MAESTRO A NOVEL BY STELIAN TANASE
A chapter translated by Jean Harris
„Emiluţa has an unfortunate thought. She’ll throw herself off the top of the building. Why? What the fuck? Let’s say for the cause of Peace on Earth, for the slumdogs, Europe, for the lonely. Which is to say she doesn’t have a ghost of a reason. Viva Walachia! The way things stand, if she doesn’t do away with herself—pressed on to the fatal deed by the wicked world—well, then Emiluţa would wind up writing the story of her life, and then everything would go to hell, the very thing she didn’t want—not that I’d advise you, gentle reader, to take pen in hand. Nor did Emiluţa want to write Avram Duca’s. For her, Tina Marcu is the veritable heroine, a modern young “woman of our times.” P.S.: Emi- Emiluţa is glad to have arrived on the flat bloc’s rooftop terrace. There she is perched on the ninth floor. Already: the traffic jam at the intersection …the hour when the city freezes into a Polaroid shot. Helping herself with wheelchair and crutch, she’s heroically carted along the TV set. She’s made it in one piece. The whole operation cost a lot of effort. She’s wiped out. And frightened too. But it’s great that no one caught her in the act. She picked the right time. She slipped through the smells of stew and sautéed cabbage. She passed a telephone ringing in a one-room apartment where no one ever answered the phone .The risk was that someone would come out on the landing or would show up in the lift, right when she was perching herself on the roof. Hey, but she made it. She’s having a good day. And Guffy says the same, even if he looks at her silently, half asleep.