The homeless dogs follow me in the night, behind the gloom of Ceauşescu architecture. I cannot see the stars, for the murk slithers as a ghost, beneath clouds, haunting. Within the shadows of age, I find a beating chest of panic, as other toothy hounds, torn plastic, flittering weeds, linger beside my Australian kneecaps, sunburnt and rachitic, which have walked a thousand miles to be here.

The clock has struck another hour, another circlet of time, since I last saw her, felt the flutter of her heart, beneath her breasts, which I could cup in the palms of a farmer. She kissed me goodnight, though I fear she kissed The Elephant Man, mumbling John Merrick, I love you.

Upon the steps to my building, urine pools in the imperfections, where insects are slain. The biggest of all speaks to me and I believe he is a cross between a Labrador and a Doberman, with matted dreadlocks of entwined dregs shaking beneath his tail. I retort with gritting choppers, grinding enamel. If I had the courage, I would kick his teeth, for my toes are gloved in Hard Yakka.

Quite often, his brothers taunt me with their fangs and their tongues, lolling like pink leather belts across their lips. But all I can do is walk within the shadows and enter the manual elevator, ascending to a concrete world where they fail to roam, for I leave them hunting and gathering on the footpath.

Mihai is my neighbour and with cockling hands, he puffs on a stub of ash. He too dislikes the homeless canines. He can barely walk, and the idea of defending himself with his gnarled walking-stick makes him nauseated.

He told me the government sent out troops of men, with their muscles as thick as tyres. They rounded up the shaggy mutts and chopped from them their testicles, their hair and their diseases. Their ears were tagged like sheep, a number for each hound, a colour for each breed and then sent back to the dells of a concrete nightmare, a sea of asphalt and the zavalinkas, which belonged to no man with a Romanian soul.

“No big problem,” said Mihai, “dog is no hurt for you. If he have tag, he give tattoo for bite, but no rabies.”

I left him that night and thought about them all scurrying, scavenging, brawling as men and apes in the streets after midnight, barking a language no one could understand.

In Australia, we cull them if they cannot be adopted, but here they are left to linger on the streets. The innocent crones, hunched and made of alabaster, leave chicken scraps and boiled vegetables at the corner of each concrete matchbox. They do so as if collecting their daily errands, as though all life will crumble if the dogs are not fed, if the food is not discarded.

During the day, it is much easier to cross the road to Sector 2 and visit draga mea, my dear, for a relaxed ambience flutters and escapes the grey nooks where it hid during the canine night. There is a feeling of depravity in my soul. One must step from his hovel dressed to the nines for fear of being maimed, for fear of not returning, for fear of riding in a wailing van, flashing crimson and cobalt, in clothes of a lesser standard. This feeling is advanced in the snarls and smiles of the dogs, which let no man pass without a growl or a bark, suggesting we are of no worth.

Can we not see our loved ones, feeling wholesome and proud, particularly if self-consciousness haunts our corpus? But when all of this nonsense passes over, when the proudest feelings rein, when the freedom overcomes, it is in a bedroom beneath the sheets, where clothing is not worn, where all things are silent as if man had never begun.

I fret over what she thinks of me and if I could only ever see her in the dark, I would have it this way forever. I would break each mirror in her apartment and tumble the shards upon the gypsy-woven carpets. To be in her arms lasts only a minute, before the sheltering smog crawls and rips a ballad above the city of Bucureşti, darkening the skies, though the sun still burns.

“You must go, is late,” she mumbles in between a soundless kiss.

“But why?”

“The dogs,” she says, “the dogs.”

The streetlights are like tallow candles upon a tabletop of asphalt. The dogs look out from the shadows of an ilex, with pig’s eyes, as though sitting with knives and forks, breaking off and slaloming over the sheets of ice and the dead leafage shingled in the snow.

To me in this moment the dogs are not dogs but shoeless, emaciated bears. I hope for a musket to swoop down and carry me off into the safety of the sable atmosphere, like some fairytale creature. But the faster I run, the more saliva they produce, flexing their ears back against their skulls, wrinkling their snouts like gibbering bats. Come one, come two, bulling forth against my spine, yet as I wave my hand in fear all that is taken from me is the sheathing pink flesh of a finger I love most.

The elevator lingers for too long in the heavens and I fly up the six flights of stairs to my apartment, bleeding. Mihai stands in the corridor and permits a grey snake to crawl out from behind his molars and circle his crown as a halo. He re-ignites his cigar and leans against the concrete.

