Best European Fiction 2013 (13 page)

The agent had an elongated, doggish face, beveled brows, and the almond-shaped eyes of an odalisque. He stared at you unwaveringly, without any embarrassment—a long-honed skill—rummaging through your brain to see what you were concealing from him, what you were trying to avoid, implanting a sense of guilt into your soul. I admit that my hatred for this particular species of villain was acute. I didn’t know how to comport myself with them. I hadn’t learned to look at them as human beings, no matter how perverse. I knew only that I despised them, grimly, tenaciously, and out of a firm conviction. And that was why I overdid my hate, ascribing them monstrous physical traits to match the abysses lurking beneath their invisible uniforms. I let myself be manipulated by clichés, swayed by bile. It was impossible for me to imagine such a specimen shaving in front of the mirror every morning, like a conscientious functionary, or playing with his three-year-old daughter on the brightly colored rug in the living room. I could never have believed he visited his mother on happy occasions, bearing a huge bunch of tulips; or pictured him pausing to catch his breath, leaning on the banister between the fifth and sixth floor of his apartment block, asking himself whether he had forgotten anything from the shopping list his wife had put in his pocket, for the party they would be throwing that evening.

Evil, the man wanted me to believe, was not all that terrifying. Nor was its scout, the secret policeman. It would be much more advantageous to regard him as a friend, as a counselor in times of trouble. I was being granted a privilege: “You can read them, but don’t pass them on to others.” Miron, who was accustomed to splitting hairs, something he took great pleasure in doing during our vesperal discussions, told me frankly:

“Be careful about this feeling of being ‘chosen,’ this privilege you were granted of being spoken to openly. Don’t let it go to your head. They’ll be keeping an eye on you, the same as they do on all of us. They just haven’t got you for anything serious yet. They can’t accuse you of anything just for having had a few meetings with T., meetings at which you could have spoken about anything at all, not necessarily anti-Soviet subjects. But they’ve made it clear to you that they’re doing you a favor, and that when the time comes you’ll be in their debt. Congratulations! You’ve joined the game: the game of cat and mouse.”

His words were like a bullwhip. I felt the need then to spool back in my mind through the entire film scene of my interview with the officer and recount the entire sequence to my more worldly-wise friend … after an awkward pause, granted: the secret policeman had asked me to sign a slip of paper to say that I would keep our discussion confidential.

“Come on, don’t be naïve,” said Miron. “We’ve all gone through the same thing. It’s their usual procedure. They ask you to sign in order to frighten you, so that you’ll think they’ve placed the noose around your neck. Nonetheless, it’s better if you don’t open your mouth. There are certain things you don’t discuss aloud, and certainly not with just anyone. But it’s all right that you told me: that’s so I could help you, so that you won’t make any more mistakes in future—that is, if you’ve made any mistakes so far.”

My colleagues in the ensemble (that makes it sound too pompous— it would have been more accurate to say, “my colleagues in getting drunk” or “my colleagues in delinquency”) welcomed me back calmly, demonstrating that they were possessed of a delicacy I would never have suspected in them; allowing me to feel (what sublime largesse!) as if I had never been absent from their midst. Perhaps I ought to have judged them in a more balanced way and not have let myself be fooled by their coarse appearance and gutter talk. I used to go to rehearsals three times a week, tapping my black violin case against my flared trousers to the rhythm of the melody I was always humming inside my cranial cavity—between perambulations I had stacked up a repertoire rich in musical scores, learned by heart, firstly because I liked them and didn’t want to forget them, secondly because they helped me fill in the blank intervals of my walks across the city, during which I would play them back, like magnetofon tapes, varying them according to my mood, whether spirited or solemn, but mostly serene and idyllic. My walk to the student culture club agglutinated into a symbolic canvas, which could be surveyed from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of the huge obelisk of the heroes of the Communist Party in front of the university’s student residences. First came the jail they called “The Baby,” with its white walls, like a hospital, sheltering stripy-uniformed, proscribed elements of humanity. This I knew. But the invariable silence of the penitentiary signaled a mystery deeper than any I could have imagined: there was never any sound, no matter how small, not so much as a screech from the wheels of the truck that delivered food to the prison and took away used receptacles … perhaps with a few prisoners hiding among them in an attempt to escape. No sound ever came from that gloomy parallelepiped for the length of the three minutes it took me to pass by its three-meter-high white wall, so I would have been perfectly justified in regarding the frightening building as a piece of stage scenery designed to discourage infractions, or a film set erected at that intersection temporarily but then forgotten because of unexpected budget cuts.

