Lost Footsteps

by Bel Mooney

  Stelian shakes his head impatiently. ‘No – all of us. And it’ll get worse, I know it’ll get worse. So we have to ask ourselves what to do. We’ve got to! I lose sleep, child, wondering what I can possibly do. Strength, we need strength … all of us.’

  Suddenly he hits the steering wheel with outstretched palm, making it shake, and Ana sees something strange and frightening: tears in her father’s eyes. She stares at him, puzzled, not knowing what he means or what she should say. Yet he is waiting – as if into the gulf between them (where once a woman stood: his wife, her mother) words have fallen, to be sucked into the vacuum, and she cannot catch them to assemble them in any sentence that might give him the comfort he needs

  After that they do not talk at all. Some hours later they arrive in Timişoara, and drive up the Boulevard Eroilor. Aunt Liliana, Stelian’s sister, and her husband Florin, a veterinarian, are welcoming. There is even roast chicken, which makes Ana glad she has come. After smoking a few cigarettes with Florin, Stelian announces that he must leave. Liliana is shocked; she had assumed he would stay the night. But no, he insists that he has business to do, and must go. So he kisses Ana on the cheek, telling her to be good for her aunt and uncle, and that he will come for her in a couple of weeks. ‘I’ll telephone you, Lili,’ he says, and they watch from the window as his ancient Dacia grumbles off into the night.

  But Stelian Popescu does not telephone, nor does he write. After two months his sister stops wondering, and sheds no more tears, and the brother-in-law’s anger has almost worn out. Both of them wonder at the composure of the girl who, after that morning when she announced, ‘I don’t think Tată is ever coming back to get me,’ never again brings up her father’s name in conversation, and is silent when they do.

  Michael Edwards liked the Cişmigiu Gardens. When weekends dragged (as they usually did, although he usually took work home to fill the time) he liked to stride in Herastratu Park in the north of the city, sometimes visiting the Village Museum for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. He found it pleasing and almost surreal to wander around those wooden houses, each in its patch of land – as if the map of Romania had been folded and cross-folded small, the architecture of all its regions artificially transplanted, ancient enmities forgotten.

  Cişmigiu was different: small and compact, bisected by paths lined with rows of slatted chairs, it reminded him of any city park in Britain – its invitation to relaxation all the more seductive for the proximity of buildings all around.

  On this Saturday in early April the sun was warm. Michael walked in the tiny park, thinking (as he often did, when the day was fine and he was in a good mood) of how sometimes the universalities could transcend all differences. He liked that. Maybe it kept guilt at bay. A small boy pushed a small wooden cart on the grass while his mother talked to a friend. Another carefully spooned soil into a plastic beaker, then tipped it out, making a series of little conical piles. His mother sat, head thrown back, sun on her face. By the green, Ottoman-style kiosk where you could buy ice-cream, a group of old women sat deep in conversation, all wearing headscarves, thick stockings and bobby socks, despite the warmth of the day. A man fanned himself with a newspaper. Beside the small lake, where boats for hire were lined up (their uniform blue-grey paint and snub-nosed shape reminding Michael of a row of patient sharks), a young couple walked so entwined together that balance was difficult, stopping now and then to kiss. By the blue weighing machine a line of women stood, waiting to weigh their children, who screamed and ran about with the pointless random eagerness of children everywhere.

  Michael revelled in his own wistfulness. It wasn’t just the lovers, although watching people wrapped in a shared blanket of passion always made him restless. It was the sense that all this was going on despite the rules of the system, and always would – for a few moments the lives of these people mirroring others in Manchester, or Seattle, or Bonn, or Lyon, or Amsterdam.

  He heard the sound of laughter, and turned. Under the trees, about a hundred yards away, a woman was about to kick a ball. She missed, clumsily, and laughed again. A young boy ran past her, showing his skill, and shouting to her all the time, ‘This is how you do it, Mama! Just watch me!’

  It was a minute or two before Michael recognized Ana Popescu. Wearing a checked shirt and beige slacks, loose hair flying about her face as she ran after the ball, she looked young, sporty and lighthearted, as he had never seen her.

