Lost Footsteps

by Bel Mooney

  Still laughing, Ana is seized and bundled quickly down corridor after corridor, which echo with the clang of distant doors. In a basement room, tiled white, with patches of black mould on the

  ceiling, she stands in a hard jet of icy water, sluicing her up and down like a beast in a stall. The guard laughs, again and again directing the stinging jet to her legs, buttocks and crotch, forcing her to bend over to make the task easier, so that she whimpers with discomfort and humiliation. Naked, dripping, teeth chattering, she is left alone for thirty minutes. Then more guards came in – tall, plump women with set faces – and force her to bend over again, slowly probing inside her with cold plastic fingers, one by one – ‘Your turn, Nina, better be sure!’ – until she retches with pain, and sees blood spread its stain on the wet floor.

  In the solitary cell, long and narrow, and furnished only with a narrow wooden bench to lie on, and a reeking, unemptied slop bucket, Ana stands in too-large, shapeless grey garments, holding a rolled-up blanket which smells slightly of perspiration and urine. She gazes up at the small square of sky, high in the wall, fixing her mind, as if that patch of grey-blue held the key to survival.

  And maybe it does, if I can see in it everything that is beyond me, beyond this filthy place – out there. Under that sky Ion’s walking around, thinking of me. And kind people are looking after him, feeding him, washing his clothes … I know it! Under that sky…

  You see, we have to have faith, Tată – there is nothing else. And we’re so alike, aren’t we? We both recognized hell after all, it was you who taught me! We both had faith in our own ability to deliver others from it. Or one other, in my case – your grandson. Yet you –you helped so many people, you were so brave. I wonder, did Mama know? Of course she did, because she loved you so much, as she loved me. He said you started in 1968, the year before she died. You were so excited; things were happening in Czechoslovakia which made your eyes light up, and you even joined Mama in a prayer before the icon. I was only a child; it didn’t matter to me …

  That spring you started to give me English lessons at home, serious lessons; every time I smelt hyacinths in the Cişmigiu Gardens, years later, I thought of you at the table, testing me on the verb ‘to be’, with that intense scent from the bowl making me giddy. And then the day you pushed it away, because I was idle and would not learn, and it shattered on the floor, and instead of being angry Mama bent over you, cradling your head,

  whispering, ‘You can’t change things, Stelian, don’t fret so much; it’s not your fault, none of it’s your fault.’ Hyacinths in the spring, the Prague spring – and I was jealous because she was comforting you, not me. You hoped that the light might spread from the north, and maybe penetrate even our darkness. Oh God, how you hoped – for them, and for us, and (I think now) for the daughter you taught to say, ‘I will be free.’

  Then, when heat was shimmering on the roads, the news came, and you smashed your fist against the wall making it bleed. Mama’s face was white; she wept quietly as she bound up your hand, and she told you again, ‘It’s not your fault, Stelian, it can’t be helped.’ In your groans I heard the rumble of tanks, and knew that it was over – whatever it was you had hoped for.

  I didn’t really notice your absences, not until after she was dead. And was it anxiety that started to eat her, multiplying, spreading – until she was dead? Oh Tată, that wasn’t your fault either – I can say it now, as she would. And anyway, what does it matter any more? The sky is there, and beneath it a whole world, going about its business as it did when she died, and when you died, and as it will when I die. Not indifferent, just driven by a force beyond us. And even if I never see Ion again, I just hope (hope! hope! hope! – that word which is all that lies between us and darkness) he’ll find out the truth one day, as I’ve found out…

  This is our spring at last, Tată. Because you didn’t leave me, you didn’t abandon me, you were going to come back for me …

  Twenty-One

  Ana had not been to church for years.

  ‘If there is a God – and I mean if’ Radu used to say, ‘then I hope I meet him in Heaven, so I can tell him what I think of him for leaving us all in this pile of crap.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t become a believer simply as a revolutionary gesture,’ Doina said drily, though she too was an atheist. ‘After all, the fact that the Cobbler hates churches is a good reason to love them.’

  ‘Oh, the churches I can love,’ Radu said, ‘it’s just the Gods I can’t stand.’

