by Adam Thorpe
She sets off towards the next village, wheeling her bicycle. She passes either a squashed rabbit or hare, it’s hard to tell from the mess. Her grandfather, bringing in a hare from the lower fields: the sinewy meat. You must not run after two hares at the same time. The neat hedge becomes a scruffy hedge that runs all the way along this part of the lane, with a tangle of trees and saplings behind it. She desperately needs to pee. It must be the shock. She waits for an opening in the hedge – there are quite a few gaps; it is more like undergrowth than a hedge – and slips through, tugging her bicycle after her. She steps a little deeper into the grey and dingy wood and crouches down. There are tiny woodland flowers and beetles and ants. Beech trees. The leaves are still fresh and green; then the sun comes out and they turn translucent, like the emerald tiara of Princess Elisabeta. Visiting the Natural History Museum on S¸oseaua Kiseleff with her father and seeing it behind glass, and tată saying, ‘At least that lot had class. But if you think they’ll be coming back any day, you’re fighting the windmills with a broom.’
As she buttons herself up, she is brought up short by what in the first horrible flash she believes is a sheep torn apart by a wolf. Shreds and bunches of grey wool scattered next to a fallen and mouldering trunk: the brown skin, the crumpled flesh. It is a memory flash, instantaneous, from when their flock was attacked years ago and she was taken to see the result. ‘They bunched together and the dog growled,’ her father said, ‘and I knew there were wolves but you never see the evil bastards. They are there, watching you, but you never see them. That’s why I hate them.’ They tore at the stragglers from behind, and one poor animal was killed, along with her lamb. The lamb survived for an hour or so, in fact, but was dead by the time Cosmina went up to look with her mother, its tongue lolling out and blood in its nose, insides spilt like stew. She was five. ‘Why did God make wolves?’ she asked her mother. ‘That’s what we’ve all been asking ourselves from the oldest times,’ her mother replied. ‘But one day the lamb shall lie down with the wolf, God willing.’
It is only a harmless item of clothing: a brown coat, maybe once red, its arms spread wide. Her heart is still pounding as she stares down. It must be delayed shock from the accident. She distinctly pictured a sheep or a lamb. Just to make sure, she picks the coat up, holding it between her thumb and finger like something poisonous and giving it a shake to release the soggy leaves stuck to it. It is quite small, maybe a child’s coat, with a big furry hood that something has ripped into clumps with its claws. A dog or a badger. No wolves here! Not in gentle England.
As she lets it drop back onto the mush of dead leaves and nutlets, she feels an unaccountable depression come over her, as if she is standing in a very dark room without a candle. Maybe she feels as worthless in her soul as this discarded coat. It is litter, like the crisp packets and sweet wrappers scattered here and there along the verge. Condoms even. A child’s rusty pushchair. But it is worse than them: it looks as if it might rise up and point at her, with its empty hood pulled forward. What a horrible thought!
She hurries back through the gap in the hedge and quickens her step along the bright lane, keeping the nearest pedal away from her leg, feeling suddenly vulnerable.
In fact, she feels a little sick and faint.
She reaches the outlying houses. The odd person she passes, walking their dog, turns round and stares at her, frowning. A woman emerges from a semi-detached house with a box of plasters, some antiseptic and a sausage of cotton wool in plastic. The woman’s chubby middle-aged face beams.
‘It’s dangerous, bicycling is. All this traffic. You should wear a helmet, pet. Look at that ear.’ The woman points to the low brick building over the road. ‘That’s the surgery,’ she goes on. ‘You’d best go and use it. I’ve only got these small plasters. Where are you from?’
Cosmina wipes her neck with a big tuft of cotton wool. ‘Romania.’ The tuft turns bright red.
The woman’s face falls a little. ‘Oh. Don’t see many of them. Not yet. Well you’d best go and use it, any road.’
