One afternoon in February they sent us to clear the pathways in a huge park at the edge of the city, and it was there, in an area few people visited, that we came upon the parade grandstand. Nobody had thought of covering it up, except that it was blanketed in thick snow, intensely blue in the sunlight, marked by no human footprint …
The real mystery, however, lay not upon the snow-covered terraces but in the grandstand’s entrails, a dark space, pierced through with steel poles, into which I slithered, following three or four of my comrades. The others, their shovels on their shoulders, were already lining up in ranks to return to the orphanage, just as we embarked on a long exploration of this metallic maze.
For me the adventure had a rather sacrilegious appeaclass="underline" crouched beneath the terraces that were generally occupied by the Party leaders, I had just gained access to the holy of holies of power, the ladder of fame, at the very heart of a symbol! From below, I identified the place where the chief apparatchik stood, then the enclosure for the intelligentsia …
My reverie was shattered by a shout from outside. My comrades were calling me and their voices were vibrant with baleful glee masquerading as friendly concern. “Hey, come on! Get out of there! It’s time to go back. The supervisor’s going to be fuming again …”
Wriggling between two steel poles, I had to climb over a waist-high barrier of beams, slip with more difficulty between the next poles, crouch to pass under a fresh crossbar.
And suddenly I realized that, although this maze was of open scaffolding, there was no way out of it!
My panic was met by wild guffaws. My comrades were helpless with laughter, pointing at me as if I were a caged animal. Perfidious reassurance was added to their mockery: “Don’t worry. You’ve got lots of time till tomorrow. Night night! Sleep well! We’ll tell the supervisor you decided to bed down under the grandstand, ha, ha, ha …”
And they were already moving off, almost forgetting me. I knew this mixture of hardness and indifference, it was the very stuff of our young lives.
Fear robbed me of all judgment. Like a puppet on strings, I bounded about, making the same moves over and over again amid countless metal poles — crouching, swiveling, sliding, skirting … Reaching the last line of poles, I realized they were closer together than the preceding ones and left me no chance of escape! I also became aware that I had instinctively chosen a route that led toward the sunlight and it was the wrong route.
But all routes were wrong in this labyrinth. I repeated the exercise in the opposite direction, already with a resigned foreboding of failure. The geometry of the steel did not change: crossbars, beams, clamps, heavy joists … Halfway along I was struck by an appalling certainty: I was simply moving from one cage into another …
In fact, the grandstand’s skeleton was nothing but a sequence of cages!
I nevertheless continued right to the end of this tough obstacle course, twisting this way and that, bending double, jumping, crawling flat on my face … At the other end of the grandstand — the same structure, the same trap, with spaces too narrow …
My panic caused the energy of a cornered wild beast to explode within me. I swung around, launched myself into a chaotic charge from one cage to the next, no longer noticing collisions with the flanges of beams, no longer headed in any particular direction … My forehead struck violently against the edge of a platform, my vision became blurred, I stopped and the pain brought me a wild calm, the gloomy acceptance of defeat.
Sunk in the torpor of a condemned man, I saw I was in a vast spiderweb, spun from iron. This three-dimensional trellis was everywhere. The sky, the frozen earth, the shadow of the trees and the sun, everything was seen through a grid of solid bars, indifferent to my fevered presence.
My terror was so profound that, within this prison-like captivity, I must have glimpsed a more immense reality concerning the country I lived in, whose political character I was just beginning to grasp, thanks to snatches of conversation intercepted here and there … Much later the memory of this metallic straitjacket would make me think of my compatriots’ despair in the face of ubiquitous censorship and police control and, above all, the impossibility of leaving the country, breaking through the armature of the Iron Curtain. All across that vast territory the same grandstands, the same slogans from loudspeakers, the same leaders’ portraits. And beneath all the terraces, identical steel traps with no way out. I was not yet familiar with the concept of a “totalitarian regime.” But the intimate sensation of what could be experienced in one took hold of me at that moment, in the chill bowels of that symbolic structure …
I resumed my journey with the numb movements of a sleepwalker, guided by the vague hope of slipping out beneath the lowest tier of the terraces, at the front of the grandstand. Now with each step I took I had to crouch a little lower. As I progressed toward this improbable way out, the cages became smaller. My calculation was not incorrect, the first tier, some fifteen inches from the ground, could have allowed me to slip through to the outside. But that took no account of the thickness of the ice, a black layer of which held the base of the skeleton in its grip. I lay full length upon the frozen surface, attempted to thrust my head under the bottom tier, which caused my shapka to fall off, with my cheek against the snow …
No, to escape, I would have had to grind away at that grainy crust or else cause it to melt. The idea of the thaw crossed my mind, but only to confirm the folly of such a notion: yes, remaining there until the fine weather in April …
I shook my head to rid myself of this vision and at that moment I saw a little spot of red encrusted in the ice. I touched it and recognized the remnant of a child’s balloon, one of those that brought color to the grandstands during the two parades. The notables’ children sometimes let them go, and, as we trod the asphalt in our enthusiastic ranks, we would watch these brightly colored bubbles vanishing into the depths of the sky … At that moment I was stretched out beneath the enclosure where they generally corralled such children and their mothers. The red balloon must have burst, fallen under the terraces, got caught on a beam …
I felt the gulf that separated me from the child who had lost it. I pictured a boy of my own age, living in a family, watching the parade, not in the middle of a crowd of strangers but on the grandstand, with his parents. I did not think, “a rich kid,” it was more that I sensed the texture of a life so different from my own, a maternal presence at his side, the solidity of a mode of existence this boy would share with some other children in the enclosure. The impossibility of imagining his way of life coincided in my mind with my inability to escape from these steel cages.
Less surprised than before, I noticed the remnants of another balloon above me, blue, this one, dangling, caught between two bars. I reached up with my hand and …
It was like a shaft of light in the darkness: just where the collapsed balloon had been caught, the grandstand’s metal supports formed crisscross patterns that, as the tiers rose higher, appeared to lead out into space!
It was a harsh challenge but hope gave me the strength of a daredevil. I had to lie flat on my stomach across the intersection of the bars, catch hold of the next crossover, haul myself up to its level, like a garment thrown over a fence, catch my breath, and, already feeling the pain of its sharp edges pressing into my diaphragm, resume this upward scramble.
Heave, balance a moment on a plank, wriggle like a lizard, grip again, thrust again …
The final lunge was performed with almost excessive vigor, with contempt for the vanquished monster. I gripped the highest bar, pivoted, grasped the topmost platform, straddled it, sat down upon the snow-covered timber.