House of the Lost (32 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
He brought his mind back to the task in hand, consulted his notes, and began typing in search requests. Nicolae and Elena Ceau
escu came under this heading as well, although there would be no shortage of information about those two. As he worked, St Luke’s and its inhabitants ceased to exist for him. He travelled to a country with a violent and vivid history, and to an era when an iron dictator had held its people in poverty and fear.
There was a wealth of material about the years of Ceauescu’s reign – which had begun in 1965 and ended on Christmas Day 1989 – and also of the years leading up to his election as leader. Matthew and Mara’s years, thought Theo. There were also several first-hand accounts written by prisoners who had been incarcerated in Pitesti Gaol or in the equally grim-sounding Jilava Gaol, and he read these carefully. They were written with varying degrees of literacy by people from widely different walks of life. Some of the automatic translations read a bit oddly, but the emotion and the suffering came through so strongly that Theo felt his throat constrict with the pity and horror of it. One account, apparently an extract from a book published by a survivor of Jilava, told of the physical and mental torture inside the prison.
They called it by many names but, boiled down to the bones, it was brainwashing. They employed torture to remove our real natures and beliefs and loyalties. One of the names they used for it was ‘re-education’, but in fact they were systematically turning us into robots and making informers of us. We had to work for exhausting periods doing humiliating tasks – I often had to clean the floors with a rag clenched between my teeth. Our food pans were seldom washed, and sometimes we were forced to eat from them with our hands bound – that doesn’t sound much, but to kneel down and lick food off a dish like an animal is degrading.
I protested, and was punished. They shut me into a tiny coffin-shaped room with a bright light permanently on, making it impossible to sleep. After three days, I managed to reach the light bulb and unscrew it – I was exhausted and dizzy; I thought I would give anything for a couple of hours’ sleep. But they came in before I could replace the bulb, and I was punished even more. They tied my hands behind my back, and pushed me to a sitting position on the floor, leaning against the cold stone wall. Then they jerked my lips wide open and pushed the glass light bulb straight into my mouth, with the narrow brass end jutting out and the wide bulbous part scraping against my teeth. I couldn’t move. If I tried to dislodge the bulb it would have splintered in my mouth and glass pieces would have gone down my throat.
They left me for an hour – I knew it was that because I counted the seconds and added them into minutes. The darkness was an added torture because earlier I had craved darkness in order to sleep. I could not sleep now. After only a few minutes my jaw ached intolerably with the strain of keeping my mouth open and still, and saliva ran from the corners of my lips. The pain was so fierce I wanted to cry with the misery of it.
When finally they came back and removed the bulb, I broke down, sobbing. I was so grateful for the ending of the pain, I confessed to whatever they wanted to hear. Years afterwards, trying to rebuild my life, I learned that the light-bulb treatment was an old Nazi trick.
It was the most detailed account Theo found from inside any of the gaols, although there were several others, brief and scrappy in the main, but all telling of physical and mental torture: sparse food, cramped and dirty cells, medical attention which consisted of the dispensing of an aspirin or strychnine shots.
As he read, an image formed in his mind of the woman in Andrei’s photograph. Had she existed in real life, that dark-haired rebel, who had been Matthew’s mother? He tried reminding himself that Elisabeth had been forged out of his own imagination, but it did not help. Matthew and Annaleise had been forged from his imagination as well, but they were also real people. He was starting to have the feeling that Elisabeth Valk was real as well, and that if he stretched out his hand he would feel her take it. He began to read a set of documents grouped under the heading of ‘Student Movements in Communist Romania’. The translations were heavy and confusing and by the time he reached the fourth one he was thinking it was a blind alley. He would check this last account, however.
The final document was not a blind alley at all. Rearranged into an English structure of sentences, it read:
In the mid-1950s, events in Poland, which led to the elimination of that country’s Stalinist leadership, provoked unrest among university students in Eastern bloc countries.
