Читать книгу The Praetor and Other Stories - Aurel Stancu - Страница 10

THE FISHERMAN’S CAP

“What have I done wrong, Costel? Did I upset you in any way? Did I ask you to share the firm between you and me according to the percentage we put into it? Did I hire a lawyer to take care of that? Why don’t you want to talk it over? At least to talk. I might not be right, for all I know.”

“Of course you’re not right, Nicoleta. What percentage are you talking about? This firm’s going bankrupt, you know that. The liquidator’s done his job by the book. What else do you want from me?”

With her hands joined together, with a look pouring out like a steam of blood which is leaving the body, with a voice broken by emotion, Nicoleta was taking great pains to reach the heart of the man who was now pretending he hardly knew her.

Her plumpness was a thing of the past, she was nothing but skin and bone now, only her explosive breasts and sharp eyes reminding one of what she had once looked like. Although her body had somehow shrunk, she still had the stubbornness of a boxer hit by a far stronger opponent—she hit back not wanting to let herself get beaten.

It was very hard to get over her husband’s death. Her man had been as big as a mountain—instead she had a handful of bones buried. One Saturday, at the age of thirty, after the last shovelful of earth had been thrown on his grave, she found herself alone, with two sons, and penniless. Her wealth, which had made her relatives, friends, and the strangers in town jealous, came down to a firm in debt, with her not being able to get its full money’s worth. The bankruptcy adjudged by the Ministry of Finance virtually wiped the memory of the ten years she had spent with Mihai. There were a lot of ambiguities, for he had never explained anything to her about his partnership with Costel and where all that money she spent without counting came from.

After Mihai’s death and the bankruptcy she began to ask questions. How could Mihai have signed the paper giving up the restaurant if he had been confined to bed for half a year and had his pains eased only by morphine?

“You’re asking too many questions and they’re all stupid, Nicoleta! For four years you didn’t find the time to wonder what had happened and now that the liquidator’s sold everything, how should I know what happened? I shared everything with Mihai as if he were my brother—maybe because of his illness he was no longer able to manage his business. So forget it!”

Burly and sluggish but still quick-minded, Costel felt all his cells rebelled each time Nicoleta was in wait for him. He tried hard to stay calm and always looked for a reason to get rid of her. He and Mihai had been partners in several firms for almost ten years. Things went well for quite a while and they even managed to open a restaurant and a hotel in the heart of the town, which was a good stroke of business in a place with about 300,000 inhabitants. As partners they never argued. They had their way of making it up with each other, giving in or getting angry at the same time, always shaking hands at the end.

More often than not, when they appeared in public together they were taken for brothers. How they did business, how they split their money between them was always a secret. They never told or let their wives interfere. As a matter of fact, the two of them breathed out through all their pores their hatred of women, which they often showed by their rough and vulgar attitude towards their wives.

“How come you don’t care about the fate of your former partner’s wife? How come the restaurant belongs only to you and the liquidator’s never touched it? Can’t you see something is wrong here? Aren’t you afraid of God?” Nicoleta insisted as if she had nothing else to lose.

“I agreed to take the restaurant and he the hotel, why don’t you want to understand it? I’ve told you that before, time and again. And now will you excuse me, I want to go fishing. You couldn’t have chosen a worse time to come and nag me,” the man blazed up while loading in the boot of his car the expensive fishing tackle he had brought all the way from Holland.

“The point is how come Mihai’s firm went bankrupt and yours didn’t? How come you two split up after Mihai fell ill? You see, all these questions have been nagging me for quite a while. Don’t you think you’re angering God by not willing to clear this mess up? Isn’t it your duty to dispel my doubts?” Nicoleta tried again to appeal to the emotions of the man who for ten years had entered her house as a great obliging friend.

“Will you leave me alone, woman? That’s God’s work if you ask me.… Sorry, no time to talk. Going fishing.”

For ten long years Mihai and Costel had been inseparable. They had done business and sexual orgies together in accordance with their wishes, time, and power. They had never accounted for anything and had been so close that they even shared, without any scruples, the same prostitutes during the same night. During their bilges the fiddlers played their fiddles so passionately that they broke their strings, while the gypsy women danced in the most luring ways. Long, hard bilges, when they left a restaurant at this end of the town to find themselves in another at the other end, just before dawn.

“You know what I think? I think you forged Mihai’s signature after he fell ill. I think you separated your business from Mihai’s by forging papers,” Nicoleta pressed on to Costel’s despair, the man finding it harder and harder not to punch her in the face. “Think of your children, you’ve got two, like I have, and you promised my husband while he was on his deathbed to take care of us.”

“You crazy woman, I know it’s hard for you, but everything I did I did with Mihai’s consent—he was clear-minded when he signed the papers in front of the notary,” Costel said slowly, trying not to lose control.

“Did he really know what he was signing? Didn’t the notary have a finger in the pie? And what if I sue you? What if I take the case to court?” asked Nicoleta, encouraged by the man’s calm.

“You’re completely out of your mind! The next thing you’ll say will be that I killed your husband! Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I didn’t kill him and I didn’t bankrupt the firm either. So, good-bye and good luck.”

“Isn’t it funny that, after he died, only Mihai’s firm went bankrupt? In those moments I didn’t realize it, I was stunned by what was to become of me and the children, what with Mihai’s imminent death and everything.”

Nicoleta and Mihai got married in such a hurry that the eighteen-year-old girl hardly realized it. She was a college freshman majoring in chemistry and met Mihai, who was ten years older than she was, in a student bar where people danced like mad. An ordinary encounter, nothing special. Until they danced an Argentine tango together, he with a rose between his teeth. That dance melted her heart. They met again several evenings in a row, and then other tangos followed while all the others preferred to dance to Metallica. After a month of dancing dates, Mihai, who looked like a very prosperous man, a winner, a man who seemed to know what he wanted, loaded with money, well-connected, and self-confident, proposed to her. Nicoleta said yes in a hoarse voice. She was dying with happiness. Her parents had been torturing her with all kinds of customs and traditions universally recognized by people of the old-fashioned mentality. The girl thought that she would escape from the hell at home and that this marriage was destiny’s lucky break. So they got married in no time, had an almost bourgeois wedding, then she gave up college and changed into an easy-going person, with minor satisfactions. In less than a year the magic love was gone as if it had been just a dream. Now she had to become a perfect housewife, and then a perfect wife. She gave birth to two boys, one after the other, one per year. They came so fast she didn’t even realize what it meant to have two children.

“You know something, Nicoleta? You can talk to the notary if you want, I’ll take you there,” said Costel coming down a peg. “Mihai signed everything in his presence.… I really don’t know who’s pounding these ideas into your head. Sorry again, I must be off, no time for you!”

“Tell me, Costel, who can swear you didn’t bribe the notary? I think I know you well enough, I know what stuff you’re made of, to suspect you might have destroyed Mihai.”

After the children were born, Nicoleta’s marriage turned into a nightmare. Soon she found out that her husband’s problem was related to sex and she had no other choice but to accept the situation. Mihai’s sexual complex was changing into a guilt one, which made him violent and unpredictable. Rumor had it that he had chosen to have sex with both men and women. More than that, he started to beat her for no apparent reason: he usually punched her hard in the mouth. On the other hand, his jealousy was possessive and aggressive. Even the simple fact that a man glanced at Nicoleta in the street was seen as a potential sign of unfaithfulness and the punishment followed suit: a broken lip, a swollen cheek, a tumefied eye. Not that there wasn’t any truth in it. Whenever Mihai was not around, Nicoleta enjoyed playing the temptress. She put on ostentatious clothes and walked provocatively. That seemed to be her only way of taking revenge on Mihai. In public life a powerful, virile businessman, at home a beast. The good side of his character was that he never let his family lack anything. The woman dressed in smart expensive clothes and was allowed to spend as much money as she wished. That was in fact the reason why she had never thought of divorcing him or worried about the future.

“I’m begging you, Costel, think of my children and yours, the tables might be turned on you sometime,” the woman insisted.

