![]() ![]() Next, that I would tell no one, no matter how close a friend or relative, that I… and then came the terrible word: colaborez-I am collaborating. Without sitting down, I wrote what he dictated-my name, date of birth and address. He shoved the tulips close to the edge of the desk, then put an empty sheet of paper and a pen in the middle of the desktop. He called me stupid, said I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch. The third time he sat down but I stayed standing, because he had set his briefcase on my chair. After that he draped his windbreaker over his arm and left. Then he said maliciously that he knew me better than I knew tulips. I contested his praise and assured him that I understood tulips, but not people. The man looked at me and praised me for being such a keen judge of character. That morning I had brought some tulips from home and arranged them in a vase. The second time he took off his windbreaker, hung it on the key to the cabinet, and sat down. The first time he stood there, cursed me, and left. Three times in one week a visitor showed up at my office early in the morning: an enormous, thick-boned man with sparkling blue eyes-a colossus from the Securitate. In the third year the routine came to an end. Two years went by in the same routine, each day like the next. Before they ate their bit of fatback, they first scraped the newsprint off the rind. But the workers simply sat over their meals with empty tinplate eyes and hands smeared with oil. Every morning the loudspeaker blared the national anthem into the factory yard at lunch it was the workers’ choruses. Twenty years later I had been on my own in the city a long time and was working as a translator in a manufacturing plant. Only then would I go out onto the street, as if having the handkerchief meant having my mother there, too. Every morning I went to the gate once without a handkerchief and a second time with a handkerchief. The brusqueness of the voice even emphasized the tenderness. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work. Anything more direct would have been embarrassing and not something the farmers practiced. The question DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was an indirect display of affection. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after me in the morning. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. And because I didn’t, I would go back inside and get one. DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |