Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  It was not therapy, it was the yellow dress that saved my life. It was Sally Bryant and her yellow dress that made me aware that I had a body and that I had once loved my body. One day during one of our meetings she made me laugh without even intending to. She said: “Marija, you might want to comb your hair today and put on a new dress. Here, I brought you this headband and this dress, they made me think of you.” For some reason that sounded so fucking funny, that she would worry about my hair and my dress. And I thought that the war hadn’t been her fault, that I had no reason to hate her. She had brought me a yellow dress like a huge lemon and that made me laugh even more. She said yellow was proven to be an uplifting color, a warm color that lifted the spirits. Sally combed my hair herself and I stopped her from combing it off my face and my eyes but she gently won that fight. She had been right, the yellow dress lifted my spirits, and for the first time I felt that maybe I did want to survive.

  Maybe I would follow Sally’s urging and move to the United States, to Santa Barbara, California, like she’d said. I considered her proposal seriously, as you would consider a marriage or a business proposal. “What will I do in America, Sally?” “Whatever you want,” she answered. That felt as refreshing and ridiculous as the yellow dress.

  When I leave Sarajevo with Sally I know very well I am forgetting something important and that I would come back for it one day. I cannot remember entire blocks of life. I found out from Sally that I suffer from a very unusual kind of post-traumatic stress disorder: the kind that instead of removing me from the present and pushing me into the hellhole of the traumas or shocks that had happened to my system, lets me live in a frozen present and I have cut out the past. Some psychologists call that state emotional blunting, Sally told me it’s a kind of freezing of emotions both good and bad so that you don’t experience the really awful ones. I didn’t understand her psychological jargon, nor did I care. But she was right: I had found a niche in a dark bath of forgetfulness. I wanted to go to the country of forgetfulness and large billboards, to Sally’s land of yellow dresses and California oranges. The most desperate wretches of the world had gone to America over the centuries to escape from something, from someone, to find something or someone they thought they could never find in their own miserable native places. It made sense for me to be like all those other wretched forgetful individuals.

  As we were suspended in the clouds between two continents, and I turned Marija’s pages, with Natalia in the seat beside me, in a temporary state of calm and contentment, we laughed at the idea that we were born an ocean away from each other on different continents. “Thank you, Mama, for moving to America to make me. That was a good move,” Natalia said.

  Washington, DC. Attempting Peace

  DECEMBER 2003

  The litigation and trials went on and on and settled in our lives together with the news of war and of American soldiers being blown up in car explosions at various roadblocks in Iraq. Because I couldn’t have either of them, I now loved both Mark and Karim. Or I did my best to do so. It seemed to me now that love was also partly built up by our own volition, deliberate accumulation of fantasies, choosing to think more of the good sides than the bad sides of the person who was the object of our affection. I idealized each of the two men in my life differently and longed one moment for the family solidity and togetherness I had once had with Mark and the next for the heated whispers and passion I had with Karim during our transnational stolen encounters. I clung to the husband with whom I had once had an American family and kept the illusion of the Tunisian romantic lover with whom I had once experienced thrilling passion.

  I still talked with Karim at least twice a week on my cell phone, in a parking lot or at a street corner on M Street or in Dupont Circle while anxiously looking around me and scouting the area for possible detectives who might be following me. Our conversations always left me spent, as Karim seemed distant and less loving, though not distant enough for me to completely give up the thrill I got from hearing my name pronounced in his soft raspy voice with a French Arabic accent. If he still called me “mon amour” he must have meant it. The occasional distant echo of a female voice speaking in Arabic at the other end of the phone made me queasy with a sense of the absurdity of the entire situation, adultery, divorce, custody litigation, family disintegration, the mess that had become my life.

  Sometimes Natalia came into my room to talk about our travels to Belgrade and Sarajevo and to look at the pictures we had taken. Everything was still fresh and weighed on her conscience and imagination: Here we were in front of the old fortress where the Danube and the Sava Rivers joined, smiling in the November sun. A kind young couple who wanted to practice their English had taken the photo. Here we were in front of the Romeo and Juliet Bridge in Sarajevo, trying to smile despite the dark drizzly day. There was the woman with the grocery bags who told us the story of the two lovers that had died in each other’s arms.

  My mother and sister were planning to visit us for Christmas with the entire family, which meant also my brother-in-law and their two daughters. At first I thought it would be crazy for us all to cram inside our duplex over the holidays and wanted to ask them to restrain their familial enthusiasm. But both my mother and sister convinced me that it was good for Natalia to have her “maternal Serbian family around her,” “to take her mind off her parents’ troubles and the divorce” and to allow her to better know her two cousins. “It’s good for her, Larinka, trust me,” my sister insisted in her aggressively life-affirming way. “The best medicine for a child torn between two parents in the midst of a bloody divorce is total immersion in family life, playing with kids her age, in other words being normal and spending the holidays surrounded by a lot of cheerfulness. I know it because I have it in my blood, I know what makes kids tick and what makes families work,” she said confidently and started to count to three while on the phone for her younger daughter, Amanda, to get into her pajamas and get ready for bedtime. “Maybe if I hadn’t helped you come to the States, you wouldn’t have found your Prince Charming and you would be cheating on some motherfucking Serbian husband with an American tourist right now and calling me for moral support all the way from Belgrade, have you ever thought of that, dear sister?” I joked with Biljana. It was a bitter joke and I felt the tension left by my words quiver in the airtime. There was a long silence on the phone, and I regretted my words.

  But then she burst out laughing: “It’s funny to hear you swear like that, Larichka. But the man you married was your Prince Charming, remember? And remember the great fanfare and pride of your wedding? Look, shit happens and people can be wrong about the mate they choose, but you have that priceless Natalia. How about that?”

  “Our mama is a different story, she just wrings her hands all day long, talking about ‘the daughter who has taken the wrong path and what did I do to deserve it?’” Biljana told me. “But you know damn well I’m not like that. I have my own set of problems with Rick, too, don’t you know it! I’m just making some choices here that are different from your choices. Come on, it will be good to spend the holidays together, to spend some time just the two of us, talking late into the night like in the old days. You might find me useful after all.”

  My sister had chosen a career in dancing and I had chosen political science and she was better at the politics of everyday life than I had ever been. I hung up and went looking for Natalia downstairs to take her to her cello lessons. She had recently developed a love of the cello and I tried to channel her artistic drives, feeling as confident about my parenting choices lately as my superconfident sister seemed to be about hers. Our journey to my birth country and everything we had seen, experienced, and heard there had solidified our indestructible bond, even if I still agonized over allowing her to step into the dark world of the war with its sickening degrees of violence and Marija’s layers of suffering. I even believed that Mark, in his support of Natalia and me traveling and her “getting to know her roots,” had become a gentler and more reason
able human being.

  One Sunday afternoon in December, I went straight to Mark in his study as he was working on his lectures for the coming week, as if everything were the same as before. I stood in front of him and asked if we could talk. Without raising his head from the computer, he nodded, and pointed to me to sit down as if I was one of his students coming in for an appointment. I remembered the early years of our marriage, when we used to actually play this game, where we acted as if one was the professor and the other a nervous student asking advice for his or her paper on Plato’s Republic or a Wallace Stevens poem. After which we would tell each other to get undressed and said that having sex first was the only way we could solve the conundrums of Plato or Wallace Stevens.

  I sat down at the desk in front of him and started to talk. “Mark, what if we rewound everything and started over?” I said in one breath with the crispiest voice I had used in a long time. To my surprise he lifted his eyes and looked straight at me with almost a shine, something on the cusp of tears. “I would if I could, Lara, honestly, I would. But I just can’t. And I just can’t see how I can live with you and love you again after all this.” Although I had thought I was immune to any feelings toward or from Mark, his words and the sincerity with which he uttered them gave me an instantaneous heartache.

