Blinding: Volume 1

1

BEFORE they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened off and suffocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ştefan cel Mare. The window usually reflected my room’s cheap furniture — a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The reflected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection in the transparent glass. I would prop my feet on the radiator under the window, and in winter the soles of my feet would burn, giving me a perverse, subtle blend of pleasure and suffering. I saw myself in the yellow glass, under the triple blossom of the chandelier’s phantom, my face as thin as a razor, my eyes heavy within violet circles. A stringy moustache emphasized the asymmetry of my mouth, or more precisely, the asymmetry of my entire face. If you took a picture of my face and covered the left half, you would see an open, adventurous young man, almost beautiful. The other half, though, would shock and frighten you: a dead eye and a tragic mouth, hopelessness spread over the cheek like acne.

I only really felt like myself when I turned out the lights. At that moment, electric sparks from the trams that clattered on the streets five stories below would rotate across the walls in phosphorescent blue and green stripes. I suddenly became aware of the din of traffic, and of my loneliness, and of the endless sadness that was my life. When I clicked off the light switch behind the wardrobe, the room turned into a pale aquarium. I moved like an old fish around the pieces of putrid furniture that stank like the residue of a ravine. I crossed the jute rug, stiff under my feet, toward the cabinet in the bedstead, where I sat down again and put my feet on the radiator, and Bucharest exploded outside the lunar blue glass. The city was a nocturnal triptych, shining like glass, endless, inexhaustible. Below, I could see a part of the street where there were light poles like metal crosses that held tram lines and rosy light bulbs, poles that in winter nights attracted wave after wave of snowfall, furious or gentle, sparse like in cartoons or thick like fur. During the summer, for fun, I imagined a crucified body with a crown of thorns on every pole in that endless line. The bodies were bony and long-haired, with wet towels tied around their hips. Their tearful eyes followed the wash of cars over stony streets. Two or three children, out late for some reason, would stop to gaze at the nearest Christ, raising their triangular faces toward the moon.

Across the street were the state bakery, a few houses with small yards, a round tobacco kiosk, a shop that filled seltzer bottles, and a grocery. Possibly because the first time I ever crossed the street by myself was to buy bread, I dream most often about that building. In my dreams, it is no longer a dank hovel, always dark, where an old woman in a white coat kneads bread that looks and smells like a rat, but a space of mystery at the top of a staircase, long and difficult to climb. The weak light bulb, hanging from two bare wires, gains a mystical significance. The woman is now young and beautiful, and the stacks of bread racks are as high as a Cyclops. The woman herself towers tall. I count my coins in the chimerical light as they glitter in my palm, but then I lose track and start to cry, because I can’t tell if I have enough. Further up the street is Nenea Căţelu, a shabby and lazy old man, whose bare yard looks like a war zone, an empty lot filled with trash. He and his wife wander dazed here and there, in and out of their shack patched over with tarred cardboard, tripping over the skeletal dog who gave them their name. Looking toward Dinamo, I can see just the corner of the grocery store. Toward the circus grounds are the supermarket and newsstand. Here, in my dreams, the caves begin. I wander, holding a wire basket, through the shelves of sherbet and jam, napkins and sacks of sugar (some with little green or orange metal cans hidden inside, or so the kids say). I go through a swinging door into another area of the store, one that never existed, and I find myself outdoors, under the stars, with the basket of boxes and jars still in my hand. I’m behind the block, among mounds of crates made of broken boards, and in front of me is a white table where they sell cheese. But now there is not only one door, like in reality — here are ten doors in a row with windows between each one, brightly lit by the rooms of basement apartments. Through each window I can see a strange, very high bed, and in each bed a young girl is sleeping, her hair spilling over the pillow, her small breasts uncovered. In one of these dreams, I open the closest door and climb down a spiral staircase, which ends in a small alcove with an electric light. The staircase goes deep into the ground, and in the alcove, one of these girl-dolls is waiting for me, curly-haired and timid. Even though I am already a man when I have this dream, I am not meant to have Silvia, and all my excitement spends itself in woolen abstractions of words and gestures. We leave holding hands, we cross the snowy street, I see her blue hair in the lights of the pharmacy window and the restaurant named Hora, and then we both wait for the tram while a snowfall covers our faces. The tram comes, without walls, just the chassis and a few wooden chairs, and Silvia gets on and is lost to a part of the city that I found only later, in other dreams.

Behind this first row of buildings were others, and above them, stars. There was a massive house with red shutters, and a pink house that looked like a small castle. There were short apartment blocks braided with ivy, built between the wars, that had round windows with square panes, Jugendstil ornaments on the stairways, and grotesque towers. Everything was lost in the blackened leaves of poplars and beech trees, which made the sky seem deeper and darker toward the stars. In the lit windows, a life unrolled that I glimpsed only in fragments: a woman ironing, a man on the third floor in a white shirt wandering aimlessly, two women sitting in chairs and talking nonstop. Only three or four windows presented items of interest.

In my nights of erotic fever, I would sit in the dark at my window until every light was out and there was nothing to see, hoping to glimpse those uncovered breasts and cheeks and pubic triangles, those men tumbling women into bed or leading them to the window and taking them from behind. Often the drapes were drawn, and then I strove, squinting, to interpret the abstract and fragmentary movements that flashed in the wedge of unobstructed light. I would see hips and calves in everything, until I made myself dizzy and my sex dripped in my pajamas. Only then did I go to bed, to dream that I entered those foreign rooms and took part in the complicated erotic maneuvers in their depths …

Beyond this second row of buildings, the city stretched to the horizon, covering half of the window with a more and more miniscule, jumbled, blurry, haphazard mixture of the vegetable and the architectural, with steeples of trees shooting up here and there and strange cupolas arcing among the clouds. I could just make out the zigzagging shadow of the mall on Victoria (once, when I was a child, my mother showed it to me, against a post-storm sky), and some other tall buildings downtown, decades old and built like ziggurats, laden with pink, green and blue fluorescent billboards that blinked on and off in different rhythms. Further on, there was only the ever-greater density of stars at the horizon, which, way far-off, became a blade of tarnished gold. Held like a gemstone in the ring of stars, nocturnal Bucharest filled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebrae and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, making the city and me a single being.

The truth is, while I sat all night on the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, not only did I watch the city, but it too spied on me, it too dreamed me, it too became excited, because it was only a substitute for my yellow phantom that stared back from the window when the light was on. I was over twenty years old before this impression left me. By then, they had laid the foundations of the building facing ours, they had decided to widen the street, repave it, demolish the bread factory, the seltzer shop, and the kiosks, and put a wall of apartment buildings, taller than ours, alongside it. The winter was windy, the sky white and clear after a heavy snow. I looked out the window only once in a while. A bulldozer knocked down, with its toothed cup, the building where a fulsome woman had lived, who had never shown herself to me naked. The interior of her rooms was bare and more visible now as ruins, and more sentimental covered in snow. Bucharest was losing a kidney, was having a gland removed, maybe a vital one. Maybe under the skin of the city, like under a wound, there really were caves, and maybe this libidinous housewife who (out of spite?) never showed herself to me naked was somehow a center, a matrix of this underground life. Now the city’s gums crumbled like plaster. Soon, that side of the street looked like a mouth of ruined teeth, with yellowed stumps and gaps and rotting metal caps. The snow smelled wonderful when I opened the thin, wet window and put my buzz-cut head outside, freezing my neck and ears and watching the vapors puff out of the room — but beyond its clear, clean smell of clothes frozen on the line, I could sense the stench of destruction. And if it was true that the cerebral hemispheres developed out of the ancient olfactory bulb, then the stench, the metaphysical drunken breath, the smell of the armpits of time, the dishrag acridity of approaching ecstasy, the air of watercress insanity are, possibly, our most profound thoughts.

In spring, the foundations were excavated, sewer pipes spread like scabies through clay, pink and black cables unrolled from enormous wooden spools, each taller than a person, and concrete skeletons rose up, obscuring one strip of Bucharest after another, choking off the rustling vegetation and blocking up the entryways, gargoyles, cupolas, and stacked terraces of the city. The disorderly and unsteady forms of wood and cast iron, the scaffolds that the workers climbed, the cement mixers that emitted waves of smoke, and the piles of new concrete electrical poles to replace the rusted metal crucifixes all looked like the visible parts of a conspiracy, meant to separate me from Bucharest, and from myself, from my fifteen years spent sitting on the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, pulling the curtain back and watching the vast skies of the city. A section of my mind closes, a wall goes up, and the wall keeps me from accessing all I projected into every cube and square — the black-green and the yellow-green, the moon, thin as a fingernail, reflecting in all of the windows.

When I was seven or eight, my parents made me take a nap every afternoon. The dresser faced the bed, and I would watch my reflection shine on its surface, minute after minute, a child with dark eyes sweating under his sheet and unable to sleep even for a second. When the sun reflecting in the veneer began to blind me, making me see purple spots, I turned my face to the wall to follow every little rust-colored blossom and leaf in the pattern on the upholstered side of the bedstead cabinet. In this floral labyrinth, I discovered little symmetries, unexpected patterns, animal heads and men’s silhouettes, and with these I created stories I meant to continue in my dreams. But sleep never came, there was too much light, and one October, precisely this white light convinced me to play with fire: I listened first for any sounds from my parents’ room, and then I slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the window. The image of the city was dusty and far away. The street curved off toward the left, so I could see the apartments on our side, toward Lezeanu and Obor. In the distance, I could see the old fire watchtower, and behind it, a city heating plant with its parabolic tubes ejecting petrified smoke. The trees appeared straight, or like Gothic arches, but the closest ones betrayed their provenance: the branches filled with trembling, sprouting leaves were not straight but twisted like an unfastened braid. I leaned my forehead against the window and, dizzy with insomnia, waited for five o’clock, but time seemed to have stopped flowing, and the terrifying image of my father bursting through the door — his dark hair knotted in a stocking on top of his head like a fez and falling in a thick line as black as a crow’s tail — kept coming into my head.

Once, during these minutes stolen from obligatory sleep, I contemplated the most beautiful scene in the world. It was after a summer storm, with lightning branching through the suddenly dark sky, so dark that I would not have been able to say if it was darker in my room or outside, with gusts of rain, rapid parallel streams surrounded by a mist of fine drops lazily bouncing in every direction. When the rain stopped, daylight appeared between the black sky and the wet, gray city, as if two infinitely gentle hands were protecting the yellow, fresh, transparent light that lay across these surfaces, coloring them saffron and orange, and turning the air golden, making it shine like a prism. Slowly the clouds broke apart, and other stripes of the same rarified gold fell obliquely, crossing the initial light, making it clearer and cooler and even more intense. Spread over the hills, the Metropolitan towers the color of mercury, all the windows burning like a salt flame and crowned with a rainbow, Bucharest painted itself onto my triptych window, the sash of which my collarbone just touched.

My illumination would be scraped off, and above it, in neat, compact letters, a command would be written, as heavy as a curtain. But today, at the midpoint of my life’s arc, when I have read every book, even those tattooed on the moon and on my skin, even those written with the tip of a needle on the corners of my eyes, when I have seen enough and had enough, when I have systematically dismantled my five senses, when I have loved and hated, when I have raised immortal monuments in copper, when my ears have grown long awaiting our little God, without understanding for a long time that I am just a mite burrowing my trails through his skin of old light, when angels have populated my head like spiro bacteria, when all the sweetness of the world has been consumed and when April and May and June are gone — today, when my skin flakes beneath my ring like thousands of layers of onion paper, today, this vivacious and absurd today, I try to put my disorder into thought. I try to read the runes of windows and apartment balconies full of wet laundry, the apartments across the street that broke my life in two, just like the nautilus that walls over each outgrown compartment and moves into a larger one, inching through the ivory spiral that forms the summary of its life. But this text is not human and I cannot understand it anymore. What remains inside — my birth, my childhood, my adolescence — seeps through the pores of the enormous wall in long enigmatic strands, deformed, anamorphic and foreshortened, nebulized and diffracted, numberless, through which I can reach the small room where I sometimes return. Pearl over pearl over pearl, blue over blue over blue, every age and every house where I have lived (unless it was all a hallucination of nothingness) filters everything that came before, combining it all, making the bands of my life narrower and more heterogeneous. You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past. I write about the way my present brain wraps around my brains of smaller and smaller crania, of bones and cartilage and membranes … the tension and discord between my present mind and my mind a moment ago, my mind ten years ago … their interactions as they mix with each other’s images and emotions. There’s so much necrophilia in memory! So much fascination for ruin and rot! It’s like being a forensic pathologist, peering at liquefied organs!

To conceive of myself at different ages, with so many previous lives completed, is like talking about a long, uninterrupted line of dead bodies, a tunnel of bodies dying one into the next. A moment ago, the body who was here writing the words “dying one into the next,” with his face reflected in the dark pool of a coffee cup, fell off his stool. His skin crumbled away revealing the bones of his face, and his eyes rolled out, weeping black blood. A moment from now, the one who will write “who will write” will be the next to fall into the dust of the one before. How can you enter this mausoleum? And why would you? And what mask of tiffany, what surgical glove, will protect you from the infection emanating from memory?

Years later, while reading poetry or listening to music, I would feel ecstasy, the abrupt and focused clot in the brain, the sudden surge of a volatile and vesicant liquid, the windowpane suddenly opening, not onto anything outside myself but into someplace surrounded by brains, something profound and unbearable, a welling-up of beatitude. I had access, I had gained access to the forbidden room, through poetry or music (or a single thought, or an image that appeared in my mind, or — much later, coming home from high school by myself, stomping in puddles along the streetcar tracks — a window glint, the scent of a woman). I entered the epithalamium, I steeped myself in the amygdalae, I curled up in the abstract extension of the gold ring in the center of the mind. The revelation was like a cry of silent happiness. It was nothing like an orgasm except in epileptic brutality, but it expressed tranquility, love, submission, surrender, and adoration. These were breakthroughs, ruptures leading to the cistern of living light from the depths of the depths of our being, rendings swirling in the interior limit of thought, turning it into a starry heaven, since we all have this starry heaven in the skull and, over it, our consciousness. Often, though, this interior ejaculation would not reach its consummation but stop in the antechamber, and the antechambers of antechambers, where it stirred flickering images that were snuffed out in a second, leaving behind regret and nostalgia that would follow me for the rest of the day. Poems, these illumination machines, debauched me. I used them like drugs, until it was impossible for me to live without them. I’d started, sometime before, to write poems too. Among so many graceful lines, enchanted and aggressive, I would find myself stringing together, for no reason, passages of nonsense that seemed dictated by some other being. When I re-read them, they terrified me like a prophecy come true. In these I spoke about my mother, God, childhood, just as if, in the course of a conversation over a beer, I had suddenly started to speak in tongues, with the thin voice of a child, a castrato, or an angel. My mother would appear in my poems walking down Ştefan cel Mare, taller than the apartment buildings, kicking over the trucks and streetcars, crushing the sheet-metal kiosks beneath her enormous heels, sweeping up passersby in her cheap skirts. She would stop in front of the triple window of my room, crouch down and look inside. Her enormous blue eye and frowning brow filled the window, and filled me with terror. Then she would stand and set off westward, her wiry, phosphorescent hair destroying postal airplanes and satellites in the sky full of blood … What was going on with this mythologizing of my mother? Nothing had ever made me feel close to her, nothing in her interested me. She was the woman who washed my clothes, fried potatoes for me, and made me go to my university classes even when I wanted to skip. She was Mamma, a neutral being who looked neutral, who lived a modest life full of chores, and who lived in our house, where I was always a stranger. What accounted for this dearth of feeling in our family? My father was always traveling, and when he came home, red-faced, stinking of sweat, he would tie his hair, thick as a horse’s tail, on top of his head with pantyhose, with the top sagging open, a dark foot hanging between his shoulder blades. My mother would make him dinner and watch television with him, pointing out the cute folk music singers or variety show actors, gossiping about them endlessly. I’d eat quickly and retreat to the room facing the street (the other two rooms gave onto the back of the building, toward the melancholy red-brick Dîmboviţa flour mill) to watch the polyhedral drone of Bucharest in the window, or to write disconnected poems in graph paper notebooks, or to curl up under the blanket, pulling it over my head as though I could not stand the humiliation and shame of being an adolescent … We were, my family, three insects, each only interested in our own chemical trails, occasionally touching antennae and moving on. “How did you do at school today?” “Fine.” “Your Dinamo got creamed, on their own turf.” “So what, I’m doing okay with Polytech.” And then into the shell, to write more lines from nowhere:

mother, the power of dreams was your gift to me

I would spend nights entire with you eye to eye

and hand in hand I would believe I was beginning to know.

and your heart would beat again for both of us

and between our crania translucent as the shells of shrimp

an imaginary umbilical cord would emerge

and hypnosis and levitation and telepathy and love

would be the different colors of the flowers in our arms.

together

we would play an eternal game of cards with two sides:

life, death

while the clouds would flash in the fall of day, far off.

2

I FOUND myself looking through my family’s small archive, housed in an old purse my mother had since before she was married, a shoulder bag, garnet-colored, its imitation leather almost completely worn through. It was lined with a cheap silk, somewhat stained. In the bag’s pocket, I found two watches, so old they had a blackish salt on their faces, and the backs of their cases were tarnished green. The watch-bands had been lost long ago. Aside from the watches, there were some fuses, a vacuum tube from an old radio, and other little things I had played with as a child. Folded inside a yellowed piece of paper were two braids of blond-gray hair, tied with elastics — my own hair, from when my family, as Mamma told me the story, would put me in dresses and aprons and call me (they and all our neighbors) Mircica. The hair was soft and always gave me a chill, because it was so tangible, it was like that three-year-old boy had lived a life parallel to mine, like he might come through the door at any moment. At the bottom of the bag there were documents and receipts, rental contracts, warranties, stamped and embossed, and also yellow, sharp-smelling old pills from old doctors, faded pictures with zigzagged and torn edges, with dates and short descriptions in permanent marker, written in an awkward and misshapen hand, coins no longer used, a small baptismal cross, a white flower from somebody’s wedding … I poured the bag onto my bed and went through the contents, without knowing what I wanted to find. I came across rolls of film, developed and wrapped in paper. I held them up against the light to see scenes of family, framed the long way or the short, everyone with black faces and white hair, white suits and black shirts, black dresses with white flowers and white dresses with black flowers. The three or so pictures from when I was small were well known: the one in a yard, near Silistra, in a little knit-cotton suit and boots, with curls and cowlicks, with one hand on a globe pedestal and the other moving toward my eyes. I was eighteen months old and sniffling. You could see the wall of a house from the edge of town, with geraniums in the window, and the yard paved with gravel. Then, the picture of me on a motorcycle with a sidecar, at a fair — me chunky and scared, in short sleeves — next to a thread-worn stuffed bear, not much taller than I was. In this last one, however, no one was sure it was me. It might as well have been my cousin, Marian, my aunt Sica’s kid. The image, a bit small, had faded into a dirty sepia. Three more pictures, from times immemorial, were mixed in with documents, discharge papers, and medals with chipped enamel. There was the typical picture of my parents, retouched so often that it was hard to say what the couple actually looked like: him with hair as black as an ink stain, slicked back, with an expression so stern you’d think he was facing a firing squad, wearing a black wool suit that seemed like part of the background, and her in a wedding gown, with an unrecognizable face (it could be anyone from the movies of the time), and on one side, holding the monstrous wedding candles, an unnaturally fat bridesmaid, her legs touched by elephantiasis, and a bald groomsman with a mustache like Groucho Marx. The second photo was, actually, the first chronologically. It was my mother and father in the spa town where they met. Here, she is beautiful, with high cheekbones, chestnut hair in curls, shining eyes: a young worker who moved to the city with no future plans. He is almost a boy, not much more than twenty, and he looks like me. He’s wearing sweats and military boots. It is snowing lightly on their bare heads, while they lean against the railing of a bridge. Two people cross the bridge, wearing berets. It’s 1955, and the winter is much gentler than the one before. Some wandering photographer, maybe a former factory owner, or perhaps he had been a photographer under the previous regime too, shivered on the bridge, waiting for customers, and my parents — who at the time just barely belonged to each other — let themselves be immortalized, out of timidity, in the sad splendor of their youth. The last picture was carefully cut in half, not with scissors, but by folding it over and over. The film coating had cracked first, so the porous paper could be torn relatively accurately. What was left was an image of my father holding me in his arms, around when I was two and wore the famous blond braids. Still, I’m not wearing a dress but a pair of flowery “Spielhosen.” My dad is smiling, square-jawed, with penetrating eyes, down the camera lens, while I am laughing at someone to my left, in the missing part of the picture. You can just see a woman’s bare elbow.

