by Norman Manea
In the nearby crib, the baby slept unconcerned. My former lover was the same, yet also changed. She had learned new ways of giving pleasure, and she performed them with tact and passion; her long, silky legs lifted heavenward, our blood pumped furiously, the triumph of unstoppable youth.
At dawn, in a daze, I tore myself from the bed of the unfaithful wife. The baby had slept serenely throughout, oblivious to the voluptuous adultery in the bed beside his crib.
I was awakened by the elixir of the summer morning. Love was not what I felt, but the ravaged residue of possession. Everything had worked perfectly well — the mind, the feelings, the body, the moment’s blindness, the subsequent detachment, the frenetic simultaneity. It was a childish sense of fulfillment, just what I needed, and received, and was taking with me. I was climbing, exhausted, to the top of Armenian Street, now deserted in the early-morning breeze. I proceeded slowly, past the old church, to the left, toward the new section of apartment blocks, and then down and left again, along Vasile Bumbac Street. On the corner, at number 18, the narrow sidewalk brought me to the door behind which, as usual, there was another servant girl sleeping.
What had happened that night was different from the teenager’s clumsy gropings of ten years earlier, different from the failed attempt in the brothel on Frumoasei Street five years earlier, different from the night with the courtesan Rachèle du Gard two years earlier, and different from the more recent fling with the Russian only one month earlier. Finally, the boil of all those entanglements had burst. All that convulsive time spent under the sign of the jeunes filles en fleur, the maidens in their budding groves, all those days and months and years in which I had overwhelmed her with my excessive erotic-literary fumblings, had finally come, vengefully, to a gala night.
The maiden had sacrificed her virginity, not on the altar of love, but on the altar of marriage, which had given her a son. Yet her beauty was undiminished. On the contrary, the blue of her eyes had deepened, her golden hair was sunnier, her breasts fuller, her waistline miraculous, her skin a smooth copper glow. She was more beautiful than ever. Her sensuality had not lost any of its delicate ardor, but had been enriched by the gift of her now educated senses. She did not appear destined for a single husband, or a single lover. But this suspicion did not trouble me, it served only to stimulate my excitement. After that ecstatic night, I should have had the decency to phone her — that was the thing to do— but I was preoccupied not with that happy end but with a new beginning. So I kept my silence. However enthralling our night of passion, I was not tempted by the possibility of future encounters, which, I feared, might become commonplace and routine.
There were two days left before I was due to leave for the mountains with my new girlfriend, the high-school graduate. It was a period in which, as in fairy tales, time expanded. In the place where the magic comb had been tossed, mountains had sprung up. Time regained and the night that had helped me regain it were now far away, beyond that mountain range. Already, they belonged to the past.
Crossing and uncrossing her legs, the girl now sitting cheerfully beside me on the train to Cîmpulung Moldovenesc was the reason for the quick break with the past. We found unanticipated surprises — the cabin on the mountaintop that kept solemn watch over the town, the simple wooden room, the wakefulness of the starry night, the light of dawn pouring down upon the bedsheet scattered with the carnations of virgin blood. This was no parody. It was real, natural, without simulation or memories, without reproaches or plans for the future. It was simple, whole, like the forest surrounding us. I had been made new by the easeful lovemaking of a new night.
Soon, however, the traditional repertory of conventions claimed its supremacy. A fragile silence seemed to have descended over the small rooms where the Montagues and the Capulets lived, unknown to each other. Was it possible that these two lower-middle-class families from the socialist provinces should find themselves caught in a dramatic conflict more suitable to aristocratic Verona? Gossip’s minions had already set the intrigue in motion. The small rooms expanded to accommodate the poisoned breath of the great drama. There were signs of imminent storm in the air, history repeated as farce. The time bomb, carefully wrapped, had revived the ghetto’s eternal fear — the shiksa, the Christian siren, the honey trap of defilement, the taboo temptation.
