The Wrong Angel . . . F I C T I O N
I do not dream. I never did in Bucharest, and I still do not here in Montreal. These days, the only way my angels come to me is in waking flashes. In my one-room flat, late in the evening, my eyes become unfocused, staring at the images on television. Outside, below my open window, people stream away from Chinatown. I catch a word about this or that bar or night club.
The indistinct chatter from the street transports me back to a morning in Bucharest, on the busy footpath outside my little Angela’s school. Her tiny face turns up toward mine. In my daydream, my daughter’s eyes are round and blue as Turkish plates.
I snap back to the present moment as the music on this television program surges dramatically. The actors exchange meaningful looks. They talk of autopsy results. A child’s corpse lies pale and stiff on a metal table between them. The last time I saw my Angela, she was this girl’s age. I lunge for the remote control. I cannot look at this bloodless child’s corpse, although in truth, today my Angela would more be closer in age to my boss Nina than this dead child on television.
For me, this has been a typical evening at home. I have no messages on my voice mail, as usual. I have slotted my backside into the wide valleys in my futon, where I pick apart a rotisserie chicken. A far cry from the savory stews and velvety ciorbă my wife Sonia used to turn out of our simple kitchen in Piaţa Rosetti.
An e-mail check: as expected, there is nothing in my inbox that cannot wait till I am back at the university tomorrow morning. New messages from my boss and colleagues push older mail down and down to the bottom of the list, as if the weeks have made them heavier than the others. The oldest ones have been pushed right off the screen, where I can forget about them.
My eyes dried up raisins in my skull, I switch off the monitor, and pull the greying sheets over my futon bed. I map out the cracks in the plaster ceiling above my narrow bed. Unbidden, with thoughts of Angela, come images of piano keys. Behind closed eyes, my fingers contort along the keyboard, spotlights isolating me out of the entire orchestra. A piece of music, Liszt, as played by my own hands, twists in rhythm to the headlights sliding across my ceiling. I wait for my body to break the surface tension of sleep. My mind replays the image of my Sonia, sitting at the foot of our old bed. In my mind’s wanderings, she is eternally sitting in the grey pre-dawn light, always facing away from me, fastening her brassiere. Back muscles slide under her skin like kittens in a sack.
Our bedroom in Piaţa Rosetti received little light after they built the massive concrete block for party members next door. That monstrosity obscured any clues our bedroom window used to provide as to the time of day. And so, in darkness Sonia perched at the foot of our bed, and hooked the straps of her brassiere over one shoulder, then the other. It was a rare occasion when I fought through the cloud of sour bed sweat and kitchen oil that clung to my wife. It was a rare occasion when I wanted her.
She turned away from my lips on her neck. “We must set an example for Angela.”
Our daughter’s bed was a few feet from our own, through the open doorway that linked our bedroom to hers.
I grappled my arms around her hips. “I am setting an example—”
“Stefan! What are you doing?”
“—that we must enjoy what is before us, from time to time.”
“Stefan! Shh! You’ll wake her.”
“She is a very sound sleeper, like her father.”
“Hm.” Sonia’s lips felt dry and deflated, but she still pressed them against mine. “Her father is very convincing. And incorrigible.”
Sonia’s hips strained against my groin, with an urgency I had almost forgotten. Then the alarm clock rang. My wife broke free of my arms to turn it off.
“My God, I can’t be late.” With the swing of her legs down to the floor, a cushion of cold air pumped in under the sheets. “Nedelcu never tires of saying he could replace us with stinking Roma for half the pay.”
Sonia stood and dressed in the dark.
As she turned to leave, I winked at her. “Old Nedelcu will never replace you all. Imagine the paperwork.”
She glared at me. I was unsure if she was more upset at my cavalier attitude toward her job—I had already told her she should feel free to resign, as we could have lived quite well on my salary with the symphony—or about the idea of “stinking” Roma encroaching on her daily surroundings.
I thought of my own boss, Maestro, in his tuxedo of last decade and ideas to match. Those pinched sweeps of his baton kept our orchestra in check, rather than teasing out the talents of each player. He was a small, infuriating man whom the Central Committee never deigned to replace. I would have preferred even the Roma who sawed away daily at his fiddle in the Piaţa, with a suit as oil-stained as if he had just emerged from under a truck. How different my life would have looked today had the Central Committee known the first thing about music.
