet and leaned their heads toward the ground, and the children, Marian, Mircea, Florea, and Rădiţa’s Doru, played with stones somewhere in the crowd, their jackets transparent with rain over their cheap clothes. Mămica would leave this much behind: a cloudy memory and an even cloudier photo, with a peasant girl in a black headscarf. Her face there had almost no features, it was so white and misty that Mircea, when he saw the picture in an issue of “Work of the Party” (he was five or six, and the family had already moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare, still unfinished, with scaffolding across the front), drew in pen, on the oval wrapped by the scarf, an ugly face with a crooked nose, and teeth and eyes like a grinning skull. On the back, in marker, was written in that flowery hand that peasant kids learned under the rod of their Doamna before the war: “Mămica at our Wedding 1955, August 4.”

  Time passed quickly in the bustle of bars on Obor. No one talked about anything but the bombing, the way that a few years earlier they’d talked for months only about the earthquake and the fall of the Carlton block, which acquired the melodramatic proportions of the sinking of the Titanic, by means of the ridiculous waltz played on every accordion. Little by little, the tall glasses of liquor turned rosy, and the color passed into the whites of the eyes of those on the smoke-blackened benches. As evening began, the trams crisscrossed in the piaţa, clanging deafening bells. Tataie and the girls left the bar at five in the afternoon and walked along Mihai Bravu, winding into the lonely slums, where flocks of children played ball on the street or poked through the mud, until they came to Rădiţa’s house, where they spent the night. Nenea and Uncle Florea were on the Russian front, and Rădiţa, who had a small shop no one entered, in spite of the beautiful cases full of porcelain dolls, had been left alone, scared, crying night after night, waiting from morning to evening for word from the front that her husband was dead. They listened to the radio for a while, but they couldn’t get any information from the propaganda programs. The country was occupied by the Germans, or at least that was the reality behind the beautiful words. They slept piled into two beds, without undressing, and the next day they went back to Tântava, where the girls would stay until th
e war was over.

  In March of the next year, it snowed wet and unusually large flakes over the roughly three hundred houses in the village, “lamb snow,” as they called it. People were annoyed, because they had to wear their heavy clothes and wool hats again, when they had thought they would move on to lighter wear. They were also afraid a frost would catch the budding trees and there would be no fruit in the summer. Maria was standing in the oven, stirring a hanging pot. The oven was made of clay, with a great yellow fire, a wood floor and a sooty window as big as a hand. The back was lined with reeds, which wild bees filled with black honey in the summer. Above was the chimney, where the smoke rose from ashen twigs that were almost always damp and full of caterpillars and spiders. In the oven, with her face hot from the fire and watching the smoky arabesques in shafts of light, Maria felt like she was inside a rounded, tender belly. It smelled like mămăligă and mouthwatering stew. She was just stirring some mămăligă when she heard the dog, Roşu, barking like he was possessed. The dog, swith fur the color of fire, had its own strange and moving story. For a time, there were always Germans in the village. They would come on their motorcycles for a beer at the bar in the center of town, next to the footbridge where Băcanu Village started … People didn’t love them or hate them; they became used to them. Only in the years that followed, when the German soldiers were replaced by Russians, did the villagers begin to miss them and speak of them fondly. The Germans had treated the locals well. They paid for what they drank and ate, down to the last penny, and they played with the children and gave them chocolate. The charm of their blue eyes would stay with the Tântavans, in contrast to the Russians, who behaved like wild beasts. Rapes and robberies came one after another with the Russians, and not even the movies with dumb, evil German characters, nor the propaganda for Soviet heroes, nor the slogans like