by Paul Bailey
I came to love my uncle when he was leonine in appearance, his abundant white hair in need of frequent cutting. I had loved him before, of course, in his paternal role as my protector. My protector from what? I had known, in some deep place inside me, that when I arrived in London in 1937, my life and world had altered drastically. Were the revelations eleven years afterwards – of my mother’s murder; my father’s willed drowning – cruelly delayed? It would seem so, from what I have written of the dreams that plagued me. I heard, later, that Annie had urged him to break the terrible news years earlier – when I was ten, for instance. But my uncle found it impossible to comply. He would wait, he said, until I was a confident English youth. Roman and Irina Petrescu would have to remain lost or missing.
My son Billy regards his great-uncle’s long silence as unforgivable, despite my protestations to the contrary. When he poured me that second medicinal brandy, Uncle Rudolf’s face showed all the pain and guilt that being secretive had caused him. I think he knew he had protected me too well. Perhaps, on one of those nights when Andrei was deserted on that snowy plain and woke up as Andrew in a chilly sweat, he should have carried me to his bed, laid me down, and told me the truth. Perhaps he often intended to, but the prospect of my young heart being broken beyond repair may have stopped him saying the words that were there to be said.
It was Billy who suggested, in December 1989, that I ought to go back to Romania, now that the revolution had ended a reign of tyranny. I had no need, then, to see the town where I was born and to stand in the market place in which the red-faced woman had taunted my mother. He made the suggestion again when he telephoned to wish me well on my seventieth birthday in January, and this time I replied that I would consider it.
My flight is booked. I shall be leaving on the ninth of September. If I don’t tear up the tickets, that is.
Uncle Rudolf’s last word was my mother’s name.
—Irina, he whispered.
His eyes were looking into mine, but it was the girl who gained his brother’s love he was seeing.
—Irina Aderca, my darling. Irina, he gasped.
I kept my hand in his for long minutes after his death. Then I stood up and kissed his forehead.
—Goodbye.
How inadequate and how nonsensical it sounded, that choked ‘goodbye’. He had craved the enduring release of death, and now that urgent wish had been granted. I was saying goodbye to his tired body, but to nothing else. I knew, even as I spoke, that I would remain imprisoned until the time of my own release, whenever that was due. Twenty-five years on, I am still awaiting it.
The Irina he spoke to at the end had yet to become my mother. She was the pretty Domnişoara Aderca, the daughter of Josef, who was known to the older people in the town as the Debt Collector. My presence was obliterated as he gazed lovingly at her, the sweetly innocent girl who would one day prefer to live with a clerk in a humdrum backwater rather than share the fame and fortune of a singer who had apartments in Vienna, Paris and London. From his hospital bed, he saw her restored to her adolescent self, and I was pleased that his final glimpse of the irreplaceable Irina was not of the pregnant woman left to die in the forest. Or so I understood by his saying Aderca, not Petrescu.
In November 1975, I followed my uncle’s instructions and took his ashes to Nice, where I scattered them, handful by handful, beneath the palm trees along the Promenade des Anglais – those same palm trees he had counted that other November morning, as with fear in his heart and a piece of bloodied paper on his chin, he made his way towards his destiny. He had relished the idea of his remains joining the hot dust, and I sent them from me with the vision of his youthful fervour in mind, the fervour of someone whose ambition it was to be the finest lyric tenor in the world. I tossed the urn that had recently contained the corporeal Rudi Petrescu or Rudolf Peterson into the glittering sea and watched it bobbing there until a motorboat spawned large waves that consigned it to the depths. My duty was done.
I live here with everything that was, and is, Uncle Rudolf’s, in the house that is now his shrine. It’s a shrine he himself created, and which I could not dismantle, as he advised me to, once he was dead.
—Sell the paintings and drawings, Andrew, but look after Bogdan’s collage for me. I can’t bear to think of a stranger owning it.
Years earlier, he had attempted to destroy the photographs that charted his career in operetta. I had rescued them with the simplest of arguments.
