Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  Natalia told me she was going to the beach with Mark for spring break and I tried not to show my pain.

  “Why don’t you and Dad go to Chicago for spring break?” I said cheerfully. “That way you’d get to also see Biljana and Melissa and Amanda and you’d have the beaches all along the lakeshore. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Her face brightened up and her eyes opened. “Do you think Dad will really want this, Mama? With the divorce and stuff, you know…”

  “Just ask him, Talia, and see what he says.” Maybe there was a way to live our new lives of halves.

  To both my surprise and Natalia’s, Mark liked the idea. He went ahead and reserved plane tickets to Chicago during the same days that I was going to Paris. Maybe he was recomposing himself just like I was. But still, I chose to keep him in my mystery box for now. He seemed safer that way.

  Two days before my flight to Paris, Karim called to tell me he wasn’t sure he would be able to come after all, because his mother was sick again, and his daughter was going through a difficult period. Besides, he thought he was coming down with the flu. I was walking on M Street in Georgetown as I listened to his slow, raspy words, out shopping for a smashing dress for my Paris trip. I lost my balance and leaned against the wall of a building. Someone asked if I was okay. Did I need help? I heard Karim’s voice: “Lara, tu es toujours là?” Lara, are you still there? “Are you kidding me?” I finally said. I had already bought the ticket, arranged my family schedule around the trip, I just couldn’t believe it. He said he was really sorry. I hung up. The brick wall I was holding was actually the Sephora store. Women inside were trying on makeup, mascara to lengthen and darken their eyelashes, lipstick to add lusciousness to their smiles, foundation to cover up imperfections on their cheeks. What a sham it all was. The only thing I could think to do was go in and look for a deep, dark lipstick.

  I was ashamed even to call my sister, but I did, after I bought the darkest-red lipstick I could find in the store. Biljana sounded troubled, not her usual upbeat cheerful and unconditionally supportive self. “Just attend the conference, Larinka, enjoy Paris, make a vacation of it, maybe hang out with other interesting men at the conference and forget the motherfucker!” she said breathlessly. But something was wrong with Biljana. She was quiet for a moment. And then she told me that Marija had called her. In a tired voice she continued to tell me that Marija was in Los Angeles, that she sounded strange and incoherent, something about a child, a boy back in Bosnia. I felt sick again. Marija’s callings and writings about a child must be true. “Did you know about it, Lara? Did you know she had a child from the rape?” I wished Biljana had not named it. Now it was truly real and truly unbearable. “Sort of, yes, I guess I knew it but didn’t want to believe it. She’s been sending me notes, letters, and I’m pretty sure she called here a few times, but Mark always answered and she must have hung up. I guess she’s preparing me for, you know… for when we finally see each other again.” Biljana said, “There was something so ominous and cavernous in the way she talked. She scared me. She said she wanted to come to Washington and try to get the boy out of Bosnia with your help, Lara. It’s awful, Larinka. I would have killed myself, that’s all.” I had never heard defeat like that in Biljana’s voice. “Of course her voice sounded ominous and cavernous, what did you expect after all that she’s been through?” I said in Marija’s defense. Though it terrified me, I felt I could deal with Marija’s war child.

  I did go to Paris after all, and I did meet with Karim, but under circumstances so dire and so wrenching that I wished Paris had never been invented. After my troubling talk with Biljana, Karim called again and poured his sweetest, most loving, most heartbreakingly romantic voice and words into my cell phone. He had been under so much pressure, under such turmoil seeing his family disintegrate. Tell me about it! He was torn between seeing his family fall to pieces and his impossible love for me, but I was the love of his life, no doubt about it, he had married his wife out of duty, but I was the one he loved. More than he had ever loved a woman. In my vulnerable state, I believed his words, which felt like soothing medication in a moment of extreme pain. I would both renew my affair with Karim and attend the political science conference, too.

