Painter of Silence Read online

  Adriana helps the patient to sit up. She lets him lean forward on to her as she firms up the pillows behind him, in the small of his back and behind his head. Her arm reaches across his chest, his head falls to her shoulder, and she smells the sourness in the nape of his neck, the hollowness of him there. He is still so feeble that there is a long way to go.

  When he is upright she brings the food. She places the bowl on the blanket and puts her arm around him as she feeds him.

  Still he has made no attempt to speak. The girl Safta is probably right. He is a mute. Perhaps he is completely deaf, since he does not turn when she speaks to him or look when one of the other patients in the ward cries out. If he is deaf, that will not prevent her from talking to him. She talks to him all the time that she is with him, as if he is a baby that must be talked to if it is to become attuned to the human voice and learn the patterns and the sounds of speech. It does not matter what she says any more than it would matter what she were to say to a baby that she was feeding. The message is there in the tone of her voice – or if it is really as she thinks and he cannot hear her voice, then it is in her touch and her manner, in the shapes made by her lips and the warm breath from them so close upon his cheek.

  ‘You should have a name. We still do not have a name for you. May I call you by my son’s name, would that be all right? I am sure that he would not mind. He would not mind sharing his name with you. He would not mind at all. Yes, I’ll call you Ioan like my son. It’s a plain, true name. There are lots of Ioans. Perhaps you were even called Ioan before? Wherever you were. Whoever you were with. Wouldn’t that be strange, if you were Ioan before and then we named you that again?’

  She is talking rubbish, she knows that. But she is speaking softly. Even from the next bed it would sound as no more than a murmur. And the patient is gone now from the bed on the other side. He has pushed aside his lunch and shuffled off to roll a cigarette in the stairwell. She has often seen him there, skulking in the stairwell in his pyjamas. His lungs are so bad with the disease that the smoking seems to be no more than an idea to him. He rolls the cigarette and lights it, and then he coughs and can do no more than watch it burn between his shaking fingers. When it dies he pinches out the end and puts the stub in his pyjama pocket for the next time. She sees that all the same it is some kind of comfort to him.

  ‘One day I’ll tell you about my son, Ioan. I don’t have anyone to talk to about him, not now. My husband said I should stop talking about him, that it didn’t do any good to talk – well I don’t see that not talking did him much good either. What do you think about that, Ioan? Anyway, my husband’s gone now. He said I should stop waiting for the boy to come back. He wanted me to throw out his things. How could I do that? How could that be right, when I don’t know? With the world as it is nowadays, with people coming and going like they do, and coming back and you don’t know where they’ve been. Even now you hear about people come back from the war when they’ve been gone for years, and they’ve been in Russia all that time, and nobody’s ever heard anything about them, but there they are again, all of a sudden. No, I keep everything for him. That’s right, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’d expect your mother to do? You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Or maybe you wouldn’t think it. Maybe you don’t think. If you don’t have words, how do you think anyway? How do you remember things? Maybe you don’t remember things. Can that be so? Then you’re just here, now, and here I am speaking to you, but you can’t hear me or understand what I say, and that’s all there is.’

  The horror of the thought runs deep into her: that experience can be held down to this moment, this hospital ward with its hollow faces and its odour of disinfectant and illness, this bleak March day and the used-up sky beyond the windows, the aching city outside which seems only an extension of the ward.

  She stops speaking and looks into his eyes, which are alert, staring directly into hers. No, she is wrong. Of course he has memories. Only they will not take the shape of words.

  ‘It was terrible of me to think that, wasn’t it? Of course it’s not so, it’s not like that, just because you can’t say. I don’t know what you must think of me, Ioan. I am sorry, Ioan, I’m just a fat old fool. Don’t pay any attention to me.’

  That is how he becomes known in the hospital, as Ioan. It is a name. Better to have a name than not. It is understandable to Safta that the mother should choose to make his silence hers and to take him as a silent son. After all, he is still like a boy. He still seems a boy despite his stubble, despite the lines, the appearance of ageing brought on by his suffering.

  Safta has told no one that she knows who he is. It would be little help to him and none to herself. There is no one here who knows where she comes from. She has told only the immediate truth: that she has come from Bucharest and that prior to that she was with the army in Ukraine and Crimea. There is anonymity to that, to the city and the war. If anyone guesses as to who she is or what she was before – and her background must surely reveal itself in her voice and manner, even after a decade – if anyone has guessed, then she is grateful that they have been silent about it. Perhaps there are things about themselves also that they would prefer not to be known. Who they used to be. What they think. What memories they carry inside their heads.

  She brought him paper that first time she came to see him, and a pencil, but he has not touched them. Has he, too, learnt the lessons of these years? Does he also choose to keep things closed away?

  Whenever she has time she comes from the part of the hospital where she works and sits with him. She takes up the pencil and paper from where they lie on the locker. The lockers of other patients have food and books and photographs on them. His has nothing inside it except for the worn military boots.

