Читать книгу: «Quaternity. Four Novellas from the Carpathians», страница 3

I asked her if she wanted more coffee. Surprised, she looked at her cup as if she had forgotten all about it. “I still have some.” She took a small sip. It was certainly cold by now.

“Perhaps he thinks it’s now or never. Finally carried away by the dream of what might have been. Too bad he didn’t ask me.”

“Would you have gone too?”

“Had I gone with him, it wouldn’t have been a new life, would it?” she chuckled: a bitter, joyless chuckle. “Thank you for the coffee. Let me know if you hear from him.”

From my window, I watched her cross the street and walk away, shoulders slumped. Yet I felt vigorous, happy, and at peace for the first time in years. I wondered if I might stay here forever with Razvan as my protective spirit, Olga Costinescu looking at me from her photographs, all my prison memories erased, and my name unmarred.

When I looked back on my life, I could imagine us walking hand in hand on the glistening pavements of Paris, Razvan showing me the monuments made by Brynkoosh: bronze men and bronze women intertwining long limbs in a passionate embrace. Razvan asking me if I wanted to spend my whole life with him there. “Yes,” I said, “Here or anywhere, with you.”

At night, I heard the wailing again. There were two of them now: one cried from my roof, the other responded from somewhere in the сhestnut tree. I figured it must be an ugly mating song of some birds that I couldn’t see in the shadows of the thick foliage: two birds emitting the screams of despair in their search for connection.

* * *

I looked for the name “Brynkoosh” on my phone one morning. It was a sunny morning, and I was having coffee in the back room. But I couldn’t find anything except a street name in a place called Chisinau. Perhaps Loredana had tricked me. I felt uneasy. To calm myself, I decided to go back to the pub. Perhaps I could treat myself to a glass of wine and a nice conversation.

I haven’t been to that watering hole in a while, but the smell of cheap cigarettes and unwashed bodies was the same. The men recognized me instantly.

“Hello, American! Welcome, my quiet American!”

“She’s not quiet, you moron. What will you drink, miss?”

“There’s a book with a title like this. You should read it. A glass of wine?”

“A water,” I said.

“Water? No. Water’s only good for washing.”

“Water is dangerous: people drown in water. Have a glass of wine. It’s the best in the country.”

I told them a bird was bothering me, screaming at night like a tortured baby.

They told me it was a cucuvea.

“It’s kind of an owl. A cucuvea’s bad news. Somebody will die.”

“Or died already. But you don’t know it yet.”

The one-armed man started telling me the story of a socialist minister who had gotten a new villa from the state but discovered that a cucuvea lived in the attic and got scared. And some cunning person had tricked him into giving that villa away. At least that’s what I understood.

Everybody laughed. They did not believe in ghosts. The man sitting next to me said that his widowed grandmother was buried in her wedding dress so that her husband, who had died young, would recognize her in Heaven after a forty-year gap. Another one said his mother still threw eggshells into the river so that “the forgotten dead would peck them.”

The cross-eyed man told me not to believe that garbage. He said I should believe only him. “Be careful, you are not at home here! There are all kinds of people around. But you can trust me.”

A cat came in and walked gingerly between chairs. I started to get that warm feeling again. How nice it would be to spend my whole life here. I could come to this pub every night and talk to these men, keep telling them about America, inventing new stories every month. And they would never know any of my secrets.

They showed me the famous clients sitting at various raggedy tables, looking as drunk and destroyed as the rest of them. One man had never worked a day in his entire life, another was an abstract painter (“You are meeting the elite here!”), the third a former soccer player. They asked me if I heard about the local professor who had been shot dead in Chicago.

“When?”

“In the nineties.”

“What was he a professor of?”

“Magic.”

“No way!”

“Oh yes. In Chicago, they study magic at the university. You didn’t know that about your own country?”

“But who shot him?”

“Nobody knows. A student, maybe. He was doing black magic with them.”

“No, his girlfriend had put a hit on him. For the insurance.”

“The drug mafia.”

“The Securitate.”

“The Iron Guard.”

“We’ll never know. There’s a lot of criminality in America. You ought to stay here, miss.”

“I bet she wants to go back. There’s more money in California. And a lot more sun.”

“But isn’t it boring?” asked the one-armed man.

I told him it hadn’t been boring, but it had been kind of empty. As if I was the only person left in town, the only person walking its streets. When I had met Mickey, I had gotten my hopes high for some sort of companionship. But he had kept whining and wanting to die. What a disappointment.

Mickey’s problem had been his mom. The bitch had hated me from the get-go. The old hippy bitch. I could see it in her eyes. Later she told the court she had never wanted Mickey to associate with me. “That woman just sent the chills down my spine,” she had said. What a joke. It was her who had made him want to die. She’d always been intrusive. I had wanted to tell the judge that Mickey had told me they used to sleep in the same bed together. I ought to have said that then. She was one incestuous old bitch.

