House of the Lost

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Silenced. The word and the way her mother said it, frightened Zoia. People in stories were sometimes silenced. If it was a fairy-story the silencing might be done by throwing them into a dungeon or imprisoning them in a windowless castle where they would be forgotten for ever. She knew those stories were not real, of course, but she knew other stories about people being silenced – stories that the grown-ups whispered and that were very real indeed. In the grown-up world ‘silencing’ could mean far worse than dungeons. It could mean your tongue might be cut out of your mouth so you could never speak again. It could even mean you might be killed.

Zoia knew Mother would not do anything like that, but still… She glanced up at her and began to feel far more frightened than when she crept up the creaky cottage stairs to strangle her father.

They did not walk through their village and onto the road as she had expected. Instead, they walked out of what people called the back of it, onto the fields, with the forest in the distance, and the mountains beyond. It was nice here in summer, with sunlight pouring down over the mountains and glinting on the trees, but there was no sunlight this afternoon. Everywhere was grey and cold, the trees had swirls of pale mist clinging to them and the mist lay thickly on the fields, so it was like walking through damp grey wool. Zoia shivered as the mist curled around her ankles and wished she had brought a coat, but her mother had not given her time.

They walked fast and every few paces her mother looked over her shoulder as if afraid they were being followed. With her scragged-back hair and frightened eyes she looked like a bolting hare. When they were across the field and at the edge of the forest, she stopped and pointed and said, ‘I’m sorry, Zoia, but you’ll have to go in there. It’s the best hiding place there is.’

Zoia looked about her, puzzled, not seeing anything except the fields behind them and the trees in front. Then her mother pointed again, and this time she did see and it was absolutely the worst thing she had ever seen in her life.

On the edge of the forest was a small building, low and ugly, made of pale old stones, crumbly and pitted and covered with moss and lichen. It was not very high – a tall grown-up, standing on tiptoe, might just touch the lower edge of the roof with their fingertips, and the roof itself was domed like the hairless skull of an old, old man. At the centre was a wooden door, and on each side of this door, just under the roof, were two windows exactly in line with each other, oval-shaped and framed by lichen-encrusted bricks. There was a terrible thick blackness about these narrow windows; they were like sightless eyes with the lichen for the eyelashes. They were dead, empty eyes, and yet if you looked at them for too long they might blink. It looked exactly like a stone face to Zoia, as she stood there staring at it. A massive stone face jutting up out of the ground, watching everyone with its blank staring eyes.

‘It’s the old well-house,’ said Zoia’s mother. ‘It used to serve several of the villages until everyone was given water in pipes and taps in the houses. But we used to hide here as children – it was our secret hiding place. No one ever found us and no one will find you. You’ll be quite safe.’

But Zoia did not think she would be safe at all. She was dreadfully afraid that this stone face had once belonged to a real person – a monster or even a giant – and that the empty eyes might suddenly blink into life.

When her mother pulled her forward Zoia resisted, but her mother was surprisingly strong and Zoia found herself being half carried towards the building. She thought she would make sure not to look up, but at the last minute she could not help it and in that moment, something flew out of the trees, disturbing the branches so that shadows shivered across the stone face.

She hoped the door would be locked and they would have to go back home and forget about hiding, but it was not. There was a black hook latch across it, and when her mother lifted this the door swung open with a groaning creak, like an extremely old man trying to move after a long time or like something dead trying to come back to life. A dreadful sour dankness breathed outwards; it was a smell that made you think of dishcloths that needed boiling in soda crystals or old drains that had been clogged for years. As her mother half pushed her inside, this bad-drains smell closed over Zoia and she began to shiver uncontrollably. The well-house was not much bigger than the main room of their cottage, and although it was dark some light came in through the open door and the two eye-windows.

In the centre, taking up at least half the floor, was what looked like a square black iron box, a few inches deep. Squitch-grass grew round its edges and a handle was set into it on one side. Dozens of scuttly black-beetles, disturbed by the light from the open door, ran about, and Zoia turned to look pleadingly at her mother, because she could not possibly stay in here. Her mother could not mean to leave her here.

