Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

I can't avoid lice - I teach at a school on the edge of town. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds the bugs at the start of the year, during her checkup, when she goes through the kids' hair with the expert motions of a chimpanzee - except she doesn't crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use.

Within a few days, the entire school stinks of anti- lice solution. It's not that bad, at least we don't have bedbugs, I haven't seen those in a while.

I remember them, I saw them with my own eyes when I was about three, in the little house on Floreasca where we lived around 1959-60. My father would hoist up the mattress to show them to me. They were tiny black seeds, hard, and as shiny as blackberries, or those ivy berries I knew I shouldn't put in my mouth.


When the seeds between the mattress and the bedframe scattered into the dark corners, they looked so panicked that it made me laugh.

Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter