Brăila

It was unexpected for me to see Brăila in Felix's absence. We had planned to see it together. He had described it to me in lavish detail. I took an enormous risk in confronting it on my own. Perched in his bed, in the "front" room of the little house on Roșiori Street, my belly rounded like a pumpkin just ripe for picking, I searched feverishly, in every object, for the man I loved. I realized how little I knew about him. Photographs, older ones or newer ones. That was what I wanted.

Whoever throws away old photographs makes a great mistake. By overlaying images frozen in "snapshots" onto the living people you know, you gain the surprising chance to plunge into realities parallel to your own. You let the poses frozen in photographs come to the foreground, and you recover a part of the past of the people who interest you.

My first memories of Brăila.

First, the whole family paraded past me, full of exuberance, of encouragement, and, in the good tradition of the place, threw a proper feast. Speaking of feasts, the people of Brăila I've known over the years — I don't think they ever missed a chance to celebrate. Felix would tell me, with relish, how the whole family gathered, young and old, around a table laden with every good thing to greet the total solar eclipse sometime in the '60s. If the end of the world was going to come anyway, then it was only fitting to meet it properly!

Felix's grandfather came first and brought me freshly caught Danube shad. He bucked me up:

"You should know, you've got a strong man!"

He told me how he had taken him, when he was only a few years old, around 10, out to the fields at Însurăței. He suddenly found him standing before the horses, which were neighing and rearing up on their hind legs, while the child, planted stiffly in front of them, his little fists clenched, was screaming:

"You're no bigger devils than I am!"

Toward evening, I wanted to see the port, the docks, and the entrance to the catacombs. The next day I boarded the train and set off for Bucharest.

Felix was right. The plain is beautiful. The train, sinking into it, had become an organic extension of me, and time had paused, to steady its breathing. The people and the place I was just now drawing away from were gradually fading from my mind. Only Felix lingered, a somewhat new Felix, to whom I wrote:

"I ask myself, quite calmly, might I not be a spectator? The most faithful of your spectators? So faithful that this has become a necessity, for me as much as for you?"

I went on noting my states and sensations in the unmistakable style of Georg Trakl. I loved Trakl. For years I filtered the world through the lines of his Psalm. It is an interesting therapy in which you distance yourself from yourself by sinking sensorially into everything that happens outside you, and by loading onto the "perceived object" all the weight of your inner confusions.

"A shepherd, a toy stuck into the field. Over his sheep the Sun dallies, slicing the dark storm clouds to pieces.

The first stop. Silence. Motion frozen in an unexpected freeze-frame, then the smooth rolling of the wheels. Plain. A cart bogged down in a sheet of faintly trembling water, and the inevitable plowed field. Buildings that break the perfection of the horizon. Wells, well-buckets fluttering in the breath of the wind, bored telegraph poles, running past cows and chicory flowers.

Another stop. People almost inert and plump hens, two women on a bench, arms crossed over their chests, the man with a cap and his hand extended into a little green circle. And again the plain. The marshes, even the very small ones, give off stillness and the certainty of death. An abandoned well and, in the distance, a row of trees. 'There they are, they've arrived!' says a Japanese haiku. The Sun dissolves into white foam beneath black-and-brown storm clouds.

My love, I miss you so! I've deified you a little.

That's it, we're stopping again. A crowd of people waiting for a train. Another one. Ours nobody takes any notice of, and it slips off into the great green plain. I'm sleepy. I want to dream of you. The heavy rain sings on the tin roof of the carriage. The grinding of the wheels and again a stop, a departure... A slowed rolling, feeling its careful way over one switch after another. Then that station roofed over with layers of black crows, keeping stoic watch in the summer rain. Many large drops strike the window. A scrap of a man in a gray wool sweater runs uselessly from one carriage to another. A woman in mourning follows him meekly. Useless — my heart breaks with pity. At last, back in the plain with its little clumps of yellow flowers. The black sky, menacing as a seismic wave, falls behind. The train races on, sure of itself, toward a brightened plain.

Could it be an omen?"

After a few hours of reverie, in which I watched the plain with all the concentration I could muster and grew tired of counting the stations, I came to a conclusion.

It's settled: I don't like the villages of the plain. Their houses lie belly-pressed to the ground.

Geo stayed silent for a while.

I respected her silence. I too knew D. quite well. He was one of my first friends in WoW. He'd greet me promptly whenever I logged into the game. Talking with him reminded me of times gone by and amused me. The frontal assault, followed by cold withdrawal, with controlled shades of mockery, only to come back like a boomerang to the same purpose. He tried to harvest victories from anywhere, including the meadows of Azeroth. I savored his conqueror's strategies. It was clear he wasn't interested in me, beyond the pleasure of a scorecard cultivated out of male reflex, since he showed little willingness to waste time helping me advance in the game. He sent me a sword, just once, and that was about it. But he kept me talking, trying to wrap himself in an interesting light, that of a misunderstood loner. For a long time he had insisted I send him a photograph.

"It's no use to you," I had tried to make him see.

"Yes it is. I want to know what a fairy looks like."

"You'll have to take my word for it. A good fairy can only be beautiful. Isn't that enough?"

"Well, I have no way of knowing she's beautiful — maybe she's under a curse and she's ugly."

"You're special," I teased him fondly.

"I know, I've been told before. They don't make boys like me anymore," he shot back promptly.

"You cocky thing!"

After a while, I had to tell him my age. Too many people on the server already knew. I made him read my CV online. He complied instantly, and when he came back he parried charmingly.

"I've seen for myself how capable you are, but I didn't find a single photograph!"

