Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

The driver’s hands tensed on the steering wheel: he managed to overtake the huge dump truck in front and shouted out a curse for the fun of it.

“Or why not try Mizil, for example. Just spend a hundred minutes in Mizil and you’ll understand what mythology is. Homer? A nobody — nothing in him at all. Niente . So, how much? What do I give you, Mr. Bender, eh?”

Tolea leaned a long way toward the meter. The driver, taken aback by the unusual tip, no longer tried to explain anything, happy now with the provincial’s babbling. The dry sound of the slamming door could be heard. Tolea jumped down crazily, youthfully, with his bag on his shoulder, and walked toward the Hotel Tranzit entrance.

THE DAY KEPT TOits usual repertoire, but the evening did not bring any soothing change. The stifling heat continued without respite.

A strange, unbearable infusion. Magnesium and iodine emissions lifted into the air multicolored peacocks, phosphorus rainbows. Pink smoky fog. Frozen sky, frozen time. Completely under the sway of the spring night, the hospitable sea, the great hospitable night which forgives our laughter and swallows up our dead bodies.

Suddenly the well-known shudder. A trembling of the shoulders.

At last, the night that takes us back, gives us back. At last, the oblivion in which we day laborers of hope have kept pumping the blood, the blood of a torn, bleeding self.

He really was shaking! A cold shiver on going out into the night. He found himself at the mouth of a metro station. He went down slowly, calmly, softly. Underground there was geometry, cool air, light. Pleasant. Why not admit it? The artificial concrete cave, an enclave purloined from nature.

He was a daylight creature. Night did not exist: it was a cunning, shapeless swamp. A barbaric, prehistoric sinking into the mud. And then all at once he forgot it: the day canceled it out, restoring energy and reflexes. When oh when did the constellation change and reduce everything to sameness? When did the blind, frozen gray establish itself?

Stifling. Larva unable to make it to the water’s edge. Did everything break up and slide into the abyss and lose itself in the thick, skyless sky of the desert?

As he climbed the last steps from the metro’s tunnel of light to the dark opening onto the street, he was still wearing his childish grin. Glad to be rejoining the great night of loneliness.

Happy pain, a moment lasting as long as we do. A moment, that’s all.

Darkness. But the eye is watching. Nothing could be made out. Neither houses nor streets nor people. Everything in obscurity: saving on electricity, saving on life, saving on energy. The lethargy of submission and slumber and standardization, that’s all.

And yet he sees them, he sees them very well. They are in the air, in the sky, among the street shadows. They come and pass hurriedly, wearing masks: the ones he met in the hospital waiting rooms, in lines for bread and meat and cigarettes, at selection committees, exemplary instruction meetings, exemplary festivities, and exemplary funerals.

Behold, he was the same age that old Marcu Vancea had been forty years before. In a similar spring he had suddenly lost contact with the earth and rambled through streets and fields beyond them, killing himself or being killed, in the night that was wasn’t and was still continuing tirelessly, endlessly. If I were to assemble all Marga’s patients tonight, lined up with a torch in their hand on the ridge sloping down to the sewer, to where it empties into the cold dark river, I would find him there among them. Yes, I’d recognize someone like him, like me. I ought to be capable of that much.

The switched-off city accepting the night. Lifeless buildings and streets in the nocturnal waste. Not a ghost, not one heart beating fraternally.

Occasionally steps could be heard. The night round, utopia’s patrols, the idle rhythm of squalor’s watchdogs.

All at once the darkness screeches. All at once bursts of light. Headlights, screeching cars, plate-metal wheels screws, an empty dilapidated bus staggering drunkenly, snatching from the night its sleeping walls and trees, rusting eaves, overflowing dustbins, the handlebars of a bicycle, an ax leaning against a broom, a silhouette. In the tall door frame the shape of an elegant gentleman. Bathed in the golden jet of the headlights, the man does not stir. Large forehead, metallic pate, fixed glassy eyes. A man from olden times, a gentleman out of interwar photo albums, frozen in the frame of the door.

The bus suddenly stops. The driver switches off its lights and the street disappears. Soon the engine and lights start up again. The dinosaur turns around and comes to a halt by the building, in front of the open door. The door is wide open, but there is no longer anyone in the wooden frame. The driver looks in astonishment through the dirty cabin window. The scar above his left eyebrow is burning painfully. He switches the lights off again. He is watching from the dark. His frightened breathing can be heard invading the street, covering it in darkness.

The round, the toxins, the muffled sounds, the spasm of the owl striking the television aerials. The dark air, its huge deceptive nets.

The airplane rocks gently. A clean, functional interior: geometry and luster. The passenger leans toward the window on his left, but he can see nothing, only the dense night. His big blue eyes turn to his neighbor. A thin, dark young man with a scar over his left eyebrow. The spitting image of the bus driver! The scar, the humble, malicious smile, the darting eyes. The old man leans over and says something, but his voice cannot be heard. The young man agrees, answering with a repetition of the tourist’s words, but the sound does not take off. Then they both turn toward the stewardess. Standing straight, in a long voile dress. Naked beneath the transparent dress. She is holding out a tray and waiting. Colored bottles, colored glasses, colored labels. Straight, naked. Blond curls, long white hands, a suave, boyish appearance. Rings of bluish makeup. The long body of an ephebe. The gray-haired gentleman, the tourist, smiles at the androgyne. His lips are measuring words words words, but without any sound. The old man’s pink face, starched collar, sky-blue shirt, dark-red tie, batrachian snout open shut open, soundless. His amphibian mouth jabbering soundless words. It moves rhythmically, and the little mustache of his young guide-minder is on patrol. The mannequin is awaiting orders, with the tray stretched out. Her voile blouse flutters so that you can see her boyish chest: the lightbulb in the middle, pink, electric, perfumed. Apollo Venus straightens her shoulders and bends toward the tourist. She again offers him glasses, bust, lips, anything. Clack-clack: the dry noise from his larynx, a red carp’s mouth swallowing sounds. A flutter of his snake-tie, again the valve of his mouth, the beating of his crustacean mouth uselessly grinding time.

Suddenly a long screech. Endless screeching, like an alarm whistle. The guide’s dark cheeks next to the tourist’s senile baby cheeks.

They are jumping about with their arms in the air. Like all the other passengers, who are piling up on top of each other.

Dominic was jerkily groping around by the low sofa, his nerves suddenly shattered. Somewhere he could hear a whirl of alarmed voices, glassy birds’ wings colliding with each other, and a long whistling or screeching, wavy, thin, vicious, and vivacious. Then, now, cascading peals of merry, red demented laughter. Hell’s bells, the devil’s cabaret.

He managed to get off the narrow worn sofa and headed blindly toward — toward nowhere. There wasn’t a soul in the house. Only that long-drawn-out creaking of the cupboard doors, again and again. The doors gave an eerie, drawn-out sound: whrrr. . ping. . whrrr, and again. Until, after an eternity, Marcu Vancea reappeared at last.