DELIA MARIA DAVIS

Cultured Women

On a day like any other, a day that would be their second to last, Doamnele A. and F. waited in the central plaza, where the memorials had once outnumbered the living people. Among the politicians and Wallachian princes, the beloved national poets, the architects from centuries gone, they sat on their usual park bench. Handbags were placed comfortably between them, shoes loosened from their calcified heels. The old women looked around, first at the statues clinging to their pedestals of stone, then at the sleeping faces. The Show would begin as soon as the queuers woke up.

The Show was so named by Doamna A., and it opened with the youngest children. The coos of the pigeons roused them, cranky and disoriented, and their cries then roused their parents, and any unfortunate person standing immediately in front or behind the family. So each day would begin, had begun for the last twenty-nine years. Every person in line had their own morning routine, carried out with the precision of gears locking into place as they turned: There was bespectacled Domnul B. with his corner-kiosk newspaper. There was big-nosed Domnul E. with his breakfast cigarette and the stroll he took to loosen his legs. There was Doamna G., who refused to speak to anybody, especially her husband, until the peddlers came to sell her coffee.

That morning in particular, Doamna C.’s children were at their games. The eldest, a girl, lounged in the stroller while her brother went around collecting rocks. He weaved through the people as though they were poplar trees lining the sidewalk and he a little bird, pecking around their trunk feet. Meanwhile the peddlers were beginning to come around with their baskets of pastries and bottled drinks. Their arrival meant the start of what Doamna A. called Act One, the dramatics of which went on until lunchtime, when Act Two commenced, and so on. She could not yet see the vendors in the plaza but she knew they were near. People were tapping their feet, peeking over and around their neighbors. As one such man leaned over to look down the line, the young boy was sprinting back to his sister. Only at the last minute did he dodge the obstacle.

He approached the girl, dropped the pebbles in her palm. “Eat one a day,” he said, “and you will live forever.”

“Will I get to be queen forever?”

He nodded. The girl put a rock in her mouth and sucked on it. “I feel it!” she exclaimed.

From their bench, the two women clapped and cheered. They loved a strong resolution. “Bravo,” said A.

“What next?” said F.

***

In the late summer of 1990, when the queue first began snaking through the plaza like an exposed root whose strength had split the pavement in two, A. and F. thought, not unreasonably, that the old decade was repeating itself. They recalled what indeed was little more than yesterday, when they would queue up separately then meet up at this very spot, under the gaze of Michael the Brave on horseback, for their weekly exchange of goods. A., whose then-husband was a diabetic, had a ration card that allowed him as much as ten kilograms of meat. F. had relatives in the countryside whom she would visit occasionally and who gave her bags of fresh tomatoes, lettuce, plums. They kept each other afloat, these two women who had met in their twenties at a factory that made Dacia parts.

These memories made the indignation creep up their spines. By the third day, once the line had slithered past their bench, F. decided to investigate. She beelined to the front of the queue, which led to the steps of the neglected old Brâncovenesc monastery, the last of its kind in the town. By the entrance there was a sign. BRING YOUR OWN STOOLS, it said, THIS COULD BE A WHILE.

Standing in line was someone she recognized, a second cousin—the one with horrendous taste in dress patterns and even worse taste in men. “What a pretty dress,” F. said, and gesturing to the line, “Say, is this one worth all the trouble?”

Her cousin shrugged. She went on to describe a strange man in a suit and an orange hard hat who had blown into town, climbed the steps of the monastery, and began to talk of a renovation, drawing a crowd. Who was this man, they were all asking, where had he come from? Had he brought with him the Western values they had been promised? Everyone agreed that there was something dependable about him, something intelligent and self-assured.

“Dependable, eh?”

“This is all secondhand, of course.”

“Who’s the first hand?”

“My boyfriend.”

Of course, thought F., the boyfriend. That man could never mind his own.

The cousin went on: When the man in the suit and hard hat had announced the construction, it was as though he had said I would like to do a magic trick and thrown a white sheet over the edifice, so earnestly did murmurs of enchantment ripple through the immediate area. What did it mean? When would he come back out? The bystanders argued into the evening, pulling up milk crates to sit in front of the entrance. By noon the next day, a queue had sprouted behind them. No one had come to an agreement, but the line’s germination was consensus enough that the magic trick, whatever it was, would be momentous. And so that was how she and her boyfriend had come to wait in line.

