Until his wife wound up in the asylum, the shoemaker had been a musician like his brother, brother-in-law, and son-in-law, who still play every evening in the restaurant on the Korso. Real musicians, he once said to me, they play from the soul—not from notes.
I don’t like to dance and never wanted to be with another
man who did. The first thing I did when I met Paul was to bring up the question of dancing.
Paul said: Is it that important, I don’t like dancing, women like dancing more than men. All the men I know feel they have to dance, said Paul. They dance with a woman half the night in order to fuck her afterwards for fifteen minutes.
What do you mean, my first husband likes dancing, I said, he loves it. You say it doesn’t matter much, but you’ve never been married. Anytime there was music playing my husband became impossible to understand. He was addicted to dancing and I hated it and that tore us apart, and not just a little. Whenever there was music we were worlds apart. I turned into myself, became distant and dull, whereas he came out of himself and was in high spirits like a frisky monkey. We would argue, but we would have been better off if we’d kept silent, so that the rift would have remained small. But then when we were silent we would have been better off saying something, no matter how rude, since it’s easier to get over a quarrel you’ve just had than the injuries you start listing in silence. The scene in the restaurant must have been near the beginning of September; we’d both taken our vacation. We didn’t have enough money to go to the Black Sea or the Carpathians. So we were going to treat ourselves to a night on the town, and on the weekend we went out to a restaurant. My husband wanted to go to the Palace, on the Korso, where the shoemaker’s family played the best music in the city. I thought it was too expensive. So that left the Central, where you can eat and dance for two hundred lei. Other people must have been watching their money as well, since the place was packed. The meat tasted a little sour, the coleslaw smelt like the powder you put out for flea beetles. Because white wine is pretty transparent it’s easy to water down, so that was all they had. Most people were enjoying the food, using the bread to
wipe their plates clean. They were chewing away like rabbits so they could get onto the dance floor as quickly as possible. And there I was, grumbling and dragging the dinner out. My husband ate faster than I did, although he was actually lingering over his dinner compared to the others. The orchestra was pretty lame but that was fine with me since I didn’t want to dance. And it was fine with my husband because any music was good enough for him. I looked at the dance floor and saw that the people there felt the same way he did. Because they were all keeping an eye on their money, they had to make sure the evening was worth it, so they were all cheering. The men were crowing, the women were purring one moment and then yoo-hooing the next. At the end of a set they all looked up wide-eyed and laughed and their movements slowed until they were rocking back and forth like huge birds coming in to land. My husband had finished his meal and wiped his mouth with the napkin. His nose was bobbing inside his wineglass and looked warped. Above the table he remained stiff, but beneath the table his feet were tapping so that the floor was shaking. I said:
Maybe we’re on a trip after all, the floor is shaking just like in a dining car. You people could dance to anything—a squeaky door or crickets chirping or whatever. Actually I shouldn’t have said
you people,
including him with everyone else, seeing that he had to content himself with looking on and was suffering. He shoved his wineglass to the middle of the table, looked at me with long, narrow eyes, fixed so hard the corners looked like keyholes. He pursed his lips, whistled, and beat out the rhythm on the table with both hands. I said:
Now it’s worse than a dining car, you must be going through withdrawal.
In a moment he’d need me to dance. In fact, he needed me now. The way he unpursed his lips, smiled briefly, and then
went right on whistling. This compulsion to be so dashingly polite. His restraint, his avoiding any argument, just so I’ll do what I’m told. The waiter cleared the table. Only our two glasses remained, trembling and transparent, as if they weren’t really there, while we sat behind them, tingling with anticipation—I was spoiling for a fight, he was waiting for a dance. Eventually he won because he kept control of himself and because he let pass all the moments that could have led to an argument, in the end the whole thing seemed too stupid to me, anyway. Why had we spent all that money—we’d be missing it the very next day. He might as well get some compensation for the awful meal. I took his hand and led him onto the dance floor. We danced a path for ourselves through the couples, until we were right up next to the orchestra. He spun me around, the keys of the accordion blurred together like a Venetian blind.
