Norman Manea - Captives

• • •

The official room: smooth desks, silence. Two women, whispering. The papers on the desk shifted slightly in the breeze as the door opened.

— The comrade can take you to Engineer Caba.

A subdued greeting. Your fingers slid into his. You looked at him, astonished. Unshaven, looking tired, the stranger wore his blue shirt open at the neck, the fabric spotted with lime or cement.

— Yes, I’ll take you.

The two of you climbed down the steps. He kept quiet. Maybe he was thinking about Caba, his former classmate’s free and easy way of passing among the school benches with his open smile and pleasant, cordial handshake, and the formality with which Caba approached each of his new classmates, and Caba’s amazement when he shook hands with the head of the class, and that classmate’s surprising reply to the handshake, so different from the others’ awkwardness. The stranger’s silhouette cut through the quiet classroom like a breath of fresh air. He was alive and cheerful, polite; he thought quickly and understood in a straightforward way: he seemed like a tennis player hopping off his bicycle near a grassy tennis court where girls were laughing. You would learn all that later.

The stranger was climbing down the steps, remembering his classmate’s voice from long ago:

— Is that how you imagine marriage? You work together for several years, you speak rarely or not at all, and then one day you invite her to the movies, and as you exit the theater you propose marriage in an off-hand way? Do you believe in such unnatural simplicity to avoid formalities and solemn engagements?

He went on descending the steps. You had both arrived on the second floor, yet he was still wandering through the memory of a winter afternoon when he had impatiently waited for a visit from a schoolmate who owed him an explanation. There were ice flowers on the windowpanes. The rustle of the impatiently flipped pages filled the room. Caba was not going to come. . The lines of print had a way of projecting themselves on the window frame: It remains a problem for professional thinkers to know if a hermetically sealed can sitting on a shelf is or is not outside time. . and what must we think of a son of the earth. . entitled to feel one of the deepest worries.

On the ground floor you turned slightly to the right, and followed the dark corridor to the last door. You were waiting for the newcomer to grab the doorknob and say: “after you.” He stopped, caught himself, smiled, looked at you.

— Ah, yes.

Near the window at the end of the room, slouched over a polished wooden desk, Sebastian Caba was piling up bits of paper: counting banknotes. The two exchanged smiles. Taking each other’s hands as they had in the past, they anticipated each other’s voices, waited for each other’s words. They seemed to share a tacit understanding. You stayed by the door. Suddenly the stranger grasped his blue collar with his hand. Your rough, wiry hair rustled. He looked surprised by you as you supported yourself with one hand and leaned against the wall, your fingers whitened by lime.

After so much time, this reunion might have clarified the past, and maybe that’s why they looked at each other amazedly: to see each other, to understand each other, all the way back to the tangled knot of their adolescence.

Maybe the stranger was hoping to finally understand the secret of Caba’s friendliness, which had won over everyone, even himself, or maybe he was hoping to discern the substance of the answer he had waited for in vain one winter evening long ago. Whatever the case, the stranger had let himself fall into Caba’s affable net. Realizing that he wouldn’t understand, even now, the stranger returned to himself, with difficulty. He had already become overwhelmed by the disarming friendliness Caba used to ensnare his opponents — again, he had fallen into Caba’s trap, helplessly and inescapably becoming his former self, maintaining the rules of their established relationship. . the stranger, the fragile son of the earth, might confuse or conflate “yesterday” with “ten years ago,” when they were still classmates, and “tomorrow” with “three years from now,” when they would again separate without his understanding — more than he had previously — the true and hidden logic of Caba’s hollow words and politeness.

Or maybe they said nothing to each other because there was you, another person in the room. When the stranger had tried to bring his hand to his throat, a gust of wind had blown near the door: the wind of dry leaves, rustling hair, vaguely metallic, and they were forced to look at the thin girl, slumped against the wall. But they would say nothing to each other in any of their daily meetings over the following years — even when there was no witness to distract or embarrass them. Nor was anything said as they separated again three years later, when Sebastian Caba had become intrigued and curious, and tried to understand the mysterious stammering of his colleague, sickened by the typewriters’ patter. At this last meeting — both were hoping it would finally be their last — Sebastian Caba eventually adopted the other’s tactic, letting himself be caught in the invader’s silence, and acting surprised by his unique phrase, itself too clear to be credible. Having decided to present himself in a pleasant and benevolent light, and being careful not to ridicule the runaway’s first, childish argument, Caba hoped that other arguments would follow (however twisted and stammered they might be), from which he might be able to discern the real, present, and past face of his onetime former protector and learn how his old classmate had renounced the chance of success for which he had been destined. Caba would try to understand how and why this former star of the school had lost himself, and why he now saluted him as a resigned subordinate, why he recoiled from any closeness or affection that would remind him of the past.

The stranger never moved beyond the superficialities of their first reunion. For the next three years, Chief Engineer Caba, moreover, did not succeed in clarifying their positions. Now, all his previous protector and schoolmate did was repeat the one ridiculous phrase, stubbornly persisted on leaving it behind, and repeating it correctly and distinctly, like the words of a magic spell. Just as the stranger became terrified by the continuously increased complicity that followed their initial conversation, which led him, then, forced him, to raise his hand to his throat to defend himself, similarly, three years later, Sebastian Caba was hiding, sheltering himself in the soundlessness of the room and in his interlocutor’s silence, becoming transfixed by the phrase about the unbearable typewriters which was paralyzing him in the paradox of their past circumstances, except now the roles were reversed. Caba hurried to raise his hands, yielding himself, conducting the stranger to the door, regaining his politeness, his amiability, and standing frozen in the doorframe, resigned to himself, abandoning words that weren’t useful, because they couldn’t explain what can’t be said.

There would need to be a new morning, further delayed, a morning like all other mornings: the fatigue, the noises, Mişa the comrade spy, clocking in to work, pumps, projects, and masks, and little Moni-pig, the fat teacher, typing stories as though sprayed from a machine gun and pounded into the walls. And finally the damp, illusory street.

You were far away or nowhere or had remained there, in the shadow of another spring, slouching against the walls, waiting.

• • •

Shoulders, hands, hair: your entire body glued to the cold, damp wall. You were watching the stranger’s hasty passage, his particular passage measured against everyone else’s passage, all in the friendly blink of an eye. By now, you were used to that hallucination, repeatedly present and in its smile. You were wading in the waters of your old terrors, which were abating. Your arms were becoming weightless, disburdened of your dead father’s memory. The forgetfulness you craved was catching you as you were becoming free, fearful, about to scream from visceral terror, suddenly light, yet available to recall the dead man — he who is always with you, in you, against you — like an outstretched shield, a casing, a shell that stifled as it defended, like being enclosed in an evil force-field that separated you from a riptide of hatred and loathing that no living being could resist. You were becoming corruptible. Another death was on the threshold, heavier than any burden on earth. You were frightened for him, the stranger — for tomorrow’s dead, brother of an instant. Another liar, loved with no way out.