Watching these retrospectives with Ana, Paul noticed for the first time how they both laughed at the same time. How much they’d experienced, understood together, without even the need to speak things. He understood now the placidity and tameness of American political comedy, like that the girls loved to watch late on Saturday night (that it was live from New York, seemed to be main selling point), probably had something to do with the lack of creativity inspired by the ability to speak things plainly, to mock in plain sight, to jostle outwardly. There was no fear, no terror, no threat, lying behind the surface of this comedy, which made it less effective. The one he liked consistently was the Daily Show. He also didn’t find groundbreaking, what with its usually in-your-face conclusions, things too plainly stated and mocked, the absurdities in much too plain sight. Or maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t know so many of the guest actors, musicians, like most other viewers must have, that lessened his enjoyment. But Maya did, and loved it, and so they always watched it together, the only ones to do so, and he liked the host, his enthusiasm, his seemingly genuine caring, warmed something in Paul.
And of course, his daily, parceled-out consumption of the New York Times, to which he would return several times a day. Sometimes, even the following days, armed with a notebook and his old fountain pen, to make strides in his English, to note new vocabulary words, phrases. So much did Paul love that beacon of American democracy, that Maya had most delightfully unexpected of surprises bought him the newly-minted fifth edition of the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for Christmas later that year. Where he found all manner of curious, or hilarious, exhortations.
And there was plenty of time to read other books, too. In fact, in those early years, Paul felt his curiosity returning. Curiosity about the world, about history, about the organization of life—something he hadn’t felt since the early days. Like a self-forgotten anthropologist, sociologist awoken from a century-long dream, a color enthusiast finally able to tear off his sepia glasses lenses after a decades-long slumber.
But awoken from what, exactly? From a lack of spare time, but also of possibility, and of uncensored words, in some good measure. It was good, too, to find himself interested in the same subjects he’d always been interested in. Never mind that most of it led to the inevitable conclusion, which he didn’t need to be reminded about, that this world leaves so much wanting. That all systems have their problems, and that life, as designed, rarely tends towards fairness.
And so it was that those two years could have stretched on forever, or at least indefinitely, as far as Paul was concerned.
❈
But it was all the new, unburdened time spent with Ana that most satiated Paul. Coming to know her in a different light, so many full decades later, after Teresa and Paula and Maya, was remarkable.
Of course, they hadn’t said to each other, on the day of their wedding, only four short months after they met—Let’s do this, yes, forget our own selves where necessary, because every young Party functionary needs an adored wife at his side, to demonstrate his seriousness, his commitment to nation-building, and because every lovely young woman needs her knight, his armor and his promise. What better shield against this brutishly changeable world, making family, building lives other than our own? This, our only shelter against death and against country.
And that’s just how it was, all those solid years of country-building and home-making, of child-scrambling and security-chasing, leaving little time, or inclination, for mutual soul searching, dilly-dallying, probing the beloved’s useless dreams.
Paul wouldn’t change a thing. And yet, watching Ana prepare his favorite dishes for the first time, he’s amazed that he’d never known a moment like this before. Had she always ever so gently poked the dough that rose like a belly full of new life? So lovingly cradled the potatoes, washing them like precious stones? Sung those soft notes just beautifully so, paused to gaze beyond the trees with dreaming in her eyes? It made him shudder, to realize the ways in which his other’s look and hand and breath and skin, that she who touched and held and fueled him for so long, could yet conceal so much.
These are the kinds of things Paul comes to know of Ana:
The night before the miscarriage—the first, she says unprompted. She puts the knife, the eggplant down, straightens her back and gazes across the kitchen table. Fixes her pale gaze, splendidly still blue eyes, on the woody parcel of land behind their deck, as if addressing the squirrels who meander on the edge of the flowerbed.
It was February, do you remember?
How could I forget? He asks about that winter of 1955. It isn’t easy to forget a second year of crushed hopes, the death of Stalin having sent no calmer winds their way as yet. A year that landed screaming its dubious facts—how a decade passed since the war’s end, and things are worse; how he’s just turned twenty-six, and how there’s still no child, two years later—
Praporgescu. She names the street, their first home, tapping its memory like a hollow tree, and he sees the house, all twisting wooden bones and beautifully carved motifs. The timber gate, veiled in violet-purple, lavender-blue lilacs each May.
The wagon-style house was large, three rooms off a hallway, a kitchen cramped at its end. They lived in one room, Mrs. Nagy in another, and Fraulein Ute, Ana’s Salesian friend, in the last. Mrs. Nagy’s husband, class enemy, had once owned the entire house, before the people’s representatives stepped in to remedy his exploits. Both his landholdings and his subjugated peasants, still foolishly weeping for him or for themselves, were then collectivized. And while Mr. Nagy marched himself to a prison camp (for such is our complicity against ourselves), Paul and Ana, devoted young harbingers of the luminous future, timidly obeyed their generous directive to quarter themselves in one of the Praporgescu rooms.
