The Lair

Part IV

The taxi driver was no longer Boltanski, but a student from Senegal, in love with America and the vacations in his native country; the nurse was no longer the beautiful Polish woman, but an Indian auntie with glasses. Dr. Hostal was the same. Solid, taciturn, trustworthy.

He’d appeared in the great operating room before and after the surgery, escorted by two young residents, taller than he is by a head. He’d been by three of the eight beds segregated with the floral curtains that rolled along the frames attached to the ceiling.

“Today you are no longer the first one, you’re the second. We’re performing more stent procedures than last time. It will take longer. Otherwise, the procedure is the same.”

The patient was silent, naked under the blue crepe paper tunic. The democratizing effect of his nudity restored his childishness.

“You already know the procedure. The little imaging camera enters through a central artery, passes toward the area of the heart, returning images. The catheter will expand in the blocked area, then the cleaning, the application of the casing.”

Improvements! Plumbing! Thirty daily procedures in this hospital, eight hundred per month, across America. Like auto maintenance.

Hostal was looking at the patient.

“We’re using Taxus Express Two. A precious metal with a protective antibuildup sheathing. Paclitaxel-Eluting Coronary System. Let’s trust it.”

The bed on wheels. The elevator, eighteenth floor, room nine, the door wide open. The nurse is Korean. The glass with the pink liquor. The restraining of his hands and legs. The resident, the professor, the computer. Start.

Now the screen was behind him, the patient could no longer see the insect nibbling away at the waste along the artery. He could see the nurse, the doctor, the resident. Sharply, the needle prick. On the left, in the cavity of his chest, toward the left. Again and again. A fine tentacle, deep needles. Pain. Burning. Thin, elongated. The oxygen balloon dilates the walls of the artery. The insertion of the cylinder. The patient closes his eyes, trying to separate mind from body.

Sleep, Professor Gora, the end will find you the green waters of dreams, an old child, blessed with numbness. For the time being, pain is merely the prologue to numbness.

“Taxus,” said the voice of the Australian. “Express Two.”

A final, hostile claw. The patient clenches his teeth. The experiment of the previous month seemed a gentle trap, to cheat his vigilance, this was now truly the end of him.

“Taxus. Express Two.”

The nurse leaned down to the open drawer, pulled another package out, opened it, extended the tube.

Time slowed, long seconds, stretched out. The tenacious pain was cutting the captive’s respiration. Terminal torture.

“Taxus. Express Two.”

He gnashed his teeth, his eyes closed. He was no Buddhist, the tortured body could not separate itself from the tortured mind. He was counting the slowly solidifying seconds in his stabbed chest.

“How is it going?”

Whom was the doctor addressing, God, Death? The magic of computerized rejuvenation had its own rules and lexicon. “How is it going, Professor? How is it going?”

“Ah, so. So, so.”

“There isn’t much more to go. Ten minutes, maybe twenty.”

So, then, an hour, two hours. The stabbing sensation advanced, long razors, his chest weighted down by a granite tombstone. His leather-cuffed hands and legs. The ceiling was sliding down, a giant granite press on top of his chest. An air vacuum, suffocation.

“Express Two.”

Maybe he ought to yell, though! Americans respect the ability to grin and bear one’s suffering, but also to express it. A jungle yell: please, stop! Stop! This is the patient’s entitlement to stop his own torture! Death, that old whore, is enjoying herself, she knows that the rebellion of the dying is pure futility.

“Express Two. There’s only a little farther to go, Professor Gora. I know it’s hard … just a little further.”

An hour, two hours, nine, it no longer mattered, the sacred ten minutes are still an eternity. He could no longer yell, he was exhausted, he’d missed his chance to cancel the deal with Meph-istopheles, he’d lost his final strength, he couldn’t stand another moment, not another moment here.

“All right, we’re finished.”

Ten minutes, that was all, ten minutes. No, not quite, another second, two, five, eight seconds, done.

“I know it was hard. Five stents! Difficult positions. It was no fun for me, either.”

The doctor took off his sweaty scrubs and threw them in the corner of the room. Naked and solid from the waist up, he left the room just like that, naked and shameless.

The scrawny little mustached man wheeled the bed toward the elevator, then toward door 568. A bright room, separated into two by a curtain. In each half, an empty bed. The metal nightstand, the television, the screen that registers his blood pressure, the window toward the courtyard.

“I heard it took a long time. Two and a half hours. A long time! Five stents. You first had two, now there are seven. A major overhaul.”

He recognized the voice. The deep, Polish timbre. Just back from the other world, he had too low a tolerance for the dish of the day.

The major overhaul doesn’t remove the body from the head. He’s connected to the sphygmomanometer and the pulse monitor, the bedpan, the needle in his vein.

“Try to sleep. The bandaged spot will be painful. It’s called an Angio-Seal Vascular Closure Device. The wound will gradually heal, the plug will be absorbed by the body in ninety days. If you end up needing another procedure … but that won’t happen. Anyway, the puncture would be made at least a centimeter from where it is now. Take the pills, sleep. The bell is by the nightstand, call if you need anything.”

Eyes closed. He couldn’t move, he didn’t even want to move. All he wanted was to sleep. The flushing of energy, dizziness, dozing off, intangible sleep. Anesthetized, delirious. Eternity.

The noise from the neighboring bed sounded like a crisis. The patient, the wife, the daughter, the son-in-law. They interfered one at a time, or together.

“I’m Bill McKelly. Kelly & Kelly Corporation, New Jersey. Well known, I realize. A month ago we had proceedings in New Jersey. We need to redo it. That’s why I came here. I’m friends with Dr. Chase. John Chase, the dermatologist. The head medic of dermatology. Everyone knows him, I’m sure. As I’ve said, I want my wife to remain here tonight, with me. I know, I know the rules, there are also exceptions. The armchair, yes, she’ll sleep in the armchair. Okay, I’ll call Chase.”

Irritated, Bill explains to his wife that John had promised to arrange everything, he just needs to keep his word. A heated discussion with Johnny followed, two brave lads appeared, carrying a cot. The commotion continued. There was talk of a wedding in Minnesota in two weeks. Plane tickets, gifts, clothing.

The Polish woman brought new pills, the antacid tea. And a large, thick book.

“You forgot your picture album. In the morning. In the preopera-tive room. Maybe you can use it, if you can’t sleep. Along with the sedatives, it should do the trick.”

