III

It was long past midnight when I left Ana’s studio. We never did make it to the editor’s birthday party, and as I biked home through the silent streets I felt light, emptied of thoughts, even if it had been a strange conclusion to a long and peculiar day. Ana had told me about her time in high school and her brief career as a mathematician, she’d chatted, gotten sidetracked and rambled for hours, but then suddenly she’d gathered the mugs and stood up and told me she had to get back to work. Did she say goodbye before disappearing down the stairs? If she did, I didn’t notice. For a while I stayed sitting on the roof, waiting, but when she didn’t come back after half an hour I got up and trudged down to the street.

Over the following days I pondered everything that had happened at Ana’s studio, and the more I turned it over in my mind, the less I understood it. I’d seen my short story, translated, in Ana’s folder, yet she’d denied knowing of it. She’d told me the most intimate details of her life, yet she’d stood up abruptly and left without explanation. None of it made sense. Each action was in conflict with the previous one. I had no idea what she wanted with me, but it didn’t disappoint or annoy me. That was probably how it was supposed to be, I thought, that was probably how artists lived, in conflict with themselves and all the world around them. Who needed predictability? Who cared about order and regularity? I had a friend in New York, I had a story to write, and that was all that mattered.

Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the translated short story, and on Sunday morning, when I was out on a bike ride, I swung by my brother’s place to ask his advice. It was a surprise to find him in. He sounded hoarse over the intercom, and at first I thought I’d woken him up, but upstairs he was sitting at his desk in the apartment, buried in paperwork, his hair damp and freshly washed, his eyes red, although he seemed pleased to see me. As I made omelets, I told him about my evening on Ana’s rooftop, and about the short story I’d found in the folder. Now and again he nodded or made a comment, and I asked if he could figure out why Ana was telling me all these personal details.

She probably needs to vent, he said. You know, offload on you.

I nodded—it did seem likely—but why me, of all people, a total stranger she’d barely met? If there were words she had to get off her chest, if she wanted to confess her sins, if she needed to stitch together all the meaninglessness with some kind of thread, some story that made sense of the jumble of events and episodes that constituted her life, then why was I the one hearing it?

Because no one else will listen? said my brother.

Okay, but then what about the story? Why go to all the trouble of finding it online, translating it, and printing it out? What does she want with it?

She’s probably just curious, he said, and he asked about Ana’s body clock and how things were going with The Time Traveler, but as soon as there was food on his plate he fell silent, munching with a vacant look in his eyes. He got up to brew some coffee, and as he waited for the water to boil he told me about a performance artist in the eighties who’d lived for six months in a small cage, totally cut off from the outside world. I didn’t understand where he was going with the story, and he kept stammering and hesitating, dropping the thread. Frankly, he didn’t look too good.

You got that right, he said. I’m trashed.

He splashed some water on his face and came back with his coffee. He didn’t have a dishcloth, and the water dripped down his forehead, cheeks and chin. He said: I slept with three women yesterday. In twenty-four hours. Then he sighed and paused for a moment. No, seventeen hours. What’s up with that?

I didn’t know what was up, but my brother did, and he told me about the three women, and how fateful the whole thing had seemed. He’d begun in the morning in Ridgewood with the sculptor he was seeing, who was so sweet and so sensitive her eyes misted over whenever she saw a dead pigeon or rat. In the evening he’d had dinner with an art critic, and afterward they’d gone back to her place for a drink. Before long they ended up naked on the floor in front of the wardrobe, which was a bad idea, because the wardrobe had mirrored doors and the critic clearly didn’t like seeing her naked body, or maybe it was my brother’s naked body she didn’t like seeing, but either way she kept wriggling and slithering away from the mirror, which made it impossible to finish. Later they went out again, but the critic quickly got drunk off her head, and while she danced around with a bunch of people she knew, my brother met an MFA student, an aspiring digital artist at the bar. By that time the critic barely knew which way was up, so my brother went home with the artist, splitting a cab. He’d been too wasted to notice where they were driving, and it wasn’t until he was on his knees on her mattress, his penis inside her, that he glanced out of the window and realized where he was: directly opposite the sculptor’s apartment. He could see her orange curtains, the dense yellow light from her standing lamp, her long, slender shadow pacing up and down in the window, and for a moment he stopped thrusting and kept still. He’d screwed in a ring. He’d closed the circle. What the fuck was up with that?

Wow, I said, feeling the hair rise on the back of my neck.

I know, right? You get it, man.

My brother gazed at me in satisfaction. Then he went on: It was like being in a nightmare or something, I got totally freaked out. I just wanted to get out of there.

So what did you do?

What did I do? I finished. I pretty much had to.

I nodded and took the last slice of bread. Underneath the table my brother’s leg joggled restlessly. It seemed like the story had perked him up.

What do you think it means? I asked.

Don’t know. That Ridgewood is full of horny artists?

We laughed a little at that. Then my brother grabbed some beers, and we toasted to artists.

Oh hey, I almost forgot, he said. I’ve got something planned for us.

Planned?

Yeah, it’s not all fixed up yet, but let’s meet next week and have a chat. If things go as I hope, it’ll be an interesting fall.

 

Three or four days later I was standing in the arrivals hall at JFK, waiting for Lærke. Her plane was delayed, something about a strike in Paris, and for two long hours I wandered up and down the airport corridors, eating ice cream cones and checking the time, until I lifted my eyes and saw her coming through the sliding doors, her long hair falling obliquely across her forehead and the phosphorous green of the exit sign tinting her pale cheeks. She headed straight for me through the mob of people, let her bags drop, and stood there with her springtime freckles and the look I loved the most, the look of someone hearing a good story they already know, pleased but not surprised, and then she leaned into my chest, all soft and warm and thrumming.

In the cab she told me about the man she’d sat next to on the plane. A man who’d read Saxo Grammaticus for seven hours straight, a man who hadn’t stopped to eat, who took Gesta Danorum with him to the bathroom, and where did you meet people like that, why didn’t we have more friends like him? I didn’t know, but I said if she wanted friends like that then she was in the right city, and I praised Greenpoint’s piers and Williamsburg, where you could walk twenty blocks without seeing a gray hair, and I talked about the adventures in store for us in the wasteland under the JMZ line, and about Bushwick, which lived a double life, or a life that was two lives, one that shone like MDMA, and one heavy like ketamine. It was our town now, I said, and Lærke put her head on my shoulder and pointed at the skyscrapers glinting on the horizon. Back at the apartment I brought out wine and glasses, and Lærke walked around the place, putting up posters and photos on the walls. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed and unbuttoned my shirt.

You’re so handsome when you’re not freezing every two seconds, she said, running a hand over my chest. So much better in HD.

Afterward we lay in bed and talked about the first room we shared in Nørrebro, in Copenhagen, and the time we set up dating profiles for a laugh. The site made you take a personality test: which compliment would you rather have, choose the two words that best express your outlook on life, that kind of stuff. It used an algorithm that incorporated psychological, anthropological, and sociological criteria to identify the most suitable partners, and when we were given our matches it turned out we were number one on each other’s lists. Thirty-two thousand users on the site, and Lærke and I were each other’s top match. It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. We ran down to the corner shop and bought prosecco, and Lærke said she wanted to have our match rating tattooed on her collarbone, and even after she’d fallen asleep I stayed seated at the computer, gazing at our compatibility report, our profiles, which lined up perfectly: She was sensitive–intuitive to just the right degree; I wasn’t too focused–observant, and I still have the final lines in my head: You both prefer flexible surroundings and have no issues with surprises. You don’t restrict each other within rigid structures and are open to adventure.

That weekend I showed Lærke the city. I took her to galleries and a Polish bakery, I showed her the abandoned lot at the tip of Hunter’s Point, and on Monday Lærke began her internship at a literary journal while I launched into my final week at the gallery. I’d been hoping to bump into Ana at the closing reception, but although I came early and left late, I didn’t see her. The next day, we began to take down the exhibition. I turned up to dismantle the The Time Traveler, but one of the technicians told me Ana’d left a note with instructions, and that she wouldn’t be coming to help out.

That week I did nothing but work. There were catalogs to pack up, articles to archive, budgets that needed to be balanced, and every day I hung around the office well into the evening, hoping I’d see Ana. But she never came padding down the hallway, her logbook never lay out on a desk, and when my curiosity got the better of me and I poked through the files for information about her, I found nothing but contractors’ quotes, technical specifications for DVD players, and endless correspondence with the Romanian Cultural Institute.

Friday at lunchtime we closed the festival office. Once we’d turned the key in the lock, my brother invited the curatorial assistant and the interns to a farewell lunch at a restaurant in Vinegar Hill. He ordered wine and talked about his plans. He was off to Liverpool the very next day, and from there to Helsinki and Copenhagen, to meet with artists and bigwigs in the cultural world, and he’d be gone for a couple of weeks. Then he lifted his glass and I lifted mine, thinking: My apprenticeship’s over then, I have to manage in New York on my own.

For the next few days I stayed home writing job applications. Lærke was engrossed in her internship, off to events every night, and after all those hours alone at my desk I was glad of the interruption when Ana phoned one Tuesday afternoon. She apologized for not showing up at the reception, explaining that she’d met an American curator and that they were organizing an exhibition together. She sounded enthusiastic, and we chatted for a while, me telling her about the job hunt and her telling me about the nonvisual installation she was setting up in the gallery. I asked how it was looking, but Ana said she didn’t know because she hadn’t seen it yet. That was the whole point. Then she stopped talking, and for a while I stopped talking too, and we listened to the traffic or the crackling on the line, or maybe each other’s faltering intakes of breath. I remember I pictured Ana standing on the pavement in Woodside or Bushwick, staring out of the corner of her eye with that dreamy or paranoid gaze, clinging to her little red tote bag, when suddenly I couldn’t stand the silence any longer and asked why she had called. There was a moment’s pause before she answered.

I just wanted to know if you’d come over and give me a hand with the exhibition. If you get a move on you’ll be here in time to meet the curator.

Half an hour later I was crossing underneath the BQE. It was one of those evenings where the wind changes, and a warm breeze makes six o’clock feel like midday. My shirt was sticking to my back as I clambered off the bike in front of the gallery. It was on Johnson Avenue, squeezed between a lumberyard and a carpet store, and a cloud of dust drifted across from the cement works on the other side of the street. The door was closed and the shutters were down, and for a moment I thought I’d come too late and Ana was gone. But when I tried the handle, the door opened. Lights were on inside, and in the middle of the room stood Ana, writing in her logbook.

Welcome to our cave, she shouted when she saw me. What do you think?

Not bad, I said. It’s a really nice space.

At that moment a woman emerged from the back office, and Ana introduced her as the curator behind the exhibition. I didn’t catch how they knew each other, but her name was Irene, and she’d grown up on the other side of town. Ana took my hand and gave me a tour of the gallery: an exhibition space, its floor covered in sheet metal, a toilet, and a back office full of junk. That was it. But the layout wasn’t really important, because Ana’s installation was called Timemachine, and it consisted of a single blacked-out room. And I don’t mean blacked-out like an unlit basement or a night in the woods. No, I mean absolute blackness, a total absence of light, one hundred percent pitch-fucking-dark. Ana’s idea was that people would live in the room while they worked or slept or danced; it didn’t matter so much what they did, just that they lost touch with the rhythms of the day.

Ana herself would be living there for thirty days, to explore how the darkness altered her perception of time, but first a whole series of other artists were going to use the installation. In the first week they had a guy organizing a string of dinner parties in the dark, then a dancer putting on a proprioceptive ballet. I’m not sure how Irene and Ana had persuaded the gallerist to go through with such a dangerous project, but persuaded him they had, and now their problem was blacking out the space.

We bought staple guns and staples, ordinary and nonslip gaffer tape. We bought a rope that we nailed to the wall all around the gallery, so that the audience could follow it around the room and find their way out of the door again. Irene had brought a mattress that we threw into a corner, and we put a plastic tub in the bathroom so the artists could bathe. Ana padded back and forth across the floor, issuing orders to me and Irene. She was full of nervous energy, and kept saying: Is there any guarantee that the sun’s going to rise tomorrow? No, there isn’t.

Then we wound down the blinds and switched off the electricity, but there was still the problem of the light seeping in around the door, and we had to rig a kind of airlock system with three layers of black cloth before we were able to block it all out. Finally we taped over dozens of tiny fissures where the sun was shining through, while Ana lectured us about photons.

When you heat an object, she said, it emits light, okay? Light is made of photons. Does that mean the photons are already inside the object you’re heating?

No, I don’t think so.

Right, so they’re produced. They’re created. Photons don’t exist inside atoms. It’s creation, see?

I laughed. It was rare to see her so enthusiastic.

Don’t you know anything about photons? They’re so tiny and adorable and weird. If you let two photons interact with each other, then you separate them and put them on two entirely separate islands, the first photon on Tenerife and the second on La Palma, measuring the one on Tenerife will instantly alter the state of the other. Literally at the same moment, without any delay. Isn’t that absurd? It’s like they’re teleporting back and forth, or time-traveling or something. It shouldn’t be possible, but the photons don’t care about possibility. They do it anyway.

Like bumblebees, said Irene.

Exactly.

But it doesn’t happen naturally, I said. It’s only in artificial experiments, isn’t it?

Doesn’t happen naturally? cried Ana. It’s been demonstrated thousands of times—it is nature. In fact, quantum mechanics is so well established that it’s considered a definition. So if I take two electrons and measure their mass, I’ll always get the same result. I can take that for granted. Unlike you. Can I take you for granted? Can I count on you? There’s always going to be room for doubt.

I laughed. I don’t know about that theory. You could always test it.

No thanks, she said. I’ll stick to photons.

We kept working late into the evening, until it couldn’t get any darker. Irene ordered pizza, and we ate it blindly. Afterward Irene went home, and we lay on the floor in the blackness, trying to sense different parts of our bodies in space. Ana unpacked her things; she wanted to do a trial run, spending the night in the gallery. I helped her put sheets on the mattress, succeeding only after five or six attempts, and we laughed at our own incompetence. She unpacked her toothbrush and toothpaste, spare clothes and soap, a notebook with a pen on a string. After taking out a screenless music player full of audiobooks, the last thing she removed from the bag was a stopwatch for the blind and visually impaired. When you stopped the watch it spoke the time out loud.

