The Dragon

For Eliana


Minerva Press
Azalea Street, nr. 213
Bucharest


Dear Mr. Kulianu,

I find myself unwilling to follow this erratic tale. . .

I find myself unwilling to follow this erotic tale. . .

In this ecstatic tale, I find myself. . .


Hortensia stands up, yawns, stretches. The movement triggers a sharp pain in her armpit, perhaps even her left chest. She explores the area with her fingers. It hurts. Probably cancer. She's heard of people with a similar affliction who laughed it off, did nothing about it, and then their arms turned limp, their brains exploded inside their skulls, their eyes fell into their breast pockets. She has pains at the back of her neck, in her shoulder blades, down her left leg and in her stomach. Cancer of everything. Not much she can do about that.


She is afraid of death and death knows this and taunts her. A perpetual state of vigilance and dread. Hortensia imagines her funeral, a grand affair with rain, and food and lonely people. She doesn't have any friends. She loves large, porcelain cows and feather butterflies. The collection takes over the house through a silent process of accumulation that comforts her. At the back of her mind-where another pain has already settled-she sees a grave filled with water and large, plastic farm animals. Amazing the power of distraction a woman has when she's unwilling to finish a letter.



Dear Mr. Kulianu,
You should no longer expect to receive the manuscript of my new novel, The Dragon. I have burned it. It made a pretty fire in the living room, and autumn evenings being what they are, we were all grateful. Naturally, you will choose to believe that the competition has won, that their contract is, perhaps, a little more attractive, that I have sold out. I have not. And the competition is not. . . more attractive. There is no competition. Having completed this manuscript under your direction, I realized that it was not the book I wanted to write. It was the book you wished for me, the one that would grant me instant fame. I love fame. I love money, and I admit that you have worked hard at this relationship-not many editors would have been this kind. Please know that I am grateful, but I cannot put my name on this book. It is untrue, and trendy and vicious and it makes me feel worse than usual about the person I have become. I'm sorry.

Sincerely,
Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu



One. The son.

"A town crier, for God's sake."


"It's a job."


Hortensia regards her son with increasing curiosity. Is he truly hers? Has she made him? Better yet, can she think of her child as a piece of writing, a draft, a rebellious act in need of revision? All around her people talk about "making stories," as if the activity itself amounts to nothing more than a domestic task, a chore like vacuuming or cooking. Nobody writes stories anymore. They tinker with them, grow them like mushrooms, handle the reluctant structures with cruel determination. She remembers a particularly unpleasant encounter with a self-professed "massager" of texts.


"After I put them on paper, Madame Hortensia, there begins a delicate process I like to call 'massaging.' I massage the stories until they yield."


His puffy little hands dance before her. She feels sick. She considers emptying the contents of her stomach on his patent leather shoes or on those bloated hands whose fingers hover in the air like fat, happy worms. But the act, however cathartic, would have to be followed by an apology, an idea she dismisses quickly as she heads towards the bar for another glass of cognac.


"Mom," the son persists, "what's wrong with being a town crier?"


"You're 25," she says. "Do you have a plan?"


"A grand plan? Something like 'the Big Picture'? No."


"Go back to school."


"School is for idiots. It numbs the mind."


"Then what do you want to do?"


"I want to smash things." He looks up with sleepy eyes, secure inside the tiny space of his convictions, protected from the realities of a world he refuses to inhabit. True, he visits reality occasionally, but he's never a part of it, a part of its massive landscape, struggling to survive. He always looks like this: barely awakened from an afternoon nap, inconvenienced by the smallest intrusion, ready to defend his fantastical plans. His is a world of adventure and, as its only hero, he sees himself through the eyes of the crowd, a young man adored persistently for his incredible and passive ways.


During his short stint in school, teachers would often try to tap into what they suspected was an atrophied sense of awareness.


"Don't use the passive voice when you write. It makes your sentences sound heavy, uninvolved."


"But I feel passive," he'd respond and close his eyes for sleep.


Hortensia wonders, rather sadly, if he is truly in such demand, if people do enjoy his company on crowded evenings about town. Perhaps he even has friends. She's never met any of them, no one ever comes to the house and he leaves his room only to fulfill his crying obligations. Often, not even for that.


"Hear ye, hear ye, it's 10 pm and all is well!"


The town council protests.


"Really, Madame Hortensia, you must impress upon your son that the correct form is 'oyez.' He exposes us to potential ridicule. What will the tourists think?"


"I'm not saying 'oyez.' That's stupid."


"Like school?" she asks, regretting her remark immediately as the boy withdraws inside his pampered shell padded with unpaid bills and civic warnings he uses for scrap paper.



Two. The Editor

"The story will tell."


"The story won't tell." Hortensia stubs out her cigarette with a force that crushes it instantly. Her hands smooth the pleats of her pale lemon dress. "The story won't tell," she repeats quietly. "Not the way you think."

"It's a novel about war, Madame Hortensia, no? We want it to resonate with the public. We want it to brim with local color and social unrest. Politics sells. Besides, you are the first to approach the subject from an autobiographical point of view with such...feminine flair. You stand to make a lot of money. I imagine that a little compromise is in order. You do need the money, don't you?"


