The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  Vera learned these details at the First of May Market. For a week, she gave up her place in line, took inferior cuts of meat and shared her produce with these servant women in order to hear their stories of the great professor. She needed to know all she could before approaching him. She knew his response to her address would be the same as the conservatory’s, and she needed an advantage. The handkerchiefs and the cheese would help, but she was unsure how she would compete with the connected wives of diplomats in these gifts. One day, she was stopped on the street outside the market by a woman name Mariana Mururescu, a cook for the well-placed family Ganea.

  “My dear lady,” Mariana said to Vera, “the answer to your problem is backgammon.”

  The wife of Stefan Ganea, deputy to the director of foreign affairs, had recently secured the help of Professor Popescu for her daughter Lutzi. Mariana Mururescu had observed Vera’s struggles at the market, overheard her questions about the great Professor and so kept her eyes open for advantage. On that very morning, Mariana had happened to pass through the side door of the house, rather than the back door on her way to the market. The side door led to the carport where the Ganeas’ government chauffeur spent his days. Responsible only for taking Ganea to work and returning him home, with the occasional out-of-town government function to attend, the chauffeur spent most days polishing the official black Mercedes sedan and the smaller, but no less black, Dacia, cleaning from them the muck and filth and dog shit of Bucharest.

  As Mariana stepped from the side door into the carport that morning, there was Popescu, seated on an overturned wooden bucket and crouched over a game of backgammon. Ganea’s chauffeur sat across from him on the third rung of a small stepladder. Neither man looked up when she entered. They were involved in a furious endgame, mesmerized by the dancing of the dice as they raced to clear their houses. Mariana stopped and watched the conclusion. Popescu won, clearing all his pieces from the board one roll ahead of the chauffeur. He laughed with happy relief at the final roll and immediately wiped his entire face with a startlingly blue cotton handkerchief. The chauffeur began resetting the board for the next game.

  “Lucky this time,” he said.

  “It’s my day,” returned Popescu, “I feel it.”

  “You’ll need more than one good day,” laughed the younger man. “The account is heavy in my favour.”

  “It will turn,” said Popescu. “It will turn. I feel it.”

  Only then did the tutor look up from the game to see Mariana standing some four feet away, watching with amused interest. He rose from the wooden bucket as quickly as his weight would allow and stood fumbling to return his handkerchief to his inside jacket pocket.

  “Ah, my dear Mariana,” he began, “you must be a friend to me and not mention this game to your employers. You know how it is with us servants. We must hang together.”

  “Professor, you lower yourself unnecessarily,” Mariana laughed. “Surely a man of your standing can choose when and how he amuses himself. And please sir, I do not tell tales on others. It pleases me to see you here, that’s all. To see you enjoying yourself so. Such passion.”

  “Yes, passion, I’m afraid with me, kind woman, it is more of an obsessive love than a fleeting passion. But you are a woman of honour, comrade. I thank you for your discretion. Consider me in your debt.”

  Mariana recounted to Vera other times when the professor’s curious obsession had revealed itself, how she had thought nothing of it but how he had struggled to conceal it from the family Ganea. Chess, not backgammon, is the game of the intelligent member of Bucharest’s elite, a game of intellect and cunning. Backgammon’s dependence on dice and chance to decide its outcome lowers it in the eyes of the powerful. As well, chess showed one’s connection to high Russian culture while backgammon told of Romania’s long and antagonistic relationship with the devil Turks. Chess was played in parlours, offices and sitting rooms, while one could find backgammon being contested on street corners and the third-class sections of overnight trains.

  “He is embarrassed to be seen by important people playing this game,” Mariana explained. “It is very well for him to sit and eat and discuss music and gossip with Ganea, but when he wants to play his game, he must sneak around and sit on buckets.”

  “Is he good?”

  “An amateur. He was lucky to win when he did. I saw three mistakes when he was bearing off alone. If you are good yourself, you will have to be careful how you let him win.”

  Mariana left Vera contemplating her new understanding of the professor Valentin Popescu. Before turning in that night she had completed a new handkerchief for the powerful tutor. Strips of red and gold coloured cloth expertly sewn to a field of white linen creating a perfect miniature backgammon board. In one corner she embroidered the standard VP, and in the other a pair of dice showing 6 and 5, her own favourite opening roll.

  Two weeks later, Valentin Popescu showed displeasure on his face, and in his impatience to leave. He had been in the little apartment less than five minutes before he began looking at his pocket watch and making protestations about his schedule. Vera barely had time to make coffee before he was pacing the living room floor, working up his excuse for a hasty exit. It didn’t help his mood that he had not stopped sweating from the exertion of climbing two flights of stairs. He had never tutored a girl who did not live in a house. He was worried about walking on Titulescu Avenue after dark. He had seen many Gypsies on his way in, and the train station was so close he could hear the cries of beggar children from the sidewalk outside Vera’s building.

  Vera worked at the coffee in the kitchen, listening anxiously to make sure the tutor did not slip back outside. If he left before she could speak with him, she would surely never see him again. She read that certainty in his eyes as he came through the door, and she could hear it amplified in the grunts of displeasure that reached her from the living room.