But it seemed she did. She pointed to the shallow iron box, and said, ‘That’s the lid over the shaft of the well. There used to be a winch mechanism and the villagers would come along the lane to fill their buckets with water, then carry them back to their houses. I don’t remember that, but my mother told me how people used to meet at the well each morning to get their water. I don’t know if the well is dry or not, but the cover’s always in place so no one can fall in. The cover will be too heavy for you to move, but even so you mustn’t go near it.’

Zoia gulped and said, ‘How long will I be here?’

‘Not long.’

‘I won’t be here in the dark, will I?’

‘No.’ Her mother suddenly bent down and gathered Zoia to her in a hug. This was so unusual that Zoia was not sure what to do. Her mother never hugged any of them; she was always too busy and too fearful of Zoia’s father. She put her arms round her mother’s neck and hugged her back. It made her feel a lot better, but after a moment her mother stepped back, and said in a trembly voice, ‘One of your brothers will come for you later today.’

‘Not you?’ The memory of that sudden hug was still warm round Zoia’s heart.

‘I may not be able to. But you won’t be here long, I promise.’ She paused, then said, ‘Goodbye, Zoia. Always be a good girl,’ and then she was gone, and there was the sound of the door creaking back into place and the hook latch being fastened across the outside.

Zoia sank miserably on the floor, trying not to cry, remembering her mother’s promise that she would not be here when it was dark. Light came in through the windows and fell across the floor in the same oval shapes so it was as if a second pair of eyes were watching her in here. She tried not to look at the floor-eyes and sat with her back against the door so the eyes could not see her.

She had learned to tell the time at school, and she thought it might now be about three o’clock. How long away was the dark? Six o’clock? Then she would only be here for about three hours, she could pass the time by saying the poetry she had learnt. Between poems she rattled the door as hard as she could, but the latch stayed firmly in place and the door did not move.

The hours went on and on, the light coming through the eye-windows began to fade, and there was no sound of anyone coming to let her out. Zoia waited and waited. She tried not to look at the well cover or think about the deep shaft under it. Most of all she tried not to think about the stone head coming back to life.

The bad-drains smell was making her feel very sick. This was worrying, because it would be terrible to be sick here where she could not see anything. She tried to open the door again so she could at least be sick outside on the grass but it still did not yield, so she swallowed as hard as she could to keep the vomit down. In the end she could not hold it in any longer and she ran blindly into a corner and was sick as tidily as she could manage. It made her feel cold and shivery, and it added to the bad smells already in here. She walked to the corner farthest from the pool of sick and sat down.

The threads of light had almost completely vanished when, finally, she heard the wedge on the door being removed. Zoia hoped it would be her mother, but it was one of her brothers, the second eldest. She shot out of the terrible, sick-smelling darkness as fast as she could, and drew in deep gulps of the cold evening air. She wanted to be back in her home – she was thirsty and hungry – but she also wanted to be a long way away from the stone face.

Her brother would not look at her as they walked back across the field, and so Zoia, in a voice that was dry and cracked from crying and from being sick, asked what was happening. Remembering what she had done earlier in the day and how her mother had cried before making her hide in the well-house, she said, ‘Is Mother all right?’

But her brother did not reply. He hunched his shoulders, and walked faster so she had to run to keep up with him.

She never saw her mother again and no one mentioned her. Zoia did not dare ask anyone what had happened to her. Life in the cottage went on. The meals were cooked mostly by her eldest sister, who was fourteen and whom Mother had always said was a good little housewife and would make any man a fine wife. The others helped.

Zoia’s father’s body had been taken away. Zoia thought there would be a funeral, but no one told her when it was, and none of her brothers and sisters attended any kind of service. Once or twice the neighbours murmured something about ‘Pity’, and pursed their lips if Zoia’s family walked through the village.

It was not until she was fifteen and her eldest sister was leaving the cottage to marry one of the farm workers in the next village, that she told Zoia what had happened. Their mother had strangled their father, she said, her face serious and sad. Zoia was old enough to know the truth now – she was passing it on to her. After the years of beatings and drunkenness, their mother had finally turned on their father and strangled him with his own belt. Then she had run to the village priest to confess and ask him to tell the Poliţia Comunitară what she had done.

The priest had done so and their mother had been taken away to prison because she was a murderess. It was not ‘Pity’ Zoia had heard the neighbours whispering all those years ago; it was Pitesti. Her mother had been taken to Pitesti Gaol on the very same afternoon Zoia was hiding inside the well-house.

She had not been at the gaol for very long. A month later she had been taken out to the yard behind one of the cell blocks, stood against a wall and shot. It was what happened to murderesses, and serve them right. Zoia’s sister said their mother had not died at the first round of firing because the soldiers forming the firing squad had all been drinking the night before – most of them had still been half drunk, and their aim had been wide. She had died at the second round of firing, though.

Zoia never dreamed about her mother being shot or her father choking out his life, but the thought of Pitesti itself remained like a hard lump of bitter misery inside her. On that nightmare car journey with Elisabeth Valk, the sudden realization of where they were bound, had brought the misery chokingly into her throat, sending her tumbling out of the car to be sick on the roadside. But if she did not dream about her parents, she dreamed about the well-house. Even when she went to university she had nightmares about being dragged towards the sinister stone head, sobbing and struggling, waking drenched in sweat with tears pouring down her face.

And now, in the grounds of the Black House, she was facing another well-house – not the one she had hidden in all those years ago, of course – this one was older and more encrusted with lichen and moss because of standing in the deep shadow of the old forest all its life. But other than this it was almost a mirror image of the one in Zoia’s childhood village. The stone face. The place of punishment. The place for being silenced. She stood looking at it for a very long time, and it was only when she suddenly realized the sun had gone in and night was creeping across the hillside, that she turned away and went back up the track to the house.

It was not very remarkable that there should be two such well-houses, of course; probably the same builder had built them. There might be a whole series of similar well-houses in this part of the country – a succession of stone faces, places of punishment.

After a while Zoia began to understand the work she was expected to carry out for Annaleise and Elena Ceauşescu and for the Party. Results, Annaleise said at the very beginning, the Party wanted results. Zoia must deliver them.

She did deliver them. She gradually built up a network of people who listened and watched – her own months in the cafes and bars meant she could train others – and after a while she gained sufficient knowledge and confidence to send the minor officials of the Securitate running this way and that. There was someone who must be investigated in Carasova or Moldova Noua, she said, handing out addresses and names. Or there were people in Dognecea suspected of dodging the land laws and it must be looked into. When the suspects were brought to the Black House in the big jeeps, Zoia saw to it that they were held in solitary confinement in one of the many rooms until the Party’s interrogators came sweeping through the night in one of their sleek cars.

The Securitate were pleased with her. After a little while they suggested she take a more active part in the interrogations themselves.

‘A reward for all your good work,’ Annaleise said, smiling, and Zoia thought anything that made Annaleise smile like that must be worth doing.

The interrogations usually took place in the big stone-floored room beneath the house, deep in the hillside. It had been fitted out as a wine cellar, but she thought it might once have had a more sinister use. Those long-dead overlords who had lived here would not have flinched at throwing their enemies into these cold cells.

Zoia sat with the two Securitate men behind the long table that had been set up at one end of the cellar. They had pens and notepaper and carafes of water. Until today it had been one of Zoia’s task to make sure these things were set out; now she was one of the people writing on the paper and sipping the water.

The first interrogation was of a weasel-faced man caught printing seditious leaflets. The leaflets were set on the table, and Gheorghe Pauker, the more senior of the Securitate men, read one, pursing his thick lips.

‘You challenge the Party’s practice of collective farming, do you?’ he said, looking at the weasel-faced man.

‘Yes. It’s cruel and barbaric.’

‘It’s a system based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labour and income,’ said Pauker coldly.

‘What about the other cooperative principles of freedom of choice and democratic rule?’ said the man defiantly. ‘Only one quarter of the peasant farmers gave up their land voluntarily. The rest were beaten and deported.’

‘The kibbutzim in Israel are collective farms, and they work very well,’ said Pauker.

‘That was voluntary collectivism,’ said the man. ‘Kolkhoz in Stalin’s Russia was a different story.’

