The Black Envelope

~ ~ ~

TOLEA HAD LEARNED FROM his friend and neighbor Gafton that redundancies were likely in many enterprises. He shrugged his shoulders apathetically. Then he heard that as much as 40 percent of office staff would be affected. He smiled and switched on the transistor lying on the desk of his colleague Gina: Monte Carlo, his favorite station.

Then someone started the rumor that such-and-such a comrade director had already been replaced by another comrade director; that certain networks were being dismantled and new links and combinations established. He looked on impassively at the hysterical reactions of his colleagues at the Hotel Tranzit: the bookkeeper, the barman, the switchboard operator, the cleaning woman were all glued to telephones trying to discover the ins and outs. He raised his eyebrows, in a superior kind of way, when his four-eyed colleague told him the criteria that would be used for layoffs. He merely lifted himself slightly on tiptoe, straightened his colleague’s loose tie beneath his made-in-China shirt collar, and went to the window to contemplate the spring fever.

Gina tried to distract him by reading something from the morning papers.

“Listen to this story that happened yesterday. ‘On the pretext that in privately owned apartment number … on the ground floor of the building there was a dog … or several dogs … and a cat … or several cats.’ Well, what do you say?”

Stretched out on the armchair, with his feet perched American-style on another chair, his head on the ceiling, his eyes shut, Tolea did not appear to have heard. Was he meditating, or calculating, or reminiscing? He flicked away the alarming news, like some annoying seasonal insect.

“There now, do you hear? Pretexts. Where are dogs and cats going to have to live now? In the forest, in the wilderness? What do you say? Isn’t it well written? Listen: only in forests, on mountaintops and ocean reefs. What are those reefs supposed to be? Yes, it’s a strong article. I wonder how it was published.”

It may have been at that moment of just-listen-to-thisness that the strange idea flashed into Tolea’s mind. The idea of playing a trick— something the public would not expect, something that would liven him up himself. For he was bored: Professor Voinov was bored to death.

In a world where everything seems programmed, even chaos, chance, or surprise, you’ve got to defy logic and bewilder people. You’ve got to make the fools believe that you control secret links to which they have no access.

Thought after thought kept passing through the skull of receptionist Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov, known as Tolea; his brain circuits were working nonstop, in perpetuum mobile, and without a doubt it would have been possible to pick up signals from them. Especially as spring — oh yes, it was a real illness, spring, a real onslaught. At last something real and powerful, for which the numbed mice no longer showed any reflexes.

“The instigators — tenants from the block! I ask you!”

The receptionist seemed to have awoken.

Suddenly the word “instigators.” Perhaps he had remembered his father …

And well, the heir will demonstrate that when all the games appear lost, a new one has to be invented, however bizarre it might seem, however futile it might be. So we are going to do things the other way round, mon père;, completely the other way! We’re not going to commit suicide, mon père; no, no, we won’t follow your scenario. We’ll just study it, act it, face up to it, that’s all. Otherwise, without a mission impossible, we won’t hold out against the spring or the boredom. Not even against the tedium of multilateral sycophancy.

Tolea jumped up from the armchair, alone at the center of the world, on the great stage with nobody else on it. Personne, niemand, nikovo.

“What’s the date today, honey?”

Hard to say whether he was speaking to himself or to his colleague Gina.

Anyway, he knew what he had to do. He’d ask for a short holiday. They’d all be flabbergasted. To leave the place of struggle at the decisive moment, when the strings are being pulled and the broadsides delivered, when everyone is trying to save their precious little skin? He’d go to the mountains, solve some crossword puzzles— perhaps also the puzzle of Mr. Marcu, le père de famille. He’d go on holiday when no one expects to take one. Such imprudence would show that receptionist Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov, known as Tolea, has special links; that he’s not afraid of the pathetic office workers’ neuroses; that he’s master of the situation. Meanwhile, already from tomorrow, he’d start to recall all the most unfavorable details of his life story: the bourgeoisified brother in Argentina, the aristocratic Teutonic sister-in-law, even the cosmopolitan exploiter of a father or the sister who had gone back to the Bible, yes, even her.

“I asked you a question, honeybunch. I asked you something, my little chick. I asked you what’s the date. What’s the date today, sweetheart?”

So, March. Perfect! End of March, a sign of horny Aries. Perfect! Tolea turned the collar of his black shirt, the crease of his black trousers.

“If you can’t get what you want, said Terence, want what you can get. Have you heard of Terence, Doña Gina?”

Colleague Gina smiled: she was used to Tolea’s larking about. Unlike others, she did not think it was arrogant, not at all; she even rather liked it, really she did.

“And what about Baronius, have you heard of him? The erudite Cardinal Baronius! You must have. In fact, I’m sure you were rereading him just last week. Do you remember his monumental history of the Church, the Annales Ecclesiastici, from 1602? Do you remember how he opens his description of the tenth century? Of course you do. ‘Behold, a new century is beginning, known as iron because of its baneful severity, as lead because of the prevalence of evil, and dark because of the dearth of great authors.’ ”

Tolea stared at Miss Gina as he waited for her to reply, happy that he could have a friendly chat with such a well-educated listener. Her mean-street smile was a fine stimulus for his challenging lectures.

“And the extraordinary Gerbert, Pope Sylvester, what do you think of him, of his Roman imperial idea. Both remembrance and a hope of consoling the great sorrows of the world. Genere graecus, imperio romanus. Greek by birth, Roman by empire! — that was the dream they all had. He dreamed of world empire and absolute renunciation of worldly vanity. ‘A regime needs poetics no less than maxims of statecraft.’ Gerbert, our fantastic friend from Aurillac! Whose legendary knowledge assured him terrible renown as the prince of sorcerers in league with the devil. Do you remember, my little cauliflower? Do you remember the phrases he used in his letters? Cunningly embroidered yet full of love. Full of love, my little frog. ‘Dulcissime frater, amantissime.’ Do you remember? Dulcissime, amantissime …”

And Tolea again adjusted the collar of his black shirt, the crease of his black corduroys, bent forward and … evaporated, just like that. Yes, all of a sudden he left his place of work and sighs. He did sometimes vanish suddenly, for one or two hours more or less, to tramp the streets, doze on some park bench, or get up to who knows what tricks.

He had disappeared, then. At some point he may have returned to the side of cherry blossom Gina, in the hall of the Hotel Tranzit. What is certain is that he spent the evening at Dr. Marga’s, where he seems to have got drunk after some time; he could no longer remember whether he had slept there or eventually found his way home — which is to say, to the apartment of his friend Gafton, where he had his own little transit cell.

Anyway, he had slept badly, disturbed by dreams of huge metallic birds desperately tossing about in a completely empty space, colorless and noiseless and without end.

He had started in fear at daybreak, to stop the ringing of the alarm clock or telephone. But it had been nothing, after all — just a dream, a nightmare. He did not go back to sleep: the street hubbub was already pouring in, and the windows shook from the noise of buses and trams. He pulled his dressing gown from the back of the door and went up to the window. Right in front of the house, a huge prehistoric truck had broken down and was blocking the traffic. The hooting and braking of cars as they drove around the monster added further to the din. Mere trifles! Nothing could lessen the joy of having once more emerged into the realm of day. For Tolea nights were stupid and tormenting snares best unremembered; he would have liked not to think of them, however many enigmas they might contain. No, they did not exist, they immediately scattered to the winds. Oh, if the new day could be the only reality of his life! Spring, winter, autumn, or summer — it mattered not. If only the night could be a forgotten parenthesis, an aphasiac disorder!

