Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  I was only grateful that Natalia was happily sauntering ahead of us. And then the spring evening breeze lifted my dress gently and a fragrance of fresh leaves and spring swept over me. Paris came alive. It all came back again: the longing for Karim, his melancholy smile, and his delicate sexy gestures that transported me away from everything banal, conventional, and American. I imagined Karim walking next to me instead of Mark and next to Natalia, talking and giggling, his twelve-year-old daughter Arina. Mark’s and Karim’s names were almost palindromes, almost. Mark was not Karim just as Victor Laszlo was no Rick. At least if Mark had been an alcoholic, or an abuser, it would have been easy to divorce him, and I wouldn’t have been torn apart by guilt for being a reckless adulteress. But he was perfect, what reasons did I have? He hardly ever raised his voice. Even when he reprimanded me like just then about the Oreo ice cream, or when he cursed, he still used a leveled tone, he had a respectable tenured professor’s job and earned a good salary, he was a faithful husband, he was concerned about human rights violations, he loved all my cooking and was a caring father.

  He must have had his reasons to bring Hassan over instead of Marija, and indeed he had tried to help stop the war with his actions of consciousness raising about what went on in the Balkans. Maybe I was just as much to blame for not pushing harder and not being more active in trying to bring her to America. My mother loved Mark like her own son. Sometimes she would call me from my sister’s apartment in Chicago, just to tell me for the millionth time how lucky I was to have a husband like Mark. If only she knew… I was worse than Frida, who had a pathological cheater for a husband. What were my reasons? The answer was Paris. I could never have Paris with Mark. He made love as correctly and levelheadedly as he talked. The sultriness and charm of our Belgrade nights and mornings had long ago faded away in our Washington duplex. Was I okay, he always asked during the sexual act, like I was having a root canal done. Until Karim I had thought that was the best one could have in love. But with Karim I was unhinged and explosive, whimsical and impatient, everything that I had never been before. The metamorphosis I’d been going through was both terrifying and irresistible. Swimming in guilty fantasies, a clear thought lit up in my mind. Mark was romantic without being passionate, while I was passionate without particularly caring about what people, especially American people, referred to as romantic. As for Karim, none of the American romantic categories applied to him—passion, melancholy, tenderness, sex appeal all radiated from him organically in an overall smoldering presence. Mark and Karim canceled each other out, I concluded, and I was caught in the middle unable to make a choice.

  Back in our apartment, I went to the kitchen to make myself some tea, and Natalia went to her room to build a puzzle I had brought her from Paris. I sat at the kitchen counter with my elbows on the blue Italian tile and experienced an actual moment of contentment looking out the window at the maple tree swaying in the evening breeze and listening to the street noises, sipping from my jasmine tea.

  Just then Mark came in with an unusually abrupt step and asked: “Who is Karim Rashid?” Because he said his first and last names in one breath, for a second it sounded like an unknown name and I thought Mark was asking me about someone else. Then I realized I must have left my laptop open in my study with Karim’s email on it. I could see a grin of satisfaction on Mark’s face, but combined with a grimace of pain around his mouth, his usually smooth face with his piercing blue eyes now looked distorted. At that pivotal moment, I felt no fear or remorse, or anxiety, or sadness. He asked again: “Who is Karim Rashid?” I looked at him in silence for one long second, and then I said in an even, unshaken voice: “He’s my lover!”

  On May 1, our divorce litigation started, with Mark as the plaintiff and me as the defendant. I had nothing to defend. I took care of Natalia, I taught my courses, I started preparing my tenure file. Mark had filed on grounds of adultery the Monday after he found Karim’s amorous email to me on my open laptop. He asked for full physical and legal custody of Natalia, with “all reasonable visitation rights” for me. “It’s illegal to use adultery in the custody litigation because it’s strictly tied into the divorce and not the parenting component,” my lawyer kept saying. “There is evidence that the mother has an immoral influence on the child,” the prosecuting lawyer kept saying. “Mr. Lundberg is concerned about his daughter’s moral upbringing,” Mark’s attorney kept saying.

