by Bel Mooney
‘Yes, but there’d be more people, all put together, than soldiers …’
Ana shrugged. ‘It doesn’t work that way, Ion.’ Then she continued.
… Now the people of the land were burdened and unhappy. The barons kept a large portion of the local taxes and the king indulged himself in every kind of expensive luxury.
When Frederick had come to power the trusted administrators of Gustave, his father, soon found themselves without jobs and more and more the barons came to rule the land. It happened, at about the time of which we speak, that Baron Rudolph who commanded the Treasury died in a fatal hunting accident, but there were rumours of plots and counterplots flying about the court. The centre of all these rumours was Gottwald, who was ruthless and ambitious, and had for some years now coveted the job of Rudolph.
She read mechanically, enunciating each word carefully, so that even if Ion did not understand its precise meaning he could guess from the context. She had read this story to him before, but forgotten its details. Now, as she read of the increasing power of Gottwald, and the king’s plans for ‘necessities’ like royal hunting lodges, depression settled on her, as heavy as the potatoes and fried turnip in her stomach. The peasant leader Hansel called a secret meeting, saying there was only one way to achieve justice and harmony in the country.
When the meeting finally took place Hansel addressed them: ‘Friends, a time has come for united action, action by each and every one of us. We, the farming and peasant folk of the eastern provinces of Braganza, have for long enough been subjected to tyranny and oppression. Up to now we have been able to pay our taxes, at least in part, but now the wicked Baron Gottwald has seen fit to increase taxes and confiscate land. How can we pay more than we do already? Our womenfolk and children are almost starving; our cattle are thin and ill fed, and we haven’t the money to fertilize crops and the land is becoming barren. We will soon be unable to grow crops …
And so the people were strong and made a plan, training a peasant knight who would challenge the evil Baron, and humiliate him by a public defeat, ridding the land of his evil influence forever. And, my little Ion, this is truly the land of fairytale, much more so than in those little English stories I also read you, in which the rabbit wears a blue coat, and the hedgehog a pink apron, and the mice inhabit the doll’s house, and the only thing to be feared in the world is Mr McGregor the gardener. Have you learnt yet, in what they choose to call your history lessons, about Gheorghe Doja? In 1514, he led the peasants in an uprising against the nobility. They defeated him beneath the walls of Timişoara, where you were born. Then, in the main square, an iron throne and crown were heated red-hot for the brave ‘King of the Serfs’. After Doja was seated and crowned, his body was torn apart with pincers, and his charred corpse force-fed to his starving followers, who had been made to watch before themselves being put to death. And other bits of him were hung on the gates at Buda, Alba Iulia and Oradea. So – we have been warned. The rotting flesh still swings in our collective memory, stinking of futility.
Thus it was that a simple village boy became the holder of the most coveted position in the land; and because he had seen oppression and injustice and wickedness, he knew best how to avoid it. He was wise in the service of the people and he was much honoured and loved for he could always be relied upon to give just account and judge wisely. As he grew in stature, so Braganza grew wealthy and proud, and a tradition of peace flourished in the land.
Ion’s eyes were closing. Gently Ana took the toy from his hands and placed it on the floor by his bed. Then she kissed him on the forehead, and tucked the bedclothes up around his chin, adding, as an afterthought, his jacket.
The flat was cold. Ana knew there was very little gas left, and she was running out of paraffin too. So, although it was only nine o’clock, she quickly made up her own bed, and lay down thankfully. But sleep would not come, despite her exhaustion. So she lay for a long time in the darkness, listening to the faint crackle of the BBC World Service on her ancient radio.
Three
Michael Edwards woke and listened. Leaves rustled outside his window – but that was not it. He was sure he could hear someone moving around in his sitting-room.
He reached for the small, powerful black torch he always kept on his bedside table, and looked at his watch. Five-thirty: an hour and a half before Mariana came to make his breakfast and clean the flat. So … who? Michael felt a tightening; the flesh on his arms prickled. Silently he rose, pulled on his dressing-gown, and crept, on bare feet, to the door that led from his small bedroom into the sitting-room. There he stopped again, his ear to the wood. He heard a drawer being opened, and closed; the sound of papers rustling.
