They finally parted in the evening, after dinner, as she hurried home to translate her French author, having agreed to meet the next day by the gallery; he, too, went home, to write a letter to his wife, finish reading his paper, calm his suddenly rebellious heart. Around ten, already in his pajamas, he went to bed intending to browse through Goethe’s travel diaries before falling sleep, the only book from his previous life he still allowed himself to touch. Outside it was a stormy night, the weather so inclement it would be best to stay indoors, yet for some reason he leapt out of bed, dressed quickly, and went outside. There, in the street leading to the town center, dark and empty, he experienced a feeling of loneliness, so unusual for Europe that one couldn’t help but call this feeling Russian. The town center was still smoldering with the usual resort activity, but he wanted no noise or light, so turned into the very first side street instead. Walking past low houses, he kept looking in their windows, as was his old habit. Although most of them were shuttered, he could still see through some: in one of them there was a woman sitting with her sewing in a yellow circle of light; in another a fat man in braces, reading a newspaper, looking somewhat aggrieved; in a third a chambermaid making a bed. The street was a cul-de-sac. He stopped, caught his breath, and went back. Drawing level with another window, he peered inside through the partially drawn curtains. He saw a girl at a desk with her back to him, writing something. Or rather, not so much writing as copying something from a book, and not just copying whole pages—she was being somewhat selective, from time to time leafing through a huge volume fixed vertically on a special stand. For a moment he imagined that the girl must be writing a commentary, perhaps to some Talmudic text, but he drove that absurd thought away. Next to the books on the desk he noticed a photograph of a young man with large sad eyes, his head resting on his left hand, the index finger sunk into his cheek. The young man looked Italian or French, but could just as well be Jewish. He came closer to the window and stood there for a while. She kept working with great concentration until another girl came into the room, probably German, a petite blonde with an amazingly large bosom. The scribe, as he dubbed her, dropped her pen, annoyed, and turned around. As he recognized Lydia it dawned on him that she was neither copying nor commenting but translating the very Frenchman she had mentioned. Perhaps it was the novelist himself in the photograph. He thought it apt; let the translator’s labors be blessed by the author’s presence, his benevolent gaze. Meanwhile Lydia must have said something very harsh to her friend, who became weepy and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. He would never forget what happened next. Lydia went up to the blonde and kissed the neckline of her dress. The blonde looked up and embraced her. It was a long embrace, long enough for him to realize he was awake. The lovers were kissing, whispering something to each other, then finally Lydia waved the blonde aside, went back to the desk, put the finished pages in order, closed the dictionary, and stole a glance at the portrait before going to the window, very quickly, giving him just enough time to step back. He was already walking away at a brisk pace when the screech of the drawn shutters scraped through his hearing. Early the next morning he packed his suitcase and took the first train to Prague. The day after that he was standing in his office, dictating to his secretary a letter to Phoenix Bohemian Insurance Company.
Still his wife did not come. The crowd around him was getting thinner, time to go, to have tea and talk to the other guests sitting at their table-d’hôte. He shook away the memory, so reminiscent of one of his dreams, and made a few circles around the pavilion with the mineral water spring. The relentless August sun burning through his dandyish light-colored suit made him take refuge in the shade again. And then he saw his wife at the end of the alley. She was walking fast, nearly running, her long bony face full of dismay and extreme anxiety, her large mouth askew, some terrible word she had to deliver struggling to come out of it, so he started toward her, a little frightened, her ugly face and awkward figure causing a wave of forgotten pity and tenderness in him, and as he grasped her hand with a thumbed newspaper tightly gripped in it—my God, what’s the matter with you, Felice my dear, what’s happened—she looked at him, her eyes full of fear, and said: “It’s war, Franz.”
art
[MOLDOVA]
VITALIE CIOBANU
Orchestra Rehearsal
When the professor of linguistics went to see who was knocking on the classroom door, interrupting his soporific discourse from the lectern, I had a presentiment that the person out past the threshold had come for me. There wasn’t anything to justify this feeling, unless we are to believe that the longstanding expectations you nourish within yourself, often accompanied by a diffuse sense of guilt, are able to convey unmistakable signals from the outside world. A few moments later, after engaging in a short dialogue in the form of curt whispers, leaning half into the corridor, Mocreac turned on his heel. Above his thick lenses, his myopic eyes wandered over the class until they fastened on me. “Aristide, step outside for a moment: there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” With an even gait, I made my way to the door, haughtily ignoring the indignant eyes of my classmates, all envious at my opportunity to avoid, legitimately, as it were, the monotony of an insipid and somnolent lecture. But only I knew, as I approached our professor’s mysterious collocutor, what anxieties undermined the aplomb I had been trying to project to the rest of the class. It was Porfirich, the head of the student folk music ensemble, the man they also nicknamed Quasimodo, out of the kind of malice that is always prone to monstrous exaggeration, because he somewhat resembled the famous character from Victor Hugo: squat, with a bulbous head and an unnaturally large mouth that looked out of proportion to the rest of his swarthy, deeply wrinkled face. It’s worth lingering for a few moments on that face: from the corners of his eyes the wrinkles spread out in a fan, which the mouth, acting as a spring, corrugated whenever he smiled or laughed, for he was constantly quipping, flinging innuendoes left and right, such as, “Natasha, stop blowing that clarinet on the stairs,” to the delight of his listeners. Because, after all, what else is an ambiguous wisecrack, spoken by the right person, but an invitation to indulge in a vicarious sexual fantasy? Porfirich liked to foster an atmosphere of merry complicity around himself, in a wholly natural way, the same as other people might exude a particular musk, and his entourage, it goes without saying, enthusiastically joined in his game. Of course, Porfirich lacked the cathedral to be a genuine Quasimodo. It would have been more apt to say that he had access to infernal bolgie.