Whether it was all that upper-class patter that Ciprian fell for we’ll never discover, but it was on one of those walks—while stopping to admire her uncle’s palace in Dorobanti—that he felt her hand, at least the back of it, graze his own, and realized he was in love.
In love! It wasn’t something Ciprian had tried before. In his village back home he’d had a crush on the neighbor’s curly-haired daughter, and had been sweet on the Roma girl who washed clothes in the stream. But this was different. This was the genuine article, is what it was, and Ciprian had absolutely no idea what to do. He listened with half an ear as the lunch lady’s daughter rattled off her sums, and was unable to contain his impatience when the senior librarian, now returned, launched into one of his monologues. It was suddenly completely impossible to concentrate in the reading room, and he was constantly having to get up and go into the break room or to the toilet, just on the off-chance that he might glimpse Maria.
Maria this, Maria that. Even Paul, who’d been pleased at first to see a little life in his friend’s eyes, got tired of hearing how good she was at ice skating, how much she liked chestnuts, and how fond she was of the baby blanket that her grandmother had knitted in the distant past and that she still hid underneath her pillow.
Paul, complaining: Jesus, is there anything you don’t know about this girl?
Ciprian had never known anything like it. For as long as he could remember, he’d only been interested in one thing, and that was knowledge. His whole life had been one long struggle to find time for his studies, whether he was leafing through the lexicon he’d hidden in the neighbor’s barn, sneaking Euclid’s Elements with him when he took the cows to pasture, or hiding behind the horses’ trough and reading about Archimedes’s circles. He’d been pummeled black and blue because of those books, but suddenly his interest in them had evaporated, supplanted by the woman he walked home from the Institute one late afternoon.
Goodbye, said Maria as they stood on the path beneath the cherry tree. See you tomorrow.
Yeah, okay. Goodbye.
You said that already, she laughed.
And it was at that point he lifted his hand to her chin, exactly as Paul had told him to do.
You really are very beautiful, he said.
Maria lowered her gaze. And the trouble with downcast eyes is that it’s tough to tell the difference between shyness and rejection. That sort of body language is hard to decipher, so Ciprian just stood there wavering, cupping Maria’s head in his hand like some half-witted Hamlet.
Ciprian, she whispered. Just kiss me.
According to Ana that was how it began, in the autumn of 1971. Ciprian, deeply in love as he’d never been before and never would be again. And Maria—well, the story is largely silent on the subject of her feelings. All in all, Ana spoke very little of her mother. I’d heard chapter and verse about her father, but about Maria I knew only the bare facts. She was born in Dorobanti in the early fifties, her father a successful dentist and her mother one of those orthodox women who sits in churches and chapels for hours at a time, pickling in an atmosphere of death and piety and half-burned candles. Maria Serbanescu grew up in a house with a piano and a library, on the surface a bourgeois home like any other, complete with table manners and freshly ironed shirts. But although they never talked about it, and although Maria was too young to understand the details, she could sense the spirit of the age, as they say, the revolutionary tide encroaching on the family. At night, when Maria put her ear to the wall, she could hear her father’s drunken ramblings, and when the family took the train down to the coast one summer’s day Maria caught sight through the window of her cousin, who’d disappeared under mysterious circumstances the year before.
Cousin Mircea, she shouted eagerly, waving at the disheveled man digging in the muddy canal. Mom, Dad, look! It’s Mircea, she shouted, before receiving a clip around the ear, the first and only time her mother ever laid a hand on her.
The point was not lost on Maria. The family might well be up to its neck in shit, but why should she worry about it? Nobody else seemed to. Every week the house hummed with dinner guests, people danced the Lancers in the living room, and Maria’s mother, who’d never been west of the Carpathians, switched into French at the slightest opportunity. The family was on a Titanic journey, playing until the whole godforsaken ship went down. They laughed and danced and drank, and one might be tempted to say that Maria’s childhood was one big party. A pathetic party? Certainly. But here one must remember that this was the People’s Republic of Romania, Ceaușescustan, a land where anyone could end up in a labor camp, where the president had just returned from a starving North Korea and announced that he felt inspired.