We were in a party. He was helping me with quests, and for a while we talked strictly about strategies for killing monsters in the hazy atmosphere of Netherstorm. Finally, with the spontaneous, playful reaction he's forever practicing, he let loose in a huff:

"Hey!... you could at least have told me you're my mother's age!"

"Yes, I could have, but you'd have ignored me at once. I warned you I'm the good fairy, not Ileana Cosânzeana!"

"Eh, well!" was his reply.

We stayed friends.

"I need some advice," he said one evening.

"Go ahead!"

"It's on the romantic front."

"I thought as much."

"How can I forget a girl I cared about enormously."

"You can't. The solution is to accept reality as it is."

"So I have to let time pass. I'm sending you something, please read it!"

He sent me a page from his diary, which began on downright tragic notes: "I keep this diary in order to unburden myself of the spells of heartache I'm going through, or to fill a great void left in my soul..."

What followed was the story between him and Geo.

"You threw yourself recklessly into a dangerous sea."

"Yes, but..."

"You're a smart guy, you knew you were taking a risk, didn't you?"

"I didn't expect to drown so fast."

"You're still too young, my dear. Be glad that you were happy, and next time be just as happy!"

"Damn it! I even cried. And I don't regret it, because I felt relieved. I still can't take in the idea that I won't see her anymore. I'll need time. Right now I've died a little."

"Go take a dip in the ocean, or, well, whatever you've got over there."

"The Mediterranean. I can't. The water's too cold right now."

"Ha! Ha! Ha! See, your sense of reality has come back?"

"But let's get back to WoW," Geo resumed. "I'd quit smoking about a year before. I wanted to smoke again. I don't know why. And I made a pact with myself. I'll take up smoking, but I'll quit WoW. I knew it was affecting me socially and psychologically. I'd had a bout of depression. Maybe it was from the lack of smoking, maybe from the presence of WoW, maybe from the job where I felt terribly useless. I was on antidepressant treatment. I told myself: 'I'm not crazy!' and I stopped taking it. I drew up a summary of what I wanted to do. I realized that smoking was a part of me, even though I no longer felt the conscious need to smoke. I realized I had to change my job, but that this called for sacrifices that didn't really square with WoW anymore. I decided to treat myself for the depression, which had already reached a moderate level. No sooner said than done. I quit WoW, took up smoking again and studying for various things I'd put on standby — things that, truth be told, I don't think I'd ever have finished in WoW, or with WoW around. A master's degree, a driver's license, a certification that gave me greater credibility in the eyes of a possible new employer. I passed all three in half a year, right after I quit WoW.

Okay, next! Next, what? Well... next, nothing... next, I had to fill the time with something. After all, WoW had poured plenty of adrenaline into my blood. Half a year of exams stood in for that absence as best they could, but they ended too. So, in the next stage, I changed jobs, became a workaholic, took two more exams... Those ended too. I'm max level here too... And now, what do we do? Life is barren without WoW, but with WoW I deny it entirely. I think I've decided to take up slalom between jobs, as my next extreme sport. I ought to leave for Amsterdam, but I can't bring myself to leave the company I'm at now, and, what's more, I've gotten another job offer in Berlin that strikes me as very tempting in terms of professional satisfaction... I'm like a child in a toy store... Anything for adrenaline, I suppose... Jobs, lovers, vacations in exotic countries, exams, too many responsibilities taken on at work — they have been and still are for the adrenaline. I don't know if I'm addicted to it because of WoW, because I've always been this way... But I didn't used to push things quite to the extreme. Certainly, the need for events in my life is owing to WoW. My life can no longer be anything but extremely dynamic, and it is so, in very large part, thanks to WoW. I left behind in WoW a character I keep trying to reproduce, by every means, in real life... She began as a copy, and now I myself am a copy of her. She jumped out from behind the monitor into 'real life' and goes looking for raids and heroic instances, and, naturally, she's never satisfied with herself unless she's perfect. She's always against the system, whatever it may be. She's Gosu."

Felix had asked me to give birth to our child in Brăila.

He had all but ordered it: "I want him to be a Brăila boy!" — but the real reason was to give himself one more assurance. He was afraid I would leave him. That I wouldn't follow him down the tangled, absurd road on which he had lost his way. I tried to fulfill his wish. I went to Brăila. For the return I had purposely chosen a slow local train. I needed to think about what I was going to do. I had entered a hard game, I had done so willingly, the game had become reality, and this reality would, in two months, bear the name of Alin.

No — my child, for practical reasons, could not be born in Brăila. I spoke, I wrote in my daily journal about our child, but first and foremost it was about my child. The worlds in my brain split in two and arranged themselves in sharp tiers. The one above, like a categorical imperative, was the child I was about to bring into the world. My soul, crowned by a woman irreversibly in love, naturally kept jumbling the two foregrounds.

To the world around me I was a creature deserving of all pity — that is, if I was dealing with indulgent people, for I sometimes also caught clear reactions of lofty contempt of the "look at this fool, would you!" sort, or, as in my mother's case, of despair. Come to think of it, the expression made famous by Alin's generation fit me: I was a wreck.

Only in appearance. Never again did I have the strength to wage a war, to the death, against all who stood in my way, as I did that summer. I believe the whole world rests on the incredible capacity of women to protect their young, even those not yet come into the world. And even if she doesn't do it sword in hand, in her very substance every mother becomes an agile warrior, unpredictable, hard to defeat.

