When he has done he puts the scythe back in its place on the underside of the cart and goes to check the mare. Easy now, let’s see how you are, my lovely, is that still tender now? He murmurs to her as he feels down her leg. The leg is relaxed beneath his fingers, all the way down. There is no longer the tightening in it that was there when he touched it before, that indicated hurt. Her lameness is almost gone.
Unseen within the house Safta watches him with the horse. He is very gentle. There is lightness in his fingers. All of her life – ever since she was of an age to hear the gossip at least – she had thought that he must have been a bad man, Augustin’s father, the man who abandoned Paraschiva. She had looked at Paraschiva who was so palpably good and wondered how she could have made such a mistake. Now she thinks, it was no mistake. It would have been his lightness that attracted her, that same quick touch. Paraschiva herself was so placid, heavy, slow. You could not imagine permanence in such a connection. Paraschiva must have known from the moment she saw him that it would be in his nature to take off, some morning like this one, clear away with the mist. And if that was so, if she knew that, then the child was her way of holding a piece of him. For an instant Safta has a physical sense of how that would have been. It comes to her like her own pain.
‘Will you go today?’
‘No, not today. She’s still a little lame.’
‘When, do you think?’
‘One day, two. I don’t know. We’ll see.’
‘Where will you go to?’
‘Back to Transylvania. To my village.’
‘Have you been away long?’
‘Just a month or so.’
Later he has his questions for her.
‘What will you do?’
‘I have to return to Iaşi.’
‘And him?’
‘I don’t know. I know that he needs to be out of the city. There’s a sanatorium. I was meant to take him there.’
‘He doesn’t need a sanatorium.’
‘No.’
‘He just needs air.’
‘That’s why we came here.’
‘You can get somebody to take him in. The priest in the village who gave you the food.’
‘I don’t know. He is old. His wife is old. And they’re afraid.’
‘Do you think he can get by without you?’
‘He seems to survive. He must have looked after himself all these years. He got himself through the war. Then he was in a camp. He got himself through that somehow. He’s stronger than you think.’
‘I could take him.’
‘You?’
‘Why not? He’s good with horses. He can be useful.’
‘He doesn’t have the right papers.’
‘I can manage that.’
The moment of parting lies close. They know that they cannot remain unnoticed for more than a few days and yet they live as if they will be there indefinitely.
István cuts wood and they light the stove in the kitchen so that they have more than the camp fire to cook on. They find pans and utensils scattered about the place, not only in the big house but in the ruins of the cottages as well.
One day they heat water and carry it through to the bathroom, and one after the other each of them takes a bath in the great iron bath. Safta looks at herself in the mirror and sees how wild she has become. She combs out her hair with a care it has not been given in many days and washes it, and washes the clothes she has been wearing and lays them out to dry on the bushes in the sun.
Augustin takes a big round basket to the orchard and fills it with plums. There are many and of many kinds, plums and greengages and little golden mirabelles. He brings back one basketful after another and tips them out on to the kitchen table. There are empty preserving jars on the shelves in the corridor beyond the kitchen, dark high shelves where they have survived unnoticed and unbroken. He takes them down. One or two have spiders dead inside them. How the spiders lived and grew so huge on air within the empty jars is a mystery.
Augustin washes the jars and leaves them upturned to drain. He spreads and sorts the plums, then packs them into the jars. Some jars he packs with fruit all of one kind; others he packs in tiers of different colours. The plums look beautiful pressed against the cleaned glass.
‘But we have no sugar.’ And Safta knows she is no Paraschiva, so expert at making preserves.
Augustin brings out Paraschiva’s old copper pan from the floor of the larder. Then he goes to the yard, takes a pickaxe and goes down to the cellar. Safta lights a lamp and follows him. There is one last hoard that was walled up in the time of the soldiers, hidden behind a heap of rotten crates and wine flasks. He strikes in two places before he finds the right spot, where the wall that he and József so hastily laid caves in easily. ‘Bravo, Tinu,’ she says, ‘you really are a marvel,’ and helps him to pick away the bricks and the soft mortar. There is a rack of wine – not their own home-grown wine whose barrels have long been emptied, but imported French bottles bearing the names of famous chateaux – and tins containing salt and flour, and sugar. ‘Eureka!’ She pours a white stream of sugar into the water in the pan. And if she has so much sugar then she will make jam as well. She has never done such a thing before; she has barely in all these years had a kitchen of her own. She sings as she watches the fruit come to the boil. Lifts off the scum as it rises. There used to be some fine precision in the making of preserves, she recalls, Paraschiva knowing as if by instinct the sweetness demanded of the syrup for a particular fruit or the moment of a jam’s setting. Safta has no mind for any of that. She sings to herself and for the length of another song or two she watches the ruby geysers seething in the pan. That’ll do, she thinks then. (Knowing all the time how little it matters. It is not after all as if she is stocking up for seasons to come. She is living within this interval, without time, without requirement for the fruit to last; standing thus over the hot stove for the purpose only of the present moment and the illusion of a future.) She takes a cloth in each hand and lifts the heavy pan to the side. ‘No,’ she says, holding Augustin back as he brings the first of the jars. ‘It’s too hot. We have to wait and let it cool just a little. If we poured it this hot the glass would break.’
There are pears also in the orchard, early French varieties that they pick from espaliers that have formed strange and misshapen trees. A single vine has grown unpruned into a jungle but yields translucent grapes which he presses into juice.
On those hidden shelves at the back of the cellar István discovers an ancient bottle of Tokay. They drink it the last night on the verandah by the light of a dozen votive candles he has stolen from the church.
They leave together. Augustin sits up beside István on the cart. Safta rides the mare. She has taken to riding these last few days, wandering bareback over the hills. At first Augustin did not like her to leave him at all but he has got used to it. He has been happy to occupy himself without her. When she has come back she has seen the new drawings that he has been making, that often mix the present and the past together: the house furnished as it was but the garden wild; or the old stable yard that is now a burnt-out ruin precisely as it was, and István’s cart – recognisably his cart crammed with all his nomadic possessions – coming in at the gate.
Through the earliest hours of the morning they travel together until they come to a paved road. Here she dismounts. István takes the horse and ties it to the cart. He lifts out her case and a big basket of fruit and places them at the roadside.
‘You stay with István. You are going to the mountains.’ She gestures towards the west. ‘I’ll come and see you.’
She kisses him goodbye. She has planned her goodbye in advance, told herself that she must not show any hesitation. If she were to hesitate it would open him to doubt. She must be firm, sure, restrained.
From his pocket he produces a present wrapped up in a piece of plum-stained muslin and tied with string. So he has known all along that they were going to separate. How could she have thou
ght she could keep it from him?
The two men get up again on the cart and István hands Augustin the reins so that he can drive. From deep in the back of his throat he makes one of those sounds with which he communicates with horses. The cart starts away with the mare and the foal running alongside.
35
She does not have long to wait for the bus to take her to the town and the railway. No part of the return journey takes much time. The watching down the road. The bus materialising after so few moments of emptiness from the direction in which the cart had disappeared. The bus journey itself. It is market day in the town and the bus is packed. She has only the edge of an inner seat, a broken view out to the road. The woman beside her has a goose on her lap. They pass a cart, two men on it and a bay foal running alongside. She looks back compulsively as if to see the mare as well even though she knows that this is not the way they have gone. Then there are more carts appearing off tracks or out of nothing in the open land. Many of them run with additional horses or with foals. She asks her neighbour if there will be frequent trains to Iaşi. The woman shakes her head. She wouldn’t know. What cause would a woman like her have for going to Iaşi?
The trains are not frequent but there is one leaving a mere ten minutes after she comes to the station. She buys her ticket and gets on to it breathless, hungry. It is as if she is winded with the transition. The train moves fast, throwing the landscape away behind her. The days at Poiana are receding from her with the land, too fast, losing their perspective, beginning too soon to merge with the distant past, the other memories from before. She opens Augustin’s gift.
It is a book that he has made in secret, of drawings of the house. He has drawn each room in turn just as it used to be, furnished and with pictures on the walls, all in pencil, all with that duskiness that is in his drawings which means that you must look hard into them to see each form and minute detail, and she believes it is all there: teacups on a tray in the drawing room, her music laid out on the piano, her grandfather’s pipe and his newspaper folded on the verandah. He has put everything back as it was, pieced it all together for her to take away, precise memories of the rooms that are lost. On the cover of the book he has drawn the view of the garden from the verandah, this too as it was, with the lawn mown and the bench beneath the catalpa and the border full of flowers, and above them he has written a remembered word: août. This had been a favourite word of his from the early days of their lessons, that he loved to draw for its shape, for its roundness and the hat of the circumflex above it, and also for its connection with himself. It is not August any more, it is September, but she holds the sense of August about her.
She wraps the book again in the cloth and puts it away in the basket with the fruit. As soon as she gets to Iaşi she will take the fruit to Adriana. Adriana will have worried that she has been away so long. She will share the fruit with her. She will say that they met a man who gave the mute a job that he could do, and took him to the mountains where the air will be as good for his lungs as that in any sanatorium. That will be close enough to the truth. One day the two of them might perhaps take a trip to visit him.
It will not even be dark by the time she arrives. She had expected it to be dark, for more time to have passed between the one place and the other, for there to have been some palpable change to the day. She left – they all left – Poiana in the early morning and it is late afternoon when she comes into Iaşi, in the same degree of light. The station hall is crowded and full of noise. She walks out swiftly with her case in one hand and the basket in the other. She does not at first take a tram but walks on for some time until she is free of the crowds.
In the morning she will go to the hospital. She will make some excuse for her extended absence. Then the old routine will return. The shifts. The daily tasks. The only facts will be the things that she does each day. The city. Her work. She will leave the past to itself.
Such beautiful fruit. They sit before a cloth on the floor in Adriana’s room and unpack the basket, doing the work that Augustin had done at Poiana so few days before. Some of the plums are bruised. Adriana takes these first and cuts out the bruises and the stones and puts them into a pan for jam.
‘You’ll have to come and help me eat it as I’ll be alone here now.’
She has the juice from the plums shining on her fingers.
‘I have news,’ she says.
Safta’s hands fall still. This news will demand stillness of her.
‘I know now.’
‘How do you know? Did you get a letter?’
‘A film. I saw a film about Stalingrad. I knew then that he could not have survived. It was a message to me.’
It was only a film, Safta might say. Adriana knows that she might say that. She knows that herself, perfectly well. She knows that the soldiers she saw in the film were real soldiers. She read that in the newspaper. The tanks and the guns were real, the Russian ones and the German ones which were captured in the battle, and the aeroplanes. The soldiers were actual veterans acting as themselves. Ones who survived. Only it will not be helpful to say that.
The film showed a battle on a scale that she could not have imagined. Even though she had read all the facts in the newspapers when it was happening and afterwards, all the facts, the statistics and the casualties. Though she had seen with her own eyes what happened in Iaşi and what happened to the wounded who came into her hospital, and multiplied all that in her head a thousand times. Alone in the dark with the rows of people about her silent as if they did not exist she understood it for the first time as she saw it on the screen. The vastness of it, the sheer numbers of aeroplanes, tanks, guns lined up across whole wide hillsides. She had never imagined such great space or such destruction. Such fighting – on the steppe, in the snow-filled trenches, on the ice on the Volga, in broken houses up staircases floor by floor. So many bright and eager young men, and she could see their faces, their courage and the shock in them when they were killed. The audience was entirely silent. She might have been alone and yet she was infected by the spread of emotion. And the music had such power. She like the rest was carried away by the music, forgetting even who she was, who was who, which side was which and which was hers. Silently inside herself she was cheering for the Russians, then weeping for the Germans. And the Romanian division to which her Ioan belonged was, they said, annihilated. They named his division in the film and the name brought her back to reality.
When the film ended the whole audience held there until the last white word had faded from the screen and the curtain fell across it. When they went out there were tears on many faces besides her own. She walked a long time in the streets. At last she came to a church. The door was locked but there was a kiosk outside with candles burning. She went to it and took a candle for Ioan, lit the candle and said a prayer. There were two sides to the kiosk: Vii and Morţii, two trays with water in them reflecting the flames of the candles. For the first time she placed Ioan’s candle in the tray for the dead and not the living.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘As I said, I’ll be on my own here now.’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought I might offer. It’s just an idea, I thought of it just now. You might live here if you like. You’ll have more space than in the hostel where you’ve been.’
Safta has started on the plums again, passing her fingers lightly over their bloom, pulling out the stalks then slicing them in half and stoning them before they too go in the pan.
‘Thank you, yes, that would be wonderful, for a time at least.’ Then she says, ‘Do you have enough sugar? We’ll need a lot of sugar for jam. I can go tomorrow and get some more.’
István sings as they pass through a great gorge. A good thing, he thinks, that the lad is deaf. His singing is not something to which anyone has ever liked to listen. He bellows a song at the top of his voice for the satisfaction of hearing the sound come back at him. The cart goes slowly. The horse has had to climb a long way. They wind between hig
h bare walls of rock. He sings ever the louder and the walls of the gorge amplify the song, bouncing the echo of it back again and again before them. When his voice runs dry he takes another swig from the bottle that he keeps propped against the footboard. It is a vintage Dom Pérignon. He has all that was saved in the cellar stacked in the cart, the pick of Constantin Văleanu’s choice vintages alongside the plum preserves. Each time he drinks he hands the bottle on to Augustin who begins to drink as he does and sees what he is doing and opens his mouth and begins to keen, just for the feeling of it. The voices of the two of them resound like those of a dozen madmen through the ravine.
They camp high. They build a fire against the cold up there. When they wake they must drink some pálinka to face the day. It is his own pálinka, that he made himself the last winter. It is much rougher than the champagne but effective. Sometimes István holds the reins, sometimes Augustin, but the horse can find its way and the way is down. There is really no need for a driver.
‘So I have a son for my old age.’
Augustin looks blankly.
‘A son. You.’
Augustin’s face breaks into laughter that falls away down the mountainside.
‘Yes, I know, it’s a joke. And I wonder if they’re any more of you about? István’s sons, eh?’
Painter of Silence Page 22