Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  ‘How did we get here?’ she asked him one day.

  She was a conscienceless lizard.

  She rolled over to him, pressing her calves together and covering her face with her left arm. The skin on the inside of her arm had remained white, almost translucent. It was fluffy and still young. The breasts had slanted and looked, in that position, like the breasts of an old matron, furrowed by fine vines, thin as the cracks on canvases displayed in the unfavourable conditions of full daylight. In the dense and heavy air, on the tiny strip of beach on which they hid themselves, a vague feeling of happiness floated, despite that fact that the reclusiveness they sought could never be truly reliable. The sand would heat beneath them as time passed; sometimes an hour, sometimes less, depending on the schedule of the ones back home, on their own apprehensions or how soon they yielded to the fear of being caught.

  They had already been there three weeks and they were used to sneaking away, to dissimulating, to sniffing each other from a distance. They had gotten used to it all: to seeing one another only when the others didn’t see them, to daily meetings, to daily approaches, in the conjugal rhythm they had created. Besides sadness, it gave them a strange feeling of possession that threatened to extend to the hours in which they weren’t together. Sometimes it was a good feeling, because it subdued them and promised them false delights; it was a feeling of sweet casualness and abandon to the beautiful illusions crowning any lover’s head. It gave them a feeling of safety never experienced in Bucharest, with their busy schedules and their responsibilities, and the city itself, with its lack of places to hide and its nosy people, its hotelkeepers with suspicious, sugary looks, its chatty taxi drivers, its prying bartenders and waiters. It wasn’t a city that would protect or cover up the tracks of those who ventured to lead double lives.

  She was watching him through the acute angle made by her arm, hidden, carefully examining him and trying to guess if he was thinking of leaving or was just lost in thought. If he had allowed her, she could have stayed like that for a long time: silent, motion-less, secretly watching him and imagining all sort of diabolical plans. Out of exasperation, he would ask her why she couldn’t trust him, but she kept stubbornly reminding him that he had left her once, with no regrets, and that it could happen again anytime. No promise in the world could have comforted her. And, somehow, he agreed with her. He felt the need of reassurance himself, but he couldn’t ask for it, because she was clever and would have summed things up right away: none of them had the right to ask the other for reassurance. Because, years before, despite all the promises and well-devised plans, one of them had still left the other, and that was enough to ruin their trust.

  He knew her argument perfectly. As a matter of fact, when he thought of ‘the two of them’ he had a feeling of optimism as if, however bad the situation had been and even if it was more than likely that it wouldn’t change for the better too soon, at least for the moment things looked nice, despite the millions of particles breaking on the inside, each with its direction and its will. These thoughts always led him to his grandmother, whom they had found lying on her bed with her black, varnished, ribbon-shaped buckle shoes on, dressed in yellow stockings and a red and green plaid skirt under which you could glimpse the lace at the bottom of the petticoat, with a frilled white puffed sleeve shirt under the black vest. Everyone thought that Grandmother had dressed up to go to the theatre, and her rather inappropriate clothes convinced them, for a couple of minutes, that she was alive and just asleep despite the sour smell in the air. When they finally wondered why Grandmother had togged up like that, they started to suspect that the stylish woman had prepared, in fact, for death.

  Yet he often thought about the future and made plans: how he would slowly drift away from those back home, how he would manage, also little by little, to become more and more dispensable and invisible, until they got used to his absence; how he would take his clothes, one at a time, then a few of the books he loved – not many, but definitely Robinson Crusoe and a few botanical atlases; how he would stretch like a rubber cartoon character, first with his arms full of suitcases, then with half his body, bringing his left foot forward and then, with a last, graceful effort, pull his right one forward as well, without his toes touching the ground.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  He knew that, however nicely and amusingly he had recounted his fantasy, she would have sulked and wouldn’t have spoken to him anymore. She would have told him reprovingly that this day he was dreaming about wouldn’t come too soon and that, anyway, it could only come if he did something about it.

  ‘Do you think we should leave?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  Childlike, he pushed her face onto the beach mat and said, with a stifled voice, ‘Because you look restless. If you want to leave, just say so.’

  Then he drew himself to her and mounted her, crushing her under his weight. It had been a deft move; he had jumped like a cat, leaving her no time to realise what was going on. She found herself under that monster, suffocated by his love. He had decided to make her realise that she was wrong. They would always waste their energy in conversations, implacably drifting toward the subject of their relationship, which she saw intricately, with adoration and disgust, and he with indulgence and fatality.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him, out of breath, her face distorted with repugnance. But then she changed, looking as if she had accidentally pressed a button and the machinery inside her had started to work again. From a distance, they could see the growing upside-down silhouette of a boy with a ponytail, holding a surfboard under his arm. He had come out of the cornfield, from between the maize that had grown its silk to the sky, dragging his flip-flops and advancing with difficulty, seemingly tired already. She tried, with a dignified and disfigured smile, to pull herself out from beneath, but despite all her effort and her struggling, she only managed to free one foot.

  ‘Please, get off. Everybody will see us.’

