Stories - 2009 - The Diva

The Queen of the Night had me in raptures; her peacock blue imperial dress, her velvet voice beyond wonder - I felt like I was floating in a world of fairytales, yet it was as real as my parents - seated either side of me in the freezing Opera House seats, wrapped in their warm winter coats, in the coldest Communist winters Bucharest had ever seen.

We clapped and shouted “Bravo!” at the end, and then we went backstage to her dressing room.   I watched in disbelief the superb, long thick lashes of the Queen being carefully peeled off her sparkling eyelids and cradled into tiny boxes, as we stood in the doorway.

‘You were wonderful, Antonia!’

‘Really? I had a bit of a sore throat today…’, cooed the diva.

‘No, you sang like Callas! Better!’

‘Oh no, Gheorghe! Ever the charmer!’  And that was my Dad.

‘Would you like to come for dinner tonight?’ said my mother, practical as ever.

‘Oh, we are getting together with the directors and the cast tonight. What did you think of Miss Clara? The Papagena?’

‘She was OK, but your voice carried much further, I could barely hear her’, answered my father carefully.

‘Isn’t that so’, said she, with satisfaction. ‘I would love to come for dinner. Can we do Saturday? Since Mr Anghelescu left, I rarely ever cook now.’

‘We would be delighted to see you.’

I was standing close to her, small and unnoticed. I watched from behind the grown-ups the glittering diva in sumptuous robes slowly turning into a normal woman. A woman like any other of the house-keepers I was used to seeing in the cold mornings, in the long and patient, endless queues of Bucharest.

We drove home in our little Dacia, bumping along through the pot-holed grey streets.  Sleepy, I watched the shapes of the trees with no leaves through the front window, past the two round hats of my parents: curly black lamb fur for my father, white rabbit for my mother. The tips of my fingers had turned ice-cold, and I ran them through the soft rabbit fur.

That night, as I rested on my pillow, I could still see the stage in my mind’s eye.  The arias still resonated in my ears, mixing with the distant barks of the stray dogs in the dark of the night. That most soothing of sounds, the barks that tell me I am home and I can sleep safely, even to this day.

I waited for Saturday as I did for Christmas. I listened to a vinyl disk with her picture in a princess dress, with a raised, embroidered, high collar – I listened over and over. I thought she must be a fairy. How did father have the courage to talk to her with such ease? He talked like that to our neighbour Geta. Then again, he could talk ferocious dogs into turning over on their back, and pat them on the belly, to their masters’ dismay. 

I was so enthralled with her songs, I sang quietly to myself.  I even did that at school, in class, sitting, as I was, at the first desk in the row, like the model student that I was. I thought I was being interesting - I knew opera now. The teacher told me to shut up.  I did, mortified.  She clearly did not understand opera.

Saturday came at last. I listened out for the whole day, trying to occupy the long hours that separated me from the long awaited evening, when the magic peacock with its luminous voice was to sweep into our house.

I could hear my mother bustling in the kitchen.  I went in, looking for something to amuse myself. She was sitting at the white kitchen table and was chopping carrots in small cubes. She had just peeled a handful of them on the table, their skins still piled neatly on the table. The potatoes still had soil on their uneven, knobbly coffee coloured skins.  The kitchen window was steamed up from the soup bubbling on the cooker.  I drew a spider on it.  We were on the fifth floor of the apartment block, and I could just about make out the tops of the tall poplars through the blurred window. 

‘Must be four-twenty, I can tell by the sun’, I told my mother.  It was just starting to set in an orange haze, around the corner of the blue-grey tower-block in front. The warm, comforting smell of boiling chicken filled the room and wafted through the rest of the house.  It had been slowly boiling with onions, carrots, and peppers for a couple of hours.  I could smell them.  Maybe parsnips and celery root too.

At one point, during the long wait, the bell rang.  I jumped.  I rushed to the door - disappointment: only aunt Dorina.  She came in from the cold, carrying two large shopping bags full of groceries, one in each hand.  I followed her to the kitchen. She put them on the table and gave me a kiss on each cheek.  Her face was cold, but she was radiant.

‘Look what I found!  My neighbour Cutzica sent word to me, and held me a place in the queue. Isn’t she a dear?’

Shopping was aunt Dorina’s favourite sport. She opened the hand-made canvass bag she had made herself, pulled out a bunch of fresh lovage leaves, and showed me something wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of the bag.

‘Fresh beef fillet!’ 

I turned up my nose at the red meat and walked away.  In passing, I broke a warm crusty corner off the stone baked loaf that was sticking out of the other bag.  I went to the living room and played the vinyl disc again, for the fifth time that day.

I passed the kitchen again on the way to my room.  Mother was now draining all the soup, separating the vegetables and meat in a sieve.  Aunt Dorina was telling her about the shopping:

‘They moved the queue from one entrance to another.  For some ridiculous reason, as usual. We were lucky; we got to the front, because a lorry blocked the way so the others couldn’t pass through. We only just squeezed between the wall and the lorry!  The meat was just enough for a quarter of the people in the queue.  The others went home empty-handed - after all these hours of waiting in the cold. What a luck!’

