The
People’s Republic of Romania is a country where you first learned
to write at a high wooden desk, covered with scrawls. Year after
year, just before school let out, the comrade teacher would ask you
to bring fragments of broken glass and sheets of sandpaper, rags and
buckets of lye water from home. Every trace of pencil, ink or
penknife, all the scrawls, words and notches would miraculously
vanish. You’d scrub the desks to perfection, cut your fingers, wind
up with numb hands and blisters, scream, giggle—eyes aglow with
concern, you’d be working with adult gravity, you’d swing the
windows wide, and the ancient dust-like wooden scrapings would slowly
drift into nothingness. You can still remember the fragrance of beech
wood scraped with the edge of a broken-glass shard, rubbed with
strips of abrasive cloth, with textures varying from rough to smooth,
till your palms got swollen with all the rubbing and scrubbing. You’d
get tired and step back to admire your work. You can neither forget
the brightness nor the whiteness of the wooden desktop, nor the
smoothness, nor the freshness, nor anything. Your swollen palms upon
the polished wood. Some other sensations having to do with noises,
rustling sounds, clicks, clapping hands, voices, interjections…
Your desk an unwelcoming space like a cage and a tank turret you’d
climb into panting after all the running at recess, you’d perch
there quietly, way up. Not until third grade did you manage to rest
your feet on the floor. You’d be listening to the teacher’s
tobacco-chipped voice, and the air would come alive with the old
unbearable reek of diesel-scrubbed floors mud sawdust rubber boots
jam sandwiches ink dirty boots and Chinese tennis shoes. Sometimes in
winter you’d fall asleep next to the hot tile stove.
You
hadn’t started going to school, you were barely six, if that old,
and you didn’t yet know all your ABCs.
You’d be trying to identify the letters in the large-print titles
in the papers. You could put your finger on the letter A in the wordREPUBLICA and on the
letter O in the word POPULARĂ.
Reading backwards you could find MOR, which means “die” in the
name of the country ROMÂNIA,
but so far you were unable to spell the words normally, from
beginning to end, because at this point you couldn’t actually read.
Nay, no way you could say in one breath acilbuper ăralupop
ănâmor, the way you did in fourth grade when you had already
joined the pioneers and reckoned you were something special with all
those words you could speak backward and – so you thought – only
you could understand. Occasionally you could rap out whole sentences
at incredible speed. You’d ask, for instance, ec iam icaf?
(how you doin’?) or ednu et icud? (where are you going?) and
started laughing for no obvious reason. You didn’t find it hard to
use that language. You could have easily spoken it for the rest of
your life, using nothing but words turned backwards. Minodora Elena,
the girl sharing your desk, was absolutely thrilled to reply with
brief covert sentences of her own enib (I’m doin’ fine) orăs ăm coj (I’m going to play). You hadn’t started going
to school yet, but you already knew how to draw, taking great pains
over each letter, the following sentence:
“Guess
what’s written here?” you’d immediately hasten to ask Mom and
Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and Ileana and Tuţi and Gigela and nenea
Willi and nenea Mihai and Aneta the dumb and Sanda veranda and
Ana banana and Georgie porgie and Nicky the sticky and Tony baloney
and Davey the gravy and all the people you’d meet in the street at
the bistro buying cigarettes for your neighbour Briotă at
kindergarten at the grocer’s at the playground in the woods to get
some goods in Muşat’s own garden where thieves get no pardon.
So
what was your thieving all about, then? strawberries radishes
mirabelles dates carob beans fried frog side dullberries? Or was it
hickory dickory dock a mouse ran up the clock? No, your thieving was
about unripe apples, green mulberries, sour grapes, plums setting
your teeth on edge, kittens, sparrows’ nests, sludge to paint
yourselves black like Gypsies, fire straw, kindling, glass shards,
empty tins to feed the dolls, cardboard sheets, papers, corks,
medicine bottles, pieces of cloth, sheep droppings, tips of scythe
blades, discarded shoes to make boats or sleighs for your rag dolls,
rusty nails, screws, bicycle tubes, wires, ends of string, round
flattened tin caps, which counted for money.
So
what did you do there, in Muşat’s house and garden and deserted
barn? One of them would get a piece of paper and a burnt matchstick
and ask: “Who can read?” Then they would make the following
drawing (even sketchier and more difficult to make out than what’s
to be seen below):
…………………………………………………………………………………..
and they’d say
“Now read.” and you’d reply “But I can’t read” and they’d
say “Okay, then, just read after me ŞUNCĂ (HAM) CAT
(STOREY) LAMPĂ (LAMP) PAT (BED) – “I ADMIT I’VE
EATEN SHIT” and you’d read after them, and in the end they were
all in stitches, rolling with laughter, splitting their sides,
laughing themselves silly, collapsing with mirth. YOU’VE BEEN
EATING SHI-IT! YOU’VE BEEN EATING SHI-IT! they’d all chant in a
chorus – Andrei and Davey Georgie and Manea, Tuţi and Sanda,
Mioara and Gigela Ana and Aneta. Particularly Ana and Aneta whom no
one could beat at speaking pig Latin…
So what were you
selling and buying out there? Food, pistols, beans, quilts, books and
note books, boxes and pots, pasta, olives, carrots, castles,
transistor radios, countries and continents, windcheaters, bananas,
candles, documents from the town hall, jersey suits, land, threshing
machines, prams, blouses, kerchiefs, machineguns and tanks, gabardine
garments, steel horseshoes, tractors and wagons, acres and hectares,
horse balm and rat poison, hatch traps, Bazna pigs, maize and wagon
canopies, latches and curling irons, all the words you knew from home
and added to every day, which you used daily in your games just to
show off.