Count to 120, she said, as we sat resting on the mattress.

Why?

Just do it, count to 120. But count it out in seconds—count to two minutes, okay?

I nodded, which was a ridiculous thing to do, all body language thwarted by the darkness.

Okay, I said, as Ana pressed start and I began to count. Trying to fall into a rhythm of one number per second, I counted Mississippis, and I felt pretty confident in my accuracy. I found a pace that fit the beat of the passing seconds, but when I’d counted to 120 and Ana stopped the clock, three minutes and eight seconds had elapsed.

Wow, said Ana. You’ve only just got here and already your sense of time is slipping. Time flies for you, I guess.

What do you mean?

I mean you lost a third of it. Don’t you see?

No, I said. Three minutes is three minutes. I didn’t lose anything.

But Ana didn’t want to hear that kind of nonsense, so she told me about an underground explorer and scientist called Michel Siffre, who had spent two months in a subterranean cave buried deep beneath a glacier in the Alps. During his experiment, Siffre had lived there alone and cut off, no sunlight, no watch, his only contact with the outside world a cable telephone he used two times a day to speak to his colleagues: once when he woke up and once when he went to bed. The researchers discovered a disturbance in Siffre’s perception of time. When they phoned to tell him that two months had passed, that the experiment was over and he could come out of the cave, he had only slept thirty-six times. He thought just over a month had elapsed. Time had gone more quickly than he’d realized.

Something happened in the cave, said Ana. She spoke more quickly than before, the pitch of her voice changing, her tone suddenly urgent, almost agitated. She said: The clock went twice the speed of Siffre’s experienced time. He lost half of it. Half. Can you imagine? Nobody knows why the time passed so quickly, but they think it has to do with routine. When your life revolves around routines, your memory can’t pin time down. It slips away. After a day or two you forget what you did the day before, and your only points of reference are falling asleep and waking up again. Apart from that there’s nothing but darkness, like one long night.

We fell silent. I wanted to talk about something less creepy. Three full minutes had passed as I counted the seconds, but I had only experienced two. What had happened to the other one? It had vanished. I had missed it, letting it slip through my fingers. And suddenly my seventeenth birthday party rushed back to me, when my brother told me I was already halfway through my allotment of perceived time. It depended, of course, on how old I got, he had added, but in terms of averages. In terms of averages, I’d already lived half my experienced time—the years had long since begun to feel shorter, and they would only get more so. Shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter, he had said, and then my mother had told him to shut up. We never spoke of it again, but now and again I caught myself wondering whether time really did shrink as we grew older, if maybe the last six months had flown by more quickly. Lærke had even mentioned it the other night—all of a sudden it was summer again, and we didn’t know where the spring had gone.

Why are you so interested in time? I asked, to change the subject.

Because I’ve been time-traveling my whole life, said Ana.

Yeah, right.

No, really. I have.

You’ve traveled through time. How did you manage that, then?

I wouldn’t dare tell you.

You wouldn’t dare?

No, it’s a sick story. Really appalling—you don’t want to hear it.

Come on, it can’t be that bad.

It is. So let’s talk about something else, okay?

No, I want to hear it.

But if I tell you, you won’t want to see me anymore.

I laughed. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ll still want to see you.

No, you’ll just think I’m lying. That I’d have to be sick in the head to come up with something that disgusting.

We were silent a moment, maybe two—it was so dark it made you doubt everything. All I could hear was the throb of my pulse, Ana’s breathing, and the rustling sheets beneath us. Then she leaned her head against my shoulder, and suddenly I felt her fingers grazing mine.

I mean it, she said. People get weird when they hear that story.

I tried to laugh, but I could feel the pressure of Ana’s hand against mine. I don’t know whether it was deliberate, but she let her fingers rest against my skin.

Seriously, I said. Do you think you have supernatural powers, or what?

But Ana insisted. Her time-travel story had already ruined far too many lives, and it would have been better if she’d never told it to anybody. I thought she was joking, of course—how bad could it be? It was just a story, just a handful of words one after another. It wasn’t black magic.

Come on, I said, stupidly. I’m sure I can handle it.

Shifting her body, she laid her head in my lap and drew the sheet over herself, and in all honesty I can’t remember how she began her story. The darkness in the gallery was so thick that there was nothing to hang my memories on, only the sound of her voice, the feeling of our sweaty hands, the weight of her neck against my thigh. Did she begin with the birth certificate or with her father? That evening it was difficult to tell where one thing finished and another began, but you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere was in Bucharest during the Good Years, at the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy, the most celebrated, most prestigious institute east of the Carpathians and west of the Black Sea. Not that there was much competition, it must be said—it was probably the only celebrated institute in those parts—but celebrated it was, especially in those days. The days when the Institute’s alumni formed the backbone of international mathematics. The days when Solomon Marcus stalked the halls, devising the first mathematical poetics. The days when Alexandra Tulcea was the femme fatale of the natural sciences, married to Saul Bellow, playing the lead in his novels. The golden days, in short, before Ceaușescu shut them down.

It was during those days that Ana’s father, Ciprian, traveled to Bucharest from his rural village to take the entrance exam at the Institute, and as he didn’t have anywhere else to stay he took up residence in Cișmigiu Gardens. Not the teeming Cișmigiu Gardens they are today, full of juice vendors, street kids, and Romani families. This was the Cișmigiu Gardens of the Good Years, peaceful and magnificent, a park famous for its black swans. It was here that Ciprian settled down on a piece of grass along the fence near the main street, beneath a tree that doesn’t stand there anymore. He lay basking on the benches and relaxed, thinking of all the poems and novels he had read about the Gardens—about unfaithful lovers meeting in the shadows of the trees, about men who died tragic deaths among the flowerbeds—and doubtless of the entrance exam too, and of all the beatings he had received when his illiterate father caught him studying: batterings with bare fists, thrashings with sandals, peltings with beetroots, wallopings with half-empty sacks of potatoes.

I have seen only a single cloudy photograph of Ciprian when he first arrived in Bucharest, but I can easily picture him on the day before the entrance exam, washing his face in the fountain and taking the short walk up to the Institute to solve the mathematical problems he’d been practicing, first as the village’s model pupil and later as the provincial high school’s mathematics prodigy. And I can picture him several weeks later, too, sauntering across the university square, bursting with confidence and nerves, to read his name on the list of those admitted to the course.

Two months later, when lectures began, he said goodbye to Cișmigiu Gardens and took up living at the university. This was Ciprian’s golden age, listening to the professors sketch the illustrious history of mathematics in the lecture halls, going days without talking to anyone other than the staff at the Institute’s library. Some days brimmed with number theory, others with combinatorics. In the breaks between lectures he discussed algebra or probability theory with his classmates, and when assignments were due he sat up all night long helping his new friend, Paul. Ciprian spent so much time at the Institute that after the first term he knew the building better even than the ancient janitor, who had swept the halls and changed the lightbulbs longer than any of the professors could remember. He could set his watch by the moment at night when the floors creaked and groaned as the day’s warmth receded, and could tell exactly which toilet was in use just by holding his ear to the wall and listening to the water as it flushed through the pipes. He even spent his nights at the Institute. When the last few students packed up their books and the library closed, he wandered the halls looking for the darkest nooks and crannies—a deserted corridor, a forgotten office—so he could roll out his blanket for the night.

Ciprian, Paul would yell from the stairwell, so that his voice echoed in the farthest corners of the Institute. Ciprian, come on. You can’t just stay shriveling up in here.

Two, three, four times Paul would shout, receiving no answer. Only very occasionally, when his conscience was gnawing at him, would Ciprian get up and go into town with Paul. Most evenings he pretended that he couldn’t hear him, not even glancing up from his book, and Paul would grumble when they met in the break room the next day: This is your first year at university, man, it’s hubris if you’re not drinking yourself into a coma every night. I’m just saying. It’s not my fault if you end up going three winters without a summer and only getting women with the clap.

Ciprian was clearly not one of those understimulated country bumpkins who’d come to the big city to revel in the noise and the traffic and the tantalizing store windows. Most village kids his age were rushing out to wine bars, hurling themselves into an orgy of booze and cheap floozies, nights when the city blazed with light in every windowpane. But not Ana’s father. He would remember those days and nights for the rest of his life, and many years later he told his wife that all he desired was to live as he had lived during his early days in Bucharest: completely immersed in mathematics.

But who knows if that’s true?

Though I can’t say exactly how long Ciprian’s golden age lasted, by the time he’d celebrated his first New Year in Bucharest and the winter’s first storms had blanketed the city in a thick layer of snow, Ciprian had found himself crippled with responsibilities.

It didn’t happen at a single stroke, but it happened nonetheless. First came the lunch lady’s hardworking but slow-witted daughter: Ciprian tutored her three times a week, paid in cigarettes he then resold beneath the trees in Cișmigiu Gardens. Was it a relief to have some cash in his pocket? Certainly it was. It was a relief being able to buy a piece of smoked meat, to go out with Paul without having to rely on charity and freeloading and scraps from the richer students’ table. But it took up so much time! It took time teaching the lunch lady’s hardworking but slow-witted daughter even the simplest equations, and it took time standing in the park beneath the trees, waiting for customers in the cold. All of it was time he could have used at the library or sitting in the break room talking to the professors, who were always looking for excuses to dodge their wives.

Cigarettes, said Paul. Doesn’t the woman know we use money these days? Jesus, you don’t even smoke.

He was right. It wasn’t much of a deal that Ciprian had going with the lunch lady. For months he weighed the pros and cons, considering just giving up the job. But one day, as he was eating breakfast with the ancient janitor, the conversation turned to the lunch lady, who’d been widowed in her youth and lost most of her family during the war. Her only hope of a respectable old age was her daughter’s exams, which would open the door to university and a richer class of men.

This was hardly Ciprian’s problem, of course. There were thousands of stories like the lunch lady’s, and it wasn’t his job to start doling out charity to widows. One might well observe that his tutorship was worth far more than the lousy packs of cigarettes he got in return, and that he had his own family to think of. One might observe these things, and many others besides, but Ciprian had been taught that a promise was a promise, and even though strictly speaking he hadn’t promised to get the lunch lady’s daughter into university, he kept tutoring her, often so late into the night that he would wake up feeling groggy when the janitor came rattling down the hall.

Moreover, the lunch lady’s daughter was not his only responsibility. Since moving to the city, Ciprian had been surviving on the potatoes his older sister smuggled out of the family home and sent by train to Bucharest. Sacks of them would arrive each month, and it was no small risk his sister was running. He tried not to think about it, but he knew all too well that his honeymoon in Bucharest would be well and truly over when the stream of potatoes ran dry, that it would probably be sooner rather than later, and that his three sisters were eagerly awaiting a package full of coffee, nylons, and chocolate from Bucharest.

All in all, Ciprian needed a real job. A job where he was paid in cash, not cigarettes or good wishes. So when the Institute’s senior librarian—who wasn’t as stupid as he looked—remarked one day that, since Ciprian already spent more time at the library than any of the librarians, he might as well make himself useful, he jumped at the chance.

A job at the library: Ciprian’s dream. And there were other perks too, because the senior librarian—who really did look appallingly stupid, and thus had never been able to find himself a wife—had plenty of space in the apartment he’d been provided by the Institute, and he offered to rent a room to Ciprian at a very cheap rate. Cheap in monetary terms, that is: In return, Ciprian had to pay with his ears, spending hours at the kitchen table, listening to his landlord tell interminable stories about his twenty-three years as the city librarian in Timişoara, when he’d been one of the driving forces behind modernizing the library system under Gheorghiu-Dej.

And thus Ciprian came to live at the Institute. True, that’s exactly what he’d been doing since day one, but now he was living there properly, with his own bed and everything. Gathering his few possessions into his blanket, he moved into the attic room in the senior librarian’s apartment, where every evening he could watch Professor Foias sitting in his study on the other side of the alleyway, his head permanently buried in a book.

Shortly before Easter, less than eight months after moving to Bucharest, Ciprian had two jobs, a garrulous landlord, at least one good friend, and a reputation as the most talented student in his class. Was there a woman or two in the mix, perhaps? Our story is silent on that point. But one can imagine. He was, after all, a good-looking man.

In any case, things were going swimmingly for Ciprian. A country boy from Oltenia, not only was he attending lectures at the most prestigious institute in the whole country, but he was also living and working at the university, getting top marks for his assignments, and before long he was able to send home a box of treats to his family. The whole village would be kissing the icon of the Holy Mother, or whomever they were kissing in gratitude these days, crying hallelujah and thanks, our father in Heaven and so on.

But it didn’t feel all that celebratory to Ciprian. There was something nagging at him, and that something was time. At first he thought it was the winter, the short days and long shadows that the low sun cast along the boulevards, making him feel as if time were slipping away. But when spring came and the sun crept higher in the sky, the hours grew no longer. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ciprian had less and less time to devote to mathematics, and each passing week he had fewer minutes to study, solve problems, and work on proofs. Where had it gone, all that time? Soon he was doing nothing but cataloging books, tutoring the lunch lady’s daughter, selling cigarettes under the trees in Cișmigiu Gardens, and peeling potatoes as he listened to the senior librarian’s melancholy prattle. It was a paradox. Ciprian lived and worked at the Institute, but even in the village, where there were cattle to drive and firewood to chop and fields to harrow, he’d had more time for math.

Every morning it was the same old song.

Ciprian, called the senior librarian as he fried some sausages. Are you giving us a hand at the library today?

A hand, mumbled Ciprian to himself. Not a whole damn arm.

And when the summer exam results were posted, he saw it in black and white: It wasn’t just a nagging feeling—his grades were falling.

