That evening they sucked out the crabs’ claws, and later they drank tea and played chess and talked about the Northern Lights and indoor cats and friends who were long dead, but when night came, when Ana was flushed with rum toddies and Isak’s hand resting so close to her leg, he put down the mug and shook his head.
Think about it, Ana. You were just a little girl.
When?
When I molested you.
For a second she looked at him to see if he was joking. Then she leaned back on the bed and sighed.
Isak, for Christ’s sake, I’m twenty-seven years old.
Don’t give me that, he said, waving his hand. I know what I’ve done.
But you haven’t done anything, she said, getting to her feet. Rummaging through her bag, she took out her student card.
Look, she said, slapping it down on the coffee table. It says right there. I just finished art school. Do you think they’d let me go to art school if I were a child?
But Isak resolutely shook his head. It’s wrong, he said. You told me that yourself. You’re much younger than it says.
Christ, said Ana. If you won’t believe me, let’s go to the police. Isn’t that what you wanted? Let’s do it.
For a moment he hesitated, then he stood up.
Okay, he said. But it has to be the Stavanger police. I don’t give a shit about the corrupt pigs in Bergen.
Early the next morning they packed up the car and drove to Stavanger. Six long hours over bridges and into tunnels, through a landscape so incredibly beautiful that Ana couldn’t comprehend it. The fog that hung above the hills actually existed. The green fields wedged among the rocks, the shadows that wandered over the fjord—all of it was real, yet the whole situation was so absurd she was experiencing it at arm’s length, as if she were standing outside and watching herself in a comedy or farce, lost in the vaudevillian bowels of someone else’s dream, and then they turned off the main road and drove through the town and parked outside Stavanger’s gray lump of a police station.
So, what can I help you with? asked the officer behind the counter.
My name is Isak Bringedal, he said. And I’d like to turn myself in.
Well, now, said the officer. I see.
It’s because I’ve slept with a minor. Her.
Isak pointed at Ana, and for a moment the officer was quiet. Only his gray mustache twitched a little, and he leaned back slightly in his chair, looking from Isak to Ana and back again. Then he cleared his throat.
Right, well. We’d better take a look at this. If you’ll just wait here, someone’ll come and get you.
Before long they were led into an office, where a policeman sat behind a desk and Ana and Isak sat in upholstered chairs. Isak stated his date of birth and address, and then he told the man about Ana, the underage Romanian girl he’d slept with. Ana couldn’t believe her eyes or ears or senses in general. If this had been Romania, he’d have been chucked into a cell and his family milked for bribes, but the officer just nodded and took notes, adding a follow-up question or two, and finally he asked Ana whether he could see her passport. He inspected it carefully and ran it through a machine, then he typed a few lines and nodded in thought.
Have a look at this, said the officer, turning to Isak. He pointed at the watermark. I can see this is a real passport. And it says right here she was born in 1979.
Isak looked at the passport skeptically, but before he could speak, the officer continued: And this was consensual sex, or was there any coercion?
Consensual, said Ana.
Yes, consensual, said Isak. But it was with a minor. You understand that, don’t you?
The officer nodded, typed a little more on his keyboard and printed out a form, which he filled out. Then he slid it across the table.
Now, you listen to me, said the officer. You did the right thing, coming down here so we could get this straightened out. But there’s no doubt about it. Miss Ivan is not a minor.
He reached for his pen, scribbling the date and his signature, and Ana had never seen anyone look as relieved as Isak when the officer stamped the form three times. His face lit up, and as they sat in the car in the parking lot, it was like his smile softened, like the muscles in his cheeks relaxed. When Ana asked if he was okay he leaned over the dashboard, hugging the wheel and gasping for air, then sat back in his seat and laughed until he shuddered.
Oh, Ana, he laughed. They said it themselves. They’ve just said it. I haven’t done a thing.
