The days went on, one after the next, like an endless, lazy Sunday. Only with difficulty could he let himself be known and loved, but he used his charismatic voice to maintain his frail ally, his girl, his faithful audience of one in her state of sickly admiration. Then the long day came when freezing silence barred the door to his room and the heavy door to the shed where he now gazed at the dusty scooters, sleds, and wooden horses — which his little friend played with while waiting for him to come home.
The hanged-man pendulum would vibrate and reel in the shed filled with old toys. Thirsting for death, the body would swing in its frantic haste toward oblivion. Then the rope broke under his serene face — perhaps the last favor granted to his daughter: her victory over his desire for death. A red streak encircled his neck, a magic sign of salvation. The dead parent rose before his daughter’s eyes like a curse and a mockery.
You would have to forget the body shattered by weakness and the fearful exhaustion of the following months. The teapot would escape from your hands, the fork’s jabs went astray, and the rows of books overlapped nonsensically. Forget what was and what followed, down to the final traces. Escape to the mountains and stare for hours on end at the empty room and the tall, polished wooden bed in the house that belonged to the schoolteacher, Vasile Obreja; listen to the swish of the small rubber wheels rolling his wheelchair; look at the mountains, the spring, the forest; lose yourself in the silence of the evenings under the pines; gaze vacantly without seeing or hearing, as if nothing could have been, nor could be. Forget the feeble little girl executing instructions from a book of popular medicine, panting over the half-man, giving rhythm to despair. Forget her obstinate will to revive him, the miracle of salvation, and the somnolent weeks when the dead man reeled, teetering in his second birth, under the care of the child who had brought him back. Forget the extravagant laughter of the suicide with the beautiful face whose noose you untied to bring back a pale, waxy countenance, which lacked the ugliness that turns hanged men’s cheeks to stone.
You can’t lose if you understand. Everything would have been lost if I died: you can’t lose if you hold out, he used to say. You, the girl addressed, should understand, and you shouldn’t lose and you should lose: you should want to lose what you don’t understand, you shouldn’t want to understand, you should forget that you lose, that you leave, that you are climbing the mountains of exile, abandoned, lied to, cast out of the game of lying, without defense. You should forget when and who and what some people say. You should look for other words, objects, hours, habits, and you should tremble once again beneath the resonance of a nearly forgotten word — that thunder — a word from the past, from so long ago that it never existed: you should tremble once again so that the whole thing can begin anew, from the present, from the past, from the past passed in the great sleep.
Those brief, rapid, cunning gestures would have to be forgotten too, and those tenderly paternal movements with their unbearable lightness: the pale hands trembling on the throat, the redness that marked the failed suicide attempt, the duty to start again, despairing and dying all over again, the gestures of refused salvation, of forced rehabilitation, the demented stubbornness to revive him, to punish him, to deny his peace, to force his resurrection, to prepare another death, the same death — his drunkenness and fairy tales and walks and promises: they would all have to be resumed, restarted, reset, without rest and without end.
Looking at the mountains, the orphan girl remembered the Sunday-ness of some mornings on the bridge or at the station, walking with her tender father, that traitor; she saw, once more, the mountains, the narrow hall where Mr. Obreja’s wheelchair rested, the race of spring, the wind blowing through the pines and words — words that were shared with that coward. Among the drifting aromas of long, straight candles, like frozen pine trees in the mountains: there you should forget your hands that once supported the dead man’s heavy body, your burdensome memory of death.
You should forget and memorize everything, ransack the hiding places, undo the knots and rip open the seams, you should understand in order to forget those places where nothing can be recovered, ever; you should forget what you’ve forgotten and what you’ve understood, empty yourself of thought, of the past and the present, look at the unseen mountains, the wooden bed, the madness of spring, the schoolteacher Vasile Obreja’s silences that were as cold as massive graves.
It was necessary to gather memories, to rummage through them, to understand them so they could be forgotten, and then the amnesia would have to be checked again and again, for it would have to cover everything so there’d be no need to cheat or engage in the farce of little passing deceptions. You’d have to understand yourself through the suicidal father, destined to pain like a favorite of the gods. The only way would be to forget him — and yourself — so that you’d climb down the mountain estranged from that former girl, aging now into the past, undermined, reborn — in transient, transpired, transpiring time.
You’d have to understand the one you’d lost — unforgivable, incapable of being forgotten — and then you’d understand your own attempt, and assume it to yourself. Because there was no other way to scrap and forget the alienated girl inside yourself that you hated so much and chased away. By now she was a kind of phantom twin. She clung like a shadow. She caught up with you wherever you went, and then you had to feel her breath rise through your body to your nauseated mouth. You would have to feel her mocking gaze burn into the back of your neck, making you feel like a stupid orphan as she rubbed her transparent palm against the whitewashed wall, lost in the mountains at the end of the world.
• • •
Death sends a servant to test the victim, to prepare her, to rotate her slowly toward the nearby faces of the deceased, to stun her with suppressed hopes, to cloud her vision and obscure her desires, to make her fragile and hollow like something that can be triumphantly lifted up.
You were still a solitary little girl, clumsy and hostile. The sap of your femininity rose slowly, with difficulty, always delayed. Seeing the future, you wrapped yourself thinly with a moistened mouth, with large eyes, and that sheen like a shower of lunar snow. Pale as moonlight, you dressed yourself in a nervous body with sinewy legs, transparent hands, and gestures abruptly broken off. Death’s servant worked on your profile, on your body’s curves with their coiled air, the curves of a sad, wounded feline.
You would have accepted isolation as a redemptive tombstone. Or, conversely, impatiently, furiously, you would have started a war with humility itself, to humiliate yourself as much as possible, embracing humiliation while dreaming of a train corridor: an obese woman professor naively babbling lewd provocations and infantile tales in French into the first stranger’s ear. Fear, disgust, depravity. You would have remained withdrawn, faded and dry, otherwise you would have turned into a mad woman or a whore in order to ruin that fat phantom of life.
You had to remain just one moment on the icy threshold of isolation to understand its torture and its weight. Having taken refuge in fragmented gestures and rapid, frightened spasms, you huddled in the cold, waiting, crouched in silence, in sleep. . to understand and receive the gift of suitable trials.
Death drew your father back so that you could see him, stand before him, shake him, resurrect him, so that you could lose him again, irreversibly. Death returned him: to hurt you, to overwhelm you with pain so completely that you’d forget any other form of suffering. The generous gift of death — suffering, your partner on the bleak mountain — makes you ugly without realizing it, leaves you famished, tired, frozen, mocked, and forgotten. The pain erodes the nights, changes and surprises, sharpens senses and thoughts, and prepares a concealed femininity. The men, all the men on earth, had perished in a violent hell, smiling like beautiful cadavers, and the only man worth protecting had collapsed like an ordinary deserter at your feet, his image eclipsing the sun.