PRELUDE

"My love,

It is very hard for me to write to you. It is late, nearly one in the morning, and the only witness to all my defeats that I have now is this sad Jiu Valley.

I have come to rest in the country of your childhood, my heart wrung by the walls of the train compartment that abandoned me here at dawn. The picturesqueness I struggled so hard to find suggested to me, if anything, thoughts of suicide. I rented a room in the hotel that could bear no other name than «The Jiu Valley», for three days, 15 lei for a single bed, and on that hard bed I laid out my soul, shrivelled with all it had never become. They say that the moment you rise from sleep you grow a centimetre taller, because all the muscles overstrained through the day relax. It seems my soul grew too, because it swelled so much that it reached my mouth — whence the expression «with your heart in your mouth», in which state I reached the theatre, around ten.

The theatre is a brick apparition beyond the railway barrier, steeped in the grimmest squalor. It is called: «The Jiu Valley — State Theatre», with one show every three weeks, but I imagine what interests you is the steps I took rather than the theatre itself.

I was met by a director, a different one from the man I'd known. He had been appointed only recently.

My long-awaited hiring did not happen. Someone was supposed to retire — hence the haste with which they'd summoned me — but the man in question has put the event off until May, because he wants to drag his old bones through the dust and soot of the theatre for two months more. I took the news blankly, without a word of reply, whereupon the director wrapped me in a wave of condolences and proposed a solution that struck him as equitable and that I pretended, for the moment, to accept. He offered me a guest engagement, giving me a role — the lead, that is to say — in a premiere that will take place now, this Sunday. The play being in one act, he handed me the part, «confident» in my acting gifts, since I could step into the show with no prior rehearsal at all, in the place of some individual, a walk-on who, in his reality as a decent man, has about as much to do with the theatre as I have with the leather trade. I hope, if I decide to stay, to do it well all the same, even though the play is stupid and archaic. In 1843, a Romanian writer, a boyar, had nothing better to do and took up playwriting, and these people, more idiotic than he was, perform it.

The troupe has eight «vacant» posts, filled by six youngsters, sons or daughters of actors, each more idiotic than the last, vying along these lines with their own parents, plus two neutral girls. I keep asking myself what I'm doing here, and I find no answer.

I want to finish high school; I've started studying and it's going very well, I've got hold of books, but I don't know when that long-awaited approval will come, so do ring 330040, extension 408, ask for Comrade Ghervasie and let me know whatever you learn. Next week they leave on tour and I'll earn 58 lei a day when I have one show, and 88 when there are two. Lodging they can't give me until May, when I'm taken on; salary the same. I telephoned D. R. Popescu, and let's see what comes of it, because the director has gone off to Bucharest and is back Saturday. For now I'm staying with those neutral girls I told you about, until they get back from the tour, then I move my tent elsewhere — into the Banat, that is, on a two-week tour aboard a «Motor Coach» (one of those ordinary I.R.T.A. buses that runs the Cuca-Măcăi — Arse-End-of-the-Valley line and back for 5 francs). «Se la'vi», and right now I too am itching to take a quick run up to heaven — I only hope they don't require there some ministry's waiver of the regulations — though I'd be content even with a little scrap of hell, where nobody beats his chest with bricks torn from the masonry of some theatre useless anyway.

I am sad, Lee, I am so sad that I turn apathetic. I miss Alin and you, but day by day I grasp my own uselessness. My superb obliviousness makes desperate efforts, but I keep stepping barefoot on shards of glass that grant me a perpetual waking with no possibility of escape, and it sickens me. I have no money, I eat what I can, my daily consumption comes down to a few lei, and as a lovely gesture fate is paying me, it has struck me as well with a neuralgia of the finest. Lucky that I have camomile tea, tetracycline and algocalmin. I'd like to be with you, but for you to be otherwise — a kind of good fairy who would calm me and say «be patient, my love, everything will be all right» — but you are just as ill as I am. I have gathered so much squalor from people that there is in me an undefined resolve to smear it across their cheeks, every last drop of my disgust. I don't know what else to write to you. I do not like the posture of the vanquished at all, nor the lamentations.

I love you beyond all telling, but right now I would be capable of leaving you and Alin both. You don't deserve the inquisitorial treatment that I-don't-know-which God metes out to me, and unhappily, for as long as I am with you, you are a party to it, you feel it with the same acuteness, and my suffering is doubled, because I suffer through you as well, because your wounds hurt me too, wounds that are in fact mine, even though they wound another body, another soul, which is in fact also mine. The same thing happens with you, but you know how to hide your torments better… and yet I perceive them, I am obsessed with them, I always have been… I pretended to be selfish, and you believed it; I pretended not to understand them, and you took me for a fool… It was the posture that suited me best, because, in any case, no other would have given you any kind of absolution — but now, when over the white snow it is snowing black flakes of coal, white and black layers settle over my soul…

You were beautiful and slender, I was happy and a boatman. You in my arms… and there was so much green and so much light on the lake that the calluses you would clean from my hands when I hauled at the oars keep even now their bittersweet, fresh taste, somewhere, in I-don't-know-which cell of me.

Then everything became hesitant and stifling, like a great wave of darkness bent on killing the light that I believe the two of us had discovered.

And I was crying NO, but my cry was smothered under the clatter of bolts and chains, and my child in your womb thrashed to come out into that light we had discovered, and you were humiliated by my bolts and chains — you who loved flowers so much that you couldn't bear to see them bound…

We need a platform, something, you know, solid… that we can tread without fear, with the certainty of gods, because I am convinced it exists somewhere and we must find it. Until then let us try to LIVE as best we can through these marshes full of snakes, of frogs and crayfish, where you sink now one foot, now the other, but never, for the life of you, both at once. That is my stubbornness, and I close on an optimistic note. «Kisses», Felix"

Oh, yes. The Jiu Valley can crush any surge of spirit in you from the very first instant. I don't know whether it's an ugly place, only that it's one where you cannot live alone. Fog, soot fallen from the sky, black snow. Only the mountains are legendary and beautiful.

What had I been trying to do, sending Felix into the Jiu Valley? To rehabilitate the first important episode of my contact with reality? To rephrase it, because it had crushed beyond all measure my child's eyes and mind, just as it was, clenched tight in squalor? I had managed to make real parks and castles out of waste lots, out of soot-blackened apartment blocks, out of the rubbish you couldn't skirt however hard you tried, out of the pigsties and the bread ovens… Perhaps it would have been simpler to make the trip down into the Valley myself, to see those places again and bury my roots for good, covering them over with well-tamped earth.

There was nothing for me to recover in that narrow valley, all but strangled by fog. As in the tales of the Wild West, the «momârlani» had been driven off their land. They had withdrawn into the narrow glens at the foot of the mountains and drawn firm borders between us and them. They called us «barabe», which in fact meant brigands, because the Austrians, at the start, had brought convicts and set them to work in the mine.

Ha! Why do I play WoW? Because that's what I did all through childhood. It's true, Kalimdor went by the name of Cimpa, or Taia; for a mount I used a little kid, thrilled that I was taking any notice of him at all. I'd harness him with a string and make him whinny and stamp. I had a sword made from a metal bar with a hilt cut from a tin can, a bow and arrows, and a cloak made from a tablecloth stolen from home. We all had swords, bows and arrows and horses, and we waged ferocious wars on Citera hill. Orcs and the undead weren't in fashion, because they hadn't been invented yet. We were Teutonic knights or, as the case might be, a few dozen Winnetous, Pardaillans and the like. It depended on the most recent film seen at the cinema that reigned over the centre of our small domain with its odd name: Lonea.

