*
„ Life is like a dance to me. A dance I want to dance just as the Great Master taught me. You know, I didn’t think you’d come here.”
With a large gesture, the man showed me the room.
„ They called me. I didn’t know what you were doing. Don’t blame my colleagues for thinking you wanted to commit suicide.”
The man began to laugh. Suddenly his eyes took on a metallic gleam. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I sat down on the only chair from that room.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“You know smoking isn’t allowed in the hospital.”
“I know. Forgive me.”
„Why did you want to dance?”
„ I need to clear my head. And dancing is that kind of madness that releases endorphins. Do you get what I mean?”
„ Honestly, no. But if you want, we can go for a walk. It’s a nice day.”
The man looked at me for a long moment and shook his shoulders.
’’All right, I’ll take you up on that. Maybe I’ll even smoke a cigarette while we’re out.”
He draped his robe over his shoulders and invited me out with a sweeping gesture. Soon we were outside, in the middle of the park behind the building, among the old fir trees that cried out their old age in the rhythm of the spring breeze. We sat down on a bench. I handed him the pack of cigarettes.
“You can take it” I told him in a neutral tone.
He took the pack, looked at it, pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He closed his eyes. Slowly, with gestures that seemed almost rehearsed, he smoked in the silence that suddenly settled over us. After a while, his calm voice began to tell his story. I didn’t know if I should listen or stop him. He wasn’t my patient; he hadn’t been entrusted to my care, I just was on duty. And I think it was the curiosity that made me listen to—something special was drawing me to the man who was telling me about dance. About dance and war. And that piqued my attention.
„ I was in the Legion, with my unit we roamed Europe and beyond. It was what I’d always wanted—a life that gave me as much adrenaline as a person could handle, if they could. I could. And it also provided me with a standard of living I couldn’t have achieved through honest means.”
„ Why are you telling me all this? I’m not your therapist.”
„ Because I want to. And I have to. In a way, you are my therapist. Right now, at this moment, I truly believe it’s no coincidence that we met. When I was in Kenya, I met a Maasai tribe. Honest thieves, if you can call them that, traders of whatever life offered to them, elite dancers, I had so much to learn from them. They were different from the Kalabari. We communicated through gestures. That’s where I learned to dance. The Great Dance Master, who was also something of a chosen one of Ngai in that area, chose me out of all my fellow troupe members. Why? I have no idea. I learned their dance, a series of specific jumps that seemed to make no sense. My classmates laughed at me when they saw me dance, but I didn’t pay them any mind. I had started to enjoy that madness, which did me good.
That was when the nightmares began. Sometimes, after a particularly grueling mission, I couldn’t sleep; my thoughts and dreams were filled only with pain and screams. War is no a lullaby, unfortunately. And that’s when I turned to dance. Why those jumps? Maybe, somewhere in another life, I was a Maasai. Maybe I had a herd of cows and five wives and by the age of 35 I’d become the village elder. There, on the reservation, I felt right at home. I drank milk mixed with the cows’ blood as if it were water. I ate raw meat as if it was the finest steak. I hunted side by side with them. I killed the lion and the village elders had come to look at me with respect. They offered me their youngest daughters as a sign of appreciation. I didn’t accept. The poor girls were genital mutilated. Anyway, boys or girls don’t use condoms at all. For me, a life like a dance with death was the African countryside. And it still is. But I liked it. I’d set up a sort of camp there. A sort of home of mine. From there I get out on missions and there I’d return. When I had free time I’d go to the humanitarian organizations in the area and lend them a helping hand. That’s where I met Andra, The Woman. I could feel her! It was something indescribable. She was the woman I wanted more than any other woman. . It was for her that I wanted to leave the Legion. She didn’t accept it when I told her. Do you believe me when I say I can still smell her perfume? Orchids and cocoa, vanilla and amber mixed with a hint of blood and earth. It drove me wild.”
Suddenly he stopped talking.
“Was she…?”
“She was a doctor there along with her husband. She’d come to Africa to save her marriage. A strange way to react but I think that drastic measures are the best for resolving certain situations in life. After an air raid, the camp was bombed. Her husband died then. She left Africa for South America. I found out much later. I tried to get assigned to missions where I could somehow be near her. It wasn’t always possible. And that’s when dance helped me get through it all, through the fact that every mission slowly but surely tore me away from the real world, turning me into a robot, it made me forget the faces of children mutilated by war they hadn’t asked to be part of, it made me forget all the pain I encountered. All those movements, performed to the music, lifted me above everything and everyone. All the horrors I’d experienced were swept away in the dance steps. I purified every molecule of my being, bringing myself back to a life I’d begun to yearn for. That’s when I found out that Andra had returned to Romania and had also married a doctor. Again.”
He fell silent suddenly. At that moment, a thought suddenly struck me. I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. I knew Andra. I knew were she is.
” I’d joined the post-mission recovery programs. I felt good doing that, alongside dancing.”
“How long did it all last?”
“I don’t remember. Until the moment I started feeling more fear than I should have felt. That’s the time when I realized that the Legion will be a memory. Anyway, after this recovery program is over, I’ll be leaving for Africa.”
“Why?”
“That’s my home now.”
„ What are you doing in Romania?”
„ Just a visit, no more.”
” What exactly were you most afraid of during all your missions? ”
„ I don’t know how to answer your question.”
He looked at me for a long time. With hands that suddenly began to tremble, he wrapped his athletic body in his robe, then, as if resigned, shrugged.
„ I don’t know how to answer that question.”
He stood up slowly, looked at me again, and turned his back on me. He disappeared among the fir trees, which seemed to be dancing a dance of sorrow.
*
I think nearly a decade has passed since I met Grig. Ten years during which I haven’t heard a word from him. Until two days ago, when a thin envelope was delivered to me by courier. The sender was unknown, and the country of origin was Kenya. I opened the envelope with caution. Inside was a vanilla pod and a cocoa bean attached to a small note, written in careful, clean handwriting, neatly arranged on the page.
“My greatest fear, in all my missions, and not only then, was not starving to death. And I had only one desire greater than the desire to live: Andra. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
Beneath the Romanian words, another note, written in a rough English, brought me news that shook me. Grig had died of malaria in Maasai country. It was his wish that the vanilla pod and the cocoa bean be sent to me. Suddenly I felt guilty. Why hadn’t I told him that I knew who Andra was and that I also knew where she could be found?
*
