Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  Marija sat down in the armchair across from the bed and next to the window, and the last rays of the setting sun lingered on her. The sadness that spread on her was luminous. It was as if the moon had melted onto her face and her sadness were a separate creature. Here was Marija and here was Marija’s sadness raining all over us and drowning us. It overwhelmed me, but I couldn’t resist it. I knew I wasn’t going to run away and I was going to go with Marija to Bosnia and to the end of the world and to the empty space in the sky that was left after the meltdown of the moon onto her face.

  We slept in my hotel bed holding each other like two fugitives on the run. Marija’s sleep was so deep and so dark that at some point during the night I thought she died. I lay unmoving until my body went numb for fear of waking her. In the short periods when I slept I had dreams that made Frida Kahlo’s paintings of eviscerated hearts and bloody fetuses look like innocent still lives: pears and grapes and feathers on a country table. Marija’s eyes kept opening up as if dark endless holes and armies of horrid creatures were coming out of them. Marija’s limbs were falling off her like a doll’s, and Natalia was holding one of her limbs and crying over it; the little boy with the round head in the picture was shrinking and becoming a spider. The well in the picture was bubbling with rotting bodies, the bodies of Bosnians killed in the genocide, and a yellow ribbon was tied to the well saying not to drink that water. I desperately wanted to hold the spider in the dream and protect it. Then I woke up with a jump and had to rush to the bathroom to vomit. When I came back Marija was sleeping in the same position I had left her, unmoved, almost without breathing. I fell back asleep next to her terrifyingly silent body.

  At some point toward morning Marija made coffee and started talking about postmodern theory. I couldn’t tell precisely whether I was hallucinating or dreaming or whether Marija’s words were real and happening in real time in my hotel room. I thought I had said something like: “Are you kidding me, Marija, postmodern theory at four in the morning? Just shut up please and let me sleep!” She said postmodern theory claimed that everything was text, even us, humans were texts and what was the real, then? There was no real, only a concept of the real that was different for everybody. Everybody’s real was different. But then, she said, if you had your optic nerve crushed under the back of a rifle, then you were not text anymore. Then you were a handful of screaming flesh and that was the only thing that was real. Postmodern theory was bullshit, she concluded.

  When the bright irreverent LA sun shone its late-morning rays onto my face and I opened my eyes I had no idea where I was. Then it all rushed in: the previous day with Marija so jammed with surprises that it seemed like an accident in the cosmic calendar. I got up and looked for her but she was nowhere to be found. The room was picked up and seemed unused except for the bed I had slept in. The bed we had slept in. I felt heavy from the horrid dreams, exhausted from the nocturnal conversation about postmodern theory, with my head screwed on all wrong. Then it hit me: the pang of pain from Marija’s absence. I didn’t want her to be gone even though her presence made me experience psychic shocks that were the human equivalent of earthquakes of the degree of ten on the Richter scale. I felt a gaping hole so deep and so excruciating that I bent over and held myself in a folded position at the edge of the bed. Marija rushed in through the door with a tray filled with pastries and fresh fruit, in her black-and-white dress, the shiny yellow ribbon holding her freshly combed hair.

  “Have you found a new religion? Who are you praying to, Lara dear?” she said laughingly. “Here, have some breakfast, you had a rough night, must have had bad dreams, huh?”

  I wanted to kiss Marija’s face and hair and scream with joy at the sight and the sound of her. Then she asked me: “So what do you want to do today, my dear?”

  “Here is what we are going to do,” I said. “We will have this delicious breakfast together, then you will go home, wherever that is, and pack a few things, and then you will take me to the airport. And then you and I will get on the first plane to Washington, DC. And when we are there, you will meet Natalia and we will make plans to go to Bosnia and get the boy. What do you say?”

  The Wild West

  MAY 2004

  “No,” said Marija later that day as she was driving me to her LA apartment. “On second thought, let’s not go to DC right away. First we take a trip out west. We need it. Both of us. We need a winding-down time, we need some time to cross over and to discover America. Neither you nor I has any idea what this country is all about, Lara. Now that you are with me and I know you will help me out, we can take our time for a while longer, don’t you think so, Lara dear? We’ll go to Washington next week.” “What about Natalia? She’s expecting me home this week.” Marija thought for a few seconds: “We’ll make it up to her, she’ll understand.” How did Marija know that Natalia would understand? What did she know about Natalia? Nothing at all. Again, for another second I wanted to run away and forget that Marija was back, forget that Marija existed. But I might as well have forgotten that I existed. Maybe soon I was going to be whole and I was going to reach the stream of clean water and be renewed. A new Lara without cracks and with a smooth face and soul would emerge from the clean water.