It can’t have been easy growing up in a home whose very existence was under threat. The political forecast promised wall-to-wall Ceaușescu. Did Maria sense her own vulnerability in that outlook? Of course she did. In fact, it might well explain why she threw herself so passionately into the arms of a farmer’s son like Ciprian. He couldn’t recite Eminescu, he couldn’t tell a symphony from a sonata, and all in all he was made of coarser stuff than the doctors’ sons Maria had fumbled around with during her high-school days, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want some flashy man-about-town. No, she wanted to be caressed by trembling fingers, undressed by greedy eyes, idolized so shamelessly that all thought of her family’s gloomy future was knocked out of her system.
To begin with, Ciprian was at a loss about how to handle such a woman. He was used to village-caliber girls, and here was a student who read Beckett and played the piano. But instead of sinking into love-struck indecision, he simply went all out, sending her letters and bouquets of flowers, and raving about her beauty every time they went for a walk: Your nose! Your freckles! Your cheeks! He drew portraits of her and collected enough chestnuts for her to swim in, stopped sending money home to the village even, so he could take her to restaurants and the theater, frittering away his cash on gaudy jewelry she stashed away in a drawer somewhere, and which she never in her life once wore.
But he did get something for the money, Ciprian. I don’t know whether it was the family’s entrepreneurial spirit or what, but Maria didn’t waste any time. Less than a week after their first kiss—one afternoon when Ciprian was showing her one of the Institute’s hidden basement storerooms—she pulled her panties down around her ankles and ground herself against him until her virginal blood spattered the sheets of logarithmic graph paper.
Ah yes, it was love! And everything Maria knew about love she’d learned from romance novels, or from the stories her melancholy aunt had told her. In stories like those there is always a wealthy earl or doctor, and there is also a nurse or receptionist or whatever, it doesn’t really matter—the important thing is that in stories like those they surrender themselves to love. They gorge themselves on love, guzzling it by the vulgar handful, stuffing each other with love until it’s sticking out of both ends. Maria had no intention of being outdone by romance novels, so by the time the Nativity Fast rolled around her routine was set in stone: Every morning before lectures she would come to Ciprian’s garret, lurking by the bus stop and keeping an eye on the house, then as soon as the senior librarian hurried out of the gate she would wrench open the door and fall into Ciprian’s arms.
And we’re going to get engaged? she whimpered as he threw her onto the bed. And we’re going to get married?
Yes, he gasped. Yes, yes, yes.
And we’ll have children? Two boys and a girl, she moaned between thrusts. And we’ll have a house, and it’ll be our house, and no one else can come in because it’s ours, and we’ll have a shed in the back garden, and when I’ve put the children to bed you’ll carry me there and you’ll fuck me, because it’s our shed, and nobody can come inside, because we own it, and it’s ours.
That’s how she moaned while they made love, and afterward they lay on the rickety bed and whispered stories to each other. Stories about how Ciprian had left the village and slept in the
dark corners of the Institute, living off potatoes, all so he could be her mentor. Stories about Maria, who despite her father’s pleading and begging had refused to study medicine, because she’d always known in her heart that mathematics had something in store for her, and what it had in store for her was Ciprian. They whispered about all the coincidences and the peculiar twists of fate that had brought them together.
If I hadn’t overslept that morning, said Maria, I’d never have got you as a mentor.
And if I hadn’t taken a shortcut across the courtyard, said Ciprian, I’d never have run into you.
Day after day they babbled away like that. It must have been unbearable to listen to. They lay chatting in the garret deep into the night, blithely unaware that they were echoing the state radio broadcasts playing in the background, which spun tales of its own—tales about the Genius of the Carpathians, the First Mate of the Nation, who yet again that year had secured a harvest to end all harvests, about the Helmsman of the Revolution, who’d brought electricity and progress to even the darkest recesses of the land.