Ciprian was twenty-three and had only spent a year in Bucharest, but as the summer wore on and the Institute began preparing for the autumn term, he was already dreaming sentimental dreams of his first days in the city. The days when time had stretched out before him like the Wallachian Plain, where he’d driven cows across the fields as a boy. Or, in less vulgar terms: He dreamed of better times. Times spent with mathematics, times spent in research. Here one might well pose the famous question: So what? Our hero was living in the Romania of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Danube of Wisdom, Genius of the Carpathians—of course he dreamed of better times. Premature nostalgia seized him whenever he thought back to his early months at the Institute, to the nights curled up on his blanket, leafing through an introduction to topology. All he wanted was the freedom to gorge himself on Cantor sets, the freedom to sit in the reading room until his eyes fell shut. Freedom from the senior librarian’s tedious chatter, and from having to send home all the money he’d saved each month. That was what Ciprian dreamed of. The easy college life—bah! Each night he went to bed as far removed from the riddles and wonders of mathematics as he had been when he’d woken up that morning. Every evening he sat in the window and stared with hungry eyes at Professor Foias’s study on the other side of the alleyway—so tantalizingly close!—and at dawn, when the Băltărețul wind whistled through the cracks in the wall, he groaned in his sleep.

 

I imagine that Ciprian could have lived like that for many years, hard at work and dreaming of mathematics. And who knows, maybe in the end that would have been a better life. But it was not to be, for what happened next?

Love, of course. That’s what happened.

Maria Serbanescu, a girl so blonde and upright that half of Ciprian’s village fell into a swoon as he paraded her through the streets two years later. Ah, whispered the old women, recalling their own youth. Ah, trilled the girls, sitting by the river and fantasizing about life on the other side of the mountains. Ah, sighed the men, hiding in outbuildings or woodsheds, or wherever they chose to hide and sigh about her.

But first: an unfortunate event.

The senior librarian’s sister had been ill for many years when, as if that weren’t enough, her husband disappeared out of the blue. One afternoon in July he went off to buy melons at the market and—poof—he was gone. Without so much as leaving a note. At first the family thought it was one of those magical Securitate disappearances, but when the man’s lover also disappeared and her family began to receive mysterious presents from Italy, it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.

He should be executed, cursed the librarian as he packed up his things. Down on his knees, one bullet to the base of the skull, job done.

So the senior librarian took a leave of absence, traveling to Timişoara to look after his ailing sister and leaving Ciprian alone in the drafty apartment with the large but incomplete collection of German heroic sagas and the smell of black pudding in the wallpaper.

One week later the Institute hired an interim replacement. Ioan Pancu, unmarried, mid-forties, suspiciously suntanned for a librarian. People took to whispering in corners, and what they whispered was that Ioan was a good friend of Nicolae Pleşiţă, a major general in the Securitate. That would also explain how Ioan got away with rolling up in the late afternoon, unwashed and reeking of booze, incapable of any work.

This big, Ioan would say, illustrating with his hands how big her ass had been. I imagine he laughed too, the way real scumbags always laugh, wet and braying. Ciprian tried to laugh too, but was there really anything to laugh about? He crept along walls and bookcases, hiding in the farthest recesses of the stacks, doing whatever he could to keep at arm’s length from his new boss, until one sluggish summer’s afternoon, when everyone and their mother had gone to the coast or to visit family in the mountains, he could no longer dodge the issue. Ioan slammed the library door behind them, turning the key seven times.

You and me, boy, he said. We’re going to the bar.

Now, I’ve never gone for a drink with the good friend of a torture-happy security chief, but I can imagine that it’s not a pleasant experience. I can imagine that there are certain topics of conversation one might try to steer clear of, subjects that one might ignore or run away from screaming. I can also imagine Ciprian sitting in the bar, his clammy hands gripping the pint glass, uncertain whether he should laugh or cry—well, not cry, of course, obviously—but either way being well and truly scared out of his wits.

They drank a beer, then they drank a pálinka. And when they were finished, they drank another round.

You look like the sort who could do with a little fun, said Ioan, after they’d downed their third beer. That’s exactly what you look like. When did you last get any, eh?

I’m not sure, said Ciprian. It’s been a while. I don’t know—I haven’t had much time.

You fucking kidding me? No time for jazz, at your age? Now I’ve heard everything. He’s had no fucking time for a decent toot on the old horn.

Ciprian picked at the sunflower seeds spread over the tablecloth. Ioan persisted: I’ll be damned, a kid of your age. No time, you’re telling me?

Yeah, said Ciprian, forcing himself to stop playing with the seeds. Ioan smiled, his gold-topped canine glinting in the summer sunlight. You know what you should do, he said. You should become a student mentor. That’s where all the pussy is. All that tasty student ass. Mm, sweet. Ioan puckered his lips into a kiss, making that sign where you connect your thumb and index finger. A perfect circle. Bull’s-eye.

What do you reckon? he said. Want to be a mentor?

Ciprian thought it over for a moment. Thought about the senior librarian and the lunch lady and all his other obligations, about the sisters back home in his village. Then he thought about the student mentors who were often promoted to student assistants, and about the student assistants who were first in line when they were doling out research assistantships.

A mentor, said Ciprian with a laugh, giddy with beer and pálinka. Yeah, that might be fun.

And there it was: the fateful decision he would come to curse many years later as he sat, sick with grief, on a slope in the Atlas Mountains. All I ever wanted was mathematics, he would rage. But what did I get? This god-awful nightmare.

Who would have guessed that Ioan Pancu, the laziest lazybones in the history of the Institute, would be the one to heave Ciprian out of his mathematical fantasy world and into reality? No one, probably. What wasn’t so difficult to imagine, however, was the love affair that followed in the wake of his decision. I mean, how many men haven’t met their wives as mentors or tutors or advisors? It was pretty unoriginal, in all honesty. But this was how it happened: Ioan put Ciprian’s name on the list of student mentors, and on the first day of term he was assigned a group of first-years. Three boys and one girl, agreeable young people with wet-combed hair who scampered after him down the halls. Here’s the reading room. Here are the typewriters. Here’s the shortcut to the canteen, but watch out—Professor Marcus can’t stand noise in the corridor. This is how the elevators work, this is how you hand in assignments. Over there is the break room. They were heading across the courtyard when he saw her. Ana says that the first thing he noticed were her shoes: high-heeled, smuggled in. Then the dress: white cotton over suntanned knees. The lipstick: risqué. And last the face: delicate, with gray entitled eyes.

Excuse me, but are you a mentor? she asked.

And he nodded, because he was.

Then it’s you I’m looking for.

So. It was a perfectly normal way to meet, this first encounter. Just as the months that followed were predictable. A few parties, a cup of coffee in the courtyard. Extra help with homework over breakfast in Cișmigiu Gardens, and long walks through Uranus, Văcăreşti and other parts of Bucharest, which back then was still the Paris of the East, untouched by the Great Winter Shoemaker’s bulldozers, and which Ciprian discovered he barely knew. On paper it was Ciprian who was the mentor, but when they went walking it was Maria who showed him around. She pointed out the buildings her family had built—there’s my grandma’s home economics school, my uncle’s tile factory—and told stories about her father, who was in the air force during the war and had more than once drunk Prince Nicholas under the table. She told him about the forest her family had owned for generations. The forest that had shared the same fate as her uncle’s tile factory, nationalized by Ceaușescu.

Whether it was all that upper-class patter that Ciprian fell for we’ll never discover, but it was on one of those walks—while stopping to admire her uncle’s palace in Dorobanti—that he felt her hand, at least the back of it, graze his own, and realized he was in love.

In love! It wasn’t something Ciprian had tried before. In his village back home he’d had a crush on the neighbor’s curly-haired daughter, and had been sweet on the Roma girl who washed clothes in the stream. But this was different. This was the genuine article, is what it was, and Ciprian had absolutely no idea what to do. He listened with half an ear as the lunch lady’s daughter rattled off her sums, and was unable to contain his impatience when the senior librarian, now returned, launched into one of his monologues. It was suddenly completely impossible to concentrate in the reading room, and he was constantly having to get up and go into the break room or to the toilet, just on the off-chance that he might glimpse Maria.

Maria this, Maria that. Even Paul, who’d been pleased at first to see a little life in his friend’s eyes, got tired of hearing how good she was at ice skating, how much she liked chestnuts, and how fond she was of the baby blanket that her grandmother had knitted in the distant past and that she still hid underneath her pillow.

Paul, complaining: Jesus, is there anything you don’t know about this girl?

Ciprian had never known anything like it. For as long as he could remember, he’d only been interested in one thing, and that was knowledge. His whole life had been one long struggle to find time for his studies, whether he was leafing through the lexicon he’d hidden in the neighbor’s barn, sneaking Euclid’s Elements with him when he took the cows to pasture, or hiding behind the horses’ trough and reading about Archimedes’s circles. He’d been pummeled black and blue because of those books, but suddenly his interest in them had evaporated, supplanted by the woman he walked home from the Institute one late afternoon.

Goodbye, said Maria as they stood on the path beneath the cherry tree. See you tomorrow.

Yeah, okay. Goodbye.

You said that already, she laughed.

And it was at that point he lifted his hand to her chin, exactly as Paul had told him to do.

You really are very beautiful, he said.

Maria lowered her gaze. And the trouble with downcast eyes is that it’s tough to tell the difference between shyness and rejection. That sort of body language is hard to decipher, so Ciprian just stood there wavering, cupping Maria’s head in his hand like some half-witted Hamlet.

Ciprian, she whispered. Just kiss me.

According to Ana that was how it began, in the autumn of 1971. Ciprian, deeply in love as he’d never been before and never would be again. And Maria—well, the story is largely silent on the subject of her feelings. All in all, Ana spoke very little of her mother. I’d heard chapter and verse about her father, but about Maria I knew only the bare facts. She was born in Dorobanti in the early fifties, her father a successful dentist and her mother one of those orthodox women who sits in churches and chapels for hours at a time, pickling in an atmosphere of death and piety and half-burned candles. Maria Serbanescu grew up in a house with a piano and a library, on the surface a bourgeois home like any other, complete with table manners and freshly ironed shirts. But although they never talked about it, and although Maria was too young to understand the details, she could sense the spirit of the age, as they say, the revolutionary tide encroaching on the family. At night, when Maria put her ear to the wall, she could hear her father’s drunken ramblings, and when the family took the train down to the coast one summer’s day Maria caught sight through the window of her cousin, who’d disappeared under mysterious circumstances the year before.

Cousin Mircea, she shouted eagerly, waving at the disheveled man digging in the muddy canal. Mom, Dad, look! It’s Mircea, she shouted, before receiving a clip around the ear, the first and only time her mother ever laid a hand on her.

The point was not lost on Maria. The family might well be up to its neck in shit, but why should she worry about it? Nobody else seemed to. Every week the house hummed with dinner guests, people danced the Lancers in the living room, and Maria’s mother, who’d never been west of the Carpathians, switched into French at the slightest opportunity. The family was on a Titanic journey, playing until the whole godforsaken ship went down. They laughed and danced and drank, and one might be tempted to say that Maria’s childhood was one big party. A pathetic party? Certainly. But here one must remember that this was the People’s Republic of Romania, Ceaușescustan, a land where anyone could end up in a labor camp, where the president had just returned from a starving North Korea and announced that he felt inspired.

It can’t have been easy growing up in a home whose very existence was under threat. The political forecast promised wall-to-wall Ceaușescu. Did Maria sense her own vulnerability in that outlook? Of course she did. In fact, it might well explain why she threw herself so passionately into the arms of a farmer’s son like Ciprian. He couldn’t recite Eminescu, he couldn’t tell a symphony from a sonata, and all in all he was made of coarser stuff than the doctors’ sons Maria had fumbled around with during her high-school days, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want some flashy man-about-town. No, she wanted to be caressed by trembling fingers, undressed by greedy eyes, idolized so shamelessly that all thought of her family’s gloomy future was knocked out of her system.

To begin with, Ciprian was at a loss about how to handle such a woman. He was used to village-caliber girls, and here was a student who read Beckett and played the piano. But instead of sinking into love-struck indecision, he simply went all out, sending her letters and bouquets of flowers, and raving about her beauty every time they went for a walk: Your nose! Your freckles! Your cheeks! He drew portraits of her and collected enough chestnuts for her to swim in, stopped sending money home to the village even, so he could take her to restaurants and the theater, frittering away his cash on gaudy jewelry she stashed away in a drawer somewhere, and which she never in her life once wore.

But he did get something for the money, Ciprian. I don’t know whether it was the family’s entrepreneurial spirit or what, but Maria didn’t waste any time. Less than a week after their first kiss—one afternoon when Ciprian was showing her one of the Institute’s hidden basement storerooms—she pulled her panties down around her ankles and ground herself against him until her virginal blood spattered the sheets of logarithmic graph paper.

Ah yes, it was love! And everything Maria knew about love she’d learned from romance novels, or from the stories her melancholy aunt had told her. In stories like those there is always a wealthy earl or doctor, and there is also a nurse or receptionist or whatever, it doesn’t really matter—the important thing is that in stories like those they surrender themselves to love. They gorge themselves on love, guzzling it by the vulgar handful, stuffing each other with love until it’s sticking out of both ends. Maria had no intention of being outdone by romance novels, so by the time the Nativity Fast rolled around her routine was set in stone: Every morning before lectures she would come to Ciprian’s garret, lurking by the bus stop and keeping an eye on the house, then as soon as the senior librarian hurried out of the gate she would wrench open the door and fall into Ciprian’s arms.

And we’re going to get engaged? she whimpered as he threw her onto the bed. And we’re going to get married?

Yes, he gasped. Yes, yes, yes.

And we’ll have children? Two boys and a girl, she moaned between thrusts. And we’ll have a house, and it’ll be our house, and no one else can come in because it’s ours, and we’ll have a shed in the back garden, and when I’ve put the children to bed you’ll carry me there and you’ll fuck me, because it’s our shed, and nobody can come inside, because we own it, and it’s ours.

That’s how she moaned while they made love, and afterward they lay on the rickety bed and whispered stories to each other. Stories about how Ciprian had left the village and slept in the dark corners of the Institute, living off potatoes, all so he could be her mentor. Stories about Maria, who despite her father’s pleading and begging had refused to study medicine, because she’d always known in her heart that mathematics had something in store for her, and what it had in store for her was Ciprian. They whispered about all the coincidences and the peculiar twists of fate that had brought them together.

If I hadn’t overslept that morning, said Maria, I’d never have got you as a mentor.

And if I hadn’t taken a shortcut across the courtyard, said Ciprian, I’d never have run into you.

