Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  Time went by swiftly and night fell again. When they woke up once more, the heat was already steaming off the ground, and even if the daylight had waned and a breath of wind rustled the greenness all around, the late-afternoon blaze could still be felt. They rubbed their eyes and looked around. The charcoal, mixed with sebum, had started trickling down their faces and bodies, leaving white streaks. Emi rolled over in the grass a few times trying to rub herself clean, but her skin only turned greenish and purplish. In the daylight she looked like a gemstone. She was amused by what she’d done and finally gave up. They headed together to the water pump; this time they were more cautious, proving that the sleep had somewhat succeeded in clearing their thoughts.

  ‘So the old guy surely knows we’re here.’

  ‘Maybe he overheard us talking.’

  ‘If he’d heard, do you think he still would have treated us so nicely and let us go, left us food and drink by the door?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe not. So he knows we’re here.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means whatever we want it to mean.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll call the police?’

  ‘If he wanted to, he would’ve called them by now. It’s been a day and nothing’s happened.’

  Should we leave?’

  ‘No, I say we should stay. If we hear a sound, we run. We can run over the fence in the back and break free anyway.’

  He thought she’d wanted to add something, but he didn’t let her. They didn’t run into any trouble up to the water pump, and after they splashed each other with cold water and rubbed their bodies, giggling and sloshing around, they made their way back, picking the fruit that hung overripe and lazy from the tree branches on their way.

  Several days passed by; each morning they would find two tin plates full to the brim, a bottle of water, some elderflower juice or milk waiting for them on the threshold. They would empty it all on the spot, belching in contentment. At night they slept outside naked, and it was only in the morning that they retired to the woodshed without really knowing why they were so concerned. In the daytime the old man didn’t set foot on their territory and stuck to his schedule unfailingly: tidying around in the morning, having his lunch no later than half past twelve, taking a nap, stretched out on the soiled deck chair, until four or five o’clock, when he withdrew inside and nobody saw him until the next morning. It was only once that they tailed him, one morning while he was watering his garden. He looked absorbed and picked at each tomato and aubergine seedling, examining the tree branches and pruning them. At that point, Sal sneaked into the house and Emi stood on the watch.

  It was a shabby three-room dwelling, two of which were inhabited and the other left untouched like a sanctuary. Everywhere around there were framed pictures of a beautiful woman who looked like an actress Sal had seen in the Cinema almanacs. Her hair was dark, and her curls, wrought with a curling iron, were set around her face; she had a beautifully shaped nose, her nostrils slightly lifted, and dark, cheerful eyes. She was pictured in several different poses: dressed up in ball gowns, always surrounded by men in tail coats, on the street, wrapped up in fur coats, on thick heels, in a funny old car wearing a wide-brimmed hat or on the tennis court clad in a long, white skirt. There wasn’t a spot on the wall left uncovered in solid wooden frames. The room was scented, and on each piece of old furniture, dusted and smelling of mould and lavender, a starched doily was set. It was obvious that nobody ever stepped into that room except to clean it. A yellow satin dress lay on a sofa covered in burgundy silk, and a pair of golden strappy sandals lay underneath. Sal felt the dress, smelled it, took a long, hard look at the sandals and rummaged through the closets. Colourful scarves were hanging among the neatly folded clothes in slips made out of plastic bags. He took a scarf with a big rose pattern that trailed along behind it the pungent smell of the past.

  In the inhabited room, the rumpled bed with its shredded, dirty sheets gave off the same sharp smell. Except for the dim room, chunks of dried bread and mugs in which there were still traces of some liquid were scattered all around. He was about to leave when he heard the man in the garden, dragging the ladder and propping it up against one of the house walls. He thought it was strange that Emi hadn’t warned him. Hiding under the kitchen table, he lingered there until the old man came closer, trudging his shabby shoes past Sal and entering the first room. He heard the wardrobe door creak, and only then did he scuttle away.

  He found Emi basking in the grass at the back of the yard, eating sour cherries and spitting out their kernels. He handed her the scarf.

  ‘Didn’t you see him coming? Why didn’t you warn me?’

