Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  He sent her a card from Bucharest, with a reproduction of Magic Bird by Brâncui: ‘Beautiful Kitty, I shall be with you. I want to be with you. Your V.’

  A second card came from Paris four months later, of Brâancui’s Adam and Eve: ‘I am getting nearer to you. There is only the Channel between us. I shall be on your doorstep soon. I am thought-collecting meanwhile and not good company for you. With my love. Your V.’

  There were three more cards, each inscribed ‘Kitty Love. Your V’, of the same Brâncui sculpture: The Bird in Space.

  Kitty had her sister to think of while she waited, with a desperately willed patience, for Virgil’s return. The birth of Cecil’s and Gillian’s daughter, Lucy, reduced Daisy to numbness and silence. An occasional slow nod was the sole indication that she understood what Janet and Andrew, Kitty and Nelly were trying to say to her.

  Then Dinu Psatta arrived, on a drizzly January day, bringing the news she wanted not to hear.

  ‘You might solve a mystery for me, Mr Psatta. If you can.’

  ‘Mystery? Which mystery?’

  ‘Virgil never told me how he escaped from Romania. Do you know how?’

  ‘Yes. The Dunãrea. You say the River Danube. He crossed the River Danube.’

  ‘In a boat?’

  ‘No, no. With body.’

  ‘He swam?’ She pretended to swim – her arms beating a way through imaginary water. ‘Virgil swam across the Danube?’

  ‘Yes, yes. From Turnu Severin. God was with him. Many others were shot. Many were caught and shot. Virgil survive.’

  Epilogue: The Names in the Dark

  A life in a shopping bag.

  (‘I have ownership of his burnt remains,’ Dinu Psatta had said.

  ‘Ashes.’

  ‘Thank you. Ashes. I have his ashes in a black casket. I have not brought the casket with me. I could perhaps send it?’

  ‘No. I don’t want Virgil’s ashes. No.’

  ‘Then, I am thinking, if his mother’s modest grave could be found and the casket put inside the problem will be solved.’

  ‘That sounds like the ideal solution.’

  ‘Thank you. Then I will pursue the matter.’)

  The copy of Mioria was inscribed ‘Popescu Matilda Aprilie 1932’. She took out the broken-backed edition of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and placed it carefully on her work table. There was a third book: Poems of George Herbert, a recent addition to his portable library. Its pages were stained with tea or coffee and annotated with innumerable pencilled comments.

  Virgil had attached to each of the five poems his own rendering into English prose.

  She opened the letter, cautiously, with a paper knife. It ran to twelve, closely written pages. She felt sick with apprehension as she began to read. Nothing it contained could be worse, she reasoned, than what she already knew. Virgil was dead. Virgil had killed himself. Virgil was finally gone from her.

  Her hands were trembling, even so.

  The first page was dated 10 January 1991.

  For many years, Kitty, there was a photograph in the living-room of the Florescu apartment in Bucharest. It was in a mahogany frame and it showed my parents happily dancing the hora on the night of their wedding. It stood alone on the top of a cabinet. My mother dusted it every morning and often I caught her kissing the glass. Because it stayed in the same position, it signified permanence and security to me. Then the photograph and the frame disappeared. I was seventeen. The dance is over, I thought, seeing the empty space. One of them has decided that the dance is over.

  I guessed it was my mother. I dared to ask her why the photograph had been removed. She said she had grown tired of it. She was no longer the pretty and carefree girl in the picture and the Constantin who had captured her heart was a changed man now. She said something I did not understand and because I made no sense of it I kept it in my memory. She said the photograph reproached her. And then she laughed and told me to forget the stupid remark.

  I am trying to write in my best and clearest English, Kitty.

