MEZZO FORTE

We celebrated our dreams, finding a pretext in anything.

I had invented a way to defend our citadel on the seventh floor, and I kept it forever after. We made a great festival out of every crumb of hope, every drop that promised to open a road for us, even when our poor celebrated road had barely begun to show its first glimmer. We treated it as a thing already accomplished.

The squalor of the Jiu Valley laid siege, with stubborn daily persistence, to our power to hold out, body and mind. I had taken on the role of being a sort of totem planted in Felix's existence. I annihilated every hostility that came down on him, fortifying our house with an impenetrable aura. That was how things stood, in my view, and Felix kept that conviction alive in me. He would collapse into my arms like a tiger with poisoned arrows sunk into his glossy fur, and I would purify him with the deepest waters of my mind, from which he came back restored, nuzzling close like a cat and confessing in his own way:

"You're a dizzying water that frightens me a little, but you're also the only thing that calms me. What would I do without you?"

"I'm a Water Dragon," I would answer with the most perfect and sincere pride, and he would add, almost every time:

"Don't ever lie to me, Ligia!"

He defended me fiercely against any man who came near me. If I seemed even faintly interested in one, that man would simply vanish from around me as if by magic. He tested me at length, with an artisan's painstaking care, and if anything sounded alarming to him, he would blow that something to pieces with arguments that left no room for reply.

He defended me from all the women who streamed through his life as well. He cancelled them out by recounting to me, in lavish detail, the so-called advances he had just parried. It was the way he convinced himself that he wasn't lying to me. And he wasn't lying to me.

"There are truths that don't exist," he would explain.

He was convincing, and so, by implication, I agreed with him. And above all, I didn't ask the questions I wouldn't have liked to hear answered. Felix's "floozies" had always been out there, in all four quarters of the sky. The ships — or little ships — with which they pirated the skies of my Parâng sometimes grew a touch bolder. The first to ring at my door called herself Mona. I don't remember very well what she looked like. I was very busy putting the house in order, giving the fern a good soaking, planting flowers in their vases, preparing the carefully chosen delicacies, and setting the inevitable bottle of Havana Club into its proper aesthetic context. I loved Cuban rum and I was a master at mixing a daiquiri. I was waiting for Felix, who was coming back from a tour through Moldova, an occasion on which he had stopped off in Brăila to see his mother and, of course, the Danube.

Mona's explanation was that she'd come to get a job at the theatre, and that she had, from I-don't-know-whom, Felix's address — he was supposed to help her. She was from Galați. She begged a million pardons for daring to ring at our door, but she didn't know where to go until it was time to head back where she'd come from, since there was no chance whatsoever of being hired at the theatre… She'd been misled, in short — a total tangle I had no time to listen to. Emilia, my friend and neighbour across the landing, with whom I shared my washing machine — that is, we wheeled it from one flat to the other along the corridor — was watching Mona with one eyebrow arched fine as a question mark, meaning to signify: "And what's the story with this one?" I'd parked her at the top of the bed so she wouldn't get in my way, and she seemed sunk deep in reading Shakespeare's sonnets and in sighs that could break your heart. I answered Emilia with a shrug and got on with my work, because the hour was coming when I'd go to wait for Felix at the station.

It was a well-established ritual. We waited for each other at the station. With a single exception. I didn't allow myself to do it when the train arrived at midnight. The town, past a certain hour, was no longer quite safe. We loved to cross the austere footbridge, blackened by the smoke of the old steam locomotives, and to find again, somewhere in the middle of that little town so romantic in its banality and modesty, our fern and the vast rooms with their windows flung wide open toward the mountain beneath which the weight of our meetings was woven.

Mona, having set aside "old Will, whom she loved more than anything in the world," was studying a photograph of Felix with great attention, telling me about her recent sweetheart, who had told her how special she was. He had encouraged her to take life head-on, because they both deserved it — she and life, that is — and no effort should be spared in reaching her ideals…

I cut short her perorations, hoisted her up by a wing, pushed Shakespeare's sonnets into her arms — she'd complained she didn't know what to do with herself on the long road back to the void she'd come from, full of empty hopes (!) — and reached the station just as the train pulled in and Felix stepped down.

"This is Mona," I introduced her.