For a few weeks after the willing surrender of her virginity, the Bukovina Juliet lived in isolation from her parents and siblings, alone in her room, studying for admission to the university. Her lover was at the seaside, wandering in solitude along the shore and going in and out of restaurants. His family had, in the meantime, received a phone call from someone who claimed that the happy couple were seen together on the Black Sea coast. Could this be the work of the adulterous wife of Armenian Street? The millennia-old anxieties had set in motion the ghetto’s many tentacles, now delving everywhere for suspicious signs.
“Cousin Riemer says he has never seen a more clever girl in all his years as a teacher,” the Jewish mother repeated. But she turned the tribute into caricature, not a sign of the student-enemy’s scholastic excellence but an indication of her cunning. The comedy of the situation turned into melodrama racked with anxiety. It seemed as if the victims’ centuries-old delirium, their fears, their demented memories had been freshly reactivated. There was no way to deal with, nor could one ignore, the tirades, the announcements of heart attacks, the threats of suicide. Mater Dolorosa was no novice in such matters and she played her prescribed role to the hilt. This time, there were no arguments, no medication that might afford relief. Her logic was unpredictable, and so were the performances. Was this the result of the damage done by the years in the labor camp, or were they evoked by earlier fears? With or without reasons, the crises escalated. At first, I could feel only compassion for this theater of despair, but compassion alone could not prevent the anger that built up in the aggrieved son. Adversity, as we have been taught by the protagonists of Verona, far from destroying passion, only served to fuel it. And so the romance continued, in idyllic groves and borrowed rooms.
In the early autumn, Juliet left her chamber for the university in Bucharest. In October, the young engineer himself journeyed from Suceava to Bucharest. On his return, Romeo moved into his own bachelor’s room in a hotel in the center of town. Communication between the capital and the provinces remained intense, and the crisis seemed to have abated. However, the drama took a vaudevillian turn and produced some more surprises. One winter night, two young men, their faces hidden behind mufflers, could be seen on the platform of the Iţcani-Suceava railway station. It was after midnight. Outside, a car was waiting. The driver, one of the platform pair, was well briefed for his mission: to take the lovers to their golden cage on the first floor of Romeo’s hotel. It was snowing, the wind was strong, the platform deserted. According to plan, at 1:20 a.m., the Bucharest-Suceava Nord express pulled into the station. The shivering passengers got off, one by one, and sallied forth into the Nordic night. A few short minutes after the last passenger had left the platform, it was the turn of the mystery woman, disguised as Juliet, to emerge. Wrapped in a warm white coat, she carried a small black suitcase. Without looking right or left, she hurried to the shabby automobile parked behind the station, next to a billboard. The door swung open, the driver helped her in, and off we sped. Miss Capulet stayed for a week in that happy captivity and strictly observed all the regulations of the conspiracy. She did not step out of the room, did not answer the phone, and her departure went off without incident.
The young engineer’s attempts to secure a job in Bucharest always failed just when they seemed on the point of succeeding. Obscure details from his dossier got in the way every time. In the spring of 1961, during one of his trips to Bucharest, he stopped over in Ploiesti, a town fifty minutes away, for an interview with the director of the local building trust. The town center was then under construction, and building sites urgently needed engineers. The applicant received, then and there, a letter confirming his tr
ansfer from the Engineering Projects Institute in Suceava to the building trust in Ploieşti. By law, however, recent graduates were forced to stay for the first three years in the job allocated to them by the governmental commission. Upon submitting his resignation, he was warned by the Party leaders in Suceava that he would be brought back “in chains.” My family’s funereal silence also suggested chains, a silence far more effective than their former paranoid clamorings. But the real chains binding the rebellious son to the family’s warm bosom were, of course, chains of love — an affectionate captivity, a possessive claw in a velvet glove.
One Monday morning, the engineer, still carrying his two suitcases, arrived at the office of the director in Ploieşti. Comrade Cotae had thin, frail, spiderlike legs, a consequence of polio, and had to support himself on crutches, but was otherwise a handsome, intelligent man, formerly a top student at the Polytechnic. He was affable and firm, and it was difficult not to be won over by his directness. The newcomer was to report the next morning to the building site in the town center.
