Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  “You needed all that, Lara, you needed to cross into some kind of delinquency and deep heartbreak, you needed to break at least one of the fucking commandments. You needed to be bad for once in your lifetime, you had always been so good. Marriage, adultery, justice, it’s all sort of mythic. It made you stronger, it didn’t break you.” She left the sentence hanging in the rawness of the night on the American highway because she knew that of the two of us, despite all the heartbreaks, I was still the unbroken one.

  In the motel rooms as we were getting closer to the East Coast we watched all the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper movies we could find, the old black-and-white ones, the colored ones, and the newly colorized ones. Once in a while, just for the hell of it, we rooted for the bad guys, for the ones who were out for money and only out for themselves, who killed and raped women and children and hung their male enemies on a lonely tree in the desert. But then we always went back to rooting for the good guys, because really they were still bad, but they never hurt women and children. And their reasons for being bad were nobler, the love of a sultry woman, an ancestral killing of a mother or wife, the haunting memory of the burning of a village or a hidden treasure. In the end they were all out for treasures, land and money. And it all hung on the women in the end. It was an ancestral, biblical universe with the sexy glow of Hollywood cinematography and the classy nonchalance of Hollywood stars. Justice and revenge hung in the movie frames interchangeably and were always diluted in the long shots of cowboys riding into the sunset, the classic ending. “All we know about fucking America is from the fucking movies, but now we are landowners and nobody fucks with us,” Marija said again and again one night, as we got drunk on miniature bottles of whiskey and vodka from the little cabinet with refreshments. We laughed ourselves to sleep the way we used to in our Belgrade college years, during our Milko period, the way we did on the night we met Sally Bryant. In the end we rooted most for the women in the movies, the lustful ones, the virtuous hardworking ones, the tough and sassy ones, the unforgiving ones with a gun, the trashy madams, the angry wives, the naive daughters. And to that gallery of western women, we added two Balkan girls with a Slavic accent, fierce in their revenge and precise in their aim, landowners in the American West and riding into the sunset in search of a blond boy.

  Country of Red Azaleas

  SUMMER 2004

  When we returned to Washington, it was already summer. The duplex on Connecticut Avenue had been sold and my tenure had been denied. Welcome back to Washington, DC! I had to laugh. If Marija could laugh, so could I. According to Mark we had gotten a great offer for the duplex and there was no way we could refuse it. Or that he could refuse it. I forgot I had given Diana Coman power of attorney in my absence and she really did use it and signed the closing documents in my stead. When I called her she sounded cheerful and proud as if we had won the jackpot. Which it turned out we sort of did. Apparently a French couple working for the French embassy fell in love with the house, outbid all the other bidders, and put down their deposit in cash in a day. I was getting a little bit more than four hundred thousand dollars as my 50 percent share on the sale.

  Mark was happier than I had seen him in a long time, and he even hugged me when I walked into the duplex filled with cardboard boxes to the ceiling. He looked straight at me, which hadn’t happened in a long time. It felt like a new reunion, a new beginning overlapping the final end of our marriage. It wasn’t sad anymore, but freeing and soothing. A mellow wave of understanding and resettling moved between us in the early-summer heat. After the year of battles and glacial treatment, Mark’s hug and warm welcome were more of a shock than the four hundred thousand dollars that landed in my lap. Peace always came at such a high price but it did come once in a great while. Natalia was at her most cheerful in the multicolored flowery dress that Biljana had gotten her in Chicago and was doing somersaults throughout the emptied-out portions of the duplex. Life was a never-ending carousel and the most important part of my ride was yet to come.

  Marija had a way of gliding through rooms and spaces like a magic force, and she fluctuated between making herself overwhelmingly present and making herself unheard, unseen, nonexistent. She was a Cheshire cat, now she was nowhere to be found, and now she startled you sitting in an armchair and smiling as if she had been sitting there her entire life, like in an old family portrait. Although she had never met Marija before, Natalia became friends with her within the first minute we entered the house. And so did Mark to my utter shock. When I introduced Marija to Mark upon our arrival I saw a flicker of recognition cross his face. Life often stood in the way of being noble and generous. For a moment, Mark and I clung to our first encounter in a Belgrade tavern, all under Marija’s presence. And that moment was not wrought with sadness, pining, nostalgia, and all the other emotional wreckages from my past life with Mark in the madness of the divorce period. It felt like a friendly handshake taking place in the virtual space of our common memory and mediated by Marija’s flesh-and-blood presence in our house. Mark found just the right tone and demeanor with Marija, and even apologized for the mess. The finality of our life as a couple came with a new lightness and just the necessary amount of coolness to our relations. The new kind, polite, and classy man in our soon-to-be-forsaken duplex was now a good roommate and an excellent conversationalist.

  I knew, however, that the old history of Mark having brought Hassan over to the States instead of Marija was still hanging in the air among us like a bird of prey ready to devour every bit of our newly acquired peace and harmony. And even though Marija’s being was fully possessed by the thought of her son, I felt we needed to clear the air of that ominous presence. To my great surprise it was Mark who brought up the subject one evening over dinner, since once in a while we actually all ate together as if we were still a family. And who was to say we weren’t, marked by cracks and wounds as we all were, but somehow now tied to one another even more, precisely because of all the wounds!

