Doina Ruști

rustido@gmail.com

The truancy

by Doina Ruști (writer) & Jim Brown (translator)

When the ten o’clock break ended, she took a last look at the stinking toilet bowl and

cautiously pulled the door ajar. She couldn’t hear a thing; not even the cleaning lady’s

rubber shoes. The water spilled during the break still glistened on the blue tiles, and

someone had left their lipstick on a sink.

She had two maths classes, which she absolutely had to skip. The Whale always

quizzed them in alphabetical order, and her turn was coming up now. So she had no choice:

either she played truant, or she’d be called out to the blackboard and made a laughing stock

before the whole class. So she’d hidden in the toilet, and was now planning on sneaking out

into the schoolyard and from there to Cişmigiu Gardens. After maths, she had PE, which

didn’t matter anyway. The school day was over and the thought of that was as refreshing as

a mouthful of Coke.

The corridor was deserted; ahead of her she could see the students’ entrance door

opening slowly, and in the white light of morning a figure appeared that she would have

recognized even enveloped in London fog, not just slightly blurred by the summer air. It

was Dani. She could see how his fingers gripped the strap of his rucksack, while the soft

soles of his sports shoes struck the spotted cement. Dani was now only a few metres away,

exactly as she’d dreamed—just the two of them in a deserted corridor: he tall, striding

forward, and she more determined than ever to not miss this opportunity.

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 As usual, he was going to pass by without a glance at her, looking straight ahead,

towards the other end of the corridor, so she thickened her voice and said with a certain

indifference:

‘Hi, Dani! Sorry… could you…?’

For an instant he looked at her over his shoulder, as if he had no intention of stopping.

It was a bad start, but if he had stopped it would have been worse.

‘I really have to ask you something!’

She wasn’t even going to take any notice if the blood that, scared to death, was trying

to burst out of her cheeks. She had to push ahead, without a plan, to ask him for something,

anything, so that he would realize she was there, in front of him, in the silent corridor.

‘Actually, I’d like to ask you a couple of things, and I was wondering if you’d maybe

have time at some point, one day.’

Dani finally stopped and look down at her, very carefully, as if he were out at the

blackboard.

‘You’re in the ninth grade, in that classroom next to ours, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I’m Monica, actually Moni. We’ve seen each other before on the corridor and I

have been wanting to ask you for a long time now…’

‘Well, ask me!’ he interrupted, smiling in a tolerant but absent way, and Monica

immediately understood that he was treating her like a girl from the ninth grade, not one

you’d take seriously when you’re about to finish high school.

She felt as if the overheating of her blood was now coming out through her eyes, and

two little muscles under her kneecaps had gone all soft.

‘I know you have to study for your baccalaureate and university entrance exam and

that’s why it’s hard for me to… I’d like to ask you if you could explain some day to me a

problem in …’

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 Monica had been going to invent something about maths, but the thought that she was

just skipping a class with the Whale, who was Dani’s form teacher, made her switch tracks

at the last moment.

‘A problem in philosophy,’ she said finally, and Dani burst out laughing.

He answered her, however, and as he talked the high windows filled with the summer

sun: ‘Who told you I was interested in philosophy?’

He was looking at her now, and his fingers were moving rather restlessly as they

gripped the cloth of his rucksack.

‘Look, if you want, there’s a lecture today at the University. Just where you enter the

University building, there on Academy Street, if you’ve ever been before.’

Monica didn’t know, so Dani explained to her in more detail, and then said as he

prepared to leave, ‘See you there at one thirty and, if you like, we can talk afterwards.’

For Monica, this was the turning point. She was so happy she had decided to skip

school that she promised herself she’d do algebra equations all weekend, out of gratitude to

the god of mathematics.

As she turned into the path, she realized she had no idea how she had got there. The

whole road from school, and then from the entrance to Cişmigiu as far as the lime tree path

had remained outside her brain, filled to the brim as it was with Dani’s words, which only

now, gone over again and listened to in slow motion, in the warm, secret chamber behind

her eyes, acquired their true value and started to shine. She had a date with Dani from the

twelfth!

