We got back to Bucharest late, at the end of September, and found that everybody else had returned from their trips long before us and the trees along the road were turning yellow. It was then that I met you also, you were just back from Paris, having studied medicine of some kind, and Andrei commented skeptically to me about this (“That Stefan Valeriu will never do anything serious”), and perhaps you remember how embarrassing it was for me that day, when he called out to you in the street so he could introduce me to you, and how he was bursting with pride and suggestiveness. I felt he expected to be congratulated for me and for his “conquest.” I felt how gratified he was by my dress, my eyes, and your amazement.
How I struggled in those days to temper his enthusiasm and indiscretion! I wasn’t a prudent person and don’t think I am today. But I was alarmed by the rumors, assumptions, and comments, and by the opening nights when I felt a trail of whispering behind me as I passed through the foyer. Or when I entered a restaurant and was met with thirty pairs of eyes that had heard something and wanted the whole story. The awkward questions, the innuendo…If I could have distributed a circular to everybody confirming that I was Andrei’s mistress and been sure that this would have satisfied public curiosity, I would have done it. I was weary of the whiff of scandal preceding me wherever I went.
I tried explaining all this to Andrei. I told him I wasn’t ashamed in front of anybody, but that we needed to give our love time to find its appropriate “social formula” (I don’t think this horrible term was employed, but that was what I meant). I asked him to let things be, to let them settle.
—You’re a bourgeois, was his reply.
I didn’t get annoyed. In a way, he was right. He was impassioned, expansive, and buzzing with plans for the future; I was reserved and a little skeptical. Lucid, at least. I enjoyed his friendship, but was tired of his juvenile effusiveness. I insisted on one thing specifically: that we live apart. I wouldn’t concede on that point. He was reckless, domineering, and threatening by turns, but I was unyielding and that was the end of the matter.
—But for God’s sake why not live together? You let me sleep at your place. You have me over for dinner. You come out with me in town. So why not live together? Why not move in with me? Why not get a bigger place, for both of us?
It would have been hard to say why and hard for him to understand. I didn’t even try. But I remained firm. I needed my own home, where I could be alone: a room where nobody could enter without knocking, a chest where I could lock away whatever I wished, four walls between which I could gather myself, at a remove from the world. A “fortress mentality” was how you described it once and I didn’t know what to say. But don’t think that’s what it is! I just know that I like my interior life, that my greatest pleasure is to return to it in the evening, and I’ve retained a very clear idea of home as a “refuge” (the return of the prodigal son is the only passage in the Bible that has ever moved me). If I haven’t ever let my life go to pieces, it’s largely thanks to this room in which I’m writing to you today. By being here, I’ve held myself back so many times from doing crazy things, from losing my temper, from leaping before I looked…And the number of times I’ve returned here wounded, anxiety written on my face, my arms hanging by my side, unable to make sense of some disaster which had engulfed me, thinking my life was over. When you’d see me in the street a day or two later, I’d smile to myself, thinking how much personal damage lies beneath my calm exterior. Because you would congratulate me for my calmness and I was proud of it—for reasons other than those you imagine, believe me.
The house is the only thing I kept for myself. The rest, bit by bit, fell under Andrei’s control. He knew how to ask for things and he had a spoiled child’s instinct for grabbing them. I liked his agitated appearance, the way he sounded tense and peremptory, the way he’d throw his hat off as he stood in the doorway, his flurry of questions, his curt replies, the way he paced the room, picking up objects and setting them down somewhere else, amazed at everything, wanting to know everything, impatient, intolerant and tyrannical and full of himself.
—Andrei, you’re outrageous!
I was kidding him. He’d suddenly feel powerful and commanding and he’d smile at me arrogantly—a smile I liked immensely, because I became restrained and passive while he became reckless and presumptuous. I knew from the start he was vain, but I was happy to cultivate this, because it was his most sensitive point. It made him impossible sometimes but it also gave him a certain rough grace, like an adolescent who knows no boundaries. Privately, I felt I was the stronger of the two of us, and I often thought that most of his victories over me, at least at the beginning, were really little concessions I’d made so he wouldn’t have to go off in a sulk.
It’s hard to say when exactly I came to depend on Andrei. There probably wasn’t a precise moment. My love for him grew gradually, out of an accretion of moments and habits, until one day I found I was his prisoner. For a long time I considered myself free and regarded him with detachment and, because I could judge him coldly and was aware of all his amusing failings, I was naive enough to consider myself independent of him and capable of splitting up with him at any moment, at no great cost to myself. I could never have imagined that man, with his rages and fantasies of control, could ever cause suffering to me, the one who regarded him so indulgently and ironically. I had the impression he was playing at being a tyrant with me and I was playing along, answering back like a slave, the way grown-ups act scared when a child with a sheet over its head says hoo-hooo like a monster…
I had no idea what a dangerous game I was playing.