Suddenly, Nita felt her heart grow even heavier. What had happened, it had escalated. She felt so alone. She didn't know if she could go over the events again. No one had believed her the first time. No one believed her now. Or cared. How she missed her home!
She glanced up at Dr. Sauers but the sharp-featured woman fiddling with the video camera did not return her look. Eventually, though, the older woman turned to the silver-haired man standing by the door; he couldn't have been more than forty; he had not yet been introduced to Nita. As if sensing her insecurities, he glanced at Nita and presented her with a quick benign smile, then faced Sauers to say in English, 'Perhaps you should test the audio.'
Sauers, scowling, twisted knobs on the tripod, aimed the small video camera's eye and adjusted the panel at the back of the camera, making sure the focus was on Nita. Was the camera lens the eye of God watching her, judging her? The doctor's long hard nail stabbed at a button on the camera twice. Maybe she was nudging God to pay attention too!
'Alright!' Dr. Sauers said abruptly, impatiently, jerking herself away from the equipment. She glanced at her watch with the large face. 'We must begin.' She sounded as if there had been a delay that Nita or maybe the grey-haired man was responsible for.
The doctor took a seat to the right of Nita, the man in the well-fitting grey suit took the chair directly in front of her, both of them out of the camera's view. Almost enough for a card game, Nita thought wryly. Her mind flew to the old beat-up decks of cards the men in her village played with as they drank the strong local brandy, and quickly jettisoned those images in favor of larger cards with faded pastel pictures that her grandmother-her
bunic-kept hidden, wrapped in a soiled scrap of green satin, buried in the rich brown earth with a rock over top as if it were a grave hiding a body that refused to stay interred. In her memory Nita envisioned only one card, a black and white and grey picture with a few smudges the color of blood. Bunic patiently explained that this was artwork from five hundred or more years ago. 'Danse Macabre,' she had called it. A grisly skeleton with tufts of hair adhering to its skull and fragments of meat on its bones, holding the hand of a richly adorned King on one side of his boney body, and clutching about the waist what looked to be a peasant woman in rags on the other, the three drawn so that they appeared to be in motion. Nita thought the King and the woman were trying to get away from the skeleton, but Bunic interpreted it differently: 'He leads the dance. We all must dance with him one day.'
Nita smiled at the memory, so caught up in her mental picture of the stark yet mesmerizing image and of her
Bunic's rough but soothing tone of voice that she missed the first part of what the man at the table was saying, which apparently had included his name.
'…and I understand you speak English. I'm a behavioral psychologist with the ICSCS, that's the International Centre for Studies of the Criminally-'
'But I'm not a criminal,' Nita said flatly.
'You're a patient, convicted of a crime, in an institution for the criminally insane,' Dr. Sauers reminded her, as if Nita might have forgotten about the trial, about being in jail, now the hospital, the humiliation, the alienation, about all of it.
She turned away from Sauers and stared at the man's cool ash-colored eyes which reminded her so much of the winter sky above the unforgiving mountains of her village. Mountains strong and permanent formed of orange and red molten rock that had burst forth from below the surface and forced its way upward towards the snowy clouds, piercing the steel-blue sky like stalagmites, until the heavens were dominated by soil and rock and trees that could withstand the fierce climate-survivor of every cataclysm. What had existed before she was born, before her grandmother, and her great great great grandmother-
A buzzer down the hall sounded and Nita jolted. Furtively she glanced around her at the sterile environment, its only richness in the dead gleam of stainless steel, its only life the color corpse-white. No, this was not the mountains. She had little power here; she looked down at her wrists chained together and her pale small hands clasped tightly in her lap as if all they could clutch, all they could hold onto to keep body and soul together was each other.
'We're not here about the legalities,' the grey man whose name she had not learned said in a comforting tone accented by a slight smile. But Nita knew that both people in the room with her thought she was not just guilty but also insane. Hopelessly insane. Not much to do about that.
Bunic believed you can't change people's minds with words, just with actions. 'Trust only what you taste and touch and smell,' she'd said. 'What others believe, this cannot matter.'
'I see your name is Luminita.'
'Everyone calls me Nita.'
'Yes, a diminutive. Very nice. What does Luminita mean? Something about light?'
'In Romanian it means 'little light'.'
