Loe raamatut: «Quaternity. Four Novellas from the Carpathians»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

I. THE BEAUTY OF BRYNKOOSH

II. BUTTERFLY IN PARIS

III. A SECONDARY CHARACTER

IV. THE PRIZE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I. THE BEAUTY OF BRYNKOOSH

When I get out of here, I first want to see those sculptures. I had no idea this was possible—a metal ball equals a bird, a cube equals two people kissing, a male member is actually a woman’s head. They are shiny, striking. Now, I can only see them on reproductions. A kind jailer has brought me a photo album after I asked about Brynkoosh. I was always a cultured gal. I remember a boyfriend introducing me to his buddy and saying, “She’s so cultured you won’t believe it!” Plus, I am enjoying quite a special status here. A foreigner, an American, the case is going to be big. If there is a case, of course, which I doubt. I’m using this time to get clued up about Brynkoosh. But photographs are 2D, and I want to see the statues in 3D. It is a totally different experience, 3D, when you can walk around things and even touch them.

Pretty soon it will all get sorted out. I am just an unlucky kind of person. Wherever I go, I am prey to awful coincidences, and there is no escape. I have traveled all the way from one continent to another in the hope of starting anew, yet where did I end up? In a detention cell. I just hope Radu comes. We can talk. About Brynkoosh, and about what happened. He will understand.

* * *

This is how I met Razvan.

When I first came to this town, I went to a vegan café. I didn’t have a place to stay yet. The café was not far from the train station if I went right and then up the hill. In such cafés, the waiters speak perfect English, so I had no problem ordering. They even had a menu in English. It was cozy but not crowded; only hipsters could afford it. I dislike them, but I was tired and couldn’t be bothered with giving laborious explanations just to try to order a sandwich from a person who couldn’t understand me. And, like this, I ended up in that vegan place.

A man at the next table began watching me as I read the menu. I got upset thinking he may have recognized me. How far must I run so that people won’t recognize me? I wondered. I then took a book out of my bag and started reading. They rarely bother you when you are reading. Men fly to a black widow like bees to honey, but an intellectual lady isn’t every man’s kind of thing.

Still he asked me, “Where are you traveling from?”

He was swarthy and had long sideburns like Elvis. His suit looked stupid and out of place here, but I liked the golden chain around his neck.

I said, “California,” smiled, and looked at my book. But I shouldn’t have smiled. I shouldn’t have said anything at all because he took it as an invitation.

He looked at my book and said, “I love that book, love Jack Kerouac. I’ve always wanted to be on the road myself.”

And then he told me about another book, written by a monk who had wandered and prayed at the same time.

You, sir, are never going anywhere, I thought. I had seen the wedding ring on him and the pudginess. He told me he had to eat vegetarian because of his cholesterol. It did stand to reason. He said he worked at the university but didn’t tell me that he was a vice-rector—as I later found out. I thought him to be an accountant or the head of security. I could tell he was important but didn’t know in what way.

I should have listened to him, of course, when he had told me about wanting to go away. Like I should have listened to Mickey’s babble of despair. I just can’t learn to be attentive enough to people’s words, and I keep being punished for it. But why would anybody want to leave their blameless existence in search of the unknown? Search me.

As the man in the café talked, I thought about the prison, how I hadn’t been able to go anywhere for five long years. But now I was free to change my name and wander. I was Kate now, not Barbara. Stanhope, not Laskey. I was not going to tell him any of that, of course.

He asked why I had come to this country, of all places.

“It’s where I was born,” I said. “I was an orphan, and Americans adopted me.”

No idea why I said that, but it was the right call. He sighed and looked at me almost with tears in his eyes. He sought signs of tragedy on my face and thought he saw them. He said, “We didn’t know much about the orphanages. I was a teenager when we found out how appalling the conditions were. It must have been hell.”

Then he looked at me again and tried to calculate my age and how old I must have been when I was adopted. I noticed his confusion as I still look like an adolescent—tall and bony. And I still behave like one. Only sometimes, when tired, I can be taken for an elderly woman. But usually I seem young—the way saints, madmen, and psychopaths always look young and innocent.

