Of course, the beholders’ terror would have amplified his phrase: I can’t stand myself anymore, and I can’t stand any of you anymore, either. I want something else. . like you, frightened of your own awareness. . impossible as it may seem, I want something desperate: poems, grenades, fires. . and on top of that, songs and flowers — naïve songs and innocent flowers, peaceful, old-fashioned flowers, wild flowers, flowers in bad taste, flowers in the hands of parents, beggars, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, directors of one thing or another — flowers growing out of typewriters, shutting them up and striking them dumb. Only then would the passersby panic — somehow the obese professor herself may have appeared, that burlesque emblem of the stifled, with her suffocating comforts and teary-eyed songs crooned from the cradle to the cathouse.
The street corner could have been the site of a more spectacular revolt than those words left behind in that upholstered office, but the young man was already leaving, deaf and diffident, as though he’d already forgotten what he’d said.
The high iron gate strikes its latch; the narrow, serpentine, spiral staircase devours itself. Hand on the cold metal balustrade, the climber coils within himself. One flight up. Again, the steps rotate uniformly again in the shape of a fan: a point flowing at an even rate along the radius of a circle. Rotating evenly, slowly around the circumference, dizzied by the curved trajectories, the climber’s body turns in on itself toward a painfully closed center.
At the door: the oval, raffia doormat. Under the mat will be a small wad of crumpled paper, hiding the key. On the door, the little cardboard rectangle: Prof. M. Smântănescu. The metal key clings to his palm. “You’ll find the key under the mat!” The door really exists, and so does the mat and the key. Prof. M. Smântănescu. French and Piano. Quiet. There are other tenants.
There will be time, time to go back to the corner at least, and from there, with idle steps, triflingly and hesitantly, onto the street now light, dry, and deserted, under the long limbs of tall trees, a tunnel through the leaves, and past houses half-hidden in greenery.
. . The building’s staircase: step, riser, step, riser — chunks of ice. The final threshold, the wooden door covered in arabesques, angels sculpted from edge to edge on its wide margins. The door opens toward books heaped on heavy iron shelves, vases with slender flowers, a narrow table, a tall chair, a piano raising its oblique tail, the ceiling painted with pastel squares, the slippery parquet: everything accumulated with the serenity of a fairy tale, until chaos imposes itself, until the path from the street corner must be taken again, killing reveries, reestablishing the brutality of things, dispelling mystifications, until the street reasserts its filth, with small, uneven houses doused in fine rain, and narrow, crooked windows; the grillwork of the gates will be damp and cold, and the length of the iron balustrade will cool the hands; the spiral of the narrow steps soiled with mud, the landing with two doors: the one in front with a glass window, the one to the right made entirely of wood.
The door will have to be opened slowly so that no one hears, so that no one comes leaping out, halting or impeding the fugitive’s steps, and, as in the past, the door must be cautiously pulled into the doorframe, smoothly and without a sound.
Door closed: obsequiously — a barrier in the face of his pursuers. Escape — even from here — is senseless.
Impossible to keep postponing the inevitable. Here, inside, the fugitive turns back into himself: a vibrating body — that well-known tremor — poised between familiar objects and the need to reinvent and rearrange them again. A hand moves along the length of his throat — that reflexive gesture — the perennial horror of reenacting the spasm that wrenched Captain Bogdan Zubcu’s body as it hung from its deadly pendulum, the same gesture that the Captain made before flinging himself into the great redeeming pyre. . Then his daughter’s wandering and the exile of this fugitive now, enchained by those two phantoms.
A chair: the body flowing into itself, into inevitable inertia. The green terracotta stove, the thin gas conduit. The valve key over the conduit’s screw-tap. To the left, it closes; to the right, it opens, released, it might, possibly. . The dusty piano. The chair in front of it, scores piled in a heap. Symbols and lines, commas, staves and braces: Mozart and Czerny under the thickly settled dust. A crammed bookshelf: vertical, horizontal, oblique, aligned, overturned, tall, thin, small, fat, broken — books crowding each other, suffocating each other: ignored and lost books, dusty from edge to edge, dust on every surface. The cabinet with its glass case: more books, family photographs — false images of a false family — nostalgic funerary relics, papers: a fictitious history, a farce.
A strange, cramped, contorted execution site: the round table covered in soft fabric with its fringe dangling down to the rug patterned with rhombuses and rectangles; circling the table, little round chairs piled with clothes, notebooks, scores, papers, rags, clips, pencils.
The hand has remained forgotten on his neck, the phantom of a routine gesture. Frightened, the hand withdraws. The fugitive refuses to recognize himself.
• • •
Morning had lurked under the haze. The alarm clock screamed, the shirt rustled. Cold air slapped the dazed pedestrians — neighbors flung into the somber streets. The doorman’s brief bow; windblown rows quietly submitting; reluctant fingers on the banister; the queue in front of the sign-in book, the signature, the chair.
Stiffness between ankle and knee, eyelids weighed by sleep, the seemingly careless glances, the hand sliding toward the briefcase — the key to the drawer. The ruler in its brown leather case, the drawing unrolled over the desk. The pink sheen of the paper: two-dimensional metallurgical furnaces in transverse section A — A, B — B; the longitudinal section C–C; the detail, epsilon; the column with funnels, columns, bunkers, dust cyclones, exhausts, blowers.
The dizziness of mornings: the damp that crawls up the bones and the tiredness that crawls down, and swollen legs like leaden bowling pins stiffly striking the stinking, clean parquet. The venomous coffee, black as night, and the sugar cube antidote. His eyelids will begin to flutter. The office worker will recognize his coworker under a smiling mask that asks, insists, slinks between words and smiles, pries, keeps watch, reports. Across the room, a faint buzz; the spy’s monotonous voice falters, then comes back flickering faintly with bits of cunning.
— Thank you. Yes, yes. Now I understand. I haven’t worked on this kind of furnace before.
Smoke, fog, steam, voices, a telephone ringing somewhere.
— Do you remember? Are the supports for this kind of terrain made on a scale of 1:25 or 1:50?
— 1:25.
— And the gradient of the slope?
— 2:1 up to four meters and 4:3 over four meters.
Slackness, apathy, pain rising slowly and damply up thin tubes. The dull submissive gestures played in slow motion — at eight-thirty: the lazy day extends itself.
In front of him, the same neighbor becomes the watcher: sallow with thinning, grayish hair, and neutral, serene, submissive eyes. His practiced facade of banalities — the scaffold of a double life: eight hours of detachedly playing the fool at the office allows him the freedom to explore more inaccessible realms than the rest of the chumps.
— I’ve been thinking, everything they’re saying about Kennedy is a bunch of shit. Robert, the brother, is hiding the photographs of the autopsy, and saying they’ll only be revealed in ’71 because they’re horrible?