  ‘Next year is the World Cup, Mama…’ Ion called, as he backed for a kick.

  ‘Well, they must put you in the team, Ionica,’ Ana laughed, as he rushed forward and sent the ball into the air.

  But the angle of his kick was wrong, and instead of heading for Ana, the football spun in the air, then rolled across the grass at speed, towards where Michael was standing. Instinctively he moved forward, caught the ball on his instep, hooked it into the air, and headed it skilfully back to the boy, who stood smiling in a patch of sunlight. Then he walked across the grass towards them.

  Ana had called ‘Thank you’ in Romanian. When she saw the new player was Michael she looked confused, and murmured, ‘Oh, it’s you – thank you’ in English.

  They stood for a few seconds, awkwardly, before Ion came trotting across the grass towards them. Michael knew Ana had a child, but had never seen him. Now, as she reached out, and put her arm around Ion’s shoulders, turning him for the introduction, he saw the likeness between them. He also noticed how Ana’s back straightened with pride as her son held out his hand in a dignified, old-fashioned way and said, in perfect English, ‘I am happy to meet you, Mr Edwards.’

  ‘Well, don’t you speak good English, Ion – do you learn it at school?’

  ‘We learn English in school, yes, but my mother has taught me the most,’ the boy replied, his formal enunciation only adding to his charm.

  ‘Can I play football with you?’ Michael asked.

  But Ana was shuffling her feet. ‘No!’ she broke in hastily. ‘I think we should go home now.’

  ‘But Mama,’ Ion said quickly in Romanian, ‘you said we had lots of time. You even said you’d see if you could afford to take us on the lake, in a boat. You said …’

  ‘Never mind what I said, Ion,’ she said, her voice not angry, but almost pleading, as she avoided Michael’s eyes.

  He knew what was in her mind, but felt determined, unable to bear the boy’s confused disappointment. ‘Well, shall I take you for a row … take you on a boat, Ion?’ he said with a smile, crouching down and speaking the child’s language.

  ’Oh please, Mama, please let me,’ he gabbled with excitement.

  ‘You don’t have to come. You can walk away a little while if you’re afraid of being seen,’ Michael said to her, speaking English rapidly in a low voice.

  Ion was jumping up and down, capering on the spot. Ana looked down at him helplessly, then at Michael, then over to where the small lake sparkled between the trees. People were rowing; there was the sound of voices calling one to another, the splash of oars.

  He saw her resistance crumble. She gave in with a shrug, and Ion whooped. Ana picked up the ball, and they walked in silence to the blue kiosk, where Michael stood in a line to pay.

  ‘I won’t come,’ Ana said.

  ‘Please come, Mama,’ Ion begged, tucking his arm through hers and rubbing against her like a small cat.

  ‘I understand, Ana,’ Michael murmured, noticing how her body bent towards her son, ‘but you know, it isn’t as if I am a stranger, a tourist. You work for me, for God’s sake! I don’t see how it can possibly cause any trouble for you …’

  The struggle was evident on her face. In that fraction of a second Michael read each part of it, and he guessed it was rebelliousness, as much as love for the child who hung pleadingly on her arm, which made her fling back her hair and say, ‘Yes.’

  The boat was leaky; a couple of inches of water sloshed around the bottom as they pushed off. Ion giggled, ‘I’m glad I’m a good swimmer, Mama!’

  �
�But what about me? You’ll have to rescue me.’

  ‘No, he’ll rescue you!’ he cried, pointing at Michael, who dipped the oars skilfully, making no splash.

  ‘Can’t you swim, Ana?’ he asked.

  ‘A little bit. But to tell you the truth, I’m afraid of water, I don’t know why.’

  Ion was trailing his hand over the side of the boat, watching the long, sparkling furrow fan out behind them. Ana reached out an arm to hold him. Fifteen or twenty yards from the shore she relaxed and sighed, ‘This is lovely.’

