Solenoid Read online

  I stop worrying about the string from my navel and, as the water runs off my body, get out of the tub. I take the lice solution from behind the toilet and pour a little of the pungent substance over my head. I wonder what class gave me lice this time, as though it matters. Maybe it does, who knows. Maybe different streets in the neighborhood and different classes in school have distinct species of lice, different sizes.

  I rinse the revolting solution off my head and comb my hair, hanging over the brilliantly clean porcelain of the sink. And the parasites begin to drop out, two, five, eight, fifteen … They are tiny, each one in its own drop of water. Squinting, I can see their bodies, with wide abdomens and three still-moving legs on each side. Their bodies and my body, wet and naked, leaning over the sink, are made of the same organic tissues. They have analogous organs and anatomical functions. They have eyes that see the same reality, they have legs that take them through the same unending and unintelligible world. They want to live, just as I do. I wash them off the sides of the sink with a stream of water. They travel through the pipes below, into the sewers underground.

  With my hair still wet, I go to bed beside my meager set of treasures: the Tic-Tac box with my baby teeth, pictures from when I was little and my parents were in the prime of their life, the matchbox of fibers from my navel, my journal. As I often do in the evenings, I pour the teeth into my hand: smooth little stones, still bright white, that were once inside my mouth, that I once used to eat, to pronounce words, to bite like a puppy. Many times have I wondered what it would be like to have a paper bag with my vertebra from when I was two, or my finger bones from age seven …

  I put the teeth away. I would like to look at some of the pictures, but I can’t stay up any later. I open the drawer in the nightstand and put everything inside, in the yellowed “snakeskin” box that used to house a razor, a shaving brush, and a box of Astor razor blades. Now I use it for my lowly treasures. I pull the blanket over my head and try to fall asleep as fast as I can, perhaps forever. My scalp doesn’t itch anymore. And, since it’s happened so recently, I hope it won’t happen again tonight.

  2

  I meant my dreams, the visitors, all that insanity, but this is not the time to talk about it. For now, let me turn again to the school where I’ve worked more than three years already. “I won’t be a teacher all my life,” I told myself, I remember like it was yesterday, when I was taking the tram home, late one summer night under rosebud clouds, from the end of Şoseaua Colentina, where I had been to see the school for the first time. But no miracle has happened; I very likely will be a teacher all my life. In the end, it hasn’t been all that bad. The afternoon I visited the school, just after I received my assignment, I was twenty-four in years and maybe twice as many kilograms in weight. I was incredibly, impossibly thin. My mustache and long hair, slightly red at that time, did nothing but infantilize my appearance, such that, if I glanced at myself in a shop or tram window, I would think I was looking at a high school student.

  It was a summer afternoon, the city was brimming with light, like a glass whose water arches above its lip. I took the tram from Tunari, in front of the Directorate General of the Militia. I passed my parents’ apartment building on Ştefan cel Mare, where I lived too, and as usual I searched the endless facade for my window, lined with blue paper to keep out the sun, then I passed the wire fence of Colentina Hospital. The hospital wings were lined up over the vast grounds like brickwork battleships. Each one had a different shape, as though the tenants’ various diseases had determined their building’s bizarre architecture. Or perhaps each wing’s architect had been chosen for his disease, and he had attempted to create an allegory of his suffering. I knew each one and had stayed in at least two of them. At the right end of the grounds, I shuddered at the sight of a pink building with paper-thin walls, the neurology wing. I had stayed there for a month, eight years earlier, for a facial paralysis that still bothered me from time to time. Many are the nights in which I wander in my dreams through the wings of Colentina Hospital, I enter unknown, hostile buildings, their walls covered with anatomical diagrams …

