What an odd young man he is, she tells Liviu later.
‘My dear, he just sat on the bed beneath the window with the plate on his knees and ate the cake and stared. He’s little and thin as a rake, not like his mother at all, with these eyes that seem to see through you. He didn’t speak a word all the time I was there.’
He might have been shell-shocked, says Liviu, who fought in the first war and saw the horrors of Mărăşeşti. He remembers how it took some men, how he heard about some of them years afterwards, how they never recovered. Something had died inside them even though their bodies survived. Or then again, it might have been his experiences after. What those Russians did to him.
Liviu and Irina’s children are both girls. At one time this was a disappointment to them, that there was no son, but when the war came they were thankful. Daughters did not have to fight in Russia. Whatever has happened to them since, that they were spared at least.
17
The first day he spends there Augustin does nothing but look about him. He gets dressed into his shirt and trousers, and then he sits motionless on the bed taking things in. He turns to rest his elbows on the windowsill and look outside. The long leaves of the chestnut tree before the window waver in the wind, otherwise everything is enormously still. Where the leaves thin out he can see the belfry, and pieces of the city down the hillside; roofs, other churches and treetops. He walks about the room. There is not much in it. Adriana had no more than a case with her when she came, which is put away now above the wardrobe, and the furniture is only what the Milescus have left her. He looks at the pale rectangle of wallpaper where the mirror had hung. On the chest of drawers beneath, propped against the wall, are a few cheap printed icons like postcards of saints. He examines each one and knows that he has seen some of the faces before. Then there is Ioan’s photograph hanging on the wall. A soldier like many others but this one he does not know. He takes this photograph down and stares at it for a long time before he puts it back. Then he returns to his position on the bed. When Adriana gets home from the hospital there is no sign that anything has happened in the room since the moment she left that morning. Not a thing appears to have been changed or moved except that the lunch she had put out for him is gone and the plate also, cleaned and put away.
The second day he opens his packet of papers and magazines. For hours he occupies himself with unfolding, refolding, sorting its contents: pictures of things or people here, cut-out words there, card and blank pages somewhere else. Adriana comes back from work to see the evidence of systematic activity in the neat piles in the corner beside his bed. Good, she thinks, he is settling in. And he has rooted about and helped himself to whatever things he wants: scissors, needles, string, thread. In the days that follow she slowly gets the sense that every drawer and cupboard in the room has been gone through minutely in her absence, that each one of her few things has been moved, just so far, and put back infinitesimally out of place. It makes her a little uneasy to realise that in his wordlessness there will be no boundaries to her privacy. If he does not hear, he will see and remember more than any hearing man.
The one thing he lacks for his purpose is glue. He mimes to her what he needs. She gives him flour and water from which to mix a paste, sees that he knows already how to do it.
He begins by making a figure. He makes it the way he has always made figures, from a simple rectangle of card. This first figure he makes in Adriana’s room is a soldier. He cuts out the shape from the soft grey cover of an old notebook, draws on to it a square head with a cap, buttons and boots. He adds a rifle that is actually a long splinter of wood. Because his figure has no arms the rifle cannot be held out to the side as in the photograph of Adriana’s son but instead it must be stuck down the centre dividing the figure in half.
When the glue is set he stands the figure on the chest of drawers beside the icons.
Adriana doesn’t know what to make of it. It is like a drawing made by a child except that it has no face. And is it meant to refer to her son? The young man sits mutely on his bed, arms crossed, regarding her. The soldier seems like a third presence in the room.
The next figure he makes is a more willowy shape. She is sure he means it to depict Irina Milescu. It is dressed in a piece of mint-coloured tissue that is just the colour of the silk dress Irina wore that time she came to meet him. And on its head he has frayed and massed pieces of red wool. This one makes her laugh.
He sees pieces of Irina through the open door, that hair of unreal auburn, her dainty shoes, the fabric of some floating dress. Adriana’s bulk blocks the rest of her from view.
‘Domnul – Citizen – Milescu and I don’t need so much, the age we’ve got to. I thought you might give this to your boy.’ And there is cake again or some small piece of meat left over from their ration.
One day she comes with a pan of soup, steaming hot so that Adriana has to let her in.
‘There’s oxtail in it. You’ll have to feed him up. Get him back to what he was.’
Her eyes take in the room: the photograph on the wall, the childish figures propped up beneath it, the young man who made them sitting at the table among his pieces of paper. They have to push the papers aside to put the soup down.
‘We’re always here, you know. If we can do anything to help, when you’re at work or if you go out sometime.’
‘That’s very good of you but I’m fine. Ioan’s fine. He can look after himself, really he can.’
‘If you have second thoughts. In an emergency . . .’ Irina hovers. She has put down the soup but finds it hard to leave, still looking about her.
After she has gone Adriana takes down the photograph that bears so little resemblance to him and puts it away in a drawer. She sees the mint-coloured figure and is uneasy. Everyone in the house until now has been careful to keep to themselves.
