This is how the other patients talk to him. She sees that. She is beginning to talk to him as they do, telling him what she can tell no one else. Finding a voice for thoughts she has hardly acknowledged to herself.
That last summer when Andrei was there seemed the longest summer that she had known. Endless days, long rides, nights that spun through until dawn. The drives they made, that seemed to have gone on for whole days, one merged into another. But they had been no more than pieces of days, and those days themselves just pieces taken out of that whole summer. The timelessness had to do with the fact that it was the last summer, because nothing after it was the same. The hills were long, wide, smooth as if they had been spread with a knife. The car swung up and crested them or rode along the ridges. Sometimes they drove on dusty tracks, sometimes they just drove across the open land. Once they came upon Gypsies making a road, unexpected as a flock of crows out in an ocean, and they were burning the tar and cooking above it at the same time. She had found the blackness and the shimmering heat and the smell about them almost unbearable. There were the Gypsies by the road and somewhere, some other time, there were the charcoal burners. She has them merged somehow in her memory: the heat and blackness all one, the charcoal beginning to ooze with the smell of tar. But they had stopped only a moment beside the Gypsies, to ask the way. She hadn’t even got out of the car yet she had felt the heat from there and wondered if the food they cooked did not itself go black and taste of tar.
One day they took Gheorghe and Mihai with them squeezed into the car and drove east towards Russia. They crossed the Prut and drove on, and the landscape did not change but repeated itself as if it would stretch out like that for ever, the long bare slopes that ran the same way, open and featureless save where the path of a river was marked by ribbons of willow or a stream made a raw crease in the soil. It would be the same if they went on to the Nistru and into Russia, the same long flattening folds of land, the villages that clustered where it softened, the people the same only that they were Bolsheviks. In a year the Russians would cross the Nistru and there would be no difference between one side and the other. In the end they’d all have to be Bolsheviks.
‘I might have left with him. Do you know that? We talked about it, driving all the way back to France. Imagine that.
‘Or that was what we talked about. What he said. Was that what he meant? I can’t say. I don’t know now. I have no way of knowing if anything he said was true. Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t at first but became so later. That’s what I like to think, that it was true, some of the time at least. I don’t really know how to remember him, you see. There’s only the surface of him. The way he looked. His words. That’s all I have.
‘One day when we were driving we met some charcoal burners. We saw the smoke in the distance and Andrei drove up to it, just driving a line out across the pasture which was hard and dry. It was a very hot day and at first we’d thought the smoke might be the beginning of a fire, there on the edge of the forest. It seemed far too hot for burning things. The men looked so hot. They had three huge mounds burning, smoke seeping out from them, black heaps, piles of wood, a couple of caravans. There was a woman, children, a naked baby, all of them black with charcoal. The smell of the charcoal pervaded everything. It was like a smell of winter. It was odd on a day like that, smelling the winter. They’d seen us coming. They were excited about the car. Andrei talked to the men for a long time. That was just like Andrei. He always wanted to know what people did, how everything worked. You could see why he had studied to be an engineer. He wanted to know what kind of timber they used, how the logs were laid to make the fire, how many days it took to burn down. I stood about and listened, and the children came up to me. We had some sweets in the car so I went and got them out and gave them to the children. I remember I saw them take the sweets from the paper wrappers into their little black fingers and put them to their mouths. They shouldn’t do that, I thought, but then I told myself it was only charcoal, it wasn’t really that dirty, it was clean. I wondered where they went to wash. Andrei was wearing a light blue shirt. He looked so immaculate standing amongst them.
‘I took some pieces of charcoal away for you. “Whatever are you going to do with that?” Andrei said. That surprised me.
‘“It’s for Tinu,” I said.
‘It surprised me to think how short a time Andrei had known us, how there were still so many things about me, about all of us, of which he had no idea. And how little I knew about him. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to that thought, perhaps it should have made me wary. I just saw it, and marvelled at how strange it was, and passed on. It was exciting to know that there was so much more that was unknown that I could tell him. So I talked to him as we drove, rattling away. I told him about your drawings, how beautiful they were.
‘Really you see we didn’t know each other very well. I couldn’t even be sure if he would find your pictures beautiful.’
He was still a stranger after all. It was possible that they weren’t the sort of pictures that might appeal to a stranger. Strangers looked from the outside. Tinu’s pictures showed things, they were all of things, yet even when they showed the outsides of things they seemed to work from the inside.
The car drove on. It was late in the afternoon and the sun cast their moving shadow across the steppe.
When Tinu drew a room he drew it empty. He drew it as it was but somehow what you saw was not the room but its emptiness. With a door you saw the opening. When he drew a pitchfork left leaning against the barn wall you saw its abandonment. How could she have explained that? An outsider might see no more than a murky sketch on a scrap of paper. Something that was too small and too inward to be communicated.
When they came back to the house Paraschiva gave them lemonade and they went through from the kitchen, through the drawing room that was cool as the lemonade. In the mirror there she caught sight of her reflection and laughed. He had not told her that she had charcoal smudged across her cheeks. He came up to her in the mirror and tried to kiss away the smudge. Just as they separated she heard someone coming. She went on quickly, spilling the drink on to her fingers, out and down the verandah steps.