The inside of the handbag, where I had looked before, but not with the interest I now had, smelled like the watches’ old copper and tarnish. The last thing I saw, because they were well hidden in the bag’s dusty folds, were my mother’s dentures, which she never used and hid there like they were shameful, nothing to talk about. When I first found them, I felt the same nausea and discomfort that I’d felt once before, in the depths of my childhood. It happened during the first year that I could cross the street by myself — for some bread, an issue of The Reckless Club, or to get my dad some cigarettes. In the silent summer evenings, I would reach a building that is not there anymore, go into the tobacco store, and look with trepidation at the cashier, a heavily made-up and fat woman with pink hair, surrounded by magazines and newspapers. Outside it was getting darker, and only here, in the little room with a window, was the light intense and still. I looked through the glass counter at all the packs of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, pistol-shaped tin lighters, and pocket knives that looked like lead fish … Next to them were other little trinkets. To me, the most beautiful things were the boxes of lacquered cardboard, with pictures of blue and gold tropical butterflies, and on the right a sticker where something was written in black ink. The word was long and fascinating: prophylactic. What could it have inside? I would often sit in the silence of my room, fidgeting with a toy, a tin laurel tree with a plastic fairy coming out, and wondering what strange, exotic plaything could be inside the butterfly box. Sometimes I imagined it could be in fact a butterfly, with a body like a bow string and wings of the same crinkly paper as fancy candy wrappers. Or a scented, chewy gum, with a little red stone set in the gelatinous middle.

My plan was to wait until the next time my parents and I walked to the Volga Theater to see a movie, and ask them to buy me a prophylactic. It was only three lei. If it came to it, I could get the money myself, from around the house, in five, ten or fifteen bani coins, until I had enough. I started getting the money together, and I imagined the pink-haired cashier would give me a maternal smile and put the box I wanted in my hand (I even knew which one I wanted: the one in the case, where the butterfly fluttered against a bright green background) … One evening on the way to the theater, I saw some Chinese boxes in another tobacco store, and I got up the courage to ask: “Daddy, what’s a prophylactic?” My father frowned and said harshly, “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” I was walking between my mother and my father with quick steps, and they went quiet for a few minutes, trading glances. I knew from my father’s tone that I had hit one of those closed doors, those places that your parents, however much they love you, will never let you enter. I could feel their breathing, their mysterious, adult lives, those incomprehensible prohibitions regarding the birth of children and the small and underdeveloped members between the legs and the way Mamma was tumbled onto the bed by my dad in the bedroom, when she cried out and I tried to save her, pounding the spine of a prickly and bestial man. After the unfortunate question, I felt a kind of horror, a feeling I re-encountered when I opened the yellowed packet that held my mother’s dentures. They were upper teeth, from the front, dirty-white with a little blue, made of cheap plastic, stuck into artificial gums. The gums were a color of red that would never be found in the membrane of an actual mouth. They had a special shade, as though their plastic had come from other dentures, old ones melted down and reused: a purple, a barely breathing mauve in the dominant red. A few wire stubs, poking out here and there, added to the fascinating repulsion I felt toward the object in my hand.

I had bad teeth from my mother, prone to cavities and rotting, and chipping. While chewing, I would sometimes feel, on my tongue, an unmistakable piece of molar: shiny as a mirror on one side, rough and hard on the other. From her I had unimaginable toothaches that would make me run through the house, knocking chairs over and pulling on the drapes. But I could tell that it wasn’t dread of my own teeth’s foreseeable future that disturbed me when I saw the hideous curve of those gums. It was their color. There was something in particular about that tinge that reminded me of something I had seen before, something I had once known, but could not bring back to mind. For a few days, I carried my mother’s gums and teeth in my pocket everywhere I walked. I fiddled with them obsessively on my route past Cantemir High on Toamnei Street and Profetului Street, I went down Galaţi in the roar of tram number five, I wandered through ruins around Lizeanu. Twilight came, and the dusty snow on the sidewalks timidly reflected the pink sky. An old woman at a window sucked spasmodically at a child’s candy ring. I saw a cat with eyes that I would know later from Gina. A woman stopped, looked around, and hiked up her stockings, pinching them through her parka and skirt. I was waiting, as I wandered among stores and children’s carts, for the moment when the twilight would turn exactly the same color as my mother’s gums, and suddenly it did. I was on Domniţa Ruxandra Street, where a small piaţa opened, dreamlike, lined with courtyards with colored globes on trellises, and there was an apartment block, almost alive, yellow and thin as a scalpel, with a vertical strip of matte glass over the entrance. The glass glowed in the twilight, and its flame inverted the branching art nouveau ironwork, black and warm as night. The snow lit the piaţa strangely with a white light from below, as though from underground, melting quickly in the morbid rose of nightfall. The silent block made me feel shaken and faint, like a blade plunged into asphalt and broken off. I stood in the middle of the piaţa, like a statue of a sad hero, and from my pocket I took the paper thin with age and unwrapped the hideous object. I raised the dentures over my head, and the teeth began to glitter, yellow like a salt flame, while the gums disappeared, melting into the matching color of evening.

“Ah, Mamma,” I whispered in the crazed silence. I stared at the dentures for a few more minutes in the darkening light, until the dusk turned as scarlet as blood in veins, and the dental appliance began to glow with an interior light, as though a gentle fluorescent gas had filled the curved rubber gums. And then my mother formed, like a phantom, around her dentures. First there was her skeleton, as transparent as bloodworms or a green x-ray, velvet and delicate. Then her skull with the wide, dark stains of her eyes and the small stains of her sinuses, her thoracic cavity, the translucent butterfly of the iliac crest, the gelatinous tubes of her hands, feet, toes, and fingers. Over them, like a light snow, like the veiled fins of an exotic fish, grew my mother’s spectral flesh, a large naked woman with sagging breasts, yet beautiful and young like in photos, with her liquid hair dissolving into the night. She turned toward the livid block, and I held my hand over her lips, as though to stop her from saying something, or from singing. The crown of my head barely reached her nipples. Together, in the descending darkness, we formed an enigmatic statue, holding still for no one. I came back to myself with the dentures in my hand and a sense of frustration, the feeling that I had been very close to something important and serious. I wrapped them up again in the paper and waited, dazed, in the piaţa’s whirling silence.

And suddenly it started to snow. In the sweet light of the lone bulb on the square, hanging, lonesome and violet, from a post, the flakes fell quickly, then slowly, white entering the diffuse ball of light, almost-black passing the center, then white again toward the ground. I felt the snowflakes’ invisible touch on my lips and eyelids, when two or three of the windows in the nearby middle-class houses lit up. Through the colorless air, speckled with the wet ice of the snowflakes, I moved toward the apartment block, a black iceberg rising into the foggy sky. I entered through the side gate, which was guarded by gas meters like two chimerical beasts. I went down a few steps to the garden level. In the whole hallway, painted green, one yellow bulb burned as weakly as a candle. Along the ceiling of the corridor, which twisted unpredictably, ran a pipe, its iron bandaged in places with red putty and hemp. Small rooms, with doors that looked as thin as cardboard, lined the walls on the left and right. At the sound of my footsteps, a door would open to reveal narrow and muggy spaces — a man in his underwear, a woman in a housedress drinking coffee from a chipped cup, an old woman with her headscarf hanging off the back of a chair, revealing two braids of graying hair that hung to her heels … I crept to the stairway that led to the next floor and beyond, and climbed. Each floor was a different color of desolation. There were black doors like in a morgue, enamel plates, much bigger than they had to be, with the apartment numbers; brass, metallic-smelling peepholes, wilted fichus and dank jute rugs. On the top floor there were no doors — only bare walls, with greenish skin, under a weak bulb. A few metal steps led toward the roof exit. Miniscule, quick snowflakes fell inside and melted on the mosaic of the floor. I went out onto the roof and was stunned. A nation of melancholy stretched out before me. It was not possible that I was still on the roof of the yellow block from the piaţa. I was on the peak of a gigantic construction, where at last I recognized one of the old blocks downtown, surrounded by copper cupolas like monstrous breasts. As far as my eyes could reach, Bucharest, like a glass model filled with blood, stretched out its fantasy of roofs: enormous eggs, medieval towers, the spirals of the Metropolitan, the CEC’s crystal stomach, the spheres on top of the Negoiu Hotel and the ASE buildings, the twisted mushrooms of the Russian church, the Telephone Palace iceberg riddled with parabolic antennae, like the iron-braced leg of a child with polio, the phallus of the old fire watchtower, all of it populated with statues of gorgons and Atlases and cherubs and Agriculture and Industry and all the Virtues and Seneca and Kogălniceanu and Bălcescu and Rosetti and Vasile Lascăr, a universe of contorted limestone and gypsum and bronze, covered with snow.

I was standing just beside the sad face of a stone woman, a winged woman five times my height. A quarter of Bucharest was filled with her stone feathers. The cupolas had scales, like moon-creature eggs. All the flora, fauna, and demonology of this sight fluttered in petrifaction, black with pinkish flashes against the low, off-white sky. In the face of the statue I leaned against, I recognized my mother. When, in the silence of a winter night broken by lonely buses, one of the eggs in the limestone garland on my roof cracked dryly open and a translucent fetus, as big as a dog, wiggled out, twitching its wet and eyeless head, and when the jugular vein in the statue of my mother began to pulse, I ran toward the opening where I’d emerged and rushed down about ten floors before coming to one I recognized. I was in front of the familiar door of my parents’ apartment, on Ştefan cel Mare, where I had left a few hours before. My father opened the door. I took off my boots and my snow-wet hat and scarf, and took refuge, as usual, in my room. I took the packet from my pocket and returned it to the bottom of the bag, beside the documents. I hid the bag again behind some linens. I stripped down in front of the mirror. What a strange animal I was! My triangular head, like a snake’s, was transformed now by the terror of statues and cupolas that still reflected in my eyes. My heart was almost visible in the network of blue veins in the skin of my narrow torso. Between my thighs, my sex, already thick from the erections of so many painful nights, veered from childish pink toward dark brown. The hair on my thighs was growing thicker. I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. My vertebrae rose like little white hills beneath my skin. On my back, as far as I could see, the triangles of my shoulder blades were so apparent that they looked like two thin discs, one on top of the other. My buttocks were round and heavy, like a girl’s, and the space between them was dark with hair, like a thick line of ink. I was obviously an animal, a fragile mechanism of organic material. I could not understand how I was able to make my skin and muscles move. I focused all the powers of my spirit on my fingers and commanded, “Move!” Nothing happened. It was like I had told a glass to slide across the table. How could I put one foot in front of the other? How could my pancreas and pituitary gland secrete their juices? How could sperm be born in my testicles and sounds in my ear canal? I passed my hands over my entire body and still did not understand how I could be just this assemblage of bones, cartilage, and skin and nothing more. I stuck out my tongue as far as it would go. I made wild movements with my hands. I pretended to be catatonic, trying to imagine how I looked from outside myself, from a meter away. Or I would wonder what it would have been like to not be born a person, but a bug or a plant, to live without realizing I was alive … After I got tired, I put on my pajamas and sat at the window, on the bedstead, to watch how the snow fell on the street. The sharp elements of the heater burned the soles of my feet.

3

AFTER evenings like this, which had become the atmosphere of my lonely and frustrated life, after my mole-like wanderings along the continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, an inextricable triple empire, I would fall onto my bed and take a book at random from the pile on the floor, beside the bedstead. I would read almost all night. Books came at the right moment, mysteriously, as though they were pieces of a puzzle, of an image that was clear yet incomprehensible, incomplete, a kind of superbook at the threshold of books and my mind. I read deep into the night, the silence ringing ever louder, and sometimes a bug would buzz into the lampshades, burning itself on the hot light bulb. A truck would shake the windows. I began to blink more and more, faster with the right eyelid, more reluctantly with the left. I remembered nights when I would have to press my eyelid closed with my fingers to fall asleep, and days when only half of my face would laugh, while the other half stayed sullen and sinister. Now, when I blinked quickly, the orbicularis muscle of my mouth twitched and bothered me, and when I was tired, a cold sweat spouted from the pores of my left cheek. I tried looking at the image of the room with a single eye. With my right eye, the room looked bright, and the colors shone obediently one beside the next. My left eye, however, saw a strange greenish cavern, where wet forms oscillated like the skin of an underwater animal. By the end of the night the books’ meanings would completely evaporate, and I would be in the embrace of their thin pages, their incomprehensible cabalistic signs, and the scent of their dusty paper, the most stimulating scent on the planet. My two cerebral hemispheres contracted with pleasure in their bone scrotum. Half asleep, I spied on the books with the passion of a voyeur. I would rip a page’s corner to see the threads of puffy texture, pick at the wound of a torn binding, or watch, for as long as half an hour, an insect crossing the enormous field, from its home in Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” or Everyman’s Physics.

From its miniscule black body, the insect projected six transparent legs, each with a dark spot at the end. If you concentrated, you could see that its antennae, also translucent, were constantly shaking. It patiently traversed the hills and valleys of cheap paper, buried itself in between the pages, and appeared in the yellow, glistening light again, without giving any thought to the complicated mental processes of Goliadkin or to the black letters, bigger than its own body, which encoded his insanities. Hard little barbs kept it anchored to the book, to the universe where it was born. You could blow as hard as you liked, but you wouldn’t knock it off. It would, though, stop for a moment to weather the hurricane, pressing its stomach to the thick mat of the paper, and then it would go on, with steady and satisfied steps. No one could take it from its homeland, where it appeared and where it would die, turning into a dry shell at the base of a page. It might bite, from time to time, into a black or white piece of woven fiber. It would stick its ovipositor into the dot on the “i” in Goliadkin and leave a cylindrical tube with a small embryo inside. It did not know that its world meant something, that it could be read — it experienced its world, and that was enough. Maybe Goliadkin, or I, whose eye like a billion suns approached, was this insect’s God, but its nervous ganglions barley managed to keep it alive. I was a God that had not created it and could not save it. I was eternally unknown and indescribable.

Then suddenly I would feel someone watching me. I would shiver all over, leap up and go to the window. I saw the stars scattered over the city. Someone, deep inside another night, of another kind, held my world and followed, with amusement, my progress over its twisting roads, blowing loneliness and evil from its mouth like tongues of black fire, and I hung on to my life, spreading sticky viscera over the page. What book might I be in? And what kind of mind would I need to understand it? And if I could, wouldn’t I be disappointed to find I was living inside a cheap, licentious little book, or a train schedule, or a coloring book for children, or an abject anonymous letter, or a roll of toilet paper?

I closed the book over this being, miniscule but just like me, a body full of organs like mine, cells whose protoplasm accomplished the same billion chemical maneuvers per second, and I turned out the light at exactly the moment dawn began to whiten the window. I curled up and pulled the blanket over my head, leaving just a narrow gap where I could breathe. That was how my mother slept, mummified in the fetal position, and that was how I had slept, too, for as long as I could remember. But I was always afraid to fall asleep. Where would my being be for so many hours? I might go somewhere I could not come back from, or I might return transformed into a horrible monster. The rupture of my self’s continuity made acid churn in my solar plexus. The idea seemed unbearable — that I dissolved, night after night, into a terrifying jungle, one that was inside me, but that was not me. What would I do, descending further and further into the catacombs of the imagination, if I penetrated its depths and found myself among horrific, blood- and sperm-splattered idols of archetypes, the instincts of hunger and thirst, the gag reflex? And what if I did penetrate this zone, what if I I sank into the somatic, what if I twisted around kidneys and vertebrae, suffocated by cells that were growing hair and nails, hugged by the peristalsis of my innards? Anything could happen: the mechanism that wakes you up could break, like on one spring morning, when I opened my eyes in a room flooded with light, fresh and full of life, and I realized I could not move. I was completely paralyzed. I tried to get up. I commanded my fingers to move. I didn’t know, I did not know how to do it anymore. The light dwindled to a few folds of the blanket, a piece of flowered fabric, a flash in the mirror. It lasted no more than a minute, and then my body returned to my possession, and the hypnologic rebellion was over.

4

IN THE end I would sink into sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of fraying dreams. I melted into sleep like sugar into water. I slid like a gear in the clutch of forgetting. I started awake, sometimes so violently that it seemed like everything inside me rattled. Other times, I fell in a nosedive like an old elevator plummeting down an endless well. Horrifying snouts and masks — torn cheeks, eyes hanging from their sockets, brains exposed — appeared for a second, then melted away with the howls of animals in agony. A timid voice whispered my name, very close to my ear. Slowly, a lather of word-images flooded my retinal screens, and someone composed stories and scenes from the aleatory marks, the way I would, from the stencils on the apartment wall or the tile on the bathroom floor. A chiromancer traced his finger, with a fat gold ring at its base, over the palm of my dream, interpreting and prophesying, slowly wading through the chaotic lines, then suddenly circling his nail around a mound of limpid skin, the glassy cover of thumping veins and arteries. Acrid delirium, a stew of colored threads, garbage swept into heaps — and unexpected, sweeping Altdorfer scenes, oceans and ships, blue mountains and amber beasts, battles where every button and lily on the banners and every freckle on the soldiers’ faces was visible, like under a blinding magnifying glass. Ivory castles, abstruse, with twisted columns and round windows like in Monsú Desiderio. Cells like Piranesi. Twilight collapsed over abandoned buildings, severe and singular — I circle around them in a slow flight, passing the mascarons below the roof, alternating with glowing windows, where “HARDMUTH” is written. In a night coagulated like blood, marble itself turns brown, its geometry emphasized by small, red stripes. These kinds of stripes and bands of evening light hem the acanthus leaves on immense capitals, stone snakes in gorgons’ hair, the nipples and pubic hair of living, rickety Atlases who hold up balconies. I pass, tiny as a flea, under immense porticos, into halls with beautiful mosaic floors, under cupolas high as the stars. I wander through sinuous labyrinths, leaving through crystal doors, to sink again into aphasia, misunderstanding, delirium, and dejection. Jungles with limpid springs, swamps with visions of eternal citadels: such was the cartography of my dreams. And in my dream life I remembered earlier dreams. I knew: I had been in that pink building before, the one that seemed made from a child’s blocks. I had already held a completely transparent spider, spread across my palm, heavy as a sphere of quartz, with only its emerald, pulsing sack of venom visible in its stomach. I had already squinted, blinded by the flame of sunrise, in one of the canals of this impossible Venice. Pipes ran between dreams, they were connected the way buildings in Bucharest were connected with each other, the way each of the days of my life, at a distance of years or months, or one night alone, was bound, by imperceptible threadlike tubes, to all of the others. But the catacombs, tubes, cables, wires, or passages were not all equally important. The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfares, making constellations and engrams that someone, from a great height, could read like a multicolored tattoo, and someone from a great depth could feel on his own skin, like the sadistic torture of tattooing. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night with one hand completely numb, cold as a snake’s skin and strangely heavy, a soft object I could move only with my other hand. In my mind I saw it black and bruised, and I rubbed it, with the same incomprehension and terror I would have touching an anaconda on the mosaic of its back, in the absurd hope that somehow I would feel it become part of me. When I let it go, it fell back onto the pillow, and only when I pushed and pulled it did the cold skin find its power, the inert flesh begin to prickle, and I fill the numb glove again. Its lace of nerves, veins, lymph pathways and tubes of psychic energy came back to life, and soon my corporeal system was once more complete.

My dreams also pulled me into the past. For almost two years, before they built the apartments across the street, I often dreamed I was climbing mountain peaks to dizzying heights. Usually, inside the black rocks, thin as skyscrapers, there were stairs and places to live, but I preferred to scale their outsides, to grab stone after stone, always higher, until I reached the fog-covered summit. Then the crags and towers disappeared, and the dream took me through sunken spaces, wet with emotion, through buildings and rooms I recognized without knowing where they were, or when I had been there, or what had happened to me to now cause this hysterical sobbing, this fainting, and the inhuman sadness of living in these rooms. I dreamed of buildings at the bottom of cold, clear water, where I could breathe, but which resisted my advance. Through diffuse light, my hair fluttering in the currents, I moved toward massive ruins, toward blue and yellow walls thousands of meters deep, at the bottom of the water. Red crabs scuttled in the sand, and here and there a fish shuddered in front of a window. The façades were rotten and ruined. I penetrated through swollen doors crusted with snails, I penetrated interiors full of swirling water. How high the rooms were! They were eaten away with decay and melancholy. Embroidered tablecloths floated over the buffet, a sea urchin rose out of a red crystal cup, and coral grew on the worn marshes of carpet, infested with krill. An octopus nested in the toilet, and a glittering dust swirled in the sink. I explored every room, trying to determine where I was, how I knew the large radio with ivory knobs and a magic eye, the sewing machine with a pedal, corroded beyond recognition, the tapestry with two wool cats, framed with the flowering of a million flickering worms. Even the chairs, toppled and tumbled by the currents, seemed familiar. Yes, I had once sat between their legs that slanted toward the sky, I had rocked there, during yellow spring evenings. A loneliness no person can experience in real life, one that could break your bones like a wild animal, tore at my internal organs. The dream would end when I found, in the kitchen, seated at the feet of the old cooler, a large cadaver rocking in the currents. A woman devoured by salt covered the entire cement mosaic floor. Her dress had melted and tangled with seaweed, like paste, like a coffee-colored gelatin. The stove had crusted into her hip and her hair was stuck to a drape with butterfly ribbons. The great statue, wrapped in rags, was four or five meters tall.