They got engaged the following summer. And they were married, too, in the spring of 1973. I’ve seen photographs from back then, and I can just imagine what it was like for the newlyweds during their honeymoon and in the days thereafter. They lived in one of the recently constructed apartment blocks in Drumul Taberei, which wasn’t yet the run-down, communal-dog-infested hole it is today. No—this was the town of the future, an idealized microcosm of Ceaușescu’s Bucharest as it looked before rationing, before the gas and electricity and heat were shut off. They lived a comfortable life in the block: mathematics every day, chess club on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Sundays a plateful of pork and a walk through the park, where the benches were still free of informants and the black swans paddled around in the lake without a care in the world, in no danger of ending up as soup stock or a roast or whatever they were used for when the shit hit the fan.
Ciprian was in his fourth year at the Institute, and he’d gotten a job as a student assistant for the first-years. Even though the job didn’t pay much, he was a happy man, or he looked like a happy man: I’ve seen the photos myself, where he’s holding Maria and smiling like an idiot. Okay, so their life wasn’t grand, but neither were his roots. He had a job at the Institute, he had an apartment with a bathroom and central heating and warm water in the taps, and when he tumbled out of bed in the morning he could stand on the balcony, smell the coffee his wife was brewing in the kitchen, and stare down at the students plodding toward the university.
You’ll be late, called Maria from the kitchen. You’ll miss the bus.
Two or three times she would call before Ciprian went into the bathroom, marveling first at the miraculously warm water that cascaded down over his body, and then at the miraculously electric razor that he plugged into the 220-volt socket every day, while he whispered—and, on his bolder days, loudly proclaimed: Let us take this opportunity to remember a deceased physicist.
Ciprian had every reason to be proud, and proud he was. He was proud when he stood in front of the blackboard at the Institute, proud when he took the train home to Oltenia in the summer with a suitcase full of trade beads, proud when his alcoholic father looked the other way as he handed out stockings and chocolate to his family, friends, and neighbors. Most of all, he was proud when he woke up at night and let his fingers glide across Maria’s ribs, hips, and small, perfect buttocks. Yes, things were going very well. But as with all stories, things go well until they start going badly, and they started going badly the day Paul turned up with a job advertisement.
It was in September of 1974. Ciprian was sitting in the break room with his fellow student assistant Florin, preparing their next lesson, when Paul leaned over the table.
What’s going on, people?
History of Mathematics, said Ciprian. We’re taking the class out sailing with Democritus.
Wrong, said Paul, slapping the advertisement down on the table: You’re writing job applications.
Two open positions as research assistants, one of them for Professor Foias. It was the moment our hero had been waiting for, ever since that day at the bar with the drunken Ioan Pancu. In fact, in a way he’d been waiting for this moment ever since he arrived in Bucharest, ever since he’d read Pythagoras’s famous dictum as a boy, which he later had woven into a doormat: All Things Are Number. The time had come to reap what he had sown, to lie in the bed he had made. Ciprian was a favorite with Nicolae Popescu, the Institute’s polynomial prodigy, he was popular with his students, and a well-known figure at the Institute—why shouldn’t he be able to get the job as research assistant?
And yet. It was Paul who first brought his attention to the problem, one evening as they sat sipping at their beers and staring at a group of Pioneers who were putting up posters for one of the mass gymnastics events that the Great Winter Shoemaker had become so fond of.
Maestro, said Paul, when Ciprian at long last paused for breath during his monologue on the potential of operator theory. If you want that job at the Institute, you’ll have to join the Party. Best to get it over with, don’t you think?
The Party, said Ciprian, annoyed by the interruption. What’s that got to do with anything?
Paul glanced over his shoulder, then nodded toward the Pioneers. Get your head in the game. Have you forgotten where you live? It’s got to do with everything.