  Natalia wasn’t taking it well. In school, her homeroom teacher complained that she used “four-letter words” a few times when she got angry at a boy called Tanyu, and that she read from The Catcher in the Rye in class instead of doing her work. Maybe she was bored, I told the teacher. Maybe Tanyu was a bully, and maybe the class wasn’t exciting enough. The teacher pursed her lips, and then said that maybe I wasn’t giving my daughter “the proper values and manners.” What were “the proper values”? I wondered. Natalia exceeded everybody in her class in reading and math, she had lots of friends, she stood up for other kids whenever she thought they had been treated unfairly, and never told on anyone who had been mean to her.

  I started calling Karim on my cell phone from my car, sometimes sitting in the parking lot of my university, at other times just pulling over and parking on a side street on my way home. I didn’t feel safe talking now, fearing both my husband and the Patriot Act. Karim had started his divorce proceedings, too. For him, custody wasn’t a problem, but money. “Elle veut tout mon argent.” She wants all my money, he would say referring to his wife, then he would laugh, and then change the subject and say “Enfin, qu’est-ce que tu veux…” Well, what do you want… There was no poetry or romance in any of that. The double adultery pattern was inscribed somewhere in Dante’s Inferno, right there with walking on burning sands or having your head switched backward so that it faced your ass. I wished I could laugh about that image now as I used to with Marija when we were reading from her luscious leather-bound edition. But only a bitter grin moved over my anxious face.

  Washington, DC. The Truth and Everything but the Truth

  SUMMER 2003

  I found out from Mark that Hassan was now overseeing the newspapers all over northern Virginia. “What news of interest could there be in northern Virginia?” I asked Mark. I held on to my Serbian sarcasm, I was on a roll as he had once said at the beginning of my life in America at the chairman’s party: “Rich senator living in Alexandria slips on ice, litigation lawyer from Herndon runs into a pole at a stoplight, news like that, Mark? This is the news that Hassan was brought over from war-ridden Bosnia to report on?” Mark was walking next to me on the National Mall with the debonair air that had so charmed me at the beginning of the Bosnian war. It had been his idea to walk and talk about the next steps of our litigation instead of arguing at home where Natalia could hear us. He kept his calm; only his jaws moved imperceptibly as a sign he was reining in his anger. I had no desire to talk about the litigation, it seemed like the most boring subject in the world to me. Only Natalia’s custody worried me. I listened to him talk in legalistic terms about our child and our future in a language that was as foreign to me as Karim’s Arabic, which nevertheless sounded sultry and sexy during our illicit encounters. “Mark, please tell me if you have heard anything about Marija from Hassan,” I begged him. An African American vendor behind one of the food carts on the side of the Mall winked at us as if we were young lovers and offered us discounted pretzels. I stared back at him as he reminded me of Karim. “Hassan must know something for sure; he is from the same city, after all, and the same Bosnian community. He knows everyone,” I went on feeling more and more distracted by the foods, sights, smells bombarding my psyche. An Indian vendor offered us tandoori chicken, then a Mexican one lemonade and churros. The smells and sight of foods fogged up my thinking and made everything seem trivial and frivolous. In my Serbian family we didn’t mix eating junk food with tragic stories. In America, everything was covered up in greasy foods, ethnic foods, fast foods, junk foods, advertisements for panty hos
e and detergent and then life was made to look easy, clean and sweet, a piece of cake, the saying went. I was a foreigner amid foreigners.

  “Go and speak to Hassan yourself,” he said, walking ahead of me on the endless grass strip. Why hadn’t I thought of that myself?

