Norman Manea - Captives

The cold of his own ascension shook him. Dislocated, he turned fragile, lazy. He threw away his chances. Your spine suddenly stiffened, meanwhile. Refusing to sink, you understood you needed to resist, to die again, many times over, until you could return to the others, without ever actually being among them. At the same time, rounds of amnesia spiraled, redoubled. Precursors of birth, recognition, tropisms lazed by warm currents, undermined all chances of revolt. Or maybe his halt wasn’t voluntary. Maybe an unexpected accident, a family nuisance, or some unlucky swindle flung him suddenly into the camp of the defeated and the wronged where he adapted just as easily to the reversal of fortune. Sadness, obsession, humility, fear. Perhaps even your return from defeat didn’t signify a choice, but only happened because it could be no other way: the unbearable had gone on for too long and something had to be tried — anything, because time kept passing. You cursed the cowardice of a father who abdicated: caught up inside himself, without escape, ignoring his responsibility, his promises. Perhaps the hypothetical brother was cursing the perseverance of a parent who didn’t abdicate but who was eager to raise protective walls, spaces of doubtful safety.

How is your isolation different from his indifference? To what extent is indifference an end and isolation a beginning, a way of waiting without hope? To what extent do they stand on the same crumbled rock?

You went down into the damp tunnel, groping. Each step took you further from the patch of sky left in the little window of aloneness. Distance narrowed that rectangular eye. Another slope closed the distances behind: the vastness increased. The light grew scarce. Whoever says there’s a moment of terror greater than this is a liar. You look back and see: there isn’t enough time to turn back. That would take more than a lifetime. Whoever claims they’re tough is a liar: they’ve made up their loss. They’ve recovered from abandonment without knowing how the cold pours over you when you can’t find a scrap of light from behind. You two have met in the risky game of banalities, though, and have both heard the suspect’s nightmarish undertones where masked figures bark at the funeral masquerade.

Damp, high, close walls: the course descends; there’s no right or left. Time grows dark, cold. Your skin covered with sores, dregs, you fall prey to stammered, startled gestures. In the distance: the torturers’ carnival. We cannot lose what we have understood and gotten close to, you said once. Yet only this do we lose — we have nothing else to lose. We squander, we abandon what we’ve understood and have grown close to: closeness dies over time. Understanding flutters for a deceptive instant. You can live in the mountains for four years or forty, always ransacking the same false idea. . what miraculous powers could have grown in the lonely little girl in a year, or two, or ten if what happened could have been delayed, if Time allowed itself to test her later, but Time raced through the defeated Captain’s damaged laugh. Nothing could support him or keep him upright. He didn’t have time, however much he might have been watched over. He needed to speed toward the moment when he’d finally embrace himself in the pyre of forgiveness and atonement.

The walls close in along the corridor. Fingers splayed, your hand slides over the narrow, moldy wall; nearby other fingers grope; a slippery step, another slippery step: your breath trembles. Your hand and the other’s should meet and clasp. You listen to the drumming of fingers on the walls, fingers bloodied by another fall. Shortening the distance, you try to reach out.

This new death will no longer be lost! So you believe. It will regain time, it will remain, it will be stopped. There will be delay or resurrection by an ardent sister who is not sixteen years old anymore, nor twenty. She has learned to defend and preserve! Joy and terror expand — the terror of meeting the other’s joy and terror. The cold doubled, the mirroring in the other, in a narrow place, condemned, where one can’t stay or go, except into an embrace of terror that’s worse than death.

The shadow embraces the emptiness as it was at the beginning, as it was long ago, as it will be tomorrow and forever.

• • •

The factory heaved great columns of smoke and flame at the sky. It demanded the workers’ hands and hardships, not to mention their complete attention. The city would soon hear of the terrible event. At the beginning of the night shift someone had plunged into an enormous pot of molten metal. The burning liquid consumed the man’s body in an instant. All that remained was a brief hiss and the smell of burnt flesh.

On closer investigation, inquiry established that it had been suicide, possibly premeditated. The worker was capable and serious, his behavior uniformly correct: he hadn’t attracted attention. His coworkers sympathetically recalled the way he obstinately gathered his strength to keep up with them and almost always succeeded. They, acknowledged, however, that he was smothered by tiredness, and then he would hurriedly rub his throat as though trying to catch his breath. He would blink rapidly and purse his lips in a way that contracted half his face.

A previous suicide attempt came to light. This essential detail should have curbed interest in the case. It had horrified many, who suffered nightmares for several weeks. Rumors continued to fly. There were vague whispers about some sense of guilt from the war. Some maintained it had been proved; others that it was nothing but an insinuation the authorities pinned on the Captain, who had refused to collaborate.

It was the beginning of 1954. The Captain’s daughter was in her last year of high school. She passed her exams and tried to become a schoolteacher. That would have suited her well. She was calm and coddled by hours of reading. She had a deep respect for her mother’s vocation. Though she was admitted to university, she was soon dismissed: her father had taken an unsolved guilt to his grave. The university advisors told her to find a job — there were enough in the country, which was at the peak of reconstruction. The girl withdrew to a quiet village in the mountains. Several peasants seemed ready to rent her a room, but as soon as they heard she had come as a teacher, they fobbed her off on their neighbors. The village had recently been disturbed by peculiar “teams of agitators” from the distant cities of the plain. Wary of showing their faces, talking in an urban, intellectual way the peasants couldn’t understand, and delivering sly slogans, a host of these “foreigners” had then settled into local households.

The new teacher eventually found a place at the end of the village in the home of Vasile Obreja, an elementary-school teacher like herself.

. . You entered the little vestibule. You heard “Forward!” shouted from somewhere behind the walls. There were two doors on the left, two on the right, and one facing the entrance.

The voice seemed to have come from behind this last door. There, indeed, there sat the master of the house, at a table facing the door. Snowy haired but still robust, he offered you the first room on the left. He wouldn’t hear of money — except, “I have one rule of my own,” he said, “never try to push my wheelchair.” The girl settled comfortably into Obreja’s empty house.

The stubborn villagers refused to send their children to school, let alone come themselves. The young teacher didn’t lose her poise: she kept coming back to them. Despite her slender body, she confronted snow-covered roads and the biting cold. She didn’t make friends. For one of them — a certain old man named Abesei — she showed particular attention and sympathy. He seemed to enjoy their conversations and came to the evening literacy classes regularly. When he was absent for more than a week in a row, she became worried, all the more so because Lică Abesei, his nine-year-old grandson, wasn’t coming to school in the morning either. She climbed the hill to their house. She was forbidden from entering their gates by the father of Lică Abesei, who practically shoved her and yelled that he didn’t need “communists” coming to visit. The peasant was living morosely as a wronged man. Poor, but still the wealthiest householder in the impoverished village, he had just lately become a kulak . Bearish and violent, he hid his son’s boots to keep him from attending the communist school. He kept quarreling with his elderly father, too, who was amused by the relative socially damaging wealth of his son, who had finally enriched himself, just when he shouldn’t. Overjoyed to infuriate his son and to make fun of him, the old man was jubilant. He was enchanted by learning the ABCs and had made a secret pact with his grandson. One of the violent father-son quarrels ended badly, and in the end, very badly for the old man’s heart.