“In short?”

“In short, right now, as soon as you get home, pack up your things... Tomorrow morning, on my way to the station, I'll drop by for five minutes: I'm gonna drag you along! Fifteen days of quietness, of fresh air, after a whole summer in this inferno will do you better than all the soothing draughts. I have a balcony with wild vine, overlooking the whole valley: it's wonderful! Autumn is really beautiful there... It's all settled! O.K.?”

It was late at night on the terrace of the restaurant, at Enescu's. It had rained during the day; autumn announced itself to be cold.

At a table, a couple of late customers were having the rest of their coffees, with their overcoats on the shoulders. A woman, her neck wrapped up in a white shawl, waiting for somebody, all by herself, was removing with slow and bored movements the wax-like peel of a pear. The musicians were putting the instruments into their black little coffins. A cembalo string, touched by mistake, startled in a moan.

The wind blew the oval, yellow little leaves off the locust trees across the wall. It was sad, damp, cold. The straw hats had disappeared for some days from the streets...

The waiter started wrapping up the table-cloths. He put out some of the lights.

The cigarette tasted bitter; I threw it away although I had just lit it. I shuddered.

“Just look at your eyes! C'mon! Say it's O.K. with you...”

I found it hard to give in. All along that summer, the only green I had rested my looks on, was that of the dusty lime leaves on the boulevard. Just a couple of times, at night, I had felt the breeze of grass in the field, overcome by the smell of gasoline on the Şosea[1].

The whole summer there had been an utter drought, a dry scorcher, radiating from the walls, heating up the tin of the roofs, lasting until past midnight. The shoeheels would get stuck into the rubber-like asphalt. In July and August all the windows had been blinded out with blue paper. At the time trains were coming, the carriages would pass by, loaded with suitcases and baskets, with women in traveling clothes: grayish cloaks, thin veils, covering small hats and tied under their chin.

For a while, the whole city had seemed empty. Few passers-by, hurrying along the walls, hats in hands, wiping their foreheads with the handkerchiefs. In the evenings, no acquaintance in the open-air cafés: so, I used to sip the ice-coffee all by myself, sitting at a table with round stains from the beer mugs, overhearing unwillingly the haggling of the grain merchants, showing one another the harvest samples, spied on by the gypsy kids selling newspapers and waiting for me to throw my cigarette butt.

Then I had witnessed everybody's return; long lines of carriages and taxi cabs, kids with sun-tanned ankles, red-faced women under the foam of their laces; shedded walking sticks with iron ends; nurses holding on their lap pitchers with Romanian folk decorations, withered wild flowers, “souvenirs” from the spa...The windows had been opened; on the trellis works and on the margins of the balconies there had appeared the carpets shaken off the moth balls. The sidewalks had regained their noisy, rested crowds, having a particular refreshed and exotic air, like people healed from their urban paleness.

That autumn found me tired, after sleepless nights. The vibration of the cars on the pavement was resounding on my nerves as if on tightened strings. Two weeks away from those walls, somewhere, would have poured into my tired veins a fortifying draught. But I found it hard to break off. Something humiliating, impossible to confess, paralyzed me to stiffness, sentenced me to this blue tormenting, without any possibility of escape.

My friend felt the hesitation in my eyes and putting out his burning lighter across the table, smiled gladly, already convinced of his success.

I lit my cigarette unawares; after two puffs I threw it away.

Obviously! I had to take his advice if I couldn't stand the smoke of my own cigarette either.

The third day, I woke up in the morning, worried by so much silence.

No sound of the “coal, coal, coal...” shouting under my windows, no truck rattle penetrating the walls, no voice of whitewashers arguing downstairs in the street... For a moment I closed my eyes, trying to come to myself. I jumped up to let the sun in.

In the yard, Alexandru, wearing his tight-belted country coat, and his riding boots, was watching a servant putting black oil on the hooves of a bustling filly.

A swollen-feathered turkey was going round, puffing asthmatically through its nostrils and shaking its bluish wattles. A maid, wearing a narrow red girdle tight around her waist, put the milking pail down and chased it away with her foot:

“Get lost, damn' you!”

My friend turned around. He saw me by the window frame. He made a threatening sign with his finger:

“You're late, lazy bone, you're late!”

Then, to the maid:

“Profira, take him his coffee at once!”

I had my coffee on the upper porch.

“Well, how did you sleep? What did you dream?” he asked me, while spreading the butter on his slice or rye bread and putting some fine salt on it.

I had slept like a log. No dreams at all!

“Strange!... I said, dropping the sugar lumps one by one and watching the bubbles coming up from my coffee. Strange! It seems I have run out of fantasy to spend in dreaming. I have only my child dreams left... Haven't you dreamt you were flying? You spread out your arms and float immaterially over church steeples, over woods which you leave behind. The land stretches out at your feet, like a map with bluish water veins, with narrow stripes of farmlands and the winding white roads... It seems a most charming, yet most natural journey... Then, another dream: an upright mountain rises in front of you and you have to climb it up, which scares you; you know you won't manage it up to the top, you can't see any path, yet something urges you, there is no way out; you hang to the rocks, your heart is throbbing to tear your chest, you're halfway up, a stone plate gets loose as you touch it, you roll down, want to cry out, no shout is heard and you know that you're going to die down there and the falling keeps on and on... You wake up moaning, your hands clutched to the pillow...”

My friend smiled, showing all his white and strong teeth, brightening up his - sun-tanned face.

He never dreamt anything. He was always too tired to be able to dream. He used to sleep with tight fists and wake up on the same side.

“But the wonderful thing, wonderful and strange, is that - I went on - as soon as you have closed your eyes, you meet characters that appear only in your dream, who have somehow become old acquaintances. You have never seen them in reality! They don't even exist in flesh and blood! But they appear in your sleep, take part in the events, disappear for a while and then reappear, and, dreaming, you remember having met them in another dream.. That's the way a providential character appears in my dreams. He saves me from the most terrible dangers, lends me a hand when I'm slipping into an abyss, dives and swims to me and saves me from drowning... He is a gray-dressed man; an old man with grayish, short-cut mustaches, with a very sad and tired figure, with a narrow black tie round a hard collar, showing the metal tip of the button. He is always accompanied by a brownish doggie with short legs, twisted forward like a crocodile's: a pointed-muzzled, floppy-eared ‘basset’. I could even tell you its name: Soliman!... It has a white spot on the chest, red, lashless eyes and a reddish collar with a shiny buckle. Since my childhood dreams, when they first appeared, they have never changed, never grown old, they seem as familiar to me as the people I meet in my real life. During the examination sessions, when my sleep was tormented by the lessons I had not learnt and by the fear of those strict teachers, that man in my dream used to come and release me from the most absurd and breath-taking adventures... The whole commission was gathered there in the examination room, round the teacher's desk. I used to stand, chalk in hand, at the blackboard, white-faced, breathless, with a blank mind, after I had swotted for a whole month. “What is the name of the most important lake in Central Africa!” I would rise my eyes to the mute map in front of me. I could see its blue spot among the brownish caterpillars suggesting the mountains. I remembered that the night before I had known it for sure, that the Nile springs from there, that is has a feminine name. But my mind was in a total darkness and I could not utter a word. The president would smile maliciously, write something down in pencil, turn to whisper in the ear of his colleague on the left. “Who came on the throne of France after Hugo Capet?” “When a pyramid is turned into a cone, its apothem becomes the generatrix of the cone; so, what is the lateral surface of a cone?”... It seemed like a language from another planet! I would drop the chalk, rumple the moistured sponge... There was a dead silence in the classroom and nobody dared to move... The three of them would make me a sign to leave, as if I had been a convict who had no one to expect a pardon from. And at that moment, the door would open and the old man with the doggie would show up. Having greeted, he'd go straight to the president, put his hat on the corner of the desk and say: “Mr. president, I guarantee for this student! He knows the subject admiringly! You have intimidated him!” The president would wipe his glasses with the handkerchief, bow on his chair and answer politely: “Well, then, that makes all the difference... Here, student Theodorescu Ion: <> in Geography, <> in History, <> in Mathematics!” The man used to say Goodbye, turn around and say extremely calm: “Let's go now, Soliman! Goodbye student Theodorescu Ion, and try to get rid of your timidity!” I would wake up as happy as if I had avoided a real danger, like the dream had solved all my childhood fears. Some other time...

But my friend had stopped listening. His quick eyes, the eyes of a master, had noticed an unacceptable disorder in the household. He rose and ordered from the end of the porch:

“Costache, See about Sâmbotina's calf! It's got loose!”

