A job in Morocco. Or, more precisely, a job at the Lycée Sidi El Hassan Lyoussi in Sefrou. That Maria had not seen coming.
It was a curious circumstance, one largely forgotten by historians, that more than a few Romanians were sent to Morocco under Ceaușescu. The Great Oak of the Carpathians was a good friend and close ally of King Hassan II, and as part of their alliance they frequently swapped gifts and favors. In those days the Romanians were famous for their technical aptitude, and those were the sort of people who ended up in Morocco: irrigation engineers, aviation specialists, miscellaneous academics. The king must have sent one or two things the other way—weapons or chemicals, who knows, dates perhaps—but in 1979 it was mathematicians that he needed. It had occurred to the king that Morocco had a great mathematical tradition—oh yes, Arabic numerals—and he decreed it should be reinvigorated. He wanted to bolster training at Morocco’s universities and high schools, planning eventually to send a team to the world mathematics championships. But you can’t just snap your fingers and redress two hundred years of academic sloppiness, so King Hassan turned for help to Ceaușescu, who was more than happy to send a small army of mathematicians.
In all honesty, Maria didn’t know what to do. She paced the apartment biting her nails, sat absorbed in thought, and heard neither the water boil nor Ciprian come in through the front door.
Maria, he said. What’s going on?
On the one hand it was a flattering offer, a chance to kick-start her nonexistent career and see something of the world—and who knew, maybe even to cut and run for the West?—but on the other, it was a four-year contract in a foreign land without any friends or family. And the Hungarian headmaster couldn’t promise he’d be able to get a job for Ciprian, so what was he supposed to do with himself?
Not that it worried Ciprian. Euphoric at the thought of Morocco, he immediately heaved the atlas down from the shelf and the pálinka bottle out of the cupboard, dancing around the living room with Ana in his arms until she squealed in delight. He had never much liked his job at the high school, and anyway, he thought, how bad could it be to live life shaded by palm trees and unpestered by parents, in-laws, friends, or close acquaintances, a life where he’d finally have enough time to finish that article on topological proofs he’d been fiddling with for years?
Over the next few days they chewed it over, taking long walks in the park and writing lists of pros and cons. And after they put Ana to bed in the evenings, Ciprian talked about everything that lay in store for them: the palaces and oases, the cities like labyrinths and the caravans that sailed over the crested waves of the Sahara. He talked about the Berbers and the Tuareg people stained deep blue, about the narrow streets that wound through the medina and the thousand smells of the spices at the bazaar, about the tanner’s leather, the minaret’s songs, and the workshops’ coppery ring, but it was of little use in calming Maria’s fears. It was as if something inside her head was pressing or pricking; I imagine it like one of those shards you get under your skin—after breaking a glass, for instance—which wanders around in your body until suddenly and very painfully it presses outward through your skin. In any case, Maria lay awake at night with an ache in her head, trying to understand what kind of strange doubt was forcing its way to the surface. She lost her appetite, her breasts stopped producing milk, and after a few days in that state she was at her wits’ end. She asked her friends for advice and even turned to a priest, but he refused to council her on such worldly matters.
In the end it was her family’s reaction that spurred her into going. When she told them about the job offer, her mother ran wailing into the chapel and lit a candle for her grandchild’s soul while her father and uncle tried to dissuade her—the latter diplomatically, the former less so.
Maria Serbanescu, he shouted. You’re not going anywhere, I can promise you that.
They listed the dangers of the Maghreb: the diseases, the age-old culture of thievery, the assaults and robberies and general state of banditry, the time-honored sport of bride kidnapping, and also: they raised cats for food. A desert is no place to raise a child, her mother wailed, but if they thought they could frighten Maria with lies and racist scaremongering, they didn’t know her very well. While previously she had hesitated, suddenly she was busy procuring visas and airplane tickets, getting their furniture put in storage and subletting their apartment. She’d show them, she would. As if she couldn’t look after her own daughter! What did they take her for—some sort of child, some slattern? Two months before they left, Maria received a letter from her parents in which they begged her to stay in Romania, and one month before they left, Ciprian’s childless older sister showed up on their doorstep unannounced, offering to take care of little Ana while they were away.
