Even more dangerous: the cunning silence, a well-calculated diversion. The classroom mute, absentmindedly looking out the window. She’d try to re-establish normality and control, but they’d already know her powerless charade of mock severity, her bloated kindness, her panic, her flurried confusion. The young masters are powerful, free, ruthless: their high-pitched screams or icy silences quickly annihilate her.
The terror of opening the classroom door. Every single time. After the tyrannical hour of class, the horror begins all over again: after recess, another slaughter by chubby-cheeked sadists. They will encircle her, dancing around, following her down the corridor screaming nicknames, questions, and demands — paralyzing her with revolt. The corridor will fill with their chorus: “Missus, missy Sour cream, sour milk makes Sour cream; what’s good with cream? What does the dog dream?” They will leave her at the door of the teachers’ lounge. Disheveled. Undone. Flabbergasted.
Big roll call book glued damply to hip — her useless shield against the class, disciplined or rebellious by turns: she would wait a moment, caught in the vortex of her ravished mind, certain — as always — of losing allies. They would be rapidly converted to the cheerful, venomous conspiracy — an echo of former days — converted, to the extent of their infantile cruelty, and they would exact their revenge against the authorities who want to domesticate them, subjugate them, tire them out, make them grow old.
The horror before the door, every single time, the repetitive motions: remaining by the window for several seconds, disappearing in the teachers’ lounge, and snapping back to reality in the cold corridor with gray walls in front of the classroom door where yesterday’s phantoms have been waiting.
• • •
“The transcription is in a file on the table.” That’s what she had said, “on the table, is the transcription.” Not on the table. On the desk, near the red bag. Under the small, red hardcover book. The transcription among other typed texts: There lived a little bird in a wood quite removed from the rest of the world. Although she suffered from hunger and cold in that forest, the bird felt that she belonged there. The forest, too, liked to know that the dear little bird could always be found there. Every tree rejoiced when the little bird. . One fine day, quite unexpectedly, a bird fancier passed through the forest. . the little bird, familiar with the hunger and cold of the forest, but also its joys, refused the bird fancier’s proposal. To prove that he was a man of his word, the bird fancier returned to the forest after a while with a new golden cage.
February 28. My Dear Dănuţ, Voila! The time has finally come for the letter I’ve been meaning to write for so long. You have created a footbridge with these telephone conversations: the swallow and the letter symbolize. . sooner than I managed to write you.
Thursday, March 2nd. My Dear Tiberiu. Just got home after an afternoon that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies.
Sunday, March 5th. My Dear Tiberiu, almost no time has passed — and yet it feels like forever — since I believed you would phone me every morning. I was afraid to believe. Then I felt that I must believe. . one’s eyes do nothing but cloud over, yearning cries out, from all points of view. . it dilutes your strength. . a fable that I will use in the school’s show at the end of the year. . you’ll be quick enough to recognize the characters. . and it would have been very suitable for the evening radio broadcast.
Miss Smântănescu, I alone try to console my thoughts, and hope what you write is true: the lines you’ve written have awakened. . to request a transfer, or if I do not get it, then through the termination of a budget. . it depends on me, and as the saying goes. . through the strength of will and the ambition I possess, I live in the hope. . for I am on the road of life, like that wayfarer. . stepping as assuredly as the wayfarer. With Deepest Esteem, Grig.
The past, present, and future, tingling with name days, endearments, colored marionettes, imbroglios, and events poured into the telephone receiver, agitation tempered by icy gestures.
Then, cringing-scared-stricken, searching-for-sweet-words,
appeals-shelters-asylums.
Then, epistolatory ribbons, endearing-cradling-sugary-words.
Then, sticky-fairy-tales-beginning-with-once-upon-a-time, the-suave-voice-of-the-female-announcer, the-bedtime-broadcast-for-children, school-celebrations, carefully-combed-blows-on-the-perfidious-piano.
Then, swooning-tears-for-lost-ephemeral-partners-garlands-trinkets-in-vain.
• • •
Over there, one swims, splashing too much.
The water: thin and clear, transparent and light. The swimmer’s rhythm, barely efficient, with only the slightest appearance of gain, proceeds by tortuous advances only to be annulled right away. In the water his suffering — his alien, minimally harmonious movement — would be illuminated as if on a screen. Only, the aged oil of days doesn’t permit spectacular waves and reabsorbs their amplitude. Under the thick layer of fluid, the tiny caresses continue, sloppy and lascivious. The boat rocks. A metal rail supports them, one beside the other. They look at the horizon, and the hill rising above it, where the detainees await them. On one side: an old man with a long, coffee-colored beard and a transistor: a portable piano.
— Handel’s Chaconne in G Major.
The man turns in astonishment toward the lovely-voiced woman sitting beside him.
— Music is my business, you know. After this visit, I’m leaving for the Apuseni Mountains. I change trains twice. I’m going to see an old friend.
He is amazed by his neighbor’s talkativeness, her logorrhea. He has no appetite for conversation. Instead, he thinks of his father in a prison uniform, and of his relationship with his father, and of the relationship between Captain Zubcu and his daughter. The tension of waiting creates a predisposition to random conversations, he doesn’t feel like talking to this stranger about meeting his father again, let alone the father and daughter he can’t stop thinking about. Monica Smântănescu misses this opportunity to learn about the Captain’s suicide or the man she has just approached. She will, however, note her address and her phone number for him on a bit of packing paper. And to top it off, the sullen bastard will eventually call her. He’ll meet her too — intrigued by her puerile appearance, by the demon of her banality. It deserves exploration, obviously: grotesqueness ornamented with idylls; the masks of reality meriting assumption; her miserable ferment — of course it deserves exploration, before being blown up it deserves to be explored, pawed, fingered, maimed, yes, before blowing it up, furiously and ecstatically. Monica is already talking, confessing, naturally; she’s going to meet her former colleague and boss, Tiberiu Covalschi, the poor thing, who has finally wound up in prison, which is to say in a labor camp: the pitiable maniac deserves compassion. The music-loving woman knows what compassion is, and tenderness, and what it means to have a sexual urge.
Once maybe, long ago, in the crystalline water of the very beginning, could they really have been so — these great, terrible, unprecedented attempts — or were they, really? Or might they become again, if the past could be played over again?
The talkative woman leaves in plain sight: several sweat-dampened strands of hair protrude from her face, short thick fingers like a bunch of plump sausages, a masculine briefcase stuffed with notebooks and breadcrusts. Just now she crosses the threshold into the school’s narrow, shadowy corridor. One pace ahead of her is Tiberiu Covalschi, the Covalschi of those days: the Crocodile.