  ‘No,’ murmured Ana, ‘it’s they who can’t bear us. The Gods are just …’

  ‘Oh yes, how come?’ jeered Radu.

  ‘Hundreds of years ago – no, thousands – they took one look at this patch of land, and the people in it, and decided to do a test. They – by the way, I didn’t know you were a partheist, Radu! – gave the Romanians a couple of truly terrible leaders to see if they’d do anything about it, but they didn’t, of course. They just bowed their heads and got on with it. So the Gods decided that’s what we deserve, and so here we are! That’s why they’re just. Our vice is acquiescence – not a very pleasant one – and that’s why they plague us.’

  ‘The Gods or the leaders?’

  ‘Both.’

  Now Ana had taken to haunting churches, sitting for hours in Creţulescu especially, hiding herself in one of the high, carved seats. She walked there briskly today, pulling her woollen hat low over her ears and forehead, snapping her mouth tight against the bitter air. As she reached the end of Strada 13 decembrie, she was aware of a sudden flurry of people, and a man in a long black overcoat stepped in front of her.

  ‘Wait – wait here now,’ he shouted rudely, putting out an arm.

  All around Ana people had stopped dead in their tracks, frozen as if by an invisible Medusa, eyes wandering to avoid contact with anyone or anything, or else cast down, as if the pavement might offer a clue to this mystery. A walkie-talkie crackled at the Securitate man’s belt; Ana cringed away from him, flattening herself against the wall. All around her people did the same; some turned quickly, and walked in the opposite direction.

  An old red Dacia had stalled in the Calea Victoriei, suddenly cleared of all other vehicles. Panic increasing, the driver tried it again and again – white-faced and staring downwards as the starter motor screamed – and militiamen converged on his battered car, yelling imprecations. In a few seconds the young man was hustled away – silently and offering no resistance – as his car was pushed speedily on to the narrow pavement.

  Ana knew what was coming. She had witnessed these hysterical preparations before, when the Presidential cavalcade was due to sweep its way across town, to the Party Headquarters. She looked only from the corner of her eye as she had learnt to do, as the four black limousines, windows curtained, drove by at speed. A dead-ness unfolded behind them in the empty street, a moment of stasis before people started to come to life once more.

  As the sound of the cars died away, and the man in the black overcoat turned on his heel and marched in the same direction, Ana unfroze – then paused in nervous disbelief. For, although she could not be sure, she thought she heard, from just behind her, a faint sound. A hiss, like the quick escaping of gas. Yet a human noise.

  Quickly, she glanced over her shoulder, hardly daring to look. People were moving, going about their business, scurrying in different directions: a middle-aged woman linking arms with an old man, a couple of young women, dressed in close-fitting woollen coats with fur collars, two young men wearing jeans and thin anoraks, despite the intense cold, a bearded man with a briefcase and a dark trilby – each of them carrying the small, optimistic shopping bag. In a few moments everyone had dispersed, and Ana too went on her way, the hairs on her neck still prickling at the extraordinary thought that someone had dared to make the faintest noise of derision, when the cavalcade had gone.

  She walked slowly now. It was her habitual gait. Grief imposes deliberation: the consciousness that each footstep on the
ground jars every bone, that movement and pain are indivisible. In the seven months (nearly) since she had said goodbye to Ion, Ana had, in truth, become accustomed to the accoutrements of her sorrow; the baggage that would, she knew, weigh her down forever. The obstruction in her chest was the worst – heavy, almost choking at times, so that sometimes her heart palpitated with the strain. And it pressed downwards on the emptiness in her stomach, making her sick and dizzy. One day it occurred to her that this sickness was like a surfeit: just as they used to dream of eating so much chocolate that they might feel ill, so now she fancied she might vomit from too much feeling. Then, most horrible of all, she could admit almost to loathing that which she loved, and yearned for: the missing object, the vacancy, the perpetual pain which answered, she remembered, to the name ‘Ion*. Were it possible she would be drunk, day and night, just to fog the clarity of a vision on which all actions – past, present and future – were etched in white, as on the vase of blood-red glass her mother gave her, years ago.