The morning light had dutifully fallen on the sofa’s white bedspread. On the sofa, Tolea stirred the instant coffee at the bottom of his cup. Slowly, slowly … Soon, then, once again at the place of atonement. “Hasn’t the professor arrived yet?” woodpecker Gina would ask, this morning, too, if Tolea was late. Yes, let him be late: he did not feel at all like hurrying, so he slowly, very slowly, stirred the dark powder at the bottom of the cup. Gina would be arranging the accounts book, the pencils, the stools, the cushion on her chair, the telephone in front of her. Gina drank coffee at work, as everyone did, although it was impossible to buy coffee anywhere. No sooner had she arrived than Gina would disappear behind the office window and return with a freshly filled cup in one hand and her greenish orange dark-red blouse in the other, having forgotten that she was still wearing only a bra. She bent over the books, arranged the pencils, and only after some time pulled the blouse over her shoulders. It was the moment at which she blushed briefly, provocatively.

“Has the professor really not come yet?” the little mouse of an employee would, as usual, be asking as she did up the last button on her blouse. But no one would answer: the good-for-nothings had already donned their blasé masks. Gina, the comrades had decided, should be seen and not heard. Let the little gypsy girl remember her place!

In vain did she try to ingratiate herself by sharing their hostility to the buffoon. “Hasn’t the professor come yet?” But their sullen indifference did not allow for such complicity. “Hold your tongue over there. Leave him be — the loony’s got his reasons.” But if she forgot to point out that he was late, then it would be they who had a go. “Ah ha, our little wanderer is in for some big trouble! He can forget all his connections, all his bird talk, all his airs and graces. That won’t do him any good. They’re going to start checking up on him — his relatives abroad, his bourgeois family background, not to mention the windbag’s own present life. And as for his morals, we know enough about our colleague’s little foibles. We know about acts punished by the law. By the law, no less!” That was Titi, of course, starchy and oblique, with his delicate silver glasses and bony face, now thrilling to the subject. Corkscrew Titi, as he was called — but in the end less dangerous than the taciturn and seemingly tolerant Gic “Fatso” Teodosiu. Both passed with their noses in the air around pretty little Gina. Not because they disliked her or had some particular grudge. No, just out of the petty malice of people in a cage. “Watch out: call me when the ones in room 218 come down. Keep 33 reserved for me until three o’clock. No one goes into 105, not even for cleaning. When Olimpia comes with the coffee bags and the cartons of Kent, put everything to one side. You don’t ask anything, and you don’t pay a cent. I’m at the head office from ten to eleven. If anyone asks, I’m in a meeting. Unless it’s Comrade Pastram—in which case let me know at this number.” The day at work: adapting to necessity; the torments, the humiliation, and above all the equivocation. A cheerful and ugly equivocation, so you can swallow the shit and forget who’s watching your digestion — and your mark of contentment, so you forget about Titi and Gic and Gina.

Tolea had left the bathroom and was lying on the sofa with a book in his hand. He prepared his role, working out the bits of impertinence and the quotations that would irritate his colleagues at the Hotel Tranzit. Maybe someone had brought a bottle of whiskey for Comrade Teodosiu. Perfect: well, Gic old man, a comrade left that smoky bottle for you. Or maybe the optician Corkscrew had arranged a room for some boss man or other. Perfect: at twelve he’ll be coming with a slim little lady in a red silk dress; fine, no one will disturb them; fine, we won’t interfere — see nothing hear nothing say nothing. But we’ll drive you nuts with Terence and Baronius and Otto III. The Saint: the idealistic politician. “In turn he offered to Romans the spectacle of his holy majesty and the aspiration to complete solitude in a hut of clay and reed.” The Holy See, electric chair, apocalypse … twilight of the world … mundus senescit. And love, of course: the reign of love on earth, for a thousand years, frater, dulcissime frater, a thousand and one years, amantissime.

His neighbor Gafton had gone into the bathroom: he could hear Matei Gafton coughing and grunting. “Under the formidable pressure of the vast nomadic hordes … people had to go among the Romans to find safety and even food … We must admit the benevolence and even wisdom of the emperors who accepted those nomads … what historians call the infiltration of the barbarians.” Recite that to the barbarians? “Fruges, non viri,” as brother Gerbert, the dulcissimus, said. “The fruits of the earth, yes, but not people”— that’s the kind of aphorism that should interest Corkscrew and Gina, yes, or rather there’s room for speculation about such nonsense, really there is; brother Gerbert, amantissimus, has a head full of dross and long rigmaroles. He threw down the book and put on his black corduroys and black shirt: his uniform. That was how he appeared at the Hotel Tranzit: in work uniform. That is, in mourning clothes. He had several pairs of trousers and ten or so black shirts: they could be made of cotton, linen, jersey fabric, silk, so long as they were black. That was how Professor Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov reported for work at the Hotel Tranzit reception.