She waits an hour for the doctor between screaming infants. He tells her that her ear has saved her life. The upper ear was pierced right through by a sharp stone but took most of the force of the collision, like a rubber guard. Just behind that part of the ear is a spot that all assassins know about, which leads directly to the brain with no bone in the way. A thin stiletto blade can fit into it perfectly. The ear is an elaborate protection and a shock absorber. The village doctor, who seems to be Indian – Asian, at least – is knowledgeable and chatty behind his large pockmarked face, his moustache and his busy hands. People in England are always chatty and smiling when they aren’t drunk or in their cars – when something turns them into scowling monsters. He sprays a sort of medical glue over the perforation and cleans her up with wet wads of cotton wool that sting. ‘You should never use dry cotton wool on a wound,’ the doctor says, probably because, when she arrived, she was still clutching the reddened tuft. ‘We have to pick out all the threads with tweezers.’
‘Thank goodness I never did that,’ Cosmina says.
She asks to wash her hands and does so in the little sink in the back room off the surgery. There is a poster in there in English and what looks like Polish, showing a sad child with bags under its eyes. The Polish ends in an exclamation mark, but the English doesn’t. TVS, PHONES AND SCREENS SPOIL KIDS’ SLEEP. The T V in the little flat in Lincoln that she shares with Anca from Timis¸oara keeps having fleas, as her father would say: static interference. Spoil is a funny word to use in this context; she thought it could only be used with an object or the word life. Spoiling my tablecloth. Spoiling my life. Not to be muddled up with soil. Soiling the bed linen. She would always stupidly confuse spoil with spill in the early days.
She tries not to feel unlucky. It is too easy. On the way here she stood on the station platform where she had to change trains, somewhere dull between the mountains and Bucharesti, somewhere grassy and full of dust off the road, four hours still to go on the slow journey, and there was a big Roma family on the platform, filthy kids running about, the baby without a nappy, two dark men and two dark women, and she somehow knew they would be in her carriage, filling it up, shouting and laughing and eyeing her luggage and her necklace and maybe her throat, the baby shitting from its bare arse. She felt so nervous she began to sweat, feel giddy. Then the train came and the Roma family stayed on the platform, sitting on the concrete, teeth tearing at sausages. Perhaps they were squatting there; Gypsies squat anywhere. She felt stupid with her fatalism, her pessimism. The only other person in her carriage was a university teacher, retired: a little lady with a thick book and spectacles who told her all about Constantin Brâncoveanu – things about the great man and holy saint that she was never taught at school. It was a wonderful journey.
She suddenly feels homesick for her village, for the glowing light from the dewy meadow grass beyond their wooden fence, for the cow bells clinking afar and for the blue haze of the mountains and the long shadows of the trees sprawled up the steep slope running down to the farm. For the spruce trees stabbing up from the mountain crests. For the sweet incense of the air. For the orchard and the chickens and the pigs in their mudbaths, for the rattle and sway of the hay waggons and that sweet hot smell, for the neat ricks, for the only spot in the garden that picks up a mobile signal, so close to her mother’s big red roses that you get scratched. But Mother won’t dig up her roses for anybody! For Mircea the shepherd passing and waving to her from the track, his big boots splashed with mud and at their heels his vicious, drooling dog – vicious to anyone it doesn’t recognise, which is a rare occurrence in her village. And in the winter the deep snow, the ice, the frozen ways. Even the harsh winter she misses. But her nostalgia is mostly for harvest time, the ripeness of the hay piled onto the waggons, so high you can hardly believe it will not fall off.
She might have been killed on her bike and all her plans to make the world a better place would have been wiped out
in a second.
At least her English is improving fast. Soon she’ll have enough money to go to journalism classes, to make contacts, to push upwards. No one here could care less that she is already a graduate, except that it has allowed her into the country in the first place. She is useful, that’s all. A spare pair of hands in the care home. Night shifts very often. They give her a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, but she is treated as if she is slow and stupid. Clear, loud instructions. As if she is an inmate! Yet her professor reckoned she was doctorate material. She could have had Doctor before her name, like this real doctor. Not in medicine but in political science. Sometimes she does the job of a nurse, even. She knows how to take blood and give an injection. She learnt this on the farm, staying twice a year as she would, and when her grandpa was very ill and the snow would often cut the village off, she was taught emergency treatments by the doctor. But she is only paid as an assistant.
