Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

“Fear of this spring. Of this stunted, ugly world that has been stifling for so long, drowsing for so long, missing for so long. The long winter of expectation. And now the pagan, illicit joy! Defiance that lacks the courage to defy. Something cunning and simple, prostrate before the elements, without the courage to become simple and elemental again. I am afraid! This outrageous appetite, disorder in the realm of order.”

Translucent, Kir Ianuli, yellow and dark, with a narrow face beneath a head of graying hair. No, she doesn’t see him, and that is good. Nor would he want to see her sorrowful eyes, or her greedy hands cutting the air with their burning fever.

The inky sky, the whitish moving patches in which she recognizes the nocturnal beast. A dizziness: her limbs and claws and desires become longer, her hair blows about, she feels sucked into the burned air, into the toxins of a huge alien being. She shakes herself, opens closes her eyes. Her mouth fills with a sticky, copious lava. A ravenous mouth in which tongue and teeth keep growing and growing. She tenses up, shakes herself, goes back into the room. Her small hand is trembling, with a cheap, foul-smelling cigarette between her pearly fingers. She tries to speak, faster and faster, whispering, stammering. Words would be a salvation. If she can manage to articulate the words, everything will become calmer and quieter. Remnants of a sentence she once heard: who was it who said there comes a moment for Yes or No.

Kir Ianuli is silent. But he is here, one step away, and does not see her: how good that he doesn’t see her. He doesn’t see her eyes burning, straining to stop the flow of tears, the hysteria. She tries to pull herself together, although her trembling hands are eager to grasp, to squeeze, to release.

Weighed down in his impenetrable silence, the believer of old is still alive. Kir Ianuli is still alive, but he does not hear and does not see the signs of change here, just one step away.

“The season is a trap,” Irina manages to whisper. “An impatient time. People who are too patient, in an impatient time. Time impatient with those who are patient,” Irina blurts out.

The screen of the window grows dark and then bright again. A flame replaces the darkness: the phosphorescent face, splendid Circe, the scumbag! Lioness, tigress, and sow majestically roaming the city, constantly crushing dainty little bones of her naïve male attendants. She is none other than the impatient consort of the patient gentleman Ianuli, his invaluable mare! Randy Emilia, known as Mila, Mila Ianuli, Megawhore. The goddess of substitutions and substitutes, Superwhore of the great pagan season, seductive mockery — yes, that was actually what she had wanted to ask the speechless combatant exiled to the moon. How do you manage with the sublime and soiled Superwhore? But does not have the time: her hands and tears and whimpers start up simultaneously, and the man is there a step away. A joke — of which nothing remains but a tearful grin, an angelic smile, sluggish and solitary on the entranced face. Her spluttering hands in the darkness. Trembling.

When she pulls herself together, the man is again in the same place, opposite her. They do not look at each other but gaze at the dark crater of the coffee paste left at the bottom of the cup: a chimera.

“Is the season a trap? What if we were to reverse the terms? What do you think? So that it is not the season but people who no longer have patience?”

The air is cool and dark — that’s how she wants it to be. Her partner is somewhere close by, crouching and shrunken. He is asleep, or is just keeping his eyes shut. She does not disturb him. She just bows her tired head. This time, her waking mind rejects exaltation or nausea. It is nothing but rejection, the rejection that disguises her at last inside herself, like her ultimate mask that no longer accepts any disguise.

She looks up at the dark sky. The bells will find her ready, as required. The beginning of something new, the brink of a new age.

Alone — alone and in control.

At some point she sneaks into the house. On tiptoe, so as not to make any noise. She returns with a thick pink rug and wraps it around the absent man. He seems alive, although he does not stir or open his eyes. He does not move, but he isn’t dead. No, not yet. Irina remains on the terrace. The cool of morning gives her back to herself.

This is how she should be remembered, in this embrace of transition, beside a witness removed from the story.

Suddenly grown old, suddenly free. Revenge and joy: a sad triumph. Time is impatiently asking her for a sign. She is ready.