THE FITTING

There it was, in her diary, the single word which had excited her anticipation for weeks now. (There were many more words in her other diary, but that was to do with the inner world and not the outer one, and she kept it locked away.) She flicked once more through the blank pages and let the word take away her breath again. Fitting. And after it, a time: 12.30. If she left early (and why shouldn't she? it was a delightful day) she could walk part of the way, only she mustn't tell her father what she was doing - well, with any luck he would be in his office - he was always opposed to her walking anywhere at all - 'Bucuresti,' he would say,'Bucuresti is not safe. It is not safe for decent, respectable people. It is only safe for the beggars and the work-shy, because the police are too scared to give them the thrashing they deserve.' - ) and she could walk part of the way back, too - her father didn't know when the appointment was - and she could pick up a cab at the end of the Cismigiu Park. That would mean she could walk both ways through it. Of course, the garden round their own little villa was pleasant in its own way, but a sixteen-year-old girl wants to see more of life than can be contained within a corner-plot full of oleanders, jasmine and bougainvillea, even if the ten-foot wrought-iron fencing swirled and swooped with an Art nouveau abandon that (as her father said) was not to be found outside Paris. 'Bucuresti,' he would say, 'Bucuresti is not Paris. But nearly.'

Not nearly enough for her mother, though. Two years ago, she had insisted on going there - Nadia could not quite recall the reason now: had it been for a dress, of a most particular kind? had it been to see a special doctor, perhaps in Vienna, from which Paris was only another day's ride by train? She remembered waving goodbye at the station. She had worn the white dress with the blue spots which she grew out of last summer. And she had cried. But she had told her father that it was a smut in her eye from the engine. At first, her mother had written, chatty little letters on hotel notepaper, about the theatres and the parks and the fashions and the habits of the French. Then the notepaper had changed - it didn't have a printed address, and she'd had to write back poste restante - and then the letters had stopped. The last one had been just a slip of paper enclosed with a fashion magazine: Hope you like this.

Nadia still had the magazine. When she felt lonely and provincial she got it out and looked at it. She could read French, of course, but it was the pictures that fascinated and excited her. She had tried to persuade Madame Golescu to copy one of them for her dress, but Madame Golescu had pointed at the date of the magazine: December 1937, and said that six months was a very long time in fashion. Nadia had been shocked to realise that six months had gone by. But that didn't stop her looking at the pictures of the wonderfully slim peach-faced models in their elegant dresses. She dreamed of looking like that, of floating away in a cloud of silk and satin, with a rose nestling between her breasts, and men's hungry eyes following her as she moved through a high-ceilinged room under tinkling chandeliers.

She did not have much to do with men outside such dreams. Her French governess-cum-chaperone, Mademoiselle Amboise, had returned to France shortly before her mother left, and though her father had often spoken of engaging another in her place it had never happened. Perhaps he had been waiting for her mother to find a suitable one - or perhaps (Nadia wondered) the money was simply not there: she overheard her father complaining about the cost of her mother's stay in Paris, and how bad business was, when he had his associates to dinner. They were not men that she liked. Fortunately, she did not have to spend long in their company. Dinner was sent up from a nearby restaurant (a proper meal would have been beyond their cook, a simple but earthy soul from a village near Radauti, who actually spoke Ruthenian, but could get by in Romanian at a pinch) and she presided over the first two courses. Part of her training, her father said. But she was not happy as the businessmen stared at her. They licked their lips, as if she were as tasty a dish as what they had they had on the plates in front of them. Some of them had dewlaps that cascaded over their starched white collars, reminding her of chicken legs with paper frills. The one or two who were not plump and balding (and more than once she found herself dazzled by the light reflected off their hairless heads) were so excessively smart that she thought of them as tailors' dummies: they wore spats, their bow-ties were just so - she felt they must have been pinned to their flesh. Their long thin hands played constantly with the cutlery and agitated her. She was glad to excuse herself when the dessert was brought. She retreated to her room, drank the hot sweet coffee which the cook had already placed there for her, and ate the chocolates which one of the businessmen always brought. They were a consolation that made her feel guilty: sweet, sticky, cloying, like the looks of those men whose eyes made her think of currants in a puffy cake or the blank stare of a lizard. She ate them with self-reproach, while her tongue luxuriated over the Turkish delight and the strawberry cream, pushing greedily into the recesses of the chocolate shell, and then licking that away until it all dissolved. Sometimes, she would look at her brown tongue and feel disgusted with herself. She knew that the chocolates gave her spots. She knew that they made her fat. She could see, when she got undressed and stood naked in front of the long cheval mirror which had been in her mother's room, that there was more of her in some places than there should be. Madame Golescu would know. She would not say anything, but she would sigh as she shifted the pins around, and opened up the tacking a few more stitches. Nadia had every reason to hate these men who came with temptations, and drove her to give in to them.

Not only that, but they kept her awake at night. Their voices babbled on into the dawn, the acrid smoke from their cheap cigars rasped its way into her room, the smell of beer and tuica clouded the air until the cook opened the windows after the last of them left at six. It made her father grey-faced and taciturn over breakfast.

They were not the only visitors her father had, though they were the only ones she was supposed to see and know about. The others came later, much later: they had keys to the garden gate which the concierge locked at nine, they had keys to the block of flats itself, though not to the apartment. Round midnight, or maybe later, she would hear the footsteps in the corridor - clicking, ringing footsteps, the sound of shiny polished steel-shod boots, and then the tapping at the door, a muttered word or two, and the gentle opening and closing. It was like a novel: the mysterious callers, whom no one saw. But she had seen them once. At some earlier stage in the building's history, her room had been another little flat, and it still had its own unnumbered front door, so one night she had opened it a crack and seen a handsome officer waiting at the door of the apartment, his light uniform criss-crossed by the leather strap and belt that held his revolver in its holster, that dark brown shape that hugged his thigh and moved slightly against it, as he paced nervously and waited to be let in. Nadia would have let him in. She could not see him clearly in the dim lighting of the corridor, but he was an officer, and therefore bound to be handsome: she imagined his dark brown eyes under the peaked cap, the thin jet-black moustache that followed precisely the cupid's bow of his mouth, the bony nose with its arched nostrils. She had gone back to bed that night too excited to sleep, so she had lain there and listened, as others came and tap-tap-tapped.

In her diary (not the one with the blank pages and Fitting : 12.30, but the other one) she imagined what would happen if one night one of the officers tap-tap-tapped at her door. She hardly dared to write it all down, even when she actually knew the words, and didn't just feel inside herself what must happen.

But the knock never came. Instead, she lay awake trembling for hours, listening to soft voices next door: they spoke about events abroad, the names Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, wove in and out of their speech. She heard the phrase: the Iron Guard, and she thought: how appropriate, how right, how different from those fat businessmen, those soft, flabby businessmen in their suede shoes. These men were hard, piercing, penetrating, like their eyes, like their guns. But she never came close to any of them; and if she mentioned noises at night to her father, he denied everything. No one had come to call; she had been dreaming. She understood why he wanted to keep her safe, because these men were dangerous - dangerous to others, and to her; but it was the danger she wanted. And she could see from her father's manner the morning after that he, too, found their presence exciting. His fellow businessmen drained him and left him lethargic; but after the officers' visits he had a spark in his deep dark eyes, and ate his morning rolls more heartily.

Only once had he been upset after such a meeting. He had shushed her back into her room when she got up in the morning and forbidden her to open the shutters. She had peeped out through them, though, and seen an ambulance come and stop down by the garden-gate, but the rest of the scene had been hidden by the oleanders. Nonetheless, she felt that the shot she had heard in the night had not been part of a dream. The voices had been tenser - she had heard that. And they had smoked more: the pungent scent of the Turkish cigarettes had reached her and stayed with her all night. But she did not try to talk to her father about it: she sensed that it was not the kind of thing fathers and daughters discussed. She wished her father would only meet the officers, but she had grasped enough from all these night-time conversations to know that he had to talk to the businessmen to get the money together that the movement needed - though she found it hard to imagine the softness supporting the hardness as it did.

Perhaps, she thought, when I have my new dress, and when I am seventeen, he will let me meet some of them - that's why I need my new dress, to go out into society, out of this flat and its garden, all very nice, but like a clothes chest filled with lavender to deter the moths.

It was time: rising, dressing, breakfasting, all passed in reverie, the Ruthenian cook clattering in the kitchen, it was time to go and take a cab to the Cismigiu Park. The sun was hot. She pulled the veil down over her face; her father didn't like her to spoil her fair skin - he found his own a little too swarthy, she knew, but it didn't matter in a man, she felt. The horse's hooves clattered on the cobbles, and she found the sound exciting.

The Cismigiu was as green and inviting as the fistic desserts she ate too much of when her father took her out to lunch. Its shade absorbed her, bathed her, soothed her. Unseen water trickled and sparkled through the dark green leaves. Jewel-like flowers glowed through the obscurity. At the sudden clearings she had to shade her eyes from the sun. There was nothing as vulgar as a fountain here: it was a garden of suggestions. She knew it had been the private garden of a Turkish water inspector in the old days, before the country's independence. She wondered whether he walked here, lain here, with his concubines, whether they had ever been let out of the seraglio into this place. She thought about life in a seraglio: its isolation, its softness, the cushions, the sweetmeats, the subdued lighting, the plush hangings: she felt it might have suited her, for a while. Her own home was a little like that - except that she had to dream about the dark men with their cruel moustaches coming with their imperious demands and forcing her into unrestrained obedience and submission. She had to dream, and write it down, and lock it away.

