Lost Footsteps

by Bel Mooney

  Fifteen

  Waiting – it was all eternal waiting.

  Radu Kessler leaned back in the sagging tweed chair that had once been the latest style in hotel lobby furniture and accommodated businessmen en route for London, New York, Tokyo or Rome. Now it was witness to a very different scene. There was a constant babble of noise – talk in different languages pitched to a point of near-panic as would-be refugees from Somalia, Iran, Ethiopia, Iraq, Eritrea, Sudan, East Germany, Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka waited for their applications to be processed. German immigration officials, refugee workers and interpreters moved among them with distant, experienced efficiency: all of them had seen too much of this. Questions were asked, forms filled in; medical inspections carried out; then more questions followed – maddening, repetitive. And confused, desperate men and women asked again, and again, ‘Can we stay?’ Heads were shaken at that; no answer could be given immediately. No answer could be given for weeks until appropriate investigations were made.

  ‘Were you in political danger in Romania?’ Radu was asked. ‘That is to say, actual physical danger?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who can say? I was certainly in mental danger. Look, I’m a painter, I could not practise my art – not in any meaningful way. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘So it is an issue of censorship …?’

  He nodded, ready to say anything.

  ‘But you were not threatened with physical violence ever?’

  ‘Once, by a Securitate agent,’ he lied. ‘He said he would beat me up, and beat my wife up …’ It was written down.

  Next to him a Kurdish woman wept bitterly, her screams and sobs piercing his brain. With the advantage of his German, he gleaned the story as the interpreter picked it from her, as one might prise a sharp stone from a hoof. Her husband had been tortured by Iraqi soldiers and left outside her house, his body mutilated. Shortly afterwards she left their village to travel to visit his parents, leaving her four children with her sister. While she was away Saddam Hussein ordered the attack on her village, and others around it. All her children, as well as her sister, two brothers and their wives and children were gassed. She returned to find their corpses, already decaying. As she closed her eyes, remembering, swaying to and fro, her pain rose to a shriek. Around her others watched, suddenly silent before a grief that was beyond consolation.

  One day Radu queued for the telephone. He had asked if he could phone the Children’s Home, and was given the number. Exhausted, he was already beginning to lose track of days; each night, kept awake by the racking sound of a man sobbing in the room four of them shared, he lay first on one side then on the other, thinking of home. Oh Doina, Doina, if only you were with me he said, over and over again, inside his head. Twice a day he tried to telephone her, queuing patiently for a telephone, but it was always impossible to get through. Then, his hand aching with the tension of holding the receiver, ears buzzing with the distant clicks, as well as the constant din all around him, he would seek the solitude of a lavatory cubicle or a corridor and hit his hand against the wall in frustration.

  Now he waited to phone Ion, as he had been intending to for days (how long had he been there? He did not know anymore). Suddenly a fight broke out nearby: two African youths pushed each other, shouting loudly, and then one of them swung a punch, sending his adversary staggering back into a small group of Tamils, two or three families, he guessed. The men in the group began to protest angrily, as their children set up a frightened wail … and the situation was tense and ugly. But Radu barely bothered to glance at them. He was used to it. It happened every day. Years ago he had worked on a huge painting inspired by Dante, an Inferno vibrating with reds and blacks; now the words inscribed on the gates of Hell came back to him:

  Per me si va nella città dolente,

  per me si va nell’ eterno dolore,

  per me si va tra la perduta gente.

  Here is pain, he thought, and here are the lost people. And yet we are not in hell, not here. That we have left behind us, passing through different gates into confusion, doubt, despair, and the certain loneliness of exile. But not hell. I think not … (Sobs and shouts all round him. In others, a terrifying, passive acceptance of whatever might happen: mute patience, but with limitless darkness in their eyes) … no, this is not the worst thing.

  He reached the telephone at last, pulled the change Muller had given him from his pocket, and consulted his scrap of paper. When the telephone at the Home was answered, he was suddenly afraid. Perhaps he felt, in some indefinable way, guilty about Ion; he asked for him hesitantly – amazed when the person at the other end said casually that of course she would go and get him.