I would awake shaken, frustrated like an amnesiac who cannot remember who he is. I tried to relive the vast, dead areas of my mind. A few cardboard buildings rose up in the petri dish of my thalamus, there between my hippocampus and my tonsils. Over them was the great aurora borealis of my cortex. I recapitulated: from birth to age two — on Silistra, a slum street in Colentina, from age two to three — the apartment in Floreasca, near a garage; from three to five — the house, still in Floreasca, but on a beautiful, quiet side street, named for an Italian composer. Then, on Ştefan cel Mare, in the tall building next to Miliţie. These were the forgotten compartments of my spiral shell, built by my mind, one after the other, like a line of ever-larger skulls, and left behind to decay like molars, down to the bloody rot of their roots. I knew that I had lived in those places. I retained some images, but no experiences, no emotions, nothing real. The three or four buildings were like the deformed teeth of my mother’s dentures, untouched by the nerves or irrigating threads of her veins and arteries. Plastic, cheap, stupid plastic. I imagined that their doors were only etched on the walls, that their interiors were full and massive, like fillings in praline candies, and that, therefore, everything was a crude, fairground imitation. But I searched around these edifices more and more stubbornly, because they still were my only landmarks. I tried to reconstitute my cerebral animal in their strange dance through time, touching the bumps of the buildings, the housing of its successive skulls, built from calcium spittle. Patiently, the flesh of my mind built rooms and roofs, scenes and deeds. Growing, it left them dry and empty like the yellowed skulls of dogs on fields, or like the clean, rubbery inside of a doll’s head.

5

UNUSUALLY for me, I started to linger at the table after eating, talking with Mamma, who was happy to remember one thing or another from the past. The table, with its torn plastic cloth, was laden with chipped and dirty plates, and with spoons and forks that, no one knows why, were larger than any others I had ever seen. Their metal, maybe plated, was twisted in strange ways: hunched spoons, forks with bent tongs, teaspoons as big as other people’s serving spoons, and a gigantic ladle. Mamma, silhouetted against the summer sky (where the tips of poplar trees rose, full of seed puffs and the crenellations of the Dâmboviţa mill), with her face thin like mine and her skin soft, spoke more for herself than for me, her attention inward, her voice mixing with the sound of doves and the scent of summer. I pushed a wasp into the honey and watched it writhe, heavy, a bubble of air between its jaws, while Mamma told old stories about her childhood in the country, with my grandparents “Mămica” and “Tătica,” who appeared in her dreams almost every night, about the family house, old and rotted, in Tântava, with all the rituals of Romanized Bulgarians, wrapped in the mystical incense of Orthodoxy and an ancient, un-Christian fear, talking about Christ and the Virgin and archangels without knowing the first thing about the Bible, singing their carols like petrified stories, with no clue who Herod was or the magi. As children, Mamma and the other girls her age had sent balls of eggshell-covered clay down the waters of the Argeş, the same river where today they cast kolaches with burning candles toward the souls of the dead. During droughts she had helped whip and then chop down the troiţe and icons, the vengeance of the village on a persecuting God. She had seen the Mother of God and Infant Son spit on and lashed by people who had knelt and kissed her since before they could remember, who now moaned like people in a trance: “Give us rain! Give us rain!” She had seen the gypsy girls led to the edge of the village and doused with trays and vials of water while they danced for rain, naked and black paparuda, hips already womanly, the udders of their breasts starting to fill, covering their blameless embarrassment, not yet hairy, with a few elderberry leaves. After the dance, they were given to the gypsy men, the bear keeper and the violin player, who took them into the forest and raped them in turns, so it would rain. The country people would swear that next the girls were given to the bear, who crushed their thin bones under arbors of raspberries. As a kid, nothing scared Mamma so much as the priest, because whenever one of the village kids cried, rocked on their mothers’ legs or in wooden cradles, they’d be told “the priest will cut off your tongue,” and here there must have been a memory housed not in the mind, but in the infants’ bodies, naked and snatched up brutally by the priest, his paw held over their noses and mouths as he dunked them three times in the icy fount. Bearded and vicious, in mystical vestments, the village priest ravaged the dreams of children sleeping with their heads on straw pillows. Mamma also remembered apocalyptic winters, with snow drifts up to the windows, and the blind furies of her father, who grabbed her one night by the hair and threw her — she would have been five or six — into the piles of snow, in the dark, wearing just her shirt. The terrified little girl had to sleep in the barn, pressed against a cow’s stomach, covered in straw and dung.

I was the same age when I went to Tântava for the first time. The roads were covered in snow. In the center of the village, wafts of ţuica brandy came from the bar. Peasants in shaggy wool coats dotted the snow here and there. If you got close to one of them, you could smell smoke and garlic. We went on our way and, after a long walk, came to my Tataie’s house. We opened the whitewashed gate and entered the yard, stopping between two quince trees. The demon-black dog clanged his chain dementedly, running back and forth, his body so thin you could see his ribs. For all his work, he’d get a dinner of corn meal mămăligă. Into the doorway came Tataie, showing no pleasure, old and fierce with a prickly white beard, his head white and almost completely shaved, with a stripe of darker hair in the middle. The house glowed white like an eggshell in the flames of smoldering dusk. I climbed onto the porch and entered through a thin, bright-red door with a four-paned window. I passed through the entryway, with its dirt floor and whitewashed stove and vents, which opened to the other room, and I entered a place that smelled of goat fur, the room where they sat during the day. The only light was the violet flame (it would change to yellow in an hour) that came in through the window, where the pear tree branches knocked, and reflected in the crooked mirror, high, near the beams. On the walls were cheap paper icons, strident, framed in black: St. George killing a gall-green dragon, the archangel Michael in medieval armor, a flag wrapped around his lance, God himself, in wide blue and yellow robes, holding open a book where something was written in red letters. Many times had I climbed onto the scratchy, quilt-covered beds to look up-close at all these creatures of a ghostly and multifarious world, at the angels’ wings, at the odd, melancholic Omega between the eyebrows of the Mother of God, at the venerable, blackish face, long locks, and white beard of an angry God … I went to the other wall, where, under the same washrags that my mother and her sister had sewn as girls, other images glowed under the pane, this time in strange pink frames of crushed glass. They were tan photos, yellow, sepia, ashen, almost totally faded, where country men and women stood rigid under hats and headscarves, with perhaps two weddings — my mother’s and Aunt Sica’s, pictures I knew from copies in the red bag — and a soldier with a long, old rifle, bayoneted, that was taller than he was. It was Tataie, Dumitru Badislav, the same man who was at that moment pouring hot ţuica into clay cups as small as a thimble. I flopped onto the bed, while the big people sat on three-legged stools by a round table and had a treat. The almost-dark evening, the smell of goat and peppered ţuica, the monotonous small talk, and Tataie’s quiet, wheezing voice all sounded like they came from another age and another world, everything strange and solemn, and it became more otherworldly when the gas lamp on the wall, with its glass and round reflector, was lit. The creatures of transparent wax, flickers and darkness, grave like the Last Supper, and the silence that could happen only in the country — they calmed me, stilled me, with my wide eyes alongside the square table, where the ancient radio and Tataie’s old glasses sat in a dusty still life. My mother’s sister, who puttered around the oven, brought in mămăligă, put it in the middle of a round table and then brought a platter with roast chicken, then another one, smaller, enameled and painted with flowers, with a white garlic sauce. It was a peace from another century, a small world, that belonged to one family, a world protected by winged and holy faces. A smell of clay and holiness filled the room that was now the center of the center of the world. We slept head-to-head in hard beds that were propped on stakes, we rolled into old sheepskin coats and slept heavily, and through the thin walls of our dreams we heard the snow falling. Curled up like a fetus in a belly of old wool and crackling straw, eaten by dozens and hundreds of fleas, I rested my head beside Tatie’s and dreamed his dreams. When a little owl spooked me and I opened my eyes in the dark, I clearly saw — blue, separate, fluttering — a halo of pure light around his spiky head, an intense nimbus like the flame of the stove burners where it emerged from his skull, rarified and yellow, then, a palm’s width to one side, it became perfectly circular, with a line of liquid diamond outlining it precisely, like a great, miraculous platter of rays, on which the old head would be placed. I felt in my sleep how, in this geyser of light, my own cranium became transparent, how the wrinkled hemispheres of my brain, wrapped in their skin, looked like the meat of walnuts yet unformed. The neurons under the pia mater, like spores bedded under asphalt, swelled here and there, growing hundreds of church spires under the sky of my skull, each one with a bell tolling for a funeral, until the pearly skin broke in hundreds of places and the neuron bells opened like wonders, like sea urchins on their peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia.

6

A LINE of sleighs without bells, pulled by small, puffy-maned horses with hooves wrapped in strips of leather, led the entire Badislav Clan to salvation — their bold and hearty infants and women, their sacks of grain, hanks of lard-smothered pork, and the vestments, icons and stoles for the priest, who sat dressed like an ordinary peasant and lashed the mare’s shiny brown back while she plodded calmly between the reins in front of him. The mare whipped him on the cheek with her coarse, golden tail, flashing her pitch black birther between her haunches. There was no visible road ahead, only the field that led to the Danube and to escape, covered with a snow that reached the horses’ chests. Glades of thin, young trees with twigs petrified in the frozen air, as if painted with sepia, fell behind on one side and the other. Crows, like black leaves, hopped between trees, shaking snow from the boughs. A melted-gold sun pushed out transparent shadows behind the sleighs and drew thin trees onto the waves of snow, growing from the same roots as the vertical trees, but they stretched longer and seemed to have more branches. The seven sleighs were packed with all that remained of the village they had left, charred and smoking, its alleyways and cottages filled with dead bodies, picked at by wolves and vultures. In that year of terror, no Turks had devastated them, no gale of flame or Albanian warlords. If you had asked one of the Bulgarian women with a mantle of coins and a scarf pulled over her ugly face, her desperate and quivering eyes limpid as a goat’s, she might have winced and crossed herself, but she would not have answered you, because all of them wanted nothing more than to forget. In their sheepskin coats, the children huddled together at the bottom of the sleigh, some with a black puppy whose hips trembled as though possessed. They would only let themselves remember the isolated hamlet in a ravine in the Rhodope mountains, surrounded by basalt peaks, just a footpath through the rock, overlooking flowering fields and fertile gardens as far as you could see. The village was held together by complicated sets of relations — everyone was someone’s cousin or godparent, everyone lived in fear of God near the little church without a steeple in the village’s center. In summer, they bent over rows of tomatoes and green peppers, while the children took the cows to graze. They made endless dandelion chains or fought with beautifully carved and decorated staves. The sky above was brilliant like a flower opening its transparent-blue petals over the valley.

Next to the hamlet was a cemetery crowded with crosses, bent by time, inscribed in tremulous Cyrillic letters. The oldest stones were so laden with moss and pocked by lichen that they looked like deformed sponges, discarded onto the black earth, surrounded by crocuses and wild arum. In the incense-filled church, the priest prayed for the living and dead as often as possible, and tallow candles constantly burned, blackening the low ceiling like the bottom of a pot. Kolaches and coliva, rice with milk and smoked prunes were the food of the dead. They were sent down the thread of water called Bârzova Creek in little wooden boats loaded with candles at the proper liturgical times. The old people of the village passed into their dormition in God with slow songs in their ears, all through the night of vigil, describing the pilgrimage that awaited them: how they would have to befriend an otter to cross the black waters, a wolf to find their path through the thick forest, a golden weasel to guide them toward their family’s house, where they would embrace their mother and father, and they all would be pulled close to She who Gave Birth to God and to the Infant of Light.

That year, however, had been the year of the poppy. As early as the winter, the Badislavs’ bruised palms had held the tiny, ashen poppy seeds, unknown to them at the time, brought by a caravan that traveled the Balkans, thieving and reading the future in snail shells. While combing the fleas from their bears, the gypsies had told of a miraculous flower that made dreams, that quieted infants and kept them asleep like logs through the night, that widened a woman’s pupils and gave her the desire to mate. The seeds were good in aromatic pastries, kneaded with honey, and if you squeezed the saints’ milk from the pods, you went to heaven while you were still alive and you met angels in the clouds. For the seeds, for a little sack full of seeds, the gypsies asked for four beautiful fiddles that still smelled of pine sap, with sheep-gut strings, the craft of some of the villagers. Then the caravan left, all at once, melting into the air as though it had never been.

The poppy seeds, light as paper, stayed behind, and the Badislavs planted a full row of them in the black, buttery earth, between the zucchini and lettuce. In the depth of summer, the flowers opened their purple petals with black folds, like the tongues of hanged men, on stalks with pallid green-blue leaves, splashed with lime-white. After the petals withered and became one with the earth, the milky pods were left, releasing a stench so sweet that birds would not fly over the poisoned field, nor would beetles or locusts brave the pale stalks. Soon, the pods grew as big as babies’ heads and their seeds rattled inside. The women held scythes and walked through breast-high fields and spent the day cutting poppies, weak with laughter, since the pods reminded them of the hanging fruits of their men. They carried the pods in baskets to their front porches, and there in the twilight, still laughing, they wrung out the thick, spermy sap and spread the “gypsy seed,” as they called it in the end, to air on copper platters. After a few days the milk curdled. First it turned as hard as cheese, then as hard as rocks. It looked like a soapy chalk, a white-blue crust that the women pressed into pills and ground as fine as the dust of the road. They made kolaches and Turkish pastries, scattering the magic powder into the sweetness of jams and honey. They mixed it with wine and pear brandy, they put it in milk with mămăligă and cigarettes that they rolled themselves from dried corn husks. The entire village came together for an unforgettable festival, as though it were the middle of winter. They drank and told jokes until the poppy vapors went to everyone’s heads at once. From boys to old men, they all fell into a strange trance, for an angel of light showed itself to them, naked, with a woman’s breasts and a man’s shame, with golden hair in thousands of braids. And the angel said to them, “You are without sin. Be like your Adam and your Eve, because your sins have been forgiven.” And everyone, boys and girls, husbands and wives, took off their sheepskin coats and long shirts and began to mate together in a writhing pile among the dogs and children, mothers with sons, fathers with daughters, brothers with sisters, their pupils as big as their irises and clear, cold sweat dripping from their cheeks, and they didn’t stop until autumn appeared, first as mild as grape juice, then as bitter as black wine. Flickering gold and rust touched the hills, while in the valley, the village slowly fell apart and the cattle moaned with hunger. Smoking mahorka mixed with gypsy seeds, the women lay on benches, staring at the wood in the stove and ignoring everything else. The women gazed at their children and let them toddle off through the ravines. Then they went to the village, their faces and nipples painted, to find some hardy soul whose weight they had yet to feel. Feeling their way inside a dark barn full of straw bales and bugs with cross-marked backs sated in the center of their cobwebs, the women, who had married as virgins and never dared to raise their eyes from the ground in front of their men, now pulled their skirts up to their faces to exhibit their thick thighs and the hairy mounds between them, and they let themselves be mounted there, on sacks of grain, among bridles and reins rubbed with tallow.

Webs with tiny spider babies at one end filled the golden air, tangled in the tender curling grapevines and garden trellises, and were pushed toward the edge of the village, where the old cemetery sat in the sun like a toad in Brumaire’s last days. There, the arms of the crosses caught so many spider webs that soon the entire cemetery wore a silky lace. Below ground, in narrow pine houses, the dead were starving. For the past forty days, no one had come to the church to remember them. While the old priest wept among the icons like the captain of a leaky boat, for forty days no kolaches or coliva or rice with milk had come down from the living. Fearful they would die a second time, from hunger and oblivion, the dead began to stir, like a dangerous underground river. Chattering their powerful teeth, they began to break the shards of wood, spongy and full of cockchafer larvae, and they dug tunnels to each other like moles, to consult in twos or threes or, finally, all of them together, in their underground village, packed into an alcove whose walls ran with roots, where the urns above their skulls glowed like crystals. Three hundred dead, weak from the long fast, but animated with a fury only the departed can know, knocked their livid, moldy skulls and chafed their blackened clothes against each other. They held long, frenzied meetings, and stared at each other with gaping eye sockets full of worms. At the start of winter, at nightfall on the feast day of Saints Mina, Ermoghen, and Eugraf, a putrid, dry, and bare-toothed host broke a path toward the white world. There were the old dead with shanks as yellow as a cow’s, so addled they couldn’t keep track of their bones, who left knuckles and jaws behind in their ancient caskets. There were younger dead, still wrapped in long shifts, with vines of flesh as dry as pastrami on their faces and torsos, and dead women with the butterflies of their hips widened by births, and their ribcages wrapped in flesh like unbeaten hemp. There were dead children a few years old, overcome by skulls too heavy for their delicate cadavers. There were rotting dogs and cats raised up by the mania of the host they followed alongside. The poisoned air swirled overhead like green smoke, blowing toward the night’s first stars. Once they reached the houses, each went to his own people to begin the terrifying carnage, while dogs howled desperately in the courtyards. The ghouls poured through the doors and into bedrooms, where, under the eyes of women who thought they were dreaming, they pulled swaddled infants from their cribs and gleefully tore at their tender flesh, staining the clay floor with a thin layer of blood. They turned to the women, they mounted them on benches and penetrated them with their black, ithyphallic worms that hardened for the first time in ages. They cornered young men in barns, masterfully parrying desperate jabs from their pitchforks and finally grabbing them by their long braided hair, pulling off their hands and legs like they were bugs, and chomping their teeth into the nape of their necks and feeding down to the bone. Dying of fright, many villagers took the side of the undead, beating their own wives and children and then, with glassy eyes and shaking joints, going outside to slice the dog’s throat and drink its black blood. Large, wet snowflakes started to fall over the alleyways, melting into scarlet puddles. Corpses wandered at random from house to house, searching out the living. They felt for them under beds and pulled them out from behind stoves, unfazed by their screams, and then martyred them, impaling and flaying them, until late in the night, when it seemed like no one in the village was left alive. Then they set fire to the houses, and all fifty cottages began to smoke and stick out red tongues like the dragons in their icons. Only the small church in the middle of the village was black and silent, under its high, clay-tile roof with a silver fringe of snow. In front of the church, in the yard where the villagers would dance hora on Sundays, the dead gathered, one by one, filing in from the narrow streets. The sweet smell of the flesh of living, whole people wafted through the cracks in the old walls, and it made the people from under the earth hungry. The last surviving villagers were huddled in the holy site, where they knelt with clenched eyes and fingers, shaken from their purple-poppy inebriation, and prayed to the merciful Mother of God. The priest, meanwhile, the only one in the village who had never ceded to the dark flower, was preparing his tools of war, in which he put all his hope. He donned his high holy vestments, and put a silver chain around his neck, from which hung, covering his entire chest, an ebony cross inlaid with old, crooked mother-of-pearl. Arranged in front of him, taken from the church walls, were the icons that worked the greatest miracles. In a large pocket in the front of his robe, he had the glass box that held the church’s priceless treasure: the tooth of one of the two hundred adepts of the martyred Saint Nicon. In his right hand, the priest held the censer burning with incense, and in his left, the Gospels, opened to the page in which Christ the Lord drove demons from a passel of hogs. Each of the roughly forty Badislavs hung holy icons over their chests and wore an oily mark of myrrh on their foreheads.

