One evening in April, climbing his A-shaped ladder, fighting against the cockchafers that attacked Pushkin’s lichen-encrusted temples like tobacco crumbs, Ionel noticed a pitch-black crack at the base of the bust, where it connected to the pedestal. That afternoon he had played a game with himself, trying to guess the names of the stone citizens just by touching their faces. From far away, he would concentrate on the white shine of a group of lilacs, squinting his eyes and forcing himself not to look at the sculpture. He kept his eyes on the ground as he approached, and once he was on the ladder, he closed them completely. He would take the chiseled cheeks in his palms, pass his hands over their wrinkled foreheads, trace his finger over their rough curls, and then say confidently: “Ah, Beethoven, daddy-o, was that you all along? Why the ugly face?” He knew absolutely everyone, they were his colleagues, he patted them protectively on the cheek or pate, he touched the breasts, harder than any woman’s, what’s theirs is theirs, of an underground communist … if they got too dirty he’d tug their ear … With this Pushkin in the Ghica Tei Park, well hidden on a path no one ever took, there was something wrong. Unlike the other busts, firmly cemented onto their poorly painted plinths, this one, who looked Ionel in the eyes the way he once did d’Anthes, during their fatal duel, rocked, almost imperceptibly, with every scrub of the stiff brush on his sideburns. The fissure widened and trembled, dark as a line of ink. It is what it is, Ionel said to himself after he looked over both shoulders, assuring himself that the pathway was deserted. Gathering his courage, as he stood on top of the ladder and pushed hard on the young writer’s left shoulder, on the epaulette, without knowing if he felt joy or fear as he saw the bust pivot on the right shoulder, and a deep well open in the pedestal, with metal rungs down one side.
A beetle hit him in the lip like a brass bullet. The smell of lilacs grew stronger as the night thickened. Already, half of the sky was a deep blue, full of the new moon and a few sparkling stars, while a sweet pearly pink light and bloody clouds outlined the ornamental shrubs on the other side, dressing each branch with a rosy-brown mist. The air darkened into sepia, like in an old picture. Ionel hesitated for a moment, and then the most bizarre ideas entered his mind. It could be an extension of one of the sewers that led into the wastewater network, that branched beneath the entire city and led downstream, toward the Danube and then to the sea, taking away Bucharest’s fermenting turpitude: liquefied feces, newspapers used for toilet paper — the front page, with the smiling beloved Leader, crumpled into a star and smeared with shit — bloody pads of cotton, gray Volcano condoms that always broke, bunching up like painful rings at the base of the vigorous tools of men who hoped they wouldn’t dump a sixth runt into their wives, rotting rats, cats with their guts hanging out in delicate hues of blue and orange … Or it might be a secret drop site for the Securitate, the institution in charge of catching the spies who photographed national targets with ingenious cameras hidden in their glasses frames. Securitate officers were smiling, energetic men who defended revolutionary progress. They each had a delicate wife at home, a wonderful homemaker, and they based their work on subtle logical inferences … Major Frunză and Capitan Lucian were Ionel’s role models, when he read about their adventures, in book after book of the Enigma series that had appeared about a year ago. Or it could be the entrance to a Nazi bunker … but then why didn’t anyone report it when they built the statue? And suddenly the young peasant remembered the story of The Enchanted Flint where fantastic treasure, gemstones and precious scepters inlaid with gold and surrounded with pearls, had been the reward for the bold one who climbed into the hollow. “A treasure,” whispered Ionel with wide eyes. Sometimes, digging out their huts or a well, his fellow villagers would find a rusty bucket full of coins, or an emerald … Ionel took another look up and down the already dark path, and then he lowered himself into the pedestal, holding tight to the throat of the Russian poet, who now looked off to one side, as though he wanted no part of the deeds of these miserable, mortal creatures of flesh, skin, nerves, and blood that would scrub him for all eternity. Propping his hands against the well’s stone walls, the young man sank up to his waist into the pitchy darkness of the interior, where the slanted light of the moon lit only the first two steps. Ionel carefully went another step down and then dragged Pushkin’s bust back over the opening, obliterating the smell of the spring sky and leaving himself in an absolute night.
Later, a week or so after that illuminated night of disturbing hallucinations, the young man would tell Maria the story of his adventure in the belly of the dark. He was still seeing her, because of a certain resentment he felt toward the damned “yid” who in the midst of pleasure slandered the teachers of mankind, and she was seeing him out of loneliness and a desire to go to the movies, which was what she loved most in the world. Time had evaporated along with the light, and the only measure of his descent, metal rung after metal rung, was fear. His eyes went blind, there was screeching in his ears, the calcified chochlea spun crazily in the midst of nonbeing, and the analytical mind of fear broke open. The young man no longer knew whether he was climbing up or down, or along an endless railroad track, grasping the ties; all he could feel with his palms and fingers was the rhythmic interval of the form and the cold of metal bars, the only objects in space. But what if these were only subjective sensations? What if he was just lying under a sheet somewhere, and the nerves in the skin of his palms, projected into his brain’s sensorial-motor zones, constructed the sensation of narrow, cold cylinders, just the length he could feel with his palms or the tips of his fingers? In the middle of the dark, with your body completely liquefied, it was impossible to say whether your pancreas was still inside the somatic bag or sagging outside like a hanged man’s tongue, or to know if your skeleton had turned into a shell like a crustacean’s, or if your neurons had left the original ball under your skull behind, spreading, unraveling like obscene lace to the end of night. The organ of fear did not have a clear shape, like the fungiform papilla or the eyeball, since it was constantly devoured by what it perceived. The organ of fear was crazed with itself in every moment, it contracted and struggled in corrosive liquid, in unforgiving acids of fear. The young man descending no longer knew who he was, nor what area of the world he climbed toward, but he saw the fear, he saw it growing, becoming a fabled scene, painted with the nuances of horror, with desperation, disquiet, anguish, terror, panic … There were startled mountains and petrified cities and forests of cold sweat. Monuments of horror lorded over vast, misty piaţas. Adrenaline sculptures, fluorescent green, portrayed terrible violations, rendings and vivisections, ablations, desquamations, excoriations …