American intermezzo: the trial

September 1977

The television programme she is sent to New York for isn’t a trial – not a real one, anyway. The programme so many people saw, all those people in their dining rooms having supper – my goodness, the fairy has put on weight – is so hurtful, humiliating, as if someone were pulling her trousers down and forcing her to confess out loud, ‘Yes, I’ve got my period.’ Because that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? They talk about her in sad, disbelieving voices, they repeat, ‘My, but you have… changed,’ which means ‘you have periods now’, and there she is, a fat fucking pudding who can’t get up from her chair and leave but instead sinks farther and farther into it with the presenter’s every new question.

She dreams she cries out, or perhaps she really does cry out, yet it can’t be real because if she did her mother would come running, of course, and here nobody comes when she bursts into tears after the programme. Sitting in the make-up room where they are wiping off the too-dark foundation she lowers her eyes to her thighs, which are thicker even than the day before, her mother won’t come, she’s so far off, and anyway who, tell me who, could restrain this flesh growing like a bulimic flower, arrogant and brutal, demanding the right to take her over bit by bit.

The trial is to be televised and takes place in three minutes thirty-nine seconds as part of an American entertainment programme. No need for a lawyer. The accused, Nadia C., is accompanied by a Romanian woman introduced as her interpreter. During the trial, we learn that the ‘interpreter’ isn’t on the side of the accused, but is instead the strange lawyer representing a group comprising the coach Béla Károlyi and the Romanian Gymnastic Federation, as well as the huge number of TV viewers who feel cheated, deceived by this new appearance of the aforementioned Nadia C. (all those letters received after the broadcast of the European Championships, complaining they no longer recognize their Montreal elf).

Irrefutable facts are presented, tape measure and weighing machine in hand, scientific evidence. The prosecution is careful to maintain a courteous tone when it addresses the child hunched in her chair in her red roll-neck sweater.

Presenter: ‘Since Montreal we’ve heard that you’ve put on a few kilos… have you been ill?’

The interpreter, in Romanian, to Nadia, ‘Compared to Montreal, you are fatter and your work is much worse.’ The sound engineer signals to the presenter that, despite the HF mike, the girl’s reply is inaudible, an embarrassed half-murmur.

Presenter: ‘And yet there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, Nadia, you still speak very softly, are you just as shy?’

The interpreter, annoyed: ‘He’s asking you to speak up.’

A smile, a breath, almost an excuse.

Presenter: ‘One day, Nadia, you’ll have a daughter, would you like her to be a champion like you?’

Abruptly she cuts across the interpreter as she is about to ‘translate’: ‘No, I haven’t given it any thought, I have time, I have time.’