  My mother’s decline was slow and gradual, not dramatic. Meals were cooked when required, the furniture was dusted and polished, beds were made and unmade, our clothes were washed and ironed, everything was as normal. She prayed to her God, as she had always prayed, when there was no one about. But I would sometimes hear her sighing and muttering to herself while she performed her daily tasks and wonder why she was in the grip of what sounded like sadness. I would go to her in the kitchen or in the dining-room or wherever she was and take her hands in mine and invite her to share her worries with me. The only worries she had, she answered, were Romanian worries, the worries we all had in such a country at such a time, the worries that would not go away. We would embrace and she would stroke my hair and advise me to tend to my studies, for they would be my salvation.

  I tended to my studies and persevered with the complex language I am writing in, and she was pleased with my progress. I left the Florescu apartment in my early twenties and lived the precarious life of a student and a teacher. She seemed to be more and more unhappy with each visit I paid. My father, the man I was still calling my father, told me he had heard her talking to her dead relations, chatting to them as if they were at tea together, in a voice as high and as irritating as a bird’s.

  Kitty, I think I have come to understand at long last why Matilda Florescu felt reproached by the photograph and why she feared to go on looking at her partner in the dance. On the day she took it from the cabinet and threw it out with the garbage – for photograph and frame vanished without trace – she had learned of Constantin Florescu’s role in the historical event, the ‘mystical occasion’ that happened before her marriage. Her bridegroom, the happy bridegroom in the photograph, was a man who had butchered his fellow men and women, who had slit human throats as though they belonged to beasts.

  That, I believe, was the dreadful knowledge my mother could not share with me. That was her worry beyond all worries.

  She let out a howl of misery and listened to the silence that followed it.

  Then she picked up the phone. ‘Nelly, I have some bad news, some really bad news. Virgil’s dead. He died in Paris a few days ago. He took his life.’

  ‘Be brave, my brave girl. Do you want me there?’

  ‘No. I do and I don’t, actually, but I’ll settle for don’t. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Of course you will. Now that Daisy’s her sensible self again I can give you my full attention.’

  ‘As you’ve always given me.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  11 January 1991

  You were always too considerate to say so, Kitty, but you must have wondered often if I was in my right mind. You were such a patient and attentive listener when – it was a frequent when – I was in a story-telling mood. I have to plead in my defence that I could not stop myself. The stories insisted on being told. They are my curious heritage, which I needed to pass on to you in some small measure.

  As the Hungarian it was my misfortune to encounter in London rudely – but correctly – observed, we had no books in Romania for several centuries. (We had no Romania for several centuries.) Our poets had tongues but no tongue. Their words wandered from mouth to mouth and the resting-place, the sanctuary, that is the printed page was as remote to them as the stars they glorified in their verses. Their names are not recorded. Their names are in the dark, like those of the humble soldiers in my mightier namesake’s mighty epic.

  (‘What a perverse student Virgil was,’ the blind Teodor Costea would say to her as they sat on the balcony of his house in Constana. ‘And what a brilliant one also. His classmates wrote of the anguish of Dido and the rescue of Anchises from the flames of Troy – the big set-pieces, you might call them – but Virgil chose to deal, I seem to remember, with the plight of the Arcadian fisherman, one of the hundreds, or indeed thousands, killed by King Turnus. He has a name, does he not?’

  ‘Menoetës.’

  ‘That is the ma
n. Will you permit me to smoke my pipe?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘We Romanians are walking chimneys, as you have probably noticed.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘The smell of my tobacco is not so pungent when there is a breeze coming from the sea. Is the wine to your taste?’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Have you cast an eye over the Roman ruins?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘And were there discarded tins and bottles and cigarette packets to spoil the view?’

  ‘I’m afraid there were.’

  ‘It is upsetting, this cavalier way people have with trash. An international custom, I hear. Blindness has a few compensations. Did you pause in front of the statue of the great Ovidius and pay him his deserved respects?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘He was exiled to this region. This is where he wrote his Tristia. I still had my sight when I moved here with my late wife. Had I some romantic notion of being closer in spirit to my hero? I think I had. For me, Miss Crozier, Ovid is the sublime one. His language is like the finest champagne, which – diligent Romanian academic that I am – I have very rarely drunk. He has such wit, such lightness. I attempted, when I was much younger, to translate the Metamorphoses, but I abandoned the effort. It is a crime, a sin, to remove Ovid from his own words. I have him in my head now and when I am unoccupied or incapable of sleep I speak his lines to myself. It is a daily ritual for me, a cleansing of the mental system. Take more wine, dear lady. Be generous with yourself. I keep a moderately well-stocked cellar.’

