House of the Lost

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Romania, early 1970s

Mara had not known whether the nuns at the Debreczen convent were aware that she had killed another person. She did not know if Sister Teresa would have told them, or even if Zoia might have found a way of telling them. She could not think what she would do if they all knew what had happened to Annaleise.

But it seemed to be all right. They made her welcome in a rather gruff fashion, and folded her into the pattern of their lives. As Sister Teresa had said, it was not an easy pattern. The days were filled with work: Mara was expected to help with scrubbing the stone flags in the big scullery and in the corridors and to take her turn in the laundry which was always filled with steam and smelled of starch and lye soap, and in the refectory where there was usually a mountain of washing-up. Each day at twelve there was a small raggle-taggle queue of tramps who came up to the convent for a meal – Mara was not allowed to hand out food to them, but she was expected to help with chopping vegetables to throw into the big simmering vat of stew, and to stir the steel urn of strong tea the tramps liked.

There were lessons each day, as there had been at home, but there were only the four other girls to share them. They did arithmetic, history and geography, all of which Mara had done at home, but they also had to learn languages. Latin, which Mara found difficult, but which the nuns said firmly was the universal language of religion, and also a smattering of French and English. Mara set herself to learn these two as well as she could because by then she was allowed to send and receive letters, although she was never sure if all her letters reached Mikhail, or if she received all the ones he sent her. But in the letters she did get, Mikhail said he was learning French and English and it gave her a feeling of closeness to him. Struggling to understand the unfamiliar structuring of sentences, she was able to think of Mikhail doing exactly the same. When he wrote that he wanted to read the great writers of the world in their own language she redoubled her efforts, spending hours in the convent’s small library. Sometimes she ached with longing to see Mikhail and hear his voice. She wrote to him about her days, describing everything she did. She loved it when he wrote back saying how much he enjoyed hearing from her, and telling her about his own lessons and the village gossip, and sharing small jokes about French irregular verbs and peculiar English spellings and pronunciation of words like bough and cough and rough.

She missed the company of a big classroom and the little tests that used to be set, and the playground and the games, and she missed her own village and the cottage. But Sister Teresa visited Debreczen three times a year and always brought news. Mara’s grandmother was well, Mikhail was growing up, and working hard at his studies. Such a clever boy. Mara wondered if she would ever see Mikhail or her grandmother again. She wondered, as well, if she would ever see Matthew.

Romania, early 1980s

Matthew was seventeen when he finally accepted he was not going to see Mara again, and that he was not going to see his father either. It was not a sudden acceptance. It gradually crept over him during the years of going to school and running home each afternoon in case this was the day his father came back. He counted the months and then the years – one year, then two, then four and five. He worked hard during those years, mostly because it was what his father would have wanted, and he even tried to understand arithmetic which changed its name to mathematics when he went up to the senior school. Almost every moment of his spare time was spent drawing, painting and reading books about famous painters. At odd moments he drew the cartoon figures he and his father had talked about, trying to make up stories about them as his father had planned. He did not think the stories were very good, but he liked drawing the figures.

And now he was seventeen and it was eight years since his father had been taken away and since Mara had vanished. They’ll never come back, thought Matthew miserably. But I’ll never stop hoping or trying to think of ways to find them.

Occasionally he wondered what would have happened if he had told the Securitate about his father’s articles. He understood now that his father was regarded as a dissident, even as what was called an enemy of the state. The Securitate were still around a lot of the time, prowling the village streets, talking to people. ‘And listening at doors,’ said Wilma, who had grown stouter than ever with the years and still fussed over Matthew as if he were four years old, and queued for hours to get the ingredients to cook his favourite goulash when he was feeling lonely.

‘They’re spies and murderers, those Securitate people,’ said Mara’s brother, Mikhail, who was two or three years younger than Matthew, but far cleverer than anyone Matthew knew. Mikhail hated the Securitate because they had stolen Mara one night. Sister Teresa had told him and his grandmother that Mara had been taken to a place where she could be looked after and that she was safe and well, but Mikhail said Sister Teresa was only repeating what she had been told to say. Nuns and priests had sometimes been brave and outspoken, he said, but mostly they bowed to authority. He thought that was what Sister Teresa was doing over Mara’s disappearance. What did Matthew think?

What Matthew thought was that if Mikhail talked about the Securitate so openly and so disparagingly, he might one day find himself stolen away as well.

‘I don’t care,’ said Mikhail defiantly. ‘I read in a newspaper about Nicolae Ceauşescu. He’s wicked and greedy and selfish. He sends all our food and medicine to other countries so he can pay off Romania’s debts. If he cared about us he wouldn’t mind about a few stupid debts, he’d care more that everyone had enough food.’