The calf, well leant upon its front legs, was suckling busily, and Sâmbotina, a Swiss-breed cow, with big, brown spots, was turning her mild-eyed head, with a wet, black muzzle, trying hard to caress its offspring with the tongue. The servant rushed and snatched the calf, pulling it by the ears and chasing it into the stock yard. Sâmbotina mooed behind.

“I'm sorry,” Alexandru excused himself, returning and laying the napkin back on his knees. If you don't keep an eye on them, everything goes wrong... You were saying...”

I didn't feel like going on. My friend proved to be too absent-minded a listener.

After all, why should he be interested in dream interpretation, which is a job for old women and star gazers. For a few minutes nothing was heard but the clinking of the teaspoons in the cups, the gurgle of the black coffee poured out of the porcelain coffee-maker. I found myself filling my cup a second time, eagerly pouring the foamy cream over the coffee.

My friend was watching me, pleased with this wild appetite.

“You're looking better today... In a week!...”

Then, after a long pause, on a lower voice:

“Still gambling?”

I bowed my head, feeling the blood rushing to my cheeks. At the moment, I looked concerned only about the yellow butter, with drops of water, which was spread on my slice of bread.

That was the question that I feared most. My sunken eyes, my life's whole mess of late, the summer that I stubbornly spent in the scorcher of the capital, were all caused by this passion, which was dragging me deeper and deeper. I was burdened with debts. I was running away from my creditors. That was my only thought. I used to avoid my friends, always talking busily, obsessed by the games at the club and every night's baccarat, blaming myself for the silly game I'd made the night before. Towards daybreak, in the pale light, the mirrors of the club reflected among the flickering candle flames and through the thick smoke, my distorted ghost figure, with glossy eyes and sweaty, dirty temples.

Something horrible and irretrievable was going on in my life, which was suddenly denied any prospect, a slow, inexorable decay, a flounder which was going to suck me in soon, for ever, in that swarming of déclassés, kibitzers and jesters around the gambling houses.

I swallowed that piece of bread reluctantly. The milk seemed suddenly tasteless, disgusting. There was no better place than that one, far away from the city, where life went on naturally, powerfully, there was no better place to show my fall more hopelessly.

My hand might have been trembling when I placed the knife on the margin of the faience plate, maybe there were tears in my eyes.

My friend rose, shaking off the crumbs. He felt sorry for having asked that thoughtless question, so unwillingly brutal. He took a few steps on the porch. He tore a red, jagged leaf off the vine stretching on the string, bit its stalk, spit the sourish juice. He drummed his fingers on the wooden beam.

He turned around, took me by the shoulders in a brotherly access.

“C'mon, don't make such a long face. I've stupidly asked you, because we are going to Vlăduleni this afternoon, to Ordeanu's, who has lost his fortune in cards playing. I didn't mean it. ‘A natural association of ideas’, as poor Apostol, our Logic teacher, used to say. Let's go down now, to show you the orchard.”

That afternoon, having crossed the bridge over the Moldova in his wheel-cart, Alexandru slowed down the horses' pace, let the bridles across his arm to roll a cigarette, and being through with that, he pointed with his horsewhip to the right of the road, on the outskirts of a village, indicating Ordeanu's houses.

An orchard spreading out on one hillside, a vineyard, the white house surrounded by trees, some fenceless outbuildings. He turned on a narrow road, covered with weeds, which felt soft under the wheels.

“This man, Ordeanu, he explained, after having smashed a huge, gray fly on the buttocks of the horse with the tip of his whip, the Ordeanu I'm talking about is, as far as I know, the last descendant of a very old family... He used to have a forty-acre lot around Roman, two big houses - real palaces - in Iaşi. He has lost everything in cards playing, long ago. He has quit gambling for some ten or twelve years. What's left to him is this vineyard and the orchard, once famous. He sold them in order to move to Bucharest. These days he is taking stock and delivering... I have noticed two colts that I think I'm going to buy... They're good breed, coming from Paşcanu's stud farm. As a matter of fact, he is so in debt that I wonder what's going to be left for him after he sells out. Cards playing is a terrible passion!...” Alexandru declared conclusively and touched the backs of the horses with the whip.

The wheels brushed along the grass-covered road. We were crossing fields of ripe corn, ready to harvest, with twisted yellow leaves and black tassel.

As we were getting near, the farm showed its dereliction. The house, white from the distance, revealed walls turned gray by the rains, with fallen plaster, a rusted tin roof, with small, black square windows, protected by thick bars, like those of a prison. No fence. Two stone pillars in the middle of the field indicated the place where there once was the gate. A dry poplar, with a shedded trunk, dry leafless branches and with black, crow nests. The weeds reached a man's height. The very image of desolation, poverty, sadness.

When we pulled in front of the entrance stairs, no door was opened, not a curtain moved behind the windows.

A maid, wearing a dirty, ungirded, hempen blouse, and holding a twig in her hand, left a goose flock by the skew barn, set on pillars, and shuffled her bare feet to the wheel cart.

When asked, she didn't answer, keeping her hand over her mouth in a silly way.

“I say, where is the boyar?”

The girl, poked the soil with her twig and kept her mouth covered with her hand, blackened by nut peels.

“To hell with her! She's an idiot, brother!” my friend lost his temper, fixing the whip in its holder and jumping off. “We'll find him without... Hey, old man, where's the master of this place, the boyar?

An old man, the small of his back bent, wearing a faded-colour riding coat, and a hat that once was green - relics of a coachman's outfit in the fashion of old times Hungarian counts - dragged his worn-out boots towards them.

“I say...”

“What? Sorry I don't get it...”

“He's deaf, he can't hear!” the maid explained and then ran to the geese in the dusty weeds.

“I'm asking where the boyar is! Master Iorgu!” Alexandru shouted as loud as he could.

“Aaa! the boyar. Where's the boyar?...”

The old man scratched his head under his hat.

“Well, who could know where the boyar is? He may be that way, in the vine, excuse me...”

“Everyone's nuts here!” my friend complained. “What a house, brother, what people!”

He pulled the wheel cart by the stable, detached the girdles by himself and knotted them, brought a handful of hay from a manger and then we both left for the orchard and the vine, in search of the master.

There, the devastation was even more distressing. The vine had empty spaces and it was overgrown with weeds; the wild vine had dried grapes and tangled stalks.

We walked to its farther end and returned on another path. No trace of him. We stopped by a half-dried pond. Once there had been a garden all around.

There were a few autumn flowers left, white chrysanthemums, still unwithered by the white frost and a few shrubs of young trees of that kind one finds around cloisters, like small white cedars, whose leaves, rubbed between the fingers, smell like basil and myrrh, and maybe that is why they are called “God's wood”. Passing by, I picked the soft tip of a branch to breathe its fragrance. Something cried in a metallic voice above my head and got away in a silky flutter of wings.

We both startled. There was a pair of peacocks. They stopped on the roof of a broken-windowed, doorless kiosk.

There, the peacock spread the fan of its tail, wonderful ornament with iridescent eyes: green, blue, black and gold. Those birds with their sumptuous and heavenly rich feathers made the poverty and ruin all around even more depressing. A spiky fruit fell off a chestnut tree, broke open at our feet and let two twin and glossy-peeled chestnuts roll in the sand.

Puzzled, we were looking around, not knowing which way to go, when, from behind a lilac hedge, there appeared the master of these gloomy surroundings.

He was coming, his grayish hat over his eyes, making no haste, his hands hanging by his body, as if extremely bored, or not finding anything to do. When he got near he greeted reluctantly, in a soft voice. I looked at him with eyes large open, and feeling like a sick man in course of unexpectedly losing his mind. I had seen that man once, coming that way.

A brownish dog, burst out of the lilac bushes barking cantankerously.

“Hush! Do behave Soliman!” his master called, and the doggy with twisted, croc-like legs came close wagging his tail, suddenly friendly.

I grasped my friend's arm:

“The man in my dream!” I babbled.

Alexandru didn't hear, or didn't understand. He shook the old man's hand, then turned to me:

“Master Iorgu, let me introduce an old friend of mine...”

He put out his hand naturally, unconcerned, as to a man he'd seen for the first time.

His hand was sweaty and cold. A dead man's hand. I let it go in a shiver. What was that? Where was the vision coming from? Like in a bad dream, when you face the danger in order to put an end to it, I felt like speaking quickly, breathlessly, thus fooling myself.