On the Saturday Safta comes to visit and Adriana shows her the figures. They are familiar as pieces of her past, and yet she had forgotten quite how they were made.
‘That one’s Doamna Milescu, see, and this is my son. Do you think the others are real people too? Do you think all of them could be people he knows?’
The three of them have lunch together in the room and then Adriana goes to the cinema and Safta goes out with Tinu for a walk in the park. This will become their custom in the weeks that follow, the two women sharing his care.
They enter the park beneath a massive new statue of a Soviet soldier, a towering hero of rough-hewn stone. Each time they go he will stop to admire the statue, and each time Safta will pull him on.
Where Safta lives she is never alone. She has only a bed in a hostel roughly converted from some institutional building by the hospital. A distant ceiling, grey wasted space above, bunks packed tight on the floor, open slots between them where twenty women’s privacies are exposed. It must be like that for many who inhabit this city. When they come to walk in the park they are more free, more alone, than anywhere else in their lives.
The park is full of trees. Bare ground beneath them for children to play, straight allées cut through for people to stroll. In June even the shade is green. They walk in step, the thin shambling man and the lively nurse. She talks and he looks ahead of him and his hands hang emptily at his sides. They pass the fountain, pass a clear space where some children are knocking a ball about. The ball lands at his feet and he runs with it and kicks it back askew, looking awkward as a puppet. The children are quick to see the oddity in him. They mimic him and flap their arms about and laugh.
She takes him on right to the end of the gardens where there are fewer people. There is a bench there that is set apart with a view out to the long blue hills beyond the city. They will come to this bench every week.
‘Thank God you can see out of this city. It makes such a difference, that a city should have hills about it. You know there’s somewhere else, beyond. Perhaps I wouldn’t think that if I’d grown up in the city, but I didn’t. I lived in Bucharest for some years, at the be
ginning of the war and after it. There were parks, big parks, and there were trees and flowers, but there was never a sight of hills. It was as if there was only the city and the city ran on and on and there was nothing outside it, and when it was hot in the summer – so hot and heavy and stifling it becomes there – the sense of the city pressed in and there did not seem to be any possibility of escape. Here there is always the knowledge of the hills and the forest. Perhaps one of these days I shall come for you early in the morning and we shall go to the forest. Remember how we used to go to the forest at Poiana? How well we knew it, all the paths and the hidden pools, and the places where you could climb to see out and spy on the village. You used to love it in the forest. We were secret there, just us, and you used to make signs for me, and words that I’d find written in leaves and twigs on the ground.’
She is looking ahead of herself but she doesn’t see Iaşi any more. She can almost smell the dankness of the wood. It is good to go where her memories take her. A long way from the present. She does not notice the man who is approaching until he raises his hat and greets her. It is the old man she has seen on the stairs at Adriana’s house. Perhaps it is because she has begun to think just now of Poiana that she thinks that he is like the sort of people she used to know, like the men who passed through the house when she was a child, who asked her name and patted her on the head and went on to see her grandfather and left a smell of cigar smoke behind them.
He has on an old mustard-coloured jacket, a straw hat with a black band. He introduces himself, kisses her hand. He knows her name. He says he knew her grandfather.
Is it possible then that he was one of the men who passed? He is very grey, his face lined, his moustache thin, his whole figure slight, diffident, forgettable. There would be nothing particular about him for her to remember.
She tells him how the family had left for England in ’41 while they still could. That her brothers were there already and her mother went to join them, and Constantin went with her. He is surprised that she did not go as well.
‘I was a nurse by then. I had a reason to stay. I chose to stay.’
‘Ah.’
She has spoken with boldness and no sound of regret, yet regret seems to echo in the pause that follows. It is a disembodied regret that belongs neither to speaker nor listener but only to the bareness of the history about them. She does not say that she might have gone later when her father went. There were others who managed to get out after the war was over. But Liviu Milescu will know that. He will know also about those who did not leave and were arrested. So many friends, cousins, acquaintances; people like themselves. And yet neither he nor she was arrested. That is in the echo as well.
‘And is your grandfather well, in England?’
‘The last time I heard.’
‘He probably won’t remember me, but you must give him my regards . . .’
Liviu stands with his hat held in the same hand that holds his stick and they talk for a while more before he walks on. She has accepted an invitation to visit. The idea of it seems quaint, the whole encounter like something out of the past.
‘They look a nice enough old couple to me. Adriana doesn’t trust them but I suppose that’s just because they live so close. He seems familiar, Augustin, as if I’ve met him before, though he says that couldn’t have been possible. He never came to Poiana. There were always people like him, lawyers with thin smiles and neat moustaches, coming to see grandfather, going to and fro. I feel different when I’m with people like that. They think they know who I am but I’m not that person any more, I only seem that way. I feel like an imposter or something, someone pretending to be myself. Perhaps they’ll invite me to one of their card parties now, imagine that. Should I go, do you think? He said how good it would be for them all to see a young face. They will have their friends there, the people we sometimes see going to visit them. The friends will be the same age as themselves, and they too will have known grandfather, or if they never knew him they will know of him, and they will want to meet me because I’m his granddaughter, as the person with my name that I used to be. Only I don’t have the clothes to wear. No pretty things any more, nothing for a party. And Irina has so many dresses. No, I’d better not go. Really I’d be a disappointment to them, wouldn’t I?
