Tony, the Cup, the young champion and his beautiful cousin fly the final leg of their journey aboard a rattling turboprop on Tarom, the Romanian national airline. Somehow, in the transfer through Bucharest, Dragos’s father and aunt have left the travelling party. Tony’s mind has begun to shut in on itself in a whirl of new information. He fidgets with the locks on the trophy case, finding solace in repetition.
Taxiing before takeoff, the plane passes by several of its own kind abandoned in rusted hulks behind a chain fence on the side of the runway. The ever-present Romanian dogs have made homes of these shells. They stick their heads from the empty doorways, sniffing the air and peering suspiciously at Tony’s plane as it passes on the tarmac. Tony tries not to wonder how the doghouse planes have ended up there, their propellers bent, their wheel rims shorn of all rubber. The plane takes to the air at sunset and makes the trip in three dark hours of turbulence and engine-howl.
Sitting, as usual, across the aisle from Tony, Dragos struggles to keep up a conversation. The closer he draws to his old life, the more agitated and talkative he becomes. Earlier, at Năstase’s house in the heart of privileged Bucharest, it had not been hard for Tony to see Dragos as a man comfortably at home, laughing and joking in his native language. Now he wonders if that sense of belonging had been just a matter of Dragos being in the presence of another elite athlete. Here, suspended above the Romanian countryside, flying into the heart of a Romanian night on his way to marriage in an ancient Romanian ceremony, the young man struggles to hide his fear.
Fear of what, Tony can’t imagine. To return to your family the celebrated hero of a Cup-winning team? This has been, for Tony, the only truly comfortable fantasy for too long. How could such a golden reality generate anything but blissful satisfaction?
“Your problem with the game, Tony, is that you play to win.”
Tony blinks at the younger man, confused.
“You must play to destroy. Trying to pick your way home safely all the time, that is well for beginners in the game, but a champion must know when to take chances, when to have courage.”
“Ah, backgammon,” Tony nods. “Yes, courage, that’s fine, but he had the better dice every time.”
“Who, Năstase? Please, Tony, if that man played tennis the way he trips around the backgammon board, he would still be retrieving balls for the rich at some spa in Constanţa. Năstase’s dice were no better than your dice. The difference was he was able to take the drive to destroy that he uses in tennis and use it as well on the board. Năstase decided to beat you; that’s why he beat you.”
“Well, I think I tried to destroy him.”
“No, Tony, you tried to not lose. You played like the hockey team that goes up 3-nil in the first period and then slowly lets it all slide into the toilet.”
Diana joins in, not hiding the disgust in her voice.
“I know it is not polite in the man’s own home,” she says, “but, Tony, you should have tried to humiliate him. A game is for winning. It’s nothing personal; everyone knows that, everyone here anyway.”
“The country of champions. Romania!”
“Yes, that’s funny.” Diana speaks to him, but her face is turned toward her own window. In effect, Tony is being spoken to by the reflection Diana’s face in the Romanian night.
“You say funny things about this country. I wish I could think of something funny to say about Canada for you.”
“No, Romania is not a country of champions, you are right.” Dragos puts himself between them again. “But it is a country that knows every game, no matter how friendly, no matter how sociable, holds within it a grain of the ultimate struggle. You should tell me now what is more important than the ultimate struggle.”
“Okay, the ultimate struggle,” Tony says wearily. “I was engaged in the ultimate struggle with a retired tennis champion, if that’s even who he was. I lost at backgammon to someone who may or may not be Ilie Năstase. And yet, I don’t feel any great sense of loss.”
Tony wonders how the loss of a casual match as a guest in someone’s house has turned him into Diana’s enemy. Since leaving Năstase’s compound after a 3-1 embarrassment, the young woman has steadfastly refused to even look in Tony’s direction.