Ploiesti was, in effect, an extension of Bucharest; the distance between them was short and the trains hourly. Juliet, for her part, proved an intelligent listener and adept at taking risks. Extravagant, adventurous, unbridled, she possessed an acute and highly intuitive mind, as Cousin Riemer, her teacher, who kept popping in and out of the family saga like a Friar Laurence, had already noticed.
It was a cruel April, the first spring in the new couple’s life. At that time in socialist Romania, abortions were still cheap and legal. The waiting rooms were always crowded and patients came and went like characters in a mournful soap opera. The ghetto mother would have been appalled to know about what was happening behind those white doors— remorse, guilt, compassion. Did the old God-fearing woman care only about her self-absorbed trance? the guilty lover kept asking himself, waiting for his wounded Juliet on a bench in the hospital garden. It was a morbid wait, racked with terror and guilt. Had the beloved become the testing ground for her lover’s limitations and duplicity? Was this liaison indeed the family’s misfortune, or the ambiguity of his own wishes? Was it the temptation of the unknown, or the delights of the forbidden fruit?
“To whom do I owe my happy marriage? Maybe the magic sieve spun for me, too?” the former Romeo, now long married, would ask his mother some twenty years later. “I didn’t recommend your wife to you. You found her yourself” was the reply of old Lady Montague in 1986, then almost blind, but still able to grasp the allusion.
“No, you didn’t recommend her, but you stopped me from marrying somebody else once when it didn’t suit you,” her son insisted.
“Fate always decides,” came the prompt answer.
“Exactly, you protected me, you made me protect myself, from what fate had in store for me.” Quips and defiance were all that remained of the old wound. “You, protect yourself? You never protected,” the old voice, still articulating the ancient neurosis, shot back. “That Christian woman was not your fate,” she added. “Christian woman? Hasn’t she got a name? Isn’t that what you were asking for, from all the rabbis, dead and alive, that she should lose her name?” This is how he should have retorted in 1961 and 1962 and 1963, not only in the summer of 1986, when the past was old, diseased, and forgotten.
Of course she had a name — Juliet, love’s generic name. This is what the tired Romeo of yore should have shouted triumphantly, that summer of 1986, before the final curtain, before the ultimate exile. Time passes, mystifications no longer afford comfort, but the old self-justifications linger on. “I did not wish her any harm,” the old woman continued. “She has children now, she’s doing all right. In England somewhere.” Of course she’s in England, where else could she be? Certainly not in Verona or Ploieşti. She’s with Bill the Bard, of course.
Love starts out as revolution, then come the chains and the ambiguities, bringing in their wake the temptation of escape, escape from love, escape from family, escape from the chains. Let us, we pray, allow life to complete, in its own way, the work of erosion of hope and disgrace. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, life will usurp our illusions of perfection and erode the vanity of our sense of uniqueness. This was Wise Will’s lesson for us all. The ball, the night of union, the flight from Verona, and then the alternate ending — the protagonists escape death by poison only to perish by a slower poison, the passing of time. Blood flows not in well-choreographed duels but also in miserable abortion clinics. The poison was not simply the antagonisms of the two families, their different traditions and social hierarchies, but life itself, with its limitations and surprising twists.
The lover struggled with the limitations of their relationship and with the limitations of a profession that did not suit him. The beloved, in her turn, struggled with her neurotic possessiveness. There were scenes of jealousy and tears. The tension to which they were now prone was no longer prompted by the hostile world they both faced but derived from their own ambiguities, the discovery of hostility, not against the enemy, but against the beloved and against oneself
We are inhabited by many different selves. Is the true birth marked by the emergence of these selves? Is lying our inevitable teacher? Its oily oozings disappear, and here we stand, the same, unscathed, as though nothing has happened, until we slip back into the tragicomedy of substitution. The lover was becoming irritated by the unannounced visits of the beloved, terrorized by her possessive claws, as she hovered above him, haunting his nightmares like a bird of prey. The beloved, fretting about being incapable of hiding or healing her wound, once appeared on his doorstep, after midnight, and discovered him with another woman. Another time, she intercepted a guilty exchange of letters. The flower of evil was blossoming, its phosphorescent petals discharging poison.
