Feature
FICTION
Reporting the News
by Philip
O'Ceallaigh
November 2004
Gara de Nord, Bucharest, leaning against an iron pillar waiting
for a woman I hardly know, a fat old gypsy woman is hunkered to my left threshing
sunflower seeds with her teeth. I check my watch and impatiently pick through
the crowd for Elena. That’s her, looking straight ahead, striding a
direct path through the milling crowd, oblivious to those around her; ragged
little boys with bags of glue, man with the sack of potatoes over shoulder
who nearly collides with her and then turns to follow with his eyes. Black
lustrous hair pulled back from her head and tied behind. Two young soldiers,
faces raw with cold, see her break into a smile when she recognises me. I
see it all with satisfaction, a director who has drilled his extras and taken
the perfect shoot. We kiss, a soldier shrugs. Cut! You can all go home. The
fat old gypsy, rising, vehemently spits. A corona of husks is left in the
space where she has been.
- I’m late.
- Doesn’t matter. Did you get it?
- I’m not sure.
- You didn’t see him?
- Please. We’ll talk about it later.
I plant a full bottle of rum on the little fold-out table by the window of
our compartment.
- In the morning I will open my eyes and see a foreign land.
I turn and she is smiling at my words. We are at the stage in our relationship
when everything that is said is interesting. As the train shunts from the
station I kiss her. I have a feeling of something new beginning and that it
has something to do with love. Bucharest’s grim apartment blocks slide
by as the dirty evening light drains from the damp winter sky and in the half-light
I catch my own satisfied reflection in the glass. The sensation of motion
takes me from myself, a snake sloughing off its dull old skin. I am happy
leaving Bucharest and my tired life behind.
- You didn’t say what happened with your uncle, if you got it in the
end.
- I don’t want to talk about it now. I’ll tell you another time.
Not wishing to seem concerned, I drop it.
Her uncle, who had been a communist functionary responsible for major construction
projects, has just been elected to the Romanian senate. The scurry after privatisation
made him rich, money and old friends have made him a senator. As such he is
entitled to a hotel suite and an apartment in Bucharest. The apartment he
has promised to Elena and, having no fixed place to live, I have a personal
interest.
The carriage attendant distributes bedding and the other occupants, a middle-aged
Moldovan couple, soon make ready for sleep. I stretch along the seat with
pillows behind me and Elena before me and am a long time sinking rum and talking,
recounting tales of trains and travel, my vagrant life, times when the landscape
tumbled by for days outside. Invisible towns slip by in the night and the
beating of the tracks hammers out a metre into which my words fall cadently.
I turn away from tedium and routine and work and all the little compromises
which together rob life of joy and with my words distil my life down to a
pure heady essence; the exhilaration of escape, the chasing of these exclusive
moments, tantalizing as half-heard music. Elena is entranced by my talk, and
indeed there is desire for her mixed in my speech and I wonder will I love
her. Carried away with the romance I tell myself I am right in the end, after
all the self-doubt, to wait for pure rare moments such as these. I am right
to be impractical, to have no home.
It is late and we recline, fitting together on the narrow bed, her head on
my shoulder, my hand stroking her thick black hair, plans bubbling in my mind.
I am at a threshold and I have so much to say that I overflow, words spilling
from my lips.
2.
I wake with a vague feeling of shame like I have told a magnificent lie. The
bottle is half empty and there’s work to be done. Moldova, several chaotic
years after emerging independent from the ruins of the Soviet Union, is choosing
a new president. I must write a report; summarising another poor country in
a few hundred words. The sky above Chisinau is tarnished lead this last day
of November.
In an unheated room on the eleventh floor of the Hotel International I take
aspirin and disappear under a mound of bedclothes. Elena must write a piece
on the celebration of Romania’s national day in its severed province.
In the street people are speaking Russian. I suggest she do something satirical,
but that would get her fired so she rushes off to some absurd ceremony in
a graveyard. In the afternoon I feel well enough to get some work done. I
buy the local papers, visit the offices of an international organisation which
is monitoring the election and then spend an hour being briefed by an earnest
young patriot from the foreign ministry. He is alarmed when I tell him I am
going to Transnistria, where ethnic Russian separatists have declared an independent
state. Your safety cannot be guaranteed, he says gravely, and speaks of the
rapacity of the border checkpoints.
That night, after making what is called love, Elena holds me for longer than
I would have liked. She asks me what is wrong. Nothing, I say. There is the
old disappointment that comes of getting what you long desire. The rum is
gone and I’m too tired to go down to the street for more.
- What’s her name? She asks after a long silence.
- What difference does it make?
- I just want to know.
- Her name is Ana.
