by Bel Mooney
You see, I can’t talk to Ionica, not tonight. All day I carried his picture, showing it to men and women who had no idea what it signified, and now the most terrible thing has happened: its significance has been lost to me too. I know he is here, maybe just two streets away from me now; I can feel his presence in this city, drawing me on. Yet in one year he will have changed, he must have changed, just as I have. Neither of us is the same as when we sat and played our game of language – always so good, Ionica, to please me, just as I always wanted to please you, when I could.
My father was a teacher and he knew his history. My mother was a teacher too, but it was language she loved, and she passed that on to me. My son was ten when I saw him last and he liked history and language, but preferred to play games when he could. My father would have taken him to see the churches; my mother would have taken him on her knee and told him stories …
‘We always have to be just,’ he said, but tell me, Frenchman, what justice is it that my son had no grandparents, and a mother who was so stupid she had an idea that things could be better? Did he deserve that?
The trouble is, I am afraid of being free. Perhaps we all were. There was safety in the fear. When that was removed there was an even worse terror, because the world we had thought of as stable – even though we hated it – was falling apart. Ah but, you didn’t know about that, did you, Radu? But of course you did! You do …
I wanted to crawl in here because it is small, like a cell. The walls surround me like an embrace. Human to want an embrace … like Christian Luca did, on that night when it seemed that the walls had at last been torn down, and we could step towards each other like human beings, in pity if not in love. Just as Michael and I did, although I know that was love of sorts, or else how could I have felt so whole, just for that moment?
Do you think of me, Michael Edwards? I wish I’d phoned … Do you wonder what I’m doing, Doina?
We would marry – ha! – and go to live in London, and I’d take Ion to see the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, and he would go to a fine school and be so clever, he always was good at his lessons, quick to learn … Michael would be proud of me. We would go to the opera, and I would wear a red dress and meet his friends. But then, I already would have met them, if I was married… Absurd! I told you so!
Look at this fruit, there’s nothing wrong with it, to throw such things away … they have no idea at all.
What would it be like to be like them? To BE them? To walk confidently in the light knowing you are right – that your system is right – and so feel no fear of speech or of action? Could I ever be like that? Can we, the discredited ones, learn to throw off our shame? {After all, it wasn’t our fault, we didn’t make communism – it created us: heads down, always heads down, with nothing – not even fruit.) You would teach me, Michael, and as for Ion – well, children are so adaptable … Oh God.
If these houses of the dead were to be laid down on the ground, they would provide coffin-homes for us to sleep in – waiting for the Day of Judgement, when we would be made whole, all our severed limbs returned by the docile beasts who savaged us.
And we would forgive them, we would have to forgive them. Even the dogs.
Forty
The priest passed Ana’s ‘house’ early next morning. He heard the birds, and felt his heart lighten. The sun shone through young leaves, and warmed the grey marble. His crucifix banged gently on his chest with each step, like an external heartbeat, reinforcing the one within. God was good; he had never doubted that – even when people doubled-up with the force of private grief or guilt asked him to explain the problem of pain. It was possible. He did it week after week. He told them of the divine plan in which all things have their place, describing it as a puzzle whose pieces interlock, and add to the meaning of the whole. Yet only God has the key to solving the mystery of His creation, he would say, it is not for sinful, mortal man to aspire to such understanding. For us there is only faith …
He thought of these things as he walked, his spirit at ease, knowing the benevolence of God. Ana saw him pass, stiff and chilly on her bed of leaves. For a second she wanted to call out – seeing the black robe swish by, and hearing the echo of his firm footsteps on the path. After the long dark night she felt such despair and weariness at the prospect of the day, she needed to turn to someone for help. She knelt, and peered out of her mausoleum, gazing at his departing back. Then she saw the whole cemetery sparkling, as if someone had scattered a sack of tiny diamond chippings on the leaves, the grass, the tombs, the plastic flowers. The air smelt new. A shadow pattern of leaves was like lace on the path, and all around the birds sang riotously.
