ANNA STEPPED ONTO the concourse of Otopeni, Bucharest’s international airport, in the early hours of the morning, pushing a trolley laden with a wooden crate, a large case, and a laptop. She stopped in her tracks when she saw a man rushing toward her.
Anna stared at him suspiciously. He was around five nine, balding, with a ruddy complexion and a thick black moustache. He must have been over sixty. He wore a tight-fitting suit, which suggested he’d once been slimmer. He came to a halt in front of Anna.
“I’m Sergei,” he announced in his native tongue. “Anton told me you’d called and asked to be picked up. He has already booked you into a small hotel downtown.” Sergei took Anna’s trolley and pushed it toward his waiting taxi. He opened the back door of a yellow Mercedes that already had three hundred thousand miles on the clock, and waited until Anna had stepped in before he loaded her luggage into the trunk and took his place behind the wheel.
Anna stared out of the taxi window and thought how the city had changed since her birth—it was now a thrusting, energetic capital, demanding its place at the European table. Modern office buildings and a fashionable shopping center had replaced the drab Communist gray-tiled façade of only a decade before.
Sergei drew up outside a small hotel tucked away down a narrow street. He lifted the red crate out of the trunk while Anna took the rest of the luggage and headed into the hotel.
“I’d like to visit my mother first thing,” said Anna, once she’d checked in. Sergei looked at his watch. “I’ll pick you up around nine. That will give you the chance to grab a few hours’ sleep.”
“Thank you,” said Anna.
He watched as she disappeared into the lift carrying the red box.
Jack had first spotted her when he was standing in line to board the plane. It is a basic surveillance technique: hang back, just in case you are being followed. The trick, then, is not to let the pursuer realize that you are on to them. Act normal, never look back. Not easy.
His class supervisor at Quantico would carry out a surveillance detection run every evening after class, when he would follow one of the new recruits home. If you managed to lose him, you were singled out for a commendation. Jack went one better. Having lost him, he then carried out an SDR on his supervisor and followed him home without being spotted.
Jack climbed the steps of the plane. He didn’t look back.
When Anna strolled out of her hotel a few minutes after nine, she found Sergei standing by his old Mercedes, waiting for her.
“Good morning, Sergei,” she said, as he opened the back door for her.
“Good morning, madam. Do you still wish to visit your mother?”
“Yes,” replied Anna. “She lives at—”
Sergei waved a hand to make it clear that he knew exactly where to take her.
Anna smiled with pleasure as he drove through the center of town past a magnificent fountain that would have graced a lawn at Versailles. But once Sergei had reached the outskirts of the city, the picture quickly changed from color to black-and-white. By the time her driver had reached the neglected outpost of Berceni, Anna realized that the new regime still had a long way to go if they were to achieve the prosperity-for-all program they had promised the voters following the downfall of Ceauşescu. Anna had, in the space of a few miles, returned to the more familiar scenes of her youth. She found many of her countrymen downcast, looking older than their years. Only the young lads playing soccer in the street seemed unaware of the degradation that surrounded them. It appalled Anna that her mother was still so adamant about remaining in her birthplace after her father had been killed in the uprising. She had tried so many times to convince her to join them in America, but she wouldn’t be budged.
In 1987, Anna had been invited to visit Illinois by an uncle she had never met. He’d even sent her two hundred dollars to assist with her passage. Her father told her to leave, and leave quickly, but it was her mother who predicted that she would never come back. She purchased a one-way ticket, and her uncle promised to pay for the return journey whenever she wanted to go home.
Anna was seventeen at the time, and she had fallen in love with America even before the boat had docked. A few weeks later, Ceauşescu began his crackdown on any individual who dared to oppose his draconian regime. Her father wrote to warn Anna that it was not safe for her to come home.
That was his last letter. Three weeks later he joined the rebels and was never seen again.
Anna missed her mother dreadfully and repeatedly begged her to join them in Illinois. But her response was always the same. “This is my homeland, where I was born, and where I shall die. I am too old to begin a new life.” Too old, Anna had remonstrated. Her mother was only sixty-one, but they were sixty-one stubborn Romanian years, so Anna reluctantly accepted that nothing would change her mind. A month later, her uncle George enrolled Anna in a local school. While civil unrest in Romania continued unabated, Anna graduated from college and later accepted the opportunity to study for a Ph.D. at Penn, in a discipline that had no language barriers.
Dr. Petrescu still wrote to her mother every month, only too aware that most of her letters were not reaching her because the spasmodic replies often asked questions she had already answered.
The first decision Anna made after she left college and joined Sotheby’s was to open a separate bank account for her mother in Bucharest, to which she transferred $400 by standing order on the first day of every month. Although she would rather have—
“I’ll wait for you,” said Sergei, as the taxi finally came to a halt outside a dilapidated block of flats in Piazza Resitei.
“Thank you,” said Anna, as she looked out at the prewar estate where she was born, and where her mother still lived. Anna could only wonder what Mama had spent the money on. She stepped out onto the weed-covered path that she had once thought so wide because she couldn’t jump across it.