I feel tired, and irritable at the same time. It is as if I have watched the
scene before and can hear the lines as they come. This is not Elena’s
fault, so I must control my resentment and speak my part. It is hard, watching
myself like this. I remind myself that soon I will be in Transnistria, as
if this were some kind of escape. Elena, not knowing that I stay with Ana
out of a lack of any purpose, has charged my infidelity with a significance
it does not have. I can feel her, as she lies beside me, trying on the role
of The Other Woman, like a piece of clothing, testing its fit.
- Are you planning to leave her?
- Doesn’t matter what I do. Things will unravel in their own good time.
More of this awkward style of talk, of which it is not necessary to relate,
then, inevitably:
- This is what your fine talk comes to. You’re not much of a man when
it comes to the real world.
- I’m well sick of the real world.
- So what are you doing here, if you don’t care about me?
- Getting the story. Reporting the facts.
It seems there has been a misunderstanding. Elena has planned another kind
of film, one involving a real world and a real man. Naturally I feel uncooperative.
But we are getting argumentative and I do not want this fuss. It’s not
true I don’t care about her. I do care, just not enough to play this
game. I don’t want to fight, to say hurtful things. So I kiss her, stroke
her.
We grapple again, better this time. Better, because we do it with anger and
frustration that we are strangers. There is no pretending at tenderness and,
strangely, moments of real tenderness appear like flashes in our struggle,
inciting us further. Then it is a cold room again and we are covered with
sweat and trying to organise the blankets we have kicked away. We sleep.
Election day. The talk is over. The sky is full of lead.
Diligently Elena rises and as she slowly dresses I feel remorseful. She is
going to the central election bureau and can’t decide what to wear.
- I should wear a skirt.
- Is it so formal?
- No. But if I dress well men will be helpful.
- Up to a point.
She puts on a very short skirt and leather boots which come to above her knees,
leaving a section of stockinged thigh exposed. I feel like pulling her back
in bed.
I sleep for hours and when I wake the sky is the same as before and I consider
getting the results from television or having a beer later with someone from
a news agency. I take some aspirin and decide to make an effort. Elena returns
after lunch and is alarmed that I am going to Transnistria. I take the opportunity
to find out about the apartment.
She tells how when she went to her uncle’s suite at the Hotel Bucharest
to discuss it he tried to grope her. Apparently, he wasn’t giving anyone
a luxury apartment for free. Which stands to reason. You don’t get rich
in a poor country with that kind of attitude. A picture is painted of a satyr
chasing a young girl around an expensive hotel room.
- I couldn’t believe it. He has two children my age. He’s fat
and old. He tried to pull me onto the bed. He said, I want to eat you.
- Greedy bastard. That’s like something I’d say. Is he your mother
or your father’s brother?
- No, my mother’s cousin. They were at university together. I’ve
known him since I was a child.
- Not really an uncle then. Second cousin. Or once removed. Whatever. I suppose
he’s got used to grabbing things that aren’t his.
- It was horrible. I knew him when I was a child.
As we leave the hotel together she pleads with me not to go to Transnistria.
It’s gratifying that she thinks I’m going to do something dangerous.
We hold hands and wait for a bus. There is a little boy of three or four at
the stop. His mother hunkers down and rearranges his hat and scarf, though
they do not need to be rearranged, and kisses his cheeks.
Elena says a child is the best thing in life; she would dress him up in funny
clothes and hear him say “Mama.” Elena’s beauty is extraordinary
but it has been of no help to her dreams, which are ordinary. All she wants
is a good reliable man with a little money who will give her a child. Instead
she collides with me and groping politician cousins. Well, bad luck. Basically
she’s stupid and I feel sorry for her. And I’m a stupid prick.
And I feel sorry for myself. She tells me not to come back late as she gets
on the bus and for a moment I actually regret that I am an episode without
consequence in her life.
There is a stale odour. The people on the train east, Russian speakers, are
worn and poor. Hunched by the dirty window, cap pulled low, I watch the landscape
drift by. Dollar bills are folded into tiny squares and hidden around my clothing
so that the frontier guards can not take everything. Assuming they let me
through. A man called Andrei asks me about myself and I reply in broken Russian.
Did I ever see a place so poor? he asks. In fact I have, many times, and it
is not interesting. He tells the same old tale; things are getting worse,
decent people can’t make a living, the mafia run everything. I wonder
will all this culminate in a request for money. I can give money easily but
it is the listening, the waiting, which makes me uncomfortable. The terrain
undulates and the horizon always presses close. A small tractor labours in
a square field. The trees are shiny black and naked and the earth is leached
of all verdure, patches of grey and brown grass waiting for the snow to fall
and hide it. –Do you have houses like that in your country? How much
can you earn over there? A peasant leads a draught horse along a track, its
hanging head bobbing heavily as it plods through the mud. A woman berates
Andrei for complaining to a foreigner. Others join in the argument. As their
voices rise and grow excited I lose the meaning. When they tire an old man,
previously silent, says calmly and with finality:
- A cow is what you need. You’ll always have milk. And your own cheese
and butter. Sour cream. Without a cow you have none of these things.
