Norman Manea - Captives

Under Vasile Obreja’s protection, the young lady teacher was able to attend the funeral, which had immediately improved the classroom attendance of Lică Abesei, a weak boy who stammered but was still the smartest kid in class.

Only then did the grumpy loner — the teacher Vasile Obreja — accept his tenant’s request to talk in the evening. More than that, he uttered some of the most curious phrases: “You should read fairy tales, miss. The people who write them are the only ones who teach us morality. Remember the syllogism of the mathematician: Babies are illogical. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. Illogical persons are despised. Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. That’s what the mathematician said, and I will accompany you to those crocodiles.”

The young teacher used to run from one edge of the village to the other. Once in a while, when she came into the village, a cheerful and energetic vitiated man would help her: the forestry administrator, Dan Vasilescu, who had come to the mountainous village and its clean, fresh air, to cure himself of a morphine addiction. Her neighbor, Vasile Obreja, helped her more often with the literacy classes.

She stayed in that village for two years. After that she was hired to assist in the construction of a factory in the capital. She worked as a low-level technician, a job that could have been handled by a high-school graduate with some capacity for drawing. Her modest diligence won the sympathy of her superiors. After the factory was built and put into operation, she remained in the “technical department,” which was an unusual reward, because the privilege of residence in the capital was almost impossible to obtain. She took classes in the evenings at the technical school and when she graduated she became a knowledgeable technician, because she knew — from her time on the worksite — many more details about the construction of the factory than any of the other employees who were hired later.

To everyone’s surprise, however, a few years later, she left the factory and the city: after a month of medical leave, she returned friendly and energetic, but on her first day back on the job, she requested the vacation days that were due to her for that year’s work, and after that she never came back. Her former coworker Sebastian Caba, who had become the chief engineer of the factory, probably approved her transfer, because the big city was too noisy for her anyway.

After a while, they no longer talked about her. Someone who had visited the factory where she ended up confirmed that she hadn’t changed, and hearing this news, they never thought of her again.

• • •

The chair, the desk. . the comrade spy in front of it. . the nearby coworkers swallowed in white mist the way that mountains rise from fog at dawn among the trees after a chilly night. The somnolent prisoner among confused, rising voices like stray tones in the woods, barely plucked from night.

The bustle of the early hours: drawers slammed, voices, telephones, rustling paper. Between dry lips, the bitter white pill to chase away sleep, bodily fatigue. . soft steps, treading the white misty waters. Soon there will be earth under his feet. A narrow strip of light will insinuate itself on the peak of the hill, the color of a delayed morning. At the middle or a quarter of the way, words will suddenly come through the receiver raised to his ear.

You see him. He’s close, a step away, near your drawing board.

In the pocket of his portfolio, a bundle of white pages covered with signs, understandings that came too late. The envelope from Donca, the sister that he’d told you about. Stepping toward the door, hesitating, and turning back, his hand again on the gleaming white envelope. The door closed, shut — the avenues of retreat: blocked. Nothing could be delayed anymore. The gong had sounded, the due-date arrived. Stairs, the upholstered office. The phrase, rapidly, negligently hurled out:

— I can’t stand typewriters anymore.

We can’t stand typewriters anymore, those machines. We’re lunatics. We fall asleep within the nightmare of machines listening, recording, printing, and classifying. We go numb toward dawn, as though paralyzed. Speeches, fairy tales, and lullabies: traps at every step. We sleep in haste. We rise pale and groggy from the ritual of tiredness that subdues us like hypnosis, from which only murder could revive us.

He climbed the stairs, suddenly, disconnected from the tiny, senseless event resembling any other, like the drop that finally makes the water spill over the edge of the glass. The avoided meeting with an imagined sister banished between the sheets of a belated envelope — and the grotesque, the surrogate, little Moni-pig, Monica.

Anything could have been said, even the truth. They might have recapitulated the months of years, the days of weeks — the years of months of weeks of days — when the lunatic had gradually lost the strength to climb the hill of captive mornings anymore, and he heard, ever weaker and more distant, the words that once gave him strength: have to, and a bit more, again today, again tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after that . . until the sky would suddenly grow dark, thunderous, and the postponements would finally explode: that would be the end.

The interim and hierarchic chief, Comrade Caba, would have to listen to the warning and pass it on to his own interim and hierarchic bosses, for the warning was not addressed to him alone, or to them. Nor did it belong solely to the subordinate who delivered it. The cryptic lament would have to be uttered. It was, in fact, a threat.

Then, the first steps in the rain, the fugitive’s cadence, the liberating refrain of a moment in the professor’s moldy cage: I-can’t-stand-anymore, once, twice, the cadence ever more aggressive between the cold walls of the event that presumed you as witness and accomplice.

He could have said anything. Caba might have given anything in response — seeking a joke, a diversion, a recollection. He might have concocted any surprise — if anything he said could still surprise. . attempting one last chance, hoping that it’s never too late to mislead once again, to sweep away the foolish target, to manipulate and deceive.

— I knew then what you risked for me. We were only high-school students, but back then, any obstacle might have been able to delay me for several years or maybe even cause a definitive failure. Who on earth knows?

The subordinate to whom he was speaking wasn’t susceptible to surprises. He knew his interlocutor too well — and all of his worn-out tricks — about which he had explained to you over and over again.

Sebastian Caba might have complained about the way relations between them had been made too official: the subordinate’s hasty and obsequious daily greeting, and the distance that the subordinate maintained.

— I don’t understand what happened. We were proud of you, envious even. In a way, we may even accuse you of allowing mediocrities to get ahead.

Raising his hands to mime helplessness or bewilderment, Caba rose to his feet behind the glass-topped desk: he knew how to listen and answer, and he continued maintaining perfect, benevolent, well-meaning, well-shining camaraderie, while assuming the appearance of amazement, with the perfect balance of emotion and expression, with studied cheerfulness, and with calculated compassion. He fell silent opportunely, understandingly, wisely. He went on listening.

— I can’t stand typewriters anymore.

His manicured, long, white hands rested on the thick glass covering the desk. He went on listening.

— I can’t stand typewriters anymore.

Concern united his hands, intertwining them, even and pale.

— I can’t stand typewriters anymore.