Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  Stalin and the Russians

  Brought to us our freedom

  nor the new national anthem with

  Our people will always be the brothers

  Of our Soviet liberators

  would change their conviction, often repeated, if under their breath: “The Germans, you know, they was what they was, but they was good people. But God save you from an angry Russian …”

  A German officer (Maria remembered his name as Klaus) had been billeted for a while with the Badislavs. He stayed in the room on the other side of the hall, lying on the bed almost all day and reading, under the shawls and coats that hung from the beam. One day he came out wearing one of Babuc’s wool hats, and the children fell over laughing. And this same Klaus got into the habit of playing in the yard with Roşu, one of the two dogs – the other was old, Roşu’s mother –; he taught him to fetch a stick he’d throw as far as the shed, to shake, and to do other silly things. When he was leaving for his native Bavaria, the German begged Tătica for the dog. Out of gratitude, Tătica gave the dog to him, and Klaus put Roşu in his sidecar. And wouldn’t you know but the dog came back a year later, trailing a collar with a German inscription, which the villagers much admired, standing surprised around him. When the dog saw Tătica, he went mad with joy, hopping and whimpering, even though he was weak, his ribs showing, and he pawed the ground with aching feet. The village told this story for a long time.

  And now the dog was barking more frantically than Maria had ever heard, until he couldn’t breathe. She came out of the oven door, and the snowflakes immediately froze her face, which was red from the fire. At the gate was a poor beggar, who seemed to have come from some hospital, since his head was completely covered in dirty, almost black, bandages. Only his eyes showed, and even they were hazy through the ceaseless snowfall. His clothing was no different from any other beggar’s who had passed through the village. Still, his crooked figure, as much as Maria could see through the snow-capped fence, had something wrong with it, something of a person from somewhere else, or possibly (Maria crossed herself on the roof of her mouth) not even a person. Framed by the dilapidated house across the street, his body looked like one of the demons painted in the village church, the ones from the terrifying Last Judgment, with broken hips and more vertebrae in his neck than seemed natural. His body’s proportions were bizarrely perverted, and he was twitching as if he were being beaten by a gale. The girl clutched her jacket and crossed the yard along the trodden path. Passing the quince trees, she brushed against them and covered herself with frozen puffs, miniscule crystals one over the other, sparkling like sequins.

  Now they were face to face, with the fence between them, almost as high as their chins. Maria quickly said the words that usually got rid of beggars: “I don’t have anything. How should I have what to give you? Move on, go ask someone else, get out!” But the person under the bandages began to giggle and said quietly, “Maria, don’t you recognize me?” And then he put his hands to his mouth like a trumpet, leaned back, and moving his fingers quickly on invisible valves, let out a wild solo, imitating the swing of the brass instrument so well that the girl immediately knew who was standing there. The mummy, blinking his yellow eyes, launched into a drum solo, rumbling and hissing with his mouth, doing the bass and the small drums, making the brushes and tom-toms and maracas, speeding up and huffing, until he hit the cymbals with all his power, almost making them real in the crystalline, frozen air, and then he bent suddenly at the waist, in a bow. “Cedric, crazy Cedric,” laughed Maria, “what in God’s name are you doing here? What’s with the get up?” Vasilica appeared from the barn, smelling not at all unpleasantly of bull and warm dung. “My oh my, it’s Cedric …” she rolled her eyes toward the heavens like a martyr, but at the same time she remembered flogging him mercilessly in the musky smell of his hot room. She would have done it again, now and then, she almost admitted to herself, as she had said to herself often enough in bed at night, wrapped in a wet excitation. She had liked wearing the black, svelte uniform, and the complete power she had had over the male who kissed her boots, who writhed and screamed with every lash, intoxicated her now, in memory, as much as she refused to admit it.

  Cedric came inside the hall and entered the big room on the right. He was as happy as a puppy and equally ragged. He let his gauze strips fall off, and soon his broad grin flashed just as it had at the Gorgonzola. The girls brought him some ţuica and nuts. He ran his eyes over the icons on the walls, full of dragons and militant angels, the yellowed photos in frames of crushed glass, and the raw silk towels. Tătica and Mămica had gone to Bolintin that morning, and would be back late that night or the next day. They still had their wagon and two horses, fat and beautiful, already old, horses that a few years later would be taken by the collective to the ravine. The girls and Cedric had plenty of time to catch up, then, as much time as the day was long. Maria just had to run to the oven now and then, to check on the mămăligă or to make sure the stew was boiling.