She unfolded her limbs and stood outside the neglected house of the Choismiers and Fichots, still looking in the direction the priest had taken.
If I call him, and tell him my story, what can he do? He will try to help me – maybe. But how? Will he say there are organisations to help people like me – or that I must go to the police and put myself in their hands? How do I know what he is like? Because he is a man of God does not necessarily mean he is sympathetic; perhaps he’s an angry man who’ll call the police without telling me … Oh anyway, Ana, haven’t you understood by now that you are on your own? Haven’t you learnt?
She bent, picked up her bag, and left by the north gate of the cemetery, catching smells from someone’s kitchen window, and strengthened at the thought of bread and milky coffee in a café. Today, she thought, she would find him. There could be no doubt about that, in the sense that doubt was not permissable.
With that at least the priest would have agreed, as he knelt before the altar.
From time to time, throughout the day, Ana thought of him, wondering if she had made the right decision. For despite her resolve, the business of walking up and down the streets, taking out her photograph, asking and hoping … asking and hoping … then the shaking of the heads, soon exhausted her again. And as she moved northwards it seemed there were more and more restaurants, not so much in the most eastern parts of the arrondissement, but around Gambetta. The colours of Paris, bright in the spring sun, assailed her eyes: the strong yellow and blue of the Ricard sign, the green of freshly painted railings, the purples and cerises of cheap track-suits hanging outside a shop on Boulevard de Menilmontant. Sometimes she longed for darkness and peace, and thought of the intense, reverent gloom of Cretulescu Church, and the look on the face of the Child …
Then she wondered what the priest would have said.
But it was too late. The pencilled-in streets in her city plan spread like a web upwards and across from Pére Lachaise. Once a policeman approached her as she left a brasserie, and asked if she wanted some help. He had been watching her for a few minutes, and saw her enter first the small Chinese restaurant, and then the brasserie – holding what he saw to be a photograph in her hand.
So he asked,’ Vous cherchez quelque chose, Madame?’
He did not expect the woman to look at him with such fear in her eyes, and his suspicions were aroused. But Ana, whose response to uniform was bred in the bone, still managed swiftly to gain control. In her most ‘English’ of voices she said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,’ adapting her stance to suit the words, acting ‘Englishness’ as she imagined it and as she had sometimes observed it at the Embassy: arrogant, confident, indifferent. It was in the set of the shoulders, the angle of the chin …
Remembering the flash of panic, the policeman trusted his instinct and tried again. ‘You … are looking … for something?’ he asked. Hesitant in a foreign language, he was instantly less threatening.
‘No,’ Ana said, stonewalling – but with a smile on her face which knew it could charm, even now. She was glad she had spent time in the public lavatory, washing, brushing her hair, and even putting on some makeup.
He shrugged, ‘OK,’ and walked on.
Ana turned back on her steps into a quiet side road, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes. It was as if the noi
se of her heart might rock the surrounding buildings to their foundations, so that they would collapse., burying her in dust and darkness.
After that moment of weakness Ana settled grimly into the search, likening it in her mind to the time in prison, which had to be endured in all its squalor, boredom and misery – for to capitulate to despair would have awarded victory to the forces of darkness. She relived the night when Cale told her story, and could almost feel the woman’s dirty head pressed against her breast as she held her there – knowing in that instant that all suffering must be measured by such a yardstick.
‘Excusez-moi, je cherche ce garcín. L’avez-vous vu?’
‘Non … je regrette …’
‘Excusez-moi, je cherche ce garcín. L’avez-vous vu, s’il vous plaît?’
‘Un moment… attendez … non, Madame.’
‘S’il vous plait, excusez-moi – avez-vous vu ce garcon?’
‘Madame, nous sommes tres occupés – regardez!’
‘Excusez-moi …’
‘Non.’