  The sun was warm. Michael pushed up the sleeves of his sweater, mesmerized by the slight lapping of the water against the side of the boat, the sound of other voices all around them which had receded, as if in a dream, and above all by the tableau before him: the mother and child who sat close together on the wooden seat, heads bending together as one of them pointed out a bird, or a branch floating on the water, faces suffused with delight simply because they were out on the lake. There was something poignant about their pleasure, Michael thought – then gave himself a mental kick. It was his biggest fault: always to romanticize. Why not stick with the fact that she was probably looking so happy because he had paid for the boat?

  ‘I haven’t been out in a boat for years,’ Ana said, ‘not since – well – I must have been nine. We went for a holiday to Mamaia. There’s a big lake, and you can hire boats. My father took us out – my mother and I.’

  ‘Was your Mama alive then?’ asked Ion.

  Ana smiled. ‘Yes, silly, or how else could we have gone out on the lake? My father tried to teach her to row. We laughed a lot, I remember.’

  Ion looked up at Michael and, switching to English, asked, ‘Will you teach me to row?’

  ‘Of course, come here.’

  The boat rocked as the child rose, turned, and sat down beside Michael. ‘You take this oar, and I’ll do the other one, like … this. OK?’

  ‘Look, Mama. I can row!’ Ion called, in a high clear voice.

  Now the tableau was reversed. Ana watched as Michael wielded one oar, his other arm around Ion’s shoulders, lightly holding his small hand on the other oar too. She thought how different they were, the sturdy Englishman with his healthy, almost ruddy complexion, tortoiseshell glasses and curly light brown hair, and her delicate, pale son. Blue eyes and brown eyes looked back at her, as the boat started to move in a circle. Ana laughed aloud.

  Is this what it is like, for normal people – the kind Michael Edwards is? A man, a woman and a child in a boat, just as once I remember, with the tall shapes of hotels blocking out the view of the sea. Did we think we were normal, then?

  ’Oh Stelian,’ she laughed, ‘we’re going round in circles! I can’t row, I can’t!’ And had it already begun – the disease consuming her, just as frustration and bitterness was eating away at him? On the beach, when I was digging a channel for the water to flood, making my own small lake for the wooden boat he made me for Christmas, they argued. He talked about the Russians, and the hotels built for them; she said he was obsessed, and why couldn’t he be like other people, and accept things? Yes, like pigs accept the dirt, he said, and walked away. She cried then, I saw her. And the sea flowed in, but my boat would not float properly, falling on its side.

  ‘Mama, you look sad! What are you thinking?’

  ‘Nothing, dragă. And I’m not sad, I’m very happy.’ As Ana smiled reassuringly at Ion once more, Michael felt as if he had been given a great gift, unexpectedly. And yet he could do nothing with it, it would fit no corner of his life.

  More and more water sloshed around their feet. Ana grimaced, and raised her legs to one side, sitting uncomfortably.

  ‘Blasted boat,’ Michael muttered.

  ‘A Romanian boat,’ she said, by way of explanation, then sighed. ‘Maybe we should go back.’

  Despite Ion’s protestations they rowed to the shore, Michael pulling strongly, even though Ion still believed himself to be in control.

  ‘We must go home, now,’ said Ana, when the three of them were standing, uncertainly, on the path.

  ‘But Mama! …’

  ‘Hush, Ion!’

  ‘Can I give you a lift home?’ Michael asked, not wanting his solitude to return.

  Ana shook her head. ‘That is very kind of you, but no. I don’t think so. Thank you,’ she said stiffly, as if he were a stranger. All the time her eyes were darting here and there, a creature at bay, looking for the smallest path of escape. ‘Come along, Ion, we must hurry. Goodbye, and thank you very much. Say thank you, Ion. Now let’s go …’

  The boy looked crestfallen, but allowed her to grasp his arm and lead him away. Michael watched them as they hurried along the path away from him, like people late for a train.

  Disappointed, he still felt things had changed. Michael Edwards was used to knowing things, and he had glimpsed something which pleased him. Two heads bent together, framed in the light off the water; now, in the distance, a consoling arm pulling the child close in against her, so that they walked with the ungainly stride of lovers.