In one clearing edged with crinkled shadows, grouped around a small pool there sat a number of gypsies - gypsies, beggars, she was never quite sure which was which - her father said they were all the same and as bad as each other. But there was not the usual crippled child, or the disfigured mother, or the one-legged old soldier in the rags of a twenty-year-old uniform, none of those people who showed themselves for money, when you thought they would really have been too ashamed to show themselves at all, and should have stayed at home, shut up in darkness. So, because she was not offended, Nadia approached the group, taking a tighter grip on her purse as a matter of course.

'Flowers! Flowers, pretty lady?' urged a woman in her late twenties, who, in one movement, stood up and almost danced towards her, a bright printed skirt swirling out as she moved. In a broad theatrical gesture, she proffered the small bouquet with an outstretched arm, while the skirt swung back from its first swirl and settled round her parted legs. A scarf knotted tightly round her head framed an angular, bony, but sensual face: the dark skin stretched over the cheeks reminded Nadia of the Arab thoroughbred she had once seen her mother ride. She felt a mixture of admiration and jealousy: this woman could do what she was not allowed to: she could flaunt herself and her attractiveness, she could show the inner hunger that was in her beauty.

On impulse, Nadia decided to show her appreciation of what she saw as a kindred spirit. She reached in her purse, and gave her the coin which she had destined to pay for coffee and cake at the only café her father considered respectable enough for her. The spareness of the gypsy's frame strengthened Nadia's resolve. The gypsy presented the flowers to her and took the money with her left hand, holding it up in a proud gesture as she turned to the group of gypsies behind her. She did not bow, or indicate thanks, but nodded her head curtly in some sort of recognition as she sprang back to join her companions.

As she walked on, Nadia began to ask herself why she had done that. Was it because she felt guilty? Here she was, off to be fitted for a dress that would, she knew, cost enough to feed all those beggars for a year. And then, there was that handsome woman, who, because of the accident of her birth, could never enjoy all the privileges that were going to be her, Nadia's, right. She had momentarily wished to be in her place; but perhaps it was not a serious wish, and she had exorcised it by giving money. Guilt? Envy? Perhaps her father really was right, and it was not safe to walk through Bucuresti, because of all the things that could occur to one.

She scurried up the stairs to Madame Golescu's. The dressmaker had a large first-floor salon, with a fine view over the Palace Square and the Kretulescu Church. One of the many young apprentices she employed, a blonde girl of fourteen or so (probably a Siebenbürger Saxon from Brasov, there was a touch of German in her accent), in a charming flowered print to show Madame Golescu's skill, with an apron over it to show that she was just staff, let her in and took her name. She ushered her into one of the curtained cubicles that lined the room and hurried off to bring the dress for Madame Golescu to fit personally.

Slowly, Nadia began to undress. She found it a strangely thrilling experience, to be removing her clothes somewhere other than her own room at home. It should have made her feel vulnerable, but instead it made her feel excited. She stepped out of her dress, and stood in her slip in front of the long cheval mirror. Noises from the salon reached her. New clients had arrived. The woman's scent was rich and opulent, with an underlying sharpness to it. The man was smoking a Turkish cigarette. She looked down, and under the edge of the thick curtain she could see shiny, polished leather boots, like an officer's. There was something strange about the woman's accent. She smelt of expensive hotel bedrooms. Nadia imagined that she must be one of those Romanian women who live in Paris, but come back to Bucuresti once every three months for a rendezvous with their greatest passion in the Hotel Athénée Palace: a day and a half of love between silk sheets, and then a veiled parting at the railway station for discretion, and nothing more of importance to think about but the next illicit meeting: only that could carry her through the next three months with her tedious and ageing husband, that, and the young men she would flirt with at a distance in the opera. In Paris, her husband watched her too well - but when she came to visit her aged mother...she would wear a new, low-cut dress to inflame her lover, and fill him with dreams of her and her alone for the next three months - - - This would go into her diary, she thought. And then she thought: what if my father ever reads that diary! Deny it all. It never happened. And best of all: tell him it was going to be a novel. What could he have against that? After all, it was well known that a female member of the Romanian royal family wrote fiction - under an assumed name, of course.

