‘We were coming to the first houses of the village. We had to pass through the whole village before we came to the gates at the top of the drive, and the peasants were all there at their doors or on the benches beside them waiting for the cows to come home and the sun to go down. Lots of “Good evenings” and doffing of hats. We didn’t speak any more to each other. I wished that he was gone already. I thought that I could not face another dinner, another breakfast, the loud public goodbyes of the day that would follow, that I could imagine so precisely before they happened.’
‘But that wasn’t quite how it was. We met that night in the garden. We crept out and met under the catalpa after everyone had gone to bed. A dark night. No moon, only stars. We were out there in the garden almost till dawn.
‘What was it you were going to tell me? I asked. It doesn’t matter, he said. I’ll sort it out. It’s not important any more.
‘My mother told me later. She had a letter from his mother, her old friend in Paris. It didn’t arrive until after he’d gone. He had a girl in France that he was going to marry when he got back, a French girl. My mother showed me the letter and what it said.
‘What was it? I asked him. Tell me. Nothing, he said. A mistake I made. I’ll sort it out.
‘I thought, when my mother showed me the letter, that that was what he meant, what he was talking about. I still loved him, you see.
‘Some of the time that night we only lay there and felt the darkness on our skin as it cooled. I’d taken out a blanket from the verandah because of the dew. Later he ran naked as he was and got another one to put on top of us. When we slipped off it the ground was cold. We said goodbye there. We said we would meet in Paris. I’d get there somehow, soon enough. And from Paris we would go everywhere. I was so young. I thought the war they talked of would soon be over and then things would be again as they were before.’
15
When the Lagonda left those who saw it go noticed clouds building and predicted that Andrei would have to stop before long and put up the roof before a storm broke.
But the news came before the rain. The schoolmaster Grigorescu came pedalling furiously up the drive, the black jacket that he had put on to mark the gravity of the moment splayed like wings about him. He had heard on the wireless that England and France had declared war on Germany.
‘Go after them,’ Marina Văleanu said. ‘Bring them back.’
Her manner was imperious. Grigorescu lifted the hand that held his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow and turned the bike around to give chase.
‘No, in the car I mean.’ Ilie had the Packard out ready to take the others to the station.
Her husband said the Lagonda went too fast even for the Packard. Anyhow, the boys would find out soon enough.
‘Then they’ll come back.’
‘Why should they? They’re on their way now. They should go on. England’s still the best place for them to be.’
Constantin backed him up. Who knew how this would come out? If anyone could be relied upon surely it was the British. And he told his son to wait while he packed some things as he was coming to Bucharest as well. He said that since he had been in the country all summer it was time to see to his affairs, but everyone knew that the old man was tempted simply to be closer to whatever was going on.
Even as they talked it began to rain. Big drops of it at first, as Grigorescu turned up his collar and rammed his hat down and made his way back to the village, then a heavy downpour as the Packard pulled away.
Only the women were left. When the shower was over there were still black streaks in the sky above the horizon and they knew that it was raining again where the car had gone. Here there was sunshine but over there the car was swishing down wet roads with the roof up, dark with wet, and there were cities with wet streets and people beneath umbrellas that had a sheen on them like the road. And somewhere, grey armies moving. There were moments when such things seemed scarcely possible, the immediate world and the weather about them being so still, so complete. They had days again of hot weather that tried to persuade them that it wasn’t September at all. The crickets sang. The afternoons were heavy, turning thoughts inward. Safta waited while her mother made plans for her to go to a college in Bucharest. She should go there, her mother said, at least until this war was sorted out. Waiting is slow in a place where nothing happens. Safta slept long, got up late and went out to ride. Each day in the afternoon she told herself she would practise the piano. She went into the long drawing room and sat before the keyboard and sometimes she did not even touch it. She sat in silence, feeling the weight of her body, hands sunk on to her lap and motionless.
Her mother came to find her. She had a letter in her hands.
‘I have to tell you something.’
Blue ink, thin blue paper, an elegant looped script, all very French. She was about to read the letter aloud but she changed her mind and handed it to Safta to read for herself.
‘It can’t be so.’
‘I’m sorry,’ her mother said. ‘I shouldn’t have let it happen.’
She didn’t look at her. She looked only at the piano, at the keys, the reflections in the polished wood.
‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘I know how it is, believe me.’
‘How can you know?’
‘I was your age when I met your father.’
‘It’s to do with me, him. Not you.’
Safta imagined all the sound in the piano crashing about the space. But the room was silent, the garden soft beyond the long windows. She closed the keyboard, stood, walked a few steps, then began to run. She pulled open the doors and ran out of them, and those of the next room and ran through that, and the doors were left swinging and when she got a long way off she screamed.