  The apartment’s one main room barely contained him. His large frame bumped against the dining table, and he found it difficult to squeeze past the chairs set in a semicircle in front of the television. Wanting to moisten his handkerchief and wipe his face, Popescu began opening doors. There were only two options, but his luck was bad and the door he tried opened to reveal a bedroom in semi-darkness. The bed was perfectly made and framed at the head and feet by wooden bookshelves overflowing with magazines. He stepped inside and examined the shelves. Every magazine contained nothing but crossword puzzles and, picking one or two up, it seemed to Popescu that every single puzzle had been completed. Then, a voice.

  “Have you come with soup?”

  The question came from the darkest corner of the room, and it electrified him to the spot. Sweat had begun to cool on his forehead, but now it flowed again, hot and fresh. An impossibly old woman sat in a padded chair, almost obliterated by shadow but with a magazine and pencil in her hand. She was not looking at Popescu, but rather she worked with studied concentration on a crossword. She was dressed as though to go to the theatre, but her shoes were removed and placed beside the chair. Instead, she wore large red slippers, men’s slippers in fact, that appeared many sizes too large for her tiny feet. Popescu could think of no answer to her question. Instead, he stood and stared, terrified of her oldness and wishing he had not ventured onto Titulescu Avenue. Hearing no reply, the woman raised her eyes from her puzzle.

  “Ah, Monsieur, it is a pleasure. Have we met?”

  “We have not, Madame.”

  The tutor was surprised to hear perfect French from such a creature in such a place.

  “You have the look of a boy I knew once. He was a musician. He loved me desperately, but I was of course already married at the time. A friend of my son.”

  “An unfortunate man.”

  “Yes, well of course I gave myself to him, but he wanted more. Eventually he stepped beneath a train.”

  “It’s tragic.”

  He looked more closely, and there was indeed a charming face beneath her age. He tried to recall
stories of young musicians leaping onto train tracks.

  “And you have no soup for me?”

  “No Madame, I have come at the request of your daughter, Vera. I am a professor at the conservatory. She wished to speak with me on some matter.”

  “Yes, yes, I know it.”

  The woman pulled herself very slowly forward on the chair. Popescu crossed the room in two steps and bent to lend his arm. The old woman leaned lightly on his elbow and gently levered herself across to the bed.

  “I am 94 years old. I had my first lover in the last century and my last lover at the midpoint of this century. Now my son’s wife brings me soup and helps me use the bathroom. If I could, maybe I also would step beneath a train.”

  “You are still very beautiful, Madame.”

  “Yes, I am. Of course.”

  Vera came to the door and, her hand on a sweaty elbow, pulled the tutor back into the living room. Then she carried a tray with soup and coffee into the bedroom and placed it on top of the bookshelf closest to the bed. On her way back out, she shut the door.

  “She will sleep after she eats. I am sorry if she disturbed you. Sometimes she forgets where she is.”

  On the dining table Vera had laid out a coffee tray with fresh bread and a small assortment of goat and sheep cheeses. Behind the table, on the wall, hung a handmade backgammon board. Vera’s husband Serban had made it for himself out of scrap wood and the cedar wrappings of Cuban cigars. While guiding Cuban diplomats around the northern monasteries, Serban had collected the wrappings one by one when they dropped to the floor after dinner. Back in Bucharest, he had sliced twenty-four of them into backgammon spikes and glued them to a board. The effect was completed with stains and finishes he borrowed from a local artisan. He then hand-carved each of the pieces and the two dice from a willow branch. Popescu stared at the board as he ate his meal. Vera smiled at him.

  They played each evening for two hours. Vera let him win many games, but not all of them, and she gradually raised the level of her game so that his wins took more out of him. The challenge was intoxicating to both of them. He listened to Andrea play her violin, but only incidentally as she practised on the balcony or in her great-grandmother’s bedroom. The lure of the game was so powerful that Vera felt no need to dissemble her motives. She told the tutor on the first evening that she wanted his help to get Andrea into the conservatory. She told him this and then she beat him ruthlessly in a quick game. He accepted the job, and she beat him a second straight time. Then she eased up a bit and let him scrape out his share of wins. The first night ended in a tie. Before he left, she presented him with the red and gold backgammon handkerchief. Popescu could not contain his delight with the object and he immediately dug a shiny centime from his pocket to pay for it. Andrea was sent to walk him back to the embassy district. There were two months remaining until the next admissions audition.

  The money Vera had hidden away in her cushions disappeared. Each new week meant fresh cheeses from the countryside and a new handkerchief to create. Popescu would assign Andrea several pieces to learn over the course of each week and on Thursday evenings she would present a small concert in the living room while her grandmother and the tutor wrestled with the dice on the handmade wooden board. Serban returned from the north for two weeks. Popescu made him nervous, and when he was nervous he liked to drink ţuică. And so, together, Vera and Serban discovered another of the great tutor’s passions. Serban had arrived back in Bucharest with four bottles of the homemade plum brandy, gifts from farmers with whom he’d billeted tourists. He returned to the north with four empty bottles.

