I hope this slum gets the plague
with his pants around his ankles, smacking the balloon of his hairy paunch! Or the drunk on Stairway 3, an old man in a gray hat who would pull out his little black worm and urinate like a racehorse with a thick jet onto the pillars in the hall, right in the middle of the kids playing in furniture boxes.
The young man lived with an aged peasant mother in a studio on the top floor of the block on Ştefan cel Mare. The elevator only went to the seventh floor, and then you took the stairs to get to his miniscule landing, shared by the apartment’s door, the always-barred metal door to the elevator motor, and the laundry door with a transparent window. The fourth door, for me the most mysterious one by far, led to the rooftop terrace. In fact, that landing (and not only the landing) was connected to concentric mysteries, ever more troubling, ever deeper … I had moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare when I was five, and the immensity of its stairways, hallways, and floors had given me, for some years, a vast and strange terrain to explore. I went back there many times, in reality and dreams, or better put, within a continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, without ever knowing why the vision of that long block, with eight stairways, with the mosaic of its panoramic window façade, with magical stores on the ground floor: furniture, appliances, TV repair — always filled me with emotion. I could never look at that part of the street with a quiet eye. If I were to take a picture, I am sure it would show something completely different: between the enormous, scarlet castle of the Dâmboviţa mill, with its pediments and crenulations shooting toward the sky, and the sea of roofs and yellow, cubic buildings, pink, or calcio-vecchio cubic buildings of Bucharest beyond the street, there would only be an empty lot, maybe some piles of rusty tram rails, or concrete forms, or purely and simply a yellow pool, refracting the yellow clouds pouring over it … The block, the Police watchtower next to it, the Circus alley and its blue mushroom cap surrounded by poplars whose branches were held in a Renaissance entrelac (and which had grown enormously over the years: summer, from my parents’ apartment balcony, through the snowfall of poplar tufts, the tree growth kept me from seeing anything of the alley, but the tallest dusty pediment of the mill) seemed actually to live only in my mind, sprung pale and ghostly, from an emotional abyss. Everything is strange, because everything is from long ago, and because everything is in that place where you can’t tell dreams from memory, and because these large zones of the world were not, at the time, pulled apart from each other. And to experience the strangeness, to feel an emotion, to be petrified before a fantastical image always means one and the same thing: to regress, to turn around, to descend back into the archaic quick of your mind, to look with the eyes of a human larva, to think something that is not a thought with a brain that is not yet a brain, and which melts into a quick of rending pleasure which we, in growing, leave behind. In countless dreams I entered Stairway 4 of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, the way it was in the first months when we moved there: the hallway full of debris, the metal panel with little letter-box doors on a different wall than it is on today, a mysterious cell, full of magazines and packages, that doesn’t exist anymore — or maybe it never did — and the monumental steps up to the elevator door. Everything is vast, like in a basilica, solemn and frightening. More terrible still is the great white opening of the elevator shaft, before the car was installed. There is no door, just a rectangular opening in a wall. I go up the steps full of stone chips and whitewashed lime, surrounded by a kind of enchantment. I stop in the immense portal and look up the enormous, astounding well, with cable viscera hanging against the walls. The infinite height makes me nauseous, I squat down and feel someone yank me backwards. It is Mamma, who takes me by the hand and we climb the stairs, full of the same debris, sometimes so much that we have to clamber over the gray mounds. In between the landings with apartment doors are others, empty, sinister, with little windows where you can see the mill, and through one door alone, the incinerator. The incinerator already emits a revolting stench, since many families have moved to the block long before the construction was completed. I am more afraid of the empty landings than of those with apartments, even though each door is different there, even though great crates have appeared with cacti or oleanders, and a few grimy pictures are stuck to the walls. If I weren’t with my mother, I would never get home, because it seems certain that the floors continue above and below