Adriana finds them comical, alive. She begins to call them his friends. There seem to be so few flesh-and-blood friends about these days.
Things begin to accumulate in his corner: the papers and scraps, drawings and materials that he might draw on, objects that have caught his eye, more matchboxes to add to the collection that he began at the hospital. All of these things are neatly sorted and stacked, some of the stacks tied with string, so that she thinks that his end of the room is beginning to resemble the back of a shop or the corner of a post office. Her own possessions in her part of the room are few. She does not acquire anything any more for herself. She lives in this place as if it is no more than a temporary measure: as if she is here only for a time, until things change and her real son comes home, and this room and this silent young man are only temporary and nothing really to do with her, but hers only by chance, for the time being. Nothing is hers but the plants on the balcony that she tends with such care. But all she has done is put in the seeds and water them. Plants are things that grow of themselves.
There was a period just after her house was destroyed when she had almost nothing and stopped nowhere at all but kept constantly on the move. She had a few things in a case that she carried with her and she slept now in one place, now in another. She had watched the battle from the forest. The civilians who had not been evacuated had fled to the forest, though the forest itself was also a scene of fighting. They saw bombardment, fires, shelling. For as long as the battle went on the city was lost in smoke and dust. And when the battle was over the dust did not settle. The late summer was dry, and every wind and movement stirred it. The civilians went back down. There were sweet and rotten smells in the rubble and sights that made her retch, so that the dust that swept over them seemed almost a mercy. She tied her headscarf about her mouth and picked through the half-ruin of her home. A whole wall was gone from it but many things were preserved in the places where they had always been, not indoors now but out in the dust-clogged open air. Beneath the bed quite undamaged was the brown suitcase which was the only suitcase the family had ever owned. Into this she put whatever first came to hand: pieces of clothing, cutlery, photographs. In those early days this was all she had. Then some time later she went back with a handcart she had borrowed and loaded it with more. She took her own clothes and her husband’s and Ioan’s too, and though she shook them and went to the river and washed them the dust and the war smell hung about for many months, so much so that she came to wonder if it was her mind that was impregnated and not the cloth. She washed the clothes again, smoothed her palms over them when they were folded. If laundering was all the action she could take, then she would take it. As for the rest, she lit her candles in the church and left it all to God or fate.
After a time her husband came back from the army and found her but she lit the candles again in the church as if he had never appeared. He was changed. He had no words for her nor she for him. He was not the answer to any prayer. There was no place for them to live at first but only a makeshift shelter. He seemed to blame her for this and he drank. There had always been times when he drank but now he seemed shut away in his drinking. Sometimes he came to her for impersonal sex and now and then he hit her. She could not recall at what point, whether it was cause or result of this, she no longer felt any connection to him. There was no anger in her, or love or hatred, but only disconnection. It seemed an oddity that they had once shared a son. And he would not hear her speak of Ioan. He said that he knew how it had been in Russia and that it was a waste of time to wait for him or to pretend that they were a family any more. Then he took a job with the railways. He was rebuilding lines and so he went where the lines went and worked there and lived where he worked. When the room in this house came through, she moved her clothes into it in the brown suitcase, and she moved Ioan’s, but she did not take the few of her husband’s clothes that he had left behind. She did not think long about the decision but merely acted as the moment prompted.
When the mute came to the hospital, all that too just came about. He needed a name so she gave him one. She had clothes so she dressed him. She had space so she took him in. She was a middle-aged woman living on her own with a few bundles of possessions and there was room in her still to be a mother. Simply having him around has filled a part of that void. When she comes in he is there like a child home from school, waiting to show her the drawings of the day. She has pinned these up as she would those of a child, on the wall at the head of his bed.
‘Well done,’ she says at each she sees. ‘That’s good, very good.’
She does not know how much effort it took him to begin his drawing. How long he had sat poised before the first scrap of paper, seated before the table with his back to the balcony and the sunlight, doing nothing morning after morning, until he put down the pencil and took up his scissors and found it easier to cut than to draw. How he would go back the next morning and lay out another piece of waste paper – at first he took only waste paper, never the clean white pages they had given him – some piece of brown paper or wrapping or a torn envelope, smoothing it where it was crumpled, taking up the sharpened pencil again, fighting what had become a deep and habitual resistance against making his mark, breaking through the shells of himself until at last they cracked, one through to another, lightly as eggshells, and how he then began, tentatively at first as if drawing on eggshell, the shadow of his hand moving on the paper beside the lines as he made them.