  I couldn’t say no to anything that Marija asked for. Once on that ride, I couldn’t stop. And when she said “Lara dear” with her elongated vowels the way she always used to, I had even less willpower to deny her anything she asked for. It wasn’t that she imposed her will on me. It was the way it had always been since the day she stood in the door of our classroom in second grade: I wanted to do everything she wanted because I knew it would be a magical ride, whether we ran across Sarajevo in the summer or went to Persia on the miniature Turkish golden velvet slippers. I provided the politics of it, she provided the magic, she joked and I laughed. I called Natalia and told her I was going to take another week or more to be home, that I would come home with Marija and she was going to love her. “Really, wow! How cool,” she said joyously, but then asked: “Is she all right, Mama, you know, you said she had been hurt…” “Yes, Natalia, she is fine, great actually. She is coming home with me and then we’ll all go on a trip together. We’ll go back to Sarajevo, isn’t that exciting?” Natalia said not to worry, that she was fine, she and Dad were doing things together. “How awesome, we’re going back to Sarajevo, Mama,” Natalia said. I wondered by what miracle Natalia came so complete out of cracked and incomplete me, Lara Kulicz, by what miracle had she been left unscathed and was emerging stronger than any of us.

  “You put all your love into her, Lara, she’ll always have that, she is full to the brim, don’t you know it?” Marija said with her usual wisdom about life. “And you think a trip out west is going to give us the final understanding of the mystery of America?” We were flying again in her red Corvette. “America is not a mystery, it’s a project of displaced people with a short-term memory that is still in the works. America destroys and creates itself simultaneously in an ongoing process. And yes, I think going out west, seeing the frontier, might be of some help to us. We are frontier girls ourselves, aren’t we? If anything it’s fucking stunning, you’ll love it, I promise.”

  In this Balkan version of Thelma and Louise, Marija and I drove for hours and then for days across high plains, through canyons and alongside turbulent waterfalls, across orange deserts, through brooding forests of spruce and shimmering light-green aspen, on hairpin roads along several-thousand-foot drops that made your head swirl like you were drunk on absinthe. We were running away from our pasts but also thanks to the distance we could better understand them. We relived our childhood, our teenage and college years, and stopped at the brink of the day when we parted in Belgrade right when the war had started. We reached that point several times from different perspectives and every time we got stuck there. We rewound everything and played it backward and forward and invented new scenarios. What if I had stayed with Marija, gone with her to Sarajevo, forgotten about Mark? “You would have ne
ver had Natalia!” Run, run, Lara, run from the past, you’re in the Wild West now, no need to tiptoe around what-ifs! “Yes, but I would have had another Natalia, I wouldn’t have known about this Natalia and it would have been just fine. And maybe you and yours would have been safe,” and my voice would drop to almost inaudible on the last words as if stepping on minefields. “Because you were the holy mother of Christ to protect us all from the rage of the Republika Srpska? You might have been dead, too. And then what?” We would burst out laughing at points of memory where most people would have lain on the ground and howled in misery. “We are crossing over,” Marija would say as if we were going to witness a cosmic event. “We’re reaching the frontier,” she would say with an alluring smile. The frontier was anything from a run-down gas station with an orange awning in the literal middle of nowhere of endless expanses of rocky land and big vaulted sky to lines in the past that neither of us was ready or willing to cross but were tiptoeing gently around in a carnivalesque ballet of swift forward steps, pirouettes, and swift steps backward.