  ‘Didn’t I see who?’

  ‘Emi, you left me uncovered!’

  ‘I didn’t! If I’d called out it would have been worse.’

  She hugged him and kissed him on the cheeks and mouth. He lay back and curled his arms around her neck. He loved her so much that he would trust her no matter what. For the first time since they had run away, he felt elated, and looking around, all he could grasp was the sheer beauty of things: the coolness, the juicy fruits, the green, the ripening grapes, the blue sky, the silk dresses, the vegetables hanging on their stalks, the shadow cloaking them, the sun that brought colour to their cheeks, the fence standing between them and the outer world. And happiness – that was going to last forever.

  XI

  THE EXQUISITE CORPSE

  It was not Emilia’s physical disappearance that was hard to accept. Her death had been long foretold. He had been aware of it since he had discovered her body in the basement, years before. Since then it had been nestled in his mind, even if the only evidence of the exquisite corpse lying on the table in Harry’s basement rested with her, on her long ring finger, that ended with an almond-shaped, perpetually lacquered fingernail. The evidence was futile, though, because everybody knew, even his childhood pals, that Sal could see things others couldn’t, said things no child would say, did things few grown-ups would do. Even he had doubted the existence of the deceased woman after a while and questioned the true nature of his visions.

  It was true that he was smarter than others, faster at counting, keener in memory, more accurate in his views; that, even though he shut himself off broodingly, he could understand better than others what was going on in the outer world; that he could instantly tell girls’ desires, that he could read Matilda’s complaints on the spot, that he would talk to his plants the way a woman would to the baby growing inside her womb. But none of that helped him unravel the mystery of the corpse or anticipate Emilia’s death. He now had to face not only her disappearance, but also the loneliness he had to adjust to; even though he had known from the start how it all ended and had thought, for a long time, that any delay meant also sweeping the terrible vision away, he had only managed to make the closure even more cruel and dramatic, becoming witness to such a miserable outcome that even his betrayed wife would have pitied him.

  He revisited the facts. After bolting out of Emilia’s place and going home, he had shut himself off and refused to talk. In vain Matilda asked where he had been; in vain she snapped at him and warned him that, unless he stopped this nonsense, he would soon find himself with divorce papers in his hand. Sal knew just one thing: nothing he could have said would have soothed him any longer. He no longer trusted any word; he was incapable of the effort to articulate another sound. ‘Silence is golden,’ his grandma used to say, flicking her tongue across her lips. He did now what he had also done twenty years before, when his parents had popped up in a dark-coloured car at the gate of the old man who had so obligingly lodged them, after one month of frantic searching. They had trampled on the tomato seedlings and the flowers, ripped the clusters of unripe grapes, jerked open the door of the woodshed where he and Emi had been hiding; along with the baton spun above their heads by the man wearing a blue police uniform, angry words had also fluttered in the air, words hurled by his father, his face bristling with rage. Emi had
fled from his side in a split second. She had been seized by some men dressed as shabbily as the man in uniform but whose cold looks showed they meant business. As soon as they had pulled her into a Dacia, with its tell-tale Securitate license plates, Emi had been erased from his mind forever.

  Standing up under his parents’ grilling, he had refused to speak, but not because he wanted to defy them. His parents had waned and scattered like dust among the blades of grass. He had refused to speak because he was struggling to call her features back from his memory: the shape of her mouth, the colour of her hair, the cut of her cheekbones, the slenderness of her wrists, the thickness of her ankles. All these had fled along with their owner, and Sal had sworn to himself that, until he could put Emi’s faithful portrait back together, he would not breathe a word. His mother was holding her head in her hands, trembling regularly as if shaken with fever, and his father wouldn’t stop snarling at him, fidgeting uselessly and excessively in the most bizarre manner. Shut up into himself, Sal found it all very amusing, weighing them up as if they had been two pieces of meat. He had severed all ties with both of them; had he been sure it would make a difference, he would have gladly finished them off right there, under the shade of the sour-cherry tree where he had slept so many nights with Emi by his side. But Emi had disappeared, their hideout had been disclosed and thus the adventure they had so confidently embarked upon had come to an end. His father wouldn’t stop bawling at him, ‘Sorin, what were you thinking?’

