A Russian GAZ truck stopped along the curb beside her. A young man in a sweatshirt and khaki hat with earflaps pulled down to his eyebrows (military issue, with the emblem ripped off the front) called to her from the driver’s side: “Maria! Maria!” Her heart jumped, as she was still dazed by the intense, spherical light of Cedric’s story, but she smiled when she recognized the man. “Ionel, Ionel, my boy, you have to stop your drinking,” she sang to him as she came over to the blue jeep. “Because all the girls laugh at me? Bottoms up? Hey, where are you going? You have a date? Toniiiight I have a daaaate … I’m so haaaapy, can’t be laaaate …” “Shush, no. I’m just going to a movie.” “What’s on?” “I don’t know what it’s called, one with the guy I like, Gérard Philipe.” Ionel smiled wryly. How the hell did Maria know every actor’s name? If he went to a movie with a girl, with an apprentice, they just chose one at random, and if they liked it, they told other people to see it too. He lived near Maria, on Silistra, but he was thinking about moving, since he was driving a truck for the state, now, for the newspaper Scintea, and there was no reason he had to keep living there with all the gypsies, in the slums. He had knocked on Maria’s door a few times, like boys will do, but without any luck. Once he had picked her up in the truck and they went to Casa Scinteii, when it had just been built, a marble palace that took the girl’s breath away. He took her inside, into the vast hallways and monumental stairways, everything in superhuman dimensions. The countless wooden doors with red plates for the various bureaus and editors looked somehow petty, like the ugly, jaundiced, clear-looking, cheap-suited inhabitants of the white stone castle. It was like the real, legitimate inhabitants, of noble and Olympian lineage, had been kicked out by a tribe of pygmies. Maria had let him take her out another time, for a pastry and a soda, but she wouldn’t let it go any further if you broke her arm. So much for that. She was a bit past her prime, at twenty-five, and if she didn’t hurry, she’d end up living with her cats, like everyone who kept her nose in the air, especially if she didn’t have anything between her ears. Ionel had left her in the pay of the Lord, and now, he was seeing a college student, Estera Hirsch, who, when they had kissed in a dark block stairway, put her tongue in his mouth right away, but to look at her, four-eyed and a little prim, active in the Young Workers Union, you wouldn’t have thought she was so fiery. But she was, and how! If the walls could talk in her studio apartment in Predoleanu, high, in the attic, in the clouds, if only they could talk … Between sessions of mad rolling around on her metal-slat bed, Estera would get up quietly and sit at her desk to study articles by Engels, naked as her mother made her, her chest freckled down to her nipples and her public hair as red as the cover of Lenin’s complete works, which lay in a pile next to her bed. She taught Ionel too, she wanted to raise his consciousness, she told him to go to night school … That’s a girl, with help like that he could be someone, he could work at HQ, doing propaganda, a man with an institute car waiting at the gate. For a country boy made truck driver, that would be something. “Okay, Maria, stay good!” he said while he turned the ignition.
Maria smiled after him condescendingly. Ionel was from Teleorman, his family had received some land after the War for Reunification, and they had spent the last few years resisting collectivization. He was the only one of his brothers to go to the city, where for a while he had worked paving streets, digging ditches for the sewers and other public works in the May 1 District, until, after he had gone into a family bar on Lizeanu to warm himself up, he had happened upon someone he knew, almost unrecognizable in his black leather coat with a nice wool hat sitting comfortably enough on his head. It was Zambilă, from Iliasca, whose father, half gypsy, half Serbian, had once set the village on fire and then cut his own throat with a sickle. They had a little drink together, a rye that was increasingly rare, being replaced almost everywhere by Two Blue Eyes ţuica, and nea Zambilă — now Comrade Ciocan, from the District, offered him a better job. Sculptors, volunteers in the War for Peace and Socialism, who rejected the formalist and intimist aberrations of bourgeois art, had placed thousands of busts in all of the parks in the Capital, busts of men of culture and art from all times and places across the globe, who, although they had not managed to correctly grasp the relationship of classes and the struggle of the proletariat for a better life, still displayed a critical-realist view of the society where they lived and worked. Countless Gorkys, Solohovis, Lermontovs (since pride of place must be given to the fighting heritage of the Russian people, our big brother to the east), Neculuts, Vlachuts, Cosbucs, Eminescus — the poet who, even though he didn’t completely understand … still