Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  For the several nights preceding Karim’s arrival, I couldn’t sleep. I took sleeping pills. And combined with the anti-anxiety pills, I was brought into a state of bipolarity that some people had naturally and were given medication to combat. I woke up groggy and barely able to articulate a coherent sentence, and then the anxiety would kick in. Once I took the anti-anxiety pills I felt ready to walk on all the tin roofs of my beloved Washington and chant the American anthem at the top of my Serbian lungs. In mid-July the air in Washington was a hot gooey soup in which we were all drowning and Karim’s arrival was in two days at Dulles airport. How was it going to be with Karim here, in my “hometown”? How were we going to re-create Paris in Washington? But most important, what kind of lies was I going to find to excuse my absences from home, and how was I going to hide Karim so we didn’t run into anyone I knew? Make love not war, as a favorite seventies movie of my parents advised the entire world? I was inescapably caught between the two. I decided I would tell Mark I needed a few days off to collect myself and that I would be driving to Virginia to consult some of the university libraries for my new research project on war and civic consciousness. I was going to get together with some colleagues in political sciences at a summer NEH seminar, I lied with a wide smile. He was happy to have the time alone with Natalia, he said, they would take a trip to the beach.

  We weren’t having another court hearing until the end of August, even judges were resting from litigations. Having a husband and a lover wasn’t the worst thing in the world, I kept telling myself in those liquefying moments of moral confusion. The heat was getting worse and the massive neoclassical government buildings seemed to sway in a veil of liquid air during the day. Karim asked me to write a letter of invitation for the US embassy. I wrote a letter saying we would be working on a common research project on practical applications of Plato’s theories in modern democracies, wondering in whose hands that letter was going to fall and under what section of the Patriot Act it was going to be judged. I even found a small Plato colloquium at a university in Virginia and called the political science department for more information. The delinquency of my personal life pushed me toward professional virtue and an illusion of moral virtue. I wanted things to actually match, the letter of invitation with the reality it referred to, what I told Mark about my whereabouts with the actual places I would cross or find myself in. The romance part of my relation with Karim had to take place in a virtual space between DC and Virginia, somewhere secret and inaccessible, or somewhere entirely obvious and under everybody’s eyes.

  It made sense to love Karim. Paris, Montmartre, Aix-en-Provence, sultry hotel rooms, and student antiwar demonstrations flashed through me in a moving collage of images and emotions when I saw his freshly shaven face at the airport. Our joyride went along the bluish misty chains of the Virginian Appalachians, driving into orangey flaming sunsets or immersed to total oblivion in our delinquent caresses in tiny motels by the side of rural roads. A crisp sense of existential symmetry seemed to have taken over my destiny. In the glassy sphere of my own lies, I felt protected. Our love was transnational, the open mountain ranges of my dreams. “C’est beau, l’Amérique…” It’s beautiful, America… Karim said at some point during one of our shameless Virginia nights. I was filled with patriotic pride for my adoptive country; as it turned out our love wasn’t just Paris-bound.

  The litigation started again at the end of August, and Mark produced for the court an array of pictures of me and Karim during our five-day joyride from the moment of our encounter to the second of our separation and the last good-byes: Karim and Lara kissing at Dulles airport, Karim and Lara kissing in the rented Kia in a parking lot or on the side of the road, Karim and Lara entering a small motel in the Appalachians, Karim and Lara crying and kissing at Dulles airport on the day of his departure. Karim wiping a tear off my face seconds before he disappeared through the security gate. My lawyer showed them to me when we entered the courtroom for the hearing. He said I should deny everything, photos could be doctored up and manufactured, everyone knew that. He didn’t want to know whether they were truthful or not. The pictures were part of exhibit A, evidence to show that I was unfit as a mother, an immoral influence on our daughter. Exhibit B displayed photographs of Mark and Natalia by the Atlantic beaches in Virginia and North Carolina: Natalia splashing with Mark in the waves, Mark and Natalia playing mini golf in a park filled with wooden dinosaurs, Natalia collecting seashells on the beach.

