Sunday love

HE LAY COMFORTABLY on the couch and felt the rage slowly welling up inside him. Now he had to get up, just when he felt like lazing on the couch, he had to go and take a hot bath, then a cold shower, to shave, to dress up smartly, lingering for half an hour over the right necktie, and go to hers. Wouldn’t it have been better to be able to stretch out his arm at night, any night, while he lay sweetly half-asleep in his big bed, and feel her warm body next to his? And why did they have to meet only on Sundays? Maybe one Sunday he wasn’t in the mood and had a hankering for her on a Monday, or a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday?

Sunday love! Yes, it was becoming clearer and clearer to him: he loved her more on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays… He’d even started to dislike Sundays. Even to hate them… He hated the straw-blond boyishly short hair that he loved madly every other day of the week; that bright blond hair, dyed of course, he didn’t know what colour it had been previously, he was able to guess only from the reddish-chestnut colour of her hair in other, hidden places. And her dark, beautiful eyes, with the rings around them, and her narrow, rather saucily upturned nose: he liked all those things every other day of the week. But they had started to annoy him on Sundays.

They had met seven months previously, on an ocean cruise around the Greek islands. In the distance they had seen an ancient temple with tall columns.

‘What temple is that?’ she asked, addressing nobody in particular.

‘I have no idea!’ he said, quickly striking up a conversation. ‘But I think it might be the temple of Aphrodite. Who can deny pampered goddesses like her?’

And they both laughed. She worked in the laboratory at a fruit syrup factory and dealt with sweet syrups all day long. It was as if her whole skin was imbued with syrup. He was a geologist and worked for an enterprise that bored for oil without finding it. He had long since accustomed himself to the hope that someday, somewhere oil would gush up. He was forty years old and a sworn bachelor… She too, the lab worker at the sweet syrup factory, was very nearly the same age. At some point in the past, for a year and three months, she had been married to a district physician, who lived with his mother, always taking her side. Which annoyed her no end, until one fine day they both decided to separate. It was easy for them to separate, since they had nothing to divide up between them. They didn’t have children, each had their own job and wage, they hadn’t managed to buy anything much jointly, they hadn’t had time to save up money in a joint account.

Daniel lay sprawled on his couch and wrathfully asked himself: why does it have to be Sunday? Who knows? Maybe she had someone else on Mondays, or Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays?”

During the fourteen-day cruise, Paula and Daniel saw a great many Greek islands with white marble temples and fishing villages; they saw a great many sunrises and sunsets over the sea, and before disembarking at the end of the cruise, they agreed to meet the following Sunday. It had been seven months since then, and they saw each other every Sunday.

Daniel lay sprawled on his couch and wrathfully asked himself: why does it have to be Sunday? Maybe because both of them felt it was the most suitable day? But who knows? Maybe she had someone else on Mondays, or Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays? Maybe the director of the fruit syrups factory, an obese man, naturally, who had a nagging wife and three noisy children at home, went to hers on Tuesdays to quell his nerves, since he had to spend his weekends at home and on his best behaviour? Or maybe it was a colleague from the factory, a syrup engineer or sub-engineer, who went to hers on Thursdays? Or maybe the lanky bachelor with tortoise-shell glasses who worked at the town hall and lived in the mansard of her building, went downstairs to hers once a week, on Mondays or Wednesdays or Fridays?

‘Hey, hey! Stop!’ Daniel mentally yelled at himself. ‘You’ve a right to be jealous on Sundays! But not on any other day of the week. Granted, if she phoned and said: “Daniel, don’t come this Sunday!” you’d have every right to be jealous. But she’s never phoned to say anything of the sort. Or maybe you want to conquer the other days for yourself? In which case, tell her! How about this very day you stand in front of her, adopting a dignified pose, look deeply into her eyes and tell her: I want you for the whole week… Every week… Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for. But you don’t dare to say it, do you? Because ultimately, it suits you to have everything remain the way it is…’

Daniel looked at his watch and leapt off the couch. He took a hot bath, followed by a cold shower. He carefully shaved, put on his smart light blue suit, selected a white-and-blue striped silk tie, and went out to meet her.

(1985)

from Maybe Even Happiness, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth (Istros Books, £13.99)

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Ludovic Bruckstein (1920-88) was born in Munkacs, then in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine, and grew up in Sighet, a small town in the district of Maramureș, in northern Transylvania. He wrote a number of successful plays including The Night Shift (1947), based on the Sonder-kommando revolt in Auschwitz. His novels, stories and plays deal with the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic, but mostly indifferent fate of simple people whose lives are under the control of highly unpredictable forces. Istros has published his two novellas The Trap and The Rag Doll (2019), and the story collections With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain (2021) and The Fate of Yaakov Maggid (2023), also translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
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Alistair Ian Blyth is one of the most active translators working from Romanian into English today. A native of Sunderland, he has lived for many years in Bucharest. His other translations include Little Fingers by Filip Florian, Our Circus Presents by Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Coming From an Off-Key Time by Bogdan Suceavă and Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Pârvulescu (Istros Books, 2020). He is the author of the novel Card Catalogue (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020).

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Thursday 12 March
Maybe Even Happiness
Romanian Cultural Institute, 1 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PH
7 pm
Free entry, booking essential
 
Istros Books founder Susan Curtis celebrates 15 years of Istros and the launch of Maybe Even Happiness together with the author’s son and illustrator Alfred Bruckstein, and award‑winning writer and academic Vesna Goldsworthy. Looking back on the Romanian titles released by Istros throughout the years, and marking 20 years of RCI’s Translation and Publication Support Programme, a vital initiative that has helped bring Romanian literature to readers around the world.
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from the collection With An Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain