He saw her heading down the streets, skipping from one taxi to another, stopping in front of shop windows, going into a store, forgetting why she had gone in, scatterbrained, delighted, exhausted, full of worries, curiosity, expectations… It would have been so easy, it would have been normal for her during one of those errands to suddenly remember him with that irritated shudder she had when she remembered something, closing her eyes and, in a childlike gesture, raising her hand to her forehead — “Oh, what a scatterbrain I am!” — and then from the first public telephone (“For goodness’ sake, the city’s full of telephones!”) to call him and to finally say to him: “Wait for me, I’m coming over.”
With each hour that passed and made her departure more threatening, that Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM read in the newspaper, which initially had been an abstract date, something distant, shapeless, unlikely, acquired reality and became a fixed point, a sore point, difficult to look in the face. With each hour, each day, a feeling of consternation was added to Paul’s wait, as though confronted by a fact with an absurd outcome and which yet he could see reaching fruition beneath his dumbfounded gaze.
On the morning of her departure he watched on his clock the slow rotation of the minutes, the cogged, mechanistic movement of the seconds — as you waited for precisely midnight to turn out the lights on New Year’s Eve — and when those two hands had been precisely superimposed, showing ten minutes to ten, he picked up the receiver and called the information bureau to ask whether the Simplon had left.
“Yes, it’s left, it just started moving,” a clerk replied.
An absurd calm enveloped him, as though all his feverishness of the last few days had been stirred up only by a doubt as to whether or not on Saturday, May 12 the Simplon train was going to leave at its scheduled time of 9:50; now that what he had wanted to know belonged to the past, he could sleep and forget.
In an afternoon newspaper he saw the photograph taken in the morning on the platform of the Găra de Nord: The group of Romanian artists leaving for Belgium to work on our pavilion in Liège.
Ann wore a tailor-made travel costume and on her head she had a sort of white visored cap, set boyishly askew over her forehead. Paul looked at her calmly for a short while: he felt that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to ask her.
A Bucharest from which Ann was missing became a calm, rather provincial city. It was as if the noise had suddenly retreated, the streets had gone silent. Paul had the impression that he was somewhere in the provinces — in Craiova, in Râmnicu-Sărat, in Roman — one of those small cities where he went sometimes for a trial and where he knew he would find neither surprises nor chance encounters.
Ann’s departure brought him an unexpected peace, a feeling of apathy, of indifference. Everything was colourless, grey and bearable. The respite that came from never waiting in expectation had a certain bitterness, but he greeted it like a welcome slumber. At work letters awaited his answers, at court things remained behind schedule. He returned to these tasks with complete indifference, but determined to let himself get caught up in a mechanical working routine. He composed long business letters, which he typed out himself on the typewriter: he liked to hear the dry noise of the keys, their quick beat. He occasionally saw photographs and reports in the newspapers about the activities in Liège; he read them without curiosity, without discomfort. A few sketches and colour drawings of the Romanian pavilion, which was almost complete, had appeared in an issue of Illustration. On the other hand, the inauguration date was approaching, and Paul, finding the magazine in a restaurant one evening, forgotten on a chair, leafed through it calmly, as if it had nothing to do with Ann.
“Hey, you like what those people do?” an indignant voice said, interrupting his reading.
It was a very well-known painter, who had retreated a few years ago to Iaşi, a professor in the School of Fine Arts there, who showed his paintings less and less frequently in Bucharest, from which he had fled, he claimed, because it was no longer possible to find either good wine or good painting. Paul knew him vaguely from a gallery opening, where his aura of a scowling bear had been greeted by the young painters with a wave of pleasure and fear, for he was known for his penchant for stopping in front of paintings and speaking loudly, almost clamouring, as, red in the face, he hurled either tremendous, unbelievable compliments or, much more frequently, breathtaking curses and abuse.
He sat down at Paul’s table without asking permission, and, taking the magazine in his hand, flipped through it nervously.
“I asked you: do you like it? You tell me, is that painting? You call those canvases? They’ve all gone crazy. They pickup the paintbrush with greed in their hearts and bingo — by nightfall the pavilion’s ready. I’ll tell you, sir, they came to me, too, and asked me: why don’t you come to Liège, Old Man Fănică, and make us a canvas, you’ve ten days, eight metres by six, bingo — here’s the money, bingo — here’s the train ticket… I looked at the money — good money, I don’t have to tell you — I looked at them, and I was dumbfounded. Well then, mister, you guys know what a canvas is, mister? Eight metres by six? Ten days? A hundred days wouldn’t be enough. Give me a year and I’ll do it for you. That’s my difficult task, that’s the subtle task: your head gives in to what’s on the walls right to the end, and not even then would you let it out of your hands, like maybe you’d like to repair it or wipe it away or change it. As those Latins who were our forefathers said: ars longa, old man, ars longa.”
Paul listened to him without curiosity — how alien all this painters’ talk felt! — but with a certain pleasure in hearing a jovial voice that insulted, meted out harsh treatment, became indignant, replied to itself, contradicted itself or expressed approval. It was at least a human being here with him, a human being who looked him in the eyes and urged him to drink. For so many days he hadn’t met anyone, for so many days he hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone. And rather than wandering giddily around the streets, perhaps it was better to sit on this restaurant terrace with empty wine bottles lined up on the gravel beneath the table, with the band playing folk music on violins that occasionally awoke from their torpor, among a few very elegant women in low-cut dresses — it was the beginning of June — which brought to the Bucharest summer night a distant breath of the beach, the sea… The Iaşi painter talked continuously, and each time he emptied a glass his indignation, which grew indolent in between times, went up by half a tone, renewed, setting out for new battles. He kept throwing away the issue of Illustration, then taking it in his hands and opening it again in search of new arguments.
“… Now that girl,” — and he indicated the sketch that Paul only now realized was signed by Ann — “has talent, sir, you know she has talent… I think you know her… Sure, I saw the two of you together at Balcic… Big love affair, eh?”
Paul uttered a bored protest. “No, it’s not what you think. We say hi, we know each other, but it’s nothing…”
“Hey, buddy, let it go. Whether she is or whether she isn’t, it all goes with the territory. Where the lamb treads, the wolf follows. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Nobody knows anybody in a big crowd.”
Paul took a long look at the wine glass in his right hand and observed that his hand wasn’t trembling. Far away and deep down, close to his heart, something stopped in its tracks and waited to break or unravel. It was like being under a heavy anaesthetic: he felt the wound, he felt the skin’s resistence to the blade, and the very precise, very exact rending, and yet it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt…