I have seen only a single cloudy photograph of Ciprian when he first arrived in Bucharest, but I can easily picture him on the day before the entrance exam, washing his face in the fountain and taking the short walk up to the Institute to solve the mathematical problems he’d been practicing, first as the village’s model pupil and later as the provincial high school’s mathematics prodigy. And I can picture him several weeks later, too, sauntering across the university square, bursting with confidence and nerves, to read his name on the list of those admitted to the course.
Two months later, when lectures began, he said goodbye to Cișmigiu Gardens and took up living at the university. This was Ciprian’s golden age, listening to the professors sketch the illustrious history of mathematics in the lecture halls, going days without talking to anyone other than the staff at the Institute’s library. Some days brimmed with number theory, others with combinatorics. In the breaks between lectures he discussed algebra or probability theory with his classmates, and when assignments were due he sat up all night long helping his new friend, Paul. Ciprian spent so much time at the Institute that after the first term he knew the building better even than the ancient janitor, who had swept the halls and changed the lightbulbs longer than any of the professors could remember. He could set his watch by the moment at night when the floors creaked and groaned as the day’s warmth receded, and could tell exactly which toilet was in use just by holding his ear to the wall and listening to the water as it flushed through the pipes. He even spent his nights at the Institute. When the last few students packed up their books and the library closed, he wandered the halls looking for the darkest nooks and crannies—a deserted corridor, a forgotten office—so he could roll out his blanket for the night.
Ciprian, Paul would yell from the stairwell, so that his voice echoed in the farthest corners of the Institute. Ciprian, come on. You can’t just stay shriveling up in here.
Two, three, four times Paul would shout, receiving no answer. Only very occasionally, when his conscience was gnawing at him, would Ciprian get up and go into town with Paul. Most evenings he pretended that he couldn’t hear him, not even glancing up from his book, and Paul would grumble when they met in the break room the next day: This is your first year at university, man, it’s hubris if you’re not drinking yourself into a coma every night. I’m just saying. It’s not my fault if you end up going three winters without a summer and only getting women with the clap.
Ciprian was clearly not one of those understimulated country bumpkins who’d come to the big city to revel in the noise and the traffic and the tantalizing store windows. Most village kids his age were rushing out to wine bars, hurling themselves into an orgy of booze and cheap floozies, nights when the city blazed with light in every windowpane. But not Ana’s father. He would remember those days and nights for the rest of his life, and many years later he told his wife that all he desired was to live as he had lived during his early days in Bucharest: completely immersed in mathematics.
But who knows if that’s true?
Though I can’t say exactly how long Ciprian’s golden age lasted, by the time he’d celebrated his first New Year in Bucharest and the winter’s first storms had blanketed the city in a thick layer of snow, Ciprian had found himself crippled with responsibilities.
It didn’t happen at a single stroke, but it happened nonetheless. First came the lunch lady’s hardworking but slow-witted daughter: Ciprian tutored her three times a week, paid in cigarettes he then resold beneath the trees in Cișmigiu Gardens. Was it a relief to have some cash in his pocket? Certainly it was. It was a relief being able to buy a piece of smoked meat, to go out with Paul without having to rely on charity and freeloading and scraps from the richer students’ table. But it took up so much time! It took time teaching the lunch lady’s hardworking but slow-witted daughter even the simplest equations, and it took time standing in the park beneath the trees, waiting for customers in the cold. All of it was time he could have used at the library or sitting in the break room talking to the professors, who were always looking for excuses to dodge their wives.
Cigarettes, said Paul. Doesn’t the woman know we use money these days? Jesus, you don’t even smoke.
He was right. It wasn’t much of a deal that Ciprian had going with the lunch lady. For months he weighed the pros and cons, considering just giving up the job. But one day, as he was eating breakfast with the ancient janitor, the conversation turned to the lunch lady, who’d been widowed in her youth and lost most of her family during the war. Her only hope of a respectable old age was her daughter’s exams, which would open the door to university and a richer class of men.
This was hardly Ciprian’s problem, of course. There were thousands of stories like the lunch lady’s, and it wasn’t his job to start doling out charity to widows. One might well observe that his tutorship was worth far more than the lousy packs of cigarettes he got in return, and that he had his own family to think of. One might observe these things, and many others besides, but Ciprian had been taught that a promise was a promise, and even though strictly speaking he hadn’t promised to get the lunch lady’s daughter into university, he kept tutoring her, often so late into the night that he would wake up feeling groggy when the janitor came rattling down the hall.
Moreover, the lunch lady’s daughter was not his only responsibility. Since moving to the city, Ciprian had been surviving on the potatoes his older sister smuggled out of the family home and sent by train to Bucharest. Sacks of them would arrive each month, and it was no small risk his sister was running. He tried not to think about it, but he knew all too well that his honeymoon in Bucharest would be well and truly over when the stream of potatoes ran dry, that it would probably be sooner rather than later, and that his three sisters were eagerly awaiting a package full of coffee, nylons, and chocolate from Bucharest.
All in all, Ciprian needed a real job. A job where he was paid in cash, not cigarettes or good wishes. So when the Institute’s senior librarian—who wasn’t as stupid as he looked—remarked one day that, since Ciprian already spent more time at the library than any of the librarians, he might as well make himself useful, he jumped at the chance.