Preoccupied, Costel no longer heard or saw her. He was about to leave, cramming into the boot the rest of the things he needed for the fishing day. He got in the car, taking a roundabout way as if Nicoleta were a dangerous obstacle. His wife, Geta, sat down next to him, disturbed by the scene she had witnessed, dumb with fear.

“What’s real about all this?” she dared ask, forgetting for a moment the small part—that of a doll—she had been playing in Costel’s life.

Unlike Mihai, Costel never beat his wife; on the other hand, he never took her opinions into account. He just mumbled while driving away:

“What was I supposed to do, think of his children or ours? I had no other choice. If Mihai had lived, we’d have saved both of us. He hadn’t, so I saved only myself.”

Geta gave up and started to weep. The day which had promised to be so rewarding had a bad start.

Nicoleta’s life went from bad to worse when the doctors found out Mihai had liver cancer and said he had no chances to survive. There followed infernal months which she faced stubbornly. The tragedy of Mihai’s terminal illness was doubled by his bankrupt business. The hotel, the cars, almost everything was put on sale, except for their home, the flat, the two rooms in which she and her two sons lived.

In the meantime, Costel’s business flourished and it was only four years later that she began to wonder. Hard, answerless questions.

Costel’s car got to the River Prut an hour before the middle of a torrid day. It was eighty-six degrees, and the man let out a curse when he saw that, because of Nicoleta’s nagging questions, he had left home the cap he always wore when he went fishing.

He was crazy about fishing, fully enjoying his moments in the company of water creatures. Now and then he took his wife along, especially when he wanted to catch wells. Two Sundays before he had been misled by the local newspaper: there was a photo of one of his friends there, with a wells in his arms weighing about 170 pounds. All the fishermen had turned green with envy. A week before, when they had phoned him to bring a sack of salt and a few cartons of beer to the River Prut—apparently his friends had caught a wells weighing 200 pounds—he had taken it for granted, rushed to the market, bought the salt, thrown it plus four cartons of beer into the car boot, and driven his car for sixty miles in the heat of the day and on a bumpy country road. When he had got to the river, he wanted to take the sack down first but one of his friends shouted: “Leave the sack there and bring us the beer, we’re dying of thirst. That damned wells, it’s still in the water, hasn’t moved yet, waiting for you I guess!”

So he promised to take revenge on them and even catch a huge fish. Today, however, the heat was melting the ground and he could barely stand it.

“You’d better sit under that willow tree or, if you want to fish from the boat, put your shirt on your head! The sun is terrible,” said his wife, sitting down in the shadow of a willow tree.

“You know I can fish only from the boat and I can wear only my cap on my head. I wouldn’t have left it home if Nicoleta hadn’t pestered me so much.”

Costel’s wife didn’t say anything. She knew her husband didn’t stand being contradicted. He didn’t beat her but could get vicious when she felt very well so, instead, she began to read a book while the burning heat was stifling the air and he was fishing in the middle of the river.

Soon she fell asleep and, two hours later, when she woke up she looked at the boat but couldn’t see her husband. She jumped to her feet, rushed to the edge of the river bank and saw Costel sprawled on the bottom of the boat. She shouted at him and then she ran to the nearest fisherman who was also fishing from a boat.

When they took Costel out from the boat there was foam at his mouth and he was unconscious. At the hospital the doctors gave the verdict: Costel had had a sun-stroke. His chances to survive were very little. There followed a week of waiting without any guarding angel around, after which the man came out alive but paralyzed. A vegetable.

Ten days later Nicoleta called. She didn’t hear about what had happened to Costel. She was still angry when Geta picked up the phone.

“Costel wanted so much to get away from me that he dropped his fishing cap on the ground. I found it and wanted to restore it to him but he left in a hurry. I’ll send it to you tomorrow, I don’t need anything that belongs to you, even if the cap was a gift from Mihai.”

And she hung up without waiting for a reply. Costel’s wife was just about to say a long forgiving prayer for deliberate or non-deliberate mistakes.…