Halina smiled, revealing teeth as white as Polish snow.

“Would you like me to turn on the TV? Would that entertain you?”

No, it wouldn’t. Mr. McKelly’s daughter and the son-in-law had left. The wife was quiet, the husband was snoring. Gora groped for the sedatives.

He awoke in the middle of the night. He ought to have opened his eyes, but he couldn’t. He could sense a streak of light coming from the street, through the window, he would have liked to open his eyes, but his lids were too heavy.

On the screen, a chessboard, a glass half-full. A black liquor with big bubbles. Nearby, a metal can. A Coca-Cola. The game of the century! Peter had become a celebrity, the New World loves celebrities. The patient doesn’t open his eyes, his lids are as heavy as a tombstone. Noise, agitation, someone had overturned the chessboard. The king, the queen, the bishops tumbling mercilessly on the floor, toward the phosphorescent corner of the room.

“A little bit more, a little bit more, to the left. Just a little more. You must wake up.”

He awoke groggily, recognizing Halina’s cooing voice.

“A little bit, just a little bit, and you should wake up.”

She’d fluffed his pillow higher, was raising him up slowly from the waist. He saw her, he was finally opening his old lids.

“Your blood pressure is high. Your pressure went up.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re watching the monitor. The general monitor connected to the monitor in the room.”

On the screen, Peter is no longer playing chess with Mephistoph-eles. Green diagrams and digits appeared instead. The whirlpools of panic, difficult breathing. In the left part of his chest, a hostile armor. His pressure had risen: two hundred over ninety-nine. The doctor on call, a Chinese resident, and a tall, red-haired assistant had arrived. “Yes, we’ll try an injection.” The syringe, another two syringes, for the blood test.

“What medication do you take for your high blood pressure?”

Someone murmured, “Fifty milligrams of Cozar. The blue pill, one hundred milligrams of Cozar.”

“Rest now, we’ll return in an hour.”

Halina gestured toward the bell by the bedside.

The diagrams varied. He closed his eyes, he opened his eyes. One hundred ninety-one over 92, 194 over 93.

Halina leaned down attentively to give him the glass of water.

“The control enzyme is too high. You’re going to stay another day.”

Was that how tests were done, instantly? Who had made the decision to keep the patient an extra day in the hospital against the rules of economy? The situation must be serious, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending more money. “We are just numbers, accounts, nothing more,” the Soviet man had warned.

Halina leaned over again, took his blood, raised his pillow.

“Everything will be all right. The pressure will drop, it will be okay.”

“Yes, I can see that, 189 over 90. Is this a drop or an error?”

Halina was smiling, without responding. The patient smiled, as well, he would have liked to ask her to tell the story of her arrival in America, the ESL classes, minuscule Mexicans and little Chinese crones and busty Brazilians, her first job, a cook at a Portuguese restaurant, the first-aid night classes, the affair with the naval officer, her first trip to Texas, the arrival of her brother from Lodz.

The patient was smiling, exhausted, senile, powerless to ask or listen to anything, grateful for the Polish woman’s smile.

Four in the morning. At 6 the commotion would start, they would take the temperature of the dying, they would check every room, they would bring breakfast, morning visitors would arrive, including the magician Hostal.

“The level of the enzymes has improved. We’re still going to hold you another day. There’s no need to worry. Today you’re going to receive instructions for the months and year to come. The medication, the states of emergency, diet, exercise program, the periodic checkups.”

Instructions for his resurrection, alongside other similarly privileged individuals.

“Everything will be okay,” Doctor Hostal assures him. You’ve been rejuvenated, but this youth is no joke. Diet, exercise, medication.”

The patient was watching him, but he couldn’t manage a response. He wanted to be accepted as the Australian’s neighbor, wherever Edward Hostal lived, he would promise to be a discreet neighbor, he understood the irritations and the exhaustion of the wizard who passed daily, ten, a hundred times a day, from one suffering heart to another, unabated and precise and smiling, he wouldn’t bother him, he wouldn’t ask for anything but for a protective proximity to this god of cardiologists. That was all he wanted, that was it, it would be enough, it would diminish his panic and loneliness, yes, why shouldn’t he say it, even his loneliness. He would move anywhere just to be close to Hostal, a silent, invisible neighbor, a younger and wiser brother, a man who had succeeded in being much more useful than he, Augustin Gora, would ever be.

“I would like to thank you for … ”

“No, no, don’t worry. Yesterday, Elvira would have accompanied you home just like last time. Today she can’t. I spoke with the porter to call you a cab. He’ll take you to the cab, he’ll speak to the driver and ask him to help you to the entrance of your apartment. You have my number. Call me anytime.”

Home, in his solitary bed! He was satisfied, he’d located Peter at the chess table, on the screen of the planetary night, he’d managed to speak to him calmly, whispering as if to a dear and addle-brained cousin, he’d managed to surprise him and move him, Peter had interrupted his game and responded to him in his turn, timidly, submissively, as if he were speaking to an older and wiser cousin.

From wherever he may have been coming, from Nevada near Gina Monteverdi, Tara’s cheerful aunt, or from the polygamous refuge with the nine wives of the Mormon Alexander Joseph, from the Long Haul Estate near Big Water, Utah, or from the drama classes from the Methodist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, or from the Sea Hawk among the Coast Guard of Key West, Florida, the ship that had intercepted twenty-five million pounds of marijuana and ten thousand pounds of cocaine, from any page of the American Album—wherever it was, Peter had in the end arrived, of course, in New York, on the evening of September 9, 2001.

He hadn’t forgotten that many months ago, his cousin, Professor Augustin Gora, had reserved for him a room at the Hotel Esplanade, on the corner of 48th Street and Eighth Avenue. On Tuesday, September 11, he was to meet with the lawyer whom Gora had hired, to obtain his miraculous green card. He would enter the ranks of new people in the New World, he’d no longer need to hide in the wilderness. No one knew about the meeting at the World Trade Center, he hadn’t told anyone, the secret remained between the two of them, to deter any of the dubious astral alignments that might provoke a crime such as the one that had befallen Palade.

Suddenly at 8:46 in the morning, the formation Herostratus, the nineteen knifemen in the Show of the Century. All the televisions in the world watch the planes full of passengers and nineteen angels of death flying toward Salvation.

