The Invention of Ana Read online

  Well, I actually do know a game my big brother plays, said Violeta, giving her disingenuously bashful smile, the same one she’d smile for sixteen years, until the day her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a bus shelter.

  If you want, she said, I can show you what to do.

  During the next recess Ana stayed in the classroom while the other kids chased after Violeta’s pigtails. Sulky and offended, she sat drawing Violeta as a cow with two udders. But if Ana thought her first day playing second violin was bad, things grew far worse when the mutiny really picked up steam. Violeta was the type to divide and rule. She split up her classmates into winners and losers, swapping best friends like the rest of us swap trash bags. One day she gave Ana a friendship ring, but the very next Monday, in front of the entire class, Violeta threw her ring into the wastepaper basket and terminated the friendship without explanation. Every single recess, Violeta played the same card: Ana plays games for babies, Ana’s just a little kid, Ana can’t figure out how to tie her shoes, Ana’s got to stand on a chair to reach the shelf. Ana still wears diapers at night, she lied, I saw it with my own eyes on an outing with the Pioneers.

  When Ana heard that story she was sitting on the jungle gym, swinging her legs. Is it true you still need diapers? someone asked. Yeah, Violeta says you still wear diapers at night, said another. Ana was trapped on the jungle gym; she couldn’t get away. And how are you supposed to answer a question like that anyway? She sat where she was and felt the helplessness wash over her, the tears welling up. It was her word against Violeta’s, and sniveling wouldn’t do much for her credibility. Look, the baby’s boo-hooing, someone yelled, and Ana tumbled off the jungle gym and ran home to the apartment block as fast as her sausage-dog legs could carry her. She lay down on the sofa and cried, quietly at first, snifflingly, but soon louder, until at last her father stuck his head out from his office and glanced around. Ah, Ana, he said, as if he’d found a natural explanation. It was just a branch against the windowpane, it was just the cat rummaging around under the bed.

  Ah, Ana, he said, it’s just you.

  Many years later, when she and Violeta had both ended up, in their separate ways, as outcasts, Ana felt a peculiar blend of hatred and tenderness whenever she saw Violeta hunched around a cigarette behind the gas station, or on Lipscani with some drug dealer by her side. In moments of teenage gloom, Ana imagined the two of them somehow shared a fate, she and Violeta: like two accelerating bodies, they’d collided with each other, and were now free-falling into the abyss.

  It was probably an exaggeration, the free fall, but that was how Ana felt. And not without reason, because that year all Ana’s friends abandoned her, and before the month was out she’d briefly lost her life.

  It began the morning their teacher gathered the girls together and explained that the Danube of Thought was turning fifty, and in celebration there was to be much pomp and circumstance: congratulatory speeches and festive fireworks, fluttering doves, tens of thousands of pennant-waving children, Romania’s daughters shouldering five-foot rifles on a parade ground lit by the first gleam of day. All Romania was paying tribute to the Female Symbol of Creation, the Scientific Elena, and the epic leadership of her Hero Husband, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Ana’s class had been given the particular honor of supplying the girl who would stand on the podium and receive a kiss on the cheek from Ceaușescu himself, and that same afternoon two officials trooped up to the school, and all the girls were lined up in the schoolyard so they could stand to attention while the bureaucrats went from child to child and scribbled down notes. Ana didn’t stand a chance, of course. She stood there with her chubby, babyish cheeks, a whole head shorter than her classmates, and it came as no surprise when Violeta won the contest. Two days later, the President’s chief medical officer knocked on the classroom door, and Ana seethed with envy as Violeta bustled off to be examined. We’re talking the full change-of-ownership inspection here: After all, the Genius of the Carpathians mustn’t be allowed to get cooties. Violeta was vaccinated for typhus and infectious hepatitis, she was tested for colds, mumps, and whooping cough, for meningitis, tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, and the next day at recess she showed off all her punctures to her classmates.

  Yeah, well, so what, said Ana. They’re just a few stupid marks.

  They’re not just marks, said Violeta. Now I can never get sick.

  Yes, you can, said Ana, as Violeta pulled up her skirt to show the bruise on her buttock.

  See that there? That’s a presidential swelling.

  Now, I don’t know if she was embellishing as she went along, but Ana often talked about the gymnastics display for Ceaușescu’s birthday. The way they practiced formations for hours in freezing weather at the parade ground; the wind that swept among the empty bleachers; the chattering teeth; the classmates who passed out with cold and had to be wrapped in blankets warmed on the stove. Ana hated the cold and the rehearsals. Her coordination was bad and she was constantly dropping the pennant, so the coach downgraded her to walking at the back of the procession and waving a flag. Now, it was one thing to dance around and humiliate herself for Ceaușescu, but to do all that with Violeta on the podium—no, Ana couldn’t bear the thought. Envy picked and tugged at her, she couldn’t sleep at night, and the day before the dress rehearsal she played the only card a frustrated schoolgirl has to play, taking to her bed with a nasty case of malingeritis.

  Nonsense, said Ana’s mother when she felt her cool forehead. I want you out of bed right now.

  And if Ana hadn’t been the daughter of a father who’d grown up in the deepest recesses of Oltenia’s darkest mountains, that would probably have been that, and Ana would probably never have died. But Ana’s father was born in the kind of village that tall tales and quacks come from, one far, far away, where the tumbleweed blows and sprained ankles are treated with distilled spirits. He may have been a man of science, but he was also something of a hypochondriac, and he was just as hysterically afraid of inflamed appendixes as the rest of Bucharest’s impoverished population. Was he slow to react when his daughter suddenly complained of stomach pains? He was not. He put his hand southwest of her belly button and asked: Is this where it hurts?

  Mm-hm, said Ana, nodding, frightened of the earnestness in his voice.

  So Ana was whisked off to the hospital by the only person in the neighborhood with a driver’s license and put in a room with two coughing boys, and there she lay, writhing in the bleached sheets, not knowing what she was most afraid of, the birthday parade or this mess. Her little lie was skidding out of control, but before she could yank the emergency brake the doctor was standing over her bed, pressing his hand against her belly.

  Yes, she said again. It hurts right there.

  Now her mother was worried too, standing whey-faced in the hallway and peering guiltily at Ana. She wanted so much to come clean. But her mother was pacing the corridor like a caged panther while her father was busy answering the anesthesiologist’s questions. Is she allergic to opiates? Taking any medication? I see she’s in Year Three—she’s nine years old? The anesthesiologist was checking against the table for age and weight, jotting down figures, and nodding to the orderly.

  And all of a sudden it was too late.

  The next thing Ana remembers is three doctors yelling in her face. What’s your birthday, what’s your name, who’s the president, how old are you?

  I don’t know, she gasped, frightened. And then she began to cry.

  Ana’s heart had stopped. She’d been dead for nearly two minutes. The idiots hadn’t weighed her before pumping her with anesthetic, going on the average weight of a nine-year-old instead. Mid-operation her pulse had disappeared, the nurses screamed and shouted, and the surgeon fumbled with the defibrillator until the anesthesiologist leaped up and massaged her heart back into action. He emerged a hero, that incompetent anesthesiologist, receiving the Order of the Star of Romania even though he was the one who’d overmedicated her, and
even though it was obvious Ana’s weight was more like a seven-year-old’s than a nine-year-old’s, and a weedy one at that.

  Back at the diner, I asked Ana what it felt like to be dead. Did she see her life flash before her eyes, a tunnel of dazzling light, what? But Ana shrugged. She had no memory of hovering ten or fifteen feet above her lifeless body. All she remembered was an extraordinary sense of relief that she wasn’t at the freezing parade ground, staring into Violeta’s lovely, ugly face. And she remembered her father standing at the end of the bed with a glass jar, in which a lump of meat was floating in a yellowish liquid. He’d bribed the surgeons with a hefty share of his Christmas bonus so that Ana could take home her healthy appendix. She still has it today. It’s sitting on top of her chest of drawers in Bucharest like a relic, in a place of pride beside her father’s old pipe.