She sat down in a quiet square, with a drinking fountain in its centre, painted dark green. It was ornate: four bare-breasted women with drapery billowing about their legs, holding up an elaborate domed roof. A child ran up to it, pressed the lever to make the water spurt, then followed her mother, wiping her mouth with her hand, and crying to make her wait. The woman pushing the pram was hot and anxious, so did not slacken her pace. The child’s shrill wails echoed off the low, square block of new flats across the square. The iron women remained, stolidly holding up the roof of the world, strong, implacable and cold.
Ana rested her legs, envying all of them: the child her mother and the mother her child – and the four miniature caryatides who had no feelings, so knew nothing. Yet they represented pure strength, female strength, she thought – and rose, reaching out to run her hands over the classical perfection of their forms, as if by touch she could toughen her own sinews.
The child caught up with her mother and clung to her coat. The wailing ceased as they disappeared into the flats.
Ana was able to find a sort of consolation imagining them ascending the stairs (as she and Ion used to do) – but no, there would be a lift; this was France, not Romania – and coats taken off, the shopping unpacked (so much food on the table), the baby unwrapped, the child set to playing a game – ‘Maman, Maman, play with me!’ But the mother would say no, as mothers do, because she is busy. And the child would cry again, as children do … and perhaps be comforted, perhaps be slapped, perhaps be set to watch the television because the baby’s feed was due … All of it going on the same, in that apartment as in others, all over the world: a flawed and messy snatching at contentment in the face of chaos.
It seemed to Ana that human life formed itself into a series of silent tableaux on a brightly lit stage – scenes forming and changing, some dramatic, some sentimental, some terrifying, some amusing, some tragic – and that she alone formed the audience for this ancient entertainment, sitting in a vast dark auditorium, her applause like the twitter of birds. Even when the silent actors formed themselves into scenes from her own life, and she could see herself as well as her parents, Radu, Doina, Michael and Ion, she was incapable of rising from her seat to run down the aisle and join them on stage, becoming the self that she had been. She had to watch; she was fated to witness the truth that those scenes had no more significance than the ones featuring strangers, and see her own story as just one tiny part of a vast show, which would continue relentlessly even if she closed her eyes. Yet strangely, she had no desire to close her eyes and seek respite. It would go on, as she would go on – and in that knowledge she could applaud and applaud, until the weak twitter of birds became a deafening choir of celebration, and miracles were possible.
It was no surprise to her, therefore, that much later she should find a dirty fifty-franc note on the pavement. After buying herself some coffee and a plate of frites, she walked along Avenue Gambetta, looking for somewhere to sleep. The night was mild. She could smell, faintly beyond the aroma of food, a strange fragrance, like incense or night flowers.
In search of a quiet corner Ana turned off the main thoroughfare and took a short side street. It was bisected by another narrow road, and walking along this one that she glanced to one side and saw the cul-de-sac. It was called Passage Rousseau. There was a glow of light at the end, where a couple of cars were parked. It looked vaguely welcoming, and, mothlike, Ana was drawn. She noticed that the wall on her right was curiously constructed with arched recesses, as if it were the support wall of a crypt. Facing it was a row of small shops, all closed for the night, selling craftwork and ethnic goods. The shopowners clearly used the deep recesses of the old wall to discard their rubbish; there were stacks of cardboard boxes, some flattened and folded, some left whole.
It took Ana a few minutes to rearrange one of the stacks to create a bed for herself. A thick layer of cardboard beneath insulated her from the ground, then she boxed herself in so that she could not be seen by any chance passer-by. As she lay there, half-dozing, footsteps clattered by and she heard the warm, intimate talk of people who have just shared a meal perhaps, and who know their conversation will continue this, and future nights. Later still she heard a foreign language spoken, as two men stopped, quite near her, as if to argue, before walking on, out of the alley. She thought she was dreaming, wondered where she was … then cursed the fact that she was still awake.
Go to sleep …
Nani, nani puiul mamii şi al cucoanei,
Vino peste de mi-i creste …
Singing inside her head, she soon fell into a deep exhausted sleep. It was the ninth night since she had left Bucharest.
