We’ll never know the reason, but one day in the late autumn Ciprian got up from his sickbed and began to walk through Sefrou again. It was the end of October, and Maria had been invited to a banquet at the Université Al Quaraouiyine. It was Saturday, October 31, 1981, to be exact. Ciprian was sitting outside a café, adjusting his watch. What is it again? asked the Algerian businessman next to him. Spring forward, fall back, so we put the clocks back again? And Ciprian nodded, Yes, that’s more or less how it was. I’ve never understood it, said the Algerian. With the time, I mean. Daylight savings and leap years and all that. Don’t know much about the earth’s orbit either, where it is and how it works. Ciprian smiled and turned the hands on his watch, explaining to the Algerian about atomic time and astronomical time, about how the earth took not three hundred and sixty-five days to travel around the sun but three hundred and sixty-five days, plus five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds, and about the leap days that made up for lost time every fourth year.
He was only too pleased to explain. Pleased, and proud to think we could play with time like that, deciphering the planets and their tilts and rotations, their elliptical orbits; it was wonderful we had a system that took it all into account. The Algerian listened and nodded with interest as Ciprian tapped demonstratively at his watch. That’s how we deal with it, he said. That’s how easily it’s done. Time—we can always rely on it. It moves forward, from the past to the present to the future, never going back again. Well, not exactly: Sometimes—at very high speeds or at very, very tiny subatomic levels—it does. But that doesn’t matter, it’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s of no significance for you and me and our everyday lives.
Hold on a minute, what kind of nonsense was that? Time could go backward? The Algerian wanted to hear more. He ordered another round of tea, and a plate of biscuits too. And Ciprian was happy to tell him. He was bursting with things to say; the world was so rich and large, and it felt so nice to sit out in the sun. There was so much to understand about curved space-time and all the mysterious things quantum physicists were discovering in laboratories around the world.
At home in the apartment, Maria was pottering around and trying on dresses. A representative of the Université Al Quaraouiyine had called that morning: They were aware it was very short notice, but a Romanian professor had fallen ill and sent his regrets. Was Maria interested in taking his place at the banquet as a representative of the exchange program? She was indeed. Very interested. So now she was busy putting on makeup and shaving her legs and writing a speech—she had a hundred and one things to do. And where had Ciprian got to? He had promised to come home at four o’clock to look after Ana. She glanced at the clock above the fridge: twenty past four and still no Ciprian. Maria ground her teeth. It was completely impossible to write a speech with Ana bouncing around in the living room, but she tried anyway. Distracting Ana with some wooden blocks, she tiptoed over to the writing desk with her pen and paper. She got as far as jotting down a few thoughts in the notebook—an amusing little play on words, if she did say so herself—but no further. Ana had begun to wail. First came little gasping sobs, and Maria sank her shoulders as if she could hide from the tears or will them into silence. To no avail. By now Ana was howling, bawling so loudly it was unbearable. Maria sighed. What is it, sweetheart? But she noticed soon enough. Ana was in the middle of the room, writhing around in a tantrum. She had diarrhea all the way down one leg; it dripped out of her shorts, leaving long smears on the floor. Oh for God’s sake, muttered Maria. This was the last thing she needed. And where the hell was Ciprian? She had to take off her dress so that it wouldn’t get dirty. Then she sat in the bathroom and comforted her daughter, struggling with the washtub and her swollen belly, which kept getting in the way. She had just managed to strip off Ana’s diaper, find the right temperature and rinse her down when the telephone rang. Maria straightened up, thinking, Who on earth can that be? Oh, just let it ring, Maria, it’s just a stupid phone call. Let it ring so we can have a happy ending, escape all this misery. But no. Maria had to straighten up. She had to look over her shoulder, God help us, she had a ball to go to, she had a speech to write, a dress to pick out. How did they do things in Morocco? Was her lipstick too red? Should she put lipstick on at all? And what about her shoes—the pointy ones or the heels or the ones in patent leather? And the slit down the back of the dress, was that alright? There, the telephone was jangling again. It might be someone from the university. Perhaps it was the Romanian consul? Maria had already gotten to her feet. Ana lay in the bathtub and water gushed from the tap and Maria could almost see the telephone shaking—no, trembling—with excitement and information. She walked through the living room with bare breasts. She had often thought they should put up curtains, but somehow they’d never gotten around to it, because there was so much to do and so little time, but at that moment she felt annoyed about it, now that she could see the neighbor at the kitchen sink on the other side of the courtyard, and now that the telephone was ringing as she reached out and felt the cold receiver in her hand.
