Thorns

By Andreea Albu

How many steps are between passion and murder? A torrid summer, a fervent woman and a potent man. Starry nights and days with thorns. Come with me on a journey in the murderer's mind, in which love is mixed with hatred, and women are not as fragile as you would expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andreea Albu
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386754794

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

"H e told me that I am insane! 

Me, insane?

Well, and if I am crazy, have you ever thought, my dear, how does a madwoman see you?

Have you thought about how you look through the eyes of a madwoman? Well, think! THINK!

Did you think that if I wouldn’t have been insane, you have never had the chance to touch my body? To strangle my breasts in your palms, squeeze them like rags until they remained red and soft.

Did you think that if I were not a madwoman, I would never have loved you just the way you were? Cause I loved you, I honestly loved you! The way a madwoman knows to love. With everything and nothing less!

Madwoman... me, a madwoman...

No!

I feel how I collapse, little by little, and it’s not the time!

I know what can calm me down. What always could.

I raise my palms and open them at eye level. I look at them, one by one, and give myself time to assimilate them. I smile. They are my beloved. One right, the other one bad.

The right one is right and straight. Nothing spoils its perfection... Perfection. That is how I am when I am dutiful. That is how I am when I am on my best behavior. A white, soft palm never worked by thoughts and ideas. Beautiful, scented meat. Desired meat.

But the other one...

The left one has a long white scar. A knife trail. That knife!

It’s my testimony that when I had, I haven’t snapped.

Even now, I won’t!

To the end, without a sigh..."

...

16 June 1953

Octav quaffs the wine, and that is his sin.

The joke caught him with his mouth full of red wine, so when the laughter erupts, the wine comes out preponderant on his nose and stops on Barbu’s shirt, so wrongly positioned in front of him. The once-white, immaculate shirt is now mottled. The woman hanging on Barbu’s arm looks resentful at Octav. Wine is dripping on her chin. Octav doesn’t even care.

Hysterical laughter covers the fuss of the small apartment. Octav, precariously seated on a three-legged farmyard chair, totters under the power of the wine, joy, and laughter. He laughs like he hasn’t laughed in a long time. Like he has never laughed. Exhaustively, with all his body and soul. His eyes are full of tears drawn from the lungs unable to keep pace with laughter. The more he tries to control himself, the more he laughs.

If you would try not to act like an animal, you might be successful, the woman tells him.

He looks at her. She is neither beautiful nor ugly and has an uncertain name he’s forgotten since he entered the apartment. As he knows Barbu, this woman was a compromise for the night, and by tomorrow, Barbu will not remember her name as well - that assuming he ever knew it.

And where is the fun, Octav says to her, remembering that she said something to him.

Barbu, his trustworthy man, his friend, and partner in crime at work laughs too so the opinion of the wanton doesn’t matter.

Another glass, Octav says to Barbu and leans over with his empty glass in hand. Full, full, don’t be stingy!

Unfortunately, the move is too much for his alcohol-abused balance, and Octav drops like a potato bag. Barbu, almost as drunk as Octav, perceives the movement too late. He dashes to pour the wine that gracefully spills in ruby sprinkles across Octav’s face. Octav tilts his face up, and the wine flows directly into his mouth, an uninterrupted stream. When the flow is too much, and the man doesn’t cope, he turns to a side, a tall poppy guffawing covered in wine stains. And laughs and laughs and laughs.

Long after, when Barbu has retired for some time with the woman in the small sideway bedroom, Octav stands in front of the last glass of wine. It’s the last one because the bottles are empty. He was careful to check and drain them to the final drop.

He looks at the half-full, half-empty glass, and can’t decide which half matters more. To drink and empty the glass, or to abstain so there would be a balance? A weighty question at this obtuse time between night or day ...

Especially when the thought line is interrupted rhythmically by the groans that are heard from the next room. The small apartment in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Bucharest is Barbu’s playhouse. Not that he couldn’t afford anything better! He just thinks that something that works perfectly how it is should not be changed.

More moans.

Octav tries to move his thoughts from the present and returns to the past, past that was very fruitful to him.

Pride, hypocrisy, money ...

In the last week, the week of debauchery, Octav tasted it all. It began Monday when he won a trial for which he struggled for months. Then he felt proud to the pith of his young bones.

On Tuesday, he scored between the thighs of a hot woman. It was a memorable day and a memorable woman. She squeezed him till the last drop of strength. So, on Wednesday he didn’t go to work, slept like a child in his mother’s arms, and rebuilt.

On Thursday he heard a piece of good news, and on Friday he lied, was pecksniffian and hypocritical, everything condensed in the three minutes he talked to the lawyer in front of whom he won on Monday.

On Saturday he received money, bribes from the customer for which he won.

Now, Sunday, on this night he will probably forget by tomorrow, he stands in front of the half-full, half empty glass, and risks losing the fight with joy.

With every passing moment, he is more and more aware. Aware of him, his life, his path.

He fills his lungs with air, a lot of air, to the point it almost hurts but he still feels it’s not enough.

He can’t fool himself.

The air is too little, or the lungs don’t have enough space next to the whole liters of ingested wine. Octav doesn’t know. He just can’t breathe enough, as he would need. Out of nowhere, he feels the need to cry. The wine glass calls him. It calls him by his name and promises it will wash all his sins from last week.

