Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  When they started to get rid of some of the yids (’cause the boss was a real anti-Semite), Estera became Emilia. Only close friends still used the old name. Comrade Stănilă Emilia – who once every year assembled the law school department secretaries and the student leaders (handsome young people, their hair cut like the Chinese or Koreans, the girls with skirts well below their knees) to tell them that love of country and Party was much more important than “the beloved person” – had been great during the winter of ’56, when a few mangy students had done some silly things. She had taken measures immediately, first assembling a complete list of all the hoodlums and putting it into the right hands. The officer smiled at the memory: what a nut! During those nights when frost grew high on the windows, Estera was fainting with excitement as she was taken vigorously from behind. She was in the college bathroom, kneeling beside the urinals, and those revolting students did her every way you could imagine, one after another and several at a time … Then she rose to the top of the University Party hierarchy, and now she would rise even more. They had called her to the Capital. He had seen her speaking at meetings several times, and she had an amazing way with words, chapter and verse. She had adapted perfectly to the changing of the Palace guards, from Russophile to nationalist. Ceauşescu’s name replaced Dej’s in the economy of her nocturnal orgasms, which, once Stalin was forgotten and the terrors ended (or because of her advancing age?) diminished slightly in drama, while becoming longer and more carefully staged.

  Lieutenant-Major Ion Stănilă wasn’t really known for his intelligence in the Department of State Security. Instead, a mean hillbilly cunning had kept him away from traps, from his colleagues’ ill will, from deals that were too dirty or from deals where you would end up knowing too much. His work had been routine: he recruited informants in a few businesses, so that his desk always had a pile of inarticulate and boring reports, which, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t squeeze anything out of – this one did this, that one said that … “Yesterday, 26 V ’967 was paiday and Maistru Boţan Ilie had a beer, telled the one about the Chief in Hell in a shit tub. He also say that Communists is a society for lazy peoples, that the Germans don’t goof off like we do. He say that over there, the engiuneers keeps their asses in the chairs and their eyes on their works, and we do it all backwards, we keeps our eyes on the chairs and asses in our works …” Most infractions were for political jokes. How the hell were you supposed to arrest a person for that, especially since you knew that the jokes were put out, along with all the rumors, by a special team in Buzeşti, by your own colleagues adapting them from French collections … And they got passed to the Czechs, Bulgarians, Russians, and Poles, so it was no shock that the whole camp laughed at the same jokes, just changing Kadar into Brezhnev or Walter Ulbricht into Ceauşescu. Better to have them laugh than march in the streets. Or how were you supposed to arrest someone for listening to Radio Free Europe? First of all, there weren’t a lot of people doing it, and then, even those who were said it was all lies and provocations. The youth have their music. They need something to suck on, or else they’ll do something even sillier.

  Two years ago, he had been surprised to be taken from the routine of meeting stool pigeons in safe houses (actually the squalid dwelling of some worker who left a key for him to use the place while he was at the factory: many of his colleagues used these houses, in fact, more as “fuck rooms” for their women), and to receive his first more unusual mission. Information existed that throughout Eastern Europe, wandering troupes of free-professionals had appeared, nomadic circus performers who entertained at fairs and vacant lots at the edge of town, troupes that resisted legitimate attempts to centralize the artistic phenomena of the circus world and place it under state control, following the model of the celebrated Moscow State Circus. Of course, there had always been rope dancers, fire swallowers and sword swallowers, strong men, dwarves, and paranormals, but what was happening now was completely different. The itineraries of some twenty of these kinds of troupes, from Gdansk to Groznâi, had followed pointless routes, apparently unconnected to immediate sources of profit. They often arrived at market sites and regular festivals, but not during the traditional fair season. Some drove covered carts or GAZ trucks with clanging sheet metal and drove in circles, while others, after a long straight path, sometimes going through rapeseed and sunflower fields, suddenly curled wide toward the left. As though on command, all of the troupes performed their shows simultaneously, on the same day and at the same time. This made the KGB officers, who were the first to be briefed (coincidence?) on the circus people’s strange maneuvers, suppose that there was either an existing plan, known and followed like a train schedule by all of the troupes, or that there was constant communication between the convoys. The second hypothesis fell right away. There was no physical contact in evidence, not by radio, homing pigeons, or human messengers. The idea of a pre-existing conspiracy, probably against state orders (there was some evidence in this respect), became the working hypothesis of the socialist secret services, even though the possibility of a political, military, or even industrial espionage network was not ruled out (some of the circus people did own and use cameras, old ones, true, actually daguerreotypes, which projected inverted images directly onto opaque glass plates). Moscow sent a coordinated plan of counterattack to the satellite countries. Then, in 1966, and not two years later, the first rebellion against the Russians had happened nearby, those first beatings of national pride; the Securitate leadership checked with the “Big Chief” to cover its ass and then rejected the Soviet plan, with many tactful caveats, demonstrating that, given our particular conditions, measures should be taken on the local level. The national plan was code-named “Operation Sycamore,” not for some occult reason, but simply because the officer in charge was Major Sycamore Bădescu. Being a bit of a physiognomist – the Major had written his doctorate in criminology on the works of Gall and Lombroso, in connection with recent work on “the crime chromosome” –, the officer chose the most “folksy-faced” people for the operation, so that they would integrate perfectly into the atmosphere on Moşilor Street. Idiots, fatties, rosacea drunks, crosseyed hillbillies, one-toothed brachycephalics, women with beehives and powdered faces, teenagers with wet lips and the crooked gaze of onanists – this was the profile of ideal agents for the present mission, in the Fellini-like vision of Major Bădescu. The fact that all of these features presupposed a subsidiary oligophrenia produced a paradox: like any artist, the major would have to accept that his ideal was impossible in the world of the senses. Wasn’t it Leonardo da Vinci himself who said that the hand cannot follow the mind? “La polizia e una cosa mentale,” said Sycamore Bădescu to himself, smiling bitterly, and he used what he had at hand.

