The Uninvited Guest (16 page)

“She's just embarrassed,” Dragos laughs, “because she knows she can't do it without liking it.”

His arm suffers for the joke. Diana's fist flies through the crowd, bruising him.

“Tony, you'd better hope she doesn't kiss like she punches. Not this time at least.”

And his other arm suffers.

Tony feels his chair being lifted beneath him. He is turned from the table into the spreading crowd. Diana walks from the edge of her friends and relatives, suddenly onstage. She turns her back to Tony and curses the laughing crowd. When she turns back, she is smiling. She slips off a long silk scarf she has tied around her waist, and twirls it into rope between her hands. It feels cool on the back of Tony's neck, then suddenly tight and hot. Diana lands on his knees and draws him into her lips with the scarf.

The kiss is violent and contemptful. The heat of her forehead crushes into his ear. As she begins to pull away, Tony tastes her tongue on his, a final flash of anger, delicious and warm. To Tony, his reward seems to last much longer than the couple of seconds Diana gives him. The scarf slides from his neck and trails along the floor as she walks away lashing out with her fists at the drunken, hysterical crowd. They part to let her pass and Tony, confused and humiliated, watches her walk past the small podium where the Cup has stood since the party began. The podium is empty.

“It is an interesting feeling is it not?”

Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae follows Tony from room to room in the wedding hall, up great wooden staircases and through narrow back corridors, checking behind pieces of furniture and inside darkened doorways.

“This feeling of suddenly not understanding anything. Language is always a difficulty in these situations. Not knowing the words. But worse I think is that sudden shock, that instance of ultimate strangeness. An experience all travellers have, even the bravest of us, I think, and certainly something all immigrants must eventually face. Whether it comes on the first day or the fifteenth or the five hundredth, there will come this moment when everything that once seemed normal and familiar and correct is whisked away like the tablecloth in a magician's trick. It is unsettling, isn't it?”

Tony walks with purpose ahead of the older man, vaulting stairs two at a time despite a head filled with homemade liquor. He calculates the time between his last seeing the Cup and the empty podium to be mere seconds. It is simply not possible that whoever took the trophy was able to get it very far. He knows his best chance of recovery will be if the Cup has been kept in the building. A quick look out the front door showed quiet empty streets and no signs of recent activity. He'd scanned the faces in the crowd to see if their eyes led him anywhere obvious, but the other guests, amused by his desperation, simply smiled back at him and laughed privately among themselves. Now it is simply a matter of checking every room in the building. The Cup will be found.

“It is my burden,” Nicolae continues, undisturbed by the speed of their search and the fact that Tony is not listening to him, “that I brought this moment not only upon myself and my wife, but upon a young child. We are told children are very resilient, that they recover from trauma. What we are not told is that whether they recover or not is immaterial. Trauma is trauma. It is my burden, and I accept it.”

The entire time they lived in Israel, Nicolae and his young family tried to leave their new and foreign homeland, tried to escape again to one of three places. Their preferred choice, of course, was the United States. Everyone wanted to go to the United States.

“To fly in an airplane over New York City,” Nicolae says with a dismissive wave of his hand in the smoky air above his head, “to look down upon the Statue of Liberty and et cetera. You know the whole story. You don't think you are going to fall for this story, but when you have left the only world you know, and you must choose a new world, all of a sudden this story is very convincing. Next there was Canada, which was also attractive if only because it is so close to the United States. The third and least attractive option was Australia, a great country to be sure, but so lost and alone there in the middle of the ocean. So far from anything we might understand, and with no accompanying story of its own.

“Naturally, it was Australia who made us the first offer. Australia opened her arms and welcomed us, and to this day I cannot say if we didn't make a terrible mistake by not opening our own arms in turn and running to Australia. In Montreal, on a morning in February when I am waiting for the bus on Sherbrooke, I am certain that Australia is laughing at me for my foolish decision. But, at the time we decided to wait.”

The offer from Australia was open for three months, and Nicolae and his wife decided to wait the three months to see if they would also get an offer from the US. Very near the end of their wait they heard from Canada, or at least from Quebec. They decided not to stretch their luck any further, accepted the chance to become Quebecers and signed their names. They flew to Montreal with a map of North America spread between them across their knees, studying the terrain. They took note how, on their map, Montreal was not very far at all from New York City. They consoled themselves in their decision by measuring the distance between Montreal and Manhattan with their fingers.

