The girl projected this same dream to us, directly into our brains somehow, as though we had dreamed it ourselves, because her words and motions were only vesperal flashes on the black crests of waves: elliptical, uncolored, and dissipating soon within the prayer-like atmosphere of the evening meal. After we finished eating, we each went to our own bed like every night, and we curled up under the sheets. In the hospital, the rooms were much taller than in the houses were I had lived, and all the way at the top, they had enormous, white globes attached to the ceiling with long metal stems. Before sleeping, I would fix my gaze on one of those globes, floating like a foggy moon in the brown darkness. I stared at it hard, until I felt that it began to oscillate … right … left … more and more … with the miniscule image of my bed held in its curve … one side … the other … until I sank, sighing, into sleep, to dream bad dreams about the girls, their hands knocking over my block towers …
Like the décor, the days were also incomparably vaster than they seem today. Eternities of fresh, glacial light passed between waking up, long mornings, and afternoon meals, there were fluttering changes of gold and shadow from the flowing clouds covering and revealing the sun in the large, white-framed windows. The girls’ features, the beds’ metal panels, the intense blue of the irises under the sink, and each detail of the hideous dolls: their shiny cardboard flakes, covered in plaster, where a nose or eyes were drawn, vibrant and glowing, that detached themselves vigorously, three-dimensionally, one on top of the other — it was as if I weren’t seeing these things with my eyes, but an impersonal camera lucida, cutting and merciless, that spotlighed even the most unimportant details with a kind of abstract consciousness. Everything glowed and spun in colors and designs from the beginning of the world. From my spot at the window, I watched Carla and Bambina perform their ballet like tiny goddesses of destruction. I watched their glassy fingers tear shreds from the sheets, blindfold their dolls, and execute them by stabbing a splinter of pressed wood in the dolls’ chests. I made myself as small as possible when they began to bounce around, ungracefully like wild animals, throwing whatever they could grab into the middle of the room. I tried to interfere once when they went “hunting” in the other rooms and dragged back a smaller boy, who they threw down, leaning over him, poking him, pulling out strands of his hair and kicking his ribs. Then they turned to me and scratched me like cats on my cheeks and shoulders. Afterwards, they would bang their slippers against the wall for hour after monotonous hour, one beside the other, chattering in mineymoezish and hopping around, until the nurse came in and took them by the ears. Then they started to scream and blame me: I was the one responsible for the mess in the room, the noise, everything. I wouldn’t leave them alone, and I took their toys.
The afternoons were almost taller, like vaults of quotidian architecture. After the meal we were supposed to sleep for two hours, but no one did. The two of them stood up on their beds and pulled each other’s hands and pajamas, trying to make the other fall, while I stared out the window at the shining outlines of the clouds, at their transformations, at their steady advance toward one of the window hinges. I watched how the September evening fell, and the pineal gland at the base of my brain detected the seasonal change in light. My pupils grew, and a gentle, atavistic sadness stole around my chest as evening came. A little before it got completely dark, the air became enchanted. Across the walls, stripes of red liquid stretched, phosphorescent, and the air in the room turned brown. The long rectangles of the windows turned from light blue to yellow, and then an unnatural, gloomy orange that covered everything in the room. Then the silence and boredom became unbearable, and everything (only then) began to reek of doctors and hospitals.
It was the moment that I waited for all day: when Carla and Bambina took off their pajamas and, like large dolls, with unexpected grace, they climbed from their beds and began to dance through the room. I knelt and, my mouth gaping, watched their small naked bodies, dark brown in the evening light, spinning like two small fish in a glass globe. From time to time, catching the window light, their eyes sparkled one moment and went dull the next. They lay down and rolled over the worn carpet, they crab walked, they tried to walk on their hands, they held each other’s arms and spun … I knew the nurse would never come at that hour (we were horribly frightened of her), so I climbed out of bed, too, tentatively, watching the dance with a kind of prudent enchantment. I looked curiously at their thin chests and the fine line between the lips of their shining pubises. At the house I had played doctor with Anişoara, in the basement, in the little room painted light green, and we often took our underpants off, but this seemed like something else, because the girls dancing around the dark room did not encourage the same complicity in danger and shame as my meetings with Anişoara. The ordinary, dumb girl at the house, who taught me to play “shots with pants off,” looked at my naked body with a kind of dreamy admiration, while I was probably so indifferent that I don’t even remember Anişoara without her underpants, just the fear of our parents catching us.
What was happening now was magic. Neither Carla nor Bambina were themselves any more, as though the acid of evening had dissolved the crust of evil from their faces, and left them pure and inexpressive like benign masks. I could hardly recognize them. When it was so dark that their dance was only visible against the windows — their black and supple silhouettes were like African statues — the two approached me, by the window, their eyes shining, and took off my pajamas. They lay back triumphantly to show me the purple slits between their thighs, as though there was something grand there, and glorious. They smiled to each other, confirming their exorbitant power, and they rejoiced to see me looking at them, but my small sex, in contrast, brought the usual meanness back to their gaze. They pulled on it, pretending to cut it off, and in the end they turned their backs to me, as though I didn’t exist. Then we got dressed again, quickly, since we heard the steps of the blonde nurse, who was bringing us our usual mollusk supper, covered with caramel syrup, which we had to eat to the last spoonful. The last night, while I chewed the tasteless meat, I felt something like a rubber tube in my mouth. I plucked out a white vein, with a greenish tip, which I placed on the edge of my plate, and I vomited. The nurse immediately brought me a fresh helping.
The children in the other rooms were not healthy and whole the way we, at least in appearance, were. Almost all of them had some strange thing wrong that made a powerful impression on my mind. One boy’s fingers stuck out in every direction, like lobster legs. The room next door constantly reeked of stinging urine and maple. A thin, withdrawn person with dull features screamed her head off when Carla and Bambina, after a lengthy hunt, caught her and pulled her into our room. They wrestled for half an hour while the child writhed like a leech, until they pulled her pajama bottoms down, to look one more time, like at a rare flower, at the bud so complicated you couldn’t have said if it was male or female. There was also a little girl, sweet and lively, happily laughing and talking with everyone, whose hands came out directly from her shoulders, like wings, without arms in between. Everyone admired her waist-length hair, like a blond doll’s, and her shining blue eyes. Several other children had terrible deformities from polio. They all wore the same faded pajamas printed with animals, bound with cords like file folders.