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“The monasteries!”

“The botanical garden!”

“Have you seen the poet’s tree?”

“You know a boy strangled a girl in that park? And nobody intervened.”

“But what’s your profession? What is it that you do in California?”

“I am a psychologist,” I said.

“I don’t believe in psychology. You don’t need psychologists. You just need good friends. You can tell everything to a friend. A friend is the best.”

“Psychologists say you want to kill your father and sleep with your mother.”

“Eh? Disgusting.”

The rest of the discussion I couldn’t understand, but after a few minutes, they switched back to English and taught me the words for male and female genitalia. They told me that all good things in life could be described with the female genitalia word, and all the bad things with the male one. “The pizda is good! So good!”

A thin man came in, got a free beer, and quickly walked away. They told me it was the local Forrest Gump. “All this guy does is walk! He walks and walks. Has been all over the country twenty times. Was hit by a car last year. But he recovered. Now he is walking again. And you, what do you do? You know how to play cards? Chess? Backgammon? What do you play in America? Hide-and-seek? Cowboys and Indians?”

They asked me what I smoked and then sent the toothless guy to buy more cigarettes. I began to feel warm inside, to feel as if I belonged, as if they were family. I knew I had to be careful with the wine, just dipping my lips into it. The man who was missing an arm offered to adopt me. He said he had a daughter my age, and we could be sisters. A cross-eyed man made me a marriage proposal (if it was indeed me that he was looking at). After a few more glasses of wine, his proposal became highly indecent instead. I decided that it was time to leave. I promised that I would come back.

I danced on the way home. It was dark, and the street running up the hill was empty. Two dogs came out and started barking at me, baring their teeth. I barked back. I think I scared them. I felt so good that night, so good, so undeservedly happy that I knew it was only a matter of time before my little paradise came crumbling down.

* * *

Sometimes, in that house, I lay sleepless, imagining Razvan beside me. He could never stay overnight, but it was in the dark that I needed him most. What is it about darkness that makes us needy? I should have felt safer in the dark than in daylight. It was in daylight that I felt a mixture of suspicion and fear when I caught a passerby’s glance. At night, there was just an old house squeaking and an owl or some other bird fluttering in the attic—a solitary night creature like me.

Razvan and I only made love during daylight. It was like making love to Elvis when he was on his way out and fat. But I didn’t mind. I like the men who let themselves go. The ones who have self-control are stingy with affection. Razvan was both macho and effeminate. He tired quickly and wanted to talk. How different it was from the long, methodical sex sessions with Mickey and the gloomy silences afterward! I wasn’t missing Mickey at all anymore. All I felt was anger at losing five years of my life because of his obstinacy. Yet sometimes I still had insomnia, although not as bad as I used to in prison. There, I had felt as if I were dead: as if I had died with Mickey, and I had to scratch myself bloody to feel alive again. Here, the occasional insomnia was just a nuisance.

I looked through the books and tried to find something I could read. Besides philosophy in languages I didn’t know, there were novels in languages I didn’t know either. The only book in English was a collection of short stories from Central Europe. Opening a random page, I read: “Know, then: I condemn you now to a drowning death!” I threw the book into a corner, grabbed that whiskey bottle, and drank myself into oblivion.

When I came to my senses, I thought about calling my parents. They had fought so valiantly for me by invoking the First Amendment and our right to free speech. They even mentioned to the press that I was a prisoner of conscience. It was a mistake because it didn’t gain me any sympathy. But they were the only ones on my side. Them and my lawyer. The jury noticed how much the lawyer liked me, and it turned them against us both.

The last time I went to see the psychologist, she had asked me about my plans after prison. I had told her I didn’t know whether I could survive there for five years.

She had said, “Of course you can. You are young.”

And I said the only thing I wanted in the future is to be forgotten.

“Someday it will happen,” she said. “People have short memories.”