‘Nobody would sell food and leave people to starve,’ said Matthew disbelievingly. ‘And you’re not supposed to read that kind of newspaper anyway.’

‘It was a good newspaper and it said Ceauşescu didn’t care about people starving,’ said Mikhail, obstinately. ‘I believe it. Newspapers don’t print things that aren’t right. Anyway, if he didn’t sell our food, where is it? It’s not in the shops. The newspaper said the next step would be rationing, like in the war between England and Germany when people only got half an egg and hardly any meat.’

‘How can you have half an egg?’

‘I don’t know, but that’s what it said. Ceauşescu says he’s keeping food out of the shops so we don’t get fat. I’d like to see anyone get fat on the food in the shops. Chicken wings and claws. Things made out of soy and bonemeal. Can you remember the last time you had meat – proper real meat?’

‘Wilma buys sardines,’ said Matthew, who could not bear sardines. ‘She says they’re just as good as meat, really. And she buys BucureÅŸti salami, although she says that’s no more than bonemeal, soy and pork lard.’

‘And the Ceauşescus have at least a dozen fine mansions and yachts, and lavish banquets whenever they want,’ said Mikhail bitterly. ‘I would like to kill them. I think Elena Ceauşescu’s a vampire.’

‘You don’t do you? Not really?’

‘I do. She sucks the life out of this country like Dracula. Or like the Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Bathory bathing in virgins’ blood.’

‘Mikhail, where on earth—’

‘Books mostly,’ he said. ‘The ones in your father’s library.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘You did say I could borrow whatever I wanted, and I always, always return them.’

‘You can read the entire shelves,’ said Matthew, who liked and trusted Mikhail more than anyone else in the world, except perhaps Wilma. Mikhail was constantly surprising him.

‘Some of the books are in French,’ said Mikhail. ‘I’m trying to learn French, a bit at a time. Some of the finest literature in the world is written in French, it’d be good to read all those books in the original language. Proust, Voltaire and Dumas. And English. Think of reading Shakespeare and Dickens in their own language. Languages are interesting, aren’t they? And useful. You never know when you might travel to another country; you’d want to know how to talk to people, wouldn’t you?’

On the night before Matthew’s eighteenth birthday Wilma came plodding determinedly into the study. Matthew liked being in the study because it made him feel near to his father. He liked having the photograph of his mother to look at while he sketched or read, as well. He was sketching when Wilma came in. She wanted, she said, to speak about Matthew’s future.

He put down his sketchpad to hear what was clearly a prepared speech.

‘You need a future,’ said Wilma, ‘with proper training. It’s what your father wanted and it’s what your mother would have wanted as well.’

‘I’ll have to have a job, won’t I?’ said Matthew. He did not know what kind of job he could get, but it was what people did when they left school. There was money in a bank somewhere for paying bills and buying food. Wilma had always said there was not a great deal of it but they would manage and Matthew was not to worry. Matthew had never entirely understood how it worked, but supposed one day he would find out.

He found out that night. It seemed that when he was very small, his father had set up some kind of trust fund with a bank.

‘It was in case anything should happen to him,’ said Wilma. ‘Maybe even that far back he thought those people would get him one day.’

‘And they did,’ said Matthew.

‘Yes. Well now, I don’t understand all this trust stuff – I never heard tell of such a thing before – but your father was a clever man, and he wanted to make sure you would have a little money. So he worked it all out with the people at the bank, without telling you. There were pieces of paper to be signed. I had to put my name to them as well, saying I had seen your father sign while I was in the room. A legal thing, so they said.’

This was exciting because it was as if his father was stretching out a reassuring hand from the past, but it was also dreadfully sad because of his father not being here to do the reassuring.

‘I never read the words on those pieces of paper,’ said Wilma, ‘and I daresay I shouldn’t have understood one word in twenty anyway. But what I do know is that it meant when you came to be eighteen there’d be money for you to study whatever you wanted. Not a lot of money, but your father thought it would be enough.’

‘To study whatever I wanted,’ said Matthew, staring at her, feeling something start to open up inside his head.

‘The university if that’s what you want,’ nodded Wilma. ‘You’d have to work hard at some exams or other – I daresay you’ll know about that, or the teachers at the school would.’

Matthew, his heart beating very fast, said, ‘Yes, they would know.’

‘It would be studying painting and drawing, I daresay?’ she said. ‘That’s what you’ll want, isn’t it? Although how you’d make a living from it, I don’t know any more than the man in the moon.’

