The night of the 11th of December 1970, the wind howled eerily around the forbidding gothic turrets of Castle Vagor, nestled high in the Inner Eastern Carpathian mountains; as it did most nights, in all honesty. The ancient and imposing castle stood in stark relief against the dramatic skyline, whenever a flickering sheet of lightning rent the storm-cloud darkened night sky. Thunder crashed and rolled around the mountains but also around the unyielding turrets and courtyards of the castle, echoing around the ancient gothic stonework ; soon it appeared, the castle walls would be scoured by driving rain as the storm broke. Soon, but not quite yet.
The darkness of the exterior of the castle was mitigated only by a handful of guttering yellow pinpricks, ancient cast iron coach lamp standards , glass blackened by the filth of the coal gas that burnt within them; all the way down the Dirijor valley as far as the eye could see and even a little beyond, the relatively soft yellow flickering glow of gas-light both from the streets and houses was as ubiquitous as it was exclusive, the sole nocturnal light source available to 200,000 households. The town gas network in the Dirijor valley was a technological tour de force, a beacon landmark in the development of European public utility networks, along with underground sewers and a pressurised water distribution system… back in 1877 when they were being built, at least. By 1970, the coal gas grid was a unique historical curio even in Caucescu's isolated and insular Romania.
Indeed, it was only once you were within the forbidding walls of Castle Vagor, away from the prying eyes of the peasantry, that electricity (other than that currently flashing around the sky) could be found at all, if you excluded the Dirijor dam itself; the giant pre-world-war-2 hydro-electric dam sat far downstream of Castle Vagor, just as the Dirijor river reached the foothills of the Carpathians on its way to joining with and flowing into the much larger Mureș river. Indeed, although lines of pylons snaked away from the dam across the rugged landscape towards Bucharest and the industrial heartlands of Rumania , there was only a single buried cable running from the dam, all the way up the valley to Castle Vagor; it delivered the only domestic electricity anywhere within a hundred and fifty miles, bypassing as it did all the habitation around and downstream of the castle. Coincidentally, Castle Vagor also had the only telephone, teleprinter or radio link with the outside world (or at least with the State Council in Bucharest) within a similar radius.
But inside the castle, storm clouds were also swirling. First-Secretary Vagor, as he was officially required to style himself since 1948, was stomping angrily around the antechamber outside the room in the North-East turret where his third wife was taking far too long giving birth to the long hoped for Vagor heir for his liking. His private secretary and his bodyguard kept their eyes averted and tried not to attract his attention, or more particularly his potentially fatal ire. Neither of his first two young wives had been successful in producing a male heir for him, and both had in due course suffered the consequences, buried along with their unwanted female issue in the private walled cemetery of Castle Vagor alongside 17 generations of the Count's Vagor, with both mothers and babies officially recorded as having died in childbirth; who could dare to contradict this, when there was nobody to tell apart from the alleged murderer himself, whose retribution against anyone speaking out would be swift, brutal and permanent?
Still, he had no wish to repeat the whole unfortunate rigmarole. He'd hate to have to order another grave dug, and go through the tedious process of selecting another young woman of childbearing age from his fiefdom to bear his progeny; this time he would have his heir, he was sure of it!
At one point he was sure he had heard a new-born baby cry, but it coincided with a particularly loud moan from the gusting wind, and the door behind which his wife had been in labour for a good many hours already remained firmly barred, so he convinced himself that it was all in his imagination; his eyes bored a hole in the heavy oak planks of the barred portal nonetheless. He knew that within the semi-circular room behind the door were just his wife of 11 months, a matronly lady from somewhere in the valley who was as close to a midwife as could be found to attend her, and a single member of what would once have been publically known as 'Countess Vagor's Personal Guard Corps' , pre-communism;
Vagor Contesa Personal al Corpului Gardienilor were traditionally a small cadre of guards who had committed disciplinary infractions that attracted draconian punishment and been given a choice between spending at best a short but unimaginably unpleasant remainder of their life in the castle's dank dystopian dungeons or gelding in the style of an Egyptian eunuch, in order to better serve, protect and control the Countess without the Count having to worry about any irregular sexual shenanigans between the Countess and her jailer-protectors - and First Secretary Vagor was nothing if not a stickler for tradition…
Eventually, during a lull in the howling storm, he was absolutely certain that this time he had heard a woman's scream mingle shortly afterwards with a baby crying healthily. Within minutes, the bolt was drawn back with a dull thud, and the door creaked open; "Congratulations, Comrade First Secretary, you have a fine healthy son!", said the matronly woman, handing him a white-swaddled bundle containing a baby fresh from a mother's womb, its face still streaked with amniotic fluid.
