One morning at the Polytechnic Institute, I met the unknown of my dreams again in one of the third floor corridors — on the arm of my former high school classmate. They were coming toward me. I didn’t know how to vanish fast enough, to keep from running into them. Caba’s cordiality would have come next. She, the unknown, would have recognized me. She would have understood that I’d been after her for a long time, driven mad to know her, to draw her closer — since the time we’d met on the boat, then in the train, then in the hall of the post office, which she’d just come out of when we bumped into each other on the lower steps. They were laughing, coming toward me without getting closer. Flattening myself against the wall, horrified, I went on listening as their steps sounded clearly on the floor — without getting any closer.
Years after finishing school, the memories are confused: the corridor at the Polytechnic Institute was different than the one at work where the thin, lunatic girl waited for me, following my movements with her big eyes from a hidden angle in the corridor with her hands still clinging to the wall. The mist penetrated to the bone. Body succumbing to wretched, rebellious, rheumatic chills, the job was now to keep staggering upstairs to a new morning, with jerky movements, pushed onward by distant voices like lost souls heard through the woods and barely plucked from the cold night, under the dew or mist, with small steps, stammering a few words, groaning like a monotonous spell. I stood up among desks, drawing boards, and telephones: the cadence of typewriters, drawers, the rustle of papers struck me. My fingers groped the corners of tables and rummaged through my pockets, found the pill — felt the earth under my feet again: on the peak of the hill, the light filtered into view, the narrow stripe of delayed morning. Suddenly: words, and telephones whistling. Went on running up and down, slamming doors, taking the stairs two at a time, three at a time, crossing the corridor on the ground floor, until caught by the dark gaze of the orphan girl, who was still waiting. She was waiting for me, following me. . in the shadows, her hands on the walls, which somehow gleamed. My hands clutched my throat, to come back to myself, to return to the surface. For a moment, her large pupil trembled. Long, slender, pale, the girl sprang from her shadowy corner like a streak of yellowed light, bald, like Dona: shorn. And there was nothing to be seen but her brightly pale forehead, eyes, and fingers on the damp wall.
These mornings took place long ago, many years after high school, which trapped me and divided me from Sebastian Caba, and after the Polytechnic, where I met him again, and after years at the factory, when he had become my chief and I saw him daily, all the time. During the vacation when I let myself be crushed between the covers of delicate Madam Colette Triteanu’s books, he was swimming in the river with my classmates — or maybe back home at Giurgiu, with his own friends, in the Danube. I met him again in his second autumn, and his second winter among us, and his second spring, when I saw him daily, and his last summer, when I met him again and we separated, in perfect understanding. . all these things have no connection to him. I must rediscover what that summer and fall had to do with myself in order to understand how we came to be in such a state of mutual understanding that we were able to meet again in apparently changed roles. I should recall how fall and spring went by and our last summer at high school as well, when I used to have memory — I wasn’t yet hermetically enclosed on a shelf. Only, the memories aren’t connected to him, nor do they have any purpose. They must and will be driven away. Then there will remain, perfectly clearly, the unknown of that autumn.
Our last juvenile fall, spring, and summer.
• • •
Back then, the windows streamed: liquefied glass — a fluid surface. No reason to wait any longer — there was no sign that it would clear up. Yet that was the first impulse, to stand on the threshold looking at the sky. The others had set out immediately, though. The dorms were nearby. I set out also, but too late: the school secretary was panting, headed in my direction, afraid of missing me. The director and my successor — the new leader of the high-school organization — were already in the staff room with a familiar, short, very dark political activist who taught at the school. I pulled up a chair. The activist smiled at me, so did the director. Still smiling, the director informed me that I had been called to help them in a difficult matter, and the activist added something about my experience and prestige. The director approved, nodding his head. They fidgeted on their chairs and turned toward the successor. The activist, yes. . I think he laid emphasis on the fact that my successor had not yet made his public debut, and it would be risky to do that under such complicated circumstances. Then in the ninth grade, my successor nodded in approval. The activist briefed me on what they’d discussed before my arrival. Then he told me that the assembly I’d have to run the following day was connected to events I would read about in the paper.
The activist raised a sheet of paper and read two names. One I knew, a scrawny freckled, nearsighted, excitable boy, who always got worked up over exams and was the son of a man who once leased large tracts of agricultural land. Then the activist read the two names again, adding that another name would have to be proposed. He looked at me calmly and smiled with his little teeth. I asked, “who’s the second?” The director launched into an explanation about the second, who had just entered school that falclass="underline" he’d come up from the country where he had joined the organization, probably inadvertently. His father — a professor, a former colleague of the director’s, and a former staff officer on the Eastern front — had withdrawn to the country to become a simple elementary school teacher after the war, in the hope that certain things would be forgotten this way, namely against whom he had fought and in what position: against our Soviet brothers as a member of the officer class. So the director affirmed, and they all turned toward me, waiting. I was still preoccupied by the name they were asking for. They waited patiently. Then, to give me time to think, they discussed the other details of the meeting: hour, auditorium, presidium, mobilization. I took advantage of the break. I told them that Saturday afternoon didn’t seem suitable for such a gathering because many of the boarders went home for the weekend. The activist responded that all departures would be forbidden and after the meeting there would be a dance organized at the girls’ school. I left the building in a hurry — it was still raining, and I got home wet to the skin from running in the rain.
The next day at three, the auditorium was full. The moment I stepped up to the podium, the hall murmured with slight surprise. Several months after the new school year began, I had become a simple infantryman again. Since students in the last year were exempted from leadership positions, I was a kind of president-in-retirement. I opened the session. The director read a page from the newspaper. The activist took up half an hour, more or less, talking about the significance of what had just been read. We passed to the second phase: the expulsions. I began with the son of the former leaseholder, the Zionist. The hall was mute. The guilty party spoke clearly, enunciating in a strong voice, and confirmed what had been said about him. He didn’t stutter or turn pale. The commentators followed. The four designated speakers had been registered beforehand. When I looked up, I saw two more raised hands in the back. I added them to the list. The first spoke as I expected, with sincere fury. The second added several combative epithets. The third designated speaker carried on in the same vein as the first, but with a loud voice, red with fury. Although they were reciting prepared speeches, the words seemed different, enlivened with pathos. Then one of the people from the hall who’d signaled he’d like to speak jumped up. He agreed in principle with the others, but was proposing that there be more discussion because the former leaseholder was gravely ill and dying. The clamor died down. There was a long silence. The last designated speaker followed. He spoke calmly, perfectly punctuating the finale: “the leaseholder’s illness has nothing to do with this meeting, nor does it matter that the sick man was a leaseholder long ago, in his own youth. The main thing is that we must rid ourselves once and for all of the shameful traces of the past!” The hubbub rose once more, particularly in the back of the room. I heard approving outcries, but other, confused ones too. I had been careless: I hadn’t arranged the speakers well, which became even clearer when finally the second speaker from the hall took the floor and he hesitated ten minutes before declaring his verdict. He kept doubling back, just when he seemed to have decided. He’d go on finding a detail here or there that stalled him. He’d liked the guilty party’s responses: the accused seemed honest and he had comported himself surprisingly, especially if we consider the difficulty his family was going through. When he sat, heads turned in his direction, seemingly in admiration. I let them wait several more seconds before intervening. I began by testifying that I appreciated the six speakers’ interesting points of view, and particularly the dramatic conclusion, proof that they were serious about the decisions to be made. But we hadn’t gathered simply to display our rhetorical skills, but rather, our resolution to decide, to neither pass over facts, nor commit injustice, nor to be superficial and hesitant. Precisely on such an occasion, we might show our force — our capacity to discern.