  Next, the tram passes along the former ITB workshops, where my father worked for a while as a locksmith. Some apartment blocks have gone up in front of them, you can barely see the workshops from the street. The ground floor of one block was once a clinic, right at the Doctor Grozovici stop. For a time, I went there for my injections, vitamin B1 and B6, following my facial paralysis at age sixteen. My parents would put the vials in my hand and tell me not to come back with them unopened. They knew me too well. At first, I would drop them down the elevator shaft and tell my parents I had done them, but this didn’t work for long. In the end, I had to get it done for real. I would set off for the clinic, at dusk, my heart full of dread. I walked the two tram stops as slowly as I could. Like when I had to go to the dentist, I would hope that some miracle would happen and I would find the office was closed, the building demolished, the doctor deceased, or that there was a blackout and the drill couldn’t run or the lights above the chair would go out. No miracle ever happened, however. The pain waited for me, all of it, with its blood-colored aura. The first nurse at Grozovici who, late one night, gave me the injection was pretty, blonde, very neat, but I soon became terrified of her. She was the type who treated your bare bottom with complete disdain. Not the thought of the pain that was to come, but this woman’s disdain for the kid with whom she was about to have an intimate relationship (albeit just sticking a needle in his butt cheek) quickly eliminated the vaguest excitement, and my sex gave up its efforts to lift its head and take a look. I waited next for the inevitable wetness on the soon-to-be martyred flesh, the three or four smacks of the back of her hand, then the shock of the needle stuck into flesh, its tip always sure to hit a nerve, a vein, to hurt you somehow, a lasting, memorable pain, then increased by the poison that traveled down the channel of the needle to spread, like sulfuric acid, throughout your hip. It was horrible. The blonde nurse’s injections would make me limp for a week.

  Luckily, this nurse, who was probably into S&M in bed, traded off with another nurse at the clinic, this one just as difficult to forget, though for different reasons. She scared you to death when you first saw her because she had no nose. But she did not wear a bandage or a prosthetic, she simply had, in the middle of her face, a large orifice vaguely partitioned into two compartments. She was as small as a gosling, brown-haired, with eyes whose tenderness might have seemed attractive if the skull-like appearance of her face did not overwhelm you. When I came on the blonde nurse’s night, I was seen right away. The wind whistled through the waiting room. But the noseless little person seemed unusually popular: the waiting room was always full of people, as full as a church on Easter. I wouldn’t get home from the clinic until two in the morning. Many of the patients brought her flowers. When she appeared in the doorway, everyone smiled happily. I could understand why: no one, probably, had ever had a lighter touch. When my turn came and I sat with my pants down on the rubber of her examination table, I would become dizzy from the smell of flowers, a row of seven or eight bouquets, still in cellophane, along the wall. That extraordinary brunette woman spoke calmly and measuredly, then touched my hip for a moment and … that was about it. I didn’t feel the needle, and the serum diffused through my muscle with nothing but a gentle warmth. Everything happened in a few minutes, and I went home happy and full of energy. My parents looked at me suspiciously: maybe I had thrown out the vial again?

  Next came the Melodia movie theater, just before Lizeanu, and I got off at the next stop, Obor, where I transferred to a tram going perpendicular to Ştefan cel Mare, from Moşilor toward the depths of Colentina.

  I knew these places well, it was, in a way, my neighborhood. My mother used to shop at Obor. She would take me with her, when I was little, into the sea of people filling the old market. The fish hall that stank until you couldn’t take it anymore, then the great hall, with bas-reliefs and mosaics showing unintelligible scenes, and finally the ice plant, where the workers handled blocks of ice that were white in the middle and miraculously transparent on the sides (as though constantly dissolving into the surrounding air)—to my child’s eyes these were fantastical citadels of another world. There at Obor, one desolate Monday morning, I saw a poster that stayed with me for a long time: a giant squid in a flying saucer reached out its arms toward an astronaut walking a red, rocky terrain. Above, the words Planet of Storms. “It’s a movie,” my mother said to me. “Let’s wait for it to come somewhere closer, to the Volga or the Floreasca.” My mother was afraid of the center of town, she didn’t leave her neighborhood unless she had no choice, for example when she had to go to Lipscani to buy my school uniform, with the checkered shirt and pants already sagging in the knees, as though someone had been wearing them at the factory.

  Even Colentina looked familiar to me, with its run-down houses on the left and the Stela soap factory on the right, the place where they made Cheia and Camila laundry detergents. The smell of rancid fat spread from here over the entire neighborhood. Next came the brick building of the Donca Simo textile factory, where my mother once worked at the loom, then came some lumberyards. The wretched and desolate street drove toward the horizon, in the torrid summer, under those enormous, white skies you only see above Bucharest. As it happened, I had been born in Colentina, on the edge of town, in a decrepit maternity ward thrown together in an old building that had been half gambling house, half bordello in the years before 1944, and I had lived my first years somewhere on Doamna Ghica, in a tangle of alleyways worthy of a Jewish ghetto. Much later, I went back to Silistra with a camera, and I took a few pictures of my childhood home, but they didn’t turn out. Now Silistra isn’t even there, it was bulldozed, my house and every
thing else wiped off the face of the earth. What took its place? Apartment blocks, of course, like everywhere else.

