Even the weather was different. It was warmer than usual for the time of year, so that people could stay on the streets all night. These small things play their part, Ana thought, in change. Would the revolution have happened if, like last year, the cold had been so brutal as to freeze all fervour? It was not that she lacked faith in human courage; after all, she had seen them, running under sniper fire, and clambering on tanks to give bread and flowers to soldiers who might, after all, have returned to old loyalties. She and Doina had hugged strangers, who shouted ‘Olé, olé, olé, Ceauşescu is no more!’ as a tiny white helicopter dipped, heavily laden, over Palace Square. And they had seen portraits and books thrown from the balcony where he had stood, by young men who looked no more than nineteen, yet had braved the den of the old lion … People waved flags with the centre cut out – the new zero, the symbol of resistance.
But it was all impetuous, dazed, accidental. In chaos, nothing was certain; and it was her permanent sense of randomness, of chance, which prevented her from embracing (with Doina’s fervour) this new order – whatever it might be.
‘We can be free now, Ana – at last. Romania – we’ll build it again, like Czechoslovakia, like Poland … We’ll never go back to the rule of those bastards. Communism’s dead, Ana! And my God, I’m dancing on its grave.’ So Doina crowed, over and over again, exhausted and exultant.
‘All I can think of is I can get out, I can get out. I can go and be with him again. Oh Doina, will he remember me, do you think? Will he want me? Sometimes I wonder if he hates me now …’
‘Maybe he loves someone else, like Radu. And that’s far worse,’ said Doina, impatiently. ‘I understand what you’re saying, Ana, but can’t you just forget your own personal problems, even for a few days? Look around you. People have died for this country’s freedom, hundreds of them – and I’d have been prepared to do that too. On the streets, I didn’t care anymore … It’s the most extraordinary feeling when you know that you yourself – little, unimportant thing that you are – don’t matter!’
It was like the old days, when they clashed all the time, Ana thought. ‘Oh, but I matter, Doina,’ she retorted. ‘I matter because I had a child once, and I sent him away because I thought light would never dawn in this dump. And now it has. So I’m going to give him back his mother – and that’s why I matter. You talk to me about the “personal”. What does that mean? If each person in this country feels strong enough to stand up, head high, and shout about the “personal” from the rooftops, then there’s some hope for us.’
‘But we’ve always looked after ourselves – that’s been the trouble! Heads down, grubbing in the gutter, looking over our shoulders … That’s why the Cobbler was so clever. He didn’t need to put us into concentration camps. He knew that if you keep people terrified and poor the whole country becomes a concentration camp – and then it’s the law of the jungle. But now! People are talking to each other on the street, and crying for each other’s dead. Strangers, Ana!’
‘Don’t think I don’t feel it too, Doina. I feel as if I’m dancing on the point of a pin.’
‘Yes, and don’t think I’m hard. I do understand about Ion. But if you’ve never had a child, you know, you’re ignorant in a very particular way. I remember you said, years ago, it’s a different type of love, totally different. Do you remember?’
Ana nodded. ‘As soon as you’ve had a baby you realize that for the rest of your life you’ll suffer at the thought of losing it. It’s as if you voluntarily put your hand in the flames, and hold it there … It’s strange, but I sometimes think of myself as a peasant woman in a picture by Chagall I saw once in the library. I don’t know what it was called – all orange and pink, and the woman is standing in a yellow skirt, pointing to her own stomach, which is exposed, like a cave. And there’s a little man standing in there – not a foetus, a little person. There’s a moon in the sky behind her, and a flying cow …’
‘Cows in the air, churches under the ground – Chagall was painting Romania, wasn’t he? Completely crazy … Radu loved him.’
Doina bit her lip, but Ana went on as if she had not spoken. ‘Anyway, I recognized her when I saw her. I realized that before I had Ion there was a hole inside me, and when I was pregnant it was filled, like it was meant to be. Then he was born, and that space was filled up with this terrible love – so that at night when he cried I didn’t hear it through my ears, but through my stomach. A kind of pinching – here. And now, since that night, it’s a huge vacuum, sucking me in on myself.’ She thought for a few moments, then added, ‘When I saw the flag with the centre cut out, I thought, that’s me. There’s a hole cut out of me. You could put your fist through it.’ And she jabbed a hand into her abdomen.
