by Bel Mooney
The next morning Ana was introduced to the Canadians, and Francine gave her an envelope containing her pay for the five days’ work. It burned in Ana’s hands; she wanted to tear it open, to shriek her excitement to the lobby. But she was quiet, saying her goodbyes with real regret – especially to Ted Allison, who (she knew) carried away with him something precious, because she had confided in him.
At the last minute, casually, he pulled something from his overcoat pocket – something rolled, secured with an elastic band. Ana saw the word ‘Time’.
‘There’s a couple of magazines there – Time and Newsweek. I was going to throw them away, then I thought they might help you on your journey.’
‘What journey?’ Francine asked.
‘Nothing. It’s just a joke between me and Ana,’ he said.
When the taxis had pulled away Ana stood alone, watching the space where they had been, tapping the rolled up magazines against her leg.
‘I thought they might help you on your journey.’
She thought there was something odd about that sentence. And there had been the slight flicker of an eyelid as he said it.
She turned and walked through the lobby to the ladies’ toilets. There she tore open her pay envelope, and fingered the dollar bills. One hundred and twenty-five dollars. Her knees felt weak, and she sat down on the lavatory. Then, feeling curious, she removed the elastic band, unrolled the magazines, and smoothed them on her knee.
Inside the pages of Time, she found an envelope, bearing her name. The note said simply, ‘Good luck. I hope this will help.
Just take it as a thank-you present, ‘cos I’m glad to have met you. God bless – Ted’. And he had wrapped it around two fifty-dollar bills.
Twenty-Seven
What did I know about my own country? Nothing at all. Yesterday, in the orphanage, and then the hospital, I did not just see with my own eyes, and smell with my own nose, and hear with my own ears. For the first time in my life I saw and smelt and heard through others, and experienced the horror with all their senses as well as my own.
They were British – the ones who witnessed my complicity, and I know they judged me for it.
On the streets with the Americans, and the Canadians, and then the second American crew, and the writer and photographer from The New York Times, we were at least breathing air, and what they wanted was easy to accept by now: tanks and soldiers and people weeping over graves covered with our mutilated flag. We talked to women about their husbands and sons, and parents about their daughters, and they called them heroes – their dead. Easy to see how the people in the West would be uplifted by this story – how the oppressed finally rose up and threw off their yoke, some of them dying in the process. The journalists paid me for my work and I felt proud. Of course I did. Once or twice … No, I can’t even admit it to myself. But I must: once or twice I even allowed myself not to think about Ion, because I was enjoying myself Isn’t that a shameful thing to confess – that I was walking with strangers around this city, and hearing its grief, and yet I was enjoying myself…? I told that kind American I could be bought.
And then yesterday. The British television team wanted to look deeper into the long-term problems of Romania, they said. And their researcher had the addresses already. We were to tell the story of Romania’s abandoned children.
Nobody tried to stop us filming; these places seemed abandoned – so why should anybody care that our shame should be made so public? The
supervisors were tired. They knew nothing else but what was there around them. What was there made the British team gaze at each other in horror. And at me.
Orphanage Number One was bad enough. Truly, I had no idea such places existed, or rather that there were so many children. So many. Unwanted.
‘How can mothers abandon their children? the reporter, Ann parker, asked me.
‘Because they are poor. Because of Ceauşescu’s policies they were forced to have children. There was no birth control. They had child after child. And they couldn’t keep them,’ I said, not trusting myself to allow any emotion into my voice.
And when we walked into the first room, packed with cots so that there was barely room to squeeze between them, all the little ones stood and rattled the bars shouting ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’, because they saw two women entering their room. Woman equals mother. Always.
Oh, Ion, you were crying out to me in all those voices, and I felt as if Ann Parker would turn to me and point, accusing this time: ‘How can a mother abandon her child?’
But I didn’t abandon you. I saved you!
