I

I heard the first of her stories one spring evening on a Brooklyn rooftop. I was interning at an art festival back then, newly arrived and hungry for the city, fancying I belonged in the art world, and because I was keen to rub shoulders with artists, I found myself on the roof of the exhibition space that evening, listening to her tell me she had a quarter in her shoe. She’d made up her mind to walk around with the coin until she dreamed about it. It had been in there two weeks, she explained. She wanted America beneath her skin, but all she’d gotten were a few ugly blisters, and she hadn’t even dreamed about the coin yet.

I wished her luck with the project, we clinked glasses, and she introduced herself as Ana Ivan. When I asked where she was from, she said Bucharest, telling me about where she grew up and about Ceaușescu’s rationing in the eighties, when only every fifth streetlamp was lit and the television broadcast programs for just two hours a day.

Oh sure, Romania, I said. Things were pretty bad back then?

Ana shrugged. They never went hungry, but there was no electricity, and she remembered the long, dark evenings in the apartment, the afternoons when there was so little to do that she was reduced to padding out the hours with daydreams. Sometimes she sat in front of the blank television and imagined the cartoons she’d seen, rearranging them into new combinations. Other times she played a game with her father: They put a blank piece of paper on the table, shut their eyes, and let a pen fall on the sheet at random. A dot here and a dot there, until there were a few handfuls of them. Then they sat together and stared at the dots, looking for figures or patterns, or patterns that looked like figures, and when they’d agreed on one they joined up the dots to make a picture emerge. They drew lines between the dots to make an elephant or a flower or a snail’s shell, and sooner or later her father always threw open his arms and said, Ah, Ana, just imagine! This is how the world hangs together, everything we see just a few tiny flecks in space. He said it every time—not, in that sense, an inventive man. What d’you make of that, then? he would say. Most of what we see is nothing but empty space. It’s just the distance between atoms, sheer nothingness. And then Ana would pick up the pen and ask, So is this nothing? and her father would say, No, sweetheart, that’s atoms and nothing, and it was all true, a nice edifying game they continued to play until one day Ana went on a school trip. She was in the second or third year, she told me—it must have been in the mid-eighties, because Ceaușescu’s palace was still a forest of scaffolding growing out of the hillside into the center of town—and the teacher was shepherding the children toward the building site, pointing at the cranes and diggers and asking, So, can anybody tell me what that is? Yes, said Ana, It’s nothing. Nothing, said the schoolteacher, what do you mean by that? That’s what my dad says. It’s sheer nothingness. Ana’s father was summoned for a conversation. He had to explain and smooth things over, and if Ana was to be believed, he was lucky not to lose his job or his front teeth, because after that episode all the family’s letters were steamed open, the Securitate kept coming to visit, and the neighbors listened in on the telephone line.

Join up the dots, said Ana, when she’d finished her story. Know what I mean?

I nodded as if I’d seen or construed or guessed what she meant, because back then everything was simpler. Ana talked and I listened, and what did it matter to me whether she talked about her father or her school trips? Ana was an artist, and in my eyes that made her worth listening to.

As I remember it, it was the first warm day of spring. I’d gotten there early to set up tables, leaning against the banister as I watched the guests come up the stairs, some of them pausing a moment and blinking as they emerged into the sunlight and the scent of the river that hung above the city that day, as if they’d forgotten why they were hurrying or what came after the short, endless days of winter. A train clattered over the Manhattan Bridge above us, down from the street came the bleating of a truck’s horn, and around me the guests were chattering away. I wanted to hear what they were saying, but I didn’t know them, and wasn’t sure how to introduce myself. So I went to the bar instead, got a glass of wine, and stared at the island across the river, where thousands of people were swarming out of the towers onto the streets, full of thoughts and dreams I knew nothing about but which would soon be opened to me. That’s the way I thought back then. I’d be dissolved into the city, and with a lightness in my chest I stared at the shiny panes of glass and the people behind them, people who’d soon be sharing in my memories, when a woman stepped away from the bar and gave me her hand.

She was pale and short, very short, with a black dress and dark hair gathered in a bun, about five or ten years older than me. She had a peculiar face, her eyes brown and inquisitive, and a smile on her lips as if my whole existence was a joke and she was waiting for the punch line.

Are you working at the festival? she asked.

Yes, I said. My brother’s one of the organizers.

I asked if she was an artist, and what work she had in the show. Ana must have misunderstood me, or perhaps she just ignored my question, because she launched into the anecdote about the coin in her shoe, and after telling me the story of the school trip and the game with the dots she asked why I’d moved to New York.

Well, my brother works for the festival, I said. And he got me—

Yeah, you said that. But why are you really here?

What do you mean?

I mean you didn’t travel all the way across the Atlantic to be an intern. You want something—to get rich or hunt bison or whatever.

I laughed. Well, I’m definitely not here to hunt bison.

Judging by that moth-eaten shirt, she said, I’d guess you want to be an intellectual of some kind. An academic or a poet or something.

None of the above, I said. Well, sort of—I write sometimes. Stories, I guess you’d call them. Short fiction and articles and stuff like that.

So you’re a writer?

I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I haven’t published much.

Yeah, well, that’s publishing, she sighed. It’s not for kids.

Then we clinked glasses and she told me about a friend who was an editor at an imprint or literary magazine or self-publishing group; I don’t remember exactly because at that moment I lifted my eyes and caught sight of my brother. Surrounded by a ring of well-dressed people, he was explaining the concept behind the exhibition. I could see it in the way he moved his hands, brandishing them in swelling gestures like a priest or a shaman or a witch doctor, summoning the spirits of the festival. Ana paused, as if she could tell my attention had shifted.

Sorry, I said, smiling. Back in a minute.

When I reached my brother he’d finished his monologue, and there was a chorus of laughter.

I see you’ve met our Romanian friend, he said with a nod toward Ana. Great, isn’t she?

Absolutely, I said. She seems—she’s quite something.

Mm, he said. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here.

Around us the party atmosphere was gradually beginning to wane. The cheerful voices and the buzz of free alcohol were devolving into drunken, whiny drivel. It had reached that point in the evening when all the dull clichés began to surface: an artist’s hand creeping up an intern’s thigh, the gallerist pedantically bossing the caterers about. I remember that my brother took his time pointing out a few of the guests—an Egyptian curator, a German journalist—and before we disappeared into the night I had one last glimpse of Ana. She was bending over her watch with an expression of concentration, but I can’t remember if we said goodbye.

And what if we did?

Back then it made no difference. Ana was just a woman I met at a reception, one artist out of hundreds, nothing more. I didn’t even glance over my shoulder.

 

A week went by before I saw her again. The following Thursday I was walking down the corridor after a lecture, going to deposit the money we’d taken at the door, and as I passed through the cavernous exhibition space I noticed the lights were on in the office. It was late, about eleven or twelve at night, and I’d expected to find the building in darkness, but coming from the back room I could hear an almost childish laugh and detect the faint aroma of fresh pastries, and when I turned the corner I saw Ana sitting at the desk, bathed in the blue light of the computer screen. She was video-chatting, wearing the same dress as she had at the launch party, or one exactly like it, but this time she had no makeup on and her face was somehow softer.

Oddly enough, it made me shy. Or not shy, exactly, but hesitant, and for a moment I stood by the doorframe, wondering whether to leave. I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t want to intrude, I guess, didn’t want to be pushy, or maybe my hesitation was more intuitive, as if something inside me knew I should keep my distance. I’d only met Ana once, and although I was charmed by the coin in her shoe and the little stories she told, I felt there was something about her I couldn’t trust. I wasn’t able to put my finger on what it was, but there was something in the air around her, something disquieting that I didn’t understand. Then again, I’d just arrived in town and there were lots of things I didn’t understand, so I continued into the room, nodding to Ana and locking the cashbox into the cabinet.

Well, if it isn’t the intern, she said, closing the computer. What are you doing here so late?

I’ve just come from the lecture, I answered.

Oh right, the lecture. Of course.

What about you?

She tapped the black notebook that lay open on the table in front of her. I was going to make an entry in my logbook, she said. But then my mom called.

A logbook? I said. What’s that all about?

You know, notes and coordinates and stuff like that.

She gave a brief smile but changed the subject, asking if I knew anywhere to get a decent pair of jeans. I recommended a few stores, but they were closed, of course, at this hour. Ana wasn’t pleased.

Isn’t this supposed to be the city that never sleeps? Even Bucharest has more going on than here.

I smiled. Can’t it wait until tomorrow? They’ll probably be open at ten.

Ten, she snorted. I’ll only just have gone to bed.

No, no—ten in the morning.

Yeah. I’ll only just have gone to bed.

I looked at her, unable to tell whether she was joking or had misunderstood me. Or maybe she was working on a schedule all her own. I asked: So you always work really late at night?

Yeah, you know, because of the time-traveling.

She said it completely naturally, as if she were talking about laundry or picking up a child from school.

Time-traveling?

Yeah. You haven’t heard about that?

No, I mean—what? You travel through time?

Sure. I can show you another time, but right now I’m dying for something to eat. Want to get breakfast?

I could have said no. I could have told her I was busy, that it was too late, that I was tired and half-dead on my feet, but those would have been lies. The truth was I was brimming with energy, and even though there was something disquieting about Ana, she was also clever and funny, and I hadn’t come to New York to turn down invitations for midnight snacks. I told her I’d be happy to, so we packed up our things, locked the door, and walked out into the city together. We ended up at a diner not far from the exhibition space, where we sat and talked about the service in America, so much better than in Europe, friendly yet ill-mannered in its own extravagant way. Ana told me about the restaurant-less part of Bucharest she’d grown up in, and I told her about my girlfriend Lærke, who waitressed at an all-night restaurant in Copenhagen and was going to move over here as soon as she’d finished her degree.

That’s so sweet, said Ana. So sweet and young and innocent. I’m amazed you dared go out with someone like me.

What do you mean?

Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to go out with Eastern Europeans? To toss a pinch of salt over your shoulder when there are Romanians around?

No, I said with a smile. I haven’t heard that one.

Ah, well, we bring bad luck, you see. We’re like a litter of black cats.