  ‘So what? You said I wanted to leave. Look, I’ll show you that I don’t.’

  ‘I know, you’ve shown me. Now let’s go.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  She screamed, and that made him stifle her voice by pressing her head into the hollow between his collarbone and his arm. He could feel the contour of her face on the inside, sunken in his flesh, and he could hear her feet rustling, like a breeze coming from the sea. He held her tight for a minute or so, but it seemed longer. Finally he let go and saw her flushed, irritated face with its lines deepened by anger. A second later, tears began to trickle down her cheeks in thin, winding streams, leaving an imaginary semicircle on her cheekbones and falling on the mat. He could have sworn that he could hear their sound.

  The surfer passed them by with his head down, swinging his free hand alongside his body and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him. On a sunny day like that, on a beach where you could see a single sheet with a couple of lovers lying on it, what could go wrong? He could have killed her right there and then, in the seconds in which the boy was leaving them behind, without raising any suspicion. He could have left her in the sun to decompose, so that no one would recognise her anymore. The surfer would have remembered there had been someone in that place, but it would have been difficult for him to say precisely who. The local police would have discovered her and connected this with the disappearance reported by her grief-stricken husband. He would have wept for her, failing to understand how something like that had happened to them, of all people, and then soon she would have been forgotten. At that moment, death seemed an easier solution, and the thought made him wonder.

  They spent the rest of their time in silence until he saw her get up and start to gather her things. He did the same, glad that it hadn’t been him mentioning that it was time to go. He didn’t realise how angry his gesture had made her. It had been an unjustified, adolescent impulse, similar to that in which boys sometimes feel like hanging an arm around their partn
ers’ necks, signalling possession and arrogance at the same time.

  When they separated, after dropping her off at the corner of the street, he lingered on for a while in his car, watching her move away. She had resumed her self-assured walk and was moving innocently, as if she were coming back from the morning’s shopping. There was no need for them to set appointments; they were both on the beach at 8 o’clock every morning, never more than a couple of minutes late unless something unexpected came up.

  He pressed his right foot to the acceleration pedal, slowly releasing the clutch with the other. Going to the seaside on holidays hadn’t initially been in his plans. For the kids, the news came like an accidental meeting with Santa Claus. He had warned them ever since the beginning of the summer that he could only be away from work for a couple of weeks. He had, somewhat cruelly, made them decide between the seaside and the mountains. He wanted to make it seem that it was their decision. Up till then, he had heard his girls daydreaming countless times about the waves that would break against their feet. And then, on a Sunday visit, his brother-in-law, who had two girls himself, came up with the idea of going together to a guesthouse in the Western Carpathians. Although in the beginning he had tried to explain with a certain irritation that they had already made plans for the vacation, he had noticed with amazement that everybody–especially the girls – seemed more and more charmed by the idea of a mountain adventure, despite their reservations about the company of those loud and noisy little cousins.

  Milk and honey flowed out of his brother-in-law’s lips in his storytelling enthusiasm, and the mountains he depicted seemed like animated giants waiting for nothing but the arrival of the beautiful young ladies from the city, ready to carry them on their backs and lay rugs of wild strawberries, blackberries, honey mushrooms and golden chanterelles at their feet. The girls, lying on the floor with their elbows under their chins, were drinking in their uncle’s words accompanied by ample, majestic gestures. Their eyes had already begun to rummage in the marvels: they had settled upon and now relished the copious dishes laid on the peasant tables, turned inside out the pantries full of preserves, jams, sherbets and fruit jellies, sniffed the hay barns and overturned stag beetles with a simple touch. They even screwed up their noses from the cold air, taking deep breaths to clean their lungs of the dust gathered over the year while the wind wafted through their hair and a round sun like a cantaloupe smiled above their heads.

  Although up until then they had whined and begged and made him swear that they would roast in the ultra-violets – which for them were some kind of flowers similar to those their father worked with – in less than a second all previous plans had been scattered. The mountain peaks already flashed in the distance, unfolding at their feet a magic carpet on which they all climbed and closed their eyes, taking flight and moving away. Although their father had beckoned to them a couple of times, knitting his brows, the girls had no eyes for him and only looked into the distance, imagining themselves sprawled on a meadow, purring by the blades of grass and cooing with pleasure. When they returned back home, the decision had been made without him, and for the whole night that followed he thought only about how he would tell her and how they would have to make arrangements so the separation would be as short as possible.

  He stopped in front of the house and took the car out of gear, lingering for a while and waiting amidst the dull sound of the purring engine. He wanted more accurately to remember the moment when he realised, upon returning from his vacation in the mountains, that he couldn’t bear to wait for her another month. His thoughts had jumbled up in his head and he had started to devise fanciful means of bringing her back. At the end of several days which he had spent roaming the streets, gesturing and talking to himself, he had decided to go after her, realising that the answer had been there from the very start and that the effort of finding another solution had been sheer hypocrisy. Now he felt ashamed for dragging the kids into all this madness, for tempting them to be, again, the ones who make a choice in his place. In the hours before their departure to the seaside, when the rest of the house was all agog – feverishly packing, throwing clothes into suitcases almost at random – he had locked himself in the kitchen and contemplated from there the withered plants of his neighbour in the garret across the street, which were once the woman’s pride and joy but had now been neglected.

