by Sarah Rayne
She had folded the letter a number of times to make it look creased and read, but standing in Mara’s room now, she unfolded it and read it again.
Dearest Mara,
I was very glad to hear from you so promptly and to know all your news. When you get home we will be able to talk properly. My studies are hard work, but life in Budapest is exciting – there’s so much to tell you.
I’ve given a lot of thought to your suggestions about my father, and if you really do know of a warden at Jilava who can be bribed, I think that would be worth trying. I like your idea of bringing my father out disguised as a guard. It would be massively risky, but I think it would work. What’s life without a few risks anyway?
I don’t have a great deal of money for the actual bribe, but I’ll manage it somehow. I don’t care if I have to live on bread and cheese for the next three months and work double shifts at the cafe to pay the rent. I don’t care if I have to beg on the streets and sleep in the gutter, if it means my father can be free.
You’re a dear true friend to have worked all this out, and one day I’ll try to repay you.
Till soon.
All my love
Matthew
Zoia had not been able to find a sample of Matthew’s handwriting, but she knew, in a general way, the style of writing children were taught, and she knew, as well, that it was unlikely the letter would be put to any kind of test. If Matthew were ever questioned about this letter he would deny writing it, but that would be perfectly all right. In Zoia’s experience, people always lied about this kind of thing. The slightly dramatic wording about not caring if he had to beg on the streets or sleep in the gutter seemed to her the kind of thing a young man studying art would say or write. She thought the whole thing would pass muster. And with Gheorghe’s help…
She was smiling as she slid the folded letter and pamphlets between two of the books on Mara’s shelf. She was still smiling as she slipped out of the cottage, carefully closing the window to its original position, then walked unnoticed down the lane to her own home.
Mara was deeply happy to be back in the familiar cottage. To curl up in the fireside corner where she had listened to her grandmother’s tales, to cook and eat a meal with her beloved Mikhail, even though supplies of food were so meagre, these were the most joyful things in the world. During all the years at Debreczen she had hoped and dreamed and prayed to return, and now it had happened. If only her grandmother could be here, life would be perfect.
Mikhail still went off to school each morning, but he would shortly be leaving and decisions would have to be made about what he was going to do. There was a small amount of money which their grandmother had left. ‘Hoarded under a floorboard in the bedroom, the old miser,’ Mikhail said, smiling with affectionate memory. ‘She didn’t want the Securitate snoopers to know about it. They can get into bank accounts and demand all kinds of payments these days, did you know that?’
Mara was not sure if this was true or if Mikhail wanted to make the Securitate sound even worse than they were. She had already noticed how very defiant he was, but after almost nine years in the quiet remote convent, the whole world seemed defiant. And loud – she had forgotten how loud the world was. Even this small village had been like an assault on her senses, so that she had wanted to hide herself in a dark corner. But she was grateful for the sturdy tin box with the money. It had to be used with extreme care, but it might be enough for Mikhail to go to university if that was what he wanted. She was going to ask Sister Teresa about that.
In the meantime, it was wonderful to be at home after so many years, to wave Mikhail off to his lessons each morning, to welcome him home each evening, and to walk with him in the lanes on Sunday afternoons when everywhere was quiet and church bells could be heard ringing. Mara wanted to trap the moments and lock them away safely somewhere so that one day, a long time in the future, she would be able to take the memories out and relive them. The convent’s routines were deeply embedded in her; every night she prayed the happy times would last.
They did not. In the middle of a perfectly ordinary week, on an apparently ordinary afternoon, two Securitate men came to the cottage, knocked sharply on the door, and walked inside when Mara opened it. Her heart thumped in her chest because this was how it had all started, all those years ago, when she hid in the attic and the men found her and carried her off to the Black House.
They were not exactly discourteous, because they did not say anything, other than the initial information that they had come to search the house. Mara started to ask why, but they were already inside, opening doors, looking inside cupboards, going upstairs to the bedrooms. She tried not to panic and reminded herself that the Securitate still came summarily into people’s homes like this and that, apart from the little store of money, there was nothing in the least incriminating here.