When Felix — with the explosion of light he spread around me — simply vanished, all I could do was slide into the most complete confusion. In the hundreds of pages I wrote, I strung onto a transparent thread a pain such as neither heaven nor earth had ever seen. All my thoughts had collapsed into the void. I didn't want to understand what was happening to me, why I couldn't find him again in the familiar places, why nightfall came as a relief, because weariness sank me gently into the calm waters of sleep. Only his son, in my womb, kept me awake, made me responsible for the day to come. Memory has the good habit of erasing, after a while, the memory of the things that hurt you. When I look back across time toward that year, the longest of my life, I remember in thousands of details every moment that brought me closer to the greatest miracle a woman can live through. The birth of the child. For him, for the child in my womb, I made myself whole again, I shook off the sadness and rejoiced. So it was meant to be! The joy of Alin's coming into the world was entirely mine. For almost everyone else it was unseemly, or sad, or — their business how they saw it. No one brought me flowers at the maternity ward.

There were no ultrasounds in those days. The conviction that I would give birth to a boy belonged entirely to me. It was the show of the century when I began to howl in the delivery room that I needed food, that I was starving and couldn't give birth because I didn't have enough energy. The poor midwife tried to convince me I wouldn't be able to eat anything, but she brought me a platter of macaroni and cheese from the kitchen. I set to eating with a will. After three mouthfuls I asked her to take the macaroni clear out of my sight. I wasn't entirely alone in the world. Auntie Mioara, who was a nurse at the hospital, stayed with me, while at the same time looking after my mother, who was trembling like a leaf in the hallway. Her gentle calm soothed me a little. I think all the women in the world scream in the moments of birth: I'M DYING! And probably that's exactly what happens. Because, after the child's first cry, still bloodied, the woman dies all at once, so that an entirely new one may be born.

"You're not dying," Auntie Mioara told me, stroking my forehead.

I had no control over my womb. I thought it would explode into smithereens. Ah! I didn't think — I was certain that's what would happen! Then, all at once, my son burst into the light.

"It's a boy!" the conviction-turned-certainty rang out in my brain, and the first cry with which Alin met his unpleasant contact with an aggressive world, full of hands that jostled him for all they were worth, dripped into every cell of me a happiness that only God and women know.

The sun set the horizon ablaze with the warm light of evening. I had barely glimpsed him before dozens of hands reached out toward him and made him disappear.

"He's hungry! He's a pretty little thing, looking for food with his little mouth," said Auntie Mioara, after she came back to me — for she had gone off together with the midwife and the other hands that had snatched my child away, to make sure he'd be well looked after.

Ha! So that's why I must have felt hungry!?

They laid me on a bed and ordered me not to move for a while. I stared at the white ceiling and understood nothing. So, I had given birth, and they had taken my child and fastened around my wrist a gauze cord with a number on it. What if they mixed him up with other babies!

"No one will mix him up, he has the same number fastened to his little hand," Auntie Mioara reassured me.

I was bewildered. I had the feeling that oddities like these happen to someone else, not to me. Pinned to the bed, on the doctor's firm orders, I slept for a while. From time to time a nurse would wake me, checking my abdomen, as if trying to settle it back into its former place. Toward midnight, they put me in a wheelchair and moved me to a private room. An eternity of my son's life had passed and I still hadn't seen him.

"I want to see my child," I kept telling the nurse who was tending to me.

"Don't worry, you'll get your fill of seeing him!" she informed me, as professionally as could be.

I waited until she vanished from my line of sight, and I set off to find my child.

"Where are you going? Mind you don't fall," said the woman I shared the room with, after me.

But I was already gliding along the walls of a long corridor that I knew led to the newborns' wards. I found that I could walk without trouble, and I couldn't understand all the fuss about pinning me to the bed. To be fair, I didn't ask for explanations either. Entirely different concerns were spinning in my head. I kept feeling my abdomen and couldn't grasp that inside it my child no longer romped about, making wave upon wave. If he was no longer there, where was he? What had they done with him? For a few moments I panicked. Oh, how dreadful Felix's absence was. No obstacle would have stood in his way. He would have turned into a mountain of joy and forced everyone to take part in it. It was past midnight. The corridors I walked were deserted, eerie even. I seemed unreal to myself, floating like a ghost in the veils of my nightgown. It was red, with a black lace bodice, lined with a transparent veil, also red. Very luxurious and out of place in a hospital. I reached the threshold of a ward with its door open. Inside were two women in white coats, and along the wall, set in little baskets, the babies.

"What are you doing here? You're not allowed here!" one of the women greeted me, without the slightest kindness.

Frozen in the doorway, my voice strangled, trying to recognize my child in one of the little baskets lined up along the wall, I barely managed to get out:

"I'm looking for my child!"

"He's not here, these are the recently born ones! What's your name?"

I transformed as if by magic. I think I was growing angrier by degrees, and it showed. I told her my name and the hour I'd given birth. She moved a little among the baskets and led me to my child. He was sleeping so peacefully that I wanted to nudge him to make sure he was alive.

"Don't touch him, you'll wake him! I've fed him, I've changed him. He's perfectly fine. Tomorrow they'll call you to nurse him. Go back to your room and don't worry."

What do you mean, not touch my own child?!

I don't remember how that night passed. I remember only my child's face. The next morning they called me and placed him in my arms. I cannot describe the feeling a mother has when she nurses her child at the breast for the first time. Do not dare to disturb it. It will surely tear you apart.

The sand of Tanaris had gotten even into my soul.

My warrior, Ligia, is an orc female. I set her tusks to the smallest size, though it was hard. Orcs are ugly mutants, like almost all the Horde races, until the Blood Elves came onto the scene. I was concerned with Ligia's appearance — that is, I did everything in my power to avoid the proverbial ugliness of orcs. Can the wrapping we're packaged in really be so important? It seems it can.

