II

When I got home from Woodside that evening, when I opened the door to the apartment and found a postcard from Lærke on the mat, when I opened the window, looked across at the apartment on the other side of the street, and watched a woman do the dishes in her kitchen: that was when I realized I’d been thinking about Ana’s story all week. From our midnight snack at the diner, when she’d explained about her appendix, through tales of sculpted dunes and her father’s suicide, Ana had been trying to tell me something, and although I didn’t understand why she had chosen to talk to a shadow of a man like me, I knew there was something at stake.

That evening I scribbled down the story about Ana’s father in a notebook, and as I lay between the sheets I thought about his final hours, about the minutes before he hanged himself, the panic or serenity that seized his body as the cord tightened around his neck, and I tossed and turned until the last light was put out across the street. Then I gave up and untangled myself from the sheets, grabbed the computer and called Lærke.

She was sitting on a bus headed out of the city, a bottle of rosé in her bag, which she was planning to drink at a friend’s allotment cabin. They’d painted it pink last weekend, she said, and while they were giving the side wall a final coat her friend had told a story about a colleague’s housemate, a yoga instructor in her late twenties who copied all the colleague’s purchases with OCD-like precision, buying the same shampoo, the same white wine, the same tub of butter. I could hear in Lærke’s voice that she was smiling, and I couldn’t help grinning either, but there was more, because one day the yoga instructor had apparently forgotten to buy a birthday present for her boyfriend—she’d spent all her cash on pot, or on a birthday present for her pot dealer; either way she was flat broke—but luckily she’d heard you could get a gift voucher if you let them biopsy your groin at the Panum Institute. So that’s what she did, and her boyfriend was pleased with the gift voucher, only now she’d lost her job at the gym or yoga studio or whatever it was, because ever since the biopsy she’d had trouble balancing on her left leg and walked with a limp. What that had to do with the cabin I never figured out, because at that moment Lærke laughed and asked why I was calling her so early in the morning.

I couldn’t sleep, I said, and explained about my evening with Ana, about the story or riddle of her father’s suicide. It made no sense, I said. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t imagine what had made her father so desperate, how he could have abandoned his daughter like that. For a second Lærke’s voice disappeared as though she’d hung up the phone, and when I heard it again it was like the frequency had altered or the distance widened.

Don’t you think it’s kind of weird she’s telling you stuff like that?

In what way? I asked. Weird how?

Lærke was silent again; for a second or two there was only the crackling of the line or the muttering of the passengers, or maybe the doors of the bus grunting open and closed.

It’s just so personal, she said. I’ve not got a surprise in store for me, have I?

What do you mean?

I mean, this story. Isn’t it more the kind of thing you’d tell boyfriends or lovers or someone like that? Is she trying to get into your pants?

I laughed. Of course she isn’t.

Not even a teeny-weeny little bit?

No, not even a teeny-weeny little bit.

Okay. But then promise me there’s nothing between you.

You’re serious?

Dead serious, said Lærke, and made me promise there was nothing romantic going on, made me swear I’d never leave her for Ana or any other artist or performer or Eastern European more generally, and then she got off the bus and I said I missed her, and she said she loved me, and there were only eleven sleeps before we’d see each other again.

 

Over the next few days, Ana’s story rattled around in my head. In the daytime at the gallery, I pictured the last time Ana had spoken to her father, wondering what he might have meant by humbug, and at my desk at night I made up excuses to see Ana again. I wanted to ask her why he’d hanged himself, what had driven him to that point, but each time I started an email I realized it was impossible. Ana was several years older than me, a promising artist with exhibitions all over Europe, and although she’d treated me like an equal, I couldn’t crowd her with my prying questions.

Then, one morning, she called me. Four days after our evening in Woodside, while I was stuffing envelopes at the gallery, I picked up the phone and heard Ana’s voice, and beneath her voice a touch of disappointment or pique, or disappointment disguised as pique.

I was going to invite you to a party, she said. But you never call, so I guess you don’t want to see me.

No, no, I do, I said. I’ve actually been thinking about calling for a couple of days.

It’s fine, you don’t have to call if you don’t want to.

But I do want to.

Are you sure?

Yes, I’m sure. I thought we could get a drink sometime?

That’s actually why I’m calling. Remember when I told you about my friend Monica?

Yeah, the editor.

It’s her birthday tonight. Just a little get-together at a bar, but you can come and say hello if you like?

I’d love to.

Drop by my studio at six, and we’ll have a drink before we head to the party.

Sounds good.

Oh, and bring a few examples of your writing. I’m sure Monica would like to see them.

She gave me the address and we said goodbye, and I was left holding the warm phone in my hand, scarcely able to believe my luck. I was going to meet an editor, and for the next few hours I basked in my own fantasies as I stuffed envelopes and went to the post office. Conceited, childish fantasies about the tales Ana had told me, about the short stories that would grow out of them and wax into collections or novels, and about the editor who’d one day take them on. I considered too what I should give Monica. A birthday present that made an impression, showed respect and gratitude, but wasn’t too presumptuous. I couldn’t think of anything like that, so after I’d mailed the letters I found my brother in his office and asked what kind of gift would make an impression on a woman you didn’t know.

A notebook, he said. Always a nice notebook and a bottle of spumante.

A notebook, I said. Isn’t that a bit much?

No, people love that shit. You’re appealing to her self-image. Here’s a woman who’s sophisticated. Here’s a woman who’s full of original thoughts.

I laughed, but my brother wagged his index finger and said an empty notebook was like a mirror, and if there was one thing people liked it was their own lovely mug. He’d given scores of notebooks over the years, and out of them had sprung hours of conversation, exhibitions great and small, sweaty nights in studios squashed under roofs, in bedrooms tucked under courtyards, in open kitchens perched high above Brooklyn Heights. It worked every time, and if you were really bold you could write some pithy observation or a line of poetry on the flyleaf, preferably in Danish, because Americans loved that sort of thing.

Who is it you want to impress? he asked.

An editor, I said, and told him about the friend Ana was going to introduce me to, an editor who might be interested in reading my work, and then my brother got up and pushed his letters and papers aside.

I’ll come and buy it with you, he said. I’ve got a studio visit anyway.

It was a warm afternoon turning into a brittle spring evening with white cauliflower clouds, the fruity scent of floor cleaner in the air and gusts of wind that followed us eastward through the borough. At the bookstore on Court Street we’d chosen a leather-bound book with unlined pages, and now I was striding through Cobble Hill like some hotshot with a bottle of sparkling wine in my hand and a bundle of stories meant for an editor. My brother led the way through the silent streets mottled with magnolia petals, talking about the abandoned factories and warehouses that once had filled the whole city, from Newtown Creek to the Gowanus Canal, the scruffy buildings, ex-playgrounds of Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson, Walter De Maria and Gordon Matta-Clark, and I smiled and felt enchanted; to think I was actually here, to think I was walking through a city where people cut holes in buildings, danced on rooftops, and filled a whole apartment with earth just because they could, and because the world was so beautiful, the city so glitteringly full of secrets, that it almost made you weep.

When we reached Graham Avenue, I said goodbye to my brother and biked the last mile to the Bushwick address Ana had given me. The street lay in an industrial area not far from the Jefferson L stop, and I biked around the warehouses and ex-factories for ages looking for the entrance, but there were no doors or gates. The buildings had their backs turned to the street, putting their minds to practical purposes: storing goods and repacking cases. It was a part of town for the dead and the finished, not a tree in sight, no workshops or factories that hummed with life. Now and then a truck roared by, but otherwise I saw not a single person. How Ana could make art in these surroundings I didn’t understand, but I’d heard my brother tell me before: Real artists don’t need inspiration, or something along those lines; inspiration was for amateurs.

By six thirty I still hadn’t found the studio, and as I walked up and down the side streets I grew more and more convinced that Ana had given me a fictitious address. Finally I entered a wholesale store and asked the way. The man who worked there looked at me like I was speaking some unknown language, and when I repeated the question he waved his hand, escorted me out onto the street and up some stairs, and plonked me into an elevator without a word. It must have been at least sixty or seventy years old, grunting and groaning its way up through the building, and when it stopped with a judder I pulled the door aside and was struck by the aroma of fresh-cut wood. A narrow corridor opened in front of me, a mannequin stuck one leg into the air out of a dumpster, and for a moment I stood still and listened. Two voices in animated discussion. A whistle. A drill, whirring somewhere far away.

