He draws a cloud above the horizon and fills it with a pattern of crosses. He puts herringbone patterning on the side of a wagon, stripes on trees, diamond shapes on the grass. The picture crowds and the sense of representation fades, and then again he turns the page.
That was the way he was first to know the war, by the convoys coming down the road to the river crossing. There were to be more convoys later: armies going back the way these carts had come, armies returning, people too; so many processions.
This first one carried furniture. So did the last one, that was the Russians going home. It was more crazy, that one, richer things in it, grandfather clocks on the wagons and mirrors wrapped in velvet curtains and enormous old trumpet phonographs and landscapes in gilded frames – but it did not make such an impression on him. By that time he had become accustomed to seeing strange things.
He had sensed long before the war began that they were waiting for something to happen. He could feel it in the emptiness of the place, as if space had been cleared, people gone to prepare, before some unknown event. It was there in the deliberateness of what people did. A number of the men left, some straight away like the men from the house, others in the months that followed. When he went to the market with Paraschiva there weren’t so many men in the town now either, or there were men but they were soldiers, idle soldiers but soldiers none the less, in the bars and on the streets, watching whatever was or wasn’t going on.
Once or twice men in uniform came to the house. After they had gone the second time some rooms in the house were shuttered up. But the days went on, the whole winter passed, and spring came and went without change.
It was not until the summer that anything unusual occurred. Some strangers came down the drive one day asking for things. These were not Gypsies or peasants but people who were dressed in the same style as the people in the big house only they had mud on their clothes and dirty shoes. Marina Văleanu came to the door and gave them food to eat, and then he helped the women to load a cart with bedding and more food, and drove it out to a crossroads beyond the village where they met a great line of wagons coming all the way from the horizon.
He saw when he got to the wagons that they were piled high as haycarts with the contents of houses. Some were roughly loaded, bristling with chairs and tables and boxes. Others had tidy loads tied down with tarpaulin but he could tell by the lowered heads of the horses that pulled them that whatever was on them was much heavier than hay. He had never seen such traffic before so he got down and walked for a long way with the wagons coming towards him, wondering when he would reach the end. He looked into the faces of the people who walked beside the horses and drove the wagons. There were men and women and children. He went close and looked into their faces but they seemed too tired to look back at him. Not even the children smiled. He found that strange because it was a lovely summer’s day and the fields were full of flowers and the children should have been smiling. He walked across that valley and up the next hill and looked down into the wider valley beyond where the big river was. The land was very green and empty except for a shimmering grey band where the willows marked the course of the river. The line continued as far as he could see, crossing the river, broken only as it passed in and out of the cover of the willows, coming all the way out of the distance. He walked back to where he had left Mama Anica and József and Paraschiva, and they had emptied their cart of all that they had brought.
21
July brings a stifling spell of weather. The overcrowded city attempts to disappear into itself, shutters closed, blinds down, pedestrians slipping out of the sun on to the shaded sides of the streets. In houses where people are packed too close they come and go with heads down as if neighbours do not exist, and in the nights they hear each other quarrel through wide-open windows. It adds to the tension that in these conditions, with so many crowded together, such heat and so little hygiene, vermin proliferate: rats, lice, cockroaches, bedbugs. These they blame on the filthy habits of the bombed-out or the Gypsies or the Bessarabian refugees, whatever displaced family occupies the apartments beside or above or beneath their own. Now and then things get so bad that the city authorities evacuate a house for a number of days so that it can be sprayed, and then the housed are homeless once more and see sparse possessions destroyed in the attempt to control the infestation.
The bugs do not bother Augustin greatly. He knows only the specific. He sees that they are unpleasant and his experience tells him that they proliferate in bad places where bad things happen. But they can be borne. He has lived with them long enough in the past. He does not have such a horror of them as others do since he has no sense of contagion or epidemic, of the power of vermin to spread disease. For him there is a worse, direct effect of the summer, and that is the sultry air: the sheer weight and heat of it. There are mornings when he wakes and feels almost that he has been woken by the difficulty of breathing. There is pain in his lungs and he begins to cough again.
One day he falls on the stairs. He is carrying the water for the plants and he falls just before the first turn up from the hall. When he recovers from a moment of blackout Irina Milescu is beside him, helping him upright, making him sit on a step, pushing his throbbing head down between his knees. He has the impression of a great depth of stairs, the buckets still rolling at the foot of them, water cascading down from step to step.
Irina goes in the open door of her room and pours a glass of water from the jug she has there. Drink that, she says, that’ll help. No sunlight reaches the stairs and yet they seem no cooler than the rooms. The water from the buckets has spilled right down and is spreading across the tiled floor of the hall. There is a kind of coolness in that at least. Stay, don’t move until you’re ready. Irina rests a hand on his shoulder to still him and goes in again to fetch a mop, starts on the step just beneath where he has fallen, working from the shade into the brightness, the band of colour that comes through the fanlight.