I had hoped she was right that one day everyone would forget about me. But as I had sat in her office, with its leather couch and a lamp under a green shade, I had thought of all the tabloids carrying the pictures they had lifted from my Facebook and Instagram accounts before I had a chance to delete them. Many young women took selfies, yet in my case, they were used as proof that something was wrong with me. I must be a narcissist and a psychopath since I liked to take my own picture or asked others to photograph me. Even the shot of me standing beside the trunk of a sequoia tree that one time when we had gone to NorCal for a weekend … even that picture showed my arrogance, apparently, because I wasn’t hugging it like others did but was instead gazing up at its crown. Whereas, in fact, I remember feeling dizzy and almost worshipful, looking at the green foliage made golden by the sunlight seeping through the red branches. Worshipful for the first and last time in my life.

But enough of my self-pity.

Whenever Razvan came to the house, I made us coffee and served it in those fragile old china cups. We used to drink it in the living room near the windows overlooking the quiet street. He used to tell me about his work—how in the past he had taught art history and then chose the administrative track, climbing all the way up to the vice-rector’s position. I told him he had an admirable career, and he said he realized now that he didn’t give a shit about it and that he’d rather leave and start his life anew someplace else. And I couldn’t help but wonder, What about me? Would he leave me along with his old life? That wasn’t the deal, I reminded myself … that wasn’t what I signed up for when I came here from that hostel with him.

There was a buzz at the door. Razvan said, “Please, God … let it not be Loredana,” and crossed himself. That was the thing with him: he’d cross himself when walking past a church or when talking about somebody who had passed away. It excited me. I liked it. I wished I could learn to do the same.

As I walked to the door, I tried to figure out a way to get us out of this predicament. I wore one of the aunt’s suits, so at least I didn’t look like someone about to make love.

The plump woman at my doorstep had to be his wife. He had never told me anything about her, but there was no mistaking her identity. She looked so much like him with the same stocky build, the same round eyes, and an expression of curiosity. Only she was blond, a fake blond, probably. She smelled like vanilla. My heart skipped a beat as I realized I could never manage to steal a man from the woman who looked like she could be his twin.

She said something. I had no idea what, of course. Razvan had tried to teach me Romanian, but I couldn’t get past dragostea and iubirea: words for love.

“Pardon?”

There was a look of confusion on her face. She asked me, in English, “Is my husband here?”

I could see she was angry. Those bitches thought men were their property. I wanted to put her in her place saying, “I just sucked him off,” and then see the look on her face. But this wouldn’t have been a strategic course of action. I needed to act strategically.

“Mr. Razvan? Yes, he’s here. Please come in,” I said and opened the door, cursing myself for never asking about his last name. “I am Professor Stanhope, visiting from California on a research grant. I am a psychotherapist.”

I could see she was taken aback.

“Loredana,” she said. And then she added, “Sorry if I am interrupting.”

“We only just started,” I said. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

She came into the living room where Razvan stood with a forced smile.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Loredana said again and lowered her eyes. “I think I want to go.”

“If you ever need me, here is my number,” I said as if peddling my psychotherapy skills. I tore off a piece of paper and wrote down my telephone number. “It’s all free of charge. On a voluntary basis. Or if you just want to practice your English. I will be happy to chat anytime.”

She put my number into a little handbag. I couldn’t tell if she believed me, but she seemed relieved. There were dimples in her cheeks, and her upper lip was short. I could see her front teeth.

“I should go now. I will see you later, Razvan.”

“Bye, Loredana, I will be home soon,” he said, his brow perspiring.

After she left, he didn’t look at me even once. He clutched his hands together and wriggled his thumbs. I thought there was little chance we would make love that day. I didn’t know if they fought later at home, or if she swallowed what I said hook, line, and sinker. But I think her coming here had somehow tipped him over the edge and made him want to leave—her, me, everything.

That would have been sad for me, of course, had he succeeded. But it may have been a great new beginning for him. Who knows! It’s difficult to tell since everything came about in an entirely different way, and I just want to reiterate that none of it was my fault.

* * *

What kind of life did he want? He was already on the wrong side of forty, continuing a quiet and somber existence. At most, I could picture him as a lay brother in a monastery. Or perhaps inhabiting another provincial town, in a similar occupation—teaching and shuffling papers. Had he gone abroad, what could he have done there? Who could possibly need him? I imagined him wandering from town to town, lost and bewildered, and then returning.

What I know for sure: that morning Razvan took his passport with him, but left his phone behind. He tucked his farewell letter into the book Loredana read at night so that she wouldn’t immediately discover it. He had packed the small suitcase—the one he used to return library books in—while she slept. Firm in his decision, his hand clutching the suitcase handle, he should have gone straight to the airport or the train station. Instead, he came to me.

He meant it well. He wanted to say goodbye. He said I could stay in the house for as long as I needed, provided I left the key under the rug at the end of my stay. He said he had written to Radu, and Radu knew. He gave me an envelope full of money despite my protests. He said I had inspired him.

He didn’t wish me a happy mother-daughter reunion. Perhaps he didn’t want to touch upon a sensitive subject, or maybe he had stopped believing me by this time. Or perhaps, at that moment, he wanted it all to be about him and only about him.

It was a gorgeous morning as warm as summer. The trees were spouting leaves, perky birds looked for worms among the previous year’s dry leaves, the sky was an unreal shade of blue, and the air buzzed with insects after the silence of winter. We sat in the backyard, squinting at the blazing sun and breathing spring air, the sweetening air of budding vegetation. Razvan left his suitcase in the hall. He clutched a steaming cup of coffee. He said he must leave to “find his way back to himself.” It was his last chance, he said, and it was me who had taught him how to be free and courageous.

I can still picture that morning when I close my eyes.

“Are you sick of me?” I asked.

Razvan touched my fingers with his free hand.

I told him that I had loved another man in the past. Even he wanted to leave me. That man had said that he must jump off the Coronado bridge because he hated himself so much. I had begged him not to do it.

Razvan was not listening. He let go of my hand. His eyes were following a buzzing thing in the air. He said, “I need to get away from that bee.”

He was not listening.

He was frozen like a deer in headlights. The bee flew close. He jerked. Then screamed.

“Kate! It stung me. Kate! Call me an ambulance!”

“What’s the number?” I asked quietly.

He mumbled something with swelling lips, but I couldn’t understand. The cup fell out of his hands. I heard the sound of china breaking. Little pieces flew in all directions.

“What’s the number?” I asked again.

I saw him sway then drop heavily onto the ground.

I ran inside the house to find my phone. It was in the living room. I searched “emergency numbers in Romania.” It said I should call one-one-two. When I called, the lady on the other end said something I didn’t understand, and I ran back through the house to give the phone to Razvan.

“Alo? Alo?” said the woman on the phone.

I realized I should try speaking to her in English. But my tongue did not obey me. I was mute. I wanted to reach the back door, but my legs were like cotton wool. The air was viscous. I could barely move through it.

When I got outside, Razvan was not breathing. I shouted, “Help!” I ran out into the street, and shouted again, “Help!” The empty street was eerily quiet. There was no one to hear me.

I returned to the backyard. I could not bear to touch him.

I sat near his body until it got dark.

I had promised myself that I would never be associated with death again. All I only want to be forgotten. No more tabloids. No more police. No more prison. How could I ever explain yet another accident I had gotten mired in—an improbable coincidence, a shadow of death falling upon those I meet?

I can’t.

Around 2 a.m. I took the shovel that Razvan had shown me and started digging. I dug until the first gray morning light. With effort, I shoved his heavy body into the trench and heaped the earth on top. And the imp of the perverse (where did I first hear about such a thing?) whispered into my ear, “He is not going to leave anymore.”

* * *

The next day, Loredana called and asked, in her faltering English, whether her husband was there.

“No,” I said. “I have not heard from him in quite a while.”

She thanked me and hung up. I had the feeling that she was still angry with me. She had no reason to be. Her husband did not leave her for me. His plan to break away from his old life had included me as well. If he was tired of his wife, she shouldn’t be blaming me for it. People always blamed me for the things I didn’t do.

It reminded me of Mickey. The dancing, the drinking on the beach, the bottle wrapped in a paper bag, the stars above, the waves almost touching our feet and slithering back into the ocean, hissing. The salty taste of Mickey’s lips. The briny air. How Mickey said we had a lot in common.