wrote “The Emperor and the Proletarian” and “Our Youth” —, Shakespeares, Voltaires, and Victor Hugos have sprung up like specters, on vine and lichen-covered pedestals along dark paths, chastising from the heights of their genius the unprincipled couples necking under the moon. The most prolific seemed to be Bălcescu, as though he were multiplying in clones: starting from the hundred lei note, his frozen effigy had spread everywhere, as though the whole of the young people’s republic was a bank note, where a population of mites travelled the tangled lines and dots of blue watermarks, collecting in the beard, eyebrows and sunken eyes of the 1848 partisan. Then there were the statues of people from the Communist underground who had fought the bourgeois-landowner regime, who had pasted manifestos onto walls dimly lit by Bacovian light bulbs while a sweet girl in a white blouse stood lookout, who blew up a German landmine by hitting it with an iron hook, saving the bridge downstream at the price of their lives, who blew the factory whistle to call workers to strike, who were tortured in H-cell in Doftana and never betrayed their comrades — just like you saw in all the Romanian movies: Olga Bancic, Eftimie Croitoru, Basil Roaită, Ilie Pintilie, and others whose actions are not widely known … Not to mention the great socialist and communist leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, in bronze or red marble statues on enormous pedestals (but this would not be part of his beat). Of course, nea Zambilă, Ciocan from the District, did not string all these names together at the time. Instead he said only that he was in need of someone to clean the busts in the district parks, to clean off the clay, soot, dust and (pardon) pigeon droppings that stained their heads and shoulders. All Ionel would have to do is take a ladder and a bucket of water, and roam and scrub the park paths systematically, stopping by the citizens of granite and white stone to make them glow with cleanliness and general wellbeing.
The young man got so thoroughly drunk that afternoon that he could barely crawl home to his room in the slums. He got barked at and even bitten by a pack of dogs, wet from where he fell in a puddle … In the morning, after nightmares of statues that spoke or grabbed at him, crushing his bones with stony arms, and after he had remembered, shuddering, that he had kissed nea Zambilă’s hand in the bar many times, in front of everyone, he shaved in his chipped mirror and went off to the new job. The City had given him all according to his need, and for days and weeks, he combed the stone locks of illustrious men, polishing pumice across the wide, convex ovals of their blind eyes, throwing away the cigarette butts that disrespectful people had stuck between their sensual granite lips. For days and weeks, he collected fresh excrement, half black-green, half white, from the birds that crowned the statues, and he crushed the speckled spiders that had woven dense webs from the cheeks’ massive ledges up to the eyebrows. It was spring, and the forsythia bushes made blinding yellow marks on the retina that remained after he looked away, as though he had looked at the sun. In the evenings, he would walk home through the amber fluid that flooded the poor neighborhoods, past girls playing with hoops and fat women on the stairs, or every few days, he would stop by Estera’s and rip her clothes off, almost as soon as he closed the door of her studio apartment on the terrace over the old, crumbling block; he threw her onto the bed with her face down and penetrated her from behind, and she, losing control of herself in excitement, with her braids stuck to her dripping face, would start with perverse and husky whispers, between her ever louder grunts: “Marx is a shithead … say it … say what I’m saying … Gheorghiu-Dej is an asshole … ah!.. aaa … Lenin … motherfucker … Stalin … aaah, aaaaah …” Stalin’s name would always send her into a ravishing orgasm, one that probably alarmed the whole block, after which she would rest — her creamy white skin with constellations of freckles on her buttocks, and even on her labia — for a few minutes and then go back to studying party documents, while Ionel, light as air, his penis resting soft and shiny on his groin, would put his hand behind his head and close his eyes. Beneath his eyelids he saw, much more precisely than in reality, statues, nothing but statues, entire nations of busts with names written below them in black letters, heads and shoulders emerging from each other, superimposing, intersecting … Their features combined: Caragiale wore Eminescu’s locks, Olga Bancic had Tolstoy’s beard, Makarenko was written under Alecsandri … Then he would drowse, lying on his back, and dream fragments of dreams where he saw himself at home in Teleorman; he’d open his eyes and see Estera, late into the night, still at her desk, her shoulder bones and breasts contoured by the lamplight and her dark, copper-colored curls, except for one strand, lit like a flame, beside the lampshade.