Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  On Christmas Eve Day, I asked Mark to please join us for the evening party. “It would be great if you and Natalia decorated the tree together. In the morning, so it can be done before the party, and the gifts, you know, the girls…” I was sort of stumbling over my words. I was trying hard to follow my new female lawyer’s advice to talk in neutral language that did not focus on me and my wishes. I would be Machiavelli’s fox. He lost his cool and stared angrily at me. “What’s with you pushing me to do all this stuff with Natalia? I do my own stuff with Natalia, I know what to do. I know how to parent. And I don’t go around fucking other women. Don’t you see, you’re trying too hard! It’s fake, we are a broken family, can’t you get it?” At that point Natalia popped her head in the doorway. Divorce brings out the worst in us, I thought. “No we aren’t,” said Natalia. “We are not a broken family, Dad.”

  Mark did end up decorating the tree with Natalia. Biljana’s girls joined in and the four of them made a beautiful family picture that showed no fissures, no fractures, and no rough edges. My mother and Biljana and I were wrapping gifts together on my bed and having a disjointed conversation half in Serbian, half in English, about my life situation, while Rick was talking to his Mexican family on his cell phone on the landing outside my room: “Sí, Mami, entiendo, no te preocupes por favor. Sí, Mami, Feliz Navidad.” Biljana’s body always straightened up in some sort of voluptuous move whenever she heard Rick speak Spanish, or speak anything at all. I will never have anything like that, I thought as I curled ribbon edges on the red and green presents. It’s all luck, it’s all bloody luck of the draw, I sighed. Just then my cell phone rang. I looked down to see Karim’s number. “Aren’t you going to answer, Larinka?” asked my mother. “No, it’s okay, it’s no one!” I said. My mother crossed herself as she did when things weren’t right. I was transparent like an empty jar. The raw truth in me ached. I wanted a solid real partner next to me like Biljana had. I wanted a different father for Natalia. I wanted another chance at starting over.

  “Is he a good man, at least, Larinka?” my mother asked. “Can you marry him after you are divorced?” She crossed herself again. Biljana told my mother to stop it. We finished the gift wrapping in silence. I thought of my father who would have added great charm and wit to our Christmas celebrations if he weren’t buried deep inside a lonely tomb in Belgrade. And what about Marija? I wondered what mysterious circles she was rambling right now.

  The girls stood in front of the sparkling tree. Mark, who was sitting next to the tree holding his knees, looked up and smiled. “They did a good job, didn’t they?” he said. He sat in the middle of what looked like a happy family picture with no cracks, a blissful holiday moment. It struck me that Mark seemed to have aged and his hair had gotten grayer. He looked even more handsome. His eyes met mine and he seemed genuinely content to be in the center of that glowing family picture. For a moment I thought he moved his hand in my direction as if wanting me to sit down next to them. He also regretted everything, I thought, but was too proud to ever go back. He withdrew his hand and stood up in a quick graceful move, his face turning back to impenetrable stone. Natalia ran to the hall closet. “Wait,” she said. “I forgot the ornament for the top.” As she rummaged through the top shelves for the treetop ornament, something shifted and a cascade of Ping-Pong balls, golf balls, BB gun pellets, NASCAR mini race cars, and white feathers came rushing down. Natalia stood in the center of a mount of balls and feathers, a touch of blush to her cheeks. Rick clapped his hands in wonderment. “¡Ay chica, qué bonito! What treasures have you got there?” To which Natalia replied simply: “I stole these,” as the girls laughed and asked Biljana if they could have some, too. Biljana looked at me puzzled. “What’s going on, Lari?” I just shrugged and pictured in my head a news headline: “Broken family reconciles amid stolen sporting goods.” I would allow myself to float in the illusion of celebration for now. I knew the days and months to come would bring nothing close to reconciliation.

  Washington, DC. War and Negotiations

  WINTER 2004

  The New Year brought frigid cold and snow flurries, new court petitions from Mark, and US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. On my first day of the semester, while news of American soldiers beating wounded Iraqi prisoners filled the headlines, my department chair told me that my tenure file was still incomplete. Without the noisy colorful caravan that was my family, Natalia returned to her moodier self and our duplex felt icy and deserted.

  I walked into my classroom for Politics 101 and explained the rule of law to my wide-eyed freshmen. In my Advanced Politics class on Eastern European post-Communist governments, the only advanced class that my chair still allowed me to teach, on account of my being Eastern European, I indulged in fleeting comparisons between the American invasion of Iraq and recent wars of aggression like the Bosnian war. There was no moral basis for the new model of American preemptive war; neither was there a moral basis for the Kosovo and Bosnian wars. Without the rule of law, almost anybody with a gun and a few soldiers under their command could become General Ratko Mladic, I told them. My voice carried through the amphitheater, even though my insides were twisting and thirst scorched my throat.

  The trial was only a few weeks away, and I called Diana Coman as soon as my classes were over to strategize before leaving the office. She was hopeful that all was going to turn out all right and told me not to worry, to trust her and mostly, she said, to trust myself. As I shot out into the parking lot, I skidded on a patch of ice. I reminded myself to stay careful and strong. I got into my car with my ankle hurting from the fall and sat for a while looking out the window at the winter dusk and the whimsical snowflakes that were starting to fall. A childhood memory surfaced of the winter when my parents sent Biljana and me to our paternal grandparents, so we could experience country life for a few days, to make “real people of us” as my father said. Our grandparents lived in an old village near Dubrovnik. My father took us there by train during our winter vacation when Biljana and I were eight and ten years old, Natalia’s age now. The winter was bitter and thick icicles were hanging from all the village roofs. Biljana and I went sledding on a little hill at the other end of the village. She was crazy about sledding but this time it was special, she said, because this was an ice hill we were going to go sledding on. I didn’t want to go at first, but Biljana coerced me and told me it was like ice skating only downhill, plus you were sitting on the sled, so what was the worst that could happen? We soon found out exactly that, because on our first run she flew off the sled and a sharp piece of ice sticking out pierced her leg through her leggings. Blood gushed and I thought Biljana was going to die from all the blood coming out of her. The ice on the hill was becoming red and shiny in the cold sun. I remembered that hard trip down the icy hill. I must have let go of the sled and glided on my butt because the sled was not part of my memory when I saw myself sitting next to bleeding Biljana. I wanted to cry so badly that my throat hurt. But Biljana looked at me fiercely. “Don’t cry, do something!” she said. Even though Biljana produced a vigorous scream at her bleeding leg, nobody came out of their house to help us. I remembered thinking These are not good people who don’t come out to help a wounded child. I remembered the village looking beautiful and eerie under the heavy snow with no people anywhere in sight. Then Biljana yelled: “What if I can’t dance anymore? I’ll kill myself!” I took my scarf and wrapped it tight around Biljana’s calf in a tourniquet above the gash that squirted blood like a fountain, without saying a word. I tore my checkered shirt and wrapped it around her wound. “What if it gets gangrened and I die?” she screamed. I told her she deserved it because she had been the idiot who wanted to go sledding on ice. As I was wrapping my shirt around her leg trying to make the blood stop Biljana told me she loved me more than anything. I couldn’t say a word, I kept wrapping her leg, the blood kept soaking up the shirt, we had two kilometers to walk home and I would have given my life for my sister right there on the stupid ice hill. W
e walked the two kilometers back home with me holding Biljana like her crutch.

  On the way back from the ice hill, I told Biljana stories of war I had heard from my father, how soldiers were coming home during World War II without a leg or an arm, or with wounds in their stomachs or in their heads, bleeding all over the place, and they made it home somehow: “What if we were at war, sister,” I said, “we would have to make it, think of that, what would we do if we were at war and you and I were wounded soldiers?” Despite all the pain she was going through, my sister still found the strength to say I was stupid because girls didn’t go to war. “Yes they do,” I said, “you and I would.”

  When she saw the two of us in the doorway, our baba yelled at us that we were idiot girls to go sledding on ice, only cretins did that, and it served us right. Dede gave us each a shot of slivovitz, the awful alcohol that Serbians drank and that burned your insides like hell’s fire. Then he called the village doctor. The doctor told me I had done a good job wrapping up my sister’s wound; otherwise she would have lost too much blood. Maybe even died, he said. After the doctor left and our baba put us to bed and made the cross sign over us for protection, Biljana and I cuddled and held each other under the thick down coverlet. Then we cried. We had survived. I glowed at the fullness of our childhood, which now seemed so close. I drove home slowly, somehow renewed with hope that the strength I had found that winter of Biljana’s bandaged leg would always sustain me. Maybe I could again rise unscathed above disaster and still keep some of my wholeness intact.

  On Monday night of the week of the trial, I came home from work, and was surprised to find Mark at home with Natalia, since it was his day with her and he always took her out even if it was a school night. I came in quietly through the back door because I had groceries to deposit. I heard their overlapping voices in an excited, joyous conversation. I felt a jolt of jealousy for which I immediately reprimanded myself and tucked it right back under my new tight blue woolen suit. I walked in on tiptoes, respecting our understanding that on our nights with Natalia, we would each stay out of each other’s way. Mark and Natalia were reading together and talking about Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “A man and a woman and a blackbird are one,” Natalia recited in laughter. The joyous relaxed scene between Mark and Natalia made me equally happy and jealous. Mark wasn’t just fighting for custody of Natalia to get back at me but because he genuinely wanted to spend more time with her. He really had learned to be a better parent because of our divorce. Maybe he was finally making the transition from teaching poetry to living it, even if it took a family cataclysm for that to happen. Even if it was too late for Mark and me, he could find that happiness with our daughter.

  “You and Mommy and I are one and we are a blackbird,” said Natalia shaking with laughter at her own inventiveness. Mark was laughing, too, like I hadn’t seen him laugh in years. I was sad, too, for all we had missed in each other. I badly wanted to cry, like the time Biljana gashed her leg on the ice, but I pumped myself up, filled with all the sadness I felt, and didn’t let one tear fall. We were lonely blackbirds perched on snowy fences, we could have all been one blackbird at one time. “He rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach,” continued Natalia. Connecticut Avenue had once been my dream come true, my Cinderella palace. I had flown over it in a glass coach once, landed in it on the arm of my husband who rescued me from a genocidal and war-ridden country, I had made a colorful palace here until the glass shattered all around us. “The river is moving / The blackbird must be flying.” Now I was only a spectator, an outsider to the blackbird moment between Natalia and Mark. He looked particularly handsome that night with his delicate yet manly profile, his gray hair shining around the temples. There was a time I wanted him more than anything else in the world. Him and America. In two days we would face each other in court, fighting for the custody rights to the quivering daughter we had created. There was no poetry in that.

  For the trial, I found my new survival mode. I disengaged from my own litigation and remembered that whatever battle Mark and I were playing out, there was a world outside filled with war and genocide. The lawyers wanted Natalia to come to the stand and I asked her if she would be willing to make a brief appearance at the trial, just to answer a few questions. She wanted to know only if they would ask her about the baseball cards and golf balls and feathers she had stolen from CVS and Walmart and then arrest her. I promised her that no, nobody was going to arrest her or even ask her about the stolen things, only about the relations she had with each of her parents. And maybe whether she had a preference about living more with one of us than the other. She might have a say in what was going to happen to her living arrangements. She became pensive for a moment and wanted to know if Aunt Biljana was going to be there in court. Once she knew this, she answered that yes, it would be cool to come to court, and was the judge going to wear a long black robe like she’d seen on TV?

  The first day when I would take the stand, I left the house early to meet Diana Coman at her office. She told me she would accompany me to the imposing courthouse. Natalia would come later with Biljana and Rick. The die was cast, as Caesar had said when crossing the Rubicon, there was no turning back. When I reached the steps of the courthouse with Diana, I just about collapsed at the sight of the chair of the Politics Department, and beside him the journalism colleague who had been on my plane home from Paris in my truncated escapade with Karim a year ago. His wife, Sarah, was there, too. I had to remember my approach, to detach myself from what was happening. But were Sarah and Brian getting a divorce, too? I actually wondered for a moment in confusion. Everybody was getting a divorce, apparently it was the thing to do that frigid winter. Their presence in the courtroom made no sense. Then I saw Mark talking and laughing with them and his lawyers, glowing with confidence and good humor. I suddenly understood why Brian from journalism had recently stopped greeting me when we crossed each other on campus; why Sarah, his wife, had turned her head the other way when I ran into her at Natalia’s school before Christmas; why my department chair acted so strangely, even peevishly, when I ran into him with Natalia. They were all there to testify on Mark’s behalf.

