Excerpt from The Ghost in the Mill

Doina Ruști
Translated by Ileana Marin

I. The Secret Life of Adela Nicolescu

1. Last year, sometime in November, I noticed the novel in the window of the Sadoveanu bookstore. It stood out because of the big Arial letters of its title: The Secret Life of Adela Nicolescu Told by Florian Pavel. For a moment, my brain folded against my forehead and I froze with my eyes glued on the window. On a navy-blue cover was my name—something I was just seeing for the first time. It could be a coincidence. I read the title again and entered the bookstore. The counter was filled with other books, but all I could see was my name. Opening the book in question, I got the impression that people were watching me. I felt as if the door of a hot oven had opened inside my skull. That book was about me. I thought as much after the first page, and now, having read the entire novel, I am positive.

On that suffocating November day, I bought the book, got home, turned on the AC, snuggled up in an armchair, and started reading:

In spring, even though Del didn’t fully understand that the world was changing, she knew her emotions had emerged from that dangerous place of fundamental transformations. One evening, after spending the day with Tantilen as usual in the kiosk in the yard, she went inside with the feeling that something bad was happening. The place was deserted, as though everybody had died. The mirror in the vestibule disappeared and the oil lamps were turned off. Through the crimson curtains, the familiar image of Ion Nicolescu with a Diplomat top hat and a lion-head walking stick looked out straight ahead from a golden frame. Piercing the dark, Del sneaked into the bedroom. Nothing of what she’d known was left. Neither the beds nor the three-door wardrobe remained, but there was a small round table, which she seemed to have seen somewhere. And some chairs. Warm evening light streamed through the tall windows. Del took a step toward a bench, bright green like most of the chairs in the house, and snuggled in, thinking that if she closed her eyes and waited for a while, a miracle might bring back all that had disappeared. She didn’t wait long—or maybe time simply compressed; anyway, after a bit, she sensed a presence … a smooth step sneaking along the walls. She slowly opened her eyes, expecting to see her mother, grandma, or anybody else. She peeked through her eyelashes. Then she opened one eye. Next to one window was a man—a dwarf with short legs and a wrinkled head that seemed to be made of balled-up paper. Del shivered. The little man had bright, restless eyes, but Del couldn’t say what made them look that way. He was a frightening, ugly little man with big eyes, a thick jaw, and a crooked nose that looked like a piece of wood cut and polished with a blade. His bright aura made it seem as though a huge spotlight was trained on him.

“Maybe I’m not as you thought,” he growled in a labored voice. Words escaped his burrow-like mouth guarded by squirming slugs.

“Maybe I’m not exactly as you thought,” he repeated almost mockingly. “But I assure you, it’s me. You wanted to see me. Here I am.”

Del understood every single word. Later in life, in moments of calm solitude, she would relive in detail the fear, the warm revelation, and the immense disgust at thinking all her hopes were reduced to the image of a hideous dwarf—a result of the complex situation she lived in now and which blocked her every attempt at speaking or moving. The dwarf smiled and the flesh on his face trembled. On his forehead were two bumps or two ears as small as Del’s little fingertips. This discovery made her laugh. Not for a moment did she think she was talking to the Devil. She was certain the dwarf was the Other one, the good one.

“I am God. Don’t you forget me,” he confirmed and rose toward the tall ceiling, becoming taller and thinner. He transformed himself into a transparent wisp within a shadow that spread across the room at sunset.

After a while, Grandma found Del and took her to the room in which they had just relocated the child’s bedroom. This room was smaller and where they used to keep the lavatory and the dresser with bedsheets.

“Well, I set up a room here just for you; you are a big girl now and can’t hang around your parents all the time—you must sleep alone. Come, come, nothing bad will happen to you, this door opens into their bedroom and this other one leads to mine, out this window you see the people in the street and, if you have good eyes, you can see Iulia’s garden; now, it’s better for you to have your own room, to learn to make the bed, to fold your things neatly, to take care of yourself during the night, to cover yourself, to wrap yourself into the blanket. One of these days you’ll go to school and here you’ll do homework, here you’ll keep your copybooks—and the books will fit on these shelves, then you’ll see how nice it is to have your own room where nobody disturbs you. Many kids would love to have their own room, but they are crammed with the rest of their families into one room with a dirt floor or maybe a cement floor covered with linoleum—not many houses have a proper floor. How many people do you think live like us? Other poor suckers can hardly make it.”

“I don’t want to go to school.”

“Who said you would? It’s a holiday now. Till Easter.”

“You. You just said it. And you should know that I met God.”

Del’s grandma sighed and continued talking about what she thought was important:

“Hey, we have a lot to do, and I count on you to separate walnut kernels from their shells for the memorial cake. Tomorrow we commemorate my father-in-law, and early in the morning you and me will go to the cemetery because Tantilen has caught a cold, you know she is sick and old. Close the door and hold on to my skirt till we get down to the stable where we’ll crack the nuts.”

