by Bel Mooney
When Franklin did not come back, Ion got up, made his bed, and played with his motorbike for a while, pushing it through a ‘tunnel’ made from a German vocabulary book. Then he tried to see how far he could flick it along the window sill without it falling off, repeating the exercise again and again, while down in the garden, on the grass, three girls sat playing a strange game with their hands. Two of them were Kurds; the third was a new girl, from Chile, he thought. The Vietnamese girl had already left; they had found a foster home for her. Such changes disturbed Ion; even though communication was spasmodic, it was impossible not to think of the group of children he had first joined as family.
Restless suddenly, he left the toy on the window sill, concealed behind the curtain, and went downstairs. He saw Franklin deep in conversation with Pushpa, standing near the map of the world. The youth worker was shrugging and saying little, but he looked sympathetic; Franklin was talking in a quick, angry voice, chopping his hand in the air. When Ion went and stood nearby, Franklin glanced at him, then shook his head and waved him away, redoubling the speed and emphasis of his complaint. There was clearly a problem. Ion had never seen his friend look so angry.
Hurt by the rejection, he went into the games room and picked up the pieces of a jigsaw someone had left unfinished. There was too much sky: pieces of identical bright blue lay scattered on the table, impossible to piece together. He tried for a while, then gave up, throwing down the bits in frustration. The sound of voices echoed from the hall.
At last Franklin strode in and flung himself down near Ion, biting his knuckles savagely. The boy gazed dumbly at his friend, wishing he had the language to discover what was wrong.
‘Franklin – OK?’ he asked in a small voice.
The older boy shook his head fiercely. ‘No. Not OK,’ he said, not meeting Ion’s eyes.
‘Why?’
Franklin sat up, and glanced angrily over his shoulder towards the door. ‘They,’ he said, inarticulately lending the word the force of a sentence.
‘What?’
Franklin smashed fist into palm in anger. ‘Pushpa say … I go different house. Not this house. I go, Ion – yes!’
Ion stared at him. Just as it had not occurred to him to doubt that his mother would come, sooner or later, so he had never thought ahead to a moment when he and Franklin might go in different directions. Like a stray creature he had attached himself to the first one to show him warmth, and that attachment was deep. Living from day to day, gradually becoming accustomed to this huge echoing building and the people in it, Ion centred the force of his affection on the Tamil teenager, who had said, after all, that Ion was his little brother. Had Ion been able to unpeel the layers of his own fantasy he would have seen, in a sunlit corner of his mind, a little half-timbered house somewhere in the mountains, with Ana there, cooking a delicious meal for himself and for Franklin, as all of them chattered together in a mixture of perfect Romanian and perfect English. His mother would come and she would look after Franklin too, and then Franklin would stop missing his own mother. Ion knew he kept that piece of rich fabric under his pillow at night, and sometimes clutched it to his cheek.
‘I not go. I stay, Ion,’ said Franklin. He was not angry now; the eyes that turned to Ion were confused.
‘Yes, Franklin,’ said Ion, picking up two bits of blue sky and studying them closely, as if by concentration he could find an answer to the universal mystery of belonging. ‘You stay with me.’
Franklin rose, and pulled up a chair. He looked at the pieces of the puzzle, then at the sweet, impossible landscape picture on the box. For a few moments he tried to complete a patch of blue, but he did not understand the technique, and attempted to force pieces together, bending and buckling the card.
‘No, Franklin – look,’ said Ion, showing him how it was done.
Franklin stared down at the table. Then, with a low angry expletive, he swept all the pieces to the floor.
Eighteen
For two nights the man had snored – a drawn-out snorting rattle which banished sleep. Radu imagined killing him slowly, choking that ugly, relentless sound into silence, so both of them could sleep forever.
Someone else in the room shouted something incomprehensible, but the terrible, shuddering noise continued, sounding now like the torment of a soul in pain. And Radu allowed himself to cry, knowing no one could possibly hear.