Monica sat down on the first bench she came to, and drank in for a moment the clear

the sky over the lime trees in full leaf. And as she lit up a cigarette, without any of her

usual precautions, she felt a great terror coming down upon her, an ominous and

overpowering feeling of panic: what if they didn’t meet? He wouldn’t come; she wouldn’t

see him; or even worse, she wouldn’t get there on time. She automatically checked her

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 watch, it was twenty past ten. A good three hours still to go before one! It was impossible

for her not to make it. What’s more, in this time she could spruce herself up a bit, or at least

take a look in a mirror.

She was so overwhelmed that she didn’t even notice that someone had sat down beside

her until she felt her cigarette being snatched from her fingers. By a completely bald

shithead.

‘Can I take a drag, poppet?’

Monica jumped up and took off, while the caveman went on talking.

‘Where are you going, poppet? You upset?’ he crowed, and his words rose up to the

treetops. ‘Stay here with daddy, and I’ll give you a thicker one!’

The man had utter contempt in his voice and no intention of stopping. ‘Smoking’s bad

for your health,’ he yelled after Monica, ‘but my dick never killed anyone.’

Only when she got to the end of the path did she realize that there were quite a lot of

people in the park, even some guys from her school, and she quickened her pace even

more, as far as the boulevard and then farther, without making any more plans, miserable

because of the scumbag’s words, which had seeped in through all her pores. Why the hell

was she so affected by the words of a lowlife that she’d left behind a while ago, instead of

concentrating on the big event of her life: the date with Dani?!

She went instinctively down toward the Town Hall and from there she took the side

streets, until she came out at Unirii, and all along the way she tried to forget the Cişmigiu

incident and to resume her thoughts from before. But a wish was slowly and painfully

growing in the lining of her heart, to go back and crack open the head of the creep, slowly,

from forehead to chin. She could even see herself forcing open the crack in his pumpkin

head by moving a screwdriver from side to side, until he gave up the ghost on his knees

before that bench in Cişmigiu.

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 When she entered the mall, she felt as if she had been she’d been wrung out and hung

up to dry.

There weren’t a lot of people there, and the voices of OneRepublic could be heard

drifting out of a shop. Monica took a deep breath and felt she was coming to life. Beside

the banisters of the stairs a woman said something to her with a pleading look in her eyes.

Because Monica hadn’t heard what the old dear wanted, she stopped and raised her

eyebrows. But the woman was silent. She looked like her grandma.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked, more out of politeness than anything, and to her surprise,

the woman smiled at her very humbly and said a bit more loudly, ‘I need some money,

even just a little, to get myself a piece of bread.’

Oh come on! The only person she hadn’t paid her contribution to was this old biddy.

‘Really, granny? Have I got “sucker” written on my face?’

And still thinking what gall beggars had, she headed for the cosmetics department,

straight towards the perfume testers and then on to make-up. She’d stink like nothing on

earth, and Dani would realize that she was wearing perfume especially for him. She

goggled at the jewellery, and at a shop with gag gifts and she felt again the time weighing

on her.

It was ten to twelve. She went up the boulevard to the University, and a few minutes

later she was already hanging around in front of the building. She’d got there too early and,

as she was hungry as well, she counted her money and reckoned she could easily go into

the Springtime on Academy Street. The crowds inside intimidated her so she was a bit

flustered by the time she had squeezed through to the till. It was the first time she had been

somewhere so crowded all on her own. She chose a salad, even if the smell of French fries

made her mouth water. But what sort of fries would they be if they didn’t have garlic

sauce? Better to limit herself to an honest mixed salad and a juice.

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 She dragged it out as much as she could and at one twenty she went through the door of

the University.

The lecture hall looked imposing to her. There wasn’t much light, or rather, it was a

light already licked by the tongue of the evening.

Suddenly she felt millions of stiff stalks growing all over her from head to toe, and she

was convinced that Dani was looking at her. But she couldn’t guess where he was. She

scanned the lecture theatre and noticed that there weren’t quite so many people there as

she’d initially thought. A lot of them seemed to be students, rather thinly spread out in the

cathedral-sized hall.

