The young man’s name was Andrei. The car was a Lagonda. He was twenty-two and he had driven it all the way from France. He had just finished his studies and had taken the summer to travel before going back to begin his first job. He was also engaged to be married when he got back to France but he didn’t mention this. At Poiana in the heat of the summer all of that seemed a world away. Almost all of his life his family had lived in France. He had not known till now how wide and beautiful his own country was, so different from the countries of Western Europe as if it magically preserved a piece of all their past. Marina Văleanu had welcomed him with vague hospitality. She had been a close friend of his mother’s a long time before. Do stay, as long as you like. Treat the place as your home. And then she left him to it, and he stayed on and on. There was room in the house for that, for people to come and stay and write at a table in the library or read on a sofa, or if they liked, tinker with an engine. Every now and then the household was reminded of Andrei’s presence by the roar of the car leaving or its return, heard and seen as a feather of dust across the landscape even before it reached the drive, or sometimes a fretful revving from the coach house. When he had it working he went out with the boys. Or sometimes he drove the family’s big Packard – though Ilie did not like to relinquish it – and took them all on trips. He talked politics with Constantin – and he had talked to people all the way across Europe, and this was the summer of 1939 so he had much to say. Things were serious, he said. There would be war and the world was going to change. He did not know whenever he – anyone – might make a journey like that again. When he talked in this way he acquired a gravity that the boys admired. For the space of that summer he was a hero to all the family. It was hardly surprising that Safta should fall in love with him. She was only sixteen.
It began on what was perhaps the hottest day of that July. The heat was already there when Safta woke, a whiteness in the morning beyond the window that seemed to hang over from the day before and the day before that. Usually she got up and rode but this morning even the idea of a horse was too hot, the thought of the heat and smell of its flanks and the milling flies. She heard her brothers go without her, slept on, found herself alone at the breakfast table on the verandah where dishes of fruit and bread were covered with white napkins and wasps clung to the sticky sides of pots of jam. Her grandfather was in his usual place but dozing with the newspaper on his lap. The house behind her was dim and half-shuttered. Her mother would have been up for some hours, writing letters in her study.
Andrei came in lightly so that she did not hear him. She did not know if he had come from the garden or from the house.
‘There’s a wonderful place for a swim. We found it yesterday.’
He did not sit but stood at the table, took some bread in his hand, spread it with honey and ate it there looking out impatiently to the valley.
‘It’s a bit of a way. Let’s go before it gets too hot.’
‘We could wait for the boys.’
‘Then we’d waste the morning. We should go now before it gets any hotter.’
They got lost once or twice on the tracks until she was not sure if he would find the place again. All the tracks looked the same. But he turned and went back and at last they came over a rise and saw ahead of them the lake like dark glass, almost hidden by a silvery clump of trees. There was a gang of boys there who were swimming already, who rushed up in excitement at the sight of the car. From the far bank of the lake other boys saw, and streaked in and swam across to where they had stopped, crowding round so close that she could feel the coolness of the water on their brown bodies. The children shouted and laughed, touched the car and left wet marks on the dusty metal, barely gave her room to open the door and get out.
They swam with the children about them. There was a rope hanging from a branch high above the water. Andrei climbed up as the boys did. When he threw himself off his ripples shattered the lake.
Then Safta swam away alone to where it was still, and Andrei followed. They got out and sat for a time beneath the trees gazing out over the water.
Look at me, he said. And he pulled the strands of wet hair back from her face and kissed her.
Then they turned and swam back, swimming alongside or sometimes behind one another without speaking. The car had been all that time out in the sun. It was too hot to touch. They laid their damp towels on the leather seats, waved to the children and drove away.
They were terribly hungry from the swimming. Paraschiva had let them take a picnic from the kitchen but they could not have eaten it at the lake with all the children about them. Where they drove the land was so hard and dry that there was no need for a road. The sky was hot and wide and empty. They were driving over open country, bare as steppe. The only pieces of shade to be found lay in black crescents at the foot of the haystacks that were spaced across the fields. At last they drove up to one of these and spread a blanket on the stubble. The shade was no more than a narrow sliver, sharply outlined before their feet. The food was hot from the car, bread and salami and sheep’s cheese, tomatoes, peaches. They sat with their backs to the hay and the flavours and the scents were strong. The crescent of shade shifted away from them and at first they did not notice and burnt in the sun. Then they moved the blanket over to where the shade grew longer.
There was little to be said. It was like the swimming again. She let herself float for a time and then fear overtook her. She stopped his hand before she drowned. She was suddenly shy. She packed up the picnic chaotically to cover her confusion.