He said he and his wife had also thought about adoption, but they didn’t go through with it. He added that my parents must have been wonderful people.

“I came here to meet my birth mother,” I replied.

“She lives in our town?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I paid a detective to trace her. But I don’t know if she wants to meet me. I am not even sure if I have the courage to meet her. I will wait and see. I want to spend some time in this town on my own, to contemplate.”

“Of course,” he said. “It is quite a personal decision.”

“Do you know of a cheap hostel?”

I read something in his eyes. An idea. A desire. Perhaps he was already thinking about letting me live in Radu’s house. But it only gleamed for a second and then went out. He got afraid, I figured. He then told me about Traveler’s Inn. He said it was the nicest and the cheapest hostel in town. He took a napkin and drew a map on it to help me find the hostel. He also wrote down his number in case I needed anything. He said his name was Razvan. I told him to call me Kate. We just shook hands and parted ways. What a loser!

* * *

The hostel was decent. A funny building—an old villa in a neighborhood of other derelict villas and sidewalks covered with dry leaves, brown and rotting. It looked a lot better than the others though—renovated and painted in bright colors. Its yard was quite nicely trimmed, without an overgrowth of weeds and bushes. I wondered if it ever snowed here because the end of February looked like autumn to me, and I’m from California. The young guy at the reception wanted to use his English, so he chatted with me for quite some time, but he saw, at last, that I was tired and gave me the key. He even said that I could pay tomorrow, although the standard practice in cheap establishments is generally to make you pay in advance. I sure didn’t mind.

The room upstairs had a bed, a window, a lamp, and a chair—kind of like the prison cell. The window was bigger, letting some dull daylight inside, and the smell was different: slightly humid, perhaps moldy. It came to me again, that feeling that no matter where I went, I’d still be there, in prison, and condemned. Well, I was doing what I had promised myself I’d do after they let me go—see the Old World. I went to London and Paris first. Saw the buildings, got into museums, and tried to enjoy the crowds. I liked the catacombs in Paris with all those skulls, and the Millennium Wheel in London. I guess I like burrowing into the ground and flying up in the sky, above everybody else. Yet when I was back on the ground, on the same level as others, I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were watching me as though they knew who I was. When I phoned Mom, she said that I shouldn’t be making much of it and that they were looking because I was pretty. I knew I was pretty, but it’s never done me much good. And then I traveled to Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe being kind of the end of the world, so there would be less chance of them recognizing me there.

I thought the university man at the vegan café must have thought me pretty. Now he was probably home with his wife, watching TV and jerking off while his wife cooked them dinner. Or maybe he was eating his heart out, wishing he had gone after the American woman and thinking, “I should have had an adventure … life offered me a chance and I did not take it.” People are unfathomable.

It is nice to daydream about that. I never had a single dream at night in all my life. They say I must be dreaming but just forgetting my dreams as soon as I awoke. Could be true. Anyway, I never remembered any of my dreams. Not even a feeling that I may have dreamed about something. It always felt like I just shut my eyes, and it was already morning when I opened them.

The psychologist back in California had wanted me to talk about my dreams before I went to prison. I had told her I never had any. The rug in her office looked striped because the rays of the sun slipped through the blinds. It was funny: those bright stripes of California sun in an office that wanted to be oh-so New York City. The move to the West Coast must have broken this doctor’s heart. Deviants like me were her only consolation. She had thought I was lying about not having dreams.

She said, “Okay, just let your thoughts wander, and tell me about the first thing that comes to mind.”

The smell of patchouli drifted through that office, coming from a tiny dispenser. I saw my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall and thought: I look really nice in an oval frame.

* * *

Somebody knocked on my door. Half-asleep, I thought I was back in my cell. Then I remembered that I was traveling. But I drew a blank when I tried to recall the name of the city. The daylight was seeping in through the window.

It was the man from the vegan café, the one who watched his cholesterol. He was sweaty and breathless from climbing the stairs. Or maybe he had run all the way here, afraid that I would disappear. He must really want to see me again.

“Sorry for barging in like this,” he said.

I told him that he was no bother and sat on the bed. I was perfectly dressed for the occasion because I hadn’t taken my clothes off when I went to sleep. My shirt was a bit rumpled, but my jeans were definitely okay.