Peter tries to exit the subway, in the area of chaos. Crowded subway. The world stunned, the deaf-mutes and the cynical jokers, you could barely breathe. Allah-Yussuma-Osama’s messengers called for the saintly and eternal paradise, on the television screens across the entire planet. The metro halted. The cars closed tight. No, no suspects have been identified. Captive bodies, stuck to one another, incapable of holding each other up. Among them, David and Eva Gapar.

Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, David and Eva remained pasted, next to each other, at the end of the train car. Minutes are hours, forty minutes seem like an eternity. A stroke can occur even faster.

A few minutes before the metro starts up again.

Cautious movements. The bandage protects the incision, the wound is green, bruised, his skin would regain its usual pallor.

“Short, slow walks at the start. After two weeks, easy exercises. Gradually, routine exercise. Half an hour per day. Or longer, forty-minute walks. Measure your tension at various hours. Keep track of the figures in a notebook. We will reevaluate in a month.”

The walk was short. Bouts of panic, sharp stabs in his temples, the chest loaded with toxins. The body estranged. Confused signals. It was difficult to block the brain’s sensor, the body was disoriented. The first warnings, often false, fueled his unease. His mind under alarm, lubricous, can’t find the remedy. Quickly, quickly, the ambulance. Neighbor Hostal wasn’t his neighbor, and he considered himself merely a plumber, a modest repairman of florid pipes. The cardiac patient needed to be connected to the global panel of the ambulance, instant and perfect response.

These aren’t just the exaggerations of loneliness, as Izy thinks, they are the digits of the blood pressure monitor. Figures, in the era of figures and numbers, Comrade Boltanski teaches us.

He won’t call Bar-El. He’s going to clip his fingernails, that’s what he’s going to do. Eyes goggling the monitor that is going haywire.

Who’s going to clip your nails, Professor? Try as you might to concentrate on this minor drudgery, in the end you still can’t prevent the unfortunate moment; you’ve pushed the nail scissors in too deep, the nail and the finger and the cuff of your shirt are covered in blood. Thin and frenetic blood, difficult to stop.

“Try to avoid bleeding. The drugs will thin your blood and you may not be able to stop bleeding, you may get an infection. An infection would be a very serious thing, if it reaches your heart. There have been fatal cases.”

Neosporin against cuts and infections! You can’t find the ointment, nor the Band-Aids, you never put things back in their place, always playing hide-and-seek. Madam Neosporin and Sir Band-Aid are having a laugh at the blunderings of the blunderer. Where have you hidden, you saboteurs? Hocus-pocus, now you see them, now you don’t, just like us mortals, here today, gone tomorrow. Ha, there you are in between the towels. I feel like the fat and playful Gapar, his silly games.

The monitor reads 189 over 94. Pressure on his nape, the body returned to the brain. Alarm in the kidneys and intestines, in the urinary tract and circulatory and respiratory systems. Gasps, spasms, you don’t know where the next attack will be. You want to sleep, to die in your sleep, forgotten by the Great Dispatcher.

Indigestion, cramps, burning. Will the body’s new age be spent on the toilet? A defective spark plug here, another defective connection there, tired suspension, a corroded carburetor, a worn pump and worn-out brakes and worn-down frame. The danger didn’t originate in the heart. The passages had been cleaned, the soldered joints reinforced, the engine restored. The spirit was working, the armatures of Faust had enlarged the arteries, the blood was pumping.

The unexpected is the great advantage of the cardiac patient, the great danger and the great privilege. All of a sudden, it’s over, you’re granted rest.

Gora had paused on the way to the couch. The desire for sleep and the fear of sleep. One hesitation overcame the contrary hesitation. All he had to do was walk agitatedly the length and width and diagonal of the room, until he arrived at the democratic throne of the water closet. There he explored old age and the cowardly tendencies that old age spurred. It was day, another day, then night, then the next day, just as in the Bible. The tension monitor had become cordial, same as with the dialogue between the soul, the stomach, and the brain. The patient was waiting for the multiplying warnings. Day tension, night tension, numbers, numbers, Comrade Boltanski, columns of numbers measure the daily cardiograms.

Gora repeated to himself: there is no fear. No, there’s no fear, only the humiliation of uncertainty, the sadism of postponement. I am enslaved to a body on which I can no longer depend. It has betrayed me, it’s gone off and moved into my brain, and I can’t draw it out of there, it’s pointless for Izy to ask me to do it, I can’t budge it from here. That’s it, I’m going to start the obituary, Cora’s Obituary. The relating of yet another meaningless death will induce calm, and calm pacifies tension and unease.

A serene afternoon. He sat at his desk, in front of the computer. The blue screen, the first letters. White, clear, clean, familiar, as ever.

In the window, the bulb of the sun where eternity lives. The sun up high in the clear sky, and here, close by in the square of the window and on the red flooring.

Impatient to animate the letters and commas and questions, one born out of another, however, he didn’t touch the keys.

The keyboard frightened him. He’d pulled out the large, thick American Album from the left of his desk. One last time, Peter chatted with the Mormon and his wives. Then with the Coast Guard lieutenant who had captured the contraband bandits. Then, after a while: the first angioplasty of the obituarist, the second angioplasty. Peter had arrived inside the hullabaloo of old television sets in Backer’s store in Phoenix, Arizona. Mr. Backer, naked down to the waist, in shorts and three-quarter socks, old, torn sneakers without laces, large hands blackened by oil and dust. In Colorado, he’d scoured the immense airplane cemetery maintained for forty years by the J. W. Duff Aircraft Company, then Alaska’s North Slope Borough, eighty thousand square meters of ice and tundra, surrounding the town of Barrow and seven smaller towns, 20 percent of America’s daily petrol production. The Eskimo mayor, like 80 percent of the people he managed, talked about the seasonal whale hunts. Had Mynheer Gapar truly arrived there, among the Eskimos, or was he nowhere at all?

Gora put a hand on the album. The blue gloves at the edge of the table. Abruptly, his breathing stops short. He tries to inhale and exhale normally, as he’d been instructed to do. His brow and temples were sweating. Shivers. Tremors. In the bedroom, the monitor. The small, short sound: 196 over 102. Bar-El or Lu or Hostal or Peter or the investigator Murphy or the defunct Dima, someone needed to come to aid the dying man!

It was late, even the poet Yussuma Ben Laden was sleeping, there was no one to call. Izy!

