THE PAST: BUCHAREST: Labyrinth by Florin Ion Firimit
"I am worried about your grades," said my high-school principal looking straight
into my eyes. "Don't mess it up now, in your senior year. Tell your mother to stop by and
see me. I have to talk to her before it’s too late."
I was staring at an old, dusty Steinway piano pushed against one of the walls. You
don't get it, do you? I thought. It is already too late. And I am 17, for God's sakes. I don't
need a babysitter.
"She can't come," I answered, stopping for a few long seconds, following the
dance of the snow flakes behind the office's window. "She is very sick." Leave me alone,
the voice in me challenged. Please, just leave me alone.
"When she gets better, tell her that we need to talk."
I almost burst into tears. The principal thought I was lying.
"She won't get better," I whispered. Then, I got up and left the room, realizing that
I had just accepted something I had been running away from since I moved to the
hospital: the fact that nothing lasts forever. In a few days, even the fresh snow would melt
and turn into a brownish, putrid substance. I accepted the decay of the winter along with
the other, more important fact: my mother’s imminent death.
It was in the winter of 1982 when I moved to the Bucharest Municipal Hospital at
the recommendation of a friend of the family who happened to be the director of the
facility. (He used to go fishing with my father when they were younger; after my father's
sudden death of a heart attack in 1981, he remained devoted to his memory.) He said he
was concerned about mine being home all by myself (we had no relatives), so he offered
me a small room on the 12th floor of Oncology wing. I could bring my homework and my
painting supplies and even eat there too if I wanted, he said, smiling. He was still looking
at me as a child. I suspected that he was avoiding the truth, and that something terrible
was about to happen. (Now I know that doctors and lawyers have the same indisputable
style of masking the truth.)
You know she is going to die, I thought, but hiding the truth is part of your job.
You doctors believe you are such good actors, and you want to detach yourselves from
death, smiling and hoping that you could do your grocery shopping, you could pick up
that mystery novel or make love to your wives, and not think about it. Not think that you
have lost another battle with death, and that not you, nor any other human being will
ever win.
My mother was there for the sixth or seventh time in several months. The doctors
avoided telling me the truth. Only now, by sitting in the principal’s office, her words
dissolving around me, was I painfully realizing it without an official medical
confirmation.
*
During those months I got to know the hospital like my own house, like the
hundreds of books I kept devouring trying to forget, like my dark paintings reflecting my
depression. I detested the building's factory-like, confusing design, done by some
drunken architect, with its gray rollercoaster of staircases endlessly climbing and
descending without hope, and tall, steel doors opening toward empty, intricate corridors. I
hated the hushed crowds of daily visitors and their cellophane-wrapped homemade
cookies, the always jovial fat women from the kitchen, the patronizing doctors, the tired
nurses, the bored elevator attendants who seemed to recognize me, but never said a word,
and the security guard who checked my daily free pass without making eye contact.
Sometimes, their rare, furtive gazes let me believe I belonged there, and although I never
wanted to, I could for a while be "one of them." In a strange contradiction, I was craving
for human companionship while avoiding it at the same time. Many times I would find
myself talking to the nurses, the janitors and the ambulance drivers, telling them my story
regardless of whether they wanted to hear it or not.
My mother's room was small and well heated. It had a narrow, spotless bathroom
and even a balcony. Her bed had a lot of green, red and white buttons inserted in the
headboard. Everything around reeked of a noxious, painful efficiency. My room was
located on the same floor. It had a view of a large park where in the summer, healthy
people pushed strollers around, walked their dogs, or played tennis. Many times while in
my room, I could hear the children’s laughter down below, and often thought about the
rudeness of the sun shining through those gleaming windows. I remembered reading
somewhere how after Waterloo, the battle field, heavily stained by the blood of the dead
and the dying, was bathed into a princely, lascivious light. I wondered how Spring must
have felt at Auschwitz, and why so many cruel and unjust things happened under the
nonchalant passivity and denial of the sun.
On the first night I slept in the hospital, my mother told me the story of one of the
doctors, who after finding he had cancer, jumped out one of the windows several hours
before my arrival. She felt a swift despair in my eyes. She didn’t say it, but I sensed her
thinking it: Don't worry, I won't put you through that kind of a mess.
So it could happen to them, too, I thought. Those invincible, cocky doctors do
sometimes crack. For a moment, the discovery of their vulnerability made me feel better.
