Gheorghe Calciu’s sublime sacrifice to save Costache Oprișan

COSTACHE OPRIȘAN, the sick man in cell 4 – put there specifically to contaminate the others with Koch’s bacillus from his cavernous lungs – was growing weaker. His cough was choking him, and blood was pooling in his throat and mouth.

He wiped himself as best he could with some sort of cloth, but little droplets still dripped from his mouth and fell down his chest from his beard, which was covered with more clots. The other three looked at him helplessly. What could they do to him?

Calcius had had the idea, and the kindness, to wash his bottle of bloody sputum several times a day with his drinking water, measured at no more than two gallons per person per day. To wash their bottoms – not to speak of toilet paper or rags, even if all that was left of their shirts and underwear were rags – they used what was left in the small tub of water they shared. A big problem, but not insurmountable. To solve the problem, they had given up washing their hands before picking up the food bowls and even washing their bottoms. What else could they do? Their obsession had become the sick person who was suffocating more and more every day and for whom something had to be done… And he too had an idea: he would put pieces of bread, from the 120 grams he was given once a week, in the mould, then dissolve them in water, and with the liquid obtained, after straining it through a cloth, he would make a kind of “infusion” which he would inhale through his nose when he began to cough. The fungus, we thought, was a kind of penicillinum notatum and could not fail to have a beneficial effect as long as other antibiotics were of the same origin, especially penicillin, which was administered in hospitals and against tuberculosis.

And indeed, their rudimentary production of dissolved mould did work. Weakly at first, but eventually effective in reducing the patient’s choking attacks. At one point, even more lively, poor Costache – as Calciu used to say – got up on his buttocks on the bed and, smiling, began to say something to them. It was a poem, or some thoughts that went something like this:

Don’t get out of the way,

through the prison of Sodom

If your spirit lies to you.

Through fire, through iron, through water, but only onward!

For the ways of the spirit suffer no turning.

A great exhortation to others, this proof of the last resort! Sickness had revealed another facet of man. A good sign, but sadly too short-lived. The Koch’s bacilli had suffered a shock, but had not disappeared, and the sick man’s body was unable to cope. He had turned completely grey and his skin was barely holding his bones together. Complete mummification! – He doesn’t have long! Calciu observed in despair. We must do something else… One last attempt…

– What do you mean?

– You’ll see,” replied Calciu, hurrying to fetch a canteen.

– What are you going to do with it?” asked Mircea, frightened, suspecting something terrible. And he was not mistaken, for, “withdrawn at the bottom of the cell, Calciu sucked up the sleeve of his shirt and, with an anglet from his boot sharpened on the cement, opened the veins of his left elbow, filling the canteen with the red liquid that dripped from it.

– You’re mad!” cried Mircea and Joseph in horror.

– Do you want to kill yourselves like the people of Pitești?” continued Joseph. Mircea, dumb with surprise, was speechless.

– Don’t panic,” said Calciu, turning to them, his bowl full of blood. I’ll leave it like this, let the haematite settle in it and give him the lymph to drink. Maybe he’ll get stronger. Can’t you see he’s barely breathing? And he put the bowl on the cement, cold, under the bed where he stood guard every day, so the guards wouldn’t catch him napping. Costache, tormented in his bed, hadn’t even noticed what Calciu had done for him. He lay motionless, only his chest heaved from time to time.

– Drink this! Calciu urged him, at a moment when it seemed to him that if the sick man did not drink the lymph, he would escape on his way to the afterlife. The other two looked at him with eyes as narrow as onions. Costache Oprișan, shaken by Calciu and urged to drink from the bowl he had placed in his mouth, opened his eyes wide as if he had seen death with them, and tried with the last of his strength to avoid what was being offered to him.

– Drink! Drink! Calciu insisted. But Oprișan closed his eyes and let his head fall limply to one side.

– Let it go, it’s over! whispered Joseph, trying to pull him away. Calciu, stunned, seemed to have started going down the same path as Costache. Looking into an inner void, he gave no sign of giving up the chase.