It wasn’t as if Ciprian had any objection in principle to joining the Party. He had simply never considered it. Politics wasn’t something he’d grown up with. It was something that happened in cities, a private party. He didn’t kid himself that he could understand politicians and their doublespeak, that intricate madness borne of two thousand years of marriage diplomacy and laws of succession, of the murky redrawing of borders by princely houses, of French rolls laced with hemlock and bodies broken on the wheel. And the wars—yes, the wars. Of them most of all. Politics was something he had no part in. And what difference did it make, anyway, whether it was one person or another wearing the presidential pants? In Ciprian’s eyes, not much. Make no mistake: Life in the village was hard under Ceaușescu. But life in the village had always been hard—take the dirt road, for instance. For as long as Ciprian could remember, politicians had been promising that the dirt road from the village into Târgu Jiu would be paved. But did it happen during King Mihai’s modernizations? Did it happen during Gheorghiu-Dej’s six-year plan, or Ceaușescu’s reform programs? No, it did not. The road remained just as pitted and gravelly as ever, and still is today, forty years later, despite the EU having paid for it to be paved not once, not twice, but three whole times. No, politics wasn’t Ciprian’s cup of tea, but if it could make him a research assistant at the Institute, then there was no more to be said: He’d become a Ceaușescu-ite.
Ciprian, a Party member—who would have thought it? Not Maria, that’s for sure.
Have you gone completely nuts, she shrieked. My family will wash their hands of me!
It was their first real fight. She kept it up for days, yammering on and on about the family forest Ceaușescu’s hooligans had seized, about her uncle who had slaved away his whole life only to have everything he owned snatched away from him in one fell swoop, and about her cousin Mircea who had come back from the labor camp with shattered nerves.
They only gave him flour and water! she squawked. People died of diarrhea!
After the initial bursts of fury were over, Ciprian decided to go down to the Party offices. Impatient, and convinced that Maria’s anger would soon pass, he picked up registration papers and a copy of his birth certificate. Ostensibly wanting to read up a little on the rules, he was, I think, planning to apply in secret. And that would have been an excellent solution, had Ciprian not been careless enough to leave the half-completed registration form in his briefcase.
Tsk, you say. One shouldn’t go poking through other people’s personal things.
Sure, but try telling that to a suspicious spouse. Maria
had sniffed out that registration form before you could say you’re getting warmer. Enterprising as always, she threw both briefcase and papers into a large stockpot, poured kerosene over it and set the whole thing alight, so that Ciprian woke to the sound of the upstairs neighbor yelling fire! fire! fire! Forty minutes later they were sitting in the local police station, obliged to explain what papers they’d been in such a hurry to destroy. Love letters! Maria declared. Love letters from his curvă! Lucky for them that her anger was so convincing. The Securitate soon let them go.
A few days later, Ciprian sent in his job application to the Institute—without a Party membership number. Maria thawed somewhat when she saw him sitting on the balcony, looking like a man who’d just returned from a week-long bender: exhausted, dark blotches beneath his eyes, and a stare that cut clear through the block and the city and everyone who lived there. She tried to cheer him up by cooking his favorites, and organized a trip to her family’s summer cabin near Constanța as a kind of penance. It was a peace offering, a glimpse into the dream Maria couldn’t give up. A dream of diplomats on terraces, of women with diamonds and pearls in their hair. She pictured masked balls at the casino, sailboats with royal playboys, and all the champagne you could pour down your throat. And if Ciprian’s best days were those he spent living in the dark corners of the Institute, then Maria’s best days were those they spent together in Constanța. When she visits the town today, its grotty beach supposedly still reminds her of Ciprian running his fingers through her hair, and of the breeze from the Black Sea that dried the sweat, the semen, on their bellies.
They were a married couple on holiday, and that was how they behaved: taking drives up and down the coast, buying turbot and shrimp at the docks. It was the first time Maria had had the summer cabin to herself, and she made the most of it. She wore white dresses and invited family friends to dinner, doling out canapés on cocktail sticks and her uncle’s illicit booze. And when the guests had gone home, she and Ciprian made love in every room in the house—and in the garden shed, of course—until they collapsed on the terrace in exhaustion.
The Invention of Ana Page 13