Forty-One
Paul Denis rose at dawn, and drove to the market as usual, returning an hour later with the boxes of produce he left by the side door for the staff to unpack. Then he opened his own door and went upstairs to make himself coffee, being sure to avoid the stair that always creaked, and treading softly. There was no point in waking them yet, although Monique would be up soon.
The morning was pearly-grey; it suited his mood. It was so difficult to know what to do; each night they sat talking until late, weighing up the issues and always, it seemed, ending in a moral cul-de-sac. Paul Denis was used to knowing the answers, even though his friends from the Sorbonne had long ago changed their minds and taken refuge in equivocation. He prided himself on knowing right from wrong. Yet with this …
And Monique’s determination worried him. He knew it had its roots in their disappointment, and that fact tipped the scales worryingly, probably in favour of wrong.
He looked out of the window, down into Passage Rousseau, holding his mug of black coffee with both hands. His car was parked in front, and he noticed with irritation that one of its hub caps was missing. ‘Merde!’
Paul loved his Citroën; despising consumerism he had maintained it for fifteen years, and now it amused him that the old car was considered a classic. Sometimes customers made him an offer, but were always refused. He thought he remembered hearing a clatter as he turned into the alley, and immediately went back downstairs to see if it might have been the missing hub cap.
Outside, still holding the untouched coffee, he glanced to the right – then smiled. About twenty metres away, lying by the wall across the alley, he spotted the gleam of metal. He was in luck. Very slowly, taking a sip as he walked, he went along to retrieve the hub cap. As he was bending to pick it up, noticing the buildup of rubbish in the arches opposite the shops and thinking he must see that something was done about it, he stiffened. There was a foot poking out from beneath some cardboard boxes.
Immediately Paul thought of murder. Hot coffee slopped on his hand. ‘Merde!’
He put down the mug, and forced himself to pull one of the boxes away, then another, afraid of what he might find. As he did so there was an eruption of cardboard, and a woman sat there in the debris, staring at him with frightened eyes. For a second neither
of them spoke. Then Ana began to shiver, the sound of her teeth quite audible in the still air. Still shocked, Paul Denis reached for the remaining coffee and held it out to her, muttering, ‘Buvez … vite.’
She scrambled to her feet, wincing slightly, and stood facing him, still with that fear in her eyes. Then, as if she could not resist the smell, she took the offered mug with both hands and raised it to her mouth, shivering all the while. He watched as she drank.
‘Pourquoi dormez-vous ici?’
Ana did not reply. She liked this man’s appearance; there was something about him that reminded her of Radu, even though his hair was mostly grey and he had no beard. But Paul Denis had a similar stocky build, and his hair was long over his collar, as if he had refused to abandon the style of his youth. His clothes added to this impression: he wore jeans, trainers and a denim jacket over an old black roll-necked sweater.
‘Merci, Monsieur,’ she said, handing back the mug.
‘Vous n’êtes pas française?’ he asked, picking up the foreign intonation.
She shook her head, then bent to find her bag in the pile of cardboard.
‘Votre pays?’
Who could you trust? Ana remembered Antoine Perrin, and shrank away from the hand Paul Denis stretched out, as if to detain her. And it was not his business.
‘I am English,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows. She did not look English, and yet the accent … His own English was good, but not perfect. He could not tell.
‘Tell me, then … why are you sleeping outside?’
She shrugged. ‘Things happen. I must go.’
‘Did you lose your money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you told the police?’
‘No!’
‘Why?’
‘Because I …’
Paul Denis’s first thought then was that she was in trouble. Why else would she look so afraid? Had her skin been of another colour he would immediately have assumed the truth – that she was a migrant. As it was he guessed that maybe she was on the run, and had been let down by somebody … But somehow she did not look the part, and in any case, why would she say she was English? He guessed she was Italian, or maybe Polish – and shrugged. It was not his business. Still, all his life his sympathies had been with the oppressed, and he felt sorry for this dishevelled woman. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want some bread?’ he asked.