Without another word, Sonia finished dressing and was out the door. Even as I rolled to my side for more sleep, I felt a pang: I knew that downstairs, Sonia would cringe as she stepped over the legs of the homeless Roma who used our lobby floor as a bed.
As was my custom, I slept another hour, and rose at eight. Piaţa Rosetti in the morning wore the predictability of a music box. I took coffee in my study, leaning my ample backside in the curve of my baby grand piano. Through the French windows of the study, I observed the Piaţa three stories below falter to life. Lit by smoke-dimmed morning light, a policeman blared his car horn to merge into the roundabout. The news stand owner clanged his racks melodiously. I found myself trying to fit all this jangling chaos into a musical pattern.
Angela careened into my study. I had just enough time to put down my coffee atop the piano, before she leapt into my arms. Still warm from bed, my daughter stretched for the piano keys.
“Tată, when can I learn to play?” She placed a finger on the tip of my nose. “Maybe today you could teach me?”
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with your math test this morning, would it?” Angela set her brow, exactly as her mother did, lips smiling wryly. How was it I could fall in love every day with this miniature person over something as simple as a look? “All right, my angel. Get dressed!” She slid down from my belly with a pout. “The maths await… on this test you must do the motherland proud!”
Angela made a loud raspberry sound, and ran giggling out of the study. I returned to my coffee, but it was cold in the cup.
At eight o’clock in the morning on my street in Montreal’s Chinatown, there is no sign of the raucous young couples and partygoers of the night before. A nervously darting squirrel is my only companion until I turn the corner, uphill into the sunshine.
Every morning I walk ten blocks over to the university. The world never seems as full of possibility as when I catch a glimpse of brilliant blue sky between two office towers, or when, while passing in front of a bank building, I exchange a smile with a beautiful young woman I will never see again. My Angela would have been the age of these lovely women. I imagine her as full of life, somewhere, swinging a backpack full of university books for some unknown degree.
She never answered the question properly, my Angela, when I asked her what she wanted to study. She was ten: too young, too young. Music, she had told me once, to my somersaulting heart; but later that same evening at the dinner table, Angela had announced she wanted to be a Securitate officer. I nod wryly to the security guard at the university entrance, remembering how Sonia’s angry reprimand had left Angela in tears, wondering what she had said wrong.
Nina walks into my office right after I do, stirring her coffee. She smiles as I pull out my computer and slide it into the docking station. This is my daily discomfort to endure, the visitations several times a week from Nina, my young boss, who likes to “catch up”. It is Nina who does the talking, usually about this and that. But today, I know her agenda will be very specific indeed. In her hand is the cassette tape I loaned her a few days previous. She encouraged me from the day I was hired to open up and be at ease with her. In my first weeks of work, I mentioned that I had been a concert pianist. “In a previous life,” I had told her. Recently, Nina asked me if she could borrow a tape. At last count, she has played it for her husband, book club, a colleague on the Music Faculty, and a friend who manages a concert hall. She has already enquired with this concert hall person about available dates. “For the Reluctant Concerto,” she calls it.
My tape having satisfactorily made the rounds, Nina now places it on the very corner of my desk; as if afraid it will be damaged by proximity to the printouts of algorithms I have pulled out of my briefcase. “This is…” She searches my face. Brilliant, I could supply. The work of a true master, I reflect, with no pleasure whatsoever. “It’s a crime nobody gets to hear you play, Stefan.”
I want to tell her to reserve that word, crime; to swallow it and hope she never has true cause to describe any situation in her life with this word. In any case, the disgust I feel about my past life of playing and performance is a shame, not a crime; this is the word she should use, I want to tell her. However, Nina is my boss, and so I arrange my face in what I hope is a mask of polite detachment. To disagree with one’s boss in Canada might be ‘career suicide’, but in Bucharest, to disagree with Maestro was to risk much more. I want to trust Nina, but I am frightened.
“There is a reason why I stopped playing,” I say.
“It would have to be a pretty good one.”
“Believe me, it is good.”
She shakes her head, and leans against my cramped desk, her knee almost touching my thigh. “You should be performing somewhere.”
The smug rightness of the young; entrenched especially in Nina because she has won her tenured post at such an early age. My boss is in her thirties, as was another, more beautiful Nina from my previous life in Bucharest. That other Nina exists for me in short bursts of suffocating female proximity. She poisoned my world in Bucharest as surely as my boss will derail my plan to quietly ripen in the glow of my computer screen. I shift my leg away from Nina’s.
Nina is now looking at me fiercely, defying me to say no to the Reluctant Concerto. I doubt she will fire me, or, more importantly, drop this concert idea. She is seemingly oblivious that her principal performer is resisting the entire scheme. I am brought back to the selective deafness of Romanian officials: the uniformed officer at the Securitate office in Pecica who barely looked at me as he scanned my emigration papers. I knew they were correctly filled up because my downstairs neighbor at Piaţa Rosetti, a retired Securitate, had assured me everything was in order. And this emigration officer could not deny the wad of notes in an envelope between us on his battered wooden desk. The accepted amount in cases such as mine.
“Where did you get all this cash?” The officer looked me directly in the eyes at that point.
“I had a piano.”
His dirty fingers counted the notes. “That must have been some piano.”
The emigration officer crammed the notes back into the envelope. Out of a drawer, he produced a stamp and pad. Leaving Romania, all I had left of the music, the life I had lived there, was a case of cassettes I had recorded before selling that beautiful instrument.
As I have mentioned, there is an image of my little Angela burned into my retinas, seen even in my waking, by this middle-aged Tată who has lost his little girl along the way. She especially shows herself when I am exhausted from dragging my bulk around, from searching and refining lines of computer code. I see my Angela looking up into my face as I walked her to school, the last time she tried to inculcate me into one of her schemes. She skipped next to me along the footpath of Strada Academei, diesel fumes blowing through the scissoring legs of the crowd. On the corner, Angela waved and smiled hello to a stony-faced Securitate. He showed no reaction. We continued on, across the street. I looked back at the soldier, but he never flinched.
“Yesterday,” Angela said, “during the pledge to the Party, my friend Elena and I said different words, about Ceauşescu’s thing!”
“Angela Natalya Petrascu!” I tried to sound stern, but inside I laughed along with her. Had I been any sort of Tată at all, I should have chided her for such dangerous irreverence. What a terrible example I set for my daughter, every time I made fun of the Maestro.
When we reached her concrete bunker of a school, Angela turned to me again. “Will you come in with me today, Tată? Teacher always reminds me that I promised you would come and play for our class.”
It would have been easy: drop by her class for half an hour, play a movement from memory, whatever the state of tuning of the school’s piano—almost guaranteed dreadful—and then return home to my work. Looking at it now, it would have been such a small thing. How many days did I spend alone at my baby grand in my study, wringing perfection out of the music Maestro set for the week’s performance?
Instead, I said, “Tată must practice the new Prokofiev piece for tonight.”
Angela rolled her eyes and tossed her fine hair. The other image I have of her, the one that makes shame well up in me at my own missed chances: watching her run from me across the cracked pavement yard, her back getting smaller until she reached the door.
This was not the last time I saw my little girl. That would have been too dramatic, a Tată’s last glimpse of his daughter, with three-story mural of Ceauşescu glaring down at me from the school wall. The last time I saw Angela, we would have been laughing and roughhousing around the study on some nameless evening. I am sorry I was not paying closer attention in those last days, because it is this moment that I am cursed to replay: watching her back as she crossed that dreary schoolyard. My daughter did not pause at the door of the school, although I watched until it closed before turning back towards Piaţa Rosetti.
The National Symphony and I played our debut of the Prokofiev piece the same evening as I denied my little Angela her Tată’s presence in her classroom. During the performance, I openly scowled several times at Maestro—for his total lack of connection to the piece, the black hole in which he mired us all.
After the other players packed up and left, Maestro came to see me. I thought, either Maestro was about to lay into me again for showing him up in front of the Party members in the front row; or one specific Central Committee member—his brother—had extended an invitation for another late night party. I had performed for Central Committee many times amid their gilded luxury, encore after encore. Maestro’s brother and his Party colleagues were never satisfied until the early morning hours, posturing about who knew the most baladă. The more Romanian folk songs one knew, the better Communist one could claim to be.
“They want you for a solo concerto this time,” Maestro leered.
He knew—because I had complained loudly about it to my orchestra colleagues—that these functions kept me from my angels, long past their bedtime. Maestro smirked as I roughly pulled on my tuxedo jacket, still damp with sweat from the performance. Clearly he was quite satisfied that I should suffer some inconvenience as payment for disrespecting him. I kept my face stony.
A brisk walk across the frosty piaţa, and I was in the lobby of the Attanee Palace Hotel. A clerk hailed me in the hotel lobby to tell me I was expected in the presidential suite. Waiting for the lift, I wondered what this solo concerto was about. Maestro’s brother was a lamp-post whom I doubted possessed sufficient Party clout to risk such an extravagance. On the top floor, thick carpeting soaked up my footsteps. I found the suite at the end of the passage, and knocked. The latch clicked open almost immediately.
“Master Petrascu. Excellent performance tonight,” said the woman who opened the door.
This woman was not merely beautiful in the way a man might find his wife pleasing, certain expressions she might make, or the familiarity of her features. This woman had the objective beauty that Romanian women achieve as nobody else: up-tilted nose, smooth oval face, and glistening black hair. Through straps and well-placed slits in her black dress, an embarrassing quantity of skin was on display. She stepped aside for me to enter.
A chandelier cast shards of light on the obsidian smoothness of a grand piano. And sitting on the divan was not the Maestro’s brother, but a much younger man, leaning back with his legs loosely crossed. He had discarded the top stud of his tuxedo shirt like a spent bullet on the coffee table.
“Ah, Master Stefan Petrascu! A true genius graces our suite tonight.”
I had never before been summoned to play for just one man. The only ‘private audiences’ I had heard of with Central Committee members were sessions of interrogation or torture. This man must have been powerful indeed.
He laughed, easily reading my hesitation. “You may call me Victor. And my companion is Nina.”
“Something to drink?” she said. I could not help but smile at her.
“I would not want alcohol to interfere with my performance,” I said.
“The correct thing to say to a senior Party member! Nina, please ignore Master Petrascu and pour him some palinca.”
No alcohol had been available in months. I took a long, slow sip.
“You will play Liszt… Années de Pélerinage.”
Victor studied my face as he named this—Sonia’s piece—as one does when saying something designed to shock. It was a good thing that life among Party members had taught me so well how to wear a mask. I had learned that Party Members lacked the spontaneity one needed to be involved in coincidences. Victor had surely read files on me, and on Sonia. He must have known, from a stray comment to a colleague perhaps, that for me, Années was and would always be Sonia’s piece. Its delicacy and brute force I had privately dedicated to her resiliency and my depth of feeling for my wife.
But no file could have documented how, on a chair at the head of my piano at home, Sonia would lean toward me as I played. I had asked her to always leave me a safe radius. But carried away by the music, the hunger for each other that we had shared in the early years, Sonia would lean in beside me, ever on the brink of defying my request.
Victor and Nina watched me expectantly. I sat down at the piano, placing my glass on one corner, and started to play the Liszt piece, as requested. Victor reclined his head back on the divan.
To calm myself, I thought of Sonia. I had first played these phrases for her on an evening shortly after we were married. It was after that she told me of the episode with the Roma. She looked to me a wet eyed fourteen year old again as she described how a man had pulled her into the alley between the pâine shop and her parents’ home. How he mashed her face into the rough stone wall and she could do nothing to stop the thrusting, the hot breath of palinca, smoke and dirt on her neck. After heaving sobs into my shoulder, her hands had found my hair, her lips my ear. There on the windowsill of my study, I resolved that she must never find out my grandfather had been Roma; that my musical talent had sprung from a line of nomads scraping away at their violins for roadside coins.
Nina crossed the hotel suite and sat at my elbow on the bench. She watched my hands with wonder, and gave off a most pleasant wave of heat and perfume. Why had I never allowed Sonia to share my piano bench as I played? Nina sitting next to me brought an imbalance that centered me. My hands brought a new urgency to the dynamics, such that Sonia’s piece became almost foreign to my ears.
When I finished playing, Nina looked at me with such naked admiration that I had to look away. Victor slowly opened his eyes and put down his empty glass.
“Bravo Master. You play that piece with so much emotion. Perhaps it is a favorite? Of yours or Sonia’s?”
My blood drained at Sonia’s name being summoned in that suite, dangled from the ceiling as if by handcuffs. For the first time, I saw Maestro for the threat he actually was. My transgressions flashed in my mind: Roma blood would not have been an issue in the opinion of the Party, although it would have been for Sonia… especially my lies about it; Piaţa Rosetti, which I had inherited, and which was surely more spacious than many a Party member’s dwelling, was surely well documented; most troublesome was that my file undoubtedly bulged with examples supplied by Maestro that proved I was a nuisance not worth my talent.
