Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  That night Karim received a phone call from his family in Tunisia with the news that his mother had a stroke. I heard an angry female voice on the phone speaking to him in Arabic, to which he was responding in what sounded like monosyllabic words. The phone conversation seemed interminable, and when Karim lifted his eyes at me, there were tears in them. He grabbed my hand and held it till the end of the call. He had to go back earlier than planned, he said after he hung up. His mother’s life was in danger and his sister said he needed to be there as soon as possible. His wife was angry that he’d left in the first place. The room started turning as if I had been hammered on the head. Every force in the universe was against us being together. I could find no words for the news. Karim was upset and guilty for being away from his family. I was heartbroken that our already short trip had to be cut even shorter. I couldn’t gather much sympathy for Karim’s mother or for any of the women in his family calling him back with such urgency in loud Arabic words. We threw ourselves in each other’s arms, made love until dawn, and fell asleep glued to each other for a couple of hours before taking on the new day: March 21, the third day of the war in Iraq and the last day of our togetherness for who knew how long. We packed our suitcases in silence and took a taxi to the airport. We each changed our respective flights from March 25 to that day. I winced at the thought of Mark’s inevitable accusatory questions about the reason for my early return. My mind was already circling in a maddening carousel of potential lies that I would serve Mark upon my unexpectedly early arrival.

  My plane was the first one to leave. We had two hours left to spend together in the Charles de Gaulle airport. I asked Karim to tell me about his country, about his city of Tunis, the labyrinthine layout of the streets, the white stone Arab houses, the markets, the dense crowds, the ornate mosques, the ruins of Carthage, his daily schedule at the university. Tunis sounded like Sarajevo only with a big blue sea at its edges, instead of wooded mountains.

  As I stood in line to get on the plane, my face streaked with tears, my bag filled with gifts for Natalia, and my carry-on luggage clumsily falling off my shoulders, not little was my surprise to see a colleague from the journalism department of my university standing in line to board the same plane back to Washington, DC. I froze with fear thinking he had seen me kiss and embrace Karim in our tearful farewell. The colleague just smiled and said hello, I answered with fake enthusiasm, dreading the possibility of my seat being next to his. Mercifully the seat beside mine was empty, and I had the full eight hours to think up a credible story about my early return. As the plane took off, and I reviewed every precious moment of my three days in Paris with Karim, I wondered: What if I told Mark the truth?

  Washington, DC. The Truth

  SPRING 2003

  “April is the cruelest month.” T. S. Eliot’s line from The Waste Land had never felt truer. The days after my return, the air in our house was unbreathable, the space suffocating, and the walls too tight around us as we struggled to move from day to day through the mire of our work and family obligations. Mark seemed to punish me for my having been away at the conference. Some days I tried not to think of Karim and see what happened if my mind focused entirely on my family right then and there. I used all my organizational skills and the self-discipline that had helped me become a political scientist to orchestrate our lives in a semblance of contentment and peace. After my classes I went directly to Natalia’s school and picked her up instead of letting her go to the after-school day-care program, and we made it into a special afternoon at the zoo or the National Gallery. We walked through the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden trying to imitate all the postures of the statues in front of us, the contorted Rodins, the enormous group of the burghers of Calais, the emaciated Giacomettis. The feel of the April breeze on my face, or the way a sun ray fell through the blooming trees, would wake a longing in my chest. And carefully I had to hide my tears, so that Natalia wouldn’t see them. I sometimes launched into fantasies about my having been born and raised in the Tunisian medina and wearing a white dress with sparkling blue embroidery; Karim would notice me in the crowd out of thousands of people and neither of us would be married but single and available for each other and we would live in bliss in a white Arab house with an inside courtyard invaded by scarlet bougainvillea. Natalia would bring me back to the hard earth of our Washington existence with a crisp tug at my coat or a squeeze of my hand. “Look, Mama, a bird just pooped on the Rodin statue,” she shouted and then giggled as we were slowly walking through our favorite sculpture garden. Natalia looked stunning in her Madeleine green coat with the chestnut hair framing her oval face and her shameless laugh at the poop on Rodin’s statue. I touched the silver-and-turquoise necklace I now wore all the time and thought of the chain of memories and associations attached to those pieces of blue stone. Karim and Marija, both absent, each on a different tectonic plate of the cracked and damaged earth. I would never be whole again.