Day after day they babbled away like that. It must have been unbearable to listen to. They lay chatting in the garret deep into the night, blithely unaware that they were echoing the state radio broadcasts playing in the background, which spun tales of its own—tales about the Genius of the Carpathians, the First Mate of the Nation, who yet again that year had secured a harvest to end all harvests, about the Helmsman of the Revolution, who’d brought electricity and progress to even the darkest recesses of the land.

They got engaged the following summer. And they were married, too, in the spring of 1973. I’ve seen photographs from back then, and I can just imagine what it was like for the newlyweds during their honeymoon and in the days thereafter. They lived in one of the recently constructed apartment blocks in Drumul Taberei, which wasn’t yet the run-down, communal-dog-infested hole it is today. No—this was the town of the future, an idealized microcosm of Ceaușescu’s Bucharest as it looked before rationing, before the gas and electricity and heat were shut off. They lived a comfortable life in the block: mathematics every day, chess club on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Sundays a plateful of pork and a walk through the park, where the benches were still free of informants and the black swans paddled around in the lake without a care in the world, in no danger of ending up as soup stock or a roast or whatever they were used for when the shit hit the fan.

Ciprian was in his fourth year at the Institute, and he’d gotten a job as a student assistant for the first-years. Even though the job didn’t pay much, he was a happy man, or he looked like a happy man: I’ve seen the photos myself, where he’s holding Maria and smiling like an idiot. Okay, so their life wasn’t grand, but neither were his roots. He had a job at the Institute, he had an apartment with a bathroom and central heating and warm water in the taps, and when he tumbled out of bed in the morning he could stand on the balcony, smell the coffee his wife was brewing in the kitchen, and stare down at the students plodding toward the university.

You’ll be late, called Maria from the kitchen. You’ll miss the bus.

Two or three times she would call before Ciprian went into the bathroom, marveling first at the miraculously warm water that cascaded down over his body, and then at the miraculously electric razor that he plugged into the 220-volt socket every day, while he whispered—and, on his bolder days, loudly proclaimed: Let us take this opportunity to remember a deceased physicist.

Ciprian had every reason to be proud, and proud he was. He was proud when he stood in front of the blackboard at the Institute, proud when he took the train home to Oltenia in the summer with a suitcase full of trade beads, proud when his alcoholic father looked the other way as he handed out stockings and chocolate to his family, friends, and neighbors. Most of all, he was proud when he woke up at night and let his fingers glide across Maria’s ribs, hips, and small, perfect buttocks. Yes, things were going very well. But as with all stories, things go well until they start going badly, and they started going badly the day Paul turned up with a job advertisement.

It was in September of 1974. Ciprian was sitting in the break room with his fellow student assistant Florin, preparing their next lesson, when Paul leaned over the table.

What’s going on, people?

History of Mathematics, said Ciprian. We’re taking the class out sailing with Democritus.

Wrong, said Paul, slapping the advertisement down on the table: You’re writing job applications.

Two open positions as research assistants, one of them for Professor Foias. It was the moment our hero had been waiting for, ever since that day at the bar with the drunken Ioan Pancu. In fact, in a way he’d been waiting for this moment ever since he arrived in Bucharest, ever since he’d read Pythagoras’s famous dictum as a boy, which he later had woven into a doormat: All Things Are Number. The time had come to reap what he had sown, to lie in the bed he had made. Ciprian was a favorite with Nicolae Popescu, the Institute’s polynomial prodigy, he was popular with his students, and a well-known figure at the Institute—why shouldn’t he be able to get the job as research assistant?

And yet. It was Paul who first brought his attention to the problem, one evening as they sat sipping at their beers and staring at a group of Pioneers who were putting up posters for one of the mass gymnastics events that the Great Winter Shoemaker had become so fond of.

Maestro, said Paul, when Ciprian at long last paused for breath during his monologue on the potential of operator theory. If you want that job at the Institute, you’ll have to join the Party. Best to get it over with, don’t you think?

The Party, said Ciprian, annoyed by the interruption. What’s that got to do with anything?

Paul glanced over his shoulder, then nodded toward the Pioneers. Get your head in the game. Have you forgotten where you live? It’s got to do with everything.

It wasn’t as if Ciprian had any objection in principle to joining the Party. He had simply never considered it. Politics wasn’t something he’d grown up with. It was something that happened in cities, a private party. He didn’t kid himself that he could understand politicians and their doublespeak, that intricate madness borne of two thousand years of marriage diplomacy and laws of succession, of the murky redrawing of borders by princely houses, of French rolls laced with hemlock and bodies broken on the wheel. And the wars—yes, the wars. Of them most of all. Politics was something he had no part in. And what difference did it make, anyway, whether it was one person or another wearing the presidential pants? In Ciprian’s eyes, not much. Make no mistake: Life in the village was hard under Ceaușescu. But life in the village had always been hard—take the dirt road, for instance. For as long as Ciprian could remember, politicians had been promising that the dirt road from the village into Târgu Jiu would be paved. But did it happen during King Mihai’s modernizations? Did it happen during Gheorghiu-Dej’s six-year plan, or Ceaușescu’s reform programs? No, it did not. The road remained just as pitted and gravelly as ever, and still is today, forty years later, despite the EU having paid for it to be paved not once, not twice, but three whole times. No, politics wasn’t Ciprian’s cup of tea, but if it could make him a research assistant at the Institute, then there was no more to be said: He’d become a Ceaușescu-ite.

Ciprian, a Party member—who would have thought it? Not Maria, that’s for sure.

Have you gone completely nuts, she shrieked. My family will wash their hands of me!

It was their first real fight. She kept it up for days, yammering on and on about the family forest Ceaușescu’s hooligans had seized, about her uncle who had slaved away his whole life only to have everything he owned snatched away from him in one fell swoop, and about her cousin Mircea who had come back from the labor camp with shattered nerves.

They only gave him flour and water! she squawked. People died of diarrhea!

After the initial bursts of fury were over, Ciprian decided to go down to the Party offices. Impatient, and convinced that Maria’s anger would soon pass, he picked up registration papers and a copy of his birth certificate. Ostensibly wanting to read up a little on the rules, he was, I think, planning to apply in secret. And that would have been an excellent solution, had Ciprian not been careless enough to leave the half-completed registration form in his briefcase.

Tsk, you say. One shouldn’t go poking through other people’s personal things.

Sure, but try telling that to a suspicious spouse. Maria had sniffed out that registration form before you could say you’re getting warmer. Enterprising as always, she threw both briefcase and papers into a large stockpot, poured kerosene over it and set the whole thing alight, so that Ciprian woke to the sound of the upstairs neighbor yelling fire! fire! fire! Forty minutes later they were sitting in the local police station, obliged to explain what papers they’d been in such a hurry to destroy. Love letters! Maria declared. Love letters from his curvă! Lucky for them that her anger was so convincing. The Securitate soon let them go.

A few days later, Ciprian sent in his job application to the Institute—without a Party membership number. Maria thawed somewhat when she saw him sitting on the balcony, looking like a man who’d just returned from a week-long bender: exhausted, dark blotches beneath his eyes, and a stare that cut clear through the block and the city and everyone who lived there. She tried to cheer him up by cooking his favorites, and organized a trip to her family’s summer cabin near Constanța as a kind of penance. It was a peace offering, a glimpse into the dream Maria couldn’t give up. A dream of diplomats on terraces, of women with diamonds and pearls in their hair. She pictured masked balls at the casino, sailboats with royal playboys, and all the champagne you could pour down your throat. And if Ciprian’s best days were those he spent living in the dark corners of the Institute, then Maria’s best days were those they spent together in Constanța. When she visits the town today, its grotty beach supposedly still reminds her of Ciprian running his fingers through her hair, and of the breeze from the Black Sea that dried the sweat, the semen, on their bellies.

They were a married couple on holiday, and that was how they behaved: taking drives up and down the coast, buying turbot and shrimp at the docks. It was the first time Maria had had the summer cabin to herself, and she made the most of it. She wore white dresses and invited family friends to dinner, doling out canapés on cocktail sticks and her uncle’s illicit booze. And when the guests had gone home, she and Ciprian made love in every room in the house—and in the garden shed, of course—until they collapsed on the terrace in exhaustion.

We did the right thing, she said one evening as she lay in his arms. Don’t you think?

What do you mean?

With the Party. We don’t need those idiots, do we?

Mm, he said, nuzzling at her neck.

We have each other, don’t we? And we have our integrity.

Yes, he said, stupidly. They can’t take that away from us.

They lay like that on the terrace, lapping up each other’s words, reassuring each other that they were something special. There’s still some justice in the world, said Maria. Of course you’ll get that job. And even if you don’t, who cares? You’ll get another chance. The world isn’t going to turn its back on talent.

The problem, however, was that it did.

When they returned from Constanța, not only had Ciprian been passed over for the assistantships, but they had gone to none other than his best friends. Florin had swiped the job with Professor Foias, bragging that he hadn’t even gone for an interview. The professor had simply handed him a contract. Paul, on the other hand, had been interviewed. Twice, in fact. But nobody had told Ciprian. When he heard the news, they were sitting in the break room playing chess. Ciprian didn’t know what to do with himself. He continued with his move, sliding a pawn forward. Said, Congratulations, that’s great. It completely knocked the wind out of him. He hated Florin for going on about Hilbert cubes and peer reviews, hated Paul for stealing the job—for having a job at all. Ciprian could understand how Florin was making a career at the Institute: He was, after all, the best algebraist in his year. But Paul, a research assistant? How the hell had that happened? Paul, who spent more time at the bar than in the reading room. Paul, who knew more girls down at the nursing school than researchers at the Institute. A layabout, a good-for-nothing, a pierde-vară without parallel. How’s the new job, then—much of a challenge? asked Ciprian sarcastically. Maestro, it’s fantastic, answered Paul. The craziest Abelian categories, chimed in Florin. It was enough to throw Ciprian for a loop: He lost the game, put his books under his arm, and fled the Institute. Back home, he poured himself a pálinka and worked off his anger by thrashing the bust of Maria’s grandmother with a newspaper.

Fucking bitch, he screamed. Who’s washing whose hands now?

He swung the newspaper so hard that the bust fell over, chipping the living-room floor, which they’d spent half the summer varnishing. Ciprian collapsed into an armchair.

Jesus Christ, he said. I’m such a loser.

That night in bed he complained to Maria. I knew it, he said. I knew I should have joined.

She sighed. Never mind, sweetheart. You can try again next year.

He spent a week in coffee shops with cigarettes and pálinka, in rainy pedestrian overpasses, in the bus station’s crimson foyer. And when Maria woke up at night to the sound of the radio in the living room, she could see him in the light of the streetlamp, his hand on his neck and a bottle on the coffee table’s tiled surface. The whole thing came to a head one evening when the researchers and their assistants were invited to an anniversary dinner at the Institute to celebrate the founding of the Academy. Maria and Ciprian were kindly obliged to stay home. They were eating their soup and listening to the radio news broadcast when Ciprian suddenly let the soup spoon fall from his hand.

You realize what we could have eaten tonight, if you hadn’t burned my registration forms? You do realize, right?

You know what? said Maria. Give it a rest. It’s so petty.

Petty?

Honestly, yes. Maybe Florin and Paul were just better than you. Have you thought about that?

But apparently Ciprian had not, because with a single flick of his wrist he flung the bowl against the wall, so that the porcelain smashed and the carpet smelled of chicken stock for years afterward. Now you better be careful, he said with a quivering forefinger and everything.

Soon things flared up yet again, when they were at the parade with all its flag-waving and choral-singing. They stood in the cold and watched the Pioneers dance around in formation, cheering the Blue Motorway eighteen times. They heard speeches and saw balloons take flight. Maria was able to keep the mask from slipping, but as soon as they were back at the apartment she began to vent her rage.

What on earth are they thinking? she fumed as Ciprian collapsed on the sofa, sighing, to the sound of his wife’s rant.

And the neighbors’ children, she said. Why they send them along to this Ceaușescu rubbish is beyond me. Sheep like that, they’ve got mush for brains. Selling their children to the lowest bidder. It’s madness, I’m telling you. If it were my kids they could forget it. They could just forget all about it. There’s no way.

She flung the window open. Can you hear me down there? You’re getting nothing out of me!

Oh, shut up, mumbled Ciprian.

But Maria kept going. And what about my uncle? Is he supposed to watch his own grandchildren running around in Pioneers uniforms? Is it any wonder his nerves are shot? They paid him a visit only last Sunday—the same people who stole his factory. What do you say to that? Ransacking his home, as if they hadn’t already taken everything. They know quite well there’s nothing more to confiscate. They’ve known that for many, many years. I mean, they’re exactly the same people who fired him from his own company. His own company! And do you think they could figure out how to run it, the idiots? They’re thick as two short planks. They couldn’t tell their asses from their elbows without written instructions!

For God’s sake, just get over it! said Ciprian.

What?

If your uncle hadn’t been so goddamn pigheaded he could have kept his stupid job.

My uncle?

Yes, your uncle. Ciprian got up, taking a pálinka bottle out of the sideboard. If he hadn’t been so fucking stubborn and refused to join the Party, they would have found a solution. They would have made a deal.

A deal, said Maria, and did she laugh contemptuously? I think she did. A deal, did you say? With those bunglers?

Yes, said Ciprian, shutting the sideboard door. A deal, a compromise. Ever heard of that? It’s what people do when they weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

By and by, however, things calmed down. Everyday routine took hold, as it generally does, with its endless series of bus journeys and runny noses, dirty laundry and chess-club gossip. By the time winter laid its flabby hand over Bucharest, one might even have thought that the row was dead and buried, and that things were going splendidly, thank you very much. You might have thought so if you were Maria’s mother, or the neighbor coming to visit with a basket of chestnuts. But trouble lurked beneath the surface like the cockroaches they couldn’t get rid of, which kept poking their antennas out of the plugholes well into November.

Ciprian still saw Paul and Florin now and then, discussing the latest mathematical journals or Bobby Fischer’s dominance at the world championships. But it wasn’t the same as before. Ciprian would politely decline when they invited him for a beer or a cigarette in the break room. Instead he would go home and take out books, problem sets, and notepads, sending Maria to dinner parties by herself while he remained at his desk. Am I married to a monk now, or what? she sighed. And at night, when the formulae began to swim together on the paper in front of him, he plodded out to the little hill behind the bus stop, at the point where the apartment blocks gave way to fields. When he held his head at a certain angle, the view was uncluttered by cars or electricity pylons, and all trace of the city was wiped away.