  To his astonishment the little thin voice which followed said, ‘Ja?’

  ‘Ion – Ionica! It’s me, Radu – how are you?’

  ‘Oh Radu – I wondered where you were.’

  ‘I’m sorry. People here use the phones night and day. But how are you?’

  ‘Very well. It’s nice here, and I have a friend now. The food’s good, Radu – and there’s always a lot. We have German lessons every day – I can say danke and nein and bitte and kleine and – and, mutter…’ – there was a pause – ‘… and other words too.’

  ‘That’s very good, Ion!’

  ‘But when are you coming to get me? When will Mama come?’ Radu started to sweat. The room was close and smelt of cigarettes and human bodies. It was difficult to breathe. ‘I can’t tell you, Ion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because everything is so complicated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … oh, God, I don’t know.’

  ‘Radu …?’

  ‘Yes, little bear, what is it? I’m sorry I can’t answer your questions, but you see …’

  ‘Will I ever see Mama again?’

  Radu threw back his head, his teeth clenched so that his jaw ached. Why, Ana, he thought, why did you do this? The price is too great … But conscious that even that tiny pause would be noticed by Ion, he was forced into speech. ‘Of course you will – what a silly question! But I don’t know when, Ion – that’s impossible to say, you know that. You just have to be a good boy, and do what they tell you, and you’ll be looked after, just as your mother wanted.’

  ‘Yes, Radu.’ His voice was flat. ‘And will you come and visit me?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I will.’

  ‘You promise? Soon?’

  ‘Yes, I promise.’

  There was a long pause; Radu could hear the boy breathing – in the background behind him, the echoes of children.

  ‘Are you still there, Ion?’

  ‘Yes, Radu. Oh Radu …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We’d better say goodbye now, but I promise I’ll try to arrange a visit, OK? Now can you say goodbye to me in German?’

  ‘Ja, Radu. – Auf wiedersehen.’

  Back in his chair, Radu gazed morosely around, wondering what he could do about Ion. Ana had not thought it through – he found himself blaming her for that. But then, did any of them think it through? How could they possibly know how their journeys into the darkness would end? Or perhaps, he corrected his own thought hastily, it should be said, journeys from darkness … In any case, how could any of them understand? He glanced across at the Kurdish woman, now sleeping, her body curled in the chair, and thought, what she and I have in common is the need to flee – desperate, headlong, ignorant. All of us here understand that at least, and try to communicate it to those who ask us questions but can never know.

  Depressed, he slumped further down, hearing the old chair creak under his weight. He closed his eyes, longing for a cigarette, yet his gorge rising at the thought. He felt dirty, even though he had taken a shower that morning, and hated the press of people all about him whose sweat smelt sharp and strange. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on walking his memory around his studio in Timişoara, pausing at his easel where every encrusted knob of paint was eviden
ce of his former vision: red and green and blue. Brown too, increasingly, only brown – no colour at all. Yet as he roamed around that familiar territory in his mind, he could not prevent himself from ascending the open wooden stair to their platform bed, and suddenly he could smell Doina on his skin, musky and damp, and see the dark golden strands spread out on the pillow below him. The pain in his chest then almost made him cry out with need, and he opened his eyes wide, looking around him despondently – anything to stop himself thinking of home.