“Really, Tony?” Diana continues to address the window. “Where I grew up in Bucharest, the three streets we considered our neighbourhood, this game was a way of life. At every street corner you would see two or more old men sitting around tables or benches, either playing or watching someone else play. You know, a great many of the old neighbourhoods there in central Bucharest were taken away by Ceauşescu, the houses nationalized and then brought to the ground to make way for the new wide avenues surrounding that idiocy he called his palace. Yet even after the houses disappeared, the same old men would show up at the same street corners and play the same games again and again.”
Diana is now not talking to anyone—she is simply talking, and Tony begins to suspect this mood that has overcome both these young Romanians has very little to do with him. The country has done this to them. Something they left behind when they escaped from Romania years before has found them again, and overtaken them. Some disappointment. Some anger.
“You would not find one of those men who would say as you do that to lose a game means not to lose anything important. They could be forced from their homes and into any one of the hundreds of identically ugly apartments that were built back then, but they could not be forced from their game. Our grandfather has played a match of fifteen games every day with the same man for almost forty years now. It is the doctor, Fischoff, the same man who delivered both of our fathers and both of us. For forty years this man has delivered babies and removed tumours and watched old people die, and for the same forty years he has taken time in each day to meet my grandfather in the park near the hospital for a match of fifteen games.”
“I see,” Tony says, working to keep all sarcasm from his tone. “That’s some important game then. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
Diana suddenly climbs from her seat, slips across the lap of her cousin and lands in stockinged feet in the aisle beside Tony. She leans down and kisses him on the mouth, using a skinny hand behind his head to pull him hard against her lips.
“I thought so,” she says, and climbs back over her cousin.
Tony says nothing. He sits and pays attention to the burning of his lips and the memory of Diana’s fingernails digging into the back of his head. The lights in the airplane blink out for several seconds as they hit a particularly bad patch of air. In the darkness, Tony concentrates on the sound of the seat belt straining against the black carrying case beside him. Diana starts talking again, her voice shaking with the vibrations of the flight. Again, Tony relaxes, resigned to listen.
In the late 1970s, a woman named Vera lived in one of the square, dull concrete apartment blocks built on a new street full of square dull concrete apartment blocks near the Victory Plaza in Bucharest. Vera’s street, Titulescu Avenue, was named for a public servant who won small fame for having resisted the Fascist push of the mid-’30s. A statue of an uninteresting businesslike figure still stands at the head of her street, where the streetcars turn from Victory Boulevard. Vera was in her late fifties, but a grandmother of some years. Her granddaughter Andrea lived with her in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor that was also home to Vera’s husband Serban and Serban’s invalid mother. What had become of Andrea’s parents, no one knew.
“I was in junior school with Andrea,” Diana says. “She was older by some years, and used to take care of the younger children after school until we were picked up. There were girls more beautiful, but she had all the talent.”
Serban was a tour guide for the Ministry of Culture and was more often than not out of Bucharest leading tours through the medieval monasteries near the northern border with the Soviet Union. The responsibility for Andrea’s education fell to Vera, and it worried her greatly. Andrea was coming to the age when she would have to leave elementary school and take her place in one of the focused higher schools. Bucharest academies were filled with children of the governmental elite. Acceptance in the better academies depended much more on connection than merit, but exceptions were made when the state recognized a talent worth supporting. In both sport and art, talent still helped to determine advancement, not always, but often. Vera knew her granddaughter was such a talent. She knew Andrea could play violin in the National Orchestra. For a year, she had investigated procedures for admittance to the best music academies in the city. For a year, she had sent official letters to boards of admittance, and received no reply. She became aware the official silence was a reaction to the return address on her envelopes.
Titulescu Avenue was two streets beyond the inner circle of power and privilege in Bucharest. Vera lived near enough to power to shop at the same market with the servants of government wives, but, in correspondence, she wore her address like a disfiguring scar. Power and privilege lived on the tree-lined streets named for the greater cosmopolitan: Strada Paris, Strada Sofia, or grand avenues named for the great and happy Communist flowering, Victory Boulevard, Avenue of the First of May. To live on a street named for a bureaucrat, no matter his prominence, was to have one’s potential defined. In six months, Andrea would have to have a place in an academy. Vera saw her granddaughter’s future slipping into mediocrity. Some strategy other than letters would have to be employed.