“I felt bad for not doing more for you,” he said.

I told him he could sit on the chair. He sat down, and the chair squeaked. He lowered his eyes suspiciously but decided it was safe.

“I wanted to suggest—don’t know why I didn’t think of it straightaway—that you could stay at my friend Radu’s house. He’s not here, and the house is empty. I am, sort of, looking after it for Radu. It would help me if you stayed there. Plus, houses deteriorate if left empty for long.”

“For free? Oh, no, I can’t accept it. Perhaps, I could pay you.”

“No need … it’s me who is asking for a favor. I would be grateful. It’s like a housesitting job. We could both profit from it, don’t you think?”

He leaned forward, eyeing me. To him, I was just a pretty American, hailing from the land of the free, some fantasy fodder. He reminded me of Disney’s dancing hippos, both graceful and overweight.

I didn’t want to say “yes” straightaway. So, I said, “Let me think about it.”

“May I invite you for a cup of coffee?”

I grabbed my bag, and we went downstairs, where he paid for my stay, saying “This is the least I can do,” so I let him.

Outside was gray and wet. We walked past the leafless trees and crumbling apartment blocks into a café with a yellow light. It was almost strange that he was neither afraid of me nor recoiled in fear or disgust. But, of course, he had no idea who I was. He just wanted to talk. I was, I think, his first adventure in a long time. Perhaps he had dreamed of picking up a random girl for the past twenty years of his marriage. Pick her up, bare his soul to her, take her to bed. But he was always deathly afraid of it, I bet. People might talk, the wife might get wind of it. Pity the normal people! They want to live our lives, but they don’t want to pay the price. We, on the other hand, would sell our souls to be one half of some conventional couple and live in some cozy little house where we would watch TV with our cozy little husband, yet things always go wrong for us, and we end up being persecuted.

He told me how he and Radu had been friends since first grade. Razvan and Radu, Radu and Razvan were two best buddies, the “fatso” and the “stick,” he told me. At school, they shared the same desk, walked home together, and explored the neighborhood. Radu’s parents had left for abroad on a party-sanctioned trip and didn’t come back. It was 1979 or 1980 when they defected. Radu was brought up by his aunt. Because it was the aunt’s sister who had defected, the aunt got demoted in her job—from a department chair to junior professor. That displeased her greatly. She had been an old-school Marxist philosopher but was now an uber-Marxist to counteract the stain on her biography. I kept nodding as if I knew what he was talking about.

As soon as Radu turned eighteen, Razvan continued, he left home and went to the capital. Times had changed anyway. Radu’s parents returned after 1989, and the family was reunited. The aunt was left to her own devices, which suited her just fine. Razvan doubted if Radu ever missed his aunt and vice versa. But last year she died, and Radu inherited the house.

“He gave me the key,” said Razvan. “He didn’t want to do anything with it. Just left it like it was and went back to his charmed life in the capital city.”

“Why is it charmed?”

“I’m joking. Not charmed. Sad.”

He obviously enjoyed talking. Perhaps nobody had listened to him in a long time. Or he liked explaining things to a pretty girl. I was curious; I didn’t know any Marxist philosophers or anyone fleeing from a one-party state to another or any men brought up by their aunts.

“Why doesn’t he rent the house out?” I asked.

“He’d need to make all kinds of repairs, throw away the old clothes, old books, the broken furniture … But no worries. The house is perfectly livable. It just would be difficult to make a profit renting it. Although he could sell it, a developer would buy and then demolish it to build an apartment block in its place. Developers have been destroying the neighborhood. So, I’m begging Radu not to sell.”

We walked again along the villas—most of them were ramshackle. The whole neighborhood was doomed to be replaced by apartment buildings with the trees cut and the grass never growing again. I smelled smoke—somebody was burning dry leaves. We stopped in front of a small blue house with an arched roof portico. Four chipped stairs led to the door.

“This is it,” said Razvan. “Do you like it? Do you see yourself staying here? Radu wouldn’t mind.”

He bit his tongue, aware that he was being too coercive.

“Do you think his aunt would have minded?” I asked.