“Call the ambulance, my boy. You can’t stay wound up with that tension all night. Nine, one, one. You have the number. The boys come quickly, they take you in, they treat you even along the way, before you get to the destination. After they see you at the hospital, you tell them to call me. When they get word from a doctor, they’ll do it. Not out of some collegiate spirit, but out of fear. Yes, yes, have them call me. It’s not serious, but don’t wait. You waited enough in your life. Now caution means urgency.”

The patient on a stretcher, the monitor connected to his left arm. He threw down the sweet liquor, then the aspirin, the EMT was massaging his wise forehead, assuring him that everything will be all right.

The halls of the emergency room. Traffic, many patients begging for the postponement of death. Two resident doctors. One blonde, freckled, thickset, and chatty and another supple and quiet Thai woman with little glasses no bigger than a thimble on her minuscule, childlike nose. Questions and answers, the sick heart’s history, tension rising. The patient didn’t have a fever, despite the sweating and shivering, which had ruffled him up in the ambulance as well as now. Small, continuous trepidations.

They took his blood, took him to radiology, gave him the first two pink pills and a glass of water. The freckled Irish woman was in a rush to get his case over with.

“Nothing unusual. As you can see, your tension has gone down. One forty over eighty-five. The tests look normal, same with the radiogram, the cardiogram. You’re free to go. Taxis come constantly, you’ll find one quickly. You’re lucky, you get to spend tonight at home.”

“What was the cause of the attack?”

The thickset woman had no time for commentary. She raised her short hands to the ceiling.

“We don’t know. We don’t know.”

Her Thai colleague hands him the release forms.

“It just happens sometimes … at a certain age, irregularities start to appear. Your test results are clear, the radiogram, the cardiogram, just as Rebecca told you.”

Aha, Rebecca, is it? The Irish take their names from the Bible.

Ah, so we’re back talking about age! Age is fishing for attention, it compels you, it compels you to …

“In fact, at any age,” the young woman added.

The incident was repeated two weeks later. The dream of Lu. A white, silken blouse. She was meticulously cleaning the vegetables, preparing the raspberries, the cherries, the wine. The slow joy of the living, concentration and sensuality. Thin, loose-fitting pants made of green silk. A sleeveless and transparent linen blouse over the pants. Sandals with a single strap on an otherwise bare foot. A supple, elastic body. A narrow, Andalusian head. The body vibrated at the first touch. She threw off her sandals, her pants, her minuscule underwear, a rusted leaf. The lips of her sex, the puff of her curly hair. The lashes trembling, as well as her voice. The electric fingers chaining her captive. A faraway look in her eyes, somewhere in the green of the great trees, whisper and whimper, calling the prisoner’s name.

Suddenly the heaviness in the chest. He breathed with difficulty, sweat covered his forehead and temples, the cold invaded his feet, hands, shoulders. He was shivering. The back of his neck ached, the anguish was rising. His moist neck and hands. Cold. He was trembling.

The monitor frowned: 201 over 110. The telephone: 911. The EMTs, the hospital, consultations, tests. Benign results. After a couple of hours, his blood pressure goes down: 143 over 90.

From time’s lottery machine I pulled out the winning numbers, Comrade Boltanski: the temperature, the white and red hemoglobin count, the glycemic index, cholesterol, even these have been tempered. We can’t ask for anything more than that. These are the high marks of good behavior.

On the event of the following crisis, he didn’t call the ambulance anymore, he just took a pill for his hypertension and a sedative.

He needed a psychiatrist, Izy told him. He’d never seen one before nor did he aspire to that indifference called equilibrium. His high school classmate assured him that he wouldn’t be prodded with indiscreet questions or harsh treatments, nor would he be reincarnated into God knows what hyperactive persona.

Dr. Stephen Kelly was tall, all skin-and-bones, gray-haired, taciturn. The patient informed him that he wasn’t prone to confessions, that all he wants is the pill that will make him functional again, that was it.

The psychiatrist smiled. It seemed like an approving smile.

“What is the problem? What happened?”

The professor admitted that he’d gone through a calendar crisis. He wasn’t asked to explain what he’d meant by that. He added himself, “Two angioplasties. A slow and uncertain recovery with moments of panic,” the patient added. Raised levels of artery tension, cold sweats, panting, shortness of breath.

Stephen Kelly’s silence continued. Ah, yes, the patient wanted to add that he would prefer a minimal dose. Even less.

The doctor smiled, he seemed to approve of everything he was hearing. He prescribed a medication with a pleasant-sounding name.

“From the Prozac family.”

“Prozac? I’ve heard horror stories about this miracle drug called Prozac. A student of mine was taking Prozac, and her depression was transformed into a continuous smile. Rictus. Sneering grin. It would have frightened even the president’s bodyguards.”

“The minimal dose is fifty milligrams. We’ll start with a quarter of a minimal dose. We’ll try it gradually and see what happens. Is that okay?”

It was okay. On the following visit, the dose went up to twenty-five milligrams. The taciturn visit cost three hundred dollars. Unlike Bar-El, Dr. Kelly responded promptly to any and all telephone calls.

The dosage kept increasing until it reached the minimal dose. Then, panic attacks, anguish. Pain at the back of his neck, tremors, sweating. Kelly recommended reducing the dosage, then trying a different medication.

The patient received a new prescription. He contemplated it for a long time, he never did go to the pharmacy, nor did he ever go back to Dr. Kelly.

Exercise will replace the pills. Dr. Bar-El had steered him toward some three-month regime. Physical therapy. Ten minutes of warm-ups, then ten minutes on three different machines, then ten minutes of cooling-down exercises. The bus ride to the periphery of York Avenue and back. The effort becomes more intense, his exhaustion diminishes, the day arranges itself around the diversion. Revitaliza-tion, fuel for self-esteem.

The experiment concluded at the end of August. At the closing ceremony each contestant promised to continue training thirty minutes per day or to walk for an hour at a brisk pace.

Back to deserted hours, specters. The transparent linen blouse. The sandals, the otherwise bare foot. The supple body under the rays of the moon. The Andalusian head, the intense gaze. She threw off her sandals, her pants, the leaf of her underwear, taking the patient’s palm in her own long, delicate, and narrow hand, making it into a fist. Her lashes trembled, just like her voice, her fingers trembled, electrified.

“Tell me about your childhood … ” she said. She listened attentively, avid and already distant, somewhere in the green of the great trees. A fraction, enough to start you awake. And she’s back here. A burned look, her fingers touch the torrid center.

