by L. A. Robbins
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was in hospital?’ I half-whisper as I follow Florin into the garden potting shed. ‘That he’d had a mini stroke? And then another?’
In the long rectangular space, my brother jerks out a wooden stool, sets it down with a bang, takes a seat on another, ten feet away. He’s next to the workbench, its surface scattered with trowels and rusty spades; my back is against the opposite wall. There’s a smell of fertiliser and damp soil. We’ll have privacy here, away from our parents, who are inside. He hasn’t invited me into his house, which means he doesn’t want Ana-Maria to hear either.
‘I called,’ he snarls. ‘I told you that Tata was poorly. And you’re here.’
‘He’s seriously ill. His kidney. I hope he recovers. But he’s 88. What chance do the doctors give him? He should have stayed in hospital after he collapsed last week, after he hit his head – a basal skull fracture.’ I tremble.
‘The doctors said he could come home,’ Florin spits out. ‘I know what he wants; he told me. He wants to be home, if necessary, to die at home. I’m respecting his wishes.’
‘Three strokes. They may have been avoided. Now he can’t speak, he has no balance. He’s disoriented. Anxious and exhausted.’
‘Who are you to damn me? To criticise what I decide?’ Florin slams a fist into his open palm. ‘You abandoned us thirty years ago. I stayed here in Ploieşti. I have lived next door on the same street, all this time. I’ve seen him and Mama almost every day.’
My beloved father; it’s too late. I want to scream. My throat is tight, teeth pressed hard together. The late afternoon sun’s rays shoot onto my blouse, make a shadow of my livid brother. It should be the other way around; me, the dark devil, and Florin, the golden angel. I am the damned one who left Romania in the 1970s with my husband and child when Ceaușescu’s draconian repression threatened to starve us all. Now the scales of justice have tipped at the great weight of my trespass. Of course, they’ve been slanting against me for decades, surfacing in Florin’s flippant remarks, in his silences. I knew all along and I didn’t know. Anguish wrenches out my words: ‘I could have come, long before I did. There was only you to tell me. Mama is deaf and doesn’t use email – how could I have learned from her?’
‘Sure, you could have come. And that would have prevented this? What are you, some kind of magician? He had a fucking kidney infection. The pain was intense. He blacked out and fell. Hit his head.’
‘I am your sister, his only daughter –’
‘What kind of a daughter?’ His face is red, contorted. ‘You and Max swan in from Switzerland a few times a year, the golden couple, with jolly stories of your adventures. Tata and Mama make such a fuss. Huzza Huzza! Fête you like visiting dignitaries,’ he snorts.
Florin has exploded. All these years he’s been nursing a poison. He was always the resentful younger brother, barely controlling his jealousy. I look away. There’s nothing I can say or do to atone, no words to fetch me pardon. My breath has stopped, my heart too. When I find my tongue, I speak. ‘I’ve begged you for years to let me be more a part of their care, to meet their doctors rather than just speak to them on the phone, to help make decisions. You wouldn’t. You’ve had everything under control.’ My breathing is forced and rapid. Anger and nausea parry like circling binary stars.
‘Noble efforts, Ioana, but you’re only here once in awhile –your interference would only confuse the doctors; I am his power of attorney, the one who has the medical directive if he can’t decide for himself. I am here.’’
‘I come whenever I can get away,’ I interrupt, but he is speaking over me:
‘I’m the one who found their doctors, who takes them for assessments and appointments. Caring for them is becoming a full-time job as more and more goes wrong. Tata has struggled with looking after Mama ever since she lost her hearing. She’s clingy and dependent, a child at times, you see it. Now his body has taken the toll.’
‘I’m looking into better hearing aids for Mama,’ I rock back and forth on my stool.
Florin unscrews the top of a small flask he takes from the lower shelf of the workbench. He puts it to his lips, pulls at it. ‘Deafness is irreversible and happens to older people; you know that, Ioana.’ His words are bitter. ‘Why throw money away on new equipment?’ His phone buzzes; he takes it from his back pocket, raises it to his ear. His long strides take him past me into the garden. ‘Ja, Dragoș …’ He tells his caller that Tata is poorly. The rickety shed door begins to swing shut. I prop it open an inch with the tip of my shoe. ‘He’s managing on one kidney.’ A pause. An expletive. ‘Yes,’ Florin says angrily. Something about collecting arrivals from Odessa. Through the dusty window, sunlight illuminates a philodendron on the workbench. The undersides of its heart-shaped leaves are fuzzy, their edges, white gold. I inhale and exhale.