Razvan shrugged. “Don’t know about the aunt, but Radu would be happy knowing a girl was living in his house. He is the loneliest man I know.”

I pulled a sad face in order not to smirk; what could these people know about loneliness? Where I come from, loneliness lands you in prison. That’s what I had said when arguing in my defense—that I was simply a lonely person. But they didn’t believe me because I was too pretty, and my parents were well-off. I was “the worst woman in America.”

And I felt such a cosmic sense of desolation that, had they executed me on the spot, it would not have helped my sorrow: it felt as if the sadness of the world would have lasted forever, even with me removed from it.

If this doesn’t make you lonesome, then what does?

* * *

I had always wanted to live in a house with a high ceiling, but I had never gotten the chance before. Even at Mom and Dad’s, the ceilings were low. Forget about my cell. Briefly, once, I had rented a studio apartment with a high ceiling and an ocean view, but my stay was cut short because of what happened to Mickey. Now, I was giving happiness a second shot.

“It’s an old-fashioned house,” Razvan said, “a suite with no corridor.”

Indeed, the living room led to a bedroom, which led to another bathroom, which led both to a small back room and to the stairs that led down to a half-basement kitchen, and then a few stairs that led up to a back door. The back door opened into a tiny yard.

“It’s very quiet,” said Razvan. “None of the neighbors are ever home.”

The bigger, newer villas on the right and on the left behind a thick wooden fence seemed empty. I looked down at the soft brown soil under my feet.

“I’d like to plant something when it gets warmer,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

I love working with earth. Planting, weeding, and mowing the lawn. Once I had been on a serious archeological dig. It was fun, and I was really good at it. But one night, my buddy and I went digging for treasures on our own. The archeologists got wind of it and threw us out.

Razvan showed me the tools: the shovel, the rake, and the watering can. I feel sad now when I remember the poor thing displaying these instruments in the hope that I would be watering flower beds. But that was what I was thinking about then, too. Man proposes but God disposes.

We went back into the house. The rooms were filled with vintage furniture from the ’60. Brown was the owner's favorite color—the curtains were brown, the tables and chairs carved of brown wood, and even the moth-eaten rugs were brownish.

“So many books. All philosophy?”

“Marx, Engels, and Lenin predominantly. Other philosophers as well, of course. I wonder what Radu will do with all these books. Nobody will want them … so old and dusty.”

Razvan opened a window to let fresh air inside the stuffy room. Then he had a sudden thought, “If you want to learn the language, I can help you. It’s your language too, after all. The first language you heard in your life.”

I told him I would think about it. I am not normally good with languages.

“Is this your friend?” I pointed to a black-and-white picture in a round metal frame. A little boy with sharp features stood beside a woman wearing glasses.

“Yes, that’s Radu and Olga. Professor Olga Costinescu.”

The boy and the woman in the photograph were standing apart, not touching each other. Neither of them was smiling. People in these socialist countries didn’t smile for pictures ever. We always smile in America. I even smiled for my mugshot.

Razvan asked me if I had enough money. I replied that I didn’t want to become a kept woman just yet. He was embarrassed.

The walls were painted beige, and there were fine cracks in the white plaster of the ceiling.

“When I lived in the orphanage,” I said, “I always dreamed of a house like this. I wanted to live in a big house with nice curtains, and my family drinking tea in the kitchen or barbecuing in the backyard.”

Razvan looked at me with his big black eyes, and it felt like he wanted to kiss me but stopped himself. I could tell he had a good heart. It would have been alright with him if we remained friends. I’d housesit for him, and he’d teach me the language.

“I will get you a cell phone,” he said.

We stood in the entrance hall, and neither of us knew what to say next. I was going to stay behind and make myself comfortable in this house. He was going to leave and bring me a phone later. But I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him all to myself, right there.

Five years ago, a newspaper had called me “a girlfriend from hell.” And from that very hell, I now called out to Razvan,

“Stay.”

* * *

Whatever clean-up Radu had done here, it must have been perfunctory. I was surrounded by a dead person’s belongings: notebooks, trinkets, postcards, jewelry. A Radiola that would never play again. On the desk, a dried-out pen and a yellowing sheet with two words—were these the last words the aunt had written?