  Once tram 21 passed over Doamna Ghica, I entered a foreign country. There were fewer houses, more dirty ponds where women with pleated skirts washed their rugs. Seltzer shops and bread shops, wine stores, fish stores. An endless, desolate street, seventeen tram stops, most without wind shelters or any reason to be there, like the whistle stops trains make in the middle of a field. Women in print dresses, a daughter on each arm, walking nowhere. A cart full of empty bottles. Propane tank centers where people lined up in the evening for the store to open the next day. Perpendicular streets, dusty, like a village, lined with mulberries. Kites caught in the electric lines, strung between wooden poles treated with gasoline.

  I reached the end of the line after an hour and a half of rocking in the tram. For the last three or four stops I may have been the only one in the car. I exited into a large circle of track, where the trams turned around to go again, like Sisyphus, toward Colentina. The day was tilting toward night, the air was amber-colored and, on account of the silence, ghostly. Here, at the end of line 21, there was not a soul in sight. Industrial halls, long and gray, with narrow windows, a water tower in the distance, and in the middle of the tram turnabout, a grove of trees literally black from the heating oil and exhaust fumes. Two empty trams stood one beside the other, without drivers. A closed ticket booth. Marked contrasts between the rosy light and the shadows. What was I doing there? How was I going to live in such a remote place? I walked toward the water tower, I came to its base to find a padlocked door, I tilted my head back to look toward its sphere glittering in the sky, at the end of a white, plastered cylinder. I walked farther toward … nothing, toward the emptiness … This wasn’t, it seemed to me, where the city ended, but where reality ended. A street sign to the left had the name I was looking for: Dimitrie Herescu. Somewhere on this street should be the school, my school, my first job, where I should appear on the first of September, more than two months from that moment. The green and pink building of an auto mechanic did nothing to destroy the rural atmosphere of the place: houses with tile roofs, yards with rotting fences, tied-up dogs, tacky flowerpots. The school was on the right, a few houses down from the mechanic, and it was, of course, empty.

  It was a small school, an L-shaped hybrid, with an old central section, plaster cracking, broken windows, and at the other end of a small courtyard, a new section, even more desolate. In the yard, a basketball hoop without a net. I opened the gate and entered. I took a few steps on the courtyard pavement. The sun had just begun to go down, a halo of rays settling on the roof of the old building. From there, it sprayed out sadly and, in a way, darkly, since rather than illuminate anything it increased the inhuman loneliness of the place. My heart grew worried. I was going to enter this school that looked as stiff as a morgue, I was going to walk, the register under my arm, down its dark green halls, I was going to go upstairs and enter an unknown classroom where thirty strange kids, stranger than another species, were waiting for me. Maybe they were waiting for me even at that moment, sitting silently on their benches, with wooden pencil boxes, their notebooks with blue paper covers. At the thought of this, the hair on my arms stood up and I practically ran into the street. “I won’t be a teacher all my life,” I told myself as the tram took me back into the known world, as the stations passed behind me, the houses became more frequent, and people repopulated the earth. “A year at most, until some literary magazine asks me to be an editor.” And in the first three years I taught at School 86, I truly did nothing but feed on this illusion, just as some mothers breastfeed their children long after they should have been weaned. My illusion had grown as large as myself, and still I couldn’t—and in a way I can’t even today—resist opening my shirt, at least now and then, and letting it voluptuously cannibalize me. The first years passed. After another forty, I’ll retire from this same school. In the end, it hasn’t been that bad. There were long stretches when I didn’t have lice. No, if I stop to think about it, it hasn’t been bad at this school, such as it is, and maybe even a little bit good.

  3

  Sometimes I lose control of my hands, from the elbows down. It doesn’t scare me, I might even say I like it. It happens unexpectedly, and luckily, only when I’m alone. I’ll be writing something, correcting papers, drinking a coffee, or cutting my nails with a Chinese nail trimmer and suddenly my hands feel very light, as though they were filled with volatile gas. They rise on their own, pulling my shoulders up, levitating happily through the dense, glittering, dark air of my room. I smile, I look at them as though for the first time: long, delicate, thin-boned, some black hair on the fingers. Before my enchanted eyes, they begin to make elegant and bizarre gestures of their own accord, to tell stories that perhaps the deaf can understand. My fingers move precisely and unmistakably, making a series of unintelligible signs: the right hand asks, the left responds, the ring finger and thumb close in a circle, the little fingers page through some text, the wrists pivot with the supple energy of an orchestra conductor. I should be scared out of my mind, because someone else, within my own mind, directs these movements, skilled motions desperate to be deciphered, and yet I am seldom ever so happy. I watch my hands like a child at a puppet show who doesn’t understand what is happening on the minuscule stage but is fascinated by the agitation of wooden beings in crepe dresses with yarn for hair. The autonomous animation of my hands (thank God, it never happens when I’m in class or on the street) quiets down after a few minutes, the motions slow, they begin to resemble the mudras of Indian dancers, then they stop, and for two or three minutes more I can enjoy the charming sensation that my hands are lighter than air, as though my father had used the gas line to inflate not balloons but two thin rubber gloves, and put them in place of my hands. And how can I not be disappointed when my real hands—crude, heavy, organic, chafed, with their striated muscles, the white hyaline of the tendons, and their veins throbbing with blood—reenter their nail-tipped skin gloves, and suddenly, to my amazement, I can make my fingers move as I want, as though I could, through concentration alone, break a twig from the ficus in the window or pull my coffee cup toward me without touching it.

