Kitabı oku: «Quaternity. Four Novellas from the Carpathians»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

I. THE BEAUTY OF BRYNKOOSH

II. BUTTERFLY IN PARIS

III. A SECONDARY CHARACTER

IV. THE PRIZE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I. THE BEAUTY OF BRYNKOOSH

When I get out of here, I first want to see those sculptures. I had no idea this was possible—a metal ball equals a bird, a cube equals two people kissing, a male member is actually a woman’s head. They are shiny, striking. Now, I can only see them on reproductions. A kind jailer has brought me a photo album after I asked about Brynkoosh. I was always a cultured gal. I remember a boyfriend introducing me to his buddy and saying, “She’s so cultured you won’t believe it!” Plus, I am enjoying quite a special status here. A foreigner, an American, the case is going to be big. If there is a case, of course, which I doubt. I’m using this time to get clued up about Brynkoosh. But photographs are 2D, and I want to see the statues in 3D. It is a totally different experience, 3D, when you can walk around things and even touch them.

Pretty soon it will all get sorted out. I am just an unlucky kind of person. Wherever I go, I am prey to awful coincidences, and there is no escape. I have traveled all the way from one continent to another in the hope of starting anew, yet where did I end up? In a detention cell. I just hope Radu comes. We can talk. About Brynkoosh, and about what happened. He will understand.

* * *

This is how I met Razvan.

When I first came to this town, I went to a vegan café. I didn’t have a place to stay yet. The café was not far from the train station if I went right and then up the hill. In such cafés, the waiters speak perfect English, so I had no problem ordering. They even had a menu in English. It was cozy but not crowded; only hipsters could afford it. I dislike them, but I was tired and couldn’t be bothered with giving laborious explanations just to try to order a sandwich from a person who couldn’t understand me. And, like this, I ended up in that vegan place.

A man at the next table began watching me as I read the menu. I got upset thinking he may have recognized me. How far must I run so that people won’t recognize me? I wondered. I then took a book out of my bag and started reading. They rarely bother you when you are reading. Men fly to a black widow like bees to honey, but an intellectual lady isn’t every man’s kind of thing.

Still he asked me, “Where are you traveling from?”

He was swarthy and had long sideburns like Elvis. His suit looked stupid and out of place here, but I liked the golden chain around his neck.

I said, “California,” smiled, and looked at my book. But I shouldn’t have smiled. I shouldn’t have said anything at all because he took it as an invitation.

He looked at my book and said, “I love that book, love Jack Kerouac. I’ve always wanted to be on the road myself.”

And then he told me about another book, written by a monk who had wandered and prayed at the same time.

You, sir, are never going anywhere, I thought. I had seen the wedding ring on him and the pudginess. He told me he had to eat vegetarian because of his cholesterol. It did stand to reason. He said he worked at the university but didn’t tell me that he was a vice-rector—as I later found out. I thought him to be an accountant or the head of security. I could tell he was important but didn’t know in what way.

I should have listened to him, of course, when he had told me about wanting to go away. Like I should have listened to Mickey’s babble of despair. I just can’t learn to be attentive enough to people’s words, and I keep being punished for it. But why would anybody want to leave their blameless existence in search of the unknown? Search me.

As the man in the café talked, I thought about the prison, how I hadn’t been able to go anywhere for five long years. But now I was free to change my name and wander. I was Kate now, not Barbara. Stanhope, not Laskey. I was not going to tell him any of that, of course.

He asked why I had come to this country, of all places.

“It’s where I was born,” I said. “I was an orphan, and Americans adopted me.”

No idea why I said that, but it was the right call. He sighed and looked at me almost with tears in his eyes. He sought signs of tragedy on my face and thought he saw them. He said, “We didn’t know much about the orphanages. I was a teenager when we found out how appalling the conditions were. It must have been hell.”

Then he looked at me again and tried to calculate my age and how old I must have been when I was adopted. I noticed his confusion as I still look like an adolescent—tall and bony. And I still behave like one. Only sometimes, when tired, I can be taken for an elderly woman. But usually I seem young—the way saints, madmen, and psychopaths always look young and innocent.

