Leaving them didn’t frighten me at all. I was tugged gently away, down other corridors, by the woman in white (who looked like a typical German, blond, short hair, penciled “eyebrows abroad”). This trust is incomprehensible to me, entering into the great adventure of detachment from my parents and exploring the hospital with a kind of wondrous enchantment. That first week of independence, subtracted from normal life, would be, perhaps, the model for my later experiences of closed, isolated worlds, spherical like pearls and just as precious, adorning the asymmetrical, capricious edifice of my ordinary life, which is impossible to totally comprehend. When they sent me away later, to camp or on trips, or who knows where else, my indifference left my parents at a loss for sufficient expression of their indignation. “Did you miss us?” they always asked, and I always responded, sincerely and naïvely, “No.” “You’ll never win with that attitude of yours,” Mamma would repeat, bitterly, adding: “I’ve never seen such a spiteful child,” meaning that, after the age of six, I would not let her kiss or pat me, but I spurned her, putting my hands across my chest and turning my head. Not once, in my adolescence, did I write them or call from camp. My father did the same when he was in the field, so that, abandoned and in a way offended by everyone, my mother often complained that she lived with two savages. The love and even passion that appear in every line I have written about my mother (and I’ve written almost solely about her) have always taken me by surprise, and made me wonder whether it was poor literary effect or if there had ever been an age in which I truly loved my mother more than anything in the world. If there had, then what conflict, frustration, or betrayal on her part had transformed my adoration into frigidity and, perhaps, a subterranean enmity? It’s true, she often told me I treated her “like an enemy,” and I remember how she cried once on my birthday, when she bought me a jacket and I told her to her face “I won’t wear something like that,” or when I wouldn’t touch the food she made, saying invariably and impersonally: “I don’t like it.” “You’re like your father. When we were first married, I would wait for him to come home from work to hot food on the table. I was thinking maybe he’d say something nice, just a word … But he would eat and not say anything. And if I asked him, when I couldn’t take it anymore, how’s the soup, how’s the steak or whatever, he’d keep his nose on the plate and tell me just ‘How should it be? It’s food!’ It killed me …”
I was finally alone with the medical assistant, holding her hand down the greenish corridors, over a red and white mosaic floor, like a chessboard. We walked down cold, vast hallways, we went up marble stairs, and in the end we came to a wing that was completely different from the others. On both sides of the corridor were unimaginably large doors, reaching almost to the ceiling, where large white globes hung from metal stems. Many doors were open, and standing in their thresholds were children, some just poking out their heads, curious, others completely in the hall, girls and boys my age, some a little bigger, all dressed in a kind of pajamas I had never seen — instead of buttons they had knotted cords. The pajamas were faded from washing, but you could see that they had once had bright colors, and they were decorated with animals: giraffes, zebras, elephants, monkeys … I walked down the entire corridor, looking in the rooms, which were the biggest I had ever seen (except for the ghostly palaces in my dreams) and almost empty. Some toys were lined up on the floors. I let the kids touch me with their little hands while I walked, and ask me my name, and ask me why I had come to their door, this time completely wooden (the others had opaque windows), at the end of the corridor. The nurse opened the two white doors wide and the smell of freshly washed clothes emerged like vapor from the room lined with shelves from top to bottom. Hundreds, thousands of pairs of pale pajamas, neatly folded and perfectly arranged, filled the shelves. On their edges were drawings of nothing but animals and birds, sketched loosely and repeated over all the material. The nurse hesitated a moment, looked at me, and chose a pair from one of the lower shelves, blue with white elephants. She unfolded the top and showed it to me, smiling in a tempting way. I don’t know what in those flannel rags, the elbows so worn you could see through them, looked extremely beautiful to me. I could hardly wait to put it on. In fact, that day, everything seemed unusual and magical, as though someone had changed the light suddenly, and a kind of emotional tuft covered all that I saw.
The nurse put the pajamas in my arms and pushing gently on my neck, led me to one of the doors with a window, in the middle of the corridor, where a young girl was standing. From the first moment, I saw such evil and hostility on the girl’s face that I could only think of Aura, the granddaughter of my old godmother, who scratched my face whenever my parents made me and Marian play with her. I walked in past her and saw another girl in the middle of the room. She was sitting down and combing the hair of a dilapidated doll. She looked a lot like the first girl, and both regarded me with dissatisfaction. The nurse didn’t say another word. She undressed me, pulled the pajama tops and bottoms onto me and showed me my bed. There were only three white cloth beds here, with metal panels around them (one of which slid to the floor to let us into the bed), a table and three chairs, two sinks with mirrors, and a shelf on the wall. Across from the door were immense windows, beyond which, at our height — the tops of our heads didn’t reach the sill — we only saw sky. When the woman in white came out of the room, telling us only, “Be good!” all of my attention turned toward my two small roommates.
The one I had seen first, on the floor, was named Carla. She was a little bigger than I was, she must have been already six. On her face, the pure, geometrical evil, extracted from the evils she did each day, was so pronounced that it seemed like a physical feature, like a puffy eye, or a mole, or a second nose. It looked like it could be removed through a simple operation, with local anesthetic, and then the girl’s face would be normal. Carla had oblique, dark eyes like a cat’s, with something crooked about them, and a grown woman’s laugh that glued her lips onto her face like an artistic collage — the same lips that she would have at thirty, superimposed, guilty and disingenuous, translucent like the skin of earthworms, revealing their lines of blood. She was the boss, she had invented “mineymoezish,” and over the week, she was the one who gave me the most bruises, pokes, and scratches. In the first few moments I was alone with the girls, Carla pulled a chair to the sink and climbed up and snatched the toothbrush the nurse had put in a cup for me, next to the other two. She threw it onto the carpet with a hatred that petrified me, because I had never encountered it before, in anyone. I had always been the littlest and most spoiled wherever we lived, passed from arm to arm, dosed with candies, cookies, and taffy, stolen by Victoriţa from the preschool where she worked, and the children always circled around me, at the house and block alike, when I would recite poems, “Uncle Stiopa the Policeman” and “Olenka’s All Grown Up,” admiring my cleanliness and the shine of my golden locks … I never knew hostility, not even when my father unexpectedly grabbed me, held me down and pinched my nose, and my mother pushed a spoon into my mouth, forcing me to swallow the bitter medicine, and whacking my head if I let it run out of the corners of my mouth while I twisted and writhed. I was horrified only by the brutality of the situation, since I knew that my parents loved me and wanted to make me feel better. But what did Carla have against my stupid toothbrush? And why didn’t she talk to me, why did she only brush me away from where they were playing? Why, later, did she knock over my blocks and break my toys? I wanted to cry just thinking about it, the way that later I would always cry after I fought with boys, whether I beat them or got beaten up.