The sky was clear and they could see everything as the plane came in over the country. They crossed Newfoundland and followed the Saint Lawrence River west into the land. It was all so big and empty, and they could imagine, looking to the south past the Berkshire Mountains, that it was also almost all New York City. It was early in October and the land was knit through with fantastic colours. They strained their eyes across the brilliant carpet, peering south, imagining they might see the tip of the Empire State Building peeking out above the horizon. And then the plane was on the ground and they were moving through the airport with everything they owned, never knowing to whom they should speak French and to whom English. They guessed at this speaking game, and guessed wrong almost every time.

That first night, in all the exhaustion of a day of travel, the luggage and the jet lag and the emotions of his wife and little Dragos, Nicolae was unable to keep his eyes closed in their tiny YMCA room. He would lie down and listen to his wife and child breathe, but then he would have to stand up and go to the window. At that time in Montreal, the YMCA sat directly above Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The traffic of the thoroughfare flowed through the building, cars and taxis on their way across the city, beautiful young people walking through on their way to Crescent Street clubs or going east for food at Ben's or to the jazz clubs of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis. And Nicolae was at the window, not knowing any of these places, but knowing at least that the blood was flowing, seeing it below him and feeling it hum up into his feet. There was so much kissing. So many arms clutching other arms. It was a fine show, too inviting, but he couldn't bring himself to go for a walk because the thought of his wife and child waking to find him not there was painful to him. After everything they'd just been through, he could not risk them waking up alone, without their only reason for being in such a strange place.

As morning grew in the window, Nicolae was surprised by a knock on the door of the room. It was a quiet knock at first, respectful of the hour, and Nicolae was initially unsure if he was hearing it correctly. Their small room was one of many in a long hallway of identical drab grey doors. He was still standing at the window, watching the streets fill with daylight, and he looked over at his wife, still in bed but staring back at him now. They questioned each other with their eyes for many seconds before whoever it was knocked again, this time with more force.

A man was laughing now behind the door. Nicolae imagined the visitor had mistaken their room for that of a friend. He opened the door, again uncertain of which language to try, and looked at a small man dressed for cold weather shuffling slowly from foot to foot at the threshold. The unexpected visitor greeted Nicolae in his own language, by his own name, smiling broadly.

“I saw your name on the list of new arrivals downstairs,” the laughing man said. “I knew you would be awake. I must tell you, to have you here in this city with me is the most beautiful gift. The most beautiful gift.”

Without introduction, he handed Nicolae a small rectangular package, something Nicolae did not fully understand at the time but which he came to know as Canadian-style cookies, dry and too sweet with chocolate like wax, crumbling to the table every time he took a bite. The man waved to the small table and he and Nicolae sat.

“To begin,” the man said, “please do not be afraid or concerned in any way. I am here as a friend. I hope to prove this to you.”

Nicolae glanced again at Veronica in the bed. Dragos lay beside her, his eyes still closed, but his breathing betraying the fact that he was awake and listening carefully. The past year had prepared them all for almost any experience but this one. This one was new.

“You were mine,” the man continued. “My very first, and my favourite.”

Having said this, the man fell silent, and his laughing mood turned sombre. Nicolae sat across the table from him, munching cookies expectantly, wishing he had some coffee. He was aware of a growing tension between himself and the stranger as though already they had run out of things to say to each other, as though there was little more about the man that he cared to know and little more about himself that he cared to have known. It was a feeling he recognized, but vaguely, like the recollection of pain from far in the past.

It was Veronica, dressing herself behind a makeshift curtain wall, who first made the connection. She stuck her head out into the room and stared suspiciously at the interloper.

“We know nothing anymore,” she said, her voice shaking with anger and fear. “We don't want any trouble. Why have you found us out like this?”

Recognizing severity in his mother's voice, Dragos ceased feigning sleep and raised his head to observe the growing drama of an unwanted stranger in a strange room in a strange country. The man suffered Veronica's questions like they were aimed at his face. His eyes filled with water and he could only look down at his hands shifting uncomfortably on the tabletop.

“I understand what I have done here,” he said. “I'm sorry. I thought maybe the cookies, somehow... if you will please allow me a few minutes to explain myself. I assure you, I bring no trouble to your door.”

The stranger's name was Alexandru Ionescu and, as Veronica had guessed, he was a member, a former member, of those very same secret police, the Securitate who haunted Nicolae's final years in his homeland. So it was, Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae had left Bucharest, lived for over a year in Israel, travelled all the way to Montreal and on his very first full day there, he would have yet another talk with the secret police.

Veronica was not to be consoled. At the time, so early on her first day in a new country, she had become very unhappy and wanted this uninvited man to leave. Nicolae too could not see any reason to continue the conversation, except that this Alexandru Ionescu did not act like any police he had ever known. He did not seem concerned to prove to Nicolae that he was in charge, or that he was as smart as anyone else.

Underneath his genuine distress at having made a startling admission, he seemed, simply, very happy, like a child is happy. He watched young Dragos struggle to eat one of those bad cookies and laughed at the expressions on his little face. He looked around the room and out the window at Montreal, rubbed his moustache and said things like “fantastic; is it not fantastic?” while the wary family sat at the small table, looking at him, waiting for things to turn worse and wondering why they hadn't turned worse already.

It occurred to Nicolae that had he wanted to, this Alexandru Ionescu could have broken their spirits completely as soon as he entered the room, but he did not seem to want their spirits broken. In fact, it seemed this man had decided it was his job to make sure their spirits remained intact. As well, Nicolae could not ignore the fact that a Romanian Securitate in Canada simply cannot have the same powers as in Bucharest, and that in fact, if Nicolae had wanted to make trouble for this Ionescu, he may very easily have done so.
Former
Securitate, as this man claimed to be, were not generally in the habit of admitting to their past profession. It was the kind of history one generally wished to bury. For this man to make his admission to Nicolae was, as far as he could tell, a form of confession, not intimidation. Where Veronica's well-trained nose smelled trouble, Nicolae sensed only pathos. Ionescu saw this understanding cross Nicolae's face and continued his explanations.

Ionescu had worked for the state police in Bucharest since his days as a student. He had been recruited secretly at the university—this was one way the state kept track of the goings-on of so-called radical student activities—and he had been a very willing and enthusiastic recruit. As a young man he proudly infiltrated and then destroyed numerous secret networks just like Nicolae's own banned literature network, sending a small but significant number of his fellow students to jail for four years here and five years there. The number of his victims grew so significant that his presence at the university quickly became ineffective.

Students would begin to instinctively avoid these fellows, smelling prison on their clothes. Eventually, these agents would disappear from the university, pulled in by their police masters and reassigned to a place they could once again be effective. And then, of course, students like Nicolae were in worse trouble, because without the obvious mole, they had to wonder who the new well-hidden agent was. They were more anxious without these operatives around than they had been with them in plain view.

Ionescu told the Petrescu family all about himself freely, though often he stopped his story to repeat an apology. It seemed to be an apology he had been developing within himself for a very long time, and to Nicolae's well-trained ear it contained a clear tone of sincerity. Ionescu said, “Please allow me to tell you about my former self, and so reveal my great shame again to the world,” and sometimes, in the middle of his story he would just stop, rub the tabletop lightly with his knuckles and say “my great shame, my great shame.” Listening to this repeated mea culpa, Nicolae understood his first morning in Montreal was becoming extraordinary, and he began to enjoy himself.

Pulled from the university, Ionescu was sent for surveillance training in Timisoara, where he spent two years becoming the kind of secret police most feared in Romania. He became an invisible man. And when he said the words “invisible man” to Nicolae, the mystery of his face disappeared. In an instant, Nicolae understood the strange familiarity of his presence, how his body seemed to fit into the picture of the world as seen from Nicolae's eyes. Here was the man who had haunted him the last five or so years of his life in Bucharest. No longer the apparition on the periphery, here he was right in front of Nicolae, across a table in Montreal now, eating cookies with his family. It was a thunderous realization, one that made Nicolae leave his chair and back away from the table.

“You must understand,” Ionescu said, rubbing his moustache, “with you it was always just play. I did not detect in you any real threat to the state. In my job, you develop a very dependable sense for these things. But I was a man who followed the orders handed down to me. I could question the logic of these orders in my mind, but not openly to my superiors. For some reason, they were worried about you, especially after you applied for a visa, but for me, I could tell you were not interested in counter-revolution. When you spent hours in the library of the American Embassy, it was just to read books from another culture. That is all, am I right? You simply love to read books. I watched you read so many books, Nicolae.”