He put on the black overalls as if they were a suit of armor. Yes, that was it. At least that was left, the defiance, and he did not complain that that was all it was — of course not. Night had scattered— that was the real victory. The calendar was made up only of days, coming one after the other. Night was a shapeless swamp, mere nothingness, a black hole. Thank God he had escaped again. You can never be sure you’ll reach the frontiers of a new day. What a wonderful event was the day — oh yes, Don Dominic Vancea was ready. The story was beginning again: the cacophony, the miracle of the day would be returned to him. Dressed in black, freshly shaven, head gleaming like the polar moon, hands in his pockets, lips pursed to whistle. “Disillusionment itself is a fire, and reality is a waking dream. The good luck to die before the death of one’s passions”— yes, Maître d’Aurillac, that’s right. A dry brow, upright and solid like that of a Roman senator. Roman the baldness, and the eyes as well. He’s at the door, ready to leave. He takes the key from his pocket, along with a large red handkerchief. In his black work clothes, and in his white clothes of idleness and life, a handkerchief is always included. Preferably red. White, black — sometimes a white one, a black one. But 5 percent red, as nature requires. Nature and aesthetics: 5 percent red. He slowly wipes his bald patch. Today, too, he’s late: again they’ll growl at him when he arrives. More proof that nothing has changed, that it’s all the same, everything in its place.

Everything in place, dulcissime, we can leave. Here we go, amantissime, we’re starting again.

The repeated sound of the bell. No, not the bell. The telephone was ringing. He staggered between chair and table to pick up the receiver.

“Toma. My name’s Toma …”

Hesitation, then silence. Yes, he remembered the voice, and he also remembered the name of the man who had already tried several times to speak to him. A polite languid young man, this Toma. How’s that for the new block manager! As if people didn’t know who these double employees are and who they work for.

He had appeared at the door one morning out of the blue. A decent-enough face, a pleasant voice, and by the time you wake up he’s already inside — like the ones who wreck apartments and set fire to cats. Polite, smarmy — and that’s that, he’s got his hands on you, even if you haven’t any dogs, cats, or canaries. It’s other matters that interest him. “May I come in? And might I bother you for a chat some other time?”

The swine! But now he’d finally given as good as he got, on the telephone. At least now there’d be a day or two of respite. Then the siege operations would inevitably start again. And why? What was the reason for them in the end? Simply because he didn’t have any contact with the neighbors? Or because he didn’t go to tenants’ meetings or paid the maintenance charges six months in advance so as to keep out of the management’s way? No, those weren’t the only reasons: there must be others, of course there must. That had been obvious at the incident on Saturday evening, when the careful manager, returning home after midnight, had found the lights still on in the ground-floor canteen. He had gone in and headed straight for the table at the back of the empty hall. What are you doing here? Nothing. I’m looking around. Don’t you know it’s the foreign students’ canteen and tenants aren’t allowed to use it? I didn’t know, but it doesn’t interest me either. At this time there’s no canteen here: it’s an empty hall. And what are you looking at exactly? His tone of voice no longer bore any resemblance to the time when he had tried to cringe and sweet-talk his way to a longer interview. It was the dry, official tone of a guard who has surprised a villain long under observation. And what exactly did you say you were looking at? A long time passed before he replied. I’m looking at the hall. There once used to be a bar here — the Bar Levcenco. During the war and before. The functionary did not seem surprised at what he had heard. He pulled up a chair and was obviously preparing to discuss the matter. But he gawked as the tenant simply stood up and left, without even glancing at him.