In the next ten minutes, my tour took in two other sights. The Friendship Between Nations student complex, also known as “Little Istanbul,” but populated mainly by Arabs, the offspring of lesser-ranking chiefs or bloodthirsty revolutionaries (since the postcolonial presidents, bloated with Marxist ideology and Soviet armaments, always sent their progeny to Moscow, Kiev, or Leningrad), who were now privileged students in Kishinev. I don’t know what sort of education those individuals took back with them to their desert lands, but in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic they made their presence felt with drug-trafficking and the deflowering of virgins, which was rather like training for the paradise promised by their prophet. I always looked enviously at those brown, solid, permanent-looking buildings from the inter-war period, comparing them to the shabby, ramshackle buildings in which we, the aboriginals, dwelled, and tried to imagine the orgiastic scenes that went on behind the green curtains, which, under normal circumstances, ought to have been the backdrop for the vocalizations of muezzins, their eyes rolling upward piously. The next piece in the symbolic jigsaw puzzle I traversed was the huge seashell of the national stadium, where we did our running in our physical education classes, under the guidance of a rugged Russian woman (a former biathlon champion, who had gone into teaching after she was discharged). The structure was like a middling-sized Roman circus, wherein the football team of Soviet Moldavia eked out its existence: Dniester F.C., the eternal “red lantern” of Soviet league football, manned by drunken and mediocre players, famous above all for the humor of the team’s supporters, with their favorite battle cry of “Dniester! Drown them in puke!” The jail, the brothel, the stadium, and the cultural house: behold a synthesis of the human passions, concentrated over a surface area of three thousand square meters, the mainstays of every political regime, of every form of societal organization, from antiquity down to the present day.

The ensemble rehearsal room was on the second floor of the culture house and to reach it you had to cross the auditorium, interrupting all kinds of festivities and theatrical performances. It was an unpleasant feeling to run the gauntlet of the irritated stares of the people seated in the hall, whose noses I was rubbing in our musical gatherings, blocking their view of the stage. In time I had learned to put up with the exclamations of “Those idiots from the ensemble again!” I would even fling back venomous pleasantries, making faces, but I have to admit that the label stuck: we were, it goes without saying, “idiots,” oddballs, fit only to be placed in a glass display cabinet as objects of curiosity. And, since I’ve raised the notion of a bizarre exhibit, it might be worth taking a snapshot of our group, and zooming in on four faces in particular—anodyne at first sight, but with whom I shared the ordeal of afternoon rehearsals. Leaving Porfirich out, naturally, since he was described above.

First there was Simona, the violinist and ensemble bruiser. She was brunette, chubby, and had vaguely Asiatic features. But her pigmentation was white. Porfirich was always coming on to her and, given the aplomb with which she would give as good as she got— either entering into the game of innuendoes or snapping at him, casting indecent words back in his face with practiced skill—it may be that something had indeed happened between them, that this was conquered ground; otherwise she wouldn’t have displayed her rights of possession with such assurance. The rest of the ensemble would follow their scuffles with amused resignation, from the sidelines, spectators not allowed to participate in the events unless they paid the modest entrance fee.