Andrei puts his face in his hands and rubs his eyes for a long time. Of course,
there will be no request for money. He is just another man humiliated by his
clothes, wanting to tell the stranger that the clothes are not the man.
In the end there is no check at Benderi, a town just inside Transnistrian
territory. A flag waves lazily in the breeze above the platform. I discreetly
ask the woman at the station cafe to change money and I am readily given a
wad of local currency. A row of mafia types sit drinking vodka at the bar.
She turns back to the television. I head towards the polling station located
back on the Moldovan side of the border, crossing a concrete bridge over the
rail lines with the wind whistling through its pillars, and follow a road
which winds and narrows through the suburbs and out of town.
By coming here I’ve got away from Chisinau and Elena, where I’d
gone to get away from Bucharest and Ana, where I’d gone for a similar
reason. Transnistrian police stop cars at a checkpoint and I trudge through
unnoticed with some locals taking bags of shopping home. Night is falling
and mud is underfoot. Banality follows me everywhere, I conclude, dogs me
like a shadow no matter where I run. I have been playing so long it’s
got serious and nothing pleases me any more. At the polling station the observers
say everything has gone smoothly. I watch a few old women argue about who
is first to be behind the curtain to vote and that is all.
After eleven I get back to the hotel, cold and tired after the journey in
an unlit, unheated train. Elena, relieved to see me, embraces the returning
hero. I look at myself through her eyes and feel a little better than I have
most of the day. She sets out food for me and pours a glass of vodka. I give
her the remains of my Transnistrian money, over a million rubles. She examines
my worthless money with interest.
I eat, drink, and the warmth creeps back into my legs. I savour the feeling
of being at home and feel a sympathy with Elena, the woman herself and not
some dream of her, that I haven’t felt before. She is glad that I am
back, safe. I tell her that I’m tired of freelancing. You have freedom,
in theory, but it’s a rotten way to make money, even if you manage to
avoid paying rent. The vodka has gone to my head and I find that I am rambling.
- There was a man called Andrei, I didn’t like him much. They were all
arguing in Russian, I couldn’t follow it, and he was sitting there with
his face in his hands, he’d heard it all before and he was sick of it.
The humiliation of work and poverty and life just going round in circles no
matter how hard you try. Just then his daughter appeared beside him, maybe
nine years old, bright blue eyes, blonde hair falling from under her hat.
She asks what language I speak and says to me in English, My name is Maria.
He was looking up at her, his clever pretty little daughter, and for the first
time his face came alive, brightened like she was a light shining down on
him. That’s what kept him going; not anything he’d thought or
done or learnt. It was this little girl who the world hadn’t touched...
In another mood I might have said, it’s odd what keeps us from drowning
in shit, and left it at that. But now I am tripping over my words in my eagerness
to explain. It is easy for me to create clever things with my speech, but
in trying to uncover something simple I feel myself failing. It occurs that
it is something obvious and that I am complicating it by giving it words.
But Elena is not listening anyway. She is turning the money around in her
hands and making sentences in her head. She tells me she has been thinking,
and it would be better if we didn’t see each other when we got back
to Bucharest. At least for a while. I receive a bad review, delivered by a
sympathetic friend embarrassed by my inadequacies. I am not unique, it seems,
I am like many spineless men who have their retreat prepared beforehand. She
goes on a bit. In the end I put up my hand. It’s been a long day and
I can do without the details. Several days in fact and enough to turn everything
upside down. The struggle to be alone, overthrown by loneliness. I want to
say, Elena, it would be simple for us to try to love one another! It is an
easy thing to say, and even to feel for a moment.
I am starting to look dejected and as a result she has filled out and looks
better, happier, stronger. Any pleading on my part would throw is into sharper
contrast, and I have my pride. So I tell her she is quite right, we shouldn’t
see each other, it would just cause trouble. I realise I am crumpling in my
fist the millions I have brought her as a souvenir.
Midnight. The exit polls are coming in over the radio and the pro-Russian
candidate has a clear lead. This is good for me; I can write about the collapse
of the economy since independence and the need for Russian oil. ''Moldova
looks to Moscow'' is a good title. I make a few calls and write my article
off. I conclude with something about the ideal of independence proving expensive.
No matter how short or superficial the article, it’s always good to
have a bit of cheap philosophy at the end. It makes the reader feel he has
really understood something.
