— I felt you were rather susceptible. I didn’t have the right to affirm his innocence till he’d been freed. If I’d done anything else, you might have easily slipped into the role of the victim — and with a certain pleasure.
— To one like him, it would have been possible to forgive any weakness. And that was evident.
— But it wasn’t clearly a matter of some guilt or weakness — but something else. If friendship is a sign of weakness, then the word itself has an entirely different meaning than the one we’re used to.
The moment had come to let myself lean back in that imperial armchair. It was proper, however, to keep quiet for a while. He understood, and when he believed that the ritual allowed him to continue the performance, he spoke again.
— Your father didn’t tell you anything?
— I didn’t ask him. He said a word or two. He isn’t giving up the role of victor, so I can’t offend him with the questions I have. At one time, I was ready to lay a heap of affection at his feet, but he would have seen that as suspicious.
— Don’t you consider yourself a victor? he asked me, heaving irritably on his throne.
— Then he really should have spoken to you, he went on. I don’t like you. You must know, I-DO-NOT-LIKE-YOU. Your father suffered a fall back then as a result of an inability.
— Of course. He was barely initiated in the strategies and tactics of “abilities.” It wasn’t easy. A former bank clerk can’t change into something else easily.
He looked at me, like an ogre, and stood up with clenched fists. I thought he would hit me, but he paced around the room and the soft rugs seemed to absorb his fury.
— I’m using “inability” in a completely different sense that you want to understand. After finishing the school we sent him to, your father received, as you know, the mission of working in the justice system. There he received anonymously signed tips about abuses committed by people with important positions. He contacted me, asking if informing higher authorities was the right thing to do. The only person who could resolve this matter was a dangerous individual, a comrade who had abused his own power. Nevertheless, I advised your father to go to him, and I felt responsible for what happened. I didn’t know that there were things about me, too, in that denunciation. In his exaggerated correctness, your father didn’t tell me. He wanted to be principled. That cost him his freedom. He wanted to dissociate himself from what he understood was going on, and he took the initiative, in the negative sense.
— What would have been the positive sense?
— In point of fact, your father delayed a certain minor payment. We don’t live in heaven. We wouldn’t have anything to do there. The person to whom your father presented himself assured him that measures would be taken. He gave him freedom of action. False freedom, naturally. Your father hurried to react, and, as I told you, ineptly, provocatively. They stopped him, isolating him in a jail cell. That’s about it.
Yes, that’s about it. I was ready to ask about the more serious cases that Comrade Father had mentioned: condemnations to do hard time, great show trials, executions. There was no sense in that. In these imperial armchairs, in this upholstered room, and before the new chief who was the old boss, the discussion stopped exactly when it should have. We had to be quiet, take our time thinking, look at each other cautiously. And that’s what we did.
— I’d like to ask you something too: is there any truth to what was said about the crisis you went through?
— Everything. Nothing of what’s said was exaggerated enough. Not enough was imagined, and I’d say that it wasn’t a big deal. It would take too long to confirm every detail. Anyhow, this meeting remains an honor for me. I have no right to abuse. .
— Indeed, I’m hurrying to stop by the hospital. If you like, we can talk in the car.
— No, the car goes too quickly.
He looked at me and smiled.
— Good, we’ll walk.
On the wide stairs and then on the street, everybody who saluted the leader saluted me. At the exit from the former Austrian town hall — now the activists’ office building — the porter looked at me as if I were the crown prince. I didn’t have anything else to discuss with the authority who accompanied me, nor did I want to elaborate: the only solution was to imagine that I was talking with Ileana and not her comrade husband.
— You had an exact intuition, Comrade Mehedinţi, imagining me as someone predisposed to sliding into the role of the defeated. I feel like a newborn. Do I have any more chances to lie, which is to say, to defend myself? May I ask how the unexpected identification took place?
— Don’t worry. Only tell me what you want. My so-called intuition about your character was something I had figured out. It seemed unnatural that a young person who was finishing high school wouldn’t be able to close a door properly.
— Ah, yes, I tired quickly, too quickly. Gestures didn’t follow me. I remained behind them. I believe that if I’d been left alone or maybe if I’d let myself simply vegetate in some room, I would have forgotten how to write, how to count: I would have forgotten my name and desires. To avoid total vegetation, I imposed obligations on myself in a perpetual panic; to go to the office, to work, to bed alternately with other women — a kind of habit — to shave, to check my address book daily and call someone, to remember my own voice and remember the faces of friends, colleagues, an aunt, a flautist who I was expecting to see after a concert so I could go to bed with her but whose features I forgot as soon as she left. Only, this isn’t really what I’d like to tell your husband. I’d like to ask if he’d allow me to speak in a public square, to confess in front of a crowd.
The words were for Ileana, in fact. Ileana kept quiet. Her husband kept quiet. I kept quiet.
— I’d let you speak.
— You’re relying on their indifference. It would be dangerous to count too much on the indifference of the masses. Their indifference is limited. All their possibilities are limited. Don’t count too much. .
Got frightened, almost screamed, though there wasn’t anything to be heard as he walked by me side — tall and calm.
— I’m not counting on indifference. I know it’s a matter of environment, not absolute. . something transitory, peripheral.
— A matter of environment? Peripheral you say? The mass of comrades gather great mountains of objects, clench heaps under their poor plastic jackets while forgetting that they produce these objects as well, and similarly, they’re blind to how they themselves dwindle in prefabricated dwellings, rarely self-reflecting, and when they do it’s reduced to a “functional” vocabulary, as they say, which means woodenly, in fact. I’m no better than they are. The perpetual chill, disgust with myself and with them, the standardized, uniform, sweaty faces, the roars of the partisans: all these things have gnawed at the weak fabric of my being too. I can’t be blamed for having inherited the characteristics of a parent who’s capable of making perpetual efforts to seem the victor — over and over again. The defeated victor, I mean. The real father has nothing in common with the hypothetical one: the one who couldn’t alter and modify himself or his senses after returning from the crematoriums and the great bazaar of blood; I mean, the one forever afflicted by what they had done to him and his daughters, and by the kind of person he’d made of himself — the one who’s only free now to scatter himself in the flames of a new pyre. Would you allow me to talk to them — those who might want to listen — about this hypothetical parent of mine?
Ileana wasn’t answering. I was captured by my own defiant words. It was better not to look around. The sick man listened silently and made no reply.