In the Red (4 page)

T
he televised grain of the image is faded into the yellow range. Everyone's skin is rendered in a raw orange. This is the revolution. This is the trial. Stern men in military uniforms sit at tables in a barren room in a schoolhouse. Their mouths are set into hard, narrow lines. It must be the camera that fails to capture the glee in their eyes—the promise of blood. But then again, the camera glances over a man in a suit fussily looking at his fingernails, as if he is, after all, indifferent to the promise of blood.

The dictator and his wife sit to be judged in their own little corner, behind an institutional table from which a teacher not long ago asked the children to recite multiplication tables, pledge allegiance to the party. Today the glorious leader and his consort have the dim hollow faces of doomed animals. Like horses with broken legs, about to be shot. The prosecutors say: destruction of state buildings, undermining the economy. They say: crimes against the people, genocide. Did you hear the charges? Have you understood?

I do not answer; I will only answer questions before the Grand National Assembly. I do not recognize this court. The charges are incorrect, and I will not answer a single question here.

This is how the Ceau
ş
escus try to hang on to the shreds of their authority. It must be cold in the room. They keep their coats on. The dictator's hat rests on the table near his wife's purse. He chops at the air with his hand when he tries to make a point.

I repeat: I am the president of Romania and the commander in chief of the Romanian Army. I am the president of the people. I will not speak with you provocateurs anymore, and I will not speak with the organizers of the putsch and with the mercenaries. I have nothing to do with them.

Please, make a note: Ceau
ş
escu does not recognize the new legal structures of power of the country. He still considers himself to be the country's president and the commander in chief of the army. Why did you ruin the country? Why did you export everything? Why did you starve the people?

I will not answer this question. It is a lie that I made the people starve. A lie, a lie in my face.

He looks at the prosecutor. The prosecutor is not deterred. The prosecutor says, We have seen your villa on television, the golden plates from which you ate, the foodstuffs that you had imported, the luxurious celebrations.

It takes the time to smoke a cigarette for the Ceau
ş
escus to be condemned to the firing squad. The defense objects that this must be legal, this must be justifiable later. The prosecutor points out that they have ten days to appeal, and then in the same breath says that the sentence is to be carried out immediately.

What?

The camera is increasingly unsteady; the man holding it shakes from terror and excitement. The prosecutor points out, I have been one of those who, as a lawyer, would have liked to oppose the death sentence because it is inhuman. But today we are not talking about
humans
.

When it is time to bind the hands of the condemned, the dictator's wife screams and curses. Her voice overwhelms the tumult of lower male voices, making the sound band on the footage crackle. The mouth of a gun is pressed against her arm—they are pushed away, we see them crowded out the door by soldiers' backs. They are not blindfolded.

Suddenly the yellows switch to grays; everyone is outside on the concrete. There is smoke; it's difficult to see. Another hiccup in the film and there is the dictator's blurry wife collapsed on the ground, a dark rivulet of blood issued from her head. The dictator has fallen on his knees in a dusty heap. His body is turned over to show his face, to show the nation that yes, it is really him. Yes, he is dead. Sallow and bloated already.

The soldiers cover the bodies with blankets the same olive green as their overcoats. Then blackness.

But unlike the footage, the story will not shortchange you. You can see what the camera did not show, if you like. The story will tell you. You can make the image explode back into being, clean and crisp in the white winter light, without the fuzzy texture and off colors of something filmed:

The dictator and his wife clip-clop down the staircase, out into the courtyard through the double doors. The wife argues with the guards all the way to the wall, saying, This is wrong, you wayward soldiers will be punished. The men with guns are already there waiting for them, their eager weapons raised. This is when the Ceau
ş
escus know they will die. Now. Not at some time in the future. One of the soldiers sees the knowledge pass over the dictator's face before he starts to cry. The soldier will never forget that look, that moment, the tears of the condemned.

The dictator starts to sing—what? The Internationale, of course. Nobody gives the soldiers the order to fire but they do anyway. They fire and fire and fire again, walking backward to avoid the ricochet, while the cameraman runs in, frantically fumbling a battery change.

No! he shouts.

But the bullets are already spent, the bodies already toppled. The wife does not die easily. She is racked by spasms, the back of her skull blown away. The only order given to the impatient execution squad is the order to stop. For a while they will mill around awkwardly, not looking into one another's eyes but not wanting to leave the place either. Their hands still thrumming with the metal click of the trigger, so sweet after such a long wait in the cold.

For years afterward the soldiers will meet up for drinks. The soldier who saw the look pass over the dictator's face will say, I had never even killed a chicken before. Eventually the soldiers will stop meeting up because they will always wind up talking about the same thing.

The wife was felled midsentence. The dictator did not make it to the fourth verse, the verse about reason thundering in its crater, about the eruption of the end of the past, about wiping the slate clean. In the pallid slanting rays of a cold Christmas Day.