To illustrate her point, she told me about the apartment she was living in. She’d inherited it from an old friend of her father’s, Paul Pintea, a Romanian mathematician who’d been a professor at Cluj university until the late nineties. When the reforms were implemented he was sacked, and to make matters worse his wife was diagnosed with a serious kidney disorder. In desperation, unable to afford dialysis or find a new job, the professor had entered the Green Card Lottery, and ended up winning, of course. As soon as the paperwork came through, he packed his bags and traveled to New York, but if the venerable mathematician had thought that jobs hung on trees here he’d been very much mistaken. He had to settle for work as a cleaner, plus a menial job on the side as a night attendant at a laundromat out in Sunnyside. The pittance he sent home was barely enough to cover the cost of his wife’s dialysis, and soon he took to drink, falling into a deep depression. Oh, nothing but pain and drudgery all around, and after they’d been stewing in their misery for a few years, the wife succumbed to her illness. Six months later it was the mathematician’s turn: he keeled over on the downtown R train, struck down by a blood clot in the lung or somewhere.

So there you go, said Ana. I’m living in the ruins of someone else’s life.

Sounds like a horror movie, I said. Aren’t you afraid he’ll come back?

Come back?

Yeah. Paul, I mean. Aren’t you afraid he’ll return and start haunting you?

She had a lovely laugh, bubbly and forthright. I wish he would, she said, so I can give him a good slap.

At that moment the waitress arrived to take our order. I only had enough money for coffee, but Ana ordered pancakes, and before long we were talking about ready-made cake mix and Dr. Oetker. We talked about Dr. Oetker the individual, August Oetker Junior, who was apparently a big art collector, and about Dr. Oetker’s product packaging, which darkened the farther south you got in Europe: cream in Denmark, yellow in Germany, scarlet in Serbia, and a sort of coffee-brown in Spain. Ana chatted and chatted, just nipping at the food, so I ate the rest while she talked. Slowly she cleared the table in front of her. First she moved the plate, then the coffee cup and sugar dispenser, the napkins and the bottle of ketchup. It was like she wanted space to talk. Her hands worked as she told me about her unlucky countrymen, about the accidents that struck both friends and relatives, and about the two minutes she’d been dead.

Sorry, what? I said. The two minutes you what?

Mm, were dead.

I didn’t know what to say. Must be some kind of joke, I thought, but Ana seemed serious enough, and I remember very clearly her reaching for the coffee cup, kneading it between her hands, her eyes fixed on the bottom as if reading the grounds. Ana sat there and told me about 1989, the terrible year that had changed her life in so many ways. It had begun innocently on New Year’s morning, as she stood on a milk crate and read aloud from Ceaușescu’s speech. The other kids had cheered and yelled hurrah, and the local grocer smiled nervously as he watched Ana ape the Great Winter Shoemaker’s gestures. She spoke with the same drawling rhythms and made the same spastic motions with her hands as the People’s President, and when Ana’s father realized what was going on he dragged her straight up to the apartment, where the family had to keep a low profile for weeks on end.

And that’s what Ana was like in those days, I guess. A close-cropped mischief-maker who hated dresses and spat long gobbets of spit and refused to accept that she couldn’t stand up and pee with the boys, so that her mother was always having to wash her spattered pants. She was small for her age, but that didn’t hold her back. Ana was the one bossing the boys around in the parking lot outside the apartment block, and the neighborhood housewives laughed when they saw the little girl ordering pudgy Gabriel Mitu to climb so far up the chestnut tree that he had to be brought down with a ladder like a cat. If you believe Ana, she tyrannized the whole district—but a fall from the giddy heights of power was just around the corner. When she got back after the Christmas break, Violeta Mincic was standing in the schoolyard. The new girl.

Violeta, who wasn’t a tomboy like Ana.

Violeta, who had hair that fell down to her butt.

Violeta, who somehow made her Pioneers scarf swell in broad, full waves across her chest, who altered and sewed and modified her school uniform just enough that she always stood out from the rest.

Yes, she was beautiful, but at first it didn’t scare Ana. They made friends that day in the schoolyard, and Violeta was enlisted into Ana’s regiment, assigned roles and tasks in games of Ana’s devising. But although Violeta was allowed to be Nadia Comăneci when they played The Olympics, although Violeta was allowed first choice when they played Among Mountains and Valleys, she was always just that little bit absent, or aloof, or whatever you’d call it in a nine-year-old.

Violeta’s true intentions emerged after a few weeks. As soon as she’d picked up how it all worked—who decided what, when, and why—she struck. At recess one day, when Ana wanted to play Rainforest and was splitting up her classmates into insects, carnivores, and herbivores, Violeta sprang her surprise.

That game, she said. You know it’s just for babies.

No, it isn’t, said Ana.

Okay, fine. If you want to play Ana’s game, said Violeta, then play it. I’m just a bit too old.

So what do you want to play, then? asked Gabriel Mitu, who could sense which way the wind was blowing: another day as the hippopotamus.

Well, I actually do know a game my big brother plays, said Violeta, giving her disingenuously bashful smile, the same one she’d smile for sixteen years, until the day her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a bus shelter.

If you want, she said, I can show you what to do.

During the next recess Ana stayed in the classroom while the other kids chased after Violeta’s pigtails. Sulky and offended, she sat drawing Violeta as a cow with two udders. But if Ana thought her first day playing second violin was bad, things grew far worse when the mutiny really picked up steam. Violeta was the type to divide and rule. She split up her classmates into winners and losers, swapping best friends like the rest of us swap trash bags. One day she gave Ana a friendship ring, but the very next Monday, in front of the entire class, Violeta threw her ring into the wastepaper basket and terminated the friendship without explanation. Every single recess, Violeta played the same card: Ana plays games for babies, Ana’s just a little kid, Ana can’t figure out how to tie her shoes, Ana’s got to stand on a chair to reach the shelf. Ana still wears diapers at night, she lied, I saw it with my own eyes on an outing with the Pioneers.

When Ana heard that story she was sitting on the jungle gym, swinging her legs. Is it true you still need diapers? someone asked. Yeah, Violeta says you still wear diapers at night, said another. Ana was trapped on the jungle gym; she couldn’t get away. And how are you supposed to answer a question like that anyway? She sat where she was and felt the helplessness wash over her, the tears welling up. It was her word against Violeta’s, and sniveling wouldn’t do much for her credibility. Look, the baby’s boo-hooing, someone yelled, and Ana tumbled off the jungle gym and ran home to the apartment block as fast as her sausage-dog legs could carry her. She lay down on the sofa and cried, quietly at first, snifflingly, but soon louder, until at last her father stuck his head out from his office and glanced around. Ah, Ana, he said, as if he’d found a natural explanation. It was just a branch against the windowpane, it was just the cat rummaging around under the bed.

Ah, Ana, he said, it’s just you.

Many years later, when she and Violeta had both ended up, in their separate ways, as outcasts, Ana felt a peculiar blend of hatred and tenderness whenever she saw Violeta hunched around a cigarette behind the gas station, or on Lipscani with some drug dealer by her side. In moments of teenage gloom, Ana imagined the two of them somehow shared a fate, she and Violeta: like two accelerating bodies, they’d collided with each other, and were now free-falling into the abyss.

It was probably an exaggeration, the free fall, but that was how Ana felt. And not without reason, because that year all Ana’s friends abandoned her, and before the month was out she’d briefly lost her life.

It began the morning their teacher gathered the girls together and explained that the Danube of Thought was turning fifty, and in celebration there was to be much pomp and circumstance: congratulatory speeches and festive fireworks, fluttering doves, tens of thousands of pennant-waving children, Romania’s daughters shouldering five-foot rifles on a parade ground lit by the first gleam of day. All Romania was paying tribute to the Female Symbol of Creation, the Scientific Elena, and the epic leadership of her Hero Husband, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Ana’s class had been given the particular honor of supplying the girl who would stand on the podium and receive a kiss on the cheek from Ceaușescu himself, and that same afternoon two officials trooped up to the school, and all the girls were lined up in the schoolyard so they could stand to attention while the bureaucrats went from child to child and scribbled down notes. Ana didn’t stand a chance, of course. She stood there with her chubby, babyish cheeks, a whole head shorter than her classmates, and it came as no surprise when Violeta won the contest. Two days later, the President’s chief medical officer knocked on the classroom door, and Ana seethed with envy as Violeta bustled off to be examined. We’re talking the full change-of-ownership inspection here: After all, the Genius of the Carpathians mustn’t be allowed to get cooties. Violeta was vaccinated for typhus and infectious hepatitis, she was tested for colds, mumps, and whooping cough, for meningitis, tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, and the next day at recess she showed off all her punctures to her classmates.

Yeah, well, so what, said Ana. They’re just a few stupid marks.

They’re not just marks, said Violeta. Now I can never get sick.

Yes, you can, said Ana, as Violeta pulled up her skirt to show the bruise on her buttock.

See that there? That’s a presidential swelling.

Now, I don’t know if she was embellishing as she went along, but Ana often talked about the gymnastics display for Ceaușescu’s birthday. The way they practiced formations for hours in freezing weather at the parade ground; the wind that swept among the empty bleachers; the chattering teeth; the classmates who passed out with cold and had to be wrapped in blankets warmed on the stove. Ana hated the cold and the rehearsals. Her coordination was bad and she was constantly dropping the pennant, so the coach downgraded her to walking at the back of the procession and waving a flag. Now, it was one thing to dance around and humiliate herself for Ceaușescu, but to do all that with Violeta on the podium—no, Ana couldn’t bear the thought. Envy picked and tugged at her, she couldn’t sleep at night, and the day before the dress rehearsal she played the only card a frustrated schoolgirl has to play, taking to her bed with a nasty case of malingeritis.

Nonsense, said Ana’s mother when she felt her cool forehead. I want you out of bed right now.

And if Ana hadn’t been the daughter of a father who’d grown up in the deepest recesses of Oltenia’s darkest mountains, that would probably have been that, and Ana would probably never have died. But Ana’s father was born in the kind of village that tall tales and quacks come from, one far, far away, where the tumbleweed blows and sprained ankles are treated with distilled spirits. He may have been a man of science, but he was also something of a hypochondriac, and he was just as hysterically afraid of inflamed appendixes as the rest of Bucharest’s impoverished population. Was he slow to react when his daughter suddenly complained of stomach pains? He was not. He put his hand southwest of her belly button and asked: Is this where it hurts?