13
The gardener carried him out. The gardener was not a big man but Augustin was light as a child to carry. He was limp, cold, barely conscious. The gardener said that he only began to moan the moment he was touched, with a strange high-pitched nasal moan none had heard from him before. He took him up to where the sun was hot and laid him on the grass. He called for help and began to strip off the cold linen that clung to the lad’s thin frame, which began to shiver as the sun struck and the blood again began to flow.
Paraschiva came pounding the ground towards her son. Her attempt to run seemed to create more awkwardness than speed. Worry for him sat oddly on her placid face. It showed in her eyes and in the tightness of her mouth, not in lines because she had none. Mama Anica hurried behind her. Paraschiva knelt on the ground and raised him on to her lap while the old woman rubbed his bare chest with brandy, put the bottle to his mouth and tried to make him drink. Then Marina Văleanu too came running. She had heard the shouts. Safta came behind her mother and saw them all clustered about him like ill-assorted holy women before the tomb.
‘So cold, my boy.’ Paraschiva felt his flesh like fish in her hands. She closed her eyes and tears welled from them and rolled down her cheeks.
‘What was he doing there? Did you send him?’
‘Of course I didn’t send him. If I’d sent him I wouldn’t have spent half the night looking for him.’
‘Who did send him then?’
They looked one to the other. Often the boy’s behaviour was inexplicable. That they were used to. This action they could not account for because of the suffering in it. They could not see what cause he had to make himself suffer.
The gardener picked him up again and carried him back, the women fluttering ahead. Safta followed slowly. She remembered that instant in
the loft when he had seen them. She held the image of it, fixed, still, like a photograph in her hand. The whole household had collected now: Stanislaw who rarely stirred outdoors for anything, the rest of the gardeners; then Gheorghe and Mihai, her grandfather and Andrei together. The men had been out shooting. They carried guns and Mihai held a brace of partridge across his shoulder. Her eyes went down to the dogs, that walked pale and alert about their legs. She could not bring herself to look at Andrei just then.
Stanislaw directed the whole cavalcade back to the house where Augustin was taken upstairs and given a hot bath in the enormous bath that was like an iron sarcophagus. Some said that a doctor should be called. Mama Anica brewed a tea from herbs.
‘What was he doing there?’ Gheorghe asked. ‘Was it an accident? Did someone shut him in?’
‘It can’t have been that,’ said József. ‘The door was open. That was why he was found.’
He might have died, they said, if he had lain there any longer.
14
There is a little shop on Strada Lăpuşneanu that sells magazines and books and toys and stationery, where she goes sometimes to buy him things. Yesterday she noticed a kaleidoscope in the window.
‘It’s just a childish thing but I thought you might like it.’
He is pleased. He takes it and puts it to his eye.
‘I remembered that you had one before. It was rather better quality than this one, of course, more complex, and painted in lots of colours. Still, one can’t be fussy. We should be grateful anyone at all’s making kaleidoscopes these days.’
His smile is tight on his face. Even now he is watchful, tense. If only he would begin to draw again.
‘I went to visit you that time when you were ill. I think it was the only time that I went inside your home in all those years. Even when we were children I never went in there. I never would have dreamt of it. It was always you who came to us. I suppose I felt bad about what happened. I didn’t follow the thought through but all the same I felt responsible in some way. So I went to see you and you were sitting up in your bed, a little pale but otherwise the same as ever, only you wouldn’t look at me, like when you first came here to the hospital, and you were looking at the wall. I didn’t know what to do so I looked at the wall as well. It was a blue wall with that blue wash on it that all the peasant houses have – rough, dappled in the sort of way that if I was a child and ill in bed I would have looked at it and seen shapes of other things in the marks like the shapes in clouds. I always found it strange going into peasants’ houses. They were so small and low, so different from the sort of rooms I was used to. Going into them was like walking into the forest from the open, everything suddenly close and dark and smelling of wood or dust. So I looked at the wall for a time and then I looked around at everything else. And it would have been just like any other peasant room, with the table and chairs and embroidered hangings by the windows, except for all your collections of things. You had such odd things. Sometimes I’d seen you pick them up but I never knew you brought them home and kept them. I didn’t know how Paraschiva could stand it, except that they were all so tidily sorted and arranged. There were the drawings, of course, stacks of card and paper, neat and tied with string, and little people all along the windowsill, but there were other things, stones and pine cones and pieces of wood, and the strangest was a collection of finely formed bones that looked like pieces of armour, fantastical helmets with visors, arranged like a marching squadron, and when I looked I realised that they were just the skulls and breastbones of birds, chickens I suppose, and others you had found. And the kaleidoscope we gave you was there beside your bed. I don’t know how long I stayed, whatever I thought was a proper amount of time. Paraschiva brought me some kind of fruit syrup to drink and when I had finished it I left.