  “Everything gets muddled up in the war, yet you get to the ultimate truths about people like in no other situation. There is a fierce clarity about the war, you get to see humanity all bare, like an X-ray, just the skeleton, the bare bones of humanity, who people really are,” Marija said at some point as we were driving past pueblo settlements and Indian reservations, layers of frontiers and past wars for territory. “Maybe it’s all about land,” she went on. “Marija, it’s about power,” I ventured on the lines of my incorrigible lifelong political training. “You’re such a politician. Of course it’s about power—land is power.” I wasn’t going to give up so easily. Something in the fiercely violet sunset descending upon the layers of mountains gave me the stubbornness to stand up to Marija’s theory, as if I had any stake in winning this argument about the real cause of wars. “No, it’s never as concrete as that. It’s the abstraction of power, the thrill, and the rush that comes with the subjugation of one human being by another. Land is a pretext. Even oil is a pretext. There is enough land for everybody on this planet—look at this,” I said, proud of my theory, extending out my arm to the high plains and the indomitable mountains in the distance, all empty, all uninhabited, all ready for the taking.

  Marija was quiet for a while, a silence akin to death. Then she stopped the car at another gas station, put her head on the steering wheel, and repeated five times the word subjugation. A torrent of sobs erupted from her like the flood of doomsday. The sobs were a creature in themselves, taking full possession of Marija and tearing every bit of her reconstructed self apart. I was afraid that parts of her were going to fall off like in my nightmare, as if she were splintered by a bomb from within: limbs, organs, body parts shattered across the rural gas station as in the most atrocious of horror movies and in the midst of it all the wicked and immortal glow of her glass eye staring in grotesque immobility at everything. Some men in cowboy boots stared at us as they were filling up the gas tanks of their enormous trucks. A woman truck driver got out of her truck and moved slowly toward our car. Marija’s sobs were unstoppable. The woman truck driver was tiny and red-haired and reminded me of Sally Bryant.

  “Sweetheart, do you need some help?” Her low voice trailed sweetly in the cool air of that spring somewhere in the Wild West, where two refugee women from the Balkans were lost and trying to make sense of lands, frontiers, memories, their own lives, and the desert ahead of them. Marija stopped her sobs instantaneously. She looked up at the woman and smiled. There was the Marija of my childhood again sitting next to me on the school bench and playing with toy Turkish slippers. I couldn’t keep up with Marija, and again I thought maybe I wanted out. The past was intolerable and we would never be able to cross over that frontier. I wasn’t made for that insanity, I hadn’t started the Bosnian war and it wasn’t my fault that Marija went through what she had been through. I missed Natalia, I missed sanity and normality. I missed my corner of the stupid Washington duplex, safety and peace. The expanses of red rocks and the huge edgy rocks and drops terrified me like prehistoric monsters. “Thank you, we would like some help, yes, if you don’t mind,” said Marija in her sweetest voice.

  The red-haired woman truck driver, whose name was Pam, told us to follow her gigantic truck to her little adobe house in the desert. I drove Marija’s Corvette while she was fixing her tear-smeared face and combing her hair. Pam fed us cactus stew while her Chaco Indian husband worked on an ancient Chevrolet convertible with wings like the cars in the seventies. Everything seemed stuck in previous decades except for the cell phones and the computer. Her twin boys played on the dirt floor with miniature trucks while their mother fed to them bits of dried beef and cactus from the stew. They were four years old yet tiny as toddlers. The entire family was small, the house was small. It felt cozy and safe to be there.

  We found out we were in a pueblo and the lunar landscape surrounding us was made of mesas and ridges, canyons and dune fields. The sagebrush and the juniper bushes spread luscious and delicate perfumes in the dry quivering air. “I too have a son. He is eight years old,” Marija said, leaving me with my mouth wide open, cactus stew dripping on my chin. “He is very tiny, too, he is smaller than he should be for his age.” The Chaco man spoke softly with an unexpectedly thin voice. His name was Hope and also Crazy Bull because he had left his reservation in New Mexico years ago and went around the country talking about the poverty and desperation on the reservations, trying to raise money and consciousness of the plight of his people. He told Marija that small boys are good, they will never be too arrogant, but kind and gentle. Marija grinned with pleasure. “Yes, I know, that’s exactly how my son is: blond and small and very gentle.” I wanted to say that she had hardly even met her son, that she had no idea whether he was sweet and gentle as a lamb or violent as a crazy bull. But the certainty in Marija’s voice and expression was so indomitable that the words died on my lips and for the first time, Marija’s fantasy of her own sweet, tender blond boy entered my spirit as well. For some inexplicable reason the image of that boy fit perfectly with the dune fields and the juniper-delicate fragrances and the cactus meal in Pam’s small adobe house.