Victor said, “Do you know any baladă?”
“I do,” I said.
My Roma blood worked in my favor when it came to folk songs. Nina added her firm voice to mine. Song after song; new glasses were poured. I was feeling the effects of the palinca. To attenuate the danger of Victor, I focused completely on Nina—greedily drinking in the bloom of palinca on her lips, as she sang to the chords I was banging out. I almost protested when she excused herself for the night, retiring to a room off the suite.
My eyes lingered on the bedroom door, my head dull and stupid now that I had no music on which to focus. I sat at the bench and awaited my next instructions. Victor stood looking out the window, saying nothing at all. I wanted very badly to return home and curl up against Sonia’s curved back, to worm my hand inside her familiar, chapped fingers. The light switched off under the door of Nina’s bedroom, where I imagined Victor would go after he dismissed me. Or maybe he would not. Perhaps there were others in that room, Party members leaning over recording consoles.
Victor turned to me and flourished his fingers before his face, as if breaking a spell. “But we have kept you late enough, Master. And Sonia has stayed late at work, too. A shame she needs to prove herself at her age, fending off Roma hordes.”
He stayed over by the window and did not make a move to see me out. My mind thrashed from one thought to another. I looked back on my performance in the suite. This was clearly a man whose powers were far reaching. If the Party had been taking my measure, looking for evidence that I should be left to my comfortable life, I had shown them nothing new. In my allotted time, I had done nothing except paint a bull’s eye on my own forehead: Petrascu, the self-absorbed bon vivant.
And now that I had clearly been dismissed, no words came to me with which to redeem myself. I left the suite without looking back. It was only when I was in the hall that I realized I still held my empty tumbler. I put it down on the carpet next to the door, and padded to the lift.
The street lamps died as I walked back along Strada Academei. I bolted the door of our flat behind me, and removed my shoes, wobbling, as I had not done outside in the cool air. Still drunk. A disgrace. I teetered along the hallway to the bedroom door, and looked in to see Sonia, lying in bed, coarse white sheets bunched like a sling across her chest. God help me, I did not ache for closeness with her. At that moment, all I could see was the moonlight bleaching her rough skin, a sack of potatoes in the bed. She opened her eyes and turned toward me as I stood watching her. For a second, I worried she had read my thoughts. I almost apologized.
“Stefan,” she whispered, “you’ve never come home this late. Is everything all right?”
I felt I had Nina’s scent all over me, that my skin must glow in the dark where she had touched my arm.
“It was another Party member asking for a private encore,” I said. “It was nothing.”
She lay back against the pillows. “Come to bed now, Master Petrascu.”
As I unpeeled my tuxedo, I considered the improbability of her choosing to call me by the same name as Nina had. It rang as an accusation in my ears. I slid into bed.
“You smell like a distillery,” Sonia said into her pillow. “I hope these parties will go out of vogue some day soon.”
Across the room, Angela was sprawled face down in her little bed, the sheets bunched in around her. So much energy, even in sleep. Her feet hung off the end of the bed. She will need a new one soon, was my last thought, before falling asleep.
After work, I make my way down the hill from the university to the city’s biggest music store. It is a brown brick building in a condition that would have incensed Ceauşescu by its mere continuing existence. In the store, instruments rise in precarious piles against all the walls. A bored-looking salesgirl makes no move to walk over to me. She stays seated at a glass counter crammed with music books, flipping through a Musician Magazine. I fight the urge to turn around and walk out of the store.
The floor is filthy in here, the pianos layered with dust. Even the salesgirl has dirt on her face. I walk halfway up the aisle, examining the models of electric piano.
“They’re actually not that bad,” she says.
My disdain for these machines must be so obvious that she actually rises to defend them. Her stool scrapes on the plywood floor as she thumps around the counter in her heavy boots. I note a smirk as she passes, perhaps at the stains on my coat, my dulled edges. She chooses the most expensive model, a black that looks like polished ebony, but proves to be plastic.
The girl starts a simple but beautiful prelude, her eyes closed with concentration. In that cramped aisle, her head is inches from mine. What I thought was dirt on her cheek is actually a constellation of tiny star tattoos that cascades from her eye. Her face rises and falls with the phrases she plays. She is correct—in her playing of this piece and in saying the sound of this electric instrument is not half bad.
