Читать книгу The Praetor and Other Stories - Aurel Stancu - Страница 6

TIGER AND ANGEL

It was a gentle, quiet night, good for self-healing. Grigore and Elena had been making love as if that had been their last time together. Looking out of the wide open window at the night sky, the man was caressing softly, slowly his lover’s large fleshy thrilled breasts. Fascinated by the stars, Elena kept sighing like a small spring which sent its water to a tiny fall. After such a radioactive embrace, instead of inner peace, a great sadness was digging caverns in their souls. Despair and ecstasy.…

“I won’t let anyone drive our love into a corner…,” he said.

“It’s like a dream, Grigore,” the woman murmured, the moment of ultimate oaths making her shiver. “Don’t let anyone spoil it!”

“Tiger and guarding angel, I’ll be both,” came the whisper.

Throughout his first marriage, the forty-eight-year-old man—even-tempered, knowing his place, and a well-doer—remembered he had been foolish and inexperienced, a little terror to himself. He had attended a vocational school, a night high school, and then a two-year foreman course. Later he regretted he hadn’t had the guts to go to college, the more so as he had to put up with so much caviling from his boss, a mediocre backboneless engineer.

For years he had lived in an unmarried people’s hostel. He had barely made ends meet while attending the vocational school and high school, when he didn’t get the odd job, that is. After the inevitable love at first sight, he had married her, a typist who worked on the building site, thinking he was making the hit of his life. Five empty years, without children, without unexpected emotions, when the only thing he managed to do was to move into a bedsit. His wife thought he was too green, while he found her a full-grown woman. She always kept her feelings in the safe, although an evil rumour had it that she was fooling around with a chief engineer.

Someone kept telling a strange story: Opening her boss’ door one morning to clean the office, the cleaner saw an amazing scene. There was this big fat ass (the chief engineer was a huge man) jerking up and down, accompanied by the caterwauling of a woman stretched on the desk. The cleaner was told to get out, the chief engineer waving at her to leave, without stopping or even turning his head. The same cleaner was said to have seen, a quarter of an hour later, Grigore’s wife leaving the boss’ office.

“You’re a fool if you don’t know how to do it without becoming a subject of gossip,” Grigore said to her calmly.

“It’s a story made up by those who hate me and want to upset you, that’s all,” she defended herself, self-possessed, knowing his reactions too well.

“What if I told you that I hate you because you’re a secretary? There are so many like you who’ve got the same kind of experience. Damn the bitches!” he ended the conversation which, if continued, could have put their hearts on fire.

It just remained a rumour. Not because she might have been man-mad but because of her money had Grigore broken up with his wife. Her father was a shepherd and had made quite a fortune. The old man wanted to buy his daughter a flat and didn’t know how to go about it without his son-in-law finding it. So, just to simplify things, Elena left Grigore. She sued for a divorce and he lied in Court saying he was a violent man who beat his wife day in and day out, didn’t give her any money, and had one love affair after another. In other words, things he had never done.

“You appeared in my life as a nobody and will disappear as a nobody,” his wife said full of satisfaction after their last meeting in Court.

“Better drink the venom now than after growing old next to you. You’ve done me a great favour by divorcing me,” he hit back, smiling like a free man.

With his second wife he had lived for twenty years, sometimes being happy, sometimes just content—a smooth life. Neither beautiful nor ugly, the woman never stood out or made a show of herself. They had two children together, a boy and a girl, who were students now. At one time his second wife fell ill and was operated on—genital cancer. She fought five years with the disease which advanced ruthlessly. Nothing could be done. The end was terrible. She carried the memories of their marriage to the grave.

Elena was nineteen when she married a man from the same village, about four years her senior, and they moved up to town right away, her husband becoming a sailor there. The young woman had a strong body and a bright face. The sailor didn’t let her get a job so she did only the housework. She gave birth to four children, one after another, a child a year, and then she stopped realizing it was too hard to raise them.

Marriage began to soften down her stubbornness on the very wedding day when she was the first to overthrow the bucket full of water just outside the church, traditionally a sign that the woman wanted to keep her predestined husband under her thumb.

At first Elena’s husband made short voyages, three months long at the most, then they needed more and more money so the sailor had to remain at sea six months at a time. Soon she felt the effects of the long separation and found it harder and harder to live by herself. Year by year Elena suppressed her wishes, drowned her dreams, and forgot her ideals. She was a dependable mother and housewife, that was about all. She put on weight to finally slip into bulimia. She was now a mountain of a woman, her breasts as big as buckets, her bottom as huge as a tank. She made the ground quake when she was walking.

The sailor, however, was happier and happier with his wife: on the one hand, he imagined that the way she had changed made her less attractive; on the other hand, now it was easier for him to make love to her because she came quickly and fell fast asleep. There’s plenty of time in the ports to look for real women, he thought to himself while coming back home to rest after long months of work on the ship.

Grigore and Elena had been living on the same floor ever since the block of flats was built. As neighbors, they had been getting along fine. Not that they had visited each other very often—they had just been on friendly terms. Their children had got together easily, attending the same school and having the same pastimes. They were good children, not brilliant but always decent.

