The Black Envelope

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A DARK DILAPIDATED CAFé. The eccentric, distinguished vacationer is waiting with his legs crossed. Wide-open check jacket. Dark-red silk scarf sticking out from the collar of his black shirt. Huge black sunglasses. On the chair next to him: a suede jacket and an umbrella. By the chair a small leather suitcase full of colored labels — the first hour of a short break in the mountains, the first coffee with milk. Coffee with milk, wow! It’s not quite so extraordinary in the mountains, where there are cows, milk, butter, sour cream: you should be able to get a coffee with milk at least. Or at least one without milk. A black coffee, anyhow, that standard coffee, that coffee substitute made from chick-peas, barley, cornmeal, or whatever. Or a tea, at least a tea. Russian, Chinese, English — or at least camomile, mint, lime blossom, whatever.

The distinguished guest did not stand up, did not storm out of the fake café in which there was neither confectionery nor cakes, just endless rows of jam and the same tired old bags of cookies. He did not request the book of complaints or ask to see the manager. He nodded politely at every piece of information and every refusal— thank you, we haven’t got any tea, thank you, there isn’t any coffee or any milk, thank you, we’re out of cakes, we don’t do soft drinks, thank you, the mineral water’s finished, thank you, thank you very much, always with an obliging smile, bent over that glossy magazine, a perfect gentleman! Calm, relaxed, belle époque, a colonial dandy come for a few moments to confer style and fame on the forgotten tourist resort, the pearl of the Carpathians.

And so Anatol Vancea, according to his identity book a receptionist at the Hotel Tranzit in Bucharest, remained like that for roughly two hours, impassive, legs crossed, in the fake café near Sinaia railway station, waiting — for what? no one could have said. Globetrotter’s luggage beside him, decadent color magazine in front of him, waiting, for what? Twelve o’clock, midday, the opportune hour. He was on holiday: with no thoughts, no memory, nothing at all. He was nothing at all, as he wanted to be.

When twelve o’clock approached — the time for room check-in all too familiar to any hotel receptionist — he would therefore head straight for the hotel. He would utter in an artificial voice the number of the reserved room, 326, go up the stairs, have a shower, and expire for a few hours in a deep, prehistoric slumber. The second day, Tuesday, would vanish like the first, in secret. Film, excursion, sleep: who could say? On Wednesday the weather would turn cold: overcast sky, thick black clouds. A walk to the bookshop. On Thursday a trip to the castle, some reading, a stroll around the country houses, through the town and park, to the post office.

Sunday in the mountains has a side that it keeps to itself, as if the day is making fun of you, sniffing haughtily as the hours drift by in a kind of hostile, smoldering provocation. You can pack slowly, without hurrying, as on any old day. You haven’t the least idea where you are going; you don’t know the time of the train or the place; you put yourself, as agreed, in the hands of the void.

Tolea Voinov spent only one boring week in the mountains. A confused, sleepy wait unsure whether to call itself Irina.

Fine weather. The sun takes the forest out of the mists and brings it up close, restores its nobility. The old boyars’ houses are still in place, though ailing and humbled, but the atmosphere, the atmosphere — identical faces, limp, half-finished gestures! Rotten, putrid sleepiness, in a huge cask of stale vinegar, carrots, and manure. No, he hadn’t been able to take it. Not the memories either — no, everything had been at another time. It had been May, another age, yes, another time, long ago, like yesterday.

Irina’s laughter. Waking up in the evening on the terrace of the villa — the lunar tide. Long, long silences, until his tongue grew dry from waiting. One afternoon, walking up the asphalt bend toward the town … Hands raised toward the man’s shoulders.

He had not forgotten the incident, even though a thousand years had passed. A topsy-turvy moment, there in the street, where the asphalt curved toward the town — it was there that they had spun around toward each other. Then a kind of unease, as if the afternoon had broken off and was hanging just on the edge of the idle hour. A heavy, poisoned silence, submerging you in its green silt. You begin to totter, and somewhere you hear suspicious pings of unseen lizards. The lips of some teenagers hurrying by — that was what it had been — could not be removed from the ridiculous sequence; they continued to totter mutely, like senile old people fallen back into the minds of children.

