‘I don’t know how long we’ll stay there. We’ll see. I just thought, we must take a look, see how it is. Just go for a day or two, then we can go on to where we’re supposed to be, and nobody will be the wiser. Perhaps we’ll find out where your mother is, who knows? And old Mama Anica, do you think she’s still alive? She’d cure you better than any doctor.’
He folds the drawing he has completed, puts it with the others into the case, puts his pencil in his pocket.
‘You’re right. It’s time to go on. We can’t just sit around all day.’
She stands, brushes down her skirt where strands of grass have caught to it.
‘We’ll need to find somewhere for the night.’
She does not know where that will be, only that she wants to be over into the next valley. The lone harvester has made slow progress across the field. A couple of women are coming to gather the wheat into sheaves. She hears them call greetings to one another. The afternoon is still hot and there is a long way to walk.
A cart comes alongside them as they reach the crest of the hill. The horse moves slowly even though the cart is empty. The driver has a black felt hat low over his eyes and his reins hang slack. She might have thought he was asleep only he calls out to them.
‘Where are you going?’
‘That way.’
‘Get in if you like.’
The driver pushes the hat back and looks at them and at their cases. He is an old man. There is weariness to him. He has a grey moustache, stubble on his chin and across the furrows of his cheeks. His voice when he speaks drags like the horse.
‘Going far?’
‘Home.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Our mother’s sick. We’re going to her.’
And when he looks at Augustin she says, ‘He’s my brother. He doesn’t speak.’
‘Wise man,’ the driver says, and tips his hat back over his eyes.
The man in the field down below is sharpening his scythe.
‘Do you expect to be there tonight?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Then you’ll be needing to stop somewhere. You can stop with me if you like. There’s room. There’s a hayloft. And there’s only me there.’
‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’
‘Looks like he needs a rest. You can go on tomorrow when he’s rested.’
The horizon has turned to purple above the horse’s ears.
27
She speaks softly. Augustin lies near her in the dark. She cannot tell if he is sleeping or not, but it doesn’t matter. She hears the latch of a door opening as the old man crosses the yard to the privy in the middle of the night, hears him return indoors. Tomorrow they will be home.
‘We didn’t know what the war would mean for us. There was that last beautiful summer and we heard about what was happening across Europe but it all seemed such a long way off as if it couldn’t touch us – or that was what I thought anyway. It wasn’t our war, after all. I was so young then. Other things seemed to matter so much more. Andrei. Not going to Paris. I lived in my father’s house in Bucharest. I went to a college in the daytime, a strict place run by French nuns, and then I went back to his house and in the evenings he used to take me out with him to meet his friends. He said he’d try and make up for its not being Paris. He never said anything about Andrei – I don’t know if my mother talked to him, how much he knew. He bought me dresses. He took me to the opera and to fashionable restaurants. The war hadn’t touched the city yet except in people’s conversations and in the uniforms you saw. Everything was very fashionable. The restaurants were shiny. My father’s friends wore beautiful clothes and they were witty and their hands danced when they talked. I had my hair cut and I wore beautiful clothes too and smiled at the right moments. I think he was proud of me. But I was immensely critical of them all. I was young. I told myself I was different from them. I kept looking at them and thinking how superficial they all were, he and his friends, so clever and stylish, all of them seeming to me like people in films when you know the women have been dressed just for that scene, and their clothes have never been worn for real life, and they speak lines they have been given, and the rooms they walk in have nothing behind them and everything exists only in two dimensions. I was thinking how the world they lived in wasn’t true and couldn’t last. And there was all the politics, the Iron Guardists, the Germans who swaggered about the city, that told me I was right.
‘Beneath the surface, I was angry. I was angry all that time. I expected to hear from Andrei. I thought there must be some mistake. I thought that he would write to me at least. When no letters came I told myself it was because of the war; that normal communications couldn’t be relied upon. But we were getting letters from England and from just about everywhere else. I wrote a letter to him but I didn’t post it. I had to hear something from him first. I wrote other letters later and burned them.
‘Once I got angry with my father. We were in a taxi coming back from a restaurant. All through the dinner I’d been watching people, hating them just for being who they were, I suppose, and not being anyone else. They used to say Bucharest was like Paris. I asked how anyone could say that. Paris to me meant culture and civilisation and reason and fairness. “Is this like Paris?” I said. “Is anything here like Paris – apart from a few boulevards and an imitation Arc de Triomphe? It’s all fake, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s really like Paris at all. Look at the Gypsies. Look at all the poor people on the streets. Look what’s going on here. This place is full of lies.” I don’t think he knew what to say to that. He didn’t really know me very well. I don’t think he had any idea what I was talking about.’
‘In the break from college I went home. It was to be the last time but I didn’t know that then, only that I was already disconnected from it. I made the train journey alone. The landscape was very bleak. It was cold and wet and all the dust of the summer had turned to mud. The car that Ilie brought to pick me up was spattered and dirty just from the journey to the railway station.