Farther down the corridor I found Ana’s door. The chipboard was painted entirely white, apart from the number written in pencil, and I took a few seconds to silently screw up my courage. I knocked three times, but no one answered. I tried knocking harder, and this time I heard Ana’s voice through the door.

Come in, she yelled. The door’s open, just come in.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that studio. Light poured in through an enormous bank of windows, ivy crept through a shattered pane, spreading tendrils down the wall, and a furrow ran clear across the concrete floor, where dust and metal shavings lay like sediment from several decades’ work. In one corner stood a workbench and the plastic cast of an Afghan hound, in the second was a shelf full of cardboard tubes and video tapes, and in the third I saw Ana. She was sprawled on the sofa, and I caught myself waving. I jerked my hand back instantly, but luckily she hadn’t noticed.

Oh, it’s so early, she said, struggling upright. Much too early for me right now.

She rubbed her eyes and explained she’d slept over at the studio, only waking when I knocked. She was going to have a wash, she told me, and then we could sit on the roof, watch the sunset, and have a drink. That sounds fine, I said, and so she picked up her clothes and towel and disappeared into the corridor.

While Ana was in the bathroom, I sat down at her desk and did a little rummaging through her stuff. On top lay a notebook full of timetables and almanacs, and underneath a sheaf of articles about a French speleologist, a caver whose name I’d never heard of. At the very bottom, beneath all the other papers, I found a folder full of pictures and curatorial statements and descriptions of her work, which must have been Ana’s portfolio, and I opened it and skimmed the pages. Most of the texts and photographs came from Ana’s exhibitions, but there were also some drawings and notes, and in a plastic folder I found a crumpled text in strangely broken English. It was a kind of story, but one difficult to read. The verb conjugations were a mess, there were no paragraphs, and the commas were scattered almost haphazardly on the page. I returned to the first line; there was something I didn’t quite understand. It couldn’t be right, I thought, and as I thumbed through the pages I felt a childlike wonder, turning my mind to the infinity of the universe or remembering that dust was dead skin. And yet. This was my own short story I was holding in my hands, the only one I’d published in Denmark, evidently fed through a translation program.

Find anything interesting? asked Ana behind me, and I flew up out of the chair, not having heard her approach.

Yes, yeah, I said, gesturing with the folder. Sorry. Your artworks, they’re nice.

Nice? God, I hope not. I mean, I’d rather they were a little ugly, or nasty. A little viciousness about them, you know, a little rage.

Ana paused, struggling with her hoodie. Casting about for something else to say, I put the folder back and picked up a framed picture from the desk, a photo of a young man standing at the prow of a sailboat.

Who’s this guy? I asked her.

Ana’s head popped out of the sweater.

Oh, that’s my ex-fiancé, she said. Come on, let’s go up on the roof.

I put the frame back on the table, Ana grabbed mugs and a bottle of whiskey, and we followed the stairs up to the roof as she explained how she met her ex-fiancé in Bergen. She’d just moved to Norway and had no friends—or maybe she did, but not very good ones—and that was when she first met Isak and they fell in love, or thought they fell in love, and moved in together on his boat at Sjøflyhavnen. It was early 2006 or late 2005, Ana couldn’t recall, but it was cold, and it rained all the time. They started making art together, the happiest months of Ana’s life, but one day she told Isak about the time she’d lived in Morocco, and after that everything withered.

See? said Ana. That’s why I’m done with men.

Morocco? I asked. What happened in Morocco?

Trust me, she said. You don’t want to know.

Ana filled the mugs, and for a while we sat and stared out over Bushwick, which lay flat and pallid beneath us, all bedbugs and great expectations. As we sat there, I couldn’t help but wonder about the machine-translated story. How long had Ana had that lying in her folder? Maybe it wasn’t so strange that she’d been curious and tried to read it, but the pages were at the very bottom of the stack, dog-eared, the staples torn out, and something told me it was printed several weeks ago. The thought made me uncomfortable, and I stared at Ana, as if I could force an answer from her with my glare, but she didn’t notice it, or didn’t care, or pretended she didn’t.

Hey, Ana, I said. Remember the short story you read. The one with the appendix?

Mm, she said. What about it?

Well, I was just thinking, how many of my stories have you read? Just the one?

Yeah, the one about the appendix.

Nothing apart from that?

No, just the one. But it was good.

Thanks, that’s kind of you.

It’s not kind, it’s true. You can ask Monica yourself when you see her.

Ana sat up straighter and topped off the mugs, and we clinked them together and were silent for a while. Beneath us the city quieted, garage doors slamming, the roar of the trucks slowly dying down. I looked at the towers across the river, shining on the horizon like a mirage, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ana huddled beneath her hoodie, swilling the whiskey around in her mug, and I bit my lip and tried to read her pale face.

Ana, I said. There’s something I’ve been wondering. Why are you doing all this for me? Taking me to this birthday thing, introducing me to editors and everything. You barely know me.

She looked at me. For a moment her gaze was distant, as though she’d forgotten who I was and why she was sitting there, but then her eyes lit up, and she smiled.

Because you’re sweet, she said. So sweet and young and naïve it almost makes me sad.

Sad?

Yes, sad. Sad because I’ve never been as young as you. Not even when I was a little girl.

I laughed, but Ana said she was serious.

I was born old, she said, and then she explained that her childhood had somehow slipped between the stitches of her memory, and she told me about the years after her father’s suicide, the hundreds of weeks compacted almost into nothing, just a flash or two left behind, vague images and moods, scents, hardly anything tangible. She’d played a lot of chess in those days, but the games she’d played were long forgotten. She liked drawing, but she’d thrown out all her sketchpads. For eight years she’d lived like a sleepwalker, looking without seeing, hearing without listening, forgetting everything, and she’d probably be living that way now, said Ana, if Bogdan Marco hadn’t woken her with a question.

She met him at the chess club. Bogdan was eighteen, she said, newly arrived in Drumul Taberei from the southern suburbs of Bucharest, a boy with an easy laugh and downy upper lip, and the first male Ana had met for several years. He was clumsy and plump and not all that cute, but Ana was in her third year at the Central High School for Girls, and Y chromosomes were thin on the ground. How her mother had finagled her into Bucharest’s finest secondary school Ana never fully understood, but it felt so alien to her it might have been another planet. Everything she knew from Drumul Taberei, the wide concrete planes and horizontal windows, the straight lines and green, open spaces, everything sensible and planned, was ousted by a world ornamented and closed, by columns in the little garden, cramped nooks with busts and paintings and rows of ancient plane trees, which shielded the school from uninvited eyes. It was an old world full of codes and references unfamiliar to Ana, and every morning she traveled the long route from Drumul Taberei to the city center, dozing on the bus, while her classmates slept in their villas and mansions and luxury apartments, and when Ana finally made it to the Promised School she found a tight-knit clique of girls who’d known each other since they were little. They called her the Bus Princess, they called her the Queen of Drumul Taberei, and although she never had any friends, she did get used to a life of girls and women, of female teachers and lunch ladies, and forgot that she’d once ordered the boys around in the parking lot, forgot, almost, that whole swathes of the population had testicles at all. Her mother’s father had died ages ago, her father’s father she’d never met, and now that her own father was pushing up daisies and their portrait of the Nation’s Father had been archived straight down the garbage chute, Ana forgot hair could grow on a human back, forgot the prickly feel of stubble against cheeks. She forgot what having friends felt like, and when Bogdan Marco entered her life and asked his question, it was like waking up from a long and quiet dream, a blind woman’s dream of a peaceful, empty cubicle.

The first time she saw him at the chess club, he was sitting with his nose in a sci-fi novel while the teacher illustrated a pawn storm. The fourth or fifth time he showed up to class, Ana noticed he was reading Flatland, and he noticed her noticing, and Ana drew a pentagon she slipped across the table.

Are you into sci-fi? he asked, as they were packing their bags together. I’ve got some awesome ones at home.

That evening he took her to a burger joint at the new shopping center, and afterward they went back to his house to swap books. Ana tried to suss him out the whole way there, Bogdan, three parts nerd and one part ghetto, and even before she entered his room she’d guessed he had a shoe box of rolling papers and a lump of hash underneath his bed. They shared a joint while sitting on the windowsill, and over the following weeks they watched science-fiction movies together, and when they had money in their pockets they snuck into one of the new bars on Lipscani and made up stories about the students on the dance floor. By Christmas they were best friends, and every evening they talked on the phone until Ana’s mother tore the line out of the socket.

Do you think we’re made of money? she’d say. Get off your backside and walk over there.