After a month Gora returned to the psychiatrist. A new office, four secretaries, elevators, bathrooms. The gray-haired Dr. Kelly inspires trust. Another pill. Small, preliminary doses. The normal dose has a positive effect. He increased the dosage by another quarter-pill. The patient seemed to have found his pill and his dosage. He slept well, didn’t feel tired. He took up his reading again, and his Obituary.

He accepted the status of a cardiac patient: a cocktail of six pills in the morning, two for dessert in the evening.

Thirsty for life, he considered its offers. Books and trees, faces and foods, the river, Lu’s gloves, the chair, the computer, the bathtub, the wintry forest, the album A Day in the Life of America, the cat on the verandah, the telephone, the blue towel, the ridiculous shoes. He’d lost the energy for revolt, the absurd had become comic. The path had been short, short, silly blind groping through the property called biography. He was ready for the retrospective.

He pushed the yellow folder with his hand and pulled the gloves toward himself. He set them down in front of himself, separate, the left glove to the left, the right glove to the right. He placed his palms on each. His hands were shorter than Lu’s, but wider. Even if he could manage to slip them inside, he still wouldn’t have been able to feel the navel of her long, delicate fingers.

He pressed the palms of each of the two gloves, his left hand on the left glove, his right hand on the right glove. The skin vibrated. Magnetic field, copulation. He looked out at the forest through the window. His hands on the two instruments of reanimation.

Dr. Hostal had given him the chance to feel that magic touch again.

The lottery offered a deferment. Brought back from the other world and abandoned on the border between that place and life, Gora was learning calm, serenity, and an ashen indifference.

There were new games: the morning exercises, the evening walk. Controlling the blood pressure, medication, visits to Dr. Morse, who had replaced Bar-El. Elvira visited him twice a week to clean his apartment and to keep him away from restaurants, to which he went anyway on the weekends.

After the second angioplasty, a telephonic interlocutor reappeared.

“And how are you feeling? Any better?”

I insisted that he tell me about the whole intervention in great detail, about why he’d been hospitalized an additional night, about the erratic variations in his blood pressure.

He seemed overwhelmed by the shock he’d endured. I had to try to divert his attention away from his illness.

“Do you remember the revolution at the college?”

“Yes, of course,” Gora mumbled.

“I had just arrived then. To you it had seemed like an apt initiation. You explained to me the mechanics of these litigious epidemics. You said they were cyclical, that people need the illusion of morality. Speeches from the balconies, blocked access to the administration, picketing, impassioned slogans. For someone who had just escaped the paradise of Communism, it was a grotesque parody.”

I found out that Gora no longer saw anyone, outside of Elvira. He’d become very timid, he said; he wasn’t sure of his own body. I was trying something, to distract him; I was happy that he’d agreed to play my game.

“I kept all the clippings from the papers. The scandal of the rape that wasn’t a rape. The revolution. The trial. The settlement with the student.”

The salad days in the desert of liberty. We’d each discovered that we were looking for our own captive oases. Religion. Rhetoric. Charity. Ser vility to bosses and bank accounts. Frustration. You can understand the extraordinary experiment only gradually.

“And what about that tall, brown-haired student Tim? The one who’d come to talk to you on Tereza’s behalf. Tim and Tereza. And then, the buck … ”

“The buck? What buck?”

“Tim had hunted a buck. He had a rifle, and a license for it. It was hunting season. So it was all legal. The scandal came after the flaying. He’d brought the shot buck back to the college, and he’d flayed it in his room, together with other students. When he was called to the president’s office, Tim excused himself, but he also called for clear and severe measures against the person who might have, at some point, raped Tereza.”

“Tim is now the head of some organization that advocates the rights of immigrants in Santa Fe; Tereza is married with three children, and the assailant is a lawyer on Wall Street. You asked me to explain to you every aspect of the incident, so that you could understand your new home.”

“Yes, yes, and now I have a question for you. Could Palade have been an informant?”

I imagined that Gora raised his eyebrows to the sky.

“You should be able to find out if he was. Or if he could have been, since we’re hypothesizing. Many who could never have been actually were. So does that mean that they could have been, if they actually were? Even if no one, not even they, suspected? We can’t ignore the when, the why, and the how they became what they couldn’t have been.”

“Forgive me, maybe this isn’t the best time for this kind of conversation.”

“Oh, sure it is.”

“I think about it often, that’s all. It’s my fault that I haven’t let go of the old toxins. We should be talking about America.”

“Yes, it would be more interesting. Our stories seem interesting only because they are bizarre.”

“Okay. I promise I’ll call with happier occasions for conversation.”

“That would make me happy. No one calls me.” It wasn’t at all clear whether it would actually make him happy or not, but I no longer felt guilty for what I’d insinuated.

The old hag jerks him around, tightening her grip around his neck. Dressed in a thin, transparent blouse made of white satin. She strangles him scrupulously, with grave attention, with glee. A diaphanous, satin death. But just when you think you’ve escaped your earthly sins, she lets go, slowly, delicately, with infinite care. You shake out of your nightmare, you wake up in front of the Folder.

On the cover, the date of birth. In a different time, that was the age of the wise; now it’s the age of Viagra. The old von Aschenbach, who was embarrassed even by the makeup with which his barber rejuvenated him, could never have imagined what wonders would have been waiting for him in the next century. A time of infinite possibility and infinite substitutions. Substitutions of kidneys and livers, of new noses and lips and new eyebrows, new eye color and gender, all at the client’s behest. Pills for your head and your feet, for narcolepsy and insomnia, for insanity, colds, and for cancer, for impotence and for envy, baldness and rheumatism, heart transplants and hair transplants and retina transplants, hearing and seeing and walking aids. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed and can be replaced. The dead have finally found their proper utility; last will and testaments foresee the transference not just of assets but also of organs, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, and the soul, all ready to serve a new body and to become new themselves.

How did all this time go by?

The exile had accepted this new place and time; he’d assimilated to the fax and the Internet and the cellular telephone, the bank account and flying saucers, religious and erotic sects, education through the Bible and pornography; however, he’d remained in a past named Lu.

