When they get in she takes off her wet dress, ties a flimsy dressing gown over her slip, sits at the table in the window to drink the tea that he has made for her. In the silence they can still hear the rain. What can he say? There was the past and now there is this present that is only a waiting for the future. It goes on indefinitely. It goes on too long. They are both of them so tired. Irina’s hair has dried in a garish cloud around her face. He should speak to her about the film they saw perhaps, but it has already quite gone from his mind.
They have only themselves now. All of their lives packed into this crowded room. All these things to which she clings, the pictures on the walls, the photographs of the girls. There are themselves and these things and this room, and there is a line drawn about them: all that is in the room matters, all that matters is held within the room, and what is beyond the room can no longer be his concern.
That night once he is sure that Irina is asleep, Liviu gets up from the bed in his pyjamas and puts on the small shaded lamp at the table and sits down to write a letter in the narrow pool of light. When he has finished the writing he will turn off the lamp but he will not make his way back to the bed for a long time.
He has been a lawyer all his life. It is second nature to him to think before he acts. There is a piece of his mind that is trained to watch and analyse, to judge when to pay attention to detail and when to ignore what is better not seen. Discretion lies deep in him and the habit is hard to break.
The letter does not require many words, and those that there are are controlled, considered, precise. It need only be a suggestion. A woman has someone living with her who may not be who she says he is. Since the refugee problem, movements and residence in the city have been strictly controlled. He can leave investigation to others. His writing is elegant. It may be the work of despair but it appears to be the product of a discreet and considered and calm mind.
They don’t know it but they are just in time. Safta has found a doctor to sign the papers. She has leave from the hospital to take him herself to the sanatorium in the mountains.
She brings boxes to pack away his work. He is pleased with the boxes and helps to pack them, systematically, taking the pictures down from the wall and the chest of drawers, using one box for drawings, another for his friends, others for his matchbox collection and his birds and constructions, packing them tightly, smoothing the piles down with his hand, folding the boxes shut, tying string tight about them. His other things, his clothes, fill no more than the bottom of a little cardboard case.
‘Don’t worry,’ Safta says, ‘I’m going with you. We’re going to the countryside. You’ll like it.’ Then, ‘No, you can’t take the boxes. Adriana will look after them for you.’ His mouth sets in a thin line and for a moment she is afraid that he will not come without his work. She mimes hurry, looking at the watch on her wrist, putting a hand with surprise to her mouth, setting up a current that pulls him away. She gives Adriana two hasty kisses on the cheeks. ‘Quick now, we must go. Quickly, or we’ll be late.’
Adriana hugs him tight. For all that she has fed him there is still little more to him than bone.
The last of his presence is soon erased. The boxes are in the middle of the floor and she kneels to put them away beneath his bed. At the back there, against the skirting, she finds a paper bag that he did not pack. Inside it is one of his jackdaw collections of things: used tram and cinema tickets, a dozen shards of coloured glass, a stick of red chalk, and a pink-and-white cosmetic pot still half full of foundation cream whose colour she recognises as one he has used recently for the skin tones of his figures. One of Irina Milescu’s disappearing objects. She puts the pot on the table wondering if she might find a way to return it later. From the table drawer she takes out the photograph of her son and returns it to its former place.
She is on the balcony when the black car arrives.
She is thinking how she will miss him. She will certainly miss him when it comes to the watering. It takes so long to bring the water can by can from the tap downstairs, and her back doesn’t like the lifting any more. She has to move delicately, as she had taught him, between the plants. The tomatoes are almost a jungle in themselves, the smell of them rising heavily off the leaves as they are disturbed. She puts down the can, plucks out some side shoots, begins to tie up new stems.
The men call up to her from the street. She had thought someone else would answer the knocking at the door. Usually when there is noise or visitors it is something to do with the Bessarabians. She goes inside, goes downstairs, lets them in. Two men, neither of them hefty, but there is a blunt weight to them. She knows who they are.
They walk ahead of her into her room and poke about. She stands in the centre of the space, turning to them as they move.
‘Do you live alone here?’
‘Yes. No. I mean, there’s only me here right now, but there is room for my son.’
‘Where is your son?’
She shows them the photograph.
‘He’s in Russia. I expect him back any day now.’
‘Then he doesn’t live here.’
How is she to answer that? She pivots to face them. Her raised hands speak for her.
‘What about your other son?’
‘I have no other son.’
‘The other son who was living here.’
‘Believe me, I know how many sons I have. If you don’t believe me, check with my husband.’
‘Where is your husband?’
‘My husband works on the railway. At Roman. I don’t have the address but the railway company can find him.’
‘We have information there was somebody else living here.’
‘There was, for a while. But he was not living here. He was only staying. There was a patient from the hospital who had nowhere to go. He stayed here for a short time and now he has gone. If people think he is my son then they are mistaken.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Ask at the hospital. The TB ward. They must have a record. I think they moved him to a sanatorium.’