“Our entire family,” Dragos interrupts his cousin, “lived on Kisselef. A much better address. The neighbourhoods were like separate cities.”
Through talks with the servants at the First of May Market, Vera heard stories of how women of privilege secured spots at the conservatory for their daughters, whether these girls showed musical promise or not. The conservatory was an academy greatly desired among privileged mothers of privileged daughters. Young government men prided themselves on public displays of cultural knowledge. Four times a year the recital hall was filled with young, unmarried men at the outset of brilliant careers. These men would drink cognac together in the foyer and speak about important government matters. Then they would sit and watch the beautiful daughters of their superiors send music into the night. It was unheard of for a recital to pass without at least five proposals of marriage exchanged between young men in dark suits and tittering girls carrying instruments. As often as not, these girls played only passable music, their talent being employed exclusively with the aim of securing a privileged married life. Often their mothers encouraged this scheme because they themselves had been successful at it earlier in life.
A population of music tutors existed within the inner circles of the powerful. These tutors, mostly men of middle age, worked with the privileged daughters in the year leading up to admissions trials. Whether blessed with natural talent or not, these young girls were imparted enough skills with an instrument to give a reasonable trial recital that, combined with their home address and some well-placed gifts of cognac and fine imported cheeses, assured them both a place at the conservatory and a potential young fiancé in a dark suit.
All tutors were courted furiously, the struggle for their favour and influence was desperately competitive. The most sought after tutors provided not just music lessons, but a solid guarantee of success built of their long-standing connections with the members of the conservatory admissions board. A student who arrived for recital on the arm of one of these influential men never failed to secure a place for herself. Handing over the last available Sibiu salami to a smiling maidservant, Vera obtained the name and address of one of the most popular tutors in Bucharest. She wrote it on the bottom of her shopping list and returned the sweaty paper to her brassiere.
Valentin Popescu was a large man who would sweat in mid-winter after walking only a block. In every season, he carried with him a collection of handkerchiefs, which he used to wipe his forehead and neck. Handkerchiefs were primary among the favoured gifts he received from the mothers of his students. He carried with him at all times a collection of French centimes which he used to “pay” for these unusual presents, handkerchiefs being symbols of grief and permanent separation and therefore much out of favour as tokens of affection.
“You remember him?” Diana asks her cousin. “He was like a pig on two legs. Disgusting.” Dragos laughs and snorts. The cabin lights flicker again, like the opening strip of film running through a bad projector. Tony wonders about electrical shorts in wires behind the walls.
Eyeing a particularly fine piece of linen or silk, Popescu would reach two fingers into his pocket and produce a single, well-polished centime with which he would offer to buy the cloth. Thus charmed out of their instinctual superstition, the mothers of his students would gladly accept the beautiful foreign coin and hand over the cloth that would next serve to remove perspiration from Popescu’s beaded brow. As a consequence of his talent with violin instruction and his eminent connections with the admissions board, Valentin Popescu had a collection of handkerchiefs from the finest clothiers in Europe. When wiping his forehead while in conversation with one of his peers at the conservatory, he did not fail to stop and gaze at the moist cloth, and to proudly drop the name of the woman who had given it to him.
“This lovely kerchief I purchased from the widow Popovici for a single centime. Her daughter is to be married to the junior secretary of the Typographers Union. The cloth belonged, she said, to her dearly departed husband who purchased it in Strasbourg while on a research tour. He was very prominent in the Department of Agriculture, you know. His arena was cheese, I believe.”
Professor Popescu, as he preferred to be addressed, was also a great admirer of cheese. The woman who obtained his services for her daughter would invariably spend the next eight months bargaining with market owners for the finest selection of cheeses in the capital. A joke went about the conservatory that for each wheel of Camembert that entered the city in some diplomat’s briefcase, a full one-fifth went into Professor Popescu’s stomach.