My Ligia is stiff, she has strange, slightly watery eyes, and the expression of a decent cannibal. I think she represents me. I consider her a success, even if some — quite a few — regard her with indulgence.

For a few days I had been wandering the desert of Tanaris, circling the ruins swarming with trolls. I was a sad warrior, in tattered armor, hauling on my back the hammer I had grabbed by force from Peacemaker in Uldaman. I rolled need on it, even though it wasn't mine to take. "Ninja!!!" Peacemaker screamed, and kicked me out of the group. It was hard to make him see that I hadn't broken the rule of the game deliberately, but had only made a mistake out of inexperience.

If you enter the game without friends from the outside to help you, and if you don't communicate easily, no one will waste time helping you beyond a formal courtesy, and you'll find yourself in a world made dangerous by its elitism, its intransigence, irony, and even cruelty. You can crash into the jagged walls of a world taken over by people too involved, too identified with animated characters worked from a keyboard. To a great extent, WoW is not a game and not a virtual reality. It's a competition you either qualify for or you don't, just as Georgiana had described it.

For instance, in order to understand even a little of what the warrior is supposed to do in an instance, I first had to be thrown out of a party with great fanfare. In my opinion, I had done everything with a great sense of responsibility. I had attacked the beasts, run from one to another with unmatched valor, while everyone screamed at me. They were screaming, because it was being written to me in capitals:

"NOOOOB!!!! WOW is not a game for you!!!!"

Sequences paraded through my mind, reminding me of my warrior's failures. The thought of giving up WoW was not at all to my liking, even though it seemed obvious that I had to. First, because I enjoyed it. And then, I had the feeling I was being rejected, and that thought enraged me. I can lose a battle, two, three, a hundred... but I cannot accept defeat. I won't make it through, I told myself with the most sincere sadness. I had two more levels to go before I could reach Outland too, and I was marking time. Better to go for a wander through the jungle, I decided, and was getting ready to mount the lion with bat wings.

"Hi."

"Hi," I answered, staying put and spinning around to figure out who had greeted me.

"Who are you?" I asked, thinking it was some old acquaintance who'd had the wacky idea of naming himself Deces.

"Nobody."

"Ah, a sort of Ulysses, then. Your name is rather strange."

"I know. Want me to help you with some harder quest?"

"Of course, if you have the time."

"I'll be gone a minute. I'll be right back. Think about what quest you want to do. But make it a hard one."

He won't come back, I told myself, and I flew off toward Feralas. But he came back, and we set off to roam the forests of Feralas together, I astride my gray wolf and the warlock on a black stallion with hooves of fire. I had a strange feeling. That forest seemed real to me. I could hear the clatter of hooves and tried not to snag myself on some bush at the edge of the path, convinced it would have scratched me and hurt. We reached the walls of Dire Maul, a former city of the elves. The warlock was ten levels higher than me. He easily killed all the sinister giants patrolling among the ruins of the former city. We found the tunnel that was to lead us into the instance. In the tunnel the Song of Elune was playing. I stopped.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm listening to the elves' music. I like it very much."

"So do I. I'll be away a little longer," said the warlock.

"Okay!"

And so began the long friendship between my warrior, Ligia, and the warlock Deces.

Rodica Mihăilescu was known, rather, by her pen name, Rodica Padina.

She happened to live in an apartment block in Palace Square. Her balcony commanded the wide view toward Știrbei Street, and amid the jumble of rooftops I could make out just where, cut out of time, the chestnut trees of "Three Balloons" were living out their incredible story.

Rodica was Felix's lawyer. Few women have ever struck me as more beautiful than she was. Nothing showed in her but her soul — so rare a thing! She took on the defense of Felix and Marius. Surely that, too, made me see her as so beautiful. I remember climbing the monumental staircase of the Grand Tribunal alongside Marcel Anghelescu and Constantin Dinulescu, two great actors I had until then seen only in films or on stage. She had mustered them to a battlefront against the absurd, and they had come, in the sincere conviction that there is but one divine justice.

The two of them deserved their road to the stage, if they had passed an exam as severe as the one for acting school. In those days, only some twenty candidates out of a good few hundred achieved this feat.

Maestro Marcel Anghelescu looked straight into my rarefied, fear-stricken soul and said to me:

"Through his great desire to step onto the stage, Felix is a promise of the Romanian theater. For him the stage is a reality beyond ordinary reality. It is a descent into the depths, exactly there where you find nothing but human substance. Not norms and rules, but soul. That is what lies where the curtain rises or falls, in order to convey something. I saw this young man in a performance at the Theater Institute and I saw how important the stage is to him. Is he believable? I am sorry I did not know your husband better, but when Rodica and Zoe Anghel Stanca asked me to come, saying my plea would help him, I came."

I was an ant lost on the sumptuous stairs of that imposing palace. Was I?! No, I was nowhere at all. If anything, my two-dimensional world was being crushed by the footsteps of a three-dimensional one, if not one with more. Everything was happening somewhere above, in a plea in which the two great actors invoked the supreme right to the freedom of expressing through your own self — even if on a stage — love filtered through the human being for human beings, the happiness of being what you are and of being utterly devoted to the message you have to convey. If you choose to do this on a stage, it signifies nothing more than the most profound sincerity.

"Perhaps, someday, you will laugh or weep with us one evening!" — thus did Marcel Anghelescu inscribe Felix within his own destiny, freezing the absurdity of a courtroom where a case was being tried that should never have been measured against the harshest articles of the penal code of the time.