My brother returns. It’s time to talk about what to do now. I swallow. ‘I was expecting the nurse to come this morning, but Ana-Maria came over instead and we washed Tata together.’
‘Yes, we cancelled the help you organised for them. We’re back. We can do it.’
I blurt out my shock and anger. ‘You don’t realise what’s involved now. Until a few days ago he wasn’t moving in the mornings. I needed help to change him and wash him. The last stroke robbed him of strength and balance. He could fall. I couldn’t leave them on their own. He needs – they both need –home support. Even before the strokes, help would have given you more time.’
Florin and Ana-Maria have just returned from a week’s sailing on the Danube. We’d arranged that I come take over, the week that they were away. But he’d summoned me a day early. Tata had fallen and hit his head, then the strokes. ‘Yes’, Florin had interrupted brusquely when I remark that the strokes had incapacitated him, yes, they were still going on their annual sailing trip on the Danube, that’s where he was calling from. Ana-Maria was home looking after Tata. She’d leave when I came. They’d just brought Tata back from hospital.
A week ago, when I first arrived, Ana-Maria had held open the door to my parent’s house, hugged me. Mama’s eyes shone, she asked after Max. In the kitchen, Tata rose unsteadily and came toward me, smiling, his face, white as the bandage taped to his skull, hand on his heart. Ana-Maria made us tea, served raspberry pastries on the patio. She had new blonde streaks in her hair, a fancy watch strapped to her wrist on which she checked messages. Her packed suitcase stood by the front door. I shifted my gaze to the backyard. A few rows of my father’s vegetable patch remained: straggly stalks slanting this way and that, curled brown leaves dangling and twirling in wan sunlight. Ana-Maria explained how Tata had improved, how creatinine levels were back to normal, his kidney, functioning, so the hospital let him come home. While he’d lost a fair amount of blood when he hit his head, the wound was healing. Ana-Maria asked my parents to excuse us: she would show me where things were.
Inside bungalow she pointed at medications and supplies. She had stocked the fridge, replenished cupboard foods. She apologised for not inviting me to her house, did I see the scaffolding? They’re having a conservatory put on the end; it’s a tip inside the house. She led me to the hallway outside the bathroom and pointed to the short iron pipe at the side of the radiator where Tata’s head struck. Thank heavens she and Florin were home that morning. An ambulance had taken Tata and Florin to the emergency room while Ana-Maria devoted three hours (three!) to scrubbing away the blood that was everywhere. She gestured at the walls, the carpet, the baseboards, metres from where skull made contact with iron. A dark shadow the size of a backpack near the pipe remains: testament to copious blood loss. I nod, eyes large, remembering that he takes warfarin, a blood thinner.
‘Tata was walking around yesterday; this morning he took longer to get out of bed.’ Ana-Maria looked around the hallway as she said they’d be back soon, would I manage? I had nodded; I could handle this. False assuredness: flickers of fear darting like a school of small fish.
In the week that I am with Tata and Mama, I am alone. Max is home in Geneva, preparing for a conference in Bucharest; he’s a Romanian lawyer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (UNHCR) He’s coming to be with us before the proceedings begin. I wish he were here now. My dear Tata, robbed of voice and spirit, and there’s no one to talk to. My heart aches. The first morning after Mama washes and dresses herself, she murmurs ‘breakfast’ and begins preparations.
I roll up sleeves to tend to Tata. I smell his wet diaper before I pull the sheet down. I reach fingers to help him up; he puts out a retaining hand. Is he telling me he can manage? Or that he cannot? Tata is six feet one, heavier than I am. How would I lift him? I’m in my sixties, without strong muscle power, recovering from Covid (negative test results). Little fingers of worry oscillate, my breath is shallow. I blink. Strong urine and sweat will stew in the late summer heat, never mind the effect they may have on Tata’s skin. I excuse myself, retire to the kitchen, call Tata’s doctor’s office and local home help organisations. I can’t move my father, change his nappies, bathe him safely, I tell them. I agree to pay a high price for emergency care today and tomorrow and a standard rate, going forward. The head nurse remembers me; I have called over the years. She asks why Florin was not willing to keep Tata at hospital longer; they could have watched him. I want to ask the same thing.
While I wait for this morning’s nurse, I change Tata’s bandage. I smooth a paper towel on the pillow beneath his head, turn it one way and carefully unstick the adhesive tape, then the other way, to loosen and remove it. I press gauze soaked in betadine to the inflamed train track of black stitches that run through bristles of shaved white hair. I speak to him softly. ‘The wound is dry, (nearly true), and healing, (probably true)’. His luminous eyes follow my movements. The left side of his face sags.
When an emergency nurse arrives an hour later, I could kiss her. Together we roll him to one side and untape the soaked nappy. She puts a bowl of warm water and mild disinfectant soap next to his waist; I sponge his torso with the cloth. He props his knees so he can wash between them himself. We gently push the knees to one side so he can wash behind. While he’s on his side, the nurse places a folded fresh nappy next to his pelvis, unfolds the left half, rolls him to his other side to unfold the right half. I tape the nappy on. I learn to use my body as a counterweight to help him sit as he swivels his legs off the bed. I feed his legs into his trousers, drape a shirt on his back. Tata buttons the front. He stands and I pull up the trousers, fasten them. I hand him his cane. He wobbles to the bathroom to shave. I give him a hot cloth to wash his face. He brushes his large yellow teeth. In the bedroom, the nurse is changing the bedsheets and disposing of the soiled nappy. I start to comb the thin thatch over his balding pate; he takes over.
I walk Tata to the kitchen for breakfast. Seated with my parents at the kitchen table, I allow a triumphant exhalation to escape. It took fifteen minutes but look what we have produced: a clean father with smooth cheeks, fresh underwear and his day clothes. The nurse leaves as we finish breakfast. I do the dishes with Mama, then book a cleaner to come, starting Thursday. We put in a laundry and I prepare meat and vegetables, nothing too difficult to chew, for our dinner. Starting tomorrow, a nurse will come first thing, to help wash Tata.
The days pass, me, speaking, Mama, lip-reading, both parents nodding. The routine imposes a structure; it comforts me, and them too, I hope. Most mornings, the sturdy young nurse comes, and twice a week, a cleaner. Afternoons, we sit in the garden. Mama weeds and reads. By Friday, though gaunt and pale, Tata can dress himself and walk to the bathroom where the nurse and I help him sit in the shower while he bathes his privates. He is more active, moving from house to garden, from sitting room to kitchen. My heart skips along unevenly as I talk to him, make cheery signs to Mama, print what might be misunderstood on a small whiteboard that I find. Besides being chief cook and bottle washer, I see that I am a breath of fresh air. I tell them how Max and I have begun trekking with a local group, that we are building muscles. No, we are not tackling the Alps, I add. I am quietly grateful that I no longer live in this polluted rust-belt collection of cheap, pop-up bungalows.
When the cleaner comes, I run errands, shopping for groceries and newspapers, bandages and creams. Tata’s appetite is erratic, as is his energy. He dozes in the late afternoons. Mama sees this. What she doesn’t know – she sleeps in another room – is that he has started to prowl the house at night. The thump of his cane on the floor boards jerks me awake. I rise, disoriented, in my old bedroom upstairs and go down to him, terrified that he will trip in the dark; there is too much furniture in their little house. The Friday night, when he first does this, I try to talk him into going back to bed. In the sitting room, he canes across the carpet, squints at framed photos of our family, stares into the moonlit garden, blinking. I hug myself in the doorway. Is there pain? He wouldn’t tell me if there were, or if it is spectres of the hereafter that flit through his mind.
In the daytime, I humour him. I bring the photos to his armchair and point to the one of our family seated on a blanket in the meadow. ‘A blustery day for a picnic,’ I say, remembering how I shivered in my cotton top. ‘You shared your big cardigan with me. We walked to the edge of the forest. My son had laughed at us, a four-legged monster in a woolly fleece.’ Beneath the fringe of tall trees, Tata had swept aside curled leaves with his shoe to uncover chartreuse spears of crocus, white stripes down the centres of their blades. ‘Don’t be cold. It’s coming, the spring.’ He had squeezed me to him. Tata taught me how to tie my shoes, how to whistle. He was the steady, encouraging support, holding the bike frame as he ran along beside me when I first peddled a two-wheeler.
One morning when the nurse comes, I ask her to help me bring a huge box of black-and-white photos down from the attic. The night before, I had pulled down the trap door, unfolded the zigzag ladder affixed to it, then climbed up into the musty loft space. I’d found the box close to the hatch. Later, Mama and Tata and I spend happy hours looking at little me and Florin, at Tata’s crop of blimp-sized courgette after my parents returned from a short summer holiday, at all four of us in evening clothes for a concert in Bucharest.
When Florin texts that they will be back the following afternoon, I invite him and Ana-Maria to dinner, despite feeling part-zombie from lack of sleep. Mama and I make polenta pie with sheep’s cheese. I put a fried egg and peppercorns on top of each serving and a salad of lettuce and beetroot alongside: Mamaliga is a childhood favourite. Mama insists that we make Placinta du Mere, a cinnamon apple pie for dessert. I humour her. Cooking keeps us busy. My brother and his wife arrive. She is tanned and windswept; Florin’s face is puffy and flushed, the whites of his eyes, faintly bloodshot. He’s wearing a watch like his wife’s and cordovan boots gleam on his feet. Ana-Maria waggles her eyebrows at the polenta pie. My brother makes a toast to good health, looks pointedly at my father as he holds his glass aloft. The way Florin’s upper lip rises as he swallows tells me it’s not water in his glass. My pie goes down a treat. They are all smiles when I describe how we looked at family photos, how Mama remembered Gin Rummy and is teaching me Whist. The smiles morph into quick nods when I talk of the nurse who comes to help with father, the cleaning lady who comes while I shop for food. I explain that I could not have looked after him on my own at the start, I would have dropped him, fallen myself. As I serve Mama’s apple pie, still warm from the oven, I am about to remark that Tata now needs help, surely they had noticed, that everyone will benefit. But I don’t say it. A look passes between my brother and his wife; the care I have set up is not appreciated, in fact, they disapprove.
‘Tell me about your sailing, Florin,’ I change the subject.
‘Good,’ he grunts, putting a forkful of pie to his mouth, chewing.
Ana-Maria saw sea gulls, she tells us, and a huge white bird, an albatross, maybe.
‘When is Tata’s next appointment with the kidney doctor?’ Florin asks her. He leaves at seven-thirty that evening to recommence his night shift as a local taxi driver. Mama and I do the dishes.
The following afternoon is the scene of the final judgment in the garden shed. Me, wondering if Tata’s subsequent strokes occurred because he was home instead of in hospital? Would his body have spiraled down anyway, no matter what Florin did or didn’t do? Florin, reinforcing how are things to be by dismissing the carers; I am to butt out. I haven’t been there all this time; I’m not welcome now.
Max arrives Wednesday evening. My husband looks good for his sixty years. His white hair frames an open face; he wears steel-rimmed glasses over intelligent eyes. He has no family anymore and dotes on me. In the kitchen we sip sparkling water while Tata rests in his room. Florin and Ana-Maria are bringing us a take-away dinner. When Mama goes to the bathroom, Max reaches across to take my hand. Pent up heartache and exhaustion spill with my tears. I wipe them hastily before Mama returns.
Max has something for her, for both of us, he says, rising to open his small suitcase. He hands a paper sack to Mama. She extracts an enamelled wooden box decorated with silver threading that frames and links pieces carved coral.
‘A Berber jewellery box, from Alphonse, at my office. It was his mother’s,’ Max says.
I admire intricate pattern.
Mama opens the lid and takes out a small black plastic box. Inside, two hearing aids sit in padded depressions: shiny, flesh-coloured paisleys. ‘Cutting edge,’ Max says, his chest out. ‘Pronak, made in Switzerland’, states the container. Mama’s fingers hover.
‘Alphonse swears by Pronak,’ Max tells me. ‘He’s the new tech support at UNHCR. He also works as a part-time distributor of hearing aids; he’s trained to fit them. Virtually deaf before he started using his own, a year and a half ago. ‘They’re ranked highest in Europe for the most clarity. With the best ability to cope in noisy situations.’ Max unfolds a piece of paper, offers it to Mama. She lifts her glasses and skims a professional review putting a hand to her ear as if apologising for the current device, that does nothing.
I want to ask how will it help Mama to have a Swiss hearing aid in Romania. It would need fitting and adjusting. Max is speaking. ‘Alphonse arrives in Bucharest tomorrow. He’s the tech man at our conference. He can come here in the evening and adjust them. How would that be?’ He looks at me and Mama.
I address Mama. ‘A present from Max’ – my lips form the words slowly. I scribble on the margin of a newspaper: to be adjusted here by audiologist tomorrow. A half smile beneath Mama’s uncertain eyes. Max is bright with expectation. ‘Can you find her last hearing test? We could show him.’
‘Yes.’ I pause. ‘Could we give them back if they don’t work?’
‘Yes. I told Alphonse her current hearing aids don’t work. He persuaded me to try. He gave me the music box to store them in. That way they won’t get lost if they’re not in her ears.’
They will in this house, I think, surveying the clutter. Kind of you both.’ Mama hasn’t been able to hear for over two years; I don’t want to get her hopes up. But I don’t want to mar Max’s enthusiasm. ‘So, Alphonse has no other plans tomorrow night?’ I ask.
‘None. He always stays late at the office; he lives alone.’ Max hands me a block of Lindt dark chocolate. He grins. I loosen paper and foil, tap it into pieces with the end of a knife and offer it around. I kiss his cheek. ‘Mmm merci, mon amour.’ My favourite. Chocolate warming in my mouth, I exhale. Everything feels possible.
Florin and Ana-Maria bring a take away Turkish dinner. Hugs for Max. Afterwards, Florin drives away for his night shift. He’s dropping Ana-Maria off for a bowling evening with friends. Alphonse arrives just after they leave. He’s a swarthy, heavy-set man in his thirties. With a hairy black monobrow over bulbous green eyes, he looks like an intelligent bullfrog in his green T-shirt. The black hair on his head is combed back, gelled in place. Behind his ears jet black hearing aids gleam.
‘How do you like working for the UN?’ I ask him in English.
‘Ça me plait beaucoup,’ he nods. ‘I can speak French in Switzerland.’
‘And before?’
‘Until last month, I worked for Netherlands Labour Authority.’
‘Ach, difficult Dutch!’ I make a face.
‘I can’t speak it. But my mother’s Algerian. Her family immigrated to France in the 60s and she met my father. French for me. I’m alright in Romanian too.’
Max smiles. ‘Alphonse is an expert on asylum seekers; he showed me an article about human trafficking in Romania. He helped with the findings.’
‘I was working for NLA and CoMensha then,’ Alphonse sniffs. ‘English is fine; everyone speaks it. But knowing the local language – knowing several languages – is really useful, if you’re looking at labour exploitation.’ The big man’s hands shake slightly as he reaches for the raspberry roll I offer and pops it into his mouth. He sets his briefcase next to Mama’s little box of Pronak on the table, leans forward then takes a sip of his tea before he opens the case. He loses his grip on the mug; Max catches it before it can spill. ‘Merci, je m’excuse.’ Then: ‘Let’s have a look,’ as the clasps snap open. Inside the briefcase are cushioned headphones and a metal box with an LCD screen. Alphonse positions his chair behind Mama’s. He squirts disinfectant into a palm, slathers it between fingers, then opens the Pronak box and fits the earpieces behind Mama’s ears. When the headphones are over top, he connects the cable to the little machine, flicks a switch. I am starting to tell Max about Tata’s night wanderings when I hear a gasp.
Mama is wide eyed, her lips parted, hands fluttering upward. She is speaking Romanian. Will it last? Is it a mistake? How?’
I am staring. Whatever sound Alphonse is piping into her ears, she is hearing it. Mama twists around to look at him.
Alphonse nods. ‘At her current level of hearing, this will continue to work. If her hearing deteriorates, we can adjust it up, to a certain point. And there’s a Pronak hearing centre in Bucharest.’ He removes the headphones and asks me to say something to my mother.
‘I love you, Mama,’ I say.
She inhales. Her lips tremble. Tears form in her eyes. I tell her what Alphonse explained about their efficacy. Alphonse shows her how use a finger to close the earplugs when the room is noisy and open them when she’s having an intimate conversation, without removing them. She goes to the bedroom to demonstrate to Tata. I thank Alphonse profusely. Hands in prayer, I nod at Max. Mama returns, her smile, wide as the sky.
When Alphonse rises to leave, he stumbles over the cardboard box of photos. I apologise, I’d meant to move it. Will the two men take it back up to the attic, please? Though we only managed the top third of the contents, there’s nowhere to safely store the big box in the crowded bungalow. Better that I bring down small batches, one at a time. Alphonse and Max lift it and move into the hallway. I hear the creak of the spring as they pull down the ladder. A loud thump prompts me to hurry into the hallway. They’ve disappeared; I see their shadows moving on the attic ceiling. I call up to them.
‘All fine; we lost hold of the box; we’re just putting everything back.’ Max’s voice.
The next day, Max leaves before dawn for the conference. When he wakes, Tata is visibly unwell. He gestures: his back aches. His legs and ankles are swollen, his hands, mottled purple. When he begins to vomit, Mama and Florin and I take him to hospital. The slide downward is swift and irreversible. He loses consciousness. His kidney has stopped working, his body is shutting down, say the nurses. Florin and I sign a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order. We take turns at his bedside, me and Mama, Florin and Ana-Maria. In the late afternoon, the head nurse tells us to go home; they will call if there’s a change for the worse.
Max comes home long after Mama and I have finished dinner, a first in two years where we have been able to have a conversation. He eats the dinner I have kept warm for him, nodding as Mama says there are many things she hopes to share with Tata. I hold her hand.
At three in the morning, I am jolted out of sleep by the telephone’s shrill rings in the hall. When I answer, Florin says they will meet us in the hospital. I wake Mama gently and Max and I hurry to put on our clothes. On his hospital bed, Tata’s long frame lies still except for a faint rise and fall of chest. His papery cheek is cool and dry when I kiss him. A nurse tells us he has not recovered consciousness, that, while he’s not in pain, it is unlikely that he will wake. There is no point in thinking ‘if only’, no point in ‘would have and should have’. My eyes are gritty and dry, my chest, hollow. I try to breathe deeply, to be present. I put my arm around Mama whose tears follow one another down her cheeks.
The two weeks after Tata’s funeral Max stays with me in my parents’ house on compassionate leave. Florin sorts post-mortem legal and financial arrangements, nothing to do with me. We sit with my mother on the patio, linger over breakfast while pieces of her heart break off and she cannot put them back. I have found local organisations to support her. She will remain in their little house, with Florin and Ana-Maria next door. A volunteer driver will take her to a community centre that offers games and crafts for the elderly. She came home exhilarated and tired from a first event, presenting me with a crocheted potholder. We go together to a morning Tai Chi group that exercises in a church hall, a ten-minute walk away. We follow the demonstration I find online; at home she can practice what they do, I tell her cheerily. Her old friend Magdalena will collect her for weekly lunches with a small group of friends. While her heart is not in it, she has promised to continue with these events; now that she can hear, a world of opportunity is blossoming; she knows this.
And then Max and I are in my old bedroom packing to leave. I am standing at the bedside, thanking him for his kindness toward Mama. I put a folded cardigan on top of my trousers. ‘Florin spoke well at the funeral service. It was a loving speech that captured much of Tata.’ My voice is a soft whisper so that Mama won’t hear. ‘I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t ask me to participate. But I didn’t have the energy to press for this.’ I look over at Max
He is perfectly still, his back against the door, eyes closed. When he knows he has my attention, he opens his eyes and begins. ‘Ioana, I’m sorry to bring this up. I waited. But I don’t know how long I can wait.’ He inhales. ‘In the attic, remember that crash? Alphonse lost hold of the box of photos as I passed it to him. At the bottom are bundles of passports. Maybe thirty of them’
My eyebrows are together. ‘Passports?’
‘We were surprised. Two of them were loose; one landed face down. When he picked it up it was open to the portrait page: a young Ukrainian man. He opened the other: another Ukrainian man. He suspects – that your brother is involved in – human trafficking’
I sink onto the bed. The air siphons out of my lungs.
‘I think he’s right,’ Max says. ‘I went up again to look at the other passports. All are of fit Ukrainian men.’ He lifts his chin, looks at the ceiling. ‘It’s common practice to take ID – threat of exposure to immigration authorities forces illegal workers to behave if they want them back. They can get across the border, that’s EU law since the war. But once they get across, they need ID to find work.’ Max looks at me, walks to his suitcase and stands, staring into it. ‘Alphonse says they’re construction workers – lifting heavy blocks, manoeuvring beams, tiling roofs. Long days, starting at first light. On shady terms – they’re subcontracted; there’s a high turnover. Who knows? Maybe they’re removing asbestos without proper protection. Employers are up against deadlines so they cut corners.’
‘But Florin’s a taxi driver.’ I feign misunderstanding.
‘He also moves Ukrainians at odd hours, Alphonse thinks. Who have come here to work. And he stores their identities.’
‘Why would their passports be in Tata’s loft?’
‘In case some anti-slavery commission suspects Florin. Stages a raid on his house, Alphonse says. They’d find nothing there. He’d look clean. A taxi driver rather than a human traff–’
‘What – will Alphonse report Florin?’ I interrupt. A wave of nausea rises.
‘He was worked-up at the conference. Talked about it every day: merde. We were presenting to the Brits – following up a police investigation about organised crime here. Operation Cardinas – some 500 Romanians were involved. Three years ago.’
I press my teeth together, barely breathing. Florin’s anger and greed. He’s fallen in with an unsavory band of ne’er do wells. Whether it’s voluntary complicity or there’s been coercion, a dark certainty churns in my stomach – the phone call from Dragoș – arrivals from Odessa. Part of me feels dizzy, the other part, vindictive. Let Florin face charges. Then I am ashamed for wishing this on anyone, much less, on my brother.
Later that morning Max and I board the plane back to Switzerland. I lean my shoulder into his arm, close my eyes, empty my lungs, breathe in, sigh again. Max gently presses into me. ‘Bitter as you feel that your brother has shut the door on you, in an odd way, he has given you freedom. To live your life, apart from them. For now, at least, he is there, next door to Mama. And you can speak with her. Often’
When he points out the window I look down on the fields and low mountains, the roads and rivers between countries, remembering the endless bus ride thirty years ago when we fled from Ploieşti through Hungary and Austria to Zurich. Hand to heart, I recall the tremulous moments when we crossed borders, fear and guilt, bright as blood in my veins. ‘Florin is assisting asylum seekers,’ I say. ‘We are asylum seekers, too.’
Max looks at me. ‘Ionically, you and I are native Romanians, who escaped the very country they seek asylum in. The difference between us and the Ukrainian labourers that Florin may be – exploiting – is that they are desperate. They need money; that’s why they’re looking for work. We had support, bless your father. Don’t chastise yourself.’
I sigh. ‘Tata understood our decision to leave Romania – it never meant I loved him less.’ Of course it didn’t. His secret gift to me was what made our flight possible. I honoured the thread that bound us by journeying home, again and again. My final vigil, sharing memories, cleaning and feeding him, watching his restless wanderings in the night, could be further testament, if it were needed, that I cherished him. Suddenly my eyes widen. ‘Could Florin have found out?’
‘I don’t know. I know only that he’s not struggling financially, the way he once was. If he’s involved in a group, this would explain it.’ There’s a flat finality in Max’s voice.
I see the conservatory Florin has commissioned, the highlights in Ana-Maria’s hair, Florin’s fine boots, their do-it-all digital watches. Something stopped me from remarking on these novelties; I’m glad now. My brother has what he always wanted. Does it puff him up? What of his affiliation with Dragoș and the men – has he jettisoned his conscience, along with his old boots? Does he numb unwelcome thoughts? My voice is small and hollow when I say: ‘If he thought we knew what he was doing, Florin would worry.’
‘He doesn’t know,’ Max answers. ‘Alphonse has not reported him. Your father’s death ensured that. And he sees how your brother supports your mother. We can’t know what Alphonse will do, going forward. We’ll have to hope he does nothing.’