She hadn’t even decided where to sit, when the speaker appeared. He was a rather fat

man with completely white hair, wearing a checked shirt.

Monica hurried into a row, pushed by someone who wanted to sit down. She was still

adjusting to the seat, when the philosopher started talking. He had an annoying voice, like a

choked engine, and the words seemed to be linked together, glued together, in fact, and

hard to follow. He was saying something about a book of his and from his tone it was clear

that it would never even have entered his head that there could be someone in that large

hall who hadn’t read it.

Five minutes in and Monica was already bored, and thinking of the amount of time she

still had to listen to the asphyxiated old chap made a disgusting venom rise up from the

bottom of her stomach to her mouth. She turned her head and looked around the hall again,

then over the heads of the people in front. Dani was definitely not there. What if she’d

happened on another lecture? For a moment she let herself be overwhelmed by panic but

the next instant she calmed down, as she read again the poster behind the speaker.

She took a deep breath, heroically determined to stick it out to the end, and a ray of

summer sunlight hit her directly in the face. Between the tops of the lime trees she could

see the sky and she could feel someone pulling her cigarette from under the pressure of her

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 forefinger. She was so surprised by the world’s new appearance that she didn’t even think

about the disgusting bald lowlife who’d nicked her cigarette. How the hell had she got here

and where had the lecture hall gone?

Monica stood up and looked around, to check that she was in Cişmigiu, and while that

toerag talked filth at her, she took off at a run down the path, this time not sparing the time

to notice who was around and who’d heard what he’d said, because she felt as if an

invisible mouth had swallowed her.

In an instant, the landscape changed again. She was in the mall, in front of the old

biddy who was saying with her honeyed voice ‘I need some money, even just a little, to get

myself a piece of bread.’ She could see her clearly, even better than the first time, because

she also noticed her platform sandals. She didn’t leave immediately, as she had done the

first time, but instinctively decided to stay there rooted to the spot, as if that way she could

stop the flow that had ripped her from the lecture hall.

But before she could finish that thought, a mist came down over her head for a second,

and the next she was sitting at a table in Springtime. She was eating her salad in no hurry

and sipping her juice through the green straw, while her eyes quickly scanned over the

faces of the others, very trendy people, she thought, probably students, in any case wearing

gear that she couldn’t take her eyes off, trousers with tons of zippers, designer blouses, hair

dos, glasses. Right in front of her were two guys, but she didn’t have time to study them as

she found herself back in the hall where the speaker was sullenly speaking the same sticky

words she’d heard before. You’d think he’d been forced to give the lecture.

It was a long sentence, which Monica had heard before and which she would hear again

and again, as the only reality of this small world that she had sped through.

And not once or twice but perhaps thousands upon thousands of times, until she knew it

by heart, word for word, first as a condemned prisoner, then getting annoyed, protesting, or

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 going up to the lectern to shut the moron’s mouth. But he continued to say the same words,

as if her gestures and insistence just hadn’t registered on him.

Monica went like a whirlwind through the four compartments, from the scumbag in

Cişmigiu to the old beggar in the mall, then through Springtime and finally to the lcture

hall.

For a long while she couldn’t get herself together, and just felt tossed from one place to

the next. Then, by willpower, she learned to use to best advantage the limited time she

spent in each of the four places. She had timed it and she knew that one full tour, from

Cişmigiu to the lecture, took a quarter of an hour. Each stop took roughly four minutes, a

short time, but she forced herself to make use of every detail, because each time she

planned her movements, trying not to repeat any, to discover the hidden nooks and crannies

or to guess the reason for each happening. It was just like in Groundhog Day or tons of

other movies, of which Monica had seen a few and, thinking about them, she clung to the

belief that at some point she would be able to stop the madness and get out of the

whirlwind unscathed.

Her first thought had been that the old woman at the mall was the key to the problem.

She should have given her money, shown pity, like in fairytales, where some helpless

creature always appears. And, for all her conviction that the old dear at the mall was

nothing but a fraud, she tried everything she could think of to win her over. At the first

opportunity, she went through all her pockets and gave her everything she had. But nothing

happened. The woman was still there, with her look of an old charlatan out to get money

for another drink. Monica kissed her, showed all her good will, then, losing her patience,

shoved her or turned her back on her immediately, trying to see other people, do anything

that crossed her mind, good or bad, from messing up the shelves in stores to making the

most beautiful declarations that a mind chased through four worlds could come up with.