  On some days Mark was warm and reasonable, the man I had once loved. “He knows that something’s going on, Larinka, he’s not dumb, you know. He is probably suspecting you are cheating on him,” said Biljana on the phone. Her words made the reality of my relation with Karim sound so wrong: a bored Eastern European wife cheating on her good American husband. Three years after she had left Washington as a happy bride herself, Biljana was now a successful dance teacher in Chicago and had a rowdy, happy family with her Mexican American husband and two Mexican Serbian American daughters that she impatiently conceived one after the other. After my father’s death, my mother had moved in with my sister. Biljana was a firm believer in the American principle of “working on your marriage.” When she talked to me now she often used words like cheating, which sounded like judgment to me. I had no clear justification for my adultery, a word that to me sounded harsh but mythic. Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in Dante’s Inferno were murdered by a jealous husband for the crime of adultery, in flagrante delicto. Cheating sounded cheap and bourgeois, adultery sounded ominous and biblical.

  One Sunday afternoon in April, I was admiring the budding maples from my bedroom window on Connecticut Avenue and I thought of my portrait experience in Montmartre with Karim watching me being drawn in charcoal. My ash-blond hair felt luminous; my indefinite blue-gray eyes were filled with sparkles. A deep longing for Karim seized me so I sat down at my computer and wrote him a passionate love letter reminding him of our stolen Parisian encounter and the romantic stroll in Montmartre. Then I took the portrait I had carried with me from Paris from the hiding place inside my wardrobe and stared at it. The moment when I watched Karim watch my face being drawn in charcoal lines became so real I almost felt the chilly March Parisian breeze on my arms. Just then Mark entered my room. I tried to hide the portrait, but he saw me and asked with a smile: “What have you got there?” I put the drawing behind my back and said: “Nothing, it’s nothing really.” He pretended to play as he was trying to get me to show him what I was hiding behind my back. He embraced me grabbing my arms and laughing. I was holding my arms back trying to save the rolled-up paper from him. Being much taller than me, he stretched his arm behind my back and grabbed it. When he tried to take it from me the paper gave in and tore. I gave a scream as if he had torn into my flesh. I pushed him away and burst into tears. I stretched out what was left of the portrait and the tear went right through the middle of my face, separating it in two. I threw it on the floor and he stared at it.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lara, I don’t know what got into me,” Mark said and he did seem to be genuinely sorry. His face was sad and regretful and I almost felt a new surge of love for him. Then Natalia came in and seeing my torn portrait on the floor she picked up the two pieces and said: “Wow, Mama, this is really cool. Who did this?”

  “An artist in France,” I said and tried to regain my composure.

  “I’ll glue this back for you, Mama!” Natalia said and sat down on the floor next to me to hug me. Mark looked ashamed and left for his s
tudy with a red face. Natalia did indeed fix my torn portrait. She glued the pieces on the back until only a thin thread was noticeable, starting from the arch of my left eyebrow, going down around my nose and through the middle of my mouth. But even with all of Natalia’s meticulous work the portrait wasn’t the same. She knew it so she decided to make it more bizarre. She put colored sparkles all along the line to make it more artistically obvious. It looked funny in a beautiful sort of way. “See, Mama, it’s better now, it’s less boring.” Looking at my distorted portrait creatively repaired by Natalia my life seemed in shambles, and impossible to glue back together. Half of the world’s population copulated and produced children with partners they either didn’t love or stopped loving at some point. Why couldn’t people just wait and have children only with someone they were absolutely sure that they loved? The rift caused by the reality of loving your child more than anything in the world and not loving the child’s parent or even hating him was irreconcilable, and impossible to live with. How did people do it all over the world?