 

It was shortly after the new year that the story took a new turn. When the dean of the Institute told him the news, Ciprian got up out of his chair so quickly he banged his knee against the desk. He shook the dean’s hand—thank you, thank you, thank you so very much!—and hobbled out of the office, forgetting both his briefcase and jacket in his haste. Here it was at last: his chance, his harvest of righteousness, justice being done. Okay, so perhaps it wasn’t exactly what he’d imagined, but it was a research position nonetheless. Pausing on the landing, he gazed at the portraits of the professors and pictured his future: the untangling of topological problems, the proofs and the theorems, promotions and a corner office, the lectern at mathematical conferences.

When Maria returned from the reading room he’d bought wine and turbot, and an elaborate bouquet of lilies was waiting on the kitchen table.

Oh my goodness, what are we celebrating? she asked.

My new job as a research assistant, he said.

There was a moment’s disbelief, and then she squealed and threw her arms around him. That evening they smoked and drank like kings, and as they lay in bed later, high on wine and sex, Maria said: It doesn’t get better than this, does it?

Nope, he said, and nearly believed it. He blew smoke at her nipple, the right one—the bumpy, raisin-like one he secretly preferred.

What did you say the professor was called, again?

Elena, he said. After all, it was her first name, although nobody ever used it.

Elena. I don’t know her, said Maria, running her fingers through his chest hair. Maybe you could invite her for dinner? Might be nice. Then we can meet each other.

Ciprian wriggled free of her arm and sat up in bed. We’ll have to see about that, he said, stubbing out his cigarette.

Fine, she said. It was only a suggestion.

One week later Ciprian put on his best suit and stood outside the third-floor office, his hands shaking as he waited. She hadn’t arrived yet, but out of the window he saw a white cabriolet enter the parking lot, a rumored gift from the Shah. She swung long legs onto the asphalt, all red jeans and a spotted silk shirt, while a dark-colored Dacia with tinted windows pulled up. Suddenly she was standing in front of him, smiling: Elena Zoia Ceaușescu, the Great Winter Shoemaker’s youngest offspring, and only daughter.

You must be Ciprian? she said, stretching out her hand. I’ve heard very good things about you.

Thank you, Miss Ceaușescu, he said, and had to stop himself from bowing. It’s a great honor.

Please, call me Zoia, she said with a smile. We’re not at a gala.

Sure enough, the dictator’s jet-setting daughter was a mathematician. While Papa Nicolae was busy handling the crisis in Czechoslovakia, Zoia had sneakily done a PhD in mathematics, and having received top marks the whole way through, the obvious next step was to continue down the path of academia. Before the age of twenty-eight, Zoia Ceaușescu—greatly to her father’s chagrin—had written her first dissertation and taken up residence in one of the Institute’s corner offices.

It can’t have been an easy situation for the venerable leaders of the Institute. On the one hand the president would prefer Zoia’s career to be curbed, so that the girl could find something sensibly proletarian to do. But on the other hand she was Ceaușescu’s daughter, and who was going to risk getting their fingers burned by giving her the sack? So Zoia kept getting promoted, and her research kept getting funded.

Had she earned it? Was Zoia a good mathematician? Nobody really knows. Ciprian hardly knew, even though he was her assistant. Like everybody else at the Institute, he was afraid to read her articles and dissertations, terrified that her work would be awful and that he would accidentally snigger or wrinkle his nose, or in some other way betray his rancor over her success. Several of the mathematicians who still remember Zoia say that she was a real siren, an A-list minx who seduced scores of men in a haze of champagne and cigarettes and lived the high life on a never-ending tour of Europe. But others say she was a girl with her heart in the right place, a white lamb in a flock of black sheep, and that mathematics was her way of hiding from her family’s monstrosity.

I don’t know who to believe, but I do know that Ciprian was Zoia’s assistant, and that he sat in the room outside her office writing drafts, sending letters, and studying vector space. Farmer’s son and president’s daughter—think what they would have said back home in the village! Would the local paper in Târgu Jiu write a profile of him? Would he be invited to the yearly banquet at the hunting club? Thus ran Ciprian’s thoughts as he sat bent over Banach spaces, as he strutted down the corridors with correspondence under his arm, and as he swung around on the landing, heading up, up, up to the research offices.

And what about Maria—did she know that her husband was pulling the wool over her eyes? Did she realize that Ciprian was working for a Ceaușescu? She must have. I mean, obviously the Institute was trying to be discreet about Zoia, but Maria wasn’t stupid. She had eyes in her head, and ears as well. But for one reason or another she chose to ignore it. Maybe she was so afraid of the Ceaușescus that she didn’t dare form their name with her lips. Or maybe she was so hurt by Ciprian’s duplicity that she fell silent, muted by broken promises. Who knows? Maybe she chose to turn a blind eye, like one of those wives who knows that her husband is running around after the secretary, but keeps her mouth shut for the sake of her children and a quiet life, or so that she doesn’t have to put up with having the pig between her own legs.

In any case, Ciprian’s career as a lady-in-waiting was short-lived. His tenure as a researcher came to an abrupt end one April morning when he found the Institute’s door locked and a note clipped to the gate. How does a dictator put his unruly daughter back in her place? This is how:

In accordance with the Presidential Decree and with immediate effect, the National Council for Science and Education has closed the Institute for Mathematics at the Romanian Academy.

The Great Winter Shoemaker, never known for his elegant solutions and sick to death of arguing with his daughter, had simply shut down the Institute. So there! That’d teach her.

Ciprian read the note that spring morning as the rain dripped down the paper. It must be a mistake, he thought, sitting down on the steps to wait. Out of the boulevards streamed pupils, assistants, and professors, one by one coming up the stairs and reading the note, one by one drifting down again and gathering silently by the bus stop. His whole life in Bucharest passed by him that day: the ancient janitor, the senior librarian, Professor Foias, the lunch lady and her daughter. They nodded to him but he barely noticed, sitting there on the stone steps, his glasses fogged up and his jacket soaked through, a dim look in his eye. He sat with his hands resting lifelessly on his thighs, thinking of Paul and Florin, who had come by that same morning. Taciturn, they had stood over him with their cardboard boxes and said that they’d been transferred to Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj. Ciprian had brightened, saying, Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad. He had missed the point, letting it pass unregistered. So which department are we transferring to? he had asked. The Institute for Numerical Analysis, Florin had answered. Only, we don’t know about you guys, added Paul. It was at that moment that the small hope still miraculously clinging on somewhere beneath Ciprian’s headache relinquished its hold and vaporized into the drizzle. But what about Zoia? he had asked, dismally. Isn’t she also going to Cluj? Florin had stared at his cardboard box, while Paul scuffed his shoe along the step.

Sorry, maestro. I don’t think she is.

It would be misleading to say that he took it well. It would be a lie, in fact. He took it neither with a stiff upper lip nor with his dignity intact. Instead he bought a bottle of pálinka and emptied it in big gulps as he staggered through Cișmigiu Gardens, kicking at the pigeons. At last he collapsed in the mud underneath a chestnut tree, eventually being woken by Paul, who had been looking for him for hours.

Fuck off, mumbled Ciprian.

Come on, you can’t lie here. Let’s get you home.

Fuck off, he shouted. Just fuck off!

When he finally came home, late the following evening, Maria was sitting in the office and talking to her mother on the telephone. Ciprian stomped right past her and yanked the telephone plug out of the wall, tearing books down from the shelves and knocking over the bookcases. What an uproar! Notepads were ripped to pieces. The writing table was flipped upside down. Nothing could stop him, until the neighbor showed up and put him in a leg lock.

Fuck off, he screamed until he was hoarse. Why don’t you all just fuck off!

Maria ran home and hid at her parents’ house, only returning a week later. She had thought that things would proceed as usual: a few days of cigarettes and pálinka, and then back to work. But this time things were different. Ciprian had locked the door to the office, and had no intention of opening it again. Maria knew things were bad when Ciprian didn’t even want to touch topology. She had never seen him like that before: chain-smoking on the sofa, staring at the rhombuses in the carpet. Even in his darkest hour he had never given up mathematics, but now he shouted and slammed the living-room door at the slightest mention of a number.

Paul visited before he left for Cluj.

It’ll be alright, he said. You’ll think of something.

What? answered Ciprian. The Institute was my life.

That’s not true, said Paul. You’ll cope, there are lots of institutes in the world. It’ll sort itself out. He continued trotting out platitudes while Maria made dinner: roast turbot and Ciprian’s favorite white wine. Shouldn’t we go away? she asked, when Paul had gone home. Shall we go to Constanța for a few days? Just a few days. You and me and nobody else.

But Ciprian prodded at the fish, then put down the fork and stared out at the buildings. I’m finished with Constanța, he said. I’m finished with all of it.

The next day he shambled across to the bar and slumped over a glass, downing first one pálinka then another. He turned the glass upside down and bodily collapsed—head, hands, pelvis—and at the bottom, two black shoes. And when, after three months, he awoke to the scent of a new season, he took his coat off the peg and went into the town, joining the queue behind the job center’s ashen blinds.

 

And so it was that the most talented mathematician of his generation, according to Ana, ended up as a high-school teacher. For what can you do when your Institute closes and you haven’t even been awarded your degree? You settle. You take what you can get, and what Ciprian could get was a post at Drumul Taberei Technical High School—and in Maria’s case, a measly job as a schoolteacher.

Broken dreams, yet again. I don’t know how they got over it. But get over it they did: a year or so after the Institute was closed, the stream of family photographs reappears, and the first postcards from Constanța are dated Christmas 1976. Slowly they took heart, and began studying mathematics again. It must have taken a while, but I’ve been told that Maria and Ciprian behaved like a reasonably well-adjusted married couple when the earthquake hit Bucharest in 1977, even having enough energy to aid in the rescue operation. Ciprian reportedly helped by shifting rubble in the center of town, while Maria took an evening shift at the soup kitchen. Perhaps it was exactly what they needed, an earthquake, to remind them that although their lives hadn’t panned out exactly as they’d hoped, there were many people worse off than they were. A failed career or two was nothing to get in a flap about. At least they had jobs and food on the table, and they also had their health. A few months after the earthquake, Ciprian finished the first draft of an article on topological proofs. There was still a long way to go, but at least he had something to show his colleagues. At the soup kitchen, Maria had met two young women with whom she began to organize French dinners and culinary classes, and all in all things were looking up. Even their sex life was improving. And although that was, of course, excellent news, the problem was that Maria was an exceptionally fertile woman. During their four years as a married couple, Maria had been pregnant three times, and gradually that took its toll.

Contraception, you might think, how hard could it be?

Pretty hard, apparently. There was no such thing as pills, and since the Great Winter Shoemaker had forbidden any type of condom, femidom, coil, or diaphragm in his efforts to support the Mothers of the Nation—who got a washing machine for the fifth birth and a Dacia for the tenth—they had to resort to coitus reservatus, navigating the precipices of orgasmic brinkmanship. Maria and Ciprian were clearly not masters of that particular art, which was unfortunate, because in his eagerness to swell the Romanian population Ceaușescu had outlawed abortion, and Maria didn’t know whether she could cope with another trip to the back-alley clinic. Her uncle had a doctor friend who carried out illegal abortions with gloves and sterilized equipment and a decent grip on things, so she was luckier than most. Luckier than Ciprian’s older sister, for instance, whose single abortion had been undertaken by the local wise woman with a knitting needle, and who now would wait in vain to be a Mother of the Nation, if indeed she’d ever been waiting for that.

Poor Maria. In her darkest hours after the procedures, she remembered her Sunday visits to the clinic: the hospital gown, the doctor’s jovial assurances that it was a lovely uterus, hers, as pretty as a Grise Bonne pear. Maria thought the doctor was mistaken. Her uterus wasn’t as pretty as a pear. Her uterus was a dark, throbbing mucus factory nestled deep inside her, a relentless spewer of pus and blood. No, Maria wasn’t at all sure she could manage another abortion. Nor was she sure she wanted a baby. Could she really bring a child into this world? A world where friends and neighbors suddenly vanished and no one asked questions, where children spent their summer holidays at parades for a bird-brained shoemaker?

Maria still remembered what her aunt had said: that a wife’s duty was to spread her legs and service her husband, and that she had only herself to blame if he ran around chasing other women or going to whorehouses, bringing back dirt and filth to their marriage bed. Men weren’t made of stone, and who could begrudge him a fling or two if his wife was overly stingy? So Maria tried to think back to their first summer in Constanța and whatever she remembered of those deep, wet kisses, or of masculine hands wrapped around her neck, maybe. But they couldn’t drown out the clinic and the village knitting needle, or the thousands of uterine scrapings being rinsed into drains every day, and before long Maria could barely kiss her husband without breaking into a sweat.

To avoid Ciprian’s advances she chose a new kind of contraception, turning to the method most warmly recommended by the Orthodox and Roman Catholic and many other churches: abstinence. Every night she went to bed before him, pretending to be asleep when he laid his hands on her buttocks, and every morning she crept out of bed before he woke. And when she couldn’t dodge him any longer, or her conscience had backed her into a corner, they made love briefly and awkwardly, always finishing in her mouth.

It was no way to live. It was a disgrace, is what it was, and their friends and neighbors were astonished. There were whispers at the greengrocer’s and gossip in the parking lot. Maria was twenty-five years old, and it was no secret that the Great Winter Shoemaker had introduced a tax on infertility, so that any married couple still without children by the wife’s twenty-fifth birthday was fined twenty percent of their income. The situation could easily have ended in divorce. According to Ana it was Miron, the balding bus driver from the chess club, who saved their marriage.

In those days in 1978, Ciprian was something of a phenomenon at the Drumul Taberei Chess Club. Every Tuesday and Thursday, and every other Saturday during the season, Ciprian dropped by the club and put his opponents in their place. Miron was also in the chess club, and the two men enjoyed sharing a beer and playing a game. Without much progress, it might seem—after the first three years, the score was 128–0–0 in Ciprian’s favor—but Ciprian took his club champion’s title seriously, and felt it was his duty to teach a man like Miron a thing or two about the wonders of the game.