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 But at least she couldn’t complain about monotony. Every moment had its surprises,

because each time she discovered something new. For example, although the scumbag in

Cişmigiu continued to say the same nauseating words, he couldn’t get up from the bench!

He stayed in the same position, nailed to the spot. As soon as she got to that bit, she threw a

punch at the idiot’s head, while he continued to say his line giving no indication that

anything had bothered him. Then, she noticed that there were some white flowers next to

the bench. Sometimes, she ignored the bald guy and just took off in various directions, so

that after a while she came to know that in those four minutes she could get to the bridge

over the lake or to two of the park gates. In the same way, during the lecture, she could

walk around the hall and stare at various individuals, who, although they didn’t speak,

would signal for her to be quiet or at least allow themselves to be examined.

In this life divided into four minute intervals, Monica noticed with surprise that the

philosopher was slightly changed. There seemed to be something wrong with his

physiognomy, as if he’d got scrunched up, had shrunk in the wash, or was about to fall

asleep. Even his voice seemed more gooey and more bored.

As she continued to study these small changes, which she kept thinking about even

after leaving the lecture hall, leaning against the trunk of a lime tree in Cişmigiu, or looking

at the jewellery under the glass of the display cases in the mall, it came to her as a

revelation that the chubby man who was mumbling on about happiness was looking the

worse for wear. His cheeks had drooped a bit and his eyes had got smaller because quite

simply he was aging. This discovery unlocked the old shivery feeling that she hadn’t felt in

a long while and that had remained hidden in her memories, now quite remote, about the

meeting with Dani in the deserted corridor.

Monica looked for a full four minutes at the beggar in the mall and realized that she too

no longer looked the way she had on the first day. The knowing little smirk had gone. It

was the lecturer who was the most marked by the passage of time, but everyone was

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 showing their age. Even the toerag, whom Monica had stopped looking at for a some time

now, had deep furrows in his brow, like a great thinker.

Electrified by a sinister sense of foreboding, at the first opportunity she ran to a mirror

in the mall. Her intuition was projected onto the silvery glass without sparing her feeling.

Nothing of what she knew she was could be seen any more. She couldn’t say she was

displeased by what she saw, but it was altogether someone else, a face smooth as a balloon,

with a rather hungry look.

For a while she lived only for the next chance to get to that mirror in the mall, to put on

makeup at top speed in those four minutes, only for it to lose all its effect immediately

afterwards anyway. She never entered an episode with what she had acquired in another.

She kept starting again, with the resources she had had at fifteen, when she had landed in

that cursed lecture hall or when she had lit up that wretched cigarette in Cişmigiu. She

didn’t even know when and why she had stepped onto this iron-toothed carousel.

Overwhelmed by the uselessness of life, she hardly even noticed what happened to

others. So the death of the philosopher took her by surprise. He had barely stepped in when

he collapsed with his forehead on the desk. Someone ran to examine him close up, and

someone else called the ambulance. The excitement of these amazing changes left her

speechless, so that she almost didn’t realize when she had passed into Cişmigiu.

The death of the lecturer made his world disappear too, and Monica’s life was reduced

to just three entrances: into the park, into the mall, and into the fast-food restaurant.

She now had the impression that time was passing slowly. The dirtbag on the bench

finished his line, and she was still walking by the side of the lake. Under a willow, some

guys from her school were playing backgammon. She had noticed them a long time ago, on

her first day in Cişmigiu, but she hadn’t spotted them since then. She lit a cigarette and,

when she’d got to the middle of it, she slowly passed into the mall. The beggar was pretty

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 run down and Monica understood that she didn’t have long to go either. She let her say her

piece, then she said with a certain compassion:

‘I think you’re going to die, and that this world will pass away with you!’

The old woman didn’t answer, but to Monica it seemed that their was a vague trace of

regret in her eyes.