Vera learned these details at the First of May Market. For a week, she gave up her place in line, took inferior cuts of meat and shared her produce with these servant women in order to hear their stories of the great professor. She needed to know all she could before approaching him. She knew his response to her address would be the same as the conservatory’s, and she needed an advantage. The handkerchiefs and the cheese would help, but she was unsure how she would compete with the connected wives of diplomats in these gifts. One day, she was stopped on the street outside the market by a woman name Mariana Mururescu, a cook for the well-placed family Ganea.
“My dear lady,” Mariana said to Vera, “the answer to your problem is backgammon.”
The wife of Stefan Ganea, deputy to the director of foreign affairs, had recently secured the help of Professor Popescu for her daughter Lutzi. Mariana Mururescu had observed Vera’s struggles at the market, overheard her questions about the great Professor and so kept her eyes open for advantage. On that very morning, Mariana had happened to pass through the side door of the house, rather than the back door on her way to the market. The side door led to the carport where the Ganeas’ government chauffeur spent his days. Responsible only for taking Ganea to work and returning him home, with the occasional out-of-town government function to attend, the chauffeur spent most days polishing the official black Mercedes sedan and the smaller, but no less black, Dacia, cleaning from them the muck and filth and dog shit of Bucharest.
As Mariana stepped from the side door into the carport that morning, there was Popescu, seated on an overturned wooden bucket and crouched over a game of backgammon. Ganea’s chauffeur sat across from him on the third rung of a small stepladder. Neither man looked up when she entered. They were involved in a furious endgame, mesmerized by the dancing of the dice as they raced to clear their houses. Mariana stopped and watched the conclusion. Popescu won, clearing all his pieces from the board one roll ahead of the chauffeur. He laughed with happy relief at the final roll and immediately wiped his entire face with a startlingly blue cotton handkerchief. The chauffeur began resetting the board for the next game.
“Lucky this time,” he said.
“It’s my day,” returned Popescu, “I feel it.”
“You’ll need more than one good day,” laughed the younger man. “The account is heavy in my favour.”
“It will turn,” said Popescu. “It will turn. I feel it.”
Only then did the tutor look up from the game to see Mariana standing some four feet away, watching with amused interest. He rose from the wooden bucket as quickly as his weight would allow and stood fumbling to return his handkerchief to his inside jacket pocket.
“Ah, my dear Mariana,” he began, “you must be a friend to me and not mention this game to your employers. You know how it is with us servants. We must hang together.”
“Professor, you lower yourself unnecessarily,” Mariana laughed. “Surely a man of your standing can choose when and how he amuses himself. And please sir, I do not tell tales on others. It pleases me to see you here, that’s all. To see you enjoying yourself so. Such passion.”
“Yes, passion, I’m afraid with me, kind woman, it is more of an obsessive love than a fleeting passion. But you are a woman of honour, comrade. I thank you for your discretion. Consider me in your debt.”
Mariana recounted to Vera other times when the professor’s curious obsession had revealed itself, how she had thought nothing of it but how he had struggled to conceal it from the family Ganea. Chess, not backgammon, is the game of the intelligent member of Bucharest’s elite, a game of intellect and cunning. Backgammon’s dependence on dice and chance to decide its outcome lowers it in the eyes of the powerful. As well, chess showed one’s connection to high Russian culture while backgammon told of Romania’s long and antagonistic relationship with the devil Turks. Chess was played in parlours, offices and sitting rooms, while one could find backgammon being contested on street corners and the third-class sections of overnight trains.
“He is embarrassed to be seen by important people playing this game,” Mariana explained. “It is very well for him to sit and eat and discuss music and gossip with Ganea, but when he wants to play his game, he must sneak around and sit on buckets.”
“Is he good?”