The choice had been mine. By sending Felix into the Valley, I had hedged my bets. I'd wanted to separate him from Marius, who had gone off to the theatre in Reșița, and the alternative of his going to Brăila or Galați I ruled out from the start. I had tried to send him up among the mountains, far from everything I imagined had done him harm. I gave no thought at all to what he might feel — he who had grown up somewhere on the banks of the Danube, which he had been swimming across since the age of twelve, whereas in the Valley nearly every morning was damp and drowned in a blackish fog.

"I am only furious, not ill in the least. I have never been resigned.

When you tell me that I'm not your good fairy, because I'm «otherwise», a tall, bitter grass springs up out of my soul. And there springs up, too, the unease that you have not believed and never will believe that my forests are real.

I was selfish in giving birth to your child. It's true that Alin was fated to be born. Over him no uncertainty hovered for a single second. It wasn't we who chose him, but he who chose us. Through him I cut off my own line of retreat. I can no longer wipe myself out of the picture whenever I might feel like it, or whenever cowardice might come to haunt me. When I feel that you have abandoned me, even imperceptibly, as now (imperceptibly, my foot!), my body shrivels, my back bows under the weight of an old age come far too soon. A suffering made of all the futile efforts I will have made for as long as I've known myself swells in my chest. Nothing more stupid, more absurd!

If you can't stand Petroșani, Brăila is an alternative. Not the happiest one, but it exists.

I do not accept that «LET US LIVE» from your letter. We are not quite so poor as all that. The thought of leaving us crosses your mind. What good would it do you to be alone? Only so that you could imagine, at every moment, the heaven or the corner of hell where the world would leave you in peace, because you are useless and because you torment those who have made their way into your soul?! When I think of all the ugly things, things so unlike us, that we have done, my hair stands on end. Oh! I cannot manage to understand how it is even possible for us to quarrel.

It's bizarre, but instead of the door slammed furiously behind you, I kept waiting for you to shake me hard and roar — «Enough, you idiot, you love me, remember!»

Ligia"

"Don't say I didn't warn you!" That warning had been sounding at every turn for months on end. It was plain that alongside Felix I had set out on an obstacle course.

Yes — knowing him once again in full flood, avid for the spectacle of the present day, which he was incapable of forgoing for the sake of some wisdom built upon the day to come, I was anxious. I was afraid both of him and of my own vanity. I was unsure. In practice, the two of us did not know each other. We had built a story together. With the greatest enthusiasm in the world. We had opened a breach into which nearly everyone around us felt duty-bound to toss something. Advice, above all. Oh, how I hated it. How frightened I was! I had stayed suspended on the fifth floor, in a Bucharest forsaken by grace; I had abolished time, abolished myself, in order to think of nothing but Felix. To feel him in the place of air. The air was suffocating me as it was. Because I wasn't breathing it together with him. His arms did not enfold my morning sleep. In fact I no longer slept at all. I had become a state of waking. The exhaustion suffocated me, terrified me.

"My love,

Each day I wait, famished, for at least a single line from you, and still none comes. I am consumed. I love you immensely, and this waiting is killing me.

And to think we had promised each other we would write every day!?

I sent you two photographs. I hope they amused you. In fact, everything I do here strikes me as a joke — sometimes a poor one, sometimes a sweet one.

Ligia, at the very least answer my letters at once, even if you don't want to write to me on top of that. I don't mean to be irritating and tiresome, but I cannot conceive what is happening with you. I am avid for every crumb of you, and a written thought settles me somewhat. Without you I feel like a wreck cast up on a deserted shore, over which there settle layers upon layers of non-being. There has been inoculated into me, more than ever, coming down through time, a detachment that is the sister of death. I am now, more than I have ever been, two separate men. One who accepts the situation as it is, in any variant whatsoever, and one furious and tenacious who swallows nothing. The one hoards the repressions, the other scatters them.

I am flexible as a fibre of glass that keeps its power to spring back without striking at its own structure, hardened into staying this way forever. From this I gather the strength that, every day, scatters from me among these mountains.

I carry within me the endlessness of the plain, but this idiot of a life has cultivated on my soul wild mountains I am forced to cross. (What can you do — that's how you become an alpinist, willy-nilly!) I don't think I'm cursed, even though my whole life has been like a scattering across a plain, out of which a beautiful flower has sprung up now and then. One of them is Alin, my supreme solace.

I am as worn out as if, since I last saw him, my soul had loaded onto ships departing into the distance hundreds of heavy sacks of longing. And I have grown tired. But I think that in a few days I'll run off, even if only for a few hours, to Călimănești. You may envy me. I'll write you ten pages of details about him.

I would be unspeakably happy if you could come too, but I think my letter will arrive when I'm already at Călimănești. That will be the punishment for not answering my letters at once. My love, forgive me! I'm wicked. I'll send you a telegram when I leave; perhaps you can come too, for a day."

The room I shared with Madi and Mana, small by nature, I had filled with our three beds. Set side by side, they had become a single bed bordered by the great window that floated above, over the city. The girls were out. The door opened and my love — blond, beautiful, travel-dusted — rippled for an instant, stirring all the air in the room. I leapt toward him, chained him to me in haste, coiled my arms around him so that he could not come undone. So that he could not vanish. We stayed like that a while. He loosened my arms slowly, we sat down facing each other and looked at one another.

"Yes, I'm real," he said, and his palm cupped my cheek in a gesture only the two of us knew.

I closed my eyes. Palms know the truth best of all. They pass beyond the flesh, they caress thoughts, desire, they receive the giving of oneself. The true kind.

"Ligia, what the devil am I to do when I'm torn apart by missing you! My coming to Bucharest for a single day was like a dream, and I don't even register how happy I was. I had come dusty and alone in order to find myself again in you. Why is it that, when I'm with you, all the veils fall from my soul and I'm left like a tree which, after being ravaged by a storm, brings out of its pain the buds of warm flowers? Sometimes I feel, all the way from here, your pulse straining toward me, and I want to shout out over these mountains in a voice of thunder — I love you, Ligiaaaaa! — and that shout shatters the window of your room (with you not home, and only Madi there, to say in a huff: Felix, Felix, Felix, you've broken our window!), and I rejoice like a heedless child flicking his ash onto the floor by virtue of who-knows-what treacherous negligence. I'll close now, because you deserve no more. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,

Felix"

It was the end of a winter and then a long spring. I watched them with impatience from the fifth floor, counting at the close of each night the dogs that barked through the park and the answers they got from the far edge of the horizon. Like a soft, touching echo, other dogs answered them, scattered far off among the buildings, the neighbourhoods, the waste lots. I tried to fit myself into the city that woke with precision all around me. It seemed deserted to me, devoid of sense. I couldn't bring myself to leave the dormitory. I couldn't think about the degree thesis I didn't believe in. I couldn't walk through the park among the entwined pairs of lovers and keep seeing Felix, there among the rose bushes, embracing a Ligia who was climbing the stairs visible through the glass pane. What could I do? I went to bed the moment the trams began to run. Mady had put up on our door a large, categorical notice: "Do not disturb — work in progress for a DEGREE!" Nonsense. No one was working on any degree. I tried to fall asleep so as to forget that I missed my love. His absence pained me. I told him stories, there beneath my forcibly closed eyelids. I scolded him roundly. I was jealous, I got worked up, I flew into a rage, then I calmed myself, discovering in me that desperation of his which does not lie, which loves, which finds the way to pass beyond, to explode, shaking the depths.