She dries her hands on a large paper towel, one of a pile that lies next to the sink, and throws it into the pedal bin, in which she glimpses bloodied plasters and a syringe. COUGHS AND DISEASES SPREAD DISEASES. An old, faded poster. Full of microbes itself, probably.
‘Feeling better? I wondered what had happened to you. Lucky it’s quiet today.’
‘Thank you, yes. I am sad because my phone was really squashed,’ she says, producing the evidence, careful not to cut her finger on the shattered screen.
‘Dearie me. Buy another one. Apple’s profit. Dreadful company.’
The doctor is from New Delhi. It is a group surgery. He is very chatty, although she has trouble understanding every sentence. He asks her about Romania and whether she is ever confronted here in England by racist types. There are problems in the area from these racist types, who complain that they never see the doctor they want, which always happens to be the two others, who are white women. He is scathing about these racist types. It was probably one of these types who hit you and then sped off, he says.
Cosmina shakes her head. She says a woman was very kind and came out of her house with plasters, antiseptic and cotton wool. She hasn’t used the cotton wool on the wound, she adds quickly. She is feeling woozy and wants to find a place to lie down. The doctor seems a bit fed up that she is disagreeing with him about the villagers. His room is clean and white, with lace curtains over a frosted window and various items of steel equipment. A Mac sits on his desk. The desk is an antique type, heavy and dark with carvings of dogs and boars under the lip. It looks out of place in here. A colour photograph of a child with its mother sits in a gilt plastic clip-frame on the desk, positioned so that both patient and doctor can see it. The mother is white, the child is half-and-half, a bit like a Roma kid but cleaner.
The doctor sits down and wipes his face with his hand, distorting it, and makes out a prescription. He’s applied iodine to the wound, and she must continue with it. The medical glue will dissolve in time. The ear will recover its shape. Cosmina has still not seen it – there was no mirror above the sink – but it is clearly a bit of a cabbage. If the ear doesn’t recover, then she’ll drape her thick dark hair over the mess to hide it.
As the doctor is making out the prescription, tapping it out on the computer, Cosmina feels a wave of euphoria. She feels as a soldier must who has been lightly wounded, visibly wounded, in a battle. She likes to think of herself as a warrior sometimes, fighting evil and injustice. An Amazon! She asks if there is anybody in the village who might straighten out her bicycle and the doctor makes a humming noise without taking his eyes off the screen. Cosmina wonders whether he heard her. She doesn’t want to push her luck. The doctor’s eyes rest on hers for a moment.
The weather turns a little warmer and the sun comes back from its hole. Everyone says how at last May is behaving properly, although the air is still cool. On Wednesday, working the early shift, Cosmina goes outside into the garden in her coat for her main break; the sun on her face is definitely pleasant. She is having her usual snack lunch of zacuscă spread and smoked yellow cheese, brushing the flakes of crust off her knees and thinking how lovely the fat red roses are, almost as good as Mother’s. They were only buds last week. She is breathing in their fragrance, even stronger than usual in the sun, when she hears a voice inside her head. It is intent on keeping something secret and is speaking in some kind of whispered code. The voice is not all that different from the noise of the little river sliding past in its lazy way beyond the lawn, but when she looks about her she sees that there is no one else nearby: the care home through the bushes looks as big and dead as it always does, its brick giving nothing away, just waiting, always waiting, as Catholics always are. Redemption. Salvation.