“An amateur. He was lucky to win when he did. I saw three mistakes when he was bearing off alone. If you are good yourself, you will have to be careful how you let him win.”
Mariana left Vera contemplating her new understanding of the professor Valentin Popescu. Before turning in that night she had completed a new handkerchief for the powerful tutor. Strips of red and gold coloured cloth expertly sewn to a field of white linen creating a perfect miniature backgammon board. In one corner she embroidered the standard VP, and in the other a pair of dice showing 6 and 5, her own favourite opening roll.
Two weeks later, Valentin Popescu showed displeasure on his face, and in his impatience to leave. He had been in the little apartment less than five minutes before he began looking at his pocket watch and making protestations about his schedule. Vera barely had time to make coffee before he was pacing the living room floor, working up his excuse for a hasty exit. It didn’t help his mood that he had not stopped sweating from the exertion of climbing two flights of stairs. He had never tutored a girl who did not live in a house. He was worried about walking on Titulescu Avenue after dark. He had seen many Gypsies on his way in, and the train station was so close he could hear the cries of beggar children from the sidewalk outside Vera’s building.
Vera worked at the coffee in the kitchen, listening anxiously to make sure the tutor did not slip back outside. If he left before she could speak with him, she would surely never see him again. She read that certainty in his eyes as he came through the door, and she could hear it amplified in the grunts of displeasure that reached her from the living room.
The apartment’s one main room barely contained him. His large frame bumped against the dining table, and he found it difficult to squeeze past the chairs set in a semicircle in front of the television. Wanting to moisten his handkerchief and wipe his face, Popescu began opening doors. There were only two options, but his luck was bad and the door he tried opened to reveal a bedroom in semi-darkness. The bed was perfectly made and framed at the head and feet by wooden bookshelves overflowing with magazines. He stepped inside and examined the shelves. Every magazine contained nothing but crossword puzzles and, picking one or two up, it seemed to Popescu that every single puzzle had been completed. Then, a voice.
“Have you come with soup?”
The question came from the darkest corner of the room, and it electrified him to the spot. Sweat had begun to cool on his forehead, but now it flowed again, hot and fresh. An impossibly old woman sat in a padded chair, almost obliterated by shadow but with a magazine and pencil in her hand. She was not looking at Popescu, but rather she worked with studied concentration on a crossword. She was dressed as though to go to the theatre, but her shoes were removed and placed beside the chair. Instead, she wore large red slippers, men’s slippers in fact, that appeared many sizes too large for her tiny feet. Popescu could think of no answer to her question. Instead, he stood and stared, terrified of her oldness and wishing he had not ventured onto Titulescu Avenue. Hearing no reply, the woman raised her eyes from her puzzle.
“Ah, Monsieur, it is a pleasure. Have we met?”
“We have not, Madame.”
The tutor was surprised to hear perfect French from such a creature in such a place.
“You have the look of a boy I knew once. He was a musician. He loved me desperately, but I was of course already married at the time. A friend of my son.”
“An unfortunate man.”
“Yes, well of course I gave myself to him, but he wanted more. Eventually he stepped beneath a train.”
“It’s tragic.”
He looked more closely, and there was indeed a charming face beneath her age. He tried to recall stories of young musicians leaping onto train tracks.
“And you have no soup for me?”
“No Madame, I have come at the request of your daughter, Vera. I am a professor at the conservatory. She wished to speak with me on some matter.”
“Yes, yes, I know it.”
The woman pulled herself very slowly forward on the chair. Popescu crossed the room in two steps and bent to lend his arm. The old woman leaned lightly on his elbow and gently levered herself across to the bed.
“I am 94 years old. I had my first lover in the last century and my last lover at the midpoint of this century. Now my son’s wife brings me soup and helps me use the bathroom. If I could, maybe I also would step beneath a train.”
“You are still very beautiful, Madame.”
“Yes, I am. Of course.”