But it seemed there was. There was a shout from her bedroom, and the younger man came rattling back downstairs holding what looked like a letter and a couple of printed leaflets. He brandished them at Mara, who had never seen them before. When she said this, the men smiled knowingly, and the younger one grabbed her arm and said she was under arrest.
‘For what?’
‘Several crimes,’ he said, and thrust the handful of papers in her face. ‘Possession of subversive literature for starters.’
‘I haven’t got any—’
‘And,’ he said, a lick of pleasure in his voice, ‘conspiracy.’
‘What d’you mean? What have I conspired to do?’
‘Helping free a prisoner from a state Gaol,’ he said, and Mara stared at him and remembered what Sister Teresa had said all those years ago about a lie. There are always consequences of a lie, she had said. Was this one of those consequences?
‘Why do you think that?’ she said at last.
‘We’ve found evidence.’ Again he brandished the papers he was holding. ‘Information was given to us – a very reliable source indeed it came from.’
‘Who?’
‘A gentleman high up in the Politburo. Never you mind about his name, that’s not for you to know. But he was quite right. This is the proof. A letter from your friend – a friend who’s the son of two enemies of the State.’
Matthew, thought Mara.
‘It tells it all,’ said the man. ‘The details of the plan you were going to put into operation to steal his father away from prison. A bad crime, that, stealing State prisoners. You’ll probably be a prisoner yourself because of it, and if you’re a Category III prisoner that’ll mean ten years at least. I doubt you’ll see the world for a very long time.’
I’ll make sure you’re shut away and that you never see the world again, Zoia had said the night Annaleise died. Zoia was behind this, Mara knew it quite surely.
As they took her out to the waiting car – not a rattly jeep but a smart sleek car – she said, ‘Where are you taking me? Am I going to be put on trial?’
‘I don’t know about a trial,’ he said. ‘But I do know where you’re to be taken.’
Pitesti, thought Mara. That’s where they’ll take me.
But the man said, ‘You’re to go to the fort under the ground. The sunken prison house. Jilava Gaol.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The present
Michael Innes stopped speaking, and there was a long, deep silence.
The spell’s winding up, thought Theo. He’s used up too much emotion in telling me all that, and he’s drained. What a deeply unhappy story, though. He let the silence lengthen, then said, very quietly, ‘And so Mara was taken to Jilava.’
‘Yes. It’s a smallish place near Bucharest – Ilfov country.’ Innes seemed to take strength from suddenly realizing where he was, and from Theo’s presence. ‘The gaol is an old fortress, partly subterranean,’ he said. ‘The name Jilava derives from a Romanian word žilav. It means humid place. In some quarters it was known as the house of the lost.’
‘They vanished as abruptly and completely as if b
y sorcery,’ said Theo softly. ‘Living ghosts in a world that will soon have no memory of them.’
‘Yes.’ Innes looked sharply at Theo. ‘A man I once knew – a clever, brave, man – wrote that.’
Andrei, thought Theo, but he only said, ‘And Mara was taken to this house of the lost? To Jilava?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Were you taken there as well?’
‘No, although looking back I was probably lucky not to be,’ said Innes with a sudden grin. ‘I was a member of an organization called the October Group.’
Theo stared at him, and thought, Well, that’s something I didn’t pick up.
‘It was an underground movement,’ said Innes. ‘A lot of them were students. In the main they fought for justice for people wrongly imprisoned. We had radio stations and broadcast to try to recruit people to our cause – all illegal of course, and they were always being shut down. But for a lot of the time we managed to keep one step ahead of the Securitate. We tried to rouse international concern by sending articles to Western newspapers. Sometimes,’ said Innes, ‘we even managed to get prisoners out and across the borders into other countries.’ He paused. ‘Mara never talked about what happened to her in Jilava, but she kept diaries – a lot of the people in Jilava did. They made ink from the juice of berries growing on bushes outside their cells, although God knows where the paper came from. I think they might have stolen bits of it from the workshop. She had the diaries with her the day we got her out. She carried them in the bodice of her gown – she was afraid the guards would find them and punish her again.’