Maria wouldn’t hear of it.
What were they thinking? she raged once Ciprian’s sister had dozed off on the sofa. I’m not a bad mother!
They’re hicks, said Ciprian. Just ignore them.
Maria sighed, leaning over the crib and whispering to Ana.
There you are, sweetie. You want to come to Morocco with Mommy and Daddy, don’t you? Does our little mouse want to go on an adventure? And Ciprian put his hands on his wife’s hips and said, Just the three of us. We’ll be happy anywhere.
One might say that they ignored the warning signs. That they turned their backs on all the frantically ringing alarm bells. But there’s much one might say from this vantage point, thirty-five years after the fact. Back then the indications probably weren’t as clear, and when Ana read Ciprian’s letters many years later, it didn’t seem that he had noticed any cause for concern. While Maria fussed over the details of the journey, over stamps and visas and a house in Sefrou, Ciprian did what he did best: disappeared further and further into topologies and mathematics, into dreams of al-Khwarizmi and al-Battānī and all the legendary scholars of the caliphate, into picturing the dry desert climate, so unusually well suited to mathematical thought. He felt as if the greater part of him were already in Sefrou, sitting in a café and waiting for his corporeal shell to catch up with him. It was as if he could see his failed life in Bucharest volatilizing before his very eyes. All of a sudden he could walk through Cișmigiu Gardens or pause in front of the Institute without being plagued by a single disappointing memory. He could smoke a cigarette by the bus stop and look right through the apartment blocks of Drumul Taberei as if they were greenhouses creaking in the wind, and when Maria, outraged, showed him the front page of Scînteia with Ceaușescu’s plans to tear down the whole of central Bucharest, he felt not the least twinge of sadness, only a vague sense of justice: It was a fitting end for this accursed city.
When spring came, Maria said goodbye to her class and Ciprian gave a valedictory speech at the chess club. Then one May morning they called for a cab, and took their bags and child to the airport.
Ciprian’s three sisters met them at Otopeni. They had come all the way from the village in the hope that Maria and Ciprian would reconsider and leave Ana in their care.
Oh, we’re going to miss you so much, said Ciprian’s childless sister.
Funny, laughed Ciprian. We’re not going to miss Bucharest one bit.
They cried and hugged and pinched Ana’s cheeks until they must have gone numb. Take care, sobbed the sisters, and may God be with you. And then it was time to show their papers from the Council of Education and Research and answer questions at passport control. And then: Ana crying when the jet engines started up, Maria rocking her to no avail, a shot of cognac in her milk somewhere over the Mediterranean. In the car from Casablanca, surrounded by dust and strange desert plants, their hair fluttered in the salty breeze. To the west was the ocean’s unending blue. Ciprian’s hand on the seat found Maria’s as the words welled up in his chest: Just look at what we’ve achieved, us two against the world—we did it, Maria! But he knew nothing then of loneliness, of cold nights in the Atlas Mountains. As yet he was unconscious of his own abilities, not knowing he could bend tim
e and numbers, could rewrite a whole life.
That first night, they slept at the Centre Pédagogique in Rabat. It was a Friday, and they sat on the collapsed mattress listening to the sounds from the mosque. The next morning, while Maria ventured her first rusty sentences in French and Ana toddled around pulling at the palm trees, Ciprian skimmed over the newspaper’s curling letters and sipped at the first Pepsi of his life. All in all it was very exotic. And it got no less exotic when they reached Sefrou with its donkeys and sunken city walls, fez-wearing men and all the horseshoe-shaped archways you could wish for. They had three days of Orientalist near-idyll before Monday came and Maria started at the high school. Ciprian got back to work too. Of a sort. He wandered around trying to find the café he had dreamed about, the café where he would solve the riddles of topology and drink tea with intellectuals in the inner courtyard. Such was his plan. Ciprian wanted to find that café, because if you’re going to do groundbreaking research, you can’t sit just anywhere. You can’t sit at home in the living room with Ana’s diapers hanging from the ceiling to dry. You can’t sit under fluorescent lighting in a gray library, or in the dank air of the tenement courtyard. Elbow room, that’s the ticket. And if on top of that you can find a comfortable chair or a decent view—over the desert, for example, lying all empty and monochrome and ready to be filled with new ideas—then that won’t hurt either. A good working environment, that was what Ciprian was after. And he took his time finding it. There wasn’t any rush. He ambled throughout the city, trying out bars and cafés one by one, but in each case the radio was blasting some sports program, or it was too dark to study, or all the other customers sat and stared at him like some sort of performing monkey.
