In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
Our guide, Ana Albu, had been trained as a librarian and although she no longer worked in that field, she was an excellent researcher. Perhaps my physical resemblance to Maria Danciu opened memories of previous times for her. Born in 1973, her childhood had been rife with the miseries perpetrated by the Ceausescu regime against the population. Limited heat, hot water, electricity during the most brutal winters. Food rationing and shortages enforced in order for the government to pay back a huge national debt. Fear and paranoia caused by the Securitate and their constant surveillance of even the most ordinary citizens. In other words, a shitty time. Ana's closest friend growing up had been a girl named Monica, whose mother, Doina, had worked as a maid for Elena Ceausescu.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Forest in Winter, Ioan Andreescu (1879-1880)
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Old Nicolae, Stefan Luchian (1905-1907)
Monica was now an art restorer and her mother, Doina, aged sixty-seven, had long retired. But Doina remembered all the stories of the goings on in the palace, and was able to tell them to my guide, Ana, who relayed them to me in a series of emails I received regularly over the next few weeks. The first thing to note is that Elena Ceausescu, who was fifty-seven at the time Doina started working for her, was an extremely unattractive woman who could not abide good-looking women around her for fear her homliness would be accentuated. Doina was a plain — bordering on homely — girl of twenty-five when Elena hired her. Her career thus far had been as a seamstress, but she learned other skills in the fourteen years she was employed by Elena — for instance how to give facials and wax hair from the body, tasks that were too private for Elena to entrust to just anyone.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Elena Ceausescu
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Palace waxing room
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Doing
To say that Elena confided in Doina would be untrue, but in her capacity as a personal maid to the First Lady of Romania, Doina overheard a lot of gossip and saw things she might have wished she hadn't (such as her boss naked in the bath). Elena had a difficult personality and Doina had to keep a very low profile — hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil — especially when it came to the antics of Elena's son Nicu, and the wild parties he gave. It was at one of those parties that Doina first caught a glimpse of Maria, whose face she knew from the cinema.