'Meaning a bright personality?'
'Yes. But also someone who lights the way for others.'
'A beacon.'
Nita remembered her
Bunic with so much longing. The woman after whom she had been named, who had meant the world to her, was gone now, and that thought stabbed Nita's heart like a rusty knife. Bunic, in Nita's youthful view, had always been old, snowy hair like goose down covered by a headscarf the color of the purple loostrife that grew in the wetlands, a face earth-brown and crinkly as Baltic fruit shriveled by a sudden frost. But her smile, that wasn't old at all. Her smile lit wise honey eyes and changed the wrinkles around her mouth until she appeared young to young Nita. As if they were sisters. And sometimes Nita believed that they were sisters, more than sisters, identical. As a child, she had wanted to grow up to be just like Bunic.
'And how do you feel about that?'
Nita's vision of the past cleared returning her to the present. The man had spoken and she had no idea what he was asking her.
'I'm sorry. Could you repeat that, please?' she said.
'Wake sus!' Sauers snapped.
The man said gently, 'I asked if we could begin at the beginning. If you would be willing to tell me about how you came to be in Bucharest.'
Nita knew this man had read her file and was aware of every bit of information about her that the courts and the doctors had been able to ascertain. Why he wanted it now, she did not know.
She was about to ask him this when Sauers ordered, '
Completat!' and Nita decided that complying was in fact the easiest way to go. Once this was over she could return to the vomit-green cell they called her room in this small asylum and fall into the world inside her, where they could not penetrate.
'Let me ask you specific questions,' the man said. 'It might be easier that way. Why did you come to Bucharest?'
'To go to school.'
She could see him struggle to recall the information from her files. 'I seem to have read that you did very well in school. Exceptionally well.'
'Yes. My grades were excellent.'
He smiled. 'It's unusual for a girl from a small mountain village to be accepted at university.'
'I studied with my grandmother. She taught me to read three languages, and to learn numbers. She wanted me to be modern and well-educated.'
'Your grandmother must have been very proud of you, earning a scholarship.'
'Yes. The whole village took pride in me.'
'I see. So you came here for university.'
'No, I studied first at the secondary school level. I then matriculated to the university.'
'I see.'
She wondered if he saw much of anything. His dove eyes revealed nothing. Did he understand how life could be? How her life had been? Could he sense a clash of worlds? She doubted it.
'Did you enjoy school.'
'Yes.'
'Did you make friends?'
'Yes. A few.' When she said no more he waited and she filled in the blank space hovering between them. 'I had two girlfriends, Magda and Anya, and a guy, Toma. We all went to coffee houses together and clubs. We listened to music and danced and talked a lot. More than I was used to.' She felt exhausted from talking now, as if all this depleted her. And to what end? She knew she was destined to be a name in some research study that a girl her age would read about in a text book one day.
'Did you have a boyfriend.'
'No.'
'What about the young man you just mentioned?'
'Toma and I were friends. Only friends.'
'And the girls? Were you just friends as well?'
She did not know what he was implying and at first could not form an answer. Finally she took the easiest route. 'We were friends only.'
'Close?'
She hesitated. 'I suppose.'
'And did you confide in them?'
'Confide what?'
'Anything. Your thoughts. Feelings. Anything about your life. Your past.'
He said 'past' as if she might have accidentally conveyed to Anya or Magda a dark secret, or even Toma, but they had not talked of the past, only the present. And the future. A future that no longer existed. 'We talked of school and movie stars and music.' She hoped that would satisfy him, and it appeared to.
'Tell me, Nita, while you were in Bucharest, did you miss your village.'
'Of course. Sometimes, not all the time. I had my studies.'
The man had been making notes on a pad of paper and now turned the page. She wondered why he made notes when he would have the videotape.
In the pause, Nita snuck a glance at Dr. Sauers. The woman's manure eyes pierced her and threatened retribution but Nita did not know for what. Nita looked down again, but a small smile spread her lips apart as she thought to herself, 'We all must dance with him one day.'
'Nita, I'd like to hear what your village was like. Can you tell me something about it? I'm from North America, so this is all new to me.'
She stared at him as he tried to look sincere. Yes, her village would not be known to him, and yet she wondered if he truly appreciated the differences. While she