Irina went into the food store, having asked him to wait outside. At the bend where the town was left behind, at the very spot where that little nothing had occurred, he seemed to wake up. He had turned to his partner — Here, let me carry a bag, I see you’ve got two — turned to Ira, taken the plastic bag from her left hand, also the one from her right hand, and they had gone on side by side without talking. They had reached the villa where Irina was staying, a narrow spruce building with a roof of brick tiles. They had walked up the steps and gone down into the hall. Ira had taken off her anorak: she was wearing a large white sweater made of thick wool over her stiff jeans. In one hand she was holding a bottle of red wine, in the other a glass painted with little blue flowers, and a rustic mug.

“There are only two people still lodging here in the villa, and they’re not in much. They’ve got relatives in town and spend a lot of time with them.”

She had half-filled the mug. The wine soon trickled down to his limbs with its pleasant, enervating warmth. At a certain moment he had taken the bottle from the floor and covered it with the empty cup. He had touched her elbow, cupping it in the palm of his hand: Let’s go upstairs. No no, Ira had put him off without conviction. He had pulled her gently, she was already on the brink of the stairs; they had gone up. A tiny little room, a narrow bed like at school, a washbasin, a large attic window through which the moon was entering.

He pulled her toward him, impatiently, clumsily. Let me undress myself — the jeans had slipped off, and on top of them the white catlike sweater. Ira had kept on her long undershirt. A small, simple slippery body — Not like that, let me—burning skin. He had hurriedly lost himself in the narrow body, electrified by the evil light of the moon. Shy dizzy awkward. Ira, her head resting on legs pressed together under the partial cover of a thick blanket, had lit a second cigarette. He was looking nowhere. Then he found the solution: he left that very evening. He had to pack his things and catch the nine-thirty train. Irina had slid off the narrow divan, among the crumpled sheets.

You don’t need to come with me. Well, as a matter of fact, I feel like a bit of a walk in the fresh air; it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m coming with you. I wouldn’t mind at all if you did: I’d like to have your address anyhow. Behind them rustled the discarded, assembled, and again discarded clothes. They had passed by the hotel for the traveler to pick up his suitcase. They kissed, like old school pals, in front of the train’s open door. Ira held out a thin strip of red paper: her address. She laughed in a relaxed way; a wisp of hair fluttered stupidly on her forehead. Parched white lips — the train had left.

Alone in the compartment, Tolea refused to go over the failure again. It’s the same with all women: the first time, whatever happens, is always haste, insecurity, evacuation. He in her — for a short time. Copulation gymnastics, a performance, growth in the birthrate? Confused magnetism — from which, if you were lucky, you might pick up the abrupt, violent glow? A sudden rediscovery and sudden denial, yes, that was it, a discharge — he preferred not to remember. No, he didn’t want to remember the emotions, the shyness, the helplessness: no, he no longer had any desire for complications!

But it was not difficult to remember. He had first met Ira years before, in his small town in the provinces. It was full of young people from Bucharest, engineers architects doctors, sent to help in the modernization of the old historic town.

Irina had worked for a while doing technical drawing, then as a shop-window dresser and as a nursery-school teacher, all the time awaiting permission to take her final exam at the architecture school, from which she had been unexpectedly expelled just before the end of her course. She, too, was part of the circle around the young high-school teacher Vancea. The future character Tolea was already a character. And how! The Professor, as he was known, would fume and fret, perfecting his acrobatics, his flippant jokes and wordplay, his friendly banter and arrogant, offhand quibbles.

He had met her one day in the street: How are you, Irina, isn’t that your name? That’s right, Professor, I didn’t think you would remember it. The young woman who was nearly an architect, Irina Ira, followed him for a while, long enough, one street on the left, a second burning with fury. The young high-school teacher Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov — snobbish maestro of provincial rebels, a kind of academic oddity of the small town! He was not even ten years older than all those young people, mostly ex-students of his, swarming around his somersault displays, all those school pupils students engineers doctors making rings around gramophone records, magazines tape recorders paradoxes bottles pipes, in the midst of which the thunderstruck Tolea played the role of chic, blasé clown in strident polyglot tones. Even in Russian, which he was still teaching at high school: that language, made to feel so repugnant and oppressive, had become a provocation, a pleasing oddity, in the rictus of his ham actor’s mask. There had only been time for a few silent meetings, occasions of foreboding and evasion, in the half year until she suddenly left town. But they had kept in touch by letter, and at some point he had gone to see her in Bucharest.

