After that they teased him often. They fired their guns close behind his back and thought it funny that he went on oblivious. They found it even funnier to scare him.
He was coming from the shed where Paraschiva had milked the cow. He had a tin churn in each hand. He did this every evening, carrying the milk across the yard. On this particular evening there was a man washing at the pump. He was naked to the waist. He had taken off his tunic and his gun and laid them on the ground. When Augustin passed him he picked up the gun and shot the churn in his right hand. A fountain of white milk streamed out and Augustin swivelled to see it, just as the man fired at the second churn. Augustin saw that he was laughing like a child. He had a round baby face and a big round belly that wobbled when he laughed, and his braces hung down over his breeches. They were like children, these soldiers. They laughed like children and fooled around like children who had nothing to do, and sometimes they were cruel like children. It was nothing new to him. There had always been children who laughed at him and joked behind his back. If these ones were bigger and had guns that did not necessarily make them more wicked.
And he could escape them like he used to escape the children. There were still places that he could hide away. There was the hayloft. When he needed to be alone he went up there and watched, and one day he saw one of the village girls raped in a field. It was Ileana who used to work in the house. There was such a blue sky that day and the field looked so tidy and pretty with all the stooks ranged across it that it looked at first like a game. Ileana was running. She was wearing a white skirt like all the girls wore. Her plaits were streaming out behind. She was running and then she was trying to hide behind the stooks. There were four men spread out, hunting her down. They all looked rather small at that distance, again like children with their running legs and outstretched arms. Later Augustin found his mother looking after the girl. Paraschiva sent him away. That night Ileana was dressed up in Mama Anica’s clothes and he and József walked slowly back with her to the village. She was bigger than Mama Anica but she did not look so big when she was hunched over and weeping.
The soldiers were there only a matter of days, a couple of weeks at most, yet the house when they left it seemed quite another place. It was as if many years had passed in that time. He walked through with Mama Anica, into the hall where the glass still lay like hailstones and through room after room the length of the house. Mama Anica was crying. He had never seen her cry before.
After that they moved down to the village. The girl Ileana was still crying but Mama Anica had stopped. In the village he made a cross for Paraschiva’s grave. He made it out of pieces of scrap metal that he found and one of the Gypsies helped him weld it.
He had seen that they did not mean to kill her. There was no meaning to this event any more than to any of the others, only that it happened. She was cooking for the men. They liked her food and when she cooked for them they smiled at her and licked their fingers. She had been peeling potatoes, seated on a bench just outside the kitchen door, dropping them as they were peeled into a pan at her feet. She went down to the cellar for more. The big baby-faced soldier was fiddling with his gun, stripping it down and reassembling it. Augustin went to watch and the man showed him that the gun had jammed and that he was fixing it. His big sausage fingers were sure and neat when they dealt with the smooth pieces of metal and he let Augustin handle the pieces as he cleaned them. Augustin held each piece and handed it over as he put the gun together. It was satisfying how neatly the pieces snapped one into the other. Then the soldier put in a clip of ammunition and held the gun to his hip to fire, just experimentally, to check that it worked. He looked to Augustin and smiled, and as he did so he fired into the emptiest space before them, towards the ground, into a black opening that was the opening to the cellar from which Paraschiva was just at that moment bringing potatoes.
Augustin could not move to touch her. He imagined her torn in half like the portrait in the hall. And the soldiers in the yard just stood and looked. Even the air was still, weighted, impassive; as if this was nothing, all this had happened so many times before. Then one went forward and began to pick up the potatoes that had fallen on the ground in front of her, and some of these were cut apart and red. And baby face put down his gun and went and put his hands beneath her arms and dragged her out to the garden with a red trail behind her. When he had laid her down he came back for a spade and Augustin followed him. He moved at last and went behind the soldier and took the spade from him, and the soldier understood and left the young man with his mother.
The smell of earth became for him inseparable from the memory of the war. War was a thing of earth and metal, a mineral thing. It was his spade cutting through the soil.
He did not go for the priest, not then at least. In the village when someone died the priest made a show of words. There were days of mourning and procession, women in black with creases in their faces. Augustin did not know the point of all that.
When he had buried her he started to walk back through the garden. The dusk was soft. The grass was long and the flowerbeds were tangled and overgrown but in this light where there was no detail the view to the verandah was hardly different from how it had ever been. He walked across the lawn to the catalpa tree and there in the shadows he came upon one of the soldiers pissing. The man had his back to him. He was drunk. He could barely stand to piss but was swaying, steadying himself against the tree. Augustin raised the spade that he held in his hand and hit the man on the side of his head with all his strength. The drunken soldier folded over. A sweep of metal and he fell to the ground, but smoothly, not jerking as Paraschiva had done. Augustin did not distinguish the man as any particular soldier. What had occurred seemed to have occurred all within himself, not outside him. He walked on, still carrying the spade, and left that moment behind. He could do that because each moment was quite separated from the next. He went home to the cottage. Mama Anica was there waiting for him but he sent her away. He had never before spent a night alone.
