Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  On some days Mark seemed both too deep and not deep enough. We still talked about all the intellectual and political problems that we used to during our long hot summer in Belgrade. I now missed the premarital honeymoon days with Mark when I was showing him secret walks on the Veliko Ratno Ostrvo magic island where the Danube and Sava poured into each other, took him to five-hundred-year-old Orthodox churches with Cyrillic writing and golden icons of puzzled faces of medieval saints, or showed him the old ornate school building where Marija and I spent much of our preteen and teenage years. Now the roles had changed: He was the guide and I was the tourist, even though I was not supposed to be a tourist but a full-fledged immigrant, soon to become a naturalized US citizen. While in Belgrade, Mark had particularly impressed me and lured me into his world with his relaxed and debonair attitudes, the way he always listened to me and seemed interested in every word I enunciated, a rather rare occurrence with the Serbian men I knew who would tell you that your eyes sparkled like stars while you were heatedly talking about national identity and ethnic hatred. Most of the Serbian men I knew didn’t listen to a word you said if you were a woman and happened to have a pair of eyes, relatively decent-looking hair, and two normal legs and arms. Milko might have been an exception, and maybe some of the Goth men that Marija and I hung out with in our proverbial taverns. But Mark seemed genuinely interested in all of me. And he was. Only now, on his own native earth, his debonair and relaxed attitudes, his humanitarian perorations and intellectual musings, could seem pretentious and overbearing. He still listened to my thoughts and opinions, but now it seemed he could hardly wait for me to finish a sentence so he could develop a complicated argument to show me how I was wrong. Unlike Marija, who would fight to the death over a political argument, I would always give in. I just didn’t feel the same energy and passion for the intellectual or political arguments that Mark did. Sometimes, particularly if the argument took place while we were walking in the street, or while he was driving, I pretended to be absorbed in the passing landscape, the faces of the people we walked past, the architecture of the gigantic government buildings, or the layered tastes of the Guatemalan cornmeal or Vietnamese soup we might have been eating in one of the myriad ethnic restaurants Mark took me to.

  One day I told him I wanted us to start cooking at home and not go out to eat all the time. Even when we ate at home, Mark brought in take-out Indian, Chinese, or Mexican from one of the restaurants in our neighborhood. We sat across from one another at his large mahogany dining room table eating out of cardboard boxes like we were in an airport or railway station. I thought it was the American way: easy, fast, disposable, prepared by someone else, usually an illegal immigrant working in the kitchen. I found myself missing the dinners with my parents. As heavy and greasy as some of my mother’s cooking was, at least it was served on beautiful china with rose or sunflower motifs on the edge of the plates. I had no idea why such details would spurt into my head, except that I must have been experiencing some form of immigrant homesickness. It will pass, just wait to get more settled and adjusted, I told myself. Mark was ecstatic at my proposal that we cook more at home. He hadn’t dared to mention it himself, not wanting me to feel obligated to cook for us. I thought that was another one of Mark’s endearing traits of thoughtfulness. I had no idea what to cook, and true enough, I would be the one preparing the meals. In our house my mother most always did the cooking while my father did the grocery shopping and dishwashing. And I had no ideas of recipes or meals that I could have prepared.