Why would Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn have fascinated him so, when he was the total opposite of everything Peeperkorn was or could ever have been; why would he have reanimated Peter Gapar? And why had he never forgotten that conversation with the pudgy Izy, thousands of years ago, in the dark and dank basement, when he divulged his admiration for Jesus’ chosen people, even though he himself would always remain religiously indifferent? What was he missing and what would explain his ever-unresolved need to become someone else? Someone less cautious, someone less remarkable. More rebellious, and not just in his thoughts, freer, and not just in his dreams, more versatile and hypocritical, more mysterious, more culpable and haunted by hostility. Someone more worthy of hate and compassion and the admiration of the masked people who surrounded him.

On top of the new earthy-gray folder on which destiny had written in large, red letters, gora, there was a blue sheet of paper with Dr. Hostal’s signature.

It seems that the coronary artery disease and the epigastric discomfort were unrelated. The angioplasty results show that there was a combination of a focalized and a diffused illness, which may have triggered a metabolic syndrome from the past, a state of hypercoagu-lation. Considering the risk factors of cardiovascular disease, the patient’s arterial hypertension is borderline; borderline hypercholesteremia (and low HDL) is at a normal level; and borderline blood sugar.

Borderline! The Citizen of the Borderland Archipelago! The character might be read in the code of Borderland. On the line, on the borderline, nowhere! Borderline!

The Citizen of the Borderline had pulled the curtains. Go to the zoo! He was talking to himself. In the zoo of the street, he would meet others like himself. Instead, he stays at home, like a vehicle forgotten in the garage.

The coffee, the cereal bowl, the pills. On the TV screen, the mischief of his species, chess players competing with destiny.

Exercises, shower. The day begins. He’d won another day, nothing could compare with that performance, his fellow citizens in the New World would have him believe. They were right. A new day. The farce of being, the wonder of existence.

He was watching the screen, the table where the ponderous Peter was playing chess, with the glass of Coca-Cola nearby. It was late.

It was late, but I’d defied the hour.

“Did you read the piece about the angioplasty?”

“Where would I have read it?”

“Today, in the New York Times. Front page news.”

“I don’t get the papers anymore. I would only read old newspapers, if I could, starting with the year of my birth. From seven decades ago.”

“That could be amusing. But you would miss all the new medical discoveries.”

“Such as?”

“Such as these, what do they call them … stents.”

“I’ve heard that word before.”

“They came up with a new model a few years ago, coated with some kind of substance that impedes further buildup in the arteries. But now they are saying the old ones were better.”

“They gave me the new ones, the ones impregnated by the saliva of Mephistopheles. I had insisted on whatever was newest, most efficient. Dr. Hostal agreed. He’s a trustworthy man.”

“Eh, don’t get melodramatic. In two months they’ll discover that the new ones are actually better.”

“The most important thing, however, is that, after you rot, those little amulets will still survive. The archeologists will be able to identify you.”

“How many did they give you?”

“Seven. A magic number.”

I was lucky. Gora was in a mood to talk.

“You know, Palade was your student. They refused his passport but gave it to him after a year, on the second try. In response to pressure from the Americans. They gave it to him begrudgingly. That seems strange.”

“What’s so strange about it? I know what you’re insinuating.”

“I’m not insinuating anything; I’m asking. I’m trying to cure myself of the illness with which we all left that place: suspicion.”

“That would have made me an informant, too, no? They gave me a passport, as well.”

“You were a different case. Ludmila’s relations could have intervened. Maybe they were the ones who made the deal.”

“And you … you came here with a passport, too.”

“They wanted to get rid of me. The secret police files have proof of that. I had uncovered informants among neighbors and friends and relations. I was naive; now I’m suspicious.”

“I remember when you first came. Palade had told me you’d arrived and that he gave you my phone number. But you didn’t call for about six months. When I asked how you were, you said you were jet-lagged. I appreciated your humor, but you seemed disoriented and lost.”

“I was. I’d lost my ability to speak. When I was leaving, at the airport.”

“I remember, you were saying that when they stamped your passport with the exit visa, they also cut out your tongue. We all went through that.”

“Not all of us. Palade came here as a young man, and Professor Gora already knew the language.”

“I sent you to my friend Koch. Izy Koch.”

“You were right about him; he wouldn’t take my money. But I can see this conversation isn’t very interesting; you’re getting bored.”

“It’s interesting, but yes, it’s boring me. I’m happy for this country’s nonsense and goodwill. I suspect that you’re also satisfied with it.”

“I am. I thought I might amuse you with my question about Palade. I don’t know if I ever told you that we were high school classmates. We went on to different things.”

“You never told me.”

“Or that I met with him once, after he returned from his visit back to the Homeland, not long before he was assassinated?”

“Not that, either.”

“He told me that he’d seen Lu, I don’t know if he told you about it.”

This was the final bait. Gora hesitates, deciding whether to lie or not.

“He never told me.”

“At the theater. The Master and Margarita.”

“Did he tell you what she was wearing?”

If that was an ironic question, then it meant he was mocking me and that I’d lost my last chance to challenge him.

“Was it a black, low-cut dress? Or something casual? Did she have her hair up in a bun?”

I didn’t answer. There was a stony silence. Then, abruptly, Gora flared up again.

“A great doctor, the Australian. He fixed me; I’m all brand new! I can just take it all from the top and repeat all the same nonsense. Are you still there, or have you gotten tired?”

He’d taken on the role of the senile, old man. He was probably enjoying himself, taking notes.

“I’m here. You’re right, I’m not so young, either. The invisible hag is waiting in the corner, with gifts of all kinds. Cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer’s, epidemics. Fires, terrorism. At your disposal.”

“Yes, it’s a huge offer. It comes when you least expect it. At night, when the forest darkens. It darkens, but it doesn’t sleep. Even here in the city, I still see woods outside my windows. Monkhood. Willy-nilly apparitions.”

A long pause. It gave me courage.

“And you really weren’t in touch?”

“We weren’t. I wrote to Lu when I arrived. She never wrote back. I wrote again. She never answered the phone, either. I didn’t insist. And I never really looked for my fellow countrymen. Even now, I avoid them, as you well know.”

“Because of this?”

“Not only.”

“And you’ve known nothing about Lu since you left?”

“I recapitulated, going over the past; I didn’t find much. Small trivialities, oddities, ambiguities, brief discrepancies. Trivialities. There were things to ponder, to be sure. Nothing important or drastic, however.”

“And then?”

“I was surprised by her arrival, but I didn’t see her. There was no point. We see each other in the past. The Iron Curtain was a good curtain, sparing us of a lot of things. You worry about what you left behind; you receive no news. You can’t simply board a plane and land in the locus of all that mystery, to see with your own eyes everything that’s being hidden from you. But it’s better this way, isn’t it? You’re spared all blame, aren’t you? What do you say to that? You’re an expert in fortunate and unfortunate and nonexistent faults; what do you think?”