Hortensia thinks about the son, about his new girlfriend who is there to stay, about the girl's job as a con artist which she describes as a civic duty.


"Hi, Mrs. H., my name is Dora. I'm a confidence man. A modern Robin Hood. I take from the rich and give to the poor."


"You mean you're a con artist."


"I prefer confidence man. Just because I'm a girl doesn't mean. . . "

"No, of course not."


Hortensia has to restrain herself every time she meets the girl. Dora comes from a catholic family of dubious pedigree. Hortensia is convinced her parents are laundering money for a drug cartel. Every year they write her son large checks accompanied by suspiciously blank tax forms.


"What do you do for these people?"


"Don't call them 'these people,'" the son protests. "We're practically related."


"For god's sake," Hortensia says. "You're a town crier. How can you justify a consulting fee for a bicycle factory? What if you get caught? Why do you even need money? I pay most of your bills."


"It's cool," the son says. "Don't worry about it. Dora's awesome."


"She steals from people. She goes out at night wearing a stocking over her head. She's dragging you down."


"Mom. I shout in the streets for a living. I mean, how low can you go?"


Hortensia remembers holding the boy in her arms, seeing his extraordinary future. He'd attend wine tastings in the South of France. . . watch the sunset in Northern Sicily. . . become a cultural attaché to the Romanian Embassy in Washington. . . Climb the tallest mountains. Scuba dive. He'd be important, rigorous and honest-a man of giant appetites but strong restraint. He'd speak Swahili, Spanish, Mandarin and Zulu, join countergangs, and start affairs. On weekends, he'd buttle for pocket money. In short-an impeccable human being. And now this.


"Madame Hortensia. . . the money?" The editor waits. "You do need it, don't you?"



Three. The Book

"Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's work is a long, delicate piece of female gossip written in an impossible language." Hortensia puts the newspaper down. The critic is right. The book is an impossibility. He's wrong about everything else, of course, her language is her own, she doesn't need to imitate just to belong; but the book-this particular book-collapses every time she tries to piece it together. In the middle of such a ridiculous mix of memoir, fiction, war narrative, romance, tragedy and melodrama Hortensia finds it difficult to contain her sentences. They run wild, often nonsensical, detailing emotions she inhabits completely but cannot describe. She denounces plot, treats it as an anomaly, a weakness of lesser writers. She has no understanding of character either so she follows, stubbornly, every single memory of her youth. What she said, felt, lived through, as a girl of twenty caught in the middle of the war. At first she feels important. Then men start dying. She's a volunteer nurse but she can barely dress a wound. She works in the dispensary at the local train station. Some afternoons the vicar's wife comes for tea. They exchange small kindnesses. Then, when she fears the war will pass her by without incident, it happens, the little town is under occupation, and people gather, gaunt in the morning light, to hear proclamations made in the midst of panic. These are opaque and unforgiving times. She starts work at the hospital. A man is brought in during her shift. He seems calm, unafraid. Perhaps forlorn. She takes off his shirt to wash his wound and then she sees it, the monstrosity in the middle of his chest, his beating heart, completely exposed. Now she understands the silence that has descended upon the ward, the nurse's aids' quick whispers, the hissing of the frightened patients in the back of the room. It is a heavy mixture of awe and horror, a certain misplaced reverence for the stubbornness of the body, here's a man whose heart they can see, and he listens and smiles and blinks like the rest of them, the ones whose chests are not split open. "What?" the patient says trying to focus. "What are you all looking at?"


This is a chronicle, Hortensia tells herself, it's just that now, 25 years later, she doesn't know if she's recording the present or the past, and often doesn't understand the difference. The son lives his crowded, unamazing life, she writes about the things that had to happen, gas prices soar, the original of a map painted by Vermeer is discovered in a museum in Bruges, snow still soaks through the roofs of old apartment buildings in Bucharest. In the end, nothing matters.

Four. The War

The war continues. It is now imprisoned inside her as she becomes her own, private museum, a cabinet of curiosities that should have burned down a long time ago, a chamber of horrors that chains, inside well-lit glass cages, fragments of a personal freak show: the moment she saw the dragon for the first time; the black locomotive dragging behind long, slippery carriages filled with wounded soldiers; the day she had to step inside the last carriage, at the end of the convoy, where men went to die. She brought them tea and water. She even flirted. Her hands, the crisp white blouse with delicate collar so out of place inside the dragon's bowels. Men lying on top of planks directly on the carriage floor. A new version of hell, this horizontal suffering. Was she to be rescued? Was this the beginning of an event?


What is that terrible noise? Hortensia stops writing. The powerful, repetitive thud seems to come from the garden shed. She looks around-there's nothing she can arm herself with, they don't keep weapons in the house. She grabs a mop from the kitchen, crosses the garden path and opens the door to the tiny shed in one, brisk move. Blinded by the sunlight, the son turns around screening his eyes.


"Mom?"


"What are you doing?"


"I'm smashing things. "


"Why?"


"I don't know."


"Where's Dora?"


"Out."


"Doing what?"


"Stealing. She steals from 1 to 3. It's the best time."