It was getting dark outside. I turned the small black-and-white TV on, only to hear
the same old official government fairytale reassuring us (how many of us really believe
it?) that we were living in the best of the possible worlds, a free, prosperous country
without major social or economic problems. In Romania, said the commentator, the
mortality was down (people were dying only in the rotten, capitalistic Western Europe),
overall productivity was up, and our beloved president was visiting again some far-off
African country, convincing its leaders about the evils of the free-market economy and
the perennial advantages of socialism.
I stepped out on the narrow balcony. From the darkness, I carved the image of the
city under me, a sad pattern from a cement-colored Mondrian painting. I could feel the
cheerless pulse of its agitation, its thousands of endless streets, tired people and lights. I
went to bed early listening to the hospital doors softly closing and opening, a white,
dreary, cold place where all signs of life seemed illegitimate. I felt caught right in the
middle of two illnesses: Communism, my country's terminal disease, was overlapping my
mother's cancer.
That night I had a dream in which the dead doctor was gently flying around the
hospital as in a Chagall painting, his large wings carrying him with easiness around the
corridors. In contrast with the revolving soft, wide spirals of his movements, his face was
quite agitated, and his lips were moving. I assumed he wanted to land, but as in a silent
film with missing captions, he could not be understood. He seemed fated to never be able
to touch the ground again.
*
In the morning, I took one of the rare public busses to school. (There was a
gasoline shortage, and the city busses were reduced to half.) At the bus stop, I would
always encounter gray, worried silhouettes carrying worn briefcases and small handbags,
facing their 9 to 5 routine. When it snowed everyone waited at a considerable distance
from the place where the bus stopped because the driver never paid attention to the large
potholes filled with a mix of muddy water and dirty salt. It was funny to see how people
cared so much about looking fresh at work; it gave them the illusion that everything was
fine.
Against unruly winds the men read the sports section of their newspapers (the
only section spared from the censors’ hatchet), while the women hid their faces behind
thick layers of inexpensive make-up. What was the purpose of putting on good make-up
in a world already buried under so many lies? What a sad circus that was, having to
spend your meager weekly wages on a bottle of perfume or a Bulgarian-made rouge!
When the bus finally arrived, I joined the weary, domesticated scent of their
bodies, becoming one of them.
Most Romanians hated winter because it meant waiting in line for food in front of
empty grocery stores, waiting for the daily two hours of hot water, and sleeping in their
clothes while using their kitchen ovens to heat their homes. Everybody hated the snow
because it made everything look dirty.
I liked snow because everything was suddenly quiet, and when it stopped
snowing, time seemed to stop as well for a little while. The whiteness had a pulsating
spontaneity that you couldn’t find on the nurses' uniforms or in my mother's immaculate
hospital room. I thought about white as a fortunate absence of colors, a happy tabula rasa
that gave me short-lived illusions of new beginnings. It was then when I was eager to go
to the high school's studio, set up my easel and work on my assignments, while Chopin or
Grieg’s music poured from a paint-stained silver cassette player. This was one of the few,
rare moments when I did not think about my mother. I wish I had a home or a church to
go to, but only painting and the snow were my confessional.
Many times, mostly during spring, I would skip school altogether. I would ride in
old buses with dirty windows, get off at the end of the line, and walk around for hours.
Downtown was another country. I would spend many hours exploring the long stretch of
large boulevards flowing into each other from Piaţa Unirii to Piaţa Aviatorilor. I
practiced belonging: I mingled with the afternoon crowds, the elegant women, the art
galleries, the bookstores, the diplomatic corps cars speeding by. Only rarely would I
return to the gray cocoon of the blue-collar neighborhood where my mother and I lived,
mostly just to get some fresh clothes, happily trading in the musty smell, the gray
linoleum of our dim-looking apartment, and the stuffed cabbage scents of my mother’s
kitchen for the shiny window displays full of records, glass and plastic trinkets, and the
colorful travel posters in the indecently modern, European-looking foreign travel
agencies on Bulevardul Magheru. Downtown, the city had other women, less maternal, a
bit surreal, yet truly desirable, always busy, always on their way toward something really
important, seeming to descend right from the glossy pages of the Burda magazines so
often mistakenly abandoned by my classmates in our high school’s boys’ bathroom. I
hoped to fall in love, but I was too shy, and could not possibly relate to any of them.