Mm-hm, said Ana, nodding, frightened of the earnestness in his voice.

So Ana was whisked off to the hospital by the only person in the neighborhood with a driver’s license and put in a room with two coughing boys, and there she lay, writhing in the bleached sheets, not knowing what she was most afraid of, the birthday parade or this mess. Her little lie was skidding out of control, but before she could yank the emergency brake the doctor was standing over her bed, pressing his hand against her belly.

Yes, she said again. It hurts right there.

Now her mother was worried too, standing whey-faced in the hallway and peering guiltily at Ana. She wanted so much to come clean. But her mother was pacing the corridor like a caged panther while her father was busy answering the anesthesiologist’s questions. Is she allergic to opiates? Taking any medication? I see she’s in Year Three—she’s nine years old? The anesthesiologist was checking against the table for age and weight, jotting down figures, and nodding to the orderly.

And all of a sudden it was too late.

The next thing Ana remembers is three doctors yelling in her face. What’s your birthday, what’s your name, who’s the president, how old are you?

I don’t know, she gasped, frightened. And then she began to cry.

Ana’s heart had stopped. She’d been dead for nearly two minutes. The idiots hadn’t weighed her before pumping her with anesthetic, going on the average weight of a nine-year-old instead. Mid-operation her pulse had disappeared, the nurses screamed and shouted, and the surgeon fumbled with the defibrillator until the anesthesiologist leaped up and massaged her heart back into action. He emerged a hero, that incompetent anesthesiologist, receiving the Order of the Star of Romania even though he was the one who’d overmedicated her, and even though it was obvious Ana’s weight was more like a seven-year-old’s than a nine-year-old’s, and a weedy one at that.

Back at the diner, I asked Ana what it felt like to be dead. Did she see her life flash before her eyes, a tunnel of dazzling light, what? But Ana shrugged. She had no memory of hovering ten or fifteen feet above her lifeless body. All she remembered was an extraordinary sense of relief that she wasn’t at the freezing parade ground, staring into Violeta’s lovely, ugly face. And she remembered her father standing at the end of the bed with a glass jar, in which a lump of meat was floating in a yellowish liquid. He’d bribed the surgeons with a hefty share of his Christmas bonus so that Ana could take home her healthy appendix. She still has it today. It’s sitting on top of her chest of drawers in Bucharest like a relic, in a place of pride beside her father’s old pipe.

 

This was the story Ana told me as we sat in the diner that night, staring at me with those narrow eyes. We were the last ones in there. The waitress idled on the barstool, doing a crossword or Sudoku or maybe drawing mustaches on politicians, and Ana took her wallet out of her canvas bag. In the wallet she found a photograph she laid on the table.

That’s me in Year Three, she said, sliding it across. A few days before I died.

I picked up the photo and examined it, searching for the self-assured woman who sat in front of me, but all I saw were the glazed eyes of a schoolgirl. I looked up at Ana and she smiled at me, and I laughed, because it was a peculiar anecdote.

What are you laughing at, she said. Don’t you believe me?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Why aren’t you writing it down, then? Didn’t you say you write stories?

Yeah, I do.

So why aren’t you writing it down? Isn’t it a story you can use?

Maybe. Bit short, don’t you think?

But it was just the intro, it was only the first chapter. Wait till you hear the rest, then you’ll be begging me to let you write it.

You think so?

Ana nodded. Before we’re done with each other, she said, I guarantee you’ll be writing my life story. Ana Ivan’s journey through time, the whole true tale.

I laughed. Sounds like a thriller.

Yeah, you can practically hear it, right? Here, take the picture. Use it as inspiration.

You mean that?

Yeah, sure. But if it’s a bestseller I’ll sue you and run off with all the money. Might as well tell you that straightaway. That’s what we Romanians are like. Unreliable.

I took the picture, smiling.

As long as I’m the one writing it, there’s probably no need to worry about bestsellers.

Oh, come on. You seem talented enough.

You don’t know that. You haven’t read anything I’ve written.

No, but I could. Why don’t you write a story for me?

A story?

Yeah, write a short story for me. A short story about my appendix. It’s got real drama, don’t you think?

I laughed again, but Ana wasn’t smiling. And was there really anything to laugh about? She’d lost her appendix, she’d died because of medical incompetence, and by the time she got out of the hospital in February 1989 her world had come apart. That month all her friends defected, and suddenly there was no one to hang out with in the parking lot, not a soul who wanted to go home and play games. When the thaw shambled into Bucharest, trampling the parks to sludge, she was already an outcast, sitting all by herself in the schoolyard and walking home alone when the bell rang. All her old subjects took part in the uprising, and soon she was on a level with the Romani kids who picked up trash behind the marketplace. No, she was below that now. She was on a level with the handicapped girl, the one with the wheelchair and the crooked arm, or at least on a level with fat Dorin Puscas, who always had his fingers in his mouth or up his nose or somewhere worse.

Ana told me more than once about those dismal months in Year Three, about the sameness, the routines run on autopilot. Getting dragged out of bed at five thirty every morning to stand in lines outside stores. Going to sleep every evening hoping she wouldn’t wake until the summer. I heard her describe so many times getting up in the dark without electricity or gas or warmth, how breakfast was nothing but a hunk of dry, untoasted bread, how her father dressed her in four layers of clothing for a long day in an unheated school—so much clothing she could barely move, her hands gloved as she took dictation, scribbling texts about the Genius of the Carpathians, Elena, the Renowned Scientist—how she’d go home again through the cold and sit in front of the oven for the two hours they had gas and electricity, eating soup and doing homework, before the dark came back and all the layers of clothing had to be removed and replaced with new ones, two pairs of woolen socks, two sets of pajamas, and piles of blankets that held her pinned against the slats all night, until there it was again: morning.

Sounds pathetic, I know, but I guess that’s what it was like in Romania in those days, just grindingly miserable. Not that I was there to see it, of course, I’d only just been born, and I know nothing of dictatorship and hunger, never having had a taste of it, not even speaking Romanian. But Ana was there, sitting on the floor in front of her father’s office every day after school, waiting for him to come out. She wasn’t welcome in the parking lot with the other kids, she didn’t dare venture into the kitchen and trouble her mother, and she didn’t want to knock on the office door and disturb her father in the middle of his thesis. Her world had shrunk to twenty-one square meters. It ran down the corridor from her bedroom and up to the living room, and from her spot outside the office Ana could hear all the small sounds inside: a match being struck, drawers shifting in their wooden frames, a pencil tracing rough paths across notepaper.

As she sat there, she guessed what her father might be doing. She imagined the scene. The small fat candles melted almost to the plate, the heavy reek of stearin, the drawing board flecked with paint, two or three sheets of paper, and the book of geometric figures, the ones with funny names. Möbius strips and tori, rhombuses and trapezoids. The theorem about the hairy ball, that one was funny. She liked it when her father talked about those things, but he rarely did. He’d sit hunched over his thesis for hours, absolutely still, and when finally he got up he’d say: Oh, Ana, are you sitting there? Shouldn’t you go outside and play?

But Ana didn’t go outside and play. Going outside sounded about as good as running into the arms of a hoard of angry miners, a band of hysterical farmers with machetes, or any other frothing mob she could come up with. Glue-sniffing child soldiers, a pack of drunken hooligans. Every day after school, Ana sat outside the office and fiddled with her homework and her crayons, and at some point during the spring it dawned on her family that she’d become a homebody, a timid child who’d inherited neither the go-getting energy of her mother’s side of the family nor the earthy practicality and work ethic of which her father’s side was so proud.

Why don’t you have any friends? asked her cousins.

Yes, where are your playmates? said her aunts, as they stroked her hair and debated her flaws as though she were a sick cow or a mare gone lame.

Goodness, she still wets the bed, said one. Isn’t she starting Year Four after the vacation?

You should give her St. John’s wort before bedtime, said another.

Like hell you should, said the third. What she needs is a good kick up the backside. The girl’s bone idle.

It can’t have been easy, and if Ana had grown up in any other home, her parents might have helped. But the best her mother could offer was a piece or two of good advice.

If you get off your butt and run outside, she said, you might find yourself a few friends.

And when she was in a more philosophical mood: If you only knew what we went through so you could have it this good.

And Ana’s father? He’d been something of a loner in his younger days too, and couldn’t see why Ana pottering around by herself was such a problem. It was healthy; boredom was for idiots, and his daughter was certainly no idiot. In March he finally submitted his thesis to Babeș-Bolyai University at Cluj, and when he came home from the post office that afternoon he told Ana the big news.

So are we moving to Cluj? she asked excitedly.

Ah, well, we’ll have to see, he said. Let’s take things one step at a time.

Then he kissed her, put on his best jacket, went into town, and came home with a chicken. God knows where he got it from, but that evening the apartment smelled like bay leaves and fat, the pálinka and cherry juice emerged from their hiding holes, and Ana’s father told old tales from the Romanian Academy that made Ana’s mother laugh until she coughed.

To twelve years’ work, he said, raising his glass.

To a hundred years’ peace and quiet, said Ana’s mother, her cheeks warm and flushed.

While Ana’s father waited for the evaluation committee in Cluj to make a decision, he suddenly had time to spare. Time to take Ana to the Geological and Technical Museums, or to drag her all the way out to Bellu Cemetery, where they paid homage to the poet-mathematician Ion Barbu and laid a protractor on his grave.

It’s about emotional understanding, he said, as they stood in front of the stone. Do you understand that, sweetheart, do you feel it?

At a café behind the university he taught Ana to play chess, and when she got back from school one day, to her surprise, the door to his office stood open. There was a geometry problem ready for her on the desk, and when her father came home they sat down together and went through her work.

Okay, Ana, said her father, when she handed over problem set number twelve. I think we’d better call a halt here. You should go out and get a little color in your cheeks.

No, she said. One more, then I’ll run outside and play.

Alright, alright, he said, tousling the hair behind her head. He got to his feet and let his fingers glide across the spines of his books, his collections of formulae and the major works of topology, packed so tightly together the shelves bent under their weight.