Terrifically animated by the light of the flames, the rag and bone army deliberated. The clean skeletons, the oldest, waved limbs as long as a praying mantis’s through the falling snow. They disliked the pious murmurs inside, and the tang of incense. The fortress had to be destroyed, and everyone inside had to be sacrificed, all before the cock crowed. The accumulating snow, damp and crystalline, retreated in front of the creaky feet whose petrified toenails poked through ancient leather. The church door was nailed together with iron and had on its thick, cracked fur the marks of flintlocks and harquebuses, bloodstains, and carved Cyrillic letters, blasphemies poorly scratched in by some priest from long ago. The corpse of Baba Liubiţa, buried just a week ago, writhing with white, fat worms, moved toward the door and touched it with purple fingers. She shook her eyeless head and moved away. They would have to set it on fire, because the thick planks were as sturdy as a castle wall. The fiends came together and blew a venomous green flame from their lipless muzzles, their black tongues hanging like dogs’. The flame thrust at an ageless piece of wood, but only a few splinters caught fire and burned out almost instantly. They blew again, but the tarred oak did not light. The skeletons realized they could not triumph by themselves. They gathered, like the base of a fountain, around a circle of fire in the snow that the oldest one had lit with a torch. Their black, vacant eye sockets watched the earth inside the circle turn translucent, like deep, green water, and this water reddened, then turned more auburn, brown, black like tar, descending into the earth’s depths, where a few points and lights seemed to move. Hundreds of flitting spots, the color of crabs, appeared in the dark, crawling up the chain of light. Soon, leathery bat wings, pointed tails, hooked beaks, hunched chests, horns like a bull’s or goat’s or sheep’s or ram’s or horned viper’s or dragon’s emerged from a swamp that screamed like a woman giving birth or a man having his balls pulled off. They moved faster and faster, they swarmed like beetles, scaling the beams of light with claws and suckers, they spouted out of scaly hips, they chortled through toothy mouths in their bellies, they belched through wall-eyed, twisted faces wedged between their ass cheeks. They were demons. They sprang from the enchanted circle like the fabled coming of evil, filling the sky with wings and howls, filling the earth with squirts of venom and sperm, and filling the divine being with horror. Cricket-demons swarmed onto the church’s roof, they slid their saw-tails through the tiles and dropped long eggs inside, which burst into poisonous spiders with a hundred legs each. But the priest in his gold-threaded robes turned them to stone, dousing them with holy water. Demons tunneled through the earth and sprang up among the kneeling people, but the incense from the censer poured into their large nostrils and exploded their serpent-heads into a thousand splinters. Bat-demons grabbed up rocks, swooped over the roof and let them go. As soon as the angelic vibration of prayer reached them, however, the stones stopped in the air and opened like enormous buds, spreading fleshy petals, strangely beautiful, until the sky over the church was filled with multicolored flowers. Insane with rage, demons scuttled onto the walls, they scurried over the roof, scratching and scraping with their claws, until no part of the holy place could be seen under the wormy swarm, the demented tangle, the furious ravel of wings and antennae.

Then the heavy door swung open, and the forty villagers, in white long shirts, their faces and hands translucent red in the light of the candles they carried, came out holding onto each other tightly, led by the priest with a beard to his waist, frowning and determined like an icon of the Father. His powerful hands emerged from large sleeves to grip a cross as long as a league, which, like the cross on each person’s chest, sparkled like gold. Stronger still, scintillating like a diamond with millions of fires, the tooth of the martyr glowed in its glass box, tied now to a girl’s forehead. The light shone over the valley. It turned the surrounding cliffs as transparent as gemstones, and, with an ever greater power, it rose in a single column of greatness to the sky, shattering the clouds, moving the stars aside, and revealing the endlessly gentle majesty of the Trinity. And through the field of light, flurries of angels began to fall, ablaze with bows and quivers, long spears in their hands, their golden wire locks fluttering in descent. A cry of victory broke out from the Badislav chests.

Touching the ground with their feet, the transparent heralds built of ideas and crystal partook of the power of the earth. Thin threads of blood grew in their feet, spreading quickly through their bodies of light, becoming systems of veins and arteries, visible inside like those in the translucent bodies of shrimp. A porphyry blood colored their lips and cheeks, and enormous wings, like swans’ wings, attached themselves to the naves of their chests with triangular, powerful muscles. The courageous alate, in gold-plated armor, formed a phalanx and drove their spears forward into the brazen band of the dead. A few moments later, the terrible subterranean host had turned into a pile of tibiae, vertebrae, mandibles, skulls, and pelvises, yellowed like old wax, their venom still steaming toward the sky. The demons ran down the sides of the church like thick swamp water, leaving it stained with saliva and excrement, and like a pack of rabid wolves they threw themselves onto the phalanx of angels. For they knew them, each in part — these were the Faithful, the ones who had stayed with the Lord during the great rebellion, the ones made million in glory, while the others descended into the subdivine, sub-human, sub-animal, and wrapped in the spiral of blood of the eternally damned. Deep in the being of each demon, behind the scales, claws, and dragon wings, lived an angel in tears.

The battle intensified, quaking the little valley, as flakes of silver snowed. Protected by icons and crosses, wrapped in veils of incense, the villagers watched the melee with wide eyes, arm in arm, with their beards on end and their flesh quivering. The angels skewered the cacodemons with arrows of steel, glass, and light. They hacked them with double-edged swords, spilling black blood in the snow. They flew up and strangled the winged demons with their wide hands. Dragons and werewolves, locusts with human heads and humans with fly heads opened their snouts, muzzles, and beaks and vomited jets of fire at the celestial legion. Some angels, their wings in multicolored flames like fireworks, like birds of paradise, fell down onto a shack or into a leafless path. Like fat dogs with bared teeth, three or four devils would pounce on the heavenly heralds, nauseating them with the breath of their bowels, spraying them with urine from the impressive hoses between their legs, and covering them with murderous curses more venomous than the fire they blew from their mouths, for the devastating speech of blasphemy filled the heavenly minds with terrible pain. Wave after wave of monsters attacked the spiky rectangular phalanx wearing it away, plucking soldiers out and throwing them into the dark. At every assault, devils also fell, writhing, into the snow.

But then, when the snowfall slowed toward dawn, the angels began to sing. They threw down their dripping swords and their lances with snuffed flames. They took off their transparent armor and stood in long, white robes, rings of golden hair falling from their shoulders to their waists. Cheek by cheek, their blue eyes trained on the sky, the angels sang. They lifted their girlish voices toward God, gentle and fresh as saplings or the stalks of carnations. They offered the crystal filigree of the psalms into the cold, hard air. The people cried like children, clutching their icons against their chests. The hill of bones began to rumble, and the skeletons assembled themselves again — the skulls found their bodies, the femurs joined to hips, and as though grown from the yeast of the unearthly song, new and tender flesh touched the cold bones again, muscle was wrapped in skin, and soon, naked and young again, all of them thirty years old, the dead rose to their feet. Waving one last time to their living kin, the group of unclothed men and women turned slowly toward the cemetery. One of them paused in front of the church to trace a wide circle of fire over the ground. The demons, petrified once the angelic psalms began, now scurried to the well of transparent earth. They dove inside, grabbing on to windpipes of light, trailing meters of intestines from their slit stomachs, and leaving behind mounds of vomit and blood before becoming smaller and smaller and disappearing into the dark.

A new cry of joy filled the air over the Badislavs. Carrying the song further, the heralds went among the villagers, embracing them one by one, putting their palms on their cheeks and marking their foreheads with their pomegranate lips. At the touch their brow bones turned to glass, like ice beneath a bonfire, until their skulls were entirely transparent and sparkling and revealed the folds and lobes of the rose of the brain. One child alone, the one with the most curls of all, with the largest and bluest eyes, did not hide delicate cerebral matter under his skull but an enormous spider with legs pulled up against its body. The vision lasted only a moment before a milky fog darkened the skull bones and brow again into aged pearl. Embracing a buxom congregant, one of the angels saw the lap of its vestment grow rigid, rising slowly, in unspeakable pain and sweetness, until it stuck straight up, until the gown of light, held by an unseen hair, gathered around its middle, revealing his chalcedony toenails. The song of praise halted in his throat, and instead a guttural cry, like that of a young wolf, trailed from his mouth. His eyes, clear since the world was made, clouded with tears, and the clouded angel, a grimace across his divine face, suddenly threw himself into the fountain of fire, his venomous claws grabbing the last devil’s tail. As he traveled the path to Hell, his skin grew sores and fistulas, his limbs scabies, his eyes grew glaucoma, his spine grew scales, and his mind filled with the hips and breasts of women. But the other angels, barely showing a twinge of pain for their fallen brother, took up their song again, and with a few vigorous pulses of their wings, they unstuck themselves from the earth, solemnly rising toward heaven on the wide beam of the martyr’s tooth, like a flock of human birds. Their blood, lymph, and black and yellow bile sprayed from the soles of their feet like a jet engine, until they were as clean and clear as the light of reckoning. Once they were among the stars, the skies opened, and the villagers saw the blinding, merciful face of the Divine again, where the angels dissolved into an air of gold.

And now the sleighs cut across the wide and sunny platter of the pathless field. The horses snorted ropes of mist out hot nostrils. Sometimes a woman, her hair completely gray after the frenzied night, turned her head back frightened, making a cross with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, but she saw only the lengthening tracks of the sleigh runners, narrowing like an arrow toward the village in the valley, the invisible origin of space and time. They traveled through the day, but at dusk, when the snow turned dark pink, the priest raised his hand and the sleighs circled into a small camp. In the center, the fire lifted thousands of brushes, in cobalt, saffron, and gold, and like a church painter it decorated a nervous tuft of horse hair, a coat with cotton embroidery, a wide face with tired eyes, a jug on worn leather straps, and a few steps from the camp, the raised fur on a wolf’s throat. At dawn, after a well-guarded sleep, they yoked the horses below the red, melted globe of the sun, and the flight began again. At night, no man touched his woman, and would not until they found a place to settle, with a hearth and church and gardens.

For some nights the stars began to fill more and more of the sky, and the darkness hung against the firmament became deeper, bluer, with clusters and tendrils of stars. Each day became warmer, more snow melted, the drip of icicles rained from the branches in groves, and the hooves splattered a warming mix of water and snow. The gray light became sparkling yellow, and the early spring, with its troubling scents, filled the white sphere that had in its center the small, dark worm of the sleighs. One morning, a blue band as wide as the entire horizon appeared to the pilgrims. As they approached, the band widened into a snake knotting through the horizon, until the land began to descend and, whipped by new branches on the trees, pierced by the squawking flight of crows, they could finally take in the miraculous sight. It was the greatness of the Danube river, so wide that the trees on the other side were barely visible, plain reeds in a purple fog. A skin of thick glass over the entire verdant expanse, lustered by a warm wind, hid the terrifying tumult of the waters underneath, and its blinding mirror reflected the sun in its orbit through space. “Dunav! Dunav!” cried the children, who jumped from the sleighs and ran, crunching the snow under their pigskin-wrapped feet, to the enormous frozen presence. But the priest yelled at them loudly, and the small people came back, stroking the horses’ hot bellies as they passed.

Before you cross its depths, a river must be blessed. A sacrifice was required, so all would not perish in a furious shatter of ice. The servant of God remembered that once, in his youth, when bringing the miraculous tooth and other holy relics from the north, he’d seen the priest cut a hole in the Danube. After praying over the hole and dousing it with holy water, leaning now and then to read from the Gospels open on the ice beside him, the priest took the shoulders of the girl fate had chosen, kissed her eyes, and dropped her into the frozen water. A lifetime had passed since then, and times were not as harsh. The elders had come to believe that, as long as it was not the body but the person’s soul that the powers of Creation wanted, be they luminous or unfriendly, and as long as the shadow was nothing other than spirit, it would be enough to sacrifice the shadow alone. So if a house was ever to be built, a river crossed, or a bridge constructed, the sleepless powers of the place were given the shadows of living people, in place of the old sacrifices of flesh and blood.

They had to wait until dawn, which after a night of collective vigil, under stars that were swallowed by clouds, and then emerged again sparkling more purely, as though they were glasses washed with raw silk, appeared like a bouquet of fire. The peasants rubbed their faces with snow. Their eyes were shining red and round like birds’ eyes, and in their white gowns with wide sleeves, they did look like a flock of great water birds, fooled by the weather into visiting the Danube before the start of spring. This time, fate chose the boy who would become the grandfather of old Babuc, that is, my Tataie. He was a lost child, different from the others. Ten springs earlier, a flock of girls had gone gathering twigs and violets in a nearby glen. They tied them into crowns and wandered among the trees with green bark that marked the air with a dizzying scent, one they would be shocked to recognize a few years later, when on certain holidays, young men took them up the mountain and made them women: the fresh bark smelled like men. Under the sky torn by bare branches, the girls themselves were torn by a dark and strange longing. Wasting away with languorous eyes, they left their toe prints in the barely grown grass, drizzled with the purple and yellow of gentian flowers that smelled, actually, repulsive. In one spot, the trees thinned out, withered into tan clusters of sticks, and the crocuses were not brilliant in their usual color, but black, drops of pitch drizzled over the short grass. A crust of snow with large beads of water tarried around the roots and glowed like a diamond. Their hair warmed by a western wind, the girls set toward this strange clearing, and even from a distance they could see, on the grass fur stained with black, a small pink creature lying still, surrounded by a crown of sunrays like paintings of saints in the church. It was a chubby, naked infant asleep, its toes twitching, enveloped in a round crystal husk, thin as a fingernail, glowing in the sunlight. The girls cocked their heads and walked around the vision. Their rings of hair stuck to the transparent egg, which they lifted carefully, so that they could get a better look at the sleeping baby. They were surprised. He was as beautiful as only a three-month-old little sausage can be, but there was something impure about him. He was a golden child with long lashes and large eyebrows, a tender, pouty mouth, pale titties like two lentil pods and a wee-wee frowning between his dimpled thighs, and he had no sign of a navel, a fact which completed the miracle. They took him to the village and tried to remove him from the capsule of hardened tears, but even the blacksmith, the woodsman, and the priest, using all of their skills, couldn’t break through the membrane. The infant woke up and began to cry. He was already hungry, and his little hands were trembling. They called the village witch, an old baba forgotten by time, who lived in the trunk of an enormous linden tree that in the night seemed to hold the enormous coin of the moon by its crest, like a vase. She stuck the egg and the infant under her dress, against her stomach. Holding her hands against the bump, like a pregnant woman, she lay down by the hearth. At dawn, in front of the wondering village elders, her labor began. She roared and convulsed, foaming at her mouth with her eyes hanging out like a snail’s, until the pseudo-stomach began to soften and slacken. Under the baba’s quilts that smelled of grass and roots, something started to move. The midwife slid the infant out, still in its flaccid skin, which she slit with a sausage knife. The boy spurted meconium and wailed like a cat. The midwife washed and swaddled him and gave the child to a woman still raising her own, who took this new boy into her care. They baptized him that same dawn, plunging him three times into the font and liberating him from Satan’s power. The boy grew up alongside the village children. Aside from his missing navel, he was no different from the others until the day when, after the devastating year of the poppy, fate chose him to lean his shadow over the frozen Danube.

There were chilling stories about people who lost their shadows. Within a year, they said, their legs wasted away, they were covered in sores from their heads to the soles of their feet, white worms with black heads burst out of their bodies and crawled along the surface of their skin, and when they died, their guts slithered out of their stomachs like tangles of snakes and vanished into holes in the earth. Their souls went to Hell the moment their shadows were taken off, leaving their putrid corpses behind to wander briefly under the sun. The devils took the souls into a hole in the rocks, hung them upside-down from a redhot iron hook over a fireplace crackling with flames, and in the red air, in the stench of sulfur that burned more than the fire, in the screams more rending than the sulfur, the devils cut their tongues, pulled off their balls, burst their eyes, flayed their flesh, scratched their long nails across their livers, hearts, and kidneys, and jabbed a reddened stake into their anuses, and over and over again, without pause, for every moment of eternity.

The priest’s Holy Writ, bound with golden wire, smoldered like embers in the purple, transparent, rayless sun of the morning. The large, leather Gospel, weathered as hard as iron and braced in tarnished silver, was held open by four children to the page where those fleeing Egypt, led by Moses, crossed the Red Sea between walls of water. The priest spoke the black and red Cyrillic letters, chanting and censing, and then motioned for the peasants to strip Vasili, the chosen boy. In spite of the wind that made his skin mist like a steaming horse, he was quiet, not trembling or rubbing his hands over the gooseflesh of his chest, where he wore a small, shining brass cross. Only a rag clung to his hips. He moved slowly toward the cliff-like bank of the river, his bare feet sinking into the snow, and the villagers followed a little behind. He was avoiding the lines of squawking crows on the roots, when suddenly his shadow became as long and pointed as the black hand of a watch and flowed onto the ice. The villagers knelt and made large crosses over their bodies, from their foreheads to their navels, while the priest prayed that the great frozen god would accept this sacrifice and let them cross safely to the other side. The boy held his arms out to the sides, and his shadow, close to the bank since the river ran from west to east, followed his lead. A long cross, blackish-pink, now stretched over the mirror of the water. “Receive, receive the shadow,” murmured the Badislavs ceaselessly, and then, before their eyes, the cross-phantom began to eat itself away, to evaporate like wet spots in the sun. The long trunk and the beam of the arms became thinner, broke into splinters, and were sucked one after the other into the river. After a few minutes, Vasili, pallid, the short golden hair of his arms and breast on end, had no trace of a shadow. He was moaning and crying. The others embraced him and quickly put his clothes back on, covering his shoulders with a shaggy sheepskin. The child climbed into the sleigh, covered himself in a blanket and mourned his shadow, lost now forever.

The horses now stepped easily and powerfully across the ice, and the Badislavs marveled at what they saw through its transparent glass. They never would have imagined that there was such beauty frozen in the thick crust of ice. But the garden of the Lord is greater than the mind of man, and its wonders are many. The line of sleighs moved forward in silence and cold over the enchanting sight. On every side, at the depth of a fathom beneath the crystal, there were butterflies with spread wings. Their delicate, furry bodies like little worms, scarlet or light yellow or black, were more than twenty paces long, and their wings sometimes spanned forty paces. Their thin little feet were extended, three on each side, and their proboscides for drinking the fog of flowers (but where were there palace-sized flowers for these miraculous insects?) were turned like the hands of a watch under their heads, under their large, bloodshot eyes. Their scintillating wings were azure, touched with a painful velvet of Tyrian purple, and almost had the taste of a rotten cherry, a pistachio, an orange peel, or a Persian rug rubbed between the fingers of the eyelids. The exuberant floral patterns, with swallow tails, peacock eyes, ferret eyes, wasp eyes, sinful eyes and weasel eyes overlapped in the waters and multiplied all the way to the lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin, but, to quote Matthew, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Everywhere along the length of the river, as far as the eyes could see, were colored butterflies with their wings spread, a few steps from each other, in a dizzying mosaic. Those far away were small and hazy, in a blue fog, while those beneath the crossing sleighs looked like enchanted animals, the kind of sprite that old men prattled on about — like an unseen doe, an ostrich, a basilisk, or a milk-white unicorn. The sun, beating on their frozen wings, already near the cross of heaven and glowing like a yellow coin, reflected the butterflies’ colors onto the horses’ middles and muzzles and the faces of the people in the sleighs, staining them with blue, gold, scarlet, and saffron — select, luxurious colors, more beautiful than the ancient red of the icons at home.

The convoy stopped to rest and eat, plum in the middle of the frozen Danube. They unpacked zacusca and cherry liquor, and sat on pallets of blankets, here and there, on the verdant glass. Shanks of pork stewed in pots of their own fat, along with the tripe that for so long had satisfied the convoy. They could see the back of a gigantic butterfly beneath them, only a few paces under the ice, like the neck of a dolphin under the waves of the sea. “I wonder what butterfly meat tastes like?” said a teenager with luminous snot on his upper lip, and, suddenly inspired, the peasants began to offer opinions: maybe it’s like goose breast, maybe the slimy foot of a snail, maybe like the tender, soft flesh from the shell of a boiled lobster. In the end, in spite of the priest’s advice to ponder the matter further, a few villagers lit up on hooch took out their shovels and heated stakes in the flames and began to break the ice. They lit more fires around, to lift out the entire winged midge. The crowd worked for a few hours, until they could touch the velvet fur on every side of the ringed stomach and palm the little goldfish scales on the wings. And when, suddenly, a tremor blew through the trim, budded horns of the butterfly and its thin feet began to twitch, the villagers took a scythe to the barrel-sized head and sent it rolling away. Blue, thick blood splattered the executioner. Then they began to cut hunks out of the butterfly’s back. The meat was as shiny and wiggly as aspic, but a little firmer, and sweet-smelling. Not one bone ran through it, but the skin and ivory needles held it in place like in a glittering net. They boiled it in clay pots and hung it from an iron tripod. All of them ate the flesh, except the priest, who thought he spotted one of the Impure One’s ploys. But nothing bad happened: the peasants licked their fingers with pleasure. Cracking the shell of the legs, they found a kind of marrow that tasted even better. Once they smashed the head to bits, they didn’t find anything inside but a fist-sized bit of brains that smelled revolting, like mold. With their stomachs set to rights and happy as clams, they took their curved knives and began to chop up the wings, like sails of a ship painted a thousand colors, calling their women and holding ragged blankets around their hips. “Not even the czarina has a skirt like this, old woman,” they smiled and laughed, while the women, wiser than they, dismissed them and left, saying that only a gypsy would wear clothes that gaudy. In the end, they made sheets from the wings and bundled themselves up in the sleighs, and set off again. They left behind a giant butterfly hacked to pieces, the veins of its wings spread on each side like rags, its mutilated legs strewn around in puddles of ash and burnt corn cobs.