W
hen she moved into Andrei's apartment at the end of the first year of her studies, Irina became obsessed with the idea of a gun. She'd told her parents that she'd gotten work at the university and would share a place with some girlfriends over the summer. She'd grown used to telling her parents only lies. She couldn't very well tell them what was on her mind. The gun. Andrei had to have one; it had to be in his apartment somewhere. The image of it would not leave her. The cool metal in the darkness of some drawer, biding its time, waiting to show what it could do. But even if it was there, it would mean nothing. Any law-abiding American could stash a firearm in every drawer in his house, if he wanted. The gun was not what made Andrei a criminal.

The weapon had to be in the office. Irina was not particularly forbidden from going into the office, but she seldom did. Andrei didn't spend much time in there either. It was mostly a place to keep things. There was a handsome cherrywood desk, and on top of that desk a much less handsome small metal cabinet. In the desk and the cabinet were the things that Andrei kept for business purposes. The cabinet locked with a small key, but he was rather careless with it, often leaving it right out on the desk like a tiny beacon for curious souls. Irina, for a long time, did not betray what might have been his trust.

If Irina had to guess where in the office, she would guess in the tiny cabinet. She could have waited until Andrei left her alone in his apartment, as he often did, to look inside. She was not expressly disallowed from looking in there, so why would she have to do so surreptitiously? She went to look in the early morning, while Andrei was still asleep. Why did she push the door to his office open gently with one finger, so that it would not make any noise? Why was the plush carpet particularly intense against the pads of her bare feet?

The key was on the desk, glinting in the morning light like a coin tossed to the bottom of a fountain. Irina picked it up and almost jumped at the serrated sound of its insertion into the lock. It turned smoothly. The hinges gave a small squeak. She saw right away that there was no gun. Instead there were a dozen hooks bolted into the back of the cabinet. On each hook hung a small key—all the keys, coincidentally, much resembling the one that Irina had just used. On each key was a tag. On each tag was a five-digit number. They looked to Irina like a series of zip codes. She had merely unlocked her way into another mystery. She sighed and closed the door, letting herself plop into the rich leather desk chair that Andrei hardly ever occupied. She opened one of the desk drawers.

There it was. On top of a pile of green folders. Irina laid a hesitant finger on it. It was cold. She'd seen so many on television, but never a live one. It was smaller than she had expected but, she found when she picked it up, heavier than she thought it would be. Was it loaded? Irina had a sudden urge to hold the thing up to her face and peer inside the barrel. She wanted to look inside that narrow black mouth, listen to root out if it could tell her anything. Were there bullets inside the drawer? She did not see anything that plausibly looked like a box of bullets, but she did notice that on each of the green folders was a tag with a five-digit number. That was interesting. She reached inside the drawer to look at one of the folders.

“Try pointing that thing at me. It might make you feel powerful,” said Andrei's sleepy voice from the door frame.

Irina was so startled that she almost dropped the weapon. Her lover did not sound surprised to find her there. Nor did he seem upset.

“Go on,” he said placidly. “It's quite a feeling. Holding death in your hand.”

“Is it loaded?”

He gave a small laugh in response and came to her, offhandedly plucking the weapon from her grasp. He pointed it at her and, before she even had time to be frightened, pulled the trigger. She gasped at its dry click.

“No,” Andrei said.

“I would not advise looking through my things. For your own personal peace of mind, you understand,” he said flatly. Irina nodded that she understood.

Any sane woman would leave a man after he pointed a gun at her, even an unloaded one. But Irina knew that she wouldn't.

“You gave me a good start, standing there pale in the morning light like that,” Andrei observed. “You looked like a strigoi.”

“A strigoi?”

The word caught Irina's ear. Andrei never used Romanian words with her, so this one had to mean something interesting.

“A revenant,” he answered. “You would say a vampire. The creature you took from us and made into your vampire, to be exact. A restless soul that has come back from the dead because it thinks it has been wronged. It returns to settle its scores.”

Irina wanted to ask why a woman would come back from the dead to sit at his chair and fiddle with his gun, but she didn't trust herself to make it sound like a quip. There was always the danger with Andrei that a quip was not really a quip. Jokes became real and the real became jokes. It was best not to tangle with this transmutation now.

“So this strigoi,” Irina said, “is basically a ghost, not a vampire.”

“Yes—no. It does eat the blood of the living. It hates the living. It has two hearts. To kill a strigoi, you must cut out and burn at least one of its hearts. If a strigoi rises from the grave and goes undetected for seven years, he can leave his native land, go someplace where they speak a different language, and become human again. He can even have children. But his children will be strigoi. So you see, it is a bit like a vampire but not quite.”

“That's strange, the thing about leaving the country to become human again.”

Andrei smiled. “Does it make you wonder how many of us immigrants are really truly the dead?”

His face looked gentle and stricken at the same time, not at all like the face of a man who'd just pulled a trigger on his young lover. Did he mean to include her in the mass of revenant immigrants? Was she part of this
us?
She'd seen the gun now, the real live revolver. She could never unsee it, never unhear the detonation of a future shot, never unsmell the bright red blood of a potential wound. She should fear such a wound—but maybe, maybe blood was not such a bad price to pay to finally feel part of an
us
.

