The Girl They Left Behind

by Roxanne Veletzos

  One account in particular made his knees buckle from horror, causing him to slump onto the sidewalk in front of the tobacco shop where he had stopped for cigarettes. It would remain with him for the rest of his life, like a permanent stain on his soul. Inside the shop, he had overheard a man telling the clerk that a group of Jews had been arrested and brought to the municipal slaughterhouse, where they had been tortured and then hung on the cattle hooks and left to die.

  Anton folded the newspaper and set it down next to him. He needed to read no further, for he could almost predict what was to come. This was no longer about the export of Romanian oil, which had for several years supported Hitler’s military efforts. Tens of thousands of Romanians would die now, not only on the Eastern Front but here at home. Even here in the nation’s capital, they would die for the Führer.

  He needed time to think, to figure out how he could stay ahead of the changes that were coming their way. For if there was one thing that he needed to do, that he felt was his duty, it was to preserve his and Despina’s newly found happiness. It had been a few short months since they had formed a family, and he could not remember a time when their lives had been more content. They were parents now, parents of a lovely and timid little girl who completed their lives in ways that he never imagined possible. But with the war at their back, there was no telling at all what the future might hold.

  Most certainly, they would have to cut back on their extravagances. For that he was nearly alone to blame, for his main personal weakness was his tendency to overspend. For a while, at least, they would have to limit their parties and trips to the French tailor who fashioned his suits in the latest European styles and to the shops where he purchased the latest fur stoles and hats from Vienna for Despina, as well as expensive gifts for her sisters and their children. He would have to start thinking about gradually shutting down three of his stores and keeping open only the one in Piazza Romana, where he had worked from the time he was a young boy and where people in the neighborhood still greeted him by his first name.

  With growing uneasiness, Anton thought about the priceless stamp collection he had amassed over the years, realizing it might be risky to leave it in his safe at the store. He would have to bring it home, where he could keep it near. His most prized stamp, the famous Boar Head, was alone worth more than all their other assets combined, more than the rental homes, their weekend home at Lake Baneasa, even his three beloved horses that were housed at the Bucharest Hippodrome. Of all these things, it was the stamp collection that meant the most to him, the one possession he could not risk losing.

  Upstairs, his wife was sleeping peacefully, her body lost in a sea of pillows. He thought of her now, how happy she’d become in such a short time, how carefree despite the fact that she now was a mother. For him, too, the girl’s presence had been a balm to his heart, and he couldn’t wait to get home in the evenings, to break loose from the demands of the day, just to feel her arms around his neck. Even at the store, when Despina dropped her off in the afternoons, she was all he could think about, knowing that she was slumbering under his desk with a stuffed animal pressed to her chest, comforted by the comings and goings, the laughter and banter he exchanged with his customers. And the piano. Nothing had prepared him for her reaction when she received that old Steinway, a fairly beat-up baby grand which he had picked up for a bargain at an antiques shop and set up in the parlor as a surprise to unveil for her when she and Despina arrived home later that day.

  There had been no overt display of emotion. She had not looked at him in gratitude or smiled but simply ambled over to it and sat on the red velvet stool. Under her raised hands, the keys had sparkled, pearly and just slightly yellowed in the sunlight, but no notes emerged from the open lid. Only light, featherlike movements caressed the ivory keys, her fingers moving from left to right and meeting in the middle, then higher, over the narrow black ones.

  “For me?” she had said, looking up at him, and Anton realized he had never seen such delight on a human face and that those were the only words she had ever uttered in their presence.

  But she did start to talk after that, to get her voice back gradually. She began asking for something to drink at dinner and then if she could go to Cismigiu Gardens and if he would buy her an ice cream from the corner vendor. Slowly, she was blossoming before his very eyes, her smile wider, her eyes more expressive, the life back in her gestures, a little more each day. Although she was too young for formal piano lessons, he nevertheless hired the best teacher he could find, for it became clear that day that she had a special gift, one he meant to foster.

  That little girl was the reason he rose in the morning, and Despina smiled more, too, as they sat late in the evening by the fireplace, enjoying a nightcap, warm and content in each other’s arms, knowing their lives were complete at last.

  No, he could not risk losing it now. What can I do, what must I do, to protect them? he thought, knowing deep down that it was a question without answer, that despite his best intentions and focused efforts, he couldn’t really fight whatever the war would throw in their path. The eye of the storm was at his door once again, as it had been many years ago when he was no more than a boy.

  Anton had not always been blessed with unabashed charm and prosperity. He came into the world in a two-room cottage on a vast estate in the heart of the Romanian countryside, where his father was employed as an administrator. His mother, a petite and fragile woman who brought in a little extra money teaching the village children arithmetic in the back of the local church, regarded his arrival as an additional burden more than a blessing. It was perhaps for this reason that from the time he was six years old, Anton learned to take care of himself. He prepared his own breakfast, fed the chickens, and swept the front steps. He brought buckets of water home from the well at the end of the dirt road where their two acres stopped and the rest of the land began. After that, he was free to roam the hills that stretched out to the horizon, to rest in the shade of overgrown grapevines, to pluck apples and pears from trees whose branches bent invitingly toward him, heavy with the fruit of summer.