I remembered how she had welcomed me. I could hear the surf from their living room; I could smell the ocean. She had tried so hard to sound friendly, to find some sort of a common cause: climate change, evil Republicans, the state of education, all the stuff I didn’t give a shit about. I had just wanted to ask why they still lived together. I had tried asking Mickey before, but he had changed the subject and made me listen to drums and chanting. We had tried to meditate but ended up having sex, and I remember thinking, He does want to live after all, but I was wrong, and I should have known it: Mickey was one of those who got sad after fucking, and it was never a good sign.

“Hey, American! Want another glass?”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, have another glass of wine. It’s all on me. What’s your name? Sorry, I forgot.”

“Barbara,” I said and then corrected myself, “Kate.”

“Barbara or Kate?”

“Both. But I go by Kate.”

“Kiss me, Kate!”

“Leave her in peace,” a curly-haired man chimed in. “Kate. I like that. A nice name for a nice lady.”

I thought for a second about taking this man home with me tonight but decided to wait for my true love instead. Perhaps after the disappointment with Razvan, my true love was just around the corner. And it turned out that I was right. My true love was already in town, perhaps entering my courtyard as we talked in that pub.

* * *

In the morning, I looked out of the window at Razvan’s grave.

I thought I was hallucinating.

A man slept in my yard with his dusty boots above Razvan’s head. The bum’s face was obscured by a mane of dirty hair. Must have wandered in and passed out. Was he drunk? Violent? I needed to drive him away without calling the police. I took the curtain rail from the window and went into the yard. I almost gave in to my baser instincts and bashed the hobo’s head in. Him trespassing, me a lone female—a perfect line of defense. But I reminded myself how they had tried to pin Mickey’s death on me and how there was already a corpse buried in my backyard. Too many unfortunate coincidences. I ought to be circumspect.

He slept peacefully, snoring just a little. He reeked of liquor. I kicked him with my foot. He mumbled something with his eyes closed. I pushed him again. He pulled the hair off his face and looked at me from under his red puffy eyelids. His fingernails were dirty.

When he saw me, his eyes widened. He exhaled, “Tooshanoo!” and covered his head with his hands, expecting to be hit.

“Out!” I pointed to the street, hoping that he would get my meaning.

Instead, he lowered his hands and peered at me.

“You. You are wearing my aunt’s clothes,” he said in English.

I couldn’t tell if he was angry or relieved.

“Radu?”

“Oops. You are Kate, no? Sorry. I thought you were her,” he said. “An apparition. Not feeling well this morning.”

He sat up and searched through his pockets.

“I could swear I still had a pack. Do you have a cig to spare?”

I pointed to a crumpled packet of L&Ms on the ground behind him. He took it and immediately lit it up.

“I shouldn’t be sitting when a lady is standing up,” he staggered up to his feet but swayed and sat down again. “It was a hard night. Sorry about this. Pleased to meet you and all that.”

I gave him my hand, but instead of shaking it, he kissed it. I wiped it on my skirt behind my back.

“Razvan done a runner?” he asked.

“Shall we go get a coffee?” I needed to get him off that yard.

He nodded but didn’t budge, expecting me to bring coffee to him.

“Women!” he said. “Must be a lady friend somewhere. But he’ll be back in no time. The old one has him by the balls.”

“I know a coffee place nearby,” I said.

“Pardon my intrusion. I just wanted to check in. See if you need anything. Stopped for a beer with a mate and lost track of time. Couldn’t wake you in the middle of the night, could I? Leaving today. You can stay, of course.”

He staggered to his feet, this time successfully. When he smiled, I saw that some of his teeth were missing.

“Shall we go get a cup of coffee?” I asked again.

“You have instant coffee? I only like instant.”

I felt bad about trying to keep him out of his own house.

“Yes, sure, come in.”

Inside, I tried to steer him to the kitchen, but he headed to the back room.

“She used to lock me in here when she thought I had been naughty. I spent hours gazing out of this window, hoping a magician would come and rescue me.”

I didn’t want him to look out at the yard again.

“Razvan never told me what you do.”

“I write children’s books,” he said.

I thought he would get angry when he saw his aunt’s photographs on the desk. “Sorry, I took the liberty …”

He grabbed a picture and brought it very close to his eyes. He must be myopic.

“She was a beautiful woman,” he said. “Not always kind, but she did bring me up. I should visit her grave. Haven’t been for years. Would you like to come?”

He looked at me. His eyes were blue.

My heart melted. I guess that’s who I am: always ready to love and to be loved, my soul tender, my heart exposed.

