He was thin, like a water bird, his shoulders stooped; bald-headed, in his frighteningly gaunt face two pure dark-brown eyes burned — two pure burning eyes, yet eyes not burning from an inner fire but merely reflecting back, like two still mirrors, that something is burning outside.
By the third day they all understood that for him the camp was not a camp, work was not work, summer was not summer, that for him there was neither swimming nor any of the pleasant restful joy of holiday-time, which tends to predominate at such gatherings. He asked for and received new footwear from the organizers (they found a pair of boots for him, hanging from a nail in the shed), which he wore the whole day long, going up and down the camp but never once leaving its confines, never ascending the peak, never descending the peak, never strolling around the lake, never even going for a walk on the wooden planks across the Mossland; he remained there inside, and when he happened to appear here or there, he walked around this way and that, looking to see what the others were doing, passing through all of the rooms in the main building, stopping to pause behind the backs of the painters, the printmakers, the sculptors, and deeply engrossed, observing how a given work was changing from day to day; he climbed up into the attic, went into the shed and the wooden hut, but never spoke to anyone, and never replied with even a single word to any of the questions, as if he were deaf and mute, or as if he didn’t understand what was wanted of him; perfectly wordless, indifferent, insensate, like a specter; and when they, all eleven of them, began to watch him, as Grigorescu was watching them — they came to the realization, which they discussed among themselves that evening around the fire (where Grigorescu was never seen to follow his companions, as he always went to sleep early) — the realization that yes, perhaps his arrival was strange, his shoes were odd and so was his cardigan, his sunken face, his gauntness, his eyes, all of it was completely so — but the most peculiar thing of all, they established, was what they hadn’t even noticed until now, yet it was the very strangest of alclass="underline" that this illustrious creative figure, always active, was here, where everyone else was at work, yet idle, perfectly and totally idle.
He wasn’t doing anything: they were astonished at their realization, but even more at the fact that they hadn’t noticed it right at the beginning of the camp; already, if you cared to count, it was getting on to the sixth, the seventh, the eighth day; indeed some were preparing to put the finishing touches on their artworks already, and yet only now did the thing in its entirety appear to them.
What was he actually doing.
Nothing, nothing at all.
From that point on, they began to watch him involuntarily, and on one occasion, perhaps the tenth day, they realized that at daybreak and throughout the mornings, when most of the others were asleep, there was a relatively long stretch of time during which Grigorescu, although commonly known to be an early riser, did not appear anywhere; a period of time when Grigorescu went nowhere; he was not by the log hut, nor by the shed, neither inside nor out: he simply wasn’t to be seen, as if he had become lost for a certain period of time.
Propelled by curiosity, on the evening of the twelfth day, a few of the participants decided to rise at dawn on the following day and try to investigate the matter. One of the painters, a Hungarian, took the responsibility of waking the others.
It was still dark when, having confirmed Grigorescu not to be in his room, they circled the main building, then went out through the main gate, came back again, went back to the wooden hut and the shed, only to find no trace of him anywhere. Puzzled, they looked at each other. From the lake, a gentle breeze arose, dawn was beginning to break, slowly they were able to make out each other; the silence was total.
And then they became aware of a sound, barely audible and impossible to identify from where they stood. It came from a distance, from the most outlying part of the camp, or more precisely, from the other side of that invisible border where the two outhouses stood, which itself marked the boundary of the camp. Because, from that point on, although it was not marked, the terrain ceased to be an open courtyard; nature, from whose grasp it had been seized, still had yet to take the terrain back, yet no one expressed any interest in it: a kind of abandoned, uncivilized, and rather ghastly no-man’s land, upon which the campsite’s owners made no visible claim beyond its use as a dumping-ground for waste matter, from dilapidated refrigerators to everyday kitchen garbage, everything imaginable, so that with the passage of time tenacious, feral weed-growth, nearly impenetrable and almost head-high, covered the entire area; thorny, dark, and hostile vegetation, without use and indestructible.
From somewhere beyond, from a point in this undergrowth, they heard the sound filtering toward them.
They did not hesitate for long regarding the task that lay ahead: uttering not one word, they simply looked at each other, nodded silently, threw themselves into the thicket, breaking forward through it, toward something.
They had gone in very deep, a good distance from the buildings of the campsite, when they were able to identify the sound and establish that someone was digging.
They might have been near, for it was clearly audible to them by now, as the tool was pressed into the earth, the soil thrown up, hitting the horsetail grass with a thud, spreading out.
They had to turn to the right, and then make ten or fifteen steps forward, but they got there so quickly that, losing their balance, they almost went plunging downward: they were standing at the edge of an enormous pit, approximately three meters wide and five long, at the bottom of which they glimpsed Grigorescu as he worked, deliberately. The entire hole was so deep that his head was hardly visible, and in the course of his steady work, he had not at all heard their approach as they just stood at the edge of the giant pit, just looking at what was there below.
There below, in the middle of the pit, they saw a horse — life-sized, sculpted from earth — and first they only saw that, a horse made from earth; then that this life-size earth-hewn horse was holding its head up, sideways, baring its teeth and foaming at the mouth; it was galloping with horrific strength, racing, escaping somewhere; so that only at the very end did they take in that Grigorescu had eradicated the weeds from a large area and dug out this tremendous ditch, but in such a way that in the middle part he had stripped the earth away from the horse, running with its frothing ghastly fear; as if he had dug it out, freed it, made this life-sized animal visible as it ran in dreadful terror, running from something beneath the earth.
Aghast, they stood and watched Grigorescu, who continued to work completely unaware of their presence.
He has been digging for ten days, they thought to themselves by the side of the pit.
He has been digging at dawn and in the morning, all this time.
Below someone’s feet, the earth slipped, and Grigorescu looked up. He stopped for a moment, bowed his head, and continued to work.
The artists felt ill at ease. Someone has to say something, they thought.
It’s superb, Ion, said the French painter, in low tones.
Grigorescu stopped again, climbed up a ladder out of the pit, cleaned the spade of the earth clinging to it with a hoe lying ready for that purpose, wiped his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief, and then came toward them; with a slow, broad movement of his arm, he indicated the entire landscape.