During my childhood, I had always been surrounded by protective women. By the
time I was about to finish high-school, all of them, except for my mother, died. Maybe
it’s the veil of time turning those women (my mother, an aunt, my maternal grandmother,
a few of my elementary and middle school teachers) into mythical figures, but I have
always felt safe and whole in their presence. They were asexual beings who moved
silently in and out of clean, well-kept rooms, and who, unfortunately, exited the stage too
early, before I was able to acknowledge their reality and could attempt to figure out their
roles in my existence. Before figuring out what questions to ask them or what doors they
should have helped me open, they disappeared, taking all the keys along. Even as a
teenager I sensed that in the murky bleakness between waking up and going to sleep,
their womanhood was constantly at stake. They had to fight every inch for the survival of
their charms, for their simple right of being women. The only reason for applying
makeup before punching in their time cards, was to keep the show going one day at the
time. In a country plagued by rust and pain, what a struggle to preserve and augment all
that beauty!
Strangely, as Bucharest became more and more uncongenial, its streets dirtier, its
lights fading, I felt that it became mine more. I started feeling a stronger sense of
ownership of it, as if I were taking stock in its decay and sorrows. It took Bucharest many
decades to gradually turn from an Eastern-European Paris into a Stalinist Disneyland, but
I could argue that in the 1980’s the city’s downfall started, not with the demolished
churches or the razing of entire neighborhoods in the name of progress, but rather with
the demise of the beauty of its women.
*
Around April the city’s mood would temporarily change. From my high school
art studio's large windows I could see across the street a pre-war yellow villa with a
deserted courtyard, and on one of the back walls grapevines and red roses lazily climbing
their way to the roof. Next to the villa there was a Renaissance style house with a deep
beige portico. On its black wrought iron balcony, wet brassieres, pants and dozens of
pairs of colorful underwear were constantly on parade on a suspended metal wire. On the
right side of the school's brick fence, a young soldier and his German Shepherd were
guarding one of the entrances to the city's radio broadcasting center.
To reach the studio you had to climb a gloomy wooden staircase that seemed to
end nowhere and made a creaky noise every time you would make an attempt to reach
the door at the end of it. Inside, old, rusted nails prevented the tall windows of the studio
from opening. On every square centimeter of the glass, in the stains of oil and tempera
paint, you could detect hundreds of colors preventing the light from coming in—instant
stained glass windows. Oddly, I don't recall anybody ever complaining about those
windows being dirty, yet, once in a while, someone would try to clean up small portions
with a razor blade and give up shortly. It wasn't worth it; it was an art school, not a
pharmacy.
The building was around one hundred years old, and it was rumored to be the
former residence of a well-known Romanian composer who left everything behind after
the last world war and settled in Paris. The government appropriated his home and turned
it into a high-school. In the main salon there was a large, windy staircase with a baroque
balustrade painted shiny black. Every time someone stepped on it, it gave the sensation
of collapsing. Before going to their assigned studios, the school's aged models often sat
down on the steps and smoked. They wore a lot of make up and not much else; they
looked like they had just fallen from a James Ensor painting. We, the boys, would never
miss a chance of slowly passing them, catching from above a quick glimpse of their
sagging breasts.
There were a few abstract paintings on the walls and a large frosted glass ceiling
high above through which the fresh outside light was filtered without much hope. At the
bottom of the staircase, a smaller plaster version of Michelangelo's David presided over
the room, his penis chopped by some prankster’s hand. The place had an eerie, static,
atmosphere like an abandoned stage set or an asylum in which all the patients and doctors
had died.
I vividly remember several other things during my high school winters, maybe
because they were the only things that seemed alive: when it snowed, the strong sensation
that the snow would never end (it kept me indoors, so I didn't have to face the world), and
most important—a ray of hope above the melancholy music of Chopin and the dormant
city—the perfume (an expensive Givenchy, I later found out), and the lively laughter, like
a string of pearls scattered on a marble floor, of the girl I fell in love with during my
junior year.
*
We came across each other at one of the scarce Saturday parties held in the large
courtyard of the high school, about a week after my mother entered the hospital for the
first time. (Nothing unusual, said the doctors, women had to deal with that type of
problem at her age. I didn't find out until later, but she managed to take a closer look at
her medical records and at the diagnosis, getting the bad news before the doctors actually
told her.)
A local rock band was giving a free outdoor concert, one of the rare moments
when the school became animated. They had big speakers and they were making a lot of
noise. At some point they had to stop; from one of the frontons, small pieces of old
plaster started to fall on the electrified crowd.
"They put up quite a show, don't they?" I heard her saying.