“Why so panic?”

“I was bitten.”

“Is no harm, just tattoo? Relax,” he says, “relax,” and with a soft palm, tinged yellow and brown, he ushers me into his hovel, which is draped in carvings of Vlad the Impaler and sepia, celluloid dreams of yesteryear, before megalomaniacs tore down the Bauhaus marble and crumbled Micul Paris into the sistimatizare of today. I sit on the end of his cold bath tub and with nervousness he washes my wound and knots a dressing over the seeping gore.

“Which is câine?”

“Huh?”

“Câine, dog, dog?”

“The old one, with the bushy tail.”

“Javra,” he says, which is not a nice way of saying the dog was born on the wrong side of the blanket. His voice is tough and grates along his throat as though his voice box is lined with the coarse five o’clock shadow on his cheekbones, arching high from a slight, eastern bloodline.
“Is no harm,” he says, as a quiet mantra, while retreating to the kitchen to prepare me a bowl of Ciorbă de pui.

Along the dead corridor adjacent to the bathroom, I find men in costumes, framed and standing as straight as cardboard. Their stoic faces have been caught by a quickened Zenit shutter, so many years ago. Their chests are draped in blue, golden stars and upon their hips a leather mouth nurses a weapon of fire and metallic stealth.

“What is that?” I ask, as he hands me a dish of Ciorbă, sitting at the table.

“Shush, shush, shush,” he whispers, with the tongue of a snake, “is the Securitate.”

“Oh,” I say, though the tail of the word barely exits my mouth, for I stall and grow silent with fear. I listen to the clink of our spoons, the concave silvers hitting the ceramic rims. Mihai coughs and grows irritated, though he looks me over with soft eyes; reminding me of my grandfather.

“What was that like?”

“I no proud,’ he whispers, “I no proud. I make fear for people.”

“Like the dogs?”

“Da, like câine. Câine is me. I câine. Once, I live for Strada Aleea Barajul Bicaz of Titan. One neighbour is say, ‘I know you, you kill brother, you kill brother’. So I move here. Is safe. No one know me.”

“Did you?”

“I not know. I know face for kill, but no name.”

We sit and breathe for a moment. I breathe and I am thankful for it, thankful I did not lose a finger, a hand, a heart, a soul. Mihai, I imagine, is thankful he was not lynched after the revolution, thankful I was not one of his neighbours in middle-class Titan, thankful I did not know what he really did, during those dark days, when cement clouds were reflected in the steel of the iconic hammer and sickle. Of course, I had heard the stories and read about it in my elephant-eared Lonely Planet. There are the secrets, the shifty nature of their ways, a line of black automobiles arriving in the night like snakes in the grass, to take loved ones into the forest, a copse from which they never returned.

I rise from the table and nod as a gesture of salutation, thanking him for the soup and suggesting it is time for me to depart, for the ambience of the apartment has grown sour with both my fear and his guilt, like water and electricity.

“Maybe you no friend now.”

“No, it is okay. We are still friends. Mulţsumesc for the bandages.”

“Bryce?”

“Yeah.”

“I go church.”

“I know.”

I open his front door and as I close it I watch him reach out and fold the photograph. I hear the crunk of the glass within the frame as it snaps around the stern, murderous faces of the Securitate.

I sleep on the other side of a grey wall, across from a man, a murderer. I sleep above the hounds in the streets, the mirrors of his soul. They gather around the iron fence fringing the school and battle each other over a qualm known only in their hearts.

I lean over the rusted edge of my windowsill and watch their hirsute machismo. Their scrap is performed beneath an orange streetlight, which flares and turns black like an animal eye folding behind a socket to sleep, for the electricity comes and goes only when canines are raging.

The neighbours on the floors above throw bottles of beer, empty pickle jars, bursting glass around their paws.

Even the most hardened of men are drenched in nightmares; even those who fall prey to fear or the euphoria of fear find a place in their hearts where their consciousness beats a drum, a kind of Morse code for the cerebra to decipher. The prisoner pummelled a cellmate who will one day return from the infirmary, thirsty for revenge. The oppressed will one day congregate in the cobbled core of a city and gather Kalashnikovs in their arms. The dogs place their tails between their legs, for they know they have awoken the only people who feed them, while Mihai took a son, a brother, a lover, a nephew, a friend, a comrade. He now speaks in hushed tones and lives only for the night, so the daytime neighbours do not meet him with their eyes.