From the mall she passed into the fast-food restaurant, which no longer seemed so

crowded. In front of her were the familiar guys eating pizza, who also seemed more

mature, with stronger shoulders and more assertive gazes.

She looked at her watch and realized that she had stayed quite a bit, but she scarcely

had time to think on that change, because straight away she was back in Cişmigiu.

For a while she divided her quarter of an hour between Springtime and Cişmigiu. The

dirtbag was more and more decrepit, and Monica supposed that he too would soon

disappear.

The day she spent a full quarter of an hour in Springtime for the first time, she knew

she was rid for ever of the words that had poisoned her first happiness.

At long last, she could now change her order. In several episodes, she ran to buy a

kebab with French fries and garlic, and sometimes she even managed to finish her meal

before she found herself in front of a salad again.

Apart from the fact that every action had to be completed within the hallowed quarter

of an hour, her life had changed radically. She now had so much time that she got bored,

gawking at people or inspecting the various rooms of the establishment. She couldn’t go

outside. In the glass door there was an invisible bouncer, who shoved her back mercilessly.

Sometimes she thought about what she could do if once she left Springtime, and the

invisible tail of an infernal animal would gently stroke her cheek.

In the restaurant’s toilet there was a large mirror, in which she examined her wrinkles

and wondered how much longer she had left to live. It seemed to her that twenty years had

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 passed over her. Anyway, she now looked like her mum, except she was still dressed in the

same clothes that she had worn on the fatal day of her meeting with Dani. They had grown

together with her and in spite of the passage of time that had left its marks on her flesh, the

clothes looked brand new. in the pocket of her jacket, she still had her packet of cigarettes

and her yellow lighter.

Monica would sometimes remain rooted to the spot, for one quarter of an hour after

another, so that she hardly felt the dividing line between her fragments of time. In this last

location there was no main character. She hadn’t talked to anyone there on that first day.

Consequently, she could hardly hope that some exhausted individual would take away her

prison with his own passing. She had the feeling that this anonymous place was to be her

tomb.

She sat down at the table of the pizza eaters, who were by now two grown men. She

tried to chat with nearly everyone, including the security guard who dozed on a chair by the

entrance to the toilet. He was the oldest character in this last scene and it occurred to her

that maybe, miraculously, he might be the master of the space and her liberator.

Sometimes, she looked at the people passing on Academy Street, always indifferent,

never stopping or responding to her friendly signals. Only occasionally would someone

spread their fingers in the air, as if responding to a stupid child. And, of course, everything

flowed in the same quarter of an hour, the same, without surprises, so that she ended up

knowing how many people passed by the door, what they were wearing, and in what order

they appeared.

Once she went into the manager’s office. She had been there before and knew that there

wasn’t much to see, because the room was dominated by a large desk, with an open laptop

on top of it. The walls were completely bare; there wasn’t even a coat hanger in that room;

and in the drawers of the desk there was nothing but papers: tables, registers, and bills. On

top of one pile lay a CD.

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 She idly moved the cursor over the three folders, which were balance sheet, payments,

and leonard, and decided on the last. Inside was an unnamed MPEG. She tapped lightly

with her forefinger on the austere touchpad, and a virtual screen opened on the desktop. In

two seconds the screen filled with the image of a shop – first the shelves, which were so

familiar to her, and then the video camera swept the corridor on which there were rows of

shelves and displays, even going under the stairs, on whose banisters the old beggar woman

was leaning. Monica looked at her tenderly as if at a cherished memory. It was absurd that

she should go soft at the sight of the old biddy, especially after she had been so happy to be

rid of her. And yet she felt as if she had found a lost family member. This thought attached

itself to her parents’ memory and a tear erupted from the corner of her eye.

Then the film flickered hazily and the growling philosopher appeared. It was back at

the beginning, when he was still in full strength. The eye of the film scanned the hall, and

then suddenly came upon the bald head of the bastard in Cişmigiu, the sight of whom made

her instantly nauseous.