  They put a round table on the clay floor and sat around it, on little chairs. Maria put the mămăligă in the middle of the table and began to fill the bowls. While they ate in the dark mystery of the room, it snowed steadily and melancholically on the windows, and Cedric told them a fantastic story.

  MARIA got off the tram at University, in a scene of deep winter. She couldn’t recognize the main boulevard or the side streets under the thick layer of snow. The familiar statues, Mihai Viteazul, Heliade, Gheorghe Lazăr, and Spiru Haret rose out of the snow like the turrets of gigantic submarines. The gray edifice of the university, stretched along its great length, looked like a basalt cliff by a frozen sea – an irregular cliff with allegorical statues on its face – Science, Art, Agriculture, Trade – that could have been elements of natural fantasy, bizarre stalactites that bad weather would carve into gryphons and trolls and countless other fairy-tale creatures. Trees with black branches, full of crows, knocked against the dry glass windows of the building. Each branch wore a delicate ice crust.

  Color had completely disappeared from the city. You felt like you were in a black and white film, wound on a well-used reel. The old celluloid, stored damp, the copy of a copy of a copy, was full of spots and scratches, and when the film was projected they looked like long drops and streams of rain. The only living, flesh-and-blood presence, colorful as a flower, was Maria, who, in her summer dress and high heels, clopped quickly toward the movie theater, lifting her ankles out of the snow as deftly as a cat. In heavy clothes, heads hunched between their shoulders against the cold, the passersby seemed too immersed in their own problems to waste a glance at her, as her plump hips swayed past them. She was carefully dressed, but unfortunately in light clothes, untouched by the deadening air around her. The gale, from the Russian steppes, blew so hard from the side that you expected the trams and cars to roll over. With every gust, people turned their backs, cursing into their scarves.

  A Russian GAZ truck stopped along the curb beside her. A young man in a sweatshirt and khaki hat with earflaps pulled down to his eyebrows (military issue, with the emblem ripped off the front) called to her from the driver’s side: “Maria! Maria!” Her heart jumped, as she was still dazed by the intense, spherical light of Cedric’s story, but she smiled when she recognized the man. “Ionel, Ionel, my boy, you have to stop your drinking,” she sang to him as she came over to the blue jeep. “Because all the girls laugh at me? Bottoms up? Hey, where are you going? You have a date? Toniiiight I have a daaaate … I’m so haaaapy, can’t be laaaate …” “Shush, no. I’m just going to a movie.” “What’s on?” “I don’t know what it’s called, one with the guy I like, Gérard Philipe.” Ionel smiled wryly. How the hell did Maria know every actor’s name? If he went to a movie with a girl, with an apprentice, they just chose one at random, and if they liked it, they told other people to see it too. He lived near Maria, on Silistra, but he was thinking about moving, since he was driving a truck for the state, now, for the newspaper Scintea, and
there was no reason he had to keep living there with all the gypsies, in the slums. He had knocked on Maria’s door a few times, like boys will do, but without any luck. Once he had picked her up in the truck and they went to Casa Scinteii, when it had just been built, a marble palace that took the girl’s breath away. He took her inside, into the vast hallways and monumental stairways, everything in superhuman dimensions. The countless wooden doors with red plates for the various bureaus and editors looked somehow petty, like the ugly, jaundiced, clear-looking, cheap-suited inhabitants of the white stone castle. It was like the real, legitimate inhabitants, of noble and Olympian lineage, had been kicked out by a tribe of pygmies. Maria had let him take her out another time, for a pastry and a soda, but she wouldn’t let it go any further if you broke her arm. So much for that. She was a bit past her prime, at twenty-five, and if she didn’t hurry, she’d end up living with her cats, like everyone who kept her nose in the air, especially if she didn’t have anything between her ears. Ionel had left her in the pay of the Lord, and now, he was seeing a college student, Estera Hirsch, who, when they had kissed in a dark block stairway, put her tongue in his mouth right away, but to look at her, four-eyed and a little prim, active in the Young Workers Union, you wouldn’t have thought she was so fiery. But she was, and how! If the walls could talk in her studio apartment in Predoleanu, high, in the attic, in the clouds, if only they could talk … Between sessions of mad rolling around on her metal-slat bed, Estera would get up quietly and sit at her desk to study articles by Engels, naked as her mother made her, her chest freckled down to her nipples and her public hair as red as the cover of Lenin’s complete works, which lay in a pile next to her bed. She taught Ionel too, she wanted to raise his consciousness, she told him to go to night school … That’s a girl, with help like that he could be someone, he could work at HQ, doing propaganda, a man with an institute car waiting at the gate. For a country boy made truck driver, that would be something. “Okay, Maria, stay good!” he said while he turned the ignition.

