Translated from the Romanian by Alexandra Coliban and Andreea Höfer

      istrosbooks

      Istros Books

      London, UK

      www.istrosbooks.com

      Copyright © 2013 Cecilia Ştefănescu

      Translation © 2013 Alexandra Coliban and Andreea Höfer

      Artwork & Design@Milos Miljkovich, 2013

      All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

      Published 2013 by Istros Books

      Via the Dzanc Books rEprint Series

      eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-00-1

      The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

      I

      SAL’S AFTERNOON

      If that darkness had suddenly burst like a bubble, it would have spilled its odourless juice and spread all over the walls of the concrete cube, melting the white shadows that constantly circled the bed and furrowed the room. Their terror and dreadfulness would have evaporated in a second, leaving them cast into oblivion forever. But they kept undulating in the air, squirming across the walls and slicing the darkness; swelling and trickling down the fresh duck-egg-blue paint and between the snowy peaks of pargeting. Then they fell still, resuming their places and watching over the boy who slept peacefully, legs wide apart, with one knee bent and one arm dangling.

      Above him, a couple of hairy guys clad in studded leather bent slightly forward with their guitars resting on their hips, were gazing into the distance, their eyes shiny embers scanning the rocky horizon. Ten cars stood aligned nearby, ready to shatter the thick air and plunge into a devilish race. A layer of dust had covered their smoky windscreens like a fishnet, and the huge wall of open engines behind them rose menacingly in anticipation of the start of the race. The drivers sat perfectly still, not a fibre on their waxen faces moving: all gazed straight ahead. Only the iris of one of the drivers had been erased, leaving a white, cold globe that seemed to presage death.

      A fine and scintillating fog had descended, and from behind it the big, round sun prepared to emerge, like a chocolate coin covered in tinfoil. Right next to the cars, though keeping a certain distance, a wooden knight bent over the body of an unconscious girl. She was frozen still, with her skirt plumped up and her boots hanging in midair, while the knight gripped the sabre at his waist with one hand and with the other helplessly clutched her arm. The girl lay on the green grass, and her ruby lips, her rosy cheeks and her golden hair matched his embroidered uniform, teeming with blazonry and insignia.

      Yet in the half-bent body of the helpless and desperate young man, in the way he concealed his face beneath the khaki felt hat and held her lifeless hand, sinking his fingers into the pinkish flesh, a well-kept secret lay hidden. Any minute, tears could start falling from his well-shielded eyes, and you might see him collapse over the girl’s stone-still body while, at the same time, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see her opening her blue eyes, stirred by the pain of the one who, rather more dead than alive, pressed her now with all his might, with all the years he had gathered in his bones, his flesh, his muscles and his skin.

      But the only motion in the room came from the rolled-up bedclothes. It was the chubby toes with close-cut nails that first started to twitch, followed by an arm that fell limp over the margin of the bed. Lastly, the hypnotic head with dishevelled hair emerged, partly from a dream and partly from reality: balancing on a narrow edge, leaning now on this side, now on the other.

      Sal half-opened his eyes, staring through his eyelashes at the striped wall in front of him. Then he closed his eyes again and the stripes resumed their rocking against the rattling of a car that had just passed on the street. He rose for a second, staring at the ceiling, and then turned on his side. The darkness in the room was furrowed by the golden ribbons of light flickering through the lowered blinds. Sal sat up, staring sleepily ahead.

      It was late afternoon and, by the faint light straining to pass through the wooden slats, he was sure it was long past the time he was supposed to call Emi. He thought of crashing back down and searching for the warm hole the crown of his head had left in the pillow’s down, but was deterred by his neck, wet with perspiration, and the sweaty palms that he had been waving in the air for a few moments, cooling him down. He was waiting for the moment in which he would realise that it was terribly late and that Emi, poisoned by the endless minutes passed in relentless countdown, would no longer answer.

      He jumped up like a robot and fumbled around the room, stumbling over a chair and moaning in pain. Finally he managed to spot his trousers, pulled them on quickly and, after a few seconds of lying in wait to make sure there was no one spying on him on the other side of the door, scuttled away. He left behind a big, golden dust cloud, a glittering powder that glazed his footprints, while the pink soles of his feet sparkled, nested in their footwear, releasing pheromones and bright messages.

      When finally outside, at an adequate distance a few houses away, he sniffed the air happily. Then, cautious not to bump into one of the boys, he started for Emi’s place, balancing on the edge of the pavement.

      Emi’s mother had called him ‘the special boy’, accompanying the words with a deprecating grimace and shaking her head in a way that meant that she had seen boys of that kind before. She used ‘special’ like some people do when trying to be condescendingly polite, referring to some kind of handicap or simply to a death-row convict whose case, in their opinions, is totally hopeless, but to whom they magnanimously lie one last time. But he never answered her spiteful words – on the one hand because she was his friend’s mother, and he understood very well that if you had a girl like Emi, you lived with the permanent terror that the world, seized with admiration or possessed by envy, would sooner or later make her disappear; on the other hand because Emi herself was more important than his hurt pride, and last but not least because he had been brought up never to engage in arguments with older people, regardless of what they said. He would flatly say ‘Good day’ and reply ‘Thank you’ when he was offered something and even before refusing; he never left the house before saying goodbye to everybody and he usually never phoned between three and half past five in the afternoon, because that was when people took naps.

      Emi was the only one with whom he ignored the rule: for three years, excepting the times they were on vacation with their parents, every day at four o’clock Sal would lift the receiver and insert his finger in the rotary dial of the telephone. At the other end of the line, after no more than two rings, he would hear her thin voice: always surprised, as if she had absolutely no clue who could possibly call at that hour, feigning her indifference so poorly and so touchingly when she seemed to recognise him at last. He imagined her rounding her mouth in a prolonged and demure ‘Hello’, followed by an interval and then by a short ‘Ah!’ that set everything back in place. So that it would always be clear that he had been the one calling and it was also he that wished to see her, he invited her out – he lured her out of the house, out of her safe shell, her hospitable cocoon.

      She was merciless, especially on herself; she had enforced a draconian schedule that she followed unfalteringly and mysteriously. She would wake up at six every morning, and she never went to bed before midnight. She would constantly complain that the eighteen hours were barely enough for her to do all that she had in mind; she had lists of books to read, diaries to keep, places to go, people to see. Her vacations were similar to her school hours except that, when she became the manager of her own time, she became maniacally rigorous and punished anyone who would upset, even by a minute, the meticulous agenda of the day. He liked her like that, paradoxical and conceited – he took her conscientiousness as a whim – but he had no doubt that behind her struggle against time another secret