Over the course of 1845, Vasili and his kin continued along on the snowy paths of Muntenia. As far as they could see, flat fields stretched out around them that seemed to reach the ends of the earth. In some places, villages of cob houses and straw roofs lifted smoke toward a sky as white as cream. The peasants were mean and quick-witted, always thinking of tricks, the men thinner and darker than the gardeners in the sleighs. The women, in contrast, were much more beautiful. They were painted like city women, and knew how to make their eyes shine with a certain boiled plant. When the convoy stopped in the middle of a village, dogs barked at them, and they were surrounded by kids with pointy hats. The villagers, well paid in copper mahmuds, stabled their unbridled horses, and after they had knelt in the church (which was rounder than theirs, with lead-shingled steeples, but painted and furnished more poorly), the fifty Bulgarians were welcomed into the rooms of their willing hosts, where they drank hot ţuica brandy, spun wool, and told jokes. The two priests drained cup after little cup by themselves, trying to communicate in baptismal-fount Slavonic, and they ended up singing the holy drones and benedictions together. The others mixed with the Vlachs, talking with their hands and trading shots of rachiv, laughing without knowing why, marveling at each other’s strangeness. The Bulgarian boys, stout and awkward, with unibrows and thick, red-purple cheeks, ran their eyes over the thin mountain girls, whose faces were masterfully made up like Easter eggs. Not infrequently, knives came out as dawn broke, after the gazes got too bold, but the more level-headed ones separated the boys and calmed them down. Then the Badislavs made pallets for sleeping in someone’s entryway, and they slept as heavily as the ground, wrapped in their butterfly wings, protected by the candle that marked the wall with melted gold. They left as dawn broke, and a pale light stretched over the field. After three days and three more nights, they found the place.

It was twilight, and snow had started to fall again. The whips snapped lazily and a horse snorted through its powerful nostrils. The priest, deep in thought, counted his prayers on a string of agate beads. The cherry-red stones knocked against each other with a sweet, quiet sound, shaking under the priest’s furry phalanges, one of which was only a stub. His right index finger had withered and dropped off in a few seconds, when, as a young monk with downy beard, he had first touched a woman’s nipple, breaking his vows of purity and propriety. Now the stub began to itch and the agate beads glowed, as had the brazen blackberry of that breast. The moment he began to be afraid and to whisper prayers into his beard to ward off the Unclean One, he saw the ruin. It was a soft light in the blood-red field, like the last molar in the mouth of an old woman. They stopped, climbed down beside the abandoned walls, holding a lantern up to one almost-finished wall and one half done that made a corner in a pile of snow-covered stones. The walls were painted inside, following the norms of piety — saints with parted beards, gold haloes, wide vestments, and blue skirts, olive-faced and frowning. There was no doubt that a church had once stood there, beautiful and famous. There were over forty saints painted on the two walls, each unrolling a parchment cylinder with letters nestled inside. Each had his own little house, separated from the others with thick, scarlet lines. And in an odd coincidence, one of them like the priest had a deformed stub in place of his left index finger. This was unheard of in a holy painting, since if a saint had missing parts, he would be imperfect. Weaklings, yes: this would demonstrate the way the spirit overcomes the flesh, but the handless, the gimps, and the blind could not be saints. Trembling in front of everyone, in the flickering lanterns, the priest held out his hand against the saint’s. At that moment, they all felt the earth move and they dropped to their knees. They would never be able to say whether it was the earth that leapt or their spirits within, or both at once. The fact is that in the passionate murmurs of prayer, flakes of fire fell from the sky and sat upon each of them, and suddenly, men, women, and children began to prophesize and speak in tongues, with their eyes wide, shouting and laughing and chortling in tears, while walls of glittering air grew from the earth, elongating the walls that stood, vaults of air arched over the glowing heads, and a steeple of air rose toward the heavens. Slowly, the new walls condensed. They became milky, then translucent, then metallic matte, finally covered in masterful paintings, matching the ruined walls, which now were clean and couldn’t be distinguished from the new church. Cathedrals with carved flowers and vines, an iconostasis covered in images, and an altar dressed in expensive items added themselves to the miraculous collection. Meanwhile, the priest’s stub grew into a ghostly crystal finger, with slender bones inside it, and a transparent nail on the tip. Capillaries wove through the flesh, while skin sprouting with thin threads of gray hair dressed the finger. When the priest took his hand from the saint’s painted palm, he saw that the saint also had a new finger to replace the one that had been left out.

They founded the village of Tântava there, between the Argeş and Saba. First they dug cottages into the strangely soft clay, and as spring came closer, they built houses, each with an entryway and two rooms, gathered around the grandeur of the church like sheep around their shepherd. Beside the church, they dug long beds for vegetables, and by summer the little village was as happy among its greens and vines as it had been in the Rhodope Valley. Over the next quarter century, the first Badislavs in Muntenia became the land’s inhabitants — they lived, they procreated, and they forgot their old language and learned what the people around them spoke. They extended their lands and drank their brains out at the bodega that soon appeared in the village center. The bar was a place to toast the Devil, the Lord’s little brother (as the older ones believed), to kill each other with tomato stakes over a woman, to hold vigils over old men in agony, so that they wouldn’t have to die without a candle on their chests, and to look for rainclouds in the sky, all without ever imagining that, in fact, they weren’t building houses, plowing land, or planting seeds on anything more than a gray speck in a great-grandson’s right parietal lobe, and that all their existence and striving in the world was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them.

7

THE past is everything, the future nothing, and time has no other meaning. We live on a piece of plaque in the multiple sclerosis of the universe. An animal, small and compact, a single particle a billion times smaller than a quark, and a billion billion times hotter than the center of the sun, encompassed the entire design that our mind perceives in the moment it is given to perceive, uniting it in the breath of a single force, with balls of space and strings and the foggy droppings of the galaxies and the political map of the planet and the unpleasant smell of someone’s mouth you’re talking to on the bus and Ezekiel’s vision on the banks of the Chebar and every molecule of melanin in a freckle under the left eyebrow of the woman you undressed and possessed a night ago and the wax in the ear of one of the ten thousand immortals of Artaxerxes and the group of catecholaminergic neurons in the medulla oblongata of a badger asleep in the woods of the Caucasus. It encompassed everything our mind has never known and will never understand, because, in a sense, that point actually was our mind, the thought that thinks itself, like a sword so sharp it cuts itself to pieces. It was the absolute past, without fissure. It was metaphysical flesh, homogenous and fiberless, without any distinction, aside from some at first unobservable filaments of the future. When and why did the symmetry shift? Who created the initial estrangements, and how? Who could have withstood the first crack of the fissuring All? The future, that is, estrangement, separation, and cooling, broke the original globe into a thousand shards and gouged hideous wounds into the body of the oneness of being, spaces that widened ever more, separating the granules of substance and letting a photonic blood gurgle between them. A purulent night wrapped every corpuscle into being, in a dark and hopeless schizophrenia. The universe, which was once so simple and complete, obtained organs, systems, and apparatuses. Today, it’s as grotesque and fascinating as a steam engine displayed on an unused track at a museum. It demonstrates its rods and levers under a bell jar. And until the bell of our minds is incorporated into the universal desolation, it will function as an internal organ reflecting the whole, the way a pearl reflects the martyred flesh of an oyster.

And yet, the universe is not everything that happens, but much, much more. Because, if those parts of us that analyze, those parts of every living being — the eyes, the compound eyes, the camera eyes, the antennae with batteries of chemoreceptors, the lateral lines of fish, the ears with trembling cochlea, the osmic cells in the nasal passages, the taste buds, the organs a spider uses to feel vibration and the organs a tick uses to sense carbon dioxide, the touch receptors of the skin, the ones that twist around every fiber of muscle in the oral organs of the Sarcoptes scabia, the ones that feel cold and heat, the ones stimulated by the otolithic stalactites of the organs of balance and the hundreds of thousands of other senses that simultaneously ingest the vibrations of matter — if these vulvae, if these tentacles adhere to the symmetry of the stars, there is still everything that we cannot perceive except through the super-sensory organ of thought, a super-symmetry, structures twisted around themselves that annul, at a higher level, the flow from the past toward the future, from all toward nothing. The universe, at a higher level than the visions of galaxies and quasars, is reflected in itself, in a super-mind, whose foundation is memory. There is a universal memory, a memory that encompasses, houses, and destroys the idea of time. There is Akasia, and Akasia is the savior of the universe, and beyond Akasia there is no hope of salvation. She is the eye in the forehead of All, encompassing the history of All and all that is, was, and shall be. In Akasia there is no death, or birth — all is coplanar and all is illusion. All of the world’s events, and every particle of substance, and every quantum of energy are present in transfinite light, there, in Memory. And if our thought (by which we perceive, in privileged moments of ecstasy, Akasia) would ever be able to turn back upon itself — perhaps by adding a seventh layer to the neocortex or by creating another, bizarre, organic basis for itself — the way that once, in the mind of a fur-covered being, awareness turned on itself and became consciousness, we might be able, like the angels, to detect the Memory of the Memory of the world, and the Memory of the Memory of the Memory and so on and so on, infinitely. And if conscience became prescience, reflecting itself in itself, it would then become omniscience, rising above this telescoping memory to see the center of the rose with infinite petals, to see the enchanting spider that weaves illusion, modeling it quickly into universes, spaces and times, bodies and faces, with its infinite, articulating legs.

We ourselves, although an unimportant organ of the world, are in some way the entire world. The All is everywhere at once and in every moment. The shuttle’s first pass through the weft that began to describe the world — the way a rod, spinning quickly, creates a dense, still circle, or the way the sweeping spot of a cathode-ray tube creates a televised image — has stamped the same configuration onto all the fragments of being, from the bottom to the top, from the holon to the holonarchy, from the eon to the pleroma. Every object, imaginable or beyond imagination, in a poor example of universial homogeneity, has a bipolar structure. Everything has a dual structure, like magnets, with poles oriented in opposition. Animal and vegetable polarities are paired everywhere, in every object. The first belongs to space, the spirit, searching, and movement. The other belongs to time, the soul, and immobile passivity. We find masculine and feminine, sulfur and mercury, yin and yang in the emblem of the hill in light and the hill in shadow. We live in two media, just as a tree lives in both the air and earth, its branches aerial roots, and its roots underground branches.

The bilateral symmetry of our organism — our two arms, two legs, two cerebral hemispheres, two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, and two gonads — often overshadows the subtler symmetry of top-bottom, the higher and truer symmetry. Our diaphragms, like walls between two kingdoms, divide our bodies into two zones with opposing polarities. Above our diaphragms, we’re dominated by the signs of air and fire, while below, we’re dominated by water and earth. It is easy to see that our arms correspond to our legs and our pelvises to our scapulae, but strange correspondences link the organs of our thoracic cavities with our abdomens. Any study of embryos will show that the heart corresponds to the liver and the lungs correspond to the intestines and kidneys, however diverse their morphology might appear. If we examined the entire, magical symmetry of a man hung upside-down on an imaginary Saint Andrew’s cross — the symmetry of a larva, the symmetry of a being whose evolution is incomplete — we would find the most fantastic, bizarre, and dizzying correspondence, and differences as well, between the organs at the ends of his body, in between his arms and in between his legs. The head corresponds to the genitals, and all our mystical, animal faculties are concentrated there. The cerebral hemispheres and the testicles or ovaries are the same organs, but opposing polarities pushed them toward opposing functions and forced them to diversify their morphologies. The brain moved toward the animal pole, which shaped it into an organ of relation, spatiality, and internal and external exploration, while the gonads anchored themselves in the fertile substance of time. And both, in different planes of existence, live and bathe in immortality. The sublime universe appears to us in the orgasm of the mind and the syllogisms of fecundity, in the sperm of the brain and the memory of the ovaries. Under two different faces — angelic and demonic, masculine and feminine — the sublime universe appears to us, touches the blood-filled jewel in which we live.

Space is Paradise and time is Inferno. How strange it is that, like the emblem of bipolarity, in the center of a shadow is light, and that light creates shadows. After all, what else is memory, this poisoned fountain at the center of the mind, this center of paradise? Well-shaft walls of tooled marble shaking water green as bile, and its bat-winged dragon standing guard? And what is love? A limpid, cool water from the depths of sexual hell, an ashen pearl in an oyster of fire and rending screams? Memory, the time of the timeless kingdom. Love, the space of the spaceless domain. The seeds of our existence, opposed yet so alike, unite across the great symmetry, and annul it through a single great feeling: nostalgia.

We are animals of nostalgia, abjections organized by geometry, as though our genitor spat into the cup of a lily and created us there, out of phlegm and perfume. But, unlike Akasia, because our memory only knows the dimensions of the past, our nostalgia is amputated, partial, a feeling that takes metaphors as reality and contorts itself around half-truths. We all have memories of the past, but none of us can remember the future. And yet, we exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings. We use one wing to fly, because we have sent our nerve filaments out to its edges, and the other is unknown, as if we were missing an eye on that side. But how can we fly with one wing? Prophets, illuminati, and heretics of symmetry foresaw what we could and must become. But what they see per speculum in aenigmate we will all see clearly, at least as clearly as we can see the past. Then, even our torturous nostalgia will be whole. Time will no longer exist, memory and love will be one, the brain and the sex will be one, and we will be like the angels.

We know from our cerebro-spinal trunk that we are the larvae of an astral being. With the marrow of our spines as its root and the two cerebral hemispheres in our skulls like two fleshly cotyledons, they perfectly resemble a plant in the first stages after sprouting. Their flesh is the earth into which they were sown and whose resources they will exhaust, and our brains will also be consumed and will wrinkle like a walnut kernel inside its dry fruit. Two small leaves will burst from its center, tender and filled with light — wings of the soul, wings of the spirit that will depart from the hothouse of this world, vested in the glory of a heavenly body, to be planted in a new earth, under a new sky.

Our painful love, born from the center of time, our daily nostalgia given to us today, itself the larva of the great and true nostalgia, projects into the past what it foresees as our destiny and future: it searches deep within the caves, cellars, basements, cells, and grottoes of time for what might be found in the rarefied air and metaphysical light of the attic. It desperately searches for something that must be found, a way out that must be uncovered, even though no organ exists that can sense it. We are constantly searching in the opposite direction, but the more mistakenly we search, the more we feel joy and certainty, because diametric opposites must lie on the same axis, and this itself is a powerful connection. We can only see our target in a mirror, in illusion, but we know that it exists somewhere in reality. Our blindness toward the future is like some patients’ corporeal agnosia: for them, the right (or left) half of the world has simply disappeared, along with the respective half of their bodies. There is not even nothingness for them. It is like the absolute silence of those born deaf, who lack any idea or intuition of sound. Metaphors, circumlocutions, approximations, the basest or most ingenious of verbal tricks, definitions by negation — you can try everything, but for someone who does not feel, for whom an area of reality does not exist, it quickly becomes tiresome to keep asking what it is like, what is comparable to something he will never know. Metaphorical speculations are, for him, simple parlor games, symbols of aesthetic value more than a deep need to define. Would we fall back on these kinds of glass-bead games, were it not for nostalgia? If passivity did not cause us pain? If we did not suffer like dogs when we weren’t searching, torturing ourselves with questions we know all too well we cannot answer, because the answer would not be a word or phrase but a deep and dramatic modification to our body’s schema and our being’s essence. We are not like someone blind from birth, but like someone who lost his sight in childhood, who sometimes dreams of things he cannot conceive: images and colors, shapes and shadows, lips, eyes, a hand that he only recognizes as an evanescent emotion, a foreboding that someday he will see again, not with his eyes, but with all the skin of his body, and not just with his skin, but his viscera, his veins and arteries, his trachea and esophagus, his pelvic bones and endocrine glands, his blood and saliva and the musk of his sweat. And not just with his body, but with the dogs and acacia and apartment blocks and cars and stores all around him, the seasons and constellations — a foreboding that he will see, someday, with the great eye, clear and pure as the whole, outside of which only non-existence exists.

Abjection and glory, like mucous that can just as well be holy myrrh, both vest the form of our body. Abjection, because we are worms, tubes with a double symmetry, nutrition in our center, relation and reproduction at our extremities, guts full of fecal matter between our brains and our genitals. The capacity for thought that we trumpet is no more wondrous a phenomenon than the ability of deep-water fish to generate light, or the power of an eel to produce electric shocks. Maybe we do have an organ to sense the divine, but it’s rudimentary, a plus or a minus, an “it is or it isn’t.” It perceives the divine the way paramecia sense light with a red dot, without actually “seeing.” What can be rescued in us? The soul? The astral body? Consciousness? A simple tumor wipes out all of those things, an epileptic nucleus shakes away memory, the sight of a woman’s hips stops a man’s thinking, an injustice drives us into the purest paranoiac delirium, a dream chills our necks and makes our hair stand on end. The harmony of a billion billion tiny, mushy things (systems and devices composed of tissues composed of cells composed of organelles: ribosomes, lysozymes, mitochondria, Golgi apparatuses, nuclei with chromosomes composed of chains of DNA and RNA composed of nucleic acids composed of molecules of hallucinatory stereosymmetry composed of atoms composed of nuclear particles composed of quarks) barely leaves any room for a splash of sparkling liquid, a clear thought, where the structured dust of worlds could develop. And this is only for a few of the billions of sentient worms that crowd together inside the stomach of a larger worm. They live as long as they’re given, and then they’re reabsorbed into the spiraling conglomeration of the earth. Everything is a grain of sand on a beach as wide as the universe. Where is there room for salvation? And why would you, you in particular, atomic bog, receive eternal life?

Glory is analogously disorienting because the symmetry of all worlds follows from the symmetry of our bodies. The human embryo recapitulates an abbreviated phylogeny of the living world. Swimming in the muscular pool of the uterus, feeling the warmth of the urinary and rectal canals, translucent and curled up, we envelop ourselves with the complications of embryonic layers, becoming, one by one, coelenterates and worms, fish with fluttering gills, amphibians, insectivorous mammifers and primates, until we break the blood-filled vulva and, dirty with meconium, we emerge headfirst into the new place where we live until our next birth. The same magical link exists between the stages of this life and the corporeal scheme of our flesh, as if we could see through time the way we see the panorama of space — as if our lives themselves were human beings made out of time, with structures identical to ours down to the smallest details, and analogous in surprising ways to a gigantic being, whose organs were the countless generations of all living creatures. In a way, by being born, playing, loving, maturing, aging, and dying, we live and breathe the gonads, vertebrae, sphincters, intestines, diaphragms, lungs, hearts, jugulars, jaws, brains, and skulls of our own lifespans.

If our whole lives are only the shadows of our bodies projected onto time, maybe we have super-shadows too — projections that are truer and more complex than the objects themselves. Maybe these shadows live inside us, the way parasitic crabs extend their own substance into the bodies of the host-crabs, but not exactly, because here the parasite is far superior to the host. Our heavenly body, like our physical bodies, has a paradoxical anatomy. It’s assembled from spiritual material, gaseous crystal circulating in diamond veins and jade arteries, pearl capillaries and marble canals, turquoise interstices and opal lymph nodes, jasper kidneys and quartz skin and a zirconium heart and a beryllium brain and sapphire testicles, our interior angels and our interior shadows, and superimposed over the stench-ridden mud of our flesh.

There are seven chakras along the spinal cord, and seven plexuses in the viscera. Three of them are below the diaphragm, the pole of time, of sex, of vegetable life. Separating the spirit from matter, the diaphragm is the border between two kingdoms, because we are amphibious beings between heaven and earth. The diaphragm is the surface of the earth: below it, blind roots grope among the moles, and above it, the corona and its gifts push toward the sky. Under the diaphragm, Muladhara is wrapped like a snake around the sacrum, innervating the snake between the thighs with four petals of thick light. A bit higher, in the small of the back, Svadisthana has six multicolored petals, the queen of the kidneys and bladder, the Leyding cells and the rectum, the place of will and vitality. Manipura has ten petals and illuminates the solar plexus. It tames the anaconda of the bowels, the pallid tongues of the pancreas and spleen, and the blood-red liver with its sack of bile. Above the diaphragm are another three chakras, the pole of the animal, space, and brain. Between the shoulder blades is Anahata, the seat of the feelings, the one that washes our interior islands in blood, the one that nourishes the timus. The gland of childhood, Visuddha, with its sixteen transparent petals, illuminates the vertebrae of the neck, aids the rhythm of respiration, protects the lungs and thyroid, and opens the frozen eyes of the intellect. The triangle between the eyebrows is inlaid with Ajna of the three fires, because there, in the pituitary gland, the queen of the nervous system, is the seat of the soul. And beyond these symmetries, beyond space-time and brain-sex, but toward space and the brain, Sahasrara glistens — the diadem and the spherical eye on the crown of the head, the Aleph of Alephs, the diamond of a diamond world.

We ought to remember with our testicles and love with our brains, but that’s not how it is. Memory is in the middle of the mind, and love between the legs, as though our perverse souls sit in their organic coffins upside-down. Maybe once, surely once, before the wall of the diaphragm was built, and before the wall of apartment blocks on Ştefan cel Mare, the great wall of maturity, the seven chakras and plexuses were flipped upside-down, so that we actually did think and love with the same organ, and we ejaculated and remembered with the parts on the opposite ends. But then, the doppelganger of our chakras and plexuses and rays flipped over, the way that in the eighth month a child turns its head down in the uterus — the reversal that makes us so paradoxical, and so fascinating. Maybe the fetus turns itself over precisely because it senses the onset of birth. We are all women, we are uteruses, and we will tear ourselves apart and we will rot, so that in another world, under a new heaven, crystalline beings can emerge, translucent as crustaceans, with their seven hearts beating in the alpha rhythm, with seven brains, or with seven sexes.

