Lost Footsteps

by Bel Mooney

  Half-understanding and half-confused, but deeply moved, the older boy put his souvenir back into his jacket pocket, and indicated that Ion should do the same with his. Then he shyly replaced his arm around Ion’s shoulders. Glancing up, feeling gratitude for this small gesture of warmth despite his bewilderment and grief, Ion saw that although he made no sound, Franklin’s face was also wet. Calmed by this mute empathy he rubbed his fists across his eyes, fiercely, making a mental vow that he would not let Mama down – or Radu, who might walk into the room any moment – by crying again. He did not know it, but the older boy was making a similar promise to himself, bolstered by his responsibility to be brave in front of this little boy who was clearly in the same situation as himself.

  And so the two of them sat perfectly still – until at last, not long afterwards, the door opened, and Helga walked in, carrying a tray and accompanied by two policemen as well as a Tamil interpreter.

  Fourteen

  With five men, three women, and four small children from Somalia, and two young men from Eritrea, Radu was, after a long time, taken by bus to a former hotel, just off the autobahn, now used as a reception centre for refugees. Crowded with tense people from all over the world, the place was even drearier and more depressing than it had been when used for its proper purpose. Exhausted now, confused, and thinking all the time of Doina, Radu asked once if he could see the child who had arrived with him, yet who – he was at pains to emphasize – was not actually with him. He received no reply.

  The Border Police were tired too. On that day alone a total of thirty-five adult refugees had arrived at Frankfurt airport, together with five children travelling with relatives and two unaccompanied minors, as the statistics described them. One of the Somali women had become hysterical, and was unable to stop the endless wailing of her eighteen-month-old baby. The noise was wearing, and tore at the nerve-endings of policeman and refugee alike. So Radu’s queries were pushed aside, nor did he force them. Dazed now by the reality of what he had achieved, and exultant deep within, despite his exhaustion, he believed that somehow everything would be made all right by the beneficent power of the country he had always wanted to reach.

  An hour before he made his short journey, Ion and Franklin made a longer one, to a village just outside Frankfurt, where the Children’s Home was situated. A plump woman drove the minibus; Ion and Franklin sat on opposite sides, just behind her, each twisting this way and that to peer from the windows at the extraordinary sights that flashed by. It was dusk now; car headlights dazzled them, then passed. Windows were brightly lit: apartment blocks, offices, houses, shops – all offered fleeting glimpses of a world hitherto unknown. There was no time to absorb these sights: fragments of a culture whirled out of gloom to assault the senses of those who watched, mesmerized, awestruck.

  At one point the Tamil teenager met Ion’s eyes, and, afraid the child had seen the terror in his own, grinned in an attempt at bravado. Because he could not think of what to say, or do, he pointed to himself and said, ‘Franklin.’ Ion nodded gravely. It was important to cling to these things.

  The mansion which housed the children’s home had once been the weekend retreat of a great family, who made their fortune from champagne, and entertained their guests in graceful rooms whose lofty proportions expressed the conviction of privilege. Now those rooms, empty and echoing, sparsely furnished with the cheapest furniture, dwarfed the frightened, isolated children whose parents had sent them – from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Kurdistan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka – to safety in the West. In the spacious hall, beneath ornate cornices now chipped by flying footballs, the youth workers had hung a large map of the world, decorated with little red markers, so that the children could see where they had come from. When Ion and Franklin arrived a little cluster of children stood beneath this map, attempting to communicate in their different languages, one of them making ‘boom, boom’ noises as his fingers formed a gun, and he tried to tell the boy next to him how his village had been raided.

  As Franklin stood nervously to one side, Ion beside him plucking his sleeve and gazing with astonished eyes at the scene, the boy enacting the fight turned, noticed Franklin, and grinned. He and another Sri Lankan child approached the newcomers, and immediately engaged Franklin in excited conversation in his own language, asking him his name, the name of his family and village, when he had left their country, and countless other questions he could barely keep pace with. Yet he relaxed visibly. These were friends, he knew that. He was approached the next instant by a Tamil youth worker who joined their conversation, and made him welcome, so Franklin moved a pace or two away from Ion who stood dazed and alone. Dirty and smelly, with the jacket still tied around his waist even though he was cold, he wrapped his little bag to his chest with both arms – as if by the fierceness of that embrace he could create a magic circle that would keep his terrible loneliness at bay.

