She got tangled in hiccups, her words ran together.
— It will be alright with Father, and with Donca, too. You’ll see. Only, we mustn’t lose ourselves — and she lost control again. . Don’t despair. You’ll see. It will work out. It was something scandalous, unjust: the whole world knows. He was always correct. The case will be retried. Have faith. Now, you’re the one who must, who can’t. . I’m so alone. . And she collapsed again, spluttering, dragging me into her terrible sobs.
Then, she went back to work. I remained alone — without knowing how to repeat the scene to myself — her pale, wrinkled face before my eyes. I was seeing her eyes, her sunken cheeks, her suffering. I looked at the window, the bed, the walls: I should have suffered. It seemed like just yesterday that she was pummeling him with reproaches: “This one did this, that one did that, this one got hold of such and such and got himself fixed-up really well.”
Could it be. . do misfortunes fulfill certain predispositions or latent tendencies? My parents had found the strength to forget in order to start over, as Father said so many times. Then what had happened was neither surprising nor unjust. If he were reborn once, he could be reborn again. The cadaver might become a militant, forgetting again, starting everything all over again from the beginning; doing this or that and getting himself well-fixed, if that’s what was necessary to start everything all over again from the beginning, tomorrow and the day after that.
Therefore, I had no right to pain, only to shame. In my new circumstances, there was no better way to atone for it than by visiting my former schoolmasters Sofronie and Popovici and the former neighbor, Colette Triteanu, not to mention the great Virgil Mehedinţi.
Spent the afternoon alone with Donca. Spilling passionate phrases, she threw her arms around me and talked loudly. She had already accommodated herself to the role of wronged man’s daughter, and she emoted compassionately with Mama. She told me that for a while now she hadn’t been running around vacant lots, only reading. . Oh, yes, she was reading voraciously and feeling alone, gathered between the covers of books. She looked at me as though wanting to forgive me for all those nights of reading when my light kept waking her. Strongly confirming the signs of an emphatic kinship with me, she expressed herself negligently, used interjections, sighed often. Muttering French verses, she went over to the window. She swung her foreign braids. She was saying that she felt adrift like a drunken boat — past prison hulks’ hateful eyes. That would have been the moment to tell her that the term should be ennobled, as the poet wanted: one says “drunken ship,” not “drunken boat,” but she came close to declare how much she loved me, her exemplary brother, and she embraced me with vast, youthful despair. Maybe if I’d had time for her mood that day, it might have been possible to do something. Mother came back in the evening. Signaling me to avoid any delicate conversation with Donca, she fluttered around the table with silverware and napkins, and in the end, she managed to reveal for my benefit the swindle for which Father had been so exaggeratedly punished. She kept assuring me that things would work themselves out: we would all be happy soon.
The next morning: saw myself stretched out in bed, alone, without the courage to offer Sofronie and Popovici the satisfaction of a visit, not to mention the delicate Colette. Went out into the city instead, and came back at noon. In the afternoon, my sister continued sighing over the noble victim of injustice. Now, she felt like a mad plank under sea-blue, spiral-flaming skies, as the poet, intoxicated by love, had said so well. She longed for the cold, black pond on which a sad child on his knees sets sail a boat as fragile as a May butterfly: she felt herself that child, adrift on the great ocean. She added suddenly that Father had been completely stunned by the event: he had never attended any trial and had therefore behaved badly. In the evening, Mother reappeared. She had prepared some warm packages of food for my trip; she assured me that her husband was well and his confidence hadn’t been broken. Donca had heard this: her hair fluttered as splendidly as the stanzas she kept repeating. Returned on the same train. The little city had seen me for only several hours, but it was already inviting me for a reunion. My real healing would involve deadlines, meetings, and responsibilities. Time would pass quickly: five months. . five years. I had a target — I was becoming a passenger with a definite route again: I would travel to get somewhere, to participate in something.
My only duty was to not forget. Nor would that have been possible anyway. I was holding on for dear life to any obligation.
• • •
The reunion only lasted a few hours. Though the old city recognized its former star quickly, I didn’t make my act of contrition. Not much remained of my former precocity, and I spared my old teachers the sight. I didn’t visit Virgil and Ileana Mehedinţi either. Now, all I could do was return to Sebastian Caba and kneel before him: I’d tap timidly on his window. I’d tell him what had happened. I’d become his disciple. I’d learn the secrets of serenity from the master himself. Of course, I’d go down on my knees in the snow. That’s the only way he’d agree to direct my words and deeds in such a way that I’d regain the use of my fellow feelings and benefit from the misfortune that had thrust me so briskly from one camp to another.
Because there were so many detours involved, the descending star had to expend more energy on the way down than he’d used to climb the chilly heights. I was a dilettante, but the university clerks weren’t too careful with the information they received, and I graduated. After that, we should have fallen into our proper places: I to the ticket window of a movie house, he to the champagne, furniture, or limousine factory. In the end we went where the wind blew; I to the worksite, he to the factory where we would meet again one bright, clear morning, like in the old days.
A large room with empty desks; it was spring. Caba’s slender hands went on noisily rustling through new banknotes. My guide was a thin, silent girl, and I let her pass in front of me. I was becoming Sebastian’s colleague again. We would see each other daily. And the years would pass quickly — I kept running on the staircase, up and down. There were circuits, industrial ovens, columns. And so I went on rapidly crossing the corridor of days until the cycles of rebirth suddenly came to a momentary halt in the long Buddhist corridor where my eerie sister’s eyes waited to ambush me. I had no time. I went racing toward the orange afternoons: the cheerful whores of amnesia were waiting for me. Damp mornings, tram, crowd, desk, drawing boards, typewriters, slide rules, cigarettes, telephones, drawings, Monday, Wednesday, March, September, long mornings, short afternoons with the office sluts: Madam Whoozits, Comrade Whatzits, the former friend, the former widow, former wife, the former ice skater who sang in the evenings (opening the windows and letting down her red hair — as red as the Revolution), or the other one, the flautist with eyeglasses, or the other one. . My former colleague was serious, determined, preoccupied by family, meetings, and studies, up-to-the-minute with everything — what should be known and done; I was becoming increasingly dim, wiped-out, lazy, indifferent, opaque to anything that might have touched me.
Still, a slave to youth, skipping steps, opening and slamming doors: invaded by voices, laughs, telephones, and the persistent feeling of a cat’s eyes lurking in the shadows. Hurrying, I pushed my luck: in a single moment of hesitation, everything would have fallen to pieces: the chief engineer would have discovered that I was braiding his wife’s blond hair; the doctor would have caught me with the flautist, musically in flagrante delicto. I’d have collapsed on the spiral stairs. Sometimes suddenly the collar of my blue shirt would throb. I’d shudder. The days went on darkening.