Augustin saw it as soon as they came home. The rest of the household were perhaps too lazy with the heat to see, though it was happening right before their eyes. When she came back with Andrei that first day Augustin knew as soon as he saw the glow of the sun on her and the tangles in her hair. The car was parked askew in front of the coach house, a basket with the remnants of the picnic left on the back seat and the blanket stuffed beside it.
He went back to his work. The tack room was always soothing, its swept floor, its whitewashed walls, the gleaming leather of the saddles. The polished leather reminded him of the young man. Andrei knew now about his deafness. He didn’t speak or acknowledge him like he used to, but slipped past as if he did not exist. Some people did that. They did not seem even to see a person who could not hear. It meant that Augustin saw the man with Safta as if they were alone.
He drew a new figure to add to his collection, another of his rectangular totems. This one he coloured brown with a crayon, and he licked the tip so that the colour shone. He gave the figure the young man’s thick black hair; no face as it did not seem to need one, the young man’s features were so regular and smooth. Often he liked to put words beside his figures as he had seen in books. Beside this one he drew two outstretched wings as they appeared in chrome above the radiator of the green car and within the wings the word LAGONDA. He printed the letters in clean angular capitals just as they appeared on the car. Then he had an idea. He screwed up that page and drew the figure again but now with the wings attached as if the man might fly.
They drove to a castle on a rock above a bend in the river. From the castle they could see a long way. There was the same rolling open bare country to the south but to the north they could see here and there the darker green of forest that was like a stain seeping over a ridge or like the shadow of a cloud.
Andrei put his hand down her back where the channel of her spine was like a secret beneath her hair.
‘If I drove on I could drive all the way to China.’
‘Can I come?’
‘Your parents would never let you.’
‘I’d go anyway.’
‘You’re too young.’
‘It’s dangerous over there.’
‘We’ll go to France then. At least there I could get parts for the car.’
They turned about, looked west the way he had come. He had left Paris in May. He had driven through snow on an Alpine pass. He had crossed Austria and Hungar
y where he had experienced a great storm on the puszta. He had the canvas roof of the car put up just in time before the black cloud that charged at him across the plain, then there was nothing he could see but the battering rain and he could not drive a yard and only huddled and sat it through like a Bedouin in a sandstorm.
‘There was lightning that lit up all the land for miles.’
‘I’d like to go there.’
‘You will.’
‘I’d like to go with you.’
He didn’t answer but only kissed her and said again how young she was.
‘I’m old enough.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
If they had been silent that first day they went to the river, words flowed between them now. They drove on. He talked as he drove of what he planned to be. He had been studying to be an engineer. All across Europe they were building pieces of engineering that she would not believe. Architecture, viaducts, bridges. There were the pavilions he had seen in the International Exhibition in Paris, the new forms and structures. He used technical terms she didn’t understand, mentioned names of architects of whom she’d never heard. He said that he was going to go to America. In America they had built a great dam across the Colorado River. There was New York. Everyone had to see New York. And in California they had just completed a beautiful bridge which was the longest bridge in the world. If there was not a war he would go to America and drive right across it on roads that ran in straight lines through the wheatfields and across the desert and then across the bridge over the San Francisco bay. Even if there was a war he would go as soon as the war was over. She listened to him talk and she didn’t listen. Sometimes she was aware only of his face, his eyes, his lips, his hands that lifted again and again from the wheel as he spoke.
They bought a watermelon at the side of the road. They stopped on a high ridge. The land stretched on in all directions. He cut slices of the melon. When they kissed they tasted again the sweet juice that had spilled on to their skin.
They drove on past a peasant walking, dressed in white linen like all the peasants with a tall black hat and a scythe carried over his shoulder. The peasant turned his body stiffly like a clockwork figure to watch the car go by.
‘You’re living in the Middle Ages here.’
‘But you keep saying how beautiful it is.’
‘I couldn’t spend my life here.’
‘Don’t you feel you should? Just because of who you are? Stay because it’s your country?’
‘Only sometimes. Just sometimes these last few days I think I’ve felt more at home here, more myself, than I ever have anywhere else.’
‘That’s how it should be, isn’t it?’
Then he drew back into himself, became again the Paris-educated engineer. ‘But things can’t go on like this here. Look at the politics. The society. The inequality. The lack of progress.’ And he spoke of all sorts of things she had never bothered to think about.
They were on a track going into a village. They slowed down to navigate the usual spill of people and livestock. When they left the village there were ox carts ahead of them. The day had become so hot that when the car went slow they felt they would stifle in the heat.
‘To hell with this,’ he said, and left the track altogether.
There was smoke rising at the edge of the forest. It seemed far too hot for smoke.
