by Bel Mooney
‘Securitate – yes. But others too … different people. It’s very complicated to explain to you,’ Ana said.
The city was full of shrines. In the greying gloom of afternoon women in black stood silently, gilded by flickering yellow candles, or knelt to place single flowers on the ground. In some places dark smears disfigured the pavement, and passers-by stopped to stare at the fuzzy photograph of a stranger, already sanctified by martyrdom and garlanded with makeshift wreaths, stuck up where someone had fallen. On a street corner a woman stood shouting a single name, ‘Flora! Flora! Flora!’ in a high, demented voice, clutching the railings with one hand as if to prevent herself from falling. Three blind men stumbled along, arms on each other’s shoulders, the leader wearing the flag, centre cut out, like a poncho. It was as if someone had thrown it over his head without him knowing and he had simply felt the extra warmth with gratitude. A young girl with long dark hair, topped with a red bobble hat, hung on a soldier’s arm, looking up at him every now and then with passionate tenderness, while he (younger and shyer) kept his eyes fixed on the red carnation in the barrel of his AK-47. In Palace Square a small boy of eight or nine ran among the tanks waving his arms in the air, his orange hat a flame amidst the ashes. And nearby passed a truck, piled with the bodies of the dead.
The American television crew had seen such things before. ‘When you’ve been in Vietnam … nothing can ever look as bad, you know? But then, I guess I was young then,’ said Ted Allison, as Francine lined up a shot with the cameraman. He pointed at the boy with the orange hat. ‘See that kid – arms in the air? Reminds me of that picture – the kid burned by napalm, running at the camera, naked, burned – a girl. You seen it?’
Ana shook her head.
‘It’s some image. Went all over the world. And I guess it summed up ‘Nam for me: a kid running from flames into flames, you know? And somebody there taking the picture, like us. I guess I’m an old cynic but I bet it’ll be the same here. I reckon we’re not talking Paradise, only Purgatory. I’d take a heavy bet on it…. Hey, am I talking too fast for you?’
Ana shook her head again – simultaneously entranced and intimidated by this new role, and the fact that passers-by looked at the group in which she was included with respectful awe.
‘I understand everything,’ she said, ‘please don’t worry,’ then smiled to herself at the ambiguity.
‘This is like a scene from Bosch,’ muttered Allison, looking up at the plume of smoke which rose from a blackened building towards the red sky.
‘Or – if I may say so – from one of our monasteries,’ Ana said. ‘Have you heard of these places?’ Ted shook his head, glancing down at some notes he held in his hand. ‘No? Oh, you’d like them, they are very beautiful – in the north of our country, in the Bucovina. The churches are painted on the outside, on the walls, you understand – and there is always a Last Judgement on the West Wall. You see heaven and hell on the same wall, like this – I think. My father took me to see them when I was a little girl. My mother, too. You should visit them.’
‘They still alive?’ asked Ted Allison, glancing up from his notes.
‘No, I meant the monasteries,’ said Ana.
‘Ready for the piece to camera, Ted?’ said Francine. ‘And Ana, while we’re doing this, see if you can get that couple to talk to us – over there, sitting on the grass. Tell them just a short interview about how they’re feeling right now.’
Ana turned and followed her gaze, knowing she had no alternative but to do as she was asked. But her spirit quailed. Even though, in the first euphoria of liberation, people had been talking to each other on the streets, it did not come naturally. To approach strangers, to ask questions … Do I dare … do I dare?
The man must have been in his early twenties. He sat on a packing case, his head in his hands, the ash from a lit cigarette falling unnoticed on his knee. His girlfriend knelt at his feet, arms about his neck. Neither of them made a sound. They were frozen in this pose, as if carved: clothes of granite, faces the palest marble. Stuck in the grass a foot away was a single yellow candle, its flame flickering precariously in the breeze.