"This morning I came away from your superb child. We spent a whole afternoon together. Ligia, he is so beautiful! He sprang a surprise on me, too. His hair, which used to show only the vaguest hint of a wave, is now curled like mine. Naturally it suits him better than it does me. He was a little ill, but he forgot his illness and gave me a four-hour recital, throughout which I was truly happy. I bought him a kind of romper with short trousers, red and white — a marvel, the way it suits him (!) — and a little summer top with short sleeves, cream-coloured, sporty, close to the body, and I could hardly keep from biting a piece off him. He strutted about the room cocky as a rooster (you have it on good authority that he walks beautifully!), proud, knowing he stirs admiration. And now you can come to an understanding with him. He listens to you, thinks a moment, and does what you ask. He takes after me. I can say so now with pride and certainty. His hair completes the resemblance.

I couldn't stay longer; I came with the troupe from Sibiu and moved on toward Târgu-Jiu, where we are now, at the «Restaurant». I ate tripe soup and a chop (sic!) and in a few minutes I'm off to wander through the town. In Sibiu I bought a very beautiful blanket, one of those fluffy, soft ones the yellow of the puppy Alfonso. I wandered through the town until I came to a park. I had completely forgotten about Brâncuși and this table of his, on which I go on writing to you now. It would be melodramatic to make you a declaration from beneath the «Gate of the Kiss». A gypsy woman is circling me, wanting to tell my fortune.

— Leave me be, girl; not even God has made up His mind yet what course to give my fate!

I walked the length of the «Alley of Chairs», and such a longing came over me to sit stone upon stone, sated with movement, fixed in essence like Brâncuși's chairs, that I took a little fright and remembered my debts — so alive and so devoid of scruple, or so loaded with scruple, the devil only knows — that I fled into some dreary bar with no poetry in it, with faces washed-out and ugly as life… sometimes.

The truth is I felt wretched at Călimănești. Your parents are — I feel them to be hostile, even though they pose as ideal parents, meaning to take me in with a rug in which they have carefully wrapped their resentments so they shan't show, and they have a stupid triumph that they mask without any skill. I felt a stranger to my own child, as though he too might have borrowed something of their nature.

Ligia, I'm afraid — I am truly afraid of myself. Sometimes I come to the conclusion that I can only live at peace alone. Alone with all my sins and all I've failed to become. Are you certain you're not merely stubborn in your faith in me?! Don't answer me, I've no appetite for pointless complications! You will come to me. I'll find myself again. Right now I'm a little estranged, and so sad, so sad that I turn furious. Perhaps because you're not with me, perhaps because I've grown a little tired of loving an idea of Ligia that takes flesh only once a month — and, to crown it, I miss your beautiful letters as well. You'll reproach me, perhaps, for having no patience. No, I haven't; I'm always in a hurry; I cannot, unfortunately, keep a steady rhythm.

What the devil am I to do with myself, Lee, when over everything I feel and everything I do a layer of optimism settles. Maybe it comes from somewhere, from some powers of mine I can't yet bring to consciousness.

I love you, Ligia, but in a particular way. This love is perpetual, like the optimism I told you about. But what if, in the end, it is an illusion, and losing it I shall have to die?"

"Felix came by here with a lady painter. He brought the child some lovely little clothes. They stayed a few hours. They were on tour."

At the time I paid no heed to the sententious note in my mother's voice. I felt it much later, though — on the evening, to be exact, when a whole town was celebrating, with great pomp, the birthday of an important lady. It was, of course, that same lady painter. "If I were to paint your portrait, I'd call it Field of Wheat with Green Eyes," Felix had told me, filling me in on his visit to Călimănești in the company of the painter in question. I liked the metaphor and kept it. It had a good ring.

At that lady's party simply every important man in the town had gathered — all the artists, that is, all the potentates of the day, plus a few clerics. I took a great many photographs, because the staging and the protagonists richly deserved to be immortalised. It amused me to think that if anyone had wanted to wipe the poor little town off the map — economically, politically and culturally — it would have been enough to set off a bomb in the middle of that party.

I knew why nearly every important man in the borough had gathered for that birthday, but I found it hard to understand why so many of them had been accompanied by their wives.

"How did you manage not to draw down on yourself the enmity of the women of the town?" I asked the lady whose day it was.

"I never wounded their feelings. I had nothing to divide with them," she answered, smiling.

I watched her shining in her own celebration, bathing in apotheosis in the days and nights carefully tucked away in the minds of the men who surrounded her, adored by the cortège of women to whom she had without a doubt been a rival to be feared. It was true. She had had nothing to divide with them. She had simply taken what she believed was her due.

"You were a strong woman. You won," I told her.

"Yes. But the price I paid was to match. My soul, my body…"

Yes, I had not heeded my mother's warning, but neither had I entirely ignored it.

"My dear love, I'm writing to you now.

I feel dreadfully unwell, a physical wretchedness, absurd and tedious. Today I fainted on the tram. At times like these I lose all desire to move or to want anything. I'm a little at the end of my tether. I haven't a penny left, so I won't be keeping my promise to come to you.

I feel terribly alone. And not only because you're not with me. When you came to Bucharest I had some strange states of mind. I didn't believe you were with me — that is, I didn't see in you a man who is with me and for me. I sensed only very faintly that you might love me. I have lost my confidence in myself. I feel dreadfully faded, and about as sad.

I spoke to Alin on the telephone. He was kicking up a fuss and banging his little hand against the receiver."

The trouble was a concrete one. I was pregnant, and abortion was forbidden. Aunt Lucica, my good fairy, came to my aid once again. But a clandestine abortion, in those days, was a risky thing.

The bachelor's thesis — or the graduation paper, as we usually called it — I had filed under lost causes. In its last two chapters I was supposed to write about the atheist education of the masses, and of the youth in particular. I had wailed at length, in the faculty corridors, that I had no idea what to do with «scientific atheism».

"Laurențiu will help you," Mady said, joking.

"Yes, it's simple — you come round to mine and I'll tell you what to write. In any case, nobody is going to bother reading what you've written."

"I'll come too and we'll write turn and turn about," Mady offered.

Laurențiu was reading philosophy, I no longer recall in which year. He was from Brăila and protected me out of caste instinct. I was a Brăila man's wife, and that was enough. And in any case, I had Mady — a bodyguard.

That evening I met Alexandru Monciu Sudinski, somewhere around Ovidiu Square, at his girlfriend's house. Laur lived in a servant's room in her villa. She was a painter and worked for the «Art Fund». She could run you up a pair of ultra-modern trousers in half an hour without taking a single measurement. Mady happened to want a pair.

Monciu was legendary. In our Philosophy department it was passed down by word of mouth, from one cohort to the next, how he had altered the name of the Chinese philosopher Mencius into Mon-Ciu, obligingly multiplying for his fellow students the lecture courses on ancient Chinese philosophy. Naturally, I asked him whether it was true. He passed over my curiosity with an elegant gesture and asked me whether there had been, of late, any spectacular suicides at Philosophy. Then he told Laur and me of his delight at having discovered that the finest rink for roller skates in all Bucharest was the corridors of the Faculty of Law.

