… you can find plenty of silly justifications to support a good argument. Put simply, I have never been in love. But while I knew this right from the start, she only realised it much too late. There was no way she could understand: I constructed our love patiently, with no hesitation, so that it really might have been what it pretended to be. I always had a ready answer to her questions and never disturbed the awkward intimacy that haloes every meeting between lovers. The strange thing is that sometimes I had the impression she felt the same way. I mean, if I were to try to pin down this impression I would realise that I never thought of her as I thought of myself, so questioning myself would have been useless as the invariably indifferent response (for me) would have just been her rapt attention. But wasn’t I just as attentive?

She would always come to me in the evening. I have always loved the minutes when the sun sets: the mind is at peace and ideas cannot be moulded into words. Lying in bed, I would watch the sunbeams shifting on the ceiling or the faint stain of a cloud at the edge of the window. Books mounted in dead piles beside me. During such moments, books become nothing more than ordinary objects.

And then I looked at her like I looked at the sky …

I would hear her footsteps down the corridor and cry out “Come in!” without waiting for her to knock. She liked that: the fact that I recognised her steps. But I only called out because I knew that her presence was inevitable. How could she have guessed my reluctance since I never confessed it?

The moment she walked through the door my eyes clung insatiably to the corner of the sky and I was too ashamed to turn my head. If I could have carved out my fate in that moment, I would have chosen to fix it in that blue, my soft bed, my tranquil gaze.

But I had to turn my head. And then I looked at her like I looked at the sky …

We were both silent. She sat on a chair with an awkwardness that irritates me even now, as if to say:

“You see, I’m sitting on the chair. I’ve got to busy myself with something else when all I want to do is look after you. But it’s you I always think about.”

These words insinuated themselves clearly, especially when she sat beside me on the bed. Then she smiled and her smile said:

“I’ve put everything aside to come to see you. Now all I have to do is sit here and admire you.”

But that wasn’t what embarrassed me. As I said: I looked at her like I looked at the sky. But then I had to kiss her. I had to take her hand and intertwine my fingers with hers, noticing their every inflection (as if each were a perfect mirror of our souls, different in form). But I — if it is possible to say that I existed somewhere outside the confined space of this world reduced to fingers, human forms, a window frame — was in my own world. I was alone and incredibly bored. There was no other way I could feel. Any conversation would have concluded with her still admiring me. She would have said that I was just conjuring a fantasy whose key only I (only He) possessed, thus justifying her complete lack of curiosity. But then, thinking about it rationally, I could not say that I didn’t love her. I held her beside me, undressed her, and we reached the same intimacy as the day before, and the one before that, following the same script as always.

Afterwards, we were silent and my mind invariably wandered towards the same conclusion: it is always simpler to accept reality than pursue the things we truly desire.

A solution simultaneously simpler and more dreadful.

If morality were not connected to the actions of real people, then sin and punishment would be fused. What was my sin? What was my punishment? Is my life simply a metaphysical symbol?

I can only answer all these questions with the same eternal indifferences. This is why I feel, on a human level, I am guilty. A purely intellectual penitence …

Reading these lines, she, who might have understood that the only reason I was calm was because excess bored me, would have said to me:

“Be quiet, your entire self is an invention. I feel sorry for you. Why won’t you listen to me? Put your head next to me and lie here in peace.”

Or: “Since the soul is always learning, why not find some use for it?”

Of course the soul is constantly learning and of course we could invent a use for it; the usefulness of a clock that can function without hands. A sentimental use. Sentiments, unfortunately, must be named.

And then, if I reject any purpose, it’s because I have devoted my entire life to searching for it.

Look at the last phrase I just wrote. False, false, I can churn it out at any time, subtly tweaking anything that doesn’t please me.

Afterwards, we were silent and my mind invariably wandered towards the same conclusion: it is always simpler to accept reality than pursue the things we truly desire.

I mustn’t fool myself. The only reason I analyse my guilt is because I’m trying to reveal the existence of morality. Logic is an admirable form of mental distraction.

I’m only surprised that so far my organs have not become abstractions and their functions have not transformed into ideas.

When that happens, I imagine my love will no longer hold any mysteries for me.

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Transparent Body & Other Texts is available soon from Twisted Spoon Press.

Max Blecher was born in Botoşani, Romania, on September 8, 1909, into a middle-class Jewish family. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Roman, and upon graduating high school left for Paris to study medicine, but soon became ill and was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis. After spending six years in various sanatoria, he returned to Roman where, confined to bed, he began to translate and to write. His only collection of poetry, Transparent Body, was published in 1934, followed by the “novels” Adventures in Immediate Irreality (1936) and Scarred Hearts (1937). His final prose work, The Illuminated Burrow, was published posthumously, first in an abridged edition in 1947, and then in full in 1971. He died on May 31, 1938.

Gabi Reigh was born in Romania and moved at the age of twelve to the UK, where she teaches English and translates. As part of her Interbellum Series she has translated a variety of work by Lucian Blaga, Liviu Rebreanu, Max Blecher, and Mihail Sebastian. A recipient of the Stephen Spender Prize in 2017, her anthology of women’s writing from the early 20th century, Virginia’s Sisters, was published in 2023.