Vera came to the door and, her hand on a sweaty elbow, pulled the tutor back into the living room. Then she carried a tray with soup and coffee into the bedroom and placed it on top of the bookshelf closest to the bed. On her way back out, she shut the door.
“She will sleep after she eats. I am sorry if she disturbed you. Sometimes she forgets where she is.”
On the dining table Vera had laid out a coffee tray with fresh bread and a small assortment of goat and sheep cheeses. Behind the table, on the wall, hung a handmade backgammon board. Vera’s husband Serban had made it for himself out of scrap wood and the cedar wrappings of Cuban cigars. While guiding Cuban diplomats around the northern monasteries, Serban had collected the wrappings one by one when they dropped to the floor after dinner. Back in Bucharest, he had sliced twenty-four of them into backgammon spikes and glued them to a board. The effect was completed with stains and finishes he borrowed from a local artisan. He then hand-carved each of the pieces and the two dice from a willow branch. Popescu stared at the board as he ate his meal. Vera smiled at him.
They played each evening for two hours. Vera let him win many games, but not all of them, and she gradually raised the level of her game so that his wins took more out of him. The challenge was intoxicating to both of them. He listened to Andrea play her violin, but only incidentally as she practised on the balcony or in her great-grandmother’s bedroom. The lure of the game was so powerful that Vera felt no need to dissemble her motives. She told the tutor on the first evening that she wanted his help to get Andrea into the conservatory. She told him this and then she beat him ruthlessly in a quick game. He accepted the job, and she beat him a second straight time. Then she eased up a bit and let him scrape out his share of wins. The first night ended in a tie. Before he left, she presented him with the red and gold backgammon handkerchief. Popescu could not contain his delight with the object and he immediately dug a shiny centime from his pocket to pay for it. Andrea was sent to walk him back to the embassy district. There were two months remaining until the next admissions audition.
The money Vera had hidden away in her cushions disappeared. Each new week meant fresh cheeses from the countryside and a new handkerchief to create. Popescu would assign Andrea several pieces to learn over the course of each week and on Thursday evenings she would present a small concert in the living room while her grandmother and the tutor wrestled with the dice on the handmade wooden board. Serban returned from the north for two weeks. Popescu made him nervous, and when he was nervous he liked to drink ţuică. And so, together, Vera and Serban discovered another of the great tutor’s passions. Serban had arrived back in Bucharest with four bottles of the homemade plum brandy, gifts from farmers with whom he’d billeted tourists. He returned to the north with four empty bottles.
Unfortunately, when he drank, Popescu became lazy at the game, and Vera was forced to work harder and be trickier in her concessions. With her husband home, Vera could not help but win much more than she lost. Strangely, it only made Popescu more determined to continue the tournament. Vera happily let her cushion money turn to cheese and disappear down the tutor’s throat. When she saw Mariana in the morning, the two women laughed and squeezed each other’s hands for luck. Each night, Vera worked the board in intense concentration. Each night, Popescu felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough victory. Each night, Andrea practised or played, and then walked her tutor safely through the empty streets.
A little more than one week from the audition, Vera awoke in the darkness of morning to the sound of her granddaughter crying. Normally, Andrea slept with her on the daybed in the living room, the two of them pressed together for warmth. Andrea’s sobs were quiet, muted because they came from the old woman’s bedroom. It was a sound Vera had long expected to hear from that room, and they woke her immediately.
“How will I tell Serban?” she wondered.
But when she opened the bedroom door, Andrea lay on the bed, and her great-grandmother, far from dead, sat beside her, rubbing a hand between her shoulder blades.
“It is the oldest story,” the old woman said, not bothering to look up at her daughter-in-law.
“He loves her, but she doesn’t love him. But he is the man, so she loves him anyway. The oldest of stories. I’ve lived it many times myself.”
