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He ushered me over to the window with a conspiratorial and concerned expression. If anyone had been watching they would have seen a comical duo framed by the window set deeply in the thick brick wall of the faculty building, gesticulating disproportionately, like actors in a silent film.

“What are you trying to do, Aristide, make a fool of me? Are you coming to any more rehearsals or not?” Ignoring my sudden discomfort, he went on in an irritated voice: “We couldn’t wait for you. We’re leaving for Italy and we have to get the paperwork ready. You know very well how long the whole business takes! The boys kept asking me about you, because you’re down on the list, but you forgot to come and see us!”

“Porfirich, I’m sorry, please excuse me,” I mumbled, conscious of the dual effect of the feeling that was suffocating me—made up of undermined self-assurance and self-esteem resuscitated as a result of being needed. “I haven’t had any time for the violin lately. I’ve been up to my ears in coursework, and other problems. But I’ll come. I promise I’ll come.”

Quasimodo shook his head.

“That doesn’t explain anything. It’s been more than six months since I last saw you. Do you think I like having to track you down, to yank you out of lectures and ask you what you think you’re doing? Do you think I like having to put off the decision all the others are waiting for? Look, we’re having a rehearsal the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday. If you don’t show up, then I’m striking you off the list. You’ve been warned. It’s up to you.”

And with that he turned his back on me, melting like a vampire into the gloom of the corridor.

You will never learn to read the signals fate is sending you. Or else you’ll read into them exactly the opposite of what they’re actually saying, because, out of some juvenile delusion, you still assume that fate will always pile gifts at your feet. Porfirich. What made him come looking for me? He might just as well have ignored me, or found someone to replace me, especially given that I was hardly indispensable to the ensemble. Quite the opposite, I would say. My encounter with Porfirich discomfited me, but more so the news that the ensemble was going to Italy, which was entirely unheard of, an event more fantastic than my flying to Mars or climbing Mount Everest. I felt all the more troubled by this given that the news came after a failed first attempt a year before. We had been due to go to a festival organized by the L’Unità newspaper in a number of cities in the north of the peninsula. This sortie into “enemy” territory, even under the cover of ideological allies, Enrico Berlinguer’s communists, still required lengthy preparations; everything still had to be sifted down to the smallest detail. It had seemed that things were bogged down somewhere in the upper echelons of the political machine, or else that our Italian comrades had had second thoughts, and so without caring about betraying my philistine, mercenary motives, I had given up going to rehearsals, fed up with the pointless efforts involved in that time-consuming and unrewarding “hobby.” I had looked on it as a blessing in my first year as a student, when all the freshmen had been corralled and sorted according to their “secondary” aptitudes, but the hobby had soon turned into a thankless chore: I played the violin, and so I had a talent that somehow set me apart from the gray mass of my fellow students; in their eyes, it lent me a kind of ludicrous aura. It was an artistic form of communal socialization, different from the usual panoply of drudgery to be borne by a journalism student in Soviet Moldavia. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t sentenced to punishment like all the rest, but it did offer me a way to spend my time differently, to alleviate the universal, withering tedium; it was a dram of entertainment, a refuge.

I was able to treat the folk music ensemble as an alternative to the kind of forbidden and perilous relationships that had been beckoning to me ever since I moved to this city. I took part in an unseen auction, without knowing that I myself was the lot under the hammer—the coveted trophy, the promised fulfillment of so many sustained efforts—and I had to learn how to root out and repress my own inclinations as I let myself be pulled now in one direction, now in another. Yes, it was something like the “redemptive alternative” magnanimously proposed to me by that secret policeman during our little talk in the caretaker’s room of the students’ hostel where I lived. He had asked me about the writer T., showing an especial interest in this leading figure of the intellectual world, who had a reputation for being a nationalist/dissident and was frowned upon by the official “organs”: “It would be a good thing if you didn’t see him anymore. You’ll make things complicated for yourself. What are you trying to do? Get kicked out of the university? Why don’t you find yourself a healthier pastime? Sports, for example. What about hang-gliding or parachuting? I know somebody at the club in town, if you’re interested. It’s very good for the health, you know. Much better than reading books in Romanian. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read them if it gives you so much pleasure, just don’t pass them on to other people.”

The agent had an elongated, doggish face, beveled brows, and the almond-shaped eyes of an odalisque. He stared at you unwaveringly, without any embarrassment—a long-honed skill—rummaging through your brain to see what you were concealing from him, what you were trying to avoid, implanting a sense of guilt into your soul. I admit that my hatred for this particular species of villain was acute. I didn’t know how to comport myself with them. I hadn’t learned to look at them as human beings, no matter how perverse. I knew only that I despised them, grimly, tenaciously, and out of a firm conviction. And that was why I overdid my hate, ascribing them monstrous physical traits to match the abysses lurking beneath their invisible uniforms. I let myself be manipulated by clichés, swayed by bile. It was impossible for me to imagine such a specimen shaving in front of the mirror every morning, like a conscientious functionary, or playing with his three-year-old daughter on the brightly colored rug in the living room. I could never have believed he visited his mother on happy occasions, bearing a huge bunch of tulips; or pictured him pausing to catch his breath, leaning on the banister between the fifth and sixth floor of his apartment block, asking himself whether he had forgotten anything from the shopping list his wife had put in his pocket, for the party they would be throwing that evening.