Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  We chose to get married in Saint Mark’s majestic Orthodox church, or rather Mark chose it not just because it carried his name but because he wanted me to experience my own tradition for the wedding. I could not have cared less and a justice of the peace would have been fine, but I thought it was cute and thoughtful of him to want to go through the exhausting ceremony for my sake. While I was standing in my poufy white dress next to Mark all stiff and handsome in his tuxedo, and I was about to faint from the heat, the tight shoes, the nonstop incense that the priest kept throwing around with his incense burner, I had a feeling that there was something overdone, ridiculous, and unattainable about the whole thing. In order not to faint I went through the philosophers’ alphabet, finding a name for each letter from A as in Aristotle to Z as in Zeno, passing through Locke, Montaigne, Russell, Wittgenstein, Young. I was happy I could even find one for Q, Quintilian the Latin orator. The priest pronounced us “man and wife” when I reached X for Xenophon, the soldier-philosopher who marched through deserts and over snow-covered mountainous chains until he reached Trebizond by the Black Sea. I felt great relief that the ceremony was over and I had managed to cover each letter of the entire alphabet with a philosopher’s name.

  The remaining months in Belgrade with the preparations and the paperwork for my departure to America seemed a few steps removed from my own life. I went through everything with precision and attention to detail but with my mind elsewhere. The affection I had experienced for my native home and city the night Mark made his glorious wedding proposal and met my parents in a swirl of languages, sentimental music, and shots of slivovitz wore off and was replaced by a feeling of estrangement and weariness. Belgrade without Marija seemed like a lifeless city and I might as well leave it for good. The news of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, the nationalistic discourse on the radio and television in which it sounded like it was still the Serbian armies and people who were the victims of the war they had waged against their neighbors, gave me a sense of bitter satisfaction about my impending expatriation. Packing for my next life, saying last good-byes, obtaining all the necessary documents from my university as proof I had actually received a degree there, organizing the church wedding ceremony for my parents’ sake and Mark’s delectation in ethnic traditions, talking to Marija on the phone once a day to find news of the war from her side and just to hear her voice, it all filled my days and months until it was time to embark on my grand adventure, to get on the plane to my new and mythic country. My family accompanied Mark and me to the airport wearing dark-colored clothes as if for a funeral. My mother was wiping tears that she said were for happiness at my good fortune, my father was smoking incessantly saying the country was going to be destroyed and a good thing it was that I was getting the hell out of there, and my sister sobbing with hiccups and asking me to write to her often and not forget them in that big America. As cool as I tried to be when we said our last good-byes I felt hot tears streaming down my cheeks and smearing the mascara I had carefully applied an hour before just to look at my very best when I landed in Washington, DC. I knew once I got on that plane I would forever be a different person, a different category of individual: an immigrant, an expatriate, someone without a country. It felt bitter and satisfying, painful and thrilling. I picked up my carry-on suitcase and walked toward the gate on Mark’s arm without looking back.

  Washington, DC. Immigrant Life

  1992–1998

  During the first months of my American life, Washington, DC, puzzled me in the exact reverse of the ways I had imagined it would. I had moved to America to live in a museum and I was a part of the display. Here is the Museum of Natural History, and here is this girl from Serbia. Here is the modern section of the Art Gallery, and here is the Serbian woman that Mark Lundberg married. Here is the Pentagon, and here is Mark’s wife, the Serbian woman who escaped the war, what a tragedy, a European war in this day and age. As I had played the tour guide with Mark during our first weeks together in Belgrade, so did he now proudly guide me through the architectural and cultural gems of Washington, DC. He showed me the great landmarks of his city as if I were a tourist on a short visit and he took me on endless tours to introduce me to all his friends and colleagues. Sometimes he even told me what to wear before meeting them. We had our first fight a month after my arrival in America, on account of what I should wear to visit his department chair in one of the chic residential neighborhoods of the city. I swore at him, which was an extremely rare occurrence for me. “I’m not your fucking mail bride,” I said putting on the belt of the floral silk dress that my mother had bought for me before leaving Belgrade, in one of our rare, warm mother–daughter moments: “To have it for a special occasion, out there in America,” she said, “and to remember your home,” she added, wiping a tear. “I’m wearing whatever the fuck I want.” I regretted my language and high-pitched voice the second they emitted from my own puzzled mouth. “You’re right, sorry,” he said. I brushed that weird exchange off as an anomaly in our otherwise happy and smooth relationship.