The wood was cold against his ear. For a few moments Michael stood there, undecided. In South America or Africa, he reflected, you would probably sneak back to bed, willing the intruder to take the whisky, and whatever else, but leave without hurting you. At home, or in France or Germany, he knew he would rush out, indignant at the invasion of his territory, and with the knowledge of a boxing blue to give him strength. Here – burglaries were unusual, street crime unheard of, snooping and informing the order of the day. So whoever was out there was unlikely to attack him; more likely he had been paid by Securitate to see what he could find. But at this hour? Knowing Michael would be in the flat?
It was curiosity, more than anything else, which impelled him to walk through the door, shining his torch around the room. A bulky figure, bent double to look in the sideboard cupboard, froze for an instant, before slowly straightening, and turning to look at him.
‘Mariana! What on earth are you doing?’ he exclaimed, in English.
The cleaning lady he had been employing for four weeks now closed her mouth, open with shock, and looked at him, a guilty, uncomprehending expression on her face, which shifted, even in those few seconds, into a look of bland servility.
‘Can you explain to me what you are doing here so early?’ he asked coldly, in Romanian.
‘Forgive me, sir, I didn’t mean to wake you. My child is ill, and so I came to work early so that I can get back to look after her when my husband leaves for work.’
Michael knew this was a lie. ‘Why are you looking in that cupboard? And I heard you looking in drawers.’ He could see fear in her eyes, but still the expression did not shift.
She shook her head. ‘With respect, sir, I was only tidying the room. And I opened the cupboard door to put away this glass – here.’
She took her hand from behind her back and held out one of his whisky glasses.
‘In the dark? And so quietly?’
‘We are used to the dark. And as I said, I did not want to wake you.’
They stood looking at each other for a few seconds more; then, slowly and deliberately, the woman bent and put the glass in the cupboard, turning back to him again with that shuttered face. ‘Shall I go now, sir? Or may I go and clean the kitchen?’
Furious that he should feel so compromised, so inept, Michael nodded. ‘Well, now you are here, you can do your work. But don’t come again at this time, do you understand?’
Wide awake, seething with frustration, Michael nevertheless retreated to his bed, and lay, his arms folded behind his head, as grey light slowly filled the window. The incident angered him, and it perplexed him too.
The woman, Mariana Vlada, had turned up one morning four weeks ago, instead of the elderly cleaning lady he had employed when he moved in, just after being posted to Bucharest. The story was that she was the other woman’s cousin, that Alis had hurt her back and would not be returning, and that she, Mariana, would take her place and work well for him. ‘I am younger,’ she had added, folding well-muscled arms.
Michael had looked dubiously at the solid, plump woman of indeterminable age, who stood at his door. It was hard to find someone trustworthy to clean, all the diplomatic staff knew that. Most of them added an irresistible perk, like a carton of Kent once a month, to the meagre wage in local currency. It ensu
red constancy, if not loyalty.
Suspicious, irritated that this stranger was foisting herself on him, yet aware of the basket of dirty laundry that stood in his bedroom, Michael had nodded, and shown the woman around his small first-floor apartment. And for four weeks now she had worked hard, leaving the flat clean, and producing laundry that was far more crisply ironed than that of her predecessor. He had no reason to complain – until now.
Perhaps her story was true. It was odd and lame-sounding, but if it was false, why would she take the risk of coming here when he was certain to be in the flat? Therefore, it must be true. And yet all his training told him otherwise. Perhaps she had come in search of his briefcase, which he generally left in the sitting-room until he went to work, and which she saw every day in its normal place between the sideboard and the door into the hall. Last night, though, he had taken it into the bedroom, because he could not sleep and had decided, late, to work through some papers. There was nothing of great secrecy, even of interest, in his folders. And yet Securitate would reward the most innocuous information about a foreign power.