* * *

We walked down an alley flanked with cypresses, then up a hill. Around us, vineyards stretched towards the distant mountains. Radu smoked one cigarette after the other, telling me about his life in the capital where people were more exciting (“All my friends are artists.”), bars edgier (“You can smoke as much as you want.”), women easier (“It’s the capital of promiscuity.”). We located Olga Costinescu’s grave—a slab of marble, no cross, no flowers, just a thick layer of brown dust. Radu got upset that it looked so uncared for.

“We can come back with cleaning supplies tomorrow,” I said.

“You don’t mind me staying?”

“It’s your house. There’s a couch in the living room.”

We sat on a bench and looked down at the valley and the hills in the hazy light. Radu lit up again and started declaiming a poem about endless spaces and superhuman silences and infinite eternities, translating it into awkward English for my benefit. I asked him if he was the author. “No,” he replied, “the author was a hunchback who died many years ago.”

When I kissed Radu, he looked around, surprised as if he thought I had intended to kiss somebody else and smooched him by mistake. But we were the only ones on that quiet cemetery hill. Then he told me that he would move here, that he loved me, that we should get married and have a child. I thought it was the hangover talking.

I’m still sorry that we didn’t go back to clean up Professor Costinescu’s tombstone. I feel we kind of made a promise then broke it because of the rush of new love and because we bought five bottles of booze on our way back home. Perhaps her ghost had gotten angry and wanted to punish us.

* * *

I want to say I found Radu writing at the desk every morning and that we had coffee and made love and cooked dinner and planted flowers in the yard together, but, of course, it wouldn’t be true. Instead, we drank ourselves to sleep and started again in the morning. We only ventured out of the house to buy more liquor, canned beans, and bread. Radu fantasized about all the places we were going to travel and all the books he was going to write. Of course, I knew it was the alcohol talking, but I was happy. I tried not to leave him alone much: whenever he thought I wasn’t looking, he would stare at some object in the house and fall into something resembling a trance. Once I saw him caressing the old black piano in the corner, a dusty, out-of-tune instrument that I used as a shelf. Another time I found him downstairs with those Christmas decorations. He sat on the floor and cried.

I asked him to tell me about a children’s book he was writing. I never saw him write it, of course, but it did exist somewhere in his mind. He told me (in that affable way of talking under the influence of alcohol that could switch to belligerence at any moment) that, as a child, he had been fascinated by shadows and by all tales about them. He used to watch them fall in different directions in the morning and in the afternoon, like clock hands. He had observed them growing longer as the day progressed. When, much later, he saw reproductions of religious paintings where figures cast no shadows, he got this idea that he would write a book about a whole city of men with no shadows.

Only children would have shadows there, he said. At the age of ten, they would be separated from their shadows, and with that separation, everything evil in them would be gone: greed, rage, envy, and sadness. They would then lead a happy unblemished life in the company of other blameless individuals. They would live in identical sunny houses in that city of joy. Shadows, on the other hand, would slither away into Shadowland. No human ever went there, no human ever wanted to go there or know anything about them after separation.

Radu has described to me the shadow separation ritual. He must have been inspired by something in his own childhood, one of these socialist rituals they likely had here. He described the inhabitants of the ideal city marching in neat rows, and the podium where the boys and girls who turned ten that year would solemnly swear to always be happy. Then a city official would do something—some trick with a torch perhaps—and send their shadows off forever. The rite would conclude with applause and fireworks, fireworks symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness.

Yet one boy kept missing his shadow, despite all the happiness. In the past, he used to be a mischief-maker. A few times, he had stolen apples from the community garden. From time to time, he’d get into fistfights with other boys. Often, he had disobeyed his aunt and ran away into the forest alone where he pretended to be a yeti. Now he spent all his time helping others, supporting others, encouraging others, and doing his best for the benefit of the community. He felt a void where his shadow used to be, and that void still hurt.

The boy wanted to meet his shadow again. To walk around in its company and to feel like a hoodlum one more time. He set off to reach Shadowland, and his aunt, a cheerful office employee, decided to accompany him, although she kept saying that it was an extraordinarily bad idea and that they should have stayed home and baked a cake for the neighbors instead.

What the boy and his aunt didn’t know was that Shadowland was a horrific world: not a ray of sun, not a chuckle, not a moment of love or friendship, just sadness, anxiety, and anger. At first, all the shadows missed their humans. They longed to be back and to connect once more with the vigorous, fleshy humans. They wished they could be part of the human life again. But slowly they forgot and resigned themselves to their crepuscular world and their tenebrous half-existence. There was nothing to look forward to, and nothing that they could attach themselves to. Listless old shadows ruled Shadowland, and the sad newcomer shades served them.