‘You aren’t here to argue,’ said Pauker angrily. ‘You’re here to answer for sedition.’

‘I am here to argue. The people I work with believe collectivism – cooperative farming – is only the start. The next step will be turning people from their homes and creating apartment buildings for tenants. Every person to be given one cell in an egg box. And,’ he said, his eyes alight with anger, ‘you can throw me into as many prisons as you like, I’ll still say what I think.’

‘But,’ said Pauker, ‘you won’t say it where anyone who matters can hear you.’ He went to the door and called to the guard outside, and the weasel-faced man was led away, his hands still bound. Zoia realized the man’s name had never been mentioned.

‘Where will they take him?’ she asked Pauker.

‘Pitesti,’ he said, off-handedly. ‘He’s guilty of subversion, no question about it. But his ideas will be lost.’

‘And the man? Will he be lost, as well?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, sounding uninterested, and then, with more animation, ‘Are we having lunch here? You served some very good wine on my last visit.’

A small stock of wine was kept for visiting Party officials, and Zoia had learnt what was good and what was not. She said, ‘Lunch will be ready for you shortly, and I’ve asked for wine to be served.’

‘Good. I always find these interrogations hungry work,’ said Pauker. ‘The prisoners always stink to high heaven.’

All the prisoners stank to some degree because they were usually kept in one of the cell-like rooms of the Black House without water or washing facilities, and the weasel-faced man had been there for nearly two weeks. Zoia did not say any of this, though.

Some prisoners were defiant and articulate, like the weasel-faced man, but others were frightened and squirmed away from the truth, trying to twist what they had done to make it seem acceptable. It was never acceptable, of course, and they never squirmed away from the truth altogether. Zoia rarely got it wrong and almost everyone who was brought to the Black House left it for incarceration inside Pitesti Gaol. They might be there for years, joining the ranks of the forgotten ones. Zoia’s mother had not been there for years, she had not even been there for months, but the end result was the same. They were all silenced and eventually forgotten.

Occasionally Zoia felt uneasy at the factory-like despatching of these people to Pitesti Gaol, but it was important not to think too deeply about what happened to them there. You could almost argue they were luckier than her mother had been, because they still had their lives. Annaleise said their punishment was deserved.

‘In some countries and in some centuries they would have been executed,’ she said. ‘Shot.’

Zoia thought, But people are sometimes shot for things they have not done. They sometimes take the blame to protect others. A mother protecting a child, for instance… And even the ones who are shot don’t die instantly if the firing squad has been drinking.

She had been at the Black House for almost a year when Annaleise arrived one night, and without preamble said, ‘We have decided on a disguise for the house.’

‘Yes?’ They had been waiting for this, because there was now quite a lot of coming and going, and there was an increasing danger that the people down in the village might grow inquisitive. Zoia said, ‘What is the disguise?’

Annaleise said, ‘How would you feel about looking after unwanted children?’

It did not happen all at once, of course. Orphanages did not spring up overnight, and it was some time before the orphanage within the Black House – the ‘disguise’ as Annaleise termed it – was established. But it did not take so very long and Zoia knew it came about because of one of the new Party laws.

‘One of Elena’s laws,’ Annaleise said with pride. ‘Her husband wanted to increase the birth rate, and she thought up this regime. Abortions are illegal, of course, but contraception itself is now prohibited. And – a very clever addition, this one – childless couples are required to pay higher taxes.’

‘Isn’t all that a bit harsh?’ asked Zoia after a moment.

‘Oh no,’ said Annaleise. ‘Elena is always very fair. Very just. As she told me herself, she has even biblical authority for the law. Genesis. God slew Onan when he withdrew and spilled his seed on the ground. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes.’ The nuns at school had skimmed rather rapidly over this part of the Bible, although there had been furtive giggling among some of the older girls about it.

‘Anyway, women who are over the age of forty-five, or have at least five children already, are exempt.’ Annaleise paused, then said, ‘But there is an unfortunate result of this law, Zoia. Much as I admire Elena, just between ourselves, I will admit that there’s an unfortunate outcome.’