Orthansa, the ensemble’s prima donna, was a literature student, a prim and professorial girl with a languorous, indulgent smile for the conductor’s smutty jokes. She didn’t dislike them, but she made a point, at least when I was around, of conserving, out of a sense of propriety, her reputation for being a bluestocking. She was noble and urbane, a diamond in a basket of knobby pebbles. Toward me she had an attitude of sympathy and complicity. Together we were part of a mésalliance with the others. We wore our difference like some token of belonging to a different caste, to a waning species, which the times had forced to submit to a ritual of humiliation and survival in new, motley social circumstances, without any hope of a comeback in the foreseeable future. In fact, we had no concept of the future. Stirred into the swill of conviviality for the length of the rehearsals and during the blessed breathers decreed by Porfirich, when everyone would smoke and gossip, I used to exchange hurried words with Orthansa, and above all meaningful glances, “looks with hidden drawers,” as she liked to call them. And in the brief moments when we were alone together, or on the way home, as far as the intersection by the “40 Martyrs” cinema, where our paths separated, we used to get back at our band mates by joking about them, laughing at the never-ending amorous war between Simona and Quasimodo, but not daring to start our own war, which, naturally, would have looked more like a reading-room idyll by comparison.

With Silviu the accordionist I struck up a composed and protective friendship from the very first. He was a stereotypical Moldavian, with a moustache framing his delicate mouth, eyes as limpid as a mountain spring, black wavy hair, and a contagious laugh that burst out at the slightest provocation. A friend. A man who understands you and helps you when you’re in trouble without asking for anything in return. Surprisingly—because he had no pretensions and automatically placed me in a privileged position—I could communicate with him more easily than with Baciu, the ensemble’s panpipes player, my colleague from university and collocutor in “nationalist” discussions.

Baciu regarded himself as being superior to the other band members. He wasn’t the only wind instrumentalist, but the pipes of Pan were simply on a higher plane: his notes in the silken fabric of the folk melodies resembled the sensuous intrusion of a young lady from the city into a rustic ring dance: they gave them suppleness and elegance, they imbued them with intrigue, they made the audience dream. The panpipes were an individualistic, self-sufficient, self-worshipping instrument. You couldn’t imagine a whole ensemble of panpipes players, whereas there’s nothing more banal, more easily ignored than a gaggle of trumpeters—and, indeed, nothing more easily heckled when they begin to get on one’s nerves. At the same time, the relative distance that Baciu and I had placed between ourselves—by mutual consent, I might add—was amicably fostered by our mutual awareness of belonging to the same circle of friends outside the ensemble, within which we had chosen to have strictly formal relations. Soldiers on the “ideological front” of the press, we read banned Romanian books and listened to folk songs from the other side of the Prut, secretly transcribing them on magnetofon tape in the university’s recording studio. Moreover, we lived in the same student hostel, even if we had begun to bump into each other ever more seldom. Baciu, of course, had other places of shelter.

Those were the characters, or at least a few of them, and that was the atmosphere in which, four times a week, we gruelingly rehearsed Moldavian folk melodies to seduce Italian communists. Once we were joined by the dance troupe, the rehearsals increased to twice a day, so that we would synchronize. By the time I went to bed, I was unable to get rid of the sprightly melodies still resounding in my head.

By the end of May, we had mastered the music and all the travel documents had been authorized and stamped: the list of students and their chaperones, the passports, the medical insurance certificates. I don’t know which of my fellow band members the University’s KGB man had recruited, but there was no doubt that arrangements had been made. Maybe he had recruited more than a few, because, surprisingly, he had left me alone. I was hiding under my shirt Miron’s letter of recommendation to Feretti, the writer from Bologna who was to help me apply for political asylum in Italy.

As we left, my friend gave me these words of encouragement: “I hope that the orchestra …”—here he hesitated, and then went on: “I think that all those torturous rehearsals will come in useful. You’ll be ready for the performance now, and you won’t make a fool of yourself.” I embraced him and assured him in the same complicit tone that all would go well.

On June 3, we got off the train at Bologna Station. I recognized Feretti on the platform, having pored over photographs of him night after night. But before I knew it was really Feretti, I had spotted his orange scarf, which was wrapped around the collar of his navy blue long-sleeved shirt. He didn’t come near, but I knew that he had seen me and would find me the next day.

TRANSLATED FROM ROMANIAN BY ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH

[IRELAND: IRISH]