The judge was silent, the clerk sat with her hands clenched on the keys of the typewriter, and the courtroom had frozen. At last, after the judge thanked the Maestro and turned toward the clerk, the courtroom came back to life, and Rodica was handing out business cards left and right.

Reckless paths can lead you straight to hell, or to something like it.

What had actually happened!

Somewhere on Uranus Street, many of Brăila's bohemians would gather now and then, in a room without much clear geometry, but with the advantage that you weren't directly under the open sky. It was furnished with a bed suspended on metal bars that you reached by climbing up, a sink, a tiny cast-iron stove, a chair, and a table. People took turns sleeping in the bed, depending on the schedule of the next day's exams during exam season; the rest of the time, each however and wherever they could. At the beginning of July, in '73, several candidates for various university programs had gathered here. Without a thought for the consequences, Felix and his friend Marius bet that they would get into the Theater Institute — this despite the fact that neither one of them had managed to finish high school. Marius, because he had been raised with difficulty by a grandmother and was supposed to become a respectable barber, and Felix, because he was a rebel to the core. A year earlier, Felix and Marius, together with Dan, another friend of theirs, had been hired at the Theater in Bacău. Encouraged by the success they had on stage and by a meeting with the director Liviu Ciulei, they thought they would test their talent and see whether they'd have any chance of getting into the Theater Institute. The exam was very tough. For the boys, at the Institute, there were only some ten or eleven places a year, which were stormed by hundreds, sometimes even over a thousand, candidates. Unfortunately, given what followed, Felix and Marius really did have talent. Two of the ten or eleven places open to competition went to them, and together with the friends from Uranus Street they celebrated their victory for three days and three nights. Once they sobered up, the shock was very strong for them both.

The Theater Institute, that El Dorado they had dreamed of, had become overnight a dream fulfilled. But at the same time the torture began. The fear of being exposed. A great many people knew about their bet, for they had made no secret of this bravado. For nearly two years they lived a paradox. Their admission, then the three examination sessions they passed, confirmed their artistic worth — so their place was on the stage — and yet, above their heads there always hung, menacing, an annihilating guillotine.

"Every time they called me to the registrar's office, I'd first circle round the whole Institute, I'd say goodbye to every little corner, and only then would I go and see what it was about," Felix confessed.

Why didn't Felix finish high school? Hard to say. One day, when I'd told him he resembled Accattone from Pasolini's film, which we had seen together, he burst out:

"Like hell! And when am I ever going to resemble myself!"

Brăila is a place of cultural crossings, of a mingling of ethnic essences come from all four winds, where history has fixed itself over time through particular laws of coexistence. A port for over six hundred years, it had a sap all its own, well known, streets curved in semicircles so that, whichever direction you go, you still end up at the Danube — to flee then into the wide world by ship, or to swim across it and lose yourself in the fairy tales and legends of the Marsh. A fabulous realm, at once myth and everyday reality. That was so until the industrialization of the '60s and '70s, when the people of the Bărăgan poured into the city in great numbers.

Like any port city, it had its fearsome hierarchies and its uncrowned "princes." Felix had attached himself, ever since childhood, to the Greek community. At a party, many years later, he took me by surprise. He was dancing the syrtaki with Flory. Felix asked: "Have you got me?" With a brief gesture the girl pointed to her lovely hips, and the next instant he leaped into the air, wrapped his legs around the girl's hips, then, held up by her, arched backward and beat the ground with his palms in turn, twisting through the air. The movement was swift and very spectacular. Flory was from Brăila, of course.

"They'd draw you into their 'business' without your noticing — like the one with the Atlantic watches," Felix would tell me. At about thirteen or fourteen, the kids who were good swimmers were sent to fish out the watches that the ship crews would sink in the Danube, wrapped in plastic bags. "You were highly trusted if you were given a mission like that. After you fished the watches out of the Danube, you'd walk with them far from the port, to a safe place, where the man you had to hand them over to would come. Naturally, the guy would follow you from a distance."

Mama, as he called his mother, enrolled him, one after another, at every high school in Brăila and Galați, but in vain. He started ninth grade some four times, and only on the fourth attempt did he move up to the tenth. What won out, without question, was that thirst for freedom forged in the shadow of the ships that called at the port, and the dream of far-off places and adventure from the stories of Panait Istrati.

"I didn't have time. I acted in plays at the people's art school, I read all summer long up on the roof of the house, to cut myself off from my family, and I was writing a novel about my friends from the port. Then, later, I was adopted by the little tarts who hung around the bar at the Hotel Traian. I was their confessor and their psychotherapist, and my head was full of stories," Felix would reveal to me, in fragments of his adolescence.

At 12 he wanted to run away from home with a circus troupe, but his plan was foiled. He saw every show that played on the stage of the "Maria Filotti" Theater in Brăila. He'd get in through the actors' dressing rooms, helped by a neighbor who was a stagehand. At 14 he ran away from home and for six months was nowhere to be found. When he came back, he hid in the attic of the house. At night he'd come down for food, and that was how his family tracked him down. He never told me very clearly what happened to him in that period. He didn't like to talk about it. This much only he explained to me at one point: "When a child steals a watermelon from the market, slipping past the seller's watchfulness, and you tell him what a clever little operator he is, instead of sending him back with the watermelon, there can be no talk of a healthy upbringing!"

In the end, everything turns in circles, with larger or smaller circumferences. In the month of April, the deed was brought to light, and the verdict came down, final, from an implacable "heaven," on August 12, 1975:

"Pursuant to Art. 1 of Decree 9/974, finds the pardon of the sentence of 10 months' imprisonment each, applied for the offenses of forgery and use of forged documents.

