‘He’s quite an artist, your brother.’
‘He’s always done that.’
‘Is it a real place in the picture?’
‘I think all the places in his pictures are real. Sometimes he adds things, things that I don’t understand, but the places are real.’
‘Would he draw this place?’
‘He might.’
‘Ask him.’
She shows Augustin what the old man wants. She cannot predict what he will do. Usually his drawings are generated within himself. He draws what he wants to draw and she does not know if he will work to order. But he seems to agree. He looks around him for a while with his eyes narrowed, studying the place. It is a place worthy of a picture, the little farmstead at the edge of its village, the road below, a track coming to meet it down the grass of the opposing hillside. He chooses his view and sets to work, and once he has started on it she cannot hurry him. She sits, and the old man sits and does not go to his field, and there is the sound of Augustin’s pencil between them and sometimes the toneless humming that comes from him as he works.
They don’t get on the road until late in the morning. It is already getting hot.
‘That was good. He liked your picture very much.’
She can see that Augustin is pleased with himself. He is proud of the picture and the man has paid him for it with food. He walks briskly for an hour or two with his case tight under one arm and the bag of food over his shoulder. Then they stop for a rest and he takes out one of the drawings he had made of the house the day before and starts another drawing on the back of it, sketching the land before them.
‘No, you can’t do that now. We should keep going if we’re to get there tonight.’
She stands in front of him, picks up the case, holds it out to him, but he does not rise. He goes stubbornly on with his picture, outlining the track they are to walk, a line of stooks like statues on the horizon, a single oblong cloud in the sky. She walks off, bluffing him as she would a small child, but has to come back as he has failed to follow, throws herself down defeated on the grass. She has known no one in her life so stubborn. It is not possible to make him aware of time. She has always known that in him. For him there are only moments, each one present and immediate, but no sense of the hours and days passing; no continuity, before and after. There is some kind of instinctive clock in him that used to make it possible for him to surprise them all by turning up for meals punctual to the minute, or to the stables when he used to work there, but it operates only as he chooses. He cannot be made to conform to time beyond that.
‘Come on, Tinu. Put it away and get up. We really need to go.’
His eyes pass between paper and landscape without meeting her own. His mouth that never speaks holds its horizontal line.
‘Have it your own way then.’
She plucks a grass stalk, strips it and puts it between her lips. It is so long since she has been in the countryside.
‘I suppose we shall be there tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that.’
Only this matters: here and now. It matters that the weather is fine and that they have the food that the old man has given them. She takes off her shoes. They are sturdy nurse’s shoes, not bad for walking in but it is good to take them off. There is a stream a little way off. Barefoot she walks to it across the grass, puts her feet into the shallow water and feels the mud between her toes. It clouds the water so much that her ankles disappear. She wades further, hitching up her skirt, bends when she comes to where the stream is clear and throws water over her face and hair.
She knows the way across country from here. They are within riding distance of the house. She will remember, if not too much has changed. There is a place in the forest where they could camp, if they don’t reach it today. She doesn’t know how long it will take on foot. It occurs to her as they start to walk again that it is possible that they are already on land that her family once owned. They might camp on what used to be their land, and get up and walk the rest of the way in the morning on what used to be their land. The thought is odd, after the years she has spent sharing cramped rooms in overcrowded cities. How could anyone ever have owned so much land?
Augustin’s eyes are sharp. He sees it before she does and points it out: the long white house like a faraway ship, still catching the sunlight though the valley below has already fallen into shade. They approach through the trees. It is good, she thinks, that they are coming from the direction of the forest because if there is someone inside the house they will not be seen. At the edge of the trees where the garden used to begin but where now there is wilderness, she stops. She pulls him back beside her just as he is about to step out into the open. He shakes his head, indicating that they can go on. For the first time, he leads the way. It is as if he has been here recently and knows what they will find. That’s it, she thinks, seeing it suddenly. He has been here. He must have come here before he came to Văleanu. So is it empty then? He knows that we will find it empty. All of the windows are shuttered save one, where the shutter hangs away broken. There is no movement. There is not even a track among the weeds on the driveway to show that anyone comes there.
It looks more than empty. It looks hollow. It will be dark and dead inside like a dead and hollow tree. For a moment she is afraid. She sees that the walls are not so white now that they are close. The white is stained, streaked in places almost to the colour of the bark of the acacias. But the leaves of the acacias are green as ever. The shade beneath them has that soft quality of acacia shade. And there are dogs slinking out from the porch. Some of the dogs have the paleness of Weimaraners.
The dogs bark at them. She walks forward, speaking gently, calling their names. But she cannot expect Spitzy and Heinz to still be alive. These dogs are only mongrels though they have elements of the Weimaraners in them. One thin black cur has the Weimaraners’ yellow eyes. She braves the ghostly eyes and it lets her pass.