  At least he had found an answer to his question about Ana. And he was unsettled by his own urge to protect her, as if sensing the key, meeting the boy, was a precious secret with which no one should be trusted; not even, perhaps, himself.

  Five

  The Socialist Republic of Romania is in southeast Europe; it is bounded by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the Black Sea. Its total area is 237,500 square kilometres and its total population 22,687,373 (1 January 1985), some 48 per cent of which is urban. There are 22 ethnic minorities in Romania (officially referred to as ‘cohabiting nationalities’), the largest of these being the Hungarian …

  ‘Yes, and they all hate each other,’ murmured Michael Edwards, skimming the rest of the page, then turning over.

  Since the Second World War Romania’s economy, formerly based on agriculture, has been extensively modernized. It is now predominantly industrial (the industrial sector accounts for over 60 per cent of the national income) the emphasis being on heavy industry: petroleum and natural gas, mining, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, chemicals and timber processing. The standard of living, however, remains one of the lowest in Eastern Europe.

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Michael. He turned the pages of the report, reading quickly, taking in general facts he already knew, and details he did not. Then he sighed and threw the red document on his desk. It fell open at the beginning once more, at the paragraph he had marked:

  This report documents the persistent pattern of human rights abuse in Romania in the 1980s, a period in which the authorities have imprisoned their critics and jailed hundreds of other men and women for wanting to exercise their rights to leave the country. Some prisoners of conscience have been tortured or beaten and jailed for years after unfair trials, while other critics of the government have been put under house arrest, have lost their jobs and then been charged with ‘parasitism’, or have been attacked in the street by thugs believed to be acting for the authorities. Some of the organization’s concerns are illustrated by the following cases:

  * 56-year-old building worker makes a speech and distributes leaflets criticizing President Ceauşescu – he is sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘propaganda against the socialist state’ …

  * A teacher complains to a foreign radio station that he was unfairly dismissed from his job – he later dies in prison while serving an eight-year sentence for ‘disparaging the central organs of the party and the state’ …

  * A father is denied permission to take his epileptic seven-year-old son abroad for medical treatment – and receives an eight-month jail sentence for trying to do so illegally …

  And so it went on, case after case investigated by Amnesty International. In his student days, believing in the universal, inalienable right to justice and freedom, Michael would have been enraged. Now it shamed him that his response was mere weariness. It went on all the time, he knew that – in Poland, Cz
echoslovakia, Russia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, as well as bloody Romania. If he (who had travelled through most of those countries and knew his ‘patch’, surprised no longer by the cruelties of the system) shut his eyes and contemplated violations of human rights in Africa and in South America, and thought of all the casuistries of diplomacy … then the only human response was to want to crawl into bed and take an overdose of sleeping pills.

  Therefore we can’t afford to be ‘human’, he said to himself. The price is too high, although a few will pay it. (A 50-year-old electrician drove through the centre of Bucharest, displaying a picture of the President with the caption, ‘We don’t want you, hangman’. What glorious madness … gaining him ten years inside. What does he think now? Is he glad he made that gesture?) For the rest … well, who am I to criticize those for whom ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘conscience’ are words as remote and meaningless as texts in Cyrillic script? I don’t know anyone for whom a great idea will weigh more heavily in the scales than the smallest personal comfort, achieved as that might be, in the teeth of the storm.

  And perhaps, in not knowing, I am diminished …

  Such thoughts were a nuisance. There was no point; all you could do was watch and offer up regular prayers of thanks that you had escaped the misfortune of being born a Romanian, or a Russian. Or a Pole.

  Ana was typing when he came in. She was pleased. In her shopping bag were good English tea, instant coffee, sugar, biscuits and toilet soap – the supplies which local staff were allowed to buy from the Embassy Commissariat, and one of the ‘perks’ (although the British staff did not like the term) which made working there so desirable.

  When he had shown her the papers he wanted her to translate, Michael seated himself on the edge of her desk. She looked up, embarrassed.

  ‘How’s Ion?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s very well, thank you – except for his cough. I thought it would go away when spring came.’

  ‘I hope being on the lake didn’t make it worse?’