Diaries, thought Theo. Oh God, Mara’s own diaries from those years… Something darted across his mind – a faded uncertain image: fragments of brittle yellowing paper with thin pale writing, the erratic glimpse of a phrase, the fragment of a sentence. He remembered the odd impression he had had the night he was attacked – the sensation that he was reading an old manuscript by flickering lamplight.
‘But even without the diaries, we all knew what went on in the prisons,’ Innes was saying.
‘Re-education,’ said Theo. ‘It was a form of brainwashing, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. The destruction of the mind – the deliberate re-shaping of a personality. They used it in the 1940s and 1950s: Pitesti Gaol was the centre of the re-education experiments but Jilava came in a good second.’
‘You said “they”?’ said Theo.
‘The more extreme sections of the communist overlords. Officials from the original Iron Guard. The Securitate,’ said Innes, with bitterness and hatred in his voice. ‘But, Theo, the horror of what happened to my sister during those months is difficult to convey.’ He leaned forward as if eager to make him understand. ‘It’s one of those situations for which language is inadequate. Neither my language nor yours really has the words.’
Theo suddenly realized what he should have seen earlier: that Michael Innes’ precise way of talking was because English was not his native tongue.
‘The original aim was for prisoners to discard all past political, even religious, convictions,’ said Innes. ‘To reverse people’s values. They forced on prisoners grotesque, wildly inaccurate versions of their own lives and their families. That’s what happened to Mara. She went into Jilava as a scared seventeen-year-old on a faked charge of conspiracy. When she came out, it was as if the real Mara had been taken and another person substituted – a withdrawn suspicious woman.’
‘But hadn’t re-education been outlawed by then?’ said Theo.
‘It had,’ said Innes. ‘It was the early 1980s and it was more than twenty-five years since re-education had been stamped out. But it hadn’t entirely vanished. Some of the old regime were still staffing the prisons and their outlook hadn’t altered. If they took a dislike to a prisoner or if they were paid, they reverted to the old methods. That’s what happened to Mara. She had made an enemy of a high-ranking Politburo official—’
‘Annaleise Simonescu,’ said Theo. ‘And there was a woman called Zoia.’
‘Yes. You know more than I bargained for.’
Theo saw again that Innes accepted his knowledge. Presently, he would ask Innes about that, but for the moment his whole mind was focused on Mara.
‘After we got her out,’ said Innes, ‘I read her diaries. I wanted to understand her. I needed to know what had happened to her. Mostly they were scrappy notes, probably scribbled in secrecy or in a dark corner where she wouldn’t be seen. I’ll never forget the things she wrote. Later, when my English was better, I made a translation. I suppose I wanted it recorded in this country as well – writing it out in English seemed to do that.’ He looked at Theo. ‘I’ve still got the translation if you’d like to read it?’
‘Oh God, yes, I would,’ said Theo.
‘It’s rough and not very tidy, but it would help you to see that whoever killed Charmery – whoever attacked you – couldn’t be Mara. Because of what was done to her, violence is absolute anathema to her.’
Theo did not reply. He watched Innes open a drawer in the desk and take out a large envelope. Innes held the envelope between his hands for a moment, as if holding on to a memory, then gave it to Theo.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever want to read them again,’ he said. ‘I don’t ever want to re-visit those years. I still don’t really understand why you’re looking backwards at all this, but if they’ll help you…’
‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘Yes, they’ll help me. I’ll be very careful with them.’
‘I’ll leave them with you,’ said Michael Innes. ‘Go up to bed when you want.’