Oh well, no matter. So it would be something other than a café that inspired our hero to mathematical greatness. Ciprian experimented with various routines, going directly from his bed to the desk in the living room or taking a brisk morning walk along the city walls before settling down to the day’s work. For a whole week he even tried taking the bus all the way into Fès so he could work in the university reading room, but little came of his efforts. His run-up took too long. Every day hours went by before he got going. Washing, shaving, breakfasting, a trip to the post office. And there was always something to sort out. Ana had to be dropped off with the nanny, letters had to be answered, money had to be sent or received. Then when he finally sat down to his calculations, often late into the afternoon, he was hungry again and had to go out and get food. And how the time flew! For no sooner had he bolted his lunch than his blood sugar plummeted and his eyelids drooped, so that there was nothing to be done but get up and find a cup of coffee. It was the caffeine high that usually gave him enough energy to scrawl a few figures in his notebook before the sun fell behind the city walls and the melancholy, golden light of early evening set in, and it occurred to him that he had barely said a word to another human being.
So what? he tried telling himself. He’d given the postmaster a nod, the neighbor a salam aleikum, the constable a bonsoir. And anyway, what did he want with people? They had always been an inconvenience. Now it was just him and mathematics—did he really need anything other than that? Obviously. Whether Ciprian admitted it or not the loneliness gnawed at him, and he usually ended up collecting Ana early from the nanny or going home to the apartment to wait for Maria. And thus he passed his days, while at night he would wake with a start and sit up in bed: Now! Now was the time to get cracking. In the darkest hours of the night he would sit at his desk in his pajama bottoms, staring at the notepad that lay exasperatingly empty before him.
Oh, how human. All Ciprian had prayed and begged for his whole life was time, and now that he finally had it, it had become a burden. Did he drink more than was advisable? Did he go back to bed after Maria had left for work and sleep for an extra hour? Did he masturbate more than once a day? Did he spend hours reading the chess section in L’Opinion, poring over every detail of the world championship in Riga, even though, truth be told, it was one of the most boring championships in ages? Of all the silly things one can spend time on, Ciprian spent time on the silliest, and it frustrated him—it frustrated him terribly. He felt trapped by his own bad habits, every day an intolerable, humdrum treadmill, a vicious cycle of self-loathing and remorse and enough feelings of inferiority for a whole army.
And then—and then. Just one short month after they arrived in Sefrou, Ciprian came home from the post office and opened the cupboard for a little swig of something, a break from the endless stream of mint tea. But what was this? An empty jar of peppers? And not two days later: another one. I think we’ve heard this song before.
Strange things began happening to Maria. Suddenly she could smell what everyone on the street was making for dinner, and when the biology teacher complimented her skirt one morning she broke down crying and had to spend the rest of the day sniveling under the bedclothes back home. I’m astonished that they didn’t act sooner. Maria and Ciprian, I mean. There’s a lot one might say about them, but idiots they were not. They must have seen the signs, read the writing on the wall. So why didn’t they do anything? I have no idea. But it had been a tough year—life as new parents, a new country and everything that came with it, the visa applications, apartment hunting, language barriers, changing routines—and it’s possible, I guess, to miss a pregnancy under those circumstances. I don’t know whether it was down to stress or denial, but when Maria finally went to the doctor she was six months along.
Over the next few weeks Maria gazed in astonishment at her body. For half a year there’d been no visible developments, but when it did at last begin to show, it happened quickly. In three weeks her belly swelled to the size of a melon, her breasts expanded, and Ciprian fell into one of his notorious fits of rage.