  This was the story Ana told me as we sat in the diner that night, staring at me with those narrow eyes. We were the last ones in there. The waitress idled on the barstool, doing a crossword or Sudoku or maybe drawing mustaches on politicians, and Ana took her wallet out of her canvas bag. In the wallet she found a photograph she laid on the table.

  That’s me in Year Three, she said, sliding it across. A few days before I died.

  I picked up the photo and examined it, searching for the self-assured woman who sat in front of me, but all I saw were the glazed eyes of a schoolgirl. I looked up at Ana and she smiled at me, and I laughed, because it was a peculiar anecdote.

  What are you laughing at, she said. Don’t you believe me?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

  Why aren’t you writing it down, then? Didn’t you say you write stories?

  Yeah, I do.

  So why aren’t you writing it down? Isn’t it a story you can use?

  Maybe. Bit short, don’t you think?

  But it was just the intro, it was only the first chapter. Wait till you hear the rest, then you’ll be begging me to let you write it.

  You think so?

  Ana nodded. Before we’re done with each other, she said, I guarantee you’ll be writing my life story. Ana Ivan’s journey through time, the whole true tale.

  I laughed. Sounds like a thriller.

  Yeah, you can practically hear it, right? Here, take the picture. Use it as inspiration.

  You mean that?

  Yeah, sure. But if it’s a bestseller I’ll sue you and run off with all the money. Might as well tell you that straightaway. That’s what we Romanians are like. Unreliable.

  I took the picture, smiling.

  As long as I’m the one writing it, there’s probably no need to worry about bestsellers.

  Oh, come on. You seem talented enough.

  You don’t know that. You haven’t read anything I’ve written.

  No, but I could. Why don’t you write a story for me?

  A story?

  Yeah, write a short story for me. A short story about my appendix. It’s got real drama, don’t you think?

  I laughed again, but Ana wasn’t smiling. And was there really anything to laugh about? She’d lost her appendix, she’d died because of medical incompetence, and by the time she got out of the hospital in February 1989 her world had come apart. That month all her friends defected, and suddenly there was no one to hang out with in the parking lot, not a soul who wanted to go home and play games. When the thaw shambled into Bucharest, trampling the parks to sludge, she was already an outcast, sitting all by herself in the schoolyard and walking home alone when the bell rang. All her old subjects took part in the uprising, and soon she was on a level with the Romani kids who picked up trash behind the marketplace. No, she was below that now. She was on a level with the handicapped girl, the one with the wheelchair and the crooked arm, or at least on a level with fat Dorin Puscas, who always had his fingers in his mouth or up his nose or somewhere worse.

  Ana told me more than once about those dismal months in Year Three, about the sameness, the routines run on autopilot. Getting dragged out of bed at five thirty every morning to stand in lines outside stores. Going to sleep every evening hoping she wouldn’t wake until the summer. I heard her describe so many times getting up in the dark without electricity or gas or warmth, how breakfast was nothing but a hunk of dry, untoasted bread, how her father dressed her in four layers of clothing for a long day in an unheated school—so much clothing she could barely move, her hands gloved as she took dictation, scribbling texts about the Genius of the Carpathians, Elena, the Renowned Scientist—how she’d go home again through the cold and sit in front of the oven for the two hours they had gas and electricity, eating soup and doing homework, before the dark came back and all the layers of clothing had to be removed and replaced with new ones, two pairs of woolen socks, two sets of pajamas, and piles of blankets that held her pinned against the slats all night, until there it was again: morning.

  Sounds pathetic, I know, but I guess that’s what it was like in Romania in those days, just grindingly miserable. Not that I was there to see it, of course, I’d only just been born, and I know nothing of dictatorship and hunger, never having had a taste of it, not even speaking Romanian. But Ana was there, sitting on the floor in front of her father’s office every day after school, waiting for him to come out. She wasn’t welcome in the parking lot with the other kids, she didn’t dare venture into the kitchen and trouble her mother, and she didn’t want to knock on the office door and disturb her father in the middle of his thesis. Her world had shrunk to twenty-one square meters. It ran down the corridor from her bedroom and up to the living room, and from her spot outside the office Ana could hear all the small sounds inside: a match being struck, drawers shifting in their wooden frames, a pencil tracing rough paths across notepaper.