I smiled, approvingly, though I didn't care too much about Romanian rock’n roll.
I had always found more comfort in my classical music records, but suffering always
from a deep, chronic loneliness, I rejoiced in being among my classmates every time I
had the occasion. My mother’s illness deepened that feeling. I was there to forget, not to
enjoy.
With her eyes sparkling from behind a pair of delicate glasses, she offered me a
graceful, yet firm hand: "I am Cristina."
She wore no makeup and no jewelry, nothing to add to her natural beauty, except
for a delicate perfume into whose malleable trap I dived without hesitating: "Nice to meet
you." Surprising myself, I then attempted to ask her a few questions. Was she new there?
How come I did not notice her? She was tall and slender (almost as tall as me) and she
had large, green eyes, and short charcoal black hair. Hard to miss.
Yes, she was new there, just transferred from another school. She mentioned her
father, one of the top architects of the country whom I had repeatedly read about in the
local press and in the Artists' Union monthly magazine.
"He worked abroad for several years, and he took us along with him; I mean me
and my mom. Berlin, Rome, Madrid. Now we're all back."
Radiant green eyes; really puzzling, deep, esoteric eyes.
"It must be so nice to travel," I said. "I have never been abroad, except to Bulgaria
once, a class trip in elementary school, if that could be counted as abroad."
She chuckled. Everyone knew that Romania had its borders closed, and only a
few privileged, mostly Communist party members were allowed to carry passports. As an
ordinary citizen it was almost impossible to travel, except for short, "safe" trips to other
socialist countries bordering us, but even in those cases, you had to have "connections."
"It's not bad," she continued, "but after a while you start missing your home and
everything that comes with it."
"Yes," I agreed, "they haven’t found a cure for homesickness yet."
While the band took a short break, the school's janitor, helped by several students,
started picking up the broken brick pieces. He was a short man probably in his late fifties;
he reminded me of my father. I heard seniors claiming that he held an advanced degree in
medieval history, but because he irritated some top Communist party officials, he briefly
went to prison, then ended up in that dead-end job. Everyone empathized with him,
secretly reproving the injustice and cruelty of the contemporary history which had ruined
his life. But that didn't stop him getting revenge in his own way, by getting drunk just
about every day, whistling tunes from "The Marriage of Figaro" in the school's hallways
while sweeping the floors, dressed always in a faded brown suit, a colorless shirt, and a
narrow black tie, a bright red carnation always on his lapel. Surprisingly, that day he
seemed sober.
We picked up two sodas from a vendor inside, came back and sat down on one of
the benches under the shadow of a gigantic walnut tree. What did I say next? How did I
overcome my shyness? My father's absence felt like an infirmity, a permanently chiseled
sentence on my forehead. Since his death, I couldn't find myself comfortable among other
people. I was locking myself behind my bedroom's door, reading for interminable hours
or listening to my records in search of answers. Books and music replaced reality, but
increasingly, not even they offered me a safe heaven anymore. Ceasing to be only an
abstraction, death descended from the pages of my favorite books right into my father’s
empty eyes.
While our savings were rapidly shrinking, my mother struggled to keep me in
school. Living in a large house was getting expensive, so we moved into a smaller, one
bedroom apartment. It wasn't great, but I welcomed the change. Then, all of sudden, she
got sick, and the concept of a place that I could call "home" collapsed like a sand castle.
Helplessly, I looked towards the janitor. He gazed back at me, then at Cristina,
and winked all-knowingly.
How come no one teaches you these things in time? I thought, then said
something just to fill in the burden of the void:
"So, what are you majoring in?"
"Painting."
I could hardly hide my excitement: "Me too!" We were going to take the same
classes in the fall. The thought made me comfortable enough to ask her for a dance. We
walked toward the main building where a different music was being played, and where
my schoolmates were mingling in what was once said to be the mansion's grand salon.
The plaster "David" had a piece of cloth over his missing penis. I stopped next to its
pedestal, waiting for the bright lights to dim and for the next song to start.
I didn't like being in the spotlight, I told her, suddenly feeling uncomfortable in
my new black corduroy pants, remembering a minor disaster experienced only several
years before.
