The City of White Skins
Doina Ruști
His death hit me hard and I never could leave him behind. Although I had seen him dead, then buried, right before my eyes, in truth, he had stayed with me. I grew up comparing myself to him, after this many years, I would say, I’ll be Tavică's age. There are only that many years until I’ll be like Tavică. I never thought about him grown up. For me, he froze at that wonderful age, free from the baccalaureate, ready for medicine. I would talk to him; I kept asking for his advice. During college, it was fashionable to practice spiritism, and I would summon Tavică. You could say I was performing, a gate to the labyrinth of storytelling. Tavică was the character, he was the second voice. He had become so popular that people from other dormitories came to ask him questions. I had a room on the corner, which was the corner of the entire building, and from that corner Tavică always showed up. I would talk about him so much, that details of his life became common knowledge. Many people would pass through my dorm room, and after drinks and discussions about fashionable books, I would inevitably bring up Tavică, and the summoning of the dead. It was enough for me to touch the coin, one of the many coins from the old days, kept in the storeroom, with a bunch of things to be thrown away; and that coin, with King Michael on one side, would start moving on the paper, choosing its letters.
I had a photo of Tavică on the wall. It had passed through many hands, because whoever summoned him felt the need to look at him, for his face to be fixed in their memory. One day, it disappeared, leaving behind the scotch tape, and my unseen ties to it, for it was among his last photographs, and somewhere, above his eyebrows, the breath of death was already hovering. I had turned him into a character, perhaps my first character, whose existence no one doubted, but he was also a dream of freedom, a symbol of the world that had perished, swallowed by communism.
I took Tavică everywhere. I recall an autumn day during high school. I was 17 and I had decided to break away from Comoșteni and my family. I started by taking all my photos from home. I had an album with notes and explanations, a kind of map of important photos, ranging from the dog teacher and even further, from Mițulica's father, the grocer, to her grandparents the vine growers, and Gică's aromanians, scattered across the Balkans, until present day, with me in front of the high school, in a public garden, at the library, at the Palace, boarding a train.
I was living in a rented house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, in a terrible house, the worst place I have ever inhabited. But it was cheap, and I was obsessed with saving up. I wanted to set some money aside so that in my last year of high school, I could find a better place to live and prepare for college, a milestone which terrified me. The woman who let me the house was a drunkard, a detail I discovered gradually, as our relationship evolved. I had met her at the University, in front, where people put up ads for students seeking to find accommodation. She was coming out of the building, dressed up and smiling. She didn't look like a teacher or a secretary, but maybe she worked in some office. She saw me reading the billboards and offered me a room, at a very low price. At the time, I didn't know that cheap usually meant scam. I went to see the apartment and was embarrassed to turn it down. It was a small, damp room, the kind where your lungs are put to the test. Over time, I learned that she was a maid – one of the imbecilic but resilient phrases in the nomenclature of socialist services. As soon as she got home, she would start drinking and arguing with an imaginary character, maybe her very own Tavică. She would throw her things around and howl like a beaten dog. I was studying her, I admit, I had even written a story in which she hanged herself. I spent two months there and we parted ways during a rainstorm that chilled to the core. I was returning from high school, under a large umbrella, brought with me from Comoșteni, from the shed. It had rained all morning.
I recognized my belongings from a great distance, some blouses, a blanket and the indispensable white coverlet, which I took everywhere with me. Not far away, stacks of books, my books, swollen by water. Then, in the middle of the flood coming down the street, I saw the album, open, stuck in a pile of mud, and a couple of pictures floating or disappearing in the dirty water. I gathered what I could. A few were still alright, but most had faded and looked like oilcloths covered in slime. In one, Tavică was headless, only parts of his polished shoes left, and a corner of a staircase. I was nowhere to be seen, my face had disappeared, taken by the autumn rains; I had lost my identity, my history. It was the first great tragedy of my life, together with Tavică's death, which had meanwhile subsided, and no longer meant much.
I gathered a few things, then the drunken woman, whom I had observed with a writer’s arrogance, came out the door with a knife. I realized it would have been stupid to insist: my savings were gone, the woman was even indignant that I had so much money hidden in a book. After I started college, I saw her again, many times. She would clean the hallways, pretending not to know me, but above her head I’d see a carousel with all my family’s pictures going round.
On that rainy day, however, I gathered what was left in two bags, and set off through the city to find another place to stay. I didn't know where to go, I had no plan. At one point, I even lost my umbrella, which I would dream about thereafter, part of my all-encompassing guilt. The rain had stopped, but it was still dripping, a droplet here and there on some leaf. I was lost in a forest of apartment buildings, grey boxes, lined up, with closed windows.
I sat down, my back pressed against a block of flats. I had no idea where I was or how to get out of the grey forests. However, I hadn’t panicked; lost in thought, perhaps dozing off, I felt someone touching my shoulder. At first, I was sure it was Tavică. I did not turn around; I did not pull away. The sky was lighting up, and the hand on my shoulder was becoming insistent. It was a woman, leaning from the window of that block of flats; she wanted to know what I was doing, why I was sitting there, on the floor. At first, I couldn’t see her clearly, then I turned around and froze: that woman's eyes were Tavică's eyes, incapable of deception, incapable of hatred. She also had a dark complexion, which gave her a southern air, rarely seen there, in the city of white skins.
(excerpt from the novel Ferenike)
Translated into English by Bianca Zbarcea
