Lurking on the threshold she became afraid, unable to enter or leave the apartment. There was no sound from the rest of the building, nothing stirring in the street. She couldn’t even hear the sluicing of the drains. The flat smelt bad. Still she couldn’t see anything, though her eyes had had time to adjust.
Having come so far, across borders real and imaginary, she couldn’t just walk away. Something – maybe the same determination that helped her escape from the country in the first place – carried her into the apartment. She felt her way along the wall beyond the light switch. The plaster was clammy beneath her right hand. She moved slowly forward, her left arm extended in front of her. Suddenly the wall disappeared. She had reached an open doorway and peered through. Illumination from outside squeezed through cracks between boards nailed across the window frame. Three or four faint rods of light divined the room’s secrets: a split mattress, stuffing and springs extruded, a smashed table, and an unresolvable jigsaw of broken glass.
A soft clunk came from somewhere behind her.
She froze and caught her breath. It was probably a bird trapped under the roof, or a rat. Or a man. A Securitate agent in hiding. A desperate man with nothing to lose.
She strained her ears for any kind of noise. The streets were as quiet as death. Then, as light as feathers falling on snow, she heard a pattering of tiny clawed feet.
Rats. She didn’t mind rats. She preferred them to men.
There was no point staying at the apartment. Her brother was obviously long gone and without light she could neither search for clues to his whereabouts, nor clear a space to sleep. Gingerly she picked her way out of the apartment and down to street level. There was no one about. She crossed the street and walked to its end. There she turned right and headed in what she hoped was the direction of the city centre.
She was strangely comforted by the slushing of the drains when she noticed the noise had returned. There were passersby too. Some turned ostentatiously to watch her as she passed; others tended more to the shadows away from the piss-yellow streetlamps. A hotel sign flickered and buzzed. She asked for a single room. The assistant manager gave her forms to fill out and, after a brief, mumbled phone conversation, a key. She trudged up the stairs to the second floor and peered at the numbers on the doors, looking for 25. The lighting was meagre: every other bulb had been removed and those remaining leached no more than 20 watts of soupy ochre. She twisted the key and closed the door behind her. Only when she was confident no one had followed to listen outside the door did she begin to undress. She dropped her sweater on a plain wooden chair by the window. The moon was almost full. She beheld her image in a cracked mirror as she pulled off her shirt and unfastened her underwear. The moonlight fell on her pale body like a caul, making the number branded on her shoulder stand out: 20363.
She climbed into bed and hugged the blankets about her. She was trying to deny the regret she felt at coming back. Though the window was closed she could hear shuffling footsteps in the street. Within half an hour they had completely died away. She was drowsy and her limbs ached.
A sound outside her door made her jump and tingle with fright. She had heard footsteps. She listened but heard nothing. Maybe she’d dreamt it. Then, quite distinctly, she heard footsteps coming along the corridor, slowing down as they approached her room. Another set of footsteps came from the opposite direction and followed the same pattern. Voices muttered unintelligibly and were raised slightly as if in disagreement.
Suddenly the door rattled in its frame. The handle twisted and turned. A weight was pressed against it from outside and Daniela heard wood splinter.
They were getting in and she couldn’t move: the blankets had pinioned her to the bed. She thrashed and grunted.
A long craaaack from the door.
She screamed.
And woke up, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear.
There was no sound in or outside her room. The hotel was as quiet as a morgue. She curled up into a ball underneath the bed clothes and tried to relax.
She was walking through the city again. Along nondescript streets battle-scarred from the revolution. With no aim in mind she just kept on walking. One street blended into another. She turned corners without being aware of changing direction. Her sense of smell, however, was active. The city stank of the drains which gurgled beneath the streets. And the smell was getting stronger. She walked on past darkened windows and barricaded doorways. The stench wafted up the street towards her in waves. At the end of the street she turned left into a wide boulevard as empty as it would have been in the early hours of the morning even though the sky was afternoon-bright. The boulevard broadened before her. A soft, persistent thrum could be felt beneath her feet. The old tenements had disappeared and been replaced by new buildings, huge and bland. She passed over a manhole cover and heard the rushing of something beneath. It smelt like sewage but sounded much thicker, almost corporeal. She wondered what vermin might be crawling around beneath the city.
She left the apartment blocks behind. In the middle of the boulevard now were fountains constructed out of plaster and false marble, and tall streetlamps twisted like grappling irons. These distractions melted away and she was suddenly engulfed by the stench of the drains. Like the sewage outfall pipes at Constanta, the smell reminded her also of the sea.
The boulevard had become a vast expanse stretching ahead of her to some kind of reef raised above it.
Then, in a flash, she saw the water. The entire boulevard between where she stood and the mysterious reef was covered with water. She stepped back in alarm for it was filthy water.
There was a haze above it which may have been steam or putrescence rising from the water. It was like a vast sea clogged with human issue. The stench became so bad she retched dryly. The reef shimmered in the haze and appeared about to reform its questionable geometry. Then it was solid again and peculiarly ugly and threatening, as before. If it was formed of rock, the surface was scored with holes and tunnels, like a maze. She wondered what foul creatures inhabited such a terrible place. The thought struck her that it might be a huge encrustation of waste fashioned by the tides into a rocky reef.
