House of the Lost

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The present

Michael Innes stopped speaking, and there was a long, deep silence.

The spell’s winding up, thought Theo. He’s used up too much emotion in telling me all that, and he’s drained. What a deeply unhappy story, though. He let the silence lengthen, then said, very quietly, ‘And so Mara was taken to Jilava.’

‘Yes. It’s a smallish place near Bucharest – Ilfov country.’ Innes seemed to take strength from suddenly realizing where he was, and from Theo’s presence. ‘The gaol is an old fortress, partly subterranean,’ he said. ‘The name Jilava derives from a Romanian word žilav. It means humid place. In some quarters it was known as the house of the lost.’

‘They vanished as abruptly and completely as if by sorcery,’ said Theo softly. ‘Living ghosts in a world that will soon have no memory of them.’

‘Yes.’ Innes looked sharply at Theo. ‘A man I once knew – a clever, brave, man – wrote that.’

Andrei, thought Theo, but he only said, ‘And Mara was taken to this house of the lost? To Jilava?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Were you taken there as well?’

‘No, although looking back I was probably lucky not to be,’ said Innes with a sudden grin. ‘I was a member of an organization called the October Group.’

Theo stared at him, and thought, Well, that’s something I didn’t pick up.

‘It was an underground movement,’ said Innes. ‘A lot of them were students. In the main they fought for justice for people wrongly imprisoned. We had radio stations and broadcast to try to recruit people to our cause – all illegal of course, and they were always being shut down. But for a lot of the time we managed to keep one step ahead of the Securitate. We tried to rouse international concern by sending articles to Western newspapers. Sometimes,’ said Innes, ‘we even managed to get prisoners out and across the borders into other countries.’ He paused. ‘Mara never talked about what happened to her in Jilava, but she kept diaries – a lot of the people in Jilava did. They made ink from the juice of berries growing on bushes outside their cells, although God knows where the paper came from. I think they might have stolen bits of it from the workshop. She had the diaries with her the day we got her out. She carried them in the bodice of her gown – she was afraid the guards would find them and punish her again.’

Diaries, thought Theo. Oh God, Mara’s own diaries from those years… Something darted across his mind – a faded uncertain image: fragments of brittle yellowing paper with thin pale writing, the erratic glimpse of a phrase, the fragment of a sentence. He remembered the odd impression he had had the night he was attacked – the sensation that he was reading an old manuscript by flickering lamplight.

‘But even without the diaries, we all knew what went on in the prisons,’ Innes was saying.

‘Re-education,’ said Theo. ‘It was a form of brainwashing, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. The destruction of the mind – the deliberate re-shaping of a personality. They used it in the 1940s and 1950s: Pitesti Gaol was the centre of the re-education experiments but Jilava came in a good second.’

‘You said “they”?’ said Theo.

‘The more extreme sections of the communist overlords. Officials from the original Iron Guard. The Securitate,’ said Innes, with bitterness and hatred in his voice. ‘But, Theo, the horror of what happened to my sister during those months is difficult to convey.’ He leaned forward as if eager to make him understand. ‘It’s one of those situations for which language is inadequate. Neither my language nor yours really has the words.’

Theo suddenly realized what he should have seen earlier: that Michael Innes’ precise way of talking was because English was not his native tongue.

‘The original aim was for prisoners to discard all past political, even religious, convictions,’ said Innes. ‘To reverse people’s values. They forced on prisoners grotesque, wildly inaccurate versions of their own lives and their families. That’s what happened to Mara. She went into Jilava as a scared seventeen-year-old on a faked charge of conspiracy. When she came out, it was as if the real Mara had been taken and another person substituted – a withdrawn suspicious woman.’

‘But hadn’t re-education been outlawed by then?’ said Theo.

‘It had,’ said Innes. ‘It was the early 1980s and it was more than twenty-five years since re-education had been stamped out. But it hadn’t entirely vanished. Some of the old regime were still staffing the prisons and their outlook hadn’t altered. If they took a dislike to a prisoner or if they were paid, they reverted to the old methods. That’s what happened to Mara. She had made an enemy of a high-ranking Politburo official—’

‘Annaleise Simonescu,’ said Theo. ‘And there was a woman called Zoia.’