Confusion, memories — the ghosts of the Vancea legend, which have been trailing him all the time recently, of which he has been thinking constantly for so many months, which have been summoning him again and again. And now the little flunky of our times, Comrade Manager Toma, or whatever his damned grade is.

He had taken a card from the pile on the table. Cavafy. “For some a day comes when they have to say the great Yes or the great No.” Pages, circled text, arrows. His name, Marcu Vancea, crossed out, rewritten, underlined. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — nights with their whispers and breakdowns and phantoms, the capricious play of thoughts.

Had Toma’s phone call been a joke or a warning? Remember, he appears when you’re not expecting him, like the first time. “At once he sees who has Yes within him ready/and saying it thither goes,” so warned the Greek from Alexandria. He moved the book from table to nightstand, from there to the top of the radio, then to the sofa. “Why is there this apathy in the Senate? Why do the senators stand around and not legislate? Because today the barbarians will arrive.” It is quiet: lazy shadows in the playing daylight, emaciated faces slinking along the dirty, darkened streets. The door seemed to shake. A pale youth with soft wavy hair. Very long mustache and a timid smile. Small scar by the eyebrow, thin murmur of a voice.

“You know, I’m Toma.”

Let him prove his identity, make him. He was holding a maroon-colored rectangular piece of cardboard.

“Come on, that’s me — it’s an old photo.”

How old can the picture be of such a young condottiere? He was already sitting in the armchair opposite, already making his confession: artful, humble, badly paid.

“I hope you weren’t angry. I wanted to get to know you. In fact, you look like an uncle of mine. I haven’t got a father: I grew up in orphanages.”

Throw him out? Or just fall asleep, quite simply, overcome by sloth and disgust, while the professional delivers the aria?

“You know, since I was put in charge of the administration, we no longer pay anyone from outside: we’ve got someone who actually lives here.”

A thin, shy voice, small yellow teeth, narrow, anemic cheeks, with an exaggerated mustache and that inevitable scar.

“I’d like to know about your plans. I wouldn’t take advantage, but I would like us to get together from time to time.”

So, just a pathetic angler for humdrum loot. So was he, Tolea, worth no more than this general-issue snoop? He felt offended— really! A taste of vomit filled his mouth and nostrils.

From the balcony he could see the dark empty square. Occasionally the jet of light from a vehicle. After midnight complete silence. The Bar Levcenco, on the ground floor of the block, had died forty years before, lost in the night that was still swallowing up the city, decade after decade, slice after slice — the night in which the Vancea family came back to life and demanded to ask the old questions itself, the ones from decades ago.

Yes, he already knew the two sequences in which they would return; ten times he had seen and noted the two scenes.

First sequence: Late August, war. Placid evening, stifling intense heat. The Vancea family dining room, white with a high ceiling. A long festive table covered with damask. Eight glittering sets of tableware, three lengthways on either side of the table, and one at each end. The dinner guests are still in their rooms, where for some hours they have been waiting for the head of the family to appear. sonia in the bridesmaid’s dressing room with her magnificent MATUS, the lame giant. TOLEA is glued to the radio, listening to LONDON. MIRCEA CLAUDIU is leaning over the head of the icy astrid to check the list of purchases for the wedding.

DIDA is alone in the dining room, worried at the uncustomary lateness of her ultra-punctual husband. She is alarmed and fears the worst, but still does not have the strength to talk of the incident she witnessed the previous evening. And now waiting tensely, ready to speak — about what? Would she be able to tell them about the legend of her marriage to marcu vancea, about the time when he had been blinded and struck dumb by the Andalusian apparition with bitumen eyes and an angular cheek of white marble? The slender young lady, just by appearing on the scene, had transfixed the man’s heart beyond repair, even though he had long since completed his erotic apprenticeship. Then the flight to Paris: the garret, acts of folly, poverty, the library, a doctorate at the Sorbonne, the return, the first child, the moment when the illustrious scholar decided to become the owner of a wine depot. Yes sir, what work for the philosopher Marcu Vancea to plunge into — for that serious, elegant, seductive man, suddenly shaken in all his certainties — and he persuaded his brother, Bob Vancea, to leave his hospital, clinic, and faculty in a hurry and withdraw to a little country hospital lost amid the snowdrifts and valleys. Maybe as a kind of protection … Should she tell them of how the philosopher occupied himself with worldly matters, with raising the children? Of how he tirelessly fed them like a wet nurse, washed and amused them, not just suggesting books and uncertainties? Should she tell them that she herself had always remained a kind of child of Marcu Vancea’s?

