Then, in the trembling, spherical light of the candle, Mamma rises and projects her colossal shadow onto the ceiling and walls, like in a strange ballet, when the woman of dark flesh, but with clear, hazel eyes like two lakes at dusk, exchanges features, clothes, and internal organs with her own misshapen, anamorphic, palpitating shadow. She opens her hand and in the center of her palm, like in the heart of a brown flower, there is a white plastic elephant, thin and semitransparent in the yellow-dark light. She puts it on the chair and lets it hang its golden coin over the arm, connected by a thread to the elephant’s neck. The coin turns a bit and sparkles, blinking slightly, casting vague sparks onto the floor. Its weight sets the elephant in motion, wobbly at first, leaning on its right leg, then the left, while the coin slowly approaches the ground. Kneeling on one side of the chair and the other, we watch it together, happy and smiling, melting in the luminous night of the half-foreign room. And in the surrounding stillness, lit from behind, extending its shining trunk and misshapen shadow onto the wood of the chair, the elephant scoots forward, minute by minute, with small, dry chuffs, millimeter by millimeter, eternity by eternity, all the way to the edge, where it stops, leaning gently over the abyss. The coin is only a finger-width away from the floor, and it alternates its faces one after another, shifting like the phases of the moon …
Sometimes, two or three months after we had moved to Ştefan cel Mare, Mamma would push the button for six or four by mistake, in the newly installed elevator. We would rise in darkness. The car light bulb was constantly stolen, until they refused to replace it anymore, and, when the car stopped with a clang of a blacksmith’s hammer, we would open the door and happen upon an unknown and frightening world. If we stopped at four, the shock wasn’t so intense, because we recognized that landing from when we used the stairs, but if we came to any floor above ours, my eyes would pop out of their sockets with fear. Those worlds were always silent and abandoned. The air was green, and through its solemn fog I saw terrible images sometimes, over the familiar forms that I had expected. The doors of the apartments on five, each with a familiar detail – the blue plaque on Mr. Manu’s door, the policeman’s silver peephole shaped like a funnel, the brown mat by Săndel’s mother – were superimposed with monstrous, threatening mental inventions: other doors, other paint, other colors on the edges of the fuse box, other mosaics on the floor. The landing was identical to ours and yet completely different, as broadly alike as it was narrowly different in details. It was another universe that howled menacingly, like a glacier, and I was completely lost. Once we even went in the wrong entryway – there were two entries like ours, but they were Stairways 6 and 7, not 3 and 4 – and we were fooled until we took the elevator to the fifth floor and opened the green metal door onto another world, and as we went down the stairs, each landing – some illuminated and full of screeching silence, others sunken in the deepest dark – was strange and frightening, as though we had descended into Hell … I howled like an animal and pulled on my mother’s hand. She also shouted, trying to calm me down, but I was throbbing all over, like a bird’s heart, and I didn’t calm down again until I saw that I was outside, on the street, and I saw the electric poles over the tram tracks, holding their globes of rosy light. Trams and cars passed in the reddened evening, and the illuminated windows of the furniture store showed familiar, calming objects: chairs and couches, desks, lamps and shades …
The eighth floor of our stairway was incomparably more mysterious than the others. I discovered it late: when I went up there for the first time, with Luci and Jean, to go out on the rooftop, more than a year had passed since we had moved to the block. I was a full six years old, and in that concrete colossus, I only knew well our stairs and the hall across the entryway we shared. I would go out behind the block almost every afternoon to play with the other kids, on the worksites where they were still putting in the sewers and electric cables. I had heard about Stairway 1, as though it were a faraway continent I might never explore. Wherever I was, I had to be within my parents’ sight from our fifth floor balcony. They stood together watching me, head by head and their gaze delimited the safe and civilized world, beyond which I would be swallowed by the void. The universe at that time consisted of the three rooms in our home and a few annexes, extended like spider legs, with an ambiguity all the greater for their distance. There was a first zone, semi-real, where I could move by myself, more or less safely, after which followed the city streets, which my parents created by walking between real and foreign places. Only my mother and father, between whom I walked through fortresses and basilicas, depots and castles of water scraping clouds like flames on yellow heavens, only my gigantic masters and friends, clasping my fingers in their great, warm hands, talking quietly over my head and pulling me through round piaţas with fabulous statues in the center, could pacify the endless dominions of chaos. Like a reflex arc, like the engram of memory, like the melting of marble steps under millions of feet, some streets, the ones we took more often, solidified, they gained a consistency, they were colored in familiar shades, detaching from the unreal gray that surrounded them. The tram toward Dudeşti-Cioplea, where Aunt Sica lived (Vasilica, my mother’s sister), was the only one painted red, and above it was the only fragment of blue sky in Bucharest. Climbing on board, I liked to sit behind the driver, to see how the control with the metal ball clattered, and to watch the sky through the thick, violet glass of the sunshade. The ball on the control lever was brass, polished by the rubbing palm of the driver, and its curve gathered, in concentrated colors ten times more intense than in the thin air outside, all of the neighborhoods we passed and all of the wooden interior of the tram car, with wooden chairs and wooden handles that knocked against the vinyl roof. I saw the driver’s face there, too, and if I got closer, my own face, just my eyes and nose, smiling in dull wonder. Equally solid, and a little less strange – although still, so odd! – was the way to my godparents’ place, on Maica Domnului, where a different tram took us only a few stations, after which we had to turn down a slummy street, always full of mud, with fences painted dementedly in pink and blue and green, to reach, at the end of an endless road, the house shaped like a ship. Above this new neural pathway the sky had a completely different form: it was a sheet of scented liquid, with vast coral reefs, and sea lilies rocking in the currents of spring, filtering the frozen air through gills that looked like feathers, and schools of fish glinting in the sun and changing their direction suddenly, all at once, at a twitch in the clouds …
The eighth floor was a zone of abstraction, unsuitable for life. There, on the crown of the block, the air was probably so rarified that no normal human being could survive. It was an adventure already to walk the stairs to the sixth floor. The seventh was almost inaccessible, but the elevator, the living and moving soul of the block, would dare go that far, like an outpost reaching deep into Mato Grosso. The landings were, if not identical, at least of the same kind as those I knew. On the eighth landing – and how many rumors, legends and myths did we kids tell each other, about this far-off land! – everything changed. There was, first of all, the door to the rooftop. Our parents must have told us hundreds of times: “Never go out on the roof! That’s not allowed!” even before they had the tiniest idea of what this rooftop was like. We didn’t even dare to imagine it. In place of an image in our minds was a green light of fear. The bigger kids had been on the rooftop, and this gave them prestige and self-assurance. They told us about the narrow door with the leaded window, going outside, and seeing the entire city beyond the concrete balustrade, and how, if you leaned over, you could also see the street like the bottom of a well, with its miniscule trams and cars … The elevator housing was also on the eighth floor, and they talked about its thundering motor, starting and stopping. In the washroom just “stupid stuff” happened (and you couldn’t get another word out of them about it). Finally, on the eighth floor, like a watchman at the border of another world, lived Herman.