“How come you don't know me?” a crazy thought urged me to ask. “I am student Theodorescu Ion, the one who didn't know the name of the main lake in Central Africa, or who followed Hugo Capet, or the lateral area of a cone... It is me you have saved from the dangers of my dream examinations and from the most terrible catastrophes in my sleep. I would have recognized you from a thousand persons! I also recognize Soliman! See how he's looking at me! He seems to remember something...”

But I could not say all these and I did my best to keep my coolest look.

“Obviously, that's the way madness starts!” I was saying to myself and suddenly I felt terribly afraid of my own self. “Now I am going to do something crazy, I'll start walking on my hands or I'll start shouting that I have a glass brain.”

But everything around me was as before, I could see everything with the same eyes: Alexandru's mustache, black and round-trimmed above his lip, and the blue-stoned ring on his finger, when he was gesticulating, and his voice, which sounded the same, unchanged. The autumn sky was blue and calm above. A bird was swinging on the tip of a branch. I whispered to myself, in my thought, the names of the trees and plants around; I recognized them, I had not forgotten anything; nothing was troubled in my thinking. Then why the anxiety and the sensation of mystery? How had the man in my dream entered my real life? And how could he speak naturally, simply about usual things? I tried to concentrate on the sense of his words, expecting to find hidden meanings in there. But there was nothing. They were simply talking about the exact area of the lands he'd sold, about prices, about the inventory of his household which was going to scatter to the four winds in a couple of days.

“Horoviţ is coming tomorrow,” said Iorgu Ordeanu, “I'm handing everything over... He kind of took me by surprise, the merchant! I am packing now what's left of my stuff. It's really hard. I'm alone. There's no one to help me... It's a sad moment when you have to leave the places where you grew up and make place to another owner, in your room, where your bed used to be.”

I felt his voice was trembling in the end. But my friend paid no attention. His mind was to his business.

“Master Iorgu, those dark-bay colts, I hope you haven't sold them, have you? I could offer a good price myself if...”

For a moment I felt a slight despise for the way he broke up this brutal haggling.

His haste not to miss any opportunity seemed to me entirely similar to the greed of Horoviţ, the Jew, who was going to take over the remnants of this ruined household, the next day. I would have probably expected more delicacy in this abrupt passing from the expelled landowner's sadness, not shared with anyone, to the business matters.

That's why I gave up listening. I stepped aside, my hands behind my back, and leaning against a tree, I stood watching.

There was no doubt: he was the very man in my dream. His thin-cut figure, with tired bluish eyes under gray eyebrows, his habit of pulling out hairs of his gray mustache, while talking, the thin tie knotted over the high, rigid collar, which showed the metal end of the button, these old-fashioned clothes, brushed to the last trace of dust, well, everything was familiar to me down to the smallest detail. Again, I was terrified by the idea of going crazy.

The brownish doggie sat in front of me, his head unmoved, staring at me with his hazel, lashless eyes, piercingly attentive.

I pushed him aside with my foot. He ran a few steps away. He stretched in the shade, his muzzle on his legs and started staring at me again. He was the dog in my dream. Besides, his name was Soliman. My ears started to hum. I took a few steps. The palms of my hands were burning for the pressure against the bark of the tree. The traces of the rough bark were visible on my skin; I rubbed my hands to bring the blood back.

I made for the shallow pond. Behind me, my friend and Iorgu Ordeanu were bargaining on the price of the horses; I considered it useless to witness their business talks.

The path with creeping portulaca was taking me among those stones for the first time, and yet, I had the troubling feeling I had walked there before, the same way. I stopped by the shore, near a rotten-boarded foot bridge. A green, golden-glass-eyed frog stood still, hanging its very small legs at water level, unmoved, like a gymnast on an invisible trapeze.

Like then, I had once looked at that water, with its greenish, scale-like vegetation above, which opened here and there into transparent water spots. I could remember that hallucinatingly... I stood right there, by the pole tied with a torn piece of rope, near the mint bush. A salamander sneaked from under my feet, with its black and yellow body, with the tail flattened into a thin crest like that of the fantastic reptiles depicted in fairy-tale books; I startled, slipped, and shouted; the old man had come from the end of that very alley, accompanied by his brownish dog; he gave me his hand and pulled me out of the water, all soaked and covered by water weeds. The doggie fawned around me, sniffing with his long muzzle... I then woke up, my teeth chattering...

How clearly I remembered that dream, as if I had just recovered from it! I also remembered that morning when I woke up with me child's heart still throbbing with fear...

I was saying my prayers on my knees, on the unmade bed. I used to repeat mother's words, line after line, but my mind was elsewhere; I could see Catinca through the window, bringing from the cellar a plateful of wild strawberries and two green soda bottles.

“What are you looking at?” my mother scolded me.

And then, I started saying it quickly, in order to get it ended: “...and do not take us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil. Amen...”

When I was through, as I raised my eyes to the icon of Saint George, in his trellised armor, piercing the monster with his spear, the salamander in my dream suddenly came to my mind, as well as the fear of drowning, and I started to cry, softly, my forehead against the nut-tree chestboard, which was smelling of paint and wax.

“What about this nonsense?” my mother had asked kindly, reprovingly looking at me in wonder.

I told her the story of my dream, about the man with the brownish doggy, Soliman.

Mother stroke my curly hair: “You're a big boy now, you needn't be afraid of the monsters and events of your bad dreams. Life has in store for all of us enough monsters and events, even worse than those...”

Then I dropped everything, forgetting the whole story, with the child's happy easiness of passing from crying to laughter. The sound of plates was heard from the next room, the dining room, and I knew that a plateful of wild strawberries with cream was waiting for me, as well as a glass of raspberry juice, whose soda would prick my nostrils with a hundred pinpoints.

This was what I recollected, and I recognized the pond with its green water and the path with its leaves of creeping portulaca; and that gentleman in my childhood's dream, in all my dreams, that gentleman was Iorgu Ordeanu himself, and the hazel-eyed doggie with the shiny-buckled collar was that very Soliman; they were all there, true, in the real world, where there are monsters and events even worse than those in any bad dream.

It seemed to me that in the pale autumn sun, on the grassy shore, a child was stepping away, dressed in his long night gown, barefoot, with reddish curly hair, a child who was afraid of salamanders, waiting for his plateful of wild strawberries, crying with his head against the chestboard that smelled of paint and wax, and there could be no resemblance between that clear-eyed, pure-soul child and the ghost in me, watching at the green table, his fingers dried by the chalk dust and tanned by tobacco, in the smoke and sweat of the clubs. And the paler the autumn sun came down, the dimmer and more airy was the ghost of the child in the white robe, stepping away among the trees with withered leaves...

I took off my hat in order to cool my forehead.

“Nonsense! It's nothing; anemia, fatigue!...” I was telling to myself stressing each syllable, in order to chase away my own thoughts.

I bent, picked up a stone and threw it at the unmoved frog on the surface of the water. The frog sank and reappeared nearby, amongst the vegetal dandruff of the water, its eyes encircled with golden rings.

When I turned around, Soliman was behind me, his muzzle lying on his stretched legs, and watching me with his hazel, lashless eyes.

“Off we go, now!” shouted Alexandru, waving to me. “I just want to have another look at the colts...”

In the stable, the horses had turned their wet eyes from the manger to us. They had a short, shining hair on their strong, young bodies. Crunching their hay, they got their muzzles closer, as if whispering friendly to one another. Alexandru, stroke the stony buttocks affectionately.

“This is Murgu, this one, with a white blaze on its forehead, Zarif!” explained Iorgu Ordeanu.

“I'll send the man tomorrow morning to take them. May I take the bridles, too,” said Alexandru, bending once again to feel the thin and nervous legs.

“Before you leave, I am sure you won't refuse a cup of coffee...”

We sipped the coffee served on a rusted tray, in earless cups, not one of a pair, in the office which bustled with registers and magazines spread all over, on a wooden table, spilled with violet ink. Unawares, I opened a leather-bound book, marked with the round traces of a milk glass.

It was a rare edition, printed in Amsterdam, of Contes de la Reine de Navarre, with pictures and artistic dropcaps, as they once used to make. I started greedily to flip the silky pages, with the sensual and gracious stories of Queen Margaret. From between two pages, there slipped a four-leafed clover, pressed there who knows how long before, placed by who knows whose hand. The small, thin, incredibly green and intact leaves, reminding a woman's delicate fingers that dreamingly caressed those pages, fingers that no longer exist.

I put back the fragile plant stem, my eyes lingering on the beginning of chapter marked by the unknown reader: “... Dans la cour de roi et reine de Castille desquels les noms dits ne seront, y avait un gentilhomme si parfait en beauté et bonne condition...”[2]. This reminded me of an old hobby, for rare and valuable things, a hobby which I had lost long before, before burying myself in the smoke of gambling houses. It was like an old, lost fragrance, like a remorse unable to come back...