He sat and roared with laughter, and Ana laughed too, and when he could breathe again he started the motor, and they drove to the ice-cream stand and bought the most outrageous cone Ana had ever set eyes on. It had chocolate and strawberry, vanilla and pistachio, soft serve, and a marshmallowy topping, and when they couldn’t cram any more down they drove along the fjord to Sandnes, high on sugar and forgiveness. It was a soft afternoon, Isak’s hand rested on her leg, warm but not clammy, and Ana was so full and hot and drowsy that the sensations came pouring in. Her sluice gates were open, unobstructed by thought, and they sat for a while in silence, gazing through the windows at the shadows that reached down the hills, the gulls that circled the harbor, the light that grew deeper and deeper, but as they drove around the hill, a wind crept through the pane, and Isak turned to her, his lips tensed and pale.
You knew him, didn’t you?
Ana looked at him.
The officer, he said. You knew the officer. Do you really think I’m that stupid?
She turned toward the window, smelling the wind and the dampness of the coming fall.
It was an actor, he said. Say it was an actor.
Isak, no, she whispered. No more.
I saw the way you looked at him.
Isak, no.
Okay, I may not be a great artist, he snarled, but I’m not a fucking idiot.
That evening Ana checked into a hostel. She didn’t want to stay at Isak’s grandma’s. She lay in bed and cried quietly, but so ceaselessly that the girl in the top bunk hopped down and sat beside the bed.
Hey, she said. It’ll be alright.
No, sniveled Ana. It doesn’t matter. Everyone I love is ruined.
The next morning Ana drifted around in Stavanger, unsure of where to go. She didn’t have the keys to the apartment in Bergen, and she didn’t want to call Jorunn and admit she’d been right. On her third day in town, she went to an internet café and found an email from Isak.
Ana, I think I’ve fallen apart a bit. I can’t bear everything I’ve done. I feel pretty wretched, but I think I’m on my way back up to the surface. On the other hand, it’s nice to be down here at the bottom. I can see all the people up there on the surface, swimming around in the sun, and I know I’m at the bottom, so I can’t get any farther down. I’m stable, I’m stuck in the mud. And no matter what—people, intelligent, with two brains, trying to stick their tongues into each other’s holes? You’ve got to admit, it sounds perverse.
Was that good or bad? Ana didn’t know, but she decided to see for herself. Boarding the local bus to Sandnes, she asked the driver to let her know when to get off for Isak’s grandmother’s farm. She sat at the back with her bag on her lap, staring out of the window at the bus station and the town disappearing behind them. She rested her forehead against the glass and dozed off to the rhythm of the engine, and she didn’t wake until the bus driver yelled that this was her stop. Getting up in a muddle, she grabbed her stuff, the bus exhaled and drove away, and she was left alone on the asphalt, blinking in the light reflected from the driveway, where a police car was parked on the gravel.
You’re the girlfriend? said the officer, as she approached. Maybe it’s best if you come with me.
This is everything they knew: The previous evening, Isak had drunk a whole bottle of whiskey and gone into Stavanger. Several witnesses had seen him rambling around the town, and at two in the morning he’d lumbered onto the bridge. What he wanted there was impossible to tell, but there wasn’t much traffic on a wee
kday night like that, and nobody noticed him climbing over the fence and onto the platform where the steel cables were secured. He stood there for an hour, staring down at the ferries and boats sailing past him below, until suddenly he wasn’t any longer. He might have jumped, he might have stumbled. The evidence was ambiguous. It was too dark on the platform for the cameras to catch much detail, but the police report concluded an overwhelming likelihood of suicide.
And so, just as abruptly as Isak had entered Ana’s life one winter’s evening eighteen months earlier, he disappeared again. Ana wasn’t even invited to the funeral. His family made it clear she wasn’t welcome, and the following nights she slept on Jorunn’s sofa. During the day, while Jorunn was at work, she sat in the window and stared at the gulls, and in the evening she walked along the harbor and cried until her face felt dissolved. Her body changed. Her breasts and hips deflated, her eye sockets darkened, her cheeks swelled from crying. She’d sit in St. Mary’s Church, whispering about why she hadn’t sent Isak to the doctor, why she hadn’t called his family, a psychiatrist, the police. Somebody. She hadn’t realized anything was wrong, she tried to tell herself, but soon she was cast into doubt, and asked family and friends if the whole thing was her fault.
Jorunn shook her head. You can’t conjure up psychoses. Who do you think you are, she grinned, a witch or something?
