I spent as much time here as I could. At first, when I was still feverishly longing to become a world-famous artist, I would go there to draw. I saw myself as a new Pascin. But my efforts got me into hot water. When the girls realized what I was up to, they alerted a couple of goons, who made it clear to me, short and plain, that their charges were plying an earnest trade and did not wish to be viewed as curiosities and committed to paper. I speedily packed up my drawing pad and watercolor box.
Strangely enough, however, my urge for self-expression with a pencil and a brush waned. My dream of world fame as an artist was suffering from consumption; the drawing pad and the paint box remained untouched for longer and longer periods. It was as if the world I was discovering day by day were too vivid, life too immediate, too powerful, for me to capture it. I first had to shape myself according to this world. I was too confused, too self-tormented, far too self-absorbed, to be a mirror of things; I had to take things in, stow them away, store them up, let them take effect and mellow before I could hand them on. I went through a time of looking, of observing, or storing, of not doing.
Here, too, in the red-light district, I did nothing but look. As the most favorable vantage point, I picked a table outside a small tavern at an intersection; sitting there over a black coffee and a glass of raki, I could gape in all four directions of the compass. Diagonally across, in one of the courtyards where the erotic carnival was frolicking, two lemon saplings in green tubs flanked a plaster column with a teasing amoretto; in front of the column stood a crib, and in the crib lay something like a Mardi Gras queen, the madam of the house: an excessively fat dwarf in a wide, transparent directoire gown and a black-velvet ribbon around the sweaty throat, which was wedged between the double chin and the bosom, and a second velvet ribbon knotted around the forehead under the severe, ballerina hairdo. With her cheeks painted peony red and the doll-like gaze of eyes in coal-black circles, she looked highly artificial. I did not need my pad; I sketched her into my memory — or rather, into my soul — along with the fat cat wearing a brass bell on a blood-red velvet ribbon around her neck. The dwarf queen leisurely stroked the feline, like a black panther in her lap, while an old crone renewed the water in a glass every fifteen minutes. After inserting a spoonful of jam from a jar into her tiny, cherry mouth, the dwarf would very delicately take a few sips from the glass, elongating her little finger, which sparkled with the diamonds of countless rings.
One day, the afternoon light was growing dimmer and finally became abstractly transparent; I suddenly realized I had sat there too long. It was late, and I had not filled my quota. I had just enough time left to beautify a single display with fresh crêpe paper and soap bars, and the window I chose was the one closest by. Unfortunately, the proprietress was the most difficult.
Normally, it was pleasant working in Văcăreşti. The usually Jewish shopkeepers were kind and mellow people so long as the two-thousand-year-old panic did not flare up, which made them hysterically vehement, and they never gave me much trouble when I arrived with my motley jumble. But this one woman, the owner of a store called Parfumeria Flora, had always been a ticklish case in the itinerary of the decoration campaign.
She was all on her own — a widow, it was said — and in the trade, even among the salesmen, she had a bad reputation for being harsh and disagreeable. This was not, incidentally, the only reason why she was talked about so much; she had a solid place in the salesmen’s erotic gossip. No sooner did her name come up in a discussion at the Aphrodite Company than several voices evoked her with the husky undertones of desire: the embodiment of the raven-haired Jewess, whose succulent ripeness contrasted sexily with her coldness. Probably only the oldest representatives knew her real name; she was generally called the Black Widow. And it was also generally felt that sinning in her company may have been good business, for her shop was doing well and she seemed to have money on the side. Unfortunately, they said, she was a block of ice, and you could freeze off practically any part of yourself.
The Black Widow treated me with an insulting arrogance that was not outdone by the owners of the elegant boutiques around the Hotel Athenée-Palace. But while I had gradually developed a thick skin against their insolence, her impertinence here, in the humble Jewish district, around the whorehouses of Crucea de Piatră, made me livid. This time, too, she received me like a bothersome shnorrer. And had it not been too late to drive to other drugstores and try my luck there, I would have wordlessly turned my back and gone my way. But then, perhaps out of sheer weariness, she abruptly, albeit still very ungraciously, condescended to allow me to remove a dusty arrangement made by our bitterest rival (world famous for their lanolin cream) and to replace it with one of our artworks publicizing lily-of-the-valley soap.
The day was now swiftly drawing to its end. Along with the twilight, something tormentingly uncertain descended into the world. I was struck — I can still feel it today — by a mournfulness, as though I were utterly orphaned. Like an abrupt pain, I felt homesickness: for home, for the Bukovina, where I had loved this hour just before darkness so much that I had always run out of the house and into the countryside, into that abstract, lilac-colored light. Its lower part would be awhirr with flitting bats and smoky with the dust of darkness, while the night wind wafted the fragrance of hay from distant meadows into my face; and before me the enormous source of night, where, toward Galicia, the flat earth fanned out to melt cosmically into the heavens. I had always been bewildered by the forlornness of the settlements in this landscape under this deeply nocturnal sky, the frailty of the blinking lights, those poor man’s stars behind the battered sheet-metal blinds. The light bulbs ruthlessly exposed the stark walls and crooked eaves of the sad little petit bourgeois houses, pulled them out of the swelling and thickening darkness, deprived them of mystery and thrust them into reality, while the surrounding world subsided into the dramatics of creation myths. Few things touched my heart so keenly as the desperate intimacy of a window shining golden yellow in the hard, bluish, whitewashed wall of a Jewish shack at the entrance of such a village.
Now, here, the eternal carnival of the red-light streets in Văcăreşti was still churning away; it kept going on all the more spookily, just a few blocks away, under the radiant street lamps — I still had the tumult at the bottom of my eyes. And now the same forlornness as outside, in the flat land, was descending upon the Jewish district all around me. The city and its hurly-burly, the evening swarm of people into the streets and avenues, the strings of light, the tumbles of light, the cascades of light overhead — all these things were meaningless; they were only a haunted world, a carnival of the bereft and desperate, lost under the enormous sky that was giving birth to the night.
I felt and thought all this while doing my job with an anger turned against myself. I had only barely cleaned the display window — it was still filthy — and now I was putting together the publicity material for Aphrodite, no doubt deploying more awkwardness than artistry. I was furious at this woman, this Jew, this huckster of notions; forlorn and bereft in her stony widowhood, she belonged in one of those Galician shtetls. Her arrogance, too, would have been more appropriate there than here. I owed it to my own stupidity that I was doing such low donkey’s work for someone like her and being treated like a peddler.