He watches as if from far away. She looks small and fragile down there below him, frail with her halo of hair and her pale mushroom-coloured dress. She is a moth fluttering in the coloured arc of light. When she comes back up the stairs she helps him to stand. She is out of breath, the frill at the neck of her dress slightly quivering. There is a powdery smell to her, powdery like a moth. She takes a lace handkerchief from her sleeve to dab her face and a stain of powder comes away.
‘You’d better come in here where I can look after you.’ She takes him through the open door into her room.
‘You haven’t been in here before, have you? It’s silly, isn’t it, when you’ve lived here for weeks – or perhaps it’s months now, I lose track. Come on, sit here on the chaise longue, you can put your feet up. I’ll bring you some tea. Or perhaps it’s just water you need? I’ll bring both then you can choose.’
She clears some sewing off the chaise longue. He sits at first but then she lifts up his feet and he lies on it, but stiffly like a figure on a tomb. She puts a small embroidered pillow behind his head.
‘You’d better stay here for now, till Adriana gets in, and I don’t know what time that’ll be. I wouldn’t like to think of you all on your own. In case you have another turn.’
She brings the tea and the water and puts them both on a small table within his reach, pulls her own chair alongside and takes up her sewing. His eyes watch her hands for a while and then they close and he falls asleep.
Irina has the urge to stroke his head which is glistening unhealthily with sweat. There, she would say, and pass a cool hand across his brow. She has a sense, just for a moment, of wholeness, that she has slipped into a moment from an earlier life, stitching beside a silent sickbed.
She is making an alteration to a dress. She used to do this for herself. She has always had a talent for sewing but she had never expected to find herself in circumstances where she tried to make a living from it. Now she puts up and takes down hems for others according to the fashion, and cuts things down and takes things in,
and spruces up old garments with trimmings and frills to make them look new. It is an occupation and it brings in a few lei but it does not focus her mind, which seems always to be falling out of the present. Like now. Like the other day when she was stitching beads on to a cardigan. A friend had brought in a fine black cashmere cardigan and she was stitching it over with pearly beads – some idea there of evening wear, of nights out in a time and a place that no longer existed – and suddenly she could not see to thread a bead because her eyes were blurred with tears. Poor Liviu saw it. He took the sewing from her with affectionate words. He is so kind to her these days. Only he was clumsy and the box of beads was spilled across the carpet, and she shrieked at him and would not let him help her pick them up. He took his hat and his stick and once he was out of the door she crumpled on to the floor among the beads and wept. She thought she had picked up all the beads but every day since then she seems to find another one glinting in some corner or crevice of a chair.
The strange young man looks out of place on her chaise longue, oddly thin, angled, foreign amongst her furnishings like a bare twig brought into a hothouse full of flowers.
She used to think that Adriana’s son was dead. He was most probably dead only the poor woman would never know for sure. That seemed more terrible than anything. She told herself that she should be glad at least that her daughters could write her letters and that she could send them parcels; that they were alive and that she had only to wait. Yet there was always the other possibility, that Adriana’s son might come home any day, and she was jealous of her for it. There should have been sympathy between the two of them but somehow it had seemed a division: that one had word when the other did not; that one could live in expectation but the other knew that there were years of a sentence to be served. There is no sharing pain. This much she has learnt, that a mother suffers alone. Then this shabby mute young man turned up with his gangling hands and his sharp eyes. At first she had felt pity. She was generous and brought him things. But day after day the fact had sunk in that Adriana had him there, whatever his condition. Adriana had his simple presence in the room next door. She had felt a flush of envy almost to the point of anger. She had looked in the mirror and counted the years of their sentence before her and tracked the vagueness of her thoughts, and feared that she would be old and have quite lost herself before her daughters came home.
Now she has Adriana’s boy here and he is ill. Adriana is the nurse but it is she, Irina, who is nursing him. She guesses he is running a fever. She used to care for her daughters in this same room. When they were ill their eyes hazed and their cheeks flushed, and they became younger than their years and she could care for them again like babies. She would cool their brows and bring them drinks and read them stories until they slept, and when they were sleeping she would sit and watch them.
There are whispers in the street. There is someone who knows someone who knew Adriana in the past. She has heard a rumour that this man is not who he is said to be. She remembers how she saw the oddness of it at the start. There was the photograph that he did not resemble one bit; and the muteness that was not accompanied by any external sign of injury. She had thought, surely there would have been some wound? It was none of their business, Liviu said, and besides, why else would the woman ever have taken him in?
She could say why, she thinks, watching him wake, seeing an emaciated beauty in him, seeing his eyes open.
‘You haven’t touched your water. Come on, take a sip now. Are you feeling a little better?’ She looks at her watch. ‘Adriana should be back soon. I’ve written her a note so she knows where to find you.’
Does he understand? She thinks that he understands something.