Vera wept on Mariana’s shoulders outside the market. After she heard the little that Andrea had told Vera, Mariana used her extensive servant’s network to check the story. It was true. The great tutor loved handkerchiefs, and cheese. He had a passion for liquor and an obsession with an ancient game. But above all he loved his students. Popescu had slept with almost every young girl he helped into the conservatory, even the homely Lutzi Ganea. For the most part, the girls’ parents remained unaware of the affair, but in several instances mothers willingly whored their daughters to the influential professor for the prospect of a spot in the academy and a good marriage.
The trysts had begun on the tutor’s walks back from Vera’s apartment. Andrea walked beside him, her arm through his, as was the custom when men and women walked together on the street. When he kissed her the first time, she had wanted to run, but was terrified of destroying all her grandmother’s hard work on her behalf. Over the weeks the kisses turned more passionate. Once he managed to talk Andrea into the park on the edge of Kisselef Boulevard. There, in the shadow of Stalin’s great stone statue, the fat tutor had reached beneath her blouse and squeezed her breasts. He slipped a hand under her skirt and struggled with her underwear, and would certainly have raped her, but he was frightened by the voices of a Gypsy family clopping along the boulevard on their horse-drawn cart.
Convinced Popescu would abandon her at the audition if she didn’t cooperate, Andrea let the affair continue. Every night her grandmother would work hard to disguise her overwhelming superiority at backgammon and every night Andrea would work to hide her disgust and fear. She kissed the professor willingly at the end of their walks, and even pretended to enjoy it, but made excuses for not going into the park. He made her promise she would find time for them to be alone indoors. She managed for a while to put obstacles in the way of such a meeting, but was running out of time and excuses. If she did not sleep with him before the audition, it was certain she would not be accepted, and her grandmother would die from disappointment. It was at this point that Andrea lay awake all night worrying and finally collapsed into tears on her great-grandmother’s bed. The old woman’s affairs were family legends, but her advice to Andrea had been too cruel for her to imagine.
“If accepting his penis gets you what you need, then accept his penis. There are worse things than a penis. Though he is not the best looking young man I’ve ever seen.”
Vera excused herself from meeting with Popescu for two nights. On both nights, she and her granddaughter sat together in the living room and talked. Andrea played for her the pieces that she was practising for the audition. Her music was perfect, but they both knew, without the tutor’s help, it would not make a difference how well she played. For the first time, Vera told stories about her time in prison. She showed Andrea letters and newspaper clippings she had kept hidden away in the backs of cupboards for thirty years.
When Popescu was admitted back into Vera’s apartment, there were four days remaining until the audition. Vera brought him some dinner at the table and sat down opposite him. Andrea listened from the bedroom.
“It is only right that you have my granddaughter,” she began.
Popescu swallowed slowly and placed his cutlery on the tabletop.
“I don’t like it,” Vera continued. “She is just a young girl and you must know she is not in love with you.”
“Madame, you mistake me.”
He made a small gesture of protest, but felt little need to be convincing. He’d been in similar situations before. He usually held all the power, and even more so on Titulescu Avenue.
“As I said, I don’t like it. But, like you, I am aware of your rights in this situation. How does one put a price on a good start in life? Me, I’ve worked since Andrea was born, since before she was born, to help her get a good start in life. I have saved many, many dollars, American dollars, to make this happen. But you set the price, and that is your right.”
The tutor resumed his meal with a smile.
“That is my right,” he said. “I have also worked very hard, and I deserve my compensations. There has never been a complaint, not even from newlywed husbands. My price is reasonable for what is offered.”
“It is reasonable, I agree. But I won’t pay it. I have talked with Andrea for two nights. We have talked it in both directions. We have looked at all the details of this situation. She is willing to pay the price, but I am not willing to have her pay it. If it were her decision, you would have your way tonight, in this very apartment, but a grandmother has one right in the end, and that is the right of final decision in matters like this.”
“You should think some more about this,” Popescu said, playing his advantage. “The audition is so close, and a space will be made. She has so much talent, it will be a simple case and will seem perfectly correct.”