  Maria smiled after him condescendingly. Ionel was from Teleorman, his family had received some land after the War for Reunification, and they had spent the last few years resisting collectivization. He was the only one of his brothers to go to the city, where for a while he had worked paving streets, digging ditches for the sewers and other public works in the May 1 District, until, after he had gone into a family bar on Lizeanu to warm himself up, he had happened upon someone he knew, almost unrecognizable in his black leather coat with a nice wool hat sitting comfortably enough on his head. It was Zambilă, from Iliasca, whose father, half gypsy, half Serbian, had once set the village on fire and then cut his own throat with a sickle. They had a little drink together, a rye that was increasingly rare, being replaced almost everywhere by Two Blue Eyes ţuica, and nea Zambilă – now Comrade Ciocan, from the District, offered him a better job. Sculptors, volunteers in the War for Peace and Socialism, who rejected the formalist and intimist aberrations of bourgeois art, had placed thousands of busts in all of the parks in the Capital, busts of men of culture and art from all times and places across the globe, who, although they had not managed to correctly grasp the relationship of classes and the struggle of the proletariat for a better life, still displayed a critical-realist view of the society where they lived and worked. Countless Gorkys, Solohovis, Lermontovs (since pride of place must be given to the fighting heritage of the Russian people, our big brother to the east), Neculuts, Vlachuts, Cosbucs, Eminescus – the poet who, even though he didn’t completely understand … still wrote “The Emperor and the Proletarian” and “Our Youth” –, Shakespeares, Voltaires, and Victor Hugos have sprung up like specters, on vine and lichen-covered pedestals along dark paths, chastising from the heights of their genius the unprincipled couples necking under the moon. The most prolific seemed to be Bălcescu, as though he were multiplying in clones: starting from the hundred lei note, his frozen effigy had spread everywhere, as though the whole of the young people’s republic was a bank note, where a population of mites travelled the tangled lines and dots of blue watermarks, collecting in the beard, eyebrows and sunken eyes of the 1848 partisan. Then there were the statues of people from the Communist underground who had fought the bourgeois-landowner regime, who had pasted manifestos onto walls dimly lit by Bacovian light bulbs while a sweet girl in a white blouse stood lookout, who blew up a German landmine by hitting it with an iron hook, saving the bridge downstream at the price of their lives, who blew the factory whistle to call workers to strike, who were tortured in H-cell in Doftana and never betrayed their comrades – just like you saw in all the Romanian movies: Olga Bancic, Eftimie Croitoru, Basil Roaită, Ilie Pintilie, and others whose actions are not widely known … Not to mention the great socialist and communist leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, in bronze or red marble statues on enormous pedestals (but this would not be part of his beat). Of course, nea Zambilă, Ciocan from the District, did not string all these names together at the time. Instead he said only that he was in need of someone to clean the busts in the district parks, to clean off the clay, soot, dust and (pardon) pigeon droppings that stained their heads and shoulders. All Ionel would have to do is take a ladder and a bucket of water, and roam and scrub the park paths systematically, stopping by the citizens of granite and white stone to make them glow with cleanliness and general wellbeing.