It wasn’t just chess and sci-fi they had in common. Bogdan was an ambitious young man, and while the other girls lost their virginity in toilets and tanning booths on Lipscani, Ana sat in the library and did homework with Bogdan. While their classmates were slogging away at sines and cosines, Ana and Bogdan were already busy with vector calculus and binomial simulations, and they felt nothing but contempt for the idiots who got stuck in physics class, mixing up beta minus and gamma decay. As they sat in Ana’s room after chess lessons, Bogdan told her about his mother and stepfather, who ignored him like the lint behind the sofa, but it didn’t matter, because soon he’d be going to Imperial College, he’d wave goodbye to Bucharest and never look back. In return Ana told him about her father, Ciprian Ivan, chess champion and mathematician, and how she wanted to apply to the Institute for Mathematics and publish all the articles he never got to write.

Can’t you stop all that number witching? said Ana’s grandma when she saw Ana and Bogdan bent over an equation.

Doesn’t the boy get food at home? said Ana’s mother, when Bogdan had once again picked the fridge clean.

On the eighth anniversary of her father’s death, Ana invited him to Ghencea Cemetery. Every year she paid her father tribute with a little ritual, lighting candles and reading aloud from Euclid and asking God to look after him. Now it was January again, and for the first time she was going to share the day with someone else. They met outside the chess club on the cold, dank day, and Ana wore a dress and tights for the occasion. She’d put on eyeliner, and Bogdan laughed when he saw her.

What’s going on, he said, you headed for a street corner?

Ghencea was deserted that day. They walked its empty paths, their boots sinking into the gravel and squelching through the mud between statues and monuments, until Ana pointed out the grave. Getting down on her haunches, she cleared the leaves and dirt, then lit a candle and read aloud, and Bogdan sang a psalm his mother had taught him. Finally, Ana placed a letter by the headstone, and for several minutes they stood in silence, watching the grave, while dusk crept up on them.

How did it happen, again? asked Bogdan with a sniff. Why’d he hang himself?

It was an obvious question, but Ana had never thought of it before. Her father had hanged himself, that was a fact chiseled into time, a certitude, like the French Revolution or the twenty-four hours in a day, and she’d never considered there might be a reason. Her mother’d often said it was just something that happened, it wasn’t anything her father could help, and Ana had made do with that explanation, but now the words had abruptly wriggled free, atomized between Bogdan’s lips.

I don’t know, said Ana. It’s not like I can ask him.

Bogdan stuck his hands in his pockets.

No, he said. But I was thinking more about what he wrote. Didn’t he say anything in the letter?

What letter?

You know, the note.

There wasn’t anything like that.

Nah, come on. A note, said Bogdan, and he told her about the hundreds of suicides he’d seen in TV series and movies, razor blades and train tracks and hunting rifles, the method varied, but there was always a letter or a note or a secret message. Maybe it was sitting in a safe-deposit box or written in invisible ink, or once he’d read a novel where a man had carved it into his own chest before swallowing a cyanide ampoule.

Bogdan, said Ana, I think I’d like to go home.

Okay, let’s move, he said, giving himself a shake. They walked through the gate, Bogdan jumped onto the bus, and Ana followed the yellow light along the main road, passed by bus after bus, as a fine mizzle fell across the streets, and she thought about what Bogdan had said. Why had he done it? Why had her father left her, and if there was always a note, then why had she never read it? When she finally got home, her grandma was sitting in front of the television and her mother was in the kitchen, doing the dishes.

What have I told you about going to the cemetery? snarled her mother. Next time you’ll be grounded.

And her grandma, proudly: You’ve always been so fond of church.

Ana took off her shoes and hung up her jacket on the peg, put the water on to boil and settled at the little kitchen table. Steam rose from the sink, and with a practiced motion her mother washed a pot clean, then lifted a frying pan out of the basin.

Mom, said Ana, did Dad write a note?

For a moment her mother froze. Then she lowered the pan and turned around.

Why do you ask?

No reason. I just want to know.

For a second she gazed at Ana. Then she nodded, turned back to the sink and picked up the pan again.

Your father wasn’t well, sweetheart. And he burned his letters in a stockpot.

That was all her mother would say on the matter, but Ana couldn’t forget Bogdan’s question. Suddenly she couldn’t concentrate in class, she lost her appetite, and she lay sleepless through the night, staring at the bony branches of the plane tree. To cheer her up, her grandma gave her little tokens, even slipping her a silver cross. She tried resolutely to get Ana to come to her Bible group, but to her grandma’s chagrin Ana was interested only in the more morbid aspects of the Orthodox Church’s liturgy, the burial and mourning, the stuff about eating Jesus’s flesh and blood.

At Easter she went to chess camp without Bogdan. Ana pestered him to come too, but Bogdan wouldn’t be swayed: He was saving up to study in London. She arrived at camp with her father’s chess pieces and two books about chess theory, and every day she played until the squares began to swim before her eyes. Afterward she stood in front of the trophy case and admired the cups inscribed with her father’s name: Ciprian Ivan, the Talent from Târgu Jiu, four-time champion at the Drumul Taberei chess club. She wanted to be at least as good as him, she wanted to be the Romanian Judit Polgár, and while the other kids went down to the lake to fish, Ana remained at the cabin, solving chess problems. In the evening, when she couldn’t move another piece, she sat in the common room and listened to the older chess players tell stories of long-lost endgames. A few evenings before they were due to go home, the camp leader said to Ana: Your father could have been the greatest chess player in Romania.

Could he? But then why did he stop?

The camp leader sighed, scratching at his beard. Yeah, that’s a good question. He left Bucharest for a few years. But I’m not really sure. He wasn’t quite the same when he came home.

Ana solved a whole book of chess problems that Easter, and filled two notepads with diary entries. She wrote a lot about her father, questions and guesses, ideas as to why he’d never become the great chess player he’d seemed destined to be. She promised herself she’d ask her mother about it, and when it finally came time to pack her things and head home, she was almost glad. But only almost. On the way to Bucharest she sat with her forehead against the train window, gazing out at the slippery fields, the rainy weather, and when they reached the gray suburbs the camp leader sighed and laid a hand on her shoulder.

I know, I know, he said. If you’ve got no other pleasures in life, at least you’ve got the pleasure of coming home and kicking off your shoes.

Back home, she applied for entry to the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy, sweating for days over the admissions essay. The night before she was due to send it off, she couldn’t sleep. She listened to the water streaming through the pipes from the cisterns, stared at the outlines of the treetops, and thought about her father’s application to the Institute, the one he’d written when he was young. She’d seen it once, worn and discolored in a scrapbook, and there might be a sentence or two she could borrow. Not wanting to wake anyone, she didn’t bother switching on the light, and when she stood in the corridor she paused for a moment. The door to his office was open, and from the corridor she could see the window, the curtains taken down, the moon shining in. It was eight years ago and the curtain hook was gone, the holes from the screws filled in and painted over, the panes and molding around the window replaced, the floors newly varnished. She stepped into the office and the books were still standing; it was still the same desk. But the smell was different, the spots of candlewax gone, the marks on the wall thoroughly scrubbed away, and not the least vestige of her father remained. The thought was so brutal she had to sit down. Time had erased him, the years had come between them and removed the last physical traces, and soon it would dim her memories too, and she would never feel him again. She pressed her hands to her mouth, as crying rolled through her chest and spit slid through her fingers.

Ana, said a voice behind her. Are you crying?

It was her mother, and she laid her arms around her and spoke in a calming voice. There, sweetheart, she said. Calm down, there’s nothing to cry about. Leading her into the room, she gave her a blanket and a cup of tea, and they sat together while Ana shook with sobs.

I’ve lost him, said Ana. He’s vanished completely, I can’t even remember how he smelled.

That’s not true, her mother said. He’s still with us somewhere.

No, said Ana. He’s just gone, there’s nothing left of him. It’s been eight years. I’ve lived almost as long without him as with him, and all those years, it’s like—they’re thinning him, they’re watering him down.

Her mother said nothing. She held Ana and stroked her hair, and slowly Ana calmed down and crumpled in her mother’s lap, her face red and puffy.

Mom, she sniveled. Why did he do it?

Sweetheart, your dad, her mother said. And she took a pause, a pause that opened like a trash chute, a trash chute full of Styrofoam and tinfoil, cat litter and plastic bags, and the pause was everything Ana needed to hear. She straightened up and dried her eyes, staring at her mother.

Why did he do it, Mom?

Your dad, he. Well, he was a bit of a pessimist.

A pessimist?

Yes, he was. You know what? I think it’s time the two of us went back to bed and got a proper night’s sleep.

The next morning Ana went to the library. She ought to be in school, but the missing note rattled around inside her like a fact, or not like a fact, because it was a fact, and when the librarian opened the doors Ana was the first one to rush in among the shelves. She borrowed books about famous suicides, notes from desperate poets and politicians, and the rest of the day she sat in the reading room and flicked through the volumes. Bogdan was right. There was always a note, and if there wasn’t a note, there was at least an obvious explanation. A suicide was no different from the rest of the universe. Nothing happened spontaneously: Everything in this world consisted of cause and effect, an apple tree won’t produce a quince or a pear, and people don’t emerge from the sea.

Later that afternoon Ana went to the cafeteria behind the post office, bought some soup and sat at a table to leaf through her notes. The conclusion was plain. If all suicides had a cause, then that cause must be deducible. It was all a question of method and thoroughness, like being a good mathematician, all about observation and verifying assumptions, excluding probable but incorrect conclusions and arriving at the truth. The raw data she knew by heart: her father’s upbringing in a village in Oltenia, his years at the Institute, his thesis on topology, which came to nothing in the end, and his stockpot of burned letters and diaries. Now it was just about gathering more information, analyzing her data, and if she was rigorous enough she’d arrive at a connection, an order in the chaos of choices and decisions, omissions and imaginings, which altogether constituted a life.

That evening Ana began her investigation. As soon as her mother had gone to bed, she crept into the office and thumbed through her father’s books and the Russian dictionary, turning the pages in a hopeless search for handwritten comments in the margins. She hadn’t forgotten what the camp leader had said, and all weekend she rummaged through the files in the chest of drawers. She played archaeologist in her father’s life, eager to know why he went so early to the grave and wasted his talent. She soon discovered it was no easy task. Her father clearly hadn’t been one for documentation, and all she found was a file of correspondence on topology, a single photo album and a pile of unexceptionable postcards.

And the witnesses? Silenced, like in a mafia movie.

I don’t know, said her mother, when Ana asked about old pictures or letters. It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake, I don’t remember.

He was born under an unlucky star, was her grandma’s explanation for the suicide, but Ana didn’t give up. She asked: But why did he stop playing chess, why did he burn his diaries?

Yeah, and why did the sun rise this morning? said her mother. How should I know?

Since she wasn’t getting answers to her questions, she began coming up with hypotheses with which to pester her family. He might have been sick with cancer or Parkinson’s, suicide perhaps his final dignified act, saving the family from a humiliating decline. Or he’d got on the wrong side of the Ceaușescu regime, smuggling dissidents over the border, maybe he was a spy, she jabbered, until her mother slapped the newspaper down on the table.

Put down that folder and do your French homework. You’ve got an exam to think about.

When Ana had read all her father’s books without result, she tried to access the old things of his that were stored in the basement, but the key was gone, the janitor took ages cutting a new one, and for the Whitsun weekend Ana’s aunts came to visit from the countryside. After they’d eaten, Ana stood lurking in the corridor, and when her aunts walked by she drew them aside and asked why her father had taken his life.

He was too fragile for the big city, said one.

God always takes the best of us first, said the second.

It was his head, it was too big, said the third. He choked on all those clever, clever thoughts.

Ana kept going, working like a scientist. She read her father’s letters. She interviewed the neighbors and the local chess players. But did she find cryptic messages in his notes? Did she see patterns in the topological figures he’d left behind? Did she hear rumors of a mysterious past, a secret lover, or at least a secret câine communitar, a communal stray he couldn’t stop feeding?

Poor Ana. Her father had lived a Teflon life. All she could dig up was guesswork, shots in the dark, and that wasn’t how a mathematician worked. Hypotheses bristled in all directions, and by the end of May she was forced to sideline the investigation and concentrate on her exams. When June came she ran rings around all opposition, even correcting her teacher during the physics oral, and at midsummer she climbed the podium three times to shake the headmaster’s hand. First for her high-school certificate, second for the mathematics prize, and third for being top of the class. This was Ana’s moment of glory: On stage before her oppressors, volleys of applause raining down, she smiled a rare smile. She’d worked hard, and in a flash of euphoria she raised a clenched fist into the air, a nerd power salute, or, who knows, perhaps a gesture to her father.

The Institute’s response didn’t arrive until July, and it came as a surprise to no one that she got in. The rest of the summer dragged along at an excruciatingly slow pace. Every day Ana knocked on the janitor’s door, until finally he got his act together and cut a new key to the basement. Ana spent the final weeks of her vacation rummaging through boxes in the damp storeroom—her father’s coat and shoes, his pants and suits—but all she found in the pockets was the silent residue of life, his forty-two years on this earth boiled down to toothpicks and a few coins, flakes of tobacco, crumpled receipts, and a snapped cigarette.

As the beginning of the semester approached, Ana bought a new calculator, cleared a shelf in the office for her compendiums, and at the chess club she played a farewell game with Bogdan. He’d got into Brunel, but only had money for the first semester, he explained. Still, it’d all be fine.

Next summer I’ll come home, he said. Then I’ll take you back with me to London.

The day before the semester started, Ana’s grandma gave her a little icon, a saint, who was supposed to protect her from the devilry of mathematics, and for once her mother didn’t grumble about her superstition.

If you’ve inherited your father’s luck, she sighed, you’ll probably need it.

And then suddenly Ana was there, for only the second time in her life: at the Institute, where her parents had met, walking the halls where her father lived as a young man. The first months were a rush of enthusiasm, weeks of conversations rich in mathematical jargon, a feast for statisticians, computer scientists, and youthful talents like herself. If she was ever going to make friends, thought Ana, it would be here.

And Ana did eat lunch with the student assistants in the canteen. She joined a topology study group, drank wine, and surfed obscure internet forums with her new classmate Claudia. She went along to a few parties, and one morning she even said hi to a tall, angular guy on the tram, who fixed her with his almost lashless eyes and smiled at her twenty-two stops in a row. Compared to her dead-dull life in high school, Ana’s first semester at the Institute was a ball. She did well academically too, flinging herself into assignments and prizewinning projects, and it wasn’t more than a month or two before she was the geometry teacher’s go-to girl.

Guess we’d better activate Ana, he said, when the other students refused to answer. Ana’ll break the strike, yes, that’s what I call a scab.

Ana was her father’s daughter, she took the Institute by storm, and after a few months she was interviewed for an intern position with an algebraic research group, but lost out to a fourth-year. She had all sorts of good and less-good reasons to enjoy the carefree life of a student, but after the initial weeks of euphoria it felt like a shadow had stolen into the Institute. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, this sensation. A kind of eczema, almost, a small but insistent itch that crawled up her left-hand side as she walked through certain parts of the Institute: the lecture hall, the canteen, the east-facing stairs. Ana never said it to her classmates, nor did she tell her mother, and it took a lot of prompting before she’d admit it to me, because of course she didn’t believe in nonsense like that. It was a delusion, pure and simple. Not him, not a haunting, nothing but a young woman’s imagination, a dream or nightmare, no more than an illusion, when she sat in the lecture hall and saw her father’s shadow slip across the floor, when she caught his scent in the corner of the coffee room, or heard the echo of his shambling gait receding down the halls.

 

In December, after her first exam was over, Ana’s maternal aunt, Carmen, arrived from Budapest. She often did at Christmas, but this time she came early. She came to die. Her pancreas, that was the trouble. The doctors had given her six months, and Carmen was divorced and had no children, so Ana had to surrender her room to her aunt and move into the office. At first she didn’t think it would be that bad. Ana’d never had much of a relationship with her flaky aunt, but once Carmen was installed in the apartment she filled up all the rooms, and no matter where Ana went she could hear her intolerable Jacques Brel songs, could see her clothes and jewelry flung across chairs and tables. Soon the metallic odor of sickness began to cling to the furniture, bottles of medicine filled first one then two of the shelves in the fridge, and Ana was often kept up late at night by Carmen moaning through the walls.

One Sunday afternoon, Ana noticed Carmen reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and when Carmen saw Ana scowling over her shoulder she put the book down.

What’s wrong with you? said Carmen. You think I’m pathetic, do you?

Oh, no, said Ana, blushing. Not at all.

Carmen said she’d gotten the book from her ex-husband, a Hungarian mathematician she’d met through Ana’s father. Her father was no slouch when it came to sums, but he sure as hell wasn’t much of a matchmaker. The first six months of marriage had been great, but then the Hungarian had lost interest, and suddenly he couldn’t get it up. He’d rather read the paper or have a bite to eat.

A fag, that’s what he was, said Carmen. Do you have any idea how much dick I got that year?

Ana shook her head, appalled, clinging to the armrest.

This much, she said, showing with her thumb and forefinger.

It wasn’t long before a ritual developed, and aunt and niece spent afternoons together. Ana and Carmen at her sickbed, Ana and Carmen in the kitchen and the bathroom: Carmen in the tub and Ana on the mat beside it. They used to chat for an hour or two every afternoon, discussing the rice-water cure Carmen was currently taking or the time Carmen was Queen of the Night in Mamaia. See these tits, she said, hauling the sorry remnants out of her bra. Once was I could get a king’s ransom for these, and now look at them, like two dried peppers.

For the most part it was Carmen who did the talking and Ana who listened, but every now and then Ana screwed up her courage and told her about the erotic stories her classmate Claudia printed out from the web, or about the male students’ ham-handed advances at the Institute. It was also around this time that Ana saw the tall guy with the bald eyes from the tram again. One day around Christmas she noticed him at Laptarie, drinking a beer. He was with a girl from the Ploiestis Chess Club, and it was she who introduced them. His name was Daniel, and Ana was invited to sit at their table. She exchanged a few words with him, if you could call it that—it was hard to hear above the music.

The next afternoon she told Carmen about the encounter.

Did he look you in the eye? inquired her aunt anxiously.

Ana shrugged. She couldn’t remember.

Next time we’ll have to doll you up a little. Carmen touched Ana’s chin, turning her head gently toward the lamp. Cover up those craters.

Ana spent New Year’s Eve studying for exams. She sat in the office and flicked through the geometry compendium and her father’s mathematical dictionary, and when the first rockets exploded above the apartment block she realized it had been nearly a year since her walk through the cemetery with Bogdan. What had she learned about her dad since then? That he was a pessimist, that he was too fragile or too clever. But she was no closer to an explanation. For a moment she ran her finger over the equations, the geometry problem. Then she slammed the book shut and went to see Carmen.

Her aunt lay dozing to the radio, but she smiled when Ana came in.

Happy New Year, said Ana.

Shitty New Year, muttered Carmen.

Ana took her hand.

At least it’ll be a short one for me, said Carmen.

You mustn’t say that, said Ana, squeezing her hand. On the radio the host was counting down to midnight, outside the skies flashed yellow and red and blue, and for a while they sat in silence, staring at the colors, until Ana wiped her eyes.

Carmen, she sniffed, how well did you know my father?

Your father? Pretty well, I’d say. But mostly when we were young.

What was he like in those days? Was he a pessimist?

A pessimist? Nah, not at all, he was curious, full of enthusiasm. There was nothing that could stop your father.

Carmen handed her a napkin, and Ana blew her nose.

But, Carmen, why do you think he did it, then? If he was happy and full of courage?

Yes, why did he do it? she said, sighing. I don’t know. But your mother always says it was the Institute that killed him. Too many theorems, you know. Far too many numbers. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me. Turns you a bit cracked, that muck.

It was the only lead Ana had to go on. Three days later, when the Institute opened, she was shifting foot to foot in front of the counter at the library before the bleary-eyed librarian had even turned up. Before he had a chance to put down his coffee cup, Ana was in full flow, explaining she was looking for information on her father, that he’d worked at the Institute in the seventies, and that she wanted to see all the files the Institute had on Ciprian Ivan.

Ivan, you say, muttered the librarian. Doesn’t ring a bell. But if you’re sure he worked here, they must have a file on him at the archive.

Ten minutes later Ana was crossing the street, walking the few hundred yards down the road to the main library, where a guard followed her down to the basement and opened a door. The archive shivered in the light of a lamp or a single fluorescent tube. It smelled sharply of mothballs, I think she said, presumably with yellowing posters on the walls, and behind a desk sat a pinched and scrawny man, his head resting in his hand. With his other hand he flicked through a newspaper, and when Ana said she needed the file on Ciprian Ivan, he nodded without looking up from the pages.

Permission from the Romanian Academy, he said.

Um, well, I’m studying at the Institute for Mathematics, said Ana. Here’s my library card.

And your permission slip from the Academy. Where’s that?

I don’t have one.

Are you sure? Try checking one more time.

Ana sighed, slipping a bill out of her wallet.

Ah, yes, he said. That’s the one. Come on, we’ll find this Ciprian together.

Ana followed him down the corridor, farther in among the shelves, until the archivist found a cardboard box, and in the cardboard box he found a ring binder, and from the ring binder he took a thin folder.

You know, you’re not really allowed to be here, he said, and glanced at his watch. Hey, look at that, it’s nearly lunchtime. If I just nip to the canteen, you’ll definitely be gone by the time I get back.

Ciprian Ivan’s records were brief. It took her no more than ten minutes to read through them. The first document registered his enrollment as a student. There followed a series of grade books, and then a letter with the names of new instructors for the spring semester of 1974. Her father’s name was at the top of the list, and farther down she recognized another name: Paul Pintea, his old mathematician friend. The next document was a copy of his employment contract as a research assistant, dated January 1975, and the final document in the folder was an index of employees’ addresses and telephone numbers. Under the heading “Research Assistants,” she found her dad’s information, and on the next line down she noticed the name Paul Pintea again. That was all. Ana rifled through the bits of paper, but there was no diploma or dissertation, not even a letter of dismissal. Like the record of a hologram, she thought as she turned the pages, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and put the folder back, hurrying down the corridor and climbing into the winter’s cold.

The rest of the day she tried to track down Paul Pintea. She remembered him from when she was little, a straight-backed man with a thunderous laugh, and as she skimmed through the phone books at the library her mind strayed back to the meal at the restaurant nine years earlier. Paul and her father had fought that evening, she remembered, but what it was about she hadn’t a clue. Ana racked her brain for a few hours and tried vainly to reach her mother on the phone, but as she walked past a poster for the Transylvanian Conference for Mathematical Didactics in the canteen it suddenly popped into her head: the university at Cluj. She remembered the city from her father’s monologues, the city he’d sent his dissertation to, a city full of mathematicians and scientists, but when she looked up Paul Pintea in the Cluj-Napoca phone book she found nothing. The internet offered no answers either, but when she called Babeș-Bolyai University the registrar confirmed that they did indeed employ a professor of mathematics by that name. Then she went into the reading room and tapped Claudia on the shoulder.

Up for a trip to Cluj? whispered Ana.

Cluj, said Claudia. What on earth would we do there?

They didn’t have the money for train tickets or a hostel, but Ana made up a story about a study trip, a sister class they were visiting at Babeș-Bolyai, and at the library she printed off two fake invitations on official Institute letterhead. At their respective ends of Bucharest they showed the letters to their mothers. Out came the wallets, and two weeks later, Ana was entering the railway station to meet Claudia.

In her bag she had Paul Pintea’s phone number and an old photograph of him with her father. She hadn’t called yet, because she wanted to look him in the eye when he told his version of the story. Why this detail was so important she couldn’t explain, but she wanted to surprise Paul and ask why her father had taken his life; something told her he held the key to the suicide, and she wanted to cry or fall to her knees and beseech him to tell the truth. Rehearsing her little plan as she walked across the railway station tiles, at the kiosk she nearly bumped into Daniel, the angular man, his eyes so lashless they seemed naked. It made her jump, but Daniel was with a beautiful girl, so Ana simply nodded. Then she hurried onward to the platform, where she found Claudia. They climbed aboard, and from the compartment she saw Daniel getting on the same train, alone.

Claudia grabbed her arm. Seriously, is that him?

Ana nodded. What are the chances? she said. Of all the trains, just think.

That’s got to be a sign, said Claudia, clapping excitedly. Ooh, you’re written in the stars.

Daniel was traveling first class, but he greeted Ana in the dining car. He invited her for a sandwich, and for the next hour they sat there as Romania whizzed by. He told her he was bisexual, he was an artist, he came from Bistriţa, had traveled all through Europe, was twenty-five years old, that his phone number was seven-seven-one-zero-one-nine, and that he liked Max Ernst. He said he’d call Ana when he got back to Bucharest. They could have a cup of tea.

Why do you think he said all that? yelled Ana over the music at a karaoke bar in Cluj that evening.

No idea, yelled Claudia. But my God, he’s gorgeous.

The next morning they nursed their hangovers at a café behind the museum. Ana could get nothing down. She excused herself, saying she might as well get it over with, and crossed the square, past the statue and the flock of tourists, through the streets, until she reached the faculty building. She checked the address and photograph one more time, stepped through the first door, and asked the way to Paul Pintea’s office. A secretary gave her directions: up the stairs and down the long hallway, first door on the left. Yes, there was Paul’s surname on the door, and she knocked hurriedly before she could think twice. A chair creaked behind the door, a drawer was closed and cups shifted around. She heard steps. The door opened.

Paul, or a man who looked like Paul, stared at her. His eyes were the same, but he was fatter and balder, his cheeks slumped toward his chin like they were melting.

Can I help you with something?

Yeah, you’re Paul, aren’t you? I think you knew my father, Ciprian Ivan.

For a moment he gazed at her. Then his face split into a laugh.

Ah, Ana! God, is that really you? Last time I saw you, you were just a little thing. And now look at you. I mean, those curves, those curves.

He laughed again, waving her into the office and asking what she was doing in Cluj. Ana told him something about a study trip, and he pulled out a chair for her and sat down behind his desk.

Math at the academy, eh? Well, can’t say it’s all that surprising.

Ana blushed. No, I guess it isn’t.

But it’s good, said Paul. It’s how it should be. If you’ve got your father’s blood in your veins you’ll be one hell of a mathematician.

Ana smiled, Paul nodded, and for a moment both were silent. Then she took out her notebook, keen to get to the point, but she felt muffled in the niceties, she didn’t know how to say the words. Paul nodded, as though he could hear her thoughts.

Was there anything in particular I can help you with? he said. Or are you just here to say hi? Needless to say, you’re always welcome.

Yes, there is something, actually, she said. It’s a bit silly, but since I’m in town I thought, well. You were good friends with my dad. Weren’t you?

The best, the closest. Like a molecule, you know.

That’s what I thought. When my dad—well, when he died, he didn’t leave a note. And I thought, since you were friends, maybe you knew something about why he did it?

Paul nodded, his gaze flitting around the room. It leaped from the desk to the bookshelves, and Ana tried in vain to catch his eye.

Ana, he said. Your father was a very talented mathematician. And he loved you very much.

Then he cleared his throat, got to his feet, and took a step away from the desk.

You know what, he said. Why don’t we have a cup of coffee? Let’s just have a little cup.

Ana nodded, but before she could stand up he was over by her chair, helping her up and bundling her out of the office, grabbing her bag as he went and closing the door behind them. She understood none of what was going on, but Paul was sweating and tugging at his collar like it was a summer’s day. In the teachers’ lounge Paul filled cups with coffee, found sugar and milk, and when they sat down on the sofa it was like the air leaked out of him, his body sagging like a block of Neapolitan ice cream, melted yet still upright, all soft and airy and made of powdered milk, collapsing onto the sofa.

Well. Yes, Ciprian, he said. Yes, it was certainly an awkward business with your father.

Ana nodded.

The other day, she said, I started thinking about that time at the restaurant in Bucharest. I wasn’t very old, but you got into an argument, you and my dad. And I was wondering whether it had something to do with his dissertation.

You mean, what? Did he hang himself because of his dissertation?

Maybe, yes. It was rejected, and my aunt says it was because of the Institute that he did it.

Paul flapped his hand.

Your father was a very ambitious man, no doubt about that. But he never let himself be beaten down. Hang himself on account of some crappy dissertation? Never!

Paul set the coffee cup on the table. He said: No. If you only knew how many blows that man could take. Every single time they knocked him down he picked himself up again. I’ve no idea where he got it from.

So it wasn’t because of the dissertation?

Jesus, no. He was like that boxer, what’s his name? The one in the movie?

Paul punched his fists into the air, chuckling to himself, but then his cheeks sank again, and the timbre of his voice seemed to fade.

But, yes, that was then, of course, when we were young. Before I moved to Cluj.

What happened after you moved?

Yes, what happened then. I don’t know. We didn’t talk for several years. And when I saw him again, well, I’m not sure. He wasn’t the person I knew.

Ana nodded. She wanted to ask whether her father had been depressed or sick, whether he was on drugs or sleeping pills, whether he was an agent or spying on the government, but then Paul got up and drew the blinds. Outside the sun had disappeared behind the mountains, a bluish light lay across the parking lot, and a tour bus pulled up. The headlights shone into the lounge, the bus stopped by the curb, the doors opened, and people tumbled out onto the street. Sweaters were taken off and put on, jackets removed from bags, and a flash cut through the twilight.

Ugh, just look at them, Paul said. Damn Hungarians.

Yeah, said Ana. All those tourists.

But what the hell do they want here? That’s what I don’t get. There’s nothing here but misery and squalor.

Two days later, Ana and Claudia took the train home to Bucharest. In the compartment Ana wrote about her meeting with Paul, speculating about her father. She’d read the few remaining letters and postcards, but they told her nothing. She’d asked his friends and family, and now she’d run out of witnesses. As the train put the mountains behind it and trundled onto the Wallachian Plain, she slid the notebook aside and let it go. She stared out of the window at the fields, at the villages that stood like ghosts in the landscape, razed and resurrected through the endless succession of wars and empires that had swept across the country, the farms and the lives that had been lived there, and were forgotten, and of which not even a shadow remained.

Hey, why the long face, said Claudia. Aren’t you going to call that Daniel guy?

Yes, said Ana. That’s true.

Claudia nodded and took her hand. You know what I think? I think this spring is going to be big.

The fourth time Ana saw Daniel was at his apartment. They drank fruit tea and listened to music, and Daniel’s boyfriend was there too. His name was Sorin. He was a few years older, and a very beautiful man. Not in the ordinary sense; or, no, it was a classical beauty, but it was also a—what did Ana call it? An inner beauty sounds so dumb. Well, it doesn’t matter. It was a lovely day they spent together, Ana, Daniel, and Sorin. It was like they’d known one another for years, and Ana listened as the two men talked about Gide and Blaga and Tournier, and when it was time to leave they gave her The Glass Bead Game to take home in her bag.

Back in the apartment Carmen was waiting, and she said: Tell me.

Tell you what?

So, did he fuck you, or what?

Carmen! said Ana, shushing her. Mom can hear you.

But then she talked about Daniel and Sorin anyway, about the literature they’d discussed and the book she’d got in her bag. It might have sounded grand to her student’s mind, but Carmen wasn’t impressed.

So he’s got a boyfriend? she said. A male one?

Yeah, so what?

Maybe you should take a step back?

But did Ana take a step back, when Daniel called the next day and invited her out for a drink? Hardly. She said, Yes thanks, absolutely, I’d love to. She put on her high-heeled shoes and walked alone up Lipscani. Blowing on her fingers to warm them, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her neck. It was Friday evening, and it was happy hour. Ana bumped into drunk people’s elbows and hips, she shook as though with cold, and for a moment she hesitated at the door. Then she screwed up her courage and plunged into the cigarette smoke, set a course for the beer taps and caught sight of Daniel through the dark. He hadn’t seen her, and for some reason she felt no urge to draw his attention. He stood side-on, his features almost dissolving in the paper lanterns’ glow, but then he turned, and his eyes grew big and round, he drummed his fingers on the countertop, and suddenly he was standing in front of her, staring.

We can go back to mine, he said, when he’d ordered two beers.

And when they’d clinked glasses: You can sleep at my place, if you like.

And when he put his empty bottle on the table: I want to make love to you.

Ana looked down at the table, feeling her cheeks grow hot. Then she got up and found a payphone, called home, and said she was staying over at Claudia’s. By the time she got back, he’d already paid the bill, and they walked back to his apartment. They took off their clothes and stood there in the middle of the carpet, Ana wishing she could crawl under the covers. She felt somehow like putting on a sweater, or a blanket would be good; it was so cold in the apartment, and no man had ever seen her naked.

I’m freezing, she said.

Daniel nodded and went into the kitchen for vodka and glasses, cut sausages and pickles, and brought a piece of bread.

There’s no reason to be nervous, he said, when they were lying in bed. I’ve tried it loads of times before.

Then they clinked glasses, and he told her she’d be the nineteenth virgin he’d gone to bed with, and that he’d screwed a hundred and eighteen women and ninety-four men. He’d been a prostitute abroad, he said, because he needed the money, but he’d also saved some up. He kept talking, and the more he talked, the more vodka Ana poured down her throat, until at last she got so wrecked that for the next five years she was just as ignorant of the joys of sex as she’d been before she spread her legs for Daniel.

Why don’t you stay? said Daniel the next morning, when she woke up. You can move in, if you want.

Ana, fiddling with her underwear and pants, didn’t answer. She wanted to go home and have a bath, she wanted to go outside into the numbing air, she wanted clean clothes and something cold to drink. So they kissed goodbye, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, her hair rumpled and greasy, her groin aching, everything smelling of smoke. On the bus she looked out at the Romani and their ragged children, at the homeless people, who’d had no contact with any water but the rain for weeks or months or years. She thought of Claudia and her other friends, who had boyfriends and had waited for the right one, and she thought of AIDS and genital warts and syphilis, and then the bus stopped at Valea Ialomiţei, and Ana plodded past the thrift shop and the dollar store, and everything almost went black. Then she reached Block A41, and when she opened the door to the apartment she was met by a doctor and two nurses, three neighbors, and a sobbing mother.

The doctor had said it was a question of days or weeks, that Carmen wouldn’t live to see the spring. That afternoon the apartment was besieged by relatives and neighbors. Housewives milled in the kitchen, bedclothes were scalded in the bathroom, candles lit around the dying woman in the front room. The funerary circus had been set in train, and Ana never got the chance to speak to Carmen properly. Many nights she held her hand while Carmen slipped in and out of a doze, opening her eyes from time to time, fearfully, and asking: Is it now, is it happening?

Ana clumsily stroked Carmen’s cheek, not knowing what to say. She told herself it was her duty to sit by Carmen’s sickbed, that she could handle it no problem, that it was the least she could do for her aunt. That was what she thought, Ana, but before two nights were out she was a zombie, a good old-fashioned nervous wreck. Did she sleep at night? Did she keep up with lectures? Did she remember to put her name down for the exam? Could she stop herself making long detours to Ghencea to clean her father’s gravestone, which by now had grown a slimy layer of moss? No, no, and no. One day she was woken in the cathedral by a giggling band of choirboys, and couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there. Another time she went to pay for her lunch at the Institute’s canteen, and the zipper on her wallet got stuck. You paying or not? said the lunch lady impatiently, and then Ana got stuck too, casting around in a panic and upturning the tray belonging to the man next to her, spilling coffee all over him.

Hysterical female, he shouted, you’re not the only person in the world, you know!

Two days after Carmen perished with a moan, Ana trudged all the way out to Ghencea Cemetery and jumped over the hedge. In the darkness all the graves were alike, and for a while she traipsed from column to column, baffled and chilled to the bone. When she finally found her father’s gravestone, she fell to her knees and laid her forehead against the cooling granite. Opening her eyes again, she saw a dog. It came trotting toward her, a scabby little communal stray. Lowering its head, it approached tentatively, snuffling at her shoes. For a delirious moment Ana thought it was a sign, an angel or something. But then she saw two other dogs come creeping out of the dark, and she scrambled up in fear and grabbed a stone. The dogs retreated slightly and Ana leaned against the gravestone, but just as she was about to turn she saw a fourth dog out of the corner of her eye, bony and more tattered than the others, limping out of the bushes, growling.

Go away, yelled Ana, kicking at it. It bared its teeth and drew back, and Ana fought for breath as everything began to spin. Go away, she sobbed, but the dogs came closer, their ears down. The tattered dog snapped at her, and when she kicked at it another one got hold of her pant leg. Ana screamed and flailed her arms, throwing her bag at them. The dogs leaped on the bag, tore and ripped at it, and in the confusion of the moment she crawled up onto the plinth. It was barely a meter high, and now the dogs were back, leaping around the grave and barking. They sprang up to reach her, snapping at her legs, their claws scrabbling at the granite, and Ana grabbed the marble cross and clung to it. Feeling something tug her ankle, she gripped the cross with all her strength, screamed, and thrashed her legs, and luckily a sexton heard the commotion. When he saw Ana he came running over, wielding a rake above his head. The dogs turned and barked but then retreated, first slinking backward, then at full speed. When the sexton was done yelling curses after all the goddamn communal strays in Bucharest, he helped Ana down from the grave.

What d’you think you’re doing? he said. We’re closed, for Christ’s sake, you must have a screw loose!

Ana crumpled into a heap beside the stone and sobbed, inconsolable.

Nervously, the sexton twitched his cap. Aw, come on now. Jesus, I didn’t mean it like that.

Ana gasped and gulped for air, and the sexton took her arm and walked her through the cemetery. He knocked on the door of the rectory, where the priest had just got back from mass.

What’s going on here? asked the priest, who was still in his robes.

This girl, she was attacked by some dogs. I found her up on a stone.

And?

Well, and I found her like this, all unhappy.

The priest looked from the sexton to Ana, and then back again. Is she mute or what, can’t the girl speak?

It was my dad, stammered Ana, sniveling. I never got to say goodbye.

The priest sighed. Oh, alright. Fine, just let her come in.

Then Ana was given tea with milk and honey, and she was given a blanket. She sat in the priest’s front room, her teeth chattering, thawing out in the warmth of the stove, and suddenly it all came trickling out of her, nine years’ guilt seeping into the carpet. God, her father had hanged himself, and she didn’t know why. God, her aunt had died, and she’d been out fucking a gay male whore.

The priest nodded. He smoothed his beard. Ana was in the middle of telling him about her mother’s silence and her father’s burned dissertation when he interrupted.

May I ask you something, he said. Where do you live?

Ana stammered out her address, and the priest brightened.

Ah, Drumul Taberei, I thought you were new. He got to his feet, smiling for the first time. Do you know what I think? I think you should take the bus home and get a bit of shut-eye. Then, in the morning, go down to your own church. This isn’t even your district.

Ana sat where she was, staring at the priest.

My district?

Why yes, my dear, you have your own priest in Drumul Taberei. I know him, he’s excellent. Come on now. Off we go.

The priest took the blanket and helped Ana to her feet, bustling her out into the scullery. Ana was still confused, and as she put on her shoes the priest stood over her and watched her fumble with the laces. He said: By the way, you shouldn’t be wearing those pants.

Ana looked down at her jeans. What’s wrong with them?

Proper women don’t wear pants. You know that.

But everybody wears pants.

You listen to me. Pants are for men, and anything else is nonsense. It confuses people. You’re tempting men into homosexuality. Surely you realize that? Why else do you think we’ve got so many gays?

For a moment Ana stared at the priest. The dead eyes, the beard speckled with what might be bread crumbs, or maybe the white from a fried egg. Then she felt something she hadn’t felt for years, and she pointed at the priest’s legs.

Who are you to talk? You’re the one in a dress!

That night at the cemetery, something woke in Ana. I’m not sure what you’d call it. A man dreams about a distant cousin, and the next day he learns she died that night. A woman tells a story about a dead sparrow she saw as a child, and a moment later a bird crashes into the windowpane. A girl is surrounded by a pack of dogs, is forced to climb a tombstone, to cling to the cross of her father’s grave. It seemed a predestined confluence of symbols, of events: The sexton hardly ever saw dogs in Ghencea, certainly never in packs, and although it was late April and the reading rooms were bulging, Ana sat in her room and stared at her journal, trying to connect the dots and read the contours of the pattern, of the drawing that had to be glimmering somewhere between the lines.

Claudia got worried. She called every evening and asked if Ana was coming to the reading room the next day. And Ana wanted to go, but at breakfast or on the bus she’d begun to sweat, and in the streets around the train station a kind of itch would rise up her neck and tighten around her throat.

It’s hay fever, she said, when Claudia asked what was wrong.

She’d come up with excuses, saying she was going to the doctor or the library, that she’d forgotten a meeting with her mother. Her days passed at the market and in the parks, and hours might be spent on the most basic errands. She had to make a sandwich, but had nothing to put in it, then when she got back from the grocer’s she had to bake some bread. She gave her bedroom a quick once-over, but since she had the vacuum cleaner running she might as well give the living room a go, and the kitchen needed one too, and the bathroom could do with a proper scrub, while she was at it.

One day she needed new socks, but in the first store they were too expensive, in the second store they were too big, in the third they weren’t made of cotton, and when the sun abruptly fell behind the buildings she got breathless, running to the bus without any socks and cursing herself on the journey home. Another day had passed, and sweet fuck all had happened. Another week had passed, and still fuck all had happened.