‘Yes. You know more than I bargained for.’

Theo saw again that Innes accepted his knowledge. Presently, he would ask Innes about that, but for the moment his whole mind was focused on Mara.

‘After we got her out,’ said Innes, ‘I read her diaries. I wanted to understand her. I needed to know what had happened to her. Mostly they were scrappy notes, probably scribbled in secrecy or in a dark corner where she wouldn’t be seen. I’ll never forget the things she wrote. Later, when my English was better, I made a translation. I suppose I wanted it recorded in this country as well – writing it out in English seemed to do that.’ He looked at Theo. ‘I’ve still got the translation if you’d like to read it?’

‘Oh God, yes, I would,’ said Theo.

‘It’s rough and not very tidy, but it would help you to see that whoever killed Charmery – whoever attacked you – couldn’t be Mara. Because of what was done to her, violence is absolute anathema to her.’

Theo did not reply. He watched Innes open a drawer in the desk and take out a large envelope. Innes held the envelope between his hands for a moment, as if holding on to a memory, then gave it to Theo.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever want to read them again,’ he said. ‘I don’t ever want to re-visit those years. I still don’t really understand why you’re looking backwards at all this, but if they’ll help you…’

‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘Yes, they’ll help me. I’ll be very careful with them.’

‘I’ll leave them with you,’ said Michael Innes. ‘Go up to bed when you want.’

Theo had thought he would take the diaries up to the little bedroom, but he seemed to have gone beyond sleep. He sat back in the chair, and opened the envelope with care. Mara’s diaries, he thought, as he withdrew the four or five sheets of paper. There were no dates, but he knew Mara had been in Jilava Gaol sometime in the first few years of the 1980s.

Innes’ handwriting was illegible in places – Theo guessed he had been deeply affected by what he was writing – and the sentences were frequently disjointed, as if Mara had written scrappy notes at snatched moments. But it was possible to piece most of it together. As he began to read, the voice of the young woman who had been Mara Ionescu came vividly into the room.

‘Today I came to the sunken fortress of Jilava. A bleak grim place, cold, unforgiving and smelling of human despair…’

There were fragmented phrases after this – references to stone rooms with walls running with condensation, and to the unvarying routine of the days, with spells of work in the prison shop, sewing and working bewildering machinery. ‘I have no idea what we are making…’ Later, she wrote, ‘I can no longer smell the despair. Is that because it’s now part of me?’ At the foot of the same page, describing her surroundings more fully, she wrote, ‘I live in a narrow dim room, with slit windows overlooking a small brick yard. There are twelve of us. Each morning they take us to a stone-floored room with a tap – we are allowed about three minutes to wash and clean what they call the bucket – it’s a kind of commode which we share. Some mornings there isn’t time to clean it or even empty it. When that happens, the stench in the cell makes us all feel sick….

‘The other women say if I’m asked to confess to anything I should do so. It saves pain, they say. I don’t understand that…’

Theo read on, his senses racing. There was something about being taken to a different part of the gaol – the writing was a bit skewed, but it was readable. Was this when the re-education had started?

‘No matter what they do to me, I won’t admit to murder,’ Mara had written. ‘I didn’t kill Annaleise, I know I didn’t. She fell.’

She fell. Theo’s mind went at once to his book, to how he had described Annaleise stumbling and falling back into the gaping mouth of the old well.

‘Zoia comes here sometimes. She stands in the doorway watching me with eyes as cold as a snake’s. Yesterday I saw her give the guards something in a big envelope – money, I think… Is she paying them to do this to me?

‘Last night, when they brought food, they tied my hands up so I had to lick the food from the plate. There were dry crustings of fat and gristle clinging to the side because they no longer bother to wash the plates. I tried to lick up a mouthful, but my stomach rebelled and I was violently sick. Being sick on the floor with your hands tied behind your back is so disgusting, so disgusting… I can’t endure this, I can’t… If I said what they want me to say it would end.’

Did she confess? Theo wondered. Did they keep on with this subtle, squalid torture – this re-education? That’s what Zoia wanted, that’s what she paid the guards for. She wanted Mara to be a self-confessed murderess so she could see her sentenced – to death, presumably. He was no longer aware of being in the warm room; he was in the sunken prison house where medieval tortures were practised in secret, and where innocent people vanished to become wraiths, living ghosts in a world that would soon have no memory of them.