A job at the library: Ciprian’s dream. And there were other perks too, because the senior librarian—who really did look appallingly stupid, and thus had never been able to find himself a wife—had plenty of space in the apartment he’d been provided by the Institute, and he offered to rent a room to Ciprian at a very cheap rate. Cheap in monetary terms, that is: In return, Ciprian had to pay with his ears, spending hours at the kitchen table, listening to his landlord tell interminable stories about his twenty-three years as the city librarian in Timişoara, when he’d been one of the driving forces behind modernizing the library system under Gheorghiu-Dej.
And thus Ciprian came to live at the Institute. True, that’s exactly what he’d been doing since day one, but now he was living there properly, with his own bed and everything. Gathering his few possessions into his blanket, he moved into the attic room in the senior librarian’s apartment, where every evening he could watch Professor Foias sitting in his study on the other side of the alleyway, his head permanently buried in a book.
Shortly before Easter, less than eight months after moving to Bucharest, Ciprian had two jobs, a garrulous landlord, at least one good friend, and a reputation as the most talented student in his class. Was there a woman or two in the mix, perhaps? Our story is silent on that point. But one can imagine. He was, after all, a good-looking man.
In any case, things were going swimmingly for Ciprian. A country boy from Oltenia, not only was he attending lectures at the most prestigious institute in the whole country, but he was also living and working at the university, getting top marks for his assignments, and before long he was able to send home a box of treats to his family. The whole village would be kissing the icon of the Holy Mother, or whomever they were kissing in gratitude these days, crying hallelujah and thanks, our father in He
aven and so on.
But it didn’t feel all that celebratory to Ciprian. There was something nagging at him, and that something was time. At first he thought it was the winter, the short days and long shadows that the low sun cast along the boulevards, making him feel as if time were slipping away. But when spring came and the sun crept higher in the sky, the hours grew no longer. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ciprian had less and less time to devote to mathematics, and each passing week he had fewer minutes to study, solve problems, and work on proofs. Where had it gone, all that time? Soon he was doing nothing but cataloging books, tutoring the lunch lady’s daughter, selling cigarettes under the trees in Cișmigiu Gardens, and peeling potatoes as he listened to the senior librarian’s melancholy prattle. It was a paradox. Ciprian lived and worked at the Institute, but even in the village, where there were cattle to drive and firewood to chop and fields to harrow, he’d had more time for math.
Every morning it was the same old song.
Ciprian, called the senior librarian as he fried some sausages. Are you giving us a hand at the library today?
A hand, mumbled Ciprian to himself. Not a whole damn arm.
And when the summer exam results were posted, he saw it in black and white: It wasn’t just a nagging feeling—his grades were falling.
Ciprian was twenty-three and had only spent a year in Bucharest, but as the summer wore on and the Institute began preparing for the autumn term, he was already dreaming sentimental dreams of his first days in the city. The days when time had stretched out before him like the Wallachian Plain, where he’d driven cows across the fields as a boy. Or, in less vulgar terms: He dreamed of better times. Times spent with mathematics, times spent in research. Here one might well pose the famous question: So what? Our hero was living in the Romania of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Danube of Wisdom, Genius of the Carpathians—of course he dreamed of better times. Premature nostalgia seized him whenever he thought back to his early months at the Institute, to the nights curled up on his blanket, leafing through an introduction to topology. All he wanted was the freedom to gorge himself on Cantor sets, the freedom to sit in the reading room until his eyes fell shut. Freedom from the senior librarian’s tedious chatter, and from having to send home all the money he’d saved each month. That was what Ciprian dreamed of. The easy college life—bah! Each night he went to bed as far removed from the riddles and wonders of mathematics as he had been when he’d woken up that morning. Every evening he sat in the window and stared with hungry eyes at Professor Foias’s study on the other side of the alleyway—so tantalizingly close!—and at dawn, when the Băltărețul wind whistled through the cracks in the wall, he groaned in his sleep.
I imagine that Ciprian could have lived like that for many years, hard at work and dreaming of mathematics. And who knows, maybe in the end that would have been a better life. But it was not to be, for what happened next?
Love, of course. That’s what happened.
Maria Serbanescu, a girl so blonde and upright that half of Ciprian’s village fell into a swoon as he paraded her through the streets two years later. Ah, whispered the old women, recalling their own youth. Ah, trilled the girls, sitting by the river and fantasizing about life on the other side of the mountains. Ah, sighed the men, hiding in outbuildings or woodsheds, or wherever they chose to hide and sigh about her.
But first: an unfortunate event.
The senior librarian’s sister had been ill for many years when, as if that weren’t enough, her husband disappeared out of the blue. One afternoon in July he went off to buy melons at the market and—poof—he was gone. Without so much as leaving a note. At first the family thought it was one of those magical Securitate disappearances, but when the man’s lover also disappeared and her family began to receive mysterious presents from Italy, it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.
He should be executed, cursed the librarian as he packed up his things. Down on his knees, one bullet to the base of the skull, job done.