“I will not pay it,” Vera insisted. “I’ve said that, and you cannot make me change my mind.”
Popescu wiped his mouth and pushed himself back in his chair. His face remained dry and without shame.
“The cheese was not very good these last nights,” he said, and stood to leave.
“I won’t pay it, but I will risk it.”
Vera pulled the board from the wall and placed it in the traditional spot on the table. She cleared away the dinner dishes and brought a bottle of vodka from the kitchen. Popescu had reseated himself and was grinning at the board, his eyes gleaming. Never before had he played for such delicious stakes.
“It is an excellent decision,” he said, rubbing the dice together between sweaty hands.
“Seven matches, five games each match. If you win the tournament, you may do what you wish with my granddaughter. And it is up to you whether she is admitted to the conservatory. As well, I will provide a meal for you three times a week for the rest of my life.”
“Excellent decision,” the tutor bowed to Vera. “You are a woman of honour.”
“But if you do not win the tournament, you must pay my price. You must admit Andrea to the conservatory and see to it she graduates from the program. You must not touch her again, and this family is released from all claims.”
“Madame, if you win this tournament, I will do all those things, and more. I will make sure she is given a place on the travelling orchestra. If you win, Madame, your precious Andrea will play in Paris and in Rome. Your granddaughter will play in Moscow, Madame. If you win, Madame.”
Vera opened the door to the bedroom and helped Andrea carry her great-grandmother onto the daybed in the living room. Andrea sat beside the old woman and held her steady against a mound of cushions. She looked directly into the tutor’s eyes and smiled sweetly.
“You must make your promise in front of us all, Professor Popescu. This is a match of honour, and it must be witnessed. My mother-in-law will hear your terms.”
Popescu repeated his pledge to the old woman, and also, gleefully, explained in detail the prize he would win for defeating Vera.
“It is fair,” the old woman said. “I will die very soon, most likely within this year. You have made a pledge to the dying, sir. Are you sure you want to take this risk, because you must honour it?”
“It is the greatest gamble I’ve ever been offered. I must play.”
As he walked home along Titulescu Avenue alone, his limbs shaking and his skin slick with perspiration, Valentin Popescu could not help himself from crying. He cried for his lost Andrea, for the sweetness of her virginity. He wept because she was the first young girl he had decided to have, whom he would in fact never have. Mostly he cried at the recollection of his play during the tournament, at the understanding he now had of his clumsiness, his ineptitude, his drought of expertise. His eyes filled with tears of shame for himself, and admiration for this old woman, this Vera, who played the board as though it were not a question of dice.
Each year following, until her death, on the anniversary of Andrea’s triumphant audition recital, Vera made a pilgrimage to the conservatory in the centre of the city. If Andrea was in the country, she would accompany her grandmother, but when the young violinist was travelling with her orchestra Vera would go alone. And each year she would tie onto the iron gates of the school a newly sewn handkerchief, in the design of a backgammon board.
“Andrea still plays for the National Orchestra,” Diana says, staring through the window at the impenetrable night. “I saw her once in New York. She is quite famous.”
The small plane lands late in the evening in the city of Suceava, near the northeastern border with Moldova. At the airport there, Tony and Diana are separated from Dragos who is dragged from the gate by old friends anxious to give the groom one last night of debauchery. They ride with the Cup the final forty kilometres to the village of Ilisesti in the rear seat of a black Mercedes sedan, a uniformed driver silent in the front. Again Tony and Diana are kept apart in the back seat by the large black travelling case, which is just as well, since Tony can think of nothing to say in response to her kiss and the story of Vera. Leaving Suceava, Tony lowers his window. Where Bucharest’s air had been hot and choking with smog, here the night smells of pine forest and long fragrant grasses. Tony slips down in the soft leather upholstery, pressing his knees against the front passenger seat. As they drive, he can hear Diana breathing slowly and heavily, and with nothing to see out the windows, he glides off into sleep.