It was a couple of minutes before they noticed Ana, standing a few feet away. The young man looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed, the contours of his face puffed-up with weeping. His chin was dark with three or four days’ growth. As if released by the presence of an audience the tears began again, pouring down his cheeks, although he still made no sound. The girl, younger than he, rubbed her fair head against him like a cat, crooning softly, ‘Shh, shhh, Constantin, shhh, it’s over, it’s over.’
‘Please …,’ Ana began then stopped, afraid of their grief.
The girl looked over her shoulder. ‘His sister,’ she said simply, and pointed to the candle.
Ana nodded, and repeated, ‘Please?’
‘What do you want?’ There was no hostility in the girl’s question, only a weariness which reminded Ana suddenly, sharply, of prison.
Hesitant, mumbling, Ana told them she was with the Americans, that they wanted to do an interview, that she would interpret … ‘Or maybe you both speak English,’ she added, apologetically, waiting for their angry rejection of this intrusion.
The couple shook their heads, looked at each other, then rose. ‘I want to tell them,’ the man cried out, hoarsely, passing a hand over his eyes. ‘Alis was seventeen, she was the best in her year, she had top marks always, and so pretty too, the kindest, sweetest person, my sister. And she wouldn’t come home, I told her to come home with me, but she wouldn’t, she ran away, and I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find her, I went everywhere looking for her. Our mother was so worried, she prayed all the time. We looked, we even went to the Emergency hospital…’
The girl nodded. ‘So many wounded, but we couldn’t see Alis.’
‘And we were going … we were going … to the morgue to look among the dead when I heard that a young girl was shot … here. And we found her, on her side, curled up, holding a flower. æ His voice rose. ‘I want to tell the Americans so they can tell the world, what those bastards did. And I’ll tell them we shouldn’t have shot the Cobbler’ – he spat viciously – ‘we should have put him in a cage and dragged him through the streets …’
‘And Her. Her too. She was even worse!’ added the girl, her round face creased with rage.
‘… and let the people beat them to death. With our own hands, slowly, with our own hands.’ He beat a fist in the palm of his hand, in a regular tattoo. Then the sobs began again.
Ana looked over her shoulder. Ted Allison had finished his camera statement; she was aware of whiteish faces bobbing in the dusk, turned towards her, waiting for her signal. Depressed, she turned and made herself walk briskly towards them. When she was a couple of yards away she simply nodded at Francine Schrire, who gave a thumbs-up sign.
‘What’s the story?’ she said.
Ana told her. It was easy to relate, being short.
‘Great! You hear that, Ted? Come on then, you guys.’
As the crew began to move towards them, the young couple stood waiting, staring at the approaching foreigners with an expression Ana was to recognize in the coming weeks: a mixture of excited fascination and acquiescent awe. They linked arms, and shifted their feet on the spot, murmuring to each other, as if rehearsing lines. The candle of mourning flickered near their shoes.
The director squinted at the scene, eyes moving restlessly from left to right. ‘OK, Ted, we can just go straight for it, I reckon.’ she said. ‘A couple of questions’ll do it – Ana, you stand by him and translate. Who they are, Ted, what happened to them, what they feel about the Ceauşescus, are they optimistic, that kind of stuff.’
‘Uh … I guess I know what to do, Fran,’ said Allison dryly.
But she was oblivious to his irony – turning to Ana with a tense smile. ‘OK – now, you ask them if we can blow out the candle, and then film them lighting it, right?’
Twenty-Six
; ‘What you have to understand is – there were two languages. The first one all of us learnt when we were babies. It is what you have in your phrase book, Ted – go on, tell me …’
He grinned. ‘Er … Bunăziua … nu înţeleg.’
‘Very good. It isn’t such a difficult language, especially if you speak Italian, I think. But I wasn’t telling you a joke, I was saying something important about this country. Something you have to understand … So, there were two languages for us all. The first one was the outer language, to be used with care – Romanian: the language that’s in our dictionaries. And which was turned into something ignorant by Ceauşescu, by the way. He had a poor vocabulary, he knew very few words, and so he … changed … is that the word? No – spoilt the language we all spoke. Oh God, he was so clever! You will never know how clever he was, even though he was an ignorant peasant!’