  I had pangs of worry about Natalia, who was going through a hard period. She’d begun stealing Barbie dolls and baseball cards, golf balls, Ping-Pong balls, BB gun pellets, and tiny toy NASCAR race cars from CVS stores as a way of asking for attention. When the CVS manager would approach me, Natalia would produce the stolen things right away and hand them to the manager as if she were the one doing the manager a favor. “Thank you, honey,” the manager would say. “Don’t do that again, okay?” or “This is not nice for a pretty little girl to do.” I just stood and stared at the manager while my face turned bright crimson. I felt sorry for Natalia and instead of scolding her I always held her tight and stroked her hair. The managers all looked at me disapprovingly, as if to say I was a terrible mother. I dreaded that by the time I got home to Connecticut Avenue our house would be surrounded by police cars and a truck full of pink-haired Barbie dolls and Sammy Sosa baseball cards would be pulling out of our driveway: our daughter’s CVS spoils for the week.

  I climbed in bed and Natalia climbed next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a while in silence. Then she asked abruptly: “Mama, is it true that you and Papa are going to split up?” I sat up, startled. I was always truthful to Natalia about everything, but never about how I felt about her father. Well, almost everything, since I never did nor was I ever going to share with her the reality of my double life and of my transnational love affair. She needed my purity even if it was contrived. Or so I thought.

  “Who told you this, Talia?”

  “Grandma Susie; she said you don’t love Papa anymore and that’s why you are away at conferences all the time.”

  “Did you believe her?” I asked, furious at the sneaky mother-in-law of mine, who seemed to perfectly fit the stereotype of a bad mother-in-law. “First, Talia, how many times did I go to a conference this year, hm?” I knew that for a nine-year-old, Natalia had an unshakable respect for logic and pragmatic facts once they were pointed out to her.

  “Once, one time, you went last month,” she answered, knowing exactly what I was doing.

  “Well, see, Grandma Susie was exaggerating, wasn’t she, because once since the beginning of the year when we are already in April is not all the time, is it?” She was quiet.

  “No, it isn’t, but it is,” she finally said.

  “What do you mean, Talia?” I asked puzzled.

  “Because you and Papa are fighting all the time, and you don’t do nice things for each other anymore, and we don’t go on any trips or walks just the three of us anymore.”

  You couldn’t fool Natalia about anything. I needed to brace myself and tell Mark the truth, like I had told myself I would in those seconds as the plane took off from Charles de Gaulle airport. The truth, the truth, the truth, I kept thinking, trying to give a concrete shape to that term so vague, so slippery. The truth was a deep pond, with an unfathomable bottom. I couldn’t see the truth in the shape of something I could tell Mark, looking him in the eyes and saying to him: I am deeply in love with another man. I want us to get a divorce. We’ve never really been a good match. I thought I was in love with you when I met you in Belgrade as an idealistic journalist and human rights activist. But really, I don’t understand you… You are not the person I thought you were when I met you then. Can we be reasonable about Natalia and custody and visitation? Could I really say those words?

  The beginnings of our threesome after Natalia’s birth were almost happy. Mark would look at me admiringly and almost in awe as I nursed the squiggly translucent baby that was Natalia. So much of what went on in our marriage was in the indefinite area of “almost.” Mark acquired a poetic melancholic humor that motivated him to launch into tirades about the miracle of motherhood. He held the baby for a little while and walked around our apartment humming an old English tune and closing his eyes while he did that. I wanted to scream Watch out, open your eyes when you walk with the baby. I was a controlled, rational person who knew where everything was, always prepared for my classes; I was never late for anything and meticulously wrote down my dreams the night after I had them. Yet I was destabilized by irrational impulses and thoughts once Natalia landed in my arms and grabbed my breast with her tiny lips.