This salesgirl is what, twenty? Eighteen? Perhaps a music student at the university. My Angela would have turned twenty last month. I drank a toast to her at a pub on my way home one evening—quietly, as befits my guilt that she is surely dead. If she were alive, why would my Angela never have tried to find her Tată? I refer not to some absurd up gushing of love on her part. Resentment might have grown with the years. Who can account for the lies that may have been told about me? And if not lies, who can account for the truth? No, I would not expect Angela or her mother to seek me with any kind of unblemished adoration or devotion, but at least a morbid curiosity.
“It’s no grand piano.” The salesgirl stops playing, and looks directly at me for the first time. There is a challenge in her look.
I have been careless, forgetting to guard my expression. This girl has taken the pain on my face at these thoughts of Angela as contempt of her playing. Perhaps I have unconsciously smirked with the old arrogance of the piano Master. Twenty years later, I am still in that schoolyard, neck burning, knowing I have disappointed my Angela. And what is worse, I have not surprised her in the least. Standing amid rows of dusty pianos, the most important thing in the world is that I soften my eyes for this salesgirl.
She drops her head to one side. “Do I know you?”
Her pose is so like my ten-year-old Angela, I cannot help smiling. As quickly, my heart crumples. “I have a daughter, your age.”
“This a gift for her?”
I do not answer right away. Her fingers remain poised above the keys. Her posture is perfect. I feel irrationally proud of her.
“Yes,” I find myself saying.
Seemingly satisfied, she resumes playing. Despite her appearance of a street person, the music she creates is exultant; precise and tempered with coyness I would have believed beyond one so young.
It seems an impassible barrier for me to abandon myself to my playing as this salesgirl is doing. And if I am not willing to surrender, or own, all the pieces of myself that could sour the music, then this concert of Nina’s planning can never be.
For a week after the private performance for Victor, I received no invitations to any Party member functions at all. In practice, Maestro let my every comment fall to the floor, not a single one ignited by the rage he usually reserved for his star performer. I chose to ignore these obvious pieces of evidence that the game had changed—that the powerful of Bucharest had gone on without Master Petrascu. Instead, I inanely hurried home to chase Angela around the flat, to partner with her in delinquency from homework. These are the famous last moments of which I can form no precious image.
Then, the little angel in bed, I took late suppers of warmed ciorbă with Sonia. Having eaten earlier with Angela, she watched me eat, seeming unsure what to do with her hands. I slurped the soup with what I hoped Sonia saw as the usual aplomb; but since the encounter with Victor, I found myself repulsed by the richness of our food. It had never occurred to me how these simple pieces of meat, this butter could mark us—could garner expectations of loyalty from the Party.
I found I could only look at Sonia askance. Her intense gaze was sure to detect the after images of Nina imprinted on my retinas. Having Sonia’s name mentioned in that hotel suite had somehow cemented the idea that I had as good as thrashed around with Nona in a luxurious bed I never even saw. But Sonia gave no evidence that she sensed any of this, or of tampering from the Party. Her work schedule remained the same, despite Victor’s insinuation of influence at the factory. Sonia was, in fact, unnaturally cheery. I was too dense to see as I do now that she was most likely just happy to have me home in the evenings.
Friday, November 11, 1988, I came home from my regular performance to an empty flat. At first I thought Sonia was playing a game with the help of her favorite little accomplice. But the sheets were ripped off the bed and thrown in a corner. The clothes had been emptied from my angels’ cupboards. Even in my mounting panic, I noted that the door had not been forced.
Still in my performance tuxedo, I rushed to the Attanee Palace Hotel and bribed the clerk to let me up to the presidential suite. Of course, Victor and Nina were not there. A knot of dirty sheets lay twisted atop the grand piano like a corpse.
I walked back home from the hotel. A terrible litany filled my head with a roar as relentless as the traffic on the strada. Maestro had been smiling in his interactions with me that week. I had been too thick to see this as smugness: he must have known, then, that decisions had been made about me, assigning me my fate. An image forced itself upon me, of Securitate knocking at the door of Piaţa Rosetti. They did not bark orders, but requested cooperation with a detached politeness that was all the more terrible. Two dazed angels were folded into a waiting car that disappeared into the whirl of traffic. Worse images visited me as the hours extended their absence: Sonia struggling, my Angela being clubbed.