But what can you understand about any of this, Englishwoman, with your notebook and your knowledge of facts. You know more about this country than I do – we joked about that. But you are not a mother, you told me that. You are not a mother… So how can your imagination hurl itself towards me?
The sharp reek of piss was in the floors, the walls, the stair-rails; it penetrated our hair and our skin, and forced us to take short breaths through our mouths, to avoid breathing through our noses. There was no one to look after the children, to pick them up and play with them. And so they stood like tiny prisoners, rattling the bars of their cots, waiting. When we interviewed the supervisor she said, ‘The parents usually take them back when they are old enough to earn money. Until then they hardly ever visit them.’ And she shrugged.
When I translated, Ann Parker asked, ‘What sort of people are we talking about?’
The supervisor looked at me in a knowing way. ‘Tell her it is the gypsies, of course – very many gypsies. And young girls who get pregnant and their parents do not want them to keep the child. And married woman with too many children …’
Outside, the cameraman said, ‘What a place! When I think of my three kids at home, and all they’ve got. All their toys … Bloody hell!’ He had tears in his eyes.
Ann Parker said, ‘I didn’t like that bit about the gypsies. Is that kind of racism common, Ana?’
I told her it was. ‘Nobody likes the gypsies. They are always out for themselves, and they always have money,’ I said. ‘And I know people … who have tried to escape, and often they are betrayed by gypsies. So people have reason not to like them.’
I could see she was not listening. Or rather, she did not want to hear what she was hearing, and so looked at me in vague disappointment. ‘I’m sure there’s another side to it,’ she said. ‘I see the gypsies of Europe as an oppressed minority.’
‘Yes, but maybe you shouldn’t expect an oppressed majority to care,’ I said.
All this was forgotten, once we were inside Gradinari. Ann Parker had the facts. She stood outside the decaying building and addressed the camera. ‘This is a hospital for the handicapped,’ she said, ‘but there are only four nurses, a medical assistant, a cook and a washerwoman to look after 96 children and 25 adults. Gradinari Hospital is a terrible proof of Ceauşescu’s neglect of his people. While he was building his palace in Bucharest, conditions for the ordinary working people of this country were bad enough. But for the old and the handicapped they were terrible. Locked up and lost, they were abandoned in their houses of horror.’
‘Cut!’ the director shouted, nodded his approval. ‘One-take Ann!’
We walked from room to room in silence, as the camera whirred quietly, and the cries of children echoed down the freezing corridors. A boy of ten was tied to his cot by a piece of filthy cotton bandaging. He rocked to and fro, banging his head against the bars, shoulders hunched, like a chimpanzee.
In the next room an emaciated girl stood naked by a pot, and threw back her head shouting babbling unintelligibly. All around her others squatted in silence, but something made her rebel. She swayed from side to side; her hipbones stretched her skin; she banged the heels of her hands together in front of just-developing breasts, and screamed. Nobody came. Urine ran down her leg and formed a puddle at her feet. There was nothing to do but turn away.
And they were crammed into their beds too, in room after ro
om. Five small children huddled together under one dirty grey blanket, all wearing bonnets, their protruding feet blueish-pink with cold.
Our breath hung before us; the cameraman attempted to close the rattling window frame completely, yet it would not move. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.
The stench settled on my stomach. I breathed deeply, trying to control the need to vomit. There were faeces on the floor of the bathroom, where four teenage boys sat in one bath, and six stood in the one next to it, no room to sit down. They stared at us mutely, teeth chattering. We moved on. Young men squatted in corridors, banging their heads with a slow, deliberate rhythm, against the walls. A small boy with no legs dragged himself along at horrifying speed, like a terrible insect, his hands slapping the floor. Somewhere in the distance a man’s voice was crying one word, over and over again. I thought I heard, Mama, Mama, Mama, but could not be sure.
And as we passed through these stages of hell, recording the cries of the damned, and capturing their pain for people to watch in their homes, in another country, I wondered if Dante felt responsible – as I did.
The nurse had shrugged. She was a hard, middle-aged woman who had nothing to say, other than,’ These people have to be housed. We do what we have to do.’
‘She doesn’t give a damn,’ said the director.
‘What a bloody country,’ said the sound recordist.
‘I’ve been in some terrible places, and seen horrible things – but none as bad as this,’ said Ann Parker, angrily.
And I felt their eyes on me. I am Romanian, I thought, and even though you would deny it {truly, because you don’t even know you feel it) you despise me for all this. And even though it is not my fault, I feel ashamed.
‘Do you think people knew it was going on?’ they asked each other, and I stood with my head bowed, knowing I was expected to say something.
‘I have never been … to such places,’ I said, ‘and I do not want to go ever again.’
‘Not seeing it doesn’t make it go away,’ said Ann Parker.
‘I know, I replied.
We drove back to Bucharest in silence, and I knew it would soon be time for me to leave. I wanted to cry, not for Ion now, but for all those children we had seen, and the thousands of others we would never see, standing alone and crying a word the meaning of which they cannot possibly know: ‘Mama.’
Twenty-Eight
The woman who turned into the Strada Jules Michelet, and told the guard at the Embassy gate that she had an appointment, knew she was different.
It was not just the clothes, although the American woman’s gift added to her confidence. Something else: beyond clothes, beyond the miraculous earned dollars, beyond the communication with foreigners – beyond the self. It was (she was surprised to realize) inextricably bound up with the breath exhaled simultaneously by the crowds on the streets, greedy for the hundreds of newspapers which had sprung up, almost as if scattered overnight from a packet marked ‘Freedom’. It was her own antidote to the shame she had often felt, with the strangers, apologizing, ‘Oh, we are so poor,’ as again they failed even to get a cup of coffee.
We are so poor, yes, but not in spirit. Not any more. And that is why I can lift my head, as people around me lift theirs, for a while at least. Hope adds inches to us, even if we must still queue for bread.
Michael Edwards was astonished at the change. When she had telephoned he had stammered like a small boy. Now he realized that mere surprise could not itself account for the extent of his disturbance at this woman’s return. He stared at her, and she returned his gaze, not nervously, as before, but almost as an equal. As soon as she sat down she lit a Marlboro, and blew the smoke high into the air.
‘I think I have many things to explain to you,’ she said, smoothing the material of the trousers.
‘You look … um … very well,’ he said.
‘Thank you. And are you well?’
‘Oh yes. I went home for Christmas and came back …’ He shook his head, impatient with the small talk. ‘Who would have thought it, Ana – this change?’
‘None of us, I think. There was no light through the tunnel then. And now …’
‘What on earth happened to you?’ he blurted before she had finished.
When her eyes met his again they looked tired and sad, at odds with the air of guarded self-confidence that had carried her into the room. ‘It will take a long time to tell you.’ She looked pointedly at her watch.
‘I have the time, but perhaps you don’t,’ he said, drily.
‘Please …’ She hesitated, then went on, ‘… I wanted to ask you … that was why I came, although I have no right. And I do want to tell you – everything. If you want to hear. But I need your help, that is, if…’
The hair fell in a dark curtain. Michael felt out of his depth.
‘Tell me what you want,’ he said quietly.
‘I have my passport!’ she said, throwing her head back and looking at him expectantly.
Michael knew enough to understand her tone; knew equally that whatever he said would fall short. ‘Well done! I mean, it must be, must be an extraordinary feeling … And let me guess – you want to go to England’.
She shook her head. ‘No … Oh, believe me, I want to go to England one day, more than anything. But now I must get to Germany. Very soon. And I have heard that it can take some time to get the visa, and so I thought … because you know the people in the Embassy …’
‘Ah yes, I see. Well, that shouldn’t be a problem. But why Germany? You don’t speak German, do you?’
She shook her head, twisting her hands in her lap, looking like the old cagey, frightened Ana now, the one he knew. There was silence for a minute or two. Then she said quietly, ‘To tell you why … is part of my story. Why I didn’t come to work. And … oh … I don’t know how to begin it, now.’
Michael thought he heard her voice waver, but her face was hidden again. He felt inept, sensing that this woman had experienced things he could not imagine, and feeling oddly resistant to whatever she had to say. Not now, anyway. It was the wrong time.
He reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll phone Rolf Fossmeyer now and get you an appointment to see him as soon as he can make it.’ He hesitated. ‘And will you meet me tonight? We’ll have a meal … at Hanul Manuc. We’ll be able to talk … you can tell me.’
She nodded.
The waiter stood in front of them, a thuggish, thickset man who did not smile. ‘I propose to you some pork with fried potatoes,’ he said to Michael, in heavily accented English.
‘Perhaps … But please will you bring me the menu,’ Michael replied coldly, in Romanian.
‘I think it is too long. Our menu is very long,’ said the man, in English again, ignoring the courtesy of this foreigner speaking his own language.
‘I have plenty of time to read a long menu,’ said Michael, sticking to Romanian.
The man shrugged insolently, and went away. Michael’s anger faded as soon as it had begun. He should be used to it by now. It had taken a packet of Kent to get the table, even though he had telephoned to book, and then an interminable argument to get them moved away from the noisy band – even though there were plenty of empty tables in the far corner of the room he had indicated. ‘Perhaps some more cigarettes?’ Ana had whispered, reaching for her bag. But Michael had refused, determined that reason and authority should prevail. It did. But he felt exhausted by the process.
After ten minutes the waiter returned with the menu. Pointedly Michael told him not to go, and glanced at it hurriedly. ‘Some chicken?’ he said to Ana. ‘And what about this tomato salad with cheese?’
‘Anything,’ she said.
He ordered chicken for her, and some fish with rice for himself, then refilled their glasses – feeling curiously nervous as if he had never before taken a woman out to dinner. There was a sense between them of ancient walls removed, so that they blinked at the new horizon, but were unsure how to proceed throug
h the rubble. Ana smoked and fidgeted.
‘Well,’ he said, to break the silence.
‘Well?’ she replied.
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Yes, with two friends – to have a drink in the courtyard. A beer.’
‘I love the woodwork. I can’t remember if you ever went to the Maramureş?’ She shook her head. ‘I love the wooden churches. I think craftsmen from there built this place?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Yes, I read it in the guidebook – when I first came to Bucharest.’
There was a short silence. Then he said, ‘I don’t want to sound like a priest, but don’t you think you’d feel more relaxed if you told me … what you want to tell me?’
‘I don’t know if I want to tell you.’
‘You’re seeing Fossmeyer tomorrow. He’ll get you your visa. When will you go to Germany?’
‘As soon as I can after that.’
‘Why, Ana?’
She took in a mouthful of air and sat up straight. ‘Because my son, Ion – you met my son, do you remember? – my son is there.’
She began to tell him, in a slow deadpan voice, never taking her eyes from his face. He sat forward to catch every word, glancing down every so often (because he needed respite from that gaze) at the reddened hands which turned a disposable lighter over and over. Once he attempted an interjection, half of sympathy, half of puzzlement, but there was no stopping her. She needed to talk as well as to justify herself, and he guessed, in all humility, that it did not matter who was sitting opposite her.
She had reached the point in her narrative when Ion left with Radu, and her eyes filled with tears. At that point, twenty minutes after they had given their order, the waiter returned.
‘I am sorry,’ he said flatly, in English, ‘but I do not have the chicken. And no fish.’
Exasperated, Michael pushed back his chair. ‘Well, will you bring me the menu again, please!’ He too spoke in English, giving the man his first victory.
‘I am sorry, but I think we do not have what you may ask for. It is a pity, but…’ Again, the shrug of heavy shoulders.