I felt my entire skin burn with shame. I pulled down my undershirt as far as I could and moved slowly, barely lifting my feet, toward our stairway. I made it into the hallway without anyone seeing me, and I scampered up the stairs. The mosaic steps were ice cold when I put my bare feet on them. The first floors were sinister and dark. One, which was mysterious, where I knew no one and thin pipes ran along the walls and fuse boxes lined up, then two, three, and four were each more familiar … I knew some neighbors who had kids: Romică’s mother, Virgil’s, Cristi’s, and the Chinaman’s … The policeman on four, with such a silly name: Corcodel, had made a monumental door, painted as black as the entry to a crypt. At Mr. Kulineac’s you could always hear Lola barking. Popa, who played soccer for Dinamo, had a daughter with fantastic toys that were brought from abroad, including a doll that pushed a stroller with a little baby … I found our apartment door half open, probably as I had left it. Mamma was doing laundry in the bathroom, and when I opened the door, she had suds up to her elbows and some in her hair. A big cake of laundry soap, green and narrow, tottered on the edge of the sink. I aimed the pistol at her and shouted, and Mamma jumped and started to shout back at me. She wiped her hands on a towel. She was enormous. My neck hurt from looking up at her face, projected somewhere against the ceiling. She told me to take the pistol back immediately to wherever I had found it, and when she saw my bare bottom, she smacked it a few times and found me some shorts. She had barely gotten them over my thighs when I tore myself from her grasp and ran outside again.
I met up with Luci, and then Jean, on the big tank near the concrete wall, across from Stairway 5, a macabre stairway, different from all the others and almost as mysterious as Stairway 1, because it was not in a hallway, but directly behind the block, near the entry to the furniture storeroom. Its gaping mouth, blacker than all the others, was mostly hidden by kitchen sets, hall tables, easy chairs, and windows packed in cardboard, all directly on the asphalt, and sometimes by workers armed with belts and hooks who would heave them into horse-drawn trucks. Jean sometimes would take a horse by the bridle and whisper in its ear: “ţuric!” and the horse would step backwards, knocking over chairs and tables.
On the big tank, stomping as hard as we could to hear the metallic booms amplified in the space underneath, we chatted a while, almost calm. Jean from Seven told us that in Italy mămăligă was called “poopy-lenta,” “so you can run down the street shouting ‘poopylenta, poopy-lenta!’ and nobody will do anything to you,” and Luci, tubby and curly headed, perched on the fence and shouted it too, laughing like crazy at the funny word. After we’d had enough of saying it a hundred ways, we set to exploring, since there were too few of us yet to play anything. I objected with all my might to going into Stairway 5, more sinister for me than a dragon’s cave. When they grabbed me and tried to force me in, I fell on a pile of planks full of nails, and I got scratched a little on the leg. In the end, shaking, I said I would go on the roof if we went up our stairway, mine and Jean’s, since Luci lived on Stairway 3. Jean was a jerk. He had a bad mouth, sang songs, and told dirty jokes. He lived on Seven, he was always dressed poorly, and his mother looked like a beggar. His father drove a tractor for the circus, pulling around caged animals and houses on wheels. But we were all good friends, because we always laughed with him and didn’t try to fight. That day, for the first time, we went in the elevator without a grown-up. Jean stretched himself high on the tips of his toes, and reached to 7. “I can go higher,” he said, and he pushed the red button, which made a buzz so loud that we all screamed. This didn’t stop him. He stretched up to see himself in the mirror, stuck his tongue out, and in the end he pressed the last button, marked “O,” which made the elevator stop in between floors. “I’m telling! I’m telling your mom!” Luci shouted, crazy with fear, while Jean opened the doors so we could see the layer of concrete between the floors. “You’d have been stuck here, man! Toast!” And we believed we really were going to stay in that terrible elevator car, painted green, forever, without our parents or the real world, and they would bury us, the little ones, in an infinite block of ice, in endless fear. My tears had already started when Jean pushed 7 again and the elevator started moving, making its slow way through the concrete universe of the block. Two more metal doors appeared and disappeared, slowly, in the elevator window, until it stopped and we poured onto a foreign landing, so unfamiliar that we could have been anywhere, thousands of kilometers away, above or below, in one place or another. For Jean, however, this was the most ordinary place possible, because it was where he lived. I had the barrel of the pistol stuck in my underpants and covered carefully with my undershirt; I hadn’t shown it to the other boys, since I was afraid they would know whose it was and take it away. Now, more dead than alive with fear, I could feel it there, so warm, it was as if it had become part of my body.
Piled together, we scampered up the stairs. From even the first moment, a new kind of light fell on us and grew stronger as we ascended. It was white, intense, unreal light, completely different from the melancholy Nile-green air of the other floors. If the first flight of stairs was more or less the same as those between the floors we knew, the landing between 7 and 8 seemed new to us, like a fairy tale: there was no radiator or door to the incinerator, it was completely empty, white and pure like a painted box, and flooded with light from a few very high windows. From there, the light fell obliquely, in thick pieces, vibrating like crystals. We went up another flight of stairs, one much shorter than normal. I would have given anything to turn back; my fear had become almost unbearable, but Jean and Luci, their shapes eroded by light, their hair full of rays, continued, hugging the walls, smudging their clothes with lime. One more turn in the stairway and we arrived on the landing for 8, in a supernatural light. It came from a leaded window in the rooftop door, which had a large, rusted lock. It was hard to see anything in the shining light. Slowly, close together and looking all around, we began to make out a few things: an old bicycle leaning against the wall, a rotting wooden crate for an oleander, a few doors with barely demarcated shapes in the walls. The landing was so narrow compared to the others that it seemed to squeeze us, pushing its doors against us, trying to crush our bones and flesh. A constant, threatening murmur came from the elevator housing. We stayed there for a few minutes. Jean said some bad words, since the rooftop door was locked. Through its window you couldn’t see anything. It was as though you were looking into the mouth of an oven where the metal is heated white-hot. The crazy light was amplified by the immaculate walls. The outline of the old bicycle looked like flame. And we suddenly saw, through our clothes that had become as transparent as cellophane, the insides of our bodies, our fragile, dark skeletons, and our internal organs like shadows on an x-ray. When someone called the elevator, on the ground floor or some other floor, the elevator housing gave a pop that paralyzed us. Frozen, with wide eyes, we awaited the building’s collapse and the world’s end.