He could hear her moving about again. I should get rid of her, he thought; on the other hand, if I keep her on the work gets done, and in any case, I never bring home any significant documents. So she can snoop around to her heart’s content, and frustrate them by finding nothing.
He thought of Ana Popescu and immediately pragmatic triumph was dissipated, to be replaced by simple lowness of spirits. He knew as little about Ana as he did about this woman who cleaned his apartment. If ever he asked her a personal question, she swiftly turned it aside; what once he took for shyness he now knew to be skill.
The other day, for example, they had been sitting alone in the office, with little work to do. Ana was reading a book from the British Council Library, across the courtyard. It was The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy.
‘Tell me – when you read about England, do you find it hard to imagine?’ he asked.
She smiled and looked up. ‘Not when it is the England of a different time, like this. I think about our Romanian countryside, and the life people have always led, and I think that perhaps it is not very different. It is when I see the magazines, and see how people live today … then it seems like another planet.’
Michael nodded, pleased that she was talking to him. ‘Yes, but still, I always think that the way people feel doesn’t change very much, no matter how they actually live. In the nineteenth centry, or the twentieth century, in Britain or in Romania … the private lives of men and women are maybe not so different. You know – what they actually want.’
Ana pushed back the dark hair that today hung loose around her face, the way it looked best. Michael noticed how red her hands were, in contrast to the paleness of her face. ‘Are you saying that we have things in common in our lives, in England and in Romania?’ she asked. ‘Ah well, I have to tell you that is something you would like to be true. I think that you would be disappointed by what we want. You can think about peace and love, and good things like that; but all the time we are thinking about bread and milk and whether there will be any meat at all this week. Our thoughts are very low, you see.’
Her smile was wide and beautiful, mocking him. Michael flushed, and made an irritable motion with his hand. ‘Yes, yes, I know all that – we all know that. But I’m not talking about everyday life. I’m talking about human emotions. You know, you studied literature – can you tell me there’s much difference between the emotions in our literature, and in, say, Mihai Eminescu? Read Keats, then read Luceafărul. In both cases it’s high romance. And what I’m talking about is, for instance, the way men and women love each other. Is that so different?’ Colour flooded his cheeks, and he suddenly felt like a boy again, during holidays from his single-sex school, meeting his sister’s friends.
Ana shrugged slightly. ‘Oh, I am afraid I cannot tell you about such matters,’ she said shortly, her English becoming slightly more stilted, as it always did when she was embarrassed. Then she bent her head back to the book, so that the hair fell like a curtain, concealing her from him.
Maybe she had supposed he was flirting with her, Michael thought, as the maddening back-and-forth rasp of Mariana’s stiff broom reached his bedroom door. Who knows? – perhaps he was.
He closed his eyes, the more easily to summon up the image of this woman who had intruded into his thoughts, as annoyingly (and disturbingly) as Mariana Vlada had intruded into his morning. Damn this country… So – Ana Popescu: not tall, almost petite, and very slim, with slender legs which were tanned in the summer. Pale olivey skin, dark hair and eyes, a wide mouth … what else? A smile, rarely given, which lit her face, transforming it into something beautiful and serene. The rest of the time … that infuriating opacity, which he had begun to find almost insulting. He had always treated her as a human being, mindful as he was of Fitzmaurice’s warning. She had no right not to return the compliment.
There was silence from the sitting room. What was that woman doing now? Cursing, Michael hauled himself from bed for the second time, and dressed quickly – giving thanks, as he had many times, that an English education at a spartan boys’ school and draughty medieval Oxford College had been an excellent preparation for diplomatic service in Eastern Europe.
As he tied his shoelaces, Ana Popescu troubled him again. He recalled the time he had walked across to the library, glad of the space when a British journalist in search of a travel feature on ‘the real Romania’ had failed to keep her appointment. On the telephone Michael had told her that she should enter the country as a tourist and visit the Maramureş and Moldavia; that if she wanted her visit to be ‘official’ she would be accompanied everywhere by a grim representative of ONT, who would ensure that the food and service she received would be totally unrepresentative. ‘It depends whether you want to suffer for your art,’ he had said, unable to avoid cynicism. The magazine had telexed to fix a meeting.