The children playing soccer in the road watched suspiciously as the stranger in her smart linen jacket, jeans with fashionable tears, and fancy sneakers walked up the worn, potholed path. They also wore jeans with tears. The elevator didn’t respond to Anna’s button-pressing—nothing changes—which was why, Anna recalled, the most sought-after flats were always those on the lower floors. She couldn’t understand why her mother hadn’t moved years ago. Anna had sent more than enough money for her to rent a comfortable apartment on the other side of town. Anna’s feeling of guilt grew the higher up she climbed. She had forgotten just how dreadful it was, but like the children playing soccer in the street, it had once been all she knew.
When Anna eventually reached the sixteenth floor, she stopped to catch her breath. No wonder her mother so rarely left the flat. On the floors above her resided sixty-year-olds who were housebound. Anna hesitated before she knocked on a door that hadn’t seen a splash of paint since she’d last stood there.
She waited for some time before a frail, white-haired lady, dressed from head to toe in black, pulled the door open, but by only a few inches. Mother and daughter stared at each other, until suddenly Elsa Petrescu flung open the door, threw her arms around her daughter, and shouted in a voice as old as she looked, “Anna, Anna, Anna.” Both mother and daughter burst into tears.
The old lady continued to cling to Anna’s hand as she led her into the flat in which she had been born. It was spotless, and Anna could still remember everything, because nothing had changed. The sofa and chairs her grandmother had left them, the family photographs, all black-and-white and unframed, a coal scuttle with no coal, a rug that was so worn it was hard to make out the original pattern. The only new addition to the room was a magnificent painting that hung on otherwise blank walls. As Anna admired the portrait of her father, she was reminded where her love of art had begun.
“Anna, Anna, so many questions to ask,” her mother said. “Where do I begin?” she asked, still clutching her daughter’s hand.
The sun was setting before Anna had responded to every one of her mother’s questions, and then she begged once again, “Please, Mama, come back with me and live in America.”
“No,” she replied defiantly, “all my friends and all my memories are here. I am too old to begin a new life.”
“Then why not move to another part of the city? I could find you something on a lower—”
“This is where I was married,” her mother said quietly, “where you were born, where I lived for over thirty years with your beloved father, and where, when God decrees it is my time, I shall die.” She smiled up at her daughter. “Who would tend your father’s grave?” she asked, as if she’d never asked the question before. She looked into her daughter’s eyes. “You know he was so pleased to see you settled in America with his brother—” she paused “—and now I can see that he was right.”
Anna looked around the room. “But why haven’t you spent some of the money I’ve been sending to you each month?”
“I have,” said her mother firmly, “but not on myself,” she admitted, “because I want for nothing.”
“Then what have you spent it on?” Anna queried.
“Anton.”
“Anton?” repeated Anna.
“Yes, Anton,” said her mother. “You knew that he’d been released from jail?”
“Oh, yes,” said Anna, “he wrote to me soon after Ceauşescu was arrested to ask if I had a photo of Papa that he could borrow.” Anna smiled as she looked up at the painting of her father.
“It’s a good likeness,” said her mother.
“It certainly is,” said Anna.
“They gave him back his old job at the academy. He’s now the Professor of Perspective. If you’d married him, you would be a professor’s wife.”
“Is he still painting?” she asked, avoiding her mother’s next inevitable question.
“Yes,” she replied, “but his main responsibility is to teach the graduates at the Universitatea de Arte. You can’t make a living as an artist in Romania,” she said sadly. “You know, with his talent, Anton should also have gone to America.”
Anna looked up again at Anton’s magnificent portrait of her father. Her mother was right; with such a gift, he would have flourished in New York. “But what does he do with the money?” she asked.
“He buys canvases, paints, brushes, and all those materials that his pupils can’t afford, so you see, your generosity is being put to good use.” She paused. “Anton was your first love, Anna, yes?”
Anna wouldn’t have believed that her mother could still make her blush. “Yes,” she admitted, “and I suspect I was his.”
“He’s married now, and they have a little boy called Peter.” She paused again. “Do you have a young man?”
“No, Mama.”
“Is that what brings you back home? Are you running away from something, or someone?”
“What makes you ask that?” Anna asked defensively.
“There is a sadness in your eyes, and fear,” she said, looking up at her daughter, “which you could never hide as a child.”
“I do have one or two problems,” admitted Anna, “but nothing that time won’t sort out.” She smiled. “In fact, I rather think that Anton might be able to help me with one of them, and I’m hoping to join him at the academy for a drink. Do you have any message you want passed on?” Her mother didn’t reply. She had quietly dozed off. Anna rearranged the rug on her mother’s lap and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll be back again tomorrow morning, Mama,” she whispered.
She slipped silently out of the room. As she walked back down the littered staircase, she was pleased to see the old yellow Mercedes was still parked by the curb.