  The day before I left for Paris, Marija did reach me on my home phone finally and my heart stopped for a little while. Some people’s hearts would have started beating faster and more sonorously in their chests; mine went quiet. Marija’s voice sounded far away, speaking in a language I couldn’t penetrate. “I’m going to need your help, Lara,” she said with a quick laugh. Marija had never asked me for help before. “I want to get the hell out of this perfect blue-sky California crap. You know what I mean, right?” I had no idea what she meant but just said, “Aha, of course.” “And another thing”—she hesitated—“I need to go back to Bosnia and get back my kid, you know.” She said it like the most normal thing in the world. “He’s eight, and I’d like to have him here with me.” She sounded lucid and clear, the old Marija I knew, not the cavernous one Biljana had told me about. Still I needed time before I could really believe what she was saying, before I could join her. I would find her as soon as I returned from Paris. She could come and live with me, if she wanted, I said, and we could make a plan of action. I had no idea how those clear and reasonable words emerged from my mouth, but they did easily and smoothly. She said with a laugh to watch out what I was signing up for, but that it sounded like a good plan. “Take my cell phone number, call me when you’re ready. And of course if you need me for anything.” She laughed. I didn’t want us to end the conversation and I asked her in a rush: “Marija, how did you know I was going to go to Sarajevo last fall?… Or did you know? Those notes, the ones at the woman’s house, they were for me, right, you had left them for me?” “We’ll talk about all that when we see each other, all right?” she said firmly and hung up. I felt taken aback by her abrupt end to the conversation, but then I remembered. The cruelty of the war had brushed off on her. At least now Marija was no longer in a thick cloak of darkness and unknown. She was speaking, laughing, thinking and planning. After I returned from Paris, I would find Marija, no matter how hard it might be to get wrapped up in her story. And how like Marija to think I was going to need her! My life’s troubles, in comparison with hers, seemed like mosquito bites. And as my plane took off, I was filled with the richness of life, with color and complexity, despite all the wounds and confusion. I was on my way to Paris again.

  Karim and I met in the same hotel as the previous year and the first couple of hours together brought back all the delights and passion I remembered. He seemed even more attentive and passionate than he used to; he called me all the endearing French words in the history of French romance plus the added Arabic ones for special spice. It was evening, and we were still lying next to each other in the small Parisian bed, when Karim started crying. I thought it was from happiness to be with me again, that we had finally sort of made it despite such unlikely obstacles. I stroked his face and felt tears welling in my eyes as well. I didn’t remember ever crying for happiness before, though I had heard many people’s stories of happy sobbing. I was proud I could have that experience, too. Karim then confessed to me that he had slept with another woman since our last encounter, or he had tried to though it appeared he wasn’t very successful at it, because all he thought of when he was with this other woman was me and his love of me, was what he said. He could only be a man when he was with me, he told me, and more tears flowed on his face, as though this would give me some kind of pleasure. It appeared that Karim’s big problem at that juncture in our lives was that he loved me so much that he couldn’t fuck other women because of the love he experienced for me. The woman had called him good for nothing, because he couldn’t satisfy her. She had shamed him. No words came out of my mouth. It was impossible for me to produce any intelligible sounds. But I found that my arms and legs could still move. My single persistent thought was that I needed to get out of that hotel room as quickly
as my limbs could carry me, out of that street, out of that arrondissement and out of that city and never return until a new geological era started and Paris was nothing but a huge expanse of black sand. Paris had been a huge mistake. Karim had been a huge mistake. Why had I not flown to Marija the moment she called? If Marija asked for help it meant she had thought it over a million times before saying it. I was on the completely wrong side of the world and I was paying for it.

  I don’t know how, but I managed to get dressed, gather all my things, leave the room, and ask the hotel concierge to get me a taxi to the airport. I found the Air France ticket counter at Charles de Gaulle. There were no more flights to Washington, DC, that evening, so I asked for one to anywhere in the United States. I was desperate to leave the city on the first plane that would take me across the ocean. The next one left for Los Angeles at six the next morning, and that was the one I would take. I changed my ticket to the flight to Los Angeles. I spent the rest of the evening and the night in Charles de Gaulle airport, gorging on sushi, seaweed salads, marzipan candy, and red wine from the various cafés and duty-free food stores strewn along the shiny hallways. I talked indiscriminately to strangers of various nationalities. I befriended the airport custodians from Poland, La Réunion, and Algeria who listened to my sob story in the neon night of the airport and advised me to “forget Karim, bad man, and get good American man instead.” I slept the few hours before the departure of the plane on one of the hard benches at the gate, waking up with a horrendous headache.

  As I boarded the plane I wondered what LA would be like. I would use the remaining days of my wrecked vacation to discover a new city, Hollywood, the place that produced fake dreams of happiness and heroism and adventure and forever love for millions of gullible men and women, just like me. And most important I would find Marija. A lucky thing that she had given me her cell phone number. As the plane glided above Paris, I sobbed hopelessly. I was crying for Paris, I told the doctor the flight attendant had brought over to me. I cried over the sweet hilly picturesque streets of Montmartre, the shady groves and the blue pond filled with children’s boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the dizzying views from each bridge across the Seine, and all the kitsch portrait artists that filled the city from one corner to the other. I’ll never have Paris, I said, gulping through my own cascades of tears. The doctor gave me a pill to swallow, and soon my tears dried and the dense fog clenched around my brain started to slowly dissipate. I was soon dreaming of the final scenes in the hotel room, arguing with Karim, throwing his cell phone out the window, calling him names in English, French, and Serbian and, as I fled from the room, slamming the door so hard that pieces of molding fell from the ceiling with a crumbling sound like an earthquake.