Monica spent her time walking among the tables or looking into the street through the

glass door, but every few quarter-hours she would run to the manager’s office and watch

the movie about her departed times. It had become her little pleasure, although there was

nothing new there. Even the words of her lowlife admirer, with his shaven head and face

like broken tarmac, made her smile, just as the speaker’s interminable sentence now

seemed to her to hide a secret clue that might eventually point to the unravelling of the

happening that had made her a prisoner.

And as she searched the film, stopping it at certain images, she made a discovery that

immediately filled her so simplistically amputated life. In the lecture hall, where the same

minutes she had learned by heart had passed over her so many times, at one point, the door

opened. It wasn’t something that would attract attention, just a detail at the edge of the

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 screen full of listening heads. Through the slightly open door, for a fraction of a second, a

new face, a latecomer appeared, and it was Dani.

Monica looked at the film several times, examined the image and, with a crushed heart,

wept for several quarter-hours. Dani came in precisely a second before she descended into

the Cişmigiu episode. How come she hadn’t noticed him all this time? And even if she had

noticed him, what could she have done? She wouldn’t have had time even to call his name.

While he slipped in through the door of the lecture theatre, she was flying toward Cişmigiu.

Seeing Dani again brought back to her their meeting in the school corridor and, along

with it, the numerous small desires that were stuck into each fibre of her flesh. She even

relived the embarrassing rebellion of her blood, and from the way the pizza eaters, who had

now reached the starting age of the stinker in Cişmigiu, were looking at her, she realized

that she was blushing.

She got off the chair and headed for the door. The same people she had come to know

in detail were passing on Academy Street. A muffled chuckle came from behind and

Monica instantly knew that someone was laughing at her. She didn’t remember ever

hearing that laugh before. She half turned and looked straight at the pizza eaters, who were

pretending to be extremely preoccupied, although there was an air of irony floating about

them that was confirmed by the playful look in the corners of the two men’s eyes. They

looked about fifty years old now, and for an instant Monica remembered them young, at

the beginning of her adventure, and thought to herself that she too had let herself go in the

meantime. She was loath to go to the bathroom mirror, especially since in a second she

would be sitting again at her usual chair anyway, where the quarter of an hour of

Springtime started.

She leaned with all her weight on one shoulder, resigned to this thought, and the glass

of the door vibrated a few times. This was something new too, but she didn’t have time to

analyze the distant hum of the glass, because the next moment she was on the pavement.

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 Monica stood motionless, still looking at the two men eating pizza at a table in the

restaurant, not even daring to lift her eyes to look at the people passing by her shoulder.

The summer air was heaped with smells whose unseen weave she had forgotten, especially

the dust and petrol smell of the Bucharest streets. Finally, she lifted her gaze and was

struck by the completely unknown figure of a passer-by. She was in front of Springtime but

the people going to and fro on Academy Street were different from those in her quarter of

an hour penance.

She took her first steps without haste, almost creeping, but by the time she turned the

corner into Queen Elizabeth Boulevard, she was already walking like someone in a hurry.

She cast her eye at the Pizza Hut window and was amazed to see herself: taller, fatter,

older, but in the same jeans, same jacket, and with her little rucksack on her shoulder, just

as she had left school. She looked like a pensioner on a tour of Europe. And all of a sudden

a terrible anxiety took her in its iron grip. Where could she go? What would she tell her

parents? What if perhaps they had died … in the meantime?

She was breathless from walking fast, and the feeling of freedom weakened her knees

from time to time. She crossed at Casa Armatei and walked in a veil of sadness all the way

to Cişmigiu. The park hummed faintly; between the green bushes she could see the crests

of the water jets from the sprinklers. If she went through Cişmigiu she would be at the back

gate of the school in five minutes, and from there it would take her exactly ten minutes to

get home. And yet she didn’t dare to go in. A prudent thought told her to stay away from

her old prison.

She continued on her way, measuring the pavement with firm steps. Her eyes licked the

school façade, and then she turned and went in through the student entrance. The yard was

exactly as she remembered it, shadowed on one side by the high wall that separated it from

Cişmigiu. Through the open door she could see the corridor where she had talked for the

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 first time with Dani. An impulse like a raging wind pushed her in. Surely she could look

around? To breathe in the smell of sports shoes and hastily mopped cement!