In midsummer, Cristina was born and Del’s world was filled with unexpected—and unwelcome—details. Everybody in the house went crazy when Ica gave birth to the second child. They held a feast with tables set in the yard, lots of people, and plenty of fine dishes. They all forgot about the other kid. Del hung around, putting up with people’s questions. Then sat next to Mrs. Predescu, a stuck-up lady who only talked about how one should do things: one must hold a fork this way, one must keep one’s handkerchief there, a girl should smooth out her dress from time to time.

In the evening, Del sneaked out to the big backyard oven where they had baked bread all day long. The oven was still warm. She went inside, sat on the nicely swept hearth, leaned against the back wall with no concern for her white silk dress, and began staring at the sky, where the moon had risen to its fullest. It was then that her God descended a second time.

It wasn’t quite like that, and as for calling myself Del, this shortening of my long and somewhat old-fashioned name happened later. But this is not essential to the story. What struck me in the first chapter was a familiarity with intense events. And with the grandma I haven’t thought of for quite a while. She was a short woman, about five feet tall, with a brown lizard-like face, all wrinkled. It seemed pinned there by the huge black eyes she often rolled like Bette Davis, her favorite actress. I remember how in the 1960s, while we both breathlessly watched movies in which Bette Davis played diabolical women, Grandma would read the subtitles aloud, stressing all the inflections and mimicking the character’s grimace—sometimes standing up. She always had a velvet band on her head, either green, black, dark purple, or burgundy—the band held back her bowl-cut hair. She wore all kinds of extravagant dresses with a belted waistline and a bust decorated with bizarre flounces, lace, and patterns. There was a big wardrobe in nearly every room, and almost all were filled with her clothes. Many were made between the wars, but from time to time, she would have some sewn by Mrs. Dobrescu, who lived two houses down in the same neighborhood. I remember Grandma always in motion, running around in large, flowery housedresses; in slippers usually one size too large, or in hellishly high heels; all wrapped up in her sophisticated dresses with yellow and green stripes; and in checkered but mostly mustard-brown coats—while giving orders to anybody. In our home, there were always many people, people who regularly called on us or who just came by. Relatives, the omnipresent Lache Ogaru, a thin old man with a long nose who continuously had a story to tell with his unmistakable voice, and who called me from whichever room I was in and who usually came at 5 PM to drink coffee with Grandma, whom he used to call Iozefina with imperial emphasis. I remember him wearing his straw hat with the black grosgrain ribbon, with his whitish cane—excessively formal—bowing to all his listeners, even to me. Anytime he was telling a story, he seemed tied by a silk thread to whoever was listening. It was the busiest time of the day, when all kinds of people came by to say hello to Grandma, and rarely, a few looked for my grandpa, who preferred to stay on the veranda, in the kiosk, or on the stairs of the house in the afternoon in the long five o’clock hour.

During the day, the frenzy was much more intense in the yard and around the kitchen. They both woke up early in the morning and fed the animals. We had a big yard with hundreds of birds—mostly turkeys, chickens, and geese. In addition, we had the field with five or six goats, so nasty that the shepherd didn’t want to take care of them even though we had to keep them for milk, especially for the kefir they made every third day. Then there were the sheep that came home only in winter, when all ten of them scattered in the stable, which had housed horses in the past and still had a feeding trough of polished yellow wood. We also had two pigs and several dogs in another yard. In our household, it was a lot of work, especially in the morning when I heard Grandma’s voice, even through my sleep. Sometimes, I woke up and ran into the living room to look out the windows facing the yard. It was terrifying to watch the futile effort in the square space bordered on each side by a building: the stable with a hayloft, the hay shed, the house, and, in the back, the summer kitchen under whose windows was the oven, like a little red house with its mouth open toward the shed. Between them was an empty clean space like the back of the hand, through which Grandma would run, short and dressed in her skirts or large flowery dresses, holding a soup spoon and talking incessantly:

“Ica, come fetch these geese, pluck them, and bring more water for Vitina! You, what are you staring at? Have you finished chopping the wood? Then follow Sile into the garden, and after you are done there, bring the vegetables for salad!”