  When I went to Hassan’s office the following afternoon, for some reason I put on a nice dress as if going on a date. In the old Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bosnia, people dressed up for even a casual meeting. Even in times of war they dressed up. As if to defy the ugliness of the siege and bombardments, they crossed the streets under the rain of sniper bullets in their Sunday best, women wearing lipstick and nail polish they had gotten on the black market or through daily acts of barter. My heart was beating like mad when I knocked on Hassan’s door, expecting a harsh self-confident man who had stepped over Marija’s chances of coming to America without a second’s hesitation. Instead, Hassan reminded me of Kemal, Marija’s grandfather: He was on the short side, with a white beard, a red round face, and a heavy limp. He hugged me like he had known me for a lifetime and asked me to sit down, and I felt sorry that I had never met him until now. He spoke softly and looked straight into my eyes. He lit a pipe that smelled just like Kemal’s pipes, and wiped his forehead with a chiffon handkerchief. All those old country habits and objects, men with white handkerchiefs with embroidered initials in the pockets of their coats. I missed that.

  I didn’t ask him about Sarajevo, Belgrade, or Alexandria. All I wanted to know about was Marija. Did he know anything about her, was she alive, where was she? I grew more agitated as he took his time to answer. First I learned that Hassan initially didn’t want to come to the States, and even suggested that Marija go in his stead; he had other occasions to leave, he could have been aided by UN organizations that knew of his work, and he had a family, wife and children, whereas Marija had no husband or children and it would have been easier for her to emigrate to America with Mark’s help. In 1993, in 1994, and in early 1995 she could have come, before the sunny July of genocidal murders and rapes. “What wasted opportunities!” I said and realized that Hassan was becoming uncomfortable. I spoke not in Serbian but in angry simplistic English. “Where the hell is she, Hassan? Where is she?” He couldn’t tell me where Marija was, he didn’t know, it was something of a mystery, he said.

  “How bad was it, Hassan, did Marija suffer a lot? Can she ever recover? Will I ever see her again? How bad was it really?” “Unimaginable,” he said. “And yet for those who went through it and survived, nothing is unimaginable any longer.” I saw that his eyes were heavy with tears. Hassan’s laugh was warm and enveloping and again it reminded me of Kemal and everything that had once been warm and joyous in my life: Marija’s brilliance and love, Sarajevo in times of peace, the smell of cinnamon and the taste of Farah’s apricot jams. We spoke Serbian again and the many consonants of my native language soothed my burning mouth, my parched throat, my devastated soul. I needed a break from English, from America, from idiomatic expressions and mannerisms.

  Hassan had gone back to Bosnia several times during the war and saw Marija. Apparently he was in awe of the tremendous job she was doing running the newspaper in the darkest times, without a single day’s break. “She did a better job than I ever did,” Hassan said. “She had humor and poetic flair and she was afraid of nothing. She was a stunning woman.” I noted he said “she was” as if she were dead. My dearest Marija, of course she awed him, of course she did a better job than anyone else. She wrote like she spoke and she spoke like she lived: with unforgiving energy and intelligence, with dizzying flair and reckless humor. As I had always thought, she could have been the president of the country, if only our people hadn’t been so stupid to elect a vicious president, the new Hitler and Stalin together, only more pathetic. Who in the world actually cared about little Bosnia and tiny Albania with no oil fields for any Western countries to dig in? The politics became even more confused in my mind as I was sitting in Hassan’s office reeling from what I had found out about Marija.

  Just as I was about to leave and Hassan got up from his chair to walk toward me and give me a good-bye hug, I couldn’t contain myself and asked him looking at his limping leg: “What happened?” He was quick to answer as if waiting for the question: His leg had been torn by a blast while driving his car from the newspaper office in one of the 140-kilometer-an-hour races to elude the Serbian snipers. He got to the hospital too late, and had to wait for hours with pieces of flesh hanging from the bones of his calves and his femur crushed until a doctor was available. He was lucky his leg wasn’t completely amputated, just the steel rod, half an amputation, he said and laughed. A man in the bed next to him had shared his vodka bottle with him, and that had helped. Now a metal rod was replacing his femur bone. “It’s all right,” he concluded, laughing as if he had just told a funny story. “I survived, that’s what matters.”