This time he was attacking directly; he was asking questions and didn’t wait for answers. There were only questions boiling with his fury.

“In any case, now I understand. I’m armed; I’m renewed. With the circulation to my heart and brain so much improved, I can understand. These stents were a magical bargain! They restored the circulation to all of my organs, the major and minor ones; they gave me a second chance.”

He was speaking quickly, with fury and speed.

He was the winner alongside his pale Andalusian, under her young gaze, touching those gloves and her young hands. One moment was enough to bring you back; the skin shrivels, the body is dry, the arms livid. Long, old arms and legs. Fragile bones that powder at the first touch. The dust of the skeleton that had been your youth. But I wouldn’t have been able to break Gora’s spell, no matter what I might have said.

“I was turned back from the gates of heaven! It was a postponement. I returned to find out what was left to find out. After this, I’ll bet they’ll take me in. And now, I have to go. Excuse me but Boltan-ski is waiting for me.”

“The Russian?”

“The Ukrainian. The Soviet. You know him?”

“Yes, I know him. The chauffeur of all the Eastern European exiles. Where are you going?”

“He’s taking me to Penn Station.”

“But where are you going?”

“I’m going to meet Avakian. I’ve finally secured a meeting with Bedros Avakian. Always busy, always worried, that one, but he finally agreed to this one favor. I have some questions about Peter and Tara. And about Deste. Supposedly she’s started a fashion house in Sarajevo. I heard that or dreamed it, I don’t know anymore; I’m getting old. Senility. The interrupted story. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“As you can see, the New World is a great concern of mine.”

I remained on the line for some time, heard his voice again; he was speaking normally, as if everything else that had been said until then had simply been swept away, or just wasn’t important.

All that was left was for me to ask him what he was reading.

“What book am I reading? I’m not reading anything. I can’t concentrate.”

“There’s not a single book on your table? I don’t believe it.”

“The news, some papers, folders. No books.”

“And on the nightstand?”

“What nightstand?”

“How should I know, the nightstand near your bed.”

“Ah, yes. Rilke. The readers’ sect is diminishing, but not dead. Thank God.”

“Rilke? Poetry? You still read poetry?”

“Not really. It’s a collection of selected works. Short essays, some verse. About love. The protection of one’s own solitude, and the protection of the other’s solitude! If you try to possess the other’s solitude, or try to give your own away, it all goes to hell. That’s the idea. You remember? A good marriage is one where each partner is the protector of the other’s solitude. Something like that.”

“But that’s referring to marriage, not to love.”

“Some say that love is an error of allocation; the poet is attempting to instruct the reader on how to maintain a contractual love. To watch over the other person’s solitude, to protect it, rather, or to leave the other person at the gate of his or her own solitude. A solitude dressed festively, one that comes out of the vast darkness. Not at all badly put. He was young, the old poet.”

He seemed to have reread the text recently, unsatisfied with what he’d found.

He was a winner; he had Lu and his friends on his shelves, who kept vigil over his aristocratic solitude, its civilized hypocrisies.

“Coupling means empowering the surrounding loneliness. When someone gives himself with complete abandon to someone else, it’s over; nothing remains, there’s nothing. Rilke was young then.”

He’d stopped speaking for the moment; he had probably also picked up one of the many colored folders, bringing it near, the way you might bring your ear to the ground, to listen for the oncoming train; he listened for a second to the nocturne of the lunatics, then leisurely put the folder back in its place, reconnecting with the wanton world.

“When two people give themselves entirely to one another, when they no longer belong to themselves … ”

I realized that now he was reading, either from a book, or some notebook of his own.

“When the two give themselves entirely, in order to belong entirely to each other, their feet leave the ground. And living together becomes a continuous failure. A continuous failure, what do you think of that?”

He was reading only because he’d been asked about his reading, and, as usual, he was addressing himself to someone absent. His voice was calm, normal.

The following weeks and months, I spoke at length with Augustin Gora about old age.

The subject didn’t strike him as somber, not even after the confirmation, albeit in dubious circumstances, of the death of our younger friend, Peter Gapar. He didn’t respond, either, when I confessed to him my suspicion that, after this recent and belated news, he would write his own obituary, who knows how true to his actual biography. It would have been presumptuous to assume, I added, that after our increasingly frequent conversations following Peter’s death, I myself would have become the hero of a similar composition. He didn’t answer; he returned to the subject of old age.

“Until the shock with the angioplasty, I never felt my age coming on. Without children, I ignored the speed of the calendar. Forty-and fifty-year anniversaries were registered and forgotten. The meeting with the doctors, with their machines and their hospital rooms, brought me to my senses. What followed was a tough year, a really tough year. The Nymphomaniac, as the departed called it, kept taunting me; I was living in constant tension. I felt, then, that the disease was a warning. That’s what old age is, isn’t it? Ever more acute awareness of fragility. Initiation in exhaustion, initiation in dying. Alert and hurried time pushing us every day and night closer to that beyond that horrifies us. As if all of life didn’t come down to just that. Every new morning is a threshold to an unknown that could be anything, including the end.”

He was right; illness prepares one for extinction. Without such preparations, you think you can prolong the ambiguity for as long as you want.

“Melancholy and the abyss? You look into the distance into which you’ll splinter just as if you’d never been here at all, but routine is stronger. It returns you to the here and now. Your instincts are still alive and intact. You reenter the chaos that consumes time imperceptibly and ruthlessly.”

“Just when the verdict is clearly pronounced, perception changes. The end of your journey is announced to you. Expiration. Just like with any product. The term of expiration, twenty-three years, thirty-four years, sixty-one years and three months and two weeks and five days. The tumor is incurable; you have six months to live. The last postponement. Today’s doctors don’t have the liberty to lie to you about the prognosis.”

“Yes, and every day becomes a gift, ignored up to that point. You become aware of every moment, every leaf, every breeze, every page. You’d like to sip them, to hold them like this, endlessly, inside you. Were you scared? Are you still scared? Of the void, of the nothing that you become?”

“Then, yes. The surprise found me unprepared, it ravaged my insides. Now, less so. A little less. I’m calm.”

