He had never imagined he might witness such beauty. That was all he could think, having only just woken up, his eyes still bleary, leaning like a drunken man against the wall of a barn, from which a host of labourers were coming and going, each going about his business. Everywhere he heard voices—whether the sharp commands of the merchants standing in the doorways of their garishly coloured shops, directed at apprentices they deemed too lazy, or the shouts and roars of laughter from the carters who had stopped in the town’s main square to throw a handful of oats to their beasts, exhausted by the journey and the weight of their loads, and who used this respite to feast their eyes with delight on the young peasant women who were keeping themselves busy in their path. He had never seen such beautiful houses before, neither in Târgoviște, where he had learnt his trade, nor even in Bucharest, where, to be fair, he had only been once, when the owner of the bootmaker’s shop had taken him to buy fine leather for a luxury commission, but even then he had barely lifted his gaze from the ground, for fear of losing sight of the master craftsman, who strode proudly along the wide boulevards, teeming with the elegant and boisterous crowd of the capital. He remembered taking off his cap and crossing himself, as one would in front of a church, even though he was no longer quite a child—he was nearly 14—when he had looked up at a house as tall as a palace on Moșilor Street, which his master had also stopped to admire, his straw hat – for it was summer – perched in wonder on the back of his head, and his hand, clutching his walking stick, propped on his hip, just as he’d seen the gentlemen from the city pose for photographs.
…He did not know where he was or how he had got there, but the question had slipped his mind before it had even taken shape. Now he was enchanted by the lively buzz of voices he could not understand, by the sounds that seemed to spring from the earth and intertwine with the thin wisps of wind making their way through the gardens awash withand poppies, amongst the graceful branches of the birch trees, before being carried away by foreign winds and carried further towards the white ridges of the mountains that could be glimpsed on the horizon.
He looked at his hands without realising why, but after a few moments it dawned on him: they were so white and soft as they had never been before, he who had toiled with his hands since he could remember, and had worn them down and calloused them year after year, whether digging with a spade in his parents’ field or piercing the thick leather of his boots with a cobbler’s awl. Now his hands resembled those of Miss Teodora, who’d come to their village, Șuța Veche, for a short while as a schoolmistress. His eldest daughter had been taught by her for just one year, because then the young lady had left to study in France and no one had heard of her since; some said she’d stayed there, abroad, others that she’d become a teacher in Bucharest, and still others even that she’d taken her own life, having fallen in love with a married nobleman—but what can you do? Once the gossip of the common folk is stirred up, not even the Almighty can quell it. He’d met the schoolmistress only once, when he’d been called in to speak to her about Anica’s marks—his well-behaved but academically inept daughter— and at that moment his eyes had remained fixed on her white hands as she leafed through the register—soft, white and slender, as if woven from rays of light—hands that resembled those of the saints in icons or those of the Mother of God, for that was how it seemed to him that Miss Teodora was holding the heel of her shoe, as though she were holding the Holy Child.
His clothes were clean and, although he was barefoot, the soles of his feet did not feel the roughness of the road, and the dust was soft as a spider’s web and almost as white and gleaming. He remembered that as a child he had always walked barefoot. In his village, from spring until late autumn, people wore opinci only on Sundays and on feast days, when they went to church. At the age of 16, having fallen out with his master, he’d left the boot-making workshop and fled to Moreni, where he’d found work as a digger for the brothers Mitu and Gheorghe Măcriș. There, they worked until sunset, when all the labourers would collapse, exhausted, piled on top of one another, in the shacks on the edge of the site, but not before dashing off to the neighbouring forest, where they would scrape the lice from the waistbands of their trousers with a twig, so that they might fall asleep in peace. Yet, despite all their efforts, the huts were still teeming with lice, even though some of the workers had smeared kerosene on the legs of their beds to prevent the insects from invading their bedding. God had evidently taken it upon Himself to afflict them for their sins and had sharpened the wits of the vermin, for they would climb the walls and, once they reached the ceiling, drop straight down into the beds of the wretched.
How he longed to return, if only for a summer, to his village, to Șuța Veche, that he had closed his eyes in the hope that when he opened them again he would find himself at the gate of his parents’ house and see his mother Rada running towards him once more, hurriedly adjusting her scarlet headscarf, which kept coming undone and falling over her eyes, or his father, who would surely be scolding him from the barn, where he almost always found him. Yes, he’ll scold him in a faint voice, as if afraid he might leave again: ‘How are you, Gheorghe… I thought you wouldn’t come back; this time I really did think you wouldn’t come back. You sent neither a letter nor a word; no one knew anything about you…’. But the miracle she had been waiting for, and for which she had prayed fervently in her heart, had not come to pass.