Pursuant to Art. 215 para. 2, in conjunction with Art. 229 para. 1 of the Penal Code, applying Art. 41 para. 2 and Art. 42 para. 1 of the Penal Code, sentences the same defendants to 2 years' imprisonment each, applying Art. 71 and 64 of the Penal Code.

Pursuant to Art. 350 of the Code of Penal Procedure, maintains the defendants' state of arrest, and pursuant to Art. 88 of the Penal Code, deducts the detention from April 15, 1975, to date, for both.

Orders the defendant Rizea Anton to pay 40,380 lei, and the defendant …. Marius 39,250 lei, with legal interest, calculated from the date the sentence becomes final until the full discharge of the debt, to the civil party I.A.T.C. Bucharest.

Orders each defendant to pay 900 lei in the state's court costs.

Subject to appeal.

Delivered in public session today, August 12, 1975.

Presiding Judge, Judge,

signed Lucan Arjova Gheorghe signed Dumitru Constantin

Clerk,

signed Cziko Lucia.

R E G I S T R Y

OF THE BUCHAREST MUNICIPAL TRIBUNAL

This copy being in conformity with the original held in the file of this court under no. 3812/1975, is hereby certified by us.

CLERK,

signed, illegible"

Shadowmoon Valley was truly a hell.

Many times the thought had crossed my mind to abandon Ligia. Because of her, old images, ones I'd thought long forgotten, would draw themselves on the ceiling in the dark, gradually flooding me with a fluid of bitterness mingled with a velvety nostalgia that paradoxically gave it a pleasant taste. I hesitated to drive her away as long as the fluid was only a thin trickle that didn't alert my vigilance, but it slipped treacherously through the night air, skirting every obstacle I set in its path. Many were the nights I pressed my forehead into the pillow, so as not to see that wretched ceiling anymore.

"I'm thinking of moving to the French server. In Maat I haven't got a chance of being taken seriously," I told the Archangel one evening. "I can't keep up with their demands. I already have a priest at level 20 there, and at least I know the language a little. I'll make myself a warrior there and call her Teea."

"Yeah, it's a problem that you don't know English. I'm telling you so you'll know. When you joined the guild, someone who knew you from another guild told everything they knew about you. That's what happens when things are out in the open."

"And what did they say?"

"Naturally I've forgotten, and I've also forgotten who it was."

"No, you haven't forgotten. You just don't want to tell me."

"I've forgotten. But I admit that even if I hadn't forgotten, I'd have said the same thing."

"I'd like you to remember."

"Why? Does it matter?"

"It doesn't matter, it doesn't affect me, but it seems very important to me to know."

"Well, how can it not affect you, yet be very important to know!?"

"Actually, it really doesn't matter anymore."

"Ligia, my dear!"

"Yes!"

"It's not true. You don't get involved in something, whatever that something may be, in a detached way. It simply isn't possible. You care, and it's normal to care. If you don't care, then quit!"

"WoW?"

"Yes. If something doesn't matter, it doesn't exist."

"Is that what you believe?"

"Yes."

"Quit because I'm not a good player?"

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what? Will you tell me who said what?"

I was making concentric circles in the most crowded part of Orgrimmar, astride my gray wolf, its head encased in a fearsome bridle. It was clear he didn't want to tell me. He was warning me, so I'd be aware of the situation, and that was all. He was suggesting that my presence in the game might be ridiculous and that I ought to be careful.

I knew who it was. It was a girl I'd helped when her level was lower than mine. I had explained to her that I'm not a hardcore WoW player, that I'm at an age where I can no longer swallow both English and the cabalistics of WoW all at once. She had thought it chic to paint a ludicrous portrait of me when I was admitted into the Maat guild by Zuma, with Bluetooth's approval. They hadn't put me through the Caudine Forks of the application on the guild's forum, nor could I have passed them. The girl made a place for herself in the guild's predominantly male society by throwing herself into every discussion on chat, regardless of the topic and without giving much thought to the consequences. She wanted to be funny at any cost and to be at the center of the conversations. I wasn't cross with her. On the contrary. I leapt to her defense when the boys came down on her too hard. Until one day, when one of them warned me to let it go, because "every little bird perishes by its own tongue." Civilized behavior was law in Maat. Bluetooth was unforgiving on that point.

What the Archangel had told me was true. I wasn't a suspect exception, but an aberration, if I looked at myself through the lens of the game. With different shades of meaning, noob means a greenhorn. With lots of o's and in capital letters, it means idiot. I had a laugh at my own expense. It wasn't the first time I'd clumsily attached myself to a context that seemed not to want me, or whose meaning I didn't grasp. I remember I was about 10 or 11. I was playing with three other little girls in what we, in Lonea, called the park. A vacant lot with trembling poplars still in their first years of life and grass gone bald here and there. Mariana decided we'd carry on our game at her place. We lived in the same stairwell, in block H. Her undeniable advantage, in that neighborhood of soot-stained blocks recalling a settlement of the Undead, was a big ball, very beautifully colored. It was a big deal to have a big, beautifully colored ball. Mariana decided, for no clear reason, that I, in particular, shouldn't go to her place too, but she didn't tell me so directly. She only claimed that all four of us couldn't go. There followed a long discussion, in which I kept asking whom we were going to exclude, she kept telling me it was me, and I didn't understand. Until then I had been Mariana's favorite playmate, and precisely at her own house. What reason did she have to exclude me of all people, after I had imaginatively built her all sorts of games out of stories adapted from the Brothers Grimm and, sometimes, if she agreed, even from the Legends of Olympus. It made no sense. I was convinced it was a mistake. What I thought hardly mattered, because I found myself alone in the deserted park, under the poplars with their trembling leaves.