The porch has collected leaves over the years, a debris of leaves piled into the corners. Leaves all along the base of the door. The right-hand panel has a sign on it stating that the property has been expropriated by the state. She puts her hand to it, to the heavy brass handle. She knows it will be locked. It seems scarcely possible that she could just walk in after all these years. She turns the handle, puts a hand against a panel and pushes, just in case. The dogs have come in close behind her, as if they trust her to open it, as if there will be something for them inside. She turns around and shoos them away. Nothing for any of them but dried leaves.
‘Tinu?’
He has gone. His case sits on the porch step between the columns but he is nowhere to be seen.
She steps out, looks across the grass, then back at the house. She walks around the side of the house towards the stable yard. The stables have burned down. There are only black and broken ruins. The cottages where the servants had lived have walls intact but their roofs have fallen in. She climbs over rubble and debris, round to the garden side of the house. There, the shutters are open along the verandah. The further ones are opening even as she looks. The shutters are being thrown back, the windows behind them opened and catching the last of the light.
‘Tinu!’
She runs to the verandah steps, along to the last window.
He is there, inside the house, laughing, throwing the window open. She climbs in. His laughter is rare but when it comes it is like bells, resounding through the empty rooms as he runs away. She chases after him, door after door, room after room, seeing the evening light come in down the length of the house, churning up a golden trail of dust. All the way she hears his laughter. Then she runs ahead of him back to the hall and up the stairs. She takes one side and he takes the other, opening all the windows in the bedrooms, shocking the rooms with air.
They come to the nursery last. He stops, panting. There is the map of the world on the wall. She gathers herself and looks about. He is coughing. All the dust has made him cough. There is so much dust and
it has lain still for so long. She wonders when the house was finally abandoned. Who was last here.
‘You knew how to get in. Where did you get in? The dining-room window? Show me.’
When he has recovered they walk back down the corridor past the open bedroom doors. She goes more soberly now, looking about her, down their footprints on the stairs. Though the rooms are empty of furniture her ancestors remain on the walls above the hall, torn in their frames. There is the smashed chandelier dangling remnants of crystal. So the Russians came through. That much she might have predicted. But someone else has been here. In the dining room, against the wall, lies a straw mattress. A few other things show some more recent and solitary occupation of the room: a bucket that must have brought water, an empty bottle, some old newspapers and dry sticks for kindling on the floor beside the stove.
‘You?’
He shakes his head.
‘But you knew the way in.’
The catch on the window has been broken. The window must just have been pulled to and wedged; and the shutter also, not barred, so that it will have been blown open and broken in a gale. Who? How long ago? She can learn nothing from the dust on the floor that is now so messed with their prints. She has an idea, looks at the newspapers by the stove. There are Russian ones as well as Romanian, and the most recent are dated from 1947. But whoever lit the fire might have found them already in the house. She opens the door of the stove. Ash. What did she expect? There is no telling how long ago a heap of ash was burnt.
‘Let’s not sleep here. Someone’s been here before us. I don’t feel right about it. But the mattress is good. I wonder where it came from anyway? Not from here. Whoever it was must have brought it. Maybe it came from the ruins of the cottages by the stables. Let’s take it, move it somewhere else.’ She has him help her pick up the mattress and carry it along the enfilade of rooms. ‘The green drawing room, let’s put it there. It always used to be such a beautiful room, so cool. It was green like the shade of the trees, only cooler, with the draught from the windows on both sides. And there were the mirrors, remember? Long mirrors in gilt frames that made the room seem to go on for ever. They’re gone now but you can see the shadows where they hung.’ The room is all the greener with the growth of the wisteria. The plant has grown into a jungle right over the far end of the verandah and has wound its tendrils all the way to the windows of the drawing room. In another year the leaves will cover the glass. The light inside will be like light underwater.
‘Wait, let’s sweep it first. I saw a broom somewhere. But let me do it alone. This dust is not good for you.’ She runs to the doorway by the kitchen. Comes back with an old broom, begins to sweep the boards, softly as the dust rises. She sweeps a corner. Pulls the mattress there. She goes on sweeping and the dust runs in a wave before her. She will not let him back in the room until the dust in the air has settled.
In the meantime he has climbed out of the window on to the verandah. He has found a couple of cane chairs there, where they were about to be engulfed by the wisteria. They are grey with age and there are breaks in the cane but they are more or less serviceable. He has brought them one by one and set them just before the window. There is a wooden bench. He has pulled that in place as well. He brings their cases. Then the pile of newspapers from the dining room. ‘We shan’t be needing a fire yet,’ she says, ‘it’s so warm.’ But that is not what he has brought the newspapers for. He takes the pile apart and squares it, and places it neatly beside his case on the wooden bench. Then he takes out his pencils and places them on top.
‘Look what I found, on the floor just beneath the window. I thought it was just a blown leaf but it’s not, it’s a dead bird. A sparrow, see.’ The small brown bird is tiny in her hand. ‘Do you think it came in the window? Then it would have been the last time it was open. It flew in and then the window was closed and it was trapped, and it must have happened quite recently because it’s not decayed at all; the feathers, all of it, perfect. Or I suppose it could have come in some other way, through a chimney or a hole in the roof or something, and then it would have found the window and died there because that was the only daylight that it could find. Here, maybe you’d like to have it to draw.’
