“Yet, that was not to be. The priests moved to one side of me, perhaps behind the crystal throne. A single voice, thin as thread, wove a sonorous tapestry in the cold gelatin of the hall, while an enormous eyelid began to slowly unstick from half the horizon and let a crescent of blinding light into the hall, like the blade of a golden scythe. I yelped like an animal, because that light was not light, but the light of a world of light, it was not a ghostly, white fire, but the fire of a world of fire and calcination. While my eyes, transparent as opals, died in inexpressible pains and voluptuousness, the skin of my naked body began to see. I saw with my chest and my arms, beyond the oven that the eyelid had slowly opened, forms and ghosts, slippages and contractions that were not of this universe. I knew, while I howled and tried to break my bonds, that I was inside an eyeball, that my own life was a miniscule speck of dust in the vitreous humor of an eye — of what god? of which giant Atlas? — and that this eye had now opened onto a world of a higher order. I had been stolen from the cerebral structures generating the dream of this being that kneaded our world in its sleep. I had been carried through the chiasm and the optic nerve, passed through the polychrome carpet of its retina and forced to look, from the middle of the crystalline ball, at a world that was blinding, blinding … The eyelid rose higher. The light from beyond light struck me like a monstrous column descending through the pupil, the hall filled with the unbearable color of blindness, and in the height of those pains, compared to which a simple pierced eyeball would have been a heavenly balm, a kind of voice, or a kind of calligraphic design on my seeing flesh told me the strange myth of Those Who Know, their global conspiracy, which spread as much in space as time (as one of the leaders of the secret services, I had a vague awareness of this — because all these services, sects, and cabals are connected, like networks of neurons), their self-rending toward heavens and hells in the inhuman effort to penetrate reality.
“I was blinded so that the ways of the Lord would show in me. I would be, from now on, chosen for atrocity — but also for prophecy — by an unknown force, so strong in comparison that the dark power of the blue-eyed boys is a degenerate caricature and a deformed metaphor. I would wait here, in my office, like a spider in the middle of its sparkling trap of hardened saliva, for the one able to recognize me, the one who would point his finger toward my eyelids, to touch them with his healing fingernail, to burst the bursting and blind the blindness of my eyes. He would be — they told me through that tattoo of speaking light when I cried out, crucified on the crystal chair — an adolescent with bones as thin as a birds’. I have been waiting for him for years, not just to restore my sight, because what more is there to see after the images I have seen, but to see Him, the one, he that will be sent, the Sent One, who, being already there, is here at the same time. Meanwhile, I have passed through all the bolgia of blindness: the trepidatious snuffing out of space; the expansion, like what bats enjoy, of the sonorous dominion, with landscapes of sounds; the hallucinations of the invented faces of those I talked to, in the most vibrant colors, fluorescent and electric, but the faces of acromegalics, Cyclopes, scalped beings, satyrs, grubs, skulls, and chameleons; the marble fears, when you feel that someone is coming toward you from all sides at once; the voices that give orders, to you by name, to cut your own throat … And, at the end of the end, the bottomless pit of the mole, the deep blindness …”
The masseur pushed my head more and more into his puffy stomach, like he wanted to somehow incorporate me there, into an impossible oval uterus. My face burned as though it had been torn off, and when I looked in the mirror that same day, right when I came back from the massage, I saw that my face was completely red and drawn, as though I had suddenly lost several pounds. It’s true that from that day on, I observed a small improvement of my peribuccal and orbicular muscles. Inexplicably, they came back under my will. But I didn’t care at that moment about the excoriated skin of my face, nor the signs of better health, because in the massage office, after the large fingers caressing me like butterfly wings had fluttered for the last time over my face, something wonderful and terrible happened to me. I put my pajama top over my shoulders again, and turned toward the masseur to thank him, as always, before leaving. I saw him filling the room, an iceberg as blind and as white as snow, a white and blind whale that smelled of silence. In front of him, face to face, I felt like a secret admirer, drained from fasting, shaken by the crystal elephantine monster. “You are Mircea,” he whispered then, barely audible. Then he opened two large, brown eyes, luminous, unspeakably human inside that head of ice.
23
A FEW months after the tanks of the Warsaw Pact entered Czechoslovakia, Romanian Securitate Department V received a series of new assignments, some of which contradicted best practice protocols and had never before been proposed, and were set at the highest levels of state secrecy. In this period, ordinary people’s children (both boys and girls) were kidnapped, blood was transported in the innertubes of military vehicles, underground buildings (nuclear command posts? bunkers? fallout shelters?) were constructed, and ultramodern linotype presses appeared, protected by reinforced walls in houses that, from the outside, seemed abandoned or inhabited by gypsies. At the Fundeni Hospital, a clinic that looked like a laboratory from outer space performed complicated plastic surgeries on citizens whose physiological, statural, or vocal resemblance to the chief of state had been detected. These citizens, now identical to the national hero, were recorded as killed in a car accident, and their funerals were arranged.
The extravagance and spy-novel mystery of these missions, the absolute power accorded to those who actually executed the horrors — doctors, police, factory workers, and priests — and the fact that they became more and more honored by the party and state apparatuses (at their party meetings, even members of the Executive Policy Office would attend) provoked profound changes in the psychology of the Securitate officers. Most officers were part of a new generation, which had grown up during the war and matured after the wave of atrocities in the 1950s had passed. Often you would hear them talk about “the old guys” like they were drunks and idiots, vulgar brutes who stomped on their victims with disgusting, sweaty feet, in chambers that stank like stables. The older colleagues in the trade, ever more marginalized, still looked like country boys whose uniforms would never stay in place. They could barely sign their own names, but when they met “for a little nip,” they bored the jejune “dandies” (as they, with impatience and hatred, labeled the newly arrived) with the same old fables about hunting enemies of the people around Făgăraşi. The gypsy Belate Alexandru, who had become the hero of the Securitate brigades and was lauded in the poems of writer-comrades, was insulted all the worse in these fairy tales: “Belate? Well let me tell you what happened with Belate. He died like the fool he was, on his feet, like he’d been ordered to, and they just had to tip him over, the crow. Comrade poet had things a little backwards in that poem they put on the coffin:
Cut down cowardly from behind
Inert lay now the nation’s boast