Anca Cristofovici – Stela's Return

It's shocking to lose someone close, and particular one's mother. But time passes, and soon you are not the person you were and, though it may be hard to admit, the person you are today, now, years after your mother's death is not the person she knew, and perhaps not a person she would easily recognise. And her, too – you are closer in age, you are more experienced in life, and perhaps now you are older than she was when she died. You could teach your mother more about being sixty than she ever knew. A curious thought.

But this doesn't matter, not really, aside from being a sad thought experiment – but then, in Anca Cristofovici's short story, Stela's Return, it does matter, and quite suddenly most everything shifts. A government official, B. K., has been assigned to the daughter and her returned mother, to assist in finding them a place to stay. That's the problem with governments, they have a department for even the most obscure of afflictions or public matters, and even grief and parting and loss must be touched by the clammy unfeeling hands of the State. At least, the daughter reasons, he is handsome enough, and alert. Attentive. But that hardly explains how her mother has returned, and the state she has returned in.

Her body was thin. A body of air. Wary. Reserved. Stepping off the train in slow motion. Drifting out of sleep or some inert state unfit for the situation. Woman still attached to some remote landscape in no haste to reach my arms, afflicted with absence. It was hard to tell if her features had been firmed or rather blurred by the spaces she had passed through. Her listless pace in contrast to her startled gaze, her indifference to words – and a disregard for me that I soon experienced in the most unexpected ways – only added to the surprise and confusion caused by her sudden appearance, then by her aloofness, which remained throughout her stay with us.

Stela did not die – she was kidnapped under unusual and unexplained conditions – but the effect is the same. The narrator has become accustomed to life without her mother, and to have her suddenly back is a shock equal to the original shock of losing her. Cristofovici's narration suddenly fractures, shifts, becomes loose and tight and then uncertain. Sentences trail away, they meld into one another, and often punctuation is forgotten. At first we are certain Stela has been returned from the dead – the actual dead, not just the “disappeared and presumed dead” of government certificates – and then we really do think she was kidnapped in a faraway country and forced into confinement for twenty years. They allowed her to borrow books from the library and gave her some pocket money, sure, but she was a prisoner through and through. And just when we believe that the narrative shatters, flickering from Stela's chaotic memories of her imprisonment (death?) to the daughter's experiences with increasingly shadowy government officials who stand around in ominous grey suits:

Night after night, they kept me going. A night's sleep was a day's life. And down there in my chest the syllables throbbed, tick-tacked. Once, a pitch sO high, like sound rising over a hUge obstacle. Like that dog over there – there – trying his way over that hedge. Too high that voice for a human voice. Too far away. Then someone whispered behind it: i-ma-su-mak. Nonsense. My voice, I couldn't raise it. But sense or no sense, I kept them there, down in my chest.
Cracking, pattering, broken sounds.
An accident? Countless. Small. Insidious. Invisible. Add up
Ether. Not the smell of ether but its effect
Catastrophe? Who said so? Nothing. I tell you: nOthing

The effect is quite startling, the back-and-forth narrative effective in both keeping the reader on their toes, and increasing the uncertainty as to what actually happened in the intervening years. Did Stella die and come back? Was she kidnapped and then returned? But why kidnap an ordinary woman? And why, really, is their a government department devoted to either situation?

Cristofovici shows us snippets from the narrator's life when she was much younger and her mother was unambiguously alive and present, the little arguments that take place between neighbours, and the curious habit very young children have of running away from home and taking their dogs with them. Interspersed with this are thoughts from the much older narrator, uncertain about her present situation but wise to the depths of emotion available to her now as an adult, and experienced enough to realise that such emotional strength can help her identify with the mother of her past and of her present. At times, the prose shifts to a syncopation-like effect, popping through short, sharp sentences that begin where they shouldn't and end awkwardly, with the overall result that we feel as though we are hurtling through the narrator's unravelling mind.

It should be noted, and not just in passing, that the translation of Stela's Return was written by the author herself. As such, we can expect that it captures the full essence of the text in the originally Romanian, and that it is as “close” to the original as possible. To that end, the text reads remarkably smoothly, confidently shifting register and tone. Additionally, Stela's Return is a self-contained extract from Cristofovici's novel, Kidnapping, which was also translated in its entirety by the author.

Stela's Return opens with the quite sad observation of a daughter remembering her mother as she was while alive, and wondering how she might be if she were still here today. In terms of capturing grief, Cristofovici's prose is strong, and contains a great deal of sympathy for the suffering that comes from a sudden death. Equally strong is the final half, when the narrative “shatters” and the broken pieces are stitched together haphazardly. The concreteness of the original character and her situation has allowed for sufficient grounding for the maelstrom of the final pages – we have someone to care about, and an intriguing situation. This is not smoke and mirrors but people and feelings, and one terribly bizarre series of events.

Stela's Return by Anca Cristofovici is a short story from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 14

See Also

Index of short stories under review from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 13: Spotlight on Romania
Index of short stories under review

Links

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