Felix had long, taut gestures. His gaze pinned the woman there, on the narrow platform between two railway tracks, and ground her into the earth. I watched her become a scatter of grey pebbles lost among the oily sleepers that held up the iron rails and the train above them.

Felix took me by the shoulders, kissed my hair, and said:

"Let's go home!"

The next day he spun me a lie stitched with thread of a glaring white, and the whole episode faded, as if it had been a thin, stray wisp of mist. Only Emilia made her firm point:

"What a waste of a good book — I'd never have given it to her!"

I was, by turns, beautiful, ugly, intelligent, or at least clever — and, by the more general opinion, utterly devoid of any sense of reality. I built castles of every size, at every street corner. I gave them away right and left, to whomever I pleased, with a good faith that poured me straight into the mould of foolishness. "Come back down to earth," said the ones who declared themselves my friends. The others smiled subtly at the corner of the mouth, exchanging glances of plain meaning: "Leave her to her grief!"

I wouldn't have admitted for the life of me that I was a mountain of vanity, that I loved my own stories, and that I had no intention of ever abandoning my own illusions. I did right. The confirmation came years later, when I was sharply put in my place by an incident that became, for me, exemplary.

On one of those days when I believed myself one with the deepest, most profound horizons imaginable, wanting to explain myself poetically to the world, I set down on paper the following absurdity:

i don't understand the people of Antarctica

nor their stellar stubbornness

this doesn't stop me writing verse

in the metre of a contemporary poet

with undoubted sexual complexes

who teaches at the University

a choice and arid sensibility...

After a very, very long time, there came a day I spent in the company of the contemporary poet. A whole day. We were travelling to Țebea together. At one point he looked at me a long while, studying me, and said: "You have such a pleasant face. How fortunate your husband is, to be able to rest each evening simply by looking at you." I wished the earth would swallow me. I hid, as fast as I could, among the descendants of Avram Iancu, gathered by the thousand around the old oak of bygone days. In passing I caught sight of the cement packed into its hollow to hold it upright. I had the sensation of carrying a piece of that grey substance in my stomach. No one, until then, had ever said anything so delicate, so beautiful to me.

But let me return to my point. I began to write a play. Felix was delighted and backed me with enthusiasm. I managed to finish it; I even got it as far as the drama department of Romanian Television, where I spoke with a lady very well known in the theatre world of those days, though now I struggle to recall her name. Such is the fate of stars, great or small. After a while they vanish into the fog. The lady received me with a courtesy directly proportional to the beautiful bouquet of flowers — obligatory, of course — that I set on her desk. "Your text is interesting," she assured me, and then explained patiently that perhaps a thing or two might need changing, as Caragiale put it, "on the essential points," that what was wanted were clear texts, ones that brought out "the struggle between good and… better." In conclusion, I was to wait in confidence: she would contact me. I waited full of confidence, and my play got lost in the belly of a drawer in the drama department of the great and only television of the day. A drawer just as obligatory as my bouquet. Then I went back to smoking meditatively, beside the window wrinkled with long trails of dust, and to admiring the Parâng. I had lost the urge to become a playwright. After a while, Felix asked me:

"May I use your characters?"

I said yes, and he set to writing. And so Erika came into our house. Felix bought her from an old man who lived near the courthouse, on the little street that climbs along the Maleia. In practice she had been given to him, the old man wanting, rather, to be rid of her. Typewriters were registered with the secret police, and it was a very serious matter to keep one clandestinely.

She was installed on a special little table by the window, at the edge of the field of sunflowers on the wall, so that Felix could see the whole of the Parâng. From then on, our mornings began with the little chime Erika gave each time she dropped down a line, swallowing the sheets of paper one after another.

We wondered how soon the secret police would take an interest in her, especially since Marius, who had taken a job at the theatre in Reșița, had managed on his very first tour in Yugoslavia to escape to Paris.

Writing became, for Felix, the valve through which he discharged his energies. The volcano that seethed in his depths seemed to settle with each outpouring of lava turned into words, then into lines carefully aligned by Erika, page after page.

I would wake to the smell of the coffee Felix made specially for me each morning and the velvety clatter of Erika's keys. I would rise from bed, sink into my armchair beneath the sunflowers, and wait.

"Shall I read to you?" Felix would ask.

"Can't you see that's what I'm waiting for?"

