After a summer and a day, it was Monday already and they were waiting for me as the jokes froze on the wage slaves’ lips — they being Misha (the plain-clothes patrol), the chair like a coffin, and the industrial ovens where Captain Zubcu burned. I brought my hand to my throat, to defend myself; it was too late: the siren was going off. . I lifted the receiver, it was the fat lady professor. Quiet. There are other tenants. I was in the street, orphan of the rain, holding out flowers to policemen and the black woman crooning Summertime.
I was a pale nomad, transparent, like a tall glass of water, defiant and suave. I found myself in a tram that would carry me toward sneering coworkers. Shadows kept climbing on and off. Their mirror images climbed off and on. The tram kept advancing toward the hill of another identical morning — casting me out onto the damp, unknown street before I planned to get off. I wandered into the fold of the streets to find the hours, the city, the people — to find the dream where the girl with hair as black as smoke, was waiting for me. And I was picking up the receiver, the cold receiver of the public phone, dialing numbers endlessly, certain that she would answer eventually, and then we would agree to find each other again. Evaluating my chances according to statistics, I was convinced that I could exhaust all of the possibilities and find her. I would go into coffee houses, movie theaters, tailors, beauty parlors, watchmakers and cobblers, taverns and groceries, jewelers and furriers; I would cross squares and stadiums, climb onto trains, into ships and flying fortresses, wait at the airport for that lucky surprise — the coincidence. I would have to blend into crowds, run around, make phone calls, put announcements in the personals. There would need to be a sufficient number of attempts, which is to say trials: the frequency of success tends to increase as the events unfold, which is to say the trial or also the attempt, the chance. . the greater the number of trials, which is to say attempts, the variables can wander further from the average, which is to say from certainty, they can be forced toward certainty, success: the monkeys that type away on a typewriter with 35 keys might produce Hamlet by chance with a probability of one divided by 35 to the power of 27,000.
Therefore, the requirements include: anything, anyhow, anytime, anywhere. I had no right to rest. I kept trying telephone calls — I would have to persevere, to heap up coincidences, deceptions, announcements, which is to say trials, to be everywhere at the same time, with those 27,000 powers of one alone. One autumn, I caught sight of her at a post-office window. I was standing in line. Several people separated us. I was looking at the delicate back of her neck. I became numb, looking at that sweet spot on her neck. I came back to myself as she went down the steps. I ran to see her face. It was she, indeed — she was walking briskly, people were looking at us, I was running, she climbed into a 103, and I lacked the courage to take the next 103. It was late, Friday evening. I had missed the opportunity. The closeness of the festive day urged me on, leaving me flustered. Something would happen, again: tomorrow they might give me a promotion, a raise, increase my status, and I had no right to get lost, to be late, the week was ending. The failure could no longer be saved at the last moment anymore. I would have to calm myself and be punctual when — who knows? — they might give me other privileges, another residence, other wishes, and another obedience training. There would be upholstered doors, like in Sebastian Caba’s office. Then, we’ll slam the door and it won’t be heard; we’ll separate from the year Monday and the year Tuesday; we’ll be free: nothing will be remembered — there’ll be an easy, scientific, perfect flow.
I found myself in the street, flattened against the glass of the telephone booth. I’d left the office in a delirious state because I could no longer stand the 27,000 monkeys pounding their typewriters. I had to get to the street, immerse myself in rain, and get rid of the flowers that tethered my hands and impeded my memory; I had to arrive at the obese professor’s lair, to kill the purgatory that Little Moni-pig represented — symbolically. I’d have to be brisk. My bullets would fire rapidly, my arms would quickly suffocate, the poison would kill quickly, without a trace. Then I’d run into the street again to encounter other hours, the city, and the police under the cold, uniform sky of the siege.
I wandered through the Big City’s slums. The collegial bleating awaited me, ready to oppress me. And meanwhile I went on looking at the display windows of clothing and pastry shops, going into cinemas, schoolyards, following the pathways through parks, detouring around kiosks, cafes, and small shops, until I found myself in the square. Limousines kept sliding by, white, black, and green, and the chauffeurs — relaxed as a gang of grandpas — continued opening car doors, and the chubby, hysterical children lay siege to the school gates.
One morning, when I was still a somnolent Polytechnician, I might have bumped into Monica Smântănescu; I might have seen her claws thrust into her white and bloated flesh, and the horrifying routine with the limousines, and the tyrannical students, and the cunning, guilty dwarfs. Back then, I might have been able to meet her and kill her, so that I would never have to see her again, never be obliged to recognize her as a potential double to be saved or killed, so that no one would discover we were passengers in the same fatherland, destined to meet again in a square surrounded by black and white and green crocodiles, revolving greedily like the ghosts of an infinite moment. Back then I might have met the giantess Monica Smântănescu and the sadistic dwarf, Tiberiu Covalschi, in an exceptional circus — with sleight of hand and hypnosis — but I was in too much of a hurry to pass through the colors of days without end, from one dawn to the next, through nights without end.
The end of the week and the end of the year would need to find me sufficiently tired. On the afternoon of the sixth day, the eve of the seventh, and the seventh day, I would not have been accepted at the festivities of pantomime and obedience training if I hadn’t proved that I was suitably tired: hollow-cheeked, wrung-out, transparent — just as I was supposed to be. Time hastened rapidly with its streets and damp skies. The afternoon and the evening of the sixth day were coming. I needed to be at present at the climax of the weekly masquerades. Every week we’d celebrate another end: of school, of the war, of the family, the faculty, the end of the semester, the year, the five-year plan. . This Saturday I’ll say farewell to the venerated schoolteachers Sofronie and Popovici, shake the hand of my parents’ friends Mehedinţi and his wife, Ileana the Fairy-tale Princess. I must bend my knees, kiss the hands of those who brought me into the world, while thanking them for the good raising and unraising. . I must embrace my sisters reduced to smoke in the old crematoriums, take Donca in my arms, then cry on the threshold of the house where I was raised, which I don’t know if I’ll have time to see again because next Saturday I will be far away, I’ll have finished with my studies, I’ll have chosen my next workplace, left my classmates, who I don’t know if I’ll ever see again, because another Saturday is coming: the weeks mount up with their Sabbath of pantomime and obedience training — only it’s not time, one must take full advantage of every working day, from dawn to dark, using each of those 480,000 seconds to strike the 35 keys to the 27,000thththth power and eventually we’ll hit on the end, the masterpiece, which is to say the grand finale, crowned with black flowers.