  Finding himself with little to do in the afternoons, Anton often wandered up to the big house. The landlord, a widower in the twilight of his life, traveled nearly year-round, leaving his vast home in the care of an old housemaid whose only duties were to water the plants and dust the few pieces of furniture that weren’t perpetually covered with sheets. And she, perhaps more than Anton, was always eager for company.

  “Come up, come up, I have something for you!” She would wave at him enthusiastically from an open window as Anton ambled up the graveled driveway, kicking pebbles in his path.

  By the time he stepped through the curved oak door, a glass of lemonade would be waiting for him on the veranda and sometimes a piece of bread and marmalade or a scoop of sherbet, which he loved the most. Yet of all the special treats that awaited him inside the villa, none compared to the cool solitude of the master’s library. Even though he could read little, there was nothing Anton loved more than spending the long hours leading to supper browsing through the hundreds of books lining the walls, taking in the scent of yellowing pages, feeling the surface of leather-bound covers beneath his fingertips.

  The summers were long and languid, and days passed quickly this way until he was nearly ten. In the early months of 1907, just a week shy of Anton’s birthday, a peasant uprising erupted in a nearby province. Seemingly overnight, the revolt spread across the countryside, and his father spoke of going away for a while, at least until the peasants’ grievances had been worked out and their fury had simmered down. But a few days later, when the army was called in and began firing on the peasants, things grew out of hand.

  On the estate where Anton lived, an angry mob marched toward the big house with raised rifles and pitchforks. From their own front porch, Anton’s father saw them coming over the hillside, and a singular thought formed in his mind: he had not seen his son since noon. Grabbing his pistol, he head
ed up the dirt road leading to the villa.

  Inside the library, Anton heard his name called out. It was just one time, and for a moment he thought he might have imagined it. Still, he set down his book and went out to the veranda. At first he saw nothing. Then his heart began thundering, and his legs grew weak.

  At the edge of the graveled driveway, his father lay motionless in the grass. He didn’t move when Anton ran to him and shook him gently, then with ferocious determination. His face was down in the gravel, and dark rivulets trickled alongside his neck, staining the collar of his linen shirt. When Anton finally managed to turn him over, his father’s eyes sent him reeling backward. They were open, vacant. Something permanent fractured inside the boy. Don’t leave me, was his only thought, but it was already too late.

  Two months later, his mother became gravely ill and succumbed quickly to the fever that had already overtaken half the village. Anton, she whispered as he leaned over his mother’s quivering lips. To Anton, it sounded like the wind whistling through the cornfields in the middle of a rainstorm. Then she was gone.

  He had never been able to shake that vision of her from his head. He thought of her when he ate the last scraps of bread from the pantry, the last of the potato stew that had grown stale and slightly mildewed. When the food was gone, he thought about her when he fed on berries and mushrooms that he collected from bushes in the fields, knowing she would protest, for they might have been poisonous. He thought about his mother when he bathed in the small stream behind their cottage, washing himself with a block of soap that she had made just weeks before in an iron tub in their front yard.

  It was only when hunger became greater than his dignity that he began sneaking up to the villa, looking for leftover scraps that the landlord sometimes left behind on the terrace, bread crusts and half-eaten pastries, browned fruit oozing onto a hot plate in the sun. He foraged through the garbage pail just outside the kitchen door, hoping to find more of the same. But he was embarrassed by his appearance and did not wish to cross paths with the housekeeper, so he only went up there when his hunger was so intense that his vision blurred and his body trembled.

  One day, the old housemaid saw him sneaking around to the back of the house, and she gasped. Instantly, she knew that if she didn’t help him, the boy’s days on earth would not be many. He would die from scurvy or from eating poison berries, but the end was inevitable. That night, she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, and by the time the sun peeked over the horizon, she had made her decision.

  Ten-year-old Anton was taken in as a box boy in a stationery shop in Bucharest that belonged to a Hungarian lady, a childhood friend of the housemaid who had recently lost her husband and was in need of help. In exchange for fifteen hours of work each day, Anton was given a cot to sleep on in the back room, two changes of clothes, and enough food to get him back on his feet. Every morning, he rose at four o’clock sharp to mop the floors and rinse the sidewalk, to sweep up the entranceway or shovel the snow that had collected in front of the store. Later he made deliveries on foot, carrying boxes and crates on icy boulevards in the dead of winter, in the suffocating, humid heat of the city summers. He developed muscles he never knew he had and along with them a spirit that was unbendable. He learned how to smile politely at patrons, how to make himself trusted with any amount of money. In short, he became skilled in making himself indispensable.

  It wasn’t until ten years into his apprenticeship that Anton began working in the front of the store. By then, the old lady’s hands shook so badly that she couldn’t scribble out a receipt or pour herself a cup of coffee, and she’d come to rely on Anton for even these simple tasks. Her vision had also begun to fail, and soon she could barely count the change in the cash register. That was when she began teaching Anton about bookkeeping and supply inventory, about managing cash flow and staying on top of vendors so that not one delivery came late or went unpaid. And all of it he did flawlessly. Anton was twenty years old, and business was booming.