In the morning he queued for a shower. It smelt of urine, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. Someone was wailing in one of the cubicles again; the sound richocheted off the broken tiles, and around his head. Water trickled ceaselessly into a basin. He hurt his hand trying to turn off the tap, and when he could not, stared for a long time at the flow. Water, it seemed, was not precious here. What was precious? He screwed up his eyes and tried to remember, and a vision came into his mind of an art shop – a huge, brightly lit place selling drawing books and canvases and paintbrushes (wonderful ones, in all thicknesses), and tubes of oil paint – thousands of them, fat and white, labelled with their colours: burnt sienna, cadmium red, deep, cerulean blue, ultramarine, vermilion … That is what it must be like, out there. Everything available, everything possible.
But not here. Not for me.
From force of habit he joined the queue for the telephone, but when at last he reached the head of it he paused for a second, puzzled. Who was it he wanted to reach? For a moment he could not remember, and shook his head slightly, frowning, whilst the man behind him, swathed in a keffiyeh, gave him a gentle prod to remind him that others were waiting.
Waiting. All waiting.
He swung round and glared at the man, who shrank away in fear. Radu saw faces staring at him, all dark, all morose, all silent He remembered then, and stepped forward to the phone, picking it up gingerly as if it were a scorpion. Wearily, he asked the operator to try his number in Timişoara collect, knowing it would be a waste of time. He hung on for what seemed like ages, the veins standing out on his inner arm as he grasped the receiver. The clicks and whistles on the line took on the rhythm of speech – alien messages in a signal system unknown to this earth, but a language nevertheless, speaking to him of distance.
The operator came back at last and made his usual apology. ‘There is no connection,’ he said.
Radu sobbed into the receiver, and heard the shocked silence the other end. Then, politely, ‘Bitte?’
He slammed the receiver back, and walked away, pushing roughly past the slight man who had prodded him – whose face, unnoticed by Radu, now registered understanding. Almost unbalanced by Radu’s passing, he shrugged, nodded imperceptibly, then stepped forward to the telephone.
Later that day Radu heard it was unlikely he would be allowed to stay. He explained that were he to be sent back he would be persecuted … and as he spoke he heard his own voice stutter, forgetting essential words in German, getting things wrong.
‘Bitte?’
So polite, but weary too – as weary as Radu himself. In a flash of insight he stared at the German who was talking to him, a clipboard in his hand overstuffed with papers, and saw himself through those light grey eyes: wild, unkempt, and alien, even though he had skin of the same colour. He tried to enter the man’s mind … looking at the Ausländers, thinking maybe, ‘What is to be done with all these alien people, thousands every year, who want what we have? There is no room, there are no jobs, no houses. And they expect so much of us; they expect us to redeem all their lost time, give succour in the present, and offer a future in exile that will fulfil every individual dream. And if we hold up a hand and indicate that none of this might be possible, they look at us with wild, disappointed eyes and judge us heartless and selfish …’ Or maybe, ‘I wish I was at home making love to my wife.’
Radu saw the man’s chest rise and fall in the tiniest of sighs. He thought he heard him whisper, ‘Mein Gott!’ – but could have been mistaken.
He walked around, wondering what to do. For a long time he stared at the clock, believing firmly that it
had stopped, so slow the pace of that day. He waited to catch the minute hand moving, as a cat might watch a mouse. Yet there was nothing to pounce on here: cat, imaginary mouse, brown man with keffiyeh, white man with clipboard, all frozen in time – and the hands of the clock not moving, although the day did indeed crawl somehow towards evening, as the walls of the large common room began, with sickening slowness, to move inwards, inch by inch.
Radu found it difficult to breathe. In his mind he blew up like a toad, and exploded finally, making the roof cave in, the walls collapse, so that the fresh air of the world outside poured in on them at last. He leaned against a wall, feeling sweat pour down inside his shirt, wiping his face with the back of his hand. But as he stood there, pressing against the wall, he felt it move – he was sure he did, and stepped back as if an electric current had passed through him, activating all his nerve endings.
