The eighth floor of our stairway was incomparably more mysterious than the others. I discovered it late: when I went up there for the first time, with Luci and Jean, to go out on the rooftop, more than a year had passed since we had moved to the block. I was a full six years old, and in that concrete colossus, I only knew well our stairs and the hall across the entryway we shared. I would go out behind the block almost every afternoon to play with the other kids, on the worksites where they were still putting in the sewers and electric cables. I had heard about Stairway 1, as though it were a faraway continent I might never explore. Wherever I was, I had to be within my parents’ sight from our fifth floor balcony. They stood together watching me, head by head and their gaze delimited the safe and civilized world, beyond which I would be swallowed by the void. The universe at that time consisted of the three rooms in our home and a few annexes, extended like spider legs, with an ambiguity all the greater for their distance. There was a first zone, semi-real, where I could move by myself, more or less safely, after which followed the city streets, which my parents created by walking between real and foreign places. Only my mother and father, between whom I walked through fortresses and basilicas, depots and castles of water scraping clouds like flames on yellow heavens, only my gigantic masters and friends, clasping my fingers in their great, warm hands, talking quietly over my head and pulling me through round piaţas with fabulous statues in the center, could pacify the endless dominions of chaos. Like a reflex arc, like the engram of memory, like the melting of marble steps under millions of feet, some streets, the ones we took more often, solidified, they gained a consistency, they were colored in familiar shades, detaching from the unreal gray that surrounded them. The tram toward Dudeşti-Cioplea, where Aunt Sica lived (Vasilica, my mother’s sister), was the only one painted red, and above it was the only fragment of blue sky in Bucharest. Climbing on board, I liked to sit behind the driver, to see how the control with the metal ball clattered, and to watch the sky through the thick, violet glass of the sunshade. The ball on the control lever was brass, polished by the rubbing palm of the driver, and its curve gathered, in concentrated colors ten times more intense than in the thin air outside, all of the neighborhoods we passed and all of the wooden interior of the tram car, with wooden chairs and wooden handles that knocked against the vinyl roof. I saw the driver’s face there, too, and if I got closer, my own face, just my eyes and nose, smiling in dull wonder. Equally solid, and a little less strange — although still, so odd! — was the way to my godparents’ place, on Maica Domnului, where a different tram took us only a few stations, after which we had to turn down a slummy street, always full of mud, with fences painted dementedly in pink and blue and green, to reach, at the end of an endless road, the house shaped like a ship. Above this new neural pathway the sky had a completely different form: it was a sheet of scented liquid, with vast coral reefs, and sea lilies rocking in the currents of spring, filtering the frozen air through gills that looked like feathers, and schools of fish glinting in the sun and changing their direction suddenly, all at once, at a twitch in the clouds …
The eighth floor was a zone of abstraction, unsuitable for life. There, on the crown of the block, the air was probably so rarified that no normal human being could survive. It was an adventure already to walk the stairs to the sixth floor. The seventh was almost inaccessible, but the elevator, the living and moving soul of the block, would dare go that far, like an outpost reaching deep into Mato Grosso. The landings were, if not identical, at least of the same kind as those I knew. On the eighth landing — and how many rumors, legends and myths did we kids tell each other, about this far-off land! — everything changed. There was, first of all, the door to the rooftop. Our parents must have told us hundreds of times: “Never go out on the roof! That’s not allowed!” even before they had the tiniest idea of what this rooftop was like. We didn’t even dare to imagine it. In place of an image in our minds was a green light of fear. The bigger kids had been on the rooftop, and this gave them prestige and self-assurance. They told us about the narrow door with the leaded window, going outside, and seeing the entire city beyond the concrete balustrade, and how, if you leaned over, you could also see the street like the bottom of a well, with its miniscule trams and cars … The elevator housing was also on the eighth floor, and they talked about its thundering motor, starting and stopping. In the washroom just “stupid stuff” happened (and you couldn’t get another word out of them about it). Finally, on the eighth floor, like a watchman at the border of another world, lived Herman.
The day when I went up to the eighth floor for the first time, two things happened to me that were so unusual, I attribute my courage in these moments to my mind’s confusion. I had gone out behind the block at around nine in the morning, when, even though the sun was shining strongly, the air was still cold like water from the faucet. I was alone, so far, in the topsy-turveyness of construction materials, mud, and ditches that made up our play area. Behind the concrete fence and the metal gate, which the girls, playing school, covered with crooked letters in colored chalk, rose the enormous brick palace of the mill, and beside it, like an annex, the flattened building of the Pioneer bread factory, with curved pipes coming out of the walls and going back in on another floor. Its windows were opaque from flour, and it was surrounded constantly by the smell of warm bread. The brick factory was as tall as our block, and on its peak, lost in the clouds, sometimes a red flag fluttered. After I had shaken the levers of an abandoned bulldozer in the block courtyard, I climbed out of the cabin and began to work on a hill of sand full of the traces of children who clambered over it all day. I dug a hole into the wet, red sand, that smelled of snails, in sharp contrast to the dry, dusty layer on top, until I could put my entire arm inside. My nails smarted in the wetness and suddenly they felt actually painfuclass="underline" I’d hit something hard. I lugged out this object that had sat crossways to my tunnel, and when I wiped away the sandy dirt, I caught my breath: it was a large, heavy, shining cowboy pistol, a revolver, with a curved handle that barely fit in my hand and a mirrored nickle barrel. It never crossed my mind to wonder whose it was, or who might have lost it. I’d had, up to then, some ordinary, two-bit water guns, made of soft, pink plastic, from which I would suck the rubber-tasting water. I had hardly ever seen cowboy guns, maybe from rich kids, and none of them compared with my unparalleled revolver. It was all mine. I had found it, and from then on it belonged to me. I climbed back onto the soft vinyl chair in the bulldozer cabin and began to shoot all around into the frozen air. I had goose bumps from the cold, but the sun and the poplar puffs, and the twisted and luxurious vegetation twined around the concrete fence brought me the feeling of a torridly hot summer. Only when I ran along the sewer-pipe ditches, aiming at the first girl who came out to arrange her dolls on a rug in the sun, did I become conscious of the second amazing fact of that morning: I was naked from the waist down. I was wearing just an undershirt that fluttered over my hips, barely covering my behind and “little rooster,” but revealing them when I ran around and shot my pistol. Because the undershirt was a little long, Mamma hadn’t noticed that I’d forgotten to put my underpants on, since she had recently been letting me dress myself.