—You can tear them up, Uncle, but you can’t wipe out your memories, however hard you try. I’ll lock them away in a drawer upstairs, so you don’t have to see them.
—As you wish.
—I shall need them if I decide to write your biography.
—Let me rest, Andrew. Even in death, let me rest, he said histrionically. I sound very Shakespearean, don’t I?
Nothing has been sold; nothing destroyed. How Billy will dispose of his inheritance, I can only guess.
For now, the shrine – with its solitary living occupant – is still intact.
—Come and sit down, Andrew. I have things to tell you. I am going to pour you a large brandy. You may not like the taste at first, but I am sure it will calm your nerves.
—I’m calm enough, Uncle. Why shouldn’t I be? I’m not in the least nervous.
—Come and sit down, my darling. As I say, I have things to tell you, if I can.
I was confused, and said so. He advised me to sip my drink.
—It is time you were told the truth, Andrew – the truth I have been protecting you from since that evening in February 1937 when I took you up in my arms on Victoria Station. You will have to be patient with me. This is as painful an experience for me as it will be for you. But the time for telling the truth has come, and I mustn’t delay it any longer.
It was necessary to begin with a history lesson, he explained. It would be a grim history lesson, but it might also help to put the truth he had to tell me in some kind of perspective.
—Perspective, my darling, he sneered. Some kind of terrible perspective.
He reminded me that my maternal grandfather, Josef Aderca, the one they called the Debt Collector, was Jewish.
—In the beastly country of our birth, Andrew, the Jews were blamed for every wrong. There was scarcely a single political crime they hadn’t committed. They spread diseases, and they stole money from the poor. I heard these opinions or sentiments wherever I went. I heard them at their shrillest in Vienna, on the lips of rich ladies gorging cream cakes and strudel. You couldn’t escape the filth. There were pogroms in our beastly country, and in Poland, and in Hungary. In Russia, too. The victims were almost always Jews, my darling.
He was silent. I waited to learn what the truth had to do with pogroms.
—Irina, your mother, Andrew, your beautiful mother, was murdered, my dear.
—Murdered? Who by?
—By three men who were seen dragging her into the forest outside the town. It was a pogrom in miniature, I suppose. They stripped her naked and raped her. One of them slit her throat. She was left to die in the snow. A boy with a dog discovered her body.
—And Tata? I asked. And Tata?
—Roman sent me a telegram with the news. Some of the news. I agreed to look after you, to give you a lovely holiday while he tried to come to terms with his grief. It was a grief I shared, but I hid it from you. I had to. Roman never came to terms with it. Have you the strength, my darling, to read the last letter he wrote to me?
I nodded.
—It’s in the language we don’t speak any more. If you have trouble with the words, I will translate them for you.
I had no trouble with the words themselves, only with their meaning.
Beloved Rudi. I am in Paris still. I do not intend to return to Botoşani. I do not intend to return to Romania. I do not intend to leave Paris. I am giving myself to the Seine.
Irina was bearing our second child. Think of it Rudi. Think of what they did to her. I think of nothing e
lse.
On the train to Bucharest we met an Iron Guardist in his green shirt. There was massacre in his eyes. That is what I saw.
Andrei will have a life worth living with you, my dearest brother. Perhaps you will teach him to sing.
Please come to Paris to identify me. I am leaving a note at the hotel reception desk to be forwarded to the police. I will have drowned by the time you receive this. You and Andrei have all the love that is left in me. Say the word IGLOOS to him. Your Roman.
I looked up and shivered. Then, through tears, I saw Mama and Tata in that blinding whiteness. They stopped and turned to gaze at their son, whom they greeted with outstretched arms. I fell into those arms, which seemed to reclaim me as I sat there on that August evening.
—Mamica, Tata, I said to their shades.
I was theirs again, and the whiteness was gone.
—I want to eat cabbage soup, Uncle Rudolf.
—I’ll get Annie to make you some. It won’t taste like Irina’s.
—No. That doesn’t matter. You didn’t say ‘igloos’ to me.
