Not even here in the café, between two drained glasses of beer, dominating all the tables around with his baritone voice and scaring his timid young listeners, is Mr Ştefan D. Pârlea ridiculous. He has an inspired visage and a firm fist. When he speaks, his gaze moves about the surrounding faces, as though seeking a target. A group of adolescents flanks him like a permanent guard, all awkward in their civilian clothing, their first since leaving school. They smoke a lot and badly, sometimes with too great a show of bravura, sometimes with a nervous twitch that betrays the recent memory of furtively lighting up in water closets. Various pamphlets circulate among them, and they read them avidly, commenting aloud, reciting verses, proclamations, manifestos. They all speak with exaggerated familiarity although they’ve never shaken hands, and never met each other before. Between one and two o’clock, the hubbub suddenly ceases. Everybody is looking for the 26 lei needed for the lunchtime special. Coins pass from table to table, coughed up either amicably or with a bit of swearing. The girls are fewer in number, the occasional one lost amidst a group of boys, jaded waifs in trenchcoats, bareheaded, stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes. It’s hard to know what they are: perhaps students, perhaps cabaret dancers, perhaps just streetwalkers.
Then there’s one who looks surprisingly like Louise Brooks, in Lulu. All the boys address her by name — Vally — and she responds to them all with the same sweet, bored smile. She wears a green sweater pulled in boyishly at the waist by a belt and on her head a scrap of a beret — also green — that leaves her three-quarters bare head rounded off with a fringe. She visited our table and greeted Pârlea with a vague gesture, raising her index finger to tip the brim of an imaginary hat.
‘Got a smoke?’ she asked me in passing, and I proffered my pack of Regalas. She took one, frowning for some reason.
‘You look like the heroine in Wedekind.’
‘I know. Lulu.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s what they tell me.’
She went away, her gait more casual and indifferent than lazy.
I’ve discovered why Vally turned up her nose while accepting my cigarette. At the Central they only smoke ‘workingman’s’ cigarettes, cheap cigarettes made with black tobacco. Mine was a bourgeois cigarette. Poets, revolutionaries, free people, those with imagination, visionaries, only smoke proletarian tobacco. My poor 30 lei pack was bad manners, an affront. The frown of the girl who looks like Lulu in Wedekind meant: ‘So that’s the kind you are.’
There are other rules of conduct at the Central. Don’t do more than raise a finger to greet someone. Under no circumstances, if you wear a hat, must you take it off. Everybody on first-name terms. But don’t formally introduce yourself to anybody. As a rule, everybody here knows everybody. There’s no time for politeness, lies, frivolity. We’re tired — right? — we’re fed up. Rich people, important people, people with pot bellies can fool about all they like. They’ve the time and inclination for joking around. Not us.
There’s a heavy air of boredom and futility at the Central, despite the constant hubbub. If these fellows aren’t busy being passionate, then they’re pretending to be, if they’re not discouraged, then they play at it. Some of them are very young, aggressive and loud, with pubescent rashes on their faces, young agitators who still haven’t found a job to do. Scattered among them is the occasional attractive adolescent face. There are also a few recent beards and moustaches that are deliberately unkempt, sombre and prophetic. (The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It’s the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.)
Once inside, it’s hard to leave the Central. Indolence grips you, the dishonest notion that you’re waiting for someone when in fact you’re expecting nobody, you’re just fed up with walking the streets aimlessly. The revolving door spins endlessly, bringing in the same characters. They come and go, then five minutes later they’re back at the same table they left. There’s an air of somnolence, stuffiness, dissipation, a taste of ash, a memory of cigarette-ends.
Occasionally there’s a heated exchange of ideas or fists at one or other of the tables, and everyone is briefly shaken from their torpor. Then the passing fuss subsides again in the constant dull din of voices.
There’s a bearded twenty-year-old from Bessarabia who’s supposedly a blacksmith’s son and a genius. He’s translated Alexander Blok and from time to time he comes to life by trumpeting a verse from ‘The Scythians’.
*
I came across Vally on her own, leaning back against the bar and watching nothing in particular through half-closed eyes, as though through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. She’s a beautiful girl and her sleek fringe gives her an amiable air which the cigarette doesn’t entirely dispel. I went up to her and made a proposal that caught her off-guard.
‘How about taking a walk?’
For a moment she seemed not to comprehend. (‘A walk? Why?’) She stopped before the doorway, hesitating once more. Rain.
‘I hope you’re not put off by a drop of water?’
She slowly turned up the collar of her trenchcoat, stuck her hands in her pockets and set off with a slightly heroic attitude, as if confronting a storm.
The old pleasure of strolling in the rain. The shining wet asphalt, the twinkling of distant neon signs, people rushing by, taxi horns blaring and the steady, general, generous rain falling on the rooftops …
We walked for a good while without speaking. I listened to her footsteps on the asphalt, sounding a little too forced and energetic for her, as though ready for a race of several kilometres. She wore a lightweight raincoat and the rain struck it noisily, making what was little more than a drizzle sound like a storm.
‘Why do you come to the Central?’
She didn’t reply for a moment. She continued walking, bent forward slightly to spare her cheeks from the falling rain. Finally she spoke.
‘It’s cheap. Lunch costs 26 lei.’
‘So you stay all day? I took you for a student.’
‘I am. Kind of. I’m in my third year but I still have exams to repeat from the first year. But I get bored, bored to death … I find it hard to sit at home. Nothing I do works out, I’m sick of it.’
‘And you find the Central amusing?’
‘Amusing! … No … Well, I don’t know. I can’t seem to avoid it, that’s all. Wherever I’m coming from, wherever I’m going, I drop in. I step in to see what’s new and get talking with someone or other. Next thing you know, time has passed.’
She talks in a jaded, indifferent tone, either from great boredom or great tiredness.
‘But have you never tried to get away from there?’
‘Yeah, sure, but I’ve never managed it. In the end, I’m happy the way I am. You think it’s a big deal if you manage to stay away from the Central?’
‘Why are you speaking as if we know each other? You met me three days ago. You don’t know who I am or what I want.’
‘So what? That’s how I talk with everyone. I think you’re smart enough not to let it bother you.’
‘Thanks for your faith in me. But it’s about you, not about me. Doesn’t being over-familiar put you at a disadvantage? A more formal way of speaking doesn’t just mean you’re being polite, it’s also a way of protecting yourself.’
‘How subtle. But I don’t get it. “Protecting yourself.” You’re funny, you really are. What should I be protecting?’
We walked on in silence. Later, I hailed a cab.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know. Wherever you want.’