You know, they say knowledge is a threat to the powerful, he said, his fingers coming to rest on the Russian dictionary. If there’s a revolution tomorrow, we’ll probably be the first ones they come for.

The next week he signed Ana up for the chess club, and every Sunday they’d hop onto a bus or a tram and go lurching off to a museum or nuclear power plant or bridge made of pre-stressed concrete. He talked and she listened. She learned it was a privilege to study mathematics, that back home in his village her father had been beaten because he always had his nose buried in a book. She learned he’d fled a drunken, illiterate father and lived in a basement at the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy, surviving thanks to the potatoes his sisters sent him on the train. In return, Ana told him about the bullying and Violeta Mincic, who ruled the schoolyard with an iron fist, and she asked: Dad, how old do I have to be before I can start at the high school with you?

How old? he said, and laughed. Oh, love, age is just something people have invented. Time’s imaginary anyway. Quantum mechanics proved that ages ago.

They spent the rest of the spring wallowing in quadratic functions and going to town on combinatorics. Ana said it was like a veil had been lifted from her eyes. Not particularly original, true, but that was the metaphor Ana used. It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, she said to me, and suddenly she saw math all over the place. Geometry in pine cones, wave functions when she threw a stone into the pond, topology in the belt she folded and put on a shelf in her wardrobe. Ana saw order and predictability everywhere. Everything in the world could be explained by mathematics, everything operated according to fixed rules that no one could alter, and although she didn’t understand all or even half of what her father said, it filled her with enough peace and purpose to pad the longest, empty afternoons.

One evening in early April, when Ana had settled down with a system of coordinates, her father came into the room. He wore a scarf and hat, at least three sweaters and a jacket, or two coats, a couple of pullovers. It looked like he’d swelled up, as if he’d been fermenting, like grape juice left too long on the windowsill in the sun.

Put some clothes on, he said. You’ll freeze in that.

What are we doing?

Well now. If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Come on, up you get.

The chill of night was settling as they emerged onto the street, and through the open kitchen windows they could hear the hum of the apartment block and the clinking of dishes and coffee sets. It was April 9, 1989, and Ana’s father didn’t know he had less than a year to live. Ana didn’t know that either, which was just as well. Cutting a slanting path across the road to the bus stop, they took the first bus to Gara Nord. They were headed to the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy under cover of darkness.

I know this building like my own body, he said forty minutes later, as they picked their way among the trash and construction waste that surrounded the Institute. This was where I met your mother, did you know that?

Ana shook her head. It’s all dirty, she said.

Don’t be silly, he said, taking out a key, but the door was already open. Inside, candles lit the way upstairs, and dusty bits of paper floated along the corridors. A chair had been caved in, and a typewriter chucked onto the landing, scattering the letters of the keyboard down the steps. The staircase curved up through the building, and on the top floor a ladder led up to the roof. Ana climbed up with her father’s arms around her, smelling the evening air as it drifted through the trapdoor, and when she stuck her head out the other side she saw the lights of the city.

Just take a look at that, said her father, but before Ana could admire the whole view, she heard the sound of men gathered noisily around a telescope. It was identical to the one she’d studied at the Technical Museum, and she gazed nervously at the instrument as the men hailed her father, before the lights beneath them all went out. Darkness swept like a wave across the city as the power was cut, from Otopeni in the north to Titan in the south, and the men clapped and cheered. The whole city twinkled as if the lights and lamps were putting up a fight, but the men didn’t care about electricity. Uninterested in the cheap falsity of bulbs, they were pointing at the night sky, adjusting the telescope and jostling to peer through.

Do you see that? asked her father, crouching down on his haunches. He pointed to a big star in the west, and said, Can you tell me what that is?

Ana looked up at the sky. She thought it over.

Well, is the answer coming or not? Get washed away by cherry soda, did it?

I don’t know, she said at last. What is it?

You’ve got to guess, he said. If you want to be a mathematician, you’ve got to be willing to hazard an opinion. Come on—is it a comet or a satellite or what? A galaxy?

But Ana didn’t say anything; she knew nothing about astronomy.

Yes, no, short, long, don’t know? Rather be a plumber, would you? Come on, just guess.

A satellite, she said. I think it’s a satellite.

Are you bonkers? Satellites aren’t that big. Try again.

A plane?

No, no, no. It’s Jupiter. It’s the biggest planet in our solar system. What d’you think of that, then? Isn’t it fantastic how clearly you can see it?

Is it Jupiter? she asked. Are you sure it isn’t a plane?

It’s definitely Jupiter, he assured her. Jupiter was so big you could fit all the other planets in the solar system inside it, he said, and he explained the difference between gas planets and terrestrial planets. He explained how time worked up there, and how long it took Jupiter to turn on its axis. Everything weighed two and a half times as much, and a single day on Jupiter was only nine point eight hours long.

If you lived on Jupiter, he said, it would take eight hundred ninety-four days for you to get a year older. Isn’t that funny?

Ana nodded, trying to keep up.

Yes, it might sound strange, he continued, but it’s true. Time is a relative concept, love. You can’t take it for granted. And I don’t want you thinking it’s just about rotation periods, because it isn’t. It’s also about mass—and I haven’t even mentioned what happens when we get to huge extremes, I mean, Jupiter’s nothing. Time passes at a different speed on a very large star than here on Earth, which is small. You’ve got to understand, time is determined by the objects around it. So if there were no mass, there would be no time or space either. See? Picture it like a stage at the theater. The props we put on stage define time and space. Before that, the stage didn’t even exist. If there are no props, there’s no stage either. Isn’t that utterly insane, and wonderful?

But Ana didn’t understand a word. It was confusing, all that stuff about time, and difficult to concentrate while the lights of the city were glinting on and off beneath her as if signaling in Morse code, as if the whole city were trying to send her a message; it wasn’t, but that was how it looked. A twinkling, signaling city, and above it: a gas planet.

Don’t you believe me? he continued. I’m not making this stuff up, you know. It’s not a joke, it’s not science fiction. It happens in laboratories.

He chattered on and on while the remaining lights were put out. The bulbs flashed their last for that night, and around them it grew dark. Jupiter and the stars brightened, and it was like the night sky tucked itself around them, the dusk lying heavily over them like a snowdrift after a storm, so dark it nearly made her shiver, and oh, how nice it felt to stand there in the dark with her father’s stubble scratching at her cheek, so sweet it almost made her cry, yes, soundlessly at first, but suddenly it was impossible to curb, it rolled out and through her, made her whole body quiver.

Hey, my little sweetheart, he said. What’s wrong?

But Ana couldn’t answer that question. She couldn’t do anything but cry and feel her arms and legs and the world around her, so big and beautiful and full of love it was unbearable.

Oh, sweetheart, he said, putting his arms around her. I shouldn’t be asking so many stupid questions, I’m sorry. No more of that nonsense now.

It’s okay, she sniffled between gasps.

No, it’s too much to ask, he said, kissing her. There now, sweetheart, it’s true. I just forget sometimes. It’s not easy being the daughter of a father.

 

I don’t think Ana told me all that, not with all those details. Still, that’s how I remember it, and I can’t tell how many gaps I’ve filled or how much of it’s in Ana’s own words. I’ve got the broad strokes, though; this was the story she told me at the diner, and when I got back to Greenpoint late that night, to the studio apartment nestled above the screeching door of an industrial garage, I jotted it down in a notebook. I brushed my teeth and drew the curtains, sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the phone charger, its cord sticking out from under the mattress, but I didn’t feel tired enough to sleep. A kind of tension was vibrating inside me, the evening’s chatter had evaporated and left an urge to hear Lærke’s voice. It had already been a day or two since we’d last spoken, and I pictured Lærke in the Copenhagen dawn, Lærke’s unconscious face resting against the pillow after a late night at the restaurant, her mouth slightly open and her fingers quivering through a dream about elderflower preserves or hares or Mexican poets. I envisioned sitting on the edge of the bed, waking her with a cup of coffee while I told her about my night, and how she’d laugh at my stories from Romania and I’d feel my nerves dispel with her laughter. When I couldn’t bear imagining any longer I got up and opened my computer, clicked on her name and stared at the picture that emerged. It was morning in Copenhagen. Lærke was bathed in white light on her green sofa, her hair wasn’t tangled at all, her eyes not the least foggy with sleep. The downstairs neighbor had woken her up early, she said, and when I asked which downstairs neighbor she told me about a man who’d just moved in, a new divorcee with a stereo system. The evening of the move he’d thrown a housewarming party with a disco theme, or what Lærke thought was a housewarming party, but the following night the lush strains of a violin had once again whined up from his apartment, and an organ bleated through the papier-mâché floors. She knew she could kiss sleep goodbye, so she’d put on her dressing gown and gone down to knock, but before she got that far the neighbor opened the door and invited her inside, like he’d been waiting for her all evening. Over his shoulder, Lærke could see the apartment, deserted apart from a table covered with empty cans, and the sound system, of course, its speakers blaring flügelhorns and keyboards and rhythm guitar, and Lærke asked if he could turn the music down, but he didn’t understand her, or maybe he couldn’t hear her over the synthesizer and the syncopated bass, because he offered her a beer, and Lærke said, No thanks, but could you keep it down a little, and then he offered a cup of coffee or maybe tea—Lærke couldn’t hear over the high-hat and layered vocals—and she felt sorry for him, unearthing his fossilized youth all alone like that, so she went inside and drank the beer while she tried to piece together his sentences, his sentences cleaved by the beat of Chic and The Supremes and Sylvester James’s soaring vocals, and it was only during a lengthy outro that Lærke managed to explain that her visit was about the noise level, about the disco he’d forgotten or hadn’t noticed, and which he’d gladly switch off, no problem.