She had all kinds of people who helped, like Vitina, who did laundry for twenty lei, or Ilie, who chopped wood and helped in the garden for a bottle of brandy. It was my mother she chased the most. She got Mother to cook, iron, and do other meticulous jobs, which Mother hated but performed sulking, with her eyes only on the thing she was piddling with—always on the verge of bursting into tears. Everybody in that house had something to do, Cristina included, who, in spite of her age, was then responsible for watering the garden. Everyone did something except me. I did nothing, absolutely nothing, that I didn’t like. Most of the time I would take the back stairs to the shed yard and climb onto one of the posts guarding the staircase. I watched with my chin resting on my hand, completely immune to Grandma’s orders and pleas. I liked to watch Vitina rub each piece of laundry against the wooden washboard on top of the misshapen blue tub that looked like a whale. I liked to watch Ilie chop off goose heads with the thin rounded hatchet on the stump near the gate. But I was especially fascinated by how my grandma started the fire in the outside oven, feeding it thin cane-like sticks she threw one by one from the neatly stacked pile on the left side of the oven. They worked a lot, cooking several dishes every day, making all kinds of preserves, filling up the basement with jars of zacuska, jam, marinated fish, barrels of cheese in brine, wine, waxed watermelons, potatoes buried in sand, Because otherwise we could not deal with life, as Grandma would have explained, opening her eyes wide. Later, I realized that all their efforts came from the way of life they’d inherited and which they felt duty-bound to life itself to maintain. They had two teacher salaries, then two pensions, out of which they bought wheat and corn for birds, sugar for jams, and gasoline. These were shopping essentials. The rest was produced there, in their yard or garden, in heroic daily struggles.

Regarding my meeting with God … In reality, it was a terrible nightmare that haunted me for a long time. The meeting took place in the basement of my brain. It was a summer afternoon. I believe I was five. I had played in the yard, and I must have suffered from sunstroke. At some point in broad daylight, definitely before evening, I went inside. I wanted to catch my breath, to cool off—but also to explore all around because there was always something to discover in that house. It was striking that I found the house almost empty, exactly like in the novel, because they were getting ready for cleaning and they had taken the furniture out into the yard. My great-grandfather’s portrait was probably on the wall, as Pavel wrote; it was always there. I can see it, him standing with his black coat, holding his walking stick, and with his hat pulled down low on his head, as if a cat had just awoken and left. He wore a look that is stapled into my brain. On the opposite wall, above the door, was the icon with the Virgin Mary, giving a crucifying look as well, and many times I thought they were looking at each other.

Passing through one room to the next, I reached the one at the end of the house. I called it the “room of ghosts” because it was the darkest, nobody was living there, and it was the only room left without light even after they installed electricity. I entered it only in search of adventure, mostly when the chest was opened for airing. The chest! It was metallic blue, guarded by black iron bars flattened at the end to look like dragon claws. In this chest they kept old embroideries, Austrian lace, Romanian folk blouses that had won prizes at the Royal Exhibit, jewels, land documents … as well as funny old toys, old tokens of love and of spring, and lots of other things I couldn’t take my eyes off of. The chest was hard to open, so most of the time I just passed by, breathlessly feeling the covering of small, shiny scales, as though it was wrapped in the skin of a green fish.

That day, I lay down in bed facing the windows, the tall ones cut into the wall next to the street that were partially covered by the linden tree crown. I knew the East, the road, and the deserted mill were behind the heavy foliage. I fell asleep and had a chilling dream:

It looked like the end of the world. Sheets of flame plummeted from the sky as people tore all over the place, and I watched it happen through the window in the room of ghosts. Suddenly, the stars burst with a white light and a giant appeared; his steps shook the earth, and when he set foot over one wing of the mill, he bent over me. With his crooked nose and slug-covered mouth, he looked exactly like the dwarf from Pavel’s novel. The giant pulled up my chin and said: “I am God.” Many years afterward, whenever I had a nightmare, I would wake up with a startling reflex. I was horrified not so much by the long-since-passed dream itself, but by the possibility of its recurrence.

As for the party celebrating the birth of my sister, whose name is, of course, Cristina, it went as he wrote: “I entered into the oven because it was getting late. I was sleepy, and nobody had any intention of going to bed, which meant that I would be alone inside. Tantilen found me in the morning when she wanted to start the fire for the second party.”

Even though the novel did not perfectly record reality, it was unquestionably about me. From the first moment, I was convinced that he knew me, although the name Florian Pavel didn’t ring a bell. It could be a pen name. I turned on my computer and searched the author’s name. I came up with two results: one from www.liter.net and the other from the newspaper The Day. Both had laudatory things to say about the writer Florian Pavel, born August 8, 1980, in Bucharest. The novel about me was his first. A novel of “indisputable maturity,” as one of the reviewers wrote. Indeed, I’d also believed it to have been written by an older person and never imagined a twenty-five-year-old guy. The Day mentioned that he is a musician, more specifically that he composes electronic music. At that time, I thought he could be the son of someone of our kin, someone with whom I had lost contact or had broken relations, or he could have been the child of an acquaintance, as sometimes happens, and whom I impressed at some point in my life either directly or indirectly through someone else’s stories. I would, as it happened on occasional meetings, tell my story to complete strangers, insisting on certain details, on certain feelings, which I might not recall the same way the second or third time as I had the first time, because I have never told my story to only one person or on a single occasion. Or, at least, this is what I believe. Who can remember all the stories that one has ever told!

Besides, I had to take into account the restless language of the ghost. How could Pavel know about it when, I would swear, this was only between me and the ghost?!