A clandestine group created links between all the faculties, with a view to organizing protests, and on 28 October 1956 a radio station calling itself ‘Romania of the Future: The Voice of Resistance’ began broadcasting. Not all the locations of this group were found, but one was certainly in Yugoslavia. The station, considered a nationalist one, presented the students’ demands and incited people to rebel.
A radio station, thought Theo, recalling his story. ‘The October Group calling,’ she had said. ‘Elisabeth Valk here, wishing a very good evening to all my friends . . .’ That beautiful voice challenging and defying, and calling people to a rally. But she’s imaginary, he thought angrily. I gave her a beautiful voice and dark hair and eyes – she’s my creation, she’s not real! None of them are real, they can’t be. He read on.
The October Group, which was behind so many protests and also much of the illegal broadcasting, was to last far longer than the Securitate could ever have visualized.
Oh God, thought Theo, staring at the screen. The October Group. He plunged back in.
Even in the mid-1960s, the October Group was still broadcasting from the country then known as Yugoslavia. Some of the ringleaders were caught, and one of the stations in a small village outside Krivaca, just across Romania’s south-west border, was summarily closed down.
Theo’s mind had spun into whirling confusion. Krivaca, he thought. That’s where I sent Zoia, Annaleise and Elena Ceauescu that morning. That bleak frozen grey morning, when they drove across the border and found the thin tall house and dragged Elisabeth out and took her to Pitesti Gaol. He had never heard of Krivaca – he had simply looked it up in an atlas. He might easily have picked any of a dozen places near the border.
A precise list of the people involved in organizing protests is difficult to reconstruct. The primary sources are transcripts of the trials that followed the crushing of the various student movements and groups such as the October Group. But a list is appended here for the researcher or enquirer.
The names were set out alphabetically, but her name seemed to leap from the page and deal a blow straight into his eyes.
Elisabeth Valk. Incarcerated in Pitesti Gaol, November 1965, for crimes against the State. No record of a trial exists.
Theo sat back and stared at the glowing screen of the monitor. So Elisabeth was real. She had lived – might still be living – and she had been a rebel, responsible for broadcasting against the communist rulers under whose sway she lived. She had risked losing her husband and small son but she had taken the gamble and it had failed. She had been caught and taken to Pitesti Gaol and, in the enlightened twentieth century, the supposed era of justice and fairness, she had not even been given a trial to establish what she had done.
Moving like an automaton he made notes of dates and times, and even found a map reference for Krivaca that might be useful and jotted this down as well, wondering for a wild moment if he would end up travelling to Romania. He was just thinking it was more or less on the normal holiday route now, when there was an apologetic tap at the door and the Bursar put her head round.
‘Sorry to interrupt, but Sister Miriam and I are taking your cousin along to the old wing to look at some of the paintings stored there.’
Theo was so deep in Elisabeth’s world that for a moment he found it difficult to focus on what the Bursar was saying. With a massive mental effort, he came back to the present, and said, ‘That’s fine. She’ll enjoy it.’
‘There’s quite a lot of stuff, most of it fairly old, but we used some for a display for our centenary celebrations last year illustrating the history of this house and so on. Quite an excitement for us all. Oh, and Miss Kendal says don’t forget her train’s at six. She’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour. If you’re not there, she’ll just go back to Fenn House. She says you gave her a spare key.’
‘I did. But I won’t be much longer – I’ve been at least an hour over the time I envisaged, anyway.’
‘You’re welcome here for as long as you want. Come again if you need to do any more research. In fact, come back to see us anyway,’ she said.
Theo returned to his research about Elisabeth, but it was almost as if the small interruption had broken a spell, or sealed up a portal into the past. There was nothing else about her, although he found some useful background details: descriptions of Ceauescu’s iron rule, and of the State orphanages that had sprung up to deal with the flood of unwanted children – again, the television images rose up before Theo’s eyes.