I laughed and said it was good she was nearly done with that apartment, and then I told her about my evening with Ana, about the nighttime breakfast and the tale of the appendix. Lærke wanted to know more. Why was Ana at the office so late, why did she go shopping in the middle of the night? Her I’ve got to meet, said Lærke, springing up from the sofa. She’d just gotten her passport back from the American embassy—she wanted to show me her visa with the photo where she looked like her mom—and she flicked through the pages of red and blue stamps while she told me about a border crossing in the Balkans and a transnational bridge in Central America, and about the time she’d fallen asleep on a tropical beach, from which you could see or imagine the stippled line of a border stretching out across an azure sea, a hypnotically blue sea with waves that sloshed so lazily against the coast that soon she’d fallen asleep. She’d only been wearing SPF fifteen, so it could have been disastrous, she said, but luckily she was woken by a hungry coati, a curious coati rummaging through her bag and saving her from burning and sunstroke and malignant melanoma, a heroic coati she fed out of her hand and followed deep into the jungle, the jungle that sat astride the border, which the cosmopolitan coati probably crossed each day, and I laughed and promised to take Lærke to the zoo as soon as she came over, so she could show me the animal herself.

Lærke nodded enthusiastically and asked how my job at the festival was going, and I told her about Ana’s work, about the coin she wore in her shoe and how she was trying to shape her dreams, and about the task she’d set me.

Why do you think she asked me to write that story?

No idea, said Lærke. Does there have to be a reason?

Maybe she’s just lonely.

Yeah, maybe.

She probably wants attention, somebody to talk to.

Sure, we all want that.

Or maybe it’s part of some kind of art project, some sort of performance.

Yeah, maybe. But honestly, that coin thing is moronic.

I agreed it was a silly thing to do, but it was precisely its moronic-ness that made it so fantastic. In any case, it was no mean feat, invading your dreams with a coin like that, transferring the real and the concrete into the virtual and the imagined. Ana had to keep a logbook, Ana had to be methodical about writing down her dreams. There was something almost scientific about her practice that was impossible to ignore.

I can ignore it just fine, said Lærke, cupping her hands over her ears, and she began to sing Hear the Little Starling. It sounded lovely, and I told her to keep going, so she sang I Know Where Lies a Lovely Garden, and she sang, How Fair Smiles the Danish Coast, and then she took her dress off, and I took my pants off, and we lay naked, masturbating in sync, swathed in electromagnetic waves or whatever it was that transmitted our pixelated bodies across Zealand’s grace and Jutland’s might, through rain and wind and the foaming swells of the Atlantic Ocean, and above the columns of vehicles shuffling inchmeal into Copenhagen and New York.

At some point we must have fallen asleep. I forgot to set my alarm clock and when I finally woke I was already forty-five minutes late to work. I had to rush out the door without breakfast or a shower, but when I stood in DUMBO on the block of former factories and gazed drowsily at the island, wondering how Manhattan held the weight of all those towers without sinking into the harbor, I was pleasantly confused about everything that had happened over the last few days. I was glad Ana had taken me to the diner, flattered she’d asked me to write a short story, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. I’d just arrived from Denmark, I’d never met anyone like Ana, and as time went by our evening reminded me increasingly of a scene in a book or a movie, some story I’d once heard that lived on in my mind. The whole setup seemed implausible; how often, after all, do you meet a random woman and end up being asked to write her life story? No, surely Ana must have meant it ironically, the atmosphere must have run away with her, and I convinced myself she’d forgotten all about it.

But then again. It was possible she’d been serious, so why not give it a chance? It’s not like I had anything better to write about. Certainly my own experiences weren’t short-story worthy. I was just an intern—white and male and middle class to boot—so when Ana served up a curious anecdote about her appendix, it seemed the obvious thing to give it a try.

That evening I got down to work. Around midnight, as the one remaining light in the building opposite mine was switched off, I stayed up, because the story wasn’t half bad. In fact, the tale of the appendix was clever and bristling with conflict, just as I’d read good stories should be. There was something at stake between Ana and her father, something tender I didn’t understand, and the next few evenings I wrote late into the night, sitting at my computer or standing by the kettle in the kitchen, watching myself from the outside: A young man bent over his desk in the dusty glow of a lamp, poor and sleepless, as though living only for the text. A stereotypical image, of course, but one that made me dash back and write another page, filled with a shining or youthful or idiotic light that burned in the middle of my chest.

It lasted four or five days. For a little under a week I tried to imagine Ana’s childhood voice. I envisioned her dead body on the operating table; pictured the parade of children marching through the frozen stadium while I stood eating pierogis in McGolrick or Transmitter Park, staring at the lewd monument to the beefcake seamen of the Civil War as the Brooklyn dusk pressed up against the river like it was jealous of the ever-glowing skyline of Manhattan. That week I wrote as if possessed, but when I biked home from the exhibition space the following Saturday, all the shine was gone. I’d just printed out the story to read it through, and I was biking up Vinegar Hill in the late afternoon, weighed down by the rough draft in my bag, clumsy and heavy and dull, without so much as a hint of Ana’s strange voice. This isn’t going anywhere, I thought. I’ve heard nothing from Ana for a week, she’s probably forgotten all about her suggestion. As I passed the Brooklyn Navy Yard and turned in along the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, my phone rang. I expected to see Lærke’s name on the screen, but when I fumbled it out of my pocket I found Ana’s three letters shining in my hand.

Ana, I said, surprised. What’s up?

Good morning, she said. Am I disturbing you?

No, not at all. I’m just on my way home.

So, yeah. Are you busy?

No, not really.

Good. Want to come time-traveling with me?

Sure, sounds fun.

Maybe, although it’s not as much fun as it sounds. But if you don’t have anything better to do, meet me at the gallery in an hour. Then you can come travel back in time.

By the time we hung up I’d gotten off the bike and was walking under the elevated tracks of the JMZ line, the trains shrieking as they bore down on Brooklyn from the bridge. I was in a totally different mood than before her call. There was a lightness tickling in my legs as I pushed the bike east, imagining what Ana might have meant by time travel. Was she dressing up in clothes from another era, perhaps, or reenacting one of her ancestors’ lives, following a grandmother’s diary like a manuscript? Like a ghost invited into her body, I thought, as I sauntered along to the sounds of the bachata or merengue, the smells of fried plantains or whatever was coming out of the bodegas, and on Montrose Avenue I saw an image of my swelled idealized self reflected in the window of a car: a young writer walking through the big city on his way to meet an artist friend, open and curious, headed for new adventures.

I made good time to the gallery, but once I was standing outside the entrance I got cold feet. Not wanting to seem too eager, I preferred to arrive a little late. So I took a walk to pass the time, standing on a street corner for a few minutes and watching the trucks hurtle down the avenue and the wind twitching at the cherry trees until the petals sifted down like snow or ash or confetti, I couldn’t find the right simile. Maybe they were just like petals, flowers content to be flowers, not wanting to be anything else. Once I was suitably late, I went back and entered the gallery. I couldn’t see Ana anywhere, but in the corner stood a wooden structure with a little sign: Ana Ivan, The Time Traveler (2010). The installation was square, measuring two or three yards on each side. Through an opening I could make out the interior walls, which were covered in posters and hand-drawn sketches, and a TV playing a video. Squeezing through the opening, I put the headphones on and listened to the man on the screen, who was explaining something about photons and quantum mechanics in a thick accent, about Zeno’s paradox, time, and gravitation. I must have been engrossed, because when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder I spun around with a jolt.

Oh, it’s just you, I said, when I saw Ana behind me with a skewed smile and dark hair slanting over her forehead.

Did I scare you? she said. Sorry.

Ana took a step closer, standing almost underneath me, her face inches from mine, and suddenly I could smell her scent. A bit like crêpes or pancakes, or it could have been Belgian waffles. It was the moisturizer she used, smelling of sweet dough against a warm pan.

So. Welcome to my time machine, she said. Have you figured out how it all works?

No, not really.

Okay, then here goes, she said, pointing at the calendar on the nearest wall, a calendar that was more like a notice board, all the days covered with notes and calculations, and I smiled as Ana explained that she was researching the discrepancy between human and astronomical timekeeping, that for three months she was going to live on precise astronomical time. It seemed the Gregorian calendar didn’t fit the Earth’s passage around the sun. We calculate a year as three hundred sixty-five days, but in fact it takes three hundred sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds for the Earth to complete its orbit. On leap days our time is brought back into correspondence with reality, but during the four years between each leap day it gets dislocated, and our perception slips further and further away from astronomically correct time.

See what I mean? she said. You’re practically living in the future.

And you aren’t?

No, I’ve traveled back to the present, I’m living on the correct time. So, for you there are only six hours left of today, but I’ve still got more than sixteen. It’s only a couple of hours since I got up.

Then she showed me a poster densely scribbled with times and dates and numbers of hours, and a drawing of the Earth’s path around the sun. She’d worked it all out with the Romanian astrophysicist in the video, and she told me that our time right now was ten hours and seventeen minutes ahead of the real, the actual, the true time, the time that wasn’t plucked out of thin air but determined by the only factor that really meant anything, the Earth’s position with respect to the sun, the star we orbited and depended on for everything, the single-celled bacteria in the seas, the plankton living off them, the fish and squid and reefs of coral that stretched deep into the oceans, the fruits of the orchards and the grain in the fields, the star that had brought us out of our caves and into civilization, the sun, that’s what mattered, not some idiotic calendar a pope had chosen.

Okay, okay, the sun, I said, smiling. You’re really into this stuff, aren’t you?

Of course I’m into it, she said. It’s about my life, it’s my work.

I nodded, and Ana went up to the wall and leafed through a calendar.

And what about you? she said. What about your work? Did you bring me a story?

Um, no, I said, not exactly. I mean, I’ve written a draft. But I didn’t know if you were serious. If you really meant it.

Ana narrowed her eyes and let go of the calendar.

So, she said, you’re telling me you don’t take me seriously?

No, no, I didn’t mean it like that.

Okay, then where’s the story? Send it to me.

Well, I’ve actually got it here in my bag. But it’s not the final version. It’s just a draft, it’s really not finished yet.

That’s fine, but I’m your reader, right? And it’s good to get feedback from readers. Agreed?

Agreed.

Good, so hand it over. I’ll read it while we have a cup of coffee.