  Then a woman was bending down beside him – one who reminded him of Helga at the airport. She wore jeans with a split in one knee, an over-sized sweatshirt and she carried a notebook.

  ‘You are Ion?’ she asked, in slow English.

  He nodded.

  ‘Hallo, Ion – and welcome. My name is Irma. Can you say that, Ion?’

  He nodded, but made no attempt.

  ‘And you are from Romania?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘We haven’t had a child from Romania here before, Ion – do you understand?’

  He nodded, somewhat dubiously.

  ‘Do you want to see where Romania is on the map?’

  He nodded.

  She took his hand. The children cleared a space from them, staring curiously at Ion, so that he hung his head with shame. ‘Look!’ said the young woman, pointing at the map with a long piece of garden cane, tapping an area that was coloured pink. ‘That is Romania – your country.’ He stared. There were some little red markers beneath the area she now traced around with the cane, in Bulgaria and Turkey, and some to the north in what he knew to be Poland. But there were none in Romania. Romania was empty; the woman’s cane tapped kindly against nothing.

  Ion blinked hard, staring up at the map. All its colours seemed to merge, swimming down at him, entering his eyes. He shook his head slightly, like a dog tossing water from its fur, and began to breathe deeply. The colours wove patterns in his head, bright and dazzling like the rugs they saw in the folk museum, the rugs which hang in churches in Transylvania and the Maramureş. Mama loved those colours, she told him … He blinked again, and all the patterns whirled in a dance, round and round like the hora.

  In a soft monotone, oblivious to the woman who looked down at him smiling and still holding her cane against the map, he stared straight ahead and began to intone the liturgy: ‘Com-rade Nic-ol-lae Ceau-şes-cu is the fath-er of all the child-ren, and Com-rade Elena Ceau-şes-cu is the mother of all the children, so all the children love them, because they are their parents …’ The whispering children fell silent, and the cane clattered to the ground as Irma caught him.

  When he awoke, lying on a low, battered sofa, Ion could hear voices all around him, talking quietly in German. He was aware of a hand holding his, and squinted sideways down his chest so that he could see it. It was a brown hand, against which his own looked white and tiny. Seeing his eyes open, Franklin made an inarticulate sound of satisfaction, and grinned broadly, gripping Ion’s hand all the tighter.

  Then someone spoke to him in Romanian, a woman of about thirty, with red hair that swung about her face as she knelt close beside him.

  ‘Hallo, Ion, I’ve come to help you settle here. My name’s Doretta, and I work in the city. They called me, you see. Now, will you let me help you?’

  He nodded, but said, ‘I won’t tell them about Mama. She told me not to.’

  ‘Ion, they have to know who you are! No one will tell. It won’t hurt your mother, believe me.’

  Stubbornly, he shook his head. She rose, and went to whisper in German to the other people in t
he room: Irma, the Tamil youth worker, who was called Pushpa, and a slightly older man with glasses, who looked rather like one of the teachers at Ion’s school: perpetually anxious. This was Bernhardt Mannheim, the senior youth worker in charge of the Home. He sighed heavily when Doretta had finished, but the look he gave was full of sympathy.

  While they were talking Franklin helped Ion into a sitting position. Doretta returned to crouch by him once more. ‘Tell me what happened to you, Ion – and just call your mother by her first name so we know that. Please, Ion,’ she asked.

  He was silent for a few seconds, and then, stammering slightly as he gathered speed, poured out the story, starting from the night Radu visited, and then the Securitate man … He knew that was when it all began, he told her, because his mother was different after that. She was worried all the time. Then he told her the rest, hesitating before refusing to name Radu and Doina either. Doretta translated everything into German, as Irma took notes; then she asked, ‘Why do you not tell your friend’s name? The one who helped you escape?’