Cradling the baby in the crook of his arm, Count Vagor quickly unwrapped the shawl , and then peeled back the cloth diaper, anxious to verify that he did indeed now have a male heir. His exclamation of satisfaction startled the baby, who began to cry, but Vagor wasn't paying any attention, flipping the shawl and diaper back over his son, and thrusting him back into the arms of the matronly woman, before striding excitedly in to the delivery room to congratulate his wife and tell her that she would be rewarded for her fecundity.
Which is where it all went wrong.
As he strode into the room, he heard the muffled sound of a second baby crying, and saw a frisson of fear pass across his exhausted looking wife's face, as she realised he had heard it. She couldn't help herself as she involuntarily glanced at the blanket box at the foot of her bed, and within seconds First Secretary Vagor was flinging the lid open to reveal an improvised crib made of blankets, with a naked baby laying in it. A baby girl!
"Please!", cried the Countess, desperately, "I have given you your heir. You do not have reason to harm his sister! I beg you!".
First-Secretary Vagor reached into the blanket box and carefully picked up the baby, cradling it tenderly in one arm while closing the lid of the blanket box. He smiled at his wife. "That, my dear, is where you are wrong. She will be a distraction to you as she grows up, stealing valuable time you should be spending on raising my son and heir. And then one day in the distant future she may be a pawn in an attempt to usurp my son, somebody will use her bloodline and the fact that she was firstborn against him. And that is a possibility I simply cannot countenance. But finally, and most significantly at this moment, you have tried to deceive me, and that can never be rewarded! Guard, open that window, right now!!"
"NOO!!!!! Myyyy BABY!!!", screamed the young woman in horrified anguish, as the member of her personal guard who well understood that an angry Count Vagor could be bad for the health of anybody nearby, quickly flung the oak-framed window' open wide to the elements and then stood aside.
The Countess's scream of visceral anguish was matched only by Vagor's roar of "How dare you DEFY ME!", as he flipped the baby into the air, grabbed it by the legs at arms length, and spun through 180 degrees, like an Olympic hammer thrower in his delivery stroke . Miraculously, the baby's head missed the furniture and the walls as he spun her, and then when he released his hold, the naked newborn baby sailed cleanly through the open window without contact with the frame or the masonry, vanishing into the darkness. Just at that moment , there was a brilliant flash of lighting, a crash of almost instantaneous thunder and the heavens opened, rain coming down in sheets.
"Close the window!", commanded the self-appointed First-Secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of the Dirigor Valley Judet (and chairman of the Dirigor Valley People's Council to boot), as rain blew into the room in a torrent. The guard struggled to comply, but eventually wrestled the catches into place, sealing the elements outwith again. The roar of the rain and howl of the wind subsided as the window closed, so that the distraught sobbing of the Countess could be heard above the sounds of the storm.
"I shall be merciful with you, because you are the mother of my only son and I do not wish him to hate me as he grows older. Raise him well, or consider justice for your crimes today merely deferred!".
Then he turned to the matronly woman who had carefully and efficiently re-wrapped the baby in her arms and now stood in the doorway of the room. "Hand me my son!", he said to her, and carefully took the tiny baby boy from her, before handing him to his still sobbing wife. Then, to the guard, he said "Take her to the Jailer, tell him she's not leaving! Ever!", and then to the shocked, gasping woman herself "You colluded with my wife to nurture a potential usurper to my son's rightful inheritance and you attempted to deceive me in the process. You should have ample time to contemplate your mistakes before death's sweet embrace claims you!". And then as the still protesting woman was manhandled away by the guard, Count Vagor's attention shifted.
"Right, Dinner! Alert my taster, I'm starving!". And with that he strode from the room towards the banquetting hall, his private secretary and bodyguard ghosting behind him having successfully avoided catching his attention or his ire during the preceding fraught few minutes.
oOo
Elizabeth Director self consciously smoothed the pleats of her grey uniform skirt, picked a suddenly noticed piece of white fluff from the sleeve of her grey blazer and slipped it into her pocket, touched the knot of her school prefect's tie as if to check it were still there, and then knocked only slightly timidly on the heavy oaken door before her.
"Come!", commanded a reedily imperious voice from somewhere beyond.
Betty grasped the whole-hand sized brass knob and twisted to open the latch, swinging the creaking door open just far enough to slip inside and then closing it behind her with a heavy clunk.
To one side, in an alcove between oak bookcases stuffed with impressive looking, and impressively well thumbed, leather bound volumes stood a large ornate grandfather clock which ticked and tocked to itself expressively, the sound echoing through an effective sounding board consisting of the varnished oak floorboards beneath it. To the other side of the room, above large cast iron radiators, three huge sash windows filled much of the wall. On the floor between the two bounding walls was a very large rug, atop which sat a giant antique oak desk covered in all the every day detritus of the administration of an exclusive private boarding school for girls. Behind the desk sat a tall, willowy, grey haired lady, who looked every inch the headmistress she was. Betty's mercifully infrequent visits to this room over the last many years had mostly involved minor infractions of school rules, and similar matters of disciplinary rectitude, and whilst she was now legally an adult (if only of three weeks standing), and was today standing here of her own volition rather than having been remanded for sanction by an irate Housemistress, she still felt like the 11 year old girl that had first stood in almost the same spot seven long years earlier.
"Ah! Miss Director!" said a now slightly warmer sounding Miriam Beattie, peering over a pair of pince-nez at her. "To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? I trust your exam preparation is still going well? ".
"I'm sorry, Mrs Beatty… I'm.. I'm going to have to miss out on sitting these exams, I'm afraid….", stammered Betty.
The expression of bristling yet stunned shock on the face across the table from her spurred her on, quickly.
"I'm really very sorry. This is a classified advert from this morning's New York Times…", she said, passing the torn out piece of newsprint she had been clutching in her left hand ever since it had first caught her eye while she had been 'keeping abreast of current affairs' after breakfast. "It jumped out at me because it is Românește… err… sorry, in Romanian. There's an identical advertisement in the Washington Post, as well. To Elisabeta Dirijor. That's me, my name. Well, the name I had, anyway.. But my name, and my mothers name, are in a classified advertisement in the New York Times! It seems that my poor mother is gravely ill. I am to come back at once to be with her. I have never had to book an air ticket before, so any help you can give me with the arrange..."
Mrs Beattie clearly wasn't listening, she was staring at the advertisement , and she seemed to crumple in her chair as she did so, leading Betty to tail off into silence. She was slightly taken aback by the head teacher's emotional response; the woman clearly didn't know her mother at all, had never even spoken to her let alone met her. This reaction was… as confusing as it was disconcerting. Perhaps it was the idea of her blowing off her first chance to sit the final exams for her International Baccalaureate at such short notice that was so upsetting to the normally icily stoical headmistress?
"My poor child ", said Mrs Beattie, clearly fighting back tears as she slumped back in her chair. "My poor, poor child…", she added, looking Betty in the eye with an expression that seemed to betray anguished sympathy if not maybe even abject pity.
"Mrs Beattie?", asked Betty querulously, getting more confused and uncomfortable by the second. It was certainly terrible news that her mother, mamă, was ill; she could only conclude from the fact that somebody had taken out US newspaper adverts to try to get in touch with her that it must be very serious. But then again, she hadn't seen her mother since she was seven years old when she had left Romania and come to the USA to stay with people who were apparently friends of the family. Although in reality she had been in boarding schools since almost the day she arrived. Since that day she left home for the last time, on the back of an ox-cart as she only hazily remembered, she hadn't once spoken to her mother or father. She had sent a few postcards and pictures over the years via their friends in the US, and had had maybe one card or letter back every year or 18 months from her parents. The letters were always warm and emotional and powerfully infused with love, but they were still as rare as hens teeth and further apart than her birthdays, and always talked in generalities and non-specifics. She kept them all in an old biscuit tin, and re-read them to herself whenever she was feeling down, or as an annual birthday treat to herself. Apparently, as her parent's friends in the US had explained, it was very difficult for them to be in touch with her, and her them, and there were still no telephones in the remote part of Romania where they still lived so a phone call was equally never possible. Elizabeth certainly loved her mother, but it was love once removed, the love she remembered as a 7 year old, in what felt like a whole other life. The compulsion to see her before she died, and that was what she inferred from the advertisement - that her mother was either dying or might be dying, was truly overwhelming, but perhaps she would better understand what she felt about her mother now when she met her face to face again. So far, she wasn't feeling any raw emotion at all, beyond the compulsion to drop her life around her feet and rush off to a strange alien land of which she remembered almost nothing but which, very nebulously, she might call home.