In the morning, I wake and step outside to drop a bulging rubbish bag down the metallic chute at the end of the corridor. I look over the balcony and the street sweepers move along the gutters with tousled brooms, rasping the broken glass along the asphalt. Mihai steps from where the eastern sun does not shine and startles me with his presence.

“O panza de paianjen,” he mumbles.

“What does that mean?”

“It mean like a spider web. Is all connected. Dog is make noise, neighbour is make break for glass, cleaner is make fix. But building administraţie is pay cleaner and neighbour is pay building administraţie, so no much money for bread. Romania man is need bread. You understand me?”

“Yes.”

He moves closer to me and the tingle I felt in my spine when he repaired my finger does not grow again. Instead it is a sense of trepidation, as when one drives past a house where bad things are said to have happened.

“I tell lie for you,” he whispers.

“Really?”

“Yes. I know name for man for brother in Titan. His name Alexandru Platareanu. I cut his—I don’t know word for English.” He pauses for a moment, dangling his digits from his hands as though playing the keys of a piano.

“Fingers?” I ask.

“Yes, all is gone.”

“All?”

“Yes, you want know why?”

“Why?”

“He is take bread.”

“That is it?”

“Yes, in old day, Communist Party is say one family is take one bread for one day. But is not enough. He take two. Romania man is need bread. Is like life. Your bread is of other side this street. Your draga mea. You tell me and you tell me for straight. You no let dog take for bread. Okay?”

“Okay.”

When I shower and leave my apartment, the dogs are curled up like feathered pumpkins, sleeping upon the footpaths where dry patches roam. The community treads past in silence, muffling the clip-clop of their soles with light knees, feathered steps.

In Sector 2, I toil and wade against her silken skin, sweating and shuddering before rolling over to caress what is mine in my heart, her soul which I believe has no interest in my appearance, for it is decomposing. Draga mea kisses me and covers her lumpy chest with the blankets, finding her breath once again.

“What is happen for finger?”

“That old dog got me.”

“Nu fi speriat, this Romania,” she mumbles from behind plush lips. For a moment, she caresses her face against my palm.

“It looks like I stuck it in an electric pencil sharpener.”

“No, no, you still handsome.”

“Really?”

“Yes, always is handsome in my eyes.”

“I was scared of what you thought. I’m going bald.”

“Nu fi speriat. No be scared.”

She leans against me and fingers the tresses growing as grass over my sternum. The tightened jaw through which I speak loosens as though snakes of morphine discolour and bleach the veins around my mandible.

Now with such knowledge, do I tread across to visit draga mea in the wintry light, dressed smartly, for my square chin quickens her breath and she loves my soul, and not the clothes I wear? But the dogs, I say in my mind, the dogs. Would it not hurt to have a paramedic cut through the heart of a designer jacket? Would it be such a crime to be maimed in clothes no better than pyjamas? Blood flows where blood flows, for its streams do not discriminate.

She tightens her robe and I whisper goodnight so as not to wake her flatmates. We kiss and as I close her front door the hand-painted dishes, hanging from her walls like photographs, quaver from the thud, clinking together as though emitting a short scream of terror.

Dark streets, dark corners, for the moon knows no glory. To know where the light shall flare is as algebra to an infant mind. Their bodies are jetsam in the hours of darkness, like discarded nightmares, their ribcages as fish bones, their eyes as the illuminated eggs of spiders, housing the foetuses of an ideology no man thought could ever be incubated in the bosoms of their forefathers and foremothers.

Snarling gapes and nocturnal hearts, beating against the sinew around their chests, folding muscles meant for the front of horses. Enfiladed, slathered beasts, from one corner to the next, raise their moist snouts from the crusty street.

He looks bigger in the dark and as he opens his mouth I attempt to read the skin upon his teeth, belonging to my finger. But I know deep inside me that it is slain within a cylindrical bar, brown and housing stewing flies upon the footpath. I stand still with my feet solid and the ambience of threat shifts with the wind.

I step to the nature strip and reef a garden stake from the plush earth as though it is Excalibur. With my Hard Yakka hooves and my tensed hands, drawing forth my splintered sword, I prepare for battle. But he simply cowers beneath the flaming globe of the streetlight and it is not long before his wolfish friends evanesce into the concrete gloom, their claws clattering as knitting needles. I stand over his spine and his pupils swell as though they are a dark sea inside him. With tremulous hams I lower the stake as he prays for me to hide his fear, to reach up and turn out the light.