The day when I went up to
the eighth floor for the first time, two things happened to me that were so unusual, I attribute my courage in these moments to my mind’s confusion. I had gone out behind the block at around nine in the morning, when, even though the sun was shining strongly, the air was still cold like water from the faucet. I was alone, so far, in the topsy-turveyness of construction materials, mud, and ditches that made up our play area. Behind the concrete fence and the metal gate, which the girls, playing school, covered with crooked letters in colored chalk, rose the enormous brick palace of the mill, and beside it, like an annex, the flattened building of the Pioneer bread factory, with curved pipes coming out of the walls and going back in on another floor. Its windows were opaque from flour, and it was surrounded constantly by the smell of warm bread. The brick factory was as tall as our block, and on its peak, lost in the clouds, sometimes a red flag fluttered. After I had shaken the levers of an abandoned bulldozer in the block courtyard, I climbed out of the cabin and began to work on a hill of sand full of the traces of children who clambered over it all day. I dug a hole into the wet, red sand, that smelled of snails, in sharp contrast to the dry, dusty layer on top, until I could put my entire arm inside. My nails smarted in the wetness and suddenly they felt actually painful: I’d hit something hard. I lugged out this object that had sat crossways to my tunnel, and when I wiped away the sandy dirt, I caught my breath: it was a large, heavy, shining cowboy pistol, a revolver, with a curved handle that barely fit in my hand and a mirrored nickle barrel. It never crossed my mind to wonder whose it was, or who might have lost it. I’d had, up to then, some ordinary, two-bit water guns, made of soft, pink plastic, from which I would suck the rubber-tasting water. I had hardly ever seen cowboy guns, maybe from rich kids, and none of them compared with my unparalleled revolver. It was all mine. I had found it, and from then on it belonged to me. I climbed back onto the soft vinyl chair in the bulldozer cabin and began to shoot all around into the frozen air. I had goose bumps from the cold, but the sun and the poplar puffs, and the twisted and luxurious vegetation twined around the concrete fence brought me the feeling of a torridly hot summer. Only when I ran along the sewer-pipe ditches, aiming at the first girl who came out to arrange her dolls on a rug in the sun, did I become conscious of the second amazing fact of that morning: I was naked from the waist down. I was wearing just an undershirt that fluttered over my hips, barely covering my behind and “little rooster,” but revealing them when I ran around and shot my pistol. Because the undershirt was a little long, Mamma hadn’t noticed that I’d forgotten to put my underpants on, since she had recently been letting me dress myself.
I felt my entire skin burn with shame. I pulled down my undershirt as far as I could and moved slowly, barely lifting my feet, toward our stairway. I made it into the hallway without anyone seeing me, and I scampered up the stairs. The mosaic steps were ice cold when I put my bare feet on them. The first floors were sinister and dark. One, which was mysterious, where I knew no one and thin pipes ran along the walls and fuse boxes lined up, then two, three, and four were each more familiar … I knew some neighbors who had kids: Romică’s mother, Virgil’s, Cristi’s, and the Chinaman’s … The policeman on four, with such a silly name: Corcodel, had made a monumental door, painted as black as the entry to a crypt. At Mr. Kulineac’s you could always hear Lola barking. Popa, who played soccer for Dinamo, had a daughter with fantastic toys that were brought from abroad, including a doll that pushed a stroller with a little baby … I found our apartment door half open, probably as I had left it. Mamma was doing laundry in the bathroom, and when I opened the door, she had suds up to her elbows and some in her hair. A big cake of laundry soap, green and narrow, tottered on the edge of the sink. I aimed the pistol at her and shouted, and Mamma jumped and started to shout back at me. She wiped her hands on a towel. She was enormous. My neck hurt from looking up at her face, projected somewhere against the ceiling. She told me to take the pistol back immediately to wherever I had found it, and when she saw my bare bottom, she smacked it a few times and found me some shorts. She had barely gotten them over my thighs when I tore myself from her grasp and ran outside again.
I met up with Luci, and then Jean, on the big tank near the concrete wall, across from Stairway 5, a macabre stairway, different from all the others and almost as mysterious as Stairway 1, because it was not in a hallway, but directly behind the block, near the entry to the furniture storeroom. Its gaping mouth, blacker than all the others, was mostly hidden by kitchen sets, hall tables, easy chairs, and windows packed in cardboard, all directly on the asphalt, and sometimes by workers armed with belts and hooks who would heave them into horse-drawn trucks. Jean sometimes would take a horse by the bridle and whisper in its ear: “ţuric!” and the horse would step backwards, knocking over chairs and tables.