You’d get the odd
kid ready to sell the Morse code, but that would only happen after
you’d become familiar with the other letter code, the alphabet. One
of you would bring a booklet less than the palm of your hands in
size, would let you feel its black plastic covers and then asked you
“D’you know what this is?”, and you’d all say “A booklet.”
“Nah, that’s a pocket book,” someone would retort. And someone
else, Aneta or Georgie, Davey or Ileana would say “A pocket
booklet, you mean”. “Okay then, a pocket booklet. Let’s
open it. That would be five bani each. Well, what can you see
here?” Next you’d take up learning dots and dashes and talking by
means of dots and dashes tapping on walls, on barn planks, on tree
trunks, on window panes, on the school- toilet doors and everything
that could yield short and long sound elements, pencils and brushes
during art class, inkpots, schoolbags, on the church
railings, on the blown up pig’s bladders you’d walk the
streets with in winter, on the top of the swill cauldron and the
wooden partitions of the chicken coop, on nenea Willi’s iron
gate and on the coffin lid when nenea Willi’s boy died. For
you, nothing was sacred. Your mind was merging into the Morse code,
and a morse was an animal living in a freezing ocean far away
from the country named Greece where people were writing exclusively
in the Greek alphabet. Because in the plastic-cover pocketbook, which
within months had completely changed your lives, you had also
discovered the alphabet in question with Γ,Δ,Λ,Ξ,Π,Σ,Φ and
other such letters (some of them not unlike the capitals in Romanian
with which you had long been familiar). You were quick to master it
and started gleefully drawing the signs which were entirely yours all
over the place, particularly on fences and house walls for people to
see them and marvel. It was your secret, yours alone. And how proud
you were of them – odalisque in a harem…
The icicles keep
dripping outside your window, a titmouse has been showing up on your
window sill for a few days now, where you scatter the breadcrumbs
every morning. It’s a green titmouse, or yellow, or grey, or tawny,
or a mixture of all those colours, it’s the beginning (according to
the calendar under the glass plate on the bedside-table where Agnes
keeps her stockings, pencils, jam jars, note books, cotton wool bag
and sewing kit) of the Rosina-Mathilde-Klemens-Hilarius-Gertrud-Eduar
week bound to end in a light wet imponderable flurry of snow, just to
make room for the saints
Josef-Irmgard-Alexandra-Lea-Toribio-Katharina, all of them
descending into the middle of the city, bang in the old medieval
fortress, wreathed in rain and mist and peradventure disclosing their
dour faces on a day of niggardly light filtered through the
branch-maize of the chestnut trees next to the Tower.
It’s spring,
after all. Monday afternoon and the window is open. You’re running
a fever, you’re sick, you’re to stay home for three days,
doctor’s orders, you’re on your own while your room mates are
imprisoned in the study room, dorm, seven iron beds: Anne Maria
Schmidt, Nicoleta Deleanu, Emilia Sabău, Isabella Teutsch, Agnes
Popazu, Crina Minea and you, Leontina Guran. Now you’ve become a
sort of rat of solitude, you’re listening to the walls’ liquefied
silence, their water-like silence, the thick and transparent green
blue liquid of the air wherein the chairs, the bedside tables, the
clothes hanging over the chairs, your hot hands refrain from saying
anything. You curl up in bed, shivering under blankets redolent of
dust and a cacophony of perfumes. The day flickers out and flows into
your hearing as if its purpose were to get bogged down in a dark
funnel – your ear. The voices of children playing under the
chestnuts and the booming sound of carpets being beaten in the
courtyards around, bicycle bells, a dog howling in the distance, a
white-grey-breasted sparrow frozen for an instant within the window
frame. The world is now given birth to inside your head, lingers
there for a moment like a sweet conglomerate of nameless noises. You
could make the efforts to differentiate between them, to pluck
yourself out of the dazing heat of the fever and discover the
banality of this solitude, yet that would only cause the world in
your head to annihilate any trace of savour it might hold. What’s
happening to you now in this body ravished by high temperature –
there goes even the o so manly profile of professor Horaţiu Mălinaş
leafing through an anatomy atlas with coloured plates – something
going together well with the word “voluptuousness,” the wordvoluptas you know from Latin classes, a word in which you
sensed from the very beginning a sort of threat, a sort of fierceness
of pleasure entirely alien to your defencelessness, a word you were
quick to associate with the desire for loss, with a desire to merge
with the world around and renouncing your own self.
