— Have a seat, please. Have a seat. Monica will come any moment now. Have a seat. Was at Ploieşti myself some years ago. Met your sister, the ISEP graduate, at a youth action meeting — it was a great pleasure for me. Who’d have thought there’d be a family tie one day? To have met your sister, who’s even the director. . can’t figure out how great the family resemblance is, but it was her, for sure.
Hand on briefcase again, the guest gave me another long look.
— My sister never worked at Ploieşti.
— That’s what you wrote, no? Your sister’s the director. There can’t be a mistake. Monica was saying. . as I know very well.
Was ready to strangle him. There was nothing else to do, and the words grit between my teeth like sand.
— There was no accident with your leg either? No poor grades in Russian and chemistry? Which means that nothing’s for certain anymore: not the stupid letters, the ads in the personals, not even the spelling mistakes? So maybe your Excellency’s the Swiss ambassador, or some long-lost brother of mine, or maybe the prosecutor who’ll be asking for my head?
All that was a useless bother. Everything was already lost. The obliquely, vengefully smirking visitor looked me straight in the eye and said:
— Mhm. That’s how the first letter is, till we get to know each other. My sister’s actually a manager in Bârlad. Doesn’t have anything to do with Ploieşti.
— Whatever, whatever. . my mistake. My memory lets me down sometimes. In any case. . remember very well that the director said her name. Still. . won’t insist if you don’t want to wait. . Maybe call and drop by tomorrow. .
Resumed a more respectful tone. My words kept dragging themselves out, but the burley, wide-faced engineer was already at the door, ready to leave, briefcase and topcoat in hand. With his hand on the door, he turned to me and smiled. Yes, he’d drop by tomorrow or telephone.
The door clicked behind him. Should have broken down the door, run downstairs after him. He couldn’t leave like that, all of a sudden, without explaining himself — it would be necessary to say: “You mean to say that back there, where you are respected, advanced, and distinguished, no one jumped into the flames? You know nothing, as if you were the Swiss ambassador or something. You were on another shift, in another section, at another factory, in another city, the other madman, the other, at some other time, somewhere else? Have you have no memories of anything, you sentimental fool? My dear fellow citizen, you are a crocodile.”
Time passed: had it been a special meeting, with this navy-blue visitor named Grig, Grigore Butnaru?
Hence: had left my office anyway. There were machines and mechanisms of all kinds. For me, unbearable. . because babies can’t stand typewriters. Repeated the phrase without being able to explain it: it was a watchword, an excusal from indiscretion or refusal. The Chief Engineer watched me run all the way downstairs. That fateful phrase had force — those words had struck him. The crocodile despises me (even now) because of letting myself be pushed into anonymity, because of my correct greetings every morning, my way of bowing sanctimoniously, comme il faut.
My lying and insulting makes me the ideal resident of this coop, but the chief remains cushioned and cordial; he didn’t even want to acknowledge that stupid phrase which did, of course, have force. The powerful and twisted phrase didn’t even touch him; it didn’t strike him at all. The boss remained amiable, absent, self-assured, comfortable, logical, as he went on playing with his fine, fragile hands in a melancholy way. Since long ago, since infancy, he’s had long, nervous fingers. We were classmates once, and back then he had perfect, pallid hands. We were like a bunch of newborns then, and we had memories, we believed in logic to the end, to the bitter end and beyond.
• • •
The new student made his way down the row from the teacher’s desk to the door. He wore a perfect, aggressively white shirt, starched like a board. This new classmate was slender. He had brown hair, and bowing ceremoniously in an almost courtly way, he shook everyone’s hand, a smiling comrade, brisk and manly. Slowly but surely, the others began to fall under the sway of his smile, straight into his palm: conquered. Shrewd, sullen, timid sons of peasants — with hands used to the hoe, the plow, and the scythe — bent over their books till late at night, they regarded him prudently, then with hostility, then mockingly, and after a few more seconds they instinctively wanted to become his future admirers and bodyguards. He shook my hand, and for an instant he looked startled. Our gestures were identical. We bowed. We smiled. We shook hands. He seemed momentarily moved. But he smiled again, walked on, and, after sitting down in his corner, flung me another brief glance.
The new boy was a mediocre student, I understood after a few days. That put him in good standing with his classmates. I asked him during a break if he had brought the “transfer slip” from the political youth organization. He wasn’t part of the organization, he replied. I asked him why. He smiled: in Giurgiu they only let swimmers in, and he didn’t know how to swim. The guys laughed, and I laughed with them. I asked him what his father did. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and he waited until the last trace of cheerfulness had left our faces, and then he answered: his father was working as a laborer in the salt mine nearby. The bell rang. I shot him a brief, friendly signal.
He respected my position among our classmates from the start. Admired and followed by them, he took part, of course more distantly, in their way of following me.
We were then in the last year of high schooclass="underline" Sebastian Caba had acclimated perfectly to his neighbors at the dorm. He became one of them and lost himself in the mass. He didn’t excel at anything. His attentive manner and his cordiality distinguished him. The intensity of my political participation was already descending toward neutrality, but it hadn’t gotten there yet. I’d become despondent when I conjectured that the enthusiasms that had projected me to the front would vaporize so quickly.
Looking at Sebastian, I’d see his father among the workers pushing their barrows among colossal vaults of ice. I’d imagine the nightmare of putting in a hard day’s work under those Gothic elevations. I kept seeing the laborers’ exhaustion, their frozen faces as wasted at the start of the shift as when they all trooped back to the light. I’d hear their blows hacking the great castle of ice, their voices seeking each other among the blocks probed by picks and drills. And so I went on feeling them: abandoned by their kind, aged, occasionally lifting their eyes to some worker nearby, who might die one day, buried among the glaciers of salt.
Our new classmate seemed worthy of the greatest attention. My desire to climb down into those vast, refrigerated burial vaults was greater, though, than my curiosity about the newcomer — greater, too, than any curiosity about the larger social experiment in generosity, compromise, and guilt. I was in a hurry to meet anything that might put the blindness of our poor textbooks to shame, along with our unfledged, youthful ignorance.
The visit to the salt mine could have been arranged right away if I’d spoken with Father. Only, I wasn’t in any shape to attract his suspicions, again.
• • •
Two years had passed since the end of the war. Only at the end of the first year of peace did we return from the camp on the steppe where we had been banished. My new sister was born several months after that.
My parents’ whispering came through the half-open door. I understood they were coming up with names — peculiar names: Katyusha, Sveta, Agnita. Sveta sounded Swedish, masculine. The others were downright incomprehensible. They never had much originality, so I didn’t understand what had gotten into them, or why it was necessary to have another child. I went into their room. The plank bed, somewhat larger than mine, had been made by the carpenter neighbor. The familiar old dining table on which we now ate and the three chairs were all in my room, together with the cupboard made of planks. Ileana, our friend and neighbor, had hidden our beautiful old table and chairs from before our deportation and gave them back when we returned.