Just as we were about to climb the stairway — or, rather, the ladderlike steps — to the rooms upstairs, the man behind the table snapped at the Gypsy girclass="underline" “The basket of corn stays here.”
“Let him have it,” I said to the girl. “If he doesn’t want to eat the stuff because it’s not kosher, he can sell it — for pig feed.”
I experienced all this in a kind of trance. This was not my first visit with some female to a bedbug-infested room, but this time it corresponded in every way to my notion of domineering virility and swift, casual adventure. The more disreputable the surroundings, the more authentic the adventure seemed.
I did not even look the room over; I pulled the door shut behind us and locked it.
The Gypsy girl stood before me. Her mute, sarcastically challenging laugh hinted that if I approached her, she would leap aside at the last moment and start a hatefully teasing game of tag, such as coy girls launch in order both to delay and to provoke the brutality of the sex act. But she stayed where she was, never stirring, nor changing her sarcastic look; all she did, when I was close to her, was to hold out her hollow palm. I put in a hundred lei piece. She remained motionless. I placed a twenty-lei coin upon it and then a second one. Quick as a flash, she pulled back her hand and spirited the money away.
She had not averted her eyes; as I stripped the blouse from her shoulders, she kept smiling and gazing into my eyes as if she knew I was doomed to fail. And for one instant, I was spellbound by her naked breasts, overpowered by a reality more precious than all daydreams. This was it: those breasts — two sturdy handfuls, warm, silky-smooth breasts, scented with almond milk and tipped by rose buds, which contracted, hard and wrinkled, when I touched them, these witnesses to a blissful thrill coursing through her body into the darkness of the womb; the crunchy-black funnel caught the thrill, leading it to the moist grottoes charily wedged between the thighs, which she now gently opened…. That was what I saw, most clearly and most excitingly, in my erotic fantasies; that was what tightened my throat in anticipation of delight; that was what sank sweetly, heavy with tenderness, into the pit of my stomach: the epitome of the feminine, the purest image of the essence of woman, that eternally alien, laughing, always elusive essence, which always slips out of reach, the creature whom I feared, scorned, and had to love, to my torment, to my damnation. Entering a woman’s womb was already something abstract, it made her image vanish, it snuffed her out: I was being received not by her but rather by the universe, the huge, dark hollow of the cosmos, swallowing me, snuffing me out too. But her breasts were life, blood-warm, living Being, sensory fact, reality …
When I raised my hands to take hold of her, there was a knock on the door. Startled, I pulled up the girl’s blouse, walked over, and opened. The man from downstairs stood in the doorway, holding out a coin: “This hundred-lei piece is phony.”
While he peered over my shoulder into the room, I fished another coin out of my pocket, gave it to him, and shut the door. The Gypsy girl was still standing there, mutely laughing. “C’mon!” I said, leading her to the ghastliness of sweat-yellowed linen, rachitic pillows, and a feltlike horse blanket — our wedding bed. She lay on her back without the least resistance. That too confused me. All the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles. All my fears and self-doubts fluttered around me in alarm and fanned out. I ordered myself not to listen to myself, for God’s sake, not to hear whether I would be able to respond to her readiness with my own. Slowly, I slipped one hand under her skirt and felt for her breast with the other. There was a second knock at the door. Once again, it was the fellow from downstairs; this time, decidedly insolent: “This hundred-lei piece is phony too!”
I gave him another one. “I do not wish to be disturbed any more,” I said, and instantly heard how ridiculously out of place this luxury-hotel formula sounded, not to mention the arrogant sharpness in my tone. He dawdled; he peered into the room and at the Gypsy girl lying on the bed, her skirt up to her groin and her breasts exposed. I slammed the door in his face, then ostentatiously turned the key in the lock twice and went back to my untouched beauty.
This time I kissed her, and she returned the kiss knowledgeably. With an unparalleled burst of happiness, I felt her putting her arm around me, drawing me over, grabbing my hair with one hand to hold my head and press it harder against her mouth. Her mouth was soft and sweet; I wanted to close my eyes to feel her lips more intimately, but I saw that her eyes were open; they seemed to be sparkling sarcastically, and I wanted to see her overwhelmed by pleasure and closing her eyes. There was a knock.
Now I was ready to ignore it, but the fellow was soon banging furiously against the door, and the girl in my arms laughed and said, “You’re really a sucker. Can’t you see he’s passing all his phony coins off on you?”
I could not let her believe I was a greenhorn, to be taken in by just anybody. I went and opened the door.
The guy held out his hand with a hundred-lei piece. “Is this one counterfeit too?” I asked hostilely. I saw the heavy muscles on his arms and shoulders.
“What else?” he snapped back, bringing his hand up.
“Du-te’n pizda mâti, jidanule!”—a popular Rumanian curse that could be heard all the time, which made it no less nasty: “Get into your mother’s cunt, you filthy kike!”
I had expected him to hit me, so his punch did not strike me squarely, but the force was so great that my ears hummed. It also knocked me to one side, so that my return punch barely grazed him — and I could not manage a second one; his fists were hailing down on me. Under a flood of curses, he beat me out of the room and into the corridor.
I do not know how I got down the steps to the lobby, but I waited for him below. I had grabbed the flat stone on which he tested coins and I hurled it into his face with all the strength I could muster. But even though he roared with pain and blindness, he kept on punching, beating me out into the street, where I started to run, just to save my bare life. I did not care if a swarm of street urchins were howling after me or a gang of men perhaps following them to catch me because I had knocked his eye out, or if someone was holding him back to prevent him from dashing after me and killing me.
I ran until I felt halfway safe. There was a stitch in my side, and I was bleeding. Trembling in fury and humiliation, with a roaring skull and aching teeth, ribs and ears, I trudged toward the center of Bucharest. I was ready to continue the fight with anyone who came along and in whose eyes I would read amazement and then prompt understanding: to think that this well-dressed young man, who doesn’t fit in with this disreputable neighborhood, could be walking around in broad daylight with a ripped-up shirt and blood-smeared jacket, his face all scratched and swollen — he must be coming from a very shady adventure that turned out badly for him.
But I would have my revenge. I would buy a pistol in the next gun shop, go back, and shoot the fellow down like a mangy dog. I knew, of course, that I would not do this, but I felt good imagining it. It soothed the burning of my humiliation, the indignation of my wounded ego, to picture him twisting under my lashing shots, sinking down, and dying on the ground like a cur. I would shoot him in his belly, heedless of the consequences. Perhaps his Jewish brethren would form a mob and lynch me, and the Rumanians around the Calea Griviţei would finally be fed up with the riffraff that sucked their blood, would rise up against them and murder them all, a pogrom would erupt throughout the land…. I felt good picturing it: the howling wives and children, the old crones with dangling breasts, wringing their hands and shrieking “Vai!” when the soldiers skewered their sons on bayonets…. Or it could even be just the Gypsy girl’s tribe who came in the night to beat the man black and blue. She had probably fallen in love with me, she had kissed me and run her fingers through my hair, she must have been as disappointed as I was by the sudden disruption of our amorous idyll…. Besides, the stone I had hurled into his kisser, his bestial roar — I hoped I had knocked out an eye, or his teeth — showed that I had at least smashed his nose ….