Theo had thought he would take the diaries up to the little bedroom, but he seemed to have gone beyond sleep. He sat back in the chair, and opened the envelope with care. Mara’s diaries, he thought, as he withdrew the four or five sheets of paper. There were no dates, but he knew Mara had been in Jilava Gaol sometime in the first few years of the 1980s.
Innes’ handwriting was illegible in places – Theo guessed he had been deeply affected by what he was writing – and the sentences were frequently disjointed, as if Mara had written scrappy notes at snatched moments. But it was possible to piece most of it together. As he began to read, the voice of the young woman who had been Mara Ionescu came vividly into the room.
‘Today I came to the sunken fortress of Jilava. A bleak grim place, cold, unforgiving and smelling of human despair…’
There were fragmented phrases after this – references to stone rooms with walls running with condensation, and to the unvarying routine of the days, with spells of work in the prison shop, sewing and working bewildering machinery. ‘I have no idea what we are making…’ Later, she wrote, ‘I can no longer smell the despair. Is that because it’s now part of me?’ At the foot of the same page, describing her surroundings more fully, she wrote, ‘I live in a narrow dim room, with slit windows overlooking a small brick yard. There are twelve of us. Each morning they take us to a stone-floored room with a tap – we are allowed about three minutes to wash and clean what they call the bucket – it’s a kind of commode which we share. Some mornings there isn’t time to clean it or even empty it. When that happens, the stench in the cell makes us all feel sick….
‘The other women say if I’m asked to confess to anything I should do so. It saves pain, they say. I don’t understand that…’
Theo read on, his senses racing. There was something about being taken to a different part of the gaol – the writing was a bit skewed, but it was readable. Was this when the re-education had started?
‘No matter what they do to me, I won’t admit to murder,’ Mara had written. ‘I didn’t kill Annaleise, I know I didn’t. She fell.’
She fell. Theo’s mind went at once to his book, to how he had described Annaleise stumbling and falling back into the gaping mouth of the old well.
‘Zoia comes here sometimes. She stands in the doorway watching me with eyes as cold as a snake’s. Yesterday I saw her give the guards something in a big envelope – money, I think… I
s she paying them to do this to me?
‘Last night, when they brought food, they tied my hands up so I had to lick the food from the plate. There were dry crustings of fat and gristle clinging to the side because they no longer bother to wash the plates. I tried to lick up a mouthful, but my stomach rebelled and I was violently sick. Being sick on the floor with your hands tied behind your back is so disgusting, so disgusting… I can’t endure this, I can’t… If I said what they want me to say it would end.’
Did she confess? Theo wondered. Did they keep on with this subtle, squalid torture – this re-education? That’s what Zoia wanted, that’s what she paid the guards for. She wanted Mara to be a self-confessed murderess so she could see her sentenced – to death, presumably. He was no longer aware of being in the warm room; he was in the sunken prison house where medieval tortures were practised in secret, and where innocent people vanished to become wraiths, living ghosts in a world that would soon have no memory of them.
‘Today,’ wrote Mara, after what appeared to be a gap of several days, ‘they said if I confessed they would make sure my brother was safe. They reminded me how very young he is – not yet sixteen. I’m so afraid that’s a threat. If I don’t make the confession they want, Mikhail will be harmed.’
Mikhail, thought Theo, feeling the pity of it slam into his throat. Of course Zoia would use Mikhail to extract that final revenge, and of course Mara would give in.
‘Now they say if I confess they will allow me to go home to him.’
The final turn of the screw. She could never have resisted that, thought Theo. That’s the one thing she couldn’t have held out against – she was only seventeen or eighteen herself.
Mara had not resisted. Straight after the entry about her brother, she had written, ‘And so, finally and at last, it’s over and I did what they wanted. I confessed to killing Annaleise. But I did it for Mikhail’s sake, for my sake, so I can see him again, so he’ll be safe… The curious thing is that I feel cleansed for saying it, for admitting it at last. I am a murderess. It seems even more real now I’ve written it down.
