NORMAN MANEA
83
ruse, even n1.ore diabolical, that would undoubtedly lead to new tortures,
perhaps even to the end. Why else had the men and able-bodied young
women been left behind? To bring them here later, on another train?
Because there hadn't been enough room? Perhaps someone had objected
to piling them on top of one another?
They could have done without those big, luxurious railway cars that
swayed like imperial barges . . . They wouldn't have minded traveling in
carts, walking for miles and miles, so long as they'd been allowed to stay
together, husbands, wives, sisters, sons and daughters, the old and the
children, all of them.
Shorn like the others, her head covered by some sort of burlap
hood, the woman before whom the nurse had stopped was ageless like
the rest. She made no sound. She had not said a word when the person
next
to
her had taken from her hands a piece of blanket and covered
herself with it. She didn't flinch when the old woman on her left, sens–
ing in her silence a confirmation of her own foreboding, became excited,
raising her arms to the sky. Finally she lifted her head: a face shrunken,
withered, old, like a Phoenician mask. But she didn't move, not even
when the nurse passed by. She just kept watching, intense, like the
midget resting its small yellowish head on her bare shoulder.
The air in the room quivered with heat. The continuous pulsing
rumble of the mass lowered the ceiling and pulled the walls in closer.
The hall had shrunk. Everything was happening close to the ground, at
the height of the crowd. Only when you threw your head back and
looked up did the ceiling recede, like a soaring, ever more unreachable
sky. From the heights, the noise lagged, distant, weak, somewhere down
below. Those who remained on the ground were deafened by it, drained
by fear, oblivious to everything.
She, too, couldn't stop thinking about what might be happening on
the train that never arrived . She couldn't have been allowed on board,
she knew all too well that she looked like an old woman, no one
would have believed that she was not yet thirty. But then she would
have had no reason to want to be on the train for men and young
women. Surely she too had seen how they had clung to each other
without shame - my father and my cousin - the moment they left the
lineup. She did not look at them, but without a doubt she had seen ev–
erything. Disciplined, she had joined her column, holding in her limp
hand the hand of the midget trailing behind her. She didn't even yank at
his arm as she helped him climb the high steps onto the train. She saw
that the child, when he reached the top of the steps, had turned his
wrinkled face toward the two who were left on the platform, sitting on
the bench too close to each other. But the woman had not said a word;
she sat down on the seat in the train and closed her eyes, exhausted.
