Short Prose: Volume 1 by Dumitru Tsepeneag

Author:Dumitru Tsepeneag
Format: epub

1964

(Cronica, no. 8, February 1967)

The Fence

I WAS COMING back by another, more roundabout road, but now, around noon, it was nicer around there. A strip of shadow still remained by the wall of those old houses, with their mysterious passageways whence wafted coolness and the smell of mold. I carefully calculated how many houses, how many meters were left before I would arrive. In the mornings, I didn’t go that way, because I was in a hurry.

I had just one more street to walk down and I now thought I could see the fence. I was always afraid I might miss it, that I might not reach it.

On the corner, the yellow roadworks sign had stopped the traffic again. They’d probably started digging that morning, the ditch was deep, all you could see were their brawny sunburnt necks and sweating brows. I was forced to make a detour; I hadn’t been anticipating that. I broke into a run. On my back, the satchel bumped up and down noisily, I ought to have taken it off. The passers-by looked at me askance, some waved scolding fingers. And how long the ditch was! Within were colossal serpents of cast iron struck by blinding swords of flame. I found a place to traverse, a bridge, the flames of the welders dazzled me. A green mist descended for a few moments. On the sidewalk, I regained my senses. The fence gleamed in the sun, tall, as black as pitch. I quickened my steps. The crack was further on. What bother I had finding it! If I stop to think, I don’t know what it was that attracted me to that huge fence, its laths that soared up to the sky, rigid, black, like mustached soldiers standing to attention, shoulder to shoulder. Once I saw a leaf floating like a kite above the fence: slightly yellowed, it rode with its petiole downward, it didn’t allow the wind to blow it at random. And after it stretched thin arms that could not reach it. The fence was twice, thrice my height, gleaming like glass, I couldn’t climb it. And it wasn’t easy for me to discover that nonetheless it had a crack, which was no wider than a stick of chewing gum, but round, just right for use as an eyehole.

An expanse of grass, without flowers. Nothing but grass and large fleshy leaves, sprouting straight from the ground. The air shimmered like the surface of a lake or else it was my eyelid quivering in fear and pleasure … The leaves spurted from the ground, they were elongated, their veins were as pronounced as a fish’s skeleton, and among them glided thin women, who were all arms, and fishes with scales glinting like chainmail.

The fence now seemed to me hostile, stony, taller and more massive than ever before. To the right of the hole was pasted a brightly colored poster for the circus.

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