On one of the evenings, when the intensive care ward looked at itself for a few minutes, I suddenly felt that I was looking. I sat up, fresh and nonchalant, without any crack in my consciousness, perfectly aware of what had happened and where I was. I removed the transparent tube from my nose by myself, slowly, like an exotic parasite, and then I touched my face. Trying to smile, I noted — as I had already guessed — the elasticity and docility of my muscles that raised the corners of my mouth. I had made great progress. I could blink my left eye — true, more slowly than the right, and not all the way — and I could raise my eyebrows. For a few months, my smile would stay crooked, and my face would always have a gentle asymmetry. The world of my left eye, withered from so much privation and humidity, would be crepuscular and dark, with strange olive tones, but, combined with the radiant colors from the right, it would not bother me too much. On the contrary, this way my world has a special topography, which I didn’t notice before the illness, and which looks like the world in a dream, when every shape is porously illuminated by emotion.
Doctor Zlătescu, who was in charge of our ward, seemed to have expected I would come back to life. I hadn’t been myself more than an hour yet when she came toward my bed like a Fury, red with indignation, with her teeth clenched. She called me everything, stupid suicide, senseless, idiot kid. She asked me rhetorically (since she was too angry to listen to anyone) what had been in my sick head when I did that. Didn’t I realize I could have died, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t I think about my parents? And how bad would she look, she who was responsible for me as long as I was in the hospital? I listened, scared, embarrassed by the indecent sounds she made in the eternal twilight of the basement. I wouldn’t have known how to respond, anyway. After a little while she calmed down, spent, and sat on the edge of my bed, and after a long silence, she looked at me and smiled. Like a newborn who sees a smiling mask, I raised, reflexively, the corners of my mouth. “You’re going the right way, băbuţo,” she told me, mussed my hair a bit and left. I would see Doctor Zlătescu again after seven or eight years, one sunny day, downtown on Magheru Boulevard. I was with a friend from college and we were gossiping about the Folklore assistant when I saw her: even in the middle of summer when the asphalt melted under our feet, she was wearing a grotesque wool hat, with vines of her dandruffy hair coming out in all directions. On the breast of her spandex, fluorescent-green dress, she wore scout badges and medals. Yellow unit commander ribbons emerged from a purse of ripped white rubber-cotton that she’d found in some trash pile. Her face was a terrible mask of insanity. She talked incessantly, pointing at a parking sign … I was shaken for the rest of the day. That evening, I sat at the window for hours, in the twilight yellow like a sodium flame, repeating the motto of my life: “God, what is happening? What the hell is happening?” to which the city responded with murmurs and specters.
Mamma came every day to sob at my bed, to brush back my sweat from my brow and to straighten the bag of glucose on the stand. She also could not understand what had made me run hundreds of volts through my fragile skull, peeling off layers and layers of old calcium. When they moved me again to the neurology ward, she came back to life, especially when I could smile without effort. She kept trying to hide her hands, stiff and blackened like an auto mechanic’s, which I had seen right away, but I hadn’t wanted to say anything about their terrible state. She said she had cleaned the sink or undone the trap underneath, she wasn’t sure … Only when I went home again, after about ten days (during which time they did several EEGs without finding anything), I found out what had happened: my mother had argued horribly with my dad, and she was trying desperately to find a job and make a little money, so that he didn’t have to take care of her, a fact that he constantly threw in her face. Some newspaper ad had unleashed this mess. One day she came home with a spool of steel wire and a kind of bizarre drill, with a vise attached — it turned out to be a spring-turning machine. “Ma’am, this work isn’t for you,” the metal worker had said humbly at the shop that placed the ad, but my mother insisted, and now she was trying to work at home, in the kitchen, tripping over spirals of blackened wire, moaning and whining about her hands, while the springs came out crooked and twisted, or they sprang back, recalcitrant, smacking her fingers and scraping the backs of her hands. When she started it up, the drill screamed loud enough to make the whole block jump to its feet. In a kind of martyrdom mixed with pain and hate, and the desire to victimize the entire world, my mother kept at this dumb idea for a few months, and she never made even one spring right. Her hair smelled like hot iron, and her hands were one big wound, but she went back to her torture, night after night, with a crazed blindness, refusing to listen to anyone, her eyes fixed and red, and when I held her hands and tried to talk to her rationally, she writhed and shouted like she was out of her mind: “Leave me alone! Stay out of it, snotface! Leave me alone!” This was her plan to punish my father.
It had been a hard winter. The mounds of brown snow lining Ştefan cel Mare were taller than a person. The plows, lined up one after another, were still parked along the sidewalk, and their drivers, in coveralls and fur hats, stood in a circle for a little ţuica. In the morning, my windows were frozen everywhere. In the bottom part, the frost was completely dull and twisted in rhythms of Art Nouveau, while a hand’s width from the top, the ice became translucent, wet, and wavy, and through it, standing on the bedstead, I liked to look at the snowy city. The air was so milky then, and the fog was so compact, that the rapidly falling flakes were barely visible. Bucharest looked like a child’s drawing, all roofs buried in snow and smoking chimneys. The roads, in spite of the plows and salt, were covered again immediately with new immaculate layers, which then dirtied into puddles of milky coffee by twilight. And twilight came quickly, at four in the afternoon, when the streetlights came on, and the snow-filled sky darkened into rose and remained red all night. I spent countless nights at that window, watching how it snowed furiously in the neon lights, and counting cars and trams … Once, in a winter that I cannot place (in childhood? in a dream? in another life?), something disturbing and charming happened. Only a splinter of it remains in my mind, flashing now and then without hope of elucidation: the painful violet of the imagination … a snow-covered hill … a green window … Nothing more, but in this nothing was a tangle of beings and inexpressible states, a kind of a prophecy, an aura, a happiness with a tight heart …