‘Or maybe she’d lend me one of hers, one of those pale flimsy numbers. How funny that would be.’
All the time she has been speaking she has been looking out over the trees. The distance is unusually clear this afternoon. The separate lines of the hills can be made out, one beyond another, and they are dark with forest. As she laughs she turns to him. He always sits the same way when people are about. He has sat like that all the years that she has known him. He sits upright, to attention, like a dog with pricked ears, but perhaps this is a way not just of hearing better but of sharpening all the senses, of smelling, watching, feeling vibration. He is watching her. His back is straight and his long hands are laid flat on to his knees.
‘He asked about you. How deaf you were. I said, profoundly. He said he didn’t know they took deaf mutes in the army. I said I thought it was the result of an injury. I don’t like to lie to them, but what does it matter? What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We’re all so many people, aren’t we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don’t know how anyone keeps track. There are the people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are. You, for example. You’re at least three people that I know of: Augustin from Poiana, Ioan we gave a name to in the hospital, Ioan Adriana’s son come back dumb from the war.’
He watches her face with such meticulous attention that anyone who passed would think that what she was saying was of great importance and that the man beside her on the bench was listening to every word.
‘Do you think they believe it, Adriana’s story? Do you think it matters if they believe it or not? It’s not so implausible, you know. I saw some like that, when I was in Ukraine. There were all the obvious wounded, the bloody ones, shot up and screaming, and then there were the ones who looked all right until you went to speak to them and looked into their eyes. They didn’t speak back. They didn’t even seem to see you. It was as if the outside world didn’t exist for them any more – or what was inside them was so much stronger and more vivid and horrific that everything else had just paled away. Sometimes they were only shocked or deafened and they’d come out of it after a few days or weeks. I don’t know about the others. I don’t know what happened to them, how they came back.’
He looks at all the pieces of her, her eyes, the arch of her eyebrows, the fluid lips, the ear that is revealed when she pushes back her hair, her moving hand, the movement in her face. Every feature remains as it was and yet she changes all the time. There are moments when the Safta he used to know flickers before him and then she goes away. Not for a moment is she fixed. He raises one of his hands and holds the palm of it flat before her mouth. He is asking her to stop talking. He wishes that she would be still.
She does not speak again until they start walking home. ‘You’re right. There’s no reason to speak. Speaking gets us nowhere. All these people here must have words inside their heads. Swarms of words. Words they mean and words they don’t mean and words whose meaning they don’t know. The park’s crowded now, so much fuller than it was when we came, families and children and girls out walking together and lovers and elderly couples, full of people and unspoken words. The things we could tell each other. I could tell them things that would make them cry. And how about them? There’s that man without a leg. I saw him when we came in, sitting on the ground with his back to the railing and his crutch beside him, his one leg sticking out and the stump beside it with the trouser pinned up. He’s come over this way now. What could he tell us? Look, he’s standing there ranting at the trees, shouting at the top of his voice. His words fly up into the leaves and people stroll by and pretend not to see him or hear him.
What’s he saying? Best not to know. They used to rant a lot, the soldiers when they were wounded. It was the pain, the morphine, the fear. Some of them cried for their mothers. That was all right, you could feel sorry for them then, cry a little too. But there were others who were full of hate. They spoke of killing, of wanting to kill. You had to close your ears to care for them. But you did hear it and what you heard you never forgot. I know, that was the war, and it’s not the war any more and nobody’s fighting now but there are casualties everywhere, here in the park. It’s just that you can’t see the injuries any more. You can’t see but they’re there. The wounded, the shell-shocked, the amputees missing pieces of themselves.’
18
No one comes to ask who he is or take him away. He might as well be Adriana’s son after all.
‘Do you think that he can do a job?’
‘How do we find him one, without papers?’
‘How do we find him papers?’
There is still no word from Poiana.
The figures he makes are becoming ever more ingenious. Adriana knows now what sort of materials he likes to use and brings things home for him. He likes to build the figures up in layers. He sticks card to card, wraps paper around it. If it is soft card he is working with, the glue-paste makes the surfaces melt one into the other. He knows how much paste to apply to get the texture that he wants. Then he lets the body dry, and when it is dry he might dress it. He will take a piece of brown envelope as an overcoat, wrapping it around, putting the flap diagonally across the chest as the opening and bending the edges back as lapels, using a separate strip as a belt. Or he will use a piece of cloth or newspaper, or a coloured page from a magazine, or make a blue-and-white check on a piece of plain paper and stick that beneath as a shirt.
Painter of Silence Page 11
