Daisies by Dave Wakely

(This story features in Lunate vol. 1)

This is our weekly ritual. An afternoon ramble to walk off a hearty Sunday lunch, pacing the ridge at the city’s rim where the twisted-trunked trees grew without a planner’s hand. Under our boots, the downfall of leaves from last night’s storm churns to mulch.

This new town spread wide below us is one of yesterday’s tomorrows, somebody’s dream from a time before we came. The kind of autocrat’s vision that — back home — the Glorious Leader would have bulldozed fifteen villages to build. English means are more subtle, although the ends are surprisingly similar. As the sunset flickers in its glass facades and autumn sprays a million trees red and gold, it is at least almost beautiful. Seen closer to, age is starting to erode its awkward teenaged sharpness. Even in the hardest marble and concrete, the wrinkles show eventually.

And this moment? Stood under these oaks with our flies open, ready to drain the lunchtime wine from our bladders? This is our tradition, our little reminder. I hear you cough as you tense, the involuntary reaction of an old smoker’s lungs, and I listen for the splash. The daisies you will draw in the mud are your party trick: a nameless signature, a dissident’s autograph. Identifying without incriminating. All that is missing is the snow.

*

It was a winter’s evening in the cruising grounds of Parcul Operei, late 1992, the underpowered streetlights staining the Bucharest fog a sulphurous yellow. Dodging the police patrols and desperate to piss, I ripped off a glove and pointed my cock at the wicker screening alongside the footpath, glad my urgency would hasten the act.

As my spare hand flapped away the rising steam, I heard a cough behind me. As fast as my racing heartbeat, I rezipped in fear and turned to make my escape: I was young then and had the self-control. And then I heard your call.

“Razvan. It’s safe. Don’t run.”

I froze in the darkness, terrified I’d soil myself as I tried to name the voice that came again.

“Come, take a violin case, walk with me. We can talk a little.”

You stepped out from behind the wickerwork, holding out a spare instrument case.

“Domnul Anghelescu?”

In the surprise of recognition — the orchestra conductor, the resident composer, in such a place — my greeting came out a question.

“Call me Vasile,” you said, watching me slip my hand back into its glove and close my fingers round the proffered case-handle. Your next words came louder, announced to the shrubs with a bold authority and a silent wink.

“We should step up the pace, Razvan, or we’ll be late for the final rehearsal.”

You strode off purposefully towards the Opera House and I struggled to fall in step beside you. I played along as you passionately explained that the crescendo in Act Three had to come at the exact moment of the heroine’s death, nodding my agreement and throwing in the occasional “Yes, of course.”

Ahead of us, torchlights flickered out of the undergrowth as two policemen emerged, shaking snow from their uniforms. As we hastened past, you nodded your fur hat in gentlemanly evening greeting.

“Ofițerii, de bună seara.”

A few minutes later, our twinned footsteps tracing our progress through the evening’s snowfall, you led me into a courtyard at the back of the theatre.

“Before we go inside… your bladder,” you said, words offered as demurely as a verbal curtsy. “And mine. Observe.”

Fresh snow still settling on your greatcoat’s upturned collar, there was a sly mischief in your smile and more than a hint of a performer’s pride. While I struggled with my trouser buttons, I watched as you pissed the perfect outline of a daisy, yellow as sunshine against the crystal white. I recognised the tune you whistled to accompany your craft, hazily recalled from illicit radio stations. You Must Believe in Spring.

“See?” you said, laughing as you shook yourself dry. “We can make it April, even in December. At least for a while.”

I watched your eyes trace upwards along a line of old bullet holes in the building’s back wall as you fumbled in your coat pocket.

“I have a key — and a private office. The night watchman is a friend. We won’t be disturbed.” A certain geniality crept across your face. “I have coffee. Or perhaps a glass of palinca to keep out the cold? If nothing else, let me warm you.”

*

In the darkness afterwards, lying next to you on your office floor as I gathered my breath, you lit two cigarettes without a word and passed one to me.

“I know you smoke,” you said. “It’s one of the things I can smell on you.”

Our scents and habits, our little rituals. They’re nearly all we have left now.

*

Daisy petals frothing freshly in the Bedfordshire loam, you turn to me, the musty smell of leaf mould and wet earth rising around us.  Today, there has been no accompanying jaunty melody.

“It's getting late, my love.”

It takes so little to make you fretful nowadays. Being here has made you cautious: I can hear unspoken reservations in your voice as well as your words. Perhaps you are going native. Acquiring fear like an infection, the protective immunity of suspicion faded now after all those decades when you had greater need.

I heard your knees crackle like winter twigs as we negotiated the hill. They’re old legs now and they’ve jumped a lifetime of hurdles. I watch a frown crumble your forehead into creases, and I know that the fresh air hasn’t cleared your mind. That it still sees three piles of paper sitting on our kitchen table, waiting silently for you to return.

The citizenship application with its demoralising forms and its demands for fees. The new opera commission, its accompanying letter poetically praising the way your work ‘transcendently hymns the other’ while holding out an offer of reimbursement that a morning’s busking with my violin would probably outshine. And the job offer. Your own venue and creative company to manage, back in Bucharest. Complete with a life-long guarantee of a rent-free old villa overlooking Cișmigiu Gardens, and the expectation that ‘your creative and life partner’ — left unnamed but acknowledged nonetheless — would accompany you.

“We should be going back,” you say.

Your odd gesture — holding your wrists aloft and shaking them — reminds me why.

“Ah. Gloria is collecting us?”

You nod.

“Oh joy. Remind me when?”

Your throaty chuckle reverberates through the trees.

“Well, we’re due at 6 — but I told her we’d take a taxi so that all of us can drink. I will certainly want to. And besides, Razvan, she collected us years ago.”

*

We’ve been in England long enough now that some of the earliest details have started to slip from memory, but I can still picture every kilometre of the journey to join you, one hundred and ninety-seven days after you made your escape.

London shocked me then, the airport’s cavernous glitz abruptly dulled by the surly officials who rifled through my cardboard suitcase as if I might ever afford anything illicit. The clatter and crowds of the Underground, as rich in beggars as the Bucharest metro under the glamorous advertisements that adorned its walls. The night-sleeper from Paddington and the milk train across Devon from Exeter, bullocks nodding me past through the morning mist. It reminded me of your grandmother’s dacha, those few days away together we snatched in the hills north of Sibiu before you bade colleagues farewell through crocodile tears.

Even on an asylum seeker’s ticket, Devon was a dreamland. While you taught music at the University, I worked cash-in-hand in the fields and studied to be your assistant. The electricity flickered, just like at home but the only bugs in the light fittings were the mayflies. When night fell, the watching eyes in the yard were just the chickens. There were mad Sunday mornings when you pranced through the thistles in our garden in your long johns to teach me ballet notation, neighbours hooting with laughter over the tumbledown dry-stone wall as you pirouetted in your wellington boots.

We were welcome then, escapees from a horror they’d watched on television three Christmases before. Still a splash of spray from a foreign sea, not yet the cresting wave of a drowning tide. We were two mysterious novelties with raucous laughs, happy to make fools of ourselves trying to Morris dance or to play our violins in the pub, though you quietly cautioned me to downplay any virtuosity. Our village friends commiserated with us each Easter when my sister’s hand-painted eggs, prudently packed in metres of tissue paper, turned to gaily coloured dust before they reached us.

*

Even here and now, fifty miles from London among hillsides shaped more by bulldozers than history, England is green and beautiful, its seasons longer and their transitions less abrupt than Romania’s. But paradise is never as glamorous as the brochures.

In the promotional films the head-hunters from the Commission for New Towns showed us to entice you, gleeful children clutched the strings of red balloons and ran through sunlit fields to cheer musicians on canal-side bandstands. A stage-managed utopia, shot from careful angles: tomorrow, we were assured, would be glorious. We smiled along, too polite to mention how many applauding crowds we’d already seen. Or how many we’d been paid to join.

And now we’re here, blinking at the coloured lights like visiting aliens, although the backdrop we see over each other’s shoulders when we embrace is not so unfamiliar. The city’s name is declaimed from every portico and local paper masthead, while colourful banners flutter along the business district’s broad boulevards to herald the latest triumphs. Beneath them, the homeless sleep in underpasses in cheap nylon tents while SUVs roar overhead, radios blaring politicians’ slogans to stir up sentiment like witches chanting round a cauldron. “The posters,” you said once as we were walking past. “Almost like the old days, don’t you think?”

There are differences too, of course. In Bucharest, your concert audiences weren’t all for your own work, perhaps, but they were everyman — and everywoman. The Opera Naţională‘s faded velvet cushions hosted every imaginable kind of buttock: grandmothers with knitting needles stowed in their handbags, widowers whose eyes misted with reminiscences, mothers clutching fistfuls of tram tickets for their families’ homeward journeys.

Here, it seems culture is a luxury. For all your smiling patrons’ airy chatter about diversity and inclusion, the ticket prices never fall. And there are no little restaurants, handed down through generations like their chef’s recipes, where people gather for pre-concert dinners of Dimitru’s polenta with chicken livers or Ileana’s plum cake. Nowadays, Slovaks and Latvians — more fashionable now than us with the recruitment agencies latterly — wait tables and scowl behind cash registers. Occasionally, we catch a few words of our native tongue exchanged between barmen or baristas, but mostly our kin clean offices and toilets, too readily branded as thieves to be left unguarded near the till.

*

Gloria collected us at one of those obligatory parties thrown by a wealthy sponsor. We sipped Gary’s warm white wine from rented glasses while his ex-wives played their role of charming co-hostesses through tightly clenched, perfectly veneered teeth. A stable of stepdaughters trotted among us, dainty as dressage ponies, bearing polished platters of vol-au-vents. Amidst it all, pixie-cropped and swathed in Peruvian patterns, Gloria’s Indian silver bracelets rattled like maracas as she waved a bottle of her ex-husband’s finest Fitou leerily overhead, her vivid exclamations lost in a cacophony of chitchat.

“Ah, I see the revolution will be lubricated,” you quipped, and your volume — and accent — caught her attention, although the sarcasm perhaps slipped past her. As she swooped across the room, assuming kindred spirits, you winced discreetly and whispered in my ear. “Tell me Razvan, does this woman not realise that a Romanian can spot a vampire at a hundred paces?”

A few minutes later, when she'd finished her monologue of small talk — wow, from București, such a coincidence, Gary’s been filming a documentary there, such a poignant history, and you write operas too, please take my card, and can I take yours, ohhh how fabulous — she pulled out her phone to take a selfie.

I could see the framed poster she was slyly manoeuvring you to stand in front of, and I knew how strongly you'd object. The image is famous now. A black-haired young man, thinner than he should be, runs wild-eyed through the snow towards the camera while an armoured car burns behind him. Despite the obvious cold, his ragged white shirt is open to his trouser waistband, its cloth billowing behind him. Seconds later, the sniper’s bullet will hit him.

There's a concrete cross in his memory, gathering dust and lead particulates on Calea Victoriei’s central reservation. In travel programmes, it appears to us now like a momentary flashback. Here, he is a symbol of the glory of freedom. In television footage we’ve only seen in the West, you can hear him scream that it’s all a lie… a coup, not a revolution. Or at least you can if you speak our language. There are no English subtitles.

The man is — or was — Grigore, your lover and protégé. ‘The other love of my life’ as you call him, phrasing your words to be kind to both of us. You'd parted two years before the photographer’s shutter clicked: you to sublimate your dreams in music and dance, him to protest without endangering you. By the time Ceaușescu fell, he'd been questioned and beaten countless times. He knew the faces of the victors on the balconies, smiling at the joy of their deceit, just as he knew that he carried a spiralling virus and shrinking defences. The picture has a title now, taken from his diaries. “We are as thin as pencil lines, and as easy to erase.”

I watched as Gloria raised her phone and took the chance to interject.

“Over here, by the window, perhaps? The light would be much better,” I say, taking your elbow and guiding you to a space by the window.

Seconds later, her snapshot captured, Gloria scampered away, fresh novelties already catching her eye.

“I’m not sure if we’ve been befriended or procured,” you said softly, steering me through the merry drinkers to the front door. “But I think we’ve seen enough for one day, don’t you?”

*

Since that afternoon, Gloria has returned periodically like a resilient rash. Perhaps we are a fascinating diversion, the way that tourists wonder at the colourful charms of cobbled Mediterranean backstreets where washing dangles from wires between the balconies when the equivalent street in England would have them clutching their wallets in their white-knuckled hands. If Gloria ever spent an hour in Sector 3, her nose would wrinkle like a grandfather’s foreskin.

Whenever her ambitions require a fresh favour from you — a festival theme tune, music for a celebration — she calls ahead. Through the net curtains of our little rented house that she always calls ‘so authentic’, we watch her survey the street as she nervously parks her fancy car in our less than salubrious neighbourhood.

These Victorian railway workers’ cottages stand proud as ever but their tenants are strictly temporary now: men who drive dishevelled saloons to minimum wage night shifts, young girls who wash along dual carriageways in shuttle buses to menial jobs in hospitals or hospitality. Two years ago, a rainbow of flags draped from bedroom windows as the World Cup blared from a dozen flat-screen TVs. Those summer evenings, a babel of languages would drift over our fences with the barbecue smoke — Lithuanian, Czech, Farsi, Albanian — while the air brought wafts of distant traditions. Grilling pork, smoked paprika, pungent pickles: elements of home they could carry with them, as easily pocketed as habits and opinions. The flags are thinner this year, just a sprinkling for Eurovision, as people drift back East like birds migrating to kinder climates. There are more English voices now, and more African and Arabic. We still don’t hold hands in the garden until it’s dark.

For Gloria’s benefit, we obediently play at noble dissidents, always hoping she won’t stay too long.  “It is the job of patrons to patronise,” you remind me in the kitchen as I make strong black instant coffee in an old enamel jug and reheat frozen pastries from the Polski Sklep, turning up the radio to cover the whirr of the microwave and clanging the oven door open and shut for effect. The real Romanian food — the mititei and mamaliga, the caşcaval and castraveți — I save for our neighbours and our truer friends.

“Think of the money, Razvan,” you tell me. “Every regime has it favourite anthems, its preferred leitmotifs. And if the princess wants endless arias in the key of trauma, who am I to refuse?” I watch you slide your smile into place before you carry a tray of my mother’s old crystal glasses through to the lounge, a cheap supermarket Rioja decanted into an old Romanian wine bottle alongside them. 

Our gratitude is well rehearsed. We make small talk, careful to hymn causes that are currently in vogue, to praise the right authors and film directors. We keep each other mindful to silently accept being exoticised for the country that we fled, rather than the love we brought with us. To play the roles of favoured jesters, smiling at promises of applause rather than possibilities of promotion. And we laugh behind waving hands as she departs, scanning the street for lurking dangers as she teeters to her car on her slender heels.

“Arrivaderci,” she calls over her shoulder. Neither of us corrects her.

“Da, să te fut și eu,” you call back, genially. Yeah, fuck you too.

*

Tonight, the Romanian Professor and his husband are to be paraded once more: two specimens who will blush charmingly while Gloria tells everyone about the Opera for Refugees of the World she will be staging. I already know how your hand will reach for mine as she speaks, how your grip will slowly tighten until it feels like my fingers might break.

Having searched the bedroom drawer for your best bow tie and pressed the creases from your velvet jacket, I find you still pacing the room downstairs. Every time you pass the table, its towering paper piles tauntingly motionless as a tantalus, you touch the top of the chair then move away again, not yet ready to take either a seat or a decision. I watch with a silently bitten tongue, wanting to start all the conversations I’ve played in my head. The ones where I tell you that no certificate could ever make us natives, that our country is finally inching forward while this one hoovers up nostalgia like a cocaine addict. That a British passport is nothing to aspire to now, our Romanian ones more useful — more respectable in many eyes. That before long, being here will be just another ritual we unthinkingly observe. Another habit it would be wise to break. That my home will always be wherever you are.

*

As the taxi drops us at the end of Gloria’s road, you’re grappling in your pocket for your cigarettes even before I can open the car door. Your urgently exhaled smoke blows round my face as we approach the house, and I can hear the clink and clatter of her patio wood chimes on the wind, tuneless as a madwoman’s music box.

We’re close enough now to see figures silhouetted against the misted French windows, glasses held aloft. You look shocked, raising a pointing finger.

“Carol singing?”

I cup my hands behind my ears to catch the words over her garden ornament’s deranged jangling.

“No,” I say. “Worse than that. Listen.”

“The people's flag is deepest red

It shrouded oft our martyred dead…”

“Razvan?”

I look at your face as you say my name, as grey-muzzled and heavy eyed as the stray dogs that loitered in the courtyards back in the old Jewish ghetto. Our evening hosts are ignorantly summoning unwanted spirits, like the naïve victims in a horror film gathered round a Ouija board. I see them dancing in your eyes.

“Yes, my love?”

“Let’s go home.”

*

Knowing that your endless indoor patrolling is unnerving me, you wander around the garden while I text our hostess to plead apologies and heavy colds. When you call inside for wine, I pour two big mugs of Shiraz, their handles easier in winter gloves than fragile stems. As I pass the table, I can see the paperwork has finally moved. Only the job offer remains, your signature still shining where your fountain pen’s ink is yet to dry.

As I step outside the snow has finally come, the first flakes already settling on your jacket’s velvet collar. You’re standing over our wonky metal barbecue, flames starting to catch at the papers you’ve crammed inside.  As I pass you your mug, you throw an arm round my shoulder.

“Drink, Razvan. We must drink heartily.”

You drain your glass and proffer it for a refill while your free hand pats your abdomen with an earthy grin, fingers sliding down to fumble with your trouser buttons.

“There can be no spring flowers without it, my love. And we must believe in spring.”

………………..

Dave Wakely's writing has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction and Bath Short Story awards, and appeared in Ambit, Chelsea Station, Fictive Dream, Glitterwolf, Holdfast, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Phare, Prole, Shooter, Token and Truffle Mag, amongst others. An MC for Lodestone Poets and one of the organisers of Milton Keynes Literature Festival, he lives in Buckinghamshire with his husband.

Twitter: @theverbalist