  At his department chair’s party Mark was the very personification of charm just as he had been at the first dinner with my parents and on every social occasion during our Belgrade months. He talked with great pride about me as if I were a newly purchased car or a new mahogany chair: “Lara speaks four languages fluently.” “Lara is a political scientist.” “Lara was an antiwar activist in her country, very courageous!” “What language did you two speak to each other when you first met?” the chairman’s wife asked. She was wearing a pair of baggy black pants and a boxy faded-blue shirt that made her look like a human square. Now I knew why Mark didn’t want me to wear the fitted floral dress: I couldn’t be too ostentatious and sexy, but not too drab, either, the academic chic was to be understated as if you didn’t care and to hide as much of your body as possible under folds of badly fitted material. “First I tried my Serbian on poor Lara,” Mark said with self-deprecating modesty, “after which she took pity on me and we switched to her impeccable English.” “How romantic,” said the department chair’s wife. She was “a stay-at-home mom,” I was told. I had no idea what that meant, though it was true, I could have given a lecture in any of the four languages Mark was so proud of, about Plato’s theory of ideal forms or Aristotle’s political and ethical views. I asked her if other moms did not stay home and if so where did they stay when they stayed away from their homes? I was shocked to find out that a stay-at-home mom was a woman who after she had her baby did nothing but just that: stayed home with her baby and waited with a warm meal for her husband to come home. Everybody laughed and thought I was adorable. They asked me what we ate in my country. That touched some wicked chord in me for some reason as I felt again put on display next to the other Washington curiosities and artifacts from foreign countries. I said we ate mostly rat sausages and during Tito’s time cat and dog sausages used to be a great delicacy. “Too bad now there’s such a shortage of cats after the fall of Communism, and what with the war and all,” I said. Everybody laughed profusely and said I was “a riot” and Mark said I was “on a roll.” I hated my English teacher in our former Belgrade high school for having skipped American idiomatic expressions while teaching us every useless word denoting literary devices used in a poem or the different parts of a Shakespearean historical play. I knew what a synecdoche meant but had no idea what the expressions to be a riot or to be on a roll meant. I delighted in literal interpretations of American expressions and imagined myself starting a big riot right outside Mark’s chairman’s house to liven up the dead street. Then I would have been a riot all right. I imagined myself rolling down on the floor as you do in the fire drills to kill the flames that somehow lit up all over me. Then I would have been “on a roll.”

  Then the most unnerving question of all came from the wife of another colleague of Mark’s who taught journalism. The wife was in her last month of pregnancy and proud to have decided she was going to also be a stay-at-home mom: “Why do you think your
people started this terrible war in the Balkans? It must be so hard for you.” She was a sympathetic woman and cared about my Serbian sentiments. “We started the war because we want to kill our neighbors the Bosnians, take away their land, and erase them from the face of the earth. We are a greedy brutish people. Wait, didn’t your ancestors do the same with the Indians? Oh, and then there was slavery, too. Any idea why your people had slaves and decimated the Indians?” I said. There was an awkward silence around the table and I realized I had gone too far. I thought I noticed an angry expression pass on Mark’s face like a fleeting shadow. I had a sinking feeling that he would punish me for it. Maybe I had drunk too much; maybe I was still adjusting to the new schedule, climate, culture, and alcohol affected me differently and more dramatically. As we left the chairman’s house I thought I detected a mean-spirited look on the face of that chairman’s wife, the woman with the boxy shirt. A look that for a very brief second seemed to say: We’ll get you sooner or later, Serbian girl with funny jokes and sarcastic remarks. I brushed it off again. I was just adjusting to my new surroundings after I had escaped a country at war that had been a Communist country before the war. I was entitled to brief moments of paranoia.

  I had imagined streets swarming with people, but instead the streets were empty in the evening. Mark said the downtown area was where most government people worked so when the offices shut down, so did everything else and the people went home. The first day I wanted to go out on the bus, the train, the metro, to try everything in my new hometown. I wanted to go by myself and Mark said I couldn’t, I had to be careful. I had no idea what he meant. In Belgrade I went wherever I wanted and there were people in the street near the government buildings, too. Not to speak of Sarajevo that was always swarming with people, street vendors, and open markets. When I wanted to shop at the outdoor market for our weekly groceries, Mark said there was only a farmers market at the other end of town on Saturdays. I walked on the streets in the downtown area during the day to see if there would be more people and was delighted to see that there were, like a child who discovers the way home after thinking she was lost. I had to get used to the rhythm of my American city.

  After the first months of incongruous encounters, conversations, and curious evening ramblings on empty boulevards, I was determined I was going to love my new city, and I did. Life seemed to move at just the right pace, not too fast, not too slow. I loved the duplex where we lived. It was right in the heart of the nation’s capital, on Connecticut Avenue, and I was enchanted by the large boulevards, parks, and bridges with people jogging and walking their babies, or jogging while walking their babies in funny-looking three-wheeled strollers. During the day the streets in our neighborhood were lively and I tried to stay outside in the street as much as possible. I was happy we lived in a district with people in the streets and outdoor cafés. I sometimes sat on the stoop in front of our duplex just to look at the passersby and I even counted the number of people that walked by our house on some days. The next-door neighbor thought I had locked myself out of the apartment and asked me if I was okay, as if I were ill or had lost a relative. I was thrilled to start a conversation with the neighbor, as in our old Belgrade apartment all the neighbors talked to one another and sometimes knocked on each other’s doors to borrow a cup of sugar or chat about daily hardships and politics. But she said “good-bye have a nice afternoon” and shut the door to her side of the house in my face. I continued to sit on the stoop and counted thirty-three people in an hour. That was fewer than the day before and fewer yet than the day before that. The thirty-fourth person that day was Mark who was returning from his day at work. I wanted to come back from work, too, and not spend my time sitting on the stoop like a stay-at-home mom. My initial tourist’s naïveté and excitement about America were turning into palpable boredom and I realized I needed to work and to find a clear direction in my life. Sometimes I wished I had been a classic immigrant, the kind that landed by themselves in a big American airport with no money and not a soul to help them and they worked night shifts while going to school in the daytime, or the other way around and they didn’t have money for rent at the end of the month and were terrified of becoming homeless. I was slightly ashamed of the easy way in which my immigrant experience was shaping up. Poor little Serbian immigrant bride, I thought to myself with a certain amount of self-disdain.