  I called my mother for a goulash recipe, thinking that I’d tone down the fat and salt and add some fresh vegetables and American spices, and it couldn’t be too bad. My mother couldn’t believe her ears that I was calling her for a recipe. She asked me how I was doing, and told me again how lucky I was, and updated me on the ever-growing violence of the war. Mark shopped for every ingredient on the grocery list with rigor and enthusiasm, proudly unloading each item like it was an artifact for a museum. We prepared the meal side by side, and for the first time I had a sense of home, and did not feel like a tourist on a limited visa. Mark played a Beatles record and once or twice even twirled me across our blue Italian kitchen tile floors, in between browning the beef and caramelizing the onions. It was a hot humid summer evening in Washington and a fragrance of honeysuckle entered our kitchen merging with the smell of cooking beef and onions. It reminded me of the smell of beef stew on the evening when Mark and I visited my parents for the first time. The Beatles music made me more nostalgic than the stew, reminding me of the high school parties at Marija’s house for her birthday. Mark’s presence made me feel safe and cozy, yet the mixture of smells and music overlapping onto my memories from a country and family at the other end of the world also gave me a feeling of vertigo. I was hanging above a transcontinental precipice and I could have been anybody, or no one at all. I could have been an opportunistic hairdresser, a greedy Serbian American housewife, a double agent working for the Bosnian Federation and the UN. Mark was the only one to hold on to, to remind me I was Lara Kulicz, a political science graduate from Belgrade University, born and raised in a modest Serbian apartment by intellectual parents in love with Hollywood movies. He alone was the witness to my heritage. He was handsome and kind, a great dancer. He could recite entire sets of Shakespeare sonnets by heart. He even liked to prepare Serbian goulash with me on a humid August evening when all our neighbors were eating Ethiopian or Thai takeout from cardboard boxes. It was a new kind of happiness, but it was one that obliterated entire portions of myself. This must be the immigrant experience. There were no roots, just lots of leafy branches reaching out toward the starless Washington evening, the great American night with twenty-four-hour supermarkets, millionaires, homeless people, truck drivers, movie stars, neoclassical granite buildings, high-rises, malls, and everything else in between. It felt hopeless and exhilarating at once. As we sat across from each other at the long mahogany table like an aristocratic British couple from a BBC series proudly eating our American version of Serbian goulash, I looked at Mark and tried to figure out who he was at his core. I was desperate to find the rawest and crudest part of him, a burning quivering point of truth and vulnerability behind the witty conversations, perfect dance moves, Shakespeare sonnets, steady thoughtfulness, and occasional distance he took whenever he prepared for his classes or wrote a scholarly article. I thought I’d get to that by opening up first. “Remember our first evening at my parents’ apartment in Belgrade, when you made your marriage proposal?” I asked Mark, smiling and looking at the diamond and pearl engagement ring on my finger. “How could I forget, it was a lovely evening,” he said. In my mind that translated to, Why waste our time reminiscing about the past? Wouldn’t you rather talk about the metaphysical poets or Clinton’s foreign policies? I tried again, thinking the more I was going to unfold my nostalgic soul, the more he would unravel his. “I wonder how my parents are faring with this war, I miss them sometimes. The news from Sarajevo is getting worse every day. I miss Marija, too, I worry about her. Do you think the war will end soon?” “I have no idea, my dear,” he said with the accent on no in the typical emphatic way Americans uttered that phrase, with a quick raise of the eyebrows and shake of the head. “I’m sure your parents must be okay, they are not in a war zone yet,” he said, calmly taking a large spoonful of the successful goulash. For a millisecond I saw myself throwing my bowl of goulash right at Mark’s head, and fantasized about it dripping with stew, caramelized onions, and local organic beef sticking to his ears. Instead I politely soaked a piece of the whole-grain bread in the stew and ate it quietly. The record had stopped playing and only Mark’s methodical chewing could be heard in the room, which ground more on my nerves. I wanted so badly to love my American savior and know who he was. But he suddenly seemed like a well-mannered stranger. Why the hell are we eating so far away from each other, at the bloody mahogany table, I thought. Whose table is it anyway, maybe he has other wives that bequeathed him expensive
mahogany furniture, what do I know of his past? Nothing. What do I know of his soul? Nothing. Why did he come to Serbia? We should be eating at a round table next to each other, I went on in my head. We should be touching knees and kissing between bites.

  “Mark, where is this table from?” I heard myself ask. He looked up at me with his eyebrows raised in surprise, then smiled and said: “It was a gift from my mother. When my father passed, she divided some of her most precious furniture between my sister and me. She said she had no use for so much stuff around her.” He seemed genuine, and I was desperately searching for genuine. I felt like a policeman investigating a crime, Inspector Columbo looking for the littlest details, a scratch on a mahogany table, maybe a drop of Serbian goulash on the Italian tile. The wine had made me tipsy, Argentinian wine that Mark had spoken very highly of as if describing an important philosophical principle.

  That night I cried quietly in my pillow. Mark kissed me good night and he said I would feel better in the morning. I probably drank too much, he said. The future was gaping in the dark like an open crater. I cuddled close to Mark, and his calm breathing and warm body were soothing. Despite everything I was glad he was there sleeping next to me. What would I have done all alone in a bed in a foreign city, in a foreign country, not a soul who cared or knew who I was? Somebody called for Bobby in the street outside our window and laughed heartily. For some reason that felt reassuring. The honeysuckle smell felt reassuring, too, reminding me of another night back home.

  Over the course of the next couple of years I threw myself into my graduate studies, spinning the threads of Continental, Eastern, and American political philosophies from Aristotle to Locke to Machiavelli, from Confucianism to The Federalist Papers, from Marxist feminism to everything else in between, to the point that any clear idea of goodness, democracy, justice, government, and leadership turned round and round in a murky whirlpool. On many of the days I came back from my classes excited about a new idea or book. I had brilliant discussions with Mark. He became particularly excited about notions of goodness and democracy and in turn shared his love of American poetry and the Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. He quoted from them by heart, dancing and sliding on our shiny hardwood floors, picking up a leather-bound edition of a metaphysical poet from his long and perfectly organized rows of books in the study and then coming to swirl me around in a spontaneous dance, kissing me on the mouth with breathless agitation. I found myself giggling like a teenager in love with her literature professor.