Mady and I took turns, a whole night long, writing down everything that passed through Laur's mind about the communist youth's struggle against God. In the morning, well before seven, while Mady was trying on the trousers ordered the evening before, Monciu's girlfriend said to me over her shoulder:

"I don't like you. You look like one of Alexandru's old flames. I can barely stop myself from smacking you across the face. What possessed you to bring out those photos of that kid of yours!"

She was set on annihilating me. I saw the gloom that drifted in the depths of her expressive eyes, telling me beyond any doubt that I was to clear off her territory as fast as possible. In fact, she was furious that I'd shown Monciu the photographs of Alin, and that he had exclaimed: "What eyes this child has. He'll be either a genius or a madman!" My child had entered into competition with her tiny baby girl, all of two weeks old. She was doing me an injustice. I wanted to answer her. But I held my tongue. Afterwards I was sorry I had, but at the time, that morning, I restrained myself. I looked down on her, from the temple of the woman who doesn't give two figs for another woman's striving to defend a ring in which she fights alone. The painter's face stayed lodged in my mind like a rusty spike. After all, what could I say to her?! That I don't look like Monciu's old flame?!

When I left it was not yet eight. It was the first morning, after a long stretch of time, that found me out on the street. Ovidiu Square was not far from the «Three Balloons». My thoughts ran joyfully down the streets that descended toward the place where a «spark of life» had become my son.

"My love,

Yesterday I received your letter, and for me it was a feast.

The fact is I've been sad all month. You could have telephoned me at the hotel, in one of the towns I passed through. That's how my mother got hold of me.

I reproach you with nothing, my love, I know you're very busy, but I miss you horribly. Vast cascades of love break against the rocks within me, and so as not to howl, I try to detach myself. I try to parcel out my attention (but only that much!). And I dream. Yes, you're right, you guessed it: I dream only for the sake of dreaming — castles in the air. For you it's simpler: you write, you read, you have your emotions, you're afraid, you're sickened, you're already nostalgic for the Bucharest you'll soon be leaving. You tear yourself from things with difficulty. I remain a fundamental problem you can assimilate, but in the meantime you also have your various refuges.

I knock against you at almost every thought, and sometimes I hate you, because you robbed me of that peace built on a million superficialities, the one I used to bathe in before you. But there is nothing negative or dangerous in this hatred. It's only a certain swaggering doggedness, like that of a child who wants to do something beyond his strength.

You keep spinning me a theory about my freedom, which amuses me a little and makes me think that, after all, you don't know me. That may be a merit of mine, or a flaw. Do you imagine the Earth can choose the Sun that warms and lights it, as often as it pleases, without the fear or the dread of being left in the dark?! It can plant in its orbit, true, a few artificial satellites — which, however, it can recall whenever it likes, or fling into the Sun, which disintegrates them without the slightest effort.

(I'm at a bar now, listening to some truly superb music. What stove, what washing machine? A tape recorder first!)

In the business with the satellites I'm joking for the joke's sake, because the conceit struck me as droll. Today I drew my pay. My love, come quickly and put order in my pockets, for I'm not in the least gifted at it. Come quickly and lay yourself upon my soul, for I'm cold without you.

I know my situation is wearing, it's true, but I'll never find the strength I'd need to kill myself over it — and besides, time settles everything. It must settle everything, even in this struggle of mine. So you are to keep calm for as long as the panic doesn't overwhelm me.

And believe me, Lee, I too know a thing or two about this disgust of a life.

And, above all, let me settle my own problems — or, if you like, attend me with wisdom, without jolting me, and love me, because from you I need nothing but love. I need it the way I need air, I need it so much, Ligia!

I don't know how the devil you hold out so long without seeing Alin. I tell you he is terribly beautiful. On the first of June I chose him over you. You may be jealous! At first I meant to take the plane from Sibiu to Bucharest (I had the money, I'd drawn my salary!) to spend a night with you and come back in the afternoon to Târgu-Jiu, for the show. But he was nearer, and it was Children's Day besides. Now I've no idea when I can come to you. The schedule for the coming month isn't settled, and we play every day through the Valley. Anyway, the moment I get three or four days, I'll be at yours on the first train. Now I'll let you study.

With love, Felix. I miss you, I miss you so much"

And he was reclaiming Alin. He did it on his own, without my help. A child, for a man, can remain a merely theoretical notion, unless he craves direct contact with the little entity he is told is his offspring.

At his first meeting with his son, Felix seemed to be treading on floors of glass. I watched him make sure of each next step. His gaze, his face, had taken on a tint of fragility. His hands knotted in the air, his feet stumbled over unseen obstacles and froze halfway, intimidated by the reactions of a six-month-old child suddenly put out by too many people who seemed to be harrying him. Nor was the photographer missing. A lady, a professional, who always convinced you that beyond the click of the flash that blinded you for an instant, an unforgettable story would set hard once she had developed it on glossy paper. Sometimes it is so.

With no little difficulty I managed to clear everyone away and leave the two of them alone. Father and son. I crept off and spied on them through the window. The child sat in the middle of the bed, absorbed in the little mechanical cars racing along a tin track printed with buildings and trees. Felix sat down on the floor, by the bed, his head propped in his hands. He was watching his child. I had the sense of committing a sacrilege and drew back from the window. I found them again in the fullest communion.

"I say, my child really is intelligent. And he's such a pretty little thing!"

"My love,

It rains. It rains. It rains. Tonight I won't be able to speak to you on the telephone, for the simple reason that I have no money. Today is the 17th of April. There's exactly a week left until I see you, and it seems immense. I've all but forgotten you. There's nothing left in me but your soul, thrashing about in there, in search of a place that is final and total. I won't write that I miss you, because I miss you too much to be able to define it. I dream of you almost every night, forever running my hand through your hair and stroking your shoulders. I'll have you know I've fallen very much in love with your body. I dream it stretched beside me, long, quivering and at peace with itself after having been wild, enveloping — and it's night, and it's warm, and it's good. Papa Freud and his repressions are to blame, but there's something else as well, I don't know what. Something he doesn't speak of, or never knew how to pin down in his theories. Perhaps because he never knew you.

I'm sad, Lee. This disgust of a life that I must consume daily, morsel by morsel, rubbish by rubbish, pearl by pearl, makes of me an enormous hourglass in which time runs out into longing, longing into dream, dream into time, time into far distances, the distances into fury… and so on, an endless cycle above which there floats, like foam, a certain optimism of mine, mine alone, which is, for that matter, a lie as beautiful as the God I believe in, in whom I must believe, for we must believe in something.

I miss Alin. I'm a little afraid, knowing him there with your people. I'm afraid for later on. I'd have liked to learn his small caprices by heart, I'd have liked to have him for my own, to discover him minute by minute and not have others show him to me… The paternal selfishness has woken in me, and that is why I write like this.

Goodbye, I love you,

Felix"

I had clear reasons to be frightened, but…

"My love, do something, compress time and come quickly, come quickly, because I am sick with Lee.

