Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

A hidden force, professore , an incomparable force concentrating passion, that’s what it was. Irresistible, hypnotic induction. They dragged themselves to the bedroom, sighing, ill in each other’s arms. The pain of desire pulled him into her, deeper and deeper, with both hands, deeper, again and again, sobbing, her face twisted out of shape. She had covered his eyes with her hands to stop him from seeing her. “Don’t look at me, don’t.” But he saw her and continued to look at the tears flooding down her small pale cheeks. He was on her and in her, clasping and feverish, but he still followed the tears as they fell incessantly toward her parched lips. Unconsciously she mumbled: “No, don’t look at me — please don’t,” clasping and overcome with joy and fear. Naked beneath the sheet, they remained fixed for a long time in each other’s embrace. “No, they can’t take this away from us,” Irina whispered faintly, militantly, jerkily. “They can’t take this away. It’s all we’ve got left — the only thing,” she stammered, lightly sobbing in lament and pleasure on the pillow, where her wiry, coppery, unmanageable hair lay. “I knew that you …” She waited for him to continue. Not for nothing had he avoided meeting her — but it had been to no avail.

Her hands trembled as they touched him, electrified him: again the blood roared, clothes flew in the air along with the crumpled sheet; she pulled him into her, deeper and deeper, stammering between sobs: “No, don’t look at me, please don’t.” And that torrid trepidation, the tears, the spasm, the salvation. “So you’ve come after all …” She laughed as she opened the door a few days later. And at once she pulled him toward her, into her, deeper and deeper into the torrid lava. “Don’t look at me, don’t,” she gaspingly sobbed, now healed in the desperate disorder of their embrace, which revived him and scared him and healed him. At some point, frightened, he had made an attempt at depressurization. She had just returned from a trip and he also left town for a while; she was ill and he was going on holiday — pretexts to make the meetings less frequent, to attempt the sobering up, the loosening of the bond.

A thinned-down, poisoned twilight. Torrential downpour. He was sleepwalking in the streets, not knowing where. He had no umbrella and the rain was streaming over his forehead and neck. His clothes were soaked: he was wrapped in a mantle of water. The deserted street. He had awoken on the pavement beneath a tree, looking toward the terrace. One minute, five, ten, and — Ira appeared. She stopped, bewildered, in front of the balustrade. She looked into the street, saw the errant shape, and understood — they both understood. He pushed the metal gate and went up. In the doorway, in a thick, long, white shirt, Ira was shaking with fever.

Her small, tense, convulsed body. “I felt you were out there …” The hysterical despair of a child. A pagan ritual resumed with ferocity. She flung the sheet aside, as if it were on a humble mast kneeling wrung and powerless at the foot of the short bed. “I’m leaving: I must go. Now, right away.” He repeated robot-like: “I must go. Right now. Immediately. There’s no other solution.” And she did not hear and did not reply. He dressed hurriedly so that there would be no time for words. She did not look at him, sat motionless, without even blinking, on the narrow coffin of a bed. Then the door had opened. He was again in the yard, in the street, in the rain. He huddled up and lifted the collar of his wet jacket. Without meaning to, he lifted his arm and saw his watch. He looked at the dial, at the circling minute hand. Half an hour! That was all: half an hour, an eternity. Hidden again beneath the trees on the pavement, he looked back at the terrace across the street, where he had been just now, a thousand years ago. In the mist and rain of the night he could hear around him the bustle and voices of passersby, the routine of people taking each other’s place in the rush toward their burrows, exhausted by the masquerade that had swallowed up another day.

If the subordinate Vancea Voinov had delayed his ozone replenishment until May, as the wise Gic had advised, then who knows, the happening might have been reborn with a different name …

“Some unidentifiable episodes of my life kept making me guilty, although I didn’t feel it in any way. I started university again a few times: but something new would always appear in my file and they’d throw me back out. I was eventually on the point of graduating when again they … After marriage two broke down, I really couldn’t pick myself up anymore. There was a moment of defeat when I suddenly directed my fury onto the outside world, toward those who kept watching me and pushing me to the margins. It wasn’t very clever of me to have handed out that text. Too big a risk. I might even have gone missing for good. Then, at the moment before the fall, a hand reached out to me — or rather, a claw. I clung to it, stupefied, exasperated, gone wild. It was Comrade Popescu. Comrade Orest Popescu saved me: he even offered me a job and a salary.”

She tensed up in the darkness. Her hand slid along, catching the edge of the table, of the bed. A chaotic danger that she did not want to name. She tensed up, concentrated, stretched out her hand. The fingers passed gently over the man’s cheek and chest and manhood: the words jerkily speeded up; the movements grew quicker, up to the trepidation of a single reintegrated body and of tears which naturally fell again and again with each spasm. “Don’t look at me, please don’t.” The embrace, like a reddened claw. And the whimpering, the stammering afterward. “They can’t take this away from us. Not this. The great savage mystery.” Savage, yes, and frail, in those sobs of lament and pleasure.

The voice had broken off, overwhelmed, and some time later started up again in a perverse and frightened contortion.

“One step from those dangers beyond return. And again I was on the brink of graduating, for the third time. I asked my friend Ianuli for his advice. I’ve told you about him, haven’t I? The legendary Greek. The pure, fanatical hero not yet touched by the dregs all around him. They bought and sold his legend for a knockdown price. The life of a rebel and martyr, not like that of your usual hustler. It’s hard to say which masquerade is better: the opportunist or the true believer. Anyway, he still had enough connections to help me. Again I went to the provinces for a while, until the heat was off — although I knew I was married to my file forevermore. Like the Catholics — until death do us part. I wanted to come back, but I couldn’t get it fixed. And so again I thought I was a rebel, again I exploded. And they gave me another demonstration of what happens next. Then Comrade Orest Popescu offered his services. I accepted. With a morbid fury, to take revenge on myself.”

The city had given up the ghost. Only the tree rustling above the terrace was a reminder that it’s no use hiding: there are witnesses and substitutes all around; the comrades of Comrade Orest reach into every corner; their invisible threads have already penetrated even here, to the bed of illicit pleasure.

Irina leaned over the bottom edge of the bed to take the pack of cigarettes. She lit one and arranged the child-size pillow beneath her head. Her slim, diaphanous fingers squeezed the cigarette until she reached the glowing end. “He’d found in me a cure, a dream, a fixation — that’s what Comrade Popescu said. He was prepared to let himself be tyrannized over if that was what amused me. He was a tyrant himself — unstable, possessive. He gave me a hand with nothing really. Or maybe perhaps: the subordinate institution. His own little kingdom in a republic of countless kingdoms big and small. And what an institution! The association! The association of the underworld, of the underdeveloped, of underhand meanings. The association of deaf-mute silence! If I didn’t know that that, too, in fact, is only one company. Behind it, under and above it, there is the network. The network is everything. The company, the goal, the structure — none of that counts, even in the case of such an exotic company; the important thing is always the way it relates to the system. That was why Comrade Orest Popescu was actually more important than he seemed, and the company much more cunning than its strange profile made it appear. I didn’t run away from the sinister experiment. I remained, hoping I would destroy myself quickly. We never know just how much of the poison we can absorb.”