It was mid-December: Ira was wearing a new overcoat made of a thick blue camel’s-hair material. The city had put on some color as it played the child. Lamps, sweets, fir trees — they jostled each other in the merriment of lines on which tiny snowflakes fell as in a holiday album. Streets filled with a bright, festive light. When they reached her house, Irina invited him in. Let’s go on up, my sister isn’t home, nor is my father: he left for good a month ago, after my mother’s funeral. Now and then we get a picture postcard and a few lines — he’s back with the woman he was living with for a long time before.

They listened to music, drank some liqueur — that vague feeling, a kind of dizziness, on the beautiful evening of their meeting again. It had been all silence and evasion, nothing else. The idyllic pastel image of winter, with its cheap, inhibiting festivity? Or did the intensity of her scared eyes intimidate him? He had simply postponed any contact. And then, at some time or other, there had been a symmetrical image: Ira in summertime, on a swing. Touched up, happy. The stupidity of those childhood interludes. And again those suddenly charged eyes, promising too much. And again a chance to avoid, in fact, the secret links of touch.

Frightened by the excessive promise, the exaggerated preliminaries?

At some point he had received a brief summons from Ira, who was already working as an architect at the site of a sumptuous new station at Braov: Come with me to the sea for a fortnight. The coward did not answer, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep avoiding her for long. In the autumn he couldn’t stop himself: he rang her, come what may. It was her younger sister, engineer Silvia Isabela, who answered the phone: Ira was married. When how why — well, it just came to her all of a sudden, as if she wanted to escape from something that was pursuing her. The friend of a girlfriend of hers, Dr. Bn¸teanu, asked for her hand. She didn’t sleep a whole night, nervously fidgeting around, and in the morning she said yes. They’ve moved from Bucharest, but they come here from time to time; I’ll pass on the message. Bang bang, just like that.

Comrade Gic Teodosiu was right: spring in the mountains catches you and breaks you, don’t forget it. A good thing that he did not wait until May, when the moon’s golden hoof has a different step and its thorn enters so deep that you can no longer pull it out. A good thing you ended the holiday early, professore: May would have caught you in a twilight intoxicated with aphrodisiacs. There, on the bend leading up to the town, you would somehow have encountered the fata morgana … On that day, long ago, you had gone up the wooden staircase holding her small frail elbow in the palm of your hand. The dense twilight, moon growing in the window, rushed contact, the light switching on and off, snapshots, too high voltage, disaster. A romantic sequence, good only for farces. Romantic farces, that’s all: long rigmaroles with sighing and sickly feelings.

They eventually met again, after time had got all twisted up again. A cold rainy dusk: do you think you’re going to escape this time, too, that the trains, addresses, and phantoms will get muddled up, that you will put things off again? But after a few months he rang the doorbell, just for the hell of it, at the address on the red note she had given him at the station.

“I was sure you wouldn’t come …” And actually he had steered clear, walking a few times around the house to postpone it. “You can take off your raincoat. You’re not going to stand like that in the middle of the room, or are you?” The apartment, newly whitewashed, was still being redecorated. They went onto the terrace, beneath the crown of the old tree. They touched. Irina pulled away in a gesture of fright. They returned to the empty room and sat down in facing chairs. They looked at each other. Her thick, dry lips, verdigris eyes, hoarse voice. As they looked at each other, her eyes became clouded, dilated, weighed down. A kind of painful trance. Her small hands touched him. They slipped hesitantly under his shirt. Quietly, trembling all the time. Her eyes delving deeper, pained, on fire. He still had time to see the white window frame, the heavy crystal glass reddened from dense and languid wine. Then burning — or perhaps something else, a kind of dizziness. Her small hands slid down further and further. They reached the fiery center, unleashed the blood, pumped wildly and furiously, like a battering ram. Vibration, trance, lips, breasts, struggling hands — the blood striking wildly, again and again, deeper and deeper. Had she kissed anyone before, had she ever kissed another man? Complete concentration, as at the beginning of the world … The miracle, the miracle of rebirth had finally happened.

A hidden force, professore, an incomparable force concentrating passion, that’s what it was. Irresistible, hypnotic induction. They dragged themselves to the bedroom, sighing, ill in each other’s arms. The pain of desire pulled him into her, deeper and deeper, with both hands, deeper, again and again, sobbing, her face twisted out of shape. She had covered his eyes with her hands to stop him from seeing her. “Don’t look at me, don’t.” But he saw her and continued to look at the tears flooding down her small pale cheeks. He was on her and in her, clasping and feverish, but he still followed the tears as they fell incessantly toward her parched lips. Unconsciously she mumbled: “No, don’t look at me — please don’t,” clasping and overcome with joy and fear. Naked beneath the sheet, they remained fixed for a long time in each other’s embrace. “No, they can’t take this away from us,” Irina whispered faintly, militantly, jerkily. “They can’t take this away. It’s all we’ve got left — the only thing,” she stammered, lightly sobbing in lament and pleasure on the pillow, where her wiry, coppery, unmanageable hair lay. “I knew that you …” She waited for him to continue. Not for nothing had he avoided meeting her — but it had been to no avail.