"Does she know how you spend your days?"


"Doesn't know, doesn't care. We're a modern couple. The less time we spend together, the more we understand each other. She's not clingy. I like that. Any chance of tea?"


Defeated, Hortensia sits on a milk crate, the only object in the room still in one piece.


"What am I going to do with you?"


"But, mom, I'm fine. I'm totally happy."


"Not now, " Hortensia says. "Later. When this euphoria wears off. When Dora's schemes stop working. When the rich get better security systems. When you grow old and realize there isn't one stable thing in your life. What then?"


"Is your life perfectly organized?"


"For the most part," Hortensia says.


"Even when that guy trashes your book in the newspaper. Even when no one reads your poetry."


"Even then. All I have is me."


"I have Dora," the boy smiles.


"Yes," Hortensia says, "that you do."


He looks at the mop in her hands.


"Were you going to attack me with that?"


"I thought there was someone in the shed."


"There was someone in the shed, mom," the son says softly.



Five. The Interview

Q: You have been accused of writing incomprehensible books. What is your response to such a harsh statement?


A: Do you think it's harsh? Clarity is overrated. My books choose their public.


Q: You have a following?


A: Yes, I do.


Q: Small numbers.


A: Yes.


Q: Does that upset you?


A: Of course. Like everybody else, I would like to be loved by everyone. But that's not possible. In fact, very few artists enjoy such popularity during their lives.


Q: You hope for fame in death?


A: There should be some reward, no? Death is so definitive. If I am to lose everything, posthumous fame would be a consolation. You know, for a reporter, you are rather morbid.


Q: Sorry. Just trying to settle the question of fame. . . Your style, though.


A: What about it?


Q: Can you describe it?


A: No. But I can say that when I want to understand something thoroughly I wrap it in symbol and it becomes intelligible. What I write, what I think does not primarily refer to ideas and emotions, but the way they feel, hence the ordeal, the need to put on paper not a description of that sensation but the sensation itself. I write under the pressure of external events. There is no organizing principle, no need for revision. Basically, things happen.


Q: Your son.


A: We were discussing my books.


Q: Your editor then. He suggested revisions. Would you like to talk about that? A: He wanted me to be edgy.


Q: Could you be more specific?


A: I'd rather not. . .


Q: Please. The public wants to know. . . and the story won't tell.


A: That's true. It won't, not in a conventional sense. Mr. Kulianu wanted me to describe in detail the sexual assaults I was subjected to while being a dispensary nurse.


Q: And?


A: There were no assaults. There were men without arms, or legs or eyes. Men whose hearts we could see, literally. Believe me, sex was the last thing on their minds. Affection, perhaps, but not sex.


Q: Mr. Kulianu insisted.


A: Yes. He said that I had to describe genitals in detail, for both genders. He said I had to shock my audience, arouse it. He wanted breasts and nipples and pricks. He thrusts, she heaves, that kind of thing.


Q: And?


A: We were in the middle of a war. All around us there were acts of unspeakable cruelty.


Q: And?


A: And I spoke of them. But it was not what Mr. Kulianu wanted to hear. I told my story, and that of a girl who was the vicar's daughter and my neighbor. She got pregnant and the boy who got her in trouble was drafted, and he left and was killed, and for months, I saw her at the station, all dressed in black, like a ghost, looking at trains full of soldiers. And then her father, ashamed, tried to sell her to a German officer. He used her, but when they asked him to marry her he laughed at them; I remember seeing him in his shirt sleeves, in their garden, hands on his hips, laughing. And then the vicar lost his temper and kicked the girl in the stomach until she died. They took her away in a wooden box in the morning, but all night long she lay there, exposed, in the middle of the street, finally at peace. . . And then there was the family of refugees who left their home in a hurry with a sick child, a little girl who died in the night, and in the morning the other families who had small children of their own and feared for them, got restless, and mean, and forced the mother to throw the little girl off the train, in a ditch. She lost her mind after that.


Q: Oh, ah. . . Hm. I see.


A: You understand what I'm telling you: there was cruelty all around us. I did not need to invent it. I did not need to make up shocking sex stories. I used the cruelty of war to heal my own, thin suffering. I found in the need to help others an escape valve for an unused passion whose hunger I was incapable of satisfying. Do you understand? The Dragon was supposed to invoke all the manifestations of suffering. . . it was the journal of the fundamental contact with a life in danger. My life. My life. Do you understand?


"Mom?"


"Hm?"


"Where's the reporter?"


"He ran."


"Another one?"


"I don't understand what frightens these people. I am afraid of death. Like, I have a pain, right here in my gums and it bothers me. . . I am afraid of dying. What are they afraid of?"


"You," the son says. "They're all terrified of you."


In the living room, before the fire fed with pages from her book, Hortensia wonders whether she's recording the present or the past, and often doesn't understand the difference. In the garden shed the son smashes peaceful, lovely things, his girlfriend waits for things to happen, gas prices soar, the original of a map painted by Vermeer is discovered in a museum in Bruges, snow still soaks through the roofs of old apartment buildings in Bucharest. In the end, nothing matters.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Fiction