There is such stillness in me sometimes, as in a dream, and then I love the mountains, I love the mountains because I count them my brothers, and I too am a mountain, and I have abundant shade and limpid springs, and I wait for you to range across me, path by path, your hair loose and your body bare, and I shall rejoice and caress you with my breezes, frighten you and temper you with my chasms, with my waters, rejoice and marvel at your spells, at the feast-days you will bestow on me, at the flowers we'll gather together — but come quickly, come quickly with your slightly detached smile, withdrawn at times from all that the world means, with the tumult of your dreams, with the warmth of your eyes, come quickly and I'll shout to you with all my echoes that I love you.

Sometimes I am as sad as a dusk over a leafless forest where the wind has held still so as not to stir the branches stretched toward the sky in prayer, like pious arms calling for the light — and then the storm breaks. The arms turn into broadswords out of fairy tales, furious, powerful, and they cut my soul, and bend me into a long groan in which the last word, the one that brings me strength and peace, is love — and for that I thank you, Lee.

Every thought of mine is for you, so torment yourself no longer with a million suppositions. Don't bind yourself so to my faith. You, of all people, I cannot deceive in the senses your fancy lends to that notion. They are far from true. How do you suppose a mountain can deceive the light, as long as night does not exist? It's true, I am tropical, and exotic, and I have abundant shade, but from here to darkness is a long way yet, and however many shadows it may carry, the mountain stays a mountain, even if others, with their belittling fancy, make a hill of it — and then, don't forget, hills too have their charm.

I love you, Felix

If you should ever want to bring me an immense joy, it's to come without my knowing you'll come.

I have my own house, waiting for you to breathe its air; before me I have the Parâng, and everywhere mountains and many birch forests. I live close to the sky (on the Xth floor, that is), at 109 Republicii Street, in the block I wanted to move to, flat 65."

All this avalanche of letters, all my inner turmoil — which scraped at my soul like a merciless sandpaper — went sliding dizzily down the serpentines of the narrow, tortuous Jiu gorge. In childhood I had travelled this road dozens of times, true, by train, watching through the window the white crags in whose crevices flowers past all counting drove down their roots.

Now I was on the road, in a fairly grimy bus, bearing proudly along with me a huge clay pot, green-glazed, with two snakes in relief writhing between its two handles. A Vlădești amphora — so I called the vessel — which I'd salvaged from my grandmother's attic. I had toiled hard to salvage it. But I was rewarded by its beauty, by its final perfection. It was an amphora. I longed so much to fill it with flowers off the crags of the gorge that I asked the driver to stop. I told him that all my childhood I had wanted to pick those flowers, and he, after pondering for a quarter of an hour or so and a few dangerous bends, pronounced: cigarette break. I gathered an armful of tall weeds, to suit my clay pot. Won over by my diligence, the driver helped me, musing aloud:

"It never crossed my mind that weeds could be flowers!"

It was he, too, who set me down on Republicii Street, at number 109. I climbed up close to the sky — to the Xth floor, that is — reckoning as I went: one and one make two and one makes three and one…

The door opened and, as though taking shape out of the half-dark of the hall, Felix folded me into his arms, pot and all.

It was hard for me to bear the regimentation. To become part of the vast process of «building the multilaterally developed socialist society», to mind my manners for form's sake and to say words other than the ones on the tip of my tongue. But the hardest thing of all was queuing to collect my first wage. That banal act was offensive; it insulted me. I felt myself fallen into line. The freedom that until then had nourished my illusory uniqueness was crumbling to dust. Little by little I managed to strike with myself the compromises required, and to make my peace with the thought that, in the end, I was one of the privileged. I had been assigned to a research institute and was doing sociological research only a few months after being taken on — which, for many of my university classmates, remained no more than a dream. I was applying myself in earnest to a hard profession that, it's true, I detested. I had dreamed of cultural anthropology, of ethnology, not of the effects of labour-force turnover on coal output. But sociological research is captivating; it gives you a kind of power beyond what the others can hope for. In a certain way it lifts you out of the general alignment. I activated my fighter's instincts. By main force I secured a flat in the famous «Hermes» block, from whose windows I could salute the Parâng whenever I felt like it — or whenever it deigned not to be in fog. I had waited for that flat half a year or so, and it came within a hair of being snatched from under my nose.

"My name is… I know the «Hermes» block is being handed over for occupancy; I hold a government allocation, and I take it I'm a priority, like my university classmate who is moving into this very block," I told the woman who looked everywhere but at me.

I had put a great deal of assurance into my voice, and the woman across from me began to flap her hands among the heaps of paper on the desk, slammed a few files down onto the floor. She was plainly on edge. When I'd come into the office she had just been informing someone, by telephone, that she might be able to lay hands on an allocation in the «Hermes» block. She asked my name, though that was exactly what I had begun with. I repeated my name; she found the file she was after quite quickly, opened it, and inside there remained but a single sheet. The allocation of a flat in «Hermes» with my name on it.

"Well… you do have an allocation. I'd heard you'd sorted out your housing problem… with the theatre people…"

She pulled open the desk drawer and held out a key to me.

Indeed, in the meantime, we had been obliged to do a two-month stint in the «Șerpărie» — the Snake-pit — a district on the edge of Petroșani, exactly as its name plainly declares. They were two hard months. The old actor we'd been lodging with in the block at number 109 simply threw us out, with the backing of the theatre's management. He had found it hard to put up with our nights of love; our nocturnal trips to the bathroom set beside his room had exasperated him. For that «house» in paradise, where Felix had waited for me to come «with my hair loose and my body bare», was only a room — in reality a rather sordid one — which we had furnished with terraces reaching out toward birch forests, toward the sun that crossed the southern side of each day at length. Actors can be sublime on the stage, but when they're left stripped bare before their own lives, some of them can turn into startling specimens of human refuse. So it had gone with the old actor. I had scoured the filth out of the bathroom, out of the kitchen. I had worked a whole day to get the smell out of his refrigerator, in which he had graciously allowed us to keep our perishables too. Everything seemed in order. He seemed glad of us. But one afternoon Felix said to me:

"We pack everything up. The theatre stagehands are waiting downstairs. We're moving to the Airport."

"But why?" I managed to get out.

"The old buzzard reported us. Says we disturb him. We're blocking his creative process."

The «Snake-pit» was a world's end that froze in you any appetite or hope for life. We had in fact been exiled to the end of the world, and we pretended it wasn't true. The block we lived in was half-abandoned. Nearly a ruin. Here lived the men who came to take work at the mine and left after a few months. They couldn't bear the hard labour underground, nor the dangers down there in the belly of the mountain. They took fright and bolted.

Even so, there in the «Snake-pit», flung overboard from reality into the void, we managed to dream of islands untouched by wicked people — and we even reached them.

We moved the same day. It wasn't even very hard. Our entire fortune came down to two suitcases of clothes, a duvet, and a remote-controlled toy car bought for Alin. A red limousine.

Reaching the seventh floor, I opened the door almost with dread. I was stepping into a space we no longer had to share with anyone else. I had come up by the lift; it had been like a flight, and I was afraid of being left suspended in mid-air. I shut the door quickly behind us. We took each other by the hand and ran from one corner to another through our vast castle. Dusk had fallen. In the bedroom, straight onto the floor, onto the yellow duvet my grandmother had given me, we embraced with a new joy. Between ourselves and the world we had raised a wall. We were sheltered on an island, ours alone. We talked without stopping, made plans; no one and nothing could touch us any more. We loved each other in a dream. Our bodies, become one, stayed that way until toward morning — toward the morning I hated, because a new falling-into-line was on its way, on pavements nearly always swathed in fog.