  ‘They’re calling you Ioan now. See, I’ll write it out for you.’ She writes the word and points to him. Writes her own name, indicates herself. Once he could read that. There were just a few words he could read: his own name, hers, the name of the village. Poiana. He had learned to write Poiana and wrote the word beautifully, with that same care he gave to all the letters he wrote so that they seemed like the work of a calligrapher, and then he had held out his two rounded arms as if they contained the whole globe, and Safta thought that he understood its meaning, for the village was then the whole world to him.

  She writes out his new name again, then passes him the paper. She has it resting on the stiff board that holds his medical notes. He looks, no more. He looks at what she has written and then he lifts the papers to look at the notes beneath, the record of medications given, temperatures taken. He hands it back. It is as if they are all of equal value: the page, the record, herself, the pencil she had offered him which lies untouched on the blanket.

  She takes up the pencil and begins herself to draw. Her hand is clumsy, the lines unsure, overdrawn. She was never so good at drawing as he was.

  It is a clumsy sketch but he knows its subject from the first few lines. The house. The long span of it, the wide porch with the fountain before it, the drive with its acacias. She has some details wrong. She has too few windows on the façade, too many columns in the porch. His memory is precise. He would not have made such mistakes himself. Then the dogs are not there, the long pale dogs that used to spread themselves on the porch between the shadows of the columns. He would like her to have put in the dogs. The sun shone sidelong across the porch some days and the dogs would lie there in the bright patches on the stone floor until they were hot and shift then into the stripes of shade. Her drawing is like the house he knew as she is like the girl he knew: recognisable, but altered. Her name though, as she has written it, over and over again these past days, is unchanged. He wrote it himself when he was looking for her. He had walked up the avenue to the house and found no one there but the dogs, and they and the house were changed, and the dogs had shown their teeth and come at him to drive him away. He had gone to the priest by the church and again he had written her name. Iaşi, the priest had written, the na
me of the city. Then he had drawn the sign for a hospital. And a cart gave him a lift to the station and he had come to Iaşi and he has found her. Now she is asking him to draw. He has drawn nothing in a long time.

  Poiana

  2

  The house at Poiana was imposing at first glance. There was its whiteness, the long neoclassical front, the pedimented porch and ranks of green-shuttered windows. It looked larger than it was because it was only one room deep. If a person came up the drive and looked in he might see right through the glimmer of glass to the garden beyond.

  It was a place that light passed through, the light of successive windows thrown on to fine parquet floors in rooms that opened one on to another, the doors of the rooms always open – save when great and irritated effort was made to close them during the coldest stretches of winter – since this was a house which people moved through freely, like the light: family, servants, visitors, villagers who came on errands or to make a request or seek advice, the children of the house and the children of the servants, who were left to roam along with the dogs.

  Some days there were wild moments when the children ran from room to room, skidding on the polished wood. Or they hid themselves in cupboards and behind long curtains where only a quiver in the damask or a peeping toe revealed them. They jumped out from behind settees and when no one was looking they climbed on the furniture, not so much on the Biedermeier in the drawing room but on the heavy wooden chests and tables in the hall which for them were galleons to be boarded and fought for, one after the other, when the wooden floor was sea and the bearskins and scattered rugs an exotic archipelago. It made the game the more exciting that it was played beneath the painted eyes of ancestors who wore fur hats and robes with jewelled daggers and the long dark faces of mourning pirates. This game came to an end one day when Safta’s brothers got angry with one another and tore two crossed swords off the wall above the fireplace and fought with them. The other children watched in horror. Augustin cowered beneath the oak table and Safta screamed for help but by the time Stanislaw and Fräulein Lore arrived there was a gash four inches long on Gheorghe’s leg and the fight had ended of its own accord. They all looked at the cut and it was so sharp and deep that time seemed to stop for a hard shocked moment before the blood welled up.

  Augustin and Safta were both born at Poiana in the same year, six months apart. Safta – a name like a quick breath, for her full name Elisabeta was hardly ever used – was born on a still late-winter’s day in the great bed in the room upstairs that had seen the birth of at least three previous generations of her family. It was right at the end of the house, a high panelled room that had windows on three sides to the bare trees and the wide white distance like porcelain beneath the snow. The bed had tall wooden posts at the corners and was covered in an embroidered turquoise silk from China. Safta’s mother had been shown into the room when she first came to the house as a bride, and she thought it was beautiful until the housekeeper opened a deep panelled cupboard where the instruments of birth were kept. Marina Văleanu was a slender impressionable girl of barely seventeen, dark as the boyars in the portraits on the stairs and with eyes that could be as passionate or as sorrowful. She had just come back from a honeymoon in Venice and was so in love that she could not think of her husband without lust. Mama Anica was old and dried up, well past the age of gynaecological fears. She pulled out from the recesses of the cupboard pans, forceps, towels boiled and dried hard as bark, scissors, thread, a knife of unthinkable purpose. And the ugly sight quite unnerved the bride. When she had sex in the bed that night there was an underlying touch of dread, a premonition in the act, that took away her ardour. What is it, her husband said, still loving her. Aren’t you happy coming home with me? She could not tell him of the horror that lay hidden in the cupboard. From that moment on she understood that she was to be no longer his lover but the mother of his children. The first of these was already in her, born within eight months of that night but dead in his cot within a year. Safta, then Gheorghe and Mihai followed in too swift succession, but her spirit stayed apart. Making love and giving birth to four children in that great bed were the cause of a separateness that was to last all the rest of her marriage.