‘And what about the other language?’ Ted Allison prompted.
They were in a dark corner of the German Bar after the fifth day’s shooting. Ana was a little drunk, but it was more than the beer. Travelling in taxis, eating hotel food, being given cigarettes, and (most of all) being talked to and listened to … it was heady. Nothing she heard, out on the streets, shocked her. She saw the expressions of horror and pity on the Americans’ faces, and knew that her own story would horrify them even more. But she did not tell them. She simply reminded herself that she could not help being almost immune to suffering. She was not to be blamed.
And who is to be blamed, if not you? You did it yourself, you placed no faith in history, you chose to act, knowing that it would bring you to a moment in time from which there would be no going back, and that, whatever the outcome, everything would be changed irrevocably by that decision. Remove blame from yourself, Ana, pity yourself, remind yourself of the pressures that drove you on – and you will be colluding once more.
‘The other language?’ Ted Allison repeated.
‘Inside,’ said Ana, placing her hand on her breast, ‘it was the secret language each one of us spoke inside here. The language of the heart, you could say. And although you would never talk openly to a friend in public, and even in your flat you were afraid, because the walls were listening – inside here you could speak another language that no one else would know, because theirs would be different. Their own, as yours was your own. The only trouble was, you could only speak it to yourself. Talking to yourself. Telling yourself things. And sometimes, you see, that is very lonely. Still, at least that language could remain pure … even if, sometimes, talking it to yourself would drive you mad, and make you do strange things …’
‘You’re an incredible woman, you know that? Really intelligent. And you’ve been great to work with too …’
Ana was not immune to the admiration on this man’s face. But she had no time; he should realize that she had no time. She laughed. ‘Oh no, you don’t know me at all. I am really very, very stupid.’
The room was hot and dark; at the next table two young Romanian women, heavily made-up, with elaborate coiffures, were speaking stumbling English to Steve the cameraman and Lester, his assistant. The table was littered with beer bottles. The four laughed a lot.
‘They on the game?’ asked Ted, jerking a thumb.
Ana nodded. ‘Like everybody,’ she said.
‘You couldn’t be bought,’ he said, adding hastily, ‘not that I’m …’
‘Don’t worry, please. I understand – and you are a kind man, Mr Ted Allison, famous American reporter! But I think you know very little about life here. If I tell you the truth, I think it will surprise you. Let me say this – I am not very different from those girls, although I am not a prostitute. They are being – what do you call it? – surviving …’
‘Survivors.’
‘Thank you – survivors – in the only way they know. And that is not a bad thing, is it?’
He shook his head.
‘I would do almost anything for money, right now. Sometimes I think … even that.’
She felt her cheeks flush scarlet. Ted Allison looked down at his glass. There was silence between them for a few minutes. Then they both spoke at once.
‘I don’t want you to …’ she said.
‘Listen, I know you don’t mean …’ he said.
‘Maybe I will tell you something,’ she went on, hurriedly. ‘Something about me, and something I did. It will explain things, I think. I told myself I wouldn’t tell anybody else, not now, not until I had put it right. But … it’s late, and I have drunk a lot of beer, and you are going home tomorrow. So …’
‘Go on.’
Quickly, without looking up from the hands she had clasped on the table, a white knot that writhed in front of her, Ana told him about Ion, and about her time in prison. When she had finished she paused before looking up, half-expecting to see contempt on his face. ‘And so you will think … I made a terrible, stupid mistake,’ she said. ‘But you understand, it seemed the right thing. It seemed the best thing.’
‘Jesus, you poor woman,’ he whispered.
‘Please don’t pity me.’
‘But I do.’
‘It is not… helpful.’
She sat upright, and stuck out her chin in a tiny gesture of defiance. ‘In any case, I am not asking for pity. Maybe what I did was right – and I don’t know what will happen now. But I have to believe in myself – what I did, and what I am doing. You see?’
