Читать книгу The Praetor and Other Stories - Aurel Stancu - Страница 7

BRIDES’ CURSE

The wedding was going well, the party was flawless. Good food, music catering for all the guests’ tastes, a vivid atmosphere, a time worth remembering by the bride and groom. Victor, the groom, radiated happiness through all his pores—he wouldn’t have felt otherwise even if a car had run him over. He was simply floating. Mirela, the bride, looked like a fairy queen but kept her wits about her.

“Our journey together is starting well, our guests are having great fun,” the groom whispered into the bride’s ear while a waiter was serving them.

“I wonder if it’s a new beginning or the same old journey,” she replied.

“It’s the first real change in our lives. We’re married!… God, what a dream come true! Just wait and see what will happen next!” he said ecstatically.

“I do hope it won’t be the hardest of all times,” she snapped at him, her words bashing him on the head. “I’m joking, you silly little boy,” she laughed seeing his puzzled face, and tenderly put one arm around his neck and gave him a quick kiss.

Seeing the scene and without hearing the dialogue, the guests around them clapped their hands. It was a good omen.

Thin, slightly bow-legged, with a sharp face, merry hazel eyes, brown hair, and a little over three foot tall, Victor’s appearance didn’t impress anyone, on the contrary he sometimes looked as if a stronger wind might blow him away. Mirela, almost as tall as he was, with a wasp’s waist, slightly green eyes, her hair cut in a fringe, her chest embellished with breasts one could see only in erotic dreams, seemed an exercise in happiness to every man. At their wedding, however, everyone saw them as the perfect match.

They had first met at the Personnel Department of the big company that had just employed them. He was a mechanical engineer and had got a job at the rolling mill. She was an economist and was going to work for the Computation Centre. After getting their employment papers, they had both said to themselves they wouldn’t make a career there, a place in which one could hardly breathe.

That had been the beginning of a long journey, though. They had been lucky to find a job just a month after graduation. On that morning they had had their first coffee together, in a squalid bar in the workers’ neighborhood. He had been a little sarcastic while she had barely kept her anger underfoot. He had shown off, pointing out he was to get up at 5:30 and take the tram at 6:30 to get to work on time, while she had almost burst into tears although she was to be at work an hour later.

“Well, you can’t have a holiday every other day,” he had tried to sound carefree and laughed affectedly.

“Not that every holiday is a success,” she gave as good as she got, laughing in the same way. “But the good of it will sooner or later get to us too.”

For their wedding they had chosen a restaurant lying about ten miles from the town, where people came to enjoy the green surroundings. There were three restaurants in that forest but this one was the most popular. It was always full—they had been very lucky to get it only one week before the event. Victor had been very keen on having a very special wedding, in the bosom of nature, despite the unpleasant surprises the weather might have in store for them.

“Our hearts need both the sun and the rain. They need the melancholy of the mist-enveloped sights,” he had said and she had agreed with him.

As an engineer, Victor hadn’t made a great impression in his first working year. On the night shift he played poker with his colleagues, on the morning shift he often took a nap. He slept in a loft, above a warehouse, where he might get suffocated at any time, the place being narrow and stuffy. He went in and out on all fours but got used to it like fish to water. The chief engineer looked for him desperately.

“Where’s Victor, the bloody loafer? I can feel his presence, I think he’s sleeping somewhere around here, but where?” his boss wondered, not realizing Victor was just a few feet above him, in that lousy loft.

Everyone knew where Victor slept but not the boss, the latter’s search for him becoming notorious. Later on, during a serious breakdown, Victor worked for thirty-six hours nonstop—consequently, his public image improved overnight and his boss stopped calling him “the bloody loafer” and started using the word “engineer” whenever he referred to him.

On the other hand, Mirela had shown from the very first day that she was good, capable, and willing to become an important economist. Ambitious, tenacious, and fashionable, she drew everyone’s attention, married men’s included. There followed a time of harassment, sometimes mild, sometimes aggressive, which she resisted cleverly. Her superiors took her on business trips hoping she would fall a prey to them in one room or another of a luxury hotel, as it sometimes happened to her female colleagues. In spite of that, no one could swear she had taken a false step. Instead, the young economist who, little by little, was getting important, fell in love with a colleague working in the same office. Ionut looked like an Italian gigolo. He conquered women easily if he took it into his head. Handsome, no scruples, and very clever.

“Did you hear the birds sing this morning?” he would begin his working day with a question that was meant to dumfound a woman’s heart.

Another morning, as dreamy and serious, he asked rhetorically:

“Yesterday, after leaving this sinister place, did you follow the migrant birds with your eyes?”

Everyone in the office could hardly wait for the morning question.

“I helped my folks pick the nuts yesterday—I can still hear the sound of wooden bells, the falling nuts.”

That was the sentence which finished Mirela off. She realized he could be her end of the line, the end of her solitary journey.

Victor had been a fisherman since his boyhood so he spent his weekends on the pond shore. His time was divided between poker, fishing, and his job, which of late he had taken seriously.