“They come from my grandfather's library. Iordache Ordeanu was a book-lover, known by all the antiquarians in Europe!” explained the owner of the book, placing near the book, on the rusted tray, a rum bottle with a jagged neck...

On our return, the sun was setting right in front of us, in a collapse of violet clouds, as if a huge crumbling of the skies. The cold, autumn wind was blowing from the water, rustling a sound of bones among the dry corn fields. The trotting of the horses was speeding up, stirred by the cool air and the dusk.                                  

“They're great, Ordeanu's colts! I'll make a pair of real horses out of them!...”

I didn't answer. His delight seemed vulgar to me. My friend's preoccupations were most common: horses, calves, haystacks.

Later, I couldn't help speaking out the words that kept tormenting me:

“Alexander, something odd's going on with me... Iorgu Ordeanu...”

“Well?”

“Imagine, Iorgu Ordeanu is that man in my dream, the one I was talking to you about...”

My friend took the cigarette out of his mouth, made a half turn and looked at me attentively, for a long while. Then, with a slight, sympathizing concern:

“You should stay here a little longer! You need some quietness...”

Actually, he meant in an indirect way that what I really needed, was to see a doctor. I found it useless to speak on.

We made the rest of the way back home in silence, suddenly estranged from each other.

Three days later the rains started. Monotonous drizzles, with gloomy fogs, saddening the light.

The silence of the empty house started to depress me. My friend was riding across the fields minding his business and returning only at dinner time, when he was throwing off his wet raincoat, talking all the time about business and plans that couldn't be of any interest to me. He would start yawning, sleep pushing him to bed early.

I would stay until late all by myself, listening to the rain and the windows shaken by the wind. I was turning the pillows on one side or the other, trying to nestle in my bed. I would put the light on and off. I had looked for something to read, in hopes of chasing away my boredom. The only books I could find in the desk were dealing with the household: Cultivating Fodder Plants, The New Sericulture Treatise, The Plowman's Almanac, Seeds Catalogue for the Year 1923.

I thought about the rare editions in Iordache Ordeanu's library, the gallant stories of Queen Margaret. I sent a servant on horseback to Vlăduleni, with a note. He came back empty-handed. Iorgu Ordeanu had left. The house was closed. There were new servants. The new owner, Horoviţ had let them know that in spring he was going to pull everything down to the basement and build new houses.

The endless hours were choking me. The whole novelty of this life that had charmed me in the beginning, turned into an infinite boredom. I found myself having mean thoughts, despising the self-contented simplicity of my hospitable friend. I would watch him pitifully, as he was trotting up the stairs with his boots covered with mud from the stable. Who was he working for, since daybreak? Who was he amassing for? I felt my words and laughter sounding false, reluctantly; I was ashamed by this hypocrisy I had found within myself. I had to leave...

In the evening, I could see from the porch, under the rain, express trains with lighted carriages crossing the metal bridge down in the valley.

They were hurrying on to the city, to the human bustle, to bars and cafeterias with harsh electric or acetylene lights, towards the noisy streets, the thrilling, killing life I couldn't do without. I was watching from the end of the porch, through the leafless vine, until the last red light at the back of the last carriage died away.

The silence was tingling in my ears. I could hear the mice running in the attic, the death watch boring through the wooden beams.

One morning Alexandru realized; he harnessed the horses to the wheel cart; then saw me to the station.

It was drizzling; the black plain was sunk into the fog. A mist was rising from the wet, newly-plowed fields. The lonely houses by the road appeared silent and sad from the drizzle. Iorgu Ordeanu's bob-tail colts, with short cut manes, were swiftly trotting along the road, at the same pace; I felt their running desperately slow.

We parted in silence, displeased. All my friend's good intentions had failed. I felt guilty. I hadn't found the right, warm word to thank him.

In the train carriage I slept like a log, for the first time after so many days.

Then...

Then, the slow and total sinking life got me stuck again. At the club, on the first night, the usher, while taking my hat and overcoat, put me up to all the news.

The autumn had brought a certain excitement. The games were keeping till dawn; money was easily being thrown away, after a rich harvest, in spite of the drought over the summer. Mişu Cariade had returned from Italy and south of France, after having won fabulous sums in the casinos over there. His baccarats were famous.

In a couple of hours, fortunes were going round the table. The dealers were skillfully picking up the rustling bills with their calm and confident indifference; my small fortune was thus going down the drain. Broke, I would then stand behind the players, watching the game till the lights were being turned out.

In the morning, I would go down in the street, my mouth dry with smoking, in the dust raised by the street sweepers. I used to meet workers on their way to factories, servants, basket in hand, going to market; the life of the city was waking up, rested and hard-working, in the clear, bluish dawn, and it was only then that I was dragging my feet in the cold air, huddled up in my overcoat with the collar put up, heading for the room where rest had long before stopped waiting for me. Kept away from natural life, I was moving like a sleep-walker, when out of the club. I was indifferent to everything; in the swarming streets I could only discern the companions devoured by the same evil, pushed together by a mysterious association.

It was only with one another that we could find conversation topics, prolonging beyond the club walls the hallucination of the game.

“I only count on the martingale!” Georgel Steriu was explaining to me one morning, over the hors-d'oeuvres at “Mircea's”, while peeling with his nail tips a slice of salami. “I can't understand the stupidity of those who believe you can win otherwise! The bad thing is I never have the sum I need...”

I was for the intermittence.

“The intermittence? But that's the biggest nonsense! That's a game for old ladies! my companion got indignated, feeling the buns, in search for a fresh one. Waiter! What about this pigwash? Get some other buns. You're serving as if in an inn!...”

Then going on:

“The intermittence mon cher is for the kibitzes! They pick two or three hundred and they go away. I'm only going for the big game. I need thrills, you see? The game is an art! It's life's hazard, condensed within a single day, a single hour, here, under my hand... If I had Mişu Cariade's fortune, I would teach you a lesson about this game!... What's the matter with this dog? It's been staring at you for a quarter of an hour...”

I turned around.

Behind my back, Soliman, sitting on his rear legs, was looking straight at me with his lashless eyes. I looked around; Iorgu Ordeanu was sitting at a table, all by himself, with an empty glass in front of him. I felt in his looks that he wanted to say something to me.. I stood up and I drew myself a chair. After a few words, he asked me some news about Alexandru. There was no news. After my leaving, I hadn't been able to write a line. I had had qualms about my laziness, which also meant a rudeness after his welcoming hospitality. I had sat a couple of times in front of the white sheet. I hadn't found the most common thankful words. I had postponed that from day to day. Now it was too late.

“Your friend is a tough guy. I can't help admiring him!” said Iorgu Ordeanu, shaking the soda bottle, as it hardly came out. “This is the kind of people we need: straightforward. They never now what sentimentalism is, they are not devoured by any vice. One of these, here and there, will keep the old-times household tradition. I haven't been able of that...”

He took the glass to his mouth, but he only sipped a little, reluctantly.

“I haven't been able of that...” he repeated in a lower voice, as if for himself.

There was such a demobilizing sadness in his remorse, now impossible to straighten up, that I felt bound to deliver an endless speech on the differences of temperament, the inadaptable characters, the hard times we were living, asking for tough people to face life.

Iorgu Ordeanu shook his head. All my stories were made up of words too casual to find in them forgiveness for a weakness known and condemned by everybody.

For his ruin, it was not the circumstances, neither the times nor the people to blame, but himself alone.

“Could you understand, sir, the amount of cowardice and selfishness and the terrible decay a vice can drag you into? It's three months since I've been carrying here, in my lapel pocket, what was left of the money I got by selling the vineyard, after I'd paid off all my debts. At first, I analyzed all the newspapers, with the patience of a profiteer, in order to find out the rates of bonds, running, calculating, watching the fluctuations of the stock market. I felt I couldn't find enough safety. What do you think? It's all that's left of a fortune of millions!... Then I tried to invest it in a mortgage. None seemed advantageous enough. I was stalling! I couldn't part with that money. That's what I understood right away. To have it always at hand... II keep walking around the clubs, then come back home, lock the money in a drawer. The next day I take it again in my pocket; I invent the most fantastic pretexts: that they may be stolen, or there may be a fire... Sometimes, in front of the entrance door of the club I decide to enter if the plate number of the passing carriage is even. It's an odd number, and I stop, getting busy around a shop window. When I see an old friend making for the entrance door, I turn my head, pretend to be in a hurry, busy... Yet, I know one night I will climb up the stairs and sit at a table... But why am I telling you all these? How can these miseries interest you?...”

