Maria and Vasilica were wearing braids down to their waists, woven with red ribbon, when they came to Bucharest. Their father, “Tătica,” brought them in a horse-cart and left them in the care of “Nenea,” their older brother, who would soon cross the Dniester and disappear somewhere on the banks of the Don. He wouldn’t come back until ’51. The girls labored in the workshop from morning until evening. At dawn, the rows of Singer sewing machines with glossy black wheels and pedals looked like giant insects with poisonous stingers, ready to receive their prey: young, living girls. Their boss was strict, with evil eyes and jaw muscles constantly twitching. She wouldn’t let the girls in the workshop leave before time, even to use the bathroom.
Despite her heavily rouged muzzle and eyelashes thick with mascara, there was something masculine about Maria Georgescu’s face. The older apprentices told the newbies what they had heard from those before them: that Madam Georgescu was not a woman in every sense of the word, that under her skirt she had what a man has. Some also said she had to shave her chin and her neck and between her breasts, so she wouldn’t grow hair like a bandit. But a thick powder covered everything, if there was any truth to it. Whatever the case, she never married. She lived in a shared room somewhere in Rahova with a schoolteacher, who was tiny and faint, with eyes surrounded by pink skin and teeth as small as a cat’s. Because Madam Georgescu never laughed, she frightened the apprentices, and they obeyed her without a complaint. The sisters never befriended the other girls, most of whom were hussies who talked in ways that girls from the country had never heard. They would have been miserable and cried every night in each other’s arms on their iron-slatted bed, had it not been for the wondrous Mioara Mironescu, the woman who became everything and more than everything to them, a fairy out of fairy tales, a model and a goddess, whose interest in the two little peasant girls seemed like a miracle. How had they come to the actress’s attention? Why — ever since she had seen them in the window of the house next door, laughing cheek to cheek and making faces, throwing crumbs down to the pigeons on the sidewalk — did the actress, stepping out of her massive Packard, stop, tilt back her black hat and veil, and stand there, a tailored silhouette out of a fashion magazine, her saffron-gloved hands clutching a bouquet of violets to her breast? The sun painted her face intense and pastel colors, igniting the thin silk of her veil and placing a large burning star on the wide onyx head of her hairpin. She watched the apprentices on the second floor for several minutes, fascinated, and then entered the dark hallway of her house next door, shedding her colors in the ever denser shadows. The black car left too, leaving the street empty and melancholic, enlivened only by the few tiny, rust-colored plants that grew between the bricks.
They met a few days later, and there followed a whirlwind of endless delight. The lady with short, slate-colored hair, with points framing her cheeks, with circles under her usually half-closed eyes, with brass bracelets jangling on her arms and even one on an ankle, took them out one evening to the Gorgonzola, a cabaret behind the Şelar, where black men sang in striped suits and hard felt hats. She would leave the two girls at a table to stare at the men blowing trumpets and glittering saxophones and at the people around them, and disappear down a staircase behind a red velvet curtain. A waiter brought the girls something to eat and some champagne, while people around them got up from their tables and crowded onto the dance floor. “Foxtrot!” cried the bass player, and everyone started to do such a ridiculous and wild dance that the sisters, no matter how awed they had been before, lost control of themselves and laughed until they cried. When the dancers went back to their tables, a plump, blond singer in a red dress with a strangely deep voice began to sing a sad, dragging song about a crazy love affair, “as never before on earth,” and the cowardly and cruel abandonment of the young “virgin” by “the man with flashing teeth,” who the virgin would still love “To the tomb of cold marble … To the bosom of God.”
Dizzy with champagne, the girls wept in the ever-thicker green smoke of cigars. Vasilica had just wiped her eyes with the back of her hand when she noticed the drummer smiling at her and winking. Her jaw hung open. She looked again. The black man smiled even wider, showing horse-like teeth between lips that looked made up. Vasilica turned around, but there was only a brown column. From then on, she kept from looking at the six jazzmen at all costs.
They were also brought glasses of a pale, crackling drink. The hall darkened slowly, and then a blue light, like that of a full moon, filled it, making the tinsel stars overhead sparkle and suddenly go out. Music began softly, with violins, and the young peasant girls were enraptured by the ravishing show on the night stage. A spotlight shone on the curtains, hesitantly, like it was looking for something that might be anywhere. The violins burst into swirling passion, and then they slowed, smooth and sweet, as a lady’s shoe appeared in the upper corner of the stage, descending slowly, until a stunning leg emerged inside a purple stocking, followed by a foam of lace. It was a dream woman, in a dress that left her powdered shoulders bare, a white satin dress with rich lace at the hem and a white, fluttering veil, a woman with pink and green cheeks glittering with gold dust. She descended gently from the night, and perched gracefully on the horn of a yellow crescent moon, with her eyes, mouth and chin smiling to lovers throughout the universe. The moon winked long, tangled lashes, and the fairy, whom they later recognized as their neighbor, wearing a curly platinum wig with strands falling past her hips, began to sing a song about Bucharest at night, sprinkled with stars, where the lovers listen, hand in hand, to the laments of gypsy fiddlers in cellar bars, and then go under the carpet of stars to embrace beneath flickering lamps, in piaţas with statues. Some blocks of scenery descended too: the Athenaeum, the Arc de Triomphe, and Mihai Viteazul on horseback, all painted strangely, all loops and spirals, as though they were woven in wrought iron. Silhouettes of young men in frocks and top hats and young ladies with skirts above their knees, with round bottoms and narrow waists, danced slowly among the cardboard buildings, in the chiaroscuro, for the only one glowingly illuminated was the languorous woman stretched along the crescent moon.
At the end of one of the stanzas, leaving the violins to take up the theme in an excess of suffering and languor, the singer stepped from the moon, and with a walk that paraded her wondrous hips, she descended the few steps that separated the stage from the club. She sang the rest of the song moving from table to table, resting a satin-gloved hand on the shoulder of a man and looking him long in the eyes, bringing her mouth toward his until everyone’s heart stopped, then pushing him sharply away and moving to another. One of the black men (the one who was smiling at Vasilica?) came toward Mioara and kissed her gracefully outstretched hand, and as the final chords were played, he walked her toward the stage, releasing her to sit once again on the crescent moon, to rise, pulled by invisible wires, and to disappear beyond the starry sky.
They went home in the Packard, so lightheaded that they were barely able to say goodnight to the singer, giggling and wobbling on high heels they weren’t used to. They stumbled up the stairs and fell asleep with their clothes on, with their two-bit pearl necklaces tangled together, so that the next day at dawn, Maria had to struggle to untangle herself from her sister, who was still sound asleep. “Lelică, hey, Lelică,” she said, and shook her, but Vasilica just turned, with her pale, plump arms, to the other side.