But who could she tell of that which sometime afterward, at long last, had been canceled out by the dark storm of the present? Tolea had to be kept safe from emotions: after that terrible bicycle accident something had snapped in the once studious and well-mannered adolescent. In vain had Marcu Vancea tried to hide from the boy the consequences of that stupid incident. It was anyway impossible to conceal them: a schoolboy unintentionally hit a confused, half-blind old woman with his bicycle, but the court, well directed by her relatives, decides that the boy must pay huge damages; Marcu therefore has to sell the house he has only just bought. How could she hide such public facts? And how could she burden Tolea now with the panic of the latest news, which he might well see as the sequel to that wretched incident which had suddenly shattered the family’s peace and heralded the greater dangers of the approaching years?

She could not even tell Sonia, who by now was too much in thrall to the messianic fantasies of her beloved Matus. Mircea was the only one she should try to tell of what had happened the previous evening — perhaps the evening before, she was no longer sure; or perhaps it had happened on two successive evenings. Yes, Mircea alone would understand and try to do something concrete, straightaway. Should she tell him that yesterday evening the strong, sharp-witted man called Marcu Vancea had suddenly been old? Ghostly pale, exhausted. Nothing was left of his perfect armor, his ceremony of controlled gestures, his sparkling eyes and clear voice which, just two weeks ago, had seemed the same as ever, without any hesitation to signal the danger. Yes, two weeks ago, when out of the blue he had introduced a new employee to his wife — a kind of suspicious “deputy,” if such a thing is conceivable, a partner even, you’ll see, and don’t think that those could be Marcu Vancea’s words. A help for “the more difficult months ahead”—that’s how he had put it. Such solutions would never be resorted to! The preliminaries for the annual wine exhibition always found him ready and on top of all the details. But even on the strange evening two weeks ago when he introduced that unlikely “partner”—who looked more like a spy or a guardian that someone had thrust on him — even on that evening full of foreboding Marcu Vancea still appeared unchanged: high forehead without wrinkles, an easy sober bearing, natural steady gestures. But then, also on that evening, Dida noticed a pile of unopened letters and suddenly remembered a series of bizarre signs from the recent period: too many phone calls, unfamiliar voices claiming either to be hurt that they have not yet received an invitation to the exhibition, or to be disgusted that your dirty business is working too smoothly, as they put it, “your dirty business in these times of lofty patriotism.”

For two weeks, then, Dida had not budged from her husband’s side at the depot. She had neglected her home, forgotten about Tolea, Mircea’s wedding, and Sonia’s agitation, forgotten everything as hour after hour she watched beside Marcu Vancea in order to see and understand. And yesterday evening, or maybe the one before, a client or acquaintance or agent had appeared at some point — it was not clear when, who, or for what reason. Dida had just gone out, and when she returned, no more than an hour later, Marcu Vancea could no longer manage to sign his name. Imagine, he couldn’t sign his own name! Bewildered, terrified, covered in perspiration, as he looked at a sheet of paper that he was unable to sign. He no longer remembered his signature. And it was nighttime, getting later and later, and Marcu Vancea was already an old man.

The brilliant doctor of philosophy from the Sorbonne, determined to live through the storm as an obscure wholesale agent for wine — always a necessary occupation and especially in hard times— and convinced that his brother would survive hidden among the mountains looking after obscure patients, who would give protection because they needed him, even he would not have been able to explain the sudden collapse of his meticulous strategy.