Doina opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated. Ana nodded to her to go on. ‘I’ve never asked you this – I was afraid to – but I’ve often thought it … Have you ever hated yourself, Ana, for what you did? We’ve never really talked about it, because it would involve Radu, and well … that story’s over for me. I don’t care any more. But you – did you ever think you’d done the wrong thing?’
Ana looked grave. ‘Oh yes, lots of times – but only on one level. It was the wrong thing for me – and it was made worse when I tried to get out with you. Wasn’t that a mess? It’s all right, I don’t blame you … We’ve been through all that. People just do what seems best at the time, stumbling along, making mistakes, hoping to be better. That’s humanity; we can’t blame ourselves for it. I didn’t think it through, I know that. I was just so … so … consumed by the thought of him growing up here, getting like the rest of us … Maybe I was wrong, I don’t know any more. But I’ve had to cling on to the fact that life will be better for him in Germany, in every way. OK, so I gave up his body, but it would save his soul – I really thought that, Doina. I did. Oh, I’ll admit now that in the darkest moments a voice whispered to me that nothing would be better for him than to stay with his mother – but I had to shut it up, I had to! If I’d let it speak I’d have gone mad. Or maybe I was always mad, since last winter, when I read that article and imagined him gone. It started then, and I couldn’t stop it.’
‘Ana, we’ve all been mad, for centuries. Mad and corrupted. I’m not surprised you wanted to set Ion free. I can imagine it …’
‘Can you? Thanks for saying so, anyway.’
‘And I’ll tell you something – I’ll do anything I can to help you, Ana. You can apply for your passport – Christian says it’s as easy as anything. They’ll start to give them away like bread. But you’ll need money.’
On December 26th Ana was cleaning in the hotel lobby when a couple of taxis disgorged a group of people, six men and two women. They were dressed in thick, puffy anoraks and noisily supervised the unloading of a pile of huge metal cases from a third taxi. Ana recognized their accents and stared. It was not that there was anything unusual about these foreigners; the place had been full of journalists and photographers from all over the world. But this film crew was American; they embodied all the glamour and the power of single dollar bills and packets of Kent.
They were checking in – the youngish woman taking charge, while the older one (tall and angular, with red hair swept up in an untidy topknot) was still murmuring with the most senior of the men, the only one wearing a formal overcoat. Then this woman walked over to the desk where Dinu Balescu was looking up the reservations.
‘And we’ll need an interpreter – pronto. Have you asked him yet, Jody?’
‘No – there’s some problem with the rooms …’
‘Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it!’
The younger woman shrugged. ‘It’ll be OK. They always mess you about. They don’t get anything right in these places.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Ana could not help smiling. Dinu spoke perfect English. Yet this Jody piped up clearly, contemptuously, as if he could not possibly understand her. The natives are deaf, as well as stupid…
The woman with the topknot was leaning on the desk now, ignoring her assistant. ‘Excuse me, can you help? We need to start filming today – this afternoon. And so we’ll need to hire an interpreter. Do you have a list of people who can do that? Or can you fix it for us – but right now?’
Dinu Balescu was doing everything at half his normal speed, which was not very fast anyway. He raised his head from the reservations book and stared at her as if he had not heard, shaking his head slightly as he always did when he wanted to create problems. And it was then, in those few seconds’ delay, that Ana knew what she must do. Realizing how untidy and unpromising she looked, she leaned her broom against a pillar, tore off her apron and smoothed a hand over her hair – thankful that none of them had glanced her way, and walked quickly to the woman’s side.
‘Excuse me,’ she said politely, careful to use the most ‘English’ of English accents (the way Michael Edwards had spoken), ‘I couldn’t help overhearing you. I am an interpreter and I would be glad to be of service.’
Dinu Balescu was staring at her, his mouth slightly open. Anticipating trouble, she turned to him with a confident smile, and spoke rapidly in Romanian. ‘Don’t spoil this for me, Dinu. I need a break, I need to earn some money, and as quickly as possible. Help me get this, and I’ll … I’ll return the favour if I possibly can. Do you understand me …?’
‘You’re an interpreter?’ asked the American director, looking somewhat dubiously at Ana’s dowdy, grubby work clothes. ‘Do you have experience?’
‘I worked for a long time at the British Embassy here in Bucharest,’ replied Ana smoothly, ‘so please don’t take any notice of my appearance. You can imagine – we’ve all been involved with the revolution. And so for three days I have not been home to change my clothes.’
‘You were on the streets?’ Ana nodded. ‘Great. I mean, there’s some things you can fill in for us … OK, then …’
The woman turned to Dinu Balescu, who had closed his mouth now, and was staring hard at Ana. She waited for him to mock her, to tell them she was just a cleaner, and reach for his list of accredited interpreters and translators. She trembled, knowing that this insignificant moment, this accident of timing, held the key to the next stage.
‘This is Ana Popescu. She is a very good translator,’ he said in the old bland tone which bordered on the sullen. Then, as if he read her hasty, speculative calculations, he added, ‘You will find that the rate for interpreting is twenty-five dollars a day.’
‘I won’t forget this, Dinu,’ she said quickly, in Romanian, smiling all the time at the Americans.
‘And you don’t owe me anything either,’ he said, looking down at the book, ‘maybe we can all change now.’
‘What’s he saying?’ asked the assistant, Jody.
‘He is telling me there is no problem about the rooms,’ said Ana.
The man with the overcoat held out his hand to her. ‘Ted Allison,’ he said. ‘I’m the guy who’ll be doing the talking. And this is Francine Schrire, who tries to tell me what to say. And this is Jody … and Steve … and Lester … and … Well, I guess it’s all a bit much. You’ll get to know us all. Look, what do you say we all go upstairs, throw our bags down and meet you back down here in ten minutes. OK, Fran?’
The director looked at her watch and nodded. ‘Yeah, we need to do some working out. We’ll have something to eat while we talk. Is that OK with you … er …?’
‘Ana. My name is Ana Popescu.’
*
The waiter at the door of the brasserie looked hard at Ana, but could do nothing to prevent her entering. She felt afraid, but exultant too, like a pariah who has suddenly, inexplicably, been granted access to the Rajah’s most private quarters: opulent and forbidden. She could smell the food; her insides bucked, so that she had to close her eyes for a second and lean back in her chair.
‘You OK?’
The reporter, Ted Allison, was staring at her hard. She made herself smile, and nod. But he said quietly, ‘I guess the whole thing has been a shock. You must be wondering what in hell is happening.’
There was something in the tone of this man – with his wise, battered face that was somehow at odds with the well-cut clothes – which made Ana even weaker. He understood; he had come thousands of kilometres, from another world – and yet he was kind, and read the confusion on her face. Embarrassed, she felt her mouth break at the corners, and tears filled her eyes.
‘Hey, it’s OK, it’s OK. Frannie, will you tell that waiter to get his ass over here and bring those beers. Ana needs a drink, and so do I.’
‘It’s not New York, Ted – they don’t jump,’ said the director tartly. She seemed harassed already, looking around the room with a constant, nervous shifting gaze, as if working out shots and schedules.
When the waiter brought the beers at last he glanced at Ana curiously. Instinctively, she lowered her gaze. ‘Will you tell him we need to get the food quickly,’ said Francine Schrire. ‘I get the feeling he doesn’t speak much English.’
Do I dare, do I dare?
Ana breathed in deeply, and looked full at the boy – a thin, shifty-looking creature she had seen many times, and who had observed her, cleaning. ‘These people are in a hurry,’ she said in Romanian, her own voice sounding unnaturally loud, so that she imagined every waiter in the place staring at her and shouting insults, and throwing her out on the street. ‘They need to get their food really quickly, so will you try to help them?’ She hesitated, and added, ‘Please.’
He grunted, and muttered ‘Yes, yes’, pointedly in English, but his expression did not change. Bending expertly at the knee as he went round the table, transferring the beers from his tray, he paused for a fraction of a second by Ana’s shoulder. ‘Parasitical tart,’ he whispered in her ear.
She felt her face grow hot, but made no reply.
When Ted Allison asked what the man had said to her she shrugged. ‘We Romanians – you will find this – are very poor people, in many ways. Maybe it’s because we have so little … But I don’t think we like each other very much.’
‘You’re kidding! But what about now, after the revolution – won’t it all change?’
Ana hesitated, then said, ‘I think it will, slowly. Anything will be better than how it was. But you must understand – people did things that cannot be forgotten in one night.’
‘You mean the Securitate?’ Francine Schrire was listening intently now, and so was Jody, and the cameraman, Steve. The rest of the crew were at the next table, downing their beers, and complaining that the food was a long time coming. Ana looked round at them all: the polite, interested faces of strangers from another world, waiting for her to explain thing* in terms they could understand.
And what language can I use to explain to you silence itself? How can the muscles of my face hold an expression of openness, when they have for so long been slack? How can my eyes meet yours, accustomed as they have been to evasion? You expect me to fill you in now, to give you all the details of this country of which, a year ago maybe, you had barely heard. You want stories of informers, of secret police, of dramatic escapes, and of course I can fulfil that need – I must, if it will help you. I will go out with you on to the streets and translate the words of my people as they tell you how they got rid of Them, in a fast and miserable death that was too good for them. That’s what they will say – joyful and implacable. And yet … I do not know which tense I will use in the translation. Only the future exists for me now, it is the only possibility. Already the past has become falsified, and the present is shifting into rumour and doubt, and the only certain tense is future: in our language a construct of wishing. I will hear the guesses, half-truths and outright lies people are going to tell you and – knowing they may illustrate the narrative you have already written – shall I give them to you verbatim? Or shall I make it more difficult for you by telling you the truth about this country: that there is no truth? Absurdity is deep within us: it babbles in the first sounds our children make, and in the groans of the dying.
‘Securitate – yes. But others too … different people. It’s very complicated to explain to you,’ Ana said.
The city was full of shrines. In the greying gloom of afternoon women in black stood silently, gilded by flickering yellow candles, or knelt to place single flowers on the ground. In some places dark smears disfigured the pavement, and passers-by stopped to stare at the fuzzy photograph of a stranger, already sanctified by martyrdom and garlanded with makeshift wreaths, stuck up where someone had fallen. On a street corner a woman stood shouting a single name, ‘Flora! Flora! Flora!’ in a high, demented voice, clutching the railings with one hand as if to prevent herself from falling. Three blind men stumbled along, arms on each other’s shoulders, the leader wearing the flag, centre cut out, like a poncho. It was as if someone had thrown it over his head without him knowing and he had simply felt the extra warmth with gratitude. A young girl with long dark hair, topped with a red bobble hat, hung on a soldier’s arm, looking up at him every now and then with passionate tenderness, while he (younger and shyer) kept his eyes fixed on the red carnation in the barrel of his AK-47. In Palace Square a small boy of eight or nine ran among the tanks waving his arms in the air, his orange hat a flame amidst the ashes. And nearby passed a truck, piled with the bodies of the dead.
The American television crew had seen such things before. ‘When you’ve been in Vietnam … nothing can ever look as bad, you know? But then, I guess I was young then,’ said Ted Allison, as Francine lined up a shot with the cameraman. He pointed at the boy with the orange hat. ‘See that kid – arms in the air? Reminds me of that picture – the kid burned by napalm, running at the camera, naked, burned – a girl. You seen it?’
Ana shook her head.
‘It’s some image. Went all over the world. And I guess it summed up ‘Nam for me: a kid running from flames into flames, you know? And somebody there taking the picture, like us. I guess I’m an old cynic but I bet it’ll be the same here. I reckon we’re not talking Paradise, only Purgatory. I’d take a heavy bet on it…. Hey, am I talking too fast for you?’
Ana shook her head again – simultaneously entranced and intimidated by this new role, and the fact that passers-by looked at the group in which she was included with respectful awe.
‘I understand everything,’ she said, ‘please don’t worry,’ then smiled to herself at the ambiguity.
‘This is like a scene from Bosch,’ muttered Allison, looking up at the plume of smoke which rose from a blackened building towards the red sky.
‘Or – if I may say so – from one of our monasteries,’ Ana said. ‘Have you heard of these places?’ Ted shook his head, glancing down at some notes he held in his hand. ‘No? Oh, you’d like them, they are very beautiful – in the north of our country, in the Bucovina. The churches are painted on the outside, on the walls, you understand – and there is always a Last Judgement on the West Wall. You see heaven and hell on the same wall, like this – I think. My father took me to see them when I was a little girl. My mother, too. You should visit them.’
‘They still alive?’ asked Ted Allison, glancing up from his notes.
‘No, I meant the monasteries,’ said Ana.