He said he and his wife had also thought about adoption, but they didn’t go through with it. He added that my parents must have been wonderful people.

“I came here to meet my birth mother,” I replied.

“She lives in our town?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I paid a detective to trace her. But I don’t know if she wants to meet me. I am not even sure if I have the courage to meet her. I will wait and see. I want to spend some time in this town on my own, to contemplate.”

“Of course,” he said. “It is quite a personal decision.”

“Do you know of a cheap hostel?”

I read something in his eyes. An idea. A desire. Perhaps he was already thinking about letting me live in Radu’s house. But it only gleamed for a second and then went out. He got afraid, I figured. He then told me about Traveler’s Inn. He said it was the nicest and the cheapest hostel in town. He took a napkin and drew a map on it to help me find the hostel. He also wrote down his number in case I needed anything. He said his name was Razvan. I told him to call me Kate. We just shook hands and parted ways. What a loser!

* * *

The hostel was decent. A funny building—an old villa in a neighborhood of other derelict villas and sidewalks covered with dry leaves, brown and rotting. It looked a lot better than the others though—renovated and painted in bright colors. Its yard was quite nicely trimmed, without an overgrowth of weeds and bushes. I wondered if it ever snowed here because the end of February looked like autumn to me, and I’m from California. The young guy at the reception wanted to use his English, so he chatted with me for quite some time, but he saw, at last, that I was tired and gave me the key. He even said that I could pay tomorrow, although the standard practice in cheap establishments is generally to make you pay in advance. I sure didn’t mind.

The room upstairs had a bed, a window, a lamp, and a chair—kind of like the prison cell. The window was bigger, letting some dull daylight inside, and the smell was different: slightly humid, perhaps moldy. It came to me again, that feeling that no matter where I went, I’d still be there, in prison, and condemned. Well, I was doing what I had promised myself I’d do after they let me go—see the Old World. I went to London and Paris first. Saw the buildings, got into museums, and tried to enjoy the crowds. I liked the catacombs in Paris with all those skulls, and the Millennium Wheel in London. I guess I like burrowing into the ground and flying up in the sky, above everybody else. Yet when I was back on the ground, on the same level as others, I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were watching me as though they knew who I was. When I phoned Mom, she said that I shouldn’t be making much of it and that they were looking because I was pretty. I knew I was pretty, but it’s never done me much good. And then I traveled to Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe being kind of the end of the world, so there would be less chance of them recognizing me there.

I thought the university man at the vegan café must have thought me pretty. Now he was probably home with his wife, watching TV and jerking off while his wife cooked them dinner. Or maybe he was eating his heart out, wishing he had gone after the American woman and thinking, “I should have had an adventure … life offered me a chance and I did not take it.” People are unfathomable.

It is nice to daydream about that. I never had a single dream at night in all my life. They say I must be dreaming but just forgetting my dreams as soon as I awoke. Could be true. Anyway, I never remembered any of my dreams. Not even a feeling that I may have dreamed about something. It always felt like I just shut my eyes, and it was already morning when I opened them.

The psychologist back in California had wanted me to talk about my dreams before I went to prison. I had told her I never had any. The rug in her office looked striped because the rays of the sun slipped through the blinds. It was funny: those bright stripes of California sun in an office that wanted to be oh-so New York City. The move to the West Coast must have broken this doctor’s heart. Deviants like me were her only consolation. She had thought I was lying about not having dreams.

She said, “Okay, just let your thoughts wander, and tell me about the first thing that comes to mind.”

The smell of patchouli drifted through that office, coming from a tiny dispenser. I saw my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall and thought: I look really nice in an oval frame.

* * *

Somebody knocked on my door. Half-asleep, I thought I was back in my cell. Then I remembered that I was traveling. But I drew a blank when I tried to recall the name of the city. The daylight was seeping in through the window.

It was the man from the vegan café, the one who watched his cholesterol. He was sweaty and breathless from climbing the stairs. Or maybe he had run all the way here, afraid that I would disappear. He must really want to see me again.

“Sorry for barging in like this,” he said.

I told him that he was no bother and sat on the bed. I was perfectly dressed for the occasion because I hadn’t taken my clothes off when I went to sleep. My shirt was a bit rumpled, but my jeans were definitely okay.

