Their hearts beating in their double chest, since fear and foreboding had made them Siamese, the girls entered the street of death. Never had they seen such carnage. Pools of blood glowed in the sunlight. Hands, jaws and smashed bones came out of the rubble and the cracks in buildings. A human brain, intact, moist, with carefully drawn circumvolutions, with tiny blue veins beating under the membrane, bloomed on the pavement, beside a wide-open skull. No house was left intact. Doors were standing, frames and all, while the walls were piles of bricks. An elevator shaft remained, wrapped in its black wire mesh, from the Romanian-German Petroleum Company, while the building around it had melted like sugar. Four floors high, the shaft, with a large wheel on top and its elegant, glass-doored car stopped between the floors, dominated the entire street like a menacing tower. Inside was still, perhaps, sitting on her chair resignedly, the elevator operator, whose power had been cut during the air raid the evening before, trapped in the cage of her eternal daily suffering. She might have struggled and screamed the whole morning, like a bird in her nest, and nobody had bothered to release her. Now she probably looked down from the height of fifteen meters at the disaster of the business district, happy in the end to have survived.
The sisters, with their damp fingers twisted together, stepped over the floor of broken windows, over widely scattered orthopedic shoes — in one a shard had cut a hole the width of a hand, exposing a beautiful lady’s revolver with six chambers and a tiny pearl handle on a wrinkled satin lining; in another was a small ingot of gold; in a third, a chess pawn, made of glittering crystal. They stepped over hats with veils, and photographic plates of frosted glass, liberally coated with silver nitrate. It was as if all the secrets of a seemingly indolent world had come to light at once, and this new world was as transparent and passionate as an engine on display in a science museum, with cut-aways in the thick metal to show how the pistons and valves moved. Who would have thought that Gavrilescu the photographer, with his big paunch and sluggish persona, always with a pint of beer in hand, and whose bloody body now lay across a pile of sepia photos of naked girls, had been a cunning and competent spy? Maria and Vasilica, passing by the former photography studio, stepped over exquisite bird’s-eye photographs of German encampments, filled with letters and arrows scratched into the glass plates. Or Nea Titi: always sullen and covered in sewing machine oil, whose hollow cheeks made him look like he only ate on Wednesdays and Fridays, now appeared to have been a great collector of gastropod cypraea, one of no more than a hundred worldwide — the conches were tossed about crazily, pearly pink and purple and anthracite, spotted like leopard fur, as though painted by Chagall, with spikes and ragged lace, big as a tire or tiny as grains of sand, and scattered and shattered everywhere. Now Nea Titi lay on his back, sliced open like an anatomical model, a pale rat in a jar of alcohol, disassembling himself in the clear liquid, displaying his liver, his heart and lungs, his large and small intestines, his kidneys and bladder. His eyes, open toward the sky, looked like two balls of green glass.
On the left side of the street was only the empty blue sky, held up by pillars of broken buildings. Across a vacant lot with conical pits and piles of rubble, one could see houses, many of them whole, from the next street. “My God, Maria,” Vasilica whispered, standing still in the middle of the street, “there’s nothing left … nothing …” They would have to begin their lives all over again, in some other shop, under some other boss. A bomb had fallen directly on the tailor shop, as though the Yank in his Spitfire, chewing gum and thinking of some down-home Ginger Rogers, had smelled the musky scent of thirty girls with bushy armpits — or the delicate Chanel of Mioara Mironescu? — and pushed the button on his joystick to drop the steel oval, with a yellow fin, the way in another situation he would have ordered open the valves of his shameful nerve, filling the corpus cavernosum with blood, to tumescence. To immerse thirty girls at once within the ravishing orgasm of death! Luckily, only one or two were caught at home, those who, like many others in Bucharest, had become numb to too many air raids, and had been content, in place of any other reaction, to cross themselves with their tongues on the roofs of their mouths and mutter absentmindedly, for the hundredth time: “Good Lord, make them go to Ploieşti!”
The girls, separated now and crying, went over to the old façade of the Verona tailor and up to the butcher’s. The half-skinned cow that had always been hanging on a steel hook was now mixed into the cubes of pavement, mutilated a second time. The indifferent lamb’s heads, covered in blood, stared into the azure sky with the same hallucinatory horror as Nea Titi’s human eyes. Sausages, headcheese, salamis and horseshoe-shaped pastramis lay everywhere, swarming with flies, like an animal’s organs in Arcimboldo. A delicate hand, as though painted by a Renaissance artist, rested, cut off at the wrist, on a slab of bacon tied with string. From the stump, like jellyfish filaments, the ends of veins and nerves emerged. On one finger, a ring with a white stone glistened. Maria’s heart stopped. She ran to the hand, getting her dress caught on a bundle of wires. She bent down, without touching it, choking with emotion. It was the butterfly! It was the mammoth-hair ring, on the withered finger, with its nail lacquered dark red, of Mioara Mironescu. Maria screamed as loud she was able to and Vasilica ran over. “Lelică, Lelică, it’s Mrs. Mioara’s hand!” The young girl’s hysteria grew into a fit, making her howl like an animal wrapped around Vasilica’s shoulders. Her sister tried to pull her away, to stop looking, to forget … But then, with a sharp contraction of her muscles, Maria stopped struggling. With her face ravaged, and something manic in her eyes, she grabbed the pale hand and brought it to her lips. She took the ring off of the finger and slipped it into her shirt, by her breast. A street vendor passed, in traditional apron and pants, with his Oltean hat around his neck, looking for something. A clerk with a white purse paused to look at them and passed on. The girls looked down. They took each other’s hands again, and walked through the ruined houses, trying to glimpse, in the piles of bricks and broken furniture, any vestige of their former lives. When they came to the back, to the service entrance, where the apprentices usually entered the building, they were moved by what they saw. Maria would never forget it, and she would tell the story many times, in the peace of her kitchen invaded by poplar tufts and wasps, cooking potatoes for Mircea and gazing at the dusty crenellations of the mill wall. And now, on the tram, when lazy, soft snowflakes suddenly began to fall, Maria remembered the morning after the bombing and smiled with emotion. The tram turned and rang its bell as it moved from station to station toward the university. Everyone wore heavy coats. Men wore Russian fur hats with the flaps down, or curly hats of wool. One or two had fedoras. The women held on to each other for warmth, laughing and joking, showing their missing teeth through their nauseatingly painted lips. Only Maria wore the same summer dress and the same headscarf with images of Sinaia. The other women were well cocooned, with rubber galoshes over their boots, as was the fashion in ’55. People at the stations froze in the snow, waiting for the tram. Some cars, Pobedas and Warszawas, attempted to lug their heavy carcasses, like beetles, over the white surface of the boulevard. In comparison, the black Volgas looked like limousines. Pushing away any thoughts of Costel, whom she was meeting that night at the International Fraternity Cinema, Maria sank again into the past, while the tram accelerated, creaking in every joint, past the statue of C. A. Rosetti, who reigned from his bronze chair over the leafless trees and snow of his little park.