And so it was that the most talented mathematician of his generation, according to Ana, ended up as a high-school teacher. For what can you do when your Institute closes and you haven’t even been awarded your degree? You settle. You take what you can get, and what Ciprian could get was a post at Drumul Taberei Technical High School—and in Maria’s case, a measly job as a schoolteacher.
Broken dreams, yet again. I don’t know how they got over it. But get over it they did: a year or so after the Institute was closed, the stream of family photographs reappears, and the first postcards from Constanța are dated Christmas 1976. Slowly they took heart, and began studying mathematics again. It must have taken a while, but I’ve been told that Maria and Ciprian behaved like a reasonably well-adjusted married couple when the earthquake hit Bucharest in 1977, even having enough energy to aid in the rescue operation. Ciprian reportedly helped by shifting rubble in the center of town, while Maria took an evening shift at the soup kitchen. Perhaps it was exactly what they needed, an earthquake, to remind them that although their lives hadn’t panned out exactly as they’d hoped, there were many people worse off than they were. A failed career or two was nothing to get in a flap about. At least they had jobs and food on the table, and they also had their health. A few months after the earthquake, Ciprian finished the first draft of an article on topological proofs. There was still a long way to go, but at least he had something to show his colleagues. At the soup kitchen, Maria had met two young women with whom she began to organize French dinners and culinary classes, and all in all things were looking up. Even their sex life was improving. And although that was, of course, excellent news, the problem was that Maria was an exceptionally fertile woman. During their four years as a married couple, Maria had been pregnant three times, and gradually that took its toll.
Contraception, you might think, how hard could it be?
Pretty hard, apparently. There was no such thing as pills, and since the Great Winter Shoemaker had forbidden any type of condom, femidom, coil, or diaphragm in his efforts to support the Mothers of the Nation—who got a washing machine for the fifth birth and a Dacia for the tenth—they had to resort to coitus reservatus, navigating the precipices of orgasmic brinkmanship. Maria and Ciprian were clearly not masters of that particular art, which was unfortunate, because in his eagerness to swell the Romanian population Ceaușescu had outlawed abortion, and Maria didn’t know whether she could cope with another trip to the back-alley clinic. Her uncle had a doctor friend who carried out illegal abortions with gloves and sterilized equipment and a decent grip on things, so she was luckier than most. Luckier than Ciprian’s older sister, for instance, whose single abortion had been undertaken by the local wise woman with a knitting needle, and who now would wait in vain to be a Mother of the Nation, if indeed she’d ever been waiting for that.
Poor Maria. In her darkest hours after the procedures, she remembered her Sunday visits to the clinic: the hospital gown, the doctor’s jovial assurances that it was a lovely uterus, hers, as pretty as a Grise Bonne pear. Maria thought the doctor was mistaken. Her uterus wasn’t as pretty as a pear. Her uterus was a dark, throbbing mucus factory nestled deep inside her, a relentless spewer of pus and blood. No, Maria wasn’t at all sure she could manage another abortion. Nor was she sure she wanted a baby. Could she really bring a child into this world? A world where friends and neighbors suddenly vanished and no one asked questions, where children spent their summer holidays at parades for a bird-brained shoemaker?
Maria still remembered what her aunt had said: that a wife’s duty was to spread her legs and service her husband, and that she had only herself to blame if he ran around chasing other women or going to whorehouses, bringing back dirt and filth to their marriage bed. Men weren’t made of stone, and who could begrudge him a fling or two if his wife was overly stingy? So Maria tried to think back to their first summer in Constanța and whatever she remembered of those deep, wet kisses, or of masculine hands wrapped around her neck, maybe. But they couldn’t drown out the clinic and the village knitting needle, or the thousands of uterine scrapings being rinsed into drains every day, and before long Maria could barely kiss her husband without breaking into a sweat.