‘I don’t know either,’ said Matthew, and discovered he was having to control his voice very tightly in case he started crying. My father’s gift to me, he thought. Wherever he is now, will he remember I’m eighteen tomorrow and know I’m being told about this money? Will he even be allowed to remember? For a moment the old image of stone cells and prisoners was with him so vividly he could feel the dank cold of the stones and almost smell the despair and bitterness. It was unbearable to think his father might be in one of those places. Matthew struggled to summon the memory of him seated at the desk in this room, smiling his gentle smile. But it eluded him and all he could see was his father being taken away by the Securitate, shouting back the words of encouragement as they drove off. ‘I’ll be back very soon… whatever happens, remember I love you very much…’

Matthew dug his fingernails into his palm to stop himself crying because he was eighteen tomorrow and grown-up people did not cry.

After a moment he was able to say to Wilma, ‘Yes. If there’s enough money, it would be studying painting and drawing I’d want to do.’

There was enough money.

‘But only just,’ said the man in the bank, to which Matthew, nervous and apprehensive, travelled. ‘You won’t be able to live a high lifestyle – in fact you might have to do evening work at times. If it’s art you want to study, you’ll need expensive materials – paints, brushes and canvases. But a lot of students have jobs in cafes and bars and so on, and there’s no reason why you can’t do the same. I daresay you’ll cope.’

‘I daresay I will,’ said Matthew, who would have scrubbed floors all night and every night if he could be taught to draw and paint during the day.

‘Your school can probably advise you as to an actual place,’ said the man.

‘Yes.’ Matthew had already talked to his art teacher, who had been surprised and pleased and was finding out what was needed and what might be available. The Royal Drawing School in Budapest had been mentioned, which sounded dauntingly grand, but which nevertheless made Matthew’s heart thump with sheer joy.

‘You’re hesitating,’ said the bank manager. ‘Is it that you don’t understand about the trust fund? It’s a perfectly legal and usual arrangement. It was set up shortly after you were born.’

‘I understand that. It’s just…’

‘Yes?’

‘Sir, my father was taken by the Securitate when I was nine.’ It came out in a rush and he had no idea if it was safe to say it to this unknown man. ‘I’ve never seen him since and I’ve never known what happened to him.’

But the manager said, very gently, ‘I know about that, Matthew. I didn’t know your father well, but I did know him for a man who spoke out against injustices – against what he saw to be injustices,’ he said quickly.

‘I don’t even know if he’s still alive,’ said Matthew. ‘But if he is…’

‘If he is, he could be anywhere in one of many prisons, and he could be in any of several countries.’

‘Oughtn’t I to try to find him? To use this money that way?’

The manager was silent for several minutes and Matthew began to be afraid he had said something wrong. But finally he said, ‘I suppose it would be possible to alter the terms of the trust – they say all laws are made to be broken – but this is a very strongly worded document. I think it would be expensive and also long-winded to break it. You’d probably use most of the money in lawyers’ fees and end with nothing – no funds to search for your father, and none for your studies, which is what your father wanted. He wanted you equipped to go out into the world and make your mark on it.’ He thought for a moment, then, clearly choosing his words carefully, said, ‘Matthew, the kind of search you’re talking about would be massively difficult and probably unsuccessful. The Securitate is a formidable engine; it’s very good indeed at keeping its secrets.’

‘You don’t think I’d find him?’

‘I think it’s unlikely in the extreme. What I do think is that you’d break your heart and end up with nothing. It could even be dangerous for you. Your father was what they call high profile, Matthew. His articles were scathing attacks on Romania’s government, so if it became known that Andrei Valk’s son was prying into the Securitate’s work… into their prisons, into the identities of the occupants… I’m sure you can see what I mean.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘I don’t think any of his articles appeared in this country, which is probably why it took so long for the Securitate to compile enough evidence to arrest him. Although I don’t know what really happened.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘They frequently imprison people on what seems to us a thin thread of evidence, but your father’s name was known in foreign newspapers and so they’d have had to be very careful. I’d say they took their time and made sure the proof was watertight. So even if you did find him, it might be very hard indeed to disprove the accusations or the charges. My advice is that you use this trust fund in the way your father – perhaps your mother, too – wanted.’

‘I’ll trust your judgement,’ said Matthew, meaning it. ‘Thank you very much for being so frank.’ He spoke truthfully; he did not think there was anything sinister behind the advice.

The manager stood up and held out his hand. ‘Good luck to you, Matthew,’ he said. ‘Work hard, but remember to play hard as well.’

‘Thank you. I’ll try to do both.’