Time, the world, the "dramatic functionaries," as Felix called some of his colleagues — aged sometimes too soon by the coal dust that spared not even the theatre stage — my miners, the friends and enemies who wore down our green carpet day after day, everything, absolutely everything slid off our seventh-floor balcony. Only nights of love drawn out until dawn could rival those mornings.

"You two are a preposterous couple!" said Adrian, who turned up at our house one afternoon and stayed until we left it ourselves, when we moved to Bucharest.

Adrian was my friend. The whole time, I had the feeling that he placed himself between me and everything that could do me harm. He took it upon himself to wage the war against that bad part of Felix, the part that seemed to negate me and to turn me into something well-behaved and complementary to his personality, something set aside and kept safe there because it "looked good in the picture." Perhaps Adrian did it out of some male conqueror's reflex, since that was what he was, but to me it seemed he was leaping to my rescue. The tense game between Felix and me was visible to everyone. I stubbornly insisted on remaining a rock above any tide that threatened to drown me, while Felix flaunted a boundless superficiality, appearing to set no store by anyone or anything. Of me, he told the women who swarmed around him: "She's my wife — don't you lay a finger on her!"

My blindness intrigued Adrian. Of course he thought it senseless, but we never discussed it. He protected me with a watchful tenderness. "I love Ligia," he would declare to his sweethearts, whom he paraded beneath the yellow flowers on the wall of my drawing room — grown immense, since it completed itself with the hills and with the Parâng itself. When he first came to our house, he was accompanied by a "liana" woman, that breed of woman with a single objective: to coil herself around a man, suffocating him, annihilating him. She acts with precision, methodically. She lays herself at her victim's feet with a deceptive humility, to numb his every vigilance. One moment of weakness is enough, and the "liana" has him pinned, smothering his ankles, his knees and his arms, shackling him. Often they cannot take possession of their victims except by triggering their compassion, and they end, unfailingly, by making them feel guilty. There are male "lianas" too — but God preserve you from meeting a man like that.

At first he struck me as arrogant.

"I don't believe in love. Love doesn't exist. Excitement, a passing passion — call it whatever you like. Between a man and a woman, the notion of love has no content."

There were days and long evenings in which Adrian stayed at my side, Felix being carried off by his meanderings into obscure horizons — which is to say, I didn't know where he was or what he was doing. Adrian would try to teach me chess; we'd watch football matches together, or simply talk.

From the outside, all of it could be read otherwise. A very beautiful girl who had fallen in love with Adrian flung in my face her surplus of vengeful jealousy: "You're lying. You're a liar! The two of you aren't just friends. There's no such thing!" she screamed at me, and her beautiful eyes poured out rivers of flame. And yet there was such a thing.

But Adrian's sweetheart was right. We weren't friends, but something else. I felt his presence in a strange way. It resembled chemistry, but it was surely something else. A kind of remembering of a long history we had travelled together, something very like meeting your own double. A sort of antagonistic magnetism, because your own double draws you — not so you'll take it in your arms, but because you want to annihilate it. As in the famous series The Highlander, where the protagonists sense one another's presence from afar and their meeting is a confrontation that only one of them walks away from with his head on his shoulders. It seemed we had been caught in the same slit of time, but we didn't want the fight. Had we fought, one would naturally have been victor and the other vanquished. And we had no need of that, neither he nor I. A kind of understanding settled between us that intrigued Felix, though he tried hard to ignore it. But Adrian didn't want to defeat Felix through me — rather, he wanted to beat him at chess. Morning would catch them playing chess and yelling at each other.

"Adrian makes a great show of not being married. That's how he conquers women," Felix would say, in keeping with his habit of telling me, with humour, about his "conquests" over the female public on their tours to who-knows-where.

"Yes! And I tell every one of them you've got a gorgeous wife!" was Adrian's retort.

He passed from one woman to the next. Sometimes he brought them to me to be calmed. I would try to convince them not to overreach in their aspirations to get their hands on him. They looked at me strangely. His repeated routine — that he'd marry only me, once Felix divorced me — should have given me pause. Had I been a little more alert, I'd have understood it wasn't necessarily flattering, but rather ironic. Clara, my best friend, was the only woman Adrian ever wanted to marry. He did marry her, then left her too, but that's another story.