The following morning as soon as there was any light Augustin returned. As he passed the tree he saw that the man was still there, still crumpled the same way. It looked quite wrong, there in the lovely garden at Poiana, even in the thin grey dawn. He moved mechanically to tidy up. He tried to put the stiff body straight, picked up the man’s hat that had fallen aside and placed it on his chest. Then he pulled him into the bushes of the shrubbery. He went on to the burial place and stood for a long time gazing down where there was nothing to see but the soil that he had disturbed the day before. That was all there was, only the soil now, no past to find there.
It got light. The sun opened a yellow gash in the sky. The ground became clear at his feet: the bared soil, grass stalks, his tracks in the dew. The sun grew whole, the sky high and very pale. He was aware of some enormity and he became afraid. Instinct made him want to hide before the sunlight touched him, but he did not move. He stood still where he was and once he felt the sun then there was no point in hiding any more.
His second fear, which came to him later, was of the soldiers.
Again he might have hidden, but he did not. He went on as if drawn to whatever consequence might follow from his actions. He went back to the yard. It had changed there. The soldiers who had done nothing but hang around for days were busy, every one of them moving with purpose. He fully expected them to come at him with their guns, expected it so strongly that he could almost see it happen, he standing there with a bright ray of sunlight on him and their guns firing at him, as if it was a picture he had seen. And yet they walked by him and paid him as little attention as if he didn’t exist.
He could not know that that morning of all mornings the soldiers had got the order to move on. They had suddenly become a troop again. And he didn’t matter to them now. He stopped and stood there, like an obstacle in the yard, and they brushed by him. They shoved their kit into their knapsacks and put in along with it anything that was loose about the place and that they
might use. He saw saucepans taken, kitchen knives, whatever stores they could find. He didn’t move to take any of it back, though Mama Anica saw him through the window and was afraid of what he might do, and came out and tried to bring him away.
Just before the Russians left the soldier with the baby face came up to him. He looked worse than ever, his cheeks blubbery, his eyes bloodshot. He rolled up one sleeve of his tunic to show the watches that he wore like bracelets all down his arm.
‘Have one.’
Augustin looked blank.
Some of the watches were working, some were not. Each one told a different time.
‘Go on, choose one.’ The soldier gestured like a salesman. ‘Any one you like.’
When he saw that Augustin still didn’t understand he chose for him. ‘This one’s Swiss. It came off a German but it’s Swiss. Quality Swiss movement, works a dream.’ He fastened the worn alligator strap around the youth’s passive wrist. ‘Now you have one of the best watches in the world.’ He held it up a moment longer. The second hand ticked on and as he watched it move he began to cry.
‘Take this too.’ From the pocket of his tunic he brought out a picture that he kissed like an icon. The picture was gold-edged like an icon and showed a man with a braided uniform and a big grey moustache. Then he held Augustin to him and kissed him and cried some more.
Augustin just stood there like his puppet. He understood that this was the man’s apology. He knew also by the smell of him that he had been drinking all the night.
When the troop moved off no one seemed to have noticed that a man was missing.
Augustin and Mama Anica walked through the shambles of the house that last time then they went down to the village. A few days later Augustin went back and buried the second body. He buried it where it was. All the time he worked he barely looked at it, though one glance had been enough to fix the image so deep in him that he would never be able to erase it. When he came back Mama Anica saw that he had been digging and thought that he must have been planting flowers on his mother’s grave.
25
His cough is bad again. Adriana finds it a relief when she can be on night duty and does not have to lie there and listen to him. She comes back in the mornings and finds him already at his table working on his pictures. His face is pale and pinched and his mouth set tight. He has taken to making birds these past days. He makes them as he makes his people, out of layers of card cut and coloured and stitched together, but there is more variety to the birds than to the people. They have heads and beaks and feet and wings of different shapes, recognisably cocks or hens or ducks or geese. He is happier with the bird constructions than with the drawings he had been doing which seemed to distress him. She has encouraged him by bringing pictures of other species for him to copy, so that there is now a brightly coloured parrot and a hummingbird, and a cockatoo with a crest of fine yellow paper folded in a fan. When he makes these exotic birds he gives them to her or places them on her bed for her to find when she comes home. The farmyard birds he keeps for himself, like the country boy he is.
Irina Milescu is right. He is a country boy and he needs country air. He should leave the city. She should find a way, a place where he might go until he is better. Perhaps if he were to be readmitted to the hospital, the doctors there might refer him to a sanatorium. There are places in the mountains. Perhaps, she thinks, he would be well if he were to go to the mountains.