endlessly. Lost on empty landings, I shout desperately, until I lose my voice, weak with fear and strangeness. We do, in the end, get home. Mamma unlocks the door, twisting the security key in the keyhole that makes the wings of the little pieces inside pull back slowly. Only then does she unlock it with the real key. We enter the vast, empty rooms, and then into the front room. The evening is dark. In the triple window, a blood-colored cloud hangs over the city. Luminous billboards, very far away, flash on and off. In the room the only furniture is a bed and a chair. The walls are unpainted and two black, stunted wires cross the ceiling like spider legs. We don’t yet have electricity. Mamma, young and beautiful, lights a candle and sticks it to a saucer. We don’t have curtains, and the window is splashed with lime. We sit on the bed, embracing, and I melt from love and magic. Along the window only the stripe of clotted blood remains a while, and the rest is night. And the round, weak light of the candle, in prismatic needles, refracts in the window. It is a beautiful and sad quiet. I huddle against my mother’s body, and we watch the stripe of blood slowly disappear …
Then, in the trembling, spherical light of the candle, Mamma rises and projects her colossal shadow onto the ceiling and walls, like in a strange ballet, when the woman of dark flesh, but with clear, hazel eyes like two lakes at dusk, exchanges features, clothes, and internal organs with her own misshapen, anamorphic, palpitating shadow. She opens her hand and in the center of her palm, like in the heart of a brown flower, there is a white plastic elephant, thin and semitransparent in the yellow-dark light. She puts it on the chair and lets it hang its golden coin over the arm, connected by a thread to the elephant’s neck. The coin turns a bit and sparkles, blinking slightly, casting vague sparks onto the floor. Its weight sets the elephant in motion, wobbly at first, leaning on its right leg, then the left, while the coin slowly approaches the ground. Kneeling on one side of the chair and the other, we watch it together, happy and smiling, melting in the luminous night of the half-foreign room. And in the surrounding stillness, lit from behind, extending its shining trunk and misshapen shadow onto the wood of the chair, the elephant scoots forward, minute by minute, with small, dry chuffs, millimeter by millimeter, eternity by eternity, all the way to the edge, where it stops, leaning gently over the abyss. The coin is only a finger-width away from the floor, and it alternates its faces one after another, shifting like the phases of the moon …
Sometimes, two or three months after we had moved to Ştefan cel Mare, Mamma would push the button for six or four by mistake, in the newly installed elevator. We would rise in darkness. The car light bulb was constantly stolen, until they refused to replace it anymore, and, when the car stopped with a clang of a blacksmith’s hammer, we would open the door and happen upon an unknown and frightening world. If we stopped at four, the shock wasn’t so intense, because we recognized that landing from when we used the stairs, but if we came to any floor above ours, my eyes would pop out of their sockets with fear. Those worlds were always silent and abandoned. The air was green, and through its solemn fog I saw terrible images sometimes, over the familiar forms that I had expected. The doors of the apartments on five, each with a familiar detail — the blue plaque on Mr. Manu’s door, the policeman’s silver peephole shaped like a funnel, the brown mat by Săndel’s mother — were superimposed with monstrous, threatening mental inventions: other doors, other paint, other colors on the edges of the fuse box, other mosaics on the floor. The landing was identical to ours and yet completely different, as broadly alike as it was narrowly different in details. It was another universe that howled menacingly, like a glacier, and I was completely lost. Once we even went in the wrong entryway — there were two entries like ours, but they were Stairways 6 and 7, not 3 and 4 — and we were fooled until we took the elevator to the fifth floor and opened the green metal door onto another world, and as we went down the stairs, each landing — some illuminated and full of screeching silence, others sunken in the deepest dark — was strange and frightening, as though we had descended into Hell … I howled like an animal and pulled on my mother’s hand. She also shouted, trying to calm me down, but I was throbbing all over, like a bird’s heart, and I didn’t calm down again until I saw that I was outside, on the street, and I saw the electric poles over the tram tracks, holding their globes of rosy light. Trams and cars passed in the reddened evening, and the illuminated windows of the furniture store showed familiar, calming objects: chairs and couches, desks, lamps and shades …