  As she sat there, she guessed what her father might be doing. She imagined the scene. The small fat candles melted almost to the plate, the heavy reek of stearin, the drawing board flecked with paint, two or three sheets of paper, and the book of geometric figures, the ones with funny names. Möbius strips and tori, rhombuses and trapezoids. The theorem about the hairy ball, that one was funny. She liked it when her father talked about those things, but he rarely did. He’d sit hunched over his thesis for hours, absolutely still, and when finally he got up he’d say: Oh, Ana, are you sitting there? Shouldn’t you go outside and play?

  But Ana didn’t go outside and play. Going outside sounded about as good as running into the arms of a hoard of angry miners, a band of hysterical farmers with machetes, or any other frothing mob she could come up with. Glue-sniffing child soldiers, a pack of drunken hooligans. Every day after school, Ana sat outside the office and fiddled with her homework and her crayons, and at some point during the spring it dawned on her family that she’d become a homebody, a timid child who’d inherited neither the go-getting energy of her mother’s side of the family nor the earthy practicality and work ethic of which her father’s side was so proud.

  Why don’t you have any friends? asked her cousins.

  Yes, where are your playmates? said her aunts, as they stroked her hair and debated her flaws as though she were a sick cow or a mare gone lame.

  Goodness, she still wets the bed, said one. Isn’t she starting Year Four after the vacation?

  You should give her St. John’s wort before bedtime, said another.

  Like hell you should, said the third. What she needs is a good kick up the backside. The girl’s bone idle.

  It can’t have been easy, and if Ana had grown up in any other home, her parents might have helped. But the best her mother could offer was a piece or two of good advice.

  If you get off your butt and run outside, she said, you might find yourself a few friends.

  And when she was in a more philosophical mood: If you only knew what we went through so you could have it this good.

  And Ana’s father? He’d been something of a loner in his younger days too, and couldn’t see why Ana pottering around by herself was such a problem. It was healthy; boredom was for idiots,
and his daughter was certainly no idiot. In March he finally submitted his thesis to Babeș-Bolyai University at Cluj, and when he came home from the post office that afternoon he told Ana the big news.

  So are we moving to Cluj? she asked excitedly.

  Ah, well, we’ll have to see, he said. Let’s take things one step at a time.

  Then he kissed her, put on his best jacket, went into town, and came home with a chicken. God knows where he got it from, but that evening the apartment smelled like bay leaves and fat, the pálinka and cherry juice emerged from their hiding holes, and Ana’s father told old tales from the Romanian Academy that made Ana’s mother laugh until she coughed.

  To twelve years’ work, he said, raising his glass.

  To a hundred years’ peace and quiet, said Ana’s mother, her cheeks warm and flushed.

  While Ana’s father waited for the evaluation committee in Cluj to make a decision, he suddenly had time to spare. Time to take Ana to the Geological and Technical Museums, or to drag her all the way out to Bellu Cemetery, where they paid homage to the poet-mathematician Ion Barbu and laid a protractor on his grave.

  It’s about emotional understanding, he said, as they stood in front of the stone. Do you understand that, sweetheart, do you feel it?

  At a café behind the university he taught Ana to play chess, and when she got back from school one day, to her surprise, the door to his office stood open. There was a geometry problem ready for her on the desk, and when her father came home they sat down together and went through her work.

  Okay, Ana, said her father, when she handed over problem set number twelve. I think we’d better call a halt here. You should go out and get a little color in your cheeks.

  No, she said. One more, then I’ll run outside and play.

  Alright, alright, he said, tousling the hair behind her head. He got to his feet and let his fingers glide across the spines of his books, his collections of formulae and the major works of topology, packed so tightly together the shelves bent under their weight.