‘Today,’ wrote Mara, after what appeared to be a gap of several days, ‘they said if I confessed they would make sure my brother was safe. They reminded me how very young he is – not yet sixteen. I’m so afraid that’s a threat. If I don’t make the confession they want, Mikhail will be harmed.’

Mikhail, thought Theo, feeling the pity of it slam into his throat. Of course Zoia would use Mikhail to extract that final revenge, and of course Mara would give in.

‘Now they say if I confess they will allow me to go home to him.’

The final turn of the screw. She could never have resisted that, thought Theo. That’s the one thing she couldn’t have held out against – she was only seventeen or eighteen herself.

Mara had not resisted. Straight after the entry about her brother, she had written, ‘And so, finally and at last, it’s over and I did what they wanted. I confessed to killing Annaleise. But I did it for Mikhail’s sake, for my sake, so I can see him again, so he’ll be safe… The curious thing is that I feel cleansed for saying it, for admitting it at last. I am a murderess. It seems even more real now I’ve written it down.

‘They were kind to me afterwards – they gave me food and blankets and tonight I’m back in the room with the other women. That’s friendly. When will they let me go home, I wonder?’

‘They didn’t let her go home, of course,’ said Mikhail, early the next morning, as he and Theo ate breakfast in the cottage’s kitchen. It felt warm and safe and there was the good scent of fresh coffee, but Theo could feel the ghosts all round them. ‘What they did was to keep holding out the promise of release. It never came.’

The envelope with the diaries lay on the table between them. Theo put his hand on them. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what’s in those pages.’

‘I never have,’ said Innes. He was buttering toast and his tone was matter-of-fact, but his eyes were deep and dark. ‘I never forgot how she wrote that she had done it for me – how she believed it would make sure I was safe from the Securitate.’

‘How did she finally get out?’ said Theo.

‘I got her out. I went into Jilava with a friend and got her out in secrecy.’

‘A friend?’ Theo was aware of a sudden bump of anticipation, and he was not really surprised when Innes said, ‘It was someone I’d known all my life – someone I knew I could trust. His name was Matthew Valk.’

Matthew. The name brushed against Theo’s mind with friendly familiarity.

‘It was one of those wild plans that oughtn’t to have succeeded,’ said Innes. ‘It was like something out of adventure fiction, like those nineteenth-century heroes locked away in ancient fortresses, outwitting their captors.’

‘If you’ve got time, I’d like to hear the final scene,’ said Theo.

‘Surgery isn’t until ten,’ said Innes, glancing at the clock. ‘You’ve got to get back to Fenn to organize the locksmith though, remember.’

‘I’ll phone him in a minute,’ said Theo.

Innes refilled the cups.

‘We decided that two people would go into Jilava openly, as semi-official visitors. The October Group created a society called the United Communist Association as cover for us. They even printed several leaflets outlining the apparent aims of the association: a mixture of Ceauşescu’s own doctrines, with a sprinkling of hard-edged Leninism. It was said to be affiliated to the Party’s Humanist Prison Committee and the Politburo’s Law Commission. Both were fictional, but they sounded sufficiently official, and everything was deliberately hydra-headed to make checking difficult. Once inside – well, two people would go in and two people would come out. Only they wouldn’t be the same two.’

‘A substitution inside the prison,’ said Theo.

‘Yes. I was going to remain behind – Mara would go out wearing my long coat, boots and a hat pulled down to hide her face. Once they’d gone I thought I could bluff my way out, or maybe drug the guards. I’d been taking extra chemistry and biology lessons, and I concocted a sleeping draught which I would smuggle in with me.’ He smiled. ‘I can’t believe how naive I was,’ he said. ‘I still can’t believe that all of us didn’t end up being put up against a wall and shot. But the plan wasn’t as harebrained as it sounds. The October Group found out the layout of the prison, the number of the guards, even some of their names, changes of shifts, patterns of the day, where prisoners were at certain hours. And somehow we got inside the gaol,’ he said.

‘And you got Mara out.’

‘Yes. But what I didn’t know,’ said Innes, ‘was that Matthew had an agenda of his own.’