NORMAN MANEA
Proust's Tea
The people crowding outside th e big, heavy, wooden doors , curious
about the spectacle, were perhaps themselves travelers , or their compan–
ions, or loiterers of the sort often found in train stations, but on that
afternoon not one of them was allowed into th e waiting room. Nor
could they see what was going on inside . The windows were too high,
the rectangular glass panes in the doors too dirty and clouded with
steam.
The waiting room was immense; it was hard to imagine anything
bringing it to life; everything got lost, swallowed up in it. Crouched
over their bundles, people in rags were huddling one on top of the
other in clusters from the walls all the way to the center, filling up the
room. The din was unending.
Shrill and desperate voices, hoarse voices, sometimes deep moans ,
grew suddenly louder when the nurses came by . The white uniforms
barely managed to squeeze through the tangle of legs and bodies. Hands
rose up all around to grab hold of the hems, the sleeves, even the shoul–
ders, necks, and arms of these fine ladies. People were screaming, begging,
groaning, cursing. Some were crying, especially those who were too far
away and had lost all hope of getting a packet of food and a cup.
Those crowded on the other side of the wood and thick glass doors
would have tried in vain to guess ages and sexes from the faces on the
mass of skeletons, dressed in rags tied with string, that crammed into the
waiting room. The women all looked like old, wretched convicts, and
children with oversized skulls popped up all around them like
apocalyptic men , compressed, stunted, as if an instrument of torture had
shrunk them all.
The nurses knew, of course, that there were no men in the waiting
room, nor young women. Had they understood the cries and the wailing
around them, they would have realized that it was this very absence that
aggravated the panic : the rescued did not understand, nor did they want
to accept, that they had been saved. They suspected that this was a new
Editor's Note: From the book
October Eight O'Clock
by Norman Manea.
Copyright
©
1992 by Norman Manea. To be published by Grove Press Inc.
R eprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove Press Inc.