He nodded. ‘There was a story I heard, in Cambodia. Then I followed it up in the States, where the guy lives now. He was an engineer in Phnom Penh, and when the Khmer Rouge took power his whole family was herded off to the killing fields. You know what I mean by that?’ She shook her head. ‘OK, never mind. The only important thing to know is that millions of Cambodians died. The whole country was a concentration camp. And this guy – I can’t remember his name – saw his whole family wiped out, except his wife and one son, who was ill. So he made this decision to try to cross the border into Thailand with his wife. But they had to leave the boy behind, they couldn’t take him with them. Like – he might survive back there, but he’d have a tough time in the jungle. A decision – terrible. So they left him. And then the guy lost his wife in the jungle. He wandered around … but never knew what happened to her. When I interviewed him he said he wondered if that was his punishment for leaving his son. And that if he had left his wife behind, well, she might have lived. Christ – who knows the answers? When you’re in a situation like that – ’ he paused ‘–or this.’
‘Did he ever find the son again?’ she asked.
‘No – but that was Cambodia, Ana. This is Europe. So – what happens now?’
‘I’ve applied for my passport. That will be easy. But I have to work hard to get money for my journey. That’s what I meant, when I said I would do anything … I know he would have gone to a children’s home, and maybe now he is with a family. That is what they do. I read it in The Times. So it won’t be too hard.’
He nodded, ‘Sure, there’ll be a Children’s Bureau in Frankfurt who’ll have all the data. Germany! We’re talking serious efficiency here!’
She smiled, and he was glad to see the wan, tense look disappear. ‘You make me cheerful, Mr Ted Allison,’ she said, and he noticed how lacking she was in the coyness, the sly coquetry that would have characterised the words in an American mouth. He felt out of his depth.
‘I’ll miss working with you all,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I didn’t like Francine at first. She seemed …’
‘Tough? Well, she is,’ he grinned.
But that morning, Francine Schrire had told Ana she wanted to talk to her in her room, to check some facts. The room was huge; the bed would have slept three or four people; there was a bowl of fruit and a bottle of whisky on the dressing table. Ana stared.
‘Listen, Ana, I … uh … wanted to give you something. A present – because you’ve been so great to work with.’
Ana raised a hand, discomfited. ‘Oh no, please.’
&nb
sp; The other woman was even more embarrassed, all her usual briskness gone. ‘Yeah, really. But you know, you can’t buy things … oh hell, of course you know! And so I thought you might like these … don’t want you to be offended or anything, but…’
A few pieces of clothing were laid out on the bed. Ana had assumed Francine was about to pack or wear them. There was a heavy knitted cardigan in bright rainbow stripes, an emerald green blouse with shoulder pads, and a pair of navy-blue trousers.
‘I guess you’re my size.’
‘Oh no, please – it is too much.’
Ana stared in awe and longing at the clothes, shaking her head. Because she made no move to pick up the clothes, or even touch them, Francine assumed she was offended by what she saw as charity.
‘I mean, you don’t have to have them, you know? If you don’t want them.’
‘They are very lovely clothes,’ said Ana, wanting them so much.
‘You’ll be helping me. I don’t have any room in my case.’
Ana smiled happily. ‘Well, you’re very kind, but I’ll only take them to help you.’
‘That’s OK then … Uh, look, I’ll pack them up in a couple of plastic bags.’ Ana watched, and all she could think was that when she found Ion at last, she would look so smart he might not recognize her.
‘She was kind to me,’ said Ana.
‘That figures – Fran’s OK. Listen, there’s a Canadian crew coming in tomorrow. They’ll be here before we leave. How’d it be if I talked to them and got them to hire you?’
Her smile dazzled him. ‘I would like that very much.’
‘OK, so it’s done. Now, I’m gonna turn in. But first, I’m gonna put you in a taxi and send you home.’