When all is said and done, interesting things were happening to me. I worked in a research institute, I flirted with an academic career, I wrote verse, and I loved Felix. I was absorbed in my academic «career». I'd have liked it, but it lasted only two years. In the third, they gave me the boot. I wasn't a Party member — a thing inadmissible for those on the social-sciences faculty. Intellectuals were «a social stratum», while the Party belonged to the working class! In our institute, obviously, people held higher degrees. Hardly once in several years was there an admission to the Party, and when there was, it was the institute's working folk who were admitted: guards, caretakers, typists. If you held a higher degree, you had to have outstanding merits to aspire to so great an honour!

Being a university assistant was a challenge. It took every resource I had to meet it. I remember the first winter. On Fridays, evenings from seven to nine, I had a seminar with my favourite group of students. A solid bloc of boys. Up a proper sledding-slope we had to reach a lecture hall built right in the forest, among the firs. The students' attendance at the seminar was striking. The hour at which the seminar began was a plain invitation to play truant, and I never marked anyone absent. Shielded by a lectern that was illusory, at least from where I stood, I spoke to them of the relation between subject and object, of objectification, of doubt and reflection… They lay in wait, like young big cats, sure of the force of their pounce, meaning at all costs to defeat me. They demanded, rather imperiously, that I talk to them about Plato, about Aristotle, about poetry, about morality, about lying, about… They tested me without let-up and showed no sign of tiring. They were enjoying themselves. One day, exasperated by their stalking, I settled the matter outright: «Gentlemen, if I had the answer to all your questions I'd be at the Sorbonne, not here with you. Since we are here, let us pass together, through dialogue, from ignorance to knowledge. The technique is called maieutics. That is all I am proposing. For the rest, you have at your disposal the libraries of this world.»

They quieted as if by magic. We became friends.

I went about it like this. They would choose a theme — sometimes a single sentence — and debate it among themselves for two hours, the cigarette break included. I merely egged them on, then turned arbiter where needed. They liked it. It had never crossed my mind to read the professor's lecture course. It was full of classifications and enumerations of the revolution Marxism had wrought in philosophical thought. They were artificial, useless, and I had never paid them the slightest attention. Marxism — especially when served up as a great victory of philosophical thought — was not something you could swallow. It made for fun during the exam. They knew the professor's course, I didn't. On the exam slips were the very classifications and enumerations in question. When one of the boys got stuck, I'd pull him out of the bind by resorting to the technique I had practised a whole year long. Maieutics. The professor would follow our dialogue, amused, and ask me amiably: What mark shall we give him?

I would speak to my students about miners — that is, about what they were going to become.

The true miners of the Jiu Valley are not ordinary men. I went down into the mine three times, and that was enough. The mines of the Valley were deep, dangerous. My jaws would clench as I descended 300 metres underground in a cage (a lift!) that slid down at a terrifying speed, and they stayed clenched as long as we passed through the winding galleries, whose ceiling sank by degrees toward the crown of my head, bearing down on it with the contempt of the mountain overhead. They unclenched only when the water — which the galvanised-tin rose of the shower turned into a lash — washed the coal-black from my skin.

The first time, I went down the mine at Lonea. First came the cage in the main shaft, the start-and-stop signals to the winding-engine man that belched like rusty trumpets, the blocked ears, and the amusement of the men escorting me.

"The mine's no place for women! Are you afraid?"

Of course I was. We walked through the galleries, and the hope never left me that round the first bend I ought to see the light of day. The want of sky above my head throttled my breathing. They told me we had to descend to another level, by way of a blind shaft.

"Why blind?" I asked.

"It doesn't come out at the surface," I was told.

There were no longer any side-grilles to cut us off, even a little, from the vertical walls of the shaft. I saw them tearing past, dizzying, to right and left; I felt them strike the tin of the cage, buckling it as if toward my fingers clamped on the side bar, to crush them. We reached a stope. A «development» stope — in fact a gallery opening the way to the seam. I laid my hand on the mountain and looked up, after light… Above lay a mountain half a kilometre thick.

"I'm in a tomb!" flashed through my mind for a second.

But the harshest experience I had was at the Lupeni mine. We were carrying out research into the physiological demands the miners were subjected to at their workplace — that is, at the coalface. The engineers escorting us had to get the miners out of there.

The stope lay at the end of galleries that had come progressively under pressure, so that along the last stretch of the way I walked bent double. The doctor — a plump gentleman, no longer very young — and my colleague — a most agreeable lady, fairly plump herself — decreed that they would not go into the stope. I said I wanted to go in, since I'd come this close. But when I saw I had to squeeze into a rat-hole — to crawl in on my elbows, that is — my nerve gave out. Mrs Jeny, my colleague, taunted me with a grin only half hidden:

"Going in? I went in last time."

"I'm going in," I let myself be goaded.

I flung myself bravely into the hole down which the two young engineers — who had led us through the tangle of galleries — were just vanishing.

"How far do we go like this?" I asked while I could still see the legs of the fellow ahead of me.

"Seven metres or so. Mind the tehaș — you'll have to go in on your side," was the last I heard, and they vanished without a trace.

"Forward, girl, this is it!" I told myself, full of valour.

The black gleam of the rock, two handspans from the lit lamp on my helmet, blinded me. In any case, I could no longer turn back. I reached the tehaș — or rather what was still visible of it. Normally a tehaș is a steel section resembling railway track, only curved, which when assembled forms a ring used to shore up the galleries in the mine. The tehaș before my eyes was about half a metre high. I'd held on to the part about «go in on your side». I made the manoeuvre, but the helmet, with its lamp shining and dazzling me, kept slipping over my eyes, and I no longer knew what to do — crawl on my elbows or keep the helmet on my head. I felt, with desperation, that I was in the bowels of the earth and that I must not panic.

I reached the stope. A somewhat wider space, where I could stand upright. But the sense of relative safety passed very quickly. The hard coal was beautiful, gleaming, still set in the massif, there in the depths of the earth. It glittered in the beams of light from the lamps on the helmets of several men moving about me in the dark. I couldn't see them, and they had a great deal to say about the doctors and «the good-god-almighty mothers of blokes like these who've got nothing better to do» than measure their blood pressure.

"Let the doctor come on through here!"

"He can't, he's too fat!" — I let the pearl drop from my mouth and took such a head-on wave of goodwill that I began to sway.

They talked without pause, but my feeling, which has stayed with me down the years, was that, in their own way, they were paying me homage. The stope was no longer a rat-hole but a vast ring, a black and gleaming arena, and I was being awarded a medal for having had the courage to step into it.

On the way back, my valour was concrete, palpable. The miners had given me confidence.

"We go in and out through here every day. We tie the timber, the mesh and whatever else to our feet and in we go."

I copied the movements of the man ahead of me, trying to be exact in my own, focused on them alone. The mountain had vanished from my mind. When I reached the tehaș I said aloud, so that as many as possible could hear me:

"Not for ten thousand lei a month would I go down this pit every day!"

Ten thousand lei was a great deal of money, and according to the legends that went round the Valley, there were said to be miners who sometimes reached — with bonuses and various incentives — that extraordinary sum. It was only a legend.