It came as a surprise, therefore, when the scales gradually began to tip. It started with a fifty-move draw one wet Thursday evening. Soon, however, their games were ending in technical draws, and before long Miron was noting down his first victory over the club champion. All the other chess players, from the fifteen-year-old electrician’s apprentice who had yet to celebrate his first victory to the rheumatic joiner who could hardly lift the pieces, stopped their games and gathered around the table so they could see it with their own eyes. If the balding bus driver could defeat Ciprian, they whispered to each other, then maybe they could too.

Miron didn’t let success go to his head. Although he was undeniably a bus driver, and although his bald spot had expanded beyond the point where one could reasonably call it a spot, he wasn’t completely stupid, and he had heard Ciprian and Maria’s neighbors gossiping on his bus routes around Drumul Taberei. He had no trouble putting two and two together, and he could guess why Ciprian was suddenly off his game.

Listen, is something wrong or what? asked Miron during the Saturday tournament, when Ciprian lost in the second round.

Ciprian shrugged and poured a pálinka.

Between you and me, whispered Miron, if it’s your wife there’s something wrong with, you should take her to the doctor. That’s what I did last time she wasn’t up for it. And let me tell you, it worked.

Ciprian wasn’t the type to listen to just anybody. And he certainly wasn’t the type to listen to balding bus drivers. But it couldn’t hurt to ask an expert for advice, so the following Monday Ciprian set off toward the clinic. The doctor? you might be wondering. What good is that supposed to do? But here one must remember that in Romania in those days there was no such thing as couples therapy, and there was also no such thing as online health forums or sex advice columns in the weekly magazines. No, in those days people listened to the clever man in the white coat, and in this case he said, You go home and relax, and I’ll ring your wife for a chat. You’ll see—everything will be alright.

The following afternoon, Ciprian could already tell something was different. When he opened the door to the apartment he was met by Maria, who cuddled up to him and burrowed her nose into his neck. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom, taking off his pullover. His shirt, pants, socks, and her dress followed. And after they had made love—or whatever you’d call it—she whispered to him with tears in her eyes, I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t know things were so bad.

It was almost too much. But what do you expect with a doctor like that? It’s giving him myalgia, he’d said over the telephone. Spasms in his back and nervous complaints. Are you trying to kill him? Because it’ll go straight to the heart, you know. It’ll end in water on the lungs. A heart attack.

There had been no sex education at Maria’s school—it had been done away with by, yeah, guess who—and she had never so much as opened a medical dictionary or an anatomy textbook in her life. On the contrary, she had grown up in a home full of petticoats and hymnals and icons of the Virgin Mary on the bookcases, and as a twelve-year-old she had been frightened out of her wits to find bloodstains in her underwear. Maria was almost illiterate when it came to human reproduction, having heard not a whisper about the birds and the bees and all that. But she loved her husband, and if the doctor asked her to spread her legs for him, then of course she’d fling them open.

And thus their sex life was reinvigorated. Hurray for the Romanian healthcare system! And hurray for Ciprian too. Our hero had kept his marital vows during his enforced celibacy. He had remained faithful to Maria, and yet it was as if desire had fermented within him, becoming stronger and bitterer, taking on a life of its own. Every day at school he could feel it roiling inside him, and as he climbed the stairwell in the afternoon each step set it fizzing in his chest. There was a pricking in his fingertips when he saw her by the kitchen sink or on the balcony hanging up laundry, and when Maria spread her legs for Ciprian that day, she didn’t know what she was unleashing. A storm of passion hailed down on her, and in the following weeks he took her over the ottoman in the living room, filleted her on the kitchen table, and mashed her thoroughly whenever he woke at night feeling thirsty. He ground into her at all hours of the day, and after two months Maria was lying on the bathroom floor and vomiting as the neighbor held back her hair.

Someone’s got a bun in the oven! the woman laughed.

No, I don’t, grunted Maria, spit dangling from her chin. It’s something I ate.

Nonsense, you’re knocked up. Don’t you think I can tell?

It must be the peanuts I can’t stomach, said Maria. Interesting theory, I guess. But it wasn’t true. Their jar of pickled green peppers was emptied at breakneck speed, and as soon as it had been devoured she rounded on the jar of red ones. Suddenly she could eat a whole jar in a week, and her mood fluctuated like one of Ciprian’s graphs when he was calculating amplitudes or angular frequencies. After a few months she could no longer convince herself that it was down to muggy weather or an acid–base imbalance, so once again she went to see her uncle’s doctor friend, and he once again confirmed that her uterus was as pretty as a Grise Bonne pear, and that it was also carrying a child.

When Maria left the doctor that day, turning down Drumul Taberei’s curving boulevard, it was as if something shifted in her body. That might sound facile, but it was how Ana told it. Something shifted in her mother’s body, and suddenly a uterus wasn’t something she had but something that consumed her. As the city’s gray housing blocks flew past on the other side of the windowpane, Maria laid a hand on her belly in wonder, smiling for the first time that superior smile that would stay plastered on her face for the next few months. Why she had suddenly changed her mind I never discovered, but she wasn’t even nervous when she told Ciprian the news. They lay on the living-room floor, looking out onto the snow-covered balcony while Ciprian caressed her stomach.

I think he’ll be a ballet dancer, said Maria. I can almost feel him dancing around inside.

Ciprian snorted. A ballet dancer? What kind of fairy shit is that? He’ll be a mathematician.

He most certainly will not.

A mathematician, said Ciprian. Think about it—with our two brains he’ll be unstoppable.

Seven months later, shortly after midnight between the ninth and tenth of October, the midwife registered Ana’s arrival in the annals of Romanian history. It was a difficult birth, and at the precise moment that the baby slid out of Maria, nobody had an eye on the clock, so the midwife handed the birth certificate to Ciprian and asked which date he preferred.

Will your daughter be a day older or a day younger? she grinned.

Ciprian didn’t hesitate.

She was born on October 10, 1979, he said. 10101979, it’s a prime number. Just listen to it—isn’t it lovely?

Ana always went on about that little anecdote, that she’d traveled in time from her first day on earth. I think I laughed the first time I heard it, and it was only much later—after Timemachine was over and many months after we parted ways—that I began to see the symbolism, or whatever you want to call it. The pattern, the prophecy, the premonition of a whole life’s lot.

 

As it was told to me, the period after Ana’s birth was the last happy time in Maria and Ciprian’s marriage. Life, in its tiny new incarnation, made itself felt in all its strength, overcoming Maria’s daydreams and Ciprian’s melancholy. The new parents went around in a haze of affection and hormones and baby talk, forgetting all their troubles and concerns, and every afternoon Maria’s family came by with food and freshly laundered clothes. Her mother sewed little outfits and her uncle ordered a crib from a carpenter. There seemed to be no end to the celebrations: the party when the little family came home from the hospital, the christening two weeks later, the gifts after the baby’s first month, then her second. And on the Epiphany holiday Maria and Ciprian took the train out to the village to present the marvelous child, so that Ciprian’s sisters gushed in chorus and even his aging father couldn’t prevent a slight twitch of the lips.

Look how she’s waggling her arms! they said. Oh, and now she’s smiling just like her mother. Look at Ana rolling around, look at Ana biting the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, look at her funny paper hat. Look at her. Look at her now. And now. Look at her all the time. Oh yes, they were joyful days indeed.

So what was it that marked the beginning of the end for the little family’s happiness? By now it can’t be much of a surprise. Mathematics, of course.

Since the Institute’s closure, theorems and set theory and topological space had slipped out of Ciprian’s days, diluted by fathering and paper grading. It was as if his life had come to taste—well, what would he have called it? A trifle bland, a little on the unsalted side. Of course, mathematics hadn’t completely disappeared—all things are, after all, number. But by this point Ciprian had been slaving away at the Technical High School for nearly five years, and although he did teach mathematics, it wasn’t high-school math he dreamed of.

And was Maria any better off? No, not really. For four years she’d worked as a primary-school teacher, her days filled with runny noses and blank stares and the occasional pair of pee-soaked pants. Not exactly what she’d imagined when she enrolled at the Institute. But unlike her husband she had no long-held dream that had to be torn up by the roots and replanted in a flowerbed much too small for it. When it came right down to it, it wasn’t all that hard for Maria to accept how things stood. And once her life was filled with Ana’s childish laughter, her first smiles and steps, Maria soon forgot all her scholarly ambition and settled down at the school.

It helped too that the headmaster was an engaging sort of fellow. As a Hungarian, it was a minor miracle he had climbed that far up in the system. He must have had sharp elbows, the good headmaster, and a soft spot for Maria too. Rumor had it that in his heyday the Hungarian had made it all the way up to the highest offices in the Council of Education, but that he’d been dismissed in one of the anti-Hungarian purges. He harbored a grudge against the government, and it was whispered that he led a ring of smugglers who helped people defect. But who knows whether that’s true? All I know is that the headmaster was a real gentleman, the kind of man who didn’t treat his teachers like faceless employees. A man of the old school, who kissed hands and pulled out chairs and slipped little notes into Maria’s pigeonhole. Enjoy your vacation! or Break a leg with the exams! The Hungarian headmaster, as the social studies teacher was fond of pointing out, was like an ideal nation-state, hard on the outside but soft on the inside, and if anyone found him treacly or overly forward it wasn’t Maria.

She and the Hungarian had gotten into the habit of drinking tea together after work on Fridays, when they would sit with their Turkish tea glasses clinking in their saucers, talking about Steiner and Piaget’s theories and, later, about Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, which the headmaster had struggled with so much as a boy. Did more than tea drinking go on inside that office? I don’t think so, but who is to say? In any case, one overcast day in June Maria entered the headmaster’s office to find him deep in thought, hunched over a letter on his desk.

Ah, he said, when he noticed her standing in the doorway. Maria, sit down, sit down.

And so she did, waiting for the headmaster to pour the tea.

Maria, he said. I was just thinking—you’ve been at the school for some time now, haven’t you? And it’s no secret that you don’t get much of a challenge. That’s a shame, don’t you think? I mean, you took exams at the Institute, speak fluent French. What are you even doing here?

Maria stared at her boss in wonder. Was this some kind of test?

Tell me, said the headmaster. Are you trying to keep the other teachers down?

No, stammered Maria indignantly. Of course not.

Well then. Why on earth aren’t you working at a high school, or a university?

Well—I mean, I don’t know.

You shouldn’t sell yourself short, said the headmaster, wagging his index finger. The world is full of opportunity. Are we agreed? They were agreed. Good, he said, and slid the letter over to her side of the table. I think we should arrange for you to take this job abroad.

A job in Morocco. Or, more precisely, a job at the Lycée Sidi El Hassan Lyoussi in Sefrou. That Maria had not seen coming.

It was a curious circumstance, one largely forgotten by historians, that more than a few Romanians were sent to Morocco under Ceaușescu. The Great Oak of the Carpathians was a good friend and close ally of King Hassan II, and as part of their alliance they frequently swapped gifts and favors. In those days the Romanians were famous for their technical aptitude, and those were the sort of people who ended up in Morocco: irrigation engineers, aviation specialists, miscellaneous academics. The king must have sent one or two things the other way—weapons or chemicals, who knows, dates perhaps—but in 1979 it was mathematicians that he needed. It had occurred to the king that Morocco had a great mathematical tradition—oh yes, Arabic numerals—and he decreed it should be reinvigorated. He wanted to bolster training at Morocco’s universities and high schools, planning eventually to send a team to the world mathematics championships. But you can’t just snap your fingers and redress two hundred years of academic sloppiness, so King Hassan turned for help to Ceaușescu, who was more than happy to send a small army of mathematicians.

In all honesty, Maria didn’t know what to do. She paced the apartment biting her nails, sat absorbed in thought, and heard neither the water boil nor Ciprian come in through the front door.

Maria, he said. What’s going on?

On the one hand it was a flattering offer, a chance to kick-start her nonexistent career and see something of the world—and who knew, maybe even to cut and run for the West?—but on the other, it was a four-year contract in a foreign land without any friends or family. And the Hungarian headmaster couldn’t promise he’d be able to get a job for Ciprian, so what was he supposed to do with himself?

Not that it worried Ciprian. Euphoric at the thought of Morocco, he immediately heaved the atlas down from the shelf and the pálinka bottle out of the cupboard, dancing around the living room with Ana in his arms until she squealed in delight. He had never much liked his job at the high school, and anyway, he thought, how bad could it be to live life shaded by palm trees and unpestered by parents, in-laws, friends, or close acquaintances, a life where he’d finally have enough time to finish that article on topological proofs he’d been fiddling with for years?

Over the next few days they chewed it over, taking long walks in the park and writing lists of pros and cons. And after they put Ana to bed in the evenings, Ciprian talked about everything that lay in store for them: the palaces and oases, the cities like labyrinths and the caravans that sailed over the crested waves of the Sahara. He talked about the Berbers and the Tuareg people stained deep blue, about the narrow streets that wound through the medina and the thousand smells of the spices at the bazaar, about the tanner’s leather, the minaret’s songs, and the workshops’ coppery ring, but it was of little use in calming Maria’s fears. It was as if something inside her head was pressing or pricking; I imagine it like one of those shards you get under your skin—after breaking a glass, for instance—which wanders around in your body until suddenly and very painfully it presses outward through your skin. In any case, Maria lay awake at night with an ache in her head, trying to understand what kind of strange doubt was forcing its way to the surface. She lost her appetite, her breasts stopped producing milk, and after a few days in that state she was at her wits’ end. She asked her friends for advice and even turned to a priest, but he refused to council her on such worldly matters.

In the end it was her family’s reaction that spurred her into going. When she told them about the job offer, her mother ran wailing into the chapel and lit a candle for her grandchild’s soul while her father and uncle tried to dissuade her—the latter diplomatically, the former less so.

Maria Serbanescu, he shouted. You’re not going anywhere, I can promise you that.

They listed the dangers of the Maghreb: the diseases, the age-old culture of thievery, the assaults and robberies and general state of banditry, the time-honored sport of bride kidnapping, and also: they raised cats for food. A desert is no place to raise a child, her mother wailed, but if they thought they could frighten Maria with lies and racist scaremongering, they didn’t know her very well. While previously she had hesitated, suddenly she was busy procuring visas and airplane tickets, getting their furniture put in storage and subletting their apartment. She’d show them, she would. As if she couldn’t look after her own daughter! What did they take her for—some sort of child, some slattern? Two months before they left, Maria received a letter from her parents in which they begged her to stay in Romania, and one month before they left, Ciprian’s childless older sister showed up on their doorstep unannounced, offering to take care of little Ana while they were away.