But she did not arrive, and Michael realized it was a measure of how much living here had already wearied him, that his principal reaction was not irritation but relief. To take a stranger through the complexities, to see eyes widen in naive disbelief… oh God, what was the point? Understanding? It was about as likely as the resignation of Nicolae Ceauşescu.
The simple little cabin that housed the British Council Library was a small haven of civilization in Bucharest. Michael loved it, feeling, whenever he pushed open the door, that he was home again. Some mornings it was full, usually with Romanian staff flicking through British magazines, or bolder local visitors who had obtained a ticket and risked official disapproval by setting foot within the shrine to foreign propaganda. Today the room was almost empty.
Ana did not see him. She stood in a corner, head bent in concentration, turning the pages of a large book. It was a collection of colour photographs of life in Britain. On the back jacket he could see a bizarre triangular composition of a ballroom dancing team, the women in green puffy dresses. Michael smiled.
He approached her softly. She remained engrossed and he was overwhelmed with the urge to cry ‘Boo!’ in her ear, to see her composure slip. Instead he simply said, ‘It’s not all like that at home, you know.’
Ana hurriedly closed the book, replacing it on the shelves as if caught doing something forbidden. Taken aback, Michael laughed. ‘Hey, you’re allowed to read it, you know. It’s all right! Let me see …’
He pulled out the book, called simply Britons, and turned over the large colour pages quickly, smiling at the group images: the portraits of his countrymen which had so absorbed this Romanian woman, hundreds of miles away. Debutantes, uniformed nannies, a women’s bowls club, smiling nuns, a black male voice choir, young cricketers, drinkers in a Soho club, a brass band and so on … for the most part photographed under a blue sky. With Michael’s amusement came a pang of acute homesickness: it was all so self-confident, so carefree and (despite the stereotypes), in an important way, so true. Then he stopped at a dramatic picture of miner
s in orange work clothes beneath the black pithead gear, under a grey sky. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘that proves it’s not all dressing up and sunshine. That could almost be in Romania, couldn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think even coal dust, even dirt in Britain, is different.’
Ana’s face was impassive but Michael thought he detected hostility in her voice. Was it because he sounded patronizing? Or simply that she had been caught out somehow?
‘I should be in my office,’ she said, bowing her head apologetically.
From being a small boy, Michael now felt transformed into a schoolmaster, and resented it. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ he said shortly, and went to turn away in exasperation. Then a book caught his eye, in a series on the counties. He pulled it from the shelf and flicked through the pages. ‘This is where I was brought up,’ he said, holding it for her to see.
In spite of herself, wanting to leave but drawn to the book, she supported it with one hand, bending her head over the black and white photographs. ‘It looks very beautiful,’ she said in a whisper, a sudden intensity in her voice.
Just then Michael heard his name called, and moved away to talk to a colleague by the television set. They discussed what film would be shown that week. When he turned back, a few minutes later, there was no sign of Ana. He had not even observed her slip past. So he chose a book for himself, and returned to work. But later that afternoon he was touched to notice the book about the county of Buckinghamshire, concealed by some papers on Ana’s desk.
Mariana Vlada had gone. To his slight shame, Michael realized that he had been skulking in his own bedroom, unwilling to confront her again. He sighed. He would have to take advice about what to do about her. The married staff were lucky; at least they did not have to confront these local problems alone.
‘The trouble with you, Michael, is you’re too independent,’ his mother used to say, echoed by girlfriends since, who usually added, ‘and too ambitious.’ It was impossible to explain to them, any of them, that you could willingly embrace isolation, even loneliness, in preference to the utter predictability of love. That knowledge was too easy for him, like success at school, at university, in the Foreign Office. You could write the story in advance; Michael found he preferred to be alone. But now he looked around his small apartment, and saw it as chilly and empty.