  Ion shook his head. One part of him wanted to cry out for Ana, and for Radu – who was, after all, much nearer. But the natural childish fear of ‘them’, and of getting people into trouble, was magnified a hundredfold in this child from Romania, brought up in that silent terror since his first breath. Never, ever tell people things – wasn’t that what his mother had said to him, again and again? In any case, he believed with all his heart that Radu would be the one to find him. And so, although if he had cried and begged them to summon Radu Kessler, the youth workers would certainly have attempted to bypass the bureaucracy, Ion kept silent. Slowly, imperceptibly, something was beginning to close off inside him – that core of innocence, of childhood, which was given shape by the syllables of the familiar language on Doretta’s tongue. ‘I speak English,’ he said to her, quite suddenly.

  Everyone smiled, even Franklin, whose expression was a few paces behind the rest. It was as if Ion had made a joke, which diffused the tension within the room.

  ‘Good!’ said the interpreter, adding, in Romanian, ‘That means you will be able to talk to these people, because they all speak English. You’re a clever boy, Ion.’

  ‘Mama – she likes to speak English,’ he said, wanting her to understand all that he meant: the room where they named objects in their game; the sound of her radio every night through the thin walls, so that the words ‘World Service’ and ‘BBC’, were a part of the litany of home; the books on her shelves, in which the rabbit wore a blue jacket, the hedgehog a pink apron. And it was ‘Goodbye, Ionica,’ each morning, kissed into his skin, instead of ‘La revedere.’

  ‘Mama likes English,’ he repeated solemnly. They stared, touched and unsure what to say.

  Then Franklin, who understood none of this, spoke to Pushpa, who translated, ‘He says he wants to be your friend, because you remind him of his little brother.’ Ion frowned and shook his head, so Doretta translated again, into Romanian.

  Then Ion smiled at Franklin. ‘Is his brother my age?’ he asked.

  The three-stage translation was repeated, and Franklin nodded.

  ‘I have no brother,’ said Ion, in English this time.

  When this was translated for Franklin, he grinned and said in that case he would have to be Ion’s brother and look after him. Pushpa, a slight, intense young man with a thick black moustache, smiled as he translated this into precise English, much slower this time. The youth workers knew that their task was made much easier when such friendships – often unpredictable, and across language barriers – were formed quickly between new arrivals.

  ‘Good,’ said Ion, nodding his head seriously, as though some pact had been sealed.

  He was hungry; the pangs he had felt at the airport, assuaged by the sandwich Helga had eventually provided, now returned to torment him. Somewhere in the building supper was nearly ready; a delicious smell of sausage and spicy cabbage filled the corridors and halls. To Ion’s embarrassment, his stomach rumbled.

  It was decided that Franklin would share a room with Ion, instead of being put with his fellow Tamils, and Pushpa took them upstairs. He showed them the room, small and square, with twin pine beds and a little table by the window. Then he took them to the bathroom. Ion walked like someone in a trance, reaching out a tentative hand to turn on a tap, and was astonished when hot water cascaded into the sparkling white basin. It was unlike anything he had ever seen: no damp on the walls, no trickle of icy water, no cracks, no smell of urine from defective plumbing. This, then, was what his mother wanted for him – this and that food they were preparing downstairs. Instinctively he straightened his back, knowing that she would be proud of him, just for being here.

  Back in the room, he unpacked his little bag, laying the spare clothes on his bed. Then he hesitated, fingering the jacket which had remained tied around his waist all this time. His soaked underpants were almost dry now, but he was still ashamed. Like a baby – to wet your pants; imagine if those boys downstairs knew; they would laugh … Luckily Pushpa chose that moment to show Franklin the other rooms on that corridor, and as they walked away, talking all the time in their own language, Ion tore off his trousers and underpants, changed, and then – after hesitating for a moment – bundled the soiled garments under his bed. As an afterthought he changed his sweater too, knowing that was what his mother would expect. When Franklin returned, Ion was sitting on his bed, holding up his little motorbike for him to see.