  As the boy wouldn’t say a word, his helpless father became even angrier. ‘Sorin, if you don’t answer me this minute, I’ll smack you blind! Do you hear me, boy? Don’t push it!’

  But he didn’t smack him after all, and when they got home and locked him up in his room, Sal discovered a shrine by his bedside, his picture surrounded by lit candles and an oil candle barely flickering. His parents admitted aloud that perhaps it was better that the boy hadn’t spoken, because had he done so, who knows what the policeman would have thought as he growled incessantly next to them and mumbled words like ‘reformatory school,’ ‘police station’ and ‘court.’ He stood awake for days on end; he had lost count. He kept his eyes wide open, staring at the wall, and a doctor who had come by pronounced a complicated word that had made his parents turn pale and walk out of the room as if they had seen him alive for the last time.

  He didn’t try to escape this new prison, because it would have been in vain anyway. Although he was less than a few hundred feet away from Emi, the distance that kept them apart was longer now and impossible to cover. In less than a week after their return home, his parents packed up the furniture and the clothes, wrapped the books in cardboard boxes, disposed of the few things they had decided in a family consultation they didn’t need anymore and left behind the apartment in Sun Alley, where they had lived peacefully most of the time.

  ‘Well,’ Father sighed, ‘in spite of everything, we did well here!’

  ‘Yes,’ Mother added in the same tone of voice, ‘and let’s hope we’ll do just as well in the future.’

  Huddled on the backseat, his hands resting quietly on his knees, Sal was also saying his farewells: not only to his room, his friends and the cherished places he had wandered countless times without thinking for one instant that they might disappear, but to Emi, too. He was lost even to that Sal from the past, the one who, deprived of her memory, would let her slip from his mind for good. He was saying goodbye, particularly, to himself. Little Sal had snuggled in the basement and was biding his time, waiting to come up, unscathed by the rage of the adults. Time went by, and settled in their new lodgings, eager to welcome the new member of the family, the grown-ups rubbed the little boy’s blunder off their minds, blaming it on his age and his companions. Only once, having wasted a whole afternoon failing to adjust the roof antenna, his father had bristled at the taciturn kid who was staring blankly at the snow on the screen: ‘Hey, Sorin, can’t you at least tell me if there’s any picture? Goddamn it, boy! Where’s your mind? Are you doing it on purpose, or what?’

  He hunched his shoulders and went on, his words striking like a clasp of thunder. ‘I don’t even want to think about it. If it hadn’t been for your friend Harry, you would still be bumming about with that tramp of a girl, and who knows what would’ve become of you. Thank heavens he told us who you were wasting your time with and what was on your mind! Oh, my! It gives me the creeps!’ He waved his hand in disgust.

  Sal withdrew to his room, which looked exactly like his old one but for the Metallica poster he had given to Toma as promised. He sat down on the floor, legs crossed, and started dwelling on this new revelation. It wasn’t easy to reach a conclusion, but, after deliberating in his mind, he resolved that everything was just a far-fetched story of his father’s. How was he to believe that Emi had betrayed him – to imagine that, after leaving Harry’s, she had snuck back to his friend despite his warnings and disclosed their running-away plan? It was mad to fancy Harry having nothing better to do than ratting him out to his parents – Harry, of all people, who in his unreliability seemed the most loyal of them all. Who could have believed such nonsense? Who could have cooked up such stories? From a distance, his friends now appeared heroic, almost supernatural. They had turned now into the mighty explorers of l’Esperance. The mere thought of them made him tremble with longing and excitement. They were brave, bold, compassionate to his misery and solitude, pure in heart and driven by noble feelings. And so he sunk himself in silence, staying that way for a long time, long enough for his parents to give up all hope and get used to the idea that their elder son had escaped from reality and shut himself off into a world of his own which they couldn’t reach.

  ‘Silence is golden.’