  She reached Cretulescu, but was not ready to go in. Often she put off the moment, savouring it in anticipation as a solace and a torment. In the window of the bookshop on the corner, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Collected Works were displayed in regular curving rows: dozens of them – works on ideology, on economic development, on dialectics, on Romanian history, on cadre politics, and four volumes of his Selected Speeches, all bearing, on the jacket, the portrait of a dark-haired, youthful man, smiling benignly. Next to them were volumes on chemistry and metallurgy by Elena Ceauşescu, which made Ana smile grimly despite herself. ‘Not bad for a cobbler with a small vocabulary, and his ignorant peasant wife,’ she said to herself – feeling such anger, suddenly, that she wanted to smash the window and jump inside, scattering these objects which so diminished the term ‘book’.

  But what was the point?

  Daily our speech is debased, through listening; our language is debased, through silence; our thoughts are debased, through fear; even our loves are debased, through the hope that this alone might transcend the reality of what we are, and the perpetual disappointment when it is not so. And so what does it matter if lies are packaged up and sold as books, taking the same shape as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, Creanga? It’s merely the outward form of our inner degradation … What does it matter? What does any of it matter?

  She turned slowly, and walked down the steps towards the small, red-brick church.

  It was dark inside. Bars of pale, grey light fell across the tiny dome, and the dim glow from yellow tallow candles haloed the shrine to the dead near the door. A woman pushed past Ana, not rudely, but absentmindedly, intent on her purpose, and carried a loaf of bread to the table of alms near the screen. Then she knelt to kiss one of the icons, her mouth moving in prayer. Nearby a teenage boy, with a pale, spotty face, was sitting in one of the carved seats, resting his elbows high each side, his head drooping on his folded hands – angular and hunched like a blue Picasso. As people came and sat down there was a faint rattle of plastic from each shrouded, woven cushion, and a similar muffled squeaking from the dusty plastic which protected table, lectern and the central area of floor. It was the only sound.

  Ana lit a candle, then sat down for a while, letting her eyes rove over the blackened, painted ceiling, wishing she could reduce her thoughts to a similar darkness, all detail lost in shadow. How did people pray? She watched the women come and go, kneeling or bending, or standing on tiptoe to kiss the holy images, and saw their eyes moist, their lips reciting soundlessly, their hands moving on the handles of their shopping bags, as though on beads. Mouth dry as usual, Ana leaned forward, as though by that movement she could approach these others more fortunate and learn. And yet she knew an abyss lay between them, and leaning over it made her dizzy. They have not done what I have done. They would not do what I have done … And yet, how do I know? Everything has happened before; everything has been suffered before, by people who thought their sufferings unique.

  At last she rose, and stood before her favourite icon, on the pillar on the right. The beaten silver cover was deeply etched and indented; the elaborate crown of the Madonna rose and spread like the rays of the sun, dwarfing the face on painted wood beneath, whose eyes gazed sadly outwards towards the door. But the child, his painted face tiny within its glittering surround, looked straight at Ana, his eyes moving as she moved, his gaze unavoidable.

  She knew what they knew, the mother and child, and felt their premonition of future pain lick along her veins, as the small red light flickered before the icon. She knew that the birthday celebration in the stable was but a rehearsal for sacrifice, the gifts of the Magi transformed, by the cruellest, most sublime miracle, into the instruments of the passion. And in her knowledge, today, Ana felt suddenly beyond the reproach she had sensed before in the images of perfect mother-love all about her. Why should it be said always, that God gave up his son to the world, she thought, for the redemption of sins? Why do we not say that Mary gave up her child, Mary stood by as they pricked him on his cross, Mary knew that all this had been prefigured by her, even willed: fed into him with her milk? The real sacrifice, the pain and the love was hers – all hers.

  Ana took out a rose she had stolen from a display in the hotel restaurant. It was made expertly of pink silk, so that in this dim light it looked like the real thing. Raising herself slightly she kissed it, and tucked it where the silver formed the Virgin’s headdress. Then she stared for a long time into the child’s painted eyes, at close quarters, vaguely wondering what she could buy him for Christmas, what she could afford, what other women would buy for their children. Cars, games, bricks, alphabets, motorbikes … But what about you, Cale? You had no money like me …

  The three women welcome Ana like a sister. Suspicious at first, then elated by their warmth, she soon realizes it has nothing to do with her; bored and frustrated, they crave news, any news, from the world outside – that’s all. Within hours the cell returns to its normal state of quibbling and bickering over the smallest things – a blanket, hairs on the floor, a precious stub of cigarette – and Ana is assimilated. She quickly realizes that for those in prison, real curiosity about a newcomer, and the whole ‘other’ existence she represents, is slight. What matters is the day-to-day reality of this world, and the rules invented to survive it.