  The boy was born in August in one of the servants’ cottages beyond the stable yard. There was a terrible storm that night, crashing thunder and a stroke of lightning that struck one of the tall acacias close to the house. His mother Paraschiva was aware of the great clap of thunder just at the moment when she pushed him from her, so aware that she did not know if the noise was inside or outside of her. He will have heard it, she thought. That’s the first sound he will hear in the world. But later she was to wonder if that single burst of sound, the thunder and the almost simultaneous crack and fall of the tree, was simply too much for newborn ears.

  Or perhaps it was a judgement. Because she was alone. Because the baby’s father had not stayed long enough to make him whole. Because he was what they called a child of the flowers, though in his case it was not flowers but a crackling bed of autumn leaves. Because he had no inheritance and she could think to name him only for the moment of his coming.

  She could not have said exactly when it was that she might first have realised that he was deaf. He was a quiet baby. He cried rarely and when he did there was some different quality in his crying, which seemed less loud, less insistent than the cries of other babies, and less sustained. Safta could cry fit to drive everyone in the house to a frenzy, a cry that reverberated off the walls and went on and on until the only solution seemed to be to take her outside where there was space and silence and no echo, just for a moment, until the cold or the night made her gasp and there was silence and relief. But Augustin’s crying was level and brief, without drama. Or he did not so much cry as moan and writhe and thrash about. When she saw him do this it disturbed her deep and urgently as any mother with her firstborn, but often she did not see just because she did not hear him. Often he must have thrashed about for a long time without her knowing. From those early days he had learned to be undemanding of attention.

  He was slow to smile, she noticed that. In the first few weeks and months after he was born she noticed the restraint in him. His eyes seemed to focus and to alight on her face, but he did not respond as other children did. His head did not turn towards her when she spoke. She did not make much of it at the time. The world about him was busy. Often she was in the kitchen where there was always talk, or sometimes she would take him along to the nursery where she went to help look after Safta. The girl burbled and sang to herself most of the time, but she was six months older. She had quick dark eyes and was so lively that you could see she was listening to everything you said. It came about naturally that Paraschiva fell into the habit of talking to the girl more and to him less, of taking his quietness for granted.

  He was almost four years old before she admitted what she had in a way known all along. He was up in the nursery in the house. He was playing with a toy train, one that had been given to little Gheorghe who was not old enough for it and Augustin had taken it for his own. He loved the train. It was made of wood with a red-and-green engine, and carriages that hooked on behind. He could play with the train for hours, pushing it up and down, so intent on it that even the other children could not get his attention. Sometimes this annoyed Safta. She would give him a kick or a punch to get a reaction to make him stop his game and look at her while she paraded or told a story. And he would raise his little face beneath its dark mop of hair and smile placidly and do as she wanted. He would forgive Safta anything, even at that age, and watch her dancing movements as if she was some flickering, endlessly absorbing film running before his eyes. This day Paraschiva came in and saw that clearly. It was a film for him, like the films the travelling cinema brought. A silent film. The little girl was a tiny dark silent actress: oval face, mouthing lips, eyes full of feeling. On this particular day Safta had made him her audience as usual and pranced before him and told him a story, and he appear
ed to listen as he always did, but she was only moving her lips. She was playing her own game with him. She was pretending to be talking to him but she wasn’t actually speaking, and he didn’t know the difference. The girl knew what Paraschiva had not admitted to herself: that he could not hear a thing.

  That evening in the kitchen she told Mama Anica what she believed. It was hard to find the words. She thought she had known them for a long time and yet she could not have brought herself to speak them before. She looked at Mama Anica and wondered if she already knew, if she too had guessed as much. If each of them had known in silence. The discovery was the kind of news that did not fit easily into words because it was concerned with wordlessness. Once it was spoken she had the feeling that she was looking down into a deep black well.

  ‘If it is so,’ Mama Anica said, ‘then we should do a test. It will be easy to test. We should have thought of doing this before.’

  The boy was on the floor playing. He did not look up when his mother went to stand close before him where she could see his face. He did not look when Mama Anica came and stood behind him. She had brought the handbell that hung in the passage beside the back door, that had a high clear ring that called men in when they were needed from across the grounds. She rang it from positions behind the little boy’s head, close first to one ear and then to the other. Then she took a saucepan and a wooden spoon and beat the pan as if it were a drum. Each time his mother watched his face. She saw no reaction on it, not even a blink, until the saucepan was close enough almost to touch him.