One thing, though, is certain. For nearly a decade, Adrian balanced the ratio of forces between Felix and me, and that was of real use to me. I remember one wholly special day. We climbed the Parâng. It was meant to be an unpretentious escapade. To ride up on the chairlift, floating above the forest, to drink a vodka at the end of the ride, the better to commune as deeply as possible with the surrounding nature, and that was about it. The idea came to us to climb the Little Parâng. It obsessed me. As a child I had watched it almost every morning and evening; I had dreamed with open eyes of winged horses on which I flew toward its conical peak, and it kept returning to me in a nightmare, always the same one. I would dream that I was climbing toward the mountain's summit, and every time, the forest at its foot would swallow me. A forest I could make no sense of, in which I lost myself among rough, threatening firs, until I woke drenched in sweat.

Felix didn't think it a good idea to swim through snow. He saw nothing entertaining in it. I insisted. Seen from below, the slope looked gentle enough, and I argued that we could rest as often as we liked, that no one was rushing us, and that we could turn back at any moment. Adrian took my side. We set off to climb the mountain. The sun blazed, melting into the snow; the sky was deep, a kind of blue ocean mirroring the mountains in its depths. Had there been no snow, the climb would have been easy and pleasant. But the snow was still deep, and soft enough to sink one leg after the other and to force a solid effort to bring them back to the surface. Indeed, it wasn't all that entertaining. I had a moment of hesitation.

"My whole childhood I dreamed I was climbing this mountain and couldn't reach the top," I said with regret.

"Then we climb, even if I have to drag you behind me the whole length of the ridge," said Adrian, and he took me by the hand and didn't let go until we reached the summit.

Felix climbed in zigzags. He fell far behind us and threw a genuine fit of rage. He bellowed! That the snow was getting into his boots, that we were imbeciles climbing a mountain in town "shoes," that we were ruining all his fun, and so on. There were several of us — that is, not only the three of us — but the others I remember only vaguely. Persida was certainly with us. She had become, without my noticing, a permanent shadow watching me ceaselessly from some corner. From that day, only three things stayed in my mind: Adrian's warm palm, Felix's fit of rage, and the fact that a dream of mine came true. I was, at last, on the summit of the mountain where I had dreamed all my childhood of standing. I had often spoken of it, likening it to Fuji-Yama, because that was how I had seen it for years from a window set somewhere in the belly of a soot-blackened apartment block. I was very happy, and with good reason. From then on I never again dreamed that I was climbing toward the summit of the mountain and that, every time, the forest at its foot would swallow me.

The void can annul every concrete trace of the Universe.

Felix was on the point of bringing his sojourn through the high school to an end. The return to the Institute of Theatre seemed close, and we waited feverishly for things to settle into normality. Into the proper kind, the kind everyone awaited.

We were deluding ourselves. Felix was doomed. With many precautions he announced to me that he had been summoned to Room X at the Militia headquarters — that is, to the Securitate. I had a panic attack. It was just like the evening when my apartment block and my seventh-floor kitchen began to sway. And it wouldn't stop. I stayed there with my eyes frozen on the light of the bulb in the ceiling, and a wave of terror ran through me from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. Annihilation, that was it, annihilation! It was all my brain could still think. I knew they would come for us one day. That they wouldn't leave us to ourselves. And still, the horror in the face of the accomplished fact left me paralysed.

"I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but you need to be prepared. To hell with them," he said in a muffled voice. "I'll handle them. They're nothing but an institution like any other. They want to keep me on a leash, that's all."

Felix cupped my cheeks in his palms, the way he did whenever he sensed me losing my grip, lifted my head — it had slipped down, my chin digging into my chest — and looked straight into the depths of my panic.

"They've hauled me in for a working-over. You want, of course, to finish high school, to go back to the Institute, don't you? That's what the Chief said too — that I should be salvaged for the theatre… You don't intend to run off like your friend, do you?… Who's the clown in that play you sent to Târgu Mureș?…"

I was so afraid that I couldn't tell whether he was afraid too. Nor could I quite grasp what he was telling me. But he was afraid, clearly. In me, the fear nested in every last cell, and stayed well preserved there for twenty years. I learned to live alongside it and to treat it like a cyst I could do nothing about. Only to ignore it, judging it benign, and to look for the strength to forget the metastases it was weaving through my brain.