It was late when they got back. The rooks were circling in the trees about the house, louder than the crickets. It was still hot. The August nights were hot. When they came in it was hard not to touch one another. They were thirsty and went to get drinks from the kitchen. Then they walked through the rooms of the house that were empty, one then another, into the drawing room that was cool like the drinks they held.
11
Augustin was leading a horse in from the field. He was walking in from the drive beside the house. It was a habit with him whenever he went by to look in at the rooms that he didn’t go into any more, that were so different and watery when seen through the glass. He saw through the window to a mirror and through the mirror to the room. In the room two forms moved, fused, moved away again.
As he passed the next window he saw Marina Văleanu in the room and the two in the mirror had gone. She had on a dark dress and she was standing very still, like one of the portraits on the wall.
He took the horse into the stables, into its stall. He closed his eyes and the horse nuzzled his palm, and then reached for his shirt as if there was hay in it. He took the horse’s head in his hands and put his head to it and kept it there until the horse lost patience and jerked away.
It was a day later, the afternoon, the quietest time of the day. Most people about the house had gone to sleep. Usually he went to sleep like everyone else but the morning had been busy and there had been no time for him to sweep the yard. So he came out to sweep it now. He liked to keep the yard perfect. He swept until every hoofprint was gone from the dust.
When he was done he went up to the hayloft.
He saw them lying there, where they had been making love. He saw first the smooth dark skin of the young man’s back, his dark brown arm reaching across the dip of her waist. He saw the shadow between them. He saw her breast, her startled nipple above the man’s arm. He stood at the top of the ladder and looked directly into her eyes. She had hardly realised he was there before he was gone.
There was an ice house in the grounds, at a spot up behind the stables where the trees began. It was half tunnelled into the hillside, half mounded above it, a solitary place quite different from any other. In winter slabs of ice were brought on a sleigh and stored away in the black hole beneath the snow. And when the snow had melted, the ice remained. Sometimes they sent Augustin to fetch some for the house. Paraschiva or Stanislaw would hand him a basket, and he would avoid their eyes and put on himself the look of incomprehension he used to keep the world away. He knew what they wanted but he did not like to go there. The blackness and the cold so closed him in.
He walked that way at first just because it led away from the house. Then he saw where he had come, and saw the door that was heavy as the door of a church. He went down the ramp and pushed it back, pushed away the childish terror he always felt as the black and the chill rushed out to him. There was still some ice in there, great blocks with straw packed about them. The ice house was dark. A lantern that you could light when you needed it hung from a hook in the doorway. He knew how to light the lantern but there was nothing inside that he needed to see. The ice did not sting at the first touch. Its surface was wet. He pushed aside the straw that wrapped it and felt the ice with the palms of his two hands, then pressed the whole of his body against it for the cold to penetrate.
They did not find him until the next morning. One of the gardeners happened to notice that the door was open and went in and saw a white shape huddled at the back. The floor was made for the melt to run down it, sloping down to a drain at its centre, and half his body was wet from the drain.
12
She thought that she had disconnected herself from the past. She has learnt that you can do that with pieces of your life. Disconnect them. Separate yourself from the person you were. That after all is what she and everyone else is meant to be doing these days.
‘I hadn’t thought about Poiana in such a long time. That seems strange but it’s so. You can forget that things happened, or if they happened they didn’t happen to you but to somebody like yourself that you used to know.’
There has been so much between Poiana and now. An intervening life lived in tents and hospitals and makeshift barracks and later in rooms in cities that despite their apparent permanence had the same hard transitoriness to them.
‘Were you there through the war? When did you leave? Did everyone leave? When I was with the army I could not imagine it touched, not even when I came upon another house like it in Ukraine, a manor like our own, built in much the same style – not grand but it had that same ease to it in its spaciousness and proportion,
and there were columns at the front and the walls had been white but the stucco had cracked off leaving them bare. No one had lived a family life in that house for decades. We moved in with our wounded soldiers and despite all that I knew of the war I could not bring myself to think then that the same thing could occur at Poiana.’
Sunlight leaves the hospital garden long before the end of the day. The shadow of the buildings falls across it so that the yellow light of evening shows only in a band high on the walls, and in the street beyond the railings where people walk home from work. They have made a circuit of the garden together. They will make another one or two circuits before he goes in, keeping on the move around the limits of the space. The grey cat walks just ahead of them. Whenever Augustin comes out it slinks out from some dim corner or behind the bins and winds between his legs and walks before him.
‘These things that I saw could not happen there, I told myself, as if the place was held in some capsule untouched by the war. And gradually I put the capsule away, perhaps because I could not risk it being broken. If I thought of Poiana at all, it must be just as it was, as when I’d been away at the college, and I came back and though some of the people had gone the place was just the same as if it had been waiting for me.’
Painter of Silence Page 8