The Archangel was right; I really was affected. The girl from the guild, too, walked through WoW with a big, beautifully colored ball she identified with, even though she was no longer quite a little girl. It saddened me.

Soon after, my friend the Archangel left the game. He told me he was getting rather bored and was taking a break. I returned beneath the green, poisoned sky. I flew aimlessly through a perpetual storm, torn at every second by meteors, like so many mocking sneers. Yes, I was flying through hell. I let the memories flood me. I was afraid to come down to earth.

I had Felix in my mind, the time his wings were broken. Two years meant an eternity. They meant the void, which looked exactly like this valley, with its lakes and waterfalls of gall. Gall is bitter; it kills you. We had become two solitudes surrounded by enmity, by the sarcastic victory of everyone. Of those close to us, those far away, those met by chance. Felix there, behind the bolts, among dangerous repeat offenders, I somewhere in an Eden where the vegetation grew unchecked. The day after the trial, when I knew the sentence would be harsh, that there was no thought of release of any kind, as Rodica had tried to make us hope, I decided that I absolutely had to see Felix. I had to assure him that nothing would change between us. That I loved him just the same, indeed far more. I had become rock. Nothing showed beyond my stony face. Only resolve. I allowed no one to utter a single sound that smacked of advice or reproach. They tried, but I would instantly become a blind fury, and then they gave it up.

More than three months had passed since my beloved had become a ghost haunting my nights, my dreams, the daybreaks of my mornings. In the courtroom he hadn't looked at me. Despair was creeping over me. I knew he played on a knife's edge. I knew that for him the first option was the extreme solution. The most readily at hand. Always the first. Of course, he wouldn't accept that I hadn't come to see him, even though, in reality, I simply hadn't had the chance. His mama had gotten ahead of me, and Felix was entitled to a single visit, once every three months. She had brought him a parcel and seized the chance to request the visit as well. The only visit for the next three months. He hadn't waited for me.

"What did you want, dear, for the food to spoil? How was Mama to know you wanted to come too? You'll find out for yourself one day what it means to be a mother. If these criminals do convict him, out of sight, out of mind..."

She was gloating. She'd done it to me. She was telling me to my face to get off the stage. My fury would have swallowed her up, and the ground under her with her. Though I really should have considered that there, behind the walls, behind the bolts, Felix needed, first and foremost, food. I took her with me, so I could reach the penitentiary without having to comb the neighborhood on my own. I got in to see the warden of the penitentiary, just as his mama had done two days before. Arcuda was, in those days, a place of detention for repeat offenders. I was so out of place among the Gypsy women sweeping the street with their long, gaudy skirts that even the guard at the entrance seemed to feel it his duty to get me out of there. He asked me what I wanted, moving me ahead of the line. Unexpectedly quickly, I found myself in the warden's office. Sober, absorbed in some papers, he let me tell my story. Then he studied me at leisure. I was the wife of the "student"!

"She should have waited for you if she knew you were coming," he said at last, referring to Felix's mother, and he granted me a ten-minute "visit."

The guard led me into a narrow, sordid room with an entire wall of iron bars and, behind them, a curtain. He told me to wait there. He reappeared behind the bars and drew the curtain aside, revealing a second row of bars and the narrow corridor between them.

Behind the second row of bars was Felix, his head shaved, thin and pale as a stalk grown in the dark. I explained to him that his mama hadn't waited for me and had asked for the "visit" beforehand, that we had only ten minutes, that I loved him very much and that I sent him, every evening, through the Evening Star, all my love. The minutes passed very quickly. The guard drew the curtain back. Its wooden rings rattled along the metal rod. Then the guard led me out of the compound. At the gate he asked me:

"What's the story with that evening star?"

"The two of us look at the Evening Star at eight in the evening and communicate telepathically."

My explanation must have struck him as downright daft, but he said nothing.

Felix had seemed to me silent, distant, and somehow unpleasantly surprised. That had hurt me, as I thought it had to do with the way I looked, or with what I'd tried to tell him with my heart in my throat.

"I'd hoped I would see my child. I heard a baby crying before the curtain was drawn."

It was a reproach. A disappointment. That was why he'd been silent.

"He's too little for such a long journey," I explained.

The truth is that it hadn't crossed my mind for a single moment to bring my child to that fearsome place.

I had become a regular presence at Auntie Lucica's house.

The chosen soul of this woman — who knew every tree that grows on the planet and worked at rejuvenating the forests in the mountains — folded itself over the soul of anyone cast adrift by fate. You had only to cross her threshold, and the chaos in your head would order itself according to natural laws, without too much philosophizing. She won every battle, however hard it might be, but above all she knew that no defeat is final. Mother, sister, friend all at once, she was like a rock, always there to save you, no matter the fury and the size of the waves that wanted to drown you.

And on that Saturday, December 13, in order to escape the leaden light that wrapped Bucharest, I took refuge once again at Auntie Lucica's. The evening was flowing along in its natural bed. The telephone rang. Auntie Lucica answered, turned toward me, paused, then said:

"It's Felix!"

I took the receiver in my hand, leaned my back against the wall, and — the way film tears during the projection of a movie — sank to the floor in slowed motions.

"Sit down, don't faint, I didn't escape! I'm FREE! They pardoned me! I'm flying to you, as fast as I can."

Auntie Lucica had turned into a question mark. I set her straight.

"Felix is free, he's coming here."