I was about 12 when my mother received an invitation to her twenty-fifth
anniversary college graduation party. My father couldn't go, so she took me with her. The
restaurant had a decent band and a large, luscious garden, and due to the bow tie and the
patent leather shoes perfectly matching my suit, I felt like a winner. For the first time it
seemed that I was about to prevail over my chronic shyness. Later in the evening, while
trying to make conversation with a charming 13- year old and was about to invite her to
dance, I heard an irritated voice rising from somewhere behind me, a short, stocky man,
urging me to get off my butt and bring him his Chicken Cordon Bleu which was probably
cold by now. I looked over my shoulder—the man was indeed talking to me. People
looked amused at the scene, but it took a few moments before it suddenly hit me: my
new expensive first suit resembled almost in detail the standard outfit of the waiters
roaming around the room. My universe collapsed. What a blow to my self-confidence!
My transition to adolescence was far from being smooth. I liked to believe I was
becoming a man, but I found myself still a prisoner of my childhood. I could hardly hide
my tears, and told my mother I wanted to get out of there.
After finishing my story, I heard Cristina whispering in my ear: "You have no
reasons to worry. You look pretty grown-up to me."
As if by mistake, she then touched my cheek, and we started dancing slowly
under the fading lights along with the other pairs. I was content holding her in my arms,
feeling the lightness of her body, the softness of her skin under the purple dress, resting
my head close to hers, absorbing the invading fragrance of her well-groomed hair. It was
the velvety perfume she was wearing that made me close my eyes, surrendering to its soft
pledge, the shadow of an invisible bird flying into the night, a perfume you could surely
not find in our socialist supermarkets.
We talked the entire evening about books and movies and other essential topics
Romanian teenagers frequently explored in the 1980s’ in order to discover and lure each
other. I, particularly, talked most of the time. Fortunately, she was a patient listener. An
attentive observer could have clearly seen how ostentatiously I was displaying my frail,
fragmented knowledge acquired mostly from long hours of reading (anything I could get
my hands on, from Romanian literature to Kafka and Hemingway), but she didn't seem to
notice. I was glad to discover that she admired some of the writers that I liked. Did she
agree with Malraux’s belief that we are what we hide, an idea I found fascinating at the
time?
Maybe. But shouldn’t we replace "hide" with other concepts, perhaps hope, or
even love? Too bad the guy was a such a Marxist, she argued; all the Marxists thought
they could save the world, and look at the mess we're in today because of them.
"Politics is something temporary," I said. "Why talk about it? Art, art is
permanent."
She took my hand and lead me upstairs, faking a grim look: "Hmmm! Permanent?
I've got bad news for you, sweetheart. Nothing is permanent." Then she started laughing.
Across the top of the staircase, in the principal's office, the old Steinway piano, a
mute surviving witness of the old regime rested. She closed the door behind us, and after
adjusting the height of the circular stool, the peaceful Adagio from Grieg's piano concerto
spread throughout the room. She played it without a flaw while I sat down next to her
with my eyes closed, thinking about kissing her fingers.
"See," she said in the end, waking me up from my thoughts, when the music
stopped and we could only hear the collective dull murmur outside the office's door, "it's
all gone. What happens with music after it turns into silence? Where does it go?”
I kept staring at her hands: "There must be a place somewhere," I said. "Some
type of afterlife high-end storage for it; we could never be sure, but at least, we could
hope."
"You know something?" she said. "Forget about painting. You should start
writing. You have a way with words."
***
Later that night I offered to walk her to the bus station, but she didn't need to take
one; she lived nearby on Dacia Boulevard, a land of patrol dogs and NO
TRESSPASSING signs, where most of the foreign embassies and high-ranking Party
officials resided. I knew the place well because a friend of mine was living there with her
parents, and as a student, my mother rented the first floor of a villa just a few blocks
away. It was no more than a half-an-hour walk, but I secretly prayed that it would never
end.
For a while we walked in silence on a small, tranquil street with old, beautiful
turn-of-the-century houses. The night was about to come to its end when, rising from my
stomach to my head, I suddenly felt vulnerable, scared, and puzzled by a new mixture of
feelings. I had to stop and lean on the tall wrought-iron gate of one of the houses. A dog
started barking behind me while I kept standing there, embarrassed and confused.
Acknowledging that for the first time I was in love invaded me like a melting illness.
She rested her palm over my forehead, noticeably worried:
"Are you allright?"
"I don't know," I said.
I don't remember how I brought her towards me, but I could still feel the loose
movement of her warm breasts against me and the embarrassing sweat running down the
back of my shirt the moment that I kissed her. Her mouth felt like warm snow, soft
music, fresh paint, like Berlin, Rome, and Madrid. Her mouth felt both like home and a
far-away country.
There wasn't anyone around except