—That’s true. Shall I say it now? ‘Igloos’, my darling.
I told him, then, about the pictures of igloos in Tata’s magazine, and how the peasants’ huts, covered in snow, made me think of them on that train journey when we met the man with massacre in his eyes.
I drank another brandy, which my uncle described as medicinal, and later on we ate the soup our resourceful Annie had prepared with a cabbage from the garden.
—All it lacks is soured cream, my uncle confided. I have another treat in store for you as soon as you’ve cleaned your bowl.
He led me to the music room, opened the piano, and sang Waft her, angels. It was Irina Petrescu and her unborn child, not Jephtha’s daughter, who were being sacrificed, though neither of us remarked on it.
In my dreams that night the icon stayed on the wall and Andrei had no cause to pursue his parents, who remained close beside him. But the woman in the market let out her usual taunts – as she did this morning, when I summoned up the courage to recall what my uncle chose to tell me on the tenth of August 1948.
I came to understand, in the years of Uncle Rudolf’s continuing musical re-education, the nature of the profound distaste he felt for the culture in which operetta had flourished. He had been party to a despicable frivolousness, he said. The gypsies he’d impersonated weren’t real, because they all turned out to be kings or princes or barons, and what were the brigands he’d played but a bunch of rabid nationalists, crude beasts for ever casting roguish glances at love-sick, lunatic maidens? In the streets of Vienna, Bucharest and Budapest, a black operetta was being enacted daily while he was behind the footlights singing of a liberty and freedom indistinguishable from tyranny. He had betrayed not only Jean de Reszke and Georges Enesco, but his own best instincts as well. He had sung the kind of music that was enjoyed by those who brought about Europe’s destruction. Such was his conviction in old age, which I refrained from arguing against.
There was a different kind of music to savour. We were a familiar sight, the two of us, in the capital’s recital rooms, concert halls and opera houses. Uncle Rudolf craved a ‘melodious dissonance’, as he termed it, now. It was there in Alban Berg and Janáček and his adored Bartók, and it cheered his otherwise depressed spirits. He relished the serious playfulness of Martinu and Ligeti, two survivors of a pogrom-ridden past. He listened with a rapt attentiveness that beatified his features. He was as much a student as I was during those hours in which his melancholy was shaken off or cast aside or not even contemplated.
In the silent hours, though, his mind turned to what he deemed his one great failure in life – his inability to persuade my stubborn father to leave a country overcome by demons.
—Roman was an absurd optimist. He said I was a false prophet when I warned him of the troubles ahead. I’d seen the signs and heeded the hateful words in Vienna and knew which way the Fascist wind was blowing. I think he altered his opinion when he heard Codreanu ranting in the town square, but by then it was almost too late. Almost, but not quite. I put out one last hand to him a month or so before – before the forest and then the bridge – but he resisted it. I should have gone there and forced them out. That’s what I should have done, Andrew.
On the evening my uncle rechristened me Andrew, he was ignorant of Tata’s plan to give himself to the Seine. The letter containing this desolate information reached Nightingale Mansions after his death. Yet Uncle Rudolf had had an inkling that my holiday in England would be permanent, such was the weariness in my father’s voice when they discussed my immediate future on the telephone. This inkling would soon be an undoubted fact. By calling me Andrew on the twenty-third of February, 1937, he was severing me in some measure from the beastly country of my birth. What’s in a name? A new identity, perhaps. He was determined that I should benefit from an English education, and that the rest of my boyhood should be carefree and fruitful. Which – Andrei’s blindingly white dreams apart – it was.
—I have a pain in my stomach, Andrei, my uncle said, in the old words, on the morning of the sixteenth of March, 1975. He was doubled up on his bedroom floor, clutching his gut. Andrei, he repeated, fetch a doctor or get me to the hospital. And again in the old words.
That was the end of his calling me Andrew, and the start of his final illness. Morphine was to be his comforter, not the soothing dissonance that captured the dark soul of a blighted Europe. Whenever he regained consciousness, he spoke the language he had renounced before his nephew’s arrival. And then, at the very last, it was my mother’s eyelashes he recognized in wonderment, not mine.