I stayed down on the floor, the receiver in my hand, until Auntie Lucica cautiously took it from me. She lifted me carefully off the floor as well and set me on a chair. Then she began to move fast, with great precision. She laid the table for two, called off Teleenciclopedia, which Uncle Picu and my cousin Lucian were watching, brought out beautifully embroidered linen, and finished it all just as the doorbell rang.

Felix in the doorway — awkward, head shaved, dressed in the suit that still showed the creases of a long folding-away — looked at me uncertainly. He touched me with fear, as if testing the solidity of the ground beneath his feet. "My heart broke when I saw him. His suit and shirt were terribly crumpled. I tried to iron them for him, but I couldn't keep him still for more than ten minutes. He looked pitiful," Madi told me — my roommate from the Grozăvești dormitory, where Felix had first gone looking for me.

I pressed myself against him, wrapped my arms around his waist, and didn't let go of him all evening. The fork and knife in his hands stubbornly kept striking the plate rather often and rather hard. I could feel his whole body tense, trying to cancel as quickly as possible that noise which betrayed his unsteadiness.

"Let the man eat, he's here now!" Auntie Lucica chided me tenderly, tactfully laying his awkwardness at my door.

Everyone in the house vanished as if by magic, leaving us alone.

That night we did not make love; we became a fluid embrace, floating far, very far from everything that could have a concrete form, and the tears flowed without any restraint, flowed simply of their own accord, washing us clean and restoring to us, together with the dawn, the full radiance you have only when you yourself become light.

A miracle had happened.

Rodica Mihăilescu had not let herself be impressed by the tribunal's decision, not even after she had lost the appeal as well. Her intuition and enthusiasm were hard to hold back. She had the talent of gliding, like a self-assured frigate, among the human icebergs in the official buildings of communist Bucharest. In her wide-open sails she felt the faintest gust of wind that might be of use to her. In the trial she had bet on acquittal, at worst on a minimal sentence. She was convinced the whole affair bordered on the absurd. In her plea she conceded as damages at most the scholarships Felix and Marius had received during the nine months they'd been students. The substantial salaries of the professors, which weighed most heavily in establishing the damages, were not reduced by the expulsion of a couple of students, whatever the reasons for their expulsion might be. The two had forged some baccalaureate diplomas, not the admission exam, which was acknowledged to be severe — so they hadn't taken a place owed to others, but the one well deserved by their talent. The court, however, had vigilantly applied the law, and the charge was no ordinary one but fraud against public property — that is, it combined two harsh articles of the communist penal code. The ruling was that they had caused substantial damage to public property (equivalent to the price of a Dacia 1100!), because they had taken advantage of the guidance of illustrious professors who could have been instructing two other young people — admittedly a bit less talented, but with their baccalaureate diplomas in order.

"What's the big deal about acting!? I could have been an actor too. Why didn't they finish high school, if they were so clever!" — a militiaman treated me to this short, scolding peroration during the investigation at Precinct 5, profoundly convinced of the truth he had just formulated.

Rodica Mihăilescu drew up a petition requesting a pardon for Felix and Marius, obtained an impressive number of signatures from the great actors and directors of the Romanian theater, placed it in my arms, and sent me with it to an audience at the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party.

This was happening in 1975, at the end of October. After thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that his mama was far better suited than I for this audience. She was a born actress, and she didn't even have to put herself in the skin of the wretched mother who loved her son without reservation, because that was exactly what she was. She would tremble all over when she spoke of Antonel, for that was what his family called him in childhood. On top of that, in case it proved necessary, she could answer possible questions of the sort: why he hadn't finished high school; what he'd done with himself instead of going to school, and others like them. I had coached her at length. I didn't feel capable of facing a Party activist. I would have frozen and couldn't have been convincing.

It was a good choice. After the audience, his mama told me that the man who received her sighed and set the petition aside, telling her that pardons are signed only by Ceaușescu personally. The last illusion was blown out of my mind. It was out of the question that the petition would reach Ceaușescu's desk, and downright impossible that he would sign a pardon for a couple of hooligans who wanted to become actors overnight, instead of "doing their part" on the "heroic construction sites of the homeland."

But the petition, endorsed by great artists of the Romanian theater, and his mama's tears had worked a miracle. Rodica Mihăilescu's idea had been brilliant.

The petition was received by Gheorghe Stoica, at the time a personal advisor to Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Gheorghe Stoica, by his real name Moscu Cohn (b. July 20, 1900; d. 1976), of Jewish origin, an underground communist, was one of the founders of the Romanian Communist Party. A participant in the 1933 Grivița Workshops Strike, he drew Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej into the communist movement. A former political officer during the Spanish Civil War, ambassador to the German Democratic Republic (1953–1956), first secretary of the Bucharest City Committee of the Romanian Communist Party (1950–1953), member of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party (1948–1974).

The pardon was signed in the course of November, with the recommendation that the two elements, if they showed evidence of reform, be recovered for the theater. I believe Gheorghe Stoica was the only man in the cold, menacing citadel into which the communists had turned the Royal Palace who could be moved by the daring of two scatterbrained children chasing after butterflies. He managed to obtain their amnesty, and his goodwill went much further. He called them in and told them to draw up another petition, requesting to be reinstated at the Theater Institute and to complete high school in the meantime. Unfortunately, in the course of that same year, Gheorghe Stoica died, and the petition in question remained buried somewhere in a drawer.

Jumping ahead a little along the chain of events: Aneta Spornic, minister of education in Ceaușescu's time, whom Felix and Marius eventually got in to see, cut them off short: "What's this theater business! I'd abolish the lot of you! Polytechnic, that's what we need! It's people who can build something concrete that this country needs. Is he going to sign your reinstatement?!"

He was Nicolae Ceaușescu.