Marina Văleanu went to her study. She lit the candle before the icon, knelt before it. Even by daylight the flame made the rest of the room seem to fall away. She could not at first find words for prayer. She felt for her daughter far more than she had shown. She saw herself there, her own look, her eyes, her vividness which was also a vulnerability. The perception struck her like a pain. Then she felt the influence of the holy image and her thoughts began to draw together, like lines focused through a lens. She is really very young. Younger even than I was.
When letters arrived it was the custom for them to be brought to the mistress’s study before they went elsewhere. If any came for Safta from France in the weeks that followed she removed them and put them away in a drawer. She would neither destroy them nor read them. She would allow her daughter that.
When Augustin recovered and went back to work at the stables he noticed immediately how empty the place had become. For him this was just something that happened, like the weather. It did not require cause or explanation. People came to the house. People left. Sometimes they touched one another. He had begun to make a new kind of figure, that was not one flat figure alone but two profiles conjoined, single eye to single eye, nose to nose, mouths fused in a kiss. He was shy of these figures and did not stand them up on the windowsill where the other figures went but kept them put away. That was the only difference in him. Each day he got up as usual and went to the stables to take the horses out. They snorted and shook their heads as they came out from the stalls into the yard and he stroked their necks. The flies gathered at the moist edges of their eyes. One moment followed another. Life was only an indefinitely continuing series of separated events.
The emptiness deepened with the passage of time. He made drawings of hollow rooms. He drew all the rooms that he remembered inside the house, which he did not enter any more, stripped of all their things, all the pictures and curtains and furniture, with only the positions of stoves and doors and the number of windows to distinguish them one from another.
Safta went away for a period and then she came back. She looked hollow to him like the house. It was November, a bleak grey autumn. She rose early in the mornings to ride and each day he saddled the horse fo
r her. The leaves and the colour had almost gone from the land, and she came each morning when it was barely light and took the horse and rode for a long time alone. There was mist most of those mornings. She disappeared into the mist quickly and there was no telling in which direction she went. Some days the mist had cleared by the time she returned. On others the mist held and when she rode back into the yard it was as if she had been nowhere, only he would know that she had ridden hard by the sweat beneath the horse’s rug when he took it off.
When she left again there was nothing to distinguish that particular departure from any other. She might have been going only for a week or two. She might have reappeared any day but she never did.
Iaşi
16
In city clothes he is alien to himself. He stands like a man in a nineteenth-century photograph who has been told to be still while some mysterious event takes place, staring into the incomprehensible apparatus that is the camera.
As Adriana has brought him the various pieces of clothing he has tried them for fit but he has never worn the full rig before. Jacket, trousers, braces, shirt, even a tie. No shoes yet. He stands in socks for now with his second-hand military boots on the floor beside him. The boots have been transformed. Two days ago when she brought the shirt, Adriana brought him polish for them. She was amazed at how he went to work, brushing and spitting and rubbing. Like a proper bootblack, she said, thinking, there’s a job that he might do, not knowing about all the saddles and harnesses that he has polished in the past.
He puts out his two hands to regard them, sticking out from the cuffs of shirt and jacket. He scrutinises first the backs of them and then the palms, and his arm swivels within the rigidity of the jacket sleeve. He passes his fingers down the lapels, across the buttons, along the edges of the pockets. He moves his neck this way and that against the collar of a shirt that is, despite Adriana’s effort to find the right size, a little too big for him. He looks to the two women who have spent so much time persuading him into these things, doing up his buttons, pushing him this way and that.
‘You look fine, very fine!’ Adriana straightens his collar. She passes her fingers through his hair which was cut this morning by the barber in the yard.
His neck is bare where the hair has been cut from it and pathetically thin. When Safta looks at him she thinks of some fledgling bird caught on the ground, holding still only because it cannot fly, panic within it. Do the clothes scare him because they mean he’s going outside? Nothing she can do but move gently as she would with a bird. No way to explain how much better it is that he leaves now, as soon as he is physically able, before the authorities take notice.
He puts on his boots with fumbling fingers. Takes his packet of things – pictures, magazines, kaleidoscope as well as his worn pyjamas, wrapped up in paper and tied with string – and clutches it to his chest.
Her hands softly tell him, it’s all right, we’re coming with you.
They leave by the main entrance. He is not conspicuous because the street is busy and there are others shambling and preoccupied like himself.
Adriana has just one room in an old villa but it is on the first floor and the proportions are generous. The door is wide and the ceiling is high. The room is big enough to be divided into two with a screen that gives a tolerable amount of privacy: a separate narrow space for him with a window looking out at the back, her bed in a corner of the main area. There is even a balcony with a heavy iron railing where they might sit out if it were not so crammed with plants.