– What! The voice of the blacksmith, who had secretly seen everything through the bean slot, was heard. He’d been waiting to see how they were, if they weren’t asleep and if they could tell him anything about the bandits, legionnaires and fascists for whom the bosses were making his head as big as a penny at the meetings. And then one of them even “liberated” himself! What else could he ask them?

– I’ll tell them upstairs,” he said, pulling back the visor he’d forgotten to close.

– Tell them,” cried Joseph. Tell them another one has escaped!

Much sooner than the three remaining in the cell, uncontaminated by Oprișan, the superiors arrived: the political officer, the duty officer and a platoon leader.

– Get him out! the political officer ordered the guard.

– No need, sir! said Calciu. He’s long gone.

WhaaaaT?!- shouted the policeman.

– He’s escaped, sir! And what about the body? But I’ll get him out myself and one of your comrades. He knew well that most guards were afraid to touch the dead.

– Hurry up, the officer on duty ordered, gesturing to the guard to help Calciu remove the body from Casimcă. And, carried by Calciu’s armpits and guard’s feet, Oprișan walked out of Casimcă to Jilavei’s yard, where the policeman ordered the two bearers to leave him at the Casimca fence, with the body.

– And you, back to your cell! the guard shouted to Calciu.

– At once! Calciu replied, bending down to pluck a small flower and two blades of green grass from a crack at the foot of the wall and throw them over Oprișan’s body.

– March to your grave, bandit! shouted the officer, kicking Calciu in the backside.

– And what did you do after that? Joseph asked him as he entered the cell with his back to him.

– What do you see?” replied Calciu, slamming himself down on the bed with tears in his eyes. And he turned around and faced up.

– Could you have done something like that? Joseph asked Mircea, looking at the bowl of blood that Oprișan had refused to drink.

– And to think that even Calciu has such swollen glands in his throat! They’ve turned his head into a giant pear,” Mircea replied. As for what he could have done for his dying friend, he hadn’t thought of it yet. But Joseph’s question started him thinking. That same day, with all the sadness and thoughts that weighed on the three roommates after Oprișan’s “departure”, the neighbours in cell 3 also found out what had happened next door. How Oprișan had died, how the guard had watched them through the bean slot – without the slightest reproach – and how the superiors, having been informed of what had happened, had come at a gallop to see the “deed” for themselves. But nothing about Calciu’s gesture with the blood in his canteen. About the little flower he tore from the foot of Jilavei’s wall and threw over Oprișan’s corpse, yes. They learned and admired the gesture, filtered to their ears through Morse. Especially as he had paid for his gesture with a kick in the backside from the political officer. But it wasn’t Calciu who told them about it, because he was having a hard time coming to his senses, but Mircea, who was just as good at sending and receiving Morse code.

His knuckles were like drumsticks from all the beating, and his ears, when he listened, were sharper than a needle. He didn’t miss a thing, because “writing” by tapping on the wall was quite superfluous, and often the sender didn’t even have to finish his sentence because the receiver had understood. But it wasn’t the transmission and communication in general that was the problem, it was the content. The facts and events that took place in the cells of Casimca were important. So was the risk the sender and receiver were taking if they were caught by the guards. But who wouldn’t risk it, in a world where there was no other way to communicate and where loneliness was a stronger incentive than fear? A problem that no longer mattered to the few who remained in Casimca. For the sick, still kept alive to infect others, news of death mattered. Any such news of someone’s “release” into the underworld inflamed them. Sixteen of the condemned had entered Casimca’s four cells and – within a few weeks – five had already died. And all of them were destined for a certain end, in the most miserable conditions. And for those who had planned it, it was only a question of when, how many and how the “bandits” would end.

But in the world of prisons, in situations of extreme “cramped conditions”, the man only proposes and the Lord, not the warden, orders. It is the absolute prerogative of the Lord God to overrule his will and his decision, and no one, no matter where, can pass. At Casimca, the damned were only waiting for the “when”, the “where”, for they seemed to see him every moment.

(Marcel Petrișor – Past Lives of Lords, Slaves and Companions)