“I felt bad for not doing more for you,” he said.

I told him he could sit on the chair. He sat down, and the chair squeaked. He lowered his eyes suspiciously but decided it was safe.

“I wanted to suggest—don’t know why I didn’t think of it straightaway—that you could stay at my friend Radu’s house. He’s not here, and the house is empty. I am, sort of, looking after it for Radu. It would help me if you stayed there. Plus, houses deteriorate if left empty for long.”

“For free? Oh, no, I can’t accept it. Perhaps, I could pay you.”

“No need … it’s me who is asking for a favor. I would be grateful. It’s like a housesitting job. We could both profit from it, don’t you think?”

He leaned forward, eyeing me. To him, I was just a pretty American, hailing from the land of the free, some fantasy fodder. He reminded me of Disney’s dancing hippos, both graceful and overweight.

I didn’t want to say “yes” straightaway. So, I said, “Let me think about it.”

“May I invite you for a cup of coffee?”

I grabbed my bag, and we went downstairs, where he paid for my stay, saying “This is the least I can do,” so I let him.

Outside was gray and wet. We walked past the leafless trees and crumbling apartment blocks into a café with a yellow light. It was almost strange that he was neither afraid of me nor recoiled in fear or disgust. But, of course, he had no idea who I was. He just wanted to talk. I was, I think, his first adventure in a long time. Perhaps he had dreamed of picking up a random girl for the past twenty years of his marriage. Pick her up, bare his soul to her, take her to bed. But he was always deathly afraid of it, I bet. People might talk, the wife might get wind of it. Pity the normal people! They want to live our lives, but they don’t want to pay the price. We, on the other hand, would sell our souls to be one half of some conventional couple and live in some cozy little house where we would watch TV with our cozy little husband, yet things always go wrong for us, and we end up being persecuted.

He told me how he and Radu had been friends since first grade. Razvan and Radu, Radu and Razvan were two best buddies, the “fatso” and the “stick,” he told me. At school, they shared the same desk, walked home together, and explored the neighborhood. Radu’s parents had left for abroad on a party-sanctioned trip and didn’t come back. It was 1979 or 1980 when they defected. Radu was brought up by his aunt. Because it was the aunt’s sister who had defected, the aunt got demoted in her job—from a department chair to junior professor. That displeased her greatly. She had been an old-school Marxist philosopher but was now an uber-Marxist to counteract the stain on her biography. I kept nodding as if I knew what he was talking about.

As soon as Radu turned eighteen, Razvan continued, he left home and went to the capital. Times had changed anyway. Radu’s parents returned after 1989, and the family was reunited. The aunt was left to her own devices, which suited her just fine. Razvan doubted if Radu ever missed his aunt and vice versa. But last year she died, and Radu inherited the house.

“He gave me the key,” said Razvan. “He didn’t want to do anything with it. Just left it like it was and went back to his charmed life in the capital city.”

“Why is it charmed?”

“I’m joking. Not charmed. Sad.”

He obviously enjoyed talking. Perhaps nobody had listened to him in a long time. Or he liked explaining things to a pretty girl. I was curious; I didn’t know any Marxist philosophers or anyone fleeing from a one-party state to another or any men brought up by their aunts.

“Why doesn’t he rent the house out?” I asked.

“He’d need to make all kinds of repairs, throw away the old clothes, old books, the broken furniture … But no worries. The house is perfectly livable. It just would be difficult to make a profit renting it. Although he could sell it, a developer would buy and then demolish it to build an apartment block in its place. Developers have been destroying the neighborhood. So, I’m begging Radu not to sell.”

We walked again along the villas—most of them were ramshackle. The whole neighborhood was doomed to be replaced by apartment buildings with the trees cut and the grass never growing again. I smelled smoke—somebody was burning dry leaves. We stopped in front of a small blue house with an arched roof portico. Four chipped stairs led to the door.

“This is it,” said Razvan. “Do you like it? Do you see yourself staying here? Radu wouldn’t mind.”

He bit his tongue, aware that he was being too coercive.

“Do you think his aunt would have minded?” I asked.