  I looked out the window and saw the snow falling, first snow of the year. The world outside looked so beautiful. I had once had it all. The room with the dark rustic oak and mahogany furniture that we had decorated together, the Indian tapestries on the walls, the Tiffany lamp, the gauzy vermillion curtains, the bare dogwoods and maples in front of the window and the snow gently covering them. I beheld the inanimate objects, and they seemed to scold me for my recklessness, for the arrogance of thinking I could have everything: a brilliant academic career, a model family, an angel of a daughter, an enviable house on Connecticut Avenue in the country’s capital, and an exotic lover for occasional flings in Paris. The world I dared to imagine didn’t exist even in the corniest Hollywood movies. I wanted to beg Mark to take me back, to forgive me, to please start over.

  “Mark, can we please stop the battle over Natalia?” I asked in nearly inaudible words. “It’s destroying her. Let’s make peace, for her sake… for the sake of our daughter. I made a mistake, I admit it. Why make her pay for it?” The words came out softly and smoothly like the snow. He looked at me with a soulful expression that gave me a moment of hope. But then I heard his words. “Fine, Lara, just give me full physical custody of Natalia and it will all be settled, not one more petition or trial or hearing. Just agree to it, and we’ll make peace. Nothing short of that will do.”

  In the days that followed I tried to fortify myself by working my way backward through the world’s worst historical catastrophes. I went back to my textbooks and reread accounts of the start of the two world wars, Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the massacre of Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s Day under Catherine de Medicis, the massacre of the Mamelukes in thirteenth-century Egypt, the Sack of Troy, and even the prehistoric cave dwellers who seemed peaceful by comparison. Civilization came with wars and destruction, I told myself. I could choose to study politics, but still I had to live “the real life.” I decided right then to re-study Machiavelli and Cicero, to find answers to the grave political errors that rolled through history. But then the image of a mother holding her child to her chest emerged in my mind and prevailed over Machiavelli and Cicero: She was rushing through fields and villages and cities at war, through bullets, explosions, fires, UN and NATO bombs, Iraqi suicide bombs, American smart bombs. Her eyes were lighting up the violent nights of history as she kept running and holding her child, trying to make it somewhere, to a certain spot that only she knew of. And she did. With her body covered in bloody rags, her feet covered in blisters, her face darkened from ashes and fires, she reached a quiet spot by a gurgling river, under the shade of willows and pine trees. The water was sparkling clean and she leaned to drink some and to give some to her child. They were finally safe and they would quench their thirst by this cool river in a secret place in the Moravian mountains. That image was in the end the only one that mattered from my abridged imaginary version of world history, and it wasn’t written in any of the history books.

  In the real, domestic part of my life I spent every moment I could with Natalia. I had never felt as creative as a mother as I did in those days and weeks following the conversation with Mark on the December snowy evening. Mark’s parenting challenge woke in me the ambition to excel at that job. I took her with me to my office and made a game of preparing my tenure file. I let her choose the colors of stickers for each one of the entries to my file. I had to go on with whatever needed to be done as my life unfolded.

  I had been re-reading The Prince, and I set myself a utopian plan and challenge for what was happening in the litigation room of my life. I would be both the cunning fox and the strong wolf, as Machiavelli advised. Five days before my family was due to arrive from Chicago for Christmas I fired my arrogant lawyer who cost me three hundred dollars for every hour of lousy advice and insults to my intelligence, and I hired Diana Coman, a young Romanian woman lawyer with a law degree from the University of Chicago. I thought our common Eastern European heritage might finally cut a clear path through the mire of lies and complications created by Mark’s lawyers. Maybe I was bolstered by Biljana’s upcoming visit.

  My family emerged from their red Subaru station wagon in front of our house, like the Serbian Gypsies used to come out of their carts to descend upon the village in the Morava Valley where my parents, my sister, and I used to spend part of our summer vacations. Biljana looked better than ever, her freckled skin glowing in the December dusk and her green eyes shining with mischief as always. Then came her two daughters, Melissa and Amanda, one dark-haired and swarthy and the other a miniature of Biljana, yawning and pushing each other around. My mother was moving slowly, a little hunched and looking older and smaller than the last time, holding her old Serbian fur coat. Finally, Ricky appeared, six feet tall with thick black hair and a matching mustache, his smile irrepressible. Just as when the Gypsy caravan showed up in our Serbian village, my heart beat with joy and curiosity, while my head told me there was about to be trouble, disruption of my attempt at a neatly ordered existence.