After the meal (sauerkraut, fried potato, sausage) he felt sick. It was dark now. The evening stretched ahead. Dizzy, longing for air he wanted to stand up and push out the walls. What if they sent him back tomorrow? He knew what would happen. He would be beaten and put in prison, and he had heard enough of conditions to know what that would mean. And would there be time to ring Ion, to say goodbye? How could he explain to Ana that somehow, he had lost touch with her son? She would think he had not cared … Or maybe she had not cared herself. He could not remember.
Prison. Yet was he not already in prison? Oh, of course, they said it was not; there were no locks, no bars. But where would you go, how would you live without papers? Sometimes refugees disappeared, but Radu was never sure if they had been taken somewhere officially, or just slipped away into the darkness, to make it alone.
Breathing hard, he wandered to a side door and stood, looking at the carpark. Not far away he could hear the whine of the autobahn: repetitive, mesmerizing. He could see an orange glow in the distance. It must be the city, he thought: all those shops – the substance of our dreams in Romania, Albania, Russia. Those shops glowing orange: a mixture of vermilion and cadmium yellow, smeared with a palette knife over the sky. And the cars swishing by, people going home, families waiting, children at tables eating …
Not knowing what he was doing Radu began to walk, faster and faster, away from the building, breaking into a run when he thought he heard footsteps. To get away, to breathe, to see something of this country before he was sent back, to find Ion, whose address was on the piece of paper in his pocket, to explain … all of this, in a confused mess, swirled around in his mind as the noise of traffic grew louder.
He panted, under the yellow lights, running on, not knowing where he was going. He climbed a fence, and ran, feeling a sudden rush of exultation, to be outside in the air, to be waiting no longer. But he heard a siren, and saw flashing lights, and felt his belly melt. There was no mistaking that sound; they were coming for him, they were coming … Terror paralysed him for a second, making him stop, looking wildly over his shoulder, then forward again, to left then to right.
Deafened by the noise, dazzled by the lights, Radu acted on instinct at last and ran forwards, head down like a hunted fox. He heard his own heart pounding, as if it were inside his ears, as he raced forwards – miscalculating in his panic.
The BMW came up as if from nowhere – the driver looking forward to an evening in a restaurant with his girlfriend, accelerating to overtake with practised ease – when a figure ran straight into its path. Radu had no chance. The force of the blow sent him flying in an arc, body flung upwards so that the sketchbook flew from his pocket, leaves scattering over the autobahn, finely drawn faces whirled away in the air – to be crushed, at last, like Radu Kessler’s skull.
Nineteen
At last the news reached the children’s home. The police had found the piece of paper in Radu’s pocket and made contact with Bernhardt Mannheim. They wanted to know if the dead man had any connexion with the home.
The child gazed at Irma and Bernhardt, bewildered; after a long pause he said slowly, ‘He was my mother’s friend. I think Mama very sad.’
The two youth workers looked at him, not knowing what to say. Then at last Bernhardt sat down, and pointed to a chair for Ion. He perched on the edge, looking blank.
‘Ion – would you like to go and live in a family soon? With a mother and father who would look after you in their house?’
‘House?’ he repeated.
‘Yes, a nice house. You see, I think we can find you some foster parents. Do you understand?’
‘I leave here?’
Irma nodded, squatting down beside him, disconcerted by the emptiness in his eyes. ‘Yes, but you would not be, far away, I think. The people, they will treat you like their own child.’
‘And can Franklin come too?’
She glanced up at Bernhardt, who frowned, and shrugged. ‘That is difficult, Ion,’ he said.
‘I want to … stay with Franklin.’
Bernhardt’s voice was gentle. ‘Ion, children have to leave here. Franklin will soon go to another children’s home where he will stay for a long time. Nobody stays here for very long. That is how it works, you see.’
‘But my mother, she comes to find me. Very soon. I told here I was here.’
Again, the two Germans exchanged glances. Ion had resolutely refused to give them any more information about his mother, other than her first name.