  ‘Look!’ said Ion.

  The older boy took the toy and held it, turning it around in his hand as if to admire, although in truth he knew it was cheap and badly made. Then he said, ‘Look?’ as if that were the name of the object he held.

  Ion laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Motorbike,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Motorbike,’ repeated Franklin, concentrating.

  Downstairs, Doretta waited. When Ion and Franklin were escorted downstairs again, she explained the way the Children’s Home worked (according to her briefing from Bernhardt Mannheim): how all the children were given German lessons each day, how there were regular sporting activities and outings; Ion, secure in his clean clothes, began to feel excited. A holiday – it was like a wonderful holiday. And when it was over he would go home to Mama; she would come and get him, he knew it. For now, maybe there would even be bananas for supper …

  But once Doretta had climbed into her car and returned to Frankfurt, and once supper (a sausage stew the like of which he had never tasted, followed by a stodgy chocolate pudding which Ion rolled around his mouth in ecstasy) was over, the evening began to slip away into lassitude. For the first time in his life Ion had no one to whom he could attach himself, whose attention and love were guaranteed. Franklin was talking to fellow teenagers in his own tongue; there seemed to Ion to be more Tamils than any other grouping. He wandered into the vast, echoing room that had once vibrated with violins as women swept into the ball in sumptuous dresses, under ornate chandeliers. Now groups of boys clustered round games of billiards, a rickety ping-pong table, and the monotonous rattle of table football. A small boy of about eight played with an Asian teenager twice his size, keening all the while a Kurdish song, in a high, wavering voice. The careless melancholy of this sound, among the hollow thumps and multilingual exclamations, filled Ion with sudden horror, so that the room seemed to blacken at the edges for a moment, like film caught in a projector, as he clung to the door for support and whispered, ‘Oh Mama.’

  Nobody glanced round at him, so he took a deep breath to steady himself, and withdrew. Pop music came from another room nearby, but when he put his head around the door, five girls – three Vietnamese and two Kurdish – were bobbing clumsily up and down and giggling. All around the room were empty chairs; the central light was tinged with blue; the thump of their feet was just missing the beat of the music, whose rhythms, though alien to the girls, epitomized all glamour to them, and all success. To Ion too, watching wistfully in the shadow of the door.


  Irma met him in the corridor, and held out a hand. Passing groups of Ethiopian and Somali boys, all lounging and talking and scuffling in play, they entered the small television room, where four or five children were staring, with differing degrees of comprehension, at the screen. The colour was turned up too high, but Ion sat for a while, fascinated by the orange faces in blinding clothes talking in this strange grunting language, advertising the miraculous nature of chocolate bars, beer and canned food. He was mesmerized. At home there was nothing on the television but images of Ceauşescu, and the interminable sound of his speeches, for just two hours a day. The chatter of this set (the advertisements were followed by a game show at which the audience laughed hysterically) mesmerized Ion Popescu; like the other children he stared with solemnity at the screen, and the louder and more raucous the laughter, the more his expression settled into awe.

  After an hour he slipped out, and nobody noticed him go. Much later, at ten, when it was bedtime, Irma wandered the corridors with Pushpa and Franklin, searching for Ion. Franklin felt guilty that he had been neglecting his ‘little brother’, and feared he had left the building. Pushpa shook his head; the child was too timid, he said. When the three of them arrived at the bedroom door, Irma signalled to them to be quiet, then pointed.

  Ion was in bed, asleep – that is to say, they assumed it was he, because the small shape had covered its head completely with the duvet. His clothes were folded with painstaking neatness on the chair beside his bed, the small motorbike placed carefully on top. And at the foot of his bed, draped over the wooden rail, were a pair of stained brown trousers and some underpants with holes in them, dripping steadily, so that a large puddle had already formed on the linoleum.