He opened his cigarette case and looked for a soft cigarette. He lit it, watching the smoke coming up in spirals, his head leaning against the back of the chair.

His eyelids were tired, there was hopelessness and decay on his face. His slant necktie showed the metal tip of the tie pin.

Again, I could see in front of my eyes the man in my dream, the way I knew him, down to the smallest detail. Everything was familiar to me: the narrow-knotted tie, and the faded-blue eyes, and the thin wrinkles around his eyelids. The only difference was that the man in my dream had never talked to me so closely.

Iorgu Ordeanu brushed with his finger nail a bit of cigarette ash off his coat. He tried hard to smile, humiliated by the confession he had suddenly made to a stranger, in a moment of weakness.

“These miseries can't mean anything to you... In fact, I had something else on my mind when I noticed you. When leaving, while packing up my things, I found in the loft a box full of books, coming from old Iordache Ordeanu's library... I carried them along with me, although I didn't really know what to do with all those old things. I have no place for them: my place is so close! You may be interested in some... At least that's what I thought. May I invite you over to choose the ones you like? In exchange, I would ask you to do me a little favor... I'm sure you know some antiquarian. I hear these things are well paid for nowadays. I'd get rid of them. I'll give you my address... Any day, in the afternoon, I am at home. You could have a look at them, evaluate them beforehand. I'm no good at this...”

When he picked up his hat to leave, he repeated exactly the movement in my dream, when he would pick up his hat from the edge of the teacher's desk and turning he would say: “Let's go now, Soliman! Goodbye student Theodorescu Ion.”

The next day, at five o'clock, I was looking for the number of his house, peeping on my tiptoes in order to make out the figures on the rust-darkened plates.

It was snow-storming.

One could not see three yards away in the fluffy snow powder blown down from the roofs, swept by the blizzard along the street. I was frozen and hurrying to find a shelter from the terrible weather outside. I finally found it: no 18, above a passage door, in a three-storied house, with a dirty-yellow facade, pested off by dampness.

I wandered for quite a while along dark corridors, on hallways with worn out stairs, slippery with frozen slops, smelling the burnt foods, through endless, crooked passages, blocked by thresholds and screens.

It was for the third time that I was uselessly knocking on Iorgu Ordeanu's door. In the end, a little girl, carrying a bandbox under her arm, told me:

“He must be upstairs, on the fifth floor! At Madame Faingold's. She's got a new tenant...

I started the round of the doors there. It was even filthier, a terrible dirt. I was slipping on vegetable peels and leftovers, spilled everywhere, I stumbled against a caldron set in front of a door and steaming with lye wash and dirt-soaked rags.

At the end of a corridor which I entered by feeling the wall in the darkness, Madame Faingold finally opened a door for me.

She was an overweight lady, related to Rebeca, red eyelashes, wearing slippers and a green shawl knotted under her arms. Through the half-opened door, one could see behind Madam Faingold a boy with a pointed cap on his head, cracking nuts near an iron stove.

“Mr. Iorgu? A distinguished person, with a small doggie?..” “Try the door on the right. Come in for a minute. He's gone to the chemist's: he's got such a terrible toothache. Marcel! Show the gentleman the drawing room of Mr. Ordeanu!...”

The “drawing room” was a dark room, with verdigrised green walls and all kinds of pieces of furniture encircling a huge round table, with a cast iron stove, whose black-metal flue, made up of joined tubes, was going round half of the wall length. When entering, the first striking image was that fantastic zigzag of smoky tin, crawling on the wall, twisted above the bed, overlengthened until it found its way out through a small window, replaced by the black cover of a sugar box.

I sat on a broken-springed chair but didn't take my winter coat off.

It was cold and stuffy. When my eyes got used to the darkness, I studied curiously the lodging of the last of the Ordeanus.

Empty walls, no carpet. A couple of golden frames stained by the summertime flies, furnished-room-pictures, cut off some magazines. A blue metal washstand, covered with a filthy towel. On the wall, dirty stains were spreading up and the shape of a wet hand pressed against the whitewash, had left there the trace of the five fingers forever. In a tea glass, a slice of black lemon, was floating on the thick remnants of drink. Above it, placed across, there was a gray-bluish aluminium teaspoon, one of those that slip through you fingers as they are too light.

Between the windows, the only piece of stylish furniture: a fine coffee table, with curved legs and a rosy face. There, leaning against a seven-arm candlestick, there were a few framed photographs.

I stood up to have a closer look. It was an opportunity to find out, through the silent evidence of the images, something about the family that was dying away, as its last representative had to end up his old age, ruined, in a worthless lodging, like the wasteful figures of the evangelic parables.

Before reaching for them in order to have a closer look, I listened carefully. No footsteps were heard on the corridor. Just a kitchen sizzling from beyond the wall.

They were pale photographs, carrying the golden inscription of the royal and imperial workshops, which had disappeared long before.

A schoolgirl, dressed in a black lustrine apron, was standing by a garden table made of birch wood, wearing a wide girdle and a white little cross on her flat chest: the old uniform of the nunnery boarding schools. A delicately and feebly beautiful woman, dressed in white, with an unusually thin waistline, and with the sleeves swollen above her shoulders - the way they used to wear half a century before - was putting out a handful of grain to a pigeon, familiarly sitting on the tips of her fingers; in the background, the San Marco square in Venice and a ragged child showing white teeth as he was laughing in the sun. A dark-haired young man, dressed in the romantic suit of the late 40's was lowering his eyes to a bulky open volume. I thought of Iordache Ordeanu, the scholar who was in love with rare in-folios. And the last... I dropped the cardboard. What was this one doing here? Oh, my God, what was this one doing here?

I bent to pick up the photo... I drew up to the window, my eyes blurred, holding the frame very close, my fingers holding tight the margins of the paper, like in a sudden prayer for the forgiveness that could no longer come, no, it couldn't come any more then...

Agata's eyes were looking at me, without seeing, beyond me, beyond the people.

And her sad smile, her thin hands leaning against the back of the chair, those hands which seemed to caress the air when stretched out, bare, in the sun, her fingers which used to sift the sand and shells, and everything that had been forgotten and everything that couldn't be said, a painful confession which nobody was to know, ever...

“Agata, what are you doing here?”

Had I spoken those words aloud? Had I whispered them for myself?

“Agata, what are you doing here?” Weren't those words sounding on my lips as on that morning when she had entered my room, there on the sea coast, where my final decay started? To think of the laughter I welcomed her quick questions with, the fear that could be read in her eyes; to think of my fake carelessness when I turned my back to her, looking out of the window, eagerly pattering my fingertips against the shiny glass!

I hadn't slept for quite a while, the dealers' voices from the casino kept on resounding in my ears, I only wanted to forget, tight fists and head against the pillows. I said it calmly, without turning away from the window, and, at the moment, the flapping rows of white seagulls flying in the sun above the water seemed to me more worth of interest than the torment of the woman clutching her hands behind my back. To think of the sigh of relief and my rush to double-lock the door when she left staggeringly!...

Can one express all these?... And the brutish sleep, till late when I woke up in the darkness, unable to realize where I was... And the absent-minded carelessness with which I listened, unmoved, after midnight, at the cards table, between two rounds, to the story which was senseless to others: Agata, far out in the sea, where she had never swum, almost drowned, snatched by a miracle from the jaws of death... To think of the frightening calm of my staring at the Jacks' green tunic and the golden mace of the Kings' hands, as if it hadn't been because of me, of the decay I had dragged her into, of the dirt which I had thrown her in, that she had hopelessly looked for escape in death...

“Agata, what are you doing here?”

Can there be an answer from beyond death?...

I turned around, feeling the pressure of somebody's looks pointed at me. Somewhere behind me, the severe eyes of a brownish dog were staring at me: it was Soliman.

Quickly, I placed the cardboard in its place, as if guilty of an unacceptable indiscretion. The dog's look was watching me with a human understanding. I felt I was blushing. What did he want from me? What did he know about me? The kitchen sizzling beyond the wall had ceased. I could only hear the roar of the snowstorm, shaking the windows. Then, Iorgu Ordeanu's footsteps on the corridor...

He shook my hand gladly. He lit the end of a candle in the seven-arm candlestick. He opened a box of books which was under a blanket; rummaging among the heavy, dusty volumes with thick, leather covers, with golden ex-libris, of famous libraries.

But now, they had stopped meaning any joy to me.