When she entered the poisoned light of the corridor, the bell was just ringing for a

break, and students were already pouring out of several classrooms. An alarm sounded

vaguely in her blood, which was alerted and chased in all directions. The toilet where she

had once hidden was still there, with its blue tiles, in which she got the impression that she

saw her face as it had been then, bent down and on the lookout. Just a few steps further on

was Dani’s former classroom, and on the doorplate of the one next door was written in

black letters: ‘Class 10 A’.

Monica stopped next to a window, with her eyes trained on the door as it opened

slowly. First she saw the register, then, bit by bit, the bulky figure of the Whale. She felt a

scarf of ice tighten around her neck and then immediately breathed a sigh of relief at the

thought that, aged as she was, she wouldn’t recognize her.

The teacher passed her by without even glancing at her, and, a few slim figures

scattered beside the open classroom door. Monica stood leaning on the edge of the window

a bit longer to gather strength before heading off, but her eyes ran over the stinking fibre of

the parquet, the chipped edge of a desk, and the irregular fluttering of the net curtains. To

her great surprise, she discovered that they were the same curtains, and then the doorway

was filled with students, who seemed undecided if they wanted to go in or out of the

classroom. She case a fleeting glance at them, like a nail driven into the body of a magnet.

In the door there was a face that looked familiar and so peaceful that it seemed to have

been wiped of all emotion. It took Monica a good few seconds to realize who it was. The

melancholy eyes, the reserved smile, and the hair moulded to the shape of the head seemed

inappropriate accessories on a face she knew like the back of her hand, her own face.

She stood up straight and took a couple of steps towards the girl, who was still her, her

hair cut, serene and a bit bland, but still her, as she had been before she had met Dani.

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 When she got close enough, she stretched out her palm towards the tense shoulder. Not the

touch so much as the mutual recognition came like an acid rain that closed in on them

violently, so that each knew that she alone mattered. Into the mind dazed by the quarter of

an hour prison, as into the brain washed by the pressure of a summer day, the entire flow

crept at the same time, with all its great events and with its details lost in the folds of a

happening of a year before.

And the new Monica went back to the day in which she had decided to skip maths,

when luck had brought Dani into her path and when the living world had ended.

After the meeting at the University, her life had been turned completely upside down.

She hadn’t even had a chance to feel the magic taste of that event. A dirty old shitbag had

embittered her soul. The trip to the mall and then the stop at Springtime had exhausted her

so that, by the time she reached the lecture hall, she was left only with a vague trace of the

enthusiasm she had felt initially. She sat tensely for five minute, and then the door to the

lecture theatre opened discreetly and Dani entered.

She jumped to her feet. She hadn’t planned anything; she just stood up, just like that.

He stood there rather confused, right by the door frame, and then his eyes found her and in

the same vague and hazy instant, she saw him melt slowly, like an ice-cream collapsing

over the cone. Monica gave a short scream, not the way one does when facing a danger, but

a pathetic and distressing scream, like a threatened turkey, so that all heads turned in her

direction. The speaker himself was scared into silence.

By the time Monica got to the door, others had got out of their chairs as well.

Now she recalled how she had bent over him and touched his face. Two trails of blood,

like two match heads, were trickling out of one of his nostrils. She wanted to call out his

name but all that she could get out was the same yell, piercing at first and then chattering,

while he slid to the floor lost and gone. Monica took his head in her hands and, because she

didn’t know what to do, sat down beside him, bending over him so that she could clearly

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 see the movement of his eyelids and the hairs growing on his chin. Someone handed her a

tissue, and she dabbed at the blood under his nose. A drop sparkled in the corner of his

mouth, and she would have liked to wipe that away too. But she didn’t have the courage to

touch his lips. From hiding places among his twisted locks and from the top of his head

came waves of heat that passed from his inert body directly into her own blood, which was

under attack from all directions.

And it was then that contact was lost. Not between him and her, but between her two

beings. Her restless, floating side jumped under the greedy wheel of a quarter of an hour.

While the other, worldly one, continued on her way without hesitating and especially

without some of her cherished memories. She went home, continued to go to school, and

filled a whole notebook with algebra exercises. Only one person was erased from her

memory, and that was Dani.