  ‘You are kind, Professor Costea.’

  ‘Virgil was not kind to you when he did that senseless thing. He was cruel to you. He was cruel to me. He was cruel to all of us. I loved him as a son. My old and worn-out eyes have a single use left to them, and that is to weep. You will excuse me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘He was a gentle soul.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘In this society designed for the comfort of brutes. He ought not to have done what he did. It was an act of cruelty.’

  She would not be able to tell Teodor Costea that Virgil had regarded his suicide as an act of atonement.

  ‘He should have heeded Marcus Aurelius, whom he did not study in Greek. The Emperor warns against impulses that are wrong. Virgil succumbed to a wrong impulse. Have you begun to forgive him?’

  ‘I wish I could have persuaded him that his being a good man was enough. I shall never forgive him for not letting me have the chance to do that. He took himself off when I might have been most helpful to him. He was thought-collecting, he said. That was how he put it.’

  ‘Poor Miss Crozier. It is a sign of the truly good among us that they find themselves wanting in goodness. It pains me that his last act will stand as a contradiction to the rest of his life. But there. When Domnul Sava returns from the hospital we will go to a restaurant I patronise. We will eat freshly caught fish and perhaps – with the assistance of a little more wine – I shall recite some lines of Ovid for you.’)

  Kitty, I was telling you the stories and speaking the poems because I wanted you to have a few memories of me that cannot be obliterated by the action I have decided upon. This I realise now, in retrospect. Only weeks ago I was intending to see you in London with the idea of ‘twisting your arm’ into joining me on a long visit to my ‘sad country full of humour’. By the way, the silent Adrian is selling perfume behind a counter in one of the new shops that have opened for business since the fake revolution, while the voluble Adrian is our representative in Strasbourg, when he is not waxing rhetorical in our selectively televised parliament. The situation is exceedingly humorous.

  The expert on Emily Dickinson was one of the many secret policemen who were rounded up and shot. He was never in America, as I had suspected. His Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost performance was created specifically for Virgil Florescu. The smooth-faced master of disguise and dissimulation had other performances for other offenders. I imagine him discussing Beethoven with a musician, or Saint Teresa of Avila with a religious, or our great Brâncui with a sculptor. On with the motley! Variety is the spice of a policeman’s life! In the Conducator’s Romania it was insufficient just to ‘put the frighteners on’ a man or woman with opinions of their own. The questioners had to have some fun, some diversion. We invented a theatre of the absurd, after all. ‘Are we in agreement that The Column of the Infinite is the most serene work by Brâncui, rising as it does to the very heavens? Or do you prefer his early Sleep, with the sleeping head still entrapped in marble? And are you shitting your pants yet?’

  (I picked up ‘put the frighteners on’ in London, in a pub at Gospel Oak. The raciest expressions can be acquired over a glass of beer. ‘They put the frighteners on him and he squealed’ was what I heard.)

  I have been deprived of the pleasure of bumping into Corneliu on a busy street and saying to him:

  ‘I never hear the word “escape”

  Without a quicker blood,

  A sudden expectation,

  A flying attitude!’

  and relishing his reaction. Would he have replied ‘Written in or around 1859 and published in 1891’, like the expert he once was?

  I have spoken to the silent Adrian however. He told me the price of a small bottle of Eau Sauvage. He was very polite, obsequious indeed. He appeared not to recognise me. He has the ideal voice for a salesman – soft, silky, persuasive.

