Читать книгу Life Begins on Friday - Ioana Parvulescu - Страница 10

4.

Perhaps all that was and will be is now, in the present. Perhaps what was is what once more will be. Before you ask me any questions, try to get used to my voice, the voice of a man sundered from a world he had come to know quite well, and plunged into an unknown and unintelligible world. Perhaps without knowing it, we live in this endless moment, in many worlds at once. Perhaps the voice that speaks to you now and which thrashes among the voices here like a fish in a fisherman’s net – this voice that finds itself in the city and the country of its birth, more alone than the voice of any man imprisoned in a foreign land – speaks even now with beings which you have no way of seeing. Or perhaps I, the source of the voice, have already been extinguished, like the sun that has just now set, but you still hear me, there, in your world, where the sun is at its zenith, there in your warm room, or outside, in a green park, on a bench. Or perhaps precisely when you cannot hear me, when you are sleeping a dreamless sleep or when you are yelling at each other like madmen, or when you are bored to death, desperate for the time to pass, perhaps this will be when the essential things will take place here. Or perhaps I will never reach you, although that would not sadden me.

But look how I finally raise my voice to the heavens, and I pray for both you, those afar, and for myself, I pray here, to this silver icon, within whose casing can be seen with the naked eye the head of a woman and the smaller head of a child: I pray for your health, your welfare, and that you not be punished, as I am. I pray that you have an old age as beautiful and soothing as roses. I pray that, if you hear a man’s voice, you will understand. I pray out loud: ‘Thou, the Relentless, spare us, spare me, release me from this net in which I am tangled, that I might find a tear in the net and swim into the open sea.’ I pray: ‘Merciful one, have mercy.’ One day, I am sure, I will come to you somehow and you will hear me again. I don’t know why I am here, in a church, in front of an icon. I don’t know why I am shut up here, in the frozen silver of a world that I did not wish for, just as you, whatever you might say, are from birth shut up as if in a prison, as if in a butterfly net or as if in a birdcage, in a world that you did not wish for, did not know, and have no way of controlling. You thrash around in vain. We are prisoners, condemned, each in his own world, each in his own solitude. Why can you not see me? I am fettered in the frozen silver of the icon of a world that perhaps no longer is. I try to see you there, from the picture frame of my present day, and if you fall silent for an instant, like the waters deep in a well, perhaps you will hear what I say to myself, because I speak for myself and only for myself. I am alone: I who do and I who judge. I am the one who speaks, I the one who is silent and listens: It is always different than we think, dear Dan. You have been cast from life to life.

When I opened my eyes, I saw wide blue sky and many trees clad in hoarfrost. Hundreds of pinpoints took flight at each gust of wind. The air clasped me. I was lying on my back. With a city-dweller’s wonderment, I immersed my gaze in the sky. All of a sudden I heard a sound like water flowing from a tap. It came from nearby, to my right. I turned my head without raising it and I could not believe what I saw. There was no doubt about it: next to me a horse had released a gushing torrent of urine. Steam wafted around the jet. It seemed unending, and a round hollow had formed in the snow. The horse was harnessed to a sleigh laden with blocks of ice and a few logs.

There was complete silence, a petrified silence. All around was whiteness, sun, a silence such as I had never heard before, because even silence is audible. The beast thrust its muzzle into the bag hanging from its neck and began to chomp. Its tail was tied in a huge glossy knot.

‘On your feet, lad, or else nightfall will catch ub with you here in the snow. Who can have left you here to berish, where there’s not another berson as far as the eye can see?’

He was a swarthy man, with huge hands, in which he was holding an axe. I took fright. The valise was a few feet away and I struggled to get up, to go to it. I tottered. My legs were frozen.

‘Can’t you bick yourself ub? Some friends you’ve got, leaving you here bissed, to freeze in the snow, dressed like a scarecrow and without so much as a cab on your head.’

When you understand nothing, all you can do is keep silent. He was talking, but it was as if his mouth were full. The man tossed the axe into the sleigh, next to a pick and shovel. He untied the horse’s nosebag and stretched out a horny red hand to me. Half his index finger was missing and it ended in a knot, like the neck of a pouch pinched with a drawstring.

‘Jumb ub, I’ll take you back to town and you’ll bay me two lei and a cub of wine. Let’s fetch that box of yours... Bull this sheebskin over your shoulders. Can you stand ub? I’ve been out cutting logs. I cut some ice, too, on the way, from the lake, but I had to sharben the bickaxe. I’m all of a sweat now.’

As he spoke, steam poured from his mouth. He grasped the reins, and the horse gave its rump a lively shake. The sleigh glided back along its own tracks, as though along rails. It left the forest in its wake, and before it spread the endless white sun-lit plain. Everything glistened with droplets, like the sea. And so there it was: I still had not managed to leave the country. What was happening? Where had everything vanished to? From whence had everything appeared?