It was no hard thing for me to make a pact with the men of the depths. I loved and respected them. I was a miner's daughter, raised among them. In my mind I likened them to sailors. Their sea was the mine — the place, that is, where they came face to face with the Planet that ordinary people ignore.

In fact… how things really stood!

We tried to give the days of that time a tinge of unbroken bonbon-pink. I can't say we managed. Conflicts, larger or smaller, would crop up between us. It happened often enough. Each of us stood for an empire in its own right, deploying intricate diplomatic systems to keep the state of truce durable.

I was bohemian by structure, with an exaggerated leaning toward feminist claims, and I was deeply outraged by the traditional division of household duties. I never once managed to spend an hour with my nose in a cooking pot and declare the occupation a pleasure. The mere thought that someone might impose such a thing on me angered me so that I could turn ferocious.

For instance, I remember an incident that might have ended very badly. It was before Felix transformed the whole scenography of our house. We had an old refrigerator, a Fram brought from Brăila. It was shabby, its enamel chipped. I painted Alfonso on it — the shaggy yellow puppy, a toy bought for Alin.

One fine day, Felix attacked head-on.

"I'm hungry!" he said.

"I think there are eggs in the fridge," I answered, and calmly went on with my work.

I was painstakingly washing a mountain of dishes — cups and glasses, mostly, because that was the way of it in our «open» house. Mountains of cups and glasses would pile up, and I had a cult of the gleam of glassware.

"Make me an egg, would you," said Felix.

I bristled all at once and told him, in the most disagreeable tone I had:

"Make it yourself, dear!"

He marched resolutely to the fridge, yanked open its door — on which Alfonso's friendly face was smiling — took an egg in his hand, and insisted, in a commanding tone:

"Make me a fried egg, please!"

"I won't!" I said, with the snarl of a panther disturbed.

The next second, the egg went whistling past my head and stuck to the wall. Then it began to slide slowly down, very near the window that gave, of course, onto the Parâng.

"What do you think you're doing?!" I shrieked, and lunged with my claws, like spears, straight for his throat.

My reaction took him by surprise. He caught my hands in their aggressive flight, bent them behind my back, pinning me, and looked at me with a terrifying seriousness. He scrutinised the anger in the convolutions of my brain and methodically drove it out, scrap by scrap, taking hold of me with assurance from one instant to the next. He was smiling. The air around me turned fluid, elastic, and I slid — as down a sheer piste — into his embrace, which was very determined to set things right.

"Here's what we'll do. One week I do everything. The cooking, the cleaning, the washing-up, everything, everything… and one week you do. All right?" he said, without letting me out of his arms.

The egg that had slid down by the window facing the Parâng stayed there, painted on the wall, for a long time. It wasn't my plain lack of appetite for cooking that stirred up states of conflict between us. In fact I cooked for Felix with pleasure and joy, and organised, with enthusiasm, festive dinners or picnics in the middle of the green rug, chosen specially for the purpose.

The tension gathered from another quarter — a treacherous snake, cold, slithering — and the balance of forces between us would grow, at times, very fragile. Felix gathered defeats of every sort almost daily, while my domineering tendencies — typical of any primitive woman who instinctively humiliates her partner the moment she senses his weakness — would now and then slip out of my control.

His war was a daily one. At times it seemed to take on comic notes, if only so much bitterness hadn't been heaping up beneath.

"That teacher of yours looks at me as though I were some monstrous insect he feels the need to crush. It makes me want to bolt!" Felix told me one evening.

It was hard for him. He was at night school. A pupil. Humiliation, disgust, frustration. That was what he had to fight.

"To hell with him! He's a stuck-up prig. Better to think it had to be this way — that we'd have run-of-the-mill secondary-school teachers. It was written for us," I tried to make light of it.

"Rubbish. The man is plainly out to humiliate me."

"Oh, to the devil with him, there's no sense getting worked up… He's really not worth it. This too shall pass."

But the words tangled in my throat. I knew how hard it was for him to master his revulsion.

The teacher really was a dry, distant, disagreeable sort. I was a slip of a girl of sixteen, and from my desk in the row by the window I would play at flirting with him. Deliberately, methodically. I amused myself trying out my effects. Lingering looks, cut short by a feigned bashfulness whenever I was «caught». Everything well measured and convincing. I had to get it into his head that I was interested, that I couldn't help myself, and that I was trying to hide it with naïveté and candour. I didn't like the teacher in the least. I don't think he had ever learned the pupils' names. They were «you», «you», or «you».

I had run into him again one day, by chance.

I was retracing the routes of my childhood with Felix. He seemed very curious to see the places I'd told him about. He seemed avid to make my biography his own. He did it as though recovering something unknown that existed within himself. That's how, one day, we came to my old secondary school. We went into the building. It was deserted. We climbed the pupils' staircase to the fourth floor; I showed him my classroom and Tom's classroom; we went along the dark corridor and came to the stairs used by the teachers alone.

"Have you ever gone down these stairs?"

"I don't think so," I answered.

"Then come on, now!" he said, and started down.

The staff-room door stood open, and in its frame appeared the teacher I have been speaking of above.

"She was a pupil here, she's looking for her memories," Felix promptly accounted for our presence.

The teacher searched for a few seconds among the hundreds of pupils who had passed before his eyes, and with a brief flash of illumination pronounced:

"Ligia!"

I was flattered. More than a decade had gone by since I'd been a pupil at that school, and I had stayed there only a single year. The man's reaction didn't escape Felix:

"I say, that one was sweet on you…"

"Yes, quite possibly. I was rehearsing on him, during break, the effects I was meant to produce on Tom."

I did my best to persuade Felix to ignore his condition as a «night-school pupil». Not to take it tragically. To find the funny side. After all, his classmates at least adored him. He'd won them over; they came to see his shows and were delighted whenever he agreed to go for a beer with them.

"You've no idea how I feel like bolting and chucking the whole damned lot!" he would say, and a bitter smile would set hard in the corner of his mouth.

I knew it, but at times I could barely keep myself from wounding him further by asking: «Whose fault is it?» He would sense my thought, the tension would mount, we'd quarrel.

But it was worse than that. In the meantime, two of his former year-mates from I.A.T.C. had finished their studies and come as actors to Petroșani. They wounded him with the legitimacy with which they patrolled the theatre, hedged about with bows from the management and their colleagues. They cornered him, whether they meant to or not. It was a good thing that in the theatre the last word lies with the audience, and Felix had his own. And they were not few. His struggle with himself was very hard. He couldn't conceive of himself off the stage. He went up onto the stage with devotion, with adoration even, so that once on the boards, those drops of divinity would begin to run through his veins. The adrenaline of the stage breeds addiction. A very drastic one. And then, the essential affliction of actors is vanity. That is why I find it hard to believe actors can be saved. As long as they remain in the theatre, certainly not. Success and failure, in their case, spring from a common substance, and their souls swing endlessly between joy, triumph, doubt, fear, and — so very often — trauma. They are indeed the festival children of the city, whom you may starve, may beat, may even humiliate, but you cannot pull the boards out from under their feet, or they enter a slow, progressive death.

That was what was happening to Felix. He died a little every day — several times over, even, in the same day — and I felt the desperation with which he wanted to live.