It was a happy house for a while, before it was a sad house. Place where they dreamt and named their first child, who was labored, but never lived.
Unthinkable, Paul thinks, that if Cantemir had lived he would have been forty-seven. Or that Teresa, Paula, Maya wouldn’t have lived at all, because isn’t that how it works, life wagered against life without logic?
I wanted to die, then. The night before we lost him, Ana said. I couldn’t tell you. You might’ve locked me up, the old woman laughs. I woke up with a start, because Mrs. Nagy was swallowing her bitter life with wail-shouts like she did sometimes. And I knew that something terrible would happen. I felt that death was coming from the inside. Cantemir told me in a dream, that he didn’t want to come. He asked if it was a good world, if the world was good, and what could I tell him?
Why didn’t you tell me?
You had to leave. Remember it was that meeting that couldn’t be missed. How Leon wouldn’t let you, bitterly, she sees his face fall in sadness. No. Don’t worry. I would’ve been too scared, too young and stupid to tell you anyway.
District sub-Secretary, Paul couldn’t miss the monthly meetings in the capital. The grueling 8-hour journey aside, it was a coveted position. Entrusted with sufficiently apolitical portfolios, bureaucratic enough, removed enough from the center to stay clean—but still, reserving a seat at a table. Which, if the reformers, Leon’s grand campaigns, prevailed, would become an entirely other proposition. The position, the result of a hard-won compromise with Leon, who had convinced him not to quit the Party, not to commit that special brand of suicide, not with a young wife with child. Patience, was Leon’s motto, wait out these hardline years. Turn away when you feel aghast, because that dream we fought for, it’s just around some corner.
But you were dancing—he says, wondering if he misremembers, but he’s sure, it was that same night when, rushing home like a madman, he stepped into the warmly-lit bosom of that old house to find Ana with Fraulein Ute in the kitchen, flour smeared in their hair, at arm’s length because Cantemir, invisible, lay between them. Looping, they laughed like children, and even Mrs. Nagy sat watching from the table, untensed until her smile became a glare with the sight of him.
And then the dancing stopped—You must be hungry, Ana exclaimed, and—Yes, my dear, he said, although he rather would’ve danced, and Fraulein Ute, embarrassed and warmed pink up to the roots of her impossibly blonde hair, giggled her good night. Leaving them there, disoriented, some energy unspent and trapped.
It was only hours later, from the depths of a dream he would never know, that he heard Ana’s blood curling scream. Running into the bathroom he slipped on the blood of wife and child, then dragged it across the carpet, the steps, and snow, screaming doctor! telephone! into the night, while Mrs. Nagy and Fraulein Ute hovered over Ana, screaming terrified.
Did I ever tell you, Mrs. Nagy told me once that you’d think it was my fault? She was drunk, said you’d think I was an evil, a loose woman, for killing two of your children. That men like you would divorce stupid women like me, for not contributing to the national cause, she laughed now. Maybe then I would finally understand the poison that is the Party. And stupid girl that I was, oh God, I believed her!
Old bitch, Paul said, although of course she would’ve still been relatively young, compared to them now. Baba Yaga, he sighed, that’s what they used to call her, because they were still children. From so far away, it felt impossible that they had ever been that young, and lived those other lives.
I was so frightened of her, sometimes, when you were gone, that I would knock on Frauelin Ute’s door. And she would let me spend the night with her, Ana said like it was something to confess. I never told you, because I thought you wouldn’t like it. She rubs the skin of a small, spotty potato, examining its surface as though it might offer a looking-glass onto those women sharing a bed.
Fraulein Ute, she said, her eyes soft. I wonder where she is.
If she is, Paul thought. Two and a half years after they left Praporgescu, Ana stopped receiving regular letters from Fraulein Ute. Her last had described the growing difficulty of things, vivid memories of her once Bavarian summers. It was a coded plea, Ana, at last a new mom, had decided, and begged Paul to help her emigrate. And he had tried.
Are you sure that they let her go? she asks now and slices her finger instead of the potato. Paul jumps at the sight of her blood falling, the same blood that he and the Fraulein had wiped off a different floor, crying themselves into the morning.
As sure as we can be of anything, he says.
Ana watched him lingeringly sometimes, after such revelations. As though waiting for him, too, to confess to something. As though waiting for him to say, yes, I also never told you, how afraid I was, of those, my own nights in bed, with a foreign woman.
“Places of Memory” is an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Midnight in Exile.