Razvan shrugged. “Don’t know about the aunt, but Radu would be happy knowing a girl was living in his house. He is the loneliest man I know.”

I pulled a sad face in order not to smirk; what could these people know about loneliness? Where I come from, loneliness lands you in prison. That’s what I had said when arguing in my defense—that I was simply a lonely person. But they didn’t believe me because I was too pretty, and my parents were well-off. I was “the worst woman in America.”

And I felt such a cosmic sense of desolation that, had they executed me on the spot, it would not have helped my sorrow: it felt as if the sadness of the world would have lasted forever, even with me removed from it.

If this doesn’t make you lonesome, then what does?

* * *

I had always wanted to live in a house with a high ceiling, but I had never gotten the chance before. Even at Mom and Dad’s, the ceilings were low. Forget about my cell. Briefly, once, I had rented a studio apartment with a high ceiling and an ocean view, but my stay was cut short because of what happened to Mickey. Now, I was giving happiness a second shot.

“It’s an old-fashioned house,” Razvan said, “a suite with no corridor.”

Indeed, the living room led to a bedroom, which led to another bathroom, which led both to a small back room and to the stairs that led down to a half-basement kitchen, and then a few stairs that led up to a back door. The back door opened into a tiny yard.

“It’s very quiet,” said Razvan. “None of the neighbors are ever home.”

The bigger, newer villas on the right and on the left behind a thick wooden fence seemed empty. I looked down at the soft brown soil under my feet.

“I’d like to plant something when it gets warmer,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

I love working with earth. Planting, weeding, and mowing the lawn. Once I had been on a serious archeological dig. It was fun, and I was really good at it. But one night, my buddy and I went digging for treasures on our own. The archeologists got wind of it and threw us out.

Razvan showed me the tools: the shovel, the rake, and the watering can. I feel sad now when I remember the poor thing displaying these instruments in the hope that I would be watering flower beds. But that was what I was thinking about then, too. Man proposes but God disposes.

We went back into the house. The rooms were filled with vintage furniture from the ’60. Brown was the owner's favorite color—the curtains were brown, the tables and chairs carved of brown wood, and even the moth-eaten rugs were brownish.

“So many books. All philosophy?”

“Marx, Engels, and Lenin predominantly. Other philosophers as well, of course. I wonder what Radu will do with all these books. Nobody will want them … so old and dusty.”

Razvan opened a window to let fresh air inside the stuffy room. Then he had a sudden thought, “If you want to learn the language, I can help you. It’s your language too, after all. The first language you heard in your life.”

I told him I would think about it. I am not normally good with languages.

“Is this your friend?” I pointed to a black-and-white picture in a round metal frame. A little boy with sharp features stood beside a woman wearing glasses.

“Yes, that’s Radu and Olga. Professor Olga Costinescu.”

The boy and the woman in the photograph were standing apart, not touching each other. Neither of them was smiling. People in these socialist countries didn’t smile for pictures ever. We always smile in America. I even smiled for my mugshot.

Razvan asked me if I had enough money. I replied that I didn’t want to become a kept woman just yet. He was embarrassed.

The walls were painted beige, and there were fine cracks in the white plaster of the ceiling.

“When I lived in the orphanage,” I said, “I always dreamed of a house like this. I wanted to live in a big house with nice curtains, and my family drinking tea in the kitchen or barbecuing in the backyard.”

Razvan looked at me with his big black eyes, and it felt like he wanted to kiss me but stopped himself. I could tell he had a good heart. It would have been alright with him if we remained friends. I’d housesit for him, and he’d teach me the language.

“I will get you a cell phone,” he said.

We stood in the entrance hall, and neither of us knew what to say next. I was going to stay behind and make myself comfortable in this house. He was going to leave and bring me a phone later. But I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him all to myself, right there.

Five years ago, a newspaper had called me “a girlfriend from hell.” And from that very hell, I now called out to Razvan,

“Stay.”

* * *

Whatever clean-up Radu had done here, it must have been perfunctory. I was surrounded by a dead person’s belongings: notebooks, trinkets, postcards, jewelry. A Radiola that would never play again. On the desk, a dried-out pen and a yellowing sheet with two words—were these the last words the aunt had written?