Hello, she said.
Out on the street, Ciprian was ambling slowly home. He was in no rush. He still had ten minutes before the clock struck four and the weather was lovely. Not too warm, with a nice breeze, he thought, stopping in front of the building. There was still enough time for a cigarette, and he drew out a packet. Lighting up, he glanced around. On the other side of the street, a man was installing new windows in his basement. Ciprian was all warmed up after his conversation with the Algerian. His French was so fluent today that he was in the mood to go over and say hello. They were virtually neighbors, after all, he and the man. So he did. He went over and said hello, asking whether he could help with anything. And might he offer a cigarette? The man said thank you. It’s the outer pane, he said. It’s the outer panes that are the problem. You can have as many inner panes as you like. Twenty, thirty inner panes. But if the outer one leaks, the water pisses right in. Ruins everything. Ciprian nodded and sucked on his cigarette. He knew nothing about windows. But it was probably true—it sounded right. Ciprian could well imagine that outer panes were important. And it was good that there were people who knew about such things. Division of labor, he thought, and that was when he heard the scream. A scream like nothing he’d ever heard before. A—what do you call it? A primal scream, I suppose, but that sounds so idiotic. A scream of terror, a mortal scream? Not that either. No, I don’t know. I give up. I don’t know what you’d call a scream like that, if you’d call it anything. But this was what happened. Ciprian was standing there in the street with his cigarette when he heard it: Maria, screaming for their dead daughter.
It’s at this point that the story gets a little—how to put it? Murky. How much of what follows is Ana’s imagination and how much is absolutely true I can’t say. Then again, the same goes for the whole tale. I guess you can’t ever pinpoint a moment and say: That was how it happened. It would be nice if we could, but we all know that the truth is a closed chapter, the truth is of the past. So what can we say? We can say that Ana sensed and experienced a series of phenomena that shaped her understanding of events. That we can say.
But that’s not saying very much.
We can say: For two days they mourned over the tiny corpse, not leaving the house. And on the third day Maria went into labor. She lay half-naked on the bed and whimpered, falling in and out of consciousness. Her water broke, slopping around her and absorbing into the mattress. Ciprian tried to take her to the hospital. Come on, he said. Come on, sweetheart, or something will go wrong. But Maria understood only part of what he said. Something had already gone wrong, horribly wrong, a long time ago.
My baby, she gasped when he tried to lift her from the bed. My baby, don’t touch her.
She flapped her arms and legs, scratching and biting with the crazed violence of instinct. Ciprian would have to change tactics. But what now? He might have been scientifically minded, but he didn’t know much about
childbirth. He was familiar with the basics, of course, having witnessed scores of births back in the village. There was something about boiling water, that much he knew. But what exactly was he supposed to do with it? The best course of action would have been to call a doctor, or at least a midwife. But that wasn’t what Ciprian did. Bringing sheets and blankets from the wardrobe, he laid them on the bed, wrapping them warmly around Maria and dabbing her forehead with a cold cloth as he tried to soothe her with the nursery rhyme they had sung to Ana. Maria groaned and whimpered, her eyes rolled, she screamed and babbled incomprehensibly, fighting her unborn child with all her strength. It was a long, long night. But by late morning, hormones and instinct took over, life’s imperatives pulsed through her veins, and with a jerk she tore off Ciprian’s clutching hands, got out of bed and crawled onto the floor. Squatting down, bellowing as their second daughter came into the world: born in two pushes, she was swaddled in towels, and laid on Maria’s breast to dream of all the things newborns dream of.