After losing his wife, Grigore had grown accustomed to having a coffee with his neighbors and, step by step, he had become fond of Elena. Nothing out of the ordinary or ostensible, though. Neither of them remembered when their story had really begun. They had never acknowledged their love, thinking they were behaving normally, but their meetings had become more and more frequent and their talks over a cup of coffee longer and longer. Both of them were vulnerable, there was no woman in his life, while her husband was far away. It was these circumstances that made what happened between them possible.

On that morning, around ten o’clock, Grigore had just got up. He had been on the night shift, slept only for three hours and, like a robot, gone over for a coffee. With her back to him, leaning over the kitchen table, Elena was looking for the coffee box on the upper shelves. Suddenly, the man took her in his arms from behind, unbuttoned her dressing gown and penetrated her—she just accepted what was happening to her, abandoning herself on the table. They made love quietly, without looking at each other, as if it were unavoidable, beyond their resistance. Then they broke loose in the bedroom.

“I’m no man, you’re no woman. God knows what’s to become of us!” he said at the end.

“Who cares?” the woman replied, stirred by words unheard and not understood before, which sounded like a great challenge.

Physical attraction made them lose their lucidity. Soon enough they were caught in the act by the children and a huge scandal followed. Both his children and hers turned against them. And the sailor was about to return. He had already phoned from a Turkish port.…

“I’m coming home, honey. I miss you so much,” Grigore heard him saying while he was kissing Elena’s strong neck.

Their five-month happiness was traumatized now. They didn’t understand why the people around them didn’t accept their affair. The children’s attitude worried them too.

“I’ve learned to look around me and keep quiet. It matters a lot not to judge other people’s lives. They may be family but they’d better mind their own business,” said Grigore.

“Please, Grigore, don’t let them ruin our relationship. Only you can face up to them.…”

* * * *

The next day around noon, Grigore went to the steel and iron works but didn’t stop at the furnace, his working place; he stopped at the mill, where no one knew him. He was dressed up as if for a special event. He climbed on the platform right when the steel-casting machine was being checked at the end of the house. The steelworkers didn’t have time to wonder who the stranger was and what he wanted. The man stopped at the edge of the gangway, took off his jacket, folded it neatly on the rail, and jumped into one of the pots which were full of liquid steel. Everyone stood still.

Instead of vanishing into the bubbling vapors of the newly founded steel, the man started to sizzle on the thin but hard crust which had already taken shape on the surface of the pot. The self-murderer was howling with pain while the workers were running about madly, trying to do something and retrieve him from the ingot moulds. It smelled terrible, of burnt flesh. At last, someone brought a crane over the stand and two workers managed to lift him from there. The ambulance came in no time but, on the way to hospital, the man died.

* * * *

Throughout his entire career, prosecutor Nicolita had had to deal with all kinds of misfortunes and horrors but never with such a suicide. No one knew who the self-murderer was or what to say because everything had happened so fast. They found the man’s jacket and, in the breast pocket, a farewell letter. In simple words, the man wrote how Elena had changed his life, describing his love as something just fit to inspire tearful romances and tame hard hearts. Late at night, after their last embrace, they had both decided to commit suicide. “Our love is like a rough diamond and our families don’t allow us to give the diamond its bright facets,” wrote Grigore. “Without my beloved I’ll be good for nothing. The ultimate proof of our love is that we’ve decided to die at the same time: I, swallowed by the liquid steel, she, after swallowing the poison. If we can’t enjoy our love, at least we can save it through death.”

Nicolita and his investigating team felt a cold shiver down their backs and hurried to Elena’s flat.

“I can’t wait to see the woman who could make one do such a horrible thing,” said Nicolita while they were in the car.

“I wonder how such a woman could be recognized in the street,” replied a younger investigator.

“We’re making a big mistake if we think only of the body, of the physical pleasure,” said the prosecutor. “The hot lips, the breasts’ aroma, the skin, soft and smooth like rose petals, all the spoiling.… That’s quite a lot. But the heart.…”

“That may be quite a lot, but we live in a world of speed,” insisted the young man. “Such a suicide is throwing us back into the last century, the perfect time for boarding-school novels.”

“If only we could get there in time,” the prosecutor cut it short worriedly.

They were ready to break the door of the flat but first they rang the bell several times. At long last a woman stupid with sleep, dressed in a typical housewife dressing gown, opened the door. The investigators looked at her in bewilderment.

“Are you Elena?” asked the prosecutor expecting a negative answer.

“Yes. What’s the matter?” answered the woman, her voice still sleepy.

The prosecutor would have liked to ask why she wasn’t dead. Instead he gazed at her and said:

“Your neighbor, Grigore, committed suicide today, at the iron and steel works. He left a letter in which he said you were going to do the same. Have you by any chance taken poison?”

“No. I’ve just woken up. I sent the children out to play and went to bed. I was very tired.”

Nicolita started to breathe heavily.

“Do you happen to know the real reason why your neighbor took his life? He wrote you had the same intention.…”

“Me? Never. He did keep mumbling something about committing suicide and all that stuff, he was kind of romantic, you know, like you see in soap operas. I just pretended I believed him. Was he really that stupid?… I’m sorry, I’m expecting my husband to come from the sea.… I’ll tell him what my neighbor did, they were good friends. That’s love! Poor him, may God forgive him!”

Her voice was loaded with compassionate inflections.