I couldn’t say no to her. An hour earlier I’d been ready to chuck the whole thing into the garbage, and now I was biking over the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, excited and confused, with Ana by my side. At the apex of the bridge, Ana braked. It was seven in the evening—nine in the morning by astrological time—and she said it was exactly the right moment to enjoy the view. For several minutes we stood on the platform and gazed across at the island, at the skyscrapers and the spaces between them, the sunlight transitioning slowly into the glare of many thousands of lamps. It never really got dark, but for a moment the two lights met, the natural and the artificial, and the city and sky dissolved together. The next it was over, only electricity was left, and we tramped farther up the hill, past the cemetery and the lurid Sunnyside arch beneath the train tracks, and I arrived for the first time in Woodside. It was a motley kind of area. Victorian terraced houses stood cheek by jowl with garages and repair shops, apartment blocks with faux-timber-framed buildings, and as we biked through the warm evening we were lit by neon signs in Spanish and Filipino, and sparks from the trains that clattered along the overhead tracks. Ana pointed to the building where she lived and we turned down a side street, where we parked our bikes and sat down underneath a restaurant’s paper lanterns.

Ana ordered coffee, I ordered beer, and while we waited for our drinks Ana got out my story and read it in silence. I tried to sneak a glance over the pages and catch a wrinkled forehead or a jeering smile, but I couldn’t interpret her reaction. Just as she was putting down the final piece of paper, the waitress came over with the drinks, and Ana spent a few minutes asking me one question after the next, as though playing for time or dodging the issue, I thought, because she felt awkward about my clumsy story.

Remind me, she asked, you said you’ve been published before?

Only a few small things, I said. And only back in Denmark, it doesn’t mean anything.

So you have been published.

I guess you can call it that.

And how does it work, do you have a publisher or what?

Nothing permanent.

You’re a free man.

Free as a bird. Or as the unemployed.

And the form, what about that? Short stories, or what—novels, short prose, serials?

Well, I don’t know. Depends on the story.

So you’re not fussy.

No, don’t think so.

Basically you don’t care who I send it to?

What do you mean?

I mean your short story. Aren’t you intending to publish it? I’ve got a friend who’s an editor at a literary magazine. And I have another friend who works for an agency, so who would you prefer?

You mean you like it?

Stop playing dumb. I’m not going to send crap to my friends, am I?

Then she tucked the pages into her canvas bag, and I remember sitting mutely, clinging to my glass of beer, while Ana talked about her friend who’d started the literary magazine in the eighties out of boredom or a lost bet or a game of Truth or Dare. Nobody’d given the magazine more than a volume or two, but now it had been in print for close to thirty years, its archives were included in Columbia University’s manuscript collection, and it had fancy offices down in Fort Greene.

Wow, I said, that all sounds pretty great.

So I’m sending it to her, then?

Of course, I exclaimed. I mean, thanks a lot, that would be awesome.

Ana nodded and slurped her coffee, and I thought I should thank her or hug her, or at least buy something we could toast with, but I didn’t want to seem like a rube, so instead I told her it was a lovely, mild evening, that we never or almost never had evenings like this in Scandinavia, and that the breeze smelled like holidays in southern Europe.

Ana snickered. She’d never been on a vacation like that, she said, but if this was how they smelled then that was just as well.

The only vacations I’ve ever taken, she told me, were at chess camp, as a kid. Plus trips out to the cabin, of course, the ones I told you about.

What? I said. What cabin?

Didn’t I tell you about that?

I don’t think so, I said, and she put the cup down, leaned across the table as if about to share a secret, whispering or muttering or humming through the twilight, and I leaned across the table too, trying to catch what she was telling me, some story about a cabin her grandpa had started building sixty years ago, a one-room hut, at first, but later extended, growing at pace with the family, acquiring extra bedrooms and bathrooms so rapidly that the floors warped and the walls creaked when there were storms. That evening underneath the paper lanterns, Ana told me how the cabin coiled through the brushwood like one of the slowworms her father found beneath the leaves, how if she put a marble at the foot of her bunk bed she could follow its path through the rooms of the house, watch it hop down the splintery stairs and past the shelves of books so old and damp that tiny mushrooms sprouted between the pages.

It was the summer of 1989, a summer so overfull with rationing and power outages that family came from near and far to escape the heat of the cities and the stores’ empty shelves. Ana had been looking forward to the trip, filling her blue suitcase with pencils and notebooks, rulers and compasses, and on arriving at the cabin she settled down in the study, took out her pocket calculator, sorted her sheets of logarithmic paper, tugged at her father’s sleeve, and asked him to come and help.

Ana’s father said: Not right now, sweetheart.

Ana’s mother said: Don’t start pestering your father.

Ana’s grandma said: Why don’t you put down that malarkey.

They were still waiting for the evaluation committee at Cluj to make a decision, but for the last few months things hadn’t been the same. Ana didn’t understand what was going on. From the study she could see her mother on the terrace, a women’s magazine unread in front of her, and several times she saw her in the kitchen, coming to a halt while peeling potatoes, setting one down half-peeled and standing there for thirty minutes at a time, gnawing at the skin around her thumbnail until it grew frayed and bloody and had to be soaked in soapy water for hours.

And her father? He got up early every morning and brewed coffee. Then he went into the woods, and Ana saw his checked shirt vanish among the trees. She wanted to go with him, but she never woke until the door slammed shut, and the one morning she leaped out of bed and tried to run after him she didn’t get farther than the edge of the woods, because the trees were full of gnats and cobwebs, and ticks hung from the branches, the kind her father picked off his inner thighs each evening.

Ana gave up math problems. She roamed the house and tore up nettles, went to the beach and threw stones at the gulls. Days passed, but one morning, when Ana was poking at a nettle cluster, her Uncle Simion and Cousin Stefan came driving up the path. They’d been in town to buy butter and eggs, and now they were maneuvering a Ping-Pong table off the truck.

Got it from the gypsies, said Simion, patting it in satisfaction. Musta fell off the back of a truck.

Ana didn’t think the table looked like it had fallen anywhere. It was lovely. The Romani always had so many fine things, and Simion and Stefan often did business with them. They bought televisions and stereo systems to repair, took old bikes apart and remade them into new ones. Now they were unpacking the Ping-Pong table, adjusting the legs and washing the surface clean, and Ana wanted to ask her father whether they too could go and buy things from the Romani, whether they too could build Frankenstein bikes, so she went over to the edge of the woods and shouted to him.

What now? he said, emerging from behind a thicket. Stop yelling. Come over here, I’ve got something to show you.

Ana walked through the high grass, and he took her hand and pulled her through the trees until they reached a clearing, where an enormous anthill loomed in the shadow of a pine tree.

What do you make of that, then? he said. It’s a big one, isn’t it?

Gosh, said Ana, as she admired the mountain of reddish pine needles vibrating like a living thing before her.

They certainly know how to build, the little brutes, he said, crouching down and pointing at the swarm of insects. But it’s not the ants I’m interested in today. It’s their nemesis.

Ana turned back and gazed down the path. From the other side of the house she could hear Stefan shouting with excitement, and she imagined the table-tennis ball’s rhythmic smack against the table.

Dad, she said.

Have you ever seen an ant lion? he asked.

Ana shook her head.

No, of course you haven’t. I haven’t either. Nor has Simion. But unlike Simion, I don’t give up that easily. I know they’re here. They’re lurking somewhere, I’m sure of it. Just got to keep looking.

Still sitting on his haunches, he nudged the leaves and twigs aside with one hand, then peered thoughtfully in the direction of the beach. Perhaps we’d be better off a little closer to the water. Yes, that might do the trick.

The next day Simion and Stefan played table tennis, and Ana watched from a tree stump. Simion said Stefan had to learn to smash, and smashing was the same as hitting the ball really hard. It looked difficult. When Stefan smashed, Simion said things like Don’t bend your wrist or Hit the ball to the side of your body, and Simion showed him how to swing the paddle at the right angle. They let Ana have a go, too. But when she smashed, Simion didn’t show her any angles, and every time she hit the ball he said, Good, you’ve got it, even when it missed the table completely.

When Simion and Stefan started forehand smashing, Ana went back to the anthill. Her father wasn’t there. But a little farther away, up by the gravel track that separated the woods from the beach, she could see his checked shirt. As she battled her way through bushes and trees, she tried not to think about the ticks hanging from the leaves, lying in wait for fresh little-girl leg.

Dad, said Ana, reaching the gravel track. How long will you be looking for ants?

Ant lions, sweetheart.

Ana crouched down and stared at her father’s fingers, which were pushing heather aside and exploring the sand.

Do you know what sort of fellow an ant lion is?

Ana shook her head, but he couldn’t have seen her, because his own head was buried deep in the undergrowth.

Ant lions live here in Romania, but they’re very difficult to find. The larvae dig pits and hide underground, having a grand old time and waiting for an ant to fall into their trap. Then, bam! The ant lion sucks the life out of it.

But Dad, said Ana.

If I’m lucky enough to find an ant lion pit, you’ll have quite a drama in store for you. Once you’ve found it, all that’s left to do is lie down on your belly and wait. And if you get impatient and you’re sufficiently heartless, you can always give an ant a little prod in the right direction. There’s something rather fascinating about witnessing the misfortune of others.

But Dad—

No buts, sweetheart. Nature is cruel. It’s not like in your cartoons. Life isn’t fair.

But—

I’m telling you it isn’t! You might as well forget it.

Ana was silent a moment. Then she screwed up her courage and asked, But when you’ve found the ant lion, can we play table tennis?

Table tennis? he said, peering at her in astonishment. You want to play table tennis? Like your pea-brained Uncle Simion?

Ana stared down at the ground, scraping at the sand with her foot.

Yes, well. Her father brushed the dirt off his hands. We can, of course. Shall we say after lunch? After lunch we’ll play a game of table tennis.

Ana used the time to study Simion’s stroke, and later her mother called them in to lunch: soup and mămăligă but no Ciprian. After the meal, Simion took out an old kite from the cupboard; one wing was broken, but he patched it up with tape and the rod from an old New Year’s firework.

So, said Simion. Anybody want to come down to the beach and fly this thing?

Ana shook her head and picked up the table-tennis paddle.

I’m playing with my dad.

Suit yourself, said Simion, and he and Stefan went down to the beach together.