And all the clothes. When I opened the wardrobe, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the inner side. A smell of mothballs, rows of blouses, and two-piece suits in somber tones. All had a severe, masculine cut to them. In the other wardrobe, I found astrakhan coats and ladies’ felt hats.

I threw my clothes in the washing machine and took a blouse and a skirt from the wardrobe. They fit me; the aunt must have been a gangly woman too. I buttoned the cream-colored blouse to the top and slid my hands down the gray skirt. My reflection in the mirror looked old-fashioned and serious. What I needed was to put my hair up in a bun and set a pair of glasses on my nose, and I’d look like Professor Olga Costinescu or the psychologist back in California.

The china in the kitchen cupboard was fragile and dusty. A row of old cookbooks made me wonder if Marxists were good at cooking. I’d rank it as a bourgeois pastime, but what did I know. Next to the kitchen, there was a storage room with more musty-smelling books, threadbare towels, a pack of toilet paper nibbled by a mouse, and a box full of Christmas decorations. Did Marxists celebrate Christmas?

I remembered that the philosopher aunt used to have a boy in the house. The cooking and Christmas must have been for him. The aunt had tried her best. The psychologist had asked me about Mom and Dad and tried to find fault with them, but Mom and Dad were alright as far as I was concerned. The aunt must have been alright too. I took out a golden bauble and a wreath with pinecones. I thought I might stay here for months to come and then decorate a Christmas tree eventually. I could be happy here—if only I weren’t me. If only I could become somebody else entirely. Not just by merely changing my name or by changing a place.

Yet I will stay me forever until the day I die. Oh, the injustice of it all to be one’s own self forever! To be doomed to be one’s own self!

* * *

Razvan was shocked when he saw me in the dead professor’s clothes. I was ready to apologize, but he said it was not a problem. The clothes were going to be binned or donated anyway. In fact, I could see that he wanted me to stay dressed like that. I made us coffee, and he kept staring at me. I wondered if he used to have fantasies about Professor Costinescu when he was young. He brought a bottle of whiskey. He seemed to think of himself as a whiskey connoisseur. I barely touched it; I didn’t want to fall off the wagon. But he became dewy-eyed and maudlin. He wanted to hear more about my life as a Romanian orphan. I said I remembered being hungry and never having warm water and having to shit in a stinking toilet.

“Just a hole in the floor, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

In prison, I had watched a film on TV in the common room about Romanian orphans. They were beaten and starved and tied to their beds. They pissed and shat themselves, but nobody cared. I shivered when I thought of my life as a Romanian orphan. I felt like I deserved more compassion from Razvan.

When I told him we were beaten there, he took my hand and kissed it.

I told him, “After I was adopted, I wanted to convince myself that my orphanage memories weren’t real, that I was never really brought from that awful place. Some children thought that they were stolen from a royal palace, but it wasn’t true, was it? That’s what I kept telling myself. Yet when I was thirteen, it struck me again. Who were my real parents? Imagine not knowing anything about yourself.”

Razvan looked at me with his big, humid eyes. I wanted to lose myself in his gaze, and I felt as if I was a character in a romance novel. And so, I continued, “But it took me many years to sum up the courage and hire a detective. It cost me all my savings, but I learned the name of my birth mother.”

I was not going to tell him the name because I hadn’t invented it yet.

“Do you think that meeting her will fill the void in your heart?” he asked and took my hand in his.

I liked this part: “filling the void in my heart.” It sounded meaningful to me.

“Even if it doesn’t … at least I will catch a glimpse of her,” I said. “Otherwise, I will continue to feel as if I come from nowhere. I want to ask her why she left me there. Was she too poor to keep me? Was I unwanted? Was I an ugly baby?”

“You were never ugly,” he said and went quiet.

I asked him to tell me more about the town, and he was happy. He said I must go see the old cathedral with stone carvings, the big palace that was a museum now, and the university building.

He said that the coolest thing about it was the Hall of Lost Footsteps.

“Why lost?” I asked.

“Because the hall makes the noise disappear,” he said. When he was a child, his dad had taken him there.

“Your dad worked at the university too?”

“Yes.” As a boy, Razvan said that he liked the paintings on the walls.

