and the punishment followed suit: a broken lip, a swollen cheek, a tumefied eye. Not that there wasn’t any truth in it. Whenever Mihai was not around, Nicoleta enjoyed playing the temptress. She put on ostentatious clothes and walked provocatively. That seemed to be her only way of taking revenge on Mihai. In public life a powerful, virile businessman, at home a beast. The good side of his character was that he never let his family lack anything. The woman dressed in smart expensive clothes and was allowed to spend as much money as she wished. That was in fact the reason why she had never thought of divorcing him or worried about the future.
“I’m begging you, Costel, think of my children and yours, the tables might be turned on you sometime,” the woman insisted.
Preoccupied, Costel no longer heard or saw her. He was about to leave, cramming into the boot the rest of the things he needed for the fishing day. He got in the car, taking a roundabout way as if Nicoleta were a dangerous obstacle. His wife, Geta, sat down next to him, disturbed by the scene she had witnessed, dumb with fear.
“What’s real about all this?” she dared ask, forgetting for a moment the small part—that of a doll—she had been playing in Costel’s life.
Unlike Mihai, Costel never beat his wife; on the other hand, he never took her opinions into account. He just mumbled while driving away:
“What was I supposed to do, think of his children or ours? I had no other choice. If Mihai had lived, we’d have saved both of us. He hadn’t, so I saved only myself.”
Geta gave up and started to weep. The day which had promised to be so rewarding had a bad start.
Nicoleta’s life went from bad to worse when the doctors found out Mihai had liver cancer and said he had no chances to survive. There followed infernal months which she faced stubbornly. The tragedy of Mihai’s terminal illness was doubled by his bankrupt business. The hotel, the cars, almost everything was put on sale, except for their home, the flat, the two rooms in which she and her two sons lived.
In the meantime, Costel’s business flourished and it was only four years later that she began to wonder. Hard, answerless questions.
Costel’s car got to the River Prut an hour before the middle of a torrid day. It was eighty-six degrees, and the man let out a curse when he saw that, because of Nicoleta’s nagging questions, he had left home the cap he always wore when he went fishing.
He was crazy about fishing, fully enjoying his moments in the company of water creatures. Now and then he took his wife along, especially when he wanted to catch wells. Two Sundays before he had been misled by the local newspaper: there was a photo of one of his friends there, with a wells in his arms weighing about 170 pounds. All the fishermen had turned green with envy. A week before, when they had phoned him to bring a sack of salt and a few cartons of beer to the River Prut—apparently his friends had caught a wells weighing 200 pounds—he had taken it for granted, rushed to the market, bought the salt, thrown it plus four cartons of beer into the car boot, and driven his car for sixty miles in the heat of the day and on a bumpy country road. When he had got to the river, he wanted to take the sack down first but one of his friends shouted: “Leave the sack there and bring us the beer, we’re dying of thirst. That damned wells, it’s still in the water, hasn’t moved yet, waiting for you I guess!”
So he promised to take revenge on them and even catch a huge fish. Today, however, the heat was melting the ground and he could barely stand it.
“You’d better sit under that willow tree or, if you want to fish from the boat, put your shirt on your head! The sun is terrible,” said his wife, sitting down in the shadow of a willow tree.
“You know I can fish only from the boat and I can wear only my cap on my head. I wouldn’t have left it home if Nicoleta hadn’t pestered me so much.”
Costel’s wife didn’t say anything. She knew her husband didn’t stand being contradicted. He didn’t beat her but could get vicious when she felt very well so, instead, she began to read a book while the burning heat was stifling the air and he was fishing in the middle of the river.
Soon she fell asleep and, two hours later, when she woke up she looked at the boat but couldn’t see her husband. She jumped to her feet, rushed to the edge of the river bank and saw Costel sprawled on the bottom of the boat. She shouted at him and then she ran to the nearest fisherman who was also fishing from a boat.
When they took Costel out from the boat there was foam at his mouth and he was unconscious. At the hospital the doctors gave the verdict: Costel had had a sun-stroke. His chances to survive were very little. There followed a week of waiting without any guarding angel around, after which the man came out alive but paralyzed. A vegetable.
Ten days later Nicoleta called. She didn’t hear about what had happened to Costel. She was still angry when Geta picked up the phone.
“Costel wanted so much to get away from me that he dropped his fishing cap on the ground. I found it and wanted to restore it to him but he left in a hurry. I’ll send it to you tomorrow, I don’t need anything that belongs to you, even if the cap was a gift from Mihai.”
And she hung up without waiting for a reply. Costel’s wife was just about to say a long forgiving prayer for deliberate or non-deliberate mistakes.…
POSTPONED JOURNEY
Whenever he saw Iulia, anesthetist Viorel Cheran stared at her in fascination. Almost sixty, the woman always left behind her, from the way she walked to the way she spoke, the most fanciful clues. If one had surveyed her life, he would have discovered an ancient statue from another world. Apart from her harmonious appearance, a body that did not attract any illness, carried as if it belonged to an intangible priestess. The people around her had never succeeded in puzzling her soul out or revealing her private life. Their amazement was even greater when, although she was single, and without having any conspicuous love affair, Iulia Datcu gave birth to two boys within three years’ time.
“Don’t tell me you’ve come here just to see me because I’m on duty today,” the anesthetist said kissing both her cheeks.
They were old friends. Many years before, the doctor had tried to conquer her but the woman had said no, love might ruin their friendship. The doctor, a great conqueror, good-looking, well-read, and well-versed had realized he had no chance to make her fall in love with him. So he had preferred friendship to estrangement. In time the bond between them had become very solid.
“I knew you were on duty, in fact I know your schedule, but no matter how hard I’ve tried I haven’t been able to get here. Until now, that is.”
“If you’ve finally got here, it must be very urgent. We’ve never wasted our time on foolish stuff, have we? We’ve always let the world take care of it.”
“Well, it’s not that serious, really. I’ve just come to ask you to be my guide to the next world.”
Iulia’s words, uttered calmly, maybe too calmly, exploded in the doctor’s mind. The woman showed him several papers—there, in black and white, he could see the results of a complete check-up. Viorel Cheran looked through those damned papers as calmly—he had lost track of how many times he had read such papers announcing imminent death. What he was holding in his hands now was a final death sentence.
“How long have you known about this cancer? Why didn’t you ask for my help?”
“Well, I’ve made so many mistakes in my life.… I’ve lived alone.… Now I wonder if it was worth it and I don’t