Her hands trembled as they touched him, electrified him: again the blood roared, clothes flew in the air along with the crumpled sheet; she pulled him into her, deeper and deeper, stammering between sobs: “No, don’t look at me, please don’t.” And that torrid trepidation, the tears, the spasm, the salvation. “So you’ve come after all …” She laughed as she opened the door a few days later. And at once she pulled him toward her, into her, deeper and deeper into the torrid lava. “Don’t look at me, don’t,” she gaspingly sobbed, now healed in the desperate disorder of their embrace, which revived him and scared him and healed him. At some point, frightened, he had made an attempt at depressurization. She had just returned from a trip and he also left town for a while; she was ill and he was going on holiday — pretexts to make the meetings less frequent, to attempt the sobering up, the loosening of the bond.

A thinned-down, poisoned twilight. Torrential downpour. He was sleepwalking in the streets, not knowing where. He had no umbrella and the rain was streaming over his forehead and neck. His clothes were soaked: he was wrapped in a mantle of water. The deserted street. He had awoken on the pavement beneath a tree, looking toward the terrace. One minute, five, ten, and — Ira appeared. She stopped, bewildered, in front of the balustrade. She looked into the street, saw the errant shape, and understood — they both understood. He pushed the metal gate and went up. In the doorway, in a thick, long, white shirt, Ira was shaking with fever.

Her small, tense, convulsed body. “I felt you were out there …” The hysterical despair of a child. A pagan ritual resumed with ferocity. She flung the sheet aside, as if it were on a humble mast kneeling wrung and powerless at the foot of the short bed. “I’m leaving: I must go. Now, right away.” He repeated robot-like: “I must go. Right now. Immediately. There’s no other solution.” And she did not hear and did not reply. He dressed hurriedly so that there would be no time for words. She did not look at him, sat motionless, without even blinking, on the narrow coffin of a bed. Then the door had opened. He was again in the yard, in the street, in the rain. He huddled up and lifted the collar of his wet jacket. Without meaning to, he lifted his arm and saw his watch. He looked at the dial, at the circling minute hand. Half an hour! That was all: half an hour, an eternity. Hidden again beneath the trees on the pavement, he looked back at the terrace across the street, where he had been just now, a thousand years ago. In the mist and rain of the night he could hear around him the bustle and voices of passersby, the routine of people taking each other’s place in the rush toward their burrows, exhausted by the masquerade that had swallowed up another day.

If the subordinate Vancea Voinov had delayed his ozone replenishment until May, as the wise Gic had advised, then who knows, the happening might have been reborn with a different name …

“Some unidentifiable episodes of my life kept making me guilty, although I didn’t feel it in any way. I started university again a few times: but something new would always appear in my file and they’d throw me back out. I was eventually on the point of graduating when again they … After marriage two broke down, I really couldn’t pick myself up anymore. There was a moment of defeat when I suddenly directed my fury onto the outside world, toward those who kept watching me and pushing me to the margins. It wasn’t very clever of me to have handed out that text. Too big a risk. I might even have gone missing for good. Then, at the moment before the fall, a hand reached out to me — or rather, a claw. I clung to it, stupefied, exasperated, gone wild. It was Comrade Popescu. Comrade Orest Popescu saved me: he even offered me a job and a salary.”

She tensed up in the darkness. Her hand slid along, catching the edge of the table, of the bed. A chaotic danger that she did not want to name. She tensed up, concentrated, stretched out her hand. The fingers passed gently over the man’s cheek and chest and manhood: the words jerkily speeded up; the movements grew quicker, up to the trepidation of a single reintegrated body and of tears which naturally fell again and again with each spasm. “Don’t look at me, please don’t.” The embrace, like a reddened claw. And the whimpering, the stammering afterward. “They can’t take this away from us. Not this. The great savage mystery.” Savage, yes, and frail, in those sobs of lament and pleasure.

The voice had broken off, overwhelmed, and some time later started up again in a perverse and frightened contortion.