Not terribly bright, this cousin. “How intriguing,” said F. “But really, where did you get your dress?”

She listened to her cousin go on and on. By the time she returned to Doamna A., it was with a fully hatched plan. Who knew when the construction would be finished? They were too old to wait for such nonsense. But once it started moving, they could use her cousin to cut to the front. In the meanwhile, they would enjoy their lives.

This could have been a good plan. But the two women were retired, widowed and divorced, respectively, their children grown and flown away from the nest. Their pensions were enough to live but not enough to live. There was little for them at home. That first year, they spent more and more time on the bench, people-watching and speculating about all manner of things.

“If there was a time machine inside,” said A., “where would you go?”

“The ’70s, of course.”

“Any year but ’73.”

“Why, that was a fantastic year!”

“It was the year I caught G. cheating on me with the downstairs neighbor.”

“Bastards, all of them!”

Like this they would go on, until the hardened bench set their postures in a dignified indifference no amount of stretching could correct.

***

Between sleeping and waking there was dreaming, and next to that, there was waiting, in which the townspeople learned they could do all manner of things. Across the years there were magazines to be read, discussions to be had, cards to be played, observations to made. And there were jokes, too. Some days were comedy shows for Doamnele A. and F., who would share a bag of sunflower seeds and a large pretzel each while they listened to the townspeople quip. F. liked to let the pretzel rest in her mouth, the saliva moistening the rock-hard bread, while A. gnawed on hers, vigorously grinding it down. A. would get lost in examining Michael, the darkened and timeworn stone, its texture rough and inscrutable. In the crevices she could discover those heroic tales she’d heard as a schoolgirl, trace along the stonelayers those spellbinding maps that told of Michael’s successes across Moldova and Transylvania. A GREAT UNIFIER, his placard read. She wondered idly what her own placard might say. Then F. would nudge her. “Pay attention,” she’d say. “You always miss things.”

Their favorite skit was about tiny-eared Domnul M., who had taken to picking and examining his earwax so often that people called him the “Gold Digger.” Over the course of each day, townspeople would check in on him.

“Did you find it yet? Are you rich today?” they asked.

“What?” he always shouted back.

Each time, A. giggled; F. offered her usual toothless smile. With a shovel-shaped pinky nail he dug at the earwax day and night, but his hearing was only getting worse. Then the day came when he found what he was looking for: a single green grass blade, clumped in with his wax. He doubled down on his efforts and weeks later yanked out the whole tuft of grass, growing from a clod of yellow dirt.

The townspeople were tired of Domnul M. by then, so they hardly noticed the ordeal. But the two women had watched the whole thing in amazement. F. spoke first: “I wish someone had told my husband twenty years ago.”

“Told him what?” A. asked.

“He couldn’t grow a damn thing. Even our lawn was patchy and bare! I told him, ‘This is why they took our farm.’ It was why we had to move, why they put us in the factories. He was such a bad farmer!”

She smiled wryly. “If only someone had told him.”

A. was getting impatient. “Told him what, for God’s sake!”

“The best fertilizer isn’t cow shit.”

F. started laughing and couldn’t stop. Yes, she could get used to this—watching God let time inflict itself on someone else.

There came to be others besides the Gold Digger. One evening, while the card players gathered in their circle, the women noticed something different about their lamplit silhouettes. As it turned out, Domnul E., the dealer, had lichens swaying from the tip of his nose. Most of the other men had mushrooms budding from their loafers, the caps jiggling from their impatient foot-tapping. But that wasn’t all. Up and down the line, there were snails clinging to sagging underarms, patches of moss covering bald spots, and in one woman’s coiffed hair, a sparrow had made its nest.

Generally, little fuss was made. The townspeople slept and woke, bickered and bantered. They reasoned that the new growths were not unlike warts or sunspots, and just like the slope of Domnul E.’s nose had turned into a ledge for lichens, so too did the tomorrows turn to yesterdays.

One afternoon Doamnele A. and F. discovered pincushion moss on their own heels. “Aren’t we two grand old biddies,” A. said, failing to suppress a cackle. “Aren’t we two fine, cultured women, out on the town!”

She felt younger than she had in a long time. Younger, even, than the summer before she graduated high school and got married, when she won a trip to Denmark from a magazine she used to read. Her mother went with her, and for six days they woke at dawn and walked in an ecstatic trance around a different country, hardly believing their eyes. Look here, look there! When they returned home, they came to call that summer the fairy-tale trip, the great vacation from reality.

As on that vacation, there was no shortage of entertainment to be found now. The line was a comedy one day, a mystery the next. Word around the plaza was that the queue was still growing every day, pushing outside the town limits. But no one, not even those at the front, could remember why they’d first gotten in line.

“Is this the line for the butcher’s shop?” a passerby asked one day.

Several queuers shook their heads. “This is the line for the money teller,” one said, to the incredulity of his neighbors.

“I thought this was the line to apply for a job at the steel plant!” said another.

“That factory’s closed, domnule! It’s been closed for years!”

“Excuse me!” a pubescent voice chirped.

They all turned to look at the girl. “My mother told me we were waiting for the new McDonald’s to open. They have a PlayPlace with slides, and a ball pit! My sixth birthday party will be there and you’re all invited.”

They all smiled and thanked her. No one said what was on all their minds. For a six-year-old, they thought, she was really quite tall.

***

The twenty-ninth year of waiting came to be known as the Year of Transformation, and it began when McDonald’s Girl, now fully a young woman, decided to leave the queue. Others jostled to move forward, to fill her place, but Doamna D., who had been standing behind the girl, refused to step up. Men shouted; children screamed. Yet Doamna D. could not move. She had woken that morning to find her legs unresponsive, adamantine as stone.

Because she wouldn’t go quietly, the people soon mobilized a group of strong younger men to help the doamna move. A. woke late to the ordeal. “She has limestone ankles, poor thing,” F. filled her in, “and the old mason said it’s spreading up to her knees.”

A. shook her head. The women looked at each other through grave eyes now clouded by cataracts. Everyone agreed to give Doamna D. until the following evening to shake her legs awake.

Doamnele A. and F. did not spend much time discussing the incident, but all throughout the day they could think of nothing else. Doamna A. looked to Michael for comfort, but he was unmoved as ever. Spindly branches had come to obscure his placard, and his horse had a frightened look in its eyes. The dog-rose bushes crept around its stony ankles.

That same day, news spread that someone in line was four months pregnant, and at this the townspeople were overjoyed. The plaza buzzed with chatter: Was it a girl or a boy? Did the woman have any names in mind? (She would have to think about it, she said.) The peddlers came around with cake and shots of brandy. Even the Man in the Suit emerged to congratulate the woman. He would have disappeared without further remark were it not for a young man’s exclamation: “Someone’s come out of the building!”

Hundreds of crazed eyes turned to him. “My good people, we’re so close to the end!” he began. “I, Nicolae Bogdan, proudly present ...”

He climbed the steps of the old monastery and in a dramatic gesture, unveiled the building. Beneath the built-in stone clock with its Roman numerals, THE NICOLAE BOGDAN CHRONOMUSEUM was engraved in the façade.

The townspeople oohed. Applause rippled through the queue. Then the clinks of glasses, shouts of joy. When they had quieted down enough to listen to the Man in the Suit again, he was gone. A queuer tried and failed to open the doors. In the distance, the first applause could still be heard echoing down the line.

“Don’t cry, doamna, he’ll come back.”

The pregnant woman smiled through her tears. “It’s not that,” she said, wiping them away. “I’m just so happy. My child will have a good life, and I’m so happy.”

She gazed up at the museum. “It’s better than we could have ever dreamed.”

***

Some weeks later, when stories of a Limestone Lady were being passed along among the children, the two women realized there had been no resolution to Doamna D.’s problem. Her spot had been filled, but she was nowhere to be found. “What kind of story gets rid of its main player like that?” A. complained.

After her friend fell asleep, F. spent the night flashlight in hand, scouring the park for Doamna D. Around her the gentle snores suffused the air like pollen.

She never found Doamna D.’s remains, and she never had a chance to tell Doamna A., besides. The next day she woke with a lockjaw so bad she could not speak. In silence Doamnele A. and F. witnessed the stiffening of arms, hips, big toes, eyebrows. For some, the transformation was total and instantaneous; for others, it was more forgiving. No one said anything about the situation either way. The townspeople at large observed the phenomenon of one another’s turning like so: They locked eyes, smiled, and looked away. Perhaps Doamnele A. and F. would’ve joined the charade if they had been able to avert their eyes.

***

By the time the Man in the Suit reemerged from his building, months later, there were once again more memorials than people to be found. They dotted the plaza like a field of poppies—Domnul E. and the card players, Doamna C., the stone mason, a peddler, the pregnant woman. She had given birth a few days before her calcification. The pink baby, still nameless, rested in her stony arms.

The Man in the Suit stepped up on a concrete block leftover from construction and, to those who remained, gave a speech he had prepared. The news cameras began rolling. The gathered journalists took notes as he explained in detail how he had converted the retired monastery, spent years acquiring clocks from all over the country, arranging them in a way that would create a metronomic symphony which would tell their definitive history, from antiquity onward to the present moment. The truth would be told. At last, the world would know them for who they really were: for their ingenuity, their sense of humor, their unrelenting spirits in the face of time and other conquering empires.

The remaining living queuers were almost paralyzed by the anticipation. They all imagined the ticks and tocks that would assail them when they entered the building. They pitied the old Gold Digger, but reasoned that at least he could examine the clocks and what would surely be their fine craftsmanship. Then the doors were opened. The baby began to cry as people scrambled around the statues and surged through the museum doors—stone-blind Domnul B., the grown children of Doamna C., widowed Doamna G., deaf Domnul M.—and tried to shake the age from their limbs, the waiting from their brains, all the better to witness the clocks. They were surprised to find only silence.

The crowd swarmed outside, gathered at the ankles of the Man in the Suit, who could not escape for his feet had stuck to the concrete. Like hot air, the apologies hissed from his lips, but the crowd would not be placated. Doamna C.’s children threatened litigation. Domnul B. demanded redress. The journalists clamored. Nicolae Bogdan raised his hands for silence then gazed into the cameras helplessly. “Most of the clocks are very old,” he finally said. “They will have to be reset.”

These final words would be broadcast for the next forty-eight hours by local and national stations, and commentators would discuss them for the next week. “This is not the first charlatan we’ve seen who is looking to manipulate the public in this insecure age,” said one commentator. “The stage has been set for this sort of thing since ’89. Are we really surprised to see it?”

“Very true, isn’t he just following the leads of the men in charge?”

“Maybe so,” said another, “but it’s a country filled with short-changers and line-cutters.”

“Yes,” another agreed, “that’s the real problem. We’ve always been too smart for our own good.”

There was also feature after feature on Nicolae Bogdan, investigative reports that tried to unearth his origins. They were disappointed to learn that he was a nobody from a small village south of the capital. One journalist tried to draw a comparison with Ceaușescu, but it did not take. Time passed, and the country forgot about the man in the suit.

In the town, there remained the problem of the stone citizens, and what to do with them. The local mayor wanted to keep them in the plaza, but the latest prime minister—who had been elected after the resignation of the last, right before the chronomuseum’s unveiling—was concerned about the kind of story such a display might tell, and had ordered that all the citizens be removed. One by one, the families of the deceased came to collect them. Only a handful of citizens remained, those whose relatives had died or else moved abroad and become unreachable. Doamnele A. and F. were among them. A contractor was scheduled to pick up the bodies, which would be pulverized and probably agglomerated for concrete mix. What was the mayor doing, then, standing in front of the old women and rubbing his chin?

He could not bring himself to get rid of the women. Something about them—and he knew he could not bring this up to anyone in the office, that he would be laughed out of the room—reminded him of when he was a child ... when he and his mother would walk home after school through his hometown’s park, the big one with the drooping evergreens and the winding dirt paths. Even though the paths led to the same exit on the other side, he always insisted they take the one on the left because it was slightly more meandering and he liked to see all the people, the crusty men sitting in the magazine kiosks, the pretty young women carrying shopping bags, the intimidating groups of teenagers eating ice cream and couples holding hands, they all filled him with a sense of the world as vast and ever-changing, all but the old ladies who rested on the benches, he recalled now, almost imperceptible in their stillness but always, always there, like the boulders he used to climb on the south side of the park.

An idea struck him. They could be an art installation; he would only have to make up a sculptor’s name, discard some paperwork at the office, and no one would know any better. That’s it, he thought, and went right away to the town engraver. As if on cue, the pigeons landed at the women’s feet. Probably they’re still there, pecking at the crumb-less ground.