23. Life is an exchange of sacrifices
It’s another season. It’s another year. Mosilor Road has been almost completely re-built. When you walk along it, you feel like saying to yourself: “this is another town!” A person who does not know the history of the place, who would come here overnight or who will be born here will see the nicely painted façade and will believe that the façade is the very reality. Memory turns pain into information and thus life is bearable, universe is bearable.
Those who will be born after us will expiate the cruelty of history and our cruelty with their candour, by fracturing memory.
Grass and trees have grown over the wounds. The ground has been leveled over the demolished houses, white blocks of flats have come up.
The finishing works have come to a standstill, because of shortage of materials, the blocks are not lived in. Lots of white, unfinished, empty blocks of flats.
Today we also pass by the place. A bus crosses this deserted district and stops in bus stops where nobody gets on or off.
I am together with my little girl, Dana, we are coming from the airport. The plane didn’t take off today either, because of the fog. Tomorrow we’ll start afresh. Dana says:
“Papa! What if it is foggy at the airport all our life? I want to go there everyday and a ‘militia’ man to check us and us to wait for a clear sky… and in the evening to come back home.”
My little girl will leave for the West, for good. She will grow up there, she will adopt that world’s life style, she will enroll in a school in one of the world cities.
“Why are this blocks empty? She asks. Where are the people?”
She holds my hand, we go home. She has a reflex of fear in this deserted district, she squeezes my hand and presses herself against me.
“Papa, I’m glad it’s foggy and planes are not flying. I’m glad I sleep in my bed with my polar bear and with granny. I wish the planes flew neither tomorrow, nor the day after tomorrow, but I’m glad mammy called me to her. I want to go her. Why aren’t you also coming? Aren’t you afraid of staying here alone?”
“Human beings adjust and live. Fear is meant to give you strength.”
All of a sudden she stops and ask me seriously:
“Whom will you marry if anything happens to mammy there in France and she dies?”
“Nothing will happen to mammy, dear child. Mammy will not die…”
“But if she dies, whom will you marry?”
Mother’s symbolical death is the unconscious punishment the child gives her for her absence, for her departure! God, how precisely words can reflect suffering… the child loves her mother so much and the former’s love is the latter’s punishment. Our child will punish us for her love and we will live with the punishment and this will be our drama on the planet. The three of us will live with the punishment as both he who punishes and he who is punished suffers, this is the chain of causality we can’t get out of.
“Come on, papa, why don’t you answer me? Whom will you marry if mammy dies?”
“In the first place she won’t die. In the second place I won’t marry. I have my own path…“
“But if you ever marry please don’t marry a foreigner. Will you promise me? Marry Mica…”
Mica is her granny, obviously.
So she has spoken out all her inner conflict on which her entire life will be built.
Fog. It’s the third foggy day. The plane won’t fly.
We walk in silence. Dana doesn’t like when I keep silent. She hates talking to herself.
“Papa, I would like to tell you what God did on the third day of creation! She says, knowing that she can capture my attention with this sudden approaches of religious topics.
“All right. Tell me.”
“On the third day He commanded the grass, the grass seeds, the trees, the trees seeds and… you!”
She laughs. There’s so much sorrow in this place and her laughter purifies the world.
“You are right, I say. You don’t know how right you are! I mean we all, thanks to the hidden memory, date back to the beginning of creation and have a relationship to its end.”
“Papa, do you know what I think? That tomorrow it will be foggy again and no plane will fly, not as long as we live. Fog is my friend. Mica is my Mica. The polar bear is my friend. Papa, if I were to buy you I would pay 3000 planets for you!”
This is the biggest price ever paid for me. And that was the moment when our relationship was perfect. What good friends we were at that time! “Positive Oedipus”, her mother used to say professionally, satisfied, from afar.
The street is empty. One day will be the last day.
Sandu Tariverde’s dumbness and Tofana’s disappearance are rehearsals for the last day.
Night falls over the white, moonlit and empty district. We see the grass, the trees commanded by God today, on the third day, and night comes and the fourth day is slowly coming – when God commanded the sun. So that man’s body can come into the world in daylight. Soul has been able to subsist anyhow, since the beginning of the world; but man’s body has a history, and its history commences on a sunny day.
Sun will be commanded on Wednesday.
We are home, we go in.
I’m writing this now. Dana is sleeping in her bed with her polar bear. I look at her in her sleep, I would like to stroke her in her sleep, only in her sleep as our parents also did to us.
I ask her, in my thought, to forgive me. I ask her to forgive me because we’ll part with each other. Though it will not mend anything, it will not heal the wound of her separation from her father. My dear child … with two countries, with parents scattered on the planet.
And when one has two countries, one will always miss the inner Country. He who has two countries has no country.
And when one loses one’s country before one gains the planet, one is in a tunnel of sadness… which one has to go through together with a purified person.
She will always miss half of the world. And she will not know the name of her revolt. She will not know the name of her non-adjustment, the tiny key of the conflict will be deeply buried. She will get angry with her parents, she will reject them, not knowing that this is the very expression of love – that love is greedy of the object of love, greedy of the physical presence, otherwise it is pain and punishment. All the three of us will live with our punishment while seeking the key of the conflict over seas and oceans. And all the wisdom of the world will become futile till the guilt is reabsorbed.
I take a glance again at the sleeping child hugging her polar bear.
It’s midnight. I sleep four hours, I wake up. It’s foggy outside, but we’ll go to the airport again today, maybe the fog will dissipate. Our duty is to be there. Dana says she will remain in the country’s fog for ever and that no plane will take off, we’ll be lyrical and confined to the fog. Her mother will be forever waiting in the Orly airport at 1.00 p.m. watching the Arrivals screen.
I enter my daughter’s room. She is sleeping, her little face is serene. Free, setting off to the free world. The day is breaking and the rhythms of my body are ascending. Adaptation is highest in the morning.
This is why I find the strength to tell her the truth: both the fog that keeps you here and the sun that will let you fly have their share of chance and frustration. The fog will let you stay with your father, the sun will give you back to your mother. On one hand, you lose something, on the other hand, you have a reserve of salvation, let us find support in the little good of the vast evil. You will always miss half of the world, half of your home. One half of your soul and body will forever suffer without knowing why it suffers and the compensation will be rejection, revolt. Your love will also have the strange form of the punishment till the time when mysterious flames burn the pain.
It’s 7.00 a.m.
“It’s time for you to get up. We are going to the airport!” I say.
She gets up, gets ready. She quietly does whatever she is supposed to do. We set off, hand in hand. We go to the Otopeni airport. She holds her polar bear in her arms. There is fog all over Romania. Fog is our friend… It is the fourth day.