  He looked along the road ahead. It was very early, and he suddenly realised that he could have stayed another half an hour on the beach. It also crossed his mind that, if he had managed to kill her, as the surfer could have reported later to the police, he probably wouldn’t have stopped the engine but instead driven on like in an American film, swallowing miles and raising black clouds behind him. Maybe he would have become a fugitive, but he would have calmed down with the knowledge that he would only have to think of her as a memory.

  He had returned from the mountains and found a white envelope, without any sender address, in the letterbox. He seized it at the same time as Matilda, and they exchanged looks. She was the one to let go of it first, so he managed to read her fine lines, handwritten with fear, announcing that despite their agreement to return at once, she had decided to stay at the seaside with her husband for the whole summer. ‘We need this!’ she had written, and it took him two days of soliloquies to decide which of them she meant: the one she had left with, or the one who was waiting for her. In the end, he was sure that she had meant him, and he had drawn the conclusion that she was wrong.

  That was why he announced to his family that he was offering them a holiday extension. There was no point in his calling his office because, at the end of his tether, he wouldn’t have known what other lies to concoct. By that point, he was indifferent to any punishments they might give out upon his return. He wouldn’t have changed his mind even if they had humiliated him, frowning and pointing to the rows of dead plants, to their dark, blood-red stems, as if pointing to horrors brought about by his cowardly departure. He knew that it was all part of a pretty vile plan, but he stubbornly insisted on persevering in it, on immersing himself in the all-encompassing plot whose victims they had all become. So he had left without looking back, as if complying with the wishes of the females who were all chirping in the old secondhand car. He didn’t have the slightest trace of remorse or regret; he wasn’t afraid of the fact that he would probably have to explain many things upon their return.

  Once they had arrived at the seaside village, he stopped at the beach tavern. He had gone alone, on the pretext of inquiring about a house to rent, and the first thing he asked the bartender, leaning over the dusty counter, was if anyone could tell him where a couple of friends he was looking for were staying: a tall woman with curly black hair and her husband, a tall, red-haired, freckled man. After a moment’s thought, the bartender seemed to recognise whom he was speaking about, saying that he had seem them and that, as far as he could tell, they had rented the house on the seafront close to the village end and told him that they would remain there all summer. He returned to the car with a triumphant smile on his face. He hadn’t found anything, he told Matilda, but he was confident that after a good meal, the house would practically come their way.

  He took off his shoes at the door and entered slowly, walking on tiptoe. But besides the hot, stuffy air that hit him, clogging his nose like two cotton balls, something else troubled him: a faint noise, like a hissed breath, coming from the living room. He carefully put his flip-flops on the floor, put down his backpack and advanced warily. When he entered the room, he saw Matilda sitting on the couch, kneading a towel in her hands. Her eyes were riveted upon the door, greeting him. She seemed more worried than angry, so he managed to compose himself in a split second.

  ‘What happened?’ he whispered from the threshold.

  Matilda answered, full of tears, with a stifled voice that obscured her words. He drew nearer and repeated the question. He reached for her hand, but grabbed the towel and felt that it was wet.

  ‘Mari is sick.
She had something like a loss of calcium, I don’t know what. I found her shivering all over. First I thought it was a touch of sunstroke, but it couldn’t have been that. We didn’t stay long on the beach yesterday. After that, I saw that her teeth were clenched and that she was white as a sheet. She kept pointing to her chest.’

  She stopped and placed her own hand under her breast, drawing in a deep breath with a sigh. ‘Her heart was pounding like crazy! And she had such a scared little face!’

  Listening to her, he was terrified but he felt calmer and increasingly relieved. He had lived the terror of having been found out, or at least suspected. Suspicion was much worse, because they would have had to be twice as cautious. And now he had unwound and was happy – happy it had only been about Mari. Stroking her hand mechanically, he remained silent; if he had spoken, his voice would have come out in a high pitch, as if it could hardly contain its happiness and was ready to trumpet it.

  ‘She’s asleep now.’

  He shook his head and kept on stroking her hand.

  ‘We should go back home…’

  ‘No! By no means!’

  She came back to her senses and looked at him, knitting her faded eyebrows. In that mood, her face had acquired a maternal personality. He thought that if he would ever have to remember her, most probably that’s how she would remain imprinted in his memory: with that wrinkle like an apostrophe throwing two black shadows, like two dark reflections, upon her pale, freckled face. He was determined to hold his ground. He had decreed that nothing bad enough could happen to the six-year-old girls to necessitate their return. He grabbed her wrist and squeezed it tightly; he had reckoned that the pain would put her off and distract her.

  ‘I’ll take her to a hospital in Constanţa to be seen by a doctor. As soon as she wakes up, we get her in the car and go together. Is that all right?’