Maria wouldn’t hear of it.

What were they thinking? she raged once Ciprian’s sister had dozed off on the sofa. I’m not a bad mother!

They’re hicks, said Ciprian. Just ignore them.

Maria sighed, leaning over the crib and whispering to Ana.

There you are, sweetie. You want to come to Morocco with Mommy and Daddy, don’t you? Does our little mouse want to go on an adventure? And Ciprian put his hands on his wife’s hips and said, Just the three of us. We’ll be happy anywhere.

One might say that they ignored the warning signs. That they turned their backs on all the frantically ringing alarm bells. But there’s much one might say from this vantage point, thirty-five years after the fact. Back then the indications probably weren’t as clear, and when Ana read Ciprian’s letters many years later, it didn’t seem that he had noticed any cause for concern. While Maria fussed over the details of the journey, over stamps and visas and a house in Sefrou, Ciprian did what he did best: disappeared further and further into topologies and mathematics, into dreams of al-Khwarizmi and al-Battānī and all the legendary scholars of the caliphate, into picturing the dry desert climate, so unusually well suited to mathematical thought. He felt as if the greater part of him were already in Sefrou, sitting in a café and waiting for his corporeal shell to catch up with him. It was as if he could see his failed life in Bucharest volatilizing before his very eyes. All of a sudden he could walk through Cișmigiu Gardens or pause in front of the Institute without being plagued by a single disappointing memory. He could smoke a cigarette by the bus stop and look right through the apartment blocks of Drumul Taberei as if they were greenhouses creaking in the wind, and when Maria, outraged, showed him the front page of Scînteia with Ceaușescu’s plans to tear down the whole of central Bucharest, he felt not the least twinge of sadness, only a vague sense of justice: It was a fitting end for this accursed city.

When spring came, Maria said goodbye to her class and Ciprian gave a valedictory speech at the chess club. Then one May morning they called for a cab, and took their bags and child to the airport.

Ciprian’s three sisters met them at Otopeni. They had come all the way from the village in the hope that Maria and Ciprian would reconsider and leave Ana in their care.

Oh, we’re going to miss you so much, said Ciprian’s childless sister.

Funny, laughed Ciprian. We’re not going to miss Bucharest one bit.

They cried and hugged and pinched Ana’s cheeks until they must have gone numb. Take care, sobbed the sisters, and may God be with you. And then it was time to show their papers from the Council of Education and Research and answer questions at passport control. And then: Ana crying when the jet engines started up, Maria rocking her to no avail, a shot of cognac in her milk somewhere over the Mediterranean. In the car from Casablanca, surrounded by dust and strange desert plants, their hair fluttered in the salty breeze. To the west was the ocean’s unending blue. Ciprian’s hand on the seat found Maria’s as the words welled up in his chest: Just look at what we’ve achieved, us two against the world—we did it, Maria! But he knew nothing then of loneliness, of cold nights in the Atlas Mountains. As yet he was unconscious of his own abilities, not knowing he could bend time and numbers, could rewrite a whole life.

 

That first night, they slept at the Centre Pédagogique in Rabat. It was a Friday, and they sat on the collapsed mattress listening to the sounds from the mosque. The next morning, while Maria ventured her first rusty sentences in French and Ana toddled around pulling at the palm trees, Ciprian skimmed over the newspaper’s curling letters and sipped at the first Pepsi of his life. All in all it was very exotic. And it got no less exotic when they reached Sefrou with its donkeys and sunken city walls, fez-wearing men and all the horseshoe-shaped archways you could wish for. They had three days of Orientalist near-idyll before Monday came and Maria started at the high school. Ciprian got back to work too. Of a sort. He wandered around trying to find the café he had dreamed about, the café where he would solve the riddles of topology and drink tea with intellectuals in the inner courtyard. Such was his plan. Ciprian wanted to find that café, because if you’re going to do groundbreaking research, you can’t sit just anywhere. You can’t sit at home in the living room with Ana’s diapers hanging from the ceiling to dry. You can’t sit under fluorescent lighting in a gray library, or in the dank air of the tenement courtyard. Elbow room, that’s the ticket. And if on top of that you can find a comfortable chair or a decent view—over the desert, for example, lying all empty and monochrome and ready to be filled with new ideas—then that won’t hurt either. A good working environment, that was what Ciprian was after. And he took his time finding it. There wasn’t any rush. He ambled throughout the city, trying out bars and cafés one by one, but in each case the radio was blasting some sports program, or it was too dark to study, or all the other customers sat and stared at him like some sort of performing monkey.

Oh well, no matter. So it would be something other than a café that inspired our hero to mathematical greatness. Ciprian experimented with various routines, going directly from his bed to the desk in the living room or taking a brisk morning walk along the city walls before settling down to the day’s work. For a whole week he even tried taking the bus all the way into Fès so he could work in the university reading room, but little came of his efforts. His run-up took too long. Every day hours went by before he got going. Washing, shaving, breakfasting, a trip to the post office. And there was always something to sort out. Ana had to be dropped off with the nanny, letters had to be answered, money had to be sent or received. Then when he finally sat down to his calculations, often late into the afternoon, he was hungry again and had to go out and get food. And how the time flew! For no sooner had he bolted his lunch than his blood sugar plummeted and his eyelids drooped, so that there was nothing to be done but get up and find a cup of coffee. It was the caffeine high that usually gave him enough energy to scrawl a few figures in his notebook before the sun fell behind the city walls and the melancholy, golden light of early evening set in, and it occurred to him that he had barely said a word to another human being.

So what? he tried telling himself. He’d given the postmaster a nod, the neighbor a salam aleikum, the constable a bonsoir. And anyway, what did he want with people? They had always been an inconvenience. Now it was just him and mathematics—did he really need anything other than that? Obviously. Whether Ciprian admitted it or not the loneliness gnawed at him, and he usually ended up collecting Ana early from the nanny or going home to the apartment to wait for Maria. And thus he passed his days, while at night he would wake with a start and sit up in bed: Now! Now was the time to get cracking. In the darkest hours of the night he would sit at his desk in his pajama bottoms, staring at the notepad that lay exasperatingly empty before him.

Oh, how human. All Ciprian had prayed and begged for his whole life was time, and now that he finally had it, it had become a burden. Did he drink more than was advisable? Did he go back to bed after Maria had left for work and sleep for an extra hour? Did he masturbate more than once a day? Did he spend hours reading the chess section in L’Opinion, poring over every detail of the world championship in Riga, even though, truth be told, it was one of the most boring championships in ages? Of all the silly things one can spend time on, Ciprian spent time on the silliest, and it frustrated him—it frustrated him terribly. He felt trapped by his own bad habits, every day an intolerable, humdrum treadmill, a vicious cycle of self-loathing and remorse and enough feelings of inferiority for a whole army.

And then—and then. Just one short month after they arrived in Sefrou, Ciprian came home from the post office and opened the cupboard for a little swig of something, a break from the endless stream of mint tea. But what was this? An empty jar of peppers? And not two days later: another one. I think we’ve heard this song before.

Strange things began happening to Maria. Suddenly she could smell what everyone on the street was making for dinner, and when the biology teacher complimented her skirt one morning she broke down crying and had to spend the rest of the day sniveling under the bedclothes back home. I’m astonished that they didn’t act sooner. Maria and Ciprian, I mean. There’s a lot one might say about them, but idiots they were not. They must have seen the signs, read the writing on the wall. So why didn’t they do anything? I have no idea. But it had been a tough year—life as new parents, a new country and everything that came with it, the visa applications, apartment hunting, language barriers, changing routines—and it’s possible, I guess, to miss a pregnancy under those circumstances. I don’t know whether it was down to stress or denial, but when Maria finally went to the doctor she was six months along.

Over the next few weeks Maria gazed in astonishment at her body. For half a year there’d been no visible developments, but when it did at last begin to show, it happened quickly. In three weeks her belly swelled to the size of a melon, her breasts expanded, and Ciprian fell into one of his notorious fits of rage.

You’ve got to be joking, he screamed. What the hell were you thinking?

On the casualty list: the Venetian vase they’d been given as a wedding present, three plates, and a refrigerator door kicked so full of dents that from then on it gave a creaky whine whenever anyone opened it. During those weeks Ciprian went sulking and grumbling around the town, sitting in hotel bars and complaining to anybody who would hear him. Pregnant again! Six months along! But his problems met with little understanding. When the hotel bartender heard about Maria’s unexpected condition, he immediately cracked out the Pernod, on the house.

My friend, he said. God is with you!

But that wasn’t how Ciprian saw it. He did not feel blessed. Cheated and deceived, more like—led well and truly up the garden path. Why hadn’t Maria told him that she wasn’t menstruating? How would they afford another child? And what about their family at home in Romania—oh God, what would they say? That evening he drank himself into a stupor, a feat not easily accomplished in a place like Sefrou. He lurched through the ancient city’s narrow streets, maundering on in hotel bars until he was thrown out. Blind drunk, he stumbled down the boulevards, supporting himself against the wall the whole way home, where he collapsed in exhaustion on the living-room floor.

He must have eaten something vile that night, because he woke the next morning to a painful spasm in his gut. He just about made it to the toilet before spewing whatever it was back up, and spent the next few weeks shuttling back and forth between the bathroom and the bed. It dribbled out of him in watery rivulets, and the doctor had to be summoned to mix salt-and sugar-water and to advise about antibiotics and fiber-rich foods. At night Ciprian sighed through feverish dreams, and during the day he lay feebly in the heat, waving away the flies. His cheeks sunken, hips and ribs protruding beneath his skin, he had to be force-fed soup and bathed by Maria with a cloth and washing-up bowl. Only gradually did his condition improve. After three long weeks in bed he was able to take a few first steps outside the apartment, but was obliged to remain within a conservative striking distance from the toilet or risk the humiliation of shitting by the side of the road. And just when he thought that the worst was over, having eaten for the first time two meals in a single day, he was seized by stomach cramps so dire that they sent him straight back to bed, palely rocking himself in the fetal position.

That night Maria kept watch by his bed as Ciprian whimpered, calling down curses upon the heads of all the unhygienic Arabs in the world. He clutched his stomach and buried his face in the damp sheets. Falling in and out of an unquiet sleep, he muttered incoherently as he tossed and turned all night. When he woke, the sun was shining in through the window and Ana was squatting down before him on her small, chubby legs. She swayed gently back and forth, holding a drawing in front of her, then flailed her arms and lifted it above her head. It daddy, she shouted into space. It daddy!

Maria, he murmured, Maria, look.

But she was already by his side. Shh, she said, her voice breaking and everything. Look, your daughter. She can talk.

There wasn’t much else Ciprian would remember from the months he lay exhausted in bed. The stabbing pain in his stomach, the feeling of the toilet paper he used to dab his rear end, the square of sunlight that crept from the bedside table across the headboard to the wardrobe against the far wall. He lost all sense of time. All sense of everything, really. Never leaving the house, he forgot there was a life outside full of responsibilities and arrangements and things to organize. Forgot that Maria had a job, a small daughter, a sick husband, and a pregnant belly to think about.

So you’re in your seventh month? asked the neighbor’s wife one day as she helped Maria with the laundry.

Yes, said Maria.

Then you should be taking it easy.

But did she heed that advice? Of course she didn’t. She made no effort to slow down, still lugging groceries and bags of rice home from the market, still tutoring disheartened mathematics students and still washing Ciprian’s nether regions as he muttered away to himself, lost in feverish nightmares. Maria, working around the clock. Maria, barely sleeping during those months. Was that perhaps the reason she didn’t tell her parents about the baby? International phone calls were outlawed, mail from overseas was monitored and censored and often lost, but still. If she knew she’d reached her seventh or eighth month, why didn’t she tell her family? Was it shame, or a guilty conscience over having dragged her family to this alien, poverty-stricken country?

We’ll never know the reason, but one day in the late autumn Ciprian got up from his sickbed and began to walk through Sefrou again. It was the end of October, and Maria had been invited to a banquet at the Université Al Quaraouiyine. It was Saturday, October 31, 1981, to be exact. Ciprian was sitting outside a café, adjusting his watch. What is it again? asked the Algerian businessman next to him. Spring forward, fall back, so we put the clocks back again? And Ciprian nodded, Yes, that’s more or less how it was. I’ve never understood it, said the Algerian. With the time, I mean. Daylight savings and leap years and all that. Don’t know much about the earth’s orbit either, where it is and how it works. Ciprian smiled and turned the hands on his watch, explaining to the Algerian about atomic time and astronomical time, about how the earth took not three hundred and sixty-five days to travel around the sun but three hundred and sixty-five days, plus five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds, and about the leap days that made up for lost time every fourth year.

He was only too pleased to explain. Pleased, and proud to think we could play with time like that, deciphering the planets and their tilts and rotations, their elliptical orbits; it was wonderful we had a system that took it all into account. The Algerian listened and nodded with interest as Ciprian tapped demonstratively at his watch. That’s how we deal with it, he said. That’s how easily it’s done. Time—we can always rely on it. It moves forward, from the past to the present to the future, never going back again. Well, not exactly: Sometimes—at very high speeds or at very, very tiny subatomic levels—it does. But that doesn’t matter, it’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s of no significance for you and me and our everyday lives.

Hold on a minute, what kind of nonsense was that? Time could go backward? The Algerian wanted to hear more. He ordered another round of tea, and a plate of biscuits too. And Ciprian was happy to tell him. He was bursting with things to say; the world was so rich and large, and it felt so nice to sit out in the sun. There was so much to understand about curved space-time and all the mysterious things quantum physicists were discovering in laboratories around the world.