She noticed her legs were carrying her forward into the polluted shallows and screamed and screamed and screamed . . . until she woke up.
She sat up, her head throbbing from the horror of the dream and the din of her terror. Her screams echoed like ghosts on a tape recorder. Otherwise the hotel was quiet. No one came running to restrain the mad woman. Between two rags of curtains the morning fell into the room like a slab of unwashed concrete.
In her mind she kept replaying the stark image of the reef sticking out of the sea of vile waste. She imagined a myriad dirty parasites crawling all over their host.
The reef resembled nothing she’d seen in Bucharest, yet the stench of the drains and the random patterns of the street were an inextricable part of her new experience of the city.
She hauled her body out of bed, sensing it must be quite late in the morning. The tap in the bathroom at the end of the hall dribbled cold brown water, which only reminded her of her dream.
Downstairs the assistant manager watched her walk across the foyer, place her key on the desk counter and head for the exit. As she opened the door to the street she heard him pick up the phone and mutter a few words in a thick accent. She felt like an outsider, unable even to understand the language.
By day her brother’s apartment building looked unremarkable. The gouts of trash littering the stairway offered no clues. She pushed open his door and stepped inside.
The apartment had been devastated, not by artillery, it seemed, for the walls and floors were intact, but by routine wreckers, obviously agents of the Securitate running amuck as they launched the counter-revolution; on the wall they had daubed in black paint the single word TRAITOR. Every item of furniture had been smashed. Even the three pieces of the bathroom suite had received sledge-hammer blows. The bath had been holed, the toilet and washba
sin had large chunks knocked out of them. She twisted one of the taps. Pipes groaned and water the same colour as her dream splashed her hand. She withdrew it instantly and wiped it on her trousers, shuddering. But she noticed, as it continued to run, that the brown disappeared and the water was soon clear. She switched off the tap, slightly encouraged.
Investigating the remaining rooms, she was surprised by the size of her brother’s apartment. She wondered how he had come to live so well.
The headboard of his bed had been reduced to splinters but the base was still functional. She fetched the split mattress from the front room and placed it good-side-up on the bed. Maybe, if she could find sheets and a blanket, she wouldn’t have to go back to the hotel.
She worked for two hours or more, piling rubbish in the corridor outside the apartment and salvaging what sticks of furniture she could. She tried removing some of the filth from the kitchen wall with tap water and rags from under the cleft sink. Driven by a determination to save what she could of her old life in the city, tenuous though she believed the link with her brother to be, she rubbed and scraped at the walls. Soon exhaustion calmed her efforts and she realised no progress would be made without proper materials. There was also the graffiti in the front room which she was determined to remove. Her brother was a patriot. She had no doubt he was out demonstrating at the moment his building was overrun. Though they had never been close, she felt a rush of protective love for him. Let him be safe, she prayed, as her mind conjured images of him lying crushed under masonry, dumped in a mass grave with another man’s foot in his face, or crumpled at the base of a deeply scratched wall riddled with bullets, like the dead tyrant.
She left the flat to look for cleaning materials and to get some fresh air. She tried not to feel intimidated by the streets. She thought her personal efforts to eradicate the Securitate should strengthen her. Taking a new route which she hoped would lead to shops – there were none near the hotel – she jumped once when a car backfired in a neighbouring street.
The gloomy overcast of the morning had thinned only slightly. Nevertheless, when she turned into the boulevard it seemed brighter. For the middle of the afternoon the pavements were eerily quiet. The buildings were more modern and while they were less grim in their aspect, they were certainly more banal. She passed a row of elaborate fountains and stopped dead in her tracks.
Her heart, after missing a beat, thumped like a triphammer. Her mouth dried up and sweat sprang out on her hairline.
In front of her was the filthy sea of her dream and, shimmering, the reef.
She felt faint. Fear pooled in her mouth. Her skin prickled.
The mirage vanished, to be replaced by the New People’s Palace, separated from her by an expanse of false marble. She recognised the Palace, Ceausescu’s last folly, from television pictures filmed during its construction. This whole end of the city had been systematically razed and redeveloped as New Bucharest. She remembered now, the new buildings she’d passed were apartments for Securitate agents. It had been claimed that secret tunnels linked both the Palace and the new apartments to the existing tunnels under the city.
She looked at the Palace again. And screamed. It had changed back into the reef. The foul stench made her retch. She spewed bile into the sea lapping at her feet and scampered back from it.
But there was only false marble beneath her feet, discoloured by her involuntary disgust. The Palace, with its massive frontage, crenellated windows and deep-set archways bore a striking resemblance to the reef, as if she’d unknowingly modelled the dreamed edifice on this gleaming monstrosity.
She tore herself away to go in search of disinfectant and cloths. She settled instead for a bucket of thin white paint and a thick brush. As she set to work on the kitchen walls she was troubled by thoughts of the Palace and its inversion, the reef. She worried about the new apartment buildings and most of all the drains; the tunnels . . .
If Hell were to revisit the earth its denizens would come crawling up through the tunnels.
She dipped the brush and drew a broad swathe across the wall. Cover-up, she thought anxiously. But what she was doing felt more honest than that. A diseased branch had been severed and she was painting the stump to protect it. Maybe her brother would come back and be grateful for her efforts. For now, though, she was concerned on a practical level with making the apartment habitable. Though she could go back to Belgrade whenever she liked, she felt tied to Bucharest. She had come home. The only family she had in the world was here. Somewhere. She dipped the brush and stroked the wall. Dipped and stroked.
In the front room she obliterated the insult, TRAITOR. But when she stood back the word was still legible, so she slapped on several more layers. She stretched into corners and crouched down to the floor.
Suddenly she stopped brushing. Something had caught her eye; a slanting graffito near the bottom of the wall. She rubbed away a smudge of dirt that had been obscuring it and read, “Daniela. 20363”. Her heart jumped and she wasn’t sure which emotion had kicked it. Love for her almost unknown brother, or fright at seeing her identity starkly represented on the wall? Had he scribbled it distracted by fear and excitement as the revolution gripped the city? Maybe he feared for her safety. Or was it, as it appeared, some kind of accusation or condemnation? Maybe the filth who had insulted her brother had intended to come after her next, not knowing she had fled the country a year before. But why would they write her name and number on the wall? And how would they even know of the number branded on her left shoulder?
It had to be her brother, desperate to help, unable to contact her. He would have seen the number when they were tiny children in Orphanage Number Six. Before they got separated. How had he committed the number to memory when so young was a mystery to her. But clearly he had. Tears stung her eyes as she wondered what their parents might have been like. They must have suffered and died so young. She had never known their names, nor seen their likeness, yet had always carried a dull ache for them which occasionally flared up, like a recurrent ulcer.
The terrible weight of self-pity now descended on her. No parents throughout her youth, no affection from the institutions that had raised her; and now no brother to share her grief. She left the brush in the paint and slunk into the bedroom where she curled up tightly on the cold, damp mattress.
The Deep Ones. The Old Ones.
The tunnels, the tunnels . . .
She couldn’t clear her mind of anxiety before sleep stole from the darkest shadows of the room to claim her.
The reef stood proud of the stinking sea. The air shimmered but the reef stood firm as rock.
Her eye was hurting. She poked a finger and rubbed it, but the irritation didn’t go away. She blinked furiously in an attempt to wash away the irritant. It failed to work. She noticed glints of light on the reef and wondered what on earth could have produced them. Maybe, if she had been right about the origin of the reef, it was infested with flies and the winter sun was catching in their wings.
She rubbed her eye again. There was a speck in it, something tiny and black. The sun flashed on another set of wings, dazzling her.
Still half asleep, she rubbed her eyes. They felt sore, as if they had been bathed in salt water. Something bright shone into them. She pressed her fingers into them again, feeling them yield horribly, and rubbed hard.
Then she realised where the light was coming from and, shielding her eyes, opened them. A narrow shaft of sunlight had sneaked in through the back window and fell across Daniela’s face. She rolled on to her side away from the window. Her head was full of the reef, the flies crawling over it, and the sea of filth, but the sun warmed the back of her neck pleasantly and the horrific pictures lost some of their impact.
She reflected on the preceding day’s whitewashing and wondered just what she hoped to achieve in Bucharest. Although it didn’t feel like it, the city had changed irrevocably. The tyrants were dead – she’d seen their bullet-riddled bodies on television – and the country was f
ree of their grip for the first time in twenty-four years. The sun moved from her neck over her head and struck the wall, revealing a patch of damp fungus. She had to carry on, she realised. The city was her home. Belgrade had just been a stopover. The sun crept towards the floor, picking out loose splinters from the floorboards. She thought briefly about her long-dead parents. The sun prised open a gap between two uneven floorboards and caught in something shiny trapped beneath the floor. Daniela watched curiously. As the sun fell a little deeper into the hole in the floor it glittered for a second then struck square and reflected into her face.
She uncurled her body and crawled on to the floor. Pulling one floorboard up to allow her hand entry, she reached in and grasped a plastic wallet. She eased it out through the gap and laid it on the floor.
Daniela’s heart thudded. Her head buzzed with questions. She felt almost as if she were holding her lost brother’s hand and he began speaking to her.
In the plastic folder were two photographs, a map of Bucharest with lines traced in ballpoint along particular streets and linking each other, and two letters addressed to her brother and signed Daniela.
She assumed her brother had formed some kind of an attachment to a woman who happened to bear her name. Until she began to read the first letter. When it became clear that the letter purported to be from her, thanking him for writing. She was well and living in Constanta, the letter said. Employed in a fabrics factory, she earned sufficient money to keep her comfortable and was a member of the local Party.
The second letter added that she remembered her childhood with great fondness but was now so happy in Constanta that she didn’t intend to visit Bucharest.
Obviously her brother had been taken in by the story and had asked to see her. They had put him off. She hadn’t been to Constanta since her adolescence, when she was briefly transferred to an orphanage in the Black Sea port. The postmarks on the envelopes, however, dated them to the very recent past.
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