He had been describing his numerous suicide attempts to me. He had overdosed on pills (but vomited them out), attempted to hang himself (the nail couldn’t bear his weight though), and climbed to the roof of a tall building, intending to jump off (but had gotten jitters at the last moment). I could see he was trying to make himself sound interesting. He had an angular kind of beauty with a small tic of his right eyelid. I had wondered even then why I had chosen him over others. Perhaps because he looked fragile and dependent, and I could see myself as his savior or his protector, his guardian angel, his kind fairy, or something of that sort.

“Have you ever wanted to die?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, because I wanted him to keep thinking that we had a lot in common. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I had never wanted to die, not then, not even now. Especially not now. What truly stopped me was the knowledge of how happy they all would be if I died. How the hypocrites would sigh, ostensibly with regret, actually with glee: “She just couldn’t live with herself. The burden of what she did must have weighed too heavily on her.” Remember I pleaded not guilty, you bastards. I will not give you the satisfaction of seeing me dead. And even when I felt half-dead in prison, I pricked and scratched myself to see blood.

I recalled these things every time I looked at the spot in the ground where I buried Razvan and every time my eyes followed a buzzing bee, the reason for my loss. I liked to hang out in the back room, which had a view of the yard. I found pictures of Olga Costinescu in a desk drawer and put them on the desk. I traced her life—from a round-cheeked, eager student with a ponytail to a middle-aged, bemused woman, and then to the bitterness of old age. And yet, even her life seemed better than non-existence despite Marxism and her spinsterhood and having to lie. It was still better to live. To live.

I was in the back of the house when I heard another buzz at the door. That must have been the day after Loredana called, but I am not sure. I remember it was a gray day. The clouds made the neighborhood appear unfamiliar. In California, whenever the sun would hide (or sometimes the thick fog would come from the ocean, obliterating the street entirely), I would get the feeling that I had been transported to another country. Here it was the same. I was sad that day; I really missed the sun.

I opened the door; a policeman was on my doorstep. He had a round face and round eyes and a mouth that was half-opened. He asked me to identify myself and to tell him when I had last seen Razvan. I had a vague feeling that I had seen the policeman before, perhaps at that pub I had gone to: he had brought the same smells of sweat and cheap tobacco with him. I showed him my passport and explained that I was visiting. I said that I had seen Razvan a few days ago and that he had seemed pensive.

“Would you describe him as depressed?” the policeman asked. Another one who was using the occasion to practice English. I remembered that Razvan’s suitcase was still standing in the hall, almost in full view from the door. I quickly asked the policeman to the living room. We talked for a while. I knew I had to get rid of him, but I liked him.

“The vice-rector disappearing like this makes you think!” But he didn’t say what it made him think of. Just shook his round head. “It is mostly teenage girls who run away,” he continued, and by the time he found them, he said, they would usually already have turned to prostitution. He said it was the hardest job in the world—trying to keep people safe. Much as I hated cops, I felt that he was a genial and good-natured man.

“Our life is a valley of tears,” I said.

“The valley of the shadow of death,” he agreed.

Before going, he ordered me not to leave town.

“But I have a flight in ten days,” I said. “I cannot stay longer than three months here with my passport.”

He stood there, thinking.

“If you don’t hear from us in these ten days, then you can leave,” he said.

After he left, I took Razvan’s suitcase into my bedroom. I looked at the neatly folded shirts, pants, and sweaters. The clothes were too clean with Razvan’s smell barely perceptible. I shoved the suitcase under the bed.

Then I tried googling his name on my phone. Internet searches give me anxiety: I am still fearful of accidentally seeing my own name or face there, accompanied by curses. But I wasn’t notorious in this part of the world. The search gave me Razvan’s picture on the university website, his publications, and a brief article on his disappearance, automatically translated by Google into awkward English. “At thirty-eight years old, he was the youngest vice-rector in the history of the university. Upon his leaving home, a farewell note was found, the content of which has not been disclosed. It is only known that the note gave his family a reason to worry. He is described as one meter seventy-two centimeters high, with a stocky build and dark curly hair. The search is ongoing. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact law enforcement immediately.”

Thirty-eight years old? Razvan had been younger than me.

How could that pudgy, settled, middle-aged man have possibly been younger than me? We both had thought he was older. His whole attitude to me was that of an older man. I ran to the mirror and stared at my face. Immobile, the skin of it was smooth. I grimaced to see the fine lines in the corners of my eyes and around the mouth. Even if my face had aged, my soul hadn’t: every day spent in prison was a non-day. My prison term was a non-time, simply cut off from life. Like a coma patient awaking after twenty years, I feel ages younger than I really am. In prison, I had been counting hours from morning until bedtime, each day a carbon copy of the previous one.

At first, they had made me wear a paper suit since I was on suicide watch. I had told the prison psychologist (yes, they had them there as well) that in my case the danger was non-existent. He had wanted to talk to me about Mickey, how I had felt about his passing. I said I regretted not having been able to save him. I told the psychologist how I would often wake up thinking he was still alive, and then it would hit me all of a sudden, and I’d realize where I was. And how I would desperately want to go back to sleep, to go back to that state of innocence that had been mine just a few moments ago, but it wasn’t possible anymore. I would just toss and turn, and think, and cry. I sort of remembered that Mickey used to smell of the ocean. His skin tasted briny after each time he had gone surfing. His right eyelid would twitch when he was angry. Yet my memories of him were fading. All I was left with at the end was guilt and resentment. I had pinned such hopes on him, and he failed me spectacularly and, I guess, I failed him in my turn.

There was something else that was curious about my incarceration: I had never gotten as many love letters as when I was there. Almost every week during my first and second year in jail, they would bring me a letter or two. The psychologist had warned me not to respond. He said those were sick men with a fetish for murderous women.

“But I am not a murderous woman.”

“Exactly. That’s why you ought not to answer. All they do is project their own fantasy upon you. It has nothing to do with you as a person.”

I have kept these letters. On their pages, I was the most beautiful, most fascinating woman in the world. The letter writers begged me to give them orders. They said they would be happy to die at my whim. Others wanted to have a child with me or described an erotic scene with me as the main character.

There had been other kinds of letters that I would rip and bin immediately after a brief glance at their contents. The letters that wished death upon me: I should have been drowned, quartered, strangled. I should have had my eyes plucked out. I would burn in Hell.

And then, the letters from nuns, or Mormons, or born-again Christians, asking me to repent. God’s mercy was boundless. He would accept any sinner into his fold (remember the parable of the Prodigal Son?). In fact, the biggest sinner, once he had repented with all his heart, would be the most beloved in the eyes of God.

I hadn’t responded to these letters, but the idea that I may still be loved—it had done something to me. Given me a will to keep dragging my existence from one day to the other, I guess. To keep looking for love. If not in Heaven, then in the correctional facility. If not in the facility, then later, abroad, once my time was served.

I took a sweater and went into the yard. Could the police discern the fresh earth if they came here? I had camouflaged it with dry leaves. I had heaps of dry leaves from last year in my garden. How quickly I started to consider it “my garden.” I also thought that of all the possible burial places, this wasn’t the worst one. In the cemetery, Razvan would only have the other dead for company. Here, he would always have me.

At night, I heard a desperate wail. It was as if somebody had abandoned a baby or a kitten. A few moments of silence separated the wails, but they went on and on. I came out into the yard to see who was crying. But there was nobody there as far as my eyes could see in the darkness. I went back inside and tried to sleep, but the pitiful screaming kept me awake for hours.

* * *

When Loredana called and asked to see me, she didn’t sound angry anymore but resigned. I told her she was always welcome.

I was surprised to see her wear white. Of course, she didn’t know that Razvan lay in my backyard. Her eyes were red. I invited her into the living room and made her coffee. She lowered herself into the soft light-brown armchair. The top button of her blouse was unfastened. When I gave her the coffee, I could see the cleft between her breasts and a little cross falling into it.