  Biljana hugged me tightly and kissed me on both cheeks. How was I holding up? she asked. My mother began to cry and took my head in her two hands, as always, to ascertain my state of catastrophe. Melissa and Amanda smelling of cinnamon rolls gave me sticky kisses. Ricky gave me a hearty hug. “Looking good, sister, not easy to get around in this fancy capital of yours.” Natalia, who had been waiting with great feverishness for their arrival for two days, stayed upstairs in her bedroom despite the honking car horn. I saw her staring from the window. She is like me, I thought as I picked up my sister’s orange duffel bag in which she must have packed her entire dance studio and half of the city of Chicago. That’s what will save us both in this custody trial, I thought as I opened the door to our house. That Natalia is like me: She broods and she makes up theories, solves problems, and likes quiet white spaces.

  As I followed everybody upstairs, an inexplicable hilarity possessed me. How were we all going to fit in the three rooms that were available for this wild pack of my Chicago family, “And Natalia and me?” I said. “We’ll be fine,” said Biljana. “In most parts of the world you would have four or five families living in a mansion like yours.” “We ran away from such a part of the world, remember, sister?” I said. When I reached the landing on the second floor, Biljana asked me in whispers about Mark, where was he? In his office, I gestured. She rolled her eyes as if to say: That’s all he ever does, how boring, no wonder you cheated on him. I didn’t care how we were going to all fit in or what our sleeping arrangements were going to be. I suddenly experienced an overpowering sense of well-being that I hadn’t felt in a long time. My life suddenly felt rich and complicated, stressful as it might have been. Natalia came ou
t of her room with a smile and offered each of the girls one of her Beanie Babies: a toucan for Melissa who was four, and a flamingo for Amanda, three. They followed Natalia to her room and the three of them disappeared inside, enveloped in a conversation about her stuffed animals.

  When I had first proposed to Mark that we celebrate Christmas as we always had, for Natalia’s sake, he mumbled a reluctant agreement to my proposal. It was all part of my new strategy, of killing him with kindness. “Great, Natalia will be so happy,” I said. And it was true. Natalia was dancing a gracious social ballet in those days before Christmas, leading her cousins in games and activities that spread all over the house. From puzzle competitions to Ping-Pong games in her room on the new table she had gotten for her birthday. She even invented a game called “refugees on the run,” much to everybody’s amusement. Biljana’s girls followed Natalia everywhere and did everything she asked them to with wide eyed admiration. Even my mother got caught up in the girls’ rendition of the Eurydice myth, performed with much fanfare in the living room. Natalia was Orpheus, Melissa played Eurydice, and Amanda wanted to be Hades, the god of the dead who gave Orpheus another chance and allowed him to take back his beloved Eurydice on the condition that he never look back for her. Even though they had no idea or understanding who those characters were, they followed all of Natalia’s directions during the rehearsals and mixed them up with fairy tale characters they were familiar with. The evening of the performance, Mark stopped in the doorway to watch. The lights were dim, and the Ravel music that Natalia had chosen vibrated in the air. She looked like an angelic apparition in her gauzy blue Orpheus costume, and at the last minute she changed the story’s ending by not looking back at Eurydice and thus saving him/herself from the fierce maenads, to Amanda’s great frustration whose favorite part was precisely the gory one of the dismemberment of Orpheus. Natalia was sick of dismemberments, real or metaphorical, so she changed the myth altogether. At the end Rick clapped and the rest of us joined him. “Bravo, great job, girls!” Mark didn’t say a word. I watched as he left the room and went into the kitchen with his expression blank. Blankness was his way of fighting me, I thought. But I didn’t care. For the first time in months I was not thinking about the future, but just about that messy colorful moment with touches of sparkling white. Mark had been overpowered by the sum total powers of our Serbian Mexican family.