“Bitterness helps, in the end? Fury, disillusionment, exhaustion, contempt for everything, not least of which for disgusting death?”

“Maybe. But fury is vital; it’s not acceptance.”

“And kindness? Serenity and gratitude. Resignation, surrender to destiny.”

“Like an enlightenment? Candor, abandon? Like faith?”

“Faith promises hope. Unverifiable hope. Maybe we’ll get to a point when we can verify hope.”

“Palade wasn’t a man of faith, but he believed in the transmigration of souls. Successive reincarnations.”

“He’s not alone. He claimed that he received coded signs. Those who don’t receive them can’t contradict him,” said Gora, quietly.

I asked Gora to tell me what he saw out the window. He announced, first, what time it was: eight past four in the afternoon.

“We can’t ignore the hour. We’re talking about old age, death, and so, about time. The time of expiration.”

After a pause, he added: “July. July 19.”

I was waiting for him to announce the year, but he didn’t. What did the nineteenth of July look like out his window, when so many people are born while others die, just like any other day?

He described a garden to me, then a green valley. A vital, vigorous green. And then further, a tall, verdant forest. In the garden facing the window, a family of wild turkeys. A mother and nine chicks, the father absent, at the library. Squirrels. Two young and timid deer. A fat, lazy cat.

“Paradise! Paradise, right?”

“Yes, but I’m not getting bored. I have my books on the shelf and my words inside me.”

“They’ll disappear.”

“They’ll no longer be my books? Or I will no longer be among them? Is that what you mean?”

“Do you envy those you’ll leave behind? Are you sorry to leave?”

“Envy? Those who remain aren’t immortal. They remain provisionally. When they disappear, they’ll also be mentioned for a while. By relatives and friends, in books and photographs. Until the last trace is gone. It doesn’t matter when. Yes, it makes you lightheaded to think about your loved ones. Even if you haven’t seen them for a long time. You know that they are still here, somewhere. Our tiring sun will also disappear, won’t it? Terrible, right?”

“Is there someone over there that you’d like to see again?”

“Oh, yes. My parents. From time to time. And others … in the same way, from time to time. If we keep them in mind, it’s enough and it’s more certain. Without depressing changes.”

I asked him how he imagines the final moment. Extended to infinity, or brief, brief, like a spasm.

I believed myself resigned, calm, biologically calm, the way an interlocutor from the faraway land used to say, but it so happens that the thought of the final hour overwhelms me. Impotence, regret, the insurmountable, drained my vital energy instantly. Like in a sensual and doomed atonement, with no way out.

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about the moment; it’s an unbearable thought,” Gora said, unconvinced.

We weren’t talking about old age, actually, but about life. Old age was life slowed down, but still life. Enfeebled, diminished, but life nonetheless. Death doesn’t exist without life.

“Material death? The perishable, the organic. What about transcendence? The prayers, the books, the manuscripts, the scores, the drawings that attempt to defy matter, even while they represent it. Mozart and Venice and Borges. All in vain?”

“Intensity. Not more futile than other futilities. Our privileged intensity. Our gift and our dedication.”

“Like love?”

The question irritated him, I realized, hearing the angry shuffling of papers and eyeglasses hitting the table.

I retreated from the necrology with a kind of childhood sadness.

Even during the conversation with Gora, I bore inside me a ten-year-old boy, or maybe a slightly older adolescent, although I remembered perfectly the hesitations and the exaltations and the failures from eighteen, from twenty-five years old and those that came later, much, much later. The boy, or adolescent, persisted, even if in another body that was the same, with another mind, which was also the same. It was as if everything had happened yesterday. When did it all come apart? Has it all really come apart, with no possibility of prolonging what was there?

When Lu asked me a week ago if I want to allow, through a testament, the pulling of the plug from the machines that maintain artificial life, the way that she intended to do, I answered no, no matter what. She won’t be able to disconnect her last victim from the sinister torture-preservation machines; my testament will deny this redemption. Not because I would hope for a miracle that would block extinction through some new miraculous medicine, or through who knows what incredible natural redress of the organism, but because the disease, even in its extreme form, an unconscious state, still seemed to me to be life. Who could specify with all certainty how absolute is the apparently total amnesia of a dying man? Palade would say I was right, he actually believed in a codified world, in mysterious formulas, in open, unresolved transitions, in magical and unpredictable metamorphoses. Izy Koch would also say I was right; he often said that nothing existed except life and that was all; this was the belief of the elders; this motivates our neuroses, our restlessness, those of us who are denied second chances, exiled unavoidably and without recourse into a predictable direction.

Lu appeared troubled by my insistence, but categorical about her own disappearance, when and how it will come. We accepted each other’s every wish, formulated in legal terms and with notarized signatures.

That following morning, I showed her the imprint that our heads left in the pillow during the night, and I suggested that she imagine the pillow with the imprint of the one who suddenly died and was removed from the room. The one with whom she’d shared her bed and her time. All at once time is deserted; the room is deserted, and only the pillow preserves the trace that cannot be preserved.

“Can you imagine it?”

“I can, but I don’t want to. It was too great a detour until we found each other.”

Her look confirmed that the latecomer had no escape. No, I had no escape and didn’t want any.

She’d remained receptive to the ambiguous warnings and to the dark foreboding, but she lived a juvenile regeneration. She came out of the illness and the first ailments of the exile as if emerging from convalescence; that’s how she described it. Her beautiful hands were waiting for the novice that I was.

Liberated from the Baroque anguish of maladjustment to the real, she became more real, in her fortifying ardor, more beautiful in her acuity, now free of tension.

Time was patient with our detours and now slyly slowed its pace. We each ignored the loneliness of the other and found ourselves in the solitude that bound us and vitalized us. The longed-for danger felt after that first and last visit to the suspects’ attic.

The ephemeral didn’t scare me. I looked at the imprint left on the pillow, after the night that had died. Lu was showing me our shadows alongside each other on the white wall, both of us happy for the daylight that would scatter them. We beat the disheveled pillow, to make the trace disappear.

We didn’t want imprints and memories. Lu had accepted the captive’s decision to defend herself against herself, and himself against himself, even if in vain.

* “The word opîrlia means “the gossiping lizard” [trans.].

* A Romanian children’s playground game, the point of which is to toss a short stick with the use of a longer stick [trans.].

* Folk tale by the Romanian writer Petre Ispirescu [trans.].

* In Romanian, glove is mnu, pl. mnui [trans.].