For a second, I felt that I was everything these people were not and vice versa. It was a feeling that came to me from time to time. I first alighted on it in a playground when I was five, and I had known even then that I had to squash it at once.

Loredana’s hands trembled. I was afraid she might drop the cup. It was part of that fragile beautiful china set of which Razvan had already broken one. I had buried the shards with him as I couldn’t bear to throw them in the garbage.

A ray of sun fell on Loredana’s face. She put the cup back on the saucer with a clink. The church bells chimed in the distance, as if they had been waiting for a signal. I had learned to love the sounds of this town—those bells, dogs barking and howling, roosters crowing, an occasional distant “moo” of a cow, and at night, the whistle of a passing train. The smells were harder to get used to: every two or three days somebody burned trash in my neighborhood, the streets reeked of petrol and the narrower alleys of urine. Razvan used to have his own smell too, and I could still detect the traces of it in the sheets I hadn’t washed.

“I can’t believe he simply left. He wrote me a letter, but I refuse to believe it. Something must have happened to him.”

The imp of the perverse whispered into my ear, “A scavenger hunt is a fun game. Tell her to look under your bed. Then tell her to dig in the yard.” I stayed silent.

“Our life together was good,” she said. “Has he told you otherwise?”

“What do you think might have happened to him?” I asked instead of answering.

She shrugged, “Heart attack. Memory loss. A car accident.”

“Does he drink?”

“Only when Radu is here.”

She looked around the room as if she just remembered that we were sitting in Radu’s house.

“He wasn’t depressed, was he, Miss Stanhope?”

Like the psychologist, who had turned each of my questions back to myself, I now used this technique on Loredana, “Did he seem depressed to you?”

“He was restless. I feared he might have had an affair. Did he say anything to you?” And without giving me time to answer, she added, “You two. Please excuse me for being direct. Did something happen between you two?”

“Happen?”

“Were you two lovers? Behind my back?”

“No, of course not.”

But I felt I ought to give her something. “He did ask me how we defined ‘mid-life crisis’ in the US. He seemed quite interested in the topic. I wondered if he was experiencing any of the symptoms.”

“We call it the crisis of men at forty,” she said, her face brightening.

“You know, that’s the age when my father left home.” I leaned forward. I was inspired. “He was a Vietnam veteran. Are you familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder? He longed to write a memoir. I think he hoped he could purge the memories from his mind if only he could put them on paper. I remember his typewriter. When he left, there was still a sheet of paper in it, with the words, ‘Stanley was about to say.’ I don’t know what happened with the rest of the manuscript. But I still see that sheet of paper and how it becomes yellower and yellower. I never learned what Stanley was about to say.”

Loredana looked at me, her eyes wide open. “Did Razvan know about it?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t told anybody in twenty years. You are the only one.”

I hoped she appreciated me being so open with her. I hoped to get something in return. Since she didn’t say anything, I pushed forward. “At night, I used to imagine my father coming home, opening the door ever so carefully, so as not to wake us up. During the day, I sometimes had the feeling that I could just open the door to another room, and he would be there. But I never saw Dad again.”

Loredana asked, “Do you like Brynkoosh?”

I had no idea what she was talking about but didn’t let it show.

“Brynkoosh is Razvan’s favorite,” she continued. “We went to Paris in the nineties, both on fellowships. I to improve my French, Razvan to write an essay about Brynkoosh. I don’t think he ever did. But we loved it there. You know that we couldn’t travel before they shot Ceaușescu, right? We stood on a balcony in Paris and looked at the roofs. Those roofs with high attics in Paris, glistening after a rainfall. Razvan said, ‘Let us stay here. This city will be ours.’ It was a temptation, of course. But I wanted to come back. I told him, ‘If you want to stay, stay without me.’ I think Razvan still sometimes dreams of how his life would have turned out had he stayed. No career, of course, just menial jobs. But I bet he thinks of it as freedom. A Gauloise in his mouth, sitting in some café, ogling women. Always a foreigner, always an outsider. Free.”

She fell silent, and then added, “He is always unhappy about never having left his hometown for good, you know. He doesn’t want to be that kind of person.”