This new death will no longer be lost! So you believe. It will regain time, it will remain, it will be stopped. There will be delay or resurrection by an ardent sister who is not sixteen years old anymore, nor twenty. She has learned to defend and preserve! Joy and terror expand — the terror of meeting the other’s joy and terror. The cold doubled, the mirroring in the other, in a narrow place, condemned, where one can’t stay or go, except into an embrace of terror that’s worse than death.
The shadow embraces the emptiness as it was at the beginning, as it was long ago, as it will be tomorrow and forever.
• • •
The factory heaved great columns of smoke and flame at the sky. It demanded the workers’ hands and hardships, not to mention their complete attention. The city would soon hear of the terrible event. At the beginning of the night shift someone had plunged into an enormous pot of molten metal. The burning liquid consumed the man’s body in an instant. All that remained was a brief hiss and the smell of burnt flesh.
On closer investigation, inquiry established that it had been suicide, possibly premeditated. The worker was capable and serious, his behavior uniformly correct: he hadn’t attracted attention. His coworkers sympathetically recalled the way he obstinately gathered his strength to keep up with them and almost always succeeded. They, acknowledged, however, that he was smothered by tiredness, and then he would hurriedly rub his throat as though trying to catch his breath. He would blink rapidly and purse his lips in a way that contracted half his face.
A previous suicide attempt came to light. This essential detail should have curbed interest in the case. It had horrified many, who suffered nightmares for several weeks. Rumors continued to fly. There were vague whispers about some sense of guilt from the war. Some maintained it had been proved; others that it was nothing but an insinuation the authorities pinned on the Captain, who had refused to collaborate.
It was the beginning of 1954. The Captain’s daughter was in her last year of high school. She passed her exams and tried to become a schoolteacher. That would have suited her well. She was calm and coddled by hours of reading. She had a deep respect for her mother’s vocation. Though she was admitted to university, she was soon dismissed: her father had taken an unsolved guilt to his grave. The university advisors told her to find a job — there were enough in the country, which was at the peak of reconstruction. The girl withdrew to a quiet village in the mountains. Several peasants seemed ready to rent her a room, but as soon as they heard she had come as a teacher, they fobbed her off on their neighbors. The village had recently been disturbed by peculiar “teams of agitators” from the distant cities of the plain. Wary of showing their faces, talking in an urban, intellectual way the peasants couldn’t understand, and delivering sly slogans, a host of these “foreigners” had then settled into local households.
The new teacher eventually found a place at the end of the village in the home of Vasile Obreja, an elementary-school teacher like herself.
. . You entered the little vestibule. You heard “Forward!” shouted from somewhere behind the walls. There were two doors on the left, two on the right, and one facing the entrance.
The voice seemed to have come from behind this last door. There, indeed, there sat the master of the house, at a table facing the door. Snowy haired but still robust, he offered you the first room on the left. He wouldn’t hear of money — except, “I have one rule of my own,” he said, “never try to push my wheelchair.” The girl settled comfortably into Obreja’s empty house.
The stubborn villagers refused to send their children to school, let alone come themselves. The young teacher didn’t lose her poise: she kept coming back to them. Despite her slender body, she confronted snow-covered roads and the biting cold. She didn’t make friends. For one of them — a certain old man named Abesei — she showed particular attention and sympathy. He seemed to enjoy their conversations and came to the evening literacy classes regularly. When he was absent for more than a week in a row, she became worried, all the more so because Lică Abesei, his nine-year-old grandson, wasn’t coming to school in the morning either. She climbed the hill to their house. She was forbidden from entering their gates by the father of Lică Abesei, who practically shoved her and yelled that he didn’t need “communists” coming to visit. The peasant was living morosely as a wronged man. Poor, but still the wealthiest householder in the impoverished village, he had just lately become a kulak. Bearish and violent, he hid his son’s boots to keep him from attending the communist school. He kept quarreling with his elderly father, too, who was amused by the relative socially damaging wealth of his son, who had finally enriched himself, just when he shouldn’t. Overjoyed to infuriate his son and to make fun of him, the old man was jubilant. He was enchanted by learning the ABCs and had made a secret pact with his grandson. One of the violent father-son quarrels ended badly, and in the end, very badly for the old man’s heart.
Under Vasile Obreja’s protection, the young lady teacher was able to attend the funeral, which had immediately improved the classroom attendance of Lică Abesei, a weak boy who stammered but was still the smartest kid in class.
Only then did the grumpy loner — the teacher Vasile Obreja — accept his tenant’s request to talk in the evening. More than that, he uttered some of the most curious phrases: “You should read fairy tales, miss. The people who write them are the only ones who teach us morality. Remember the syllogism of the mathematician: Babies are illogical. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. Illogical persons are despised. Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. That’s what the mathematician said, and I will accompany you to those crocodiles.”
The young teacher used to run from one edge of the village to the other. Once in a while, when she came into the village, a cheerful and energetic vitiated man would help her: the forestry administrator, Dan Vasilescu, who had come to the mountainous village and its clean, fresh air, to cure himself of a morphine addiction. Her neighbor, Vasile Obreja, helped her more often with the literacy classes.
She stayed in that village for two years. After that she was hired to assist in the construction of a factory in the capital. She worked as a low-level technician, a job that could have been handled by a high-school graduate with some capacity for drawing. Her modest diligence won the sympathy of her superiors. After the factory was built and put into operation, she remained in the “technical department,” which was an unusual reward, because the privilege of residence in the capital was almost impossible to obtain. She took classes in the evenings at the technical school and when she graduated she became a knowledgeable technician, because she knew — from her time on the worksite — many more details about the construction of the factory than any of the other employees who were hired later.
To everyone’s surprise, however, a few years later, she left the factory and the city: after a month of medical leave, she returned friendly and energetic, but on her first day back on the job, she requested the vacation days that were due to her for that year’s work, and after that she never came back. Her former coworker Sebastian Caba, who had become the chief engineer of the factory, probably approved her transfer, because the big city was too noisy for her anyway.
After a while, they no longer talked about her. Someone who had visited the factory where she ended up confirmed that she hadn’t changed, and hearing this news, they never thought of her again.