  As the plane was descending, bringing me back to the American soil, I had a vision of Mark and Karim both walking on the runway. They were walking away from me at a steady pace both wearing fancy dark suits. They waved good-bye to me. I felt only a cold sadness, like the passage of an autumn wind. I imagined Mark and Karim walking toward each other at the end of the runway, shaking hands, and then embracing just as my plane hit the hard earth of the City of Angels.

  Los Angeles. We’ll Always Have Hollywood!

  APRIL 2004

  Marija was not answering the phone. I stood confused in front of the Los Angeles airport not knowing what my next move should be. Tanned, slender, and overconfident Californians passed me. By some stroke of luck the taxi driver I flagged down was a kind man from Uzbekistan who decided to give me an hour-and-a-half tour of a dizzying conglomerate of highways punctuated by short tours of LA neighborhoods. He then dropped me in front of a lovely white hotel with blazing azaleas on the porch on a sunny street, all for the price of an airplane ticket back to Washington. It didn’t matter where he took me, since I had no idea where any part of my life was going.

  The hotel room was white and plain. Specks of darkness and redness like splintered body parts from a recent bombardment were encroaching themselves onto the wall of my room like miniature paintings, the visual art abridged version of my life. I had done bad things and was all alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Whiteness and purity were a fraud. Only specks of blood and darkness were real. And then suddenly out of those crowds of black specks that were all the bad things in my life, Marija walked toward me like a goddess of fire, more beautiful than I had ever seen or remembered her. She wore dangling sparkling jewelry all over her body, even on her ankles and in her nose, and her eyes were blazing, but not with hatred, with love. With golden shining love like a benevolent sun. She asked me to go with her. And I did.

  At that same moment, my cell phone rang, breaking my reverie, and without even looking at the number on the screen I said: “Marija? I’m in LA.” She had the same throaty, warm, somehow ironic voice I remembered. She didn’t sound a bit surprised I was there. Her voice matched the image of power and beauty I had just had of her in my vision. There was no whiteness in her voice, but neither was it all speckled with blood and darkness. It was a voice like a flooding river that swept you away and overpowered you. Marija was going to come pick me up at my hotel any minute. When I told her where I was, she said, “Fancy, fancy!” I waited for her sitting on the steps in front of the hotel, framed by enormous pots of azaleas, like a girl in some Mexican painting I once saw. The street was uncannily quiet as if everybody had died. Yet the sun shone with such warmth and conviction onto everything and enveloped me so lovingly that even if everybody on that street was dead, the warm light made it all right. I dozed off for what seemed to be a fraction of a second and when I opened my eyes a red car appeared from around the corner like a blazing eagle. It sparkled in the sun and for a second it looked like it was all ablaze. Then Marija got out wearing a simple black-and-white dress and a yellow headband. She had none of the colors I had expected, she was a black-and-white movie with a speck of yellow that seemed both amiss and necessary, both attractive and irritating. Marija looked somehow unchanged and yet a completely different person, as if time had not touched her but as if she had gone through a transformation that changed her completely. My greatest shock was that she looked neither devastated, nor broken, nor a pulsing blob of raging anger, as I probably would have been. She laughed when she saw me and her laughter scratched the surface of my brain sharply and deeply all the way to one of the last memories I had of her laughing and talking in the hallway of Belgrade University, surrounded by a group of men and women who all seemed to be mesmerized by every single word flowing out of her mouth. How did one laugh after one had been through what Marija had been through? But laugh she did. War, genocide, mass rapes, NATO bombings, adultery, bloody divorce, and custody battles in between two of Marija’s laughs stretched across a full decade and then some.

  Marija had a glass eye and a reconstructed nose but you could barely tell. It was all done to perfection by a plastic surgeon in LA who operated on movie stars, on people like Cher and Michael Jackson, she told me. During the attack, the rape, the murder of her family, she “obtained an injury” that crushed her optic nerve and her nose. She used the word obtained as if it were something one would ask for. She passed out from the pain and didn’t remember the rest, a blessing she said. “Yeah, I was among the lucky ones,” she repeated. Marija was frighteningly beautiful while she spoke. There was something detached and unnaturally poised about the way in which she rushed through the telling of those events as if recounting someone else’s life. At some point her glass eye produced a tiny sparkle in the sun in the café on Sunset Boulevard where she took me. And at that exact moment something cracked and I started sobbing with uncontrolled rage. My body shook from its core and my chest was heaving in excruciating pain. Marija held my hands without moving and without flinching and without blinking until my sobbing crisis passed; she told the blond tanned waitress who asked if we were all right and whether we needed anything to stay away from our table and not to bother us again until we called her. The people at the surrounding tables cast surrep
titious glances and pretended not to hear or see anything. They dug into their salads and sipped their diet drinks. It was only then that I realized Marija and I were speaking English and not Serbian. It felt perfectly normal to speak in English to each other about Serbian atrocities. You saw everything in LA and nobody cared. Marija paid the bill and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here. I want to show you something.”