‘There was a bitter edge to the wind. Such bitter winds we used to get there, that blew down from Russia. Perhaps it was the wind that made the place seem so empty, driving people indoors or into grey huddles. The villages smelled of cabbage as they always do that time of year.
‘I remember Ilie said that he wasn’t going to be our driver any more. He was joining the army. Who’ll drive us then? I asked. He said József could drive. I thought József was too old, and anyway he was the groom. József knows how to drive, Ilie said, and there was you. You wouldn’t be joining the army and you could do József’s work in the stables. I said I supposed there wasn’t much work to do any more. That’s right, he said.
‘Until that moment I don’t think I’d ever considered the possibility that Ilie or any of the staff might want to do anything but work for us. Now I noticed him, noticed that he was still young, not even ten years older than me, and strong. And he knew about machines. Of course he would want to go and fight in the war, if – when – the war happened. I should have seen that. Coming back from being away I was starting to see things differently. It was as if I was seeing the place from the outside for the first time.’
The hay in the loft smells sweet. It takes her back. There are things of which she has never spoken to anyone, of which she will not speak even to a deaf man in the dark.
Her mother came out to the porch to greet her. There was a commotion of dogs about them as they kissed, racing out and surging about their legs, that made the meeting easier.
‘It’s good to see you.’
‘Good to be home.’
Their kisses barely touched.
When they went into the house the dogs’ feet skittered on the parquet. She bent down to them and fondled their silky ears and let them lick her face. The big tiled stove was burning in the hall but the other rooms were cold.
‘I thought it a waste to heat them,’ Marina said. ‘Just myself here, rattling around. I have my
study warm, and Ileana’s lit a fire up in your room, but now you’ve come we should get her to put a fire somewhere else. Where would you like it, do you think? In the drawing room perhaps? But perhaps that’s too big. I don’t know where you’ll want to be.’
‘Let’s think about it in the morning.’
She went up to her room. She sat on her bed for a long time before she opened her case. She thought it was a dead room. She could feel how the room had been shuttered all the time that she was away; how it had been without light as well as heat.
As she went back down the stairs the Weimaraners got up again from their place on the rug before the stove. They were bored by the lack of people, the lack of hunting that resulted from the lack of men. Come, Spitzy, Heinz. She put on her coat and hat and threw open the doors, ran after them as they rushed out towards the trees.
At dinner they sat like two icons regarding one another.
‘How are things in Bucharest?’
‘Just the same.’
‘But how about you? Are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes, everything’s fine.’
‘Where did you have your hair done?’
‘A friend of father’s took me.’
‘It’s lovely like that.’
‘It’s how everybody has it nowadays.’
‘And you’re wearing make-up.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Just so long as you don’t wear too much, at your age. No need to look vulgar.’
‘Of course not.’
‘You’re not eating much. Don’t you like Paraschiva’s food any more?’
She was so cool, her mother. There was something still and carved about her, as if she was a fine piece cut out of marble and you knew before you touched her that she would be cooler than her surroundings. And because of that you didn’t touch her or tell her things, and she became ever cooler and more still.
Her mother wanted everything to do with Andrei to be over, never mentioned again. But it wasn’t all over. Safta could never have told her that. It was still no more than a suspicion, an intuition within her, and she didn’t dare to speak it even to herself.
In the morning she woke early and went riding. She rode a long way, through the woods and away from the village, away from everyone. The ground was still heavy from the rain. On the tracks the horse’s hooves sank deep in mud and she could do no more than walk. On the open hillside she kicked the horse into a gallop. She rode on for miles and the land stretched endless before her. She rode on until the horse tired. She felt that she could have gone on and on until the feeling in her was pounded away.
When she got back Augustin was waiting on the block by the gate. She could see that he had been worrying about her. She had always been able to read his face.
He came to hold the horse.
‘It’s good to see you, Tinu.’ She meant this when she said it more than anything she had said since coming home.
No, she thought. He is deaf and mute. He can have no sense of my confusion.
She washed her hands under the pump and went in through the back door to the kitchen rather than round to the front of the house. Mama Anica was there and Paraschiva with her sleeves rolled up and her hands dipped in flour. You got up so early, Paraschiva said, I thought you’d be hungry when you came in. The ride had made her hungrier than she had been in days. Paraschiva had made thick polenta pancakes and she had put out bread, cheese, pork, sausage, whatever was left over from the day before. She ate a piece of everything except the pork which she felt she could not stomach. Paraschiva was kneading dough. She watched Paraschiva’s arms that were so strong and brown working the dough on the board. She felt her own strength coming back to her. How was it in the city, Paraschiva asked. Paraschiva had never been to a city in her life.