  Thus did (then) Lieutenant Ion Stănilă come to sell Turkish fezzes made of aluminium foil and crepe paper, sequined trumpets, and cardboard glasses in the fetid crowd at the Moşilor market, in the wineshop and meat-patty autumn of ’66. Between the fish market, with its putrid stench of salt and women, and the Obor hall, the vast pavement of the piaţa was no longer visible under the mud. The chairs of the chain carousel rotated crazily at the back of the scenery. The motor was hidden by panels dotted with dancing Arab girls and camels with human faces. A sea of people crowded under the central stem with their arms and legs held out by centrifugal force. Even though you wouldn’t think you had enough room to take your hand out of your pocket, the mob managed to advance in fat heaps toward the piaţa, the wine shop, the cheesemongers with their little cloudy jars, and the mounds of crates where the popular soda sold for 75 bani, in round, dull bottles. Dressed in a sheep fleece, pulled tight like a theater costume, with a fez on his head, and blowing a horn shaped like a butterfly proboscis that shot out when filled with air, the officer found himself on a corner near the booths where the circus shows were performed. On the little table in front of him, he also sold sawdust-filled balls of colored paper that hung by rubber bands, clay birds painted strawb
erry and indigo, with colored feathers on their tails, celluloid weebles with lead bases, and sunglasses with red cellophane lenses. The kids around him, ragged and snotty from the bad weather, constantly stretched out their hands to steal or beg for a hat or a ball, and the lieutenant, with his eyes all around, could barely keep up surveillance of the circus entryway. From time to time he put a paper fez on the boy’s head, so he would walk through the piaţa as a living advertisement. It was strange how caught up in the business he became. He got the goods from the DSS inventory, and now he was chewing his fingernails over how to make a profit, however small, for himself, so first he started to ask 50 bani more than the price set by his superiors, then a whole leu. He haggled with the clients, like at the market, and he tried to trick them when counting money. On the very first day he was surprised to find himself, by lunchtime, completely oblivious to his mission. Hundreds of suspects might have passed him while, red in the face with effort, he hawked his wares. At night, tossing and turning in bed beside his wife, whose freckles were lit faintly in the dark like ground cloves dusting a gingerbread figurine, Lieutenant Stănilă plainly saw on his retina heaps of metal watches with multicolor plastic bands, multicolor wrappers, referee’s whistles, rubber balls, hamsters running on wheels and elephants pulled by the weight of gold coins.

