At the beginning of Holy Week I met several members of the club, who passed on to me rumours about my disappearance during the excursion. The chairman had worried all the way back. He had waited for me at the station. Radu came looking for me the very next morning. He was astonished when I told him the story. He thought I must be hiding something from him.
‘And that’s all?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re either stupid, or in love, or insane. Not everyone has the chance of spending the night with a girl he likes, in the forest – you missed an opportunity.’
Since it was Radu who was upbraiding me, I tried to explain that in every situation I sought the most perfectly ethical, beautiful, original, and heroic solution. There was much more beauty in a chaste nocturnal journey at the side of a stranger, whom I felt becoming my friend, than in any other prolonged series of embraces, ending, perhaps, with sexual assault in a furrow. Anyone could do that. Why not experience a series of actions that only I could enact? Why must the hero always be interpreted as a brute, when the Nietzchean path toward the superman could be accomplished by fulfilling the most insane ethical standards? Why should I not acquaint myself on a daily basis with the tenants of heroism, so that my life might naturally unfold in an heroic existence?
Radu knew my sexual temptations and potential all too well; he could not suspect me of unmanliness, timorousness, or inadequacy. Therefore, my conduct was driven not by weakness, but by the spiritual forces that controlled my conscience. Whence a series of parables offered by Christianity: at which point Radu seemed to understand me and explained, or rather, added, that he could never do anything as insane as that.
‘To those who have never engaged in the struggle to achieve the absurd, anything that goes beyond weakness and mediocrity will look like madness’, I concluded, abruptly, looking at my friend.
A few days later, a little before sunset, I heard laughter and knocking at my door. Bibi and the girl with the green eyes had come.
‘I can tell you now; her name is Nişka!’
When I heard that name, a memory flashed through my mind. I knew where I had seen her before: it had been at Sacele, on a cart path next to the railroad tracks, six years previously. She had been wearing a short adolescent dress, and had been running through a field of wheat. A grey-haired man had called to her: ‘Nişka! Nişka!’ That afternoon, I had decided to dedicate my life to chemistry. I had promised myself not to waste my time on anything else. On the first page of one of my Diary notebooks, I had written, that very afternoon, my cardinal rule: I will never fall in love!
The memory transported my soul to a solitary summer, in a small mountain village, amidst struggles and yearnings now long forgotten. My visitors looked at me without understanding the bitter, bitter shadows on my face.
‘Aren’t you happy we came? Nişka would like to thank you again.’
‘Let me say it, I came to remind you that you conducted yourself very sweetly a few nights ago and you spoke to me very beautifully, although as you were leaving you got upset and made several false predictions that I’m sure you now regret.’
I mumbled a few meaningless words and invited them to sit down. Nişka marvelled at each bookshelf in turn. She pulled out books, leafed through them, complimented them, and made exclamations.
‘Will you take me on as your librarian? Just wait and see how beautifully I’ll arrange the books. Please say yes!’
‘Strange hands cannot bring order to a library.’
‘I’m so glad you know that!’
I thought she might be offended, but I glimpsed a smile on her face.
‘I’m not sure how to conduct myself around you’, I confessed. ‘If I talk to you frankly, you get annoyed, but if I am reticent, you become suspicious.’
‘Talk to me as if I were your friend.’
I blushed with delight, and pretended to be taken aback by the intimacy that Nişka displayed and demanded.
‘Do you know what people are saying about us? That it was an attempted kidnapping. How about that! As if there had been any need for kidnapping! Bibi, how could your dear friend, who acted so abominably chaste, be accused of such abuse.’
Why ‘abominably’ next to ‘chaste’? I told Nişka about my ethical urges. I explained to her that, in my conscience, my actions had been authentic and real, rather than borrowed from storybooks, or inherited from childhood. That ethics had been a discovery, a triumph of mine from last winter. I told her why she should not mistake an ethically illumined soul for dry, absurd moral rigour, for pedantic, false moralism, the same as anything else inculcated through fear by families and schools. Ethics should crystallise as the result of lived experience.
‘But nobody does that.’
‘Others have done it, before me. Why should I not experience it, over again? Do you suppose that to have a conscience with ethical values means to be unmanly, elderly, insensate, idiotic? Do you think that ethics cannot cohabit with sin, with temptation?
‘Stop it, stop it, I don’t understand you any more! And besides, I feel so strange.’
‘Women are not capable of experiencing ethics.’
‘But you men are?’
‘Not all men: only an elite. It requires a whole series of experiences in order for a masculine soul to ripen. How many would survive, especially when such experiences imperil life, sleep, tranquillity?’
Evening gently descended on the attic. It was the first spring evening when young women had lingered upstairs in my attic. And I was not about to tell them. Nişka asked if I had any cigarettes. She had never smoked before, but she felt a craving to smoke. Bibi refused stubbornly.
Eyes watering, smiling, rubbing her eyelids, moving her eyebrows up and down, she finished half a cigarette. Together with the rest of mine, I placed them in an envelope and wrote the date on it.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m keeping them.’
‘Witchcraft?’
‘No, memories.’
We laughed, amused by the accumulating sadness that would weigh upon the envelope with each passing year.
On her way downstairs, Nişka asked if she could visit again.
‘You have the most adorable little room and so many books – it’s comforting.’
I told her that on certain days, when I had less work to do, she could stop by for a few hours.
‘And which days are those?’
‘I have never thought to designate them.’
‘In other words, you don’t want to see me?’
‘Don’t exaggerate.’
‘That’s fine, don’t worry. I won’t come.’
They did see the shadows welling in my eyes.
‘And all this time I thought we would become friends. And I wanted to introduce you to Viorica.’
I did not know what to say. So I said nothing, frowning.
‘But we could sometimes meet.’
‘Thanks, how nice of you.’
She left, with an insouciant laugh. Bibi turned to me:
‘You ought to know that this time she really is upset.’
That evening, a note from Radu: ‘Tomorrow Nonora and I are going to the cinema. She wants you to come too. Before five o’clock, my place.’
The note was my salvation. I had not seen Nonora since Palm Sunday. I thought of our impetuous embrace in the crypt, when Nonora’s lips had pressed against mine.