I get into bed. It’s warm. Elena is warm too. She wakes and embraces
me and throws a leg over mine. For the last time, it seems. This time her
tone is that of an independent woman taking her pleasure. I feel I have underestimated
her, which makes me want her, and I am a little thrown off balance by my new
part. I perform, and she falls into a contented sleep long before I do.
3.
Now I’ve flown south and found my rest in Athens. I landed on my feet
as usual.
After returning to Bucharest I had to force myself to keep moving, keep the
money coming in; economic collapse in Bulgaria, street demonstrations in Belgrade,
unrest in Kosovo. The Balkans are burning! said a journalist friend, glee
in his eyes. But I was worn out, tired of the trite summaries that journalism
demands, and Bucharest was no place to rest. It seemed wherever I lay my head
packs of wild dogs would howl beneath my window. (Half the city complained
of being bitten, the other half fed them scraps – there was never a
convinced majority for their extermination). I stopped sending the stories.
It felt nice, to give up. Ana finally lost patience with my apathy. I was
sorry to have wasted her time. Winter always dragged me down. Spring is the
season of migration.
One day in March I sat on a park bench wondering what to do with myself next.
The money was getting low. The weather had turned inexplicably kind and the
tiny bright leaves were bursting from the old trees. And then a strange thing
happened; Elena, who I hadn’t seen since Chisinau, came strolling along
the gravel path hand in hand with a man, relaxed, happy, an expression on
her face I’d never seen. I realised then what would not have come to
me had I been with her alone a thousand hours; that she had not trusted me
for a moment. She looked around, she read the ground, she raised her face
to him, and she never saw me. I had the sensation – slightly too ghostly
for my taste – of being completely invisible. As if this weren’t
wonderful enough, I saw with a shock from the other direction a girl who must
be Ana, also with a man. Surely too great a coincidence! And so it was. As
she came closer the girl bore only a superficial resemblance to Ana. Even
so, it felt like an omen. Move! Get out! The two couples drifted past each
other in opposite directions and disappeared.
It reminded me of the scene in the railway station when I watched Elena cut
through the crowd, except this time I felt more like an extra than a director.
My moment had passed. I had observed all there was to see. I had filed my
report. It was time to move on.
So I came to Athens, the city that has seen everything. The city that has
died and been reborn several times.
I was able to persuade an owner of ships to let me teach his bored daughters
English for more than I earned chasing trouble around the Balkans.
I have a small room with not much furniture. Something is bound to happen
soon but it will do no harm if I keep to myself for a while. Instead of watching
Albania rip its heart out in a pointless civil war I spend my afternoons with
two young women, aged nineteen and twenty-one. They dress fashionably and
elegantly, as good-looking rich girls must. Their father has ordained that
they will go to California to study, that their idleness must end. They have
no interest in anything I tell them about the world I’ve seen and nothing
at all seems to impress them. We understand each other rapidly; they don’t
want to learn and I don’t want to teach. In any case, their English
is good enough for California. So, while their father sits in an office making
fortunes, including mine, they take me around the town. We sit and sip on
café terraces. I try to write, or read. They buy me cakes and ouzo
and while I read ancient history, of the defensive walls Pericles and Themistocles
built to keep out the Spartans, of ambition and treachery and empires long
dead, they smoke menthol cigarettes and from behind mirror sunglasses impassively
as cats watch the people as they come and go. Two sleek bored sphinxes.
I don’t even know if they like me or if I am just part of the scenery.
Yesterday the elder of the two put her sunglasses on the table, her hands
behind her head and, fixing me with eyes that could have belonged to Cleopatra,
asked in Greek:
- What’s the matter with you? Are you afraid of women?
I wasn’t supposed to understand so I pretended not to and they laughed.
I don’t think that is a nice way to talk to your teacher. I replied
in the language of my ancestors, to which I have a sentimental attachment.
- Ta tuirse orm, tar eis do mhathair. (Your mother wore me out).
Not much of a conversation. She put her glasses in her hair, Italian style,
like an extra set of eyes. I went back to Thucydides. The Athenian democracy
debated whether to execute the entire population of a small island for backing
the enemy.
There are days when I get tired of all this repetition and I feel like a dog
running around in endless circles chasing its own tail. Other days I take
a train down to the harbour and squint across the flashing water at the ships
heading off across the sea and I feel life before me in the energy of the
sun on the pulsing wavetops. It is that excitement, beginning all over again,
in the spring, though the last winter has just told me it is useless. What
next? What next? What is over that sea? Is that boat heading for the Bosphorus?
Quixote on his deathbed tells Panza, Forget those wanderings, I was mad. And
Sancho weeps, But I loved you then! Just one more journey! The boat gets smaller
and smaller. There is a bridge at Istanbul. I could walk to another continent,
leave Europe behind. There is enough gold in my pocket. The boat becomes a
point. I strain my eyes. It flickers. And is gone.