  I followed Marija into her red convertible. I would have followed her to the moon. She seemed superhuman to me, only her glass eye—the idea of it—hurt me more than the idea of the rape, while to her it was a “blessing” because it reminded her that she didn’t remember what had happened. Her own psyche protected her from the memory. She didn’t want to talk about the war and that day, only about the future. It wasn’t clear to me what future she was talking about. Her son, probably. She asked me about my “adventure” in Paris with a throaty laugh. I poured everything out to her as if she were my personal therapist. She was whizzing across serpentine LA highways at the wheel of her red Corvette with her shock of black hair rising in the wind like a magic bird. She said: “That’s awful, Lara, what an awful thing to happen to you, I would have strangled the man.” Then she said: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Nothing made sense. How could she be so sorry for me and my little pathetic Paris melodrama, when she survived the unsurvivable? It turned out that I did need Marija as she had suggested when she called me in Washington and a good thing it was she gave me her phone number. It wasn’t her who needed saving right now, but mostly me.

  She must have guessed my thoughts: “Everybody’s suffering is their own, Lara. We all have our own boulder to bear up that fucking hill. Nobody’s pains are traded for someone else’s pains.”

  Because Marija spoke a lot in riddles and aphorisms, I had to construct the puzzle of her full meanings in my mind as we talked while also observing every one of her expressions and gestures. It was exhausting and thrilling, like a carnival of the mind. I felt I was being taken on a spatial journey in Marija’s red Corvette and all the questions that were scorching my mind about her past and the last ten years were pulverized into fine dust. At some point she turned toward me smiling lovingly and asked: “How are you doing, girl?” Then she said: “Just because one went through Apocalypse and back doesn’t mean one has to wear dowdy clothes and look like shit and be miserable all day long, right?” Soon after that she pulled into a parking lot in Burbank and showed me a sign that said WARNER BROS. STUDIOS. “Come, let’s see behind the illusion,” she said, smiling again. We got on a small tram and got off at a set that looked French. “We’ll always have Paris?” She laughed heartily. “Paris be damned!” I said. But then it clicked and I burst out laughing, too. It was the set where the Paris flashback scenes were shot in Casablanca, Ingrid and Humphrey driving in a convertible, drinking Champagne at a piano bar, dancing, swirling, laughing, and kissing, all in a make-believe cardboard reconstruction of Paris. It had all started with Marija: my fixation with Casablanca. We were in sixth grade and Casablanca was playing one night at the Kinoteka cinema where they showed old movies in the center of Belgrade and where my parents had first taken me to see the notorious Doctor Zhivago under whose fated stars I had been born and raised. I remembered the cans of condensed milk in her pantry that we ate as dessert before going to the cinema. We sat in our chairs at the end of the movie while everybody was leaving the theater, and cried like we had just watched the funeral of our parents or something tragic like that. We stayed up all night talking about the movie and arguing whether Ilsa should have gone with Rick or should have done what she did. We decided we did not like Ilsa as a character either way but we still wanted to be like her—sort of like her—only I would have gone with Rick, and Marija would have left both of them and gotten on the plane alone. I didn’t get that about Marija at the time. Why was she going to dump them both? “To increase my chances at happiness and adventure,” she had said then, and I remembered admiring her so much for the courage of her freedom. I laughed, imagining the perplexed faces of both men as their beautiful Ilsa/Marija got on that ugly warplane with neither of them. Then we opened and gulped down another can of condensed milk from Marija’s pantry and fell asleep holding hands and drowning in sugar overdose. From then on all throughout high school and sometimes even when we ran into each other in the hallways of our university, once in a while Marija would stop and look at me and recite me a line from Casablanca. It was our inside joke. “But what about us?” she would say, looking at me teary-eyed, and I wouldn’t answer with the most famous line but the one after that and would say: “We got it back last night.” The “We’ll always have Paris” line was embedded in silence and we swallowed it in a greedy gulp like the best spoonful of condensed milk in the world, sweet, gooey, and creamy.