Ana stood by the game table and swung the paddle in the air like Simion said you were supposed to: horizontally, and without bending your wrist. She hit at least fifty, maybe a hundred smashes. But then her arm got tired, and she sat back down on the tree stump and picked at the coating on the paddle. She stared into the woods. Not a shirt in sight, not even the sound of her father talking to himself. She closed her eyes to listen better, sitting like that a good long while, so long that at last she thought she could hear the birds and the dragonflies, the rushes swaying in the breeze, a kite fluttering in the wind, and Stefan’s laughter being carried up from somewhere on the beach.

It wasn’t until many hours later, after Simion and Stefan had come home and dinner was ready on the table, that her father came walking out of the woods. His eyes were red, his pants black with dirt.

Aha, said Simion. The big-game hunter returns.

Ana’s father sat down heavily in a chair and rubbed his eyes. Simion poured him a palinká, and her father shook his head pensively.

I know they’re out there, those goddamn ant lions.

Simion laughed loudly and clapped him on the shoulder.

You never give up, eh?

Ana’s father clinked glasses with Simion.

No, I don’t give up, he said, smiling. It’s like I always say. They can force a scientist out of his laboratory, but the lab coat in your mind—that you never lose.

Early the next morning, Ana’s father got up and brewed coffee before disappearing back into the forest. But, for once, Ana’s mother didn’t sit out on the terrace with her cigarettes. From first light she was in the kitchen with Ana’s grandma, gutting fish and slicing vegetables.

What’s going on? asked Ana.

Ana, I’ve told you a thousand times. We’ve got visitors coming from Paris. Can’t you make yourself useful and run down to the farm for some cream?

Ana could. On the long way there she threw stones at the birds and lashed at the nettles, and when she got back to the cabin there was a car in the driveway. Ana had never seen a car like it before. It was big and shiny, its shapes rounded and soft, and through the kitchen she could hear her mother laughing shrilly. Ana went inside the house and out the French doors, where she found her mother and grandmother on the terrace, clinking glasses with a strange couple. Ana hardly recognized her mother dressed to the nines. She’d put on a long gown, her hair was piled seductively high, and her lips gleamed with a lipstick she never used.

Putting down the cream, Ana shook hands with the strangers, two tall people in loose shirts, and her mother poured more wine.

You just sit down, she said, and I’ll bring out the meal.

Ana asked whether she should go and find her father, but her mother shook her head. He’ll be here soon, she said. We’re going to eat now.

Three courses and wine—she’d killed the fatted calf that night—but by the time the last blob of dessert had been eaten and the tall couple began to glance at their watches, her father’s chair was still empty, his plate touched only by the flies.

Well, said the woman, I think it’s getting time to make a move.

But Ana’s mother must not have heard, because she got up and said: Goodness, I forgot all about the bottle we salvaged from the shed.

She laughed a peculiar laugh, which sounded to Ana like one of the girls from her class, and then her mother went into the kitchen and brought out another bottle of red.

I’m sure you can stay for one more glass, can’t you?

Ana’s mother stood in the doorframe and looked at her guests. The tall couple exchanged glances, and the woman smiled and said: Alright then, just one more.

But one glass became two and then three, because Ana’s mother had some preserves they absolutely had to taste, and then they had to see the clippings about a mutual friend, who’d appeared on the front page of the weekly paper because she’d given birth with her arms in plaster casts. But at last the tall couple really couldn’t put it off any longer, and they got up and asked Ana to help them find the way back onto the main road. They were in a rush, they had no time to get lost among the cabins, and Ana nodded and sat in the passenger seat beside the man, who ground his teeth and kneaded the gearshift. On the main road he stopped the car and said thank you. Ana nodded. And then the blonde woman leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

You’ll see, she said. It’ll all work out.

She gave her a little squeeze, and Ana nodded again. Then she opened the door and got out of the car, standing and watching the taillights until they vanished among the trees.

The cabin was completely silent when she got back. Opening the front door, she paused and listened. It was a strange, humming silence. Maybe it was the flies hovering around the dirty pots and pans in kitchen, or maybe it was the breeze drifting in from the beach at this time of night. Through the French doors Ana could see her mother sitting on the terrace, a lit cigarette in hand. She was elegant as she sat there. It was as though she’d suddenly shrunk a size or two, the cigarette hanging loosely between her fingers. Ana took a step into the house, but stopped short. There was something in her mother’s stoop, some eeriness about it. Like a sight recognized but never experienced, remembered from a dream or from the kind of mediocre film that’s soon forgotten. Ana backed noiselessly out of the house and closed the front door behind her, continuing down the path toward the beach, and maybe she imagined it, because the sea fog made the foliage rustle and there were walls and doors between them, but the whole way down to the dunes she thought she heard her mother cry.

That night Ana lay awake. She listened to the noises of the cabin: the timbers that creaked and the floors that groaned, the arguments that floated from her parents’ bedroom and down the many halls, that died away and started up again. When Ana was certain they’d fallen asleep, she got up and put on her clothes. She pulled on a long-sleeved sweater and tucked her pants into her socks. In the shed she found a spade and a flashlight. For a while she stood by the edge of the trees, trying to remember the right path, because it’s not easy finding a clearing in a darkened wood. But she must have been lucky, because it didn’t take her long to reach the anthill. It stood on a patch of higher ground, majestic in the flashlight’s beam. Coming nearer, Ana switched off the light and tried to get used to the dark. Then she picked up the spade with both hands and swung it as hard as she could. Four or five sturdy blows, a final deep twist, and then she ran. She ran back down the path, branches whipping at her face, away from the ants that crawled up her leg.

Next morning she was awoken by her father yanking back the covers, grabbing her arm, and jerking her upright in bed.

Clothes on, he said.

Ana had made up her mind to be stoic. She’d planned to sit on the edge of the bed and stare, as indifferent to him as he was to her and her mother. But somehow it didn’t quite work. He was already standing on the terrace, spade in hand.

Come on, he shouted, his voice ringing through the rooms.

They followed the tracks through the woods, and Ana didn’t stop until they were standing on top of the dry pine needles. The anthill was half gone—she was surprised how much she’d destroyed. She could hear her father’s steps continuing through the undergrowth, and when he was a little farther down the path, he yelled: Come on, Ana, move along.

For a moment she hesitated in the clearing. Then, curious, she followed him through the woods and down to the beach, where he thrust the spade into the sand and pointed at the dunes.

You see that dune?

Which one?

That dune.

That one there, you mean? The one with grass on the top?

Yes, that one. You’re going to move it six feet to the left. You understand?

He tugged the spade out of the sand and held it out to Ana. She eyed him quizzically.

You’re moving the dune six feet to the left, he said. Is that so hard to understand?

Then he turned and went back toward the woods.

I’ll come back at lunchtime and see how you’re getting on, he said over his shoulder. By then you might understand what you’ve destroyed.

For the first hour Ana threw stones at the gulls. She didn’t feel like listening to her idiotic father and his idiotic lectures. But she knew he wouldn’t give up until she’d moved the stupid dune. So, at last, she got to her feet, picked up the spade, and started to dig.

It was noon when her father came along with sandwiches.

You’re making progress, he said, putting down the tray. Then he left again.

For the next three days, Ana worked from morning till night. She got blisters on her hands, and swimmers stopped on their way down to the water to ask whether she realized this was a protected beach, while their kids stared sheepishly at her. Ana didn’t reply. She just dug and dug, and it was no worse than slashing nettles or throwing stones at gulls. Better, maybe. Because the dune really did move. It was hard to tell if you were a passing beachgoer, or the one ranger who drove by in his jeep, but Ana moved the dune. And on the fourth day, when her father picked her up for dinner, they stood together and inspected her work.

Well, look at that. I think you’ve done it, he said.

She nodded, and her father drained his beer. It’s turned into a proper first-rate beach, he said. A good old-fashioned dune beach.

He laid his hand on the back of Ana’s neck and shook her gently. Then he nodded in contentment.

 

At the beginning of September, when the family got back to Bucharest—returning, as though from a trip made at the speed of light, to find the neighbors aged years and the stray dogs shrunk to skin and bone—her father got word from Cluj. It was a gray morning with dusty light, and Ana was kneeling in the living room watching her father: the way he changed his shirt and tie; the way he paced up and down the hall, making the candles flicker each time he spun on his heel. It was half past seven in the morning. Her mother was having a bath, and Ana’d been up most of the night with her ear pressed against the wall, listening to them fight. First they’d fought about the bearskin rug her father’s mathematician friend, Paul Pintea, wanted to give them. He’d inherited it from his parents but couldn’t be bothered to lug it all the way home to Cluj, and it was kind of him, thought Ana’s father, but Ana’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. It brought bad luck, having dead animals on the floor.

Can’t we just sell it? Ana’s father had asked.

But no, Ana’s mother wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, and the argument flowed back and forth. He said: You know we need the money. And she said: What don’t you understand? I don’t want that bear, just get that through your head. And he yelled: You’re acting like some farmer’s wife, coming out with all this superstitious claptrap, just stop it. And she hissed: Go and sleep on the sofa, then, if you don’t want to be here.

Early the next morning, things took another wrong turn.

Ana’s father kicked things off: I don’t know if I can take a visit from that guy. I get so—I can hardly be in the same room. But Ana’s mother interrupted: Oh, just stop it. You’ve simply got to stop being such a sore loser. And he snarled: Sore loser, am I? And she said: Well you are, just listen to yourself. Such a bitter old man. When did you get so wretched? She paused for a moment, and then Ana heard the way she laughed. A little bit cold, a little bit nasty. God, she gasped between the laughter, you’ve become such a pathetic little man.

Pathetic, he shouted. Don’t talk to me about being pathetic, you’re the one who dragged us through this nightmare.

By now Ana was peering at her father through the crack in the door. She saw him jump when the doorbell rang, saw him fumble with the handle and embrace Paul, saw them shake each other and go into the kitchen and take out the bottle of pálinka.

That evening they took a cab into the city to eat dinner. Ana came too, sitting squashed between the dark paneling and the heavy wooden furniture, eyeing the grown-ups. Ana’s father squirmed in his chair as he read the menu, and her mother also looked a little anxious.

They’ve raised their prices, she said. God, we don’t have the money for that.