He had met Mirela again at a meeting with the general manager who wanted to know the young employees of great potential. He had asked her out for their second coffee together and insisted on getting her phone number. She had felt comfortable and flattered by his insistence so she finally gave in, let him know her cell number, condescendingly, as if trying to show him how gullible he was. She had smiled ironically seeing how anxiously the engineer was pressing the keys on his cell.

“From now on you’ll never be able to get rid of me,” he promised solemnly.

“In your dreams, maybe,” she laughed.

Hearing her voice, Victor had thought of the sound of nuts falling off the tree. In five years he had called her almost every day. Sometimes she answered. After fifty calls his patience had moved her and she had gone out with him for a walk or a coffee. But the thrilling date had not come yet. No touch. Just words. Smiles. Separate ways. When he could no longer bear it, he waylaid a woman, had sex with her, kept her for one month, and then drove her away. He rather did it for his body and mental health than for something else. Mirela was his obsession.

For five years Mirela had been Ionut’s slave. So attractive that high school female students could pin his picture on the wall, he acted like a highly skilled romantic. Surprising gestures, flowers that couldn’t be found at the florist’s, exotic perfumes, moonlight, sea sand, kisses under the trees, words impossible to resist. There was one thing he had never done, though. He had never asked her to marry him. Not that she had twisted her arm—she had just waited for it, like the shore waiting for the high tide.

Ionut had never raised the subject. The young woman had no idea what this man hid inside him or how much she meant to him. In his turn, Ionut was obsessed with his career and would have done anything to get to the top. Lately he had fixed his eyes on the general manager’s daughter who worked in the Marketing Department, patiently devising a diabolical plan.

In his manly self-pride, Mirela’s unconditional love made him feel so well. He liked her just enough to want to madly and unrestrainedly have sex with a blessed body, but he didn’t love her. He managed to fake his feelings skillfully. All the same, Mirela believed in him. Irrationally.

“I wonder if it’s good for me to almost depend on you physically,” she said to him after his being away for three days.

He had told her he would visit his parents in the countryside but instead he had attended a symposium where the general manager’s daughter had also been present.

“If it’s of any comfort to you, let me just tell you that all this time I’ve kept thinking of you,” Ionut lied to her, knowing that was what she wanted to hear.

Actually, throughout the symposium he had tried hard to make himself conspicuous in the eyes of the general manager’s daughter. Nevertheless, just in case, he had in mind several other good matches in the town. He enjoyed the old saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in the same basket,” and kept Mirela for her body’s mystery only, as an erotic cure.

The engineer’s love, however, went way beyond the notion of orgasm. He loved everything that was related to her being, from body to spirit, and in order to conquer her he was ready to go through all Hercules’ labors. He knew, like everyone else, about her love affair with Ionut and, although it hurt terribly, he still hoped for the better. He knew patience was an extraordinary weapon. He loved and waited.

“Do you think a woman can love two men at the same time?” he asked Mirela during one of their rare dates.

“I think a man can love two women at the same time. But it’s not true love if you don’t make up your mind,” she answered without understanding his reproachful look.

The unavoidable had happened when Victor least expected it. One afternoon, after talking to Ionut on the cell, Mirela overheard a conversation between him and some of his friends. Having a couple of beers with his buddies, Ionut forgot to switch off his cell and carelessly put it on the table.

“This broad’s keeping track of me with her bloody phone as if she could really see where I am. She’s sick, this woman is, thinking I’ll shut up myself just because I feel great when I’m giving it to her!”

“I thought you really loved her. I’ve seen you both always leaving the office hand in hand,” said one of Ionut’s friends.

“What else can I do when she sticks to me like a leech so I can’t get away from her?”

They went on like that for a while, Ionut explaining to them nonchalantly what he wanted from life and why he would never marry Mirela. The woman was listening breathlessly to words which, under different circumstances, she would never have believed.

Nevertheless, she had had the superhuman strength and pride not to ask for explanations, she hadn’t made any hysterical scenes or cried in anyone’s arms. She hadn’t begged him. She had just walked away.

That had been Victor’s chance. He couldn’t believe his ears when Mirela asked him out for dinner. And when she proposed to him, he thought she was making fun of him.

“I know I’m not the man you love. If you want to take revenge on someone, don’t do it by ruining my life,” he warned her.

“You’ve been waiting for me for such a long time that I’m pretty sure you’re the man I need,” she answered honestly.

The wedding arrangements had taken only two weeks. They had persuaded the chief engineer to be their godfather in no time. Victor’s boss had laughed and said to Mirela:

“Do you really know who you’re marrying? A very talented but irresponsible engineer. Do you know what his latest trick was? Sunbathing on the roof of the rolling mill!”

Stealing the bride has always been the suspense of a wedding. If it takes place before midnight, it’s the godfather that buys back the bride. If it happens after midnight, it’s the groom that does it. Victor had been on the lookout all night trying to prevent that. He didn’t want, not even in a symbolic way, his bride to be stolen. He had managed to abort a few attempts but, in the end, it just happened. The bride vanished at about two o’clock in the morning. When they announced her kidnapping, the groom’s first reaction was to glance at Ionut—Mirela had invited all her colleagues. His table was deserted.

