Also known as: Alexandru Jebeleanu, Savva to those who knew him. Svetlana Jebeleanu, née Chipăr, Lana, the name her mother called her as a little girl. A felt slipper and a sunbeam, an earthworm and an enchanted lily (Olga’s version)
Occupation: He taught history and lived among thirty-seven thousand books. She was a doctor, and had patients to see. Their real occupation was each other.
First appears: Chapter 004, the last time I saw them
Status: Together. They were never anything else.
Usually seen with: Each other. A black silk top hat, kept in its original box on top of the wardrobe.
Their philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
They had made fidelity seem less like a moral decision than a property of matter: something as natural and unquestionable as gravity. They did not choose each other anew every morning. They simply woke into a world in which the choice had already been made, once and for all. In mathematics, an invariant is what survives a transformation. My parents were an invariant. In the Russian lives of the saints, Peter and Fevronia of Murom prayed to die on the same day, and did. My parents never asked for it in my hearing. They were granted it anyway.
What I think they thought of me
Savva thought I had spent twenty years writing without writing, and told me so a week before the end, in a monologue rehearsed for an acting class. In my father’s emotional cartography I came somewhere below his thirty-seven thousand books, his library, Marcel Avram, a glass paperweight and his students. My position was provisional. Lana thought I would last until forty. At least. She spent her life keeping two men from drifting beyond the reach of one another, with a patience neither of us deserved and a generosity neither of us knew how to return. She was right about the forty.
What I think of them
I used to think Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium was a charming piece of Greek nonsense: creatures with four arms, four legs and two faces, split in two by an uneasy Zeus and condemned to look for each other ever since. Then I looked at my parents. Two people who had somehow ceased to be entirely separate without surrendering the smallest part of what made each of them distinct. Brâncuși understood it in The Kiss: not two bodies pressed together, but a single form that has forgotten how to divide itself. He was a man without metaphors who wore a top hat to fall in love. She was so beautiful that, when she entered a room, the furniture seemed heavier. Olga has studied their marriage for half a century without getting any closer to understanding it. Neither have I. Every comparison I find for them is absurd, and every one of them is true.
Things they said, usually to me
“It would have been too much,” my father interjected, with the gravity of a man explaining a fundamental principle of aesthetics. “And you, Andrei, have never appreciated the too-much.”
“An extravagance à rebours,” my mother concluded. “It’s his signature.”
“Quite right. One should never surrender anything prematurely.”
“No. What we’re telling you now is true.”
“You could hardly imagine two men more different. The conqueror of the world and the beggar. The god and the dog.”
“That is how I think of the two of us. A father and a son brought close by everything they fail to understand about each other.”
Andrei’s footnote: My father, who could spend forty minutes on the administrative reforms of Diocletian and still fail to notice that she had changed her hair, once described her style in two words. Stoic opulence. I have never found better ones for either of them.