The boy’s shadow kept missing the boy. It missed their games, which had been so different from the usual pastime of shades: watching how animals killed each other, how a lightning bolt struck a tree, how birds swept down on a pond to peck out the eyes of the fish. These were the kind of things that shadows saw. They observed the quaking of the earth, the flood of lava from an erupting volcano, the moon waxing and waning, high and low tides of oceans. Nothing around them was human anymore.

On the way to Shadowland, the boy asked his aunt, “How come our city sends the shadows away?”

“It’s for the common good,” said the aunt.

“I understand. But who came up with that?”

I waited for the story to continue, but Radu stopped. He said that was as far as he had gotten on his plot. He added that perhaps I could help him develop it.

“If you are that boy,” I said, “I could be your shadow.”

He laughed. He said I was not a shadow but a dream. An American dream. I went to the fridge and got us two more beers.

I told Radu how I was adopted, how my adoptive father had left the family, and how I had decided to become a psychologist to cure people’s souls. He asked me why I was still single. I told him about the boyfriend who had taken me to Paris to see Brynkoosh. I said I had tragically lost my love—he had gone to a concert while I had stayed behind in the hotel because I had a stomach flu, and then terrorists entered the club and killed him. I said I still felt guilty because he had wanted to stay behind with me, but I had forced him to go out since I craved solitude when I was unwell. For a long time, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to France, yet this year I had summoned up enough courage. I went to the place where he died and then went to Romania, the birthplace of his ancestors, the Jews, the country that he had dreamed of visiting. I said that many of his relatives had perished during the Holocaust. Wasn’t it ironic that the same happened to him, in a way?

Radu looked at me with his blue eyes, suddenly sober, and said that I shouldn’t feel guilty. Then he asked me how I had liked Brynkoosh. I didn’t know why out of everything I had told him in my story he latched on to Brynkoosh. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the sheer volume of my suffering. I said I loved Brynkoosh; his art was so life-like that his statues seemed about to walk off their pedestals and join us in the streets.

How the fuck was I supposed to know that his name was spelled Brancusi and that his men looked like bricks? I think that was when Radu smelled a rat and didn’t quite trust me afterward. Whereas I liked him more and more, and when the rain started, I wanted to tell him everything.

The summer storms were so strong that I didn’t even recognize the place anymore. It was really violent, despite its undulating hills and churches, and the quaint little parks. Showers lashed the roof, the windows, the porch, and the trees. It drummed and drummed, and I almost forgot about my trip back to the US. The house smelled of rain and of Radu’s cigarettes. I didn’t know how he would take it—me leaving him. Maybe I should forget about going back and just stay here, keep Radu close to me, and nestle in the house. On the rare times when we ventured outside, the streets smelled of jasmine and wet dust. Sometimes one of us would accidentally step on a snail—thousands of them crept across sidewalks after a rain, leaving a slimy trail behind. The shell would crack, and looking down on a squashed creature, one of us would realize that we had just committed murder.

I ought to tell Radu how I used to love a man who had gotten it into his head that we’d be better off dead. I remembered Mickey’s flat voice droning on about climate change and capitalism and wars and hunger and despair. If he was so full of compassion for nature and mankind, why couldn’t he love me back? I was the one human being in front of him who longed to be taken into his arms. Why did he want to die instead of helping me live? When he had sent me the thousandth message, “I want to jump off the Coronado bridge,” I had written back, “Just do it, for God’s sake.”

But that wimp had dithered and wavered since everything had to be about him until the end, texting, “don’t know if it’s right,” “will my death help the world,” et cetera, the bland banalities of an American douchebag.

I was so angry that I wrote back, “Jump off that fucking bridge. I don’t want to ever hear from you. Nobody will miss you. Just do it, you coward.”

I didn’t know he was already standing on that bridge when he texted me.

Incitement to suicide.

Manslaughter.

They had said I should have gotten the full fourteen years behind bars. I got five.

The rain kept drumming on the roof, the glass in the windows tinkled, and the branches knocked on the walls of our house. It was dark even during the day, and I couldn’t get out of bed. I knew I should get up and go to the airport and leave, but it rained so hard that our bedroom seemed the only safe place to be in. Such little things—a rain, a chill, dozing off—can undo us.

The morning when I realized I had missed my flight, I reached out to Radu, but he wasn’t in bed with me. I got up and walked through the house. The rain pelted the tin roof. I looked out of the back window. Radu stood in the yard, his clothes and hair soaking wet in the downpour. He was looking down, and I realized I hadn’t managed to make the ditch deep enough. The earth had turned to mud, the stream had washed it off, and Radu now looked at what was left of his friend.

My legs became soft, and I couldn’t run away. I waited for him to turn to look at me.

Would he still love me? Me, his shadow, his beloved, his American dream?