House of the Lost (28 page)

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes. It’s cruel and barbaric.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoia said she still thought it rather a harsh law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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