Nevertheless, Gheorghe wasn’t disheartened, for that little street was simply too beautiful in the sunlight, and the people’s cheerfulness had rubbed off on him too; and he would have liked to strike up a conversation with men his own age, to ask them what life was like there, whether the forests were just as cool, whether the mountains were just as high, whether the grapes were harvested in autumn, just like everywhere else, anything at all, just to strike up a conversation with someone; he’d already made up his mind about the houses—they were beautiful and spacious, and seemed inhabited by angels rather than people, so clean and bright were they against the sky flooded with the joy of midday. But as he did not speak their language, he had once again sunk into that pleasant reverie that warmed his heart, wondering in amazement how he could remember his father so clearly during the years of the First World War, when his father would take the cattle out to graze in the clearings of the Trundin Forest, so that the army would not find them and requisition them, and would not return until nightfall, with the cows’ hooves wrapped in rags, so that no one would hear them. He could not have been more than two or three years old at the time, and yet Vasile, his father, seemed to be walking right in front of him, with a bundle of firewood on his back and a bundle of cornmeal in his right hand, from which his mother, Rada, would make flatbreads for them every evening; and just like that, he thought, watching himself silently tucking in by the fire, they had overcome even the post-war famine. He then saw himself standing there hesitantly, his hand stiffly pressed to his chest, as if posing for a photograph, his eyes blurred with tears of emotion, in the front row of the school that had recently opened in an old barn dating back to Cuza’s time, with his boots full of mud and his tunic clinging to his body, patched at the elbows and smelling sweet of manure. That’s how all the children were back then, and their parents weren’t any cleaner either—quite the opposite, in fact.
Then he suddenly grew sad as he watched a red insect, with wings as large as a dragonfly’s, alight on the stump of a young tree that had recently been cut down; it would fly off and return, drawing ever-wider circles, as if it could not bring itself to believe that it would find nothing there; only a moment ago it had stood tall, at least five cubits above the ground, with young shoots and brimming with vigour, and now it is nothing more than a barren stick, a rod like an exclamation mark, which no longer serves any purpose in the world and tells no story, except perhaps the story of the red insect that came from afar and rested here for a few moments; and after shaking its translucent wings like two petals of air, it took flight and never returned. With such sorrow in his heart he had set off for the front, and he remembered everything as if it had happened yesterday—no, just now—the heavy boots dragged with difficulty through the dust of the alleyway, the unfamiliar cloth of the uniform that scratched his neck and had reddened his sweat-soaked wrists, the knapsack that kept slipping from his shoulders, and the only familiar thing that brought him comfort—the yellow headscarf of his wife, Olguța, in which she had placed two pieces of flatbread and a slice of bacon for his journey, and which he clutched to his chest, tears streaming down his cheeks as he thought of the grief he had left behind.
On the Siret, near Storojineț, his Mountain Hunters battalion had been violently and unexpectedly attacked by dozens of deafening cannon muzzles that had wiped out his comrades in the blink of an eye. He, too, had been swept away into death, along with everyone else, without a thought, without surprise, without regret, crushed like an insect by the iron curtain of the sky that had come crashing down without warning upon their bodies, exhausted by the march. Because of the roar and the shock, he had not felt the shrapnel embedding itself in his shoulder, the back of his neck, and his forehead. He’d thought the smoke had merely momentarily blinded him and had gently dropped to one knee, to give the air time to clear. He was still clutching Olguța’s yellow headscarf in his hand—stained with dirt and soaked in sweat mixed with blood—and had tried to cool his burning forehead with it, which felt as though it were being pierced by a red-hot iron. He had leaned on his weapon, but had slipped slowly into the mud, which was half a cubit deep, and when he tried to get up, he couldn’t, for the earth was pulling him back with the strength of a hundred arms. ‘Never mind, I’ll stay here until the storm passes,’ he had whispered to himself, wallowing with delight in the mud that had welcomed him with the sweetness of an imperial bed.
He was thinking of all this right now with a mind that was no longer his own, free from fear, passion or sorrow, as if his whole life had floated like a wisp of vapour above the city, a vision upon which he had fixed his gaze serenely for just a moment, for that was all he needed to take it all in and let it drift away, so that it might disperse and gather once more on the horizon, far from him, carried on the crest of a gentle breeze, in a graceful dance of which he might at any time have been aware, had he so wished. He now recognised the regiment’s horses as well, hitched to the carts that had come to rest in the town square; he recognised the church dedicated to Saint George; he understood the quarrel between the Jewish merchants and the merriment of the apprentices who were bickering amongst themselves in Russian. The town was just as he had first seen it, yet the mangled carcasses of the horses had vanished, as had the bodies of his comrades, pulverised by the first cannon salvos, whose shattered limbs had become one with the red mud of the road, and now the streets glistened, bathed in the sun’s rays, with the mountains so close, so very close that he could have caressed their forests, had he only reached out his hand. But as soon as he heard familiar voices, warm voices, from home, Gheorghe shook off the beauty that had begun to enslave his thoughts once more and went to meet them, barefoot, humble and with a heart as light as a spark carried by the wind.