  The young man got so thoroughly drunk that afternoon that he could barely crawl home to his room in the slums. He got barked at and even bitten by a pack of dogs, wet from where he fell in a puddle … In the morning, after nightmares of statues that spoke or grabbed at him, crushing his bones with stony arms, and after he had remembered, shuddering, that he had kissed nea Zambilă’s hand in the bar many times, in front of everyone, he shaved in his chipped mirror and went off to the new job. The City had given him all according to his need, and for days and weeks, he combed the stone locks of illustrious men, polishing pumice across the wide, convex ovals of their blind eyes, throwing away the cigarette butts that disrespectful people had stuck between their sensual granite lips. For days and weeks, he collected fresh excrement, half black-green, half white, from the birds that crowned the statues, and he crushed the speckled spiders that had woven dense webs from the cheeks’ massive ledges up to the eyebrows. It was spring, and the forsythia bushes made blinding yellow marks on the retina that remained after he looked away, as though he had looked at the sun. In the evenings, he would walk home through the amber fluid that flooded the poor neighborhoods, past girls playing with hoops and fat women on the stairs, or every few days, he would stop by Estera’s and rip her clothes off, almost as soon as he closed the door of her studio apartment on the terrace over the old, crumbling block; he threw her onto the bed with her face down and penetrated her from behind, and she, losing control of herself in excitement, with her braids stuck to her dripping face, would start with perverse and husky whispers, between her ever louder grunts: “Marx is a shithead … say it … say what I’m saying … Gheorghiu-Dej is an asshole … ah!… aaa … Lenin … motherfucker … Stalin … aaah, aaaaah …” Stalin’s name would always send her into a ravishing orgasm, one that probably alarmed the whole block, after which she would rest – her creamy white skin with constellations of freckles on her buttocks, and even on her labia – for a few minutes and then go back to studying party documents, while Ionel, light as air, his penis resting soft and shiny on his groin, would put his hand behind his head and close his eyes. Beneath his eyelids he saw, much more precisely than in reality, statues, nothing but statues, entire nations of busts with names written below them in black letters, heads and shoulders emerging from each other, superimposing, intersecting … Their features combined: Caragiale wore Eminescu’s locks, Olga Bancic had Tolstoy’s beard, Makarenko was written under Alecsandri … Then he would drowse, lying on his back, and dream fragments of dreams where he saw himself at home in Teleorman; he’d open his eyes and see Estera, late into the night, still at her desk
, her shoulder bones and breasts contoured by the lamplight and her dark, copper-colored curls, except for one strand, lit like a flame, beside the lampshade.

  One evening in April, climbing his A-shaped ladder, fighting against the cockchafers that attacked Pushkin’s lichen-encrusted temples like tobacco crumbs, Ionel noticed a pitch-black crack at the base of the bust, where it connected to the pedestal. That afternoon he had played a game with himself, trying to guess the names of the stone citizens just by touching their faces. From far away, he would concentrate on the white shine of a group of lilacs, squinting his eyes and forcing himself not to look at the sculpture. He kept his eyes on the ground as he approached, and once he was on the ladder, he closed them completely. He would take the chiseled cheeks in his palms, pass his hands over their wrinkled foreheads, trace his finger over their rough curls, and then say confidently: “Ah, Beethoven, daddy-o, was that you all along? Why the ugly face?” He knew absolutely everyone, they were his colleagues, he patted them protectively on the cheek or pate, he touched the breasts, harder than any woman’s, what’s theirs is theirs, of an underground communist … if they got too dirty he’d tug their ear … With this Pushkin in the Ghica Tei Park, well hidden on a path no one ever took, there was something wrong. Unlike the other busts, firmly cemented onto their poorly painted plinths, this one, who looked Ionel in the eyes the way he once did d’Anthes, during their fatal duel, rocked, almost imperceptibly, with every scrub of the stiff brush on his sideburns. The fissure widened and trembled, dark as a line of ink. It is what it is, Ionel said to himself after he looked over both shoulders, assuring himself that the pathway was deserted. Gathering his courage, as he stood on top of the ladder and pushed hard on the young writer’s left shoulder, on the epaulette, without knowing if he felt joy or fear as he saw the bust pivot on the right shoulder, and a deep well open in the pedestal, with metal rungs down one side.