“One step from those dangers beyond return. And again I was on the brink of graduating, for the third time. I asked my friend Ianuli for his advice. I’ve told you about him, haven’t I? The legendary Greek. The pure, fanatical hero not yet touched by the dregs all around him. They bought and sold his legend for a knockdown price. The life of a rebel and martyr, not like that of your usual hustler. It’s hard to say which masquerade is better: the opportunist or the true believer. Anyway, he still had enough connections to help me. Again I went to the provinces for a while, until the heat was off — although I knew I was married to my file forevermore. Like the Catholics — until death do us part. I wanted to come back, but I couldn’t get it fixed. And so again I thought I was a rebel, again I exploded. And they gave me another demonstration of what happens next. Then Comrade Orest Popescu offered his services. I accepted. With a morbid fury, to take revenge on myself.”

The city had given up the ghost. Only the tree rustling above the terrace was a reminder that it’s no use hiding: there are witnesses and substitutes all around; the comrades of Comrade Orest reach into every corner; their invisible threads have already penetrated even here, to the bed of illicit pleasure.

Irina leaned over the bottom edge of the bed to take the pack of cigarettes. She lit one and arranged the child-size pillow beneath her head. Her slim, diaphanous fingers squeezed the cigarette until she reached the glowing end. “He’d found in me a cure, a dream, a fixation — that’s what Comrade Popescu said. He was prepared to let himself be tyrannized over if that was what amused me. He was a tyrant himself — unstable, possessive. He gave me a hand with nothing really. Or maybe perhaps: the subordinate institution. His own little kingdom in a republic of countless kingdoms big and small. And what an institution! The association! The association of the underworld, of the underdeveloped, of underhand meanings. The association of deaf-mute silence! If I didn’t know that that, too, in fact, is only one company. Behind it, under and above it, there is the network. The network is everything. The company, the goal, the structure — none of that counts, even in the case of such an exotic company; the important thing is always the way it relates to the system. That was why Comrade Orest Popescu was actually more important than he seemed, and the company much more cunning than its strange profile made it appear. I didn’t run away from the sinister experiment. I remained, hoping I would destroy myself quickly. We never know just how much of the poison we can absorb.”

It was not obvious when she let herself be carried away by the nightmare — as if the script and the role had been rehearsed so much that she no longer needed anyone else to take part.

“In fact, he even talked of divorcing his wife. No one at that strange institution guessed anything. But my family knew. Then Father gave me the ultimate weapon. They knew each other too well — so I was in a position to act the great rejection scene, with a plausible scenario. That is, I presented him with a surprise. I told him I couldn’t agree to making things ‘permanent,’ whether legally or otherwise. Not because of the age difference or because I didn’t like the partner. Those were not insignificant reasons, of course, but they could have been disregarded in our little play with so many obscure codes. No, what I said was that I had heard about his activities during the war. It came as a bolt from the blue, as I expected, but at the same time did not expect. He was stunned. He knew from where I’d found out about his great secret. In captivity, before assuming an identity more in keeping with the new times, he had already begun another operation — the operation of replacing his own self with the expedient one. Substitute men, like substitute bread, clothing, or books, weren’t invented today or yesterday.”

She was no longer smoking. Paradoxically the intensity calmed her down. The intensity did not come from the telling of her story— not at all. It was as if the acute hidden terror, huge and always there, was appeased by the very facts that she related. As if the unknown which had always terrified, and of course still terrified, her lurking vulnerability became bearable when it took on concrete shape.

As if reality, however terrible it proves to be, is much more ambivalent, more soluble, than the terrors you imagine or expect.

“In the camp, because they were prisoners of war — of the anti-Soviet war — they were each given two little cubes of jam a day on one slice of bread. He was struck off to supervise the operation. Well, seeing how overpassionate he was getting about me, Father eventually told me the whole story. As a final weapon for putting pressure on him — dangerous, of course, like everything else concerning him. His whole being was one of darkness and masks. Father had kept clear of him after witnessing his rapid rise in postwar politics — quite spectacular during the early years. Nowadays, in comparison, he was pretty low down the hierarchy, important only because of the obscure and extraordinary contacts, both old and new, that he had with the network.

“So anyway, he’d guarded the starvation rations in the camp. And he made sure he raked off the customs duties, so that he and a few others could survive.”