  ‘When this Romanian, his name is Dinu, gave me the news, I surprised myself by not being surprised. I was calm. I talked to him. He answered a question Virgil never answered, except in riddles. When I heard how Virgil escaped I laughed, because the idea of his swimming the Danube seemed incredible. Comical, even. I opened some wine and we chatted. He came back yesterday evening with a shopping bag containing three books, five poems and a very long letter. I cooked a simple meal, which he enjoyed. He thanked me and left. I phoned you after reading the first page of the letter. I quite literally didn’t have the stomach to read on because I was retching so much. I’ve just finished the second page and the third is beckoning. I’m gabbling, Nelly.’

  ‘Gabble on.’

  ‘I can’t. That’s it. That’s it, for the moment. I can’t say any more.’

  ‘I’ll be here when you can.’

  12 January 1991

  Kitty, during those first happy weeks after we met in London – in the park, not the hospital, of course – I would relive my escape from Romania while spiking and disposing of the leaves and litter. I told you I had ways and means of escaping and that is what I told everyone else, including the diverting Derek Harville, who is neither Mephistophelean nor devilish. You know now that Constantin Florescu is streets, boulevards, avenues, squares and motorways ahead of him in devilishness. Streams and rivers and oceans too.

  I swam the Danube, at its narrowest point I believe, but it was wide enough. I was expecting the guards’ lights to pick me out. I was expecting to be arrested and beaten up or shot with a marksman’s bullet. But I reached the farther side. I slept my first sleep of liberty in a field in Yugoslavia, with the morning sun slowly drying me. I travelled at night for safety, resting in woods and forests in the daytime. I lived on bitter-tasting berries and herbs, and I drank running water …

  (‘Typical, typical, typical,’ Doina Rangu would exclaim, clapping her hands. ‘It was typical of Virgil to choose a route no one else had taken. Virgil loved making life difficult for himself. There was a man working for the Red Cross just a few kilometres from the border, and Virgil – typically – contrived not to meet him. Why make contact with a man who can supply you with food and shelter, and ease your path across the country, when there is the exciting alternative of eating grass and sleeping under bushes, like a hermit? Oh, Kitty, Virgil had a genius for difficulty.’)

  … Until the day I drank strong beer and ate grey bread and orange-coloured cheese. These were the gifts – the benison, to use your lovely old word – of a farm
-hand named Branko who invited me to share his lunch. He offered me salami too, which I had to decline. We communicated in mime show and in babyish French. His generosity warmed me and stirred me with hope. I felt honoured in his presence.

  That is how I escaped. Swimming the Danube at dead of night sounds like the action of a hero, but I am not heroic and I did not want anyone to consider me so. You would do it if you had to. Hundreds did it. That is why I spoke of ways and means. Ordinary ways. Simple-minded means.

  I was reliving my journey of escape because it led me to you, via Split, and Ancona and Rome, and thanks to an obliging woman named Pamela who allowed me to marry her and become quasi-British. Everything seemed to fit into place, taking on a strange logic, when you wrote your address for me on the scrap of chocolate paper. How often I looked at that Lindt wrapper and counted myself blessed.

  For I could not begin to believe in such a vast sprawling city as London – Bucharest is minute by comparison – I would meet again, and speak to, the beautiful woman I had wheeled on my porter’s trolley from the operating theatre to the ward. I had neglected my duties for many minutes that day, Kitty, while I sat by your bed and watched you. And when I came back the next morning and saw that your bed was occupied by another I was sad but philosophical. I had prepared a little speech to say to you, but it had to go unsaid.

  Kitty, you were my best hope. There were many times with you, in and out of the untidy bedroom we made untidier, when I thought: Yes, I am free. She is giving me my real freedom. She is liberating me from him, the man who sired me when he should have been dead, the man I had called – with all the shades of meaning children employ – my father. Kitty, you must know that I called him ‘Tata’ for the last time on the evening of his confession. The word became filth in my mouth from then on.

  But you could not and cannot give me that real freedom because he took it from me with his boasting. He took it from me with the history lesson no son in the whole wide unhappy world should ever have to listen to. I think sometimes (no, I think of it with unbearable frequency) of his making love to the young and innocent Matilda Popescu with the blood of children on his hands. And I am the product of their love-making. I am their first-born child.