Unlike myself, who found not a trace of an answer, the man at the reins found an answer to all questions; he knew everything. A burly man, with long moustaches that joined to curly, greying sideburns, he inspired both trust and fear in me. But the fear was less aggressive than the curiosity. We advanced, gliding slowly.

‘What time is it?’

Here was my voice, for the first time, hoarse and muffled.

‘How should I know? It’s early! I was ub at the crack of dawn. Ain’t you got a timebiece? Lose it at boker, did you, the same as your coat and cab? Take that there overcoat. I was going to give it as alms, in memory of my old ba, who bassed away last month.’

The coat had bone buttons. He handed me a bottle, which was almost full, and again I saw the crudely stitched stump of his forefinger: ‘Have a swig, to warm yourself ub! If you’re feeling beckish, there’s bread in the knabsack.’

‘I drank; it was plum brandy. But I could not eat; a dreadful disquiet held me by the throat. We passed some crows, stark against the white of the road. They did not take flight, but minded their own business, croaking, tracing patterns in the snow with their claws.

‘Betre is my name,’ said the man. ‘My mother was from Russia.’

‘Petre?’

‘Yes, Betre. Betre!’ he shouted, as if I were deaf.

He was expecting me to reciprocate. Bored of my silence, he broached me directly: ‘What’s the name of your family? Where’re you from?’

‘Bucharest, Crețu,’ I answered unenthusiastically.

‘A relative of Kretzu the abothecary – with the ginger moustaches? And who was it shaved your moustaches off?’

I made no reply. Nothing matched up with anything else. From time to time, Petre cast me increasingly wary glances. I could see he was making a great effort to think. Suddenly he pulled on the reins. I jolted forward as if pushed. He jumped down with a nimbleness that was evidence of long practice. We were in a copse; snow clung to the tree trunks like white moss. A body lay on the ground, on its back. I had not noticed it.

‘Here’s another now!’ exclaimed Petre and went up to the form in the snow. ‘What is with you, good beople?’

I climbed down, gingerly. My whole body was aching. On the ground was a blond young man, with a carefully trimmed beard and a wound below his shoulder. My eyes remained glued on his clothing: an elegant, seemingly brand-new suit, whose pieces I could not quite name, and tall, highly polished black boots. Beside him a hat had been cast aside, but there was nothing other than that. I saw he was breathing. There was no doubt that he was alive.

‘It was the devil himself made me leave the house today, to get away from my wife’s brattle, and now I’ve met the devil himself, God forgive me. What to do?’

He suddenly turned around and looked at me suspiciously.

‘It wasn’t you, was it?’

He bent his forefinger, as if pulling a trigger.

‘I? God forbid! I don’t know one end of a gun from another.’

‘Come off it! You can’t fool me. Where’s your bistol?’

‘What do you mean? I don’t have a pistol,’ I said, feeling like a bad actor in a good play.

‘What are you jabbering on about?’ Petre began to shout. ‘I’ll bunch you in the head, see if I don’t!’

And he brandished his fists at me.

‘I have never held a pistol in my life, understand that once and for all! I have never seen this... this boy in my life. He should be taken to hospital as a matter of urgency. I think he has fainted. I do not even know where I am. I do not recognize anything. I think I must have fainted myself. Maybe I fell. Maybe I was struck. I do not understand anything of this. Anything at all!’

Unfortunately my voice trembled. Petre gave me a strange look: ‘You’re not in your right mind! You’re lunatic. You escabed from the madhouse, didn’t you? I read in the newsbaber that they make you swallow quicksilver, so that your beard and your moustache fall out. You fell to fighting, like our Lahovary on Filibescu Street, tried to kill each other in a duel, with swords and bistols! The devil take me if I can understand what’s wrong with such beople!’

For a time he trampled the snow with the toe of his boot, without taking his eyes off me: ‘I’m taking you to the Bolice. Let them deal with you. Even though I’ve seen that there aren’t too many cobbers around the blace at the weekend, we’ll find one to lock you in a cell sure enough.’

Then he tried to heave the young man into the sleigh. He struggled with the body for a while and in the end yelled at me, releasing a white plume from his mouth, as if he were smoking: ‘Why don’t you helb me? I can’t lift him by myself!’

I grasped the blond young man by the shoulders, as instructed by Petre. He was heavy. Petre looked at me scornfully. We laid him on a plaid rug, on top of the logs. Petre tidied him up, as if he were arranging goods for display, put his hat on his head, rummaged in the inside pocket of his coat, whence he removed a deer-skin wallet, which he immediately concealed in his own pocket. All of a sudden I realized what had been niggling me ever since Petre said he intended to take me to the Police.

‘What do you mean there are not many people there at the weekend? What day is it today? Isn’t it Monday? Today was Monday!’