One afternoon she was sitting in Nicolae Iorga Park, the foliage hanging neon green around her, and underneath the plane trees some students from the art school were holding court. She couldn’t see Daniel, but she saw Sorin, and he came over and asked how things were going. Ana lied and said things were great, and Sorin showed her a book about Joseph Beuys, and for a while they flicked through the pages, while she interpreted or guessed what the works meant. Sorin was particularly interested in a performance where Beuys had lived in a gallery for three days with a wild coyote, brandishing a cane and playing the triangle while wrapped from head to toe in felt. Ana had never heard of anything so weird, but it was a beautiful image. There was something strangely intriguing about the coyote and dark-felted figure, and Ana told Sorin about the dogs in the cemetery, and how she’d clung to the gravestone.

Isn’t it strange? said Ana. Do you think it was a sign?

Sorin shrugged. You think it was a sign? Then it probably was.

Three days later, Ana tried to go back to the Institute. This time she made it all the way through the gate, forcing herself along the corridors and sneaking into the middle of a lecture. In the hall she paused to find Claudia. At first she couldn’t see her, but then she caught sight of her in the dusty light, sitting in one of the back rows and scribbling in a notebook. Ana was about to go over, but she stopped for a moment and watched her friend—eyes turned avidly toward the blackboard, tongue greedily licking her lips—and it was then that Ana realized she’d never be a mathematician. In one of those clear moments novels are made of, Ana suddenly understood that she didn’t belong at the Institute, that she didn’t have math in her bones, that it was worse, in fact: that she was nothing but a little girl with a table-tennis paddle, sitting on a tree stump and waiting for her dad.

Backing out of the lecture hall, gripped by an overwhelming urge to pee, Ana turned and ran along the corridor, and for several hours she roamed the streets, her geometry compendium and book of formulae weighing heavily in her hands. She thought of her father’s suicide, of the dogs at his grave, and late that afternoon she reached the bus stop at Militari. She stood there for a while, gazing at a trash can. A communal stray stood on its hind legs, its head buried in the garbage, chewing at a plastic bag, and Ana gave a deep sigh. It hadn’t been a sign. It was a random pack of dogs, her father’s grave was a granite block, and everything they’d told her at the Institute was lies. The world wasn’t systematic or coherent, life didn’t consist of cause and effect. Then the bus arrived, the passengers flocked through its doors, and the dog limped away with its spoils.

You getting on? yelled the driver, above the idling motor.

Ana looked up from the trash can. She nodded. Then she dumped her books on top of the discarded newspapers, the wrappers and bottles and cigarette filters headed for the landfills that surround Bucharest, for the smoldering fires that dissolve everything into air or wind or that smoky breeze that blows through the city late at night, and with two shuffling steps she boarded the bus.

 

That week Ana cleared the decks. She packed up her compendiums and deregistered at the Institute, tearing down her Kasparov poster with no quibbling from her family. Her mother seemed almost relieved, in fact, and her grandma crossed herself and thanked the Virgin Mary.

Deliver us from mathematics, she laughed, and all its misdeeds.

Not long afterward, the matriarchs packed their bags and decamped for the summer cabin. Ana didn’t feel like joining them. She preferred to stay in town and hang out with her friends. But one week later, when exams were over and Claudia went to stay with her grandparents in Sighişoara, Ana was bored to tears. She lay in bed and tried to imagine her future, but her thoughts refused to coalesce. She didn’t know what she’d be doing after the summer vacation, and to block it out she read novels and took long walks, getting so desperate at last that she defied her mother’s warnings and called Bogdan in London. He didn’t pick up, and one afternoon she went down to the art school and asked cautiously about Daniel.

Daniel? said Sorin. Haven’t seen him in months.

Sorin asked if she’d like to come to an opening, and Ana had nothing better to do. He grabbed his bag and a few beers, and together they trudged over to the UAP, where Ana was introduced to the other art students. Later that evening they went to a bar, and the next day Sorin invited her to lunch. Afterward they sat in the park and spent a whole day dissecting their experiences with Daniel, and bit by bit Ana’s summer passed. There were poetry readings with the art-school crew and lectures at the German cultural institute, but mostly they just hung out, and when Sorin disappeared into a car with some guy or other, Ana sat with his friends and tried to decrypt their banter. She knew nothing about art, but slowly a whole new language opened up for her, a nomenclature of theories, practices, and crit sessions, biennials, magazines, and studio visits, artists she’d never heard of and words she’d never used. The art world was just as complex as mathematics. Even more so, in a sense, because its etiquette demanded on the one hand a feverish kind of activism, and on the other a bored disregard; because there were things you had to do but mustn’t mention; and because Ana soon found out you couldn’t simply ask: So what exactly is social practice, anyway?

That summer she met feminists and deconstructivists, and for the first time in her life she was asked to talk about herself—downright encouraged, in fact. Initially it was unpleasant, but one day Sorin’s crit group wanted to hear the whole story about the dunes and the anthill, and afterward one of the teachers came over and asked if she’d considered applying. As they were walking home that afternoon, Sorin asked her if she’d ever want to.

What, apply?

Yeah, man, they’re crazy about you.

But I’m not an artist. I’m a mathematician, my whole family are mathematicians. What would I make art about?

I don’t know, do like the rest of us. Scratch around in the trauma, dive into the muck.

But Sorin, I’ve already done that.

Then you’d better dive deeper, get further into the grime. All the way down to your family demons.

Sorin, listen to what I’m telling you. I’ve already done that. I know everything about my dad.

Okay, he said. But what about your mom?

They continued down the bare street, putting trees and alleyways behind them, while Sorin talked about his own mother, her alcoholism and loneliness, which he’d been so ashamed of when he was a boy. Ana said nothing. For as long as Sorin could remember, he said, he’d been a mommy’s boy, a shivering homosexual nervous wreck, but what had been a weakness at school was the reverse at the art academy. There it was better to be a reject, a gypsy, or a homosexual; there you fit in if you had a diagnosis, if you were a little unhinged around the edges, a little borderline maybe.

You’ve got to have chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star, said Sorin. Know what I mean?

Ana could hardly hear him above the traffic, but she nodded anyway. There were no shadows on the boulevard, and the heat thudded upward from the molten asphalt, but oddly it seemed like Sorin was enjoying the walk. He must have seen Ana growing paler, the patches of sweat expanding beneath her armpits, but he kept on talking about the torturous coddling and smothering attention his mom had put him through, and the smile never left his face. Ana listened until she could cope no longer. Coming to a halt at a bus stop, she said a hasty goodbye and leaped onto the bus. As she was letting herself into the apartment block, she bumped into her mother. Sweetheart, her mother said, what’s wrong? What do you mean, said Ana, what could be wrong? I don’t know, said her mother. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Ana stared at her. A ghost?

Her mother dropped her gaze. Then she picked up her shopping bag, and as soon as she’d rounded the corner to the market Ana dashed up to the apartment and into her mother’s bedroom. In the wardrobe she found the hatbox, the one with her mother’s knickknacks and mementos. Taking it into her own room, she shut the door and braced a chair in front of it, then she leafed through the scrapbook clippings, the envelopes of photos. She saw pictures of her mother at the tile factory’s offices, or clad all in white on a terrace in Dorobanti. She found a childhood diary in her mother’s handwriting, her old slide rule. It was wrapped in black cloth in a leather case, and Ana took it out and held it in her hand like a scepter. The bright wood was inlaid with a shiny metal, the look of a revelation as the pale instrument emerged from all that darkness. Ana delved down into the hatbox again, and at the bottom she found a plastic folder. It lay buried under a pile of tax returns, and when she opened it her birth certificate tumbled out onto the carpet. She’d never seen it before, and now she picked it up and studied it. It was neatly filled out in bluish cursive and stamped with the emblem of a Ceaușescu ministry, and there was something oddly nostalgic about finding herself in an obsolete document, a registration number in a disused database. Ana was about to jot down that thought when she discovered a second sheet. Years of pressure had stuck it firmly to the back of the birth certificate—a rougher piece of paper, nearly falling apart. It must have been wet at some point, and Ana struggled to tell one word from another. Only when she realized that it was in French could she make out what was written on it: her own name and that of her parents, and a church in Morocco.

That evening they ate dinner with the radio on.

By the way, said Ana, I think I found my birth certificate today. Two different copies.

Ana doesn’t remember what her mother answered—it was nothing special—and they washed up and left each other to their own devices. But the final scene from that evening she’ll never forget. When she came out of the bathroom, her mother was standing by the window in the streetlamp’s glow. She looked pretty, standing there half-turned toward the pane, as though the light were shrouding her, and Ana took a step into the room, then halted. There was something about the way her mother fiddled with the birth certificate between her fingers. She stood like a cold storage on a night when the power’s gone out, a creaking, dripping hall of pallet racks, full of boxes thawing.

Ana, she said. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.