And all the clothes. When I opened the wardrobe, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the inner side. A smell of mothballs, rows of blouses, and two-piece suits in somber tones. All had a severe, masculine cut to them. In the other wardrobe, I found astrakhan coats and ladies’ felt hats.

I threw my clothes in the washing machine and took a blouse and a skirt from the wardrobe. They fit me; the aunt must have been a gangly woman too. I buttoned the cream-colored blouse to the top and slid my hands down the gray skirt. My reflection in the mirror looked old-fashioned and serious. What I needed was to put my hair up in a bun and set a pair of glasses on my nose, and I’d look like Professor Olga Costinescu or the psychologist back in California.

The china in the kitchen cupboard was fragile and dusty. A row of old cookbooks made me wonder if Marxists were good at cooking. I’d rank it as a bourgeois pastime, but what did I know. Next to the kitchen, there was a storage room with more musty-smelling books, threadbare towels, a pack of toilet paper nibbled by a mouse, and a box full of Christmas decorations. Did Marxists celebrate Christmas?

I remembered that the philosopher aunt used to have a boy in the house. The cooking and Christmas must have been for him. The aunt had tried her best. The psychologist had asked me about Mom and Dad and tried to find fault with them, but Mom and Dad were alright as far as I was concerned. The aunt must have been alright too. I took out a golden bauble and a wreath with pinecones. I thought I might stay here for months to come and then decorate a Christmas tree eventually. I could be happy here—if only I weren’t me. If only I could become somebody else entirely. Not just by merely changing my name or by changing a place.

Yet I will stay me forever until the day I die. Oh, the injustice of it all to be one’s own self forever! To be doomed to be one’s own self!

* * *

Razvan was shocked when he saw me in the dead professor’s clothes. I was ready to apologize, but he said it was not a problem. The clothes were going to be binned or donated anyway. In fact, I could see that he wanted me to stay dressed like that. I made us coffee, and he kept staring at me. I wondered if he used to have fantasies about Professor Costinescu when he was young. He brought a bottle of whiskey. He seemed to think of himself as a whiskey connoisseur. I barely touched it; I didn’t want to fall off the wagon. But he became dewy-eyed and maudlin. He wanted to hear more about my life as a Romanian orphan. I said I remembered being hungry and never having warm water and having to shit in a stinking toilet.

“Just a hole in the floor, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

In prison, I had watched a film on TV in the common room about Romanian orphans. They were beaten and starved and tied to their beds. They pissed and shat themselves, but nobody cared. I shivered when I thought of my life as a Romanian orphan. I felt like I deserved more compassion from Razvan.

When I told him we were beaten there, he took my hand and kissed it.

I told him, “After I was adopted, I wanted to convince myself that my orphanage memories weren’t real, that I was never really brought from that awful place. Some children thought that they were stolen from a royal palace, but it wasn’t true, was it? That’s what I kept telling myself. Yet when I was thirteen, it struck me again. Who were my real parents? Imagine not knowing anything about yourself.”

Razvan looked at me with his big, humid eyes. I wanted to lose myself in his gaze, and I felt as if I was a character in a romance novel. And so, I continued, “But it took me many years to sum up the courage and hire a detective. It cost me all my savings, but I learned the name of my birth mother.”

I was not going to tell him the name because I hadn’t invented it yet.

“Do you think that meeting her will fill the void in your heart?” he asked and took my hand in his.

I liked this part: “filling the void in my heart.” It sounded meaningful to me.

“Even if it doesn’t … at least I will catch a glimpse of her,” I said. “Otherwise, I will continue to feel as if I come from nowhere. I want to ask her why she left me there. Was she too poor to keep me? Was I unwanted? Was I an ugly baby?”

“You were never ugly,” he said and went quiet.

I asked him to tell me more about the town, and he was happy. He said I must go see the old cathedral with stone carvings, the big palace that was a museum now, and the university building.

He said that the coolest thing about it was the Hall of Lost Footsteps.

“Why lost?” I asked.

“Because the hall makes the noise disappear,” he said. When he was a child, his dad had taken him there.

“Your dad worked at the university too?”

“Yes.” As a boy, Razvan said that he liked the paintings on the walls.

