Deaths

The death of Crina Ceausescu, a small girl, on the hand of the enemy army, and Matusa Doina, the gossip-woman.

Crina dies three days later. Through Tullia’s intense care and cobwebs and bandaging, it has taken her three days to stubbornly bleed to death. She has not stopped crying, and then moaning when she became weaker, for the last three days. Since the attack, she has become paler and paler as she lost more and more blood through Tullia’s thick bandage, until eventually she becomes the palest possible, and she stops moaning and crying, but lies still and the blood that has been defying Tullia and Doamna Ceausescu’s prayers stops flowing, finally drained from her small body after three days of suffering. She is washed and dressed in a white tunic that is much too big for her, with her dark hair loose and her face innocent and haunted. Iosif Ceausescu does not attend his youngest daughter’s funeral, but opens the window to watch her burial and then returns to furiously reading, like this is the only way he can express any feeling anymore. Crina is buried right outside the Clearing, with only a wooden cross stabbed into the mud that would surely decompose faster than the body to show she was there. We stand in silence for her, and, Eugen Ceausescu, against his mother’s wishes, engraves into a flat headstone his sister’s name. Dana Ecaterina Brezeanu, Razvan’s mother, and Viorica Presecan, Gabi’s mother, stand beside us at the funeral. Most of the Oameni watch from windows, but cannot step out into the open because of fear of attack. We wear black for forty days to mourn Crina; Matusas Dana Ecaterina and Viorica follow suit, and stay at the Ceausescu’s permanently, insisting that it was good for themselves as well as their children to stay together in these dangerous times. Decebal Brezeanu is the image of his older brother without the sense of humour who cries a lot; our of fear, anger, disappointment, hunger, ridicule; there is not one emotion he does not express with tears.

“I’m telling Mama you called me stupid,” he tells Razvan one day, when Razvan comes to the Ceausescu’s to take some blankets from Luminita, about an incident that occurred almost a year ago.

“Mama already knows you’re stupid,” Razvan says impatiently, pushing past his younger brother so he can take the blankets and go already. This makes little Decebal cry, and his mother Dana Ecaterina Brezeanu is so busy making mamaliga to feed the Razboinici and youth that she only has time to peck him on the cheek to comfort  him.

Decebal and Ana look deserted and forlorn without their third playmate, the leader: Crina was the adventurous one who began all of the exciting games: now without her they sit in the corners of the house look up with hauntingly innocent eyes at us as we rush by. They are, along with Crina, the first victims of the Battle, I think.

Doamna Ceausescu starts to pray constantly, she is always mumbling to the Lord, pausing only when she issues commands and goes into the bathroom. Iosif Ceausescu remains as elusive as ever, locked up in his room with his medical reports and cheap novels, indifferent to the war raging outside his window, which had a piece of cloth tightly concealing it. After the death of Crina, Tullia ignores her father, not counting him in the food and walking past his room as though the door is part of the wall, but Doamna Ceausescu always takes his plate of plain mamaliga to him at noon and sometimes the occasional cup of Turkish coffee, which is not being made anymore. War does not allow for Turkish coffee, which in the halcyon days accompanied sitting on the mattress in the sitting room and gossiping. Even Matusa Doina, previously thought invincible, shuts herself up for three days; there is no gossip at all during that time; nobody will talk, just work silently, tersely, and wait for news reports to come from me or Cristian, currently the weakest members of the Razboinici. We think Matusa Doina is being wise and keeping her head down, until a smell of rot, aided by the decomposing leaves in the mud underfoot, rises from her hut and we break the door down and find her dead in her bedroom. She does not look anyway amiss, not choked, stabbed, bludgeoned; her body looks in perfect order, and a suspicion arises that she have possibly died in her sleep, but Eugen the expert insists that nobody dies in their sleep in war: even very old people defy nature so they can die after the fighting is over. He concludes that Matusa Doina was poisoned, showing us the blackness on her tongue as proof, and, after much investigating and many questions, it turns out Matusa Doina’s murderer is none other than Jenica, the rather plain-faced but beautifully bodied girl Andrei was with at Eugen’s party: when the Oameni go to her door to try and get some answers from her as to why she poisoned the old bat, she seems quite deranged, and doesn’t say anything that makes much sense to anybody, but speaking in a venomous way brimming with vengeance. Eugen says leave it up to him, and, in next to no time, it turns out that Jenica decided to become a spy for the Second Brother’s Forces, and, under Maaike’s psychopath influence turned crazy; the old woman steamed the latest gossip about Andrei and Jenica’s rather shameful drunken get-together at Eugen’s party, and Jenica, whose inflamed brain could not possibly stomach the idea of being gossip material because it is considered shameful, paid Matusa Doina a visit, insisted she make the coffee, and put a dose of poison in it which resulted in the old woman’s death in less than eight hours.