  Being an immigrant in America both matured and infantilized me as I stood and looked aghast at formidable constructions, obelisks, giant drinks with cherries and miniature paper umbrellas on top, and as I tried to pull out of my fractured psyche and life experiences enough strength and energy to keep up with some kind of a reckless race for something that everyone around me seemed to be engaged in. I couldn’t believe President Clinton’s abode was only a few minutes away by car from where we lived. We were practically neighbors. Maybe I could see him or picket the White House with a sign saying: HELP SARAJEVO! or STOP THE WAR IN BOSNIA! I saw people with all sorts of signs moving or standing in front of the White House and some seemed to have stopped counting the years, as they looked as if they’d been left there since the Vietnam War. I wanted to tell them that particular war was over and others had come and gone and new ones were starting again. And also to suggest that maybe if they washed and changed their clothes, they might have more success with the president that way.

  In my second year in America I avoided the nagging feeling of guilt about having left my parents, my sister, and my beloved Marija by drowning myself in graduate studies. With Mark’s encouragement and financial help I started a doctoral program in political science that not only filled some of the empty spaces in my time and heart but gave me the self-importance of an immigrant molding her American Dream with a steady step and fierce determination. I was making it in America. Marija’s blessing was coming true, the one she had given me when I first called her in the shelter where she now worked as a journalist for Sarajevo’s main newspaper: that I find marital bliss and professional fulfillment. I devoured the scholarly studies listed on my endless bibliographies with as much hunger as the ethnic foods that Mark introduced me to with great meticulousness: the Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, Indian, Middle Eastern, and African. My palate made the tour of the world in my first Washington years. Whenever Marija called me, though, and I heard her deep raspy voice move in its various tonalities from excitement to serious engagement, from irony to melancholy resignation, I became jittery and ill at ease for the rest of the day. The building of the main Sarajevo newspaper had been blown to pieces at the very beginning of the war and the director, a passionate journalist and reporter, had set up the headquarters of his paper in a forsaken bomb shelter left from the Cold War era. Marija was utterly thrilled to work there as a war journalist. It sounded movie-like, so perfectly fit for Marija and her adventurous, courageous spirit. When I heard voices of fellow journalists in the shelter where Marija was calling from, I experienced tinges of jealousy. They were living under daily bombings and off humanitarian care packages, yet in the background they sounded so animated, like they were having the time of their lives. For one thing, war must not have been too boring. Sarajevo was crumbling under mortar and shells every single day, my friend was in danger of being shot dead by snipers with every step she took in the street, and I wasn’t there to help. I missed Marija’s presence to the point of desperation on some days, her voice, spirit, and humor.

  During those first two years of the war I received several letters from Marija in which she gave me more details about her life in besieged Sarajevo, the journalistic work in the bomb shelter, and news from her parents and grandparents. They had all moved in with her parents, in their three-room apartment, crowding together as well as they could, as the hills had long become uninhabitable. Farah and Kemal held on to their house for awhile longer until they were forced out by the continuous shootings and bombings. Marija described how she drove her car through intersections at 150 kilometers an hour to escape the snipers, feeling like a plane pil
ot. One time the team of journalists had a party with sausage, cheese, and whiskey inside the bomb shelter. They even had chocolate and they danced the twist and rock-and-rolled to songs by Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Elton John. With chocolate and whiskey in an atomic bomb shelter, they produced a truly glorious two-page newspaper every day, Marija said. There were packages of UN humanitarian aid that their editor distributed to them. My life in America seemed so insipid compared with Marija’s exciting life under bombs. Something heavy and hollow like a missed heartbeat echoed through my days in the nation’s capital, and in my marriage.

  My love for Mark went up and down in cycles and stages as if searching for a particular shape or a place to settle. Was it a comfortable domestic kind of love as we chose new furniture for the duplex or decided what food to take out or what to cook for the couple we were having over for dinner on a Saturday evening? Was it a sweeping love that made you hold your breath in excitement like some wild ride, as my first nights and days in Belgrade had been in the atmosphere at the beginning of the war with foreign journalists and loud disgruntled students swarming all around us? Was it a calm tender and intellectual love that would finally settle with us writing joined scholarly articles together? I picked a little from each of these options like I picked a spring roll from the Vietnamese restaurant and a samosa from the Indian one and then gorged on a burrito and was still left wanting, missing.