Memory is in the middle of the mind, under the brain, pia mater and neocortex, where it spills over the sensory and motor zones, the homunculus with its swollen tongue and orangutan paws. In the center of the brain, formed in the limbic system, in the fornix and hippocampus, the mammillary bodies and the amygdalae, memory soaks in the striated waters of the thalamus and hypothalamus, it shapes neuronal sculptures, and it wets the marble of the mind with florescent liquids. It creates nets as flimsy as spiderwebs, turned on themselves like Möbius bands, and rippled like the petals of a colorless rose. It runs from the real to the virtual and back to the real, as though Escher’s hands were drawing each other a billion times a second. But does this glittering and tireless shuttle weave something truer, something less monstrous than the homunculus which is its starry sky? Could it be that time’s body and our life’s reverie, from the moment the spermatozoon adheres revoltingly to the ovum and its mind advances through the mucilage to mix with the sun’s mind, and up to the moment when we ourselves, spermatozoa of some inconceivable animal, adhere revoltingly to the great globe of our deaths, and our skulls break into shards and our brains (carrying half of whose information?) migrate through the mucous of death and fuse with the mind of death and then everything dies in a gigantic metabiological explosion called rebirth — could that be projected, reliably, onto the screen behind the retina? The teeth upon the gears of our lives are not only horribly uneven, but of different colors, made of different substances, blown around by the winds like the sails of a skiff, and their indicator needle, capricious, suddenly spins for dozens of revolutions until it disappears, as if it didn’t exist. Then it stops on a minute or for hours on end, licking and touching the minute, analyzing it minutely, coupling with it and giving it children, until it grows old and tarnished and falls, and only then will the indicator deem it ready to advance. From this comes another homunculus, more deformed, grotesque, and phantom-like than that of the sensorial-motor, that hunchbacked stillbirth of our life’s ultimate and hidden meaning. But even this stillborn fetus has a shining mark on its forehead that can smell God and on and on until the billionth dimension, as far as we can imagine, alongside a spatial world whose people and animals have suddenly disappeared, and instead, only their images remain, crowded together on streets and in houses. There are homunculi of people and dogs and cats and rats projected onto this shell — and a world in time, where instead of their actual lives there are only lives reconstructed in memory, lives where one gesture in childhood takes up more time and space than ten years of adulthood, and elephantine temporal organs hang on every side, while the sensory organs can barely be seen.

Memory weaves us, there in the depths of the three-petaled chakra, the forehead’s eye. However hideous (because time is an inferno and a creature of time is a devil from the inferno, or maybe a creature forever damned), it is our twin, and a strange desire pushes one toward the other, one into the arms of the other. When I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon, with kids shouting outside and poplar tufts floating in the sun-filled summer, I remember scenes and gestures and faces from long ago, obscure, enigmatic, melted into pure emotion, then I see it — co-created with my flesh but in another dimension, creating a caricature of me, frightening but at the same time dear to me. Every moment that passes, my memory separates from me a little more, it becomes more daring and independent, its shadow and power grow, and it rises over me, spreading its claws and bat wings. Its beak has crooked teeth, just like my mother’s dentures, and it has a single eye in the black and shining bone of its brow. It crawls out of me like an insect, still wet and soft, from the transparent shell of its former carcass. My memory is the metamorphosis of my life. If I do not plunge bravely into the milky abyss that surrounds and hides my memory in the pupa of my mind, I will never know if I have been, if I am a voracious praying mantis, a spider dreaming upon an endless pair of stilts, or a butterfly of supernatural beauty.

I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold. And, somehow, it is also transparent, ever more transparent the deeper the fountain of my mind becomes (and I, a skeleton leaning over its walls, contemplate the wide, dreaming eyes reflected in the golden water). That hyaline cartilage, there on the shield where the three heraldic flowers meet — dream, memory, and emotion — that is my domain, my world, the World. There in that sparkling cylinder that descends through my mind. There, like a specimen in a green jar, pale and bloated with formaldehyde, it lies with its Asiatic eyelids half closed, with its ecstatic and lifeless smile, with its umbilical cord wrapped around its stomach. How well I know it! How accurately did I imagine it! Oh, my twin, open your painted eyelids, press your lipsticked, sweet lips, swell until the vat bursts and, through the shards of brain, through the organic mucilage, come into the light! With the eye between your eyebrows, enlighten the pearly-skinned pages of this book, of this illegible book, of this book.

8

ON HER left hip, my mother had a large violet-pink mark shaped like a butterfly. The vermiform body moved horizontally across her stomach toward her left buttock, one wing descending over her thigh, and the other rising toward her waist. I remembered this only when I was in my teens, and not during some vesperal reverie, but in a dream. I dreamed, one night in July, after hours of wandering streets downtown, and looking carefully at statues, that my mother was sitting on a bed with a white satin sheet, artfully wrinkled like the felt in jewelry boxes. She was huge and marble-white, capillaries and sweat glands showed through her transparent skin, and on her left hip a tropical butterfly, its colors shining intensely, had landed on thin, nervous little legs. When I woke up, I knew my mother had a lupus eritematos marked on her hip. I had often seen it, in the depths of time, when she walked naked around the house on sweltering afternoons. I knew what she looked like naked, my two- or three-year-old eyes had seen her and remembered. But then, after we moved to the apartment and my mother started to make Persian rugs, I only saw her naked to the waist, her nipples the same color as the butterfly on her hip, now off-limits. Because, later, when we moved again to the house in Floreasca, I wasn’t even allowed to see her breasts. It was as though this woman I came out of — a zone of wet skin, with pimples and moles — was once my domain, and then we were estranged, piece by piece, at the end of a series of unlucky battles. In each one, not only did I lose hectares of thighs, pubic hair, armpits and breasts and wrinkles on the stomach, but also I was wounded, mutilated by steel blades lettered in an unknown alphabet. In five years I lost my mother’s body irreversibly, and I moved away from it, I was moved away with such force that the thought of it and the memory lobotomized my brain with the same blood-covered blade. Therefore, when I dreamed of the butterfly on her hip, I woke with a horrible nausea. Where had my memory been keeping that image? Was it even real? More than the mark itself, I actually remembered my wonder in looking at it. Had my grandma, whom I didn’t remember at all, as though my grandpa made my mother by himself, stolen a butterfly? Or, when she was sunbathing naked on the banks of the Sabar, when she had my mother in her womb, was she touched by the shadow of a pair of delicate wings?

I lay in my bed until an intense night fell, cut in pieces by electric stripes on the ceiling and walls, sparks from the trams on Ştefan cel Mare. I was excited and sad. If I closed my eyes, beneath my eyelids I saw the dozens of statues I had looked at, eye to eye, trying to understand the thoughts of those men made of green bronze and stone, illustrious men whose rubicund muses held out goose quills or equally tarnished laurels, trying to understand how these woman with marble uteruses could make love. Yes, long into the night, when the trolley buses were in the station, the illustrious men climbed down from their plinths, grabbed the muses by their hair, and humped among the trees in the park. They pushed their polished-metal penises between the women’s dew-dampened stone labia. Atlases coupled with limestone gorgons with chipped noses, leaving oleander-filled balconies to fall onto the sidewalk. But I stopped my erotic reverie short, because a balcony like that, on the second floor, with pots of oleander and teasel, actually existed somewhere. It came from somewhere real, in very close connection to the lupus mark on my mother’s left hip — the mark the color of her dentures (ah, now I got it!), the sinister mark. Sinister. Silistra. There was a house on Silistra with a balcony supported by Atlas statues. When mother carried me home from the store, wrapped in my coat, my head passed right by the pubises of the two terrible bearded men bent under the weight of the balcony, which were painted a dirty yellow. I looked up and, framed against the white sky, I saw an old woman whose grey hair fell in waves like a girl’s. But the rest seemed to have melted into fog, pearly and unraveled, and truly the rest melted into dreams.

In the morning, I woke up nervous and distracted, to the birds’ strident chirping and the great yellow light of summer. I got out of the wrinkled bed, walked through rooms painted dull olive and beige, and went into the kitchen, where my mother was already doing her chores, moving among the food-stained chairs. I ate breakfast silently, dipping my bread in coffee and milk, rolling the wet crumbs into marbled balls, and flicking them into dirty cups in the sink. I went onto the balcony. The Dâmboviţa mill, once so flashy in its red-brick vestments, now was white with flour and dust over the roofs full of tin patches, over the huge walls, the round and rectangular windows, and the supports that had girded them for over a hundred years. The mixture of brick-red and white produced an indefinite color, something sad, the shade of all the ancient mills, factories, and workshops in ruin, worn away by time and vegetation. Pitch-black poplars grew everywhere, with carnivalesque green leaves, licking the old, pallid walls and covering them with waves of puffy seeds. Poplar seed puffs — in July, they came down like snow, they drifted around the mill’s foundation, they stuck to the holes and cracks between bricks, they latched onto the feet of pigeons that filled the roof, and they found a tiny bit of earth and extended roots through the panes of glass blocked out by flour. The giant corpse of a ruined but still-functioning mill dominated the back of our block. It scraped the clouds with its triangular pediments like a medieval castle, equally crumbling and melancholy. The mill had a large yard, a few small administrative buildings, deserted and quiet under the sun, and a bulky concrete fence to separate it from the territory of the eight floors of children who came out of the block every morning and played in its shadow, lighting it up with shards of glass and strident screams. Far away to the left of the mill, you could see the outline of Casa Scinteii, the building that published The Spark, with its little red star burning all night. On the right, the State Circus had been visible, but now it was obliterated by the flesh, nerves, muscles and bones of the poplars. You could see the circus only from the roof terrace, a flying saucer on the park expanse. The poplars had been planted only a few meters from the building, and they grew as high as the fifth floor, where we lived, so close we could lean out and touch their supple, leafy branches, splattered by pigeons. Last year, there was a pigeon who spent three weeks trying to hatch a ping-pong ball that had fallen into our balcony drain. I sat on the balcony in my pajamas for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.

My short-sleeved shirts were too tight at the shoulders, so they creased across the front, making my chest look more sunken than it really was. As soon as I left the cool apartment, I started to sweat. Big drops dripped from my armpit hair onto my already wet skin. Under my pink or leek-green shirts, my crooked thorax drowned in transparent colors and water. The asphalt was soft under my shoes. I looked in the furniture store windows on the ground floor and saw myself among the ficuses and kitchen decor, a kid with a blade-thin face and a wobbly walk. If I felt someone looking at me, my steps became awkward and mechanical, as though I was afraid that I would forget how to walk, and that I might fall onto the asphalt at any moment. I walked toward Obor on the shady side of the boulevard, blinded by the shining windshields and windows, unconsciously registering the great curve of the blocks, and ending up in front of the Melodia movie theater.

From Obor, I knew I should go up toward Colentina. Here it already felt like the edge of town. Among the cars passed horse-pulled trucks with automobile tires, their azure or green panels painted with mermaids, stags, and floral patterns. They left a trail of yellow-green, globular scat. And the people changed. The women wore headscarves and print skirts; they bared their metal teeth at each other as they came out the factory door, lugging plastic bags and woven baskets. They looked like meaty hens with sagging crests. Clusters of gypsies filled the sidewalks, waiting for the tram, the women in layers of flowery orange and brick-red dresses and sport coats, the men in black suits and hats, sitting on puffed sacks, incredibly greasy. Still, I liked their smell, of the slums, of natural decay, like the unmistakable smell of the country, a combination of fruit fermenting in vats of ţuica, lye splattered in semi-circles on the ground, and sap from frightening vegetation that darkened my gaze in the summer. Workers on ancient, iron bicycles, with two or three soda bottles tied with wire to the little racks behind their saddles, pedaled deftly in bleached sneakers. The yellow road rose toward the east, framed by a green labyrinth of trees.

I crossed Suveica, where my mother had worked at the mechanical looms, and where she would emerge at dusk, drowning in gnats and plagued by the urge to vomit, smelling the rancid fat from the soap factory next door. All the way home, and all night at home, the noise of the looms where she spent her days would ring in her ears. Over the entry gate, in red block letters, arched the words “Long Live the Romanian Communist Party,” and on the wall of honor, in black and white photos the size of postcards, the vanguard of production smiled stupidly — women with crooked faces, like men or children, with immobile hair and dead eyes. Dresses that looked like school uniforms — with white collars and polka-dot prints in white on black, or black on white — seemed to be the universal fashion in their limited environment of factory, market, and home.

I stopped at Teiul Doamnei, feeling irritated. I could sense, in my mind’s nostrils, the effluvia of the house on Silistra. But where was it coming from? Since the moment we had moved away from that part of town, I couldn’t remember coming back except once: like in a dream, I saw a road and a tram, a market paved with square bricks, and the hazy ghosts of buildings, leaning forward menacingly … Nothing else. But now, lost, I wandered through the neighborhood of run-down houses, with watch repair shops and locksmiths, I asked an old man — yes, the street was somewhere around here, everyone knew it, but maybe they didn’t call it Silistra, something else, who knows what … and I would have gone back home, if, suddenly, in the rarefied air of my mind, the route I’d taken that day hadn’t come to me in a glimmering vision, from who knows where, as the crystalline skeleton of a bird’s wing, or a flying mammifer. The humerus stretched from my block to Bucur Obor, the radius and cubitus, stuck together — from Obor to Teiul Doamnei, and from there the finger bones separated, much too long and ending in powerful claws. When I saw, on one of the beast’s fingers, a massive gold ring, I knew that I had found (because any discovery is remembrance) the mystical street and house of my birth. I only had to cross the boulevard and drown myself in the streets of that neighborhood.

But it seemed the shining wing did not have only five fingers, but many, a tangle of fingers. I wandered for hours under a tropical sun along identical sad streets on the edge of town, with middle-class and country houses, with kites hanging from telegraph wires and pigeons singing in mulberry bushes. I rounded corners, I read the street signs: Bujoreni, Zorilor, Sadova, Major Anastasie Petru, Perişani … I was hypnotized by the abandoned buildings invaded by weeds, the doorframes and window frames torn out, and a dirty child pulling a band of cut copper behind him, muttering something in a room painted blue. I stopped old women wearing slippers and asked them where Silistra was. “Ah, Silistra, I think it’s two streets that way. But who are you looking for, sonny?” I froze when, deep into a far-away street, perpendicular to those I’d walked before, I saw, against a sky crossed by clouds, a melancholy and austere tower, the one I had seen for some time in my dreams. The actual tower had a window on the upper floor, with heavy bent shades. Standing there, petrified on the empty street, face to face with the high building, I felt certain I had been there before, and a strange magic made me open the unpainted wooden door. There was a spiral stairway, with a cold stone railing. I walked up, with all of my joints trembling. The paint on the wall was green and oily. There was a pot with a sick cactus, covered in mold, pale and ulcerous. I leaned on the cool railing and knocked at the only door on the miniscule landing. It had a large, outdated peephole. In the cloudy light that came through a single windowpane, Anca opened the door. I walked into a hall that smelled like dusty Persian rugs. The room was packed with old things, chipped porcelain and almost black silver servings. There was a picture of the tower, somewhat crudely painted, with Anca in front, playing hopscotch. Beside the tower, in the picture (not in reality) rose an olive-green cypress tree.

Still dizzy from so many twists and turns through Colentina, my shirt drenched with sweat, I was glad for the cold of the dark, quiet apartment. Anca brought a saucer with a spoonful of rose petal jam, and while I ate, looking at the filigreed spirals on the handle of the spoon, she told me about her childhood.

9

HER mother worked the stamping machine in a metal shop. Eight hours a day, Monday to Saturday, she sat on a rotting wooden box, in front of an enormous and greasy hydraulic press, jabbing rectangular pieces of sheet metal into the jaws of the machine. A shiny cylinder would fall in a flash with a deafening sound, stamping the sheets and rising just as quickly. In the shop, eight presses were operating constantly. At each one worked a woman in a blue coat. All of the women were practically deaf. They each had all of their fingers, because the ones whose fingers got caught under the cylinder did not come back. Anca’s mother worked in the shop until she went into labor (her daughter never had any trouble remembering the howl of the presses, because she had heard it, diffused by the liquid of the placenta, since she was no bigger than a salamander). She left for the maternity ward by tram, in a happy, sweating crowd on a Saturday afternoon.

Anca grew up in the tower, the former brick annex of a workshop from the beginning of the century, later demolished. A vacant lot with a few black, greasy pieces of machinery — wheels, belts, springs, and the frame of a tram wagon, with flaking paint and missing windows — spread its weeds and trash behind the tower. That’s where the girl would play, sitting on one of the wooden benches of the old tram and pretending to take a trip, catching gray and brown locusts that writhed in her fist and tried to escape between her fingers, touching her dress (with a bud of yellow velvet sewn onto her front pocket) to the greased machinery … When evening came and the sky turned purple, and a little window sparkled high on the tower wall, Anca knew that it was time to come inside. Still, sometimes she would stay in the field, flattening balls of paper with colorful pictures, listening to the factory whistle, or just running here and there until the light fell into the earth and the moon appeared.

“Mircea, things were so strange! The moon looked like a huge slurry of ice, and even the wild snapdragons in the field turned the pallid color of the moon. The plaster and half-demolished walls would start to shine, while everything else descended further into shadow. And from the other side of the wall, on nights like these, Herman would always come. I wasn’t scared of him at all, since he came toward me very slowly, as I sat on my heels, with my skirt tucked between my legs, so I could look at whatever scrap I was looking at. I never responded to my father the first time he called for me, even though in that silence, his voice was as strong and clear as an angel’s, because I wanted very much to stay a little longer with Herman. He didn’t take my hand, I took his, and we always went toward the ruined house nearby that had a hole in its roof almost as big as an entire room. We walked through the horsetails growing in the doorway and went into the fluid blue of the room below the bare sky. There, while we held hands, face to face, his eyes, blue like mine in the light, turned transparent white, like a fish’s, and on their glassy surface, scratched with the point of a needle, I saw my chest and the flowering, flayed tapestry from the wall behind me. Since he was bent at his shoulder blades, more hunched over than anyone I had ever seen, he had to bend his head back as far as he could just to see straight. The fact that there, in the room where everything seemed to float, he always took off my blouse, carefully unbuttoning me and leaving me with bare, dark nipples on a nearly flat chest, seemed amusing and mysterious to me, and it never scared me, because he never touched my chest, at most he would move a lock of hair in front, bringing it down to where my ribs ended. He started to tell me about a world that, for me, was normal, next to this one but still inaccessible. Herman’s steady, low voice was a tunnel that led me there directly.

“All of a sudden, the tunnel would expand into fleshy, soft folds, and a blinding world would appear before us. Dozens of pink moons made the water glow, a vast gulf full of ships, edged with hills with crystal palaces, beryllium pagodas, and crysolite bells piled one on top of the next — ornaments for the architecture of fables. Our frigate neared the shore, and we disembarked onto pink marble steps, carved with volutes and counter-volutes. The staircase began in the waves and rose toward a grand façade. The columns of the portico were fifty times thicker than my body. The statues above, in moon-reddened arcades, could have symbolized either vices or virtues. Blind windows, round and rectangular, showed on the façade as translucent and flat as a mirror. We went into the marble palace, bare of any furniture, tapestries, or paintings, and eventually, in one of the halls, on a marble throne, we found a girl with a shaved head, her entire scalp decorated in marvelous tattoos. On another night, in another castle and another hall, instead of the throne, in the middle of the marble cavern, we found one of the hydraulic presses from my mother’s shop. A scrap of brass came out of its jaws, and on it were letters. A word was written there, a name I had never heard before.

“One night in every two or three, Herman would come and we would talk, never for more than an hour, in the ruined house. Set against the moon, spiders would shimmer their transparent legs through the steps of a strange ritual. Speaking in a sad monotone, the young hunchback again and again unraveled the thin material of my life — with prints of our tower, the field, Mamma and Pappa, my dolls, and the neighbor’s girls — to build other and still other scenes in their place, with marble temples dissolving into the light. One night, after he had led me through the galleries of a house whose windows were held by putti and garlands, and then down rectangular corridors with niches of pot-bellied urns, we came to a room in ruins, lit by a moon through a frameless window and overgrown with weeds. There I looked Herman in the eye.