“It’s a depiction of the Romanian soul,” he said.

I think he wanted to make me take pride in my nationality—the fact that I was born Romanian.

“What’s a Romanian soul?” I asked.

“I will take you to see them,” he said.

And here was the real crux of the matter.

Much as he wanted to show me around the city, Razvan was afraid to be seen with me. His colleagues—or worse, his wife—could see us together. What if we appeared too close? What if he couldn’t come up with a proper explanation?

Out of fear, he never showed me the Hall of Lost Footsteps. I went to see it alone. I spent many hours alone, waiting for him. While I waited for him, I visited the cathedral, the opera building, the merchant street, and all the trimmings of a county town. When I went to the university, I saw the Hall, and I liked the paintings. There was a lot of blue and a lot of fantastic beasts and human figures emerging from clouds. Naked women, too (bold for a place of higher education), and a picture where heroes were meant to be “accepting death.” When I looked, I wondered if something in me had responded, whether I could have a Romanian soul, or at least train myself to feel like I had one.

I walked away from the university building, crossed the boulevard, and lost myself in the little streets running down the hill. Some of them had pavement from over a century ago; some of them were unpaved. The houses didn’t look like villas anymore: just shacks with no running water. A rooster, plus a couple of hens, walked in the front yard, and always a bored dog or two would start barking whenever I passed. Other dogs would join in the choir, so that I walked down the winding streets, past the draw wells, accompanied by a whole barking glee club.

This would be a suitable place to meet my birth mother. Perhaps she lived in a hut like this without running water and could barely feed a dog. And when she’d had me, she thought I would be better off in an orphanage. My imaginary mother must have been very young when she had given birth to me, I thought to myself. I would approach her poor hovel, knock at the door, and their dog would bark out loud.

A woman would yell, “Who could it be?”

Then, a man would yell, “Make sure you look through the eyehole before you let them in.”

And the woman would then shout back, “I know! I know!” She would come to the door and ask, “Who is it?”

I would somehow understand what they were saying and would answer in their language, “It’s me, your daughter.”

My mother would come out. She would still be young, in her fifties, slim, and dark, and she would look at me with suspicion in her eyes: could it really be her daughter, her Zamfira, or Ileana, or Vasilica, or whatever my name had been before my adoptive parents gave me an American name?

Then I walked over to the synagogue, a building made of stones with a dome. It looked empty. Razvan had told me once that many Jews had lived in this town once upon a time. But most of them had perished during the Holocaust, and the rest had emigrated. He had said that he had first reckoned that I may be one of those Jewish Americans who come here in search of their roots. That’s an idea, I thought. Maybe next time. Being Jewish. Not with Razvan, alas, it was too late for that. I was kind of stuck in the orphan mode. But with someone else. I did feel like an orphan, being so alone, but I sort of felt like a Jew too, persecuted by public opinion. Must there necessarily be a contradiction? One could be both. Perhaps I could be a Jewish orphan.

I walked past the synagogue, turned on the big street, and followed it to a square with a statue of a gigantic female on it, probably a “Liberty” or a “Motherland.” The square was flanked by a socialist-style building of a hospital, some old villas, and a pub on the corner. The tables were obscured by bushes and a low awning. I was thirsty and so I went inside. Everything seemed lopsided there, including the tables, the chairs, and even the customers, most of whom were missing something: a limb, an eye, or some teeth. One had a cauliflower ear, another’s nose was a rosacea-infested bulb. They were friendly though: three of them motioned for me to sit at their table and, in a split second, I had a glass of house wine in front of me.

I sensed that homely smell of unwashed bodies that almost does not exist in the States, the land of obsessive showering. As soon as I spoke, they knew I was a foreigner, and they really liked it. I tried to understand what they said in their broken English, with words from other languages thrown in. No music here, just a hum of drunk voices and the smell of cheap ciggies.

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“Oh, welcome to the Hotel California, right? I have a cousin in California. Perhaps you know him.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Tourism,” I said.

“Tourism? You are in the right place with us here. All the elite drinks here.”

“Shut up! She hasn’t come here to see the pub. You ought to see the Palace of Culture, miss.”