The Oameni can’t think of a suitable punishment; the last murder they had was that of Doam Alexandru Ceausescu eighty years ago, and in the end it turned out that he killed himself for no apparent reason until they came to wash the body before the burial and found welts the size of walnuts on his skin, and it was then apparent that the welts caused so much discomfort that Doam Alexandru Ceausescu decided to end his own misery. This caused a huge flurry of panic, particularly spread by Matusa Dacia, Matusa Doina’s grandmother, who was turning forty at the time. She told the women that although it would take at least a couple of welts to kill you, but one, even the smallest possible, would put a permanent end to fertility that neither cinnamon and raspberry vapours nor rubbing rose water and sodium carbonate (as was practice in those days to cure infertility) could cure you of. The Oameni resorted to extreme measures to protect themselves, even though no one in the forest could imagine such a large insect that could live in the cold. Bathing in vinegar and rosemary or wiping melted unt all over the body became fashion, but the mysterious insects that lived in the cold could not be identified and since Doam Alexandru Ceausescu was the only victim people soon forgot about it.

In the end, Jenica is confined to a single room in her parents’ house, where she spends the rest of her days in some kind of delirium, imprisoned for the killing of Matusa Doina. Some see the punishment as unnecessary, because, as Tavian points out, “Everybody cares that Matusa Doina is gone, but who’s upset about it?” She and Iosif Ceausescu are the only ones unaffected by the war, and I’m not the sure the latter is sane, either. There is a heated discussion whether to bury or cremate Matusa Doina’s body, but it was already beginning to decompose and in the rain a cremation would have been impossible anyway, so she is buried next to her house, and Brigita is the only one who hangs around after everyone has paid their respects and receded quickly to the safety of their homes. Brigita places the small cup traditional for serving Turkish coffee in with a couple of nuts inside (which some mice later come and steal) on the ground beside Matusa Doina’s headstone, symbols for the times she would sit with the old bat and let whatever was bothering her slip, and even though the nuts are stolen by mice and the cup sinks into the mud and is crushed by accidental footsteps, the cup of Turkish coffee and handful of nuts become symbols of gossip.

Matusa Doina, even in her death, is a topic of gossip for the Oameni: with no one doing anything for fear of the Second Brother (technically his forces), what they would do next, and the death of one of their personalities in a war on the hand of a deranged girl was subject to much controversy. Andrei, pretending to miss Jenica, kept a close eye on her parents’ house, ensuring that she did not, by any chance, slip out at night; for all we knew, she could still be a spy, but we are forced to believe that she is really permanently in delirium, because every time we steal a glance at her through her window, she is scratching at the walls with her fingernails, which causes her to develop an acute form of fungus on the ends of her fingers and under her nails because of the mud and humidity, which Eugen cures by instructing her mother to put her hands in a solution of salt water on even days and vinegar on odd days, and after a week Jenica’s fingers are red and the skin is peeling, but the fungus is gone.

Author's Note

Please tell me what you think of style, context, presentation, everything!!

It may be a bit confusing because of the Romanian terms and names... =|

Reviews

[alice]

(Pros) It's clear, concise and a great on how each events are connected. (Cons) The narration is dry; it's too detached from the story and very clinical, like a passive observer taking notes of things and the narrator, themselves, are never introduced or explained, which makes the story unrelatable and more of a journalist writing about what he/she observed during a very short stay in a war-torn village.
You deviate away from the actual battle, but focus more on how the action affects each person differently. It's kind of surreal on how they go about their business and remain numb from the whole thing, like just "meh," about the situation.
It really reminds me of the Illiad, because of the descriptions of each and every little thing. It's kind of great, but a real drag to what kind of story you're trying to convey.
It's well edited, but, it lacks any type of emotion. The death of innocent should be a sign of things yet to come and the death of the old lady should be the nail in the coffin on how the war is escalating and anyone is a target, regardless of age, gender and affiliation. There should be chaos, there is none.

[Dareen]

No one???