On the big tank, stomping as hard as we could to hear the metallic booms amplified in the space underneath, we chatted a while, almost calm. Jean from Seven told us that in Italy mămăligă was called “poopy-lenta,” “so you can run down the street shouting ‘poopylenta, poopy-lenta!’ and nobody will do anything to you,” and Luci, tubby and curly headed, perched on the fence and shouted it too, laughing like crazy at the funny word. After we’d had enough of saying it a hundred ways, we set to exploring, since there were too few of us yet to play anything. I objected with all my might to going into Stairway 5, more sinister for me than a dragon’s cave. When they grabbed me and tried to force me in, I fell on a pile of planks full of nails, and I got scratched a little on the leg. In the end, shaking, I said I would go on the roof if we went up our stairway, mine and Jean’s, since Luci lived on Stairway 3. Jean was a jerk. He had a bad mouth, sang songs, and told dirty jokes. He lived on Seven, he was always dressed poorly, and his mother looked like a beggar. His father drove a tractor for the circus, pulling around caged animals and houses on wheels. But we were all good friends, because we always laughed with him and didn’t try to fight. That day, for the first time, we went in the elevator without a grown-up. Jean stretched himself high on the tips of his toes, and reached to 7. “I can go higher,” he said, and he pushed the red button, which made a buzz so loud that we all screamed. This didn’t stop him. He stretched up to see himself in the mirror, stuck his tongue out, and in the end he pressed the last button, marked “O,” which made the elevator stop in between floors. “I’m telling! I’m telling your mom!” Luci shouted, crazy with fear, while Jean opened the doors so we could see the layer of concrete between the floors. “You’d have been stuck here, man! Toast!” And we believed we really were going to stay in that terrible elevator car, painted green, forever, without our parents or the real world, and they would bury us, the little ones, in an infinite block of ice, in endless fear. My tears had already started when Jean pushed 7 again and the elevator started moving, making its slow way through the concrete universe of the block. Two more metal doors appeared and disappeared, slowly, in the elevator window, until it stopped and we poured onto a foreign landing, so unfamiliar that we could have been anywhere, thousands of kilometers away, above or below, in one place or another. For Jean, however, this was the most ordinary place possible, because it was where he lived. I had the barrel of the pistol stuck in my underpants and covered carefully with my undershirt; I hadn’t shown it to the other boys, since I was afraid they would know whose it was and take it away. Now, more dead than alive with fear, I could feel it there, so warm, it was as if it had become part of my body.
Piled together, we scampered up the stairs. From even the first moment, a new kind of light fell on us and grew stronger as we ascended. It was white, intense, unreal light, completely different from the melancholy Nile-green air of the other floors. If the first flight of stairs was more or less the same as those between the floors we knew, the landing between 7 and 8 seemed new to us, like a fairy tale: there was no radiator or door to the incinerator, it was completely empty, white and pure like a painted box, and flooded with light from a few very high windows. From there
, the light fell obliquely, in thick pieces, vibrating like crystals. We went up another flight of stairs, one much shorter than normal. I would have given anything to turn back; my fear had become almost unbearable, but Jean and Luci, their shapes eroded by light, their hair full of rays, continued, hugging the walls, smudging their clothes with lime. One more turn in the stairway and we arrived on the landing for 8, in a supernatural light. It came from a leaded window in the rooftop door, which had a large, rusted lock. It was hard to see anything in the shining light. Slowly, close together and looking all around, we began to make out a few things: an old bicycle leaning against the wall, a rotting wooden crate for an oleander, a few doors with barely demarcated shapes in the walls. The landing was so narrow compared to the others that it seemed to squeeze us, pushing its doors against us, trying to crush our bones and flesh. A constant, threatening murmur came from the elevator housing. We stayed there for a few minutes. Jean said some bad words, since the rooftop door was locked. Through its window you couldn’t see anything. It was as though you were looking into the mouth of an oven where the metal is heated white-hot. The crazy light was amplified by the immaculate walls. The outline of the old bicycle looked like flame. And we suddenly saw, through our clothes that had become as transparent as cellophane, the insides of our bodies, our fragile, dark skeletons, and our internal organs like shadows on an x-ray. When someone called the elevator, on the ground floor or some other floor, the elevator housing gave a pop that paralyzed us. Frozen, with wide eyes, we awaited the building’s collapse and the world’s end.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 26