Petre did not deign to reply. He seemed clear in his mind. The horse was moving at a trot and the surroundings were innocent enough, and yet I was about to lose my mind. The trees arched whitely overhead, then the open road, the sun, again clumps of woodland and a lone bird fluttering without a care. We soon reached the main road, where many different tracks could be seen mingling together.

‘It’s Friday,’ he condescended to say – seemingly mollified.

Having risen before dawn, after a night of restless sleep and exhausted by my own agitation, I think I then fell asleep.

‘Just a hob, a skib and a jumb and we’ll be there!’

My opening eyes were seized by the most astonishing scene I had ever beheld. The sun was high in the sky. The light suffused a bustling street: carriages to which were harnessed pairs of glossy horses, an ox cart creaking under a gigantic barrel, hansoms, irritable coachmen, one- and two-storey buildings in whose windows glinted the rays of the sun, shops with gaily painted signs. The people were seemingly all dressed in the same fashion, one matching the other. The ladies wore hats swathed in scarves tied beneath the chin; their waists were unnaturally slender and their heavy garments reached to the ground. The men all had bowler hats and canes. Two officers in braided uniforms saluted somebody in a carriage. A hubbub, a merry buzz, with clattering hooves muffled by the snow, coachmen’s cries, and jingling harness bells. The snow on the road was sullied as if with ashes and churned by the horses’ hooves, but the pavements were white.

I felt rested and joyful. It was as if I found myself in the world of a young and active God, having lived in an increasingly ruinous world that had lost its God or which had been lost by God. It was as if I were seeing, after many long years, a sky I no longer knew existed. It was as if I had been resurrected, after a living death. It was as if I were under a protective wing. A good feeling, one of love for all that I saw, tightened my throat. My heart was beating wildly and I felt the pain that had long ago inured me to the thought of death. Something had happened without my knowledge. I did not understand why, but my eyes filled with tears. Might I be dreaming? When you dream, however, you do not necessarily realize it is a dream, but when you are awake you know for sure. I did not need to pinch myself to be sure that all I was seeing was real. Reality has an unmistakable consistency. When you go to work in the morning, nobody has to tell you that you are not asleep or that you are alive. I was in a world that was alive and awake. It looked familiar to me. I knew that I knew it, but I did not know how I knew it. I knew it and yet I did not really know it. I asked myself where I had ended up. I did not ask myself how. I shall think about it when I feel able; for the time being, I am not able. Like never before, I felt the urge to look, to feast my eyes on the spectacle of everyday life. Petre said something to me. I did not hear him, because my eyes, which focused on the details as if through a huge magnifying glass, had replaced all my other senses. Suddenly, one image struck my retina like a hammer. It was a building I seemed to recognize: Bucharest’s National Theatre, on Victory Avenue. In the plaza in front of the building small hansoms covered with tarpaulins stood in a row, and the snugly dressed coachmen were talking among themselves. Snow-laden trees marked the semi-circle of the plaza. So, I was on Victory Avenue. I had, in a way, come home and my parents’ house must have been but a few steps away.

‘Good God, where have you brought me?’ I groaned.

‘To the bolice station. I told you!’ came the immediate reply from up on the box. ‘Whether they’ll send you back to the madhouse, that I can’t say, but at least there’ll be beople to take care of you. I couldn’t leave you lying there, like him, who got shot with the bistol.’

Petre’s harsh but not hostile voice brought me back to reality: to the new reality. I plunged back into the unruly city. To the left, on the blank lateral wall of a splendid building, beneath the oddly squashed outline of a roof whose chimneys were smoking, I saw an advertisement in capital letters: L’INDÉPENDANCE ROUMAINE. The letters U and M, which were below a chimney, were blackened with soot. Bells were ringing somewhere nearby. Then I heard, like an echo, the chimes of clock, of the sort that provides entertainment to those new to the city.

‘They still haven’t appointed a new director at L’Endebandans, to reblace Mr Lahovary,’ said Petre, who was suddenly talkative. ‘I read it yesterday in Universul. Whoever they bring in, the baber won’t change its bolicy. True, they bretend they’re not caught up in bolitics. But that’s what they all say!’

The street advanced in time with our sleigh, strangely fast. We reached an intersection that I was seemingly seeing for the first time, we crossed it with difficulty, since sleighs and carriages were passing along the boulevard and were not prepared to wait, and then we turned right, coming to an immediate stop. We were plunged within the shadow of a wall. I recalled the unconscious young man and wondered whether he might have died in the meantime. I looked at him and he seemed to groan. There was something terribly childlike about his face, and his blond, longish hair covering part of his cheek.

An imposing, yellowish, two-storey building loomed before us, and above the entrance, beneath the coat of arms, was embedded a clock, whose hands showed half past two. And beneath the clock, large stone letters read: PREFECTURE OF THE CAPITAL’S POLICE.