There is a Hotel Minerva in the town where I was born, and I am staying in room 32 until tomorrow. I spent yesterday in Botoşani, the nearby city in which my parents shopped for clothes and furniture. I sat for a while in the park, and remembered that my mother, on that far-off summer afternoon, had said no to my father’s suggestion that we hire a boat and take it out on the lake. Had Roman forgotten that she was terrified of water?
—It’s not the sea, Irina, he had assured her. Look at that handsome lifeguard. I am confident that he would be delighted to rescue you.
Mama laughed, and remarked that if she ever needed rescuing she would rely on her own handsome husband to do it.
My mother had brought a bowl of muraturi – yes, that is the old word – and spread out a rug on the grass for us to sit on. We ate the delicately pickled vegetables on little plates, I recall, and drank sharp-tasting lemonade. My father was allowed to have his weekly glass of beer, and Mama and I wondered how long it would be before he fell asleep.
—We shall tickle you if you do, Roman. Be warned.
—Oh no, not that. Spare me from that. My father put on the silly, frightened expression I loved.
As he pretended to doze, providing the occasional snore to add to the effect, we went to work on his ankles and his chin, an especially sensitive spot. Our tickling session soon followed its usual pattern, however, with Tata waking up as if from a nightmare, saying:
—I will have my revenge, you scamp.
His revenge, happily anticipated by me, was to lift my shirt and run his fingers across my bare tummy until I was weak with giggling.
As I sat there, in the same park where that scene, once submerged in memory, had taken place, I was stirred out of reverie by sounds of shouting and cheering. I reasoned they were coming from the city’s main square, some streets away. I knew that a presidential election was in progress – it was the all-pervading subject in the newspapers I had attempted to read – and so I decided to join the crowd and listen to the speeches that were finding such deafening favour. I hurried along Strada Eminescu, named after the national poet who was born in the nearby town of Ipoteşti in 1850, and mingled with the now-silent men, women and children who were concentrating on the words a fat man dressed entirely in white was declaiming.
During my stay in the country of my birth, I have not been completel
y at ease with the old words. So many are unknown to me, and others that I knew in childhood have had to be dredged up with difficulty from the recesses of my clouded mind. Yet certain words have never gone, as I quickly realized as I listened to the gross politician in his angel’s outfit. He was echoing, this more physically substantial Pied Piper, what Codreanu had said sixty-four years earlier in this very region, to the intense dismay of Irina and Roman Petrescu, among – I hope – others. I heard evreu and evreiesc and camatar (meaning usurer), and then tigan. My ears were alert to the filth my uncle had referred to so often, and they absorbed every nuance of the hate-filled rhetoric. The purity of Romania, as exemplified by the white shirt, the white suit, the white shoes, had to be restored, and that restoration could only happen as soon as every foreigner – every Jew and gypsy and drug-dealing Turk – had been expelled from her borders. Romanian purity had for too long been sullied by Western decadence and Russian domination and American materialism, but for not much longer.
I stared about me in that admiring crowd and my eyes settled on a plump, pink-faced woman who reminded me of the one who has plagued my dreams for most of my life. Was this her daughter, perhaps? The woman’s eyes met mine, and suddenly she was at my side, kissing me on the cheek.
—He is a beast, she murmured.—And they are beasts also who cheer him. May he burn in hell.
To my shame, I suspected that she was leading me into a trap, in which I would be exposed as one of those foreigners the diabolical angel was haranguing.
—He belongs to our dark history, she said.—He should never have come out of it.
—Yes, I managed.—Yes, you are right. I agree with you.
Once the crowd was dispersed, and the fat vision of whiteness manoeuvred into a limousine that smacked of Western decadence and materialism, I invited Denisa to drink with me in a cafenea. I insisted on paying for the coarse red wine, as an unspoken apology for assuming she might be a reincarnation of the harridan who had upset my mother at the time the slimmer Pied Piper was extolling that impossible, implausible Romanian purity.