  It was only on the second day that the officer began the disturbing adventure that he now, in his room on Dristor, awaiting his superior, relived in his memory, against his will, just as he had done hundreds and thousands of times before. The Securitate officer returned to his corner at the fair, beside the booths covered over with pictures of clowns, the deformed women in swimsuits, and a hideous spider with a girl’s head and chest (the girl had vampire fangs and blood on her lower lip). He was blowing hard on his horn to make it shoot straight out, when suddenly he saw a terribly familiar face in the crowd of people gaping at the emcee on the booth platform. A jolt of ice-cold adrenaline overwhelmed his arteries. Good Lord, that evening in May, with beetles thudding through the dark rose of Ghica Tei park, and the dizzying smell of lilac. The descent, through the plinth of Pushkin’s statue, into the green empires of fear … The levitation over palaces and halls of a transparent hell … And the sphinx-like face of the princess in the oval window, a fairy-tale face in blue satin crinoline, sitting at the spinet piano with its lid inlaid with mother-of-pearl … The languor of her eyes and the horrible, scabby tumor on her neck … It was her, but now in a worn-out raincoat, now with pallid lips marked with cloudy sores, wearing a man’s boots and galoshes. The emcee shouted something into the microphone, but nothing more came out of the box speakers than a groan like a truck. Beside him, a wide, flabby old lady with bleached hair juggled bowling pins. Her lamé dress made her look like a decrepit virago. “Get your tickets, the show is starting!” said the man in black, dropping the microphone, and some of those who gaped, but not too many, mainly those with children, climbed the platform steps and bought tickets. The multitude of trinkets on Officer Stănilă’s improvised stand faded away, while he was unable to take his eyes from the being he had once seen in an inexplicable trance and who had suddenly invaded reality like the smell of sewage, brusquely delivered by a gust of air. She was there, concrete and splattered by the Obor mud, mixed in with the mob of peasants and slum-dwellers, where even a neck boil the size of a quince was not out of place, among twisted faces, toothless mouths, mealy eyes, and gout-swollen fingers. The girl climbed the platform too and bought a ticket. For the second time, but for a different reason, the officer completely forgot his mission. He dryly closed his case with colored ribbons and paper hats, put the wooden goat to one side, and case and all, he presented himself to the blonde in the lamé dress, who had transformed into the cashier. Ticket in hand, he entered the room mechanically behind the others and searching in a daze for the girl.

  The hall seemed much larger from the inside than you would have believed from the brightly painted booth outside. At one end a stage was visible, with a blue sheet hanging with a few gold stars. There was no other scenery. The walls were bare, unplanned planks, the floor was made from the same material, and the fifteen-or-so rows of chairs were set up like seats in a movie theater, pivoting up and down on rods, with numbered tags on the backs. It smelled disgustingly like kerosene, like all the theaters did at that time, and on the ground, never mopped, sunflower seed shells and pretzel crumbs

  with salt and poppy seeds

  it’s what your stomach needs

  swam in spit. Someone, maybe at the previous show, had dropped a bottle of ţuica, and now it smelled overwhelmingly of plums, and you could get drunk just off the thick fumes. With a fez on his head, forgotten in his emotion, and carnival glasses on his eyes, the officer sat in one of the last rows and changed seats a few times to the right or to the left, because meaty peasants, in heavy sheep coats and hats, sat down in front of him. His chest beat powerfully, as though not just his heart, but also his lungs, throat, the marrow in his spinal canal and the ganglia of nerves were pulsating, hot, synchronized and suffocating. The young woman in the brick-colored raincoat, with cheap clips holding her hair above the gaping sore, sat quietly three rows of black chairs ahead.

  Onstage, the first to appear was a thick woman in a fringed bathing suit. She had large red lips like a black woman, and she tossed and twisted and slid a snake along her neck. The snake wasn’t too big. It moved like wax, and it was ringed with alternating stripes of coral, black, and gold. The woman danced with the snake to a broken, scratchy music that came from a speaker that matched the one outside, as she wrapped it around one arm, passed it over her breasts, and then finally, took it tightly by its head and looked directly into its gemstone eyes. From time to time the snake stuck out its thin, forked tongue, cylindrical and wet as a worm. Staring fixedly, the woman suddenly opened her mouth and took the snake’s head between her thick lips, sucking it into her interior. Centimeter by centimeter, the reptile penetrated the woman’s throat, dilated with swollen veins like an opera singer’s. The rouged ring of the dancer’s mouth expanded more and more as the slippery body widened, and her eyes became glassy and cloudy, as though she herself had become an ophiuroid. The heavily painted lady spent a few long minutes swallowing the muscular, living cylinder, until the snake disappeared completely down her throat and into her stomach. Then she started to dance again, rocking her navel, sometimes shaking her white buttocks beneath the noses of the front rows, until she regained her vulgar gaze. Then she stood still again, her stomach moved a few times as though she would burp, her neck dilated again, and the glassy body of the reptile emerged from her lips like a tumescent tongue. Grabbing it immediately, she slowly pulled out the enormous earthworm, whose body bore carmine traces of lipstick. A cage was brought in and a black rabbit was pulled out by its ears. Once set on the stage, the snake lifted the first third of its body, leaned toward the disoriented, jumping rabbit and jetted forward, biting its ear. The rabbit held still, its entire body throbbed, and then it collapsed, all in a single moment, onto one side, its little legs trembling. The woman presented its corpse triumphantly, yanking it by the ears. She kissed the snake sweetly on the nose and exited to wild applause.