So the senior librarian took a leave of absence, traveling to Timişoara to look after his ailing sister and leaving Ciprian alone in the drafty apartment with the large but incomplete collection of German heroic sagas and the smell of black pudding in the wallpaper.
One week later the Institute hired an interim replacement. Ioan Pancu, unmarried, mid-forties, suspiciously suntanned for a librarian. People took to whispering in corners, and what they whispered was that Ioan was a good friend of Nicolae Pleşiţă, a major general in the Securitate. That would also explain how Ioan got away with rolling up in the late afternoon, unwashed and reeking of booze, incapable of any work.
This big, Ioan would say, illustrating with his hands how big her ass had been. I imagine he laughed too, the way real scumbags always laugh, wet and braying. Ciprian tried to laugh too, but was there really anything to laugh about? He crept along walls and bookcases, hiding in the farthest recesses of the stacks, doing whatever he could to keep at arm’s length from his new boss, until one sluggish summer’s afternoon, when everyone and their mother had gone to the coast or to visit family in the mountains, he could no longer dodge the issue. Ioan slammed the library door behind them, turning the key seven times.
You and me, boy, he said. We’re going to the bar.
Now, I’ve never gone for a drink with the good friend of a torture-happy security chief, but I can imagine that it’s not a pleasant experience. I can imagine that there are certain topics of conversation one might try to steer clear of, subjects that one might ignore or run away from screaming. I can also imagine Ciprian sitting in the bar, his clammy hands gripping the pint glass, uncertain whether he should laugh or cry—well, not cry, of course, obviously—but either way being well and truly scared out of his wits.
They drank a beer, then they drank a pálinka. And when they were finished, they drank another round.
You look like the sort who could do with a little fun, said Ioan, after they’d downed their third beer. That’s exactly what you look like. When did you last get any, eh?
I’m not sure, said Ciprian. It’s been a while. I don’t know—I haven’t had much time.
You fucking kidding me? No time for jazz, at your age? Now I’ve heard everything. He’s had no fucking time for a decent toot on the old horn.
Ciprian picked at the sunflower seeds spread over the tablecloth. Ioan persisted: I’ll be damned, a kid of your age. No time, you’re telling me?
Yeah, said Ciprian, forcing himself to stop playing with the seeds. Ioan smiled, his gold-topped canine glinting in the summer sunlight. You know what you should do, he said. You should become a student mentor. That’s where all the pussy is. All that tasty student ass. Mm, sweet. Ioan puckered his lips into a kiss, making that sign where you connect your thumb and index finger. A perfect circle. Bull’s-eye.
What do you reckon? he said. Want to be a mentor?
Ciprian thought it over for a moment. Thought about the senior librarian and the lunch lady and all his other obligations, about the sisters back home in his village. Then he thought about the student mentors who were often promoted to student assistants, and about the student assistants who were first in line when they were doling out research assistantships.
A mentor, said Ciprian with a laugh, giddy with beer and pálinka. Yeah, that might be fun.
And there it was: the fateful decision he would come to curse many years later as he sat, sick with grief, on a slope in the Atlas Mountains. All I ever wanted was mathematics, he would rage. But what did I get? This god-awful nightmare.
Who would have guessed that Ioan Pancu, the laziest lazybones in the history of the Institute, would be the one to heave Ciprian out of his mathematical fantasy world and into reality? No one, probably. What wasn’t so difficult to imagine, however, was the love affair that followed in the wake of his decision. I mean, how many men haven’t met their wives as mentors or tutors or advisors? It was pretty unoriginal, in all honesty. But this was how it happened: Ioan put Ciprian�
�s name on the list of student mentors, and on the first day of term he was assigned a group of first-years. Three boys and one girl, agreeable young people with wet-combed hair who scampered after him down the halls. Here’s the reading room. Here are the typewriters. Here’s the shortcut to the canteen, but watch out—Professor Marcus can’t stand noise in the corridor. This is how the elevators work, this is how you hand in assignments. Over there is the break room. They were heading across the courtyard when he saw her. Ana says that the first thing he noticed were her shoes: high-heeled, smuggled in. Then the dress: white cotton over suntanned knees. The lipstick: risqué. And last the face: delicate, with gray entitled eyes.
Excuse me, but are you a mentor? she asked.
And he nodded, because he was.
Then it’s you I’m looking for.
So. It was a perfectly normal way to meet, this first encounter. Just as the months that followed were predictable. A few parties, a cup of coffee in the courtyard. Extra help with homework over breakfast in Cișmigiu Gardens, and long walks through Uranus, Văcăreşti and other parts of Bucharest, which back then was still the Paris of the East, untouched by the Great Winter Shoemaker’s bulldozers, and which Ciprian discovered he barely knew. On paper it was Ciprian who was the mentor, but when they went walking it was Maria who showed him around. She pointed out the buildings her family had built—there’s my grandma’s home economics school, my uncle’s tile factory—and told stories about her father, who was in the air force during the war and had more than once drunk Prince Nicholas under the table. She told him about the forest her family had owned for generations. The forest that had shared the same fate as her uncle’s tile factory, nationalized by Ceaușescu.
The Invention of Ana Page 12