  Only later does the fear come, only after this fantasy (that happens about once every two or three months) becomes a kind of memory do I begin to wonder if somehow, among all the anomalies of my life—because this is my topic—the fantastical independence of my hands is further proof that … everything is a dream, that my entire life is oneiric, or something sadder, graver, weirder, yet truer than any story that could ever be invented. The cheery-frightful ballet of my hands, always and only here, in my boat-shaped house on Maica Domnului, is the smallest, least meaningful (and in the end the most benign) reason for me to write these pages, meant only for me, in the incredible solitude of my life. If I had wanted to write literature, I would have started ten years ago. I mean, if I had really wanted to, without the effort of consciousness, the way you want your leg to take a step and it does. You don’t have to say, “I order you to step,” you don’t have to think through the complicated process by which your will becomes deed. You just have to believe, to have belief as small as a mustard seed. If you are a writer, you write. Your books come without your knowing how to make them come, they come according to your gift, just as your mother is made to give birth, and she really does give birth to the child who grew in her uterus, without her mind participating in the complicated origami of her flesh. If I had been a writer, I would have written fiction, I would have had ten, fifteen novels by now without making any more effort than I make to secrete insulin or to send nourishment, day by day, from one orifice of my digestive system to another. I, however, at that moment long ago when my life still could have chosen one of an undefined multitude of directions, ordered my mind to produce fiction and nothing happened, just as futilely as if I had stared at my finger and shouted, “Move!”

  When I was a teenager, I wanted to write literature. Even now I don’t know what happened—if I lost my way somehow or if it was just bad luck. I wrote poems in high school, I have them in a notebook somewhere, and I wrote some of my dreams as prose, in a large school notebook with a thick cover, full of stories. Now is not the moment for me to write about that. I took part in the school competitions for Romanian, on rainy Sundays in unknown schools. I was an unreal young man, almost schizophrenic, who, during the breaks between classes, would go into the schoolyard to the long-jump pit, sit on the edge, and read my poems out loud from ragged notebooks. People looked right through me, they didn’t listen when I talked, I was a decoration to them, not even a good one, on an enormous and chaotic world. Since I wanted to be a writer, I decided to sit for university entrance exams in Letters. I got into the major without any problem, in the summer of 1975. At that time, my solitude was all-encompassing. I lived with my parents on Ştefan cel Mare. I would read for eight hours a day, rolling from one side of the bed to the other, under a sweaty sheet. The book pages would adopt the ever-changing color of the Bucharest skies, from the gold of summer dawns to the dark, heavy pink of snowy evenings in deep winter. Dark would come and I wouldn’t even notice. My mother would find me reading in a room sunk deep into darkness, where the paper and print were nearly the same color and I wasn’t reading anymore, I was dreaming farther into the story, deforming it according to the laws of dream. Then I would shake it off, stretch, get out of bed—the whole day I had only gotten up to go to the bathroom—and, invariably, I would go to the large window in my room, where I could see, poured out under clouds of fantasy, all of Bucharest. Thousands of lights were lit in the far-off houses, in those nearby I could see people moving like lazy fish in an aquarium, much farther away the colored neon signs turned on and
off. But what fascinated me was the giant sky above, the cupola higher and more overwhelming than any cathedral. Not even the clouds could rise to its apex. I pressed my forehead against the cold, yielding window, and I stood like that, a teenager in pajamas with holes in the armpits, until my mother called me to eat. I would come back to the vision of my solitude, deep under the earth, to read farther, with the light on and with another, identical room, extended into the mirror of the window, until I was overwhelmed with exhaustion.