The mingled odour of perfume, cigarettes and leather wafted to her, and made her arch her body, as if she were living out one of her diary entries. With trembling hands, and a deliciously chill hollow in the pit of her stomach, she drew up her slip, revealing fine straight legs with dimpled knees, and then, as she gathered it and slid it further, thighs that were a touch too full from chocolates and fistic (she was sure there were some people who stayed thin by sheer power of will, whatever they ate). She watched herself in the mirror: who was that girl? whose were those hands? Slowly, she revealed more of herself to herself, as if to a stranger. Her gently curved stomach, the firm line of the diaphragm (Mademoiselle Amboise had taught her a little singing, after the French fashion, not the Romanian gypsy tunes), then her shy and modest breasts. The hands that were slowly lifting her slip brushed against the pale pink nipples, and they began to harden as she watched them in the mirror.

The curtain rings clattered behind her. She dropped the slip in a rush and began smoothing it down. Madame Golescu, with her cashew-scented breath, began fussing and pinning and giving instructions to the blonde girl, who made copious notes. There was a small intake of breath over the hip measurement, but nothing more. In any case, Nadia noticed little of what was actually going on: she was absorbed with herself in the mirror. The dress transformed her, as her nakedness had done. She was no longer the person who filled pages of a diary with what never happened: she was the person who really did those things, and had no need to write them down. She was like those officers who came to call: where others talked and talked, they acted. She made her mark on the world, with a sharp instrument. Others, like Madame Golescu and the little blonde girl, only had an existence insofar as they were bound up with hers and served her. Their job was to make things fit her, not to make her fit them. She stood patiently while they slid the half-finished dress down her and held it while she stepped out. Putting on her own dress again was like putting on a disguise: she was pretending to be little Nadia, the dutiful daughter with the wicked dreams; but she was far beyond that. She felt in possession of an authority that she exercised by the mere right of being.

The little blonde girl let her out, and she acknowledged the courtesy with a gracious gesture of the left hand that was studiedly dismissive. The brightness of the Palace Square called for the veil, and she shielded her face and eyes with it. But the Cismigiu Park was as delightfully dim as before, and she strolled with pleasure through its sensuous shade.

The small group of gypsies was by the same pool. She paused on the edge of the clearing and looked at them. Being lunch-hour, the garden was more crowded now than before: men and women, sometimes separately, sometimes together, passed through. They struck her as being grey and indifferent, members of families, mothers, fathers, functions, statistics, packing. She was real - she and the gypsy woman. She stood in the shade and tried to analyse her feelings. She had become aware of her position, and approved of it: she felt no guilt at her superiority. Nor did she feel the need to flaunt it, because it was essentially unassailable. Those who objected or resisted would, in good time, be disposed of - but not prematurely. There was no need for any particular kind of behaviour: there was only her choice as to how she wanted to behave. It seemed to her that the gypsy woman partly shared that view - but did not have the position of command from which to carry it out. My father is right, she thought, all the beggars constitute a threat - much more so than the ordinary people - because they don't - won't - can't - fit into the system, and thus they have the same kind of freedom that I have just stumbled on. They are our only rivals. Well, no doubt their time will come: but not necessarily from us. It may be that the ordinary people will be happy to destroy them, when they realise that they are outside the system. Because the ordinary people will not realise that we are: we shall take care not to show them. If we showed them, then they might resent it. And then we would have to act against them. And that would take up too much time and energy.

The gypsy woman had noticed her, had recognised her as her earlier benefactor, and was preparing herself for some gesture of acknowledgement, that might be combined with a fresh piece of begging. Nadia prepared herself for the encounter with the previous bouquet in one hand, and a large coin in the other. They met by the edge of the pool. The other gypsies watched as if it were a knife-fight. From the corner of her eye, Nadia saw that there was a crippled child being displayed by his begging mother, and that another gypsy was making his empty right sleeve more noticeable for her benefit. She turned to look at the culprits pointedly, to stress that she was ignoring them. Her action should have nothing to do with pity. Before, she had given the money because she knew the gypsy woman would never have a dress as fine as the one awaiting her. Now she did so out of pride and joy that she had the dress and the gypsy did not. She flung out her arm in a theatrical gesture, holding the coin between thumb and forefinger. With an uncertainty that came from having her own gesture anticipated and stolen from her, the gypsy woman began to hold out a tentative hand, which she had to jerk forward to catch the coin as Nadia dropped it. She was not ready for the sudden movement, her shuffling feet scuffed up the dust, and before she could recover her balance the young lady in the veil had disappeared into the green darkness on the far side of the clearing.

As she climbed into the carriage, Nadia realised she had just given away the fare. No matter. The Ruthenian cook could pay for it out of the housekeeping. That was what servants were for, after all. She would make a note of it in her diary. In both of her diaries.

Mike Rogers

23^rd July 1989