The first drawing was tiny, made on a scrap of brown paper no bigger than a cigarette packet. On it he drew his bed in the corner against the window, the rectangle of the window and the panes across it, then the details, the lines of floorboards, the floral wisps of Irina’s once-fashionable wallpaper, his pillow on the bed. Though they had given him colours he made the picture entirely in pencil, shading it until the floor was glossy and the pencil was worn down and his fingers were blackened with graphite. When the picture was done to his satisfaction, shaded dark, so small that it fitted into the palm of his hand, he folded it down to the size of a postage stamp and put it aside, then he began on a different corner of the room, until he had all four corners of the room folded together in his pocket. This miniature representation of his refuge he kept to himself like an amulet for safety. Only then did he begin again, on larger scraps but still not touching the sketchbook, and these he allowed himself to show her.
The subjects in them are once more the pieces of the room: his own bed, her bed and the doors open to the balcony, the table at which they eat, a chair pushed flat to the wall. They are repeated and sometimes they are coloured, and sometimes the wallpaper designs develop and change themselves into other shapes. They seem to her like a child’s pictures at first, but they are far cleverer drawings than a child would make. He has done one on a folded strip of paper which opens to reveal the room and its reverse like its own reflection, like sky and trees looking down on themselves in a lake. It is so perfect that it seems to her like a kind of conjuring.
‘See this.’
She shows his pictures to Safta when she comes. She is proud like a young mother expecting a visitor to express amazement at every simple standard step in her child’s progress. There is the reversing image, and another picture that was made at night, when she was on a night duty at the hospital, of the room and the long window before the balcony, and the rest of the room perfectly reflected in the window. Whenever she is at work, she says, he is doing these drawings. Every time she comes back there are more drawings.
‘He’s doing drawings now.’ Safta is careful to say ‘now’, not ‘again’, though that is the word that comes to her lips. She is so happy to see him drawing again.
‘You always thought he might be able to draw, even in the hospital when he first came.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’
There is a series of patterns he has made, the first in pencil and then others in colour. The patterns, like the reversing rooms, are made from folds and reflections, a pattern an
d its mirror image contained within a lozenge shape and the same lozenge repeated four or six or eight or twelve times in a circle, fanning out from the centre like the petals of a flower.
‘I looked at them a while and thought they were like something but could not think what it was. And then I understood. Do you see what they are?’
‘They’re kaleidoscope pictures.’ Safta sees it quick as a flash.
‘Why then, have you seen such things before?’
Then there is a little book that he has made and stitched that is full of words. Some of the words are no more than jumbled letters and others are words taken whole and at random and copied from print: the title Scânteia as it appears on the newspaper masthead, the long word internaţionale spread across two pages, chibrituri, which is a favourite word as it printed on all the matchboxes.
‘Does he draw anything else?’
‘Only this room. Only what is before him, here, now. Or sometimes, if he has been out, the street, a shop or something, and he does it as accurately as if it is still before his eyes.’
He goes in and out as they talk about him, carrying water for the plants on the balcony. He crosses the space between the two women as if they were not there. His deafness gives him this ability, that when some task occupies him it holds his attention completely so that for its duration the rest of the world ceases to exist. So he brings up buckets from the tap downstairs and crosses the room with them as if he were in an empty yard. It is a job that he performs daily, and it is a measure of his increasing strength that he can carry the buckets full now, so full sometimes that the water slops if he walks too fast and Adriana must correct him. When he first began he was exhausted after a single trip with half the quantity of water.
‘I thought there might be something he could tell us. That he might draw where he has been, so that we could know what has happened to him.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t think about it.’
‘Of course he thinks. Everybody thinks, don’t they? How could he be different?’
‘He draws only real things.’
‘He could remember real things.’
‘Perhaps it hurts to remember.’
She tells Safta about the nights. She would think he was getting much better if it were not for the nights. He goes to sleep but wakes in the small hours. She knows this because she does not sleep so much herself nowadays. She hears him thrashing around and whimpering in his sleep, and then the thrashing stops and there is an intensity in the air in the room as if he is sharply awake. She can feel his thinking reaching out there in the blackness like ripples passing through water, as if the two of them are held in a black tank of water. Once he is awake the movements in his bed become more deliberate, and then cease altogether. She can imagine that he has arranged and straightened himself beneath the bedding and is lying on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, only the ceiling is unseen and there are other, unimaginable, images passing through him. She herself goes to sleep again, deep under the water; often she sleeps her deepest, most reviving sleep between five and six in the morning when the blackest time of the night is over. She does not know if he also manages to sleep then. In the mornings he is very pale. Only gradually, as the day progresses, does he pick up colour. When she is home in the daytime she sometimes finds him napping, curled on his side on the bed beneath the window, even in the middle of the day when the sunlight falls bright across him and she must reach over and draw the curtain above his head.
Safta will take him to the park this Saturday as every other.
‘I think he likes it there more than anywhere,’ she says. ‘He likes the trees and all the green. There’s nothing else in this city that he would like.’
‘If they showed the sort of films they used to show, he could come with me to the cinema. I do miss those films we used to see. Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Roberta, Top Hat, Flying Down to Rio. He’d love all the dancing. Or those musicals where the dancers make patterns like kaleidoscopes. Do you remember? No, I suppose you’re too young. You weren’t here in Iaşi then, you didn’t know the old Trianon as it used to be.’