For one person alone it is a palace. But that was because she lied and said that her son was living with her – though it wasn’t quite a lie, she told herself when she filled out the form, it was only a question of time; and meanwhile there is room for this young man who must be the same age as her son and to whom she has lent his name. For now she will let the neighbours think that is who he is. It will be easiest that way. The few of them who have entered the room may have seen Ioan’s picture where it hangs on the wall: a photograph taken before he went to the war, standing straight in his new uniform with his rifle held at ease to the ground. The image is not sharp. The uniform shows up more clearly than the man. It would not stretch the imagination too far to believe that this is the soldier returned. His face – all of him – is much thinner, certainly, but that is true of so many when they return. Sometimes after they have been years in Russia their families even do not recognise them.
It is normally twenty minutes’ walk from the hospital, but far longer the way they choose to go. They could take a tram but they sense that he is not yet ready for trams. Better to walk. The street is so crowded that even that becomes an ordeal for him, his nervousness visible in his eyes, in his fingers clutching the packet, and in the erratic way he moves, shuffling forward, stopping, side-stepping passers-by. As soon as they can they turn off into side streets and there his pace slows and he drops behind, walking evenly but close to the walls. They go uphill a long way. In many places they pass scars from the fighting. Where they come to a place that was bombed, where there is no house but a great hole in the ground, he stalls.
Safta goes back, takes his arm and walks him on.
The villa is high on the hill in an old bourgeois district. It is a pleasant late-nineteenth-century building of muddied yellow ochre with a tin-roofed turret to one side. There is an ornate porch with stone pillars, double doors with stained-glass lights above them, a dim vestibule, stairs to her landing. He clutches his packet close to his chest and reaches out his other hand to touch the carved pillars, the door, the railing of the staircase. The villa conveys a sense of the past, history and home, even if he has never been there before. Of lives lived privately, interior space. These are things that he has not known in a long time. In the room they come to there is the smell of old furnishings well kept. There is light falling through windows on two sides, a green garden light though they are on the first floor because of the plants on the balcony and because of the trees beyond the other window beneath which his bed is placed. He touches the soft red fabric with which the bed is covered, looks out of the window where the bulbous copper roof of a church belfry shows between the trees.
‘It’s a fine room.’ It is the best place Safta has seen since she came to Iaşi.
‘I was lucky.’ Adriana shuts the door behind them. ‘They gave me this place because my house was bombed.’ When she first got here she knew that she was lucky just to have a door, let alone the space beyond it.
In the reallocation of properties that followed the Communist takeover, the first floor of this villa, like the floors above and below, was roughly divided into three separate habitations. One was allocated to Adriana and her son. The room beside it, which is the biggest, was given to a refugee family from Bessarabia. The third room was retained by the Milescus, the elderly couple who had until then owned the entire house. Adriana has not been inside the other rooms but she has been into this one, soon after she first came there. It is an awkward room, long and narrow and running into the rounded turret space, and yet Irina Milescu said that it was her favourite. It was the room in which her daughters had slept. It had seemed spacious in those days, with just the two beds and an armoire and the curved space open at the end. Now it is crowded like a bric-a-brac shop with everything that was of greatest actual or sentimental value that the family had owned: armoires and chairs pushed one against the other; a chaise longue covered in burgundy damask; an inlaid oval table; an upright piano; lace-edged cloths on top of every polished surface, barely visible beneath the clutter of Viennese china and Hungarian jugs, lamps and candlesticks and stacks of books and photographs; and on the walls pictures stuck side by side like stamps in an album. Irina and her husband Liviu sleep in a heavy wooden bed at one end of the room and at the other they carry on a vestige of the old life. They see friends from that time and the samovar is put to boil and there are card parties at the round table in the turret.
A few pieces of their furniture still occupy the
other rooms though now and again Irina diffidently takes something back that she can sell. Not from the Bessarabians – the sort of people they are, she says to her husband, so rough and rowdy, she simply wouldn’t have the nerve – but from Adriana or the other tenants. There had been a large gilt mirror above the chest of drawers in Adriana’s room. Irina had not known when she asked for it that Adriana would be pleased to see it go. Adriana had barely ever seen herself in a mirror of such a size before and had found it disconcerting to live alone that way with her own reflection, catching herself at all angles and unprepared: a fat old woman like a stranger passing by in her own room.
‘Take it away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be less lonely without it.’
The two women removed it from the wall, gingerly, wondering if it would have been better to have called a man to help, and rested it on the floor.
‘But your son’s coming. You won’t be alone then.’
‘Yes,’ Adriana had said. Her son would be coming soon.
Irina looked at the photograph that hung on the wall beside the pale space where the mirror had been. ‘He looks a fine boy.’
‘Ah, but that was some years ago. He’s had a hard time of it since then.’
Irina behind the wall hears Safta go and then after what seems a polite interval she knocks at the apartment. She has a cake to welcome the young man. It is the sort of act of neighbourliness that would have been commonplace in the old days but in these changed times it seems an eccentric act. As she has no oven she had had her husband buy the cake at the patisserie by the Piaţa Unirii, and she is glad to see that it is a good one, fresher than usual. He eats greedily and takes a second piece, eats every crumb that falls on to his plate.
Painter of Silence Page 10