  Unfortunately, when he drank, Popescu became lazy at the game, and Vera was forced to work harder and be trickier in her concessions. With her husband home, Vera could not help but win much more than she lost. Strangely, it only made Popescu more determined to continue the tournament. Vera happily let her cushion money turn to cheese and disappear down the tutor’s throat. When she saw Mariana in the morning, the two women laughed and squeezed each other’s hands for luck. Each night, Vera worked the board in intense concentration. Each night, Popescu felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough victory. Each night, Andrea practised or played, and then walked her tutor safely through the empty streets.

  A little more than one week from the audition, Vera awoke in the darkness of morning to the sound of her granddaughter crying. Normally, Andrea slept with her on the daybed in the living room, the two of them pressed together for warmth. Andrea’s sobs were quiet, muted because they came from the old woman’s bedroom. It was a sound Vera had long expected to hear from that room, and they woke her immediately.

  “How will I tell Serban?” she wondered.

  But when she opened the bedroom door, Andrea lay on the bed, and her great-grandmother, far from dead, sat beside her, rubbing a hand between her shoulder blades.

  “It is the oldest story,” the old woman said, not bothering to look up at her daughter-in-law.

  “He loves her, but she doesn’t love him. But he is the man, so she loves him anyway. The oldest of stories. I’ve lived it many times myself.”

  Vera wept on Mariana’s shoulders outside the market. After she heard the little that Andrea had told Vera, Mariana used her extensive servant’s network to check the story. It was true. The great tutor loved handkerchiefs, and cheese. He had a passion for liquor and an obsession with an ancient game. But above all he loved his students. Popescu had slept with almost every young girl he helped into the conservatory, even the homely Lutzi Ganea. For the most part, the girls’ parents remained unaware of the affair, but in several instances mothers willingly whored their daughters to the influential professor for the prospect of a spot in the academy and a good marriage.

  The trysts had begun on the tutor’s walks back from Vera’s apartment. Andrea walked beside him, her arm through his, as was the custom when men and women walked together on the street. When he kissed her the first time, she had wanted to run, but was terrified of destroying all her grandmother’s hard work on her behalf. Over the weeks the kisses turned more passionate. Once he managed to talk Andrea into the park on the edge of Kisselef Boulevard. There, in the shadow of Stalin’s great stone statue, the fat tutor had reached beneath her blouse and squeezed her breasts. He slipped a hand under her skirt and struggled with her underwear, and would certainly have raped her, but he was frightened by the voices of a Gypsy family clopping along the boulevard on their horse-drawn cart.

  Convinced Popescu would abandon her at the audition if she didn’t cooperate, Andrea let the affair continue. Every night her grandmother would work hard to disguise her overwhelming superiority at backgammon and every night Andrea would work to hide her disgust and fear. She kissed the professor willingly at the end of their walks, and even pretended to enjoy it, but made excuses for not going into the park. He made her promise she would find time for them to be alone indoors. She managed for a while to put obstacles in the way of such a meeting, but was running out of time and excuses. If she did not sleep with him before the audition, it was certain she would not be accepted, and her grandmother would die from disappointment. It was at this point that Andrea lay awake all night worrying and finally collapsed into tears on her great-grandmother’s bed. The old woman’s affairs were family legends, but her advice to Andrea had been too cruel for her to imagine.

  “If accepting his penis gets you what you need, then accept his penis. There are worse things than a penis. Though he is not the best looking young man I’ve ever seen.”

  Vera excused herself from meeting with Popescu for two nights. On both nights, she and her granddaughter sat together in the living room and talked. Andrea played for her the pieces that she was practising for the audition. Her music was perfect, but they both knew, without the tutor’s help, it would not make a difference how well she played. For the first time, Vera told stories about her time in prison. She showed Andrea letters and newspaper clippings she had kept hidden away in the backs of cupboards for t
hirty years.

  When Popescu was admitted back into Vera’s apartment, there were four days remaining until the audition. Vera brought him some dinner at the table and sat down opposite him. Andrea listened from the bedroom.

  “It is only right that you have my granddaughter,” she began.

  Popescu swallowed slowly and placed his cutlery on the tabletop.

  “I don’t like it,” Vera continued. “She is just a young girl and you must know she is not in love with you.”

  “Madame, you mistake me.”

  He made a small gesture of protest, but felt little need to be convincing. He’d been in similar situations before. He usually held all the power, and even more so on Titulescu Avenue.

  “As I said, I don’t like it. But, like you, I am aware of your rights in this situation. How does one put a price on a good start in life? Me, I’ve worked since Andrea was born, since before she was born, to help her get a good start in life. I have saved many, many dollars, American dollars, to make this happen. But you set the price, and that is your right.”

  The tutor resumed his meal with a smile.

  “That is my right,” he said. “I have also worked very hard, and I deserve my compensations. There has never been a complaint, not even from newlywed husbands. My price is reasonable for what is offered.”

  “It is reasonable, I agree. But I won’t pay it. I have talked with Andrea for two nights. We have talked it in both directions. We have looked at all the details of this situation. She is willing to pay the price, but I am not willing to have her pay it. If it were her decision, you would have your way tonight, in this very apartment, but a grandmother has one right in the end, and that is the right of final decision in matters like this.”