He saw again her blond hair, her too-bright eyes, her expressive hands — and then that serious smile, which sometimes used to interrupt him in unexpected agitation, the smile too heavy for her small eyes, which expanded when she made an effort to pay attention, as though she might have fallen silent on hearing another voice, which had been covered by the words she had spoken until then.
… He crossed the street towards Icoanei Park and failed to recognize, in the small park in winter, the image of the gardens where had so often spent the day. Everything was foreign: the snowy paths, the dark trees, naked in their wooden motionlessness, the sparse park benches, the electric lights that burned pointlessly, as though someone had forgotten to turn them off when leaving.
Somewhere near the left-hand gate must be the bench on which, on an October morning in 1932, he had waited for Ann with a sketchbook in his hand, having come to make some sketches of trees for a publicity project he was working on at the time. He didn’t have the courage to look for that bench and, given how much the park had changed, he might not have found it.
He looked at his watch and realized that it was less late than he had imagined: ten minutes to two. At this time Ann might be at their usual bar on Bulevardul Basarab. She was always going out these days, so why would she have remained at home tonight?
This night can’t pass without Ann, Paul said to himself. The thought that he could meet her, if he wished, thrilled him.
He sees the bar on Basarab, the metallic reflections on its walls, the white lights, the circular dance floor like an illuminated island. Ann must be there, among a group of friends, at their usual table. He walks up to her and, looking her in the eyes, says: “Ann, I’m turning thirty tonight. I didn’t even realize it; I remembered it just now by chance and I’ve come so we can clink a glass together. You know how superstitious I am.”
Smiling, she looks at him. “I was waiting for you, Paul. I knew you would come. This night can’t pass without you.”
It was hallucinatory to see this: he felt the warmth of her words, their heat against his cheek. Everything was so present, so close: her black dress, the small silver brooch over her left breast, the silk handbag radiant on the table, the glass of whisky that she gave him with a nervous gesture, as though she wished that there was nothing to separate him from her.
… He came to with a shudder of panic. How much time had he wasted dreaming? He didn’t dare to look at his watch. He glanced around him and couldn’t figure out where he was. He was no longer in Icoanei Park, the street was unknown to him, the houses alien. Beyond those buildings that he didn’t know was a weak blue halo: that lights of Bulevardul Brătianu. He chose to go in that direction, forcing himself to think about nothing. At the first corner he found a taxi stand. The driver was asleep, the frozen engine started with difficulty — and how far, how unbearably far away, was the bar on Bulevardul Basarab!
He hopped out of the car, flinging the door shut and shouted as he passed the doorman: “Pay him, please.”
“Are there a lot people here?” he asked the coat-check girl as he took off his overcoat, not daring to state more clearly the only question whose answer interested him.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned around with an outsized shudder of fright. (I should control myself, he thought.) It was another of the bar’s regulars, a lawyer for an oil company.
“About time I found you, buddy. I’ve been phoning you all day. What’s happening with our hearing tomorrow?”
“What hearing?” Paul asked absent-mindedly, trying to look past the man’s shoulders, towards the interior of the bar, as the curtains at the end of the hall opened.
“What do you mean, what hearing? You know what I’m talking about. Commerce hearing number two, with the Steaua Română refinery. Don’t you know? Number 3623 slash 929. You want to go to trial tomorrow? I say we adjourn. It’s pointless now, just before Christmas. Maybe sometime after the holidays, whenever you’re available. Hey! What do you say?”
Paul gave a vague reply, as he hadn’t been listening and didn’t know what the man was talking about. “Leave it, we’ll see tomorrow
… Excuse me, please, I’m in a hurry, I’m looking for someone…”
“Who are you looking for? There’s nobody in there. I was bored stiff. You should come with me to Zissu’s place.”2
Paul walked away from him, almost without saying goodbye. Nobody, nobody. He repeated the word mechanically, without understanding it. He parted the curtains with a brisk motion. Far away, very far away, it seemed, in the opposite corner of the bar, at a distance that struck him as enormous, impassable, their usual table was empty.
He walked towards it with a mechanical step and forced himself to look fixedly in the direction of that same point with his eyes wide open, as though he wished to retain the image on his retina and prevent himself from transmitting the horrible news towards other centres of pain.
Everything occurred without accident. He dropped, exhausted, into his seat with the air of a man who was worn out yet still controlling his movements.
The piano-player gave him a wave of recognition. “Haven’t seen you around here much lately.”
He replied with a lift of his shoulders, a vague, tired motion that replied to something else, something completely different.
The bar was dimly lit, like a sleeping car at night. He always rediscovered here the atmosphere of a journey, a departure. The city seemed to drift away, losing itself. Ann had drawn up the decoration plans out of friendship for the owner, formerly the manager at the Colonnade Hotel. With childlike enthusiasm she had sketched each detail, so absorbed she was in every new discovery!
“It has to be superb, my dear Paul. Superb, you understand? And look here” — her pencil stopped on the page, indicating a given point — “this will be our table, yours and mine.”
What farcical trick of his memory had reminded him of her forgotten words precisely at this moment, as though the point of her pencil had signalled, months in advance, the exact spot where on a future night, on this very night, he would have to wait for the shadow that no longer came?
And what if, even so, she came even now?
Paul rejected this hope, which he knew to be false. He didn’t want to harbour new vain hopes. Yet the alluring thought persisted: It’s not impossible that she still might come.
No, it wasn’t impossible, he had to recognize that. So many times before, towards morning, when the lights were being turned out, when the jazz music was yawning into silence, when the metal instruments were returning to their cloth bags and only the piano continued to play for the dancers who were washing off their makeup and the coat-check girls or a client who had delayed his departure, so many times, opening the curtains at the end of the hall, pale, wide-awake, dazzling, with her decisive step and her morning smile, Ann had come in.
Paul raised his head, as though to call out to this apparition. But the curtains at the opposite end of the room were motionless; with their heavy folds, their reddish old-copper tone, they separated one world from another.