He grabs the glass with all the strength and drinks it in a sip.

And now what?

Nothing.

What sooner would have seemed a rescue, now is more like a torment.

Questions of nothingness come to his head.

What is life?

Always on the run, always hasty looking for something you don’t have yet. What? What he doesn’t have yet? He doesn’t know either. If he knew, he would look for it specially and get rid of this ongoing search. He just knows something is missing. And he must run, seek, fight to have more. Always more. And never enough!

He is looking for his cigarettes and doesn’t find them.

As a child, he crawls through empty bottles, upside down chairs and splashes of wine. He is looking for cigarettes. Eventually, he finds one and lights it with a match found by a miracle at hand.

He pulls with intensity smoke into the chest. Deeper. The air is stiff, and the lungs are even smaller.

In the room next to him, the groans have reached the peak. They are prolonged, in force and die husky.

Octav tilts on his back, eyes in the ceiling and a cigarette in his hand. He laughs as he laughed earlier, a crazy laugh, as he is now, with a screw loose. 

Somewhere, lost among the tall blocks, a rooster is singing apathetically. What a stupid rooster who doesn’t understand the piles of civilization the came over him! In the world of pride, hypocrisy, and money, roosters are no longer needed.

When Barbu came out of the bedroom door with the woman hanging from his shoulder, Octav doesn’t bother to move.

He just tells that if Barbu will wait for him to work, he will wait in vain. Then he stands up and leaves.

He slept all day and then, in the evening, he came out of the beautiful dream where reality wasn’t necessary, and he started his job as a good and obedient boy.

CHAPTER 2 

At two in the morning , Octav stopped drinking coffee, and at 3 a.m. he finished studying the last client’s file. 

Drunk with fatigue but still happy for the links he made, he put himself in bed for sleep. He found the strength for one last smile at the thought of his client contentment. 

At 5 a.m. he was still dozing. There was a loud owl at his window, and he hated that sound with all his heart strength. He finally fell asleep... 

At 6 a.m. he was already awake because of his biological clock. He was set to wake up at this obscene hour, no matter what. His brains are revolting. He stretches, he gets up without care and goes as empty as his mother made him to the bathroom. He slams the door behind him, fussy and jumpy. 

Half an hour later - and looking already like another man -, he exits the apartment door, hasty but smiling, to work. A cold shower and a massive cup of coffee do wonder for any psychic. A second steaming mug of black coffee, he takes it with him. 

Outside, his baby is waiting for him. A 1945 Buick, dubbed the dollar’s grin, it’s the only love that hasn’t disappointed him yet. With love in his eyes, he caresses the hood and gives it a wink. The black car shines, like a spoiled child, and he feels proud. No other car would suit him better. He gets in the car and leaves. 

At each intersection, he takes another sip of coffee. This coffee doping is the only way he transforms himself from the cavern’s man into the functional contemporary one. 

At the third intersection, the idea that today is the day when he must take out Miruna for a cake - again! -, flashes through his head. He frowns. He is definitively not in the mood for her and her lamentations. Why on earth, from all the women in the world, his mother chose her and now she militates for her with every occasion? 

She is a pretty girl, and he admits that, but all the charm evaporates when she talks. She is so talkative that the words begin to ruin his head, and he can’t find the strength to answer her. She is already a slanderous crone! 

Thinking that he still has a long time till then, he speeds up and spares his brain for other useless abuses. 

He gets to the office. The same swarm that feels like home surrounds him and fills him with pleasure. The more chaotic is in there, the more he’s in his element. He draws a deep breath into his chest. The smell of fiery minds overwhelms him, and he feels again - like in every working day -, lucky that he can do what fulfills his life. He is still with the mug in his hand.

Thank you for the coffee, Mirela, his partner’s secretary, tells him while she fugitive passes him and grabs away any trace of coffee. 

Always a pleasure, Octav replies with wit and smiles. 

Mirela walks away with her tongue in her cheek. Indeed, people like them will never grow up. It’s so lovely to be young and to do what you like! 

The closer he gets to his office, the more he realizes the particular fuss. It’s usually chaos in a law office, but like now, rarely. 

He sees Alin Barbu, the man who owns the other half of the office and heads towards him. Barbu is the only reason he still practices his job at a time when being an intellectual is hazardous. Only the chance made Barbu a member of the communist party after WWII. He was well seen, a man of the people, with healthy origins. They met in the war. Octav’s parents, people with status, sacrificed everything to keep him as far as possible from the trenches. Ultimately, when the need for cannon meat exceeded the possibilities of the system, he was thrown there. 

They both fought in the war and, luckily, escaped only with their pride tarnished. 

While Octav stood aside, Barbu made politics against Antonescu, and that raised him in the eyes of the party’s pilings. Even now you could hear him saying when he knows he looks good in someone’s else eyes: 

The Legionnaires? Bandits of nation and country! 

If it was to ask him, Octav believes that those who lead the country now are blacker than the legionnaires. But these are things that he would never have dared to recognize nor in front of his conscience. 

Octav was accepting Barbu the way he was. A good guy who was next to him in times when a genuine word meant the difference between life and death. 

You came! I was going to call you to come here faster, Barbu welcomes him. "Come, fast, we have work to do! Two lawsuits are pending