‘What a luck, indeed!’ said mother, carefully sprinkling egg vermicelli into the clear soup that was now bubbling on the cooker.

I did not listen to all of this, but busied myself with a dress for my ballerina doll, to make the time pass faster.

My doll had blond short hair, pretty face, moving arms, and it had no name – it was not important. The dresses were. I usually loved to spend long minutes, maybe even hours, in deep concentration, trying to make the dresses stay on the square body of the doll, with no breasts and no hips, just like mine.  But now the minutes dragged on, and even the opera arias didn’t seem to shorten them.  My uncle had given me a present of a doll’s house, hand-made by his neighbour who worked in the factory.  It had one storey, windows, a bed and an inner staircase, a balcony, and a roof that I could take off, and had sparkling burgundy glass beads on.  The doll fitted snugly inside, and sometimes would stand proudly on the balcony, showing off her latest dress.  Today it was going to be a dancer’s dress. Aunt Dorina, who made dresses at home for us, for all our friends and for their friends, had given me a triangular piece of cloth.  It had a pattern of little coloured flowers, and, as luck had it, it came with a large red frill. Perfect!  The frill was going to make a lovely puffed up skirt, like that on the cover of the vinyl disc.

Finally, at 6 o’clock, as I was unsuccessfully trying to fit a raised, princess collar on the dress, the doorbell rang. I dropped the cloth and ran to the door, overjoyed. She was there. My heart was throbbing, leaping in my throat. She wore a brown jumper, no long lashes and bright orange lipstick. Wrinkles on her pale, powdered face. Her jeans were well worn, too long for her, the hem turned a few times, to make them shorter. Her boots dusty from the street.  I didn’t look at them: my eyes were on the elegant, long, flame-coloured nails.  “When I grow up, I’ll wear my nails like that”, I thought.

They sat down, drinks at hand - strong palinca in short squat glasses, and started talking.  She talked incessantly of Mr Anghelescu the Monster and of Miss Clara who only got her applauses because her school friends were there.

Mother called me to help her make platters with snacks. She sliced diagonally a smoked sausage we kept in the freezer, together with slanina, the delicious fat-only bacon. These went well with the intoxicating, powerfully flavoured palinca, the home-made cherry-brandy.  They had just the right taste – the warm, seeping taste of paprika, blended with charcoal smoke, garlic and pepper, slowly filtering through the smooth bacon. I stole a piece before the meal, but mother didn’t slap my hand like my grandmother would.

I went back to the living room and watched the diva talking.  I could not believe she was right there, for real, in our own house. After a while, mother called me again to the kitchen and gave me some plates and forks to set the table - I felt important and useful.  She had made stuffed eggs for starters – my favourites. 

We sat down at the big dinner table. Antonia took a bite and closed her eyes, with a slow, dramatic in-breath.

‘Silvia, this is delicious!  These eggs, they are so fresh, and the cheese, mmm, wonderful!  ... Since Mr Anghelescu left, I rarely bother to go to the market.  It’s empty anyway, and I can’t be asked to queue for hours in the cold.  I need to look after my voice.’

‘We get them from uncle George, from the village.  They are from his chicken, he keeps about twenty.  He knows the Serbs, who make their own cheese - they have sheep.’

‘And the sausages, they are from my relatives in Transylvania. They have the best recipe’, said father proudly.

‘How do you make those eggs?’

‘Well, said my mother, you boil them first.  Then you make fresh mayonnaise, from a couple of yolks; be careful to just drip one drop of oil at a time.  Then you mix the boiled yolks with the mayonnaise, chopped gherkins, salt and pepper. I put some parsley too; we freeze it in the summer, to have some for cooking in the winter.’

I still looked on in wonder at the woman whose voice I had listened to, over and over, wishing I grew up to be a diva like her.

The evening slowly came to a close. I wondered if she was going to sing for us, but that did not happen.  She got up to leave, and then they talked for a good quarter of an hour at the door; then they opened the door and called the lift.  The corridor was dark as usual; the State was cutting down to save electric power. Another fifteen minutes, more talk.  The lift had arrived, but they ignored it.  Few more things were to be said, and mother remembered with a jump:

‘Oh Antonia! Wait! Just hold on a minute!’

Father held open the door of the lift.  Mother rushed in and came back in an instant, with a hard wrapped plastic bag.

‘I hope you don’t mind’, she said, ‘but I think you might like it. Have this chicken.’

Antonia looked inside the bag.

‘Oh, no, dear Silvia!’ she cried, with grateful delight, her resonant voice lilting a few scales up and down. ‘Are you sure? This is wonderful! Oh, I couldn’t accept this, this is too much!’  

‘Please, please take it, Antonia!’

‘So generous of you! Are you really sure? So lovely of you, Silvia!’

‘I insist, do take it. It’s our pleasure.’

‘Oh, thank you so much!’

A few more goodbyes, and she was gone.  Looking out the window, I saw her shape walking tall into the velvety night, carrying a frozen chicken in a plastic bag - like the most magnificent bouquet of flowers ever offered to a diva.