‘That was just after everyone went away. I should have come to you before that but I never quite got there. I think I felt bad about you, and then with each day that passed I felt bad about not going sooner, and besides, time went so fast. It was always like that at the end of a summer. The days go on like they could go on for ever and they’re hot and lazy, and then suddenly they’re over and everyone’s going. The boys were going back to school in England. There was a great adventure planned, Andrei was going to drive with them as far as Budapest and leave the car with someone there and take the train on and see them all the way to Paris and see them off at the Gare du Nord. For a time I had thought that I was going somewhere too. There had been talk of a finishing school in Switzerland but they had changed their minds. There’s no point in going abroad to start anything, my mother said. Not if there’s going to be a war. We’ll find you something else. She spoke lightly, as if it didn’t matter, but it was like a bomb falling. I argued. I went to my father, to Constantin, but they sent me back to her. I was so angry. I shouted at her, but her voice came back smooth and cool as always. She had this way of making it seem that all these things I was concerned with were only temporal and transitory, far beneath argument.
‘The last day we went mushrooming. We always did that at the end of the summer. I couldn’t bear the thought that everyone else was leaving. I remember the birds. I was terribly aware of all the birds, migrating. So many of them went over Poiana, it was the route to the delta and the south. There were great flocks of them in the sky that time of year. The mushroom day was beautiful. It always was. All the mushroom days were that I remember. I didn’t know that it would be the last. It was the 2nd of September 1939. Anybody would know now, knowing the date, that it was bound to be the last and that everything after it was bound to change.’
She feels that she is about to cry. He does not see because he is looking into the kaleidoscope. He looks at each pattern for a long time, as if he is bent on understanding it, breaking it up and seeing where it begins to repeat, reflect. Perhaps his mind can do that, divide and fix the shapes. Is he aware even that she is speaking? Is all the sympathy that people imagine in him no more than his passivity? And yet she goes on talking as if he understands. She wants to yell to make him hear her. Then he shifts the pattern again and she is calmed.
‘We went out early, Gheorghe, Mihai, Andrei and myself, my cousin Angelica, a couple of the boys’ friends. Riding where there was still dew. The sky becoming very bright. The peasants already up. Peasants up like the birds in the early morning. József had been slow saddling the horses. You weren’t there. We had saddled them ourselves. Old József had to get the carriage ready to follow us later.
‘Andrei and the boys were leaving the day after. There’s something I have to tell you, Andrei said, but he didn’t tell me. All day he didn’t manage to say whatever it was.
‘We rode out to a glade in a wood some ten miles away. It was a place we had come to a week or so before, just the two of us riding out there in the heat. Tall beeches, the open ground beneath them starred with white anemones, a high stillness. It was different with everyone there, all the riders and horses racing about. As if people were shouting in a cathedral. It seemed wrong. I felt separate from them all. I didn’t think I could bear the day. But then Andrei came up and said something that made me laugh, and we left the horses and spread out through the trees. When the carriage came it brought the picnic and big baskets for the mushrooms we had already begun to gather. It was just like when we were children, everyone trying to pick the most, Mihai stealing from Gheorghe, squabbling over who had the best. And Andrei couldn’t tell one mushroom from another. Everyone told him he had spent too long in Paris. He’d have poisoned us all if there hadn’t been a Paraschiva to check them. Paraschiva would tip all the mushrooms out on to the kitchen table that evening and check every one before she cooked them. Paraschiva could always be trusted. And I think I never ate anything so good as her mushrooms, ever.
‘All the morning we picked and then we came back to the glade with our baskets, and the picnic had been laid out on a great white tablecloth. Meats and breads and cheeses, salads, sarmale, and everything tasted a li
ttle of mushroom because of the smell of the mushrooms about us and clinging to our fingers. Mushroom even in the wine and in the peaches, like a taint of earth. The sun was hot through the afternoon as in summer. All that urgency of the morning had gone and I felt that we would be there for ever, eating and drinking, Andrei a little way off on the grass joking with the boys and I didn’t need to be any closer to him because he was there and I was there and we’d picked a basket of mushrooms together and shared the touch of them, and the tethered horses grazed and shook their tails beneath the trees. And then it was over. József was putting the horse back between the shafts of the carriage. The wine was all gone. Some people were asleep, or almost asleep. No one had talked much for a time. Everyone seemed a little lost. We helped pack up the picnic things and my mother and Mama Anica shook out the great white cloth and pulled it out between them and folded it, fold upon fold. Andrei went and got his horse and mine, and I don’t think he said anything but when he gave me the reins I felt the leather on my fingers as if it stung. We rode off with the others. The horses were well rested and we took a long route, climbing up out of the wood on to the heights of the hills then galloping down the long mown hay fields and slaloming about the ricks.
‘We were at the top of a valley, just within sight of the house. We slowed to allow the others to ride on ahead. We couldn’t really see the house from there so much as the trees that surrounded it, and the rooks gathering above them. There was a cloud of dust on the road down below that must have been the carriage, which had taken a more direct route and almost home. We turned down a track that ran along the side of the hill through the vineyards. The grapes were almost ripe and the last of the sun was on them. There’s no more time, I said. He didn’t hear or didn’t understand and made me say it again. I wanted time, I said. I thought there was time but there isn’t any. And he only looked at me and didn’t say anything.
Painter of Silence Page 9