Little by little, veil after veil fell from before my eyes. I saw differently the people who roamed our house and the various small incidents around me. Such as the one in which a charming blond friend who haunted our house asked Felix to type him a trivial certificate, and Felix strung out, along the bottom of the page, every character Erika possessed. "There — have your capitals and your punctuation marks too!" and all the while he roared with laughter. In those days, typewriters were forbidden. Erika was a clandestine typewriter.

A few weeks later, I came home from work early. I found Felix sitting on the carpet with the tape recorder in front of him. He was struggling to make out some mumbling, running the tape at different speeds.

"I recorded the guy from the secret police!"

He meant the Securitate officer who handled Felix. He lived in our same stairwell.

"You really are stark raving mad!" I said, collapsing into my armchair by the door.

"Unfortunately, nothing came of it; I didn't have time to set the thing up properly. The guy invited himself over."

He was very sad that it hadn't worked.

"Hey — aren't you afraid? Can't you ever just settle down? What if the guy had caught on? How the hell did you do it?"

He explained that he had put the tape recorder in the wardrobe and wrapped it in clothes so its motor couldn't be heard, and hidden the microphone under the armchair.

"Yes, you're stark raving mad! What good would it have done you?!"

"I'd have had proof that the guys are blackmailing me… It would have been terrific if I'd pulled it off. I steered the conversation so well! Such a shame!"

That was Felix. He plunged, with utter candour, straight into the void.

A few weeks later, Felix had it figured out:

"I've worked out what they want. To them you're a negligible quantity as long as you don't break ranks, but if you've got some skeleton in the cupboard or you play the clever one, they make you write little papers so you build your own file and lose any urge to ever escape the socialist camp. I'm filed under the heading — must not break ranks —, because Ceaușescu pardoned me and Marius Petrache fled to Paris. But I won't play by their rules. In fact, I told them: if I learn a bomb's been planted at a mine shaft, I'll come and tell you myself. Don't put me to telling you who's sleeping with whom around town, or who's cracking Ceaușescu jokes."

In any case, after the miners' strike of '77, the Jiu Valley practised "decimation," as we called it, half in jest, half in earnest. One in ten of the "friends" who dropped by our house was on "assignment." It wasn't at all hard to spot them. Felix refused to play their game, and that cost him. I can't recall the despair he sank into after Bibanu, the great actor, blew him to pieces with a single, simple gesture.

"I didn't want that hooligan back in the Institute" — that's reportedly what he said when asked why he had failed Felix at the acting exam.

"To hell with acting! You'll go into film directing!" I said, more in my mind than aloud.

The void was without margins and, contrary to every theory, had the density of a boulder that has pinned you beneath it, crushing you. But when, the following year, the same thing happened again, things began to grow plain. It took me three years to convince him to give up the idea of ever returning to the Institute of Theatre.

"They don't want you anymore, it's clear!"

Marius Petrache, in Paris, was exultant. He had been proved right. He had judged correctly the type of communist morality that grants you no right to any rehabilitation. It was then that I cursed my weakness in having sent Felix to Petroșani. He had wanted to go to Reșița, and I had opposed it. He could have been in Paris. That city, which he never got to see, would have suited him to perfection.

Around Felix a wall was rising that left him not even enough air to breathe.

"The boys have got nervous, by the look of it," Felix told me at last. "What are we going to do, Ligioara? Do you think you can hold out?"

He was afraid for me. The pit, the black hole like a chasm of endless night in which we lived, had come into full view with all its hideousness. The brave deeds and the heroics belonged to the generations born before us. Whoever parades his heroism on this subject certainly held no significant interest for the "system." Otherwise it wouldn't have let him slip so easily from its claws.

"You'll write — and that, no one can stop you doing. In the end, every ill turns to good! If you'd been a well-behaved student, knowing his place, with his school-leaving exam in order and at the proper time, you'd be an actor today, probably right there in Petroșani. Don't you see how many illustrious talents pass through this wretched theatre? More than likely, the idea of writing would never have come to you. You wouldn't have had the time, and it would have been a pity, because you're good."

He set to writing with a fierce zeal. He finished The Box of Monkeys, a bitter satire about tyranny, cowardice and informing, about captivity in a cyclical universe that marches in place. But he wasn't satisfied. Something was missing in the play's construction. He'd redo whole scenes, read them to me, and grow furious if he sensed any hesitation in my reaction. He abandoned it for a while and set to work on the novel Domino. Scenes from the Life and Love of a Vagabond. The subject was his bond with Erika. He would discuss Spinoza's Ethics with her. But he kept returning to the play. His labour was titanic. He would rewrite whole pages only to tear them up in a fury. One evening, I picked up the guitar and said to him:

"Here's how I see it. Right now this play sounds like this… and it ought to sound something like this!" — and I demonstrated on the guitar.

"Yes, sir!" said Felix, and the problem was solved.

He was overjoyed, and told everyone how I had played his play on the guitar.

We were aware that Felix's plays had no chance of seeing the footlights on any communist stage. In 1983, through the notorious Mangalia Conference, the guillotine of censorship came down the length and breadth of the country. Even so, he kept sending his plays everywhere.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Russia and his perestroika was spoken of as a true miracle, there began to flow from Erika's keys a delightful text about doing away with the two hard-edged world ideologies.

"The world can't be divided into black and white!" Felix decreed, and wrote in a single breath The Comedy of Fools, prudently naming it Chess Is Chess and Commands Respect.

"This one's bound to be staged! It's a pacifist play!" he encouraged himself.

He received important confirmations from directors for each of his plays. His most advanced discussion was with the theatre in Târgu Mureș. Kincses Elemér had shown interest in staging one of the plays, but in the end, from the literary secretary, he received the following text: "I congratulate you on the quality of your play. Unfortunately, we cannot stage any debut play." I don't recall which of them it was, because he had sent all three.

And Dinu Săraru promised that The Box of Monkeys would be read at the Teatrul Foarte Mic, where public readings were held to promote original drama.

The last blow, which Felix took square on the soft of the skull, was "a Christmas present." Without any explanation, in the final days of December 1984 (a year I always associated with George Orwell's novel "1984"), he was thrown out of the theatre.

At that year's end, we were feverishly awaiting the holidays. A week before Christmas I had even hung, the whole length of the bookcase, a sort of banner on which I'd written, in shards of coloured baubles: "Happy Holidays!"

It turned out the exact opposite. I no longer had the strength to react in any way. Mușata Mucenic and Mugur, who had stayed with us for the holidays, took part of the blunt, packed blow, coming up with the solution: "You'll come to Bucharest. There you'll manage differently!" Mușata was directing a production at the theatre in Petroșani, and Mugur was credited with the set design.

Felix left for Bucharest. For a time he tried playing the worker at a plant that produced viscose. The solution had seemed a salvation, though it was really downright tragic. We had decided, Mușata and I, that we couldn't leave him in the clutches of his enemies in Petroșani, because there were always plenty of people to be found who hated Felix, with or without reason.

Besides, this way he was escaping a little the poisonous vigilance of "the blue-eyed boys." Bucharest was rather large, even for them. But it seems they got somewhat annoyed. One weekend, when Felix was able to come home, we found a beat officer at our door. He checked both our papers and fined me, curtly, a thousand lei — an enormous sum — because my husband, that is, Felix, whose legal residence was in Brăila, was living illegally with me!

It was the first time I ever gave a statement to the police. I can't claim to have any self-control. Corner me and I turn aggressive and reckless. When the militiaman asked what my profession was, I sneered: "Sociologist — if you even know what that is!" The militiaman went scarlet, and a colleague of his at a nearby table rebuked me: "Come now, we're not quite that uneducated either!"

I didn't pay the fine. I tidily filed an appeal. A judge — who looked quite young even beneath the folds of the robe she was wrapped in — after scolding me for having put my hand on the "bar," asked the clerk under her breath: "Who's this clever militiaman, then?" Then she addressed me in a voice not lacking in amusement:

"Are the two of you legally married?"

"Yes," I said, keeping a proper distance from the "bar."

"Make a copy of your marriage certificate and put it in the file."

That was all. For a while, whenever I passed by the courthouse — and I did so daily — a choking cinder lingered in my throat.

Our separation lasted better than a year. A hard, strange year in which each of us could project ourselves outside the other, could find arguments for and against, could give free rein to our prides and to the whole scaffolding of "affectogenic" needs of one kind or another.