  Belgrade and Sarajevo

  THANKSGIVING 2003

  Over Thanksgiving break I went to Belgrade in search of Marija. And then to Sarajevo for the search of my life. This time I took Natalia with me, despite fervent pleas from my entire Serbian family to curb my patriotic urges. I didn’t care about patriotism or my native country, but I gave the excuse that the vacation was as good a moment as any to reconnect with my roots and for Natalia to connect with them in the first place. “To help her understand her ancestry,” I told Mark. In truth, all I was dying to do was find traces, threads, clues that would lead me to Marija. Ironically enough, only Mark supported my decision. When it came to things like “Natalia needs to know and understand her roots” Mark was all understanding and support. His respect for ethnic diversity and his political correctness were actually as embedded in his person as his stubbornness about the divorce and custody litigation. If nothing else Mark lived by those principles, and strangely enough it had been both what had attracted me to him in the first place and what in the end bored and dissatisfied me. When I asked him in our kitchen before he was leaving for work if he could trade his time with Natalia over Thanksgiving break so she could travel with me to Serbia for a whole week, his face relaxed and he said simply: “Yes, sure, that’s a good idea, it’s important for her to discover where her mother comes from.” I thought his voice mellowed with affection. Referring to me as “her mother” was distancing, yet those two words also carried a world of meaning and so much of our history. They carried the memory of us conceiving Natalia on a breezy summer afternoon when I was wearing a fluffy dress in the colors of the American flag, hundreds of hours of us caring for Natalia, worrying about her, making decisions about her life, everything big and small, trivial and exceptional, deciding on a birthday gift or the school she was going to. But it also carried the singed afternoon of my torn-up portrait, the sour smell of the glue Natalia used trying to put it back together, the dreary discovery of my relationship with Karim and everything else after that. I was that mother, “her mother,” with a deep gash cutting through my portrait and through our lives and marriage, a crack poorly covered up in sparkling glue and lies. When Mark caught himself looking at me for a second longer, his kindness and his half smile turned to a grimace; he brushed by me and left the room. His gait seemed heavier and less assured. I knew that he, too, had suddenly been touched by that wicked flutter of our history. And then he shook it off his shoulders like a fleck of dust.

  Natalia and I descended upon the Skadarljia neighborhood of Belgrade the first evening looking for our hotel, in the midst of loud and cheerful accordion music, rivers of wine and vodka pouring in all the little cafés and restaurants, and pungent smells of grilled sausages as if we had just entered God’s paradise on earth. I had decided to stay at a boutique hotel in the most colorful part of Belgrade, and guide Natalia first through the touristy parts, not the dark, broken, and gray city that I had encountered when I had come for my father’s funeral. At least for the first few days, so she would have something pleasant to remember my native city by. A nostalgia as pungent as the smells coming out of the different restaurants pinched at my heart along with the images of Marija and me drinking, joking through the early-morning hours, indulging in the wildest mind games and fantasies, in these same cafés a decade earlier. It made perfect sense that now I was there in that same spot with my beloved Natalia, who took everything in with fierce curiosity.

  The November air was crisp and the last chestnut leaves were trailing down t
he cobblestone sidewalks like lost souls. Some inexplicable ancestral feeling grabbed at my guts and I ordered straight vodka, which for the same unknown reason quenched a deep thirst inside me for something strong and destructive. Natalia watched me with curious eyes as if she was fascinated with this new mother, who spoke Serbian and joked with the mustached waiters, drank shots of vodka without blinking, and laughed loudly at obscene jokes from the neighboring tables. She knew why I had gone to Belgrade. She and I had planned a secret trip within our trip, the Bosnian portion of the journey that not even my own sister, mother, or husband knew anything about. She asked me to let her put the tip of her tongue in my shot of vodka and I was happy to oblige as she scrunched her nose in disgust: “How can you drink this awful stuff, Mama?” “I guess because it’s in the blood, as they say,” I laughed. The accordionist stopped at our table and played Serbian tunes for us. Tears sprang to my eyes as I remembered Marija singing one of their songs on the morning of our separation. Natalia took my hand. We made a glorious team on that chilly autumn night filled with such unbearable regrets, desires, and sugary accordion music that ripped through my heart like a reckless hurricane.

  After a couple of days of being a tourist with Natalia in Belgrade, I started making phone calls and meeting people at street corners or in the hallways of drab gray buildings. I knew Marija knew people in Belgrade who had been against the war, and knowing her as well as I did, she probably reconnected with them after the war for some humanitarian purpose. Natalia held my hand tight throughout all of our ramblings as if afraid to lose me among the rows of shabby blocks left from the socialist era. We walked fast without looking behind us even when we heard steps following us too closely. After the excitement, vodka, sausages, and accordion music of the Skadarljia neighborhood wore off I started feeling strange vibrations pulsate through my native city as we went on our various walks. Pro-nationalist Serbian graffiti on walls and gates such as MLADIC HERO gave me shivers of unpleasantness every time I saw them, and the ones that said things like MUSLIM PIGS froze the blood in my veins. The thought of Marija and her family having been the target of that hatred firsthand turned me alternately into a block of ice and a volcano of sorrow. Hot tears were falling down my face with a will of their own. One afternoon when we stopped in a café to warm up and replenish our energies with coffee, pastries, and hot chocolate, Natalia said looking straight at me: “Mama, I think you are going around in circles. The woman in the offices on the top floor in the ugly building knew something about your friend.” “Which ugly building, Natalia? All the buildings we’ve been to so far are ugly. And which woman?” Then I remembered. It was the office of the human rights organization where we visited Sonja, the director who was working on a huge project of annual reports about Serbia’s nationalist orientation and unwillingness to capture the war criminals and recognize the role of the Republika Srpska in the genocide. “How do you know that Sonja knew about Marija?” “Because when you asked her she sipped from her coffee first and then she said she didn’t know and she didn’t look you straight in the eyes when she said that. Why would she sip her coffee at such an important question? She was buying time, Mama, first she wanted to tell you something, and then she changed her mind.” Apparently I had raised a little Sherlock Holmes who read character and psychology better than I was able to. The coffee warmed my insides and the sugary creamy pastry gave me a slight rush like I used to get in my childhood whenever my father took me to the pastry shop on our street for hot chocolate and a cake on cold afternoons like that one. “We’ll go back to her then. What do you think, Natalia?” Natalia kept silent and sipped from her hot chocolate. Natalia was both genius and fairy, the one thing in my life I had done perfectly by giving birth to. “Let’s go,” I said impatiently once she took the last sip from the drink. “Wait, Mama, let me finish my cocoa, okay?” And she stuck her finger at the bottom of the cup to take all the sugary froth.