Suddenly an old man no longer able to ward off the inevitable? Just because he had received some kind of dark message? The thought departed and returned — a brief luminescence, the red-hot point of a needle. Yes, she should tell all this to Mircea.

Dida slowly turned in front of the window to face the wedding table. She actually turned to the slow rhythm of the words: yes, Mircea could be told about it. And incredibly she smiled, beaming like a simpleton. As if under a spell, idiotically. So many memories out of season: despair and panic and yet a kind of diffident, fatalistic reconciliation lacking in energy, like a shallow consolation — caught up in the aura of the legend, the secret incandescence, of the magic cavalier who, until yesterday evening, had been her beloved Marcu Vancea; safe from the eyes of the world.

Having turned to face the festively lit room after so many hours of shocked stillness, Dida Voinov met the eyes of Mircea Claudiu himself, the son who had probably been watching for some time, in silence, how she kept pressing the palms of her hands against the window frame, as a last, reassuring physical contact with reality. A bald young man, with long sideburns on a rosy round cheek, could be seen in the edge of the mirror. Short eyebrows, large marshy eyes. Yes, she remembered the boy — a tidy pupil, effortless prize winner, and good at sports. The headmaster had not suppressed his stupefaction: “Our eminent Mircea Claudiu! Just think, madam, he has stolen a classmate’s wallet! A handsome sum, my dear lady. It’s incredible! Who would have imagined it? Unbelievable!” But the eminent Mircea Claudiu had smilingly admitted it, without a moment’s hesitation, looking straight into the headmaster’s eyes. Nor were those yet the years of material difficulty that would follow Tolea’s bicycle accident, when Mircea had to start working in his spare time as an architect’s draftsman because his family could not pay his school fees and expenses.

Yes, and it had been the same unbending Claudiu on the morning when the architect’s wife, a friend of Dida’s, with makeup over the deep bluish patches under her tigress eyes, had suddenly burst in. The tyrant! she sobbed inconsolably. Dear Mircea Claudiu, the eminent polytechnist whom she literally adored, no longer wanted to see her. In fact, he had belted her, no less. It had happened before, because she had flouted convention and gone looking for him at friends’ houses, bars, and even at the university. Yes, she couldn’t help it: she had flouted the convention of never ever going in search of him. But the darling lover had belted her, thumped her about without saying a word. “Belted,” “thumped”: strange words in the beautifully arched mouth of the worthy lady, unused to rising early but now rushing so soon after dawn into the arms of the culprit’s mother.

The inscrutable son followed his mother with unfamiliar, searching eyes. Should she speak to Mircea Claudiu about the murky happenings of the past two weeks? Or to his icy Astrid, whom he already resembled too much? Dida again turned around slowly, showing her back to the witness as she looked in the direction of the window.

She had accepted the pose only because her beloved wanted children. Indeed, her husband had given his progeny both time and importance beneath the ever perplexed and easily troubled gaze of the beauty who had unenthusiastically given birth to three children and then grown up herself among them as a kind of fourth offspring of Mr. Marcu Vancea.

Where was Vancea? Where had he broken down and why? Where might he be called back from? The sky was no longer anything other than the dull gloomy cloud of the window in which the long-awaited one did not appear. Her son’s rapid movements could be heard behind her. Dida realized that Mircea Claudiu was changing jackets to go out, as on every evening, with his haughty partner. Again, she smiled idiotically, lost in the nightmare of the window.

When she again turned toward the festively lit room, another two weeks would have passed. An evening of celebrations, this time on Sunday. The festive table covered with damask.

Second sequence: Without the dinner setting at the head of the table. After the funeral and after the wedding.

A farewell meal in honor of the young couple, who will leave Bucharest in just a day’s time. The young wife cannot bear the Balkan atmosphere of petit Paris, “the garbage and jokes of this drunks’ market.” That is what the cold Astrid Vancea said, with ruthless sincerity, impatient to return to the civilization of Braov, which she mentioned by its German name, Kronstadt.

