The girl shook off her dizziness and found herself in her underwear in a strange room. Only then did she understand what had happened, and fear, repulsion, and self-hatred combined incomprehensibly in her breast, taking the place of lucid thought, and they drove her to run. Her clothes were a mess, but she put them on, in a kind of frenzy, and she opened the wardrobe to look for a shawl or something to cover the missing buttons of her blouse. But the wardrobe had nothing but uniforms. They were black, SS officer uniforms, the kind she saw every day in the cafes of Bucharest, or driving the streets in black cars. Above them were 5 or 6 tall helmets, each with the emblem of a grinning skull, and below the uniforms shined pairs of polished boots. Only behind the boots were stuffed some women’s clothes, a kind of carnival costume and some masks. Maria wrapped herself in a saffron mantle that could pass, in the city night, for a shawl. She glanced at the woman curled on the floor and departed, leaving the gramophone needle to scratch on the rotating disk.
She went through the passage quickly with loud footsteps and sank into the unlit, miserable streets, under stars that blew an icy air. Barked at by stray dogs, grabbed by drunkards, taken for one of the easy women who leaned here and there around the bars, walls, and light posts, the girl, whose mind throbbed full of unclean thoughts, took more than an hour to get home. Vasilica was not back. Maria put on her nightgown and lay under the sheet. She tried to force herself to sleep but fell into a painful numbness. The ether of the liquor she had drunk was completely evaporated, and now her stomach was heavy with a chemical, decomposed air. She was sweating. She pushed the sheet to one side and writhed and turned, drenching the bedsheets.
From this daze Vasilica woke her, just as the new day approached. She was drunk and giggling like crazy. With their fingers interlaced in the brightening room, while the sparrows began to chirp outside and they could hear vendors hawking their wares on a street nearby, the sisters told each other their strange stories, the disturbing experiences of the night before. Falling onto the sheet with laughter, Vasilica whispered in Maria’s ears that she had been with Cedric, the black man, to a couple of places where they had danced and he’d spent money left and right, that they had eaten crawfish on crushed ice and drunk a flaming liquor. He sipped it and suddenly breathed a flame toward the ceiling, like a dragon, charring the quartz prisms of the chandeliers. And then they went out onto the street and Cedric danced and sang the whole way, tapping the asphalt with his polished shoes, “Maria, he sounded just like a priest hammering the bell,” and she laughed when, after a series of pirouettes, Cedric suddenly fell to his knees at her feet, with his arms outstretched like onstage, hands wiggling and grinning with his ivory teeth, then jumping up to keep tapping and singing in English. He could make the sounds of a trumpet, a saxophone or the brushes on the drums, beating his curiously white palms on the pipes … until Vasilica did not know how late they had come to Cedric’s place, a room off Piaţa Lahovari. But what a room! On the walls, there was a kind of matting with masks scattered, “like ours with the goats, but uglier, real demons from the people he came from,” and in a corner there was a crimson idol “with its thing down to its knees.” In a glass case with countless little cups and glasses there was something dark and ugly. Seeing Vasilica looking in there fearfully, Cedric had laughed, opened the glass door, and grasped the hair of a human head, small as a fist, dried but with expressive features. “This man used to be alive,” he explained, “but now his power is mine.” It was an actual human head, and Cedric held it on his fingertip like a ball. In the same case, there were wide gaping crocodile jaws, full of needle-sharp teeth. Vasilica had known when she went into the room that she would sleep with Cedric. Unlike her younger sister, she was no longer a virgin: in the village she had had a “darling,” and since she had come to Bucharest, she had been, as would any happy and healthy girl, with two others, a clerk at the Department of Alcohol and a medical student, and she didn’t call them “darlings,” like in the country, but cupcakes, as they said in the neighborhood in those days. She wasn’t against having an affair, for her own pleasure, even with a black cupcake as cute as Cedric. But good Lord, listen to what happened next! Vasilica started to laugh so hard her eyes watered. It was so funny! Cedric poured a drink and started to murmur prayers in a satanic language, without looking at her. He clapped his hands and babbled. Sweat began to run down his forehead and cheeks. His shirt was soaked almost immediately, and his strong, well-defined muscles showed through the wet fabric. Then he pulled his shirt off and his striped pants down, almost tearing them, and then he was naked as a beast and smelled like a circus lion. His eyes became round, his corneas saffron. When he jumped up, Vasilica stiffened, thinking he would rush at her, but instead he opened a wardrobe and took out a German uniform, “Nazzies!” and threw it on the bed. He told her, with a wild look, to put it on. “And I pulled those tight pants on and buttoned the vest with iron crosses up to my neck, and then I put on the boots and the cap. I tightened the leather belt and looked in the mirror. And you know what, it looked good! But it all was kind of hanging off me, since it was made for a man …” Then Cedric gave her a thick, round leather crop, and he commanded her to whip his back without mercy while she said all kinds of stuff: dirty darkie, gigolo, sonofabitch … She beat him all night until her hand hurt, and that was it. Cedric came on the sheets several times, but he never touched her.
Maria raised her arm and watched its shadow on the wall. She told her sister about the singer. She scratched her head for a while, trying to guess what had scared Mioara so much. She decided it couldn’t be anything but the rosy butterfly on Maria’s hip, which the singer only saw when she pulled down her panties. But why, what had the mark meant to her? She remembered the ring on her finger, with the butterfly etched in ivory. The sisters thought they would try to find out what was really happening, but the next day the bombing of Bucharest began, and that magical night passed into oblivion.
14
THE next morning, after they’d trembled through the night in a shelter, screaming at every rumble of the earth and deafening explosion, the sisters found their neighborhood in ruins. Above, on the blue sky, transparent, without reality, the Americans had written VICTORY with colored airplane smoke, and the letters were unraveling, turning into just a line of clouds, scattered in the wind. Many homes had just a few walls still standing, like the remnants of cavity-filled teeth. The demolished roofs revealed people struggling with pieces of pipe and cable, salvaging something or other. Shop windows were shattered, and homeless kids plundered the mannequins. A tram lay across the street, toppled to one side, and one rail rose up vertically, two stories high, to point at the sky. Dusty soldiers ran around in disarray, with chairs in their arms, or vases or rolls of carpets. The head of a plaster gorgon, from over an entryway, had a triangular steel splinter stuck directly between its eyes. The splinter cast a pointed shadow, like a sundial, across the gorgon’s cheek, ear, and two ridiculous serpents in the tangled capital of fury.
The closer they came to their street, the greater the disaster. The ruins seemed more hideous and ancient, as though the bombing had happened decades ago. The brick walls were yellow and crumbling, and beyond the façades yawned chambers with nudes hanging on the walls, while dead bodies lay among glass cases displaying intact goblets. The girls passed a knife sharpener carrying his primitive machine on his back. They clambered over piles of rubble mixed with small objects and laundry, and stopped on the corner, embracing, with the same fear in their eyes. They did not dare turn onto the street where the center of their Bucharest lives had stood — but was it still there? — the tailor shop with the apprentices’ rooms upstairs, the other middle-class houses across the way that stood, decaying and clunky, full of silly ornaments, beside the Toval corporation, the factory for orthopedic shoes on the ground floor, along with the Leon Gavrilescu photo studio, and their close friend Nea Titi, who had the great and ferocious Singer sewing machine, decorated with gold floral designs in her window and on her hanging sign. And, of course, next to the Verona tailor shop, the whitewashed building with the butcher on the ground floor, where, three flights up, lived the actress who sang from the crescent moon.