  ‘Take a piece of advice from me, never tell anyone what you’re in for – they’ll use it against you,’ says Cale.

  ‘Haven’t you got any cigarettes hidden? Look, if you share some of your food with me, I’ll see you all right. And you want paper? I can fix it …,’ says Luminiţa.

  ‘At least once a day, Ana, try to rise above all this. Try to think some thought that lifts you up. Do you pray?’ Rodika’s face is almost comical in its earnestness. Ana shakes her head. ‘Oh, that’s a pity. Well … think of other things then. Anything to overcome all this, this … banality. Yes?’ Ana nods.

  A good word to choose – banal. It’s very strange that from the outside our suffering would seem tragic, Doina, wherever you are. I’m sure you’re in a cell like this, hot at night, reeking with sweat, urine and faeces, breathing the breath of other women whose crimes – if crimes they are – you don’t know. And by now – knowing you, Doina! – you’re probably joining in the quarrels over food, the bitter recriminations about who spilt slops and failed to clean up, the laughter over a particular guard whose breath smells, yet who fancies the young ones like Luminiţa, even though they call her fat old cow’ to her face. And the hatred of Pincers – but you might not know that one, not if you’re in the other wing. She’s the meanest of them all. So, sharing these things, you know how foolish it all is, in its base monotony, its crassness, even the pathos of distant wailing in the darkness – silenced, not by authority, but by the impatient cries of those whose own cries have been stifled, and so have no time for pity.

  Sometimes I’ve noticed a guard’s eye pressed to the peephole, and, glancing round the narrow cell, I’ve seen us through her eyes: grey-
clad sticks lying on narrow grey beds between grey stained walls, dirty spiky heads like mangy parrots. And poor Rodika trying to kneel and pray, crossing herself again and again, as Cale deliberately farts near her head and shouts, ‘O my Fuck, why the fuck hast thou fucking well fucked me?’, pressing her hands together and rolling her eyes, while Luminiţa falls on her bed and cackles. And yes, it is banal, Doina, I’m sure you agree. Wherever they have taken you.

  Ana has been in the cell for one week when she learns that Doina is alive (she feared the worst) and is indeed in the other wing. The message comes along the pipes, the secret prison network of communications – intense echoing taps and whispers that transmitted the hopes and loves of hundreds of individuals. Or messages are scribbled on tiny scraps of paper, weighted with spit, and hung from the window on pieces of unravelled wool from the blankets, knotted together. If one of these is seen, dangling outside the window, it is pulled in and eagerly read, and that message passed from cell to cell until it reaches its destination. Such messages range from the serious (’Tell Doina Kessler that Ana Popescu is alive and strong and sends love’) to the childish (’Watch out for Potato Face – she always spits in the stew’), and take up hours of the non-time that is prison time.

  Time begins to preoccupy Ana as never before. Outside, the constant cycle of foraging for food, cleaning the apartment, washing their clothes, caring for Ion, working, cooking, had so eaten up the hours that there was never time to think. Here time does not so much stop as become denser, more intense, so that all before-time is repeated in imagination, relaxed almost to the point of absurdity, like slowed balletic movements in a film. Life becomes a perpetual exercise in recapitulation – like a plot that has suddenly stopped developing, a story marking time. It isn’t that Ana constantly re-examines her own motives, or relives the moment when she said goodbye to Ion, or flagellates herself for her terrible impulsive error in joining Doina. I forgive myself the lot, she says to herself now. It is rather that she can now turn an X–ray on herself and see all those events as part of a deeper pattern, a process of learning which awes her. Because everything that happens in prison is so trivial, yet elevated – because of the timelessness, the plotlessness of their days – into the significant, so Ana sees everything before this time as contributing to it, her mother’s death directly connected to Cale’s profanities as well as Rodika’s prayers.