She had taken her hands from under the sheet and stretched them out to him, relaxed and parallel to each other. Small, pale, childish hands. The sleeplessness of a feverish night, pleading to be cured. Hungry, delving green eyes, darker and darker, pleading to be cured. The sheet creased up, like her sad mouth parched by expectation. The ball of linen was cast aside, the embrace sighed— self-abandonment and tears.

Much later, after night had come, she regained her thick, disconsolate voice.

“He’s someone given an early start in skulduggery, this fellow creature of ours. Evil as a chance for survival. So I hit him where it really hurts. But he took the blow and he’s still getting along okay, with the same thirst for life as we have, no? What do they want to prove to us, over and over again? That we’re evil, or treacherous, or weak-willed? And that we’re really like a bunch of saints, after all — is that what we keep proving? Hunted rebels, apprentices in illusion! Sick people thrashing around in the ephemeral and the precarious?”

During the night she had twisted again in the same impotent whining. But what if she herself is also an unconscious … perhaps she, too, is … He had left with the weight of that last string of words. Sick people caught in the ephemeral and the precarious. There would be time enough in the future to keep turning them around and around, professore. Each new May bends differently the wind of those dubious questions, so like our dubious times. You should have had the patience to follow your suspicions, professore; you wouldn’t have got bored! Or the boredom — the worst affliction of all, as you are fond of saying — might well have diminished. You would have kept meeting new knots and traps; events would have doubled and tripled their appearance; you would have been rewarded for your patience.

It may be that the episode would have acquired a name, a direction, if you had not been able to find a suitable train to escape on. But you would have needed patience, curiosity, and a certain modesty, professore. The modesty of dialogue and of its dangers, professore.

You might not have been bored in its syncopations and snares. You would have found that the beginning of a new day brings back the same wrinkled plaster face called Orest, the same phantom quietly waiting at each gong of the calendar to remind you of the cave in which you crawl.

Time macerates all obsessions, as you well know, professore. Even Comrade Orest Popescu grows weary under the omnipotence of time: the passion becomes mediocre while the hatred becomes a routine, a kind of mimicry necessary to keep up appearances.

“You ask why I don’t find another salary, another job, another town. It would be possible, no doubt. Things aren’t like in the fifties anymore. Yes, I’d find a job all right. Even if he continued to hunt me with his legion of professionals, cunning and vengeful as he is. But I, too, have the right to see the play till the end — now, when it has got so unclear and threadbare. Something real and concrete — it helps you to think more constructively! I find I can follow the scale of the degeneration better if I have a goal that I know in detail. Then I have something in flesh and blood that is immediate and accessible. And above all, ambiguous. Is this also where the sense of the abyss appears? In the ambiguity which makes us accomplices, which always holds out to us the mirror and the trap? So as to demonstrate the precariousness of it all? To humiliate us? By delivering us, O Lord, to guilt and despair and our surfeit of weaknesses — by destroying us, destroying us.”

You see, professore, our fellow creatures are wary of talking about fear and suspicion. Not about boredom, though, as you well know and exemplify every day. Like that, you would also have discovered their painful interpenetration, called Irina. Women keep reminding you of something always put off and always hurt, as your friend Marga would say. Vampires, grasping claws, fetters, fly traps, chain loops, wedding rings — you remember how you used to educate your young companions about their future women partners. No precautions of any kind, Professor? Didn’t you take the simplest precautions demanded by the suspicion that already surrounded you and would soon be used to punish your insolence. Actually, there were better strategies than the one of hawking the same old sarcasms to show you feared nothing because you respected nobody. You’re still doing it now, this wet evening, in the dusty compartment of the train carrying you back from your mini-mini-break. The haughtiness, the spleen, the pipe, and the little silk bag, your airs and graces with your humble fellow passengers — the same old masquerade.

Look, after Mr. Bn¸teanu’s divorce and after old Eusebiu’s divorce and between one divorce and another and one marriage and another, the ghost Irina reappears. She comes close, very close, but never close enough to try to make you connect, as our Dr. Marga still hopes. Her stern, delicate face concentrates a kinetic energy in which you could finally become entangled and even, in Marga’s view, be cured. Listen again to the echo of that other age, feel the pain once more, like that time when you crashed to the ground from the glistening handlebars of adolescence.

The rhythm of a truth from which it is not possible to escape forever, professore. Irina would have helped you to rediscover it, perhaps. And to lose the ham actor’s mask beneath which you have been hiding for too long, and behind which you still hide when old Marcu Vancea finds you and summons you night after night to see him again, to give birth to him again.