To avoid Ciprian’s advances she chose a new kind of contraception, turning to the method most warmly recommended by the Orthodox and Roman Catholic and many other churches: abstinence. Every night she went to bed before him, pretending to be asleep when he laid his hands on her buttocks, and every morning she crept out of bed before he woke. And when she couldn’t dodge him any longer, or her conscience had backed her into a corner, they made love briefly and awkwardly, always finishing in her mouth.
It was no way to live. It was a disgrace, is what it was, and their friends and neighbors were astonished. There were whispers at the greengrocer’s and gossip in the parking lot. Maria was twenty-five years old, and it was no secret that the Great Winter Shoemaker had introduced a tax on infertility, so that any married couple still without children by the wife’s twenty-fifth birthday was fined twenty percent of their income. The situation could easily have ended in divorce. According to Ana it was Miron, the balding bus driver from the chess club, who saved their marriage.
In those days in 1978, Ciprian was something of a phenomenon at the Drumul Taberei Chess Club. Every Tuesday and Thursday, and every other Saturday during the season, Ciprian dropped by the club and put his opponents in their place. Miron was also in the chess club, and the two men enjoyed sharing a beer and playing a game. Without much progress, it might seem—after the first three years, the score was 128–0–0 in Ciprian’s favor—but Ciprian took his club champion’s title seriously, and felt it was his duty to teach a man like Miron a thing or two about the wonders of the game.
It came as a surprise, therefore, when the scales gradually began to tip. It started with a fifty-move draw one wet Thursday evening. Soon, however, their games were ending in technical draws, and before long Miron was noting down his first victory over the club champion. All the other chess players, from the fifteen-year-old electrician’s apprentice who had yet to celebrate his first victory to the rheumatic joiner who could hardly lift the pieces, stopped their games and gathered around the table so they could see it with their own eyes. If the balding bus driver could defeat Ciprian, they whispered to each other, then maybe they could too.
Miron didn’t let success go to his head. Although he was undeniably a bus driver, and although his bald spot had expanded beyond the point where one could reasonably call it a spot, he wasn’t completely stupid, and he had heard Ciprian and Maria’s neighbors gossiping on his bus routes around Drumul Taberei. He had no trouble putting two and two together, and he could guess why Ciprian was suddenly off his game.
Listen, is something wrong or what? asked Miron during the Saturday tournament, when Ciprian lost in the second round.
Ciprian shrugged and poured a pálinka.
Between you and me, whispered Miron, if it’s your wife there’s something wrong with, you should take her to the doctor. That’s what I did last time she wasn’t up for it. And let me tell you, it worked.
Ciprian wasn’t the type to listen to just anybody. And he certainly wasn’t the type to listen to balding bus drivers. But it couldn’t hurt to ask an expert for advice, so the following Monday Ciprian set off toward the clinic. The doctor? you might be wondering. What good is that supposed to do? But here one must remember that in Romania in those days there was no such thing as couples therapy, and there was also no such thing as online health forums or sex advice columns in the weekly magazines. No, in those days people listened to the clever man in the white coat, and in this case he said, You go home and relax, and I’ll ring your wife for a chat. You’ll see—everything will be alright.
The following afternoon, Ciprian could already tell something was different. When he opened the door to the apartment he was met by Maria, who cuddled up to him and burrowed her nose into his neck. She took his hand and led him into th
e bedroom, taking off his pullover. His shirt, pants, socks, and her dress followed. And after they had made love—or whatever you’d call it—she whispered to him with tears in her eyes, I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t know things were so bad.
It was almost too much. But what do you expect with a doctor like that? It’s giving him myalgia, he’d said over the telephone. Spasms in his back and nervous complaints. Are you trying to kill him? Because it’ll go straight to the heart, you know. It’ll end in water on the lungs. A heart attack.
There had been no sex education at Maria’s school—it had been done away with by, yeah, guess who—and she had never so much as opened a medical dictionary or an anatomy textbook in her life. On the contrary, she had grown up in a home full of petticoats and hymnals and icons of the Virgin Mary on the bookcases, and as a twelve-year-old she had been frightened out of her wits to find bloodstains in her underwear. Maria was almost illiterate when it came to human reproduction, having heard not a whisper about the birds and the bees and all that. But she loved her husband, and if the doctor asked her to spread her legs for him, then of course she’d fling them open.