  I left Hassan’s office staggering and drove aimlessly around northern Virginia until I remembered I had a home to go to. I had a family that waited for me, disjointed as it might have been. The thought of Natalia, so fragile, so torn between Mark and me, made me weep in the car as I drove through atrociously ugly new developments and malls and waited at the red light in a state of utter alienation. It all looked like the new inferno, a place with no shape and no soul. The light changed to green and I rushed home to hold my dear Natalia.

  After the meeting with Hassan I strangely felt less angry at Mark. Maybe because now I knew more of the truth about Marija, and hard as that truth was, it was better than the fogginess of ignorance. Maybe also because Hassan reminded me so much of Kemal, warm, thoughtful, and straightforward. I kept trying to find my own big truth pulsing underneath the messiness of my life. Some nights, falling asleep with Natalia next to me, I yearned for the quiet times before Karim. “Haven’t we been a happy family?” I was asking myself in the private litigation with my soul. “Yes, we sort of have, for periods of time at least,” said my soul. “Have you really given Mark a chance, all the chances he deserved?” My soul answered: “No, not really, I haven’t given Mark and our marriage all the chances they deserved.” Some mornings, when I woke up and took full consciousness of the new day of misery that lay ahead of me, I was determined to meet Mark in our beautifully tiled kitchen as he was drinking his coffee, take his hand, and tell him: Let’s forget that this ever happened, let’s start a new day and stop the madness that is tearing us and Natalia apart! But each morning brought only a new legal notice from Mark, a severe statement about our next court date, or about Natalia’s schedule over the weekend, which now was divided equally between the two of us.

  Natalia always seemed to find the split second when Mark and I crossed paths in the kitchen to make her morning appearance and acted as if we were the same family as before. “Can we all go to a movie tonight?” she would ask. “Pirates of the Caribbean is playing.” Mark and I pretended we hadn’t heard her and went on doing whatever we were in the process of doing. But then she got angry. “Hey, guys, are you deaf or something? I asked a question.” Then Mark would lecture her about the “inappropriate” tone of her voice or I would tell her she needed to finish her homework. Sometimes she ignored our answers and would return to the kitchen ten minutes later dressed in an old Halloween costume as a ladybug, or as a biker rock star, which was her most recent costume and involved a pink wig. When I told her she needed to get dressed for school, she said that she was dressed for school. One day when I did take her to school dressed as a biker rock star, her homeroom teacher looked at me angrily and with disgust when she greeted us at the school entrance. I watched Natalia as she walked into the school with her huge backpack, her back slightly bent, her pink biker’s wig perched on her head. I regretted everything.

  That day I arrived at my office with my eyes red from crying. On the way up the stairs to my office, my cell phone rang and I answered without looking at the number calling. It was Karim with his sweetest and most loving voice telling me he missed me like crazy, h
is divorce was coming along, he had reached an agreement with his wife, and he was coming to see me this summer because he couldn’t stand being away from me any longer. Stupefied and confused by the unexpected news I asked where he planned to come see me. He said Washington of course, wasn’t I happy? Then he said “Lara, mon amour,” and my knees became weak. A student of mine was waiting at the top of the stairs to talk to me about his paper on Plato’s Republic. How did people carry on with their lives under bombs? I wondered again, reaching the top of the stairs, while at the same time smiling at the student and speaking to him in French by mistake. Karim asked me if I was okay, wasn’t I glad? The student was staring at me in puzzlement as to why I addressed him in French. I reached the door to my office and tried to unlock it while dropping my purse on the floor with everything falling out of it, including a couple of menstrual tampons. The entire material world was against me. I told Karim in my sweetest voice that I was ecstatic about his visit, could I call him a bit later, after my class. He said “Je t’aime,” and I said “Moi aussi” while smiling at the student with the Plato paper. I dropped everything I had in my hands on my desk and sat down facing my father’s eyes in the photograph on my desk, smiling his ravishing smile in the picture I had taken of him in the spring of 1989, the year that Communism fell. When the student left my office I felt a big hole in my heart. There was no perfect city, no perfect human relation, the hell with Plato’s perfect forms and cities. What really worked?