There seemed to be no escape, and yet, there was one — the lie. That filmy cloud of breath was at the ready, helping one out of trouble, by transforming reality into its many variants, a two-tongued monster, come to rescue you. Had the tale of Verona, like all tragic recurrences, become a farce? The finale was lingering, separation seemed imminent, not through tragedy and death, but through boredom. He wished for the regeneration of solitude, with its great riches and promises. The role of the tragic, purehearted lover had turned into the comic role of a man irritated by his consort and by the monotony of cohabitation. The protagonists of Verona had become consumed by exaltation, doubts, treason, and remorse. Resignation to their condition could not reignite the idyll. Their marriage had been consummated without legal confirmation, there was no barrier to their parting. Each would find, in the future, a happy marriage, a real marriage — as had been predicted by both the Gypsy woman on a street corner and the rabbis in the Suceava cemetery, and by the clouds’ whisperings through their long, sleepless nights.
He revisited the image of Juliet, lying blood-smeared in the clinic, skipping along the seashore, dancing at the graduation ball. The years gradually dissipated those images, until all that remained were guilt and gratitude for that stormy apprenticeship in love. Youth had abandoned him to the lessons in imperfection.
There was one last, cryptic message, like a threat: “It’s me, I will return.” In the next sequence, her image fills the night screen. I see a bench, next to the stone rail of the seashore promenade. The woman is wearing a flowery dress, with brownish Oriental motifs, a silk scarf around her neck, and brown, high-heeled shoes. Visible between the shoe and the hem of her dress is a portion of white skin with bluish veins. Next to her lies an open bag with small boxes and packages, and on top of it, another thin yellow scarf. Her hair blows in the wind, she gazes intently, focused on something unseen, outside the frame of the screen. Her face bears the expression of a gentle, evasive solitude, but retains its old intensity.
I hear her saying: The first crisis happened two years ago. I was just back from a happy trip to Spain. A good friend of mine had just died. Then I heard the news of the accident in which my youngest sister was killed, the most cherished member of my fa
mily in Romania. I was hospitalized and had to stay there for a few weeks. I went through a desperate period of rehabilitation. My true salvation came from my children. I had to look after them, to protect them from the torment that had engulfed me.
The voice seems to come from behind the image or from nowhere. It is the same familiar voice, the same familiar face, the same appearance, and even the same self-absorbed expression of pain: I had a terrible relapse, like an endless, dark heavy sleep. Then, having partly recovered, we went to live wherever my husband’s business took us, the Far East, Africa, Latin America. He does business with Communist countries, as you probably guessed from that cheerful group picture with the Communist leader. Now I’m coming out of the hospital again. This time I’m trying traditional Eastern remedies, teas and special powders. You have probably guessed what I’m suffering from.
The sound trails off. There is a long pause. I wait for something to move: her lips, her hands, her body, or at least the waves. I’m trying to forgive, to forget my beggar princess’s pride. I am praying that my heart may heal, that the pampered child within me may be healed. You know how intensely I sometimes resent the malevolence around us. I am too impulsive and honest, as you know. Our strange closeness still hurts me sometimes. What have I been for you, a mere source of amusement, a catalyst? That’s the chemist in me speaking. But I haven’t been in a chemical lab once in the last ten years. They can’t allow a chemist with this sort of illness into a lab, can they? My children are now grown-up, and so am I.
The image remains motionless, on the promenade at the edge of the sea. Behind her, equally motionless, stretches the flat expanse of water and the sky’s gray horizon. The image is frozen, like a picture postcard. Only the voice animates the bizarre daydream. Yes, the dawn of that morning in Verona … those big, encompassing moments of adolescence. Nothing could have stopped me from completing my burning journey through that experience to the very end. Now here, at home, I come across all sorts of strange objects — an old cigarette pack from thirty years ago, a small mound of earth, a half burned candle. No, I’m not frightened, the disease protects me from everything