T
he men expected the two girls to be friends, to get each other out of the way when it was time to do business. Elena might have been brought in to be Irina's companion as much as Vasilii's; it was easier to send two girls out for shopping sprees than one. On one of the trips to the desert city, Andrei shooed them out of the hotel suite, telling Irina that Vasilii was of the opinion that his new wife dressed like a cheap whore, that Irina should get her new clothes. Irina had almost replied, “So I can dress her like what? An expensive whore?” She had clearly been spending too much time around Dragos.

Elena was perfectly passive when Irina showed her what clothes to get. Short but not too short. Cut close to the body but not skintight. An enviable object but not one for public consumption. Whenever Irina asked Elena if she liked what was held in front of her, she said yes. It was true that everything seemed to look good on her—which was, after all, to be expected. Were the designers not imagining a young, slender body just like hers to drape their creations over? Elena looked over the figure she cut in the fitting room mirror, slinkily wrapped in a knee-length black dress that Irina had informed her was a basic piece for any woman's wardrobe. An open V-neck and narrow straps emphasized her delicate collarbone and shoulders. It was a stark contrast to the crunchy ballerina costume she had worn to marry Vasilii. Here she looked like a real, plausible ballerina, dressed soberly but elegantly for an arts fund-raiser where she would be proudly displayed to wealthy patrons, expertly performing not a dance but a courtship. Yet Elena's eyes shone with an inscrutable fever.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Irina asked gently, as if checking on the comfort of a suffering patient.

“Yes, yes.”

Elena seemed to be in earnest. She must have been trying to believe that whatever this was, it was enjoyment.

“You look very pretty,” Irina reassured her. “You should buy this one.”

“Not a bad purchase,” Elena said carefully, as if she was repeating words that she had heard somewhere.

“Yes, it's very nice.”

“He will not send me back home and ask for his money from the agency. I am not—what do they call it? Defective merchandise. Arm candy,” Elena said. “I am good arm candy.”

Elena sure spoke a lot of English all of a sudden. She was making sure she fit the dress, rather than making sure the dress fit her. Irina laughed, seeing in her mind's eye a pink statue of a pretty woman, fashioned of glimmering hard candy, being pulled through a doorway to a posh party by a well-dressed man. An unwieldy object to be consumed. What kind of grit might adhere to a vulnerable, unwrapped delicacy like that? Yet she could not be put back into the initial protection of her slick, sealed plastic wrapper. It was too late; she'd been opened. Eat or discard.

“Where are you getting these words?” Irina asked.

Elena shrugged. “People. Television.”

What a thing to learn an entire new language from context, from scraps gleaned from exchanges she had no part of. Irina knew she had once done it with English herself, even if she did not remember.

After buying the dress, the two girls flipped the tags on fine lingerie on a different floor in the gigantic department store. Elena shouldered the crinkly garment bag holding her new clothes and fingered the black lace on a garter belt. She read aloud the name of the designer on the satiny label. “Funny,” she said, “to wear some strange man's name against your skin.”

Irina thought of the hands that had stitched together the rich silk, hands that were not the designer's. A nameless laborer, somewhere, in whatever country was listed on the label after the words
MADE IN
.

“Do you mean funny as in strange?” Irina asked.

“No, I mean funny as in funny,” Elena answered absently, pinching the plush cup of a padded bra.

In the fitting room, Irina showed Elena how to fasten the tiny buttons on the garter belt to the top of a stocking. “That's what Vasilii will like,” Irina said, “for you to wear things like that underneath so he knows it's for him only. Not for any others.”

The lingerie set that Elena liked best was a saturated crimson that contrasted beautifully against her milky skin, with layered lace frills over the rump and at the breast line. Irina flipped the price tag hanging from Elena's waist and saw that this was the most expensive set in the pile of discards she had just tried on.

“You have good taste,” Irina said, with what might have been construed as a touch of irony.

But Elena was not ironic. Her flushed face and glimmering eyes registered something like sad wonder. “I have never worn something so beautiful for underneath,” she said, laying her hand on the soft upper curve of her lifted breasts.

Fear, wonder, amusement—this girl seemed to toggle from one inappropriate emotion to the other on a simple shopping trip. The source of the maelstrom from which these feelings were flung flummoxed Irina. “You are inscrutable,” she said to the girl's reflection, as pretty and suggestive as something that might be seen in a men's magazine.

Elena gave a real laugh at Irina's observation and waved her off. “Oh, no,” she said. “You will see. I am really quite scrutable.”

While the cashier was ringing up the underthings, Elena looked up at a flicker in the fluorescent light.

“No windows,” she said. “Like in the casino.”

“Yes,” Irina answered. “They don't want you to see time pass.”

“This light,” Elena said dreamily as Irina signed the credit card receipt, “this light is not a real light like the sun. But it is not darkness either. This light—this light is an unlight.”

Unlight. Scrutable. This girl was full of words that were not words. In her mouth, English hardly recognized itself.