Standing in front of the 10 A classroom, with her eyes illuminated by the window in the

corridor, Monica remembered all the apathy of the last months, in which she hadn’t been

able to find her place or even a single point of interest. Right after the ambulance had

disappeared into chaos of the boulevard, taking with it Dani’s helpless body, she had gone

home and cut her hair, scaring her dad, who joked, not unkindly:

‘What’s the matter, eh, pet? Why have you cut your hair like that? You look like a Nazi

soldier in a Russian movie!’

But his remark evaporated without making the slightest impression on a numbed and

quasi-amnesic brain.

Then, day by day, she entered the classroom quiet and indifferent. She had no

complaints and she didn’t feel besieged by desires. There was nothing that could move her.

In one break, she now remembered, in the summer light that had broken in through the

window, a tall, cheerful boy had opened the classroom door; it was Dani.

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 ‘Is there any Monica in your class?’ he’d asked as he scanned the faces turned towards

him.

‘Depends who’s asking,’ one of the girls tried to joke, but several fingers were already

pointing towards her, as she sat glumly, resting her chin on her hands.

‘Oh, it’s you! I didn’t even recognize you,’ said Dani, as he headed for her row.

But she didn’t answer him. He seemed a trivial apparition, not worth the slightest

effort, like getting up to greet him or going out into the corridor. Dani stopped by her desk

and said, a bit awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry about that business at the University.’

And as Monica kept looking at him blankly, he added, as if wishing to explain, ‘I

probably scared you to death… just when you wanted to ask me something or other,

remember?’

And that was the real problem: Monica couldn’t remember anything, not even that she

had been to the University. She vaguely knew that she had tried to skip class and that she

had wandered the streets, but she had no idea which streets she had been on. And she

wasn’t even much bothered about this obscure, amnesic episode in her existence, which

now was now running on smoothly like a ball of butter spread on freshly toasted bread.

Without emotions and without any disturbing thoughts.

‘I’ve no idea who you are,’ she said, looking up at him, with her eyes comfortably

buried behind her eyelids.

‘Weren’t you at the University when I took ill?’

Monica made a face as if to say ‘no way’, and then, finally lifting her chin from

between her palms, she added with some eloquence, ‘I think you’re mistaking me for

another girl!’

That had been all. They hadn’t even met again in school, especially since the

baccalaureate was drawing near and the twelve graders had melted away without a trace.

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 And, remembering this short, stupid meeting, while she still stood in the classroom

doorway, Monica was at last filled with that vital syrup that wrecked her well-ordered

plans and made all her blood vessels sprout wings. In the desert territory, which for a whole

year had been untouched by the breath of life, the sound of flowing blood could at last be

heard. It was only her impulsive side that loved Dani, the side driven to consume itself, her

aged being, in which lived all the urges and the serpentine motions of a desire hard to

control.

When the break ended, and the clang of the bell fell again over the classrooms, Monica

picked up her rucksack and was off almost at a run. She hadn’t even got past Dani’s former

classroom, when she heard the Whale’s heavy voice: ‘Where do you think you’re going,

young lady? Not thinking of skipping class, I hope?’

Monica looked up and the Whale started in surprise. Between the restless eyelashes

there shone a new, devilish look. The teacher stopped and examined her sideways, almost

curious to hear the response of the girl, who smiled and said in an almost confidential tone,

‘You had an outstanding student last year: Dani.’

The Whale lowered her voice too and offered a warm and open ‘yes’.

‘Do you know what’s happened to him?’

‘What’s happened?’ the Whale asked, alarmed.

And because Monica was waiting with the same drunken eyes, she answered with a

certain indifference, ‘He’s a student at the University.’

While the teacher was still reflecting, bemused, on her question, Monica was already

heading away to the exit, straight into the fluttering wings of the summer day, determined

to cross the Cişmigiu Garden, to take the boulevard head on, and to go into the University

building, even if what was waiting at the end of the journey might be a new quarter of an

hour with its diamond teeth.

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 (trans. James Christian Brown)

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