It is a sweltering tram ride to the centre of the city. The dust is starting up again as it does through the course of every summer. The freshness is gone from people’s faces; a sheen of sweat on them; the smell of sweat oppressive. There are too many people in this city crowded into too few rooms, and not enough places to wash. Adriana has had to run to catch the tram and is sweating herself. She is afraid she will be late for the cinema. She likes to get a good seat, in the centre and close to the screen, because her eyes are not so good but also because she likes to be where she knows nothing but the picture, where she has no awareness of the black rows of people about and before and behind her. Even the tram is crowded. It is so warm, the air so thick. To cool herself she looks out of the window at the leaves of the trees and pictures Hollywood. In Hollywood everything is wide and open and new. Clean. The streets are wide and the trees, where there are trees, stand neatly on them all alike as lollipops, and the cars and people glide on ground smooth as a dance floor, and women and bellboys wear white gloves. All the films she likes best are made in Hollywood. She loves the cleanness of those films. She has loved Astaire for being so very light and clean. She wishes she might have been Ginger Rogers. Not a beauty, she has never particularly wanted to be a beauty. The great American beauties do not seem quite real to her, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, women who do not cook or laugh, she would not want to be one of them, she does not mind being the sort of woman who grows a little plump with age. But to have been, for a moment, Ginger Rogers, to have danced with Astaire, that would have been fine. As the tram slips down the long hill she looks out at the broken avenues and the scarred houses of Iaşi and imagines America. Sleek streets. White smiles. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. So many places they went to, those two, clean happy places where people stepped off white liners and there were no poor and no wars but only natives with turbans or sarongs or flower garlands about their necks. Rio, Tahiti, Singapore. If only she could go to such places.
But there are hardly any Hollywood films any more, not since the Trianon became the Maxim Gorky. There are only Eastern bloc films made in Bucharest or Moscow or Prague, or Alma-Ata, wherever that might be. Nothing from Hollywood except Rin Tin Tin. And one she saw called White Fang. They show films about American animals but not the people. She wishes someone would tell her why. What harm could come from such films? No one takes them seriously. Only possibly they might be considered a little fattening, like sweet cakes.
She gets into the cinema minutes before the programme starts. There is a free seat close to the screen just beside the aisle. She walks down as the lights are put out and happens to glimpse the Milescus a couple of rows back. She sits down quickly hoping they have not seen her. The matinée is her escape. It may not be Hollywood but it is still her escape. She does not want to share a moment of it.
Liviu is going a little deaf with age. Irina has taken care to seat herself beside his better ear so that she can whisper to him if there’s something he doesn’t hear or he fails to catch the plot. She has perfected a sharp and penetrating whisper which her husband can hear even against the patriotic music of the newsreel.
‘There’s Adriana. I’m sure she saw us. You’d think she might have said hello.’
‘Why should she?’ Liviu says. ‘The film’s about to start.’
‘Well we must talk to her later. I’ve been wanting to speak to her anyway.’
‘What about?’
‘The house, of course.’ Irina spends the first few minutes of the film going over in her mind all the matters about which she might speak to her neighbour: the use of the shared facilities, the vermin, the noise of the Bessarabians, odd little things that have been disappearing lately. She fidgets until her husband puts his hand on hers to still her. Only beneath the gentle weight of his fingers can she at last push the tangle of thoughts aside and focus on the screen.
As it happens they don’t have a chance to speak much after the film because it begins to pour with rain just as they come out on to the street, big drops of rain that soon become a heavy summer downpour. They take shelter under an awning and go for the tram when they see it coming. Others get on at the same time, all of them wet and dripping, and Adriana lets the crowd separate them.
‘See. She’s avoiding us.’
Adriana has squeezed herself into a seat by the window and has her face almost to the glass watching the rain.
‘It’s funny, her coming all alone like that, don’t you think? You’d think she might have brought her son with her, wouldn’t you? If he really is her son. She hides him awa
y like some terrible secret, and comes out all alone. And he’s nothing like the picture I saw. One begins to wonder.’
‘He’s stone deaf. Why should she take a deaf man to the cinema?’
‘For the pictures. He could follow the story from the pictures.’
‘You pay too much attention to these people. Let them be. Perhaps he doesn’t want to go. What is it to you anyway?’
‘Can’t help thinking, that’s all. If it was Nadia or Danuta, would you leave them at home?’
‘But you have to stop thinking. It isn’t Nadia or Danuta. And it’s not likely to be, is it? Not till God knows when.’
It is still raining hard when they reach their tram stop. Adriana runs ahead of them – in so far as she can run, the size she is. Liviu has put his coat about his wife, who is already soaked through in her thin cotton dress. He has spoken too brutally. He understands why she has become neurotic, peevish, jealous of the world. She was not always like this. She is not herself. She looks so fragile in the clinging dress that he feels a sudden sharp tenderness for her and for the past.
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