Dense silence. Strong cold light, crystal glasses, silverware, porcelain, stillness of the tomb. Unity of place, time, and action? You will each bear another mark of defeat, the dead man had probably thought … and his voice was now being heard again. Defeat — that is, the inevitability of fate — which he had kept trying to mollify, buy off, postpone. But Dida Voinov lost track of her own thoughts. A charred statue; the words had died.

A small group of characters, a brief history boiling in the much-heated cauldrons of History, in the soup of planetary slaughter? A dinner setting for the schoolboy Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov, the timid prisoner of chance. He had been whistling heedlessly above the bicycle’s gleaming handlebar when he was struck down by the stupid black scarecrow of chance. The boy had kept twisting his adolescent guilt into knots, until that sudden bang two weeks before which drove him blindly night and day through streets and valleys, sleepless, tireless, on an empty stomach, to find a witness, an answer, an absolution from all that had happened.

A setting for his beautiful sister Sonia, queen of the Bar Levcenco, target every evening of a constant stream of love letters, flowers, visiting cards, coming from every dinner table. A cheerful, incorruptible prey, a kind of exciting lure to the bar, reappearing, laughing, fluttering her black plaits, feverishly dancing until dawn, when she would retire pale as a Shulamite exhausted by triumph and fear.

Until about six months ago, when the lame and witty Matus, skeptical missionary, terrorist, and drunkard, appeared on the scene. Good-natured but with rigid projects that mixed together biblical metaphors and an overwhelming secular, pragmatic vitality. His puerile intoxication and irresistible masculinity were the ruin of the happy little sister, flower of the accursed family, beauty of beauties and angel ready to burn her wings in the newcomer’s fire.

Old china plates, heavy silver cutlery, thin crystal glasses: all the decor of the end. So that everyone should remember — including the German woman who had recently married the son of the wandering Jew, and also including the adventurer Matus, ready to carry his fantasies and his sweetheart into the hypnotic infinity of the East. They are all celebrating a funeral repast of disintegration, this festive collapse. The proud possession of the moment — that is all we can strive for, poor Marcu Vancea had thought. Already perhaps the seal of defeat was borne by them all, not only by the ghost of the one who had just departed from their midst. Mother, widow, mother-in-law could not recover word or voice, lost in the apathy of the blood-red evening as in a long-awaited amnesia.

Only the bridegroom proved hyperactive, giving directions to the cook, arranging the wife’s chair, stroking the mother’s hand, smiling to sister and brother, careful to fill the silence with words and gestures, cheerfully and competently holding forth about his future job with the reputed German industrialist from Braov who had become his father-in-law, about the furnishing of the home (a whole floor given over to the newlyweds by the family of the great Friedrich Wolf), but also about the course of the war and BBC commentaries, about the activity of speculators, martial law, the race laws, the Byzantine ways of the secret police, the cruelties of the Russian winter, the latest gossip about love affairs at the opera, the starvation among the peasantry, the racially motivated deportations, the blackout, the banquets given by the diplomatic corps, the vanity of the marshal dictator, and and — Engineer Mircea Claudiu Vancea Voinov knew everything there was to know.

The post-wedding and post-funeral dinner, prolonged until daybreak by the skill and hard work of the new head of the family, who takes care not to mention the empty place and what everyone has been thinking all the time without saying it.

An empty place, one setting short. The family reunion will drag on, through thick and thin, until daybreak. With difficulty will they gather the strength to break what has long been broken. Early morning, in the street. The two couples — the Astrid Mircea Claudiu Vancea family and the future Sonia Matus Calinovschi family — are standing on the wet platform of the tram stop. Late revelers from the Bar Levcenco ceremoniously greet the princess who has disappeared from their fox-trot-and-champagne parties. A sure sign that another day really has dawned.

In the dining room, mother and youngest child are silently looking at the uncleared, deserted table.

A hazy hour: the bluish dawn invading the Bar Levcenco on the ground floor of the apartment block. The jolly old Levcenco madhouse is dead as well; it has been for many decades.

The window moistened with dew. The trams started up in the street. Dull grinding movement.