In the days after the birth, Ciprian often stood watching over them in the doorframe. Maria and the newborn, breastfeeding happily. He kept his distance, an uneasy fear spreading within him as he thought of Ana lying in the bathtub muffled in sheets, feeling that it wasn’t real. No doctor had taken her pulse, no official had filled out a death certificate. Ana couldn’t possibly be dead: it couldn’t be true that a child could die so easily, so completely without echo or consequence and without being noticed by a single soul. If she were really dead, his sisters would ring, they would hear from Maria’s mother. Yes—if she were really dead, someone would have done something. Surely? You couldn’t leave a dead child lying in a bathtub without repercussions, it just couldn’t be true. The world didn’t work like that.
And yet it did, of course. The child was as dead as a child can be, and deep down Ciprian knew he had to act. Knew it was up to him to handle the corpse and the neighbors, who had begun knocking on the door and bringing gifts, Maria’s screams and the newborn’s cries having sliced through the walls. Ciprian kept them at arm’s length with excuses: It was a difficult birth, mother and child needed to rest, he said, playing the culture card by explaining that in Romania a mother and child lay in bed for a week, that it was tradition. He bought a little time, enough to pace around in circles in the living room, to spit up bile in the kitchen sink. He couldn’t be in the house with all its strange smells and sounds, instead he sat in the tenement courtyard, speaking Romanian to himself.
We have to go to the authorities, he said. That’s obvious. But what good will that do? he added a moment later. This fucking shithole—he was shouting now— What do they care if our daughter is dead? He tried to pull himself together, wanting to be pragmatic. Okay, first things first, then second things second. Loudly he said to himself, This isn’t the end of the world. He himself had had two younger siblings who had succumbed before the age of two: a boy and a girl. One died in childbirth and the other was struck down by some kind of illness. Or was he imagining it? Suddenly he wasn’t sure, overwhelmed by a powerful urge to write home and ask. The post office was right around the corner, after all—he was only a telegram away from the mountains of his homeland, which all at once he missed so much that his head began to swim. No, he didn’t want to think about Oltenia. First: problem-solving. He went inside to get a notebook and paper, drawing up a table. First a Plan A, then a Plan B. A Plan C was also necessary, as anything systematic always came in threes. Duck, duck, goose. Rock, paper, scissors. Always in threes—or fours. He had only just started when he heard crying from the bedroom, and tried to concentrate on the promising schematic in his book instead of the worrying sounds from the other room.
There you go, said Maria. There you go, Ana. You’re a hungry little one, aren’t you?
Ciprian knew he had to do something. But what? His diarrhea was back, but he didn’t dare use the bathroom where the corpse lay, shitting instead in a bucket in the broom cupboard as the flies buzzed around inside. He sat sweat-soaked in the living room watching Maria, who flitted silently around the apartment, looking after the baby, changing diapers and bedclothes, cooking rice and peas, washing up. Who knows what would have happened if Maria’s headmaster hadn’t phoned. They had gone stark mad in those rooms.
Ah, you must be the man of the house, said the headmaster when Ciprian finally pulled himself together enough to pick up the receiver.
Yes, that’s me, said Ciprian, apologizing for his wife’s absence on her behalf. You must understand, she’s just had a baby.
I know, I know, said the headmaster, who had already guessed how the land lay. He congratulated them both and instructed Maria to take it easy. Take three weeks, get her strength back, and was it a boy or a girl and Masha’Allah and all that.
It was precisely what Ciprian needed to kick him into gear: a deadline.
That night he didn’t sleep, nor did he sleep the next. He sat up flicking through maps and bus timetables and tourist brochures for Morocco’s national parks. And in the late afternoon on the third day he sneaked out of the house, taking a bus to Fès then another from the Place de la Résistance to Immouzzer. He sat with his sports bag between his legs, looking out of the window at the mountains as they vanished into the dusk. From the bus station he wandered among the stalls in the souk, mixing with the tradesmen, then continued along the main street and up the steps to the old church, hewn into the rock, surrounded by trees. Darkness had fallen, he tried the handle but it was locked, so he sat for an hour before the gate: Ciprian, never known for his piety, with his hands folded in prayer for his daughter’s soul. Then he hoisted his bag and trudged into the woods, brushing cobwebs from his face and bits of twig from his hair. He walked like that until the trees thinned out, up over the ridge of the hill and down the other side, reaching at last a clump of bushes and trees where he took up his trowel and dug a grave.