You’re dragging, my arm is falling asleep, he said.
I can’t weigh less than I do.
Even the fattest women are light when they dance. But you’re not dancing, you’re just letting yourself droop.
He pointed out the fattest dancer in the restaurant, a matronly woman whom I had already noticed when we were eating. While she was at the table, I couldn’t see much of her white dress with the black chess pieces, only that she pushed her plate practically to the middle of the table in order to be able to see it past her breasts. At the ends of her short, fat arms, her knife and fork barely reached the food.
That dress is billowing because it has deep pleats down the sides, not because she’s so light on her feet. After all, I do know a thing or two about clothes, I said.
But not about women, he said.
The chess pieces came flying away from the white pleats. Snow and thistledown, my father-in-law’s white horse, the
wedding cake, the icing that scratched the tip of my nose. My head felt heavy. Even if I had to dance, I had no right to reproach my husband with his father, the Perfumed Commissar. I pulled myself together, but I did what I had not intended not to do. It’s easy to tell other people not to do certain things, especially your nearest and dearest, but it’s harder to tell yourself. As we danced past the swimming accordion keys, my brain went on tormenting me with scenes from the past, while my husband was enjoying being so near to the matronly woman. He touched the arm of the man who was leading the chess pieces and crowing out loud: Your partner dances well.
You bet she does. And I lead well, he said.
Then the matronly woman’s dancing partner crowed once more, the matronly woman purred, and my husband crowed along with them.
If you crow like that once more, I said, I’m going to take off and run as far away as I can.
He crowed once again, but I kept my feet on the floor, and the matronly woman purred, and I didn’t budge.
People were constantly switching partners. They paired off without a word being spoken. They were either following some intimate law between man and woman or else leaving it all up to chance. No requests were made and no consents were given. I lost the rhythm.
You’re nothing more than a wisp but your bones turn to lead whenever you dance, said my husband.
Why don’t you grab that tank, I said, then you’ll have something to hold on to.
The old woman
with the doddering head nudges me with her finger: Tell me, maybe you have an aspirin. No. But the driver
has water, doesn’t he, or maybe I didn’t see right—no, he has a bottle. He has a bottle, I say. Her eyes had once been larger. As is often the case with old people, hers are webbed over with a very thin membrane like raw egg white growing in from the sides. Her two oval earrings, set with green stones, tremble along with her head. The constant shaking has stretched the holes in her earlobes into long slits that have practically been torn open. Toothpaste and a toothbrush are about all I could give her. The driver might have some aspirin, I say. The man with the briefcase reaches into his pocket: I think I have one left. A shriveled strip of cellophane crackles as he smoothes it flat: No—they’re all gone, now I remember, I took the last one this morning. There’s a pharmacy at the market, says the young man by the door. The old woman turns her head, I need the tablet now, not when we get to the marketplace. She moves up the tram from one row of seats to the next, steadying herself with both hands, until she reaches the middle of the car. The driver sees her in his mirror: Sit down, Grandma, you’ll cause an accident. You should have taken the tram going the other way, it would have been quicker. The old woman totters up to him. What do you mean, I asked you and you said this was the right way. Do you at least have an aspirin.
If you’re not
in love, then dancing is worse than the crowd of people in the tram, I had said to my father-in-law. And if you are in love, then you have something better to do, a different way of stretching your legs, which can make you just as dizzy.
What do you mean, something better to do, he said, dancing isn’t work, it’s pleasure, if not an innate gift, a predisposition. And it’s part of your culture. In the Carpathians they have different dances than they do in the hill country, and the ones
by the sea are different from those along the Danube, and in the city they dance differently than they do in the country. You’re supposed to learn to dance as a child. Your parents and family are supposed to teach you. Yours must have neglected their duty, and if you didn’t learn you’ve really missed out.