For me, Alin had become the chief charge. I felt my heart tearing when I saw the Parâng shackled in clouds and knew that up there, beneath the clouds, among the snowdrifts, Felix had exiled my child. He had made the decision after the first three weeks had passed since the start of my child's life as a schoolboy.

"We'll put him in the ski school. He has to grow into a man, not some limp little girl," he replied when I told him I didn't feel able to leave my child alone among strangers, that I thought with dread of him riding the chairlift up by himself, of his having to spend months on end deep in the heart of the mountains, where bears and wolves roam, and where a single wrong step can plunge you into snow several metres deep.

"Woman's nonsense, fretting over the block of salt that'll never fall! Between your comfort today and my son's good tomorrow there's nothing to discuss. A ski school is a chance few people get — don't you realize that?! You'll get used to it!" Felix rebuked me.

Yes. I got used to living with my heart in my mouth, with a second pang of fear behind every heartbeat, and with the image of my child as he was when I'd asked him how he was managing up there alone. The two of us were standing by the window in the dining hall of the Sports School at the 2,000-metre mark, watching the slope outside glitter under yellowish strips of light. "All right, but you stay here with me too," the child answered me, with grave seriousness, without looking at me.

No one could understand how I came to accept such a thing. Not even I. When I enrolled Alin in the first grade, I chose, of course, the best school and the most renowned teacher. After only a few days, when the not-quite-perfect little strokes in the child's exercise book had been struck through with a big "Z," red and plainly irritated, I grew truly worried. Out of curiosity I had taken the arithmetic book and challenged Alin. In play, I had him work through various exercises, and in less than an hour we'd reached the end of the arithmetic.

"It's easy, Ligioara," the child assured me.

On a small slate — a charming toy he always kept on his desk — an "x" and a "y" would cross, for hours on end, from one side of the "equals" sign to the other; he was absorbed by the idea that passing through "0" could set any of the commonly known numbers equal to any other. Dan, who was a mathematician, watched him with amusement and encouraged him: "You're pulling a little trick of calculation that isn't quite mathematically correct, but it's good that you set yourself problems of this kind. Well done!"

"What's this crossing-out?" I asked Alin, and he, as though he had committed some major crime, told me:

"The teacher crossed them out and said to do another page of strokes."

The child had done them, but they were far more "apocalyptic" than the ones crossed out in red on the previous page. The future presented itself to me in sombre colours. I couldn't get the better of the far-too-strict and pedantic teacher, and I had no way to fight Alin's little strokes. They simply wouldn't straighten out, and that was that. I knew that the start of school marks a child forever, and that the power of educators — especially the renowned ones, be they primary teachers or professors — is far greater than we're willing to admit, and not always for the good. It kept nagging at my mind that Mara, my childhood friend, had become, before my very eyes, the victim of our maths teacher. Her story became, for me, exemplary. The two of us had shared the same desk from the first grade. Mother didn't like Mara — or rather, she didn't like Mara's mother. "She's full of grand-lady airs," Mother would say. "If she had to scrape for every penny, she wouldn't spend the whole blessed day at the hairdresser's," she'd add with rancour. In the seventh grade my cousin Nuți came to live with us. "You'll have to share a desk with your cousin," Mother decided, and the day before school began, I screwed up my courage and knocked on Mara's door to break the news. I repeated, like a parrot, what Mother had told me, not daring to step past the threshold. Mara listened, holding the door half open. I begged her not to be upset. "I understand," she said simply. I remember, though, that her eyes narrowed a little as she closed the door. She hadn't invited me in. Our friendship was ending abruptly. Part of the credit I enjoyed — little monster bent on a straight row of tens — had, in the teachers' minds, reflected onto Mara as well. She was a good pupil. She moved to the desk in the row by the window, beside a girl a year older than us, a repeater. Mara was only fourteen, but the beautiful woman she was to become had already taken precise shape, despite the white, forever-starched frills of her little schoolgirl's pinafore. The maths teacher punished, with a wholly gratuitous sadism, the future woman glimpsed beneath those white frills. He did it out of a perfidious, malevolent male instinct. "Yes, that's what I felt too," Mara confirmed to me, across the years. "He really did grind me into the ground. In fact the man admitted to me, years later, while the two of us happened to be reflected together in a shop window, that he was sorry he'd never got his hands on me!" "You're a halfwit, you're stupid! You're just copying your deskmate," the teacher would tell her, and the child, who only two years earlier had been a good pupil, withdrew into herself and began to do as he pleased. The regression was lightning-fast. Mara would drop her eyes to the floor and keep stubbornly silent whenever she was wronged. Gradually, as if by contagion, nearly all the teachers began to treat her the same way.