‘It’s the city. Lots of buildings and cars and trams, and people in suits and hats.’
‘You’ll be missing fresh food, if you’ve been in the city. There’s some lovely soured cream, in that bowl on the sideboard. Take some of that with the pancakes. I don’t suppose you get any of that over there.’
Paraschiva took more flour in cupped hands and sprinkled it over the mound of dough.
Of course they have soured cream in the city, Paraschiva, she was going to say. People bring it in straight from the dairies. Women like you come in from the countryside every morning and bring in fresh cream and cheese and fruit. Thousands of them. They bring vegetables and spread them to sell on the pavements. Walnuts. Garlic in endless ropes. Vast baskets full of flowers. There is more choice than you could imagine . . .
She was going to say something like that but when she went to pick up the bowl it slipped from her fingers to the floor. Her two hands held still for a second as if they kept the bowl in their grip even as she gazed down at the cream spilling about her feet. And she threw herself down on the chair and cried like a child.
‘Oh you poor girl,’ Mama Anica exclaimed, seeing the meaning in it.
She was sitting with her head on the table crying, and beneath her a white pool of cream and blue-flowered shards of china. The old woman reached over and stroked the hair that was so tangled from the ride, pulled gnarled fingers through and smoothed it, stroked her quivering shoulders and her back.
‘How many months?’
‘How do you know?’
It’s like that, Mama Anica said. Sometimes when a woman was pregnant the muscles went like that, inexplicably, things just slipped away. She had seen it before. She had felt it herself, the strangeness of it. There are things like that that you can sense, she said. You can sense it in the skin of a woman, in the smell of her, in the way her feet are planted on the ground.
Paraschiva began to mop up the cream. She had laid a piece of linen over the bread and put it to rise, all in her own time, no urgency to anything, and only then had she taken a cloth in her hand and bent her sturdy form down over the floor. When she was done she shifted back on to her heels and asked if she had told the young man.
Mama Anica made up a tea. Mama Anica knew things, people believed that. Women came to the back door and Mama Anica sent them away with cures. Safta had thought it little more than superstition, because they were ignorant and because Mama Anica was old – she had been old as long as anyone seemed to have known her – and had lines on her face that made her look wise.
She did not know what went into the tea, only that it was dark and bitter, but Mama Anica would not allow her to sweeten it with honey. She said that honey would stop it from working. Safta drank the tea as she was told. In the nights she woke with cramps. She could not be sure that the tea was the cause. She told herself she didn’t really believe in it. If it worked so well then why did Paraschiva not make use of it when Augustin’s father had deserted her? Then she started to be afraid. Her thoughts carried on and asked, was it that it only partly worked, Paraschiva being so big and strong? Was that why her boy was born as he was? She spent much of the nights awake and when she slept she had dreams of snakes that gnawed at her, snakes with teeth and the skeletons of snakes on the bank of the lake where she had swum with Andrei. Then Andrei was there and he said they could not be snakes because snakes did not have those kind of bones. Or perhaps they were only the skins of snakes, dry and white, and the snakes had slithered out of them and away. She got up in the mornings and drank the tea again and then she went out and rode. She had Augustin saddle up the Lipizzaner. The horse had not been ridden in weeks and was very fresh. She rode recklessly. The rain held off and the ground hardened but there was mist that on some days didn’t clear and she rode out all the same. She wanted to know nothing but the wind on her face and the smells of the earth and of the horse’s sweat. One of those mornings, out there on the hillside out of sight of anyone, she fell. The horse tripped and she fell hard on to the ground and rolled, and lay stunned on the grass and felt the shudder of the impact inside her. The horse came back to her where she lay and after a time she remounted and rode home. She had bruises on
her arm and on her hip but no other visible injury.
The bleeding did not happen until she got back to Bucharest. She was very afraid. She had to confide in someone so she spoke to the woman who was her father’s mistress at the time, who seemed to be the sort of woman who would understand such things. Ramona was sympathetic and discreet, and took her to a doctor to get her checked. The doctor said that miscarriages occurred quite commonly at that time in a pregnancy, particularly in a first pregnancy when a girl was as young as herself.
It was not long after that she decided to become a nurse. Because, she said, the war was coming.
Her father was angry with her. She did not know if Ramona had spoken with him. ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, my dear Safta,’ her father said. ‘It’s not a world for girls like you.’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘At least I’ll be doing something with my life.’
There was a row and she moved out of his house. She wrote a letter to him and she wrote separately to her mother saying that she would be on her own now. For a time she did not even tell them where she was.
28
She wakes at sunrise. Lies still with her eyes open and watches the light increase and give definition until everything at last has outline and colour. Knows that she is in this place, this one moment and no other. Then she sleeps again.
By the time she comes down Augustin is sitting on the step making a drawing and the old man has put out a breakfast for them on the table beside the summer kitchen.
Painter of Silence Page 17