‘You wrote to her?’ asked Bernhardt.
Quickly, Irma pulled up a chair and sat close to Ion, taking his hand. ‘Ion, if we could tell your mother you’re well … and we could find out when she is coming … Please, won’t you tell us how we can telephone her? Now?’
Ion looked down, and was silent. His hand lay slackly in hers; she squeezed it encouragingly.
Radu was dead. The man who had brought him, the man who (his mother had told him again and again) had given them a home when he was born, the man whose voice down the line had sounded so flat and sad … He was dead. They said he was running away, but no one knew why. He was coming to see me, thought Ion, and his eyes smarted. But he would not cry, never again.
Yet now, with Radu dead, everything depended on his mother coming soon. He knew she would come, and maybe … maybe if she told them when, they would let him stay – and Franklin too. He looked up at the clock on the wall, and made his decision. ‘She is at her work,’ he said.
Irma sighed raggedly: they had broken through. ‘Yes, Ion, but we can telephone her at work. We can do it today. Tell us where she works … is it in Bucharest?’
He nodded, looked as if he was going to speak, then hesitated.
‘Please, Ion. We won’t tell anyone why we want to talk to her. We will just speak to her – and maybe you can speak to her too!’ said Bernhardt, thinking ruefully of the telephone bill, and the low budget he had to administer.
At that Ion jerked his head up sharply, his eyes bright. A deep breath, and he said, ‘British Embassy. Her work is the British Embassy.’
‘Good!’ said Irma, giving his hand a final squeeze. ‘Now you can go and play, Ion, and we will start trying. Sometimes it takes a long time. But when we reach her, we will call you. I promise.’ Then, in rapid German to Bernhardt, ‘My God, I hope we can get hold of her and work something out. This kid – he gets to me, somehow …’
It took Bernhardt Mannheim forty minutes to get through to the British Embassy, Bucharest. He asked the woman on the switchboard if he could speak to Ana Popescu, and after a long pause, she muttered something he could not quite catch. She was obviously trying to transfer him, and he waited patiently, wondering what Ion’s mother would sound like. At last a voice said something in Romanian, and he repeated his request (in slow English) to speak to Ana Popescu.
‘There is nobody here of that name,’ said the woman’s voice coldly, without hesitation.
‘Please, I am telephoning from Germany … I have information about Ana Popescu’s son, so I must speak to her. I know she works there. Please can you give her a message?’
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br /> ‘Nobody of that name works here,’ the woman repeated, her voice tinny.
‘Look, I am with the Youth Department of Frankfurt, West Germany. This is an official inquiry. I can telephone the German Ambassador to Romania, and ask him to find out from the British. But perhaps you will be able to help me, after all?’
There was a short pause. Then, in a slightly different tone, the women said. ‘I am Floria Milea, and I have the job Ana Popescu left. She has gone. A long time ago. Nobody knows anything about her. I am sorry.’
‘Where?’
‘I am sorry, I am unable to help you. Goodbye.’
Ion was playing table football with Franklin when they called him. His face brightened, and he almost ran from the room, leaving Franklin alone, staring after him and kicking the table leg: preoccupied, almost morose. He was still angry; he had been told he would be transferred to a children’s home at Wuppertal, where he would have more lessons, and some training as a mechanic. And Ion? he had asked. Ion would be fostered very soon; there were plenty of families ready to take a child his age. Franklin shook his head, wondering at the anticipation in Ion’s face.
The youth workers were used to telling the children bad news. So many of them had been sent away by their parents with a promise that in a week or so they would follow. As the days passed – one week, two, three, four – it dawned on the children that this would never happen. Or sometimes they had to be told, to stop them waiting, to enable them to progress to the next stage. And then they wept more bitterly than ever before, or sat in numbed silence, miserable and confused, as Ion did now.
‘I am sorry, Ion,’ said Irma, so softly Bernhardt could barely hear her. ‘There must be a good reason for your mother … er … not to be there. Do you understand what I am saying?’