“It’s a depiction of the Romanian soul,” he said.

I think he wanted to make me take pride in my nationality—the fact that I was born Romanian.

“What’s a Romanian soul?” I asked.

“I will take you to see them,” he said.

And here was the real crux of the matter.

Much as he wanted to show me around the city, Razvan was afraid to be seen with me. His colleagues—or worse, his wife—could see us together. What if we appeared too close? What if he couldn’t come up with a proper explanation?

Out of fear, he never showed me the Hall of Lost Footsteps. I went to see it alone. I spent many hours alone, waiting for him. While I waited for him, I visited the cathedral, the opera building, the merchant street, and all the trimmings of a county town. When I went to the university, I saw the Hall, and I liked the paintings. There was a lot of blue and a lot of fantastic beasts and human figures emerging from clouds. Naked women, too (bold for a place of higher education), and a picture where heroes were meant to be “accepting death.” When I looked, I wondered if something in me had responded, whether I could have a Romanian soul, or at least train myself to feel like I had one.

I walked away from the university building, crossed the boulevard, and lost myself in the little streets running down the hill. Some of them had pavement from over a century ago; some of them were unpaved. The houses didn’t look like villas anymore: just shacks with no running water. A rooster, plus a couple of hens, walked in the front yard, and always a bored dog or two would start barking whenever I passed. Other dogs would join in the choir, so that I walked down the winding streets, past the draw wells, accompanied by a whole barking glee club.

This would be a suitable place to meet my birth mother. Perhaps she lived in a hut like this without running water and could barely feed a dog. And when she’d had me, she thought I would be better off in an orphanage. My imaginary mother must have been very young when she had given birth to me, I thought to myself. I would approach her poor hovel, knock at the door, and their dog would bark out loud.

A woman would yell, “Who could it be?”

Then, a man would yell, “Make sure you look through the eyehole before you let them in.”

And the woman would then shout back, “I know! I know!” She would come to the door and ask, “Who is it?”

I would somehow understand what they were saying and would answer in their language, “It’s me, your daughter.”

My mother would come out. She would still be young, in her fifties, slim, and dark, and she would look at me with suspicion in her eyes: could it really be her daughter, her Zamfira, or Ileana, or Vasilica, or whatever my name had been before my adoptive parents gave me an American name?

Then I walked over to the synagogue, a building made of stones with a dome. It looked empty. Razvan had told me once that many Jews had lived in this town once upon a time. But most of them had perished during the Holocaust, and the rest had emigrated. He had said that he had first reckoned that I may be one of those Jewish Americans who come here in search of their roots. That’s an idea, I thought. Maybe next time. Being Jewish. Not with Razvan, alas, it was too late for that. I was kind of stuck in the orphan mode. But with someone else. I did feel like an orphan, being so alone, but I sort of felt like a Jew too, persecuted by public opinion. Must there necessarily be a contradiction? One could be both. Perhaps I could be a Jewish orphan.

I walked past the synagogue, turned on the big street, and followed it to a square with a statue of a gigantic female on it, probably a “Liberty” or a “Motherland.” The square was flanked by a socialist-style building of a hospital, some old villas, and a pub on the corner. The tables were obscured by bushes and a low awning. I was thirsty and so I went inside. Everything seemed lopsided there, including the tables, the chairs, and even the customers, most of whom were missing something: a limb, an eye, or some teeth. One had a cauliflower ear, another’s nose was a rosacea-infested bulb. They were friendly though: three of them motioned for me to sit at their table and, in a split second, I had a glass of house wine in front of me.

I sensed that homely smell of unwashed bodies that almost does not exist in the States, the land of obsessive showering. As soon as I spoke, they knew I was a foreigner, and they really liked it. I tried to understand what they said in their broken English, with words from other languages thrown in. No music here, just a hum of drunk voices and the smell of cheap ciggies.

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“Oh, welcome to the Hotel California, right? I have a cousin in California. Perhaps you know him.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Tourism,” I said.

“Tourism? You are in the right place with us here. All the elite drinks here.”

“Shut up! She hasn’t come here to see the pub. You ought to see the Palace of Culture, miss.”

“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.”

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?