I lay in my bed until an intense night fell, cut in pieces by electric stripes on the ceiling and walls, sparks from the trams on Ştefan cel Mare. I was excited and sad. If I closed my eyes, beneath my eyelids I saw the dozens of statues I had looked at, eye to eye, trying to understand the thoughts of those men made of green bronze and stone, illustrious men whose rubicund muses held out goose quills or equally tarnished laurels, trying to understand how these woman with marble uteruses could make love. Yes, long into the night, when the trolley buses were in the station, the illustrious men climbed down from their plinths, grabbed the muses by their hair, and humped among the trees in the park. They pushed their polished-metal penises between the women’s dew-dampened stone labia. Atlases coupled with limestone gorgons with chipped noses, leaving oleander-filled balconies to fall onto the sidewalk. But I stopped my erotic reverie short, because a balcony like that, on the second floor, with pots of oleander and teasel, actually existed somewhere. It came from somewhere real, in very close connection to the lupus mark on my mother’s left hip — the mark the color of her dentures (ah, now I got it!), the sinister mark. Sinister. Silistra. There was a house on Silistra with a balcony supported by Atlas statues. When mother carried me home from the store, wrapped in my coat, my head passed right by the pubises of the two terrible bearded men bent under the weight of the balcony, which were painted a dirty yellow. I looked up and, framed against the white sky, I saw an old woman whose grey hair fell in waves like a girl’s. But the rest seemed to have melted into fog, pearly and unraveled, and truly the rest melted into dreams.
In the morning, I woke up nervous and distracted, to the birds’ strident chirping and the great yellow light of summer. I got out of the wrinkled bed, walked through rooms painted dull olive and beige, and went into the kitchen, where my mother was already doing her chores, moving among the food-stained chairs. I ate breakfast silently, dipping my bread in coffee and milk, rolling the wet crumbs into marbled balls, and flicking them into dirty cups in the sink. I went onto the balcony. The Dâmboviţa mill, once so flashy in its red-brick vestments, now was white with flour and dust over the roofs full of tin patches, over the huge walls, the round and rectangular windows, and the supports that had girded them for over a hundred years. The mixture of brick-red and white produced an indefinite color, something sad, the shade of all the ancient mills, factories, and workshops in ruin, worn away by time and vegetation. Pitch-black poplars grew everywhere, with carnivalesque green leaves, licking the old, pallid walls and covering them with waves of puffy seeds. Poplar seed puffs — in July, they came down like snow, they drifted around the mill’s foundation, they stuck to the holes and cracks between bricks, they latched onto the feet of pigeons that filled the roof, and they found a tiny bit of earth and extended roots through the panes of glass blocked out by flour. The giant corpse of a ruined but still-functioning mill dominated the back of our block. It scraped the clouds with its triangular pediments like a medieval castle, equally crumbling and melancholy. The mill had a large yard, a few small administrative buildings, deserted and quiet under the sun, and a bulky concrete fence to separate it from the territory of the eight floors of children who came out of the block every morning and played in its shadow, lighting it up with shards of glass and strident screams. Far away to the left of the mill, you could see the outline of Casa Scinteii, the building that published The Spark, with its little red star burning all night. On the right, the State Circus had been visible, but now it was obliterated by the flesh, nerves, muscles and bones of the poplars. You could see the circus only from the roof terrace, a flying saucer on the park expanse. The poplars had been planted only a few meters from the building, and they grew as high as the fifth floor, where we lived, so close we could lean out and touch their supple, leafy branches, splattered by pigeons. Last year, there was a pigeon who spent three weeks trying to hatch a ping-pong ball that had fallen into our balcony drain. I sat on the balcony in my pajamas for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.
My short-sleeved shirts were too tight at the shoulders, so they creased across the front, making my chest look more sunken than it really was. As soon as I left the cool apartment, I started to sweat. Big drops dripped from my armpit hair onto my already wet skin. Under my pink or leek-green shirts, my crooked thorax drowned in transparent colors and water. The asphalt was soft under my shoes. I looked in the furniture store windows on the ground floor and saw myself among the ficuses and kitchen decor, a kid with a blade-thin face and a wobbly walk. If I felt someone looking at me, my steps became awkward and mechanical, as though I was afraid that I would forget how to walk, and that I might fall onto the asphalt at any moment. I walked toward Obor on the shady side of the boulevard, blinded by the shining windshields and windows, unconsciously registering the great curve of the blocks, and ending up in front of the Melodia movie theater.
From Obor, I knew I should go up toward Colentina. Here it already felt like the edge of town. Among the cars passed horse-pulled trucks with automobile tires, their azure or green panels painted with mermaids, stags, and floral patterns. They left a trail of yellow-green, globular scat. And the people changed. The women wore headscarves and print skirts; they bared their metal teeth at each other as they came out the factory door, lugging plastic bags and woven baskets. They looked like meaty hens with sagging crests. Clusters of gypsies filled the sidewalks, waiting for the tram, the women in layers of flowery orange and brick-red dresses and sport coats, the men in black suits and hats, sitting on puffed sacks, incredibly greasy. Still, I liked their smell, of the slums, of natural decay, like the unmistakable smell of the country, a combination of fruit fermenting in vats of ţuica, lye splattered in semi-circles on the ground, and sap from frightening vegetation that darkened my gaze in the summer. Workers on ancient, iron bicycles, with two or three soda bottles tied with wire to the little racks behind their saddles, pedaled deftly in bleached sneakers. The yellow road rose toward the east, framed by a green labyrinth of trees.