She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again, feeling an obscure sensation of fear and dread. Her ear is healing remarkably quickly – the black blobs like plum jam have almost disappeared – but she can’t help thinking of the perforation and the blade of a stiletto entering the vulnerable point of the skull. She suffered a light headache for two days but that in turn has faded. Her phone is unmendable, they said, and it wasn’t insured. She has bought a bottom-range mobile, pay-as-you-go, chunky and with giant letters, until she has worked enough hours. Or maybe she won’t bother to buy another iPhone. The doctor was right. Apple computers and exploitation. Child miners! She wants to live right. At least the bike has been straightened out. That wasn’t cheap either. Eighty-five quid! She can’t send any money home this month without starving. Sometimes when on nights after meals in the home she brings back untouched leftovers to the kitchen for her own consumption, but there are limits. Everyone here throws everything away, even before it’s finished. And this is the country, not the city. Yet it is worse than Bucharest.
She wonders if she was overconfident about her injury and is now being punished. She is only twenty-two and a part of her wishes her mother was right here, sitting next to her on this bench. There would still be snow in the mountains. She lays down her bread roll and stands up, brushing caraway seeds off her blue tunic. The little voice is coming in and out of the other sounds. She walks about a bit on the grass and bends down at a place where the water laps vigorously at a sandy spit formed by the seasonal action of the water on the crumbling bank. She dips her fingers into the very cold water, resting her chin on her knee. She feels fit, mentally and physically. She cycles a lot, though she was never into sports very much back home; going back each summer with her parents to help with the harvest on her grandparents’ farm was exercise enough. Picking raspberries without crushing the fruit! She would like to build her own log house in the meadow next to the farm and look after her grandparents in their extreme old age and then her parents when they retire and come back from the city and grow very old in turn. One day she will do that, when she has the money and has lost her ambition, but right now she has other dreams. When she first came up here she had no choice but to work under a gangmaster cutting broccoli and cabbage that stretched to the horizon, feeding them onto a conveyor belt. Imagine how much money is tied up in these huge fields!
She isn’t sure she likes all these agricultural advances, this economic efficiency. The food here tastes of nothing. The fields are monotonous. The locals don’t work in them; there are no horses pulling ploughs or waggons. Maybe she is just her great-grandmother reborn, grumbling about the new ways. An ignorant rustic under her university degree. Or maybe she is ahead of her time. The German couple who have bought the farmhouse next door to her grandparents claim to be the future, the only possible future. They are politically green, let rooms out to tourists, grow organic vegetables and fruit, have a composting toilet. They said to her grandmother, ‘We are learning from you!’ Cosmina translated, laughing with her grandmother. Up until then everyone had said to her grandmother, ‘Your peasant ways are finished. Thank God we’re in Europe now. We can advance.’ But her grandmother’s house has a proper flush toilet, installed just a few years ago almost before anyone else’s in the village. A proper shower, thanks to her father, workin
g so hard as a plumber in Bucharest. They are saving up for a dishwasher, even. This did not impress the Germans. What had impressed them was the dung heap in the yard, the hens coming into the kitchen, the filthy, mud-bespattered pigs at the bottom by the fence. ‘They’re fighting with the windmills,’ her grandmother said when they’d gone. And laughed, showing all her missing teeth.
Cosmina kneads the water as she imagines the rest of her life, picturing an empty place like a chair and no one coming to occupy it. A slight pressure is creeping around her head, like a migraine. She’s had two attacks of migraine in her life and they both laid her low for three days, lying in bed unable even to read, the curtains drawn and every shaft of light an agony.
The May sun dapples the river through the small overhanging trees that line the banks. It will be lovely here in the high summer. The water is too shallow to swim, or she might strip off when it gets hot and wade in. She laughs inwardly. No, not really! Never! Because opposite is a footpath, and then gardens, and then a group of modern houses before the fields begin. They also look as if they are waiting, with the dark eyes of their windows.
Blind windows that can see.
It is like the view from their apartment in Bucharest: yet more blind windows in the tower block opposite. Her parents remember when the heating was kept to ten degrees even through the harshest winter, the pipes frozen solid: government orders. ‘You were born the day after Christmas Day,’ she keeps being told, ‘but not any old Christmas Day. The day the devils were executed. You were our angel of hope, Cosmina.’ That is a big burden. A great weight, being an angel of hope. Her wings should be bigger. Not sparrow size but swan size. A heron’s wings.