At home in the apartment, Maria was pottering around and trying on dresses. A representative of the Université Al Quaraouiyine had called that morning: They were aware it was very short notice, but a Romanian professor had fallen ill and sent his regrets. Was Maria interested in taking his place at the banquet as a representative of the exchange program? She was indeed. Very interested. So now she was busy putting on makeup and shaving her legs and writing a speech—she had a hundred and one things to do. And where had Ciprian got to? He had promised to come home at four o’clock to look after Ana. She glanced at the clock above the fridge: twenty past four and still no Ciprian. Maria ground her teeth. It was completely impossible to write a speech with Ana bouncing around in the living room, but she tried anyway. Distracting Ana with some wooden blocks, she tiptoed over to the writing desk with her pen and paper. She got as far as jotting down a few thoughts in the notebook—an amusing little play on words, if she did say so herself—but no further. Ana had begun to wail. First came little gasping sobs, and Maria sank her shoulders as if she could hide from the tears or will them into silence. To no avail. By now Ana was howling, bawling so loudly it was unbearable. Maria sighed. What is it, sweetheart? But she noticed soon enough. Ana was in the middle of the room, writhing around in a tantrum. She had diarrhea all the way down one leg; it dripped out of her shorts, leaving long smears on the floor. Oh for God’s sake, muttered Maria. This was the last thing she needed. And where the hell was Ciprian? She had to take off her dress so that it wouldn’t get dirty. Then she sat in the bathroom and comforted her daughter, struggling with the washtub and her swollen belly, which kept getting in the way. She had just managed to strip off Ana’s diaper, find the right temperature and rinse her down when the telephone rang. Maria straightened up, thinking, Who on earth can that be? Oh, just let it ring, Maria, it’s just a stupid phone call. Let it ring so we can have a happy ending, escape all this misery. But no. Maria had to straighten up. She had to look over her shoulder, God help us, she had a ball to go to, she had a speech to write, a dress to pick out. How did they do things in Morocco? Was her lipstick too red? Should she put lipstick on at all? And what about her shoes—the pointy ones or the heels or the ones in patent leather? And the slit down the back of the dress, was that alright? There, the telephone was jangling again. It might be someone from the university. Perhaps it was the Romanian consul? Maria had already gotten to her feet. Ana lay in the bathtub and water gushed from the tap and Maria could almost see the telephone shaking—no, trembling—with excitement and information. She walked through the living room with bare breasts. She had often thought they should put up curtains, but somehow they’d never gotten around to it, because there was so much to do and so little time, but at that moment she felt annoyed about it, now that she could see the neighbor at the kitchen sink on the other side of the courtyard, and now that the telephone was ringing as she reached out and felt the cold receiver in her hand.

Hello, she said.

Out on the street, Ciprian was ambling slowly home. He was in no rush. He still had ten minutes before the clock struck four and the weather was lovely. Not too warm, with a nice breeze, he thought, stopping in front of the building. There was still enough time for a cigarette, and he drew out a packet. Lighting up, he glanced around. On the other side of the street, a man was installing new windows in his basement. Ciprian was all warmed up after his conversation with the Algerian. His French was so fluent today that he was in the mood to go over and say hello. They were virtually neighbors, after all, he and the man. So he did. He went over and said hello, asking whether he could help with anything. And might he offer a cigarette? The man said thank you. It’s the outer pane, he said. It’s the outer panes that are the problem. You can have as many inner panes as you like. Twenty, thirty inner panes. But if the outer one leaks, the water pisses right in. Ruins everything. Ciprian nodded and sucked on his cigarette. He knew nothing about windows. But it was probably true—it sounded right. Ciprian could well imagine that outer panes were important. And it was good that there were people who knew about such things. Division of labor, he thought, and that was when he heard the scream. A scream like nothing he’d ever heard before. A—what do you call it? A primal scream, I suppose, but that sounds so idiotic. A scream of terror, a mortal scream? Not that either. No, I don’t know. I give up. I don’t know what you’d call a scream like that, if you’d call it anything. But this was what happened. Ciprian was standing there in the street with his cigarette when he heard it: Maria, screaming for their dead daughter.

 

It’s at this point that the story gets a little—how to put it? Murky. How much of what follows is Ana’s imagination and how much is absolutely true I can’t say. Then again, the same goes for the whole tale. I guess you can’t ever pinpoint a moment and say: That was how it happened. It would be nice if we could, but we all know that the truth is a closed chapter, the truth is of the past. So what can we say? We can say that Ana sensed and experienced a series of phenomena that shaped her understanding of events. That we can say.

But that’s not saying very much.

We can say: For two days they mourned over the tiny corpse, not leaving the house. And on the third day Maria went into labor. She lay half-naked on the bed and whimpered, falling in and out of consciousness. Her water broke, slopping around her and absorbing into the mattress. Ciprian tried to take her to the hospital. Come on, he said. Come on, sweetheart, or something will go wrong. But Maria understood only part of what he said. Something had already gone wrong, horribly wrong, a long time ago.

My baby, she gasped when he tried to lift her from the bed. My baby, don’t touch her.

She flapped her arms and legs, scratching and biting with the crazed violence of instinct. Ciprian would have to change tactics. But what now? He might have been scientifically minded, but he didn’t know much about childbirth. He was familiar with the basics, of course, having witnessed scores of births back in the village. There was something about boiling water, that much he knew. But what exactly was he supposed to do with it? The best course of action would have been to call a doctor, or at least a midwife. But that wasn’t what Ciprian did. Bringing sheets and blankets from the wardrobe, he laid them on the bed, wrapping them warmly around Maria and dabbing her forehead with a cold cloth as he tried to soothe her with the nursery rhyme they had sung to Ana. Maria groaned and whimpered, her eyes rolled, she screamed and babbled incomprehensibly, fighting her unborn child with all her strength. It was a long, long night. But by late morning, hormones and instinct took over, life’s imperatives pulsed through her veins, and with a jerk she tore off Ciprian’s clutching hands, got out of bed and crawled onto the floor. Squatting down, bellowing as their second daughter came into the world: born in two pushes, she was swaddled in towels, and laid on Maria’s breast to dream of all the things newborns dream of.

In the days after the birth, Ciprian often stood watching over them in the doorframe. Maria and the newborn, breastfeeding happily. He kept his distance, an uneasy fear spreading within him as he thought of Ana lying in the bathtub muffled in sheets, feeling that it wasn’t real. No doctor had taken her pulse, no official had filled out a death certificate. Ana couldn’t possibly be dead: it couldn’t be true that a child could die so easily, so completely without echo or consequence and without being noticed by a single soul. If she were really dead, his sisters would ring, they would hear from Maria’s mother. Yes—if she were really dead, someone would have done something. Surely? You couldn’t leave a dead child lying in a bathtub without repercussions, it just couldn’t be true. The world didn’t work like that.

And yet it did, of course. The child was as dead as a child can be, and deep down Ciprian knew he had to act. Knew it was up to him to handle the corpse and the neighbors, who had begun knocking on the door and bringing gifts, Maria’s screams and the newborn’s cries having sliced through the walls. Ciprian kept them at arm’s length with excuses: It was a difficult birth, mother and child needed to rest, he said, playing the culture card by explaining that in Romania a mother and child lay in bed for a week, that it was tradition. He bought a little time, enough to pace around in circles in the living room, to spit up bile in the kitchen sink. He couldn’t be in the house with all its strange smells and sounds, instead he sat in the tenement courtyard, speaking Romanian to himself.

We have to go to the authorities, he said. That’s obvious. But what good will that do? he added a moment later. This fucking shithole—he was shouting now— What do they care if our daughter is dead? He tried to pull himself together, wanting to be pragmatic. Okay, first things first, then second things second. Loudly he said to himself, This isn’t the end of the world. He himself had had two younger siblings who had succumbed before the age of two: a boy and a girl. One died in childbirth and the other was struck down by some kind of illness. Or was he imagining it? Suddenly he wasn’t sure, overwhelmed by a powerful urge to write home and ask. The post office was right around the corner, after all—he was only a telegram away from the mountains of his homeland, which all at once he missed so much that his head began to swim. No, he didn’t want to think about Oltenia. First: problem-solving. He went inside to get a notebook and paper, drawing up a table. First a Plan A, then a Plan B. A Plan C was also necessary, as anything systematic always came in threes. Duck, duck, goose. Rock, paper, scissors. Always in threes—or fours. He had only just started when he heard crying from the bedroom, and tried to concentrate on the promising schematic in his book instead of the worrying sounds from the other room.

There you go, said Maria. There you go, Ana. You’re a hungry little one, aren’t you?

Ciprian knew he had to do something. But what? His diarrhea was back, but he didn’t dare use the bathroom where the corpse lay, shitting instead in a bucket in the broom cupboard as the flies buzzed around inside. He sat sweat-soaked in the living room watching Maria, who flitted silently around the apartment, looking after the baby, changing diapers and bedclothes, cooking rice and peas, washing up. Who knows what would have happened if Maria’s headmaster hadn’t phoned. They had gone stark mad in those rooms.

Ah, you must be the man of the house, said the headmaster when Ciprian finally pulled himself together enough to pick up the receiver.

Yes, that’s me, said Ciprian, apologizing for his wife’s absence on her behalf. You must understand, she’s just had a baby.

I know, I know, said the headmaster, who had already guessed how the land lay. He congratulated them both and instructed Maria to take it easy. Take three weeks, get her strength back, and was it a boy or a girl and Masha’Allah and all that.

It was precisely what Ciprian needed to kick him into gear: a deadline.

That night he didn’t sleep, nor did he sleep the next. He sat up flicking through maps and bus timetables and tourist brochures for Morocco’s national parks. And in the late afternoon on the third day he sneaked out of the house, taking a bus to Fès then another from the Place de la Résistance to Immouzzer. He sat with his sports bag between his legs, looking out of the window at the mountains as they vanished into the dusk. From the bus station he wandered among the stalls in the souk, mixing with the tradesmen, then continued along the main street and up the steps to the old church, hewn into the rock, surrounded by trees. Darkness had fallen, he tried the handle but it was locked, so he sat for an hour before the gate: Ciprian, never known for his piety, with his hands folded in prayer for his daughter’s soul. Then he hoisted his bag and trudged into the woods, brushing cobwebs from his face and bits of twig from his hair. He walked like that until the trees thinned out, up over the ridge of the hill and down the other side, reaching at last a clump of bushes and trees where he took up his trowel and dug a grave.

 

For a week they lived like ghosts in the apartment in Sefrou. The rooms were no longer theirs, sorrow written in every corner. Silently they padded across the floors—and was it then that they hatched it, the story that would shape Ana’s life? I don’t know, for good reason: Ana was just a baby girl, she can’t remember a word. But I don’t think it was some grand plan. No, I think it was a manner or a tone, a language that grew out of the circumstances, casual and—well, you wouldn’t call it natural. Organic, perhaps. Maria went around with the newborn close to her breast. She went to the laundry room and the market, and at night she writhed and twisted in nightmares. Her laugh had gone, her smile was rare. She nodded glumly to the neighbors, stood patiently in the queue at the baker’s, stroked children’s hair.

And Ciprian? He bribed a doctor in Fès and went to Maria’s headmaster, talking about complications and postpartum depression, and got her an indefinite leave of absence from the school. Every morning he crept out of the building, past the housewives by the washing line who whispered in secret, out into the dry wind that swept in from the desert, that barren, treeless plain before him. He missed Oltenia like he’d never missed anything before. The woods and the fields and the cows’ heavy stench, their rolling gait as they returned home from the mountains in the afternoon, their udders full of milk. The mountains—that was what he wanted. The feeling of the landscape enfolding him and wrapping him up, tucking him in between banks of fog in spring or the winter’s reassuring layers of powdery snow.

When Maria came home one day from a walk with the baby, he was waiting for her, solemn, on the sofa.

Come here, he said, patting the cushion with the palm of his hand. But she didn’t come, and didn’t sit down. She went over to the sideboard and continued going about her shrill business, so he got up and put his arm around her. My darling, he said, and tried to talk to her about the dead child. But she jerked her shoulders free, shaking off her firstborn with a blink of her eyes and a twitch of her left cheek. She opened the drawer. Goodness, she said, we’ve run out of dishcloths. She tried to edge past Ciprian into the utility room, but he wouldn’t let her pass. Taking her arm, he said, Maria, we need to leave this place.

He had expected her to protest, or at least to ignore him. But she simply lowered her gaze and nodded.

Alright, we can do that, she said, as if he were suggesting a walk in the woods or a trip to the beach. Wriggling out of his hands, she went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil for a load of laundry.

Ciprian was still trying to understand it all when they stood at the bus station four days later.

We could just go home, he said, as the bus pulled up.

Maria said nothing, adjusting the baby’s woolly hat, which had slipped down over her eyes, four sizes too big.

Maria, we could just go home. Home to Romania.

At that moment the bus stopped in front of them and out milled the passengers, bundled up in windbreakers and blankets and scarves. The sun had yet to rise, and a biting wind swept in from the north, bringing the sand with it. He could feel his stomach roll, his guts contract; he had held such great hopes for this country. But what had it given him? Dust in his eyes and a daughter buried in the desolate earth.

Let’s sit at the back, said Maria, as Ciprian maneuvered their baggage on board. Through the back window they caught a last glimpse of Sefrou: the tradesmen’s discolored awnings, the wooden crates crammed with pulpy fruit. The bus climbed up into the mountains, glass rattling in the window frames, the vibrations from the engine rocking the passengers to sleep. Ciprian leaned against the window and studied his daughter. She had the same pointed chin as the one he had buried, and it struck him that age was a relative quantity. Yes, there we have him: a man shaped almost like the father Ana will get to know. He is thirty-two years old and the first lines are emerging on his face, a crease appearing on his left cheek. His eyes still shine behind their glasses, but there is a drooping twist to his lips that only rarely fades. He still believes mathematics has something to offer him, unaware that he will spend four years toiling in this wasteland, and that there’s nothing waiting for him in Romania but a populace in disarray, a rejected thesis, and an early grave.

When Ciprian woke, the bus had stopped by a shack. Passengers smoked cigarettes, stretched their legs. Two boys sold sweets from a kiosk. A man on the seat in front of him had turned toward Maria, pointing at the baby in her lap.

Such a cute little girl, said the man. How old is the little beast?

Two, said Maria, lifting the knitted cap so the child could open her eyes. We’ve just celebrated her birthday. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?

But Ana didn’t answer, of course. She turned her head and squinted. It was early morning, and the sun was peeping over the Atlas Mountains.