Fragments

After the funeral, Eva returned to her father’s apartment. Inside it was dark, even though it was only just past midday. The heavy furniture and thick drapes sucked out all the light and the air was foul with the smell of unwashed clothes. She opened all the windows. Although she was tired, she couldn’t sit still, her body filling with a desperate urge to escape. She forced herself to look around. Every drawer was a coffin. Eva could not bear to open them, nauseated by the thought of touching the corpses of all the things that her father had cherished or forgotten, whose significance had been snuffed away the second he took his last breath. Instead, she imagined them. Tin openers, pill boxes, unpaid phone bills, concert tickets, her letters. Someone else would throw them away. She went into the kitchen and looked at the wall covered with all the cards she had sent him, pictures of her children from every year of their lives, the calendar whose pages he would never turn past February.

She had been brought there under false pretences. Her father had tricked her into coming back. Two days ago, when she had got the call from her aunt telling her that he was sick, she had scoured her heart for every scrap of forgotten love to will herself onto that plane. Eva had listened to news reports of a virus creeping its way around the world, hoping that her sense of self preservation might trump her guilt. But somehow, she had clicked ‘Buy’ on the WizzAir website in the middle of the night, a numb sense of responsibility propelling her forward. As she sat in a taxi that crawled its way out of Bucharest airport, Eva had opened a Whatsapp message informing her that her father was dead.

In Romania, funerals take place exactly three days after death, meaning that a lot of parents sink into the earth before their children, scattered across the world, can return to them. For two days, the body of Eva’s father lay in the chapel of rest  like a museum exhibit discreetly illuminated by candles, while elderly neighbours she vaguely remembered from her childhood floated in to mutter their condolences. The molar on the right side of her mouth began to hurt. On the third day, she watched the damp earth swallow her father’s coffin while the chants of Orthodox priests coaxed the last shreds of his soul into the grey heavens.

Eva didn’t recognise anybody at the funeral. After the last clumps of earth had been smoothed over the coffin, an ancient engineer introduced himself and asked her how she felt about Brexit. He demanded her phone and added the number of his son to her Whatsapp contacts list, explaining that he was working as a chef in Bradford. He told her that her father had been very proud of her. They knew each other from the Baptist church which her father had attended until someone had offended him by suggesting that he should wash his clothes more regularly. Her father, the engineer assured her, would have hated an Orthodox funeral.

In between engineers, Eva wondered why she was there. Back home, she was needed, her patients would be annoyed that their appointments had been cancelled and her children would not brush their teeth properly until she came back. Here, she was only a symbol, the ghost of a daughter no-one recognised, with no-one and nowhere to haunt.

Eva remembered the last time she had come to her father’s apartment, when her eldest daughter was five years old. Her father had been an archaeologist. Even after he retired, he would spend days walking the hills around their town or taking long train journeys and coming back with supermarket bags full of unidentified fragments. ‘Roman!’ he would proclaim, holding a piece of metal next to the little girl’s nose. ‘Dacian!’ he would shout, pressing an identical scrap into her hand, while Eva furiously cleaned the kitchen.

‘He loved you very much’, another engineer had said as she was walking out of the cemetery. ‘He was proud of you and appreciated everything you did for him’.

A card at Christmas and card for his birthday. Then no more cards, because he said that the postman was stealing his mail. A phone call, every few weeks, then every month. Then no more phone calls, because he claimed that the bastards had cut off his phone. She wasn’t sure exactly the last time they talked. Maybe two, three weeks ago? He said he was fine. Her last words must have been ‘I love you’. Eva had discovered this trick recently, like a placebo she administered to patients no longer responding to treatment.

She went back into the dining room and sat down in an armchair by the window, inhaling the faint toxicity of car fumes. The disordered noises of traffic and distant voices tethered her back to the solid world. Eva looked around at the shelves full of books whose words she could no longer understand, then at the sacks full of her father’s archaeological treasures. The pain in her tooth was getting worse, but she would wait until she got back to England and make an appointment with her dentist.

She put on the light and, trying to distract herself from the pain, started taking the objects out of the bags, one by one, placing them on the table. Blunt pieces of heavy metal, black with dirt, nuggets of stone, coins, broken bricks, shards of pottery. Arrowheads, a Dacian altar, a Roman urn, her father would have said. And then a broken watch, a Lego policeman, a computer mouse. Eva wondered whether her father had picked these up on the trips when the Roman and Dacian treasures had been elusive, something to take home so as to prove to himself that the journey had not been wasted. Or perhaps he had changed his tactic and wanted to document human civilisation in its entirety, mixing together the useless remains of the ancient and the modern world.

Eva continued to reach into the sack, laying out the broken objects on the table. She noticed that there were several fragments of what looked like the same ceramic pot. After she gathered them all at one end of the table, she swept all the other objects into a pile on the floor. Eva emptied the rest of the sack next to it and sat on the carpet, searching for more ceramic fragments. She reached up to the table to put anything promising safely aside, then emptied out bag after bag. Her numb legs tingled as she walked around the house, discovering more sacks in the pantry, the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom. She emptied them all out in the rooms where she found them, sifting through them methodically, but could not find any more pieces.

Eva walked back to the dining room table, stepping over the mounds of broken things, hearing some crack under her feet. She managed to pull out a chair and sat down again at the table. Now that she was looking at them closely, she realised that the ceramic pieces were not all the same. Some of them were a slightly darker rust colour, like dried blood, with a faint black pattern. Eva swept all the pieces without the pattern onto the floor. She moved the remaining shards towards the centre of the table, trying to match them together like a jigsaw puzzle. They seemed to belong to the same object, but she could not make any of them fit together. The pattern looked to her like a crude drawing of a scene she did not understand, a vision from another world, irredeemably shattered.

*

She walked down the street where she had lived as a child. The communist era apartment blocks jutted out at regular intervals, as broken and decayed as the teeth in her mouth. She imagined her throbbing molar as one of those rotting buildings, poisoned at the root, awaiting demolition.

The streets were filled with people her father might have greeted, old women who might have patted her head when she was small, middle aged men that might have sat in the same class as her at school. Walking into the centre of town, she recognised certain shops from her childhood and a cinema where she used to go with her parents, now boarded up. It was almost three o’clock and Eva reckoned that she had another couple of hours before it would start getting dark. The park at the edge of the hill that her father used to climb, searching for his treasures, was already in sight, and she walked towards it as fast as she could, weaving her way through people and traffic.

Eva had a photograph of herself standing primly by the swings in that park, bundled in the cold weather clothes her grandmother had knitted for her, her father invisible on the other side of the camera. When she was fifteen and visiting her father during the summer holiday, she had met her first boyfriend there, an eighteen year old student who was a terrible kisser but knew a lot about Seneca. She skirted around the playground and started climbing up the hill, towards the castle ruins.

When she reached the top, Eva realised that she was alone. She stopped to catch her breath and stared for a moment at the untidy horizon where everyone else was absorbed in their secret, purposeful lives. She glanced back down the hill she had climbed and remembered sledding there on a winter long ago, her back pressed against her father’s chest, his hands holding the reins.

The castle, like every ruin, was a series of broken walls enclosing spaces where life used to happen. She walked inside one of them. The damp grass reached the top of her boots. The fortress had probably been built in the Middle Ages, over the gravel of Dacian and Roman bones, arrowheads, altars, coins and pots. An hour earlier, a notification on her phone had announced that her flight back to England was cancelled because of the virus, the country locking its doors  once again. Eva had locked the door of her father’s apartment behind her and then placed one foot in front of the other until she had reached this place. Her father was safely tucked in his grave. There was nothing left for her to do except to find the rest of the scraps of the ceramic pot lying on his dining room table and glue them together so that she could see the black pattern. The missing fragments were buried somewhere in the seamless earth, perhaps on this hill, amidst the long grass, the cigarette butts and the crushed beer cans, or perhaps somewhere else where she had never been, hadn’t even heard of. 

Gabi Reigh moved to the U.K. from Romania at the age of 12. In 2017, she won the Stephen Spender Prize which inspired her to translate more Romanian literature. As part of her Interbellum Series project, she has translated interwar novels, poetry and drama. Her story ‘It was a very good year’ was shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Award.