“I was naked to the waist, as usual, and my hair ran over my shoulders, down to my nipples. Herman held a hair clipper, nickel-plated, like a pair of pliers with one long side, full of teeth along the edge. He came toward me, smiling, and with his other hand he mimed a pair of scissors. I let him clip me bald, strand by strand, my hair falling around me. Then I let him shave my head with a razor, an old one that folded into its handle. In the end, Herman ran his fingers over the flat hemisphere that housed my brain, as voluptuously as he would have touched a grown woman’s breast. That was the one time I was scared. Only then did I see a plank table, with an arrangement of instruments that were completely unfamiliar to me. Some of them looked like the pieces of metal I found in the field, near the greasy machinery and the old tram. Others had long needles at the end with unnerving curves. With these, all night long, until the dawn turned white, Herman tattooed my entire scalp. He worked as laboriously as a giant arachnid, mechanical and quiet. What fantastically colored anatomical illustration, what constellations from a map of another planet’s stars, what starched lace, like over the scalp of a rotund Dutchwoman, did Herman engrave into my skull? I would never know. Through the long hours of painful slices, prickings, and impregnations of multicolored inks, I looked around myself, moving only my eyeballs, and I observed certain incongruities between the ruined room I was seeing and the way it had looked before, like in those games where you compare two almost-identical pictures. The tarnished doorknob, the plug hanging from the wall, and the mold on the tapestry were all different, even if I couldn’t say how. Perhaps the difference was not in them, but in me, in my emotions, even in my nature (yes, yes, that’s it, because I remember looking deep into Herman’s fish eyes, and seeing a strange princess from a faraway land, her head shaved and her ears oddly large. That was the only time I ever saw myself and thought that I was beautiful).”

Anca went home at dawn, at last, with stiff bones, with the conviction that this was not the world where she had been born, that it all looked different, that the clouds made impossible, prophetic shapes in the morning sky, that even the sparrows who hopped through the garbage were not supposed to be the way they were, but some other way completely, although they had the same shape that Anca remembered. Her father saw her through the tower window, his face pale and sleepless, his hair blown in the cold wind. When he saw her, he was motionless for a moment, and then he disappeared from the window. “He banged down the spiral staircase and rushed to me. I hugged him and drew in his smell of red putty and hemp. My head was cold and painful. My inflamed skin drew a network in my mind of linear and pointillist pain. I leaned my skull against his chest, and this was how my mother found us, rushing over from a neighbor who had a phone. She had called all the hospitals, ambulances, the police … I climbed the tower’s three flights of stairs, and they locked me up in my room without a mirror, and there I stayed until, in slow rotation, autumn, winter, and spring had passed, and it was summer again. My hair grew like reeds, like a brown grass, and that year bushes of hair sprouted from my armpits, and below my belly, so much that I was afraid that the curly, sparkling tufts would surface and cover me everywhere, leaving just my nipples and eyes, like a mother dog. How lonely I was, when the cupolas of my breasts took shape! When my skin became soft! I lay in my wet bed for hours, curled up, my hands pressed between my legs, wetting my pillow with saliva and tears. Ever since, ashen faced, she had seen the colored drawings on my skull, my mother had begun to hate me, she only came into my room to yell at me about straightening up, or smelling bad, or that I hadn’t bathed since who knows when. She said nothing to me when I woke up one morning, scared to death, with a spot of blood on the sheet, between my legs. She just brought me a tub with some bleach and soapy water, so I could wash the coarse cloth. When she would burst into my room, with her tortured laborer’s face, with the smell of cheap soap, “Cheia” or “Cămila,” carrying a bowl of soup, something softened and flowed within me, leaving an unbearable void between my ribs: I did not want, even if you broke my arm, to become a woman, to go to the factory, to cook, wash, sew, and then let a husband grab me at night and slam me onto the bed to step on me and abuse me, the way my father did with my mother. Why didn’t Mamma leave? Why didn’t she go out into the world? What kind of life was that, home and the factory, with only one dress for years and years, with a bra that looked more like a dishrag and underpants in shreds from being boiled so often? Now and then she went to the hairdresser, and she came back with some ridiculous stuffed-cabbage hairdo, and in a few days it fell apart. When a thread came out of a stocking, she took it for mending to a lady who sat from morning until evening in a small room with one window, barely big enough for her folds of fat, looking like a caterpillar in a print dress. Yes, my mother came into the world and lived without joy and without hope. So I didn’t mind when I saw how much she hated me. I saw my shitty future in her, being a painter or weaver or stamper, because then I could not imagine a different life was possible. And maybe it isn’t.

“There were several times that the teacher knocked on our door, because I was supposed to be in the sixth grade and I hadn’t come to school in the fall. By September, my hair was already bushy and covered up the tattoos. I didn’t go to school all year. The doctors found something in my bones or my heart, I don’t know what, that let me put school off for a year. But I read a lot, because anything was better than lying in bed or wandering around the table. And I dreamed a lot, more than ever, the way I heard once on the radio that embryos dream in the womb, that they are dreaming (but of what?) almost all the time. And locked in my room, curled up under the sheets, I was nothing but a fruit of flesh ripening in the shadows. I dreamed that you would come, I dreamed of what you would look like, in every detail, which is why I was not upset when you knocked, and I invited you into the house like an old friend, as I would Herman himself, if he ever came. In my dream, you were wandering the streets of a quiet and sunny neighborhood, you were like a blind man’s hand, plunged into what might be called reality, if it wasn’t unseen, the way something can exist even when there’s nobody there to perceive its existence. I watched from the little window as you approached, as you crossed the lot full of strange wheels, prismatic windows, fresh red and yellow paint, steps that lower automatically, the number clear on the side, and a small platform at the back. I watched as you reached the cypress — chopped down years ago — to the right of the tower, as you read the silly thing that Dănuţ, the carpenter’s son next door, had written in the wall in chalk, and as you sensed that you had to come in. I called you then, in the dream, by your name: ‘Mircea,’ and I knew that, years later, you would hear.”

10

THE rose jam gave me a dizzying pain at the bridge of my nose. I finished the jam, and now I distractedly scratched the spoon against the thick glass plate, dotted with syrup. Herman. How strangely everything was starting to connect! I had always hoped my life would go differently than anyone else’s, that it would have a meaning, a meaning that perhaps I couldn’t grasp, but that was visible from somewhere high up, like a pattern in an immense field. Nothing ought to be accidental. Every person I ever met and every toothache and every grain of dust seen in a ray of light (or unseen, but there with its unsteady geometry to plug a corner of my life’s endless fractal) and even the vaguest feeling of hunger or anxiety were only colored dots in a carpet rolling and unrolling within itself, wrapping me like a silk cocoon or like the mottled strips that wrap mummies. And even I, a mummified butterfly, was just another figure, dotting the canvas with the wool of my blood. Anca kept watch over the entrance to the labyrinth, in her lonely dungeon, with her tattooed scalp covered by hair, the way that Mayan temples full of rattlesnakes lie in the jungle and in Ernst’s paintings. An immense full moon might turn the steps yellow. Anca’s blue eyes would remain the only constant of her life, from when she was a little girl to her old age, as though the fluctuating volume of her life was only a series of photos passing before two blue bars. But an old Anca, hanging flaccidly from her own eyes, was inconceivable to me, because she could not have her own destiny, separate from mine. She was as dense and homogenous as a statue. Anca only made a brief appearance in my life. She was a robot built to deliver her lines, just like every person I ever met, and every object. The glass of juice I sipped sometime as a child appeared so I could drink it. There had been nothing before and there would be nothing after it left my hand or my sight. A woman on the street, who looked at me for a moment and then, with the same expression, at the window of a home store, existed only for that moment, slopped together with some plaster and a bit of color, and then dissolved on the spot in the scorching traffic. What could Anca do in old age? Raise her grandchildren? But the chair I sat on, sipping my cup of cold water and watching her, had never been made by a carpenter from timber brought from the mountains, and the timber was not cut from a tree that lived for thirty years in the piney solitude of the forest, and the fir had not sprouted from a seed fallen to the earth, among decaying pine needles and ferns. A year from now it will not be sold, other people will not sit on it, and in ten years it will not be taken apart, not used to patch a hole in a wood fence … it will not grow mold and lichen there, in a grove of cherry trees, until all its nails rust and its wood passes through the intestines of termites, to mingle with the earth. The chair had no history, but was conceived there only for an hour, in a house built for an hour, inhabited by a girl with breasts already large and round, but without qualities, without softness and warmth and internal structure. If I had touched Anca’s breasts, they would have become instantly pliable and scented, and then just as instantly not. I move slowly along a predestined path, while around me someone creates my existence.

Yes, I was sure: my life was constructed. Second by second, a metaphysical artist invented billions of details and made captivating and exuberant scenery, iridescent surfaces beyond which was perhaps a uniform radiance, or the indescribable. Naturally, this immense façade could at any moment take on the appearance of depth. You could put a sample of anything (a drop of blood from your finger, say) under the microscope and gaze at the snowflakes of hemoglobin, the iron atom in the center and the surrounding lace of oxygen and hydrogen, but this structure is created by the investigation itself, and only locally, no other drop of the cubic kilometers of blood of all living creatures had that pattern. Its depth was only produced by surfaces …

I stood. Anca did too, smoothing her blue dress with her fingers. Each fold housed in its depths a silken, ultramarine reflection, darker than the azure dress and flowing like water, as though she were dressed in a gelatinous liquid. She called me into another, smaller room, where a chipped mirror hung on the wall. Under the mirror was a pine table with a drawer, covered with a naïve cross-stitch. We looked into the mirror of olive-brown waters: a young man with hollow cheeks, sensual lips, fixed and fanatical eyes, and a modest girl from the edge of town. Anca pulled open the drawer, and I saw that it was filled with fantastical instruments: a glittering toolkit. I could recognize a razor, clippers, pliers, needles and bottles, and more complex devices utterly foreign to me, things that looked like sewing machine shuttles, electric torture clamps, wishbones … All were French-fitted into trays of white latex foam. Joints with delicate rivets, fine tips arching like insect mandibles, heavy, truncated handles — they all produced as much pleasure as repulsion, they were perfect, but perfect for wounding, tearing, puncturing, cutting, and maybe also for strangling and trepanning (a small saw, a beauty of silver metal, might serve to take slices from the skull). I lifted the kit carefully and placed it on the table. The girl took an old, dirty chair and sat on it in front of the mirror. She unfastened the straps on her shoulders and was naked to her waist, her breasts large and firm, with gooseflesh from the cold. Standing behind her, I passed my hand through her hair, and through the disorder of brown strands, for the first time, I glimpsed the wonder: a multicolored universe etched into the white, pearly skin of her head. My fingers opened scented paths, bordered by thousands of threads extending their white shoots. Every path seemed paved with blue tiles, and violet and pink and yellow, so many disparate letters in a convex puzzle … a quiet forest, empty and lonely, that covered ancient foundations. For a moment I imagined I was a louse exploring the barren woods, stepping on pliable soil, grabbing onto thick, semitransparent trunks made of horn, trying to trace the inextricable mandala beneath my footsteps on a map.

I removed the clippers from their bay. I snapped them a few times in the air, watching the two toothed blades mounted on the end work together, well oiled, and then I placed the cold metal on Anca’s brow and cleared a first stripe, up to her crown. Her locks fell gracefully, art nouveau, into her lap, and just a few hairs clung to her eyelashes, which she shook off with a wink. I continued, carefully following the undulations of her scalp, scattering spiral locks on the ground, until her forehead stretched up to the fontanel. I cleared the area around her left ear (now I noticed her earrings, a little girl’s, three grains as ruby as a raspberry held in a bit of gold), and then her neck, trying hard not to look at the increasingly bizarre lithography I uncovered. There were some tufts between the two neck muscles that I found impossible to cut away. I continued toward her right ear, and everything was complete when an aery spiral fell in a delicate coil to the floor. Her scalp was ashen, as though along with her hair, she had also lost the frame that, like a motorcycle helmet, protected her brain. In that ashen desert there were drawings. The tattoos were clearly visible now. But I hadn’t wanted to understand the tattoos from the start, so, gently bringing my eyelids together to hide the dazzling embellishments, I kept working, repeating Herman’s technological maneuvers in reverse. I lathered her scalp, and with the razor, I removed the last traces of the ancient forest. I wiped her skull with a napkin until it began to shine dully, like an ivory ball. In comparison, Anca’s face seemed fleshy and vulgar, like a sexual organ hanging toward the floor. Her breasts, her slim teenager’s belly, her hips and legs now wrapped in electric blue cashmere were hanging, like the fringes of a multicolored jellyfish, from the convexity of her scalp. I stared, stunned by the thousands of lines intersecting like the threads of a bizarre embroidery, curves of endless grace traced over the floral design, tiny figurines flowing one into the next, knotted in an inextricable diorama. There was nothing to understand, yet everything cried out to be understood … the mystical conduction of the lines, the manic patience of the connections, and the refinement of the colors made you feel there was a message encoded there, that Herman had left a generous invitation or a terrible warning, or both at once, fixed on the hemisphere of that planet that had once been inhabited and flowering.

I circled around Anca, trying to make connections mentally, to join this spot in the shape of a wing with that line like a polyarticulate spider leg, this figure I thought I knew with that graffiti from a public toilet, this letter so clearly depicted (an M, in antic capital, colored in a beautiful violet), with that man as naked and beautiful as an archangel … But I didn’t have the key, and without it, everything was chaos and despair. Like in a coffee cup, a tortoise shell, the whole and broken lines of the I Ching, a palm whose sprawling fingers would hold the world, an inextricable dream, an obscure prophecy, I tried, in the catoptromant of memory, to divine, through the fog of too many colors, through the obscenity of excessive chastity, the message from another world. With my eyes closed, I circled my fingers over the pearly shell of Anca’s brain, like a phrenologist exploring the hump of stubbornness and gratitude. I opened my eyes and continued around her, trying dozens of angles, each of which revealed still more degrees of the design (the left parietal area seemed to house the watermark of a strange transparent egg, in which throbbed the fetus of a scaly chimera; toward the occiput I made out clearly the word DAN woven in royal cobras; above the forehead at one point I saw a naked girl sitting on her heels, urinating a flood of blue, and then I lost her; in Broca’s area my parents were smiling like in their wedding photo). Anca tried from time to time, helplessly, to meet my gaze, showing me a detail in the mirror and then shrugging her shoulders.

Only when I looked from exactly overhead, and just with my right eye — the one that lets me see clearly — did I have the revelation of the whole. There, on Anca’s skull, Herman (the same one I had talked to for hours on the cement steps of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, listening to his husky whispers about Felicia and the cosmos and his need to drink two bottles of vodka per day) had tattooed Everything, and everything had my face. Looking directly at the middle of the fontanel, I saw my face in a convex reflection. Moving my eyes just a centimeter to one side or the other changed the perspective and destroyed the overall picture, as if the drawing was not flat, but in relief, containing all of Anca’s intracranial space, biting into her jugular, and rooted in filaments of her entire body. It was my face, but every feature of it was formed in many miniscule designs, tightly intertwined, and their details, drawn in even thinner lines, were in turn composed of other designs, on another scale. The process had no end, because the twisting shroud of the abyssal fish that was a hair in my right eyebrow, was in turn composed of a nocturnal scene where Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus sat by a fire the night before the flight to Egypt. If you looked carefully at one of the stars frothing in the sky above the Holy Family, you could just see an immense cluster of faces screaming among tongues of fire (one of these faces was Felicia’s). The mole on her chin clearly held the smoking remains of a railway accident, and in an atom of the smoke were the planets and suns of another universe, with their own flora, fauna and ethology, and so on, and so on, without end. Exploring any detail meant you had to chose one branch, ignore the rest of the design, and concentrate on just one detail of the original detail, and then a detail of the detail of the detail. This plunge into the heart of the design could be deadly for one’s mind to even attempt. From the thousandth level, you would have to come back, to reverse course to find, in the billions of details of your level of detail, a single detail from the next higher level, to combine it with a billion more to move higher up, in maddening continuity.

Hours must have passed before I surfaced, before I recomposed my face from a myriad of particulars in the silky mirror of Anca’s scalp. But did I come out onto the same surface? Might the image of me in the tower, looking at the shaved skull of a girl naked to the waist, seated in front of a mirror, repeat somewhere in the depths of the billions of layers? Perhaps, following a new thrust of my mind, I might have risen so high that the scene in Anca’s room, and the tower and houses nearby, and the clouds above, and the fantastical view of Bucharest, and the vast curvature of the earth, and the golden pocket watch of the galaxy, and the foam of the supergalaxy, curved within itself and throbbing like an embryo, all of this would make up just one atom of carbon in a thread of chitin in the back of a fly from another universe, and this universe would constitute one atom of a potato peel in the garbage of a higher universe, and this whole process of my mind would continue indefinitely too, just like diving into the details and details of details …

Again I looked at my thin and sad face, that seemed drawn in charcoal, as it was reflected in the shining, living ball in front of my sternum. I looked around us, and the world was concrete again, reassuring, with impenetrable gray walls, where lights and shadows were sharply drawn, with a window where summer clouds rolled by, and a bald girl seated in front of a mirror — and me. The wet floor was strewn with brown hair, and looked somehow dirty. Anca stood, reattached the straps at her shoulders and took my hand, leading me back to the living room. We were quiet for a few minutes. She was ashen and exhausted, as if she knew her life was over (I saw her again a few years ago: a housewife holding a baby boy and a misshapen bag from which arose a hemisphere of cabbage. She was about to cross somewhere on Ziduri Moşi. She had a fatigued expression, and her right cheekbone was bruised. I rapped on the tram window taking me to Pantelimon, but I couldn’t get her to look) and that from that moment on, she would grope blindly through the dark, as spent as a discharged weapon, as ignored as a valuable incunabulum mixed in with rags and scraps by a clueless antiques dealer. I was distractedly looking at the wall, where there was a painting of a girl in a red dress jumping a crooked hopscotch, each square a different color. The tower was solemn and awkward, like a hut of planks raised higher than high, its crown in the clouds, and above it, like an ashen blade, slanted, hung the shadow of the cypress. We embraced in the hallway, like brother and sister, and touched our lips to each other’s cheeks. I went down the spiral staircase, opened the front door, and was struck suddenly by the gale, ready to knock me down, of the light and heat of the day. I didn’t take even a dozen steps before my shirt was sopping. I waded into the flames squinting, wounded, trying to orient myself, almost sure I was going the wrong direction. And I was, because after a while, turning onto a street with an algae-filled gutter along the edge, I recognized a ruined house, where I had seen the gypsy working a strip of brass. The boy was a few houses further on, eating sunflower seeds with some other kids wearing only underwear: black, dirty shorts and torn tank tops. Among the weeds that jetted up from the rank and the gaping holes in the windows, where plaster had been worn down to the brick, I saw something glittering gold. I walked through the garbage and thistles up to the wall of the house, staining my pants on the rusty cans and greasy pipes. Human feces, dry and full of flies, were scattered everywhere, in the corners of empty rooms, on the grass, and in the weeds … I lifted the brass band, a crooked crescent baked so long in the sun I could barely hold it. It looked like a filmstrip, with every frame sliced by the jaws of a guillotine press. My heart jumped when I saw that, near the middle, the series of rectangles broke off and were replaced by etched letters. A word. Perhaps it was the word Anca saw in her dream (or in her true reality): PÎNCOTA.

11

WITH tears in my eyes, I remember thirty years. I am not in my right mind. A loneliness murmurs in my ears, desperate and soothing at the same time, like the sound I once heard of the murmuring bowels wrapped around my mother’s womb — the babble of caves, with the underground spring of her bladder. Sometimes a tram passes, or deep in the night, a stray dog barks, or someone talks loudly, and all of these noises remind my skin (certainly then I heard through my skin, like spiders do, as though I were completely enveloped in my own eardrum) of the distant echo of my father’s voice, from a miserable room where I had yet to exist. Very young, unshaven, and wearing just an undershirt, my father would stick his ear to my mother’s stomach and speak, and my skin, thin as a soap bubble, heard his garbled words, the way you hear noises in the house when you sink into a full bathtub. I thought I smelled sweat from the bushes of his armpits. I felt him punch me on the heel or elbow when I pushed them against the elastic wall of my mother’s belly. Over part of my hunched, transparent body, I felt the shadow of the large butterfly on my mother’s hip, eclipsing the dim light bulb that hung from two wires in the ceiling. I would open my eyelids, soaking my corneas in placental fluid, and through the thick glass of the uterus, I saw the World: two huge animals sniffing each other in their lair, embracing each other on a plank bed, penetrating each other like heavenly bodies. Two monstrous anatomies nailed to the stocks, two teratological exhibits. My mother’s womb, like a lens of flesh, distorted the new world into which I would be expelled. Through it, the woman’s skull elongated, her snout filled with frightening teeth, her ribs poked through her skin and opened into two monstrous bat wings, while my father’s spine shot out bone spikes that scratched the ceiling. I was afraid of them, of their lair, of supplication to respiration and digestion, of the unimaginable touch of horny fingers on my fresh, moist skin.