  Marija had dropped her past somewhere in a red desert in the Wild West yet she also carried it. She was inventing herself and her past as she went along, but the little boy in the house with the well was at the center of everything, an unmoved point in the darkness like a lighthouse for lost ships. “That’s good,” said the truck driver woman, “boys are good. They are fun to have.” She gave them each a piece of dried beef in their tiny mouths, which opened up for the food like hungry birds. “Where does your son live? Does he stay with you?” Pam asked. “He is far away in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, at the end of the world, really,” Marija answered casually, like she had known and raised this mystery son for her entire life and as if Sarajevo were just next door. “You’ve been through something, haven’t you, honey?” said Pam with no preparation. “I can tell. I’ve been through stuff, too,” she added. “People say it gets better with time, but it doesn’t really. You just learn to live with it, whatever it is, with the stuff that hurt you. With your wounds and scars I mean.” People were like the landscapes in that part of the world, in constant metamorphosis, becoming something else before your eyes, from rounded orange desert rocks to luscious aspen forests, to edgy gray rocks hanging above your head, to high plains and dark lakes to desert again. The desert and the orange rocks and the mesas and the sagebrush were our favorites. This was our America. Pam gave us her own and her husband’s bed to sleep in that night and she and Hope and the children all slept on different sofas in the tiny main room. Even though everything was tiny, there was room for everybody. The lands out there were endless, uninhabited, and wild, but the adobe houses were small and self-contained, they held us in, they made us feel safe and whole. During the night, the two boys crawled into bed with us and cuddled against us, between Marija and me. Their bodies were fresh and light, velvety
and soft, they whispered words in a language that could have been Spanish, but wasn’t really, maybe Navajo. Marija and I each fell asleep holding one of the twins. It felt perfect for a night.

  “This is a new generation of boys who will make the world a better place: these twins, my son, the new boys of this century.” Marija had a habit of talking in the middle of the night. She wasn’t sleep talking, she was awake and would start up a conversation in the dead of the night. I learned not to answer, and after a while she would go back to sleep. Marija’s sleep was forever compromised so she took me with her on long conversational rides that ranged from theories of war and warfare to French movies to nouvelle cuisine to fashion to child psychology or modern architecture. She made up for lost worlds at night and the rides were exhausting. But during our road trip through the Wild West, no matter how hard and troubled our night rides through past and future universes might have been, I was always happy to find her still next to me in the morning.

  “My son is blond,” Marija repeated in the morning at the breakfast table with the Chaco Mexican American family. “That’s nice, blond is always beautiful,” said Pam. She was leaving that day for another week of driving transports across the country. She held her boys each on one knee through breakfast and fed them again like a mother bird would feed her chicks. “You need to go see your son, wherever he is,” Pam said. “I hope my boys didn’t bother you during the night. They’re used to always sleeping next to someone, usually it’s their father and me, but if someone else visits, they have no problem climbing in bed with them. They are funny that way.” The boys said, “The ladies smell nice,” and I was surprised to hear perfect little English words come out of the boys’ mouths almost in unison. Marija laughed and said she enjoyed their presence in bed, it was comforting, and it made her think of her son. Marija spoke of her son with the assurance and knowledge of a consummate mother. If she had deserted him once because she hadn’t even been aware she had given birth to a live creature eight years ago when it happened in some woman’s house near Sarajevo, she was now giving birth to this blond son again and again in Pam and Hope’s house. He was as real and as alive as the dark-skinned twins sitting on their mother’s lap across the table. Upon departure Pam gave us a quilt in shades of orange and light green; it had the colors of the landscape and was soft and feathery and smelled sweet like some kind of hay or lavender. We gave her money and chocolate and she took it with a smile. Her husband came out from under the Chevy he was fixing and wished us a good trip. We left the small family standing in the road against their tiny adobe house with cacti and orange earth and red flowers around it. We wanted to take them with us, we wanted to stay with them forever, for some reason it broke our hearts to leave the pueblo family with the twins in the adobe house. We couldn’t stand any more departures, separations, good-byes, but we had to go on.