Only, we were not alone in the world. The general opinion of me was that I was «off my head» for stubbornly insisting on being his wife. After all, he brought me nothing but damage of every kind. That was roughly what most people thought. «Just because he's an artist, is that it?!» the others marvelled, at an argument so flimsy — the only one they were capable of framing. It was suggested to me, directly or indirectly, that I stood in need of «a real man, with his feet on the ground». Even Felix sometimes told me, with exasperation:

"You should have married an engineer, that's the truth of it!"

It wounded me. I felt cornered and could find no grounds to justify such a reaction. He meant the mining engineers among whom I spent my days as a researcher. They were influential men, flush with money. Felix's salary went, month after month, in measured instalments, to pay off the grave damage done to the Romanian state — for having worn down, over nine months, the mosaic on the stairs of the Theatre Institute. An attractive woman who worked, who was badly dressed and who didn't want «their money», was inconceivable. On top of which I had an exotic profession into the bargain. Sociologist. I provoked them. The town was small, the gossip plentiful.

The Valley was often shrouded in gloom. People hauled themselves out of its murk however they could. The official couples were a matter of form. Most of them. Beneath the lie of respectability lay no end of human squalor. The women suffered, washed the curtains and the rugs without cease, and whitewashed the walls every year. The men built themselves mountain cabins and mistresses. The two of us were atypical.

"You're a pair of skin-and-bones. When the two of you make love, I'll bet sparks fly," a colleague at work told me.

A fair-haired lady, past fifty — which she neither looked nor would accept — had set her heart on visiting me. She brought a bottle of wine. I set the glasses out on a tray, right on the bed in the bedroom. That was what my guest wanted. The «dining room» — the living room, that is — was furnished with nothing but a table, a divan, and a great snail the size of the whole wall, drawn in pencil lead.

"How beautifully the Parâng shows from your window! Pfah! What filth!" she said, drawing the curtain aside, then letting it fall back.

She meant the dust on the windowsill.

I didn't understand why she had come to visit me. We could never be friends. Our worlds were utterly different. She was after something else. I had no time to wonder what. It didn't interest me, although…

One of my directors — a Don Juan of long standing in the town, much sought after by women — had taken a fixation to me and smothered me with his daily sallies. He was from Brăila. I have a weakness for Brăila men, that much is certain. He'd come into our office, with cause or without. He harried me, and my office-mates seconded him. It was three against one. They kept me on a continual offensive, roguish enough to demobilise them with impertinent replies got up to look charming. They were jokes!

My colleagues — well, like men — sold me out to my face, and that frightened me a little. I did a great deal of fieldwork. I'd find myself at impromptu parties in the reception halls of one mine or another. One such party was followed by a real performance. We were coming back from Lonea in a sorry bus, a wretched rattletrap, packed full. The man — the director, that is — was blind drunk. He had insisted on coming with us, sending his car and driver off for a stroll. We bickered the whole way like a pair of blind men, under our breath, but everyone was listening. People surely knew him. He had been the mine director. I edged away, putting the passengers in the aisle between us; he shoved them aside one by one and caught up with me. We swam like that, through the people, until I fetched up beside the bus driver.

"All you ever see before your eyes is artists," he reproached me at last.

"Who, what's more, are also from Brăila," I pointed out.

I had reached the stop where, in another life, I had parted so painfully from Tom. I wanted to howl. The pitiful man making a spectacle of himself, and my own vulgarity, gave me a feeling of nausea.

A short while later I was with Felix in the only «God-help-us» bar in the town centre. A harsh scene unfolded. We were sitting quietly at a table. My director, from the very far end of the bar, struck first, picking on Felix for no reason.

"Got a problem?" Felix hissed through his teeth, and half-rose from the table.

The other fell dead silent. Without being athletically built, Felix had the aggressive potential of a dangerous wildcat.

In that bar he was, once again, so dear to me! I looked at the scar on his neck. It bore the marks of a brawl in Monument Park, in Brăila. He was with a girl. Some chance girl he had only just met. Two fellows accosted them, saying:

"Leave the girl and clear off!"

On the principle of the surprise attack, Felix struck the nearer of the two on the chin and yelled at the girl:

"Run!"

The other drew a knife, threatening:

"I'll have your throat!"

He managed to dodge the dangerous blow, turning the blade aside with his hand. In a few seconds his neck and hand were running with blood. He sprang back, roaring:

"I'll take the two of you down with me!!!!"

The girl's screams — she had stopped at a distance that kept her safe — and Felix's unexpected resistance put the attackers to flight.

"You should have seen how he carried on afterwards, at the police station, like a star. The truth is she saved me by stopping and shrieking at the top of her lungs. If she'd thought only of her own skin and taken to her heels, those two would have made mincemeat of me!" Felix would recall fondly.

Our living room stayed, for some two years, furnished only with the divan, the table and its four chairs, and the snail drawn in charcoal the whole length of the front wall. Then one fine day Felix mustered his practical sense — which, for that matter, was not his strong suit — and furnished the house handsomely. I painted a whole wall with sunflowers. Two immense ones, set in the foreground, behind which you could hide when you felt yourself a small, wretched little bug, and three smaller ones, sinking by degrees into a horizon that slid cautiously toward the window and toward the Parâng. Everyone who set foot in our house had some remark to make about my flowers. They were alive. They were very luminous and timeless. Each looked off in a different direction.

In our tiny hallway I reproduced, to scale, a work by Vasarely, to warn you that you stood on a realm apart. It was a vertical leaf, fed on black and white that threw back, in antithesis, the beams of light of a sun somewhere at its nadir.

With furniture or without, our house drew a great many people.

«At Felix's Inn», Florin Fătulescu had dubbed it during the time he stayed in Petroșani. He was serving his apprenticeship, and he managed to raise the miners' theatre to heights of «glory beyond all hope». It is no exaggeration. He hauled it up behind him with a towrope, because Florin had the theatre in his blood and turned everything that fell into his hands into a show. Like the Barge Haulers on the Volga. I don't know why that painting by Ilya Repin lodged itself so firmly in my mind. As a warning. As a hieroglyph I was, one day, to decipher. Afterwards, I often felt that I was at one and the same time both the vessel and Repin's barge-haulers.

Felix drew people like a magnet, and they came pouring over us. All around us, a great many people lay in wait. The quarry was Felix. Forever ready to fling a peal of laughter at the world, to put it in its place, he floated above events and gathered round him a whole crowd of people, men and women, all pell-mell.

I had no wish to open my eyes to the world around me. I don't even think I had the capacity to take in its dimensions, its naked concreteness. I made an effort not to feel the weight of the days, the black, choking dust that hung in the Valley's air, demanding imperiously that I whitewash the walls every year, and the harsh scenography of the coal mines I roamed, sometimes daily.

Many women who had no business there came and went through our house.

My vanity was well fed by their prying, jealousy-laden curiosity, and they sought me out to make sense of what I could possibly have that was so special, where my reckless assurance came from in letting them get so close to my soul, to my love, and to the love I scattered all around. To them I cut the ridiculous figure of a fairy, imagined and blind. I intrigued them, and they, triumphant, would decide I was merely a stupid woman. So everything became clear. Women in love with Felix were part of my everyday ordinariness. Sometimes I even dressed the wounds my coming between them and their happiness had caused. I was bewilderingly generous.

Pride was my sharpest, bloodiest weapon — and the relish with which I wielded it when the time came. I was a warrior, though few people guessed as much. Even to me it was fairly unclear. Only Felix knew it. And he knew it with precision.