  The Kurdish woman caught his eye again. She had shifted in sleep, the hand supporting her head now lying gently along her cheek as she relaxed. He noticed her nose, fine and elongated, and how the angles of her face caught the light with a dull sheen. Next to her, sitting bolt upright was an elderly man, staring straight ahead, his neck rising almost defiantly from the folds of his keffiyeh, a hawkish look about his profile. Perhaps that was her father-in-law … Across the room a young woman – Sudanese, he guessed – suckled her baby, oblivious of the crowd around her, bending her face obliquely towards the little shapeless bundle in her arms, with a look of such tender concentration Radu was mesmerized. Her eyelids had the sweep of a quattrocento Madonna, yet the angle of her shoulder, and the splay of her bony knees, reminded him rather of a Degas, or even of one of the figures in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. This figure, he thought, like the sleeping woman nearby, was beyond mere beauty, indeed, she called beauty itself into question: the grave concavities of her face, weary, and yet full of dignity, spoke to Radu of something beyond the single flesh-and-blood individual whose sole reality now lay in her scrawny arms. Her clothes were dusty-grey – light against her dark skin; the hair of the old Kurd was grizzled; the sleeping woman next to him was dressed in a shapeless black garment – this palette would be almost monochrome, Radu thought, regretting briefly his dream of colour freed from form, his youthful celebration of light. Yet he looked and looked, allowing his eyes to swivel round the room resting on face after face, noticing the curve of cheeks, the lines of noses, the structure of a head, the sweep of a whole body slumped in despair, the roundness of children, the angle of a neck or arm, the hollows of cheeks and eyes.

  Radu had studied anatomy, of course, but years ago; in any case he had never before looked beyond mere structure to what he saw all around him here: the pure geometry of grief. (‘I wish you would still draw, Radu,’ Doina had once complained, but Ana had disagreed; she loved his large, swirling compositions, agreeing with him that colour free from the demands of the object could itself constitute reality. He remembered that day, and Ana’s green painting coruscating on his easel.)

  Radu sat up straight and ran a hand quickly through his shaggy hair, feeling its coarseness. Texture and colour had been everything, he thought, but here, all around him was something else which made his head buzz – a truth of line, and a reality within it, that he needed to capture. Beyond aesthetics? Yes, perhaps, he thought, feeling a current of urgency run through his fingers, and yet in these faces all around me, in the shapes of these frightened, angry, mournful, or weary people I live among, is beauty universal and awe-inspiring.

  He reached inside his jacket for something he had brought with him as an afterthought. The sketchbook was home-made; you could no longer buy such things in Timişoara. Once, to please Doina, he had sewn together some pages of plain paper, encased them in a brown cardboard cover, and promised her he would return to carrying a sketchbook as he had when he was a student. Of course he had not, and it had lain with its blank pages of poor-quality greyish paper untouched. Some impulse had made him grab it when he left. Now he opened it carefully, mindful of his own rough stitching, took out his stub of pencil and began to draw.

  Sixteen

  When Ion put down the telephone, he stood staring at it for a few seconds, then turned abruptly on his heel, and walked upstairs. Franklin, who happened to be coming out of the games room at that moment, saw him and was about to call out his name. But the set of Ion’s shoulders, the droop of his head, stopped him. He thought for a moment, then went to search for Pushpa.

  When Franklin and the youth worker arrived at the room Ion had shared with Franklin for ten days now, they found the door firmly shut – unusual in the daytime. Franklin grimaced. ‘I think something has made him sad,’ he said.

  ‘There was a phone call – and from a Romanian, Irma guessed, although he spoke good German. So maybe …’ Pushpa shrugged. They hesitated for a moment, then opened the door.

  Ion sat at the small table by the window, staring out at the wet garden. He did not look round, or say anything, and they stood in silence; the only sound in the room was the gentle drumming of rain on the window.

  ‘Ask him if we can talk to him for a while,’ whispered Franklin, and Pushpa translated from Tamil into English. The only movement was a slight lifting of Ion’s shoulders, as if to shrug were too much effort.

  Franklin sat down opposite Ion; Pushpa went to find another chair. When he returned Ion had turned to face Franklin and was crying quietly, while the older boy held both his hands and crooned, ‘Yes, yes, Ion, yes, yes’ – the English word awkward in his soft guttural voice.

  ‘Who telephoned you, Ion?’ asked Pushpa gently.

  ‘It was my friend – the friend of – of – my mother. Radu. I came to Frankfurt with him. On the plane. And I want to see him.’ Ion’s voice was high and quivering.