I have been writing in this brown-covered notebook for three months. I’ve almost never left my apartment in the attic. And when I have left, to go to the grocery store or the bakery, or for night walks through Piata Rosetti, Piata University, Strada Batiştei, I’ve always returned with the feeling that something has happened. Not even the world is in its right mind. It’s as if my notebook were a permanent marker tip resting in a cup of water: slowly diaphanous veils emerge, purple and indigo, veils of unreality, diluted like cigarette smoke in the cold April wind. Yesterday morning, in a blinding light, a crowd of Bucharesteans gathered at the intersection of Moşilor and Bulevard, looking at the peaked domes of a house I had noticed long ago, a yellow building with a concave front, crowned with two domes like huge breasts, rising against the chaotic spring sky. Tram 21, passing at a distance of barely a meter, provoked the beautiful building, its window frames painted in pale blue, into a gentle and continuous shimmy, so that it really seemed to be a female torso emerging from the asphalt. Now, helmeted workers were up on the roof, on a circular scaffolding that bent around the brazen breasts and their nipples with black lightning rods poking out. At first, it was hard to tell what they were doing. The building had been restored only last summer. What could that be, foamy and pink, which was covering the abundant chest, bit by bit? The workers unpacked it from bales they carried on their shoulders to the top. In the end, everything became clear: they were giving the building a bra! Within two hours, the cupolas, which were at least five meters high, were completely covered by veils and lace of pink pearl, a flowery style with small holes. The two large cups connected in the middle by a turquoise brooch, and fastened onto an elastic band. The city, we were told, had been receiving reports of the building’s impropriety for several years, and it had waited patiently to find funds to remedy the situation. Although it looked like silk, the cover was actually made of waterproof plastic, able to withstand all types of weather.

And monsters. More and more of them came out, you could see them everywhere — cripples, hunchbacks, unbelievably stinky bums, bald-headed hags with cheeks as hollow as a Goya, the crazy and mad, and imbeciles with snot running into their mouths. In front of the Baraţiei Tower, an old beggar thumped onto the pavement, a venerable man with a gray and yellowed beard down to his waist. He had a serious face, but his pants were open like a hernia, and his penis and balls were hanging out, as pink as a teenager’s. And others, and others, filling the streets, waking the subway stations, a subterranean humanity rising like menacing water.

At first it was fun to look at her, although I realized how unusual her appearance was. She filled the subway seat nicely, her wonderful heft even continuing beyond its edges. She stood out mostly as a large patch of pink, since she was wearing a shirt and trouser ensemble made of pink satin, a thin material with flowers, like pajamas. She was considerably wider than she was high, stocky, puffy as a mandarin (and even the curve of her body had something about it of a Chinese person with a touch of obesity) and her unnaturally white arms, fat, with very thin skin, emerged from short sleeves. Her large head, wire-haired, very gray, was somehow paradoxical: its skin seemed coarser than her body’s, and her features appeared to have been artificially aged. Her metal-framed glasses contributed to this impression. And yet there was something terribly naïve and helpless about her face: like a ten-year-old girl’s, a mixture of fear and shyness. Sometimes she crinkled her nose like a little panda bear, and her fleshy mouth hung open in gentle perplexity. She looked so clean, so neat (you could almost smell the expensive soap) that you might have said she was from another country, or she was an Asian doll. After my eyes had cropped her out of the sweaty mob dozing in the train, I realized she was not alone. Beside her, standing, was another woman. Her hair was just as gray. She seemed, judging from her body, older than the first woman (but by how many years?), and her appearance attracted no attention at all. She was an ordinary woman, in an ordinary dress. Her face, bitter: pressed lips, wrinkles between her eyebrows — she was a woman without joy, probably damaged by life. She had a sturdy body, stout, but without the flabby appearance of the other. Watching the two of them trade looks, you could think at first that you were wrong. The one standing regarded the other with a love all the more touching on a face that harsh, and the seated one responded with small, shy smiles, looking up with the most childish eyes you could imagine. When they approached the station, the older woman motioned to the younger one. They became much more explicitly a couple than the language of their gestures had shown, and more mysterious at the same time. The two, with the same haircut, wiry and half gray, touched each other, regarded each other, and a love moved between them that was difficult to interpret, at once moving and odd. The older one sometimes held the other’s shoulder, with looks of quiet assurance, and other times she took her gently by her plump arm or caressed her forearm. The first responded awkwardly, slightly bent, her hands always hanging at her sides, always with the same small, lost smile. When the door opened, sliding to one side, the older reminded the younger to watch her step, like you would a child, and they moved across the tiled platform through the crowd. The younger one walked unnaturally, weighted, as though she had to lift her thick feet with her hands, wide and strange as pink balloons, and then suddenly she seemed alone again, a Chinese doll, or a teddy bear.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to describe him. One unbearably light day, I climbed onto a crowded bus. Someone stood up right in front of me and I got a seat by the window. I took out a book. Among the last to get on were two men, tall, bony, in crumpled long-sleeved shirts. They weren’t much older than forty, and they were good-looking, in a provincial way. A dwarf was traveling with them, and one of them helped him get on board before the doors closed and the bus started. When we came to the next station, the woman next to me got up and one of the two men, who had been talking constantly about soccer, resting his arms on the dwarf’s shoulders, sat down and took him on his knee, like a child. The poor guy was relatively well proportioned. He was at least fifty, judging by his damp hair, half gray, by the wrinkles on his face, and by his corpulence. He was not more than one meter high. He wore dark glasses, his mouth was red and pocked, and his unshaven face was quite bright and pinkish. His arms, exposed by his rolled-up shirtsleeves, were also pink and stubby, with tender skin, and hairless except on his fingers. He held on to the back of the seat in front of him, with his legs hanging into the abyss under the chair. What was disturbing was the way this man was shaking, like a frightened animal. He didn’t look at anyone. He just sat in the arms of the young man, shaking continuously. Sweat ran down the hair on his cheeks. The two men were paying no attention to him, as though he were a monkey or a dog on its way to the vet. I stood up when it was time for me to get off, and only then did the dwarf look at me, from head to toe, in fear. But he made no gesture. The young man turned to one side to let me pass.

Two or three days ago, on my way home at night, alone, I went into Stairway 1. I went into the entryway and looked up through the endless square well shaft lined with windows and gathering a speck of stars at the top. I went past the stairway that smelled like insecticide, its paint peeling from the walls in wide strips, and I went out again and continued, like a somnambulist, to the concrete courtyard. A single dim bulb, orange-red, shone a ghostly light over the yard. Everything was like a dream. I saw that throne with the rusty pot above it, and the depression with a little cement bridge over it, leading toward the walled-over doorway. Everything was narrow, gray, and oppressive, with sharply cut shadows, in silence, and a kind of hidden, latent, mythical power. A fire escape held in iron rings cast a lacy shadow onto the wall of the police station. A poplar leaf batted gently against a whitewashed wall. I was moving, fascinated and careful, inside a photograph. I looked fixedly toward the bridge, one end held by the huge, bare wall, the railing on the left casting a pitch-black shadow in a triangle over the tiles.

Out of that corner came Silvia, her eyes sparkling, her lips wet. Her tiny nipples peered through the flesh of her crossed arms. Her thin, naked body, her hairless pubis, and her limpid legs white as chalk were drawn against the rough background of the wall, where nocturnal insects scuttled. I recognized Silvia as one of those transparent beings who visited me ever more frequently, who would sit on my bedstead and watch me carefully, without disappearing when I opened my eyes in terror. She would come down the steps gently and stop in front of me. Then, confused, I realized we were the same height, we stood eye to eye. I hadn’t grown since I was ten, but the walls had grown tremendously and the mill behind the fence was an obtuse castle, as big as a continent, crowding the square of night sky above. Brown moths turned through the spectral air in electric light and landed on the lumpy lime, forming a mosaic of triangles. Silvia climbed onto the tall throne and sat over the metal bowl, and I stood with my head tilted back, looking into her eyes, following her glassy, whitish body, enlaced by the smell of ladybugs and milked flour. Looking me in the eyes and smiling, her girl face suddenly started to urinate a yellow sparkling stream, which bounced in drops of diamonds over the pavement at my feet. She was a frozen enigma. She looked like a baroque fountain of elliptical beauty.

There were days when the only people I saw on the streets were blind. The first one I saw gave me a feeling of foreboding. And then they began to stream in from all sides. Other times I only noticed the deformed beggars, their shirts undone to display a tumor as big as an infant’s head coming out of their stomachs, a grinning tracheotomy, an abscess spread from neck to collarbone, or hands and feet crudely cut off and the stumps tied with strings, like sausages. It was as if the entire population of Bucharest had been mutilated. Afterward, I would come back here, to my attic, the top of the scarlet block on Uranus, a block I’ve known since I was a teenager. I would hang out in this attic apartment with a chair, a table, and a bed, never guessing that I would drop everything one day to live my dream: to live in the halo of solitude, an unearthly life. It was a place to attempt (as I’ve done continuously for the last three months) to go back where no one has, to remember what no one remembers, to understand what no person can understand: who I am, what I am.

Last fall I rented this studio. I moved in bit by bit, first for a few hours in the morning, just to write, then to nap in the afternoon, and finally, I slept here, writhing through nocturnal nightmares. It’s a small room, with a ceiling that slopes from the front door to the window. One strange feature is that the window is oval — outside there is a garland supported by two plaster Cupids so that it frames Bucharest into a conglomeration of buildings and vegetation under a shifting sky, like a bad painting. The table is right by the window and bathed in light, while the bed is shaded in a dark corner. My bed is the deepest pit of my spider nest. The desk is only a projection of my bed. This text, which devours more and more white pages, like mold or rust, is the sweat, semen, and tears that soak the sheet of a single man. Spread like a damp piece of parchment, just skinned, over a wooden frame, the sheet could be the map of our secret life, with large areas of white and yellow, wrinkled and burned parts, nothing but countries and dominions with allegorical names, deltas and rivers and deserts: the Land of Love and the Land of Atrocities, the Laguna of Fear, the Fjord of Dizziness … Surfaces smeared by all the manure of the world, the cortex crammed under the skull like a dirty old shirt in a washing machine, sheets crumpled in the bed and pages in the notebook, trailed with ink marks — these three texts wrap themselves in and interpenetrate in my madness. If I were to stretch my cortex over the bed, it would cover it completely, like a gray blanket with six layers, crossed with veins. If I cut it into pieces and glued them between the covers, it would be this text, spoiled with lysergic acid, the fabric that holds my fearful, concupiscent sweat. Rising from the bed, I sit at the desk. Then I fall back into bed again, dragging the lace of inky letters, like a spiderweb, in my pulverized mind, and melting into the vast network of dreams.

Who am I? Who was I? How is it possible? Why did I come into the world? What does all this madness mean, this circus, this illusion? Why did I pop out of a woman’s uterus onto a speck in a constellation of dust? And why do I understand this dementia? Alongside the banal nocturnal thought that you will soon disappear forever, when you sit bolt upright and you say, “No, Lord, I won’t, please, please, Lord …” and you are sure you will never think or feel anything ever again — alongside these hideous banalities, I have often experienced others, maybe even more disturbing to me: I could have been born an earthworm or a bug or a mite or a bacterium, I could have experienced existence and then disappeared without gaining anything, diving into mud at the bottom of a lake, advancing with peristaltic movements, waving my vibrating cilia in a drop of water, digging canals with my mandibles through a foul hunk of cheese that would have been my universe for my entire life. I could have been a fungus that gave thrush to a stray dog, or who the hell knows what, anything else. I could have been not only without conscience, but even without consciousness, even without feeling. God, a life without feeling, how horrible! To have the sacred opportunity to live in the world, and all you get to be is a chip from a tree trunk, or a pinworm smeared with feces in the rectum that is your whole universe. This is when the madness hits me, when I jump out of bed and pace with my hands on my head, muttering something quickly so I won’t hear myself think. My suddenly clear and perverse mind tells me that this is actually what I am, that I really am a pinworm, that the world really is a nasty anus, and that I will never know the true world, or the true consciousness, or the true light that makes this world, in contrast, look like a cesspool. My mind tells me I’m nothing more than a pool of flesh, veins and arteries, cartilage and mucus, and that itself is a miserable consciousness, barely able to understand its own misery.

Now, while I am writing these sentences, these pages are turning so dim I can barely see them. It’s a twilight you don’t often see in spring. The sky has suddenly turned yellow and threatening, leaving dregs of gold in the craggy apartment blocks — a yellow-green sky, like cobra venom. The sky is growing darker, while light still hangs on the houses and the windows, heating their pale skin, giving them the ravaged color of memory. I myself am as white as a pillar of salt in the shadowy room. I stand up by my desk to gaze at Bucharest, my city, my alter ego. This strange block on Strada Uranus, where I have decided to live, has always looked to me like the city’s penis, red and erect, with veins and cables flowing under its skin. My skull, transparent in the twilight, my thin, fluttering body, pink in the glowing window — I am a spermatozoon, ready to shoot toward the sky. As far away as the Intercontinental Hotel, the city raises its forms and branches, its roofs and clouds. My oval window is too small for me to notice the scene’s lack of edges, as I did as a teenager on Ştefan cel Mar, before they built the block across the street. Now I am on the other side of the block, within a symmetrical and far-off chakra. I am grown up, that is, I am an idiot, that is, I am tired, I’m decidedly finished with my life, I’m doing the only thing I have left to do, that is, I’m sending lusty and feverish glances through the block-curtain, through the shutter of my body, like a voyeur peeking at his own life, as though, like a shellfish, I was female until the middle of my life and then I became male, as though I could fertilize myself through the perineal wall. I am a voyeur of my own childhood and youth, trying to understand what is happening behind the blinds, running from one window to another, misreading what I see in the shadows, mistaking an elbow for a breast, mistaking a dress thrown over the back of a chair for exposed buttocks, mistaking black branches against the window for lovers flopping onto the bed. I cannot be there, I will never be there, but still I must get there, I must try to understand.

The buildings on the horizon have turned pitch black, smeared at the edges with a gloomy orange. I don’t want to turn the light on, even though now all I can see is the oval window, the dark orange page, and a trace of the same dirty color from the tip of my pen. In the (maybe) quarter-hour of visibility left, I turn back to the word engraved in brass. PÎNCOTA. “Paunch,” I’d said immediately, moving further through the harsh and burning light, turning onto a cross street. On both sides of the street were lines of square, yellow buildings with their plaster shattered, like Etruscan tombs. Some sort of house-wagon, two stories high, with all its windows broken, sprang directly from a pile of broken toilets, flattened cans, and paper. Old gypsies poked their heads out the windows. It all seemed familiar to me, and it hurt like a wound, as if the entire neighborhood were a crust of dried blood on a child’s knee, and I, the child, picked at the scab until beads of blood appeared. I could not place anything precisely, however. I don’t know how many corners I turned, or how many strange, triangular piaţas I found, each one with a statue of a soldier surrounded by puddles as green as bile, brimming with pollywogs. How many times did I retrace those streets, how many times did I pass the house (or castle) built by a crazy old man, who decorated it with turrets, niches with statues, and mysterious emblems … In the yard, there were glass globes in pink, blue, lilac, and saffron staked on poles, pembá, like a landscape of Christmas ornaments, plaster gnomes, and tomato trellises. Pîncota. I knew it had to be the name of a street, and that it couldn’t be anywhere but this tangled neighborhood. Pîncota. Paunch. When I was looking at the ruins — and actually all the houses were ruins, ruins that smelled like laundry soap and dirty water — the poem I had written a few years before came to me, written when I saw in a dream (as I would so many times) the house where I was born. I recited it out loud to the rubble of concrete fences, to the tiny flowers growing through the stones in the pavement, to the clouds built overhead like another labyrinthine district, overwhelmingly sad:

i remember: beads of sweat growing through pavement stones

i recall: the grocery in the slums knocked over by clouds

and clouds running to my mother’s stomach, crashing into a billion snail horns

huddled there in the billions of pores.

i know: kindergartens, nurseries, roads of lamp gas

i understand: night, night with a goiter

stars, chopped chrysanthemum stuffing

chopped arteries, ponds …

i see again: i see you kneeling again, sagging breasts, black hair whirling

white arm outstretched, fingers crinkling my face

huge, terrific, bomb exploding in slow motion

big black fly buzzing in the net of my nerves.

my dear mother who never bore me!

i write these lines to you, lines that will never be born.

i still know diamond street and house number zero

where you knit my veins into a sweater for dad

i still know, i know those clouds chained like rabid dogs

rushing towards your stomach, rending it — taking me out

taking me out of there, i remember, mamma,

and wrapping me in the blanket of your hair.

how you screamed out, how bruised you were when the clouds, your men

and gynecologist fertilized you, delivered me,

when i, pure as milk and polite

left the shadow of my fingers upon your face.

The windows on one side of the streets had already begun to sparkle in the dusk when I found it. “PÎNCOTA (formerly Silistra)” was written on a small blue placard, nailed to a fence greased with petroleum. I cannot understand to this day why they changed the name of the street. But I know when I entered that tunnel of unsettling houses, walking with small steps, I was trying as hard as I could to recognize, to reconstruct, and to relive. I’d only glimpsed this completely walled-off part of my life in my deepest dreams, and even then as something ambiguous and surreal, something combined with disparate objects from other layers of my mind. I walked with the feeling that nothing was real, that I was entering my own brain, or entering a realm attached to reality like a denture over toothless stumps. There was an overlapping stage décor, something fabled and psychic, enchanted. I saw the balcony with oleanders, propped on the pink clay backs of the two Atlases with hairy pubises. On the balcony, so eaten away by termites that the holes could be seen from the street, a wicker rocking chair swayed gently in front of a door with rectangular windows. I passed the old grocery store, with its low entryway beneath a stone arch. I put my head into the basement where, in my mother’s arms, I must have stared with round, dumb eyes, and touched the fire-red poppies in the showcase (still there after twenty-eight years) near the primitive cash register, with rolls of paper for tickets, and the receipts and shelves of canned food and pasta glimmering in the shadows. The shopkeeper was still there, mummified, her nose eaten away, her teeth bare, wrapped in the rags that remained of her apron. Spiders scurried everywhere, caught between old wormy sacks of flour and petrified sugar, in webs so thick that they looked like pieces of felt or batting. Across the black and withered hands of the shopkeeper (with a faded bow in her hair) crawled oily cockroaches, touching their antennae in an abstract alphabet. Everything was rotten, everything stank, everything in the old grocery store was infested. I left with cobwebs in my hair, as if I had turned gray from grief, and I went on through the neural tunnel until I saw before seeing, I intuited, located or maybe constructed, digging through the day’s soap with my own eyes, the House. The old and dear house, forgotten and remembered so often, the house in the middle of my mind.

When I actually saw it, behind the wrought-iron railings, in the U-shaped courtyard, it seemed surprisingly narrow. In my memory, in dream and dream-memory, it was different, vast and teeming with people. In fact, it was not more than six or seven meters wide. Half of its flat and sunny façade was taken up by a blue pathetic-looking Mercedes from the 70s, battered and repaired. I shook with excitement. I was seeing what I thought I never would. The building that shared the yard was irregular, as if its three parts, each with a second floor, had been erected at different times. The right side, where Madame Catana and the old man lived, was like a country house, painted blue, with wood-framed windows, while the one in back was a middle-class house, yellow and flaking, with a wooden hallway upstairs (where the ship was, and Elvira and Uncle Nicu Bă). The dirty-white painted hall also went along the left side of the building, supporting the roof with its wooden pillars. Through the pillars I saw windows with deep-blue wooden shutters. The shutters were torn from their hinges, and the windows were broken, some walled over, and others covered with newspapers yellow with age. Below, a burgundy door opened in the blue wall, the scarlet door of my nightmares, present like a seal of blood over everything I have ever written, and everything my mind describes in sleepless afternoons.

Shaken, with my hair standing on end, I opened the wrought-iron gate and entered the yard. There was no one there. Bright clouds were motionless in the sky. In one corner, a pink oleander, the only living thing in the empty courtyard, exuded a wild smell. I stopped in front of the deep-red door. I leaned my head against it for a moment. I felt like I was draining out of myself, flowing over the courtyard tiles like a shadow. The door was not locked, so I opened it halfway and went in. I was no longer in reality. I knew, I recognized everything. I knew the stairway, also scarlet, that smelled like detergent and Clorox. I walked upstairs slowly, ready at every step to faint. Emotion eclipsed me like an overwhelming pain, one so vast that it became a kind of joy. I reached the next story, the gallery with plank floors, worn by time. I opened another door between shattered windows. I entered a vestibule I knew, one I remembered with a new wave of adrenaline in my arteries. There were three doors here, in a thick green light, where gnats swarmed. I did not hesitate for a moment, because it was the front door, also scarlet, it was the wallpaper with flower baskets, moldy and ripped from the walls, but still recognizable. I opened the door and entered the room. I stopped on the threshold, squinting from so much light.

A blinding morning sun poured into the room, and in the intolerable light, at its center, I saw my mother, young and naked, sitting on the bed, the lupus mark on her hip, her hair tossed onto her shoulders, looking at me with a welcoming smile.