by Sarah Rayne
She had been at the Black House for almost a year when Annaleise arrived one night, and without preamble said, ‘We have decided on a disguise for the house.’
‘Yes?’ They had been waiting for this, because there was now quite a lot of coming and going, and there was an increasing danger that the people down in the village might grow inquisitive. Zoia said, ‘What is the disguise?’
Annaleise said, ‘How would you feel about looking after unwanted children?’
* * *
It did not happen all at once, of course. Orphanages did not spring up overnight, and it was some time before the orphanage within the Black House – the ‘disguise’ as Annaleise termed it – was established. But it did not take so very long and Zoia knew it came about because of one of the new Party laws.
‘One of Elena’s laws,’ Annaleise said with pride. ‘Her husband wanted to increase the birth rate, and she thought up this regime. Abortions are illegal, of course, but contraception itself is now prohibited. And – a very clever addition, this one – childless couples are required to pay higher taxes.’
‘Isn’t all that a bit harsh?’ asked Zoia after a moment.
‘Oh no,’ said Annaleise. ‘Elena is always very fair. Very just. As she told me herself, she has even biblical authority for the law. Genesis. God slew Onan when he withdrew and spilled his seed on the ground. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes.’ The nuns at school had skimmed rather rapidly over this part of the Bible, although there had been furtive giggling among some of the older girls about it.
‘Anyway, women who are over the age of forty-five, or have at least five children already, are exempt.’ Annaleise paused, then said, ‘But there is an unfortunate result of this law, Zoia. Much as I admire Elena, just between ourselves, I will admit that there’s an unfortunate outcome.’
‘Unwanted children,’ said Zoia, understanding at once. ‘And a lot of people won’t have enough money to feed them.’ Memory spun an image for a moment: herself and her brothers and sisters hungrily eating the thin, unsatisfactory stew which had been made with the cheapest cut of meat obtainable, and filling up on plain bread afterwards.
‘Exactly,’ affirmed Annaleise. ‘Children whom parents can neither feed nor clothe.’
‘And a whole crop of orphanages springing up because of it.’
‘Yes. The State will fund such places, of course, although it can’t be on any very lavish scale.’
Zoia said she still thought it rather a harsh law.
‘I don’t think so. Contraception might be forbidden, there’s still good old-fashioned abstinence. They’re not actually forced to have children at all, these—’
‘Peasants?’ It came out more angrily than Zoia had meant, but she had felt a stab of bitterness at Annaleise’s words. She looked at her, and thought: when did you ever practise abstinence! When did you ever suffer hunger? Not just a few pangs because a meal was delayed, but permanent aching hunger for weeks on end? But she had already gone further than was wise, so she smiled and said she was sure Elena and the Party knew what they were doing. Elena was so intelligent, said Zoia.
It did the trick; Annaleise smiled the wolf-smile that meant she would share Zoia’s bed tonight.
And so the children came to the Black House in twos and threes, in forlorn trickles, sometimes brought furtively by guilty-looking mothers or grandmothers, less often, by defiant fathers. Occasionally minor members of the Politburo brought them, although this did not happen very often.
Zoia dealt efficiently with these children, seeing they were fed at regular intervals, making the best use she could of the sparse money doled out. Sometimes the smallest children cried for quite long periods. It was irritating and exhausting and it took Zoia back to the unhappy years of her own childhood, but she could just about cope with it.
But Annaleise could not. ‘That constant wailing drives me distracted,’ she said, angrily. ‘I can put up with a good deal, but not grizzling babies for hours on end. For pity’s sake shut the brats away somewhere.’
‘But they’re too little. They might fall and hurt themselves and lie injured without anyone knowing.’