  Still, those moments became rare and what began to set in was more like cohabitation with a stranger than the continuation of the sweeping love affair that had started at the beginning of the war. I still didn’t know what had made him come to Belgrade in 1992 and why he continued to be involved in the war, to the point that he had even decided to bring Hassan Rakic, the director of the newspaper where Marija worked as a wartime journalist, to Harvard on a prestigious fellowship. “I promised Marija I would stop the war, remember, Lara?” he said with a cunning smile one evening over a dinner of take-out Indian food. He’d truly meant that, hadn’t he? I remembered that one night in Belgrade when we were slightly drunk and I called Marija from his apartment, he had taken the phone from my hand and asked Marija in his most charming tone what he could do for her. Anything that she wished, he would do it. I picked up the receiver in the other room and listened in. “Stop this war for me, will you?” Marija said simply and crisply. Mark said: “No, seriously, what would you like me to do, Marija? I would do anything for Lara’s best friend.” Marija answered breathlessly: “I couldn’t be more serious. Stop the fucking war and you’ll be my hero forever.” Mark answered confidently: “All right, I’ll do that for you, Marija, anything really. As soon as I get to America I’ll get on to trying to stop the war.” I remembered thinking then for just a quick moment: What a fool, what a self-important fool. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life with him? But I never answered that question and the next day we were making wedding preparations. I chose to believe he was truly an idealistic pacifist and fighter for human rights. “Bringing Hassan to America, a Bosnian hero and a first-class journalist who risked his life to produce a newspaper even at the height of the armed conflict, is the perfect way to bring this war to the attention of American politicians, even President Clinton, can’t you see that, my dear?” When he saw I was looking at him in utter puzzlement, Mark corrected himself without batting an eyelash: “All right, not stop the war, help stop the armed conflict, contribute to the peace process, something of that nature. It’s something, all right, better than nothing.” The more he tried the less I believed him.

  “Why didn’t you talk to me first, Mark?” I finally asked. “You know of Hassan from me and I know of him from Marija and she is my best friend in the world. How is your getting a Harvard fellowship for Hassan helping the peace efforts? Why aren’t both of them coming over? That would have made more sense both politically and personally, for me,” I told him. Mark looked as puzzled as I had ever seen him. “And it’s not a goddamn armed conflict but a war of aggression and ethnic cleansing. Besides, Marija is the one running the newspaper now in Hassan’s absence, and she is the one out there in the street every day sneaking her way through sniper bullets to get news and stories for the newspaper. She is at least as much of a hero,” I flared up at Mark. “In fact she is the real hero.”

  He looked straight at me with his deep-blue eyes the way he had the night when I was imparting antiwar lectures and vodka. He dismissed my anger as one would an annoying mosquito buzzing around one’s head or the antics of an unruly child. “I did what I had to do,” he said with his usual calm. The glacial expanses of self-composure and calculated behavior that Mark served me in our hardest confrontations left me confused and lonely. Who is this man posing as my husband? I thought in quick flashes that left me spent and panting.

  Mark wanted to make love in the different places in the house and at odd hours, at times when I was either writing a paper or getting ready to go for a run, in the laundry room or on a chair in his study, and I always went along, whether I felt like it or not. Then there were also the times when I genuinely desired Mark and found him charming and irresistible and felt lucky to be his wife in his apartment on Connecticut Avenue, amid his dark-colored velvet and mahogany furniture like an exotic princess in a Westerner’s palace. But those times became scarce as time went by and the only safe place from my marital conundrums was the crystal realm of abstract ideas and theories. And the short stolen telephone conversations with Marija when she sometimes called me from the bomb shelter where she did her journalistic work. The background noise of journalists, always talking, arguing, laughing, gave me a rush of pleasure mixed with jealousy. I held on to each conversation for as long as I could, and asked Marija to tell me more. She gave me abbreviated news about mortars and shells and market bombings or a rock concert held in a basement as if it was no big deal and just as ordinary as a walk in the park in times of peace. Sometimes she sounded extremely upbeat and almost happy, pouring on awful and wonderful information all together, in indiscriminate order, snipers killing children as they crossed the street holding their mothers’ hands, getting a pound of fresh coffee and five eggs on the black market, a poetry club in times of war, her grandparents having to leave their house on the hill because that area was being taken over by Serbian snipers altogether. I wanted to hold on to one image alone and process it and talk more about it but Marija went on at a dizzying velocity and then she would stop and say: “But tell me about you, how’s life with Mark? How’s life in graduate school? Are you learning anything?” I would hear her light up a cigarette and drag from it at the other end and I felt a fierce desire to smoke with her and be in her presence, my heart beating, my mind racing, all of my senses alive as I always was in her proximity. There was nothing for me to say about Mark. “It’s great, my courses are fabulous, and life with Mark is exciting.” I mumbled banalities that sounded so important in English,
but so hollow in Serbian.

  One day after a similar exchange she said: “And Hassan, how is he doing in America, is he at least drawing the attention of that president of yours?” Then came a silence, filled only with the sound of Marija puffing her cigarette. I felt ashamed, yet I didn’t want to trash Mark’s name to her. But I wasn’t going to insult her and our friendship with some worn-out cliché. “I know, it sort of sucks,” I said. “You should have come instead.”

  “Well, at least I got his job, you know there is a big shortage of jobs out here what with the war and all,” she said, slicing our conversation with her unforgiving irony. Then she corrected herself: “Never mind, I wouldn’t have come anyway. How could I have possibly left my parents alone in the middle of this raging war?” Then she said: “I am wearing your turquoise necklace, Lara, you were right, it looks good on me, green and blue go well together.” She laughed, and I felt like walking out the door of Mark’s and my mahogany furniture-filled home on Connecticut Avenue, joining Marija under the rain of bombs and sniper bullets the next morning. Instead, during the second summer of the war, I became pregnant.