And thus their sex life was reinvigorated. Hurray for the Romanian healthcare system! And hurray for Ciprian too. Our hero had kept his marital vows during his enforced celibacy. He had remained faithful to Maria, and yet it was as if desire had fermented within him, becoming stronger and bitterer, taking on a life of its own. Every day at school he could feel it roiling inside him, and as he climbed the stairwell in the afternoon each step set it fizzing in his chest. There was a pricking in his fingertips when he saw her by the kitchen sink or on the balcony hanging up laundry, and when Maria spread her legs for Ciprian that day, she didn’t know what she was unleashing. A storm of passion hailed down on her, and in the following weeks he took her over the ottoman in the living room, filleted her on the kitchen table, and mashed her thoroughly whenever he woke at night feeling thirsty. He ground into her at all hours of the day, and after two months Maria was lying on the bathroom floor and vomiting as the neighbor held back her hair.
Someone’s got a bun in the oven! the woman laughed.
No, I don’t, grunted Maria, spit dangling from her chin. It’s something I ate.
Nonsense, you’re knocked up. Don’t you think I can tell?
It must be the peanuts I can’t stomach, said Maria. Interesting theory, I guess. But it wasn’t true. Their jar of pickled green peppers was emptied at breakneck speed, and as soon as it had been devoured she rounded on the jar of red ones. Suddenly she could eat a whole jar in a week, and her mood fluctuated like one of Ciprian’s graphs when he was calculating amplitudes or angular frequencies. After a few months she could no longer convince herself that it was down to muggy weather or an acid–base imbalance, so once again she went to see her uncle’s doctor friend, and he once again confirmed that her uterus was as pretty as a Grise Bonne pear, and that it was also carrying a child.
When Maria left the doctor that day, turning down Drumul Taberei’s curving boulevard, it was as if something shifted in her body. That might sound facile, but it was how Ana told it. Something shifted in her mother’s body, and suddenly a uterus wasn’t something she had but something that consumed her. As the city’s gray housing blocks flew past on the other side of the windowpane, Maria laid a hand on her belly in wonder, smiling for the first time that superior smile that would stay plastered on her face for the next few months. Why she had suddenly changed her mind I never discovered, but she wasn’t even nervous when she told Ciprian the news. They lay on the living-room floor, looking out onto the snow-covered balcony while Ciprian caressed her stomach.
I think he’ll be a ballet dancer, said Maria. I can almost feel him dancing around inside.
Ciprian snorted. A ballet dancer? What kind of fairy shit is that? He’ll be a mathematician.
He most certainly will not.
A mathematician, said Ciprian. Think about it—with our two brains he’ll be unstoppable.
Seven months later, shortly after midnight between the ninth and tenth of October, the midwife registered Ana’s arrival in the annals of Romanian history. It was a difficult birth, and at the precise moment that the baby slid out of Maria, nobody had an eye on the clock, so the midwife handed the birth certificate to Ciprian and asked which date he preferred.
Will your daughter be a day older or a day younger? she grinned.
Ciprian didn’t hesitate.
She was born on October 10, 1979, he said. 10101979, it’s a prime number. Just listen to it—isn’t it lovely?
Ana always went on about that little anecdote, that she’d traveled in time from her first day on earth. I think I laughed the first time I heard it, and it was only much later—after Timemachine was over and many months after we parted ways—that I began to see the symbolism, or whatever you want to call it. The pattern, the prophecy, the premonition of a whole life’s lot.
As it was told to me, the period after Ana’s birth was the last happy time in Maria and Ciprian’s marriage. Life, in its tiny new incarnation, made itself felt in all its strength, overcoming Maria’s daydreams and Ciprian’s melancholy. The new parents went around in a haze of affection and hormones and baby talk, forgetting all their troubles and concerns, and every afternoon Maria’s family came by with food and freshly laundered clothes. Her mother sewed little outfits and her uncle ordered a crib from a carpenter. There seemed to be no end to the celebrations: the party when the little family came home from the hospital, the christening two weeks later, the gifts after the baby’s first month, then her second. And on the Epiphany holiday Maria and Ciprian took the train out to the village to present the marvelous child, so that Ciprian’s sisters gushed in chorus and even his aging father couldn’t prevent a slight twitch of the lips.
Look how she’s waggling her arms! they said. Oh, and now she’s smiling just like her mother. Look at Ana rolling around, look at Ana biting the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, look at her funny paper hat. Look at her. Look at her now. And now. Look at her all the time. Oh yes, they were joyful days indeed.
So what was it that marked the beginning of the end for the little family’s happiness? By now it can’t be much of a surprise. Mathematics, of course.
Since the Institute’s closure, theorems and set theory and topological space had slipped out of Ciprian’s days, diluted by fathering and paper grading. It was as if his life had come to taste—well, what would he have called it? A trifle bland, a little on the unsalted side. Of course, mathematics hadn’t completely disappeared—all things are, after all, number. But by this point Ciprian had been slaving away at the Technical High School for nearly five years, and although he did teach mathematics, it wasn’t high-school math he dreamed of.
And was Maria any better off? No, not really. For four years she’d worked as a primary-school teacher, her days filled with runny noses and blank stares and the occasional pair of pee-soaked pants. Not exactly what she’d imagined when she enrolled at the Institute. But unlike her husband she had no long-held dream that had to be torn up by the roots and replanted in a flowerbed much too small for it. When it came right down to it, it wasn’t all that hard for Maria to accept how things stood. And once her life was filled with Ana’s childish laughter, her first smiles and steps, Maria soon forgot all her scholarly ambition and settled down at the school.
It helped too that the headmaster was an engaging sort of fellow. As a Hungarian, it was a minor miracle he had climbed that far up in the system. He must have had sharp elbows, the good headmaster, and a soft spot for Maria too. Rumor had it that in his heyday the Hungarian had made it all the way up to the highest offices in the Council of Education, but that he’d been dismissed in one of the anti-Hungarian purges. He harbored a grudge against the government, and it was whispered that he led a ring of smugglers who helped people defect. But who knows whether that’s true? All I know is that the headmaster was a real gentleman, the kind of man who didn’t tr
eat his teachers like faceless employees. A man of the old school, who kissed hands and pulled out chairs and slipped little notes into Maria’s pigeonhole. Enjoy your vacation! or Break a leg with the exams! The Hungarian headmaster, as the social studies teacher was fond of pointing out, was like an ideal nation-state, hard on the outside but soft on the inside, and if anyone found him treacly or overly forward it wasn’t Maria.
She and the Hungarian had gotten into the habit of drinking tea together after work on Fridays, when they would sit with their Turkish tea glasses clinking in their saucers, talking about Steiner and Piaget’s theories and, later, about Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, which the headmaster had struggled with so much as a boy. Did more than tea drinking go on inside that office? I don’t think so, but who is to say? In any case, one overcast day in June Maria entered the headmaster’s office to find him deep in thought, hunched over a letter on his desk.
Ah, he said, when he noticed her standing in the doorway. Maria, sit down, sit down.
And so she did, waiting for the headmaster to pour the tea.
Maria, he said. I was just thinking—you’ve been at the school for some time now, haven’t you? And it’s no secret that you don’t get much of a challenge. That’s a shame, don’t you think? I mean, you took exams at the Institute, speak fluent French. What are you even doing here?
Maria stared at her boss in wonder. Was this some kind of test?
Tell me, said the headmaster. Are you trying to keep the other teachers down?
No, stammered Maria indignantly. Of course not.
Well then. Why on earth aren’t you working at a high school, or a university?
Well—I mean, I don’t know.
You shouldn’t sell yourself short, said the headmaster, wagging his index finger. The world is full of opportunity. Are we agreed? They were agreed. Good, he said, and slid the letter over to her side of the table. I think we should arrange for you to take this job abroad.
The Invention of Ana Page 15
