Then, the door of the only resident of that landing opened, and on its threshold, Herman appeared. But he was changed. His face was not a human face. His hands, holding a spiny mollusk shell as big as a teacup, were not human hands. And he wore only a silk robe, open at the chest, and decorated with the most fantastically alive and slippery drawings, passing into each other, looking at each other, playing with each other, coupling and biting and rending each other. It was a soft, crystal mirror, a prism with folds that reflected the space around it — us kids, the rusty bicycle, the rooftop door — but it deformed each surface anamorphically, filling it with colored sparks of the most tender violet and voluptuous red, the most unforgettable green, the most childish yellow, and heavenly blue and orange, so that, from Jean’s long-eared face stretched in a pleat of the robe, there emerged a stag beetle of ivory and gold, and the beetle’s mandibles were two statuesque naked women, holding cornucopias, watching over a gateway to hell, and each cornucopia, with the next movement of silk, became an agglomeration of viper skulls. Luci became a team of horses with flowering cashmere saddles, and in the middle of the flowers, asps battled unicorns for a priceless gem, and the gem was a planet covered in clouds, whose gaps revealed ponds and craters, and each pond reflected the inhuman face of Herman. I saw myself, too, in a single moment without end (and, in a way, also without beginning), but immediately my pallid and angular face, all eyes, stretched from the middle of pulsating irradiations over the entire vestment, completely covering it, so that Herman was now vested in the flayed skin of my face, wrapped in the long lashes of my eyes, illuminated by the timid strawberry-pink of my lips, punctuated by the black sun of the freckle by my ear, fringed by the vines of hair on my neck. The vision lasted less than a moment, and then shattered into spirals of spirals of spirals, greenish yellowish red, planets of lizards of stars, worlds of worlds, voids of voids, ship-moons, scorpion-cars, brain-vipers, vulva-angels, cloud-islands … Herman was floating. He levitated in the doorway, his neck broken and his face indescribable, and the colors of his horrible, enchanting vestment danced over our faces. We would never have snapped out of that fascination if the elevator hadn’t started again, with an apocalyptic bang. We started suddenly and ran down the stairs, howling as loud as we could, floor after floor, while alarmed neighbors opened their doors as we passed. I don’t know how we got to the ground floor, how we came out of the glass door of the stairway … We didn’t stop until we reached the big sheet-metal gate of the mill fence, where Silvia and Marcela were drawing princesses with colored chalk. Panting, we leaned against the fence, looking up at the top of the apartment block. What if Herman had followed us? But nothing happened. It was time to eat and our mothers, leaning on the balcony rails, called us up. First the girls left, then Luci. Jean went down the alley, and I was left alone, still leaning against the rough concrete fence. What a strange day! And, especially, how … unusual, how different I felt. While running down the stairs, I heard a loud clang behind me and I imagined I lost the pistol, but I could still feel its warm barrel against my stomach. When, at last, I heard my mother’s high voice, I went home and into the bathroom to wash my hands, where I wanted to admire my pistol again. But the pistol wasn’t there anymore, and the hard, hot barrel was made of flesh and came out of my body. It was my little pecker, that I used to go peepee, which now was strangely erect and painful. It all lasted a few minutes, and I didn’t have time to become alarmed before things turned back to normal, for years and years …
Herman is sleeping now, drunk, in my bed, crosshatched with dark. I was barely able to lug him up here. A few hours ago I went out for some air in the dusk as thick as pitch. I slowly crossed the lot full of old refrigerators and upholstery springs and casing wires, and stumbling over them, I saw the precise design of the walnuts in the tree branches against the velvet colors of the sky, urine yellow on the horizon, then pink, and on the opposite side, a deep blue, indigo that the moon whitened … A giant metal construction, like an endless drill rig, with antennae on top, a radio relay probably, gave me a strange desire to climb its narrow vertical ladder, through the protective ring, high up, in the middle of sunset. I passed through twisting neighborhoods, with old houses, massive as galleons, floating in the dusk, their balconies ferrying men in shirts and women in bras, smoking, speaking softly and listening to the crickets. I went down deserted side streets, past shoemakers and watchmakers with their shutters drawn. I went along the cyclopic worksite of the House of the People, avoiding the police patrolman talking about soccer, and I emerged, after a long while, onto the boulevard with movie theaters, already sunk into the dark. Yellow bulbs, every third one lit, transformed the buildings into pale crystals, without any trace of reality. The trees leaned the shadows of their branches over walls with blank windows. I walked slowly, my hands in my pockets, thinking of Cedric and Vasili, The Albino, and Herman, my senseless and endless manuscript, this illegible book, this book … I passed in front of Romarta, looking, as always, toward the cubist attics (superimposed, retreating from each other) of the block across from the Casa Armatei, and wishing I could live there, high up, in the last cube, under the great blue sign for the C. E. C., so that I could go out in the evening onto the little landing in front, lean against the last C, seen by no one, like a Ferragus scorning the metropolis, and contemplate the city, my mysterious and beloved city spread under the Persian carpet of the constellations. On the almost-deserted streets came a wave of warm air that smelled like linden trees. The trolley buses passed, sad like funeral trains, through the University intersection. I followed the line of my thoughts up to the strange, enchanting story of Paul and the Russian circus dwarf, Katarina, who always held her panther cub in her arms, and when I reached Piaţa Rosetti, with its nationalist statue sunk in a tarnished bronze chair, the haunting syllables began to churn in my mind: NO-TO-KO … TO-KO-NO … NO-KO-TO … A nearby maxi-taxi idled with its lights on, without a driver or passengers, docked by the statue like a skiff on the rocky shore of a little island. Collapsed beside the statue, with his back against the bronze plaque, lay a beggar or drunk, one of those who had multiplied in Bucharest in recent years. I don’t know why I crossed the street and entered the little park around the statue. Night had descended like pitch, like in the slums. The bronze statue was almost invisible, and the beggar was a warm spot, a viscous liquid muddying the spectral marble. He cast a fetus-like shadow, with its head pressed unnaturally into its chest, in a perpetual bow, in endless humility. It had been years since I had seen Herman, but every time I did, it seemed like he had always been with me, sometimes curled up inside me like an embryo in a uterus, other times protecting me like a ghost from the folds and corners of the city.
I squatted in front of him and took his face in my palms, pricked by his few days’ beard. My stomach turned over from the nauseating stench of cheap alcohol in his mouth. Nearly fifty years old, Herman was almost bald; white hairs, every which way, surrounded his skull, and his face belonged to a man of suffering, one made for suffering. His crusty, elongated eyes, with tufts of eyebrows above them, opened for a moment, without focusing, like in a faint, lowering their eyelids again and showing only two stripes of cornea, yellow as ivory. Because of the night and the sad moon, the former azure of his irises was now stained by coma and agony. I was barely able to carry him to the 343 bus station, where I had to put him down for half an hour until the bus came to take us close to home. I shoved him into the tired elevator that carried us to the last floor of the old, scarlet block; and look at the old man now, the codger, the great sinner in my bed, shaking and stinking of sweat. A few minutes ago, I stopped writing to open his left fist, where I saw, between his fingers, a crumpled piece of paper. On the cheap paper, torn and torn again, that he must have kept in a dirty pocket full of stuff, something was written in pencil, which at first sight looked like a telephone number. Then I saw it was a mathematical formula. I am writing it here as best as I can make it out, hoping I don’t get one of the signs wrong: