Adriana Bittel – Names

There's a certain line of thought that suggests if you know the name, you know the person. Most of us become, whether we wish it or not, the Harry we were born as, or the Melanie, or the Damian. We meet an older man, he possesses a somewhat grand air though it's fraying, and he seems slightly ramshackle, his head high but his mouth hanging low, and we aren't too surprised to learn his name is Jacques. Or a ruddy, plump, broad-shouldered man with coal-black hair and deep red palms, the hair spraying from his knuckles thick and dark - well, his name is surely Colin. Young children who don't fit the name their parents gave them tend to earn nicknames, and these often stick well into adulthood. Adrian Bittel's Names is concerned with the subtle shift of identity that occurs when our name changes, and how we and others perceive us depending on which name we have.

The narrator of Names is Sarina, a woman in her late twenties, still living at home, who is plain of face but believes she possesses, at the least, a nice body. She harbours a suspicion that her emotional maturity has been stunted by the fact that she still lives with her parents, and that she was, until recently, a virgin. Her beau – boyfriend is too strong – is Ernst, a German, who comes across as a remarkably cold, though focused and ambitious, young man.

I was not allowed to come unannounced – I did it once and he got angry, as I had caught him washing his underwear – he decided in advance the day and hour of our meetings, usually on Sunday, but also on rainy Thursdays, when he couldn't play tennis.

He is the sort of man who reads not by his bed but at a desk, with a pencil in hand. He makes love to Sarina, without saying “I love you”. She puts up with this because she's never had anything else to compare it with, though her parents tell her that Ernst should be snapped up and married – he's a stable man, after all, and that is important – but she shouldn't waste her time in loving him. What's the use? He doesn't seem capable of loving her in return.

As a narrator, Sarina is sensitive to the development of her family members and of Ernst and, later, when she travels (alone) to visit Ernst's parents, to them as well. She is interested in where people come from, because that supplies, to her, the reasons for how they are the people they are now. In her family, given names were not enough – people and objects needed nicknames, additions, sly joking references:

Names were very important in our house. Generally dissatisfied with the real ones, my mother and father re-baptized beings and even things in such a way that if you weren't used to the way they talked, you wouldn't understand a thing. When they said, for example, that Antipa and Max had invited themselves over for dinner, and you saw Mr. and Mrs. Popian appear, you could deduce that Antipa (Patty for short) was derived from Antipathy (Mrs. Popian being neurotic and a snob) and that Max cam from Maxwell's Pendulum, because Mr. Popian, who had Parkinson's disease, jerked his head rhythmically.

All of the characters, we discover, have secondary and even tertiary names, and that includes Sarina, who is known by the diminutive “Sara” at times, and who is, of course, as the narrator, also an “I”. What we learn about a person from one name is enhanced, or contradicted, or simply runs sidelong, to what we already know. “Sarina”, as, say, Ernst knows her, is quite different to the “I” that we, the reader, comes to know.

It was only in bed that I was allowed to lose control. For the rest, to please him, I had to contain my enthusiasms, playfulness, indignation, and boredom, and if I didn't always succeed, I was punished with a few days of the silent treatment. “I can't deal with this puffed up toad anymore,” I'd tell myself, idling away my afternoons in bed with playing cards and the radio, or gabbing with Antipa and Max over coffee and countless cigarettes. But my ear was tuned to the telephone, and I didn't dare go to the movies or visit girlfriends I had neglected these past two years (“what do you have in common with those silly geese? Married women, and they fill their time with nonsense,” was Ernst's opinion).

It's significant that Sarina “loses control” only in the bedroom – for there she is called, by Ernst, Sara, and not Sarina. Outside the bedroom, her name is Sarina, and her behaviour alters accordingly.

Soon Sarina travels to meet Ernst’s parents – but she goes alone. She thinks it is odd, but she does it anyway. What she wants from the trip is both to learn who his parents are, and to perhaps discover how Ernst came to be the way he is.

If the place where you grow up shapes you, I'm happy he grew up on these charming streets, that the civilized air of the burgh entered his pores, that he strolled with his friends past the Evangelical Cemetery, in the lower city, and went skiing on the surrounding hills. Just as I was marked by my daily walks to school among the crowds along Magheru Boulevard, my courage steeled to face down the hooligans who gathered in front of the Scala Movie House and to advance against the torrent flooding out of the Patria Cinema.

But here the story shifts. As mentioned, Bittel is concerned with the identity of people, and how that identity shifts when their name changes. Sarina is stifled by the uptight nature of Ernst’s parents, and at first it seems that the reasons for Ernst’s personality are clear. But then – a late-night visit from Ernst’s distraught mother. But then – the discovery that Ernst’s name is in fact Bruno. But then – a sinister past involving German soldiers, adoption, and covered-over secrets. But then – An older man, Emil, connected to the family in way’s unclear. Names, it seems, reveal information, sometimes more than we wish. The murky origins of Ernst/Bruno provide a wholly new perspective to the man, and also to Sarina. The final few pages of the story are almost dream-like, and there’s a sense that Sarina’s own identity has been compromised by the shift in Ernst’s background.

Adriana Bittel’s Names is a thought-provoking story that avoids providing answers. Bittel’s Sarina is an excellent “camera”, and her roving eye captures well the look and feel of today’s Bucharest. She sees a great deal, and remembers, and what’s more she understands the inextricable relationship between what’s real and what’s remembered. Of course, the tenuous nature of memory is disrupted when the name of things change, and that, in essence, is the primary question explored in Names. If we call a boy Jimmy and the man James, are they the same person, or different? The answer is both, but it’s more than that, too – they are connected, these names, separate but the same, and you don’t always need to know one to know the other. But when everything changes its name, then the foundations upon which we rest become shaky, and memory as a continuation of the past into the future by way of the present becomes untrustworthy, and we risk losing everything.

Names by Adriana Bittel is a short story from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 13: Spotlight on Romania.

See Also

Other stories from the Absinthe: New European Writing Issue 13: Spotlight on Romania issue include:
---Agopian, Ştefan - The Art of War
---Cărtărescu, Mircea - Clockwork Animals
---Lungu, Dan - To the Cemetery
---Suceavă, Bogdan - Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum?
---Teodorovici, Lucian Dan - Chewing Gum

Index of short stories under review

Links

Contemporary Romanian Writers
translations.observatorcultural.ro
Plural - Romanian/English Online Magazine

Reviews

Czech Position - Literalab