‘Then we’ll get one of the workmen to fashion something to keep them enclosed,’ said Annaleise. ‘Other places do it – they have a kind of half cage with compartments. I’ve seen them. It’s up to you, Zoia, but I’m not coming here again if that row’s going on.’ She stood in the draughty hall and looked about her disparagingly. ‘This place is falling apart. If I’m to come here again, you’ll have to get it in better condition. I’m not staying in a house where rainwater spatters into the rooms and gutters leak.’ She made for the door and Zoia said, desperately, ‘But there’s no money for repairs.’
‘Don’t be naive. Hive some off the allowance and spruce the place up a bit. Let me know when it’s done and I’ll see about coming back for a night here or there.’
Zoia did as Annaleise wanted. She was not very happy about the cages for the smallest children, but it meant Annaleise came back which was all that mattered. And looked at sensibly, there was no point in giving young children elaborate meals which might make them sick: plain fare was much better. It had been what she and her brothers and sisters had been given, and it had not harmed them. There was no point, either, in dressing the children in fancy clothes which no one would see and which they would soil within twenty-four hours. Clothes were difficult to get anyway, and the cost was prohibitive if you did get them.
The years went along and the Black House’s sinister reputation became safely established in the area. Not a place to approach after dark, and not really a place to approach in the daylight, either. The people who knew it was an orphanage were the ones who had placed children there, and they did not talk about it. They considered it shameful and sad. Somewhere best ignored and best forgotten.
Zoia’s stock within the Party rose quite high. Elena Ceauşescu was known to be pleased with her work, and if Elena was pleased, Annaleise was pleased. When Annaleise was pleased, she visited Zoia frequently – she still turned Zoia’s bones to water simply by touching her hand. She prepared little suppers for Annaleise herself, going down to the cold-floored sculleries and cooking appetizing meals, and she made sure that on those nights a big log fire burned in the hearth, and fresh sheets were on the old-fashioned tester bed. Life was not ideal, but life was never ideal. Zoia was as content as she could hope to be.
And then the spying snooping child, Mara, was brought to the Black House.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Romania, early 1970s
When Zoia caught her outside the room with the caged children, Mara was very frightened indeed. She was afraid Zoia meant to shut her in the room itself – perhaps in one of the cages like Hansel and Gretel. She had always thought Hansel and Gretel was just a story, but now she was not so sure. Supposing it was true? Suppose all the stories her grandmother had told were true and there really were wolves and witches and giants?
But Zoia did not put her in the room with the crying babies. She took Mara back to the long room with the empty beds and the mushroom growths on the ceiling and this time the door was locked. For a while Mara sat on the windowsill and stared outside, trying to see Matthew’s house across the tops of the trees, wondering what to do if he did not tell the secrets and she had to stay here for ever. Eventually she fell into a frightened sleep on one of the beds, waking at intervals to sit up and peer through the darkness in case the black stove was lurching towards her or the mushroomy things had fallen onto the bed. Somewhere before dawn it occurred to her that she might be inside a nightmare and none of this was really happening. This was such a comforting idea she promised herself she would soon wake up in her own bed at home, with grandmother downstairs and her little brother asleep in the next room. For a moment she could see Mikhail’s small curled-up outline under the sheets in his small bed, and she seized on the image and went to sleep with it in her mind.
She woke t
o find she was still in the dreadful room but it was morning now because daylight showed at the windows which made Mara feel a bit better. Perhaps locking-up for the night had been the punishment. Probably Matthew would already have told them all the secrets, and she would soon be allowed to go home.
Presently a woman she had not seen before came in with a mug of milk and a bowl of some porridge stuff. The milk was a bit watery and the porridge was lumpy and tasted faintly of cabbage, but Mara was hungry so she ate and drank it all. Afterwards the woman took her to the lavatory which was a terrible place with rusty pipes and a huge wooden box encasing the lavatory itself and damp floorboards all round it. When Mara ran water from the tap it came out rusty, but she managed to wash her face and hands.