I was absent-mindedly opening the pages smelling like dry paper, elastic sheep or calfskin, the ink of the engravings. What had that man to do with Agata? What was that grayish, lifeless, opaque look hiding? What unseen web of seemingly disconnected events, scattered along my life, was revealing mysterious ties, ensnaring me like the ropes of a trap for the forest beasts, and getting me closer and closer to this man, this ghost of my childhood dreams? And to what end?

Now, the book piles had raised between me and Iorgu Ordeanu, showing dimly, in the flickering flame of the candle, the lusterless golden ornaments of inscriptions deeply engraved in the red, bluish and blue leather.

There was a fortune there; books for which maniacs had stolen or killed, priceless engravings, unparalleled miniatures, manuscripts scrupulously toiled upon by monks in their monastery cells, at the light of rushlights, by scholars burned at the stake, by cabala devouts, black magic wizards, or alchemists in search of the philosopher's stone and the spring of eternal youth. In the old days, miserly greedy, I would have plunged my hands into the gold pieces of this desired treasure, lost till dawn in leafing the unparalleled vellums and in-folios... But my love for valuable things had been lost long before. I wiped the dust from the tips of my fingers. I placed on the edge of the table three books which I had once strived for, chosen this time - as I well knew it, although I was rejecting the thought - only because, when badly needed, they could be exchanged for the price of another night's gambling.

Iorgu Ordeanu coughed, choking with the dust raised from the book piles. He took his fleshless hand to his chest and, bent with coughing, narrow-shouldered, he looked to me unusually thin, diminished under his large clothes to the size of a child's body who'd just recovered from an illness.

On top of the books, a thick notebook, with unbuckled covers and filigree-worked pages, was showing in the candle light a crown under a half-moon and a six-cornered star, as the Venetians used to make for the use of the Orient.

On the first page he could discern the signature of chancellor Ioniţă Ordeanu; on the other pages, among judgments on life and death, short notices about miseries and everyday events. One could read there: “All of a sudden there came my fearful hour of doom, awaiting emperors and headmen, slaves and robbers, each for his own deeds will pray or be ashamed, and if thou kiss me, thy kiss shall be the last one, for no return is there for me now, left by all, and all is gone like a shadow.” And, turning the page: “For all night long did horses toil to cross the Tecuci river, but soon all was forgotten with the foods and great feast at honorable Kiriac's, the bread provider.” On another page: “Today Costea's first tooth turned out”, and underneath: “All thy vanity and thy endearment, and those riches and the greed, and thy stinginess will turn to ashes and thy soul will cry out then...” The paper was pierced by the death watches; a small insect, a little worm with tiny quick legs passed from under one page under another.

Unwillingly, I looked at the frail figure of the last descendant of chancellor Ioniţă, as if he were a stuffed being, spread with camphor, in a museum.

Iorgu Ordeanu had sat on the arm of a chair, his unlit cigarette in his mouth, feeling in his pockets for the matchbox. In the candle light his face was greenish, his hair was rotten grayish, and his inexpressive look betrayed a total, upsetting resignation, like the icy look of a dead man.

I couldn't find the right words. I would have liked to mention that long-lost grandfather who had written the brass-buckled diary. I felt an urge to inquire indirectly how come Agata's picture was leaning against the seven-arm candlestick. Then, again, the resemblance with the man in my dream was troubling me. There, in the cold, dark room, with our increased or diminished shadows dancing on the verdigrised green walls, face to face with that stranger, yet so familiar from a parallel life to the real one, I felt uncomfortable, surrounded by a haze of mystery. The piled books, the brownish dog lying his muzzle on his legs, staring his round eyes at me, the snowstorm beating against the windows, the muffled noises on the corridor, all of these seemed strange to me, artificial, as if put up on a provincial town stage where a very old melodrama is to be played.

Iorgu Ordeanu's late nights, in this transitory, unfriendly room, when everyone is asleep, suddenly appeared to me frightening.

This long row of chancellors and ladies, of headmen and bread providers, then exquisite boyar ladies and scholars like Iordache Ordeanu, living in the welfare of the stony courts, with joys and sorrows whose memories had long been lost, everything and all of those were ending up together with this living dead.

Kind words lay behind my tongue, but I didn't utter them for they would have sounded vain, or maybe distressing: the sympathy of a passer-by.

The walls were suffocating me. I wrapped the books in a newspaper and prepared to leave. Iorgu Ordeanu too, put his wintercoat on, blew out the candle and turned the key in the lock.

We climbed down the dark corridors feeling the walls.

In the street, the light of the bulbs shining blue on the snow, in the sideways rolling of the snowstorm gusts, also seemed theatrical and out of place. The harness bells of the sleigh horses, the people muffled up to their eyes, passing in the violet shining of the shop windows and disappearing in the darkness, the shouting of the newspaper boys, got my feet back on the ground, from chancellor Ioniţă's notes: “All thy vanity and thy endearment, and those riches and the greed, and thy stinginess will turn to ashes...”

“I'll send Pach or Kohn tomorrow!... Or, I'd better send them both. One at a certain hour, the other, later!...” I said turning my back towards the storm, not to have my words blown away.

“Hadn't you better come too? I was telling you I'm no good at... “

“Tomorrow at eleven, then.”

And I put out my hand to part with him in front of the club.

I had noticed the light upstairs: Georgel Steriu leaning against the window, talking with someone I couldn't see behind the green curtains. I had a couple of thousand lei in my pocket. I had been spoiled by luck for about a week. I was impatient to climb the stairs as soon as possible.

Iorgu Ordeanu himself stopped; he hesitated in putting out his hand.

“So, you are gambling, too?...”

“Oh! No!” I suddenly lied, making an indifferent face. “Very rarely... When I've got nothing else to do... Like tonight...”

Iorgu Ordeanu wouldn't let himself taken in.

“Are Mişu Cariade, Creţeanu, Ionică Istrate still coming around?”

They were the habitués of the club. The most famous gamblers.

“Naturally, naturally they're coming... I mean Cariade, Creţeanu are still coming... Ionică Istrate is trying his hand with Saint Peter in Heaven or with Belzebuth in Hell,” I jested stupidly, and I suddenly blushed, ashamed, for thus I had repeated an old joke from the club, where the kingdom to come was imagined as a huge, endless game, in which those who had lost their fortune would regain it, and those who had won a fortune were going to lose it.

I put out my hand again.

Iorgu Ordeanu was printing in the snow, with the tip of his galosh an ace of diamond, soon wiped out by the storm. He raised his eyes and his face suddenly looked younger, lit by the bluish glow of the shop window, like a flame bursting from embers seemingly put out before.

“May I accompany you?... I have old friends upstairs... I'm bored to death at my place. After all, I won't touch the cards. Maybe just a game of bridge...

When he entered the big lounge of the club, Mişu Cariade threw away his cards on the green table and rushed, toppling his chair, to embrace him.

All the old gamblers gathered round him.

Others, younger ones, who didn't know him stopped in the doorway of the other rooms, smiling glad but without any reason, as they didn't know who he was; they only realized that the new guest had been lost and now he was back.

The old ones gathered aside, by the fireplace (which was in fact a mask for the central heating radiator). The servants rushed for some hot drinks and coffees. The games which had already started were stalling. Iorgu Ordeanu was looking around with a strange eye, wondering about the changes that had been done, asking about people I had hardly heard about, long time before.

I entered another room and sat at an écarté table, where the fans were gathering one by one, after having satisfied their curiosity. I stood there for a long time, stuck to the chair, my hand gripped on the cards. Since the first half hour, good luck left me. The bills were slipping away one after the other. In sweat, damp-fingered, I was unfolding bills, gathering the change, counting the chips, poking in my pockets.

When I stood up, very few were still dealing, low and not cash; and in my waistcoat pocket there was one last thousand lei left. In the big hall, you couldn't see the table in the middle for the heads of those gathered around. I made my way through to watch. Iorgu Ordeanu was dealing. When had he sat down? How come he had broken his word? Why did they let him?

I had the feeling he sensed my questions when his looks met mine and he quickly lowered his eyes in guilt.

But in front of the dealers the bills had piled up, rustling as they kept on gathering... I realized that Iorgu Ordeanu had met that rare day in the life of a gambler, a day that comes once in ten years.

