After the word FIN appeared and the dirty, yellow lights came on, Maria and Costel stood up without a glance at each other. She smiled, he squinted in the light, and they turned — moving with slow and mechanical steps, like slaves in chains, behind the dozens of kids with fat faces and girls who were attractive only by virtue of their youth — toward the door, over which was written in white on a blue rectangle: EXIT. With the same stumbling gait, careful not to step on anyone’s feet and especially not to get stepped on, they dragged toward the narrow hallway that led outside, withering under the garlic stink from one person’s salami to another, and the smell of sheepskin from everyone. Even before they saw the light outside, Maria, with a happy heart leaping up, knew that spring had come, because a purple butterfly perched on a pipe in the wall, folding its wings and occasionally moving its little filiform feet. Maria stared after it for a long time, keeping her discovery for herself. She didn’t even show Costel. She was holding his arm tightly to keep the crowd from separating them. It seemed that no one else saw the velvety wonder, the spot of blood on the dirty green of the pipe. It was like the butterfly was not sitting there on the pipe at all, but on Maria’s retina, where, writhing in the swirling optical chasm, it wanted to spread its wings into the two hemispheres of her brain. Only once she passed did it lift off, its wings fluttering like a wind-up toy over the heads of the flock crowded in the tunnel, to escape into the whirling light outside.
Bucharest was now enveloped within the heat of a scented spring, with puddles reflecting the blue sky, budding black branches on trees that lined the boulevards, and windows sparkling in the steady, intense, white light, raising pulses and stirring memories. The hair and umbrellas of pedestrians crossing the street were caught by warm gusts. The wind popped the red flags mounted on storefronts (since May First was approaching), and often an elegant woman would lose her hat, to the laughter of groups of machine-shop apprentices. Squinting and pursing their upper lips in so much sun, the troglodytes who emerged from the somber grotto of the theater moved over the sidewalks or straight into the mostly empty boulevard, cut only by a Volga or a ringing tram. The police, who had not changed into their fair-weather uniforms, moved around without doing anything, layered in coats and Russian hats, squabbling with a gypsy in a cart, whose horse had shat in the center of the Capital. Where were the snowdrifts that had lined the streets? Where was the milky sky, so low you could have touched it? Now the sky’s color rose, limitless, outlining the statues outside the university, the cubist apartment blocks, with dozens of balconies, big and small, glowing pink in the luminous air, and the pitch-black hornbeams and poplars with leafless branches. Around these sharp shapes, the strong blue diminished until it was almost the pure color of light, and then straight overhead it became deep and intense, in places ultraviolet, a color you could not see without feeling woozy and exalted, as though you could peer through the translucent skin between your eyebrows with the great and lost pineal eye, now withdrawn to the base of the skull, on its tiny Turkish saddle, attentive only to the bestial light of the interior world.
Released, finally, from the plodding narrows, Maria and Costel walked down toward University, happy and without a thought, they mixed into the scenery, drowned in the whirls and fractals of history, without distinguishing themselves from their world, and without understanding that they lived on a grain of sand on a beach wider than the universe, spread out and sifted, melancholically, by a mind that chose the two of them and decided their destinies. They were unfazed by the debt of their existence owed to their separation and imagination, down to the most hallucinatory details, by a monstrous cabal of neurons, by the fact that only for this sect are they significant, alive and bright-eyed, as they moved arm-in-arm, within the moment “now” in a world lacking time, over the sidewalk from Casa Armatei on the theater boulevard, into a Bucharest in which every building was only a wood and paper façade, propped up in back with rough-hewn boards, a city built with tweezers inside a green, paunchy glass.
But the clouds seemed so real! — blown along the sky by a dark, passionate wind, broken by the warm metal of the trams and the bay windows on the roof of the university. The white light was so comforting, sliding over the cheeks, and so nourishing for the arterial system, in the clammy air of young flesh, replete with desire, dreams, and adrenaline! In the breath of spring, Maria, the simple girl from the edge of town, almost past marrying age, felt she could love the awkward boy beside her, whose arm she gently pressed. She watched him from the corner of her eye, as he walked beside her through the fluid honey of the sun. He was very, very much a child, thin as a banjo and sickly pale, with pitch-black eyes. His flat hair, combed back and glued to his scalp with walnut oil, was a black mirror of shifting waters, a style that would have been completely ridiculous if it wasn’t the look of all the young men in the factories and workshops; when they were leaning over a wrench or lathe, a curl might fall loose, might fall in their eyes and they’d push it, irritably, back on top time and again. Costel was not that tall, not too handsome; he wasn’t “fine,” as the girls in the rug factory said, but at least he was gentle and serious, and his eyes (although Maria would later complain constantly that her husband was “jumpy” and “weird,” that she never knew what was inside his head) sometimes had a warm, meditative expression, as though, from time to time, someone else, a far superior person, had inhabited his mind, and Costel himself had gone to some other place. That look of noble contemplation — the deep and true melancholy that sometimes crossed his face, especially in the evening, even when he was wearing just torn pajamas and smoking smelly Mărăşeşti cigarettes — looked like it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t, actually, because in those moments Costel was completely without a self or a thought, the way an actor who plays a noble person may be, in his normal life, a middling blockhead. Without liking the boy from Banat too much, Maria loved, actually loved, even then, the deceitful sadness on his face, when his unknown ancestor, a great Polish poet of the XVIII century, arose within his tangled viscera, like puffs of steam over a coffee cup, to regard the world once more, through Costel’s black eyes, which were identical to his own.
High on the sweet amphetamine of springtime, the two young people went arm-in-arm through the yellow air, cold as glass, talking about nothing and laughing. Maria wondered how he was able to keep frowning even when he laughed, and Costel felt he was made entirely from scented air. He was trying as best he could to find Maria’s algorithm, to intuit (like in those almanac puzzles where, knowing which direction the first gear turned in a complicated system, you try to work out which way the last one turns) the ineffable functioning of her mind, to extract its secret, how it produced those happy smiles, equivocal, bitter, hesitant, those little grimaces of dissatisfaction that frightened him, those vague declarations of the eyes and eyebrows, those evanescent inflections of the voice, those tiny quivers of the wings of her nose. Thus did the young apprentice imagine the psychology of the girl he loved: the projections and diagrams of technical drawings, cycloids and hyperbolae, a rubber geometry, extensible and yet precise, from which, if you knew the laws and mastered the technology, you could obtain each of the thousands of possible effects and combinations. And if in saying something else or pressing her arm a little harder, Costel saw her react completely differently than he expected, his explanations were not mystical or poetic, nor did he credit them to the ineffable caprices of women; he blamed instead the imperfections in his technique, not following all the gears, bolts, pinions, clutches, and Maltese crosses closely enough. Looking at the stars sometimes, dreamily, in his underwear, on the small, rusty balcony of the house where he lodged, humming a little song from Banat: