Stalin and the Russians
Brought to us our freedom
nor the new national anthem with
Our people will always be the brothers
Of our Soviet liberators
would change their conviction, often repeated, if under their breath: “The Germans, you know, they was what they was, but they was good people. But God save you from an angry Russian …”
A German officer (Maria remembered his name as Klaus) had been billeted for a while with the Badislavs. He stayed in the room on the other side of the hall, lying on the bed almost all day and reading, under the shawls and coats that hung from the beam. One day he came out wearing one of Babuc’s wool hats, and the children fell over laughing. And this same Klaus got into the habit of playing in the yard with Roşu, one of the two dogs — the other was old, Roşu’s mother —; he taught him to fetch a stick he’d throw as far as the shed, to shake, and to do other silly things. When he was leaving for his native Bavaria, the German begged Tătica for the dog. Out of gratitude, Tătica gave the dog to him, and Klaus put Roşu in his sidecar. And wouldn’t you know but the dog came back a year later, trailing a collar with a German inscription, which the villagers much admired, standing surprised around him. When the dog saw Tătica, he went mad with joy, hopping and whimpering, even though he was weak, his ribs showing, and he pawed the ground with aching feet. The village told this story for a long time.
And now the dog was barking more frantically than Maria had ever heard, until he couldn’t breathe. She came out of the oven door, and the snowflakes immediately froze her face, which was red from the fire. At the gate was a poor beggar, who seemed to have come from some hospital, since his head was completely covered in dirty, almost black, bandages. Only his eyes showed, and even they were hazy through the ceaseless snowfall. His clothing was no different from any other beggar’s who had passed through the village. Still, his crooked figure, as much as Maria could see through the snow-capped fence, had something wrong with it, something of a person from somewhere else, or possibly (Maria crossed herself on the roof of her mouth) not even a person. Framed by the dilapidated house across the street, his body looked like one of the demons painted in the village church, the ones from the terrifying Last Judgment, with broken hips and more vertebrae in his neck than seemed natural. His body’s proportions were bizarrely perverted, and he was twitching as if he were being beaten by a gale. The girl clutched her jacket and crossed the yard along the trodden path. Passing the quince trees, she brushed against them and covered herself with frozen puffs, miniscule crystals one over the other, sparkling like sequins.
Now they were face to face, with the fence between them, almost as high as their chins. Maria quickly said the words that usually got rid of beggars: “I don’t have anything. How should I have what to give you? Move on, go ask someone else, get out!” But the person under the bandages began to giggle and said quietly, “Maria, don’t you recognize me?” And then he put his hands to his mouth like a trumpet, leaned back, and moving his fingers quickly on invisible valves, let out a wild solo, imitating the swing of the brass instrument so well that the girl immediately knew who was standing there. The mummy, blinking his yellow eyes, launched into a drum solo, rumbling and hissing with his mouth, doing the bass and the small drums, making the brushes and tom-toms and maracas, speeding up and huffing, until he hit the cymbals with all his power, almost making them real in the crystalline, frozen air, and then he bent suddenly at the waist, in a bow. “Cedric, crazy Cedric,” laughed Maria, “what in God’s name are you doing here? What’s with the get up?” Vasilica appeared from the barn, smelling not at all unpleasantly of bull and warm dung. “My oh my, it’s Cedric …” she rolled her eyes toward the heavens like a martyr, but at the same time she remembered flogging him mercilessly in the musky smell of his hot room. She would have done it again, now and then, she almost admitted to herself, as she had said to herself often enough in bed at night, wrapped in a wet excitation. She had liked wearing the black, svelte uniform, and the complete power she had had over the male who kissed her boots, who writhed and screamed with every lash, intoxicated her now, in memory, as much as she refused to admit it.
Cedric came inside the hall and entered the big room on the right. He was as happy as a puppy and equally ragged. He let his gauze strips fall off, and soon his broad grin flashed just as it had at the Gorgonzola. The girls brought him some ţuica and nuts. He ran his eyes over the icons on the walls, full of dragons and militant angels, the yellowed photos in frames of crushed glass, and the raw silk towels. Tătica and Mămica had gone to Bolintin that morning, and would be back late that night or the next day. They still had their wagon and two horses, fat and beautiful, already old, horses that a few years later would be taken by the collective to the ravine. The girls and Cedric had plenty of time to catch up, then, as much time as the day was long. Maria just had to run to the oven now and then, to check on the mămăligă or to make sure the stew was boiling.
They put a round table on the clay floor and sat around it, on little chairs. Maria put the mămăligă in the middle of the table and began to fill the bowls. While they ate in the dark mystery of the room, it snowed steadily and melancholically on the windows, and Cedric told them a fantastic story.
15
MARIA got off the tram at University, in a scene of deep winter. She couldn’t recognize the main boulevard or the side streets under the thick layer of snow. The familiar statues, Mihai Viteazul, Heliade, Gheorghe Lazăr, and Spiru Haret rose out of the snow like the turrets of gigantic submarines. The gray edifice of the university, stretched along its great length, looked like a basalt cliff by a frozen sea — an irregular cliff with allegorical statues on its face — Science, Art, Agriculture, Trade — that could have been elements of natural fantasy, bizarre stalactites that bad weather would carve into gryphons and trolls and countless other fairy-tale creatures. Trees with black branches, full of crows, knocked against the dry glass windows of the building. Each branch wore a delicate ice crust.
Color had completely disappeared from the city. You felt like you were in a black and white film, wound on a well-used reel. The old celluloid, stored damp, the copy of a copy of a copy, was full of spots and scratches, and when the film was projected they looked like long drops and streams of rain. The only living, flesh-and-blood presence, colorful as a flower, was Maria, who, in her summer dress and high heels, clopped quickly toward the movie theater, lifting her ankles out of the snow as deftly as a cat. In heavy clothes, heads hunched between their shoulders against the cold, the passersby seemed too immersed in their own problems to waste a glance at her, as her plump hips swayed past them. She was carefully dressed, but unfortunately in light clothes, untouched by the deadening air around her. The gale, from the Russian steppes, blew so hard from the side that you expected the trams and cars to roll over. With every gust, people turned their backs, cursing into their scarves.