She lays the bird beside his things on the bench.
‘How long do you think we can stay here? I only thought of coming here, I haven’t thought beyond that.’ She can feel tears rushing to her eyes and does not know why she should cry in this moment when she is happy. ‘It was just that we needed to be here. We had to get out of Iaşi. It was making you ill. You’ll be better here, I know you will.’ With the tears clouding her eyes she strokes his thin face. She pulls him to her and hugs him harshly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make a plan. I’ll find someone you know, find somewhere for you. If I can’t find anything else, then you can go on to the sanatorium after all. Tomorrow I’ll go into the village. We’ll eat the last of what that man gave us and then I’ll have to go tomorrow to find some food.’
29
Even after the war was over he kept on making soldiers. He cut them out of any old scraps and drew their uniforms on to them, tunics and belts and buttons, the caps on their heads and the wrappings they wore instead of boots. They were made without the care that he had usually put into his figures, without variety. There was just enough detail to identify them as Russians, no more than that. He made them and left them behind him wherever he had been, until one day Mama Anica decided to collect them up and destroy them. She went about and picked them up from the floor and the chairs and the tables and beneath his bed, and placed them together like a pack of cards. She went to Augustin with the pack in her hand.
‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘You’ve done enough of them now.’
She made him hand her the soldier he had in his hand that moment, which he had cut out but on which he had not yet begun to draw.
‘Are there any more? Let’s see in your pockets.’
There were a couple crumpled in his trousers. She smoothed them and added them to the pack.
Then she went to the stove and opened the door and fed them to the fire.
‘There. They’re gone now. No more soldiers.’
They were living up by the big house again, he and Mama Anica and József and Stanislaw. For a time they had all that they needed. They had kept the vegetables planted, and there were the hens they had hidden and the cow that József had brought back from the forest. No bees any more as soldiers had burned out the hives. They seemed all right while the old men were with them. But all across the countryside folk were hungry and on the move, and József took it into his head to go back to the village he came from, in the Székely land across the mountains. Then Stanislaw also began to speak of going home. He had a sister who would take him in. He hesitated a long time before he left, mumbling with the shame of deserting the house where he had served so long.
One morning Mama Anica decided that they too should go. She thought that she had heard wolves in the night. The dogs themselves were becoming like wolves. They were running as a pack with the strays now that they had to fend for themselves. She could no longer be sure that they would be any protection.
They travelled like the others they had seen before. They took with them only the little that they could carry and lived however they could along the way. Sometimes they travelled in company and sometimes on their own. An old woman and a mute were no threat to anyone. They were not part of a convoy like the first war refugees but pieces of a more random and fragmented exodus. People were taking off individually or in little groups, like scared birds; rising and scattering, moving on, settling for a moment and then scattering again, keeping only to the constant of a direction south. Just as surely as those others before them, they were driven by the war. People went on being driven by the war long after the war was finished, because of the hunger that followed on from war. Where the war had passed, animals were taken and fields were not planted. After the war had gone there was hunger.
It was the time of year when the birds flew north. Augustin looked up into the sky and saw high above them the flocks of birds flying in the opposite direction, following the same migration routes they used each year, flying north as those below went south.
He had no idea that the land could stretch so far or be so empty. Once or twice on the road they passed through villages that seemed to be entirely empty. Most times they were just sparsely populated, some houses and yards abandoned, others lived in, and the people who lived within their gates might come out and offer what little they had, if only bread or maize or salt. Between the villages the fields ran wild. Thistles, oats, wild flowers and the reseeded remnants of previous crops of maize tangled beneath a year or two years’ dried growth of grass. It was good that Mama Anica knew what there was to eat in them. She found leaves, mushrooms, roots. She dug up the fat roots of burdock and ground thistles that boiled into a starchy pulp. Sometimes in the fields there were craters, and the trees that ran along the road were broken off, and he knew that there had been fighting in that place.
The south was flat. The hills had gradually stretched themselves out. The land was flat and the road ran straight between fields that were once more tended and controlled. Villages were strung loosely along the roads, avenues of unbroken trees and houses and wells, everything low beneath the great breadth of sky.
The people there were meant to take in the refugees. An old woman and a slightly built mute youth were no threat to anyone on the road but they were not much use either. It was a while before they found a place, and then it was only a room in a ramshackle house at the edge of a village with a rough peasant couple and a gang of filthy children. The moment Mama Anica moved in she cleaned the room they had been given, that was along the yard from the main house. Then she cleared and swept the portion of yard before their door. She swept that space every day thereafter of every leaf and chicken dropping that landed there. It was an expression of her separation from the family in the house. The man was brutish, callous with his animals and taciturn with people. The woman was heavy and sullen. Mama Anica heard them sometimes when the man came back drunk from the bar and knew that the woman had cause for her anger. These people could be trouble, she saw, but she could not guess the form that the trouble would take.
Painter of Silence Page 18