You’ve got to be joking, he screamed. What the hell were you thinking?
On the casualty list: the Venetian vase they’d been given as a wedding present, three plates, and a refrigerator door kicked so full of dents that from then on it gave a creaky whine whenever anyone opened it. During those weeks Ciprian went sulking and grumbling around the town, sitting in hotel bars and complaining to anybody who would hear him. Pregnant again! Six months along! But his problems met with little understanding. When the hotel bartender heard about Maria’s unexpected condition, he immediately cracked out the Pernod, on the house.
My friend, he said. God is with you!
But that wasn’t how Ciprian saw it. He did not feel blessed. Cheated and deceived, more like—led well and truly up the garden path. Why hadn’t Maria told him that she wasn’t menstruating? How would they afford another child? And what about their family at home in Romania—oh God, what would they say? That evening he drank himself into a stupor, a feat not easily accomplished in a place like Sefrou. He lurched through the ancient city’s narrow streets, maundering on in hotel bars until he was thrown out. Blind drunk, he stumbled down the boulevards, supporting himself against the wall the whole way home, where he collapsed in exhaustion on the living-room floor.
He must have eaten something vile that night, because he woke the next morning to a painful spasm in his gut. He just about made it to the toilet before spewing whatever it was back up, and spent the next few weeks shuttling back and forth between the bathroom and the bed. It dribbled out of him in watery rivulets, and the doctor had to be summoned to mix salt-and sugar-water and to advise about antibiotics and fiber-rich foods. At night Ciprian sighed through feverish dreams, and during the day he lay feebly in the heat, waving away the flies. His cheeks sunken, hips and ribs protruding beneath his skin, he had to be force-fed soup and bathed by Maria with a cloth and washing-up bowl. Only gradually did his condition improve. After three long weeks in bed he was able to take a few first steps outside the apartment, but was obliged to remain within a conservative striking distance from the toilet or risk the humiliation of shitting by the side of the road. And just when he thought that the worst was over, having eaten for the first time t
wo meals in a single day, he was seized by stomach cramps so dire that they sent him straight back to bed, palely rocking himself in the fetal position.
That night Maria kept watch by his bed as Ciprian whimpered, calling down curses upon the heads of all the unhygienic Arabs in the world. He clutched his stomach and buried his face in the damp sheets. Falling in and out of an unquiet sleep, he muttered incoherently as he tossed and turned all night. When he woke, the sun was shining in through the window and Ana was squatting down before him on her small, chubby legs. She swayed gently back and forth, holding a drawing in front of her, then flailed her arms and lifted it above her head. It daddy, she shouted into space. It daddy!
Maria, he murmured, Maria, look.
But she was already by his side. Shh, she said, her voice breaking and everything. Look, your daughter. She can talk.
There wasn’t much else Ciprian would remember from the months he lay exhausted in bed. The stabbing pain in his stomach, the feeling of the toilet paper he used to dab his rear end, the square of sunlight that crept from the bedside table across the headboard to the wardrobe against the far wall. He lost all sense of time. All sense of everything, really. Never leaving the house, he forgot there was a life outside full of responsibilities and arrangements and things to organize. Forgot that Maria had a job, a small daughter, a sick husband, and a pregnant belly to think about.
So you’re in your seventh month? asked the neighbor’s wife one day as she helped Maria with the laundry.
Yes, said Maria.
Then you should be taking it easy.
But did she heed that advice? Of course she didn’t. She made no effort to slow down, still lugging groceries and bags of rice home from the market, still tutoring disheartened mathematics students and still washing Ciprian’s nether regions as he muttered away to himself, lost in feverish nightmares. Maria, working around the clock. Maria, barely sleeping during those months. Was that perhaps the reason she didn’t tell her parents about the baby? International phone calls were outlawed, mail from overseas was monitored and censored and often lost, but still. If she knew she’d reached her seventh or eighth month, why didn’t she tell her family? Was it shame, or a guilty conscience over having dragged her family to this alien, poverty-stricken country?
The Invention of Ana Page 16