DEDAL

Dedal was a wide-open window in which Felix had set his soul, turned toward the world. A stage raised on the dyke of the Olt, across the street from the Hotel Central in Călimănești, that well-known emblem of the old spa town. A platform built of iron bars, very much like a docking gangway for the imaginary vessels that travelled the waters of the Olt, borne by the breeze off Mount Cozia every morning and evening. Otherwise, it was meant to be a bar, but it looked like a ship hauled up onshore, full of young, cheerful people. Carpeted, with sails of colourful nylon, a brown vinyl tarpaulin trimmed with golden fringe, and, in the early days, even an artesian fountain ingeniously contrived from two sprinklers and two water pumps bought at the market from Bessarabians and sunk into the water of the Olt. It was a delightful toy. Soon after the opening, four pedal-boats with orange floats were added to the inventory.

The name, Dedal, was a charming trick of chance. Elis, as we'd decided to call "the firm," was already taken. I say charming because I can't see what else the "Dedalists" could possibly have been called, other than... Dedalists.

We'd sold the Bucharest flat in great haste — practically gave it away for next to nothing to the first comer. The initial plan was to put the money in the bank and get by on my salary, and for him to go back to the typewriter. A different one, not Erika. She'd stayed behind somewhere on a balcony, in Bucharest.

But Felix couldn't live cut off from the world, and the one he'd just left repelled him. He denied it. In the background, Călimănești was striding spectacularly into the rising sap of spring, and Felix explored it with delight. He gave himself over to it in a self-forgetting I could do nothing about. And I didn't even quite know whether I ought to do anything. I too had been overwhelmed by its green explosion, warm and headlong.

The bar at Căciulata fell to me, because — wanting to be efficient — he'd built a terrace there too, again on the dyke of the Olt. I finished it.

I decorated it beautifully. Behind the bar reigned a scaled-up reproduction of a Mondrian, which ennobled it. It was very beautiful, but it didn't work out. It sat on a campsite, and what we'd thought would be in its favour had exactly the opposite effect. The people in the tents bought their beer from the grocery shop and made their coffee on camping-gas burners. Instead, they'd ask our waiters to keep their water and the meat for their mici in the fridge. Once the campsite had descended into a full-blown free-for-all, almost no one ventured through the tents as far as our terrace.

Dedal, though, drew people in. It had a good spot, there in the car park across from the Hotel Central, and people stopped at Dedal — at first out of curiosity, then out of habit. Gradually, many of the brighter young people of Călimănești gathered around Felix, becoming "the Dedalists," as they liked to call themselves. Everything that happened at Dedal was cheerful and interesting. Only for me were things a little different. In the first two months, the bar was robbed without scruple by Felix's waiters and waitresses. To help him, I had to learn accounting overnight.

For me, the summer passed quickly. But it was hard. Felix had abandoned me, at home all sorts of hostilities were being woven, and at work I paid dearly for my status as a former "minister material." The "boss" of the directorate had isolated me at the computer and, when asked what the lady from the ministry was up to, amused himself by explaining: "She's playing with the little mouse!" He meant the computer mouse.

Autumn was coming, the Dedal terrace was going out of service, and the profit from Felix's ventures was zero.

"We'll board up the terrace, insulate it somehow, and keep it open through the winter too" — that was Felix's decision.

The saving idea, though, came in the end from Alin. He talked him into buying a pool table with the last money we had left from selling the Bucharest flat.

What was serious, though, was that we no longer had a home of our own. We hadn't been at all well received in Călimănești. Ever since, I think of Eden only as a beautiful photograph. I no longer part its foliage along the paths, and I know that in its trees lurks a serpent gnawed by envy and malice. We no longer had a physical space of our own, to retreat to when we tired. We no longer had privacy — in short, we no longer had anything secure and ours alone.

That summer stayed with me. I'd drink beer all on my own, on the grass in front of "Dedal," in the breaks when I traded the unskilled labourer in me, hammering nails, for the "decorator" who had to polish a turd. I don't say this with bitterness but, in a way, with delight — though my soul was heavy. I had stepped into the skin of the real Daedalus. I padded the bar on the inside with the tarpaulin that had been its roof; under the carpet I laid mineral wool and plastic sheeting to insulate it from the cold, and the sides were closed in with windows. Inside it looked good. Outside, all I managed was to paint an enormous serpent on it, red on a blue ground. Only toward spring did I correct its appearance, covering it with a canvas-backed wallpaper, pink, fixed with thin wooden battens that formed squares. I designed a crowning border for it out of thin fir laths cut into diamonds. Since the windows were too small and out of proportion, I extended them in appearance with frosted glass. Below them I repeated the diamonds from the crown. In the end, I came up with an acceptable composition that lasted, physically, until the year 2000 — and in some people's memory, much longer.