For a week they lived like ghosts in the apartment in Sefrou. The rooms were no longer theirs, sorrow written in every corner. Silently they padded across the floors—and was it then that they hatched it, the story that would shape Ana’s life? I don’t know, for good reason: Ana was just a baby girl, she can’t remember a word. But I don’t think it was some grand plan. No, I think it was a manner or a tone, a language that grew out of the circumstances, casual and—well, you wouldn’t call it natural. Organic, perhaps. Maria went around with the newborn close to her breast. She went to the laundry room and the market, and at night she writhed and twisted in nightmares. Her laugh had gone, her smile was rare. She nodded glumly to the neighbors, stood patiently in the queue at the baker’s, stroked children’s hair.
And Ciprian? He bribed a doctor in Fès and went to Maria’s headmaster, talking about complications and postpartum depression, and got her an indefinite leave of absence from the school. Every morning he crept out of the building, past the housewives by the washing line who whispered in secret, out into the dry wind that swept in from the desert, that barren, treeless plain before him. He missed Oltenia like he’d never missed anything before. The woods and the fields and the cows’ heavy stench, their rolling gait as they returned home from the mountains in the afternoon, their udders full of milk. The mountains—that was what he wanted. The feeling of the landscape enfolding him and wrapping him up, tucking him in between banks of fog in spring or the winter’s reassuring layers of powdery snow.
When Maria came home one day from a walk with the baby, he was waiting for her, solemn, on the sofa.
Come here, he said, patting the cushion with the palm of his hand. But she didn’t come, and didn’t sit down. She went over to the sideboard and continued going about her shrill business, so he got up and put his arm around her. My darling, he said, and tried to talk to her about the dead child. But she jerked her shoulders free, shaking off her firstborn with a blink of her eyes and a twitch of her left cheek. She opened the drawer. Goodness, she said, we’ve run out of dishcloths. She tried to edge past Ciprian into the utility room, but he
wouldn’t let her pass. Taking her arm, he said, Maria, we need to leave this place.
He had expected her to protest, or at least to ignore him. But she simply lowered her gaze and nodded.
Alright, we can do that, she said, as if he were suggesting a walk in the woods or a trip to the beach. Wriggling out of his hands, she went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil for a load of laundry.
Ciprian was still trying to understand it all when they stood at the bus station four days later.
We could just go home, he said, as the bus pulled up.
Maria said nothing, adjusting the baby’s woolly hat, which had slipped down over her eyes, four sizes too big.
Maria, we could just go home. Home to Romania.
At that moment the bus stopped in front of them and out milled the passengers, bundled up in windbreakers and blankets and scarves. The sun had yet to rise, and a biting wind swept in from the north, bringing the sand with it. He could feel his stomach roll, his guts contract; he had held such great hopes for this country. But what had it given him? Dust in his eyes and a daughter buried in the desolate earth.
Let’s sit at the back, said Maria, as Ciprian maneuvered their baggage on board. Through the back window they caught a last glimpse of Sefrou: the tradesmen’s discolored awnings, the wooden crates crammed with pulpy fruit. The bus climbed up into the mountains, glass rattling in the window frames, the vibrations from the engine rocking the passengers to sleep. Ciprian leaned against the window and studied his daughter. She had the same pointed chin as the one he had buried, and it struck him that age was a relative quantity. Yes, there we have him: a man shaped almost like the father Ana will get to know. He is thirty-two years old and the first lines are emerging on his face, a crease appearing on his left cheek. His eyes still shine behind their glasses, but there is a drooping twist to his lips that only rarely fades. He still believes mathematics has something to offer him, unaware that he will spend four years toiling in this wasteland, and that there’s nothing waiting for him in Romania but a populace in disarray, a rejected thesis, and an early grave.
The Invention of Ana Page 17