Ana’s mother wasn’t so sure. Isak probably had a predisposition, she reasoned, but something had to push the poor boy over the edge, and maybe Ana’s time-travel story had been the final shove.
So it was my fault? sobbed Ana down the phone.
I’m not saying that. But what you don’t know can’t drive you crazy.
For several months Ana remained in Bergen, wondering whether to stay and find a job. But, frankly—what was there to keep her? Isak was dead, Jorunn was starting a teaching job in Oslo, and as soon as the first cold blew down from the mountains, she bought a ticket to Bucharest. It’s there we find her next: back in her old room in Drumul Taberei.
So, what now? asked Maria, as they sat at the dinner table that first evening. Maybe a Romanian next time?
No, I’m done with men, said Ana, smoothing the tablecloth. From now on I’m going to live like a prime number. Wild and unbroken and only divisible by myself.
Ana’s grandma had passed away that fall, leaving mother and daughter alone in the apartment once more. During the day they went to the market. They shopped and cooked. In the evening they watched television and drank tea. Now and again, Ana walked up the hill behind the bus stop and gazed out across the blocks, which were bound to be her home forever now. She felt infinitely tired, and certain that her life was over. Sure, there would be events—mealtimes, movies at the cinema, days of sun and days of rain—but she’d never be alive again. And so the days passed silently, short, muffled weeks huddling to form a muted, vacuous year. Ana and her mother cleaned and cooked; they’d made a pact. Ana never asked about Morocco, about those two years and the sister she’d never met. Maria never asked about Isak and her time in Norway, and even when she saw Ana’s work, full of video clips and photographs and a whole saga about Isak’s library card, she just nodded and said: Looks good, Ana. Genuinely.
Instead of talking about all the tragedies, Maria talked about the Good Years: about the tile factory and her family’s confiscated forest, about her own father, the famous dentist, and about the villa at Dorobanti, where she’d seen her parents dance the Lancers macabre on the night the Securitate’s dark Dacias came gliding up the driveway.
On Ciprian’s birthday, Ana borrowed a dress from her mother, and together they drove into town for dinner. On the way they passed the Institute, and Ana asked the driver to stop for a moment. She hadn’t been there for nearly seven years, and I’ve seen the sad picture they took that day: two widows in old frocks, wan and mistrustful, each with a dry smile on her lips. At the restaurant they drank two bottles of wine, and when they were mid-dessert Maria drew a gift from her bag. It was a shabby old book, its spine held together with tape, and Maria tapped the cover heavily.
I think your dad would have wanted you to have this.
Ana opened it at once. It was Euclid’s Elements, its pages thoroughly scrawled with Ciprian’s notes and commentary, his drawings in a childish hand. In the middle was a photograph of a girl, no more than a year old, and when she got home she put it in a frame and hung it above her desk. Over the next few months her art began to change. Her work filled with formulae and number theory, science crept into her videos, and gradually she formed her practice. She studied the philosophy of time, became obsessed with calendars and clocks and the resonant frequency of caesium-133, and every evening she tried to capture time by keeping a logbook. She read Henri Bergson and J.M.E. McTaggart and several shelves’ worth of quantum physics, and on the rare occasions she held exhibitions, it wasn’t at galleries downtown but at studios and exhibition spaces belonging to friends and acquaintances abroad. She was part of a show in Prague, of another in Vienna, and one fall she had a residency in Villa Waldberta with Ciprian Mureşan, who was representing Romania at the Venice Biennial the following spring. But as soon as she got home again, she barricaded herself in her old room and kept herself aloof from the Bucharest art scene. She kept house and washed clothes, cooked food and went shopping, occasionally meeting a friend from art school.
Ana, they said. Why didn’t you come to the opening? Why are you wasting your talent?
One year became three. In the parks, the chestnuts dropped from the trees and sprouted anew; in the city center, scaffolding rose and was abandoned; and one day Ana was sitting in a café on Strada Covaci, trying to find a title for a piece she was exhibiting in New York. She was hunched over the form they’d sent her, filling out the title of the work, her name and birthday, when a tap on the windowpane made her turn. Outside it had begun to rain. She saw the drops fall diagonally against the glass, saw them gather into glistening patches in the headlamps’ beams, and for a moment she pictured the rain falling over Bucharest. She pictured it pattering down on Cișmigiu Gardens and gathering in dark puddles on the Institute’s roof, whipping against the gables in Drumul Taberei and onward to the dunes by the sea. Pictured the droplets seeming to hover in the dark between the shops and the townhouses on the other side of the street, between the long boulevards of the apartment blocks and all the lives that were lived there, and then she lifted her pen and filled out the title, name, and birthday. She called the work The Time Traveler, her name was Ana Ivan, and she was twenty-eight and thirty years old.
