Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

About to open his eyes. On the lids is the infinite zephyr, the cool long hands of morning.

The buzz of routine penetrated the window. He was prepared.

The high-school teacher in that wooded town of his adolescence, pampered with springs and melancholy hills, played a star come down for a moment to flummox provincial teenagers. Colored scarves, machine-gun ripostes. Always irritated, bored, spitting out aphorisms, accompanied by a motley retinue of raw, chaotic youth. Step one, just inside the classroom: throwing the register on his desk. He would mount the chair and look out at the lazy good-for-nothings. Lip hanging down in spleen, eyes fixed in loathing. His forefinger would point to a dunce and summon him to answer a surprise question. Tense silence, enraptured, terrified audience waiting for the blow. But the professor does not have the patience: he gets bored and looks out the window. Then he suddenly stands up, writes the title of the next lesson on the blackboard — in huge letters as if for idiots — and is on his way. He does not even take the class roll with him. It stays like that, open on the desk, while the chair still retains the vibrations from the thin, swaying body, wrapped in extravagant clothing, of the clownish m’sieur professor.

But in the afternoon — oho! In the main street, in the cinema lobby, on the shaded paths leading down to the river, anywhere and everywhere is tolea: the focus of the teenage public. Dragging after him, higgledy-piggledy, thickheads and prize winners, bobby-soxers and even young ladies.

He growls, tells stories, ever changing his voice and adjectives: how students in the capital, exhausted with drink, are said to organize escapes from bars without paying; what happened last year, supposedly, at the jazz festival in Newport, Newpork; which is the favorite drug used by actress Merry Very; how somebody wrote a fan-tas-tic story, the last word, which begins one morning when two agents arrest, as it were, citizen ABCK, yes, Mr. K., in metaphysical and jokey Prague, The Trial, yes, yes, the famous, fan-tas-tic tale; and how the plane carrying diplomat Homar Hamar or Olde Eld Elsen was brought down in that moussaka Middle mystical East; and what the Pope said when it was suggested to him that he take a stand against Hitler; and what is being said about and how does it happen that and what is brewing in and what will it be like if where when — yes, that’s it!

Late in the evening, at the house of his bookkeeper friend or the gambling lawyer or the drunken music teacher Schnapps or Madam Madama, listening to records, leafing through picture albums almanacs astrologies. The pedagogic circus number, played in class during daylight hours, diversified and contradicted itself and gathered energy through the acrobatics of afternoons stretching far into the night, until the break of another day.

Very occasionally he went out with some developing little broad. A bald, talkative page maintaining a state of alertness, pleased with the pussy cat’s smile, buoyed by the breeze of long pleated skirts. For a whole season, however, he devoted himself to the major’s statuary wife! He also made friends with the mustachioed artilleryman, and they would go out in a threesome as if to make official the scandalous liaison that the locals were following with envy and indignation.

In that provincial past did Anatol Dominic Vancea Voinov called Tolea figure as a kind of symbolic fixture, along with the clock on the town hall and the various picturesque characters from the town’s everyday mythology? Did his removal from teaching raise or lower the bohemian’s stature? Certainly, questions suddenly began to pile up. Playful old Tolea has gone a bit too far this time! His sensational removal from the didactic corps ought to have reminded those who knew him not only of what had, perhaps, been codified in many of his bizarre acts of public impudence, but also of what stood in contradiction to those acts. His attachment to his mother, for example, went so far as to seem implausible. He had cared for her like a martyr, never once complaining or even saying a word about it. Nor was he in the habit of mentioning the bizarre trades he practiced in order to spare his mother the humiliations of a harsh widowhood of poverty and depression.

A good-looking boy, always quick to reply, that was Tolea Voinov from the start! Only good to crunch between the fangs of his ravenous female colleagues at work. First at the library, where he was beset with provocative notes from female readers. Then at a record shop, next to the ones selling buttons and perfume and ladies’ underwear. Then settled for a while in the photo studio of Primadonna, a former soloist, who didn’t give him up and from whose sanctuary he took off with some savings, so people say, straight for academia … And there at the university, what a surprise! His relations with the attacking sex, for five whole years of study, became timid, evasive, apathetic. The sarcasm of his unpleasantries actually expressed a weary indifference. Then also, it seems, began the suspicions and gossip about his odd way of behaving. He avoided any intimacy, any closeness.

An incipient incompatibility, perhaps, of which he himself was not yet aware? Perhaps he did not yet know enough about himself, or that he ought to be careful with what he would discover.

How bountiful the pubescent public must have seemed to the young student and then teacher Vancea! A real compensation, a rebirth! What a tumult of weaknesses and danger and expectation, in that gray area between ages and between sexes! Between sexes, indeed, since all those boys wavering on the threshold between ages still had a certain effeminacy, a turbid potentiality, but at the same time they succeeded in curing you of the dull repugnance to which you had grown used, too early on, from women’s rooms and voices and clothes and bodies. Was it their delicate obtuseness, their voracity appeased in swooning lyrical strategies and then exploding in that alloy of pagan sensuality and domestic piety? Did they all seem to herald the tedium of the property contract, the marriage contract? What prolonged relaxation, on the other hand, in the refuge of adolescence! Still capable of thrilling, taking fright, surrendering …

However frivolous receptionist Vancea’s rambling talk may seem — a kind of trivialization of Teacher Vancea’s rambling — it is enough to follow the proliferation of substitutes all around, in a world of substitutes, to realize that at least Tolea is parodying himself and not other people. Now, after he has been found out and punished and placed under watchful scrutiny, it would no longer be right to speak of frivolity; although even that term, in a world of dull, oppressive seriousness, is gaining a certain new validity. A form of liberty— however deviant — minor, of course, but still undefeated. An irritant at least. At least that! But what if this smart little fragment has simply been manipulated by the Exemplary Association? What if he has fallen into the trap it held out for him? For nothing is left to chance in our chaotic underworld.

A summer evening. tefan Olaru meets a former classmate. An evening that seemed to be summer, in front of a kiosk that appeared to be real, which incredibly had the words fresh pies written on it but was, of course, selling only substitutes. Odd-looking sandwiches: two slices of rubber calling themselves bread, which had been grilled in hell’s fires and had floating between them, like a thin red cat’s tongue, a shiny slippery leaf of substitute. Your old classmate from school tefan Olaru is nowadays replaced by a tall, severe, timeless gentleman. He immediately approaches and, in his relaxed way, overwhelms you with his clear-cut judgments. From time to time he rubs his huge palms together, as if to bring them to life. From time to time he straightens his thin spectacles, on the perfectly cut mask of the new Stefan Olaru.