Each card drawn by the banker was making the most unexpected combinations; the naturals came in a row; the punters were stripped off their money, nervously throwing the bills and the bone chips which they were weighing and fanning in their hands till the last moment, when they would throw them on the table squares, where the dealers swiftly raked them into piles. Iorgu Ordeanu's hand would slightly pick the card, caressingly; I understood his heart-throbbing expectation when he was ready to overturn it onto the green table, after having looked to the first square, then to the second, until all the bets were made. His eyes were shining, his cheeks were rosy-glowing on his pale complexion; it seemed that even the slight wrinkles around his eyes, and those narrow lines going down by his nostrils had vanished away.

“Nine for the bank!”

He would throw the cards into the porcelain cup with that well-known carelessness we used to know.

Mişu Cariade kept on fretting his fat body, raising his short hands in order to loosen the collar around his neck and would open his bulky leather wallet to pull new banknotes out. He would then put it back in the inside pocket, the frowning of his brows betraying the interior monologue, his decision that that be the last money he threw away before leaving the table for good.

“Eight for the bank!”

One couldn't hear anything but the raking of the chips, the dragging of the bills. Cigarettes were going out in the ashtrays, after having been lit and forgotten there. Mouths were clutched, breaths were short.

“Where have you got it from, man?” sighed Georgel Steriu, turning round to whisper to me as I was standing right behind him. “Damn that martingale. Take my place! I'm broke...”

I sat on the empty chair. When I got the card I threw the bill folded in four. The cards were shaking in my hand, I turned them over and there was a general sigh of relief: a Jack and a nine of clubs...

From then on, I can't understand what happened. Iorgu Ordeanu's luck passed into my cards. My throat was dry; the waiter was renewing my drink on the nearby table every fifteen minutes. For each card of the bank I would throw on the table a bigger one. The pile of bills and the cylinders of chips were dwindling in front of the dealers. The cautious waiting of the players started to relax.

Six for the bank! I would throw a seven. Eight for the bank! I would drop a nine. Every point was a winner.

The blood was throbbing in my temples. I gulped down my drink which made things in front of my eyes shake unreally through the thick smoke. I was seized with that nervous and malicious joy of the game, when you mumble half-words, stuff crumpled bills into your pockets, with a silly smile on your face and throw the card to your opponent, malignantly, like thrusting a blade. I felt Iorgu Ordeanu started losing his temper. When it was my turn, he would face me altogether, waiting with trembling dry lips, eager to shuffle the cards, pushing the card that had lost with a self-confidence that showed nerves strained to the limit.

The whole hall was silent under the white, motionless light of the chandeliers. What you could hear was the creak of someone's boot, as he was trying to stand on tiptoes and see over the others' heads, the rustling of the cards, the stifled exclamations when a card was upturned. The whole attention was upon the two of us; it seemed between Iorgu Ordeanu and me there was a merciless fight, silent and close, as it must have been among the cave people when they were gropingly strangling one another in the darkness for some woman or piece of meat. So much the more frightening was this battle, in our civilised, black coats, with white, hard shirt fronts, in this hall filled with the dry heat of the radiator and the glow light of the bulbs, where the waiters were walking silently on the carpets, among so many people who were all by my side, against the trembling-handed old man, whose eyes were now sunken in their orbits; so much the crueller and the more horrible was this strain of wills, wishes, bustling each time I was raising a card from the table.

The smoke of the cigarettes was lowering upon us in shattered veils, burning our breaths.

Once in a while, in the strange silence between two hands, the sound of a sleigh's jingling bells down in the street penetrated the windows.

When I passed my tired eyes over the wall of players around us, I could see the two waiters standing still in the doorway, looking impassively, in their metal-buttoned black coats.

Right in front of me, on that same side of the table, there was a player I had never seen before. He had a sallow face, glossy with a greasy sweat, reddish, lashless eyes, like those of the rabbits, gleaming unpleasantly from beyond his glasses. He was winning a lot on my hand and after each card, he was rubbing his hands, winking vulgarly with the tail of his eye, counting greedily the row of chips and the pile of banknotes, his grin showing two pointed canine teeth, outstanding in a disgusting set of teeth, more golden and platinum than real. When stretching his hands for the money, his flat-pointed fingers, with black nails, seemed to me like five thick caterpillars swarming so greedily that I had to turn my eyes. But he was trying to get my look, smiling imperceptibly, like an accomplice, urging me with a trembling flutter of his eyelids to go on, not to stop. Why would that man, whom I didn't know, feel a companion of mine, and gather through me a fortune on the table in front of him?

“Six for the bank!”

I would drop the card. It was a seven. The flat-fingered hand with black-pointed nails was picking the white, greenish, rosy bone chips and the pile of paper money.

How long did this last? Two hours? Three? More? The windows were turning blue with the dawn light when Iorgu Ordeanu stood up... He had a forced smile on his lips. I felt him hesitating when he took the first steps, making for the window, to stretch his stiff bones, with the matter-of-fact air of a man who wants to seem tired only. I noticed him taking his hand, out of habit, to the pocket where he had kept what was left of his fortune, a gesture which was useless now.

I knew he had taken out from there the last blue banknote. I was seized with a tender emotion. I was the only one to really know the complete ruin that that night meant for Iorgu Ordeanu...

I passed into the barber's room to wash my hands and refresh my eyes. When I returned, Iorgu Ordeanu was gone. The lights were being put out. The doors were being closed.

A couple of guys were counting their money on the corners of the tables.

The waiter held my coat more politely than ever. I threw him a crumpled bill. He ran down the stairs after me, to give me the packet of books I had forgotten: Ordeanu's books. I had them sent home.

In the street, the snowstorm had ceased. It was frozen; a windless frost as it is always after the blizzard. The snow was crunching under my footsteps.

The iris light of the dawn was rising cold over the dark, granite-wall houses, with their black windows. The rough air was penetrating my lungs deep-down, refreshing like a spring. The sky was clear and high, the stars were paling out; for the first time after a long while I would raise my eyes.

I felt weightless.

I felt relieved. Great, misty decisions were growing within myself. Everything could end now. Next to my chest, in the pockets of my coat I had the price of that new life, which I was going to start. One hundred fifty, one hundred eighty thousand, maybe more, stood packed there, warm, close to my body... I was going to pay my debts, to settle my life; I was swearing to myself never to set foot into that club again, never to lay hands on a playing card again. Desires fallen asleep were waking up, hopes lost long before, were coming out from depths covered by ashes.

The morning with its cold air, with the white sonorous snow under my feet, with the town asleep and lonely sleighs, ringing the lively metal of their bells through the snowdrifts which I also passed with my coat unbuttoned, well, all these were going to mean the dawn of my first day of deliverance.

Close to my house, a coachman was sleeping into his sleigh, muffled up to his eyes, and when I passed near the muzzle of the horse, breathing warm, steamy air, that breath felt good and friendly. The horse shook its head, ringing a bell which sounded clear and soothing in my ears, like the crystal-clear voice of my childhood's sleighs.

My loneliness hurt. I had been long since there wasn't any one to get close to, no hand to encourage me. Now, everything was going to end. And the first spear-like reflection of purple rays in the windows welcomed me in the doorway, as I was pressing the frost-whitened handle, in a roar of light, like a new morning on earth.

Once in the cold room I threw myself on the bed, the quilt over my head, decided to sleep like a log and then wake up rested as if after the year-long, bewitched sleeps that bring you into another life. But nightmares started tormenting me. My every night bad dreams, prolonging the day-time fears and humiliations, the frightened throbbing of my chased-beast heart... Sleep in which the dream-moaning is a sigh of relief for my real-life torments...

The most unusual and terrifying events were mixing up...

I was at the casino in Sinaia. Iorgu Ordeanu was the banker.

“One million for the bank!”

“I go...”

“Nine for the bank.”

I overturn the card. King of clubs, king of hearts. One million would be lost.

“Four million in the bank!”

“Nine for the bank...”

I lost two million.

“There's four million in the bank!”

How come I did that? Where had I drawn from those two cards I threw on the table? Out of my double sleeve, or from the fold of my cuff? How long had I been keeping them there? How come I had learned that stuff, too?

A five of clubs, a four of clubs.

I won four million. I was stretching my hands to grab a pile which had raised higher than our heads.

“You cheated!” someone shouted. “Check his sleeve. He's got marked cards.”

“Get him out! Out with him! It's a disgrace, gentlemen!... Je ne ficherai plus pieds dans ce tripot!...[3] Sir, you are requested to leave at once...”