19
In the park Safta takes out a book to read. She will read it here and not at the nurses’ hostel because the book is in French. To be seen reading French would set her apart. Even here she takes care to keep the cover flat on her knees.
This morning she went to visit the Milescus. They gave her coffee – no more than what goes for coffee nowadays, but the cups were fine and patterned with roses. She drank the coffee and made polite conversation in the cramped gentility of their room. They had pictures of their daughters in silver frames. Pretty girls; the pictures taken when they were about the age she was now, she thought, though by the look of them that must have been some years ago. She complimented Irina Milescu on her girls. They look like their mother, she said, and realised as she spoke what had not occurred to her before: that the faded Irina with her too-red hair must once have been quite a beauty. Irina picked up the photographs and handed them to Safta so that she might look at them more closely. The photographs were taken at a studio in Bucharest, softly lit so that the faces glowed. Nadia and Danuta, fashionable girls of the early ’40s with restrained smiles and delicate features, long-necked, elegantly coiffed and made up. The likeness in them so clear that she asked if they were twins. Not twins, their mother said, but so close. Only a year apart. Irina took the pictures back and seemed not to notice how she clasped them to her as she talked. They had been such clever girls, she said, both of them, and so close in age. They had gone to Bucharest together. Such good jobs they had had. Such modern girls. Such a future there might have been for them. If only. Her shrug was eloquent.
‘You know where they are at least?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Liviu. ‘They get the parcels we send them.’
Irina put the photos down. ‘They should have become nurses like you did.’
‘That wasn’t why I became a nurse.’
‘You were lucky then.’
Safta looked for another subject that had fewer dangers attached. She asked about the books. There were many books in the room, a bookcase along one wall, further stacks piled up beneath the windows. There were historical works and there were novels, in French and German as well as Romanian. Liviu’s books, she thought, not Irina’s, and their daughters’. Borrow one, Liviu said. She chose something in French because she had not used her French in such a long time. She has never read Madame Bovary though she has always meant to. The book has Danuta’s name on the flyleaf. She’s written in the margins so she must have studied it.
She cannot concentrate, trying to read it here in the park. It is so very foreign. Not only the language. She has little difficulty with the language. That comes back to her easily. The problem is with the book, all that it is concerned with. The words flow on and she understands their meaning but they are foreign to her all the same.
In ’47 when it was still just possible she had gone to apply for an exit visa. At the last minute she turned away. She looked down the street where she was, some long stone street in Bucharest, and saw the ordinariness of the crowd and saw that she was one of them. Shabby and beaten like them but this was where she belonged. Her purpose here, speaking this language. And there was someone at that time who she thought might love her, who she thought she might love. Here, not there. But the purpose vanished. They were all of them disempowered, powerless even to give meaning to themselves.
She looks up to the forested horizon beyond the city. A vague horizon, its colour neither green nor purple, its distance unknown, only she knows that there are further horizons beyond it.
‘What do you think, Tinu? Is it really so different over there?’
Augustin sits beside her on the bench doing a drawing.
‘Do you know that there are other places beside this one, existing now? I suppose you must. That there are other lives, all going on at the same time.’
He
is using a sketchbook he has made for himself by stitching loose sheets of paper together and wrapping them about with a piece of canvas. He prefers this home-made pad to the one she bought him in the shop. His pencil presses on to the paper. His fingertips are stained with graphite.
He seems unmoving, fixed always in the present moment. And yet his drawings begin to move outside it.
She watches a picture form. Madame Bovary lies open on her lap but her eyes are on his picture. Only someone who knows his work already would understand that he is drawing figures. Figures on a road: black rectangles one beside the other like a row of ill-fitting teeth. But the landscape behind them is realistic, and also what are clearly carts beside them on the road. Some of the carts are pulled by horses, some by oxen, big boxy beasts with crescent horns. The loads on the carts are like hedgehogs, stuck about with things. He draws the outlines first and then goes back and puts in the detail and the things become recognisable as chair legs, bed frames, chickens, pigs. Is it for himself he is making this picture or is it a story that he is telling?
20
He draws the rectangles, the road, the carts. With the side of his pencil he makes the smooth grey line of the hill down which they have come. Far away on top of this he outlines small sharp black shapes that may be more people and carts. Then that picture is full and he turns the page and begins another. It would appear that this second picture is not improvised as the one before. There is a sense of composition in the positioning of all the elements – the horizon, the big carts in the foreground, the road – as if he has the entire picture in mind from the start. There is space in the centre of this picture where there was not in the last one for a bridge, raised a little out of the perspective so that all of its piers and spans are clearly visible. Beneath the bridge, a river. At this stage the picture is an accurate representation of a recognisable place; but he goes on drawing. Some whim intervenes.
Painter of Silence Page 12