  Mark’s two lawyers extolled his virtues as a father and downgraded me as a mother. He was careful, I was reckless, he was stable, I was unpredictable, he was caring, I was careless. He offered a good role model, I offered the model of a depraved woman, a bad role model for a girl. He had taken Natalia to the beach, I had taken a self-indulgent joyride on the Blue Ridge Parkway with my lover. There were pictures of Mark and Natalia at the beach, on a school bench, on a visit with his mother. And there were me and Karim always kissing. I exposed my child to danger in times of enhanced national security, the lawyers charged.

  I nudged Diana Coman and she wrote to me on a piece of paper that the judge didn’t like for parents to denigrate each other that way. But the judge seemed to be listening carefully. How did Diana know? I wondered. I stared at the murals on the wall and was struck by the irony of a larger-than-life representation of Lady Justice draped in the folds of a tunic that left one of her breasts exposed as she held the scales of justice. I couldn’t help smiling to myself and wondering why even the incarnation of Justice had to be a sex object in a world of men. Images of Gregory Peck or Spencer Tracy, the passionate lawyer defending an unjustly accused woman, a poor man, or a person of color, passed through my mind. But Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy were nowhere in sight to defend my virtue and my maternal rights under the glaring lights of that American courtroom.

  Like a bad dream, Brian the journalism professor recounted how he saw me in Charles de Gaulle airport engaging in lewd acts with an Arab man. He stressed “Arab man” and then repeated that I was kissing an Arab man in public when he saw me. To that he added that after he and his wife had lent us their children’s old crib when Natalia was born, I returned it years later, damaged, with several of the crib’s nails missing. I had stolen nails from their crib, he said, and fr
om this Mark’s lawyer concluded I was teaching Natalia to steal. Mark testified at length about our marriage, our arguments, our parenting disagreements, his shock and pain at discovering my love affair. He sounded convincing, and I even was able to believe his argument. His lawyer produced copies of emails between me and Karim, and more photos from Dulles airport, and I was mortified by the exposure, like a Hollywood star followed by paparazzi for the National Enquirer.

  Of all the testimonies, I loved Rick’s the most. “Ms. Kulicz understands her daughter better than anyone else,” he said. “Better than even Natalia knows herself. It’s all smooth between them, no edges.” Rick looked stately and manly and his Mexican accent gave his speech a special weight of warmth and truthfulness. I understood why Biljana was so crazy about him. Between my sister and me at least one of us had been lucky that way, and had a happy marriage to a good man, without any necessary foreverafterness. It was all in the here and now. “A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.”

  When Diana Coman started her line of questioning of the witnesses, she was my own Lady Justice holding the scales, my Gregory Peck. Mark, the witnesses, the judge, the lawyers, and everybody in the room opened their eyes wide and seemed to wake up from a long sleep. “Have you, Mr. Brian McAlister, observed Ms. Kulicz interact with her daughter for any length of time, yes or no?” She spoke without gibberish or extraneous talk. “No, I haven’t,” he said. “Have you, Mr. Lopez, watched Ms. Kulicz interact with her daughter for any length of time, yes or no?” “Yes, I have.” When my turn came to testify her confidence in me was unflappable, like she had waved her wand to make me a sparkling new person. I spoke clearly and coolheadedly about every aspect of Natalia’s upbringing, how I’d packed sandwiches with her favorite cheese, and how I’d read her Norwegian fairy tales before bedtime. I described our epic escapades to the zoo and to the sculpture garden, our visits to the doctor and the time we stayed up all night together when she had bronchitis, even before a long day of lectures. And there were the cello lessons and the practicing. Every time Mark’s lawyers asked about Karim, I took the Fifth and stared at them silently, just as Diana had instructed. “It is irrelevant for custody, Your Honor,” she would say to the judge. And then the judge asked me himself: “Did you have an extramarital affair? Answer the question, Ms. Kulicz, or I’ll hold you in contempt.” But before I could speak, Diana Coman stood up and approached the bench. Diana asked the judge to wait until Natalia was heard. The judge conceded.