‘Liviu will be back soon too. He said he’d be back around five and it’s nearly five now. He’ll be surprised to see you here.’
There is an appearance of listening in his eyes. In the brief time left before Liviu comes she would like to tell him everything that troubles her, everything that she cannot say to anyone else. She would tell him how Nadia and Danuta were arrested because they were clever and spoke foreign languages and went to Bucharest and worked for foreign companies; how each of them was taken separately, on different days in different places, but so little time apart; how silently they went, how long before she heard news; how in that time she had lived with the idea that they were dead and how she could not quite believe them alive now, would not really believe it until she could touch them again. And she would tell him about the other thing, that she could not tell even to Liviu. About the men who have come to her. Twice they have come now. The first time they knocked on the door just after Liviu had gone out, and they asked only for her and not for him so that she could guess that they had watched the house and chosen that moment to find her alone. The second time they came to her in the street where they must have followed her. They said that if she helped them she might help the girls. It was up to her. Her choice. This she could tell to the mute, but she could not tell it to Liviu because she knew what he would say. Liviu was a man of principle. He would say that there was no choice to be made.
She looks into the eyes of the mute that are so cool and still. Wonders if she sees sympathy there.
In the nights she thinks about what they said. They are so hot, these nights. There’s no air to breathe. And there are always voices, people about, moving, in the house or on the street. Dogs barking, always dogs. She listens to the barking of the dogs and sees the pattern of it behind her closed eyes. It’s like a storm coming in. First one gust, then another, until it’s blowing right across the city, a great storm of barking, but it doesn’t bring rain with it, or even cool air, but only blows across the city and then dies, and then there’s a silence when the night seems hotter even than before. There are too many dogs in this city.
‘I hate those dogs,’ she says out loud, standing and going to the window. ‘Why don’t they kill all the dogs? They have killed so much else. Or round them up and put them all in cages in the Bărăgan’ She can imagine a great cage – sides, floor, roof of bars – in the middle of the steppe; a million dogs barking into nothingness. ‘But I suppose they don’t bother you, do they?’
He’s so harmless, she thinks.
If he is harmless then why should they do him harm?
Adriana arrives home at the same time as Liviu. Irina hears the two of them coming up the stairs together. She goes to the door as they reach it.
‘At last you’re back. I’ve been waiting for you. I have your Ioan here. He wasn’t well.’
Adriana’s concern looks real as any mother’s.
‘Take some coffee with us, won’t you?’
‘If the lad’s really ill,’ Liviu says, ‘then he should go home.’
‘No, no, take some coffee please, I insist.’ Irina begins to make the coffee even as she speaks.
Liviu fumbles to help. Irina has been so unpredictable lately, a brittleness in everything she does. It worries him. There is something fey, unstable in her. They are in their own home yet she has begun to drift in it as if she does not any more belong. It worries him but he can only play along and attempt to hold her to herself. So he goes out for a walk at the same time each day and comes back, regularly as if he has been to work, as if the routine will root them, and when he comes back he brings one of the cakes she likes. Today the routine is upset and the cake will have to be shared. The box in which it comes is tied with coloured string. It takes him an awkward amount of time to untie the knot and put out the cake, and when he has done so it is clear that it is too small for the four of them, a tiny island in the centre of the gold-rimmed plate.
‘He fainted. I found him on the stairs.’
‘That’s very kind.’ Adriana says the standard phrases. ‘You are very kind.’
It is true. He does look ill. His face is pale and a little shiny.
‘I think he has a fever.’
‘Then I must take him home.’
‘It’s his lungs, isn’t it? Rea
lly the air here is not good, all that dust, the humidity, the flies. If he has delicate lungs, this is not the place for him to be. But of course you know that. Why am I telling you this? You are the nurse, not I.’
Irina hears herself trying to save him. She is trying to get her to send him away. Quickly, before anything can happen.
‘Is there nowhere else that he can go?’
22
From the far ridge the war was no more than an ominous drab line moving along the centre of the valley. The line was angular and knotted at points like a spine. It moved so slowly, with such random halts and hesitations, that it seemed an organic part of the landscape rather than some separate entity, any entity with purpose, moving across it. That first summer the line was broken where it passed under the willows about the river but by the end of the war the willows had gone and everything was visible as on the barest days of winter.
The house at Poiana was empty by then. The rooms were swept and uninhabited as his pictures. He had seen them emptied and the dust sheets laid, the bars set across the shutters and the doors to each room closed one after the other. No one was living in the house any more, and there was just a handful of them left in the cottages beyond the yard. They dug a piece of the land, enough for maize and potatoes and vegetables. They had the chickens and a pig and a couple of cows still so that they could survive on their own. But he was all the time aware of the hollowness of the place, an echo that could be seen instead of heard. He was aware that the cause lay somehow with what passed by at the river crossing, and with the flashes that he sometimes saw in the sky.
Painter of Silence Page 13