I wonder how I got outside, on that bench hidden under the fir-trees, my tear-wet cheeks against my hands? There was a wet breeze coming from the woods, a resin fragrance; and everything would have been so heavenly simple if that hadn’t happened! I was lowering my forehead towards my knees... A hand lay mildly on my shoulders. I raise my eyes. Agata is pressing my forehead against her breasts which I feel elastic and warm and I can hear her heart beating softly, so softly underneath... She is stroking my hair, pushing a lock off my forehead. She is mercifully looking deep into my eyes. Keeping one of her knees onto the ground and, bent over, she is holding my temples tight with her long fingers, smelling like hydrangea; oh, no, not hydrangea, it is an unknown perfume, more delicate than any other fragrance I have ever smelled.

“I don't want to see your eyes that way. Here, all my jewelry: the pearls, the rings, the diamonds...”

I hold her hands, and they are so friendly now, and I need them so much, to feel in mine, to be thrilled by the blood in their veins, pulsing in the same rhythm with my blood!... There's nothing weird any more. I know her flesh has been rotten for long, and her bones have turned white, - for how long now, four, or five years? - and I find it natural that she be there by my side, so I can feel again, under her warm breast which I lean my forehead against, I can feel the ticking of her heart again, as if in real life, that life-ticking that had been stopped so long before... I feel this can't be true, it must be just a dream, so I should never open my eyes again, so that it last forever... And I hold on tight to her. And we are both afraid we might wake up and put an end to everything.

“Agata, what are you doing here?”

Where from has Iorgu Ordeanu popped up by my side? He has no right to ask, in fact! What end of the white path under the fir-trees has he come from? I was forgetting! It was so good I was forgetting!... I have to explain to him... It's not my fault!... It was not me who hid those cards to cheat. Someone must have put them there... I've done all sorts of things, but that?... I tell him but he wouldn't listen. I put out my hand, but he puts his into his pocket... He turns his back... He takes a few steps and then remembers something. He comes back. Now he has a small, black pistol in his hand, it's like a toy... He hands it to me.

“You know what I'm expecting you to do!... If there is still something human...”

Now he is far away, at the end of the alley; he's walking slowly, I can see the smoke of his cigarette, dispersing blue behind him. He says something to Soliman and the dog turns round and looks at me with human eyes, with despising human eyes.

I take the toy to my temple and I feel its cold barrel like a round metal coin... Agata shrieks and wants to take it away. So violently do I press the trigger and yet, the bullet won't come!... Does it take so long to die?...

I woke up tears in eyes. The dream kept thrilling me. I stretched my aching bones.

The afternoon sun was coming through the window. On the bedside table there was a cup of cold tea waiting for me, and the packet with Ordeanu's books. I hadn't even heard the maid coming in.

Iorgu Ordeanu's books? I jumped in the middle of the room. How much was true of what had happened the night before? How much of it was just a dream?... I grabbed my coat from the back of the chair and I rummaged through the pockets. I was afraid now that even what was true might have happened in my dream only.

But I took out of my jacket pockets handfuls of banknotes, mixed up with cigarettes, matchboxes and countless bills of one thousand, five hundred, folded, crumpled, hundreds and others... others... I turned them over an unfolded newspaper on the bed. In the cold, barefoot on the frozen floor, I started counting... There was no joy in it any more. There was much more than I needed, more than I needed to pay off my liberty, but no more joy was there, in front of it. What did it mean? I would look at a banknote with its blue filigree. Is it for this that people struggle, kill, sell out their youth? Is it with this you can buy quietness and bread and love?... When you don't have it you suffer for it and hunger may torture your entrails, and for it a woman may sell her kisses, putting her soft arms around your neck, begging for it!...

I suddenly found it strange and foolish that people should deceive themselves, considering it simple and natural that this patch of paper should have such powers; a patch of paper which I could tear to small pieces or lit with a match flame, turning it to nothingness in an instant... Because I didn't have that I had suffered; now that I finally had it, was I going to be happier, better and more human?... And because Iorgu Ordeanu had wasted his very last banknote, was he going to suffer from hunger and cold, and was madam Faingold going to throw him out in the street? What would he be doing now?...

I remembered I had promised to be at his place by eleven. I was supposed to announce the antiquaries. I looked at my watch. Almost noon. I quickly put my clothes on and set out almost running.

It was a cold winter sun, glimmering like steel in the snowballs. The town seemed unusually clean, airy, renewed. In the passing sleighs, wrapped in soft furs, red-cheeked women were smiling, with their eyelashes wet by the frost. The voices of the passers-by were raising in sonorous echoes. Some small snow-flake, a hardly visible crystal star, would float down from the sky, which was so clear and so high!... I felt good, in the mood of doing something unusual, unthinkable.

I was feeling the money in my pocket. Maybe I wanted to find some way of giving it back to Ordeanu, a way to straighten everything I had ruined over night. I didn't know how. I didn't know what.

When I got to the end of the street, my heart throbbed. There was a crowd in front of the house. Sleighs were stopped. In order to pass, the tram was ringing the horn wildly. I make my way through. I started to understand.

I was terrified to start understanding.

“Á small pistol, just like that! A pistol as small as a cigarette case!” said a woman wrapped in a woolen shawl, with a trellis basket under her arm.

“He was old. Anyway, he would have...”

“You'll freeze, my lass!... Let me warm you in my coat!” goes a devilish-eyed conscript unbuttoning his wintercoat and half-wrapping in it a Moldavian maid, her bosom tightly kept in her fur vest, and carrying a blue soda bottle in her hand.

The girl pulled herself aside, giggling.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves!” reprimanded an old gentleman, with white mustaches and with an Astrakhan fur collar. “There's a dead man upstairs and you...”

“Relax, man. You'll probably be the...” the soldier cut short and drew back dragging the lass behind him.

“Make place for the prosecutor!” the constable started pushing the people with his elbows.

The prosecutor came downstairs, a police inspector wearing a wintercoat and a cap with lots of trimmings. The people spread away. The sergeant was the only one left in the doorway, his hand stuck on the belt.

“Is there anything you want?”...

“No... I mean... Well, is there a dentist in the neighborhood?” I decided to randomly ask something.

I was thinking of the empty room upstairs, of the bluish walls, the black, zigzagged flue of the iron stove, of the man that lay there. I wouldn't have the strength to face...

“A dentist? At the very end of the street, on the right, at number 2, a white house with a small window.”

I thanked and I turned round on my heels. I was called from behind:

“Not that way! The other end...”

I waved my hand by way of understanding and I went on my own way.

My mind was straying. I felt someone walking behind me. I turned round. It was Soliman.

I stopped. He stopped, too. I started again and he also started. I threw a snowball to chase him away. He avoided it running away, but when I walked on, he stuck to my heels.

I went round many streets, I entered a restaurant, he waited for me outside; I got on a sleigh, he ran after, panting.

I finally lost him. I felt relieved.

Late at night, I came back home staggeringly; I had sought oblivion in wine... I was turning the key in the lock when I felt a warm breathing by my feet in the darkness.

I bent to make out what it was. Soliman was waiting unmoved on the door mat.

Now, everything is over. There is no way out for me.

I can measure my ruin by the way my old-time friends avoid me; I can see it reflected by the mirror, when I look aside, not to see the rough-bearded face, the worn-out clothes, the dirty shirt, the collar that hasn't been changed for weeks.

I am no longer entering any club now. Nobody would accept me there. I drag my feet through pubs, cafés, where they play behind the closed shutters, with dirty card decks and where the arguments end in stabbing someone.

I will never know why Iorgu Ordeanu no longer appears in my dreams, to offer me a hand, when I'm decaying like I do now, and nobody answers my crying. Iorgu Ordeanu, who died because of me. I will never know what brought him and Agata together when they lived. Agata, who died because of me.

Nothing makes any sense now, and I have even stopped looking for an explanation.

At high night I return home talking by myself, wandering through dark, empty squares. Small, black shadows run aghast off the warm steaming canal openings. Maybe they are rats, frightened by the sound of my footsteps. Maybe just visions in my troubled mind. I lengthen my stroll. I am afraid to open the front door.

The dog is waiting for me there. Soliman.

He is awake, in the middle of the room. He steps aside when I turn the light on. He lays his muzzle on his legs and stares at me. His red eyes mercilessly pierce myself. I kick him. He makes no sound. He moves a little further and keeps on staring at me.

I turn the light off, I throw myself in bed, hands crossed under my head, dressed as I am. I wish I could sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. I wish I could forget, but can that be forgotten?

And, through the darkness, I feel Soliman’s eyes piercing me. He won't miss a move. What is he doing while I'm sleeping? In the morning, when I open my eyes, he is awake, watching, waiting for me. Why is he spying on me? What else is he waiting for?

One morning I will buy a dose of strychnine. For him? For me? One dose is enough for both.

Translated by Adrian Bleoca