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Biruind gândul ce-i venea de-a o rupe la fugă, el deschise ușa odăii bolnavului. Năprasnică duhoare de hoit și de privată. Ochii săi, înțepați de țipirig, se închiseră, lăsându-i de-abia vremea să vadă de pe la spate, o tigvă lustruită ca o bășică umflată, precum și un braț, cu pielea pe os, ce atârna pe marginea patului plin de țoale scârnave.

Adrian kneeled and glued his forehead to this skeleton arm, cold as ice. The sick man didn’t move.

„Get up… Adrian… And spare me…”

Adrian shuddered. That wasn’t a human voice, Anghel’s manly speech, but a nasal meowing of a child dying of tuberculosis.

He got up with hat in hand and stood up straight, humbly, in the middle of the room, before the sick man. This sick man was not his uncle Anghel, but a decrepit old man with a mummy’s cheek; with large, sparkling eyes, missing eyelids and deepened in two empty cavities; with an elongated and sharpened nose like a knife’s edge, with parched lips and mouth ajar. A crown of white hairs encircled the neck from one temple to the other. The beard, which long ago was curly and black, was nothing more than a mass of smoked clumps. Together with the two skeleton arms that dangled in the shirt sleeves, this was all that was visible, appearing from under a pile of bags, blankets, and tattered garments. It was all that was left of uncle Anghel.

[…]

“I can take it anymore… Only my head is still alive… The rest… I don’t feel it anymore. It’s over with… the rest. But the head!… What a miraculous thing!”

Anghel fell silent for a moment, and he stared down his nephew; then, with certainty:

“I should have died three days ago… because I had nothing left to contemplate, when Irimia came toward evening to tell me that you had returned… Then I tarried, waiting for you…”

[…]

Anghel stopped for a moment to breathe. Adrian thought he was standing before one of those embalmed pharaohs from the Bulaq Museum in Cairo, a pharaoh whose half-open eyes no longer blinked. The skin on the cheek – moving, dried out, translucent – revealed all the facial bones over which it glided, stretched out like a thin sheet of parchment, almost threatening to break at every movement.

[…]

“It’s been three years since I’ve stepped down from this bed in which you see me. Three winters, three springs, just as many summers and just as many autumns of lying down on my back and looking up at this blackened ceiling. In all my life, it’s the period I’ve lived most intensely. In the last year, I barely eat or sleep, and in the last six months, nothing at all; not a single breadcrumb, not a single moment of sleep. Instead, I drink, I drink this brandy. By day, my son pours it down my throat, as you’ve seen. By night, so that I don’t perish or wake up that poor being, I suck on that sponge on the table, which I soak in brandy. In the morning, it’s completely dried own, burned by my lips…”

Adrian covered his face with his hands:

“Oh, uncle,” he cried. “How terrible life is!…”

“Terrible, you say, my nephew? Terrible? Maybe… But it’s just, given my fate… I wanted the fullness of joy, carefree joy, the fulfillment of my vain flesh… And to have it, I struggled fiercely. Twenty years of toil in order to get a beautiful woman who falls asleep eating; smoked barns that burn like hay; livestock that disappear; children who die; gold that brings with it beatings with a club; a clean shirt which is dirty the next day. All these necessities of a body that has separated itself from my head, which is just as foreign as the rags that cover it, this body which now is rotting, which I’d like to see eaten by ravens, just as it’s now being eaten by worms. A quarter of a century… And not for a single moment did I realize that I had a head, a brain, a light which mold and worms couldn’t touch.”

Stifled after such an effort, the sick man fell silent for a while. Adrian, enduring his gaze with difficulty, wondered to himself if his uncle was perhaps preparing to scold him. That’s exactly what happened:

“Adrian!… I called you over to tell you that I’m dissatisfied with you!…”

Having been flogged, Adrian jumped:

“Dissatisfied with me, uncle?!… Why is that?”

“Because you’re a reprobate!… Because you forget the light in your head and my words from yesteryear!… This is allowed for many thousands of ordinary people, like me, but not for you. Adrian, do you hear me? Not for you! Your brain knew the light even from young childhood.”

[…]

“But, rubbish!… Far, far from me, these dreadful memories!… You, Adrian, my nephew, you need to listen to me, you owe me submission! You should not have any hopes or expectations from the life that crushes a man, that causes the body to rot, and that makes you forget that you have a head.

“What’s with this shamelessness you’re wearing?… What’s with this outfit tailored to size?… What’s with this smoked collar?… What’s with these shining cuffs?… What?… What use is there to all these gaudy adornments for a young man who knows the light of heaven and who knows what his uncle Anghel went through?…

[…]

“Forgive me!… forgive me… I’m a wretch!…”

“Very good!… You repent!… And repentance brings correction. Strive to correct yourself, and I’ll forgive you right this second; and you’ll be my Adrian, my nephew, dear to uncle Anghel’s heart, this uncle Anghel whom you see rotting away on these garments, due to the mistake of desiring too beautiful a wife, too prosperous a house, and too clean a shirt. But that’s enough!”

(to be continued)

Panait Istrati