The woman was waiting for her when she went out; she took Mara’s hand and led her down the stairs. Waiting in the big dim hall, was Zoia. She gave the woman a nod of dismissal and took Mara outside. Bright sunshine flooded the courtyard and the hillside; it was dazzling after the dim rooms and Mara put up her free hand to shield her eyes. A man came out of one of the outbuildings to join them. He was wearing a dark uniform – Mara thought he might be one of the people who drove the jeep – and he had little squinty eyes. They led her down the slope and, just as Mara was starting to think she might be going home after all, they turned off the path and went into the trees.
It was cooler here and everywhere was very still, almost as if they had stepped into a different world or even a different time. Mara remembered her grandmother’s tales again, but if this was a fairytale it was not the kind where a friendly woodcutter or a passing prince in disguise would come along to rescue her.
‘We’re here,’ said Zoia. ‘This is our place of punishment.’ She pointed, and Mara saw with horror that in front of them was a lump of stone thrusting up out of the ground like a giant’s face. There were narrow slitty windows for eyes, and over the door were lumpy pitted stones for a nose.
‘It’s an old well-house,’ said Zoia. There was a note of fear in her voice.
Mara was staring at the stone structure in panic. She did not believe it was a well-house at all. She was dreadfully afraid it was the hacked-off head of a giant, like in one of her grandmother’s stories. She wanted to run as far away from it as she could, but Zoia had a tight hold of her, and the man was opening the door. It stuck for a moment, then gave way, swinging inwards to show a dreadful gaping blackness like a toothless mouth. When Zoia and the man began to pull her forward, Mara struggled, then screamed for help. Her voice echoed through the forest, sending birds flying wildly up from the trees, but no one came running to see what was happening. She screamed again, but this time Zoia smacked her across the cheek to silence her. Mara gasped and began to cry. Tears ran down her face and into her mouth because Zoia and the man were holding her hands and she could not wipe them away.
They had got her to the door when Zoia suddenly half turned to look back towards the track. Mara looked as well, and saw movement within the dappled sunlight of the forest. Her heart gave a thump of hope. Someone heard my screams after all. The guard stood up straighter, and Zoia’s face lit up and in a soft voice, she said, ‘It’s Miss Simonescu.’ And then, with a kind of reverence, ‘It’s Annaleise.’
Annaleise. The last shreds of hope dropped away from Mara and she knew there was no longer any point in trying to escape because she would be caught and carried back. Annaleise was no longer a dark wraith, a fearful whisper in the playground, a prowling ghost waiting to pounce on children, she was a real person. She wore a long dark coat with the hem trailing on the ground and the deep collar was turned up to frame her face. Her skin was pale and smooth as if she had been carved out of ivory, and she had black hair looped up into a kind of coil on top of her head. Little tendrils had escaped from this coil; they curled over her neck like crawly spiders’ legs.
‘Miss Simonescu likes to oversee punishments whenever possible,’ said Zoia, and Annaleise said, ‘Sadly, punishments are sometimes necessary, especially for children who see things they shouldn’t.’ Her voice made Mara think of cold lumps of granite in the depths of winter.
‘The cages,’ whispered Mara, staring at her. ‘The babies in cages, that’s what you mean, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t talk about them, not to anyone. I really wouldn’t.’
‘But we have to make sure of that,’ said Annaleise – Mara could not think of her as Miss Simonescu; in the stories she was always just Annaleise. ‘We have to show you what happens to silly little girls who might tell their friends and families about secrets they shouldn’t have seen.’ She took a step nearer and Mara cowered back. ‘Secrets,’ she said softly. ‘I hear your friend Matthew hasn’t shared his secrets with us, Mara.’ Her eyes, which Mara had expected to be dark, were pale, like pebbles.
‘Matthew doesn’t know any secrets. It’s no good keeping me here. He can’t tell you anything.’
‘Not even when he knows you’re shut away in the place of punishment?’ said Annaleise, and Mara sent a scared glance at the dreadful well-house.
‘How long will I be here?’ she said.
‘Until we know all we need to know about Andrei Valk,’ said Annaleise.
