Archipelago BooksMarch 2021Selected by Barbara Epler

“You started leaving when I was young.” Plangent, particular, haunting, sorrow-sodden, this novel about a mother’s death is also an indelible story of abandonment and yearning, of loss before loss, of loss within loss, and of pain and love mixed together – a bill from the past always redelivered with compound interest. — Barbara Epler

Christian wanted to bring my bags up to my room. He left them in front of the bed, then went back down. First, though, he showed me the balcony and the facing window, your place, only one floor down from mine. There was a street in between, a few metres of air – it would only take a taut wire and a bit of courage. He asked if I wanted to see you one last time, before they nailed the lid on and lowered you underground. After all this time I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t say yes. Your face, I’d tried to reconstruct your face every year on Christmas Day, measuring your voice on that single phone call, like a blind man running his hands over someone’s features. As the years went by, my image of you wasted away; I’d compare your photo to that voice speaking to me over the phone, and it felt like I’d wound up on a different line. That voice, ever more rasping and heavy – I didn’t know what to do with that voice, how to tie it to you.
So I stared at your window and sat down on the bed. I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t go down those stairs, cross the street, see your face and only recognise you as you lay there dead, and never be able to forget you again.
          Yet I kept stepping onto the balcony, trying to see you inside your apartment. Behind the slightly parted curtains, there wasn’t anyone to see – I was staring at a window, but who knows if they even put you close by. All around was Bucharest, buildings of reinforced concrete crammed together along the boulevard, and a background noise I didn’t recognise, as though even the traffic spoke a language other than my own. Some lights were on in your apartment, and I tried to guess which room you used to call from, where you slept. I stared at your place, my elbows on the balcony rail, not wanting to think of it as a furnished mortuary on the seventh floor of an ugly condominium building in downtown Bucharest. I shut the door to the balcony and went and took a long shower, sitting down on the shower floor, legs crossed, drawn up to my chest, forehead against my knees. You’ve only arrived after your first shower. Afterwards, over there, everything was still the same, the curtains parted, the lights on, and you hidden somewhere, stretched out, eyes to the ceiling.
         Then a curtain opened, and I took a step back. It was Christian, who’d seen me out on the balcony but hadn’t called over. I watched him walk from room to room like the place was empty, like he’d forgotten something and couldn’t remember where. And so I learned where you were, because in front of the last window, he stopped and turned toward me. No signal, barely looking at each other, him in front of you and me in a bathrobe on a balcony. Then he turned his back to me, sat down, and I couldn’t see him anymore. Only a thread of smoke slipping through the window, rising toward the eighth floor, unravelling as it went. A nice way to be near you, Christian’s method, sitting in a chair, smoking beside you. Over the years you’d taken to smoking with a vengeance, almost out of spite.
It began as something on Tuesday evenings, but then it became one of your most steadfast habits. You never went anywhere without three packs in your purse – you found comfort in digging through your purse and discovering them, hiding in there, among your things. And on the phone, the few times we spoke were punctuated by flicks of your lighter and puffs on your cigarette. Then you were coughing and there was nothing more to say.

When I went down, Christian was in the lobby, sitting on a couch waiting for me. He got up to come over, but I signalled he shouldn’t. We remained where we were for a moment, not saying anything, not saying that we’d only seen each other a short time before. Then I sat down closer to him than I’d meant to, and we stayed crammed together, on the right side of the couch, neither one of us doing anything to correct that unnatural situation. A waiter came up to us and asked if we wanted something; we didn’t order anything. Then Christian told me, They say the dead go up to heaven, and he glanced at the ceiling, puzzled, not saying anything more, a half-formed thought. He was looking at the ceiling and beyond the ceiling, looking toward your place, as if to say that you’d only managed to die halfway, that while going up, you’d stopped short, on the seventh floor. ◉

The speaker here is Lorenzo, a young man from Italy whose mother left when he was young to develop her business interests in Romania, which she saw as a European “Wild West” of opportunity. Here, Lorenzo addresses his mother while visiting Bucharest to attend her funeral.

The title of Bajani’s novel is taken from Psalm 130:3 in the Old Testament, known as one of the “penitential psalms”. In the novel, Psalm 130 is read at the funeral of Lorenzo’s mother.