After I came to know Vasile, Alin's teacher — whom I later called "bădița Vasile," because he seemed to step straight out of Ion Creangă's memoirs — the decision to send my child up into the Parâng came to seem right to me. I had to get him out of the hands of a teacher about whom I had learned, quickly enough, that she belonged to the all-show-no-substance sort, and I'd been assured that the hierarchy of worth she decreed for the children who came under her hand was rather rigid, formal, and even self-interested.

Then, two things made me defend my decision against objections of the sort: "You were a criminal of a mother!" First, the feeling of pride. I was with Felix on the chairlift, at the end of Alin's first week spent on the mountaintop. On the last stretch before reaching the 2,000-metre mark, I was looking, for the first time with real attention, at the slope snaking below, and wondering aloud how long it takes before you can ski down it.

"After a week," Felix answered me.

"You mean my Alin skis down that ravine?"

"Yes, he does!"

We got off the chairlift, and just then my child was coming toward us on his skis. I couldn't believe it.

"Yes, it's him," Felix assured me — he had supervised, "live," Alin's process of adapting to his new life.

We set off together toward the chalet and, like any mother, I wanted to carry Alin's skis on my back.

"What are you doing, Alin! Carry your own skis!" — a harsh rebuke thundered behind us.

Alin obeyed without a murmur, and I was left without a reply. It was his coach, a woman of delicate physical build, dark-haired, petite, but volcanic and of a sincerity that could put you in a tight spot. Juja was her name, and she had been a national skiing champion. I was to discover that my son, who used to catch cold and get a red throat at the slightest thing, withstood the Parâng's bitter frosts splendidly. My child was being tempered.

"How do you know, little one, what to put on in the morning when you go out on the slope?"

"Well, Juja comes in the morning, opens the window for us, and we stick our hand out to see whether it's cold or warm."

The other thing that had set my mind at ease was the certainty that the new teacher really was good. Four years on, Alin confirmed I hadn't been mistaken.

"Vasile graded us on merit."

Yes, "bădița Vasile" was a good choice. He marked the children's performance fairly, gave them self-confidence, taught them to assess themselves, and that, it seems, counted for a great deal, over time, for Alin.

For Felix, things stood otherwise. He had been annulled, erased from his own existence.

"Let me show you how the moon rises from behind the Parâng. I promise you a full moon as big as a cartwheel!" I decided one evening.

I had taken up astronomy a while back, because it had seemed absurd to me to look at the sky and not recognize at least the main constellations.

"You know there'll be a full moon?" Felix asked me.

"I know."

"And you're saying you'll hand me the moon out of the sky tonight?"

"In ten minutes it rises, and it's dedicated to you alone. Look — the moon's beyond the mountain. It'll climb up toward us any moment now," I said.

We settled meekly onto the balcony. The crest of the Parâng was lit by a thread of light. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty… After half an hour, still nothing had happened. Only the streak of light behind the mountain was a little more pronounced. Of the moon, not a sign. Felix was silent, staring fixedly at the mountain's crest. He was so tense that I felt dread take hold of me. What if I'd got it wrong?

"I'm just going to the bathroom. Don't leave, because the moon has a habit of bursting onto the sky all at once. It's running a little late because it climbs the mountain's flanks more slowly."

I took the astronomical almanac and shut myself away with it in the bathroom. I couldn't have got it wrong, because I had checked the time of moonrise several times over. Why wasn't the moon appearing? The answer was simple. Because the time printed in the almanac was that of the Astronomical Observatory in Bucharest, and we were on a different meridian. I mobilized all my knowledge of physics and mathematics and recalculated the time difference for the moon to reach us. By the time I came back out onto the balcony, the sky above the Parâng had changed colour.

"Look, there it is, rising!" Felix said with relief.

I explained to him the business of the meridians.

Fallen into himself, there on a seventh-floor balcony, Felix had believed, for a few moments, that even the Moon was refusing to rise because it was he who waited for it…