That’s how
everything starts, with renunciation. To get rid of your boyish
rigidity, the rigidity of a girl good at team sports, a girl on whom
high hopes have been placed, to forget this constant inclination of
yours to split the hairs of the words uttered by the people around
you into an endless number of nuances, to tuck your dress hurriedly
around your thighs so as not to be lifted too high by the wind, to
bite your lips so as not to tell Didi Zăgreanu, a pain in the neck
and pompous at that, and high-voiced, on top of it, what you really
think about him. Renunciation and return to the foothills, to the
fire on which bacon was roasted, to the stable where the warm steam
of cow pates enveloped you like a shirt soaked in oil, to the summer
kitchen swarming with flies, forehead buried into Grandma Profira’s
shiny hapron. To return there to the garden of your house,
where impudent Valer, your cousin, suddenly pulls your knickers down
and watches as if in a dream the dark fold of your sex, the sex of a
little girl without breasts, to experience once again the prickling
stubble in the soles of your feet, the sticky hot feel of the bread
broken into pieces as soon as it was taken out of the oven,
Grandfather Marcu’s blood-splattered boots in December, after
slaughtering the pig, cast like a bunch of dead rats next to the
entrance steps, the persistent odour of rancid pork fat that had
saturated the attic beams, the dust in your pockets at the end of
summer when the cherry-tree foliage fades to yellow for lack of any
further use.
Here nonetheless is
the air wherein the frizzy sheep and flour odour of student Teuch,
Isabela still lingers on together with the fragrance of stale water
in a glass with three sprigs of basil which Emilia gives off wherever
she goes, dark-haired and massive and sententious Emilia Sabău, an
Orthodox priest’s daughter. Here’s nothing but the fragrance of a
juicy tart apple, half-eaten and forgotten by Nicoleta on the corner
of her bedside table – the greenish-green apple dotted with
pore-like specks resembling a child’s complexion – and your room
mate who’s sneaked away into town to end up in a nauseating cinema
hall, all gone limp as Feri’s ample hand feverishly curls around
her fingers simultaneously trying to rub against her knees, as his
palm engages in a frenzied search for her thighs, her legs sheathed
in Triumph tights, flimsy and gray as a spider web, the tights she’s
got as a present from Anne Maria, the German ethnic from Saschiz,
tiny and freckled, lymphatic Anne with her famished-mouse teeth and
her stiff, much too shiny hair reminiscent of a plastic doll, the oh
so insignificant and minute being going by the name of Anne, for whom
the right size of dessous doesn’t seem to exist at all.
You’re clenching
your teeth because your mind once again conjures up Horaţiu
Mălinaş’s profile rising from among the anatomy plates, his lips
moving mechanically while his eyelids hardly blink, and at the same
time you experience a sweet swoon-like feeling descending from the
top of your head through your medullar recesses and coming to a
velvety stop in the sensitive folds of your sphincter. Return,
relapse, launch into a time akin to a sort of aquarium, a childhood
despised, loathed, your village in the foothills, a world straight
from life’s ancient dereliction. You’ve managed to run away,
you’ve had the extraordinary chance of running away, you’re now a
student two years away from graduating from high school in a genuine
town, you’ve swore to yourself you’ve run away for good, and it’s
enough for you now to hear the rhythmical wave of the children
screaming outside, the faint cock-a-doodle-doo of a cock on one of
the hills surrounding the walled-in city, car claxons, footfalls, the
flapping wings of the doves perched on the eaves of the Lutheran
church next to your dorm with walls going all the way back to the
middle ages – it’s enough for you to hear all that for everything
to tumble into a darkness of which you’re not afraid.
The rustling noises
of the city pervade every nook and cranny, enmeshed in an uncanny
feeling of joy, take possession of the ashen air you indwell, and
within that air objects appear to have entered unawares an
infinitesimal albeit continuous exchange of material substance, the
blanket appears to renounce its tattered edges, and the said edges
seem to ooze into the molasses of the mattress, the white bed sheets
appear to have reached an exchange of atoms with the walls’
lime-like plush. You have discovered this Monday-afternoon solitude,
and your fever-ridden flesh feels strong now. The icicles outside
your window hang frozen in their opaque transparency. The sick bay is
full, the girls sneeze, cough their hearts out, there’s no vacant
bed left, the doctor ordered you to stay for three days in your dorm,
drink tea, take aspirins and have lots of honey and lemons.
Consequently, your toes are groping around on the floor in search of
your slippers, you walk down the isle between beds, you take the hot
plate out of the cupboard, plug it in, retrieve the kettle from the
bedside table, its bottom a-glimmer with the remains of a golden
liquid pulsating underneath a bright oxide skin, you open the door
and walk out into the corridor enveloped in a scratched celluloid
light.