‘Unwanted children,’ said Zoia, understanding at once. ‘And a lot of people won’t have enough money to feed them.’ Memory spun an image for a moment: herself and her brothers and sisters hungrily eating the thin, unsatisfactory stew which had been made with the cheapest cut of meat obtainable, and filling up on plain bread afterwards.

‘Exactly,’ affirmed Annaleise. ‘Children whom parents can neither feed nor clothe.’

‘And a whole crop of orphanages springing up because of it.’

‘Yes. The State will fund such places, of course, although it can’t be on any very lavish scale.’

Zoia said she still thought it rather a harsh law.

‘I don’t think so. Contraception might be forbidden, there’s still good old-fashioned abstinence. They’re not actually forced to have children at all, these—’

‘Peasants?’ It came out more angrily than Zoia had meant, but she had felt a stab of bitterness at Annaleise’s words. She looked at her, and thought: when did you ever practise abstinence! When did you ever suffer hunger? Not just a few pangs because a meal was delayed, but permanent aching hunger for weeks on end? But she had already gone further than was wise, so she smiled and said she was sure Elena and the Party knew what they were doing. Elena was so intelligent, said Zoia.

It did the trick; Annaleise smiled the wolf-smile that meant she would share Zoia’s bed tonight.

And so the children came to the Black House in twos and threes, in forlorn trickles, sometimes brought furtively by guilty-looking mothers or grandmothers, less often, by defiant fathers. Occasionally minor members of the Politburo brought them, although this did not happen very often.

Zoia dealt efficiently with these children, seeing they were fed at regular intervals, making the best use she could of the sparse money doled out. Sometimes the smallest children cried for quite long periods. It was irritating and exhausting and it took Zoia back to the unhappy years of her own childhood, but she could just about cope with it.

But Annaleise could not. ‘That constant wailing drives me distracted,’ she said, angrily. ‘I can put up with a good deal, but not grizzling babies for hours on end. For pity’s sake shut the brats away somewhere.’

‘But they’re too little. They might fall and hurt themselves and lie injured without anyone knowing.’

‘Then we’ll get one of the workmen to fashion something to keep them enclosed,’ said Annaleise. ‘Other places do it – they have a kind of half cage with compartments. I’ve seen them. It’s up to you, Zoia, but I’m not coming here again if that row’s going on.’ She stood in the draughty hall and looked about her disparagingly. ‘This place is falling apart. If I’m to come here again, you’ll have to get it in better condition. I’m not staying in a house where rainwater spatters into the rooms and gutters leak.’ She made for the door and Zoia said, desperately, ‘But there’s no money for repairs.’

‘Don’t be naive. Hive some off the allowance and spruce the place up a bit. Let me know when it’s done and I’ll see about coming back for a night here or there.’

Zoia did as Annaleise wanted. She was not very happy about the cages for the smallest children, but it meant Annaleise came back which was all that mattered. And looked at sensibly, there was no point in giving young children elaborate meals which might make them sick: plain fare was much better. It had been what she and her brothers and sisters had been given, and it had not harmed them. There was no point, either, in dressing the children in fancy clothes which no one would see and which they would soil within twenty-four hours. Clothes were difficult to get anyway, and the cost was prohibitive if you did get them.

The years went along and the Black House’s sinister reputation became safely established in the area. Not a place to approach after dark, and not really a place to approach in the daylight, either. The people who knew it was an orphanage were the ones who had placed children there, and they did not talk about it. They considered it shameful and sad. Somewhere best ignored and best forgotten.

Zoia’s stock within the Party rose quite high. Elena Ceauşescu was known to be pleased with her work, and if Elena was pleased, Annaleise was pleased. When Annaleise was pleased, she visited Zoia frequently – she still turned Zoia’s bones to water simply by touching her hand. She prepared little suppers for Annaleise herself, going down to the cold-floored sculleries and cooking appetizing meals, and she made sure that on those nights a big log fire burned in the hearth, and fresh sheets were on the old-fashioned tester bed. Life was not ideal, but life was never ideal. Zoia was as content as she could hope to be.

And then the spying snooping child, Mara, was brought to the Black House.