  That evening lying with Natalia on my bed and holding the rolled-up paper with the torn portrait of myself in Paris under Karim’s affectionate eyes, I felt eviscerated. I asked Natalia to go out for a walk with me. She wanted Mark to come, too, and I agreed. Maybe we could rebuild, restart, and make that thing called marriage more tolerable. Maybe Karim would dissolve in oblivion and I would stop that emotional outflow once and for all. Mark was enthusiastic about the walk and even asked Natalia if she wanted to go to a movie, it was Saturday after all, and then he turned toward me and winked. For Mark to wink at me, something special must have occurred in his professional life, such as a prestigious journal accepting an article of his, or a conference inviting him to give a keynote address. It was when his work went really well that part of his happiness also spilled into our family life.

  The April evening was fresh and fragrant. We went out on our beloved Connecticut Avenue like a happy family. I loved our street so much that I sometimes thought I had sedated myself and feigned contentment in my marriage just so that I could always go out on a spring night like that one or on a clear fall morning, or on a sweltering summer night and walk to the corner of M Street and Dupont Circle, or eat at a Mexican restaurant at the corner, then sit at one of the cafés on the sidewalk sipping a latte for an hour while correcting a pile of exams for Politics 101. We decided to see Frida at the cinema near our house. I never cared much for surrealist art and Frida’s images of miscarried fetuses, or her self-portraits with eviscerated hearts didn’t particularly touch a chord with me. I didn’t understand why Frida put up with so much crap from that lecherous Diego Rivera, with all his demented infidelities, and then when she herself had an affair the best she could find was Trotsky, a Stalinist fugitive.

  After the film and before we went home, we stopped to have an ice cream. We walked back licking our ice creams, and Natalia dropped hers in the street. “It’s nothing, no big deal, I’ll get another one,” I said, licking my own lemon sorbet. “You have no parenting principles, Lara,” Mark said, throwing his own half-eaten Oreo cookie ice cream in the trash can. “That’s right, I don’t want to develop any clear principles about ice cream consumption in our family,” I said, throwing my own sorbet into the trash can. The way Mark would give such importance to a trivial issue that to me didn’t deserve a minute’s attention irritated me now more than ever. I always thought there must have been other rationales behind Mark’s overblown arguments over tiny domestic issues, something deep and mysterious, like a childhood trauma or a burning concern for world peace. The little idiosyncrasies of our daily life, I thought, must offer a pretext for a greater drama. I cursed the Oreo ice cream in my mind, as well as Mark’s impenetrable self-righteousness. Yet when I looked up at him I
was still stunned by his beautiful and manly profile, as much as I had been in our daily ramblings through Belgrade that summer ten years before, and even in my first years in America. Only now his high forehead, beautifully carved cheekbones, and dreamy blue eyes all seemed shadowed by a cloud of worry—or maybe it was sadness? I felt sudden pity for him, for his trusting me during the two years of my reckless multicultural love affair, and now in his delicate gloom Mark appeared to me more real than ever before. Right then on our way back from the Frida movie and the failed ice cream experience, I decided I was not going to tell him of my love affair and that I would slowly let my relationship with Karim fade out of existence. He seemed to want to make peace, too. “Lara, what do you say we take a weekend vacation, just the two of us, to New York or maybe to the beach somewhere? We can leave Natalia with my mother, she’s always happy to babysit, you know. We haven’t been together just the two of us on a trip since before she was born, do you realize that?” His proposal sliced painfully right through my heart. He was the Mark I had fallen in love with, plus an added warmth, something quivering and raw without the movie-like image. It was as though he had just then decided to crack the icy wall that always seemed to be protecting his heart. Maybe the knowledge of Marija’s tragedy, maybe an intuition that I was unhappy and unfaithful, maybe a renewed sense of mortality and growing old. Why had he waited so long? I wondered with tears in my eyes. “What a great idea, Mark. Let’s go to New York, I’ve never been… all right,” I heard myself say. My voice seemed foreign and wobbly, insecure and untruthful. I didn’t recognize it. It was the voice of a deceitful and confused woman.