Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

“Research is being carried out on the dingo in special reservations. If the dog is removed at birth from its habitat and placed under different conditions, it develops normally without any murderous tendencies. I mean, more or less normally. It becomes an extremely submissive dog. Yes, they can be tamed if they are taken from the wild. They display a mute, submissive tameness. Quite shattering!”

Oh yes, I see, mumbled the visitor, yes, of course; Irina went on nodding in accompaniment, yes, yes, the old woman confirmed, yes yes, when she had already begun to slide back along the corridor toward the door, to the repetitive stuttering refrain that matched the rhythm of her steps.

She could hear the old woman’s spectacles dropping, probably onto the glass surface of her desk. It was a glassy gloomy sound, yes, a silver xylophone, and suspicious little whimpers and the harsh sound of spectacles on desk glass. Thinned kettledrums, clink clank, the spectacles, the knife, the silvery night breeze: yes, Irina walked away from the brick cube enveloped by the soft perfumed waves of darkness, but it was still daylight, powerful and aggressive, with thousands of ravenously open mouths and holes.

At some point she reached the city center. A tram rattled into the stop on Rosetti Boulevard. The step was too high and her dress too tight. In irritation she gave a little push on her leather handbag, straining and clinging to the bar, and she was up.

The tram was nearly empty, just a few passengers. In front, a disheveled, scabby-cheeked young man was reading a magazine, all the time making agitated movements with his legs. She put her hand to her throat, closed her eyes as in a dizzy faint, and wiped the sweat from her cold brow. When she opened her eyes again, the young man had vanished. Probably he had got off, although the crumpled magazine was still lying on the seat in front. Without realizing, she picked it up automatically with a rapid, absurd movement of her hand. Her eyes met the sensational headline: the first few sentences lashed out at her and immediately vanished; all she could see were a few traces. As if the tracer fire had left behind only discontinuous signs, which still pulsated like a red lightbulb. “In the morning the female tenant of the apartment. . Climbing the balcony, the windows. . broke into the house, tied the woman up, pulled out the telephone. . Under the balcony they lit a bonfire. . The tenant, her cats, fists, fighting. . The broken windows, the fire. . the bound woman, her burned cats. .” The words became real as soon as she spoke them to herself.

Words — their sharp, vigorous presence. Sunday, March 8, 9:30 a.m., the attack on the apartment in such-and-such street, the fire, the roughing up of the cats and the pensioner. A moment in the life of the magazine, in the life of the world. Was it just a snapshot from the onslaught of spring, unchained force attacking a chained object nearby? A certain meeting on a certain day in a certain tram car, just as the new trance, spring, was bursting with excretions and aromas.

She managed with difficulty to remove her hand from the back of the seat. She got off at the next stop and made her way, shivering, on foot to Dr. Marga’s. An hour of rambling talk, as between friends. That was how people discussed with Marga, perhaps because in the end his profession was also friendship, nothing else. She left feeling tired, relieved, secluded from the world.

A gray film floated over the day’s agony. Before her opened the welcoming seas of the night, which gives us the forgiveness we have been seeking, and gives us back our selves. A fine dust settled on her eyes and lips. Suddenly that shudder, that shaking of her shoulders, as if the crust that had kept growing in the course of the day were now breaking up with a thin, silvery sound.

She really did shake, as if being set free. Her shoulders jerked from the currents of chill night air. She crossed her arms in an effort to gather strength for the prancing void of the night, for its extremity of illumination and blindness.

Finding herself right in the opening of a metro station, she went down the steps. A concrete grotto with a neutral geometric plan. The red signal came on. The train glided smoothly into the station; its doors drew open.

What a day, ooh, what a day!

But she did manage to find her way to the refuge.

Gradually she shook off the weight of the strange day as if extricating herself from a suit of armor. Recovering the right to become alive with a secret dimension of your own. In other words, real— which is to say alive, again alive. Oh, joyful pain of the great and good night, give us back to ourselves.

A VIOLET SKY. Abluish silhouette with a pack of whelps. A bitch’s head, if you looked closely enough; it was nothing other than the oblong head of an angry bitch chasing the night sky, followed by clouds coming from all sides and covering the nocturnal sea. And somewhere, sometime, the ghost of the murdered father, forty years ago.

His hand trembled on the cup’s enamel rim. Tolea gripped the handle, lifted it slowly, and took a sip. The coffee was cold, as usual, having been left for hours in the pot until whenever. As if he were not alone: as if he felt around him the presence of Marcu Vancea, who had been killed or committed suicide forty years before. It had already happened to him several times; it was happening more and more often that he saw him, felt him nearby.

As they head for death, so do I head with them for death: that’s the premise. To see how I and my fellow countrymen present ourselves at the moment of the supreme embrace. One appointed morning, when you no longer hope for anything and you suddenly rediscover nature in its boundless indifference. One appointed morning of glistening spring, when we forget for a moment the guardians’ faces and the dirty streets and souls, and we lift our eyes to the empty golden sky.

Finally at peace — happy, and free from the panic of our tiny cell. Then, bang, heart attack, surprise! The murderous fraction, the last tangent, the end of it all.

It is night, creative night. At last the action is going to start! He knew it would be a highly ambiguous action, Operation Spring.

All at once the gentle night breeze enveloped him. He suddenly remembered Toma the pursuer. Miserable informers are not even servants of the devil: they don’t have such a high rank, no, they’re just fish in the swamp called the present. Wretched fish in the swamp, with souls and diseases and fears and pleasures of the swamp. What can his mission be, in fact, that mask called Toma? Why does he appear when you are not expecting him, after days on end of expecting him all the time? Is this a race of barbarians? Are the barbarians coming at last, as the old man Cavafy whispers? They will come because they came and multiplied a long time ago, gradually occupying not only the tumbledown fortress but the souls, diseases, and fears of the mice population. And the barbarians never stopped coming, never stopped interfering with the honorable rodent citizens. That is what the barbarians and their barbarianized prisoners became — a huge mass of hungry, cunning mice ready for the great fiestas of collapse. All of them attracting attention, with a scar wrinkle at the tip of their eyebrows. A barely visible sign in which one could read the tic of a sly and degenerate species — the winking of an eye.

At some point he finally fell asleep, lost in the oneirosphere of night.

The airplane rocks gently, and the man gently leans over to his left toward the little window. The seats vibrate slightly; a brief current of alarm shudders through the plane’s metallic pike-belly. The passengers look at the distinguished tourist, as if his behavior is the real test of how the flight is going. They look excitedly at their watches and then worriedly at one another. But the elegant foreigner does not show the least sign of unease. He looks at his neighbor, a slim, dark young man with an inoculation-type scar by his left eyebrow. He stretches out his hand toward the little table fixed to the back of the seat in front. But the stewardess leans over to serve him herself. In a long voile dress, with a silver tray in her hands. Naked beneath the purplish voile. Long white hands. A bronze bust, red lips. Rings of violet facepaint. She bends toward the turkey ear of the tourist. The voile dress flutters. Glossy breasts with their pea-mouth in the middle. But the senator appears not to notice. He smiles into infinity, listening enraptured to its music in the headphones placed over his ears.