  We went back to the gray ugly building in the far end of the Dorćol neighborhood, near where my parents’ apartment used to be, then walked to the nicer part, where Marija’s parents used to live, with turn-of-the-century houses and apartment buildings and friendly little parks where children swayed on the creaky swings. Natalia remembered the street and hopped a step ahead of me while still holding my hand. Then she turned around looking at me and with a huge smile said, “Mama, did you use to walk on these streets to go to school when you and your friend were little?” Of course we had, Marija and I running back from school and taking the most roundabout ways in order to prolong our togetherness, Marija and I pretending we got lost and ending up at the opposite side of town where neither of us lived, Marija walking me to my apartment building and then me walking her back to hers and then having to walk back home alone and wishing it were tomorrow when we would see each other again. And sometimes stopping in a little pastry shop such as the one Natalia and I had just been in, and sharing one fluffy cake and one hot cocoa from the money we had both saved from the change our parents had given us. This new Belgrade was cold and unfriendly, but the ghosts of my childhood and of the fiery little girl that Marija once was, and of the flamboyant and revolutionary young woman she became, ripped my heart into bloody slivers.

  Sonja at the Helsinki human rights organization was not in the least surprised to see us back. All the staff had left for the day when we got there and she was all by herself in the office with the large windows looking out onto the Danube River with its lazy nonchalant flow cutting through the city. Seen from up there the neighborhood didn’t seem ugly, but rather majestic. I was liking and hating my city in alternate transports even within a single hour of the day. Before I finished my sentence asking again about Marija and whether she had been in touch with her in the last decade after the war, Sonja handed me a piece of paper with some sentences scribbled on it. She didn’t want to say it out loud but instead she repeated that she had no idea where Marija was, or what she had been up to, no she hadn’t seen or heard from her. “No, absolutely not,” she said adamantly. I was shocked by such caution and mostly by what it implied: that offices and buildings where antiwar, anti-nationalistic, and human rights activities and projects went on were actually bugged just as in the eighties, following Tito’s death and even before. The note Sonja handed me said that Marija had been coming to Belgrade regularly to give information to the human rights commission and mostly to get in touch with the group called Women in Black. I had heard of Women in Black from Biljana, a group of mostly Serbian women who were against the war and who every year on the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres stood in public places in Belgrade dressed in black and wrapped in silence. Not a word, just silent resistance. Marija had stopped coming about two years ago, the note said. Sonja listed some names and a couple of cell phone numbers all scribbled on the same piece of paper that she had torn from her lined notebook. Natalia leaned over to read the note and her eyes lit up as if to say: I told you, Mama. I kissed Sonja good-bye and thanked her profusely. She whispered to me to be careful; it was still not safe, she said. As soon as I got to the hotel I bought our bus tickets to Sarajevo for the next morning, the day of the American Thanksgiving holiday. Natalia was jumping up and down with excitement. I needed to find Marija.

  As Natalia sat next to me on the bus to Sarajevo swallowing the landscapes that unfolded in front of her, images of Marija, Biljana, and me traveling the same route almost thirty years earlier ran through my head at dizzying velocity: Marija and I holding hands and closing our eyes at the sharpest curves in the road, Biljana waving and grimacing out the window at people standing on the side of the road or in front of their houses, Marija’s mother sitting in the seat across from us lost in reverie and sometimes embroidering or knitting an item of clothing for Marija. Pine forests on one side, naked sharp rocks on another, high drops that made your heart swoon, winding turns that left you breathless, and then suddenly in front of you the charmed city where I had spent the happiest days of my life: wooded, hidden among firs and
pines, white houses with red tiles emerging like a surprise from behind the dark-green areas, the gleaming rounded cupolas of mosques with the crescent moons greeting you like shining smiles. Natalia looked at me smiling. For a brief second I was ten-year-old Lara and Natalia was ten-year-old Marija. The darkest waters of the last decades had washed over us and left us grieving and begging for wholeness. Clusters of red flowers were hanging on the white houses even in November, though the nonconiferous trees were barren. I realized I had never been to Sarajevo in late fall. I had not been to Sarajevo since I was in college. The hills around us were sprinkled with hundreds of fresh white tombs of Sarajevans killed in the siege. I was in for the time travel of my life, and thank goodness Natalia was right next to me with her glorious smile and warm hand in mine, always reminding me that life mattered, that what we were up to on our secret crazy trip really mattered.