The inside of the handbag, where I had looked before, but not with the interest I now had, smelled like the watches’ old copper and tarnish. The last thing I saw, because they were well hidden in the bag’s dusty folds, were my mother’s dentures, which she never used and hid there like they were shameful, nothing to talk about. When I first found them, I felt the same nausea and discomfort that I’d felt once before, in the depths of my childhood. It happened during the first year that I could cross the street by myself — for some bread, an issue of The Reckless Club, or to get my dad some cigarettes. In the silent summer evenings, I would reach a building that is not there anymore, go into the tobacco store, and look with trepidation at the cashier, a heavily made-up and fat woman with pink hair, surrounded by magazines and newspapers. Outside it was getting darker, and only here, in the little room with a window, was the light intense and still. I looked through the glass counter at all the packs of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, pistol-shaped tin lighters, and pocket knives that looked like lead fish … Next to them were other little trinkets. To me, the most beautiful things were the boxes of lacquered cardboard, with pictures of blue and gold tropical butterflies, and on the right a sticker where something was written in black ink. The word was long and fascinating: prophylactic. What could it have inside? I would often sit in the silence of my room, fidgeting with a toy, a tin laurel tree with a plastic fairy coming out, and wondering what strange, exotic plaything could be inside the butterfly box. Sometimes I imagined it could be in fact a butterfly, with a body like a bow string and wings of the same crinkly paper as fancy candy wrappers. Or a scented, chewy gum, with a little red stone set in the gelatinous middle.
My plan was to wait until the next time my parents and I walked to the Volga Theater to see a movie, and ask them to buy me a prophylactic. It was only three lei. If it came to it, I could get the money myself, from around the house, in five, ten or fifteen bani coins, until I had enough. I started getting the money together, and I imagined the pink-haired cashier would give me a maternal smile and put the box I wanted in my hand (I even knew which one I wanted: the one in the case, where the butterfly fluttered against a bright green background) … One evening on the way to the theater, I saw some Chinese boxes in another tobacco store, and I got up the courage to ask: “Daddy, what’s a prophylactic?” My father frowned and said harshly, “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” I was walking between my mother and my father with quick steps, and they went quiet for a few minutes, trading glances. I knew from my father’s tone that I had hit one of those closed doors, those places that your parents, however much they love you, will never let you enter. I could feel their breathing, their mysterious, adult lives, those incomprehensible prohibitions regarding the birth of children and the small and underdeveloped members between the legs and the way Mamma was tumbled onto the bed by my dad in the bedroom, when she cried out and I tried to save her, pounding the spine of a prickly and bestial man. After the unfortunate question, I felt a kind of horror, a feeling I re-encountered when I opened the yellowed packet that held my mother’s dentures. They were upper teeth, from the front, dirty-white with a little blue, made of cheap plastic, stuck into artificial gums. The gums were a color of red that would never be found in the membrane of an actual mouth. They had a special shade, as though their plastic had come from other dentures, old ones melted down and reused: a purple, a barely breathing mauve in the dominant red. A few wire stubs, poking out here and there, added to the fascinating repulsion I felt toward the object in my hand.
I had bad teeth from my mother, prone to cavities and rotting, and chipping. While chewing, I would sometimes feel, on my tongue, an unmistakable piece of molar: shiny as a mirror on one side, rough and hard on the other. From her I had unimaginable toothaches that would make me run through the house, knocking chairs over and pulling on the drapes. But I could tell that it wasn’t dread of my own teeth’s foreseeable future that disturbed me when I saw the hideous curve of those gums. It was their color. There was something in particular about that tinge that reminded me of something I had seen before, something I had once known, but could not bring back to mind. For a few days, I carried my mother’s gums and teeth in my pocket everywhere I walked. I fiddled with them obsessively on my route past Cantemir High on Toamnei Street and Profetului Street, I went down Galaţi in the roar of tram number five, I wandered through ruins around Lizeanu. Twilight came, and the dusty snow on the sidewalks timidly reflected the pink sky. An old woman at a window sucked spasmodically at a child’s candy ring. I saw a cat with eyes that I would know later from Gina. A woman stopped, looked around, and hiked up her stockings, pinching them through her parka and skirt. I was waiting, as I wandered among stores and children’s carts, for the moment when the twilight would turn exactly the same color as my mother’s gums, and suddenly it did. I was on Domniţa Ruxandra Street, where a small piaţa opened, dreamlike, lined with courtyards with colored globes on trellises, and there was an apartment block, almost alive, yellow and thin as a scalpel, with a vertical strip of matte glass over the entrance. The glass glowed in the twilight, and its flame inverted the branching art nouveau ironwork, black and warm as night. The snow lit the piaţa strangely with a white light from below, as though from underground, melting quickly in the morbid rose of nightfall. The silent block made me feel shaken and faint, like a blade plunged into asphalt and broken off. I stood in the middle of the piaţa, like a statue of a sad hero, and from my pocket I took the paper thin with age and unwrapped the hideous object. I raised the dentures over my head, and the teeth began to glitter, yellow like a salt flame, while the gums disappeared, melting into the matching color of evening.