Going Home
26
He sits curled over his work on a bench in the station hall. He has the little suitcase on his knee on which to rest the paper while he draws.
He sharpens the pencil using the penknife he keeps in his pocket, keeping the point broad, slightly blunt, as he works with the side of it rather than the tip.
He works precisely, never going back to erase.
Now that they are leaving it comes easily to him. He draws the one place he can picture as a destination for the two of them. The first drawing takes the view from far in the distance, from as far away as he has ever seen it, where the house itself is not visible but only the tall trees that surround it, that can be seen on their hill from the road far away down the valley. He draws as jagged specks – yet even so at that distance they are out of scale – the rooks that he knows are there, that make their nests high in the trees, that her grandfather used sometimes to shoot from his bedroom window.
Safta sees the drawing take shape. The memory is all there in him, precise, ready to be drawn. It must have been there throughout these months in the city waiting for release. She sees the pent excitement in him. When a train comes in he looks to the platform, the stream of people, looks to her. No, not this one. And he is disappointed and goes back to his work. She had rushed him out, and now the train is late. She thought he might be afraid, hesitant at least. She sees no hesitance in him now but only impatience. How can it be that he knows where they are going. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Perhaps it is only that he trusts her. That he would follow her anywhere like this, carrying his little case, just to her side but a step behind, looking confidently ahead, walking as she walks, stopping when she does, even his eyes following hers and looking where she looks. If she appears sure of what they are doing then he will be too.
Once they are on the move the jolting of the train makes it impossible to draw so he slips the page beneath his case where it
cannot be seen and raises his eyes and looks out across the other passengers to the window. He does not look at the passengers themselves, only glancing at their faces in the blandest way, as if they were no more than the furnishings of the carriage. When the train stops he gets the page out again and begins to draw immediately with such quick fluent lines that it seems as if he has the picture ready, every stroke of it in his head, and it is a simple mechanical process to transfer it on to paper.
They come to a junction where they must change. The tickets Safta bought in Văleanu bring them only this far. She must buy new tickets, and there is another and longer wait, sitting in the sun on a narrow platform that stretches out from the small town into the fields. No one there but a stationmaster tending marigolds. Time for Augustin to make three further drawings.
He draws the drive running down between the acacias, with the columns of the porch at the end of them. This is a picture of strong verticals and deep perspective, very black and white as he draws the trees bare of leaves and does not shade the gaps between the trunks.
He draws a much softer, greyer picture of the village as it appears from before the house: the road running a little downhill, the houses scattered along the slope, the schoolhouse with the storks’ nest on its chimney, the outline of the church behind, a sketchy notion of stooks in the fields and trees in the distance.
Then, as if he had stood in the same spot but shifted position only, beginning to turn clockwise towards the house, he draws the stable entrance and the roofs of the buildings about the yard. The horizon of this picture runs on at the same height as that of the previous one, a tree that appears at the edge of one page recurring at the corresponding edge of the next.
At the next stop on the journey he will go on as if he were to continue to turn on the spot. He will make the front of the house from close up: the porch, the doors, the feathery overhang of the acacias in summer. Then he will draw the view away to the other side, to the hay fields rolling away into forest. In all of these drawings the level of the horizon will hold, as if he has kept a camera steady in his hand and turned it full circle across his memory.
At this point they leave the railway. He will make a further half-dozen drawings on the journey, in a variety of locations as they continue across the country: in the afternoon shade of trees and crosses at the roadside, in the back of a cart, in the evening on the step before a summer kitchen. The pictures home in, entering the stable yard and then the sheds and the house itself. Later when they have got there he will piece all of these drawings into a book, stitched together with end-boards made of card, and the card with holes punched in it so that it can be tied together with a piece of green wool that he has picked up along the way.
The air is thick with harvest, sun, dust. They have been walking more than half the day and though they have passed people at work Safta has spoken to no one since they left the train. For a time they rest high on a hill where they can look back the way they have come: another long valley, but almost bare of trees, long bare ridges that would be dull if they were not golden right now with harvest and if the far hills did not turn to violet under the brightness of the sky. The railway tracks run straight, north–south along the line of the valley, but the river meanders, cutting deep exposed banks from the sandy soil. They watch a train travel the length of the view; slow, long, a line of innumerable wagons the colour of rust.
A little way off a lone man stands reaping. It empties her mind to watch him. It is so long since she has been out of the city. A golden field, a man in white, the blue of the sky most intense where it touches the wheat at the crest of the hill. This man seems fixed in his work, in the rhythm of his strokes, of the stalks falling. He does not look up or around. As if there is nothing here on the hillside but the job in hand, his mind automatically measuring the uncut area ahead against the reaped area behind, his progress as steady and mechanical as that of the train. If he does not look up to check the height of the sun then he will know how far it has come by the length of his shadow. That is how it is in this heat. It is the feeling she has when they are walking, step by step up the length of the hill: that she has only to keep her eyes to the ground and at last she will be there. Beside her Augustin draws with pencil strokes that are as sure and rapid as those of the scythe.