  A few days after he visited her at her flat, Emilia dropped a note in his letterbox. It was Matilda who brought it to him, her face wan with irritation. She had opened the envelope and read the note; that’s why Sal asked her, through his grinding teeth, what Emi had written.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed to make me tell you what your mistress is writing? And isn’t she ashamed? Shame on you both!’

  She left the room, seeking refuge in the kitchen that was smothered in a dense fog given off by the steamer on the stove. But Sal dogged her, insisting she should tell him what Emi had scribbled in the note.

  ‘Say it, Matilda! Is it something important? Does it concern you as well? Because probably that’s what you had in mind when you opened the envelope. That she might have written to you as well!’

  ‘So now I’m to blame for opening that filth! Not her, for trying to ruin our family, for being a slut that sleeps around with married men! That’s really something!’

  They kept at it, on and on, until Sal raised his hand above her heated head and kept it hanging in the air for a few seconds. He let his arm drop, and while stepping out of the room, he simply added, ‘We’re through!’

  It wasn’t the ideal breakup formula, but it seemed rather to the point, and as time was running short, he was glad that those few words could wrap up a decision he had been striving to make for years. He took nothing but what he had on: a grey vest with pockets, a black velour shirt, some shabby, ragged jeans he would wear at work and a pair of overused suede shoes. He also had a broken mobile phone with him, a fistful of ruffled banknotes, a Minolta camera, the car keys and a three-day-old beard. He had given up the books, objects and everything belonging to that house; he had left them all to Matilda, in exchange for his freedom.

  In her note, Emilia had written that she would be waiting for him at the Banatul Hotel. A little while before, when Sal had been better off and could afford it, they had taken a room there for about a year. The hotelkeeper, a gaunt man with yellowish skin and bony, emaciated arms, would jot their names down in his tattered register, and after a while, seeing that they were good clients, had even given them a discount. Every afternoon, he would welcome them with his soapy smile, stooping and tilting his head a little in a subtle greeting and slipping the key to room
22 in Sal’s hand. They would climb two floors; at the end of the corridor, the key slid into the lock, turned twice and, once the door banged open, their foster home lay ahead. It wasn’t exactly like the green-walled room; they missed the impression of cosiness feigned by the few personal things scattered about here and there, but they knew that the sheets were freshly changed and cleaned, that the towels, despite their frayed appearance, smelled of soap and bleach, that they would find on the pillows two bars of chocolate instead of one. The water jug and glass tumblers glinted in the red light seeping through the red satin curtains that weighed down the windows.

  Although their adjustment to their new condition of hotel lovers was difficult, although Emilia invariably had, in the first couple of days, dark circles under her eyes and the air of a sick person having lost all hopes of recovering, Sal knew he had to give her as much time as she needed to get used to it. In truth, it was far from being a delightful place: the dim corridors, covered in tattered silk that laid bare the seedy walls, the rugged wooden doors with massive door handles, the floor lamps with their glazed shades and dusty tassels darkened at the ends, the ashtrays in front of every door chock-full of stubs and giving off the smell of damp ashes, the replicas of unknown painters hung askew… all these things bore the stamp of a former brothel rather than that of a hotel. In fact, on their very first day there, Emilia had told him as much while sitting on the edge of the bed, peering around, her face screwed up in disgust: ‘This place says a lot about us!’

  Before taking the room, he had asked her if she agreed and she did. He had posed the question several times; as he was familiar with her anxieties and heard her whining about their living on the sly, with people looking down on her, he wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her. She was fickle, though. She had not hesitated for a second to come to his place one cold winter day, when Matilda and the girls were visiting their grandparents. He had almost ripped her clothes off, rolling her over on the Persian rug that had been a gift from Matilda’s parents. They had drunk their coffee later on from the same mugs that Dori and Mari drank their warm milk from every morning, and he had set her down on the same chair that was usually Matilda’s. And she hadn’t been troubled by any of this. She had her own moral scale, which she tuned according to whims and circumstances. What had seemed squalid in the beginning had become in time the place where they came not only to see each other and have sex, but also to rest, the way people do when they come back from work and stretch out on the living room couch in front of the TV, waiting to fall asleep.