But Paul shook his head, holding out a hand like some latter-day Caesar. Don’t you worry about that, he said, I’ll pay. And then he ordered six appetizers and four main courses, two plates of sausage, a basket of bread, two pitchers of beer, a glass of red wine for the lady and a whole cake for dessert. Ana couldn’t remember the last time she ate so well. There were meatballs and roast potatoes, stuffed peppers and creamed mushrooms, almost more food than she could comprehend. She shoveled down the courses while Paul told stories about the universities at Cluj. Something about a female research assistant, something about the students getting worse year after year. Ana’s father said nothing. He picked at his food, downing the occasional pint.

You’re certainly knocking that back, said Ana’s mother, as he emptied another glass.

Yes, drink up, said Paul. Go for it, we’re not here to shell shrimp. And then he lifted the pitcher and nodded to the bartender: Another one, old man!

Paul! said Ana’s mother irritably. Half the city was starving, not a decent head of cabbage to be had, and there they were, filling their faces. It must cost a fortune, surely, and where was he getting the money from? Was it dirty money, eh? Had he robbed a bank? Was it an inheritance? What was going on?

You hit the nail on the head, laughed Paul. Then there’s my salary to top it up—I was promoted last August. So don’t you worry about that. You just eat your fill.

But now Ana’s father could contain himself no longer, and he leaned so far over the table that his elbow ended up in a puddle of gravy. But Paul, he said, you must know something about my thesis. You said it yourself, dammit, they’ve just promoted you.

Paul shook his head. He shoveled a piece of pork chop into his mouth. It’s not my department, he said, smacking his lips. I don’t know anything about it.

Come on, Paul, said her father. It’s been six months since I sent it in. Can’t you get anyone to take a look at it?

Paul wriggled a little in his chair, ill at ease, washing down the pork chop with a mouthful of beer. Oh, you know how it is, you know the bureaucracy. It’s a damn—well, you know what it’s like.

There was silence for a few seconds. Ana looked at her father, at the gravy stain on his shirtsleeve.

But for Christ’s sake, he tried. There must be something we can do. Goddammit, you’re a lecturer, aren’t you, can’t you try and get them to read it? Come on, Paul, help me out here, for fuck’s sake.

Ana’s mother was smiling nervously now, and she said, Darling, why don’t we—

Maria, he said calmly. I’m just having a chat with my friend, okay? I’m having a nice little chat with my friend. With my best friend. Isn’t that right, Paul?

Paul nodded. He was mopping up gravy with the last piece of meat.

For old times’ sake, Paul, come on. You know how many times I’ve saved your ass. Can’t you make them read it properly, just once?

Paul looked up from his plate, and for a brief moment the two men’s eyes met. Then he put down his cutlery.

Maestro, please. This thesis—yes, of course I’ve read it. Look, how long is it you’ve been out of the university? Coming on fifteen years? And your thesis, well, it’s—he sighed and took a pause. I’m really sorry about this. But it’s simply not good enough.

The next day Paul took the train back to Cluj. Things changed rapidly. First, Ana’s father stopped spending all his time at home, and Ana’s geometry problems began to pile up on his desk. Days would go by before she saw him, and when she finally did—late in the evening, when he kissed her goodnight—he smelled so sharp it scorched her nose. When December came, Ana’s grandma arrived to celebrate Christmas, and Ana’s father started barricading himself in his office. He locked the door in the morning and reemerged late at night, and silence fell across the apartment, across the whole block, a cave-like stillness that wrung the parks empty, drove the children up to their apartments and the traders from the market. When Ana went to borrow a ruler from her father a few days before Christmas, the door to his office was locked. The light was out, no sound came from inside, and even the aroma of tobacco was gone; it was as though the person working behind it had vanished, as indeed he almost had. He emerged only to go to the toilet, or to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

You’d best leave your father be, said her grandma from the living room.

But I want to go in and get a ruler, said Ana, tugging at the handle.

Oh, be quiet, snarled her mother. Go outside, if you have to be noisy.

Yes, sweetheart, said her grandma. We’ll be listening to the speech in a minute.

But where’s Dad? asked Ana. If he’s in there, I’ve got to use his ruler.

Come here, said her grandma soothingly. Sit down next to me.

No, I don’t want to, said Ana, and she went outside and slammed the door. She could hear the sound of televisions echoing in the stairwell, of residents waiting tensely in living rooms throughout the block. Nicolae Ceaușescu was going to give a speech, the Dear Winter Shoemaker would placate the demonstrators and bring the people to reason. Thousands had been summoned, bussed into the square from far and wide. Meanwhile Ana sat on the steps and moped, ignorant of politics. She imagined where her father might be: at the chess club or on the roof of the Institute, maybe in Piaţa Palatului with all the people on TV. He wasn’t there for dinner, and late that night Ana woke to explosions, volleying shots ringing between the buildings. Through the gap in the door she saw her grandma muttering a prayer on her knees, and she felt her mother’s warm hand on her forehead.

You mustn’t be afraid, sweetheart, she whispered. They say they’ve caught them. You’ll see, everything will be much better now.

And it was true: On Christmas Day the whole family gathered in front of the television to watch the Ceaușescus’ drumhead trial. Even her father materialized, coming out of his office and flinging himself onto the sofa to witness the presidential couple’s final minutes. The Scientific Elena cursed and screamed on screen, while her Hero Husband seemed bewildered as they bound his hands behind his back. They were led into a yard where the firing squad was waiting, and nobody covered Ana’s eyes as the gunsmoke rose into the air and the cameras zoomed in on the dead bodies.

Ah yes, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

On the streets the demonstrators set half the city alight, but at home in her apartment Ana’s mother wept with happiness. She sashayed around with the phone under her arm, getting tangled up in the cord. She called friends and acquaintances, relatives near and far. Now the family would return to its former glory, the villa in Dorobanti, the tile factory, the confiscated forest. From time to time they heard a crash, the sound of a helicopter, but Ana never saw the soldiers or the tanks. She sat on the floor outside her father’s office, drawing. She put her ear to the door, but heard nothing besides the occasional cough and the chair creaking as he rose. Sometimes she tried a cautious knock, but he didn’t hear it, or pretended he didn’t hear it, and Ana wondered. Where was the shuffle of books being drawn off the shelf? Where was the flick of a pencil swept along a ruler? Once, when she knocked, he opened up and stared at her with tired, red eyes.

Sweetheart, what do you want?

Nothing, she said.

Alright, then stop knocking.

But Dad, you promised to play the game with the dots. We always do that at Christmas.

He gazed at her.

Ana, he said, do we really do that?

Yes, we always do.

Well, okay. Let’s give it a try.

Then he slouched back into the office and collapsed on a chair, and Ana grabbed the stool, she found the pad and pen, and she closed her eyes and let the pen drop onto the paper. A dot here and a dot there, more and more dots, until she was satisfied and put the pen down.

What do you think? she asked her father. What do you think it looks like?

But he couldn’t have heard her, because he stared at the pen without any expression, so Ana held the paper in front of the lamp and examined the dots.

See, that looks like an apple tree, she said, and that there, that looks like a little crab. And that one, that’s a whale. A whale at the bottom of the ocean, don’t you see it? A little crab and a whale, and there’s an apple tree too.

Her father drained his coffee cup, put it on the table and swallowed the last sip.

Humbug, he whispered.

What?

Humbug, humbug.

What is? said Ana, and she looked at him, and for a moment he caught her eye and lifted his fingers, nodding slightly, as though he meant the drawing or Ana, the family in the living room, the window or the rain that beat against it, the water puddling in the streets, the tanks rolling down the avenues, or the snipers on the rooftops, lying drenched and vigilant above the whole godforsaken city.

Three weeks later, Ana started school again. After her last class, walking home among the tower blocks, she couldn’t see much sign of revolution. The kiosk looked its normal self, the drunks sat on the same benches as always, the grocer still complained about the power cuts, and she continued across the parking lot and up the staircase. A heavy silence lay over the block, gray light falling through the frosted panes of glass, and when she let herself into the dark apartment there was nothing to be heard but her shoes dragging across the floor. In the kitchen she lit a candle and walked down the hall to the living room. A faint scent of something burnt; and, through the glimmer of the candlelight, the shadow of a piece of paper taped to the office door. A step closer, and she saw the words: The door is locked, call the police. Just that one sentence, and instantly she took a step back and turned toward the kitchen. The note was taped to the door, it was definitely her father’s handwriting, and the instruction was simple enough. The door was locked. She should call the police. Yet after two steps she knew she couldn’t do it. There was something behind that door, and with a single glance at the note, the whole world had changed. The door was no longer a door. It was a gateway to a future or a nightmare, to the nightmare that lives in the imagination of all children: a life without parents, at an orphanage. No father. No mother. Nothing. A moment earlier she’d been looking forward to her homework, but now she stood in the kitchen and gasped for air, more afraid than she’d ever been.

She peered down the corridor. She couldn’t see the note. Maybe it was all something she’d imagined, a dream and nothing more, and she turned on the tap and got the washing-up bowl and bar of soap. Last night’s dirty dishes were still in the sink, plates and cutlery and frying pans, and as long as there were chores to do she didn’t need to think about the note. She had to do the washing up. Scour plates and rinse pans and wipe glasses. She doesn’t remember how long she stood bent over the sink, but when her mother appeared in the doorway her fingers were pruney and pale, and the frying pans gleamed like new.

Ana, is that you? said her mother. Are you standing here in the dark?

Ana looked toward the door down the hall, shivering.

Oh, hey, sweetheart, what’s wrong?

Her mother took two steps toward the office. For a second she paused, then turned her head slightly to the left, as though speaking to the wall.

Ana, go to your room.

Ana sobbed and put away the sponge. She went in and sat on the bed, and over the next hour she heard neither the officers nor the sound of the door being kicked in, not the hubbub of the paramedics or the relatives clattering up and down the stairs. She heeded none of it, sitting on her pink bedclothes, with her eyes shut and her fingers so far into her ears that she heard nothing but the slenderest little whine.

What happened, when she finally heard it, and who told her, she doesn’t remember. She remembers only these facts:

That he was hanging from a cord tied to the curtain hook.

That he’d burned his thesis and his diaries in a stockpot.

That he’d been kind enough to put a towel over his head.