‘Ready for the piece to camera, Ted?’ said Francine. ‘And Ana, while we’re doing this, see if you can get that couple to talk to us – over there, sitting on the grass. Tell them just a short interview about how they’re feeling right now.’
Ana turned and followed her gaze, knowing she had no alternative but to do as she was asked. But her spirit quailed. Even though, in the first euphoria of liberation, people had been talking to each other on the streets, it did not come naturally. To approach strangers, to ask questions … Do I dare … do I dare?
The man must have been in his early twenties. He sat on a packing case, his head in his hands, the ash from a lit cigarette falling unnoticed on his knee. His girlfriend knelt at his feet, arms about his neck. Neither of them made a sound. They were frozen in this pose, as if carved: clothes of granite, faces the palest marble. Stuck in the grass a foot away was a single yellow candle, its flame flickering precariously in the breeze.
It was a couple of minutes before they noticed Ana, standing a few feet away. The young man looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed, the contours of his face puffed-up with weeping. His chin was dark with three or four days’ growth. As if released by the presence of an audience the tears began again, pouring down his cheeks, although he still made no sound. The girl, younger than he, rubbed her fair head against him like a cat, crooning softly, ‘Shh, shhh, Constantin, shhh, it’s over, it’s over.’
‘Please …,’ Ana began then stopped, afraid of their grief.
The girl looked over her shoulder. ‘His sister,’ she said simply, and pointed to the candle.
Ana nodded, and repeated, ‘Please?’
‘What do you want?’ There was no hostility in the girl’s question, only a weariness which reminded Ana suddenly, sharply, of prison.
Hesitant, mumbling, Ana told them she was with the Americans, that they wanted to do an interview, that she would interpret … ‘Or maybe you both speak English,’ she added, apologetically, waiting for their angry rejection of this intrusion.
The couple shook their heads, looked at each other, then rose. ‘I want to tell them,’ the man cried out, hoarsely, passing a hand over his eyes. ‘Alis was seventeen, she was the best in her year, she had top marks always, and so pretty too, the kindest, sweetest person, my sister. And she wouldn’t come home, I told her to come home with me, but she wouldn’t, she ran away, and I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find her, I went everywhere looking for her. Our mother was so worried, she prayed all the time. We looked, we even went to the Emergency hospital…’
The girl nodded. ‘So many wounded, but we couldn’t see Alis.’
‘And we were going … we were going … to the morgue to look among the dead when I heard that a young girl was shot … here. And we found her, on her side, curled up, holding a flower. æ His voice rose. ‘I want to tell the Americans so they can tell the world, what those bastards did. And I’ll tell them we shouldn’t have shot the Cobbler’ – he spat viciously – ‘we should have put him in a cage and dragged him through the streets …’
‘And Her. Her too. She was even worse!’ added the girl, her round face creased with rage.
‘… and let the people beat them to death. With our own hands, slowly, with our own hands.’ He beat a fist in the palm of his hand, in a regular tattoo. Then the sobs began again.
Ana looked over her shoulder. Ted Allison had finished his camera statement; she was aware of whiteish faces bobbing in the dusk, turned towards her, waiting for her signal. Depressed, she turned and made herself walk briskly towards them. When she was a couple of yards away she simply nodded at Francine Schrire, who gave a thumbs-up sign.
‘What’s the story?’ she said.
Ana told her. It was easy to relate, being short.
‘Great! You hear that, Ted? Come on then, you guys.’
As the crew began to move towards them, the young couple stood waiting, staring at the approaching foreigners with an expression Ana was to recognize in the coming weeks: a mixture of excited fascination and acquiescent awe. They linked arms, and shifted their feet on the spot, murmuring to each other, as if rehearsing lines. The candle of mourning flickered near their shoes.
The director squinted at the scene, eyes moving restlessly from left to right. ‘OK, Ted, we can just go straight for it, I reckon.’ she said. ‘A couple of questions’ll do it – Ana, you stand by him and translate. Who they are, Ted, what happened to them, what they feel about the Ceauşescus, are they optimistic, that kind of stuff.’
‘Uh … I guess I know what to do, Fran,’ said Allison dryly.
But she was oblivious to his irony – turning to Ana with a tense smile. ‘OK – now, you ask them if we can blow out the candle, and then film them lighting it, right?’