"You must sit down, my child. Please… ", said Mrs Beattie, having come round the desk as Betty had been lost in her thoughts and pulled a chair away from the wall, placing it behind a bewildered Elizabeth, then motioning her to sit down. "There is something I'm afraid I must give you…", said Mrs Beattie. "And I'm afraid it is going to be a terrible shock to you…".
The late middle aged woman walked over to a large painting of the school's founder hanging behind her desk, and swung it away from the wall like a cupboard door to reveal a safe door with a combination lock, speaking all the while as she did so; "They said it might happen like this. I thought they were just being melodramatic. Or it was all a charade for immigration purposes. And after all these years without the slightest problem, as well. I was going to show you all this after your exams, when I was sure it wouldn't be a distraction..."
"Mrs Beattie, about booking my flight…", Betty said desperately in an attempt to get the discussion back on track.
"I'm sorry, Elizabeth, I really am, but the one thing I think I have understood is that what you absolutely cannot do is fly home to Romania. And if what I've been told is true it is extremely unlikely that your mother is ill at all. From what little I understand, she may be in... a different kind of difficulty entirely".
The safe door swung open, and there was some rustling before Mrs Beattie turned around with a large but nevertheless bulging Manilla envelope closed with string. Undoing the string closure, Mrs Beattie slipped out a dog-eared Manila folder and a fat white envelope sporting a wax seal.
"The people looking after your interests here in the USA are part of an organisation calling themselves the Romanian Opposition in Exile. They have support from our State Department. According to the most recent update they sent me on the situation in Romania, the very best thing you could expect if you flew into Romania now would be that you would be locked up in Jilava Prison, summarily sentenced to fifteen years hard labour by the securitate as either a suspected spy or a potential agitator the moment you landed in Bucharest, under what they call 'Law 209'; exiles don't return to Ceausescu's Romania so you would instantly fall under suspicion, and suspicion is as good as proven guilt. And… well, they have a track record of torturing political prisoners", said Mrs Beattie, almost apologetically. "The exiles send me an update once a year when they pay your school fees, and I add their notes to the file. I've always done them the courtesy of reading them, but of course as time went on and nothing ever happened, I paid the whole subject less and less heed.".
This came as a great surprise to Betty. In recent years she had at her teacher's behest kept abreast of current events, and she was of course always disposed to read what little was printed about Romania in the finest US publications; these yielded slim pickings indeed given most newspaper's usual obsessions, even more so at the moment with everything else having to be crammed in between their current fascination with the seemingly futile congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal and the Giants going to the Superbowl. However, as far as she could tell, Romania was quite in favour with the US government because its' foreign policy seemed less slavishly aligned with that of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. She had just naturally assumed that her country was one of the more enlightened and free in the eastern bloc, and not at all prone to arrest, imprisonment and torture of even potential dissidents. Because, she just naturally assumed, the land of the free would never favour a country with an execrable human rights record purely out of diplomatic self interest. The naiveté of youth...
"But according to this file, the very worst thing that could happen would be that for some reason they do believe you, they don't put you in prison, and that they let you go back to your parent's home village in Transylvania. I don't know any more than that your life would apparently be in danger. I'm told this letter from your mother, written before you left Romania, explains things!", she said, holding up the quite tatty and dirty looking sealed white envelope.
"But… but…", stammered a completely up-ended Elizabeth.
"This letter, and this folder, were passed on to me by the headmistress of your prep school when you came up. It was passed on to her by the Romanian Opposition in Exile who helped your parents smuggle you out of Romania and over to the United States all those years ago. Over the decade it has been given a few updates, some from that Romanian exile group, and a couple of others from your parents via intermediaries. There were instructions here from day one, saying that you should be given the letter if you were considered mature enough to cope with it in the event that an attempt was ever made to get you to go back there, and in any event when you were an adult. As I said, I was going to give you all this in a few weeks anyway. I never expected… ", babbled an almost hysterical sounding Mrs Beattie. "The instructions said it might be done this way, even though they are over ten years old now. I really never… oh dear…".
" There is a lot in here for you to read. Please don't hesitate to sit right here at my desk for as long as you need. All of this is yours now. You can continue to keep it in my safe if you like, but … umm… and I'll have Emily bring in some tea for you. It goes without saying that you are excused classes today. I really, really am most dreadfully sorry, Elizabeth…"
oOo
It was a hell of a way to make a bit of extra money, the fisherman lamented to himself. It was bloody dangerous as well, as he stood precariously in a small open boat in the middle of the river, while lightning flickered and fizzed all around and about him and wind turned the river angrily choppy. His improvised anchor was holding against the fast flowing river, and he stood, poised like a fool, giant gill net in hand and ready to throw, hoping and waiting for that precise moment when the clouds would let go of their payload and the rain would started to fall. He knew that at that precise moment, the fish would interpret the sudden disturbance to the surface of the river as a swarm of juicy insects landing, and the fish would rise en-masse. Within a few seconds, they would realise their mistake as the rain continued to fall and they would sink back into the murky depths until after the rain stopped, but at that precise moment, his father had shown him, if you could cover a large enough area of the river with a big gill net you could pull out more fish in a few moments than you could catch in a week any other way he knew how. Once you'd pulled the bulging net over the gunwhale of the boat, the battle was to get the little river anchor up and row the boat to the bank before the rain swamped it and sank it.
In truth, he didn't need the extra money, or the extra fish, that much. But it took his mind and body away from the stress, the grief, the despair at home for a few hours, and that made it well worth the soaking and the danger, fish notwithstanding.
For tonight he had picked a spot in the lee of Castle Vagor, which meant he was in less danger of being blown out of his boat and into the river, but there was the downside with this spot that he had no wish to advertise his presence to the castle guard lest they took exception to it , so he couldn't light the storm lantern he normally used when he was night fishing to help him see what he was doing, and there was a thick reed bed along the bank below the castle wall which he therefore had to try to miss when he cast his net by memory alone.
And then he felt the quality of the air change about him, and sensed rather than saw or heard the deluge on its way from the clouds above as they suddenly gave up their load; experience told him that now was the moment, he lunged, launching the net wildly out across the river, hoping that he had timed it perfectly so that the first splosh of rain on the river surface would coincide with and mask the splash of his net hitting water.
His timing was indeed perfect, but as a giant fork of lightning at that very moment missed him by less than 50 metres to strike the water close to the bank on the opposite side of the river from the castle, he had an eye-searingly illuminated snapshot view of the scene around him; his timing was perfect, but his aim was awry, and a good quarter of his net was going to land on the lush reed bed around the river bank at the foot of the castle wall. There was also something else he saw. Something in silhouette. A doll, perhaps, or a particularly ugly wild animal. Falling. But now his ears were ringing after the loud bang of the lightning strike, his night vision was destroyed, and his nostrils were filled with the pervasive stench of ozone. And his net was caught. He went to yank it back in, and it was caught up in the reed beds. Or so he assumed, anyway - he could see absolutely nothing now beyond blackness with a fading after-image of a lightning bolt through it.. There would be no bountiful fish catch tonight. Indeed, if he didn't get out of the river at some point soon, there would be no boat either, and he might consider himself lucky not to end up dead, caught in the debris screens of the dam turbine sluices thirty miles downstream!
Quickly, he hauled up the little anchor; it came up without a fight but he would have been perfectly prepared to cut it loose if necessary, and then began hauling himself in towards the reed bed, carefully furling the net as it came aboard, as he tried to balance haste with care. But the other end of the net wasn't shifting, so the boat gradually got closer to the point where the net must 'obviously' be caught. In due course, the boat had six inches of water sloshing around his feet, and rising, when it came to a definite stop as the bow was jammed firmly into the tall reeds.
He could have sworn that he heard a baby cry. The wind was playing tricks on his mind.
There was nothing for it; he'd have to risk leaning over the prow and trying to free the net without toppling into the water. If that didn't work, he might have to abandon the valuable net and make a run for home on the racing current, downstream. Even if he did think he could wade into the reeds to retrieve the net, he'd never get back in the boat…
Carefully, wedging himself up into the bow, he leant forward, keeping tension on the net, feeling for where it was hung up… and then suddenly, something warm grabbed his finger. And hung on. And this time, not only did he definitely hear crying, but his other hand found… a small, wriggling, newborn baby, wrapped in netting...