It seemed crucial that the next day Piaţa Rosetti not remain empty, and the day after. There was still the ludicrous belief then that it could have all been a misunderstanding. Sonia and Angela would walk in the door, shaken by their ordeal with the Securitate, but free again. Only questions would remain: Why were we taken, Stefan? They never even asked us any questions…
And when my angels were returned, they would find a new Stefan Petrascu: a man who had carved the arrogance out of himself like a tumor, no matter how painful and bloody the process. It took all my courage to enter the study for the first time. My belly constricted at the sight of my piano. How like a weapon it looked to me now. As Maestro had acted through Victor, so did I mow down my angels with pride as my ammunition. I stood by the window, and traced with my hand a pointless circle over the smooth piano top. Here we had made love, Sonia and I. Here I had decided for the first time to wall up a part of myself from Sonia. It was then I touched the lowest register of despair: what if Victor had let slip to Sonia this greatest secret I kept from her? I pictured him making the long trip out to the factory, the better to see her reaction firsthand: shock and rage when she found out I was one with the Roma filth who had stolen her youth, quickly washed over with choking disappointment that I could have betrayed her trust when she had been most vulnerable. The door unforced, the clothes all gone: it might have been Sonia who took Angela away.
In the weak morning light from the window, I continued this emergency surgery to eradicate my famous pride. One organ at a time I sliced out in that cruel light, until all that was left was a crusted gory husk. I contemplated the three-story drop to the pavement.
At four AM, Chinatown is as quiet as a cemetery outside my window. I have been awakened for the third time by dreams. I have not this habit of dreaming. How overwhelming as I wake to try to corral these images that spill over; they seem to magnify and lose focus all at once. My boss, Nina, in a Romanian border officer’s uniform, among a faceless audience in formal wear; the music store girl, her eyes piercing me from the window sill of my old study.
Lacking the courage to try sleeping yet again, I open my laptop and scan my inbox. At the top of the message list, there is an e-mail from my boss, asking how it went at the music store. She has spoken to her contact at the concert hall about hosting my performance, and he is “into it”. She is being impossible, unswerving in this project. My eyes sweep the crowded studio flat. It would be ludicrous to imagine a real piano in here; this electric piano will be a start. I will at least feel how it is to play again, if only for myself. I resolve to return to the music store tomorrow.
Scrolling down my inbox, there is one e-mail message at the very bottom of the list. This message is most often invisible, sitting below all the new and unread mail. I re-read its brief contents for the hundredth time. It is from the other Nina. She found me on the internet, she writes, through the university department where I work. She lives in Moscow, but is coming to Montreal on business next month. She hopes I will agree to see her.
Years ago, I stopped hoping a hand would reach out from my previous life. And now that one has come, God help me, it belongs to the wrong angel.
My last days in Romania I spent in Costineşti, a fishing village on the Black Sea coast. There had been rumours of Securitate prisoners allowed to ‘escape’, of a pipeline to smuggle these people to Istanbul. My third day there was lashed with a bitter January wind. A tiny room in a crumbling concrete hotel by the seashore was disgraceful, but costly. My final act in Bucharest had been to sell the baby grand and my gold wedding ring. Piaţa Rosetti I left abandoned. Selling it would have drawn unwanted attention to my flight. The pile of lei dwindled quickly, though, as I handed over money to locals. Word had reached everybody in the village by then, about the stout little man from the city, so desperate to be told something, anything about the dark haired woman and blue eyed little girl.
I was at the point of walking back to my hotel for the evening, when I saw a fisherman pulling his rowboat up on the beach. This man did not approach me, as the others did. He only glanced up from his work for a few seconds, then continued to drag his baskets of fish out of reach of the surf. I walked over to him and recounted again the tale of my vanished angels. A fish bent convulsively in the basket, as if in the throes of a bad dream.
“I am sure I saw the woman and child you describe,” said the man. He slit his eyes against the jewels of sunlight on the sea. “Your wife and daughter?” He looked down at the strands of foam straining across the gravel. “I know the smuggler who likely has them.”
My heart thumped at double tempo. They had been seen alive.
“Let me see what I can find out,” he said. “Come back tonight at ten o’clock.”
Ten o’clock seemed a century away. I found a tavern, where I sat down at the bar and ordered coffee. How would I prise Sonia and Angela from this smuggler? I still had a sizeable sum. Perhaps I would pay this smuggler and join them on their way to Turkey.