‘We don’t mind what we have to do to find out,’ said Zoia.
Mara saw that although they wanted to make sure she did not tell people about the cages, Matthew’s father was of far greater interest.
Before she could screw up her courage to run away and hide in the trees, Zoia and the guard had picked her up and carried her through the open door. Great swathes of pale cobwebs hung down over the opening as if they were strings of saliva inside the mouth. Zoia pushed them impatiently aside, but they still brushed against Mara’s hair and her face. The bad-smelling darkness closed about her. It was smothering and confusing, and before she could gather her senses, she had been set down on the brick floor and Zoia and the guard were outside, closing the door. It scraped into place and the light was shut off altogether. She could just hear Annaleise and Zoia going away through the forest. She could hear their voices getting fainter and fainter.
She was inside the stone face, and panic swept over her. It wasn’t a real stone face, of course, Mara knew that, deep down. Or was it? Supposing these weren’t stones and bricks but bones and skin. Supposing those trickles of moisture weren’t rain, but blood or the stuff that came out of people’s eyes when they had colds. She reminded herself she was not locked in; there was no lock on the door. That meant all she had to do was find the door and she could be out in the forest, then she could run down the track and be home.
It was not absolutely pitch dark because of the eyeholes, but for the first few moments it nearly was. Mara’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness, and she could eventually see the bricks of the walls and the floor. The floor… At the centre was a black yawning hole. That’s the well itself, she thought, staring at it. It was like a massive lipless mouth and round it was a tiny wall, only as high as Mara’s ankles. She stared at it in horror. It would be a long deep tunnel, going down and down, and all kinds of things would live there. Worms and spiders and blind crawling things that did not like the light. If you fell down it you would never climb back up. The thing to do was not look at the well at all but to stay close to the wall, find the door and get out. Mara said this to herself several times.
The door was not easy to see, but it was situated between the eyes, so she stood up and began to feel her way cautiously along the wall until the eyes were on each side of her. Here was the door: she could feel the break in the stones. She moved her hands all the way up and down, expecting to find a handle or a latch. But there was nothing. The door was old and its hinges had shrieked like a screaming animal when Zoia opened it, but it was a thick heavy door, and once shut it fitted absolutely flat and smooth into the stone walls.
Panic rose in her all over again, but she fought it down and tried to prise the door open with her fingernails. It would not budge. All that happened was that Mara tore several of her finger
nails, which was just about the most painful thing in the world. She sank to the floor again, huddled against the door in the terrible darkness, putting her raw fingertips into her mouth to suck them clean of the blood. After a little while she tried again, trying to forget the spiky pain in her fingers. But it did not move, so she went to stand on tiptoe under one of the eyeholes, shouting to be let out. She shouted until her throat hurt, but she did not think anyone could hear. The eyehole was too high up for her to reach, and her voice bounced back on the brick walls, sounding muffled in the enclosed space.
She sat down again. The floor was hard and cold and there was a gritty feeling to it, but there was nowhere else to sit, and she could not stand up for hours and hours. Once she put her hand down by her side and felt a crackly little heap of something light and sad. A bird skeleton, thought Mara, snatching her hand back and shuddering.
The truth had better be faced – Sister Teresa said it was always better to face things head on, so you knew the whole truth. The whole truth here was that Mara was not going to get out until Zoia and Annaleise came back to let her out. They were leaving her inside the stone face until Matthew told them what they wanted to know about his father.
But Matthew did not know anything. Mara remembered this in a terrible rush of fear. He did not know. ‘There are secrets about your father,’ she had once said to him on one of their walks to school, curious to see what he would say, but it had not worked. He had stopped and stared at her, and said, ‘What secrets? What do you mean?’
Remembering this, she felt as if a huge clenched fist had come smacking out of the darkness and punched her in the throat.
When they asked Matthew about the secrets, even if he wanted to tell, he could not. He knew nothing.
Then how long would they leave her here?
The present
