Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

Author:Mircea Cartarescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

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I seldom see the lower school teachers, except for Steluţa, who is practically my neighbor on a street parallel to Maica Domnului. Sometimes we happen to take the same bus or tram to school, if we have a meeting in the morning or if we are going to collect litter or chestnuts. In fact, this is when I see the other lower school teachers, too. Their world is even smaller than ours. They are the poor women at their desks eternally crocheting macrame, when they are not cutting out cardboard rabbits and carrots to teach the children to count. They almost never come out of their classrooms; they stay inside, surrounded by their little subordinates, like ant queens, chubby and indolent, while workers clean their joints. There is an entire fauna, which, albeit dominated by the housewives wearing beehives and dresses made from unnameable material, the poor women worn down at home and at work, nevertheless contains some exemplary eccentrics. Mrs. Mototolescu and Calatorescu (real names, “squeezed” and “traveled”!) are twins: they always teach parallel classes, one next door to the other, always visiting each other, at school and (so we heard) at home, too. Never would you see either of them alone in her room. At any moment during class time, if you opened the doors, you would find one room where the children were alone, trained to sit still, and the other room with two teachers endlessly chattering away. They have been scolded in meetings countless times, but they can’t do anything about it: neither one—however much they try, like people who have smoked all their lives trying to quit—canquitcan endure more than a few minutes of separation from the other. Mrs. Spânu is a woman-man, tall, broad-shouldered, her hair cut short, with a military gait. Her chalk, when she puts it to the board, screeches worse than any other teacher’s. You have to believe she does it on purpose. When you come in from Dimitrie Herescu, you hear the unbearable screeching even before you pass the auto mechanic’s. The children from her group often end up in the nurse’s office with thin lines of blood running from their delicate cochleas.

The real problem cases in the lower school are two other teachers. One is a slumland beauty, a wasp-waisted Madonna with a heart-shaped mouth. Her catlike green eyes regard you languorously through fluttering eyelashes. Her double chin invokes a kind of oriental voluptuousness, likewise her unusually abundant breasts, where gold chains hold throbbing crosses. Gheară, who, for all his fear of his wife, would plow blindly into the harem that is any teachers’ lounge, often told us, too often in fact, about the time he went home with “the venomous hyena,” how he put up with her fastidious fussing for a few hours, fighting for every centimeter of unveiled skin, until the barricades suddenly dropped and he found himself violated with a terrifying ferocity by the owner of the juiciest exotic fruit he had ever seen between a

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