  Anton had never shared the details of his childhood with anyone, not even his wife. Despina had asked several times if they could take a trip to his childhood village, but he’d refused her adamantly. The past was best left alone, buried along with his parents under the patch of wild grass at the back of his childhood cottage. What good would it do for her to know the bleak details of his early life?

  His life truly had begun with her. God had given them the precious gifts of love, prosperity, and promise and so many things that he never thought possible. He would not dwell again on those days long ago, when in a short space of time everything that was dear to him had slipped away from his grasp.

  8

  THEY HAD BEEN LIVING IN the attic for six months now. When she had come out of her shock, her debilitating stupor, when she had wiped away the tears long enough to look outside the attic window, she had started counting the days. She began marking them in a yellowed notebook she found in a cardboard box along with some old newspapers. Tick after tick, day after day, the hands of an invisible clock turned endlessly. At least it gave her something to do. She had long ago stopped reading the books that Maria had left for her up here. Now she simply sat on the lumpy mattress among dusty trunks and discarded furniture and wrote frantically in her notebook. The signs of a new season—changes in temperature, the lengthening of days, the chirping of birds, the blooming of cherry trees—were all meticulously recorded. Her husband just paced endlessly, traversing the length of the attic to and fro, day and night, the hardwood planks groaning under his bare feet.

  “Stop it!” she would shout, glaring at him. “Stop it, you are making me crazy!”

  Several times he paused and turned to her as if he meant to say something but ended up just staring at her. As the days passed, there was less and less of him. He lacked fresh air and good food. He lacked life. She saw no emotion on his face now, nothing other than the wild, cornered look of a stray dog. Perhaps he deserved it. Perhaps that was what their daughter had felt when they did not return for her that night, when she realized that she had been left alone in a city ablaze.

  Needing food less, she let him have most of the bread and butter, the occasional ham or block of cheese they found outside the door. They never knew when the provisions would be there next or how much longer they would continue. Maria came up less frequently now, and when she did, she always knocked on the door softly, as if she was afraid to disturb them. As if she was a hotel maid dropping off room service.

  “Leave it!” the woman would shout from her side of the door.

  She did not intend to be ungrateful or rude. But there was little grace left in her heart. There was no strength for a polite exchange or a display of proper manners. She felt less like the woman she had been with each passing day, feeling her humanity eroding in that dark attic.

  One morning, she awakened and simply did not care if Maria and Stefan put them out on the street. She envisioned herself running back to their scorched neighborhood, shouting out her daughter’s name in the alleyways. Shouting at the top of her lungs, not minding if the Death Squad got her. At least that would be real, it would be honest. She wouldn’t have to hide out like a hunted animal in a dark hole.

  Her husband barely spoke now, but the silence between them came as a blessing. She hated him, hated what he had convinced her to do of her own free will. There was no solidarity for him and her anymore. Not in this lifetime. He could go to hell for all she cared.

  Days and nights strung together interminably. There was no beginning, no end. She had almost forgotten why they were here, she had forgotten that she was still alive. She felt like a corpse buried in a tomb, in this attic from which she would never see the light of day. Then one evening, something changed.

  The knock came just after suppertime. It was stronger than usual, more urgent, so she went to open the door. When she cracked it open as wide as the chain would allow, Stefan stood there holding some papers over his head.

  “I have good news,” he
announced cheerfully. He was still in his work suit, and his hair was slightly disheveled as if after a long day. “Please, let me in. I must speak to you now. I must speak to you both.”

  With his well-meaning demeanor, he entered quickly, though when his eyes roamed over the space and he spotted his young friend on the mattress, the ruddiness of his cheeks drained away.

  “I have great news,” he repeated in a voice less buoyant. “You are leaving. In a couple of days. I was able to get you papers. Look.”

  Although the papers were not legible under the weak light, Stefan waited with an outstretched hand as the young man rose to his feet and came over to take them. He watched him amble back to his corner, crouch over them in a sharp, almost feral movement, then flip them front to back with only mild interest.

  “Your poor father,” Stefan went on explaining, “God rest his soul, still has friends in this town, still has some influence. And the money you gave me, it was also very helpful. I’m afraid there isn’t anything left. I’ve had to use every last bit.” He paused. “In two nights, there is a train departing for Geneva, from Gara de Nord. I’m afraid we cannot waste any time. We don’t know when the borders will shut down, how much time we have left. Rumor has it that the Allies are going to bomb Bucharest any day. It could be tomorrow for all we know.”

  The entire thing had been delivered practically in one breath. “You have to leave on that train,” he went on more sternly, emphasizing each word. “It’s the only way out. Switzerland is a neutral country; it will be safe for you there. I have arranged for your tickets already. Under your new names.”

  Still, there was no response, no gesture of any kind. It was as if he’d spoken a different language.