No, I said, with my family it was more melancholy than neglect, after the camp nobody in our house had much zest for things like that.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, that was before you were born, he said. Some people’s lives just don’t work out and they’re always coming up with excuses. Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that. Come on, you might be too young to realize it, but I’m not. Believe me, even without the camp, life wouldn’t have worked out for them.
It was New Year’s Eve. The paraputch, as my father-in-law called the extended family, was celebrating in my in-laws’ living room. I’ll never know exactly what paraputch means. For me it sounded like a gang, because the family was so large and each member was shady in his own way. And although they couldn’t stand one another, they were forever getting together. My father-in-law himself was at least two different people. He had the habit of making a nest for himself inside a person’s breast, so as to be better able to kick him in the ribs later on.
David, Olga, Valentin, Maria, George, and a few others were there. I had no idea which name went with whom. Everybody had taken off their shoes, I counted ten pairs beside the door. My father-in-law’s youngest brother came with a fat wife; his oldest brother had come with a wizened one. The middle brother was laid up at home in bed, but his wife was here with her brother and her—or his—eldest daughter and a son-in-law. The son-in-law was drunk as a skunk. No sooner had my
father-in-law taken his coat than the man had to throw up in the bathroom, still wearing his hat and scarf. I did manage to fix two names in my mind that evening: Anastasia and Martin. Anastasia—like my late grandmother—was my father-in-law’s cousin. She was about fifty years old, supposedly still a virgin, and had worked as an accountant in the cookie factory for thirty years. Martin was my father-in-law’s colleague, a widowed gardener. He was supposed to make a conquest of Anastasia that New Year’s Eve.
She’s a bit of a cold fish, said my father-in-law, but there comes a point when they all unbutton their blouses.
Seven or eight times a year, when the relatives came, my father-in-law would flip the picture in the living room, to show the original paraputch: his parents with their six children. Mother and father sitting on the coach box, each holding a little girl. The boys were sitting in twos on the backs of the two chestnut horses. Every other day of the year the picture showed a white horse, on which sat a young man in glistening riding boots, carrying a short crop. This was my father-in-law, although not exactly. At that time he had a different name.
I danced with my husband, asking him not to spin me around, and we bobbed back and forth. When his father was present he kept his composure. I danced with the son-in-law, who after having thrown up was no longer as drunk as when he had arrived. He dragged his feet and lost a sock during the foxtrot. Martin picked it up and hung it on a branch of the chandelier. Then I danced with his father-in-law or uncle, and after that with the brothers of my father-in-law, and later with Martin. The old men had firm grips and didn’t talk while they danced, I had to allow them to spin me around in silence. When my father-in-law planted himself in front of me with open arms and his tie loosened at the collar, I said:
Come and sit here at the table with me, we can talk too.
Talk, he said. Dancing keeps you young.
He had just been to the bathroom and his perfume was wafting around him. He picked out one of the liqueur cherries from a small dish perched on the corner of the table. They tasted of compote and made you drunk. I had already eaten a few too many and they had clouded my head. My father-in-law popped the cherry in his mouth and sucked the red juice from his forefinger. With his other hand he signaled me to get up. He sucked on the cherry stone and pressed his hand into the small of my back, making me aware of what he had in his trousers. I was no more curious then than I was a year later when his son reported for military service, when I was putting the towels in the cupboard and he knelt down behind me and kissed my calves.
Come on, you’ll see, it will help you get over his absence.
I pressed my legs firmly together and closed the cupboard and said:
I can’t stand you.
He could of course have asked why, then he would have gotten an earful. But what he said was:
There you have it. You rack your brains to come up with ways of helping the children, and this is what you get for your pains.
He wanted to take his son’s place. That time when I offered myself to my father in place of the woman with the braid, it seemed both urgently necessary and quite possible. This time it was neither. I never let on to my husband and my mother-in-law, nor did they ever find out what I knew about the white horse, the Perfumed Commissar, and his change of name. He had already reinvented himself once, he had practice doing that. Hell would have frozen over before I would forget that. But I didn’t make
any fuss, I kept my mouth shut as usual, so that their misfortune didn’t come home to roost for the whole paraputch.