This was the story Ana told me in the blacked-out gallery, and in the stillness that followed her words I imagined Isak lurching on the edge of the metal bridge, at once living and dead, existing in two states at the same time, like an electron in superposition. For a long while I waited for the next anecdote, but no more came. A quiet sniff, a rustle as she pressed against the sheet: That was all. I listened to Ana’s breathing as it seemed to grow weaker, her inhalations shallower and shallower, and I don’t know how long I lay on the mattress, whether I fell asleep, but through the blackness I saw or dreamed about a coin, a silver or cupronickel coin, rasping against the toe of a shoe. Perhaps it was the closeted air in the gallery, but it felt like my head and fingers were buzzing—my tongue and lips dry, my whole body longing for fresh air—and when I sat up on the mattress, Ana was no longer by my side. For a few minutes I groped around for her, calling her name, but she wasn’t there, or she wasn’t answering, and at last I got to my feet and stumbled out of the gallery.
Outside, it was still dark. I unlocked my bike and trundled home through the deserted streets. The puddles had nearly evaporated, the cicadas hissed from the trees in the park, and when I got back to the apartment I felt drained, used. I pulled off my shoes and clothes, and the last thing I did before crawling into bed was plug my dead phone in to charge. From the bed I saw the screen light up, and before I fell asleep I noticed the time was just past twelve, but perhaps that was
just a guess or a dream.
When I woke up again, it was nearly sunrise. The first yellow light of dawn seeped between the buildings, the street was still free of dog walkers, not a single yoga mat was in sight, and when I switched on the computer and checked my email I discovered it was early Tuesday morning. For a moment I stared at the screen. Then I checked a few news sites, and sure enough: It had been more than thirty hours since I’d stepped inside Ana’s installation. Either I’d spent more than twenty-four hours in the gallery, or I’d slept that long in bed, or I’d mixed up the days and thought Monday was Sunday when I opened the gallery door. None of those explanations made sense, and for a while I sat on the windowsill and tried to work out how it all fit together: Ana’s stories, my retellings, Isak Bringedal’s sad, short life. Down on the street, the traffic was beginning to swell. From my window I could see the trees, the leaves rippling in the wind, the flowers, or what was left of them, lying brown and sludgy in their beds, and then I opened a document and wrote down Ana’s latest stories. I tried to think about Isak. Tried to imagine him in his apartment in Bergen, functional and anonymous, as I pictured it, on the top floor of a red apartment block, smoking or maybe sitting on the sofa, while Ana told a story. I tried to picture Isak Bringedal, on the couch or maybe on a bridge, listening to Ana, and then my head began to ache. Then my hands began to tremble and I shut my eyes. There was something disturbing about Isak’s story that had escaped my attention, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly. Isak sat on the couch with a cigarette, or he stood on the bridge in the dusk while Ana talked, and I sat at the window while my gaze wandered over the desk, the walls, the floors, the bits of furniture; but no matter where I looked there was something I didn’t want to see. Lærke’s towel hanging from the doorknob on the wardrobe, the silly pink one from the dollar store, the only thing she’d left behind, like a residue of her being. On the floor by the mattress were business cards from my brother’s festival and a map of the stadium in Finland, and on the desk: stacks of Ana’s stories, notes about her life. It felt as though I had a name on the tip of my tongue, some thought or memory that kept slithering away. Then, before it came to me, I got up and walked through the single small room of the apartment, saddled with the objects that until recently had constituted the basis of my whole life, without looking at them or bumping into them, a maneuver that required the grace of a ballet dancer. I picked up the phone and called Ana, listening to the drone of the ringing until it collapsed into voice mail, and when she didn’t pick up on my third try, I headed for the gallery.
The Invention of Ana Page 24