Victor didn’t panic. After all, he had to keep up appearances. An hour later he thought too much time had passed since the two had disappeared so he slipped out, got in his Ford and drove to town.

Ionut had stolen Mirela for fun, to humor himself. He had had one of his female colleagues invite Victor to dance and, while the latter was waltzing happily, he asked his former lover to run away together.

“Do you want to steal me for ever or just for the sake of tradition?” she asked smiling ironically.

“Both,” came his puzzling answer.

Ionut stopped his car at the edge of the forest and they made love there, angrily, wildly. Mirela’s wedding dress got all crumpled up. Then they drove to town.

Victor caught up with them a few miles before they entered the town. First he saw a bride waving her long white veil in the middle of the road. He stopped his car, got off, and asked her in such a self-possessed manner that he made Mirela shudder:

“Something wrong with the car?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Ionut had lifted his Renault’s hood and was now gazing at the engine. Quietly, Victor pulled at some wires, checked the engine here and there and, a couple of minutes later, the engine roared into life. Then he suddenly said, looking at Ionut with half-open eyes:

“How much do you want?”

“Want what?”

“You don’t love her, I want to buy her back. How much? I’ve got a vineyard in the country and a plot in the town. I’ll sell both of them. How much?”

“Very much, my friend,” Ionut answered ironically. “Look at her, isn’t she gorgeous? Take my word for it, I know what I’m talking about, I know her inside out.”

“How much?”

“What are you doing, Victor, buying me like I was some kind of merchandise?” asked the bride full of anger. “Beat him up instead, bung up his eyes, kill him for me!”

“How much do you want?” Victor pressed Ionut, unperturbed.

“How much do you care to pay?” Ionut said, suddenly showing a genuine interest in the matter.

“Half a billion lei. I can collect it in two days, honest!”

Ionut shivered a little, it could be the best piece of business he had ever done. Looking away from Mirela he nodded.

“Deal.”

Mirela burst out laughing hysterically.

“You find it so easy to sell me, Ionut!” she said and then added slowly, “Why don’t you ask me what I want?”

“Victor’s the man you need, Mirela. I’m just a jerk,” Ionut retorted melodramatically.

“I don’t want to see or hear either of you any more! May you be accursed!”

In sorrow-burnt tears, with her veil sweeping the ground, Mirela started walking slowly to the town. It was half past three in the morning and she had quite a few miles to cover. A strange sight: a lonely bride trying to get on foot to the town gates.

The two men got in their cars: Victor was off like a shot to the restaurant in the forest where he broke the party; Ionut passed by Mirela without even slowing down.

* * * *

Victor cried over Mirela for two years but, in a moment of almost festive solitude, he came to the conclusion that he wanted to live again. He chose a woman to be his life partner. Raluca, his second bride, a schoolteacher, was a college sophomore. She shone with beauty too, but her beauty was different from Mirela’s, which was the alluring type. Raluca’s was domestic. The engineer was certain he would avoid his first love and wedding’s disaster.

This time, instead of the ordinary party, he decided to give a reception. A chic, sophisticated one. He chose the same restaurant in the forest, urged by God knows what instinct. He invited many of the people who had attended his first wedding, plus Raluca’s relatives and friends. And the result was worth remembering in the years to come.…

* * * *

By five o’clock in the morning no one had left, vying with each other in eating, drinking, and dancing. Then came the wedding cake. Brought by four waiters, the huge flamboyant nine-tier cake caused sensation. The groom took the knife and started to cut out the godfather’s slice. All of a sudden the flame of the nearest candle caught the bride’s veil and Raluca’s hair turned into a torch.

It took them quite a while to put out the fire. Someone was amazed at how crazy and furious the flames had been. Someone else wondered if there was a curse at stake. Anyway, Victor’s second wedding ended abruptly in sadness and regrets.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had your first wedding in the same place?” Raluca asked from her hospital bed.

“I didn’t want to upset you. It was so foolish of me.”

“I think you wanted to cure yourself of Mirela, of her memory.… But why did you have to do it by sacrificing me?”

“It just didn’t occur to me such a tragedy might happen.”

“When I’m out of hospital, I’ll be like new, cured of burns and of you.…”

From hospital, Raluca went straight to her parents’. The divorce was consumed in no time.

* * * *

In Bucharest, Mirela became bank manager, married a colleague, and gave birth to two boys. She made a great career and had a great family. She never met Ionut or Victor again.

Bent on climbing up the ladder of success, Ionut made a very good match marrying the mayor’s daughter. A few years later he caught her in the act in their own bed with a friend of his. He divorced her and, as a result, his former father-in-law did his best to make him lose his job. He started to drink heavily and borrow money which he never returned. He owed money even to the woman who sold newspapers.

For a long time Victor tried to find an explanation of what had happened to him. He lived like a lonely wolf. Sometimes he said loudly: “Surely he who benefited from the fear in my thoughts must be rich now!” And he hummed the tune to which he had once cut out a slice of the cake during a wedding in the forest.…