Black-clad mourners clustered around the bar. As I watched them break off pieces of ring cake from a silver tray, fingers brushed along my shoulder. I turned, and could not believe what I saw. Here was Nina—gaunt, her eyes red and swollen—but still shockingly beautiful, especially among these unshaven villagers.
“Master Petrascu,” she said.
I scanned the room instinctively, half expecting to find Victor leaning cooly against the bar. I still do not know what link, if any, Nina had to my angels’ disappearance. Whatever her involvement, she deflected my distress as deftly as a Securitate or Party Leader.
“This is my sister’s funeral,” she said.
“You are from this village?” It seemed as unlikely that such a lovely creature could come from Costineşti as from the moon.
She reached for a morsel of ring cake, her taut belly pressing on my thigh.
“We have had no music for my sister,” she said. I followed her eyes to a piano in the corner. She toyed with the cake, not eating it, staring at the bar. God help me, her body was was warm against my leg.
She followed me to the piano bench, and, as in the hotel suite, her eyes fixed my hands deferentially as I played. And what piece did I choose? Années, it could be argued, would be a fitting tribute to Sonia, a talisman for good conclusion on this night I was to be reunited with my angels.
Now I come to that perfect definition I could cite my boss Nina, of what it is to shame somebody one professes to love. No matter what I lies I told myself to explain why I chose Sonia’s piece at that bar piano, the truth is that I needed to bask in Nina’s naked admiration, exactly as she had bestowed it the hotel suite. I needed to know that I had not merely imagined the life from which I had been prematurely torn.
Nina’s lips brushed my cheek as I left the bar, a gesture of gratitude as were those I accepted from her entourage at the door. I did not have the foresight to recognize these benedictions from a funeral party as a guarantee of bad fortune. True to this omen, my fisherman did not show up at our ten o’clock meeting.
On that deserted beach, certainty choked me that I was tainted. Not content to destroy my life in Bucharest, shadowy players were blocking my every attempt to contact my Sonia and Angela. In truth, the improbability of meeting Nina in this place was evidence above anything else that they were alive and the new game was to keep me from them. A raw night wind raking my face, I vowed that they were safer without me. I knelt in the stinking sand and wept, and closed off my angels in a dark corner of my heart.
At first they ripped and lashed against this prison of my construction; but now, years later, all I have felt is a feeble flutter from time to time. Until the plans for this cursed concert: now I can scarcely halt this flood.
Since Master Petrascu died on that beach, I have attempted in my mind to construct an explanation for Angela in case she ever finds her Tată: of how a father could have let her go so completely. I have yet to come up with an answer.
It is Saturday morning in the music store. The clerk who is not my Angela turns her face toward mine as she once again demonstrates the electric piano. I imagine the apologies I could make if she were my Angeliţa—for the pride that kept me away from her classroom piano, for the truth I hid from her mother; and for the dishonor I did to her deepest secret. And above all for the Tată I have been.
The girl smiles, belying the tattoos spilling from her eye. “It’s all right,” she says.
I could sob to think my Angela might one day say these same words to her Tată. But this is simply a clerk, reading in me, correctly, that I will never touch this keyboard without extraordinary encouragement.
My fingers feel clumsy pressing down the keys. Perhaps I have not truly used my hands in years. No, the keys are most definitely questionable, their action precise—absolutely artificial. There is no key on this electric piano like the high C on my old baby grand, sticking slightly where Angela spat out her milk, laughing at my imitation of the hapless Maestro. The low register keys spring back uniformly beneath my fingers. The same ones on my old piano were damaged early in our marriage: the first time Sonia and I made love on the piano top, her feet had slammed the same five keys over and over. Those keys were never the same, and I had to compensate with every visit to that register.
There are no memories to negotiate on this electric keyboard. But this machine will be serviceable for my small Chinatown flat; for practice I will need to do.
The girl has not returned to her magazine. She remains at my side, staring at my fingers. They perform scales of their own volition, as if cajoling me; this is what we are for… why have you been wasting our time all these years?
“What will you play?” the girl asks.
“Ah,” I reply.
She smiles again, as if privy to the background libretto of the Ninas, and my submersion into nothingness of two perfect angels. I stare down on a precipice that looks like a set of 88 keys.
The End
Monday, March 28, 2011