  Not understanding what he said, Franklin repeated his soft litany, ‘Yes, yes, Ion, yes, yes.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Ion. I will speak to Bernhardt and Irma, and we will try to arrange a meeting – help you to see your friend. You should have asked us! Do you understand?’

  Ion nodded, and shivered slightly as he tried not to cry. He looked across the table at Franklin, who smiled at him. Then the teenager let go of Ion’s hand, and picked up a mug that stood on the windowsill.

  ‘Cup,’ he said, holding it aloft and pointing comically with the other hand, in the manner of a magician.

  Despite himself, Ion smiled.

  Each night now, they did their English practice. In the morning they learned German verbs and vocabulary, and before bed Ion took Franklin through the English words he knew, pointing to objects and naming them. Sometimes Franklin felt that his brain would burst, as ‘mutter’ danced around with ‘mother’, and ‘haus’ with ‘house’ … What was the difference? What did it all mean? Some evenings, indeed, he did not want to ‘play’. But he saw how Ion relished the role of schoolteacher, unconsciously mimicking his mother and so bringing into that light, bare room something of their close, crowded little flat. Already dissatisfied with mere nouns (for who could base a conversation on the naming of things?) he had started on the verbs, saying, ‘I go!’ before marching across the room so briskly that, for a while, Franklin was under the impression that the word ‘Igo’ meant a soldier.

  Ion knew little about the older boy’s background. There was a country called Sri Lanka – Franklin and the other Tamils had pointed it out to him on the map – and there was fighting going on, he knew that. But it had never occurred to him to wonder about Franklin’s family, beyond that first information that the Tamil had a young brother who was just his age. In truth, Ion had been so dazed at first, then so preoccupied with fitting in, getting things right, and not thinking about his mother, that he had no energy left to be curious about anyone else’s life. Now suddenly, as Franklin waved the mug around, trying to make him smile, he saw him for the first time as there, just as he was there – and wondered.

  ‘Pushpa,’ he said, ‘will you ask Franklin why he came to Germany?’

  The young man smiled. ‘Don’t you know? He is like most of the children here. Their countries are at war; it is very dangerous for them to stay. So they run away, or their parents send them away – so that they are safe.’

  ‘Will you ask him?’

  Pushpa repeated Ion’s question to Franklin, who stopped smiling immediately. He stared at Ion, speaking Tamil in a sof
t, passionate flood. ‘My best friend was called Nimal. We always played together when we were children. He was older than me – one year. One day he was kidnapped from his home by the Eelan People’s Liberation Front, and taken to their camp. Nobody knows what happened then, but I think maybe he tried to run away later. They left his body by the side of the road; he was all beaten … it was terrible. His mother, she cried and screamed. I can still hear her … Anyway, my father is very worried because he is a supporter of the Tamil Tigers, and he knows that in our area not many people are. And all the other small armies, they are capturing boys to fight with them against the Tigers …’

  ‘As if it was not enough for Tamils all to fight against Singhalese,’ Pushpa interjected, bitterly, in his own language, as if Ion was not there.

  The youth worker knew this already; it was a story which, in different versions, had been told by all the Tamil children who passed through the Home. Still it made him sad, awakening feelings of homesickness, as well as frustration that it did him no good to allow. An image of his grandfather’s house, with its shady verandah, flickered across his mind, and the village where his family had lived for generations … where you were somebody, where you mattered … But he banished such memories angrily; Franklin was still talking.

  ‘So my father started to talk to my mother about me, and what they would do if the guerrillas came and took me away, like Nimal. They were so afraid – all the time! And they asked people what they should do, and found out that there was a man, Mr Ganesha he was called, an agent, and he organizes for boys like me to leave the country and come to Frankfurt, because if we are alone we do not have to have a visa. So my parents saved their money, and they sold some things, and soon it was time to wave goodbye at Colombo. I will never forget that moment … never! And so I came to Germany.’ He shrugged, unable to continue, his mouth twisted with pain.