He will not show her until he is ready. That is his way. He puts a screening arm about the page and leans low so there is no looking over his shoulder. Does he know how close they are? She thinks he does. Perhaps, like his black rooks, he knows direction.
She speaks to the sky, eyes half closed.
‘I remember how it was when I left. It was winter – or perhaps not quite winter – autumn. I remember that the trees were almost bare and half the house was shut up. I didn’t know I was leaving for the last time. I’d thought I would be back. But the war came and the world started to change around us. It was a time when the little moves you made became big and permanent even if you didn’t mean them to be so.
‘I went back just once after the war was over. I was the only one of the family left in the country by then. There was a man I was with. He had business somewhere not so far away. I told him where I came from and he said that I should come with him, and we would make a detour and see it, only the detour took much longer than we had thought it would because the roads were so bad. Some of them hadn’t been fixed from the war and it had rained hard and there was still a bridge gone somewhere. I’d been seeing Paul for some time but he didn’t know much about me, he knew only the nurse that he’d met in Bucharest.
‘We went there and looked around. It was empty. Nobody there at all. I was surprised, that none of you were there. I had imagined you would be there always.
‘We drove in the rain, through heavy summer showers that made little floods on the roads and then cleared, and when they cleared I had never seen the countryside look so beautiful. It was the year after the famine and it was amazing to see the fields lush again, everything green, great clouds with rain in them swelling above. Flowers everywhere. Frogs in the ponds. I used to love the croaking of the frogs. You wouldn’t know that, would you, that it was one of the sounds of the place? I used to go to sleep to it at night. We were there in June, I suppose, early summer. That’s when the frogs were loudest. We walked right around the garden but we didn’t go into the house because it was locked and shuttered. If Paul hadn’t been with me I’d have gone to the village. I’d have looked someone up, asked about you all. But it didn’t feel right with him there. Anyway we didn’t have time, the journey had taken so long. He wanted to go on, get to where we were going before it got dark. He kept talking about the state of the roads. So we just walked about the garden that was all wet with the rain and drove away. We stopped seeing one another soon after that – not for any particular reason, only that we’d both become aware of the distance between us. I remember that my shoes were wet and I took them off in the car, and he just drove and didn’t say anything, and he was cross one time when we missed the way. In all the time we’d known one another I realised that there was a centre to me that he had not touched, that he had not even seen was there – the old me that nobody else knew any more, or almost no one since everyone from the past had gone, or they were going, or planning to go.
‘There hasn’t been anyone since Paul, no one who mattered. We went back to Bucharest and it ended, and I thought the cause was something to do with the city. It seemed a brittle, corrupted, tarnished place. People were brittle. Friendships were false, doomed to failure. Or that’s how it seemed to me. In the end I decided to leave and came to Văleanu where things had been harder. As if that would give it more integrity.’
‘I wrote to them in England about the house. My father had been the last person to visit it. He’d gone up at some point and taken a few pictures and pieces of furniture and brought them back to Bucharest, but then he had decided to leave the country. We’d felt for some time how the world was closing in on us, right since the end of the war, and it was al
most too late by then. He came and asked me if I’d go with him. He said, didn’t I see that the place was becoming a prison about us? I explained that I had thought it through and that I was staying. I had work. This was my reality. I wouldn’t be real anywhere else. He asked if I wanted some of the furniture. What for? I said. Where would I put it? I could see he didn’t understand at all. He got away all right of course. He had a mistress who was an aviator and they flew away in her aeroplane. My father always had style.
‘He’s separated from my mother now. She’s in England and he’s gone on to France. They’re better that way. Without Poiana there wasn’t anything between them any more. I think I’d always known about the other women. From when I was a child I knew that there was my mother and there were the others, and I thought they were beautiful when the house parties came. I used to watch them from the windows. There were so many windows at Poiana, and doors, rooms giving on to rooms. It wasn’t a house for secrets. I used to watch the women my father brought and I wanted to grow up to be like them and wear silk and be languorous on the verandah in the middle of the night. I used to hear them from up in my room. The windows would be wide open and I would wake and hear the night outside and the men and the women talking after dinner. You know where my room was, just above. I could hear everything. I could smell the smoke of the men’s cigars.’
‘It’s not so far from here, if I can find the right way. I don’t like to ask people, I don’t want to draw attention to us. That’s why I thought we’d come this way, across the hills. If we went the other way we’d have to go through the town and then the village, and we might meet too many people who knew us. We should be there tomorrow. We’ll take it gently. We’ll walk a bit more today and find somewhere to sleep and tomorrow we’ll get up early while it’s cool. Mustn’t let you get too tired.
Painter of Silence Page 16