Although naturally he carried every kind of cosmetic article, I had no professional dealings with him. After all, there was no display window to decorate. The wares lay open all the way into the street. Any shopper, even a window-shopper, could pass in and out of the convoluted stalls unimpeded, like the birds in the crown of a gigantic old elm tree that shaded all this. And Mr. Garabetian probably cared as little whether his goods were displayed agreeably as whether their quality was convincing. Anyone interested in checking them could pick them up, weigh them, smell them, determine their solidity, their ripeness, and then either purchase or put them back. It made no difference whatsoever to Mr. Garabetian. He did reveal his Armenian preference for pink by the arrangement of silks, mineral pigments, roasted pistachios, and rahat lukum. But that was as far as his aesthetic sensibility went; any attempt to use a picture of a jubilant bathing beauty to inveigle a buyer into purchasing a shampoo would have struck him as ludicrous. Nevertheless, we had got humanly closer.
It all started with my greeting him. I had begun doing so spontaneously because I was incapable of pretending not to know a person whom I passed several times a day. Thus, I had nodded at him with a smile, and he had responded with Oriental expressiveness. For a while, things went no further than this mimetic exchange of friendliness, in which Mr. Garabetian was always the more generous. I waved and smiled at him; and he clutched his chest with a gesture of surprised — nay, startled — and joyful recognition. His smile radiated dazzling white from the darknesses of his mustache, lips, and lip growth; then, scarcely hindered by his enormous belly, he leaned forward with closed eyes, casting out his arm and hand in a vast, flat curve, solemnly affirming unconditional submission.
At some point or other, we exchanged a word or two, and he permitted himself to offer me a cup of coffee. Although three times as old as I and no doubt aware of what a low rank I had among the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in the hierarchy of the Aphrodite Company, Mr. Garabetian treated me as a person commanding respect; and, needless to say, I reciprocated his cordiality. He seemed to like this very much. The invitations to coffee were repeated, and eventually I got into the habit of dropping in on him. When the office was closed for the day, and I was done with my rounds as well as with the ensuing paperwork and the preparations for the next morning, I would go over to the bazaar. The gradually waning daylight would be growing thinner and clearer, while the turquoise sky was taking a step into the universe and igniting at its edges. At Mr. Garabetian’s side, I would sip mocha; the coffee grounds in the tiny cups curdled into Japanese ink-brush drawings, while the two of us waited to catch the twinkle of the first star and soon after that the blinking of the pale street lamps in the descending twilight.
We were fairly monosyllabic at such times, like truly close friends. But perhaps the thing binding us in silence was chiefly our disparate solitudes: the afflicted loneliness of youth and the mellow loneliness of imminent old age. Once, he introduced me to his son, whom I had long known by sight. Garabetian junior was a few years older than I and a rather striking person: he was the beau not only of this suburban neighborhood but presumably of very different, far more fashionable districts of Bucharest. Even in the daytime, his hair, black as patent leather, seemed to reflect the neon frames of the nightclubs he frequented. Tall, slender-hipped, in dandyishly long, sharp-shouldered jackets, baggy trousers, and black-and-white shoes, he moved elastically on inch-thick rubber soles. He drove a Chrysler convertible and was always accompanied by breathtakingly beautiful, high-bosomed, cherry-eyed girls, such as I knew at most from the front pages of the yellow press.
I complimented Mr. Garabetian on such a proud off-spring. He scornfully waved this off with his folded newspaper. After a while he said, “You come from a home in which it is not customary to do any sort of work — don’t ask how I know; I can tell. Nevertheless, you don’t consider yourself too good for it.”
I held my tongue guiltily. Had I confessed my shameful scruples to Mr. Garabetian, his indolent eyes would have gone all agape.
“He,” Mr. Garabetian continued, with a scornful snort through his nostrils and with his chin motioning in the direction in which his son had vanished, “he won’t have anything to do with his father’s work, much less any work of his own. Did you notice how hurriedly he said good-bye? He knows who you are, of course, and he’s too embarrassed to admit he’s my son.”
I wanted to object, but Mr. Garabetian anticipated me, waving off my objection. “I see him twice a month. On the first, like today, when he comes for his allowance, and on the fifteenth, when he comes for an advance on next month’s allowance.”
I could not reply to this either, unless I told Mr. Garabetian that until recently, my wish to go home to my parents had been equally cyclical and prompted by the same motives.
Mr. Garabetian took a sip of coffee, lit a new cigarette, and inhaled the smoke, deeply filling his lungs as though trying to free his mind of wearisome thoughts and switch into a more philosophical gear. “What can you do,” he said. “That’s the way he is, that’s how he’s made — or rather, that’s how I made him. When I was a child, I was poor as a churchmouse. I wanted him to be spared that. What he has been spared is being considerate, being a decent person. I’ve spared him that and the ability to think about things in general. All he’s got on his mind, if anything, is women.”
It was unsuitable, I felt, to add to Mr. Garabetian’s paternal grief with the disabusing news that he was nurturing illusions about me in this respect too. If anyone in the world had only women on his mind, it was I.
But, alas, I had them only on my mind — that was what I wanted to tell my siren in the wheelchair. She was to know everything about me, even things I barely admitted to myself. I was filled with great tenderness for her as I pictured myself sitting close to her poor, blanket-wrapped legs, holding her hands warmly in my own, and explaining with a guilty smile that I was schizophrenically split. I ran around convinced that I was a lothario and an irresistible seducer, or at least acting as though I were, and I believed that other people believed I was too. But if ever I did get a chance at seduction, fear of my own clumsiness turned me into an oaf. But not just this fear, I wanted to tell her. Also a sense of the ideal. She had to believe me. Certainly, I was always on the make, as they put it; I wanted to omit nothing, miss none of the erotic possibilities — usually imaginary, alas — offered me at every step. But I did not want to give my heart away below my rank — my moral rank, of course. That was something she had to know.
In any event, I had diminished my chances as a lover through another passion. I had told my parents only very vaguely what I was up to in Bucharest, and I had not revealed anything about my job and my — albeit modest — salary; as a result, my mother kept on sending me money. I accepted it without a thought, assuming that spiritual well-being is at least as important as physical well-being, and I applied the cash to my old and ardent passion for horses. Every morning at five, I was at the riding track and in the stables around Shossea Khisseleff and Shossea Jianu, where the thoroughbreds gathered for early workouts in the courtyards of old caravanserais. Being light and having a good hand, I almost regularly got a mount. At seven, I was at the Aphrodite Company, changing from the life of a riding-enthused gentleman to that of a window cleaner, loading up my Model T with publicity material. All day long, I worked — if one can apply the term “work” to enriching junk-shop windows with packages of soap. In the evening, after drinking my coffee with Mr. Garabetian, I ate my grătar—grilled meat — in some small surburban restaurant and went to bed, dog-tired — I did not know how. I had little opportunity to meet people of my own age, nor did I seek them out. For months, Mr. Garabetian was the only person I conversed with, beyond chitchat with my clients and a few banalities exchanged with colleagues at work.