  “Marija, I talked to Hassan the other day and he was happy to hear you moved here. He asked me to send you his best wishes, you know he…” Mark stuttered like he hardly ever did, he paused, he left the sentence hanging, and he seemed vulnerable, even confused. The air froze in the room for a second despite the warm summer day.

  “It would be nice to see Hassan again at last,” Marija said without a shred of irony or resentment. “And you, too, Mark, it was a good thing you brought Hassan over to the States. You had no way of knowing…”

  “I wish it had all been different, Marija. If I could, I would…” Mark halted and to my shock I saw tears in his eyes. I looked at Marija and her smile looked like tears, too. I followed the exchange between them like a stranger in my own house with a sense of relief and puzzlement all at once. The two of them needed to confront each other just like that and tear up the evil bird of prey feather after bloody feather.

  Marija leaned over toward Mark and gently touched his hand as if consoling him. I felt a deep scratch of jealousy in my throat. I wanted to scream to Marija and say: He is not the one who needs consoling, you are the one who needs mending and consoling. Instead I stuffed a piece of blackened salmon in my mouth. I drank from my wine and stared at Natalia quivering with emotion beside me. I completely missed the remaining conversation between Mark and Marija. By the time I had finished my salmon, their words sounded like fast-forwarded bits of an unintelligible language. My thoughts were louder than the outside world and the conversation going on in the room right next to me.

  “All we have is the present, and my son is in the present,” I heard Marija say. “I wouldn’t have had him if I had come…” Her Cheshire cat smile lit up the room for a brief moment, carrying with it desperation, resignation, and bitter irony all at once.

  “But at what price, Marija! At what price! I would have never had your courage!”

  I had never seen Mark so human and so unraveled. If it hadn’t been for Mark I wouldn’t have had Natalia, my thoughts resumed, as i
f wanting to compete with Marija, and then I just thought The ifs don’t matter anymore. Natalia looked up and took turns examining each one of us. Then she giggled and asked for the honey-and-almond cake that Marija had made for us. Mark stood up in a flash to bring it to the table.

  During the following weeks Natalia moved between us with the grace of a ballerina, tiptoeing her way in and out of all family interactions with a sly smile. I may have thought that reading and discovering some of the world’s worst horrors in Marija’s notes from Sarajevo were going to break her, but they seemed only to have made her stronger, with a maturity that still held the last sparkles of her childhood. She and Marija were made of the same metal: the bending and unbreakable gold of the stars.

  I took the news of my denied tenure with a shrug. A brief moment of sadness at the word failure written all over my career crossed me. But mostly I felt unexpected relief. At least now there would be no more waiting and guessing. The news came in the form of a letter that was waiting for me on my desk, together with all the other mail collected in my absence, including a letter with Tunisian stamps. I didn’t bother opening that one, but I did open the envelope with the letterhead of the university. It announced that the vote had been “unfavorable” for my tenure and promotion. It was when I read that word that I laughed. Unfavorable, a word of diluted negativity, was priceless. Why couldn’t they just say: You did not get tenure, or The vote for your tenure and promotion was negative, or You failed, your academic career is finished? That wimpish unfavorable evoked a scene with people sitting in front of a meal they didn’t like and turning up their noses at the sight and smell of it. Maybe to get tenure everything was supposed to be the other way around, maybe I had gotten it all wrong and I should have done a lousy job teaching, not done any research, and pretended not to see my colleagues when they passed me in the hallway. Maybe you weren’t supposed to be good to be promoted, or maybe you just had to be a man. What was the difference, really, between here and good old Yugoslavia, I asked myself without bothering to find an answer.

  Marija was more upset by the news of my denied tenure than I was. She suggested I appeal it, or sue the university. I should go ahead and hire a labor attorney, she advised. That only made me weary, to think of throwing myself into a new litigation procedure with those same colleagues of mine who had already been inappropriately involved in the messy operation of my custody and divorce trial. The most important thing, I told Marija, was to unravel the logistics of adopting her son and bringing him to America. I was now ready to throw myself into someone else’s tragedy and misery. I asked her to please not mention my tenure and suing anymore, I might even get out of the academic line of work altogether and work for a nonprofit organization for women’s rights or something noble like that. Then I told Marija of my plan to see my attorney and get her advice on the matter of her son. I knew Diana had worked on some cases of adoption of orphans from Romania. Every time I mentioned the boy, the son, the little round-headed child in the blurry picture that had become a tiny spider in my nightmare in the LA hotel, Marija stretched and relaxed and moved like a purring cat. I kept thinking: How was she going to look at him every day of her life without being reminded of that day, how was she going to pull any love toward that child? And invariably, every single time, Marija heard my thoughts and answered me directly, without me having uttered a single word on the matter: “I think about that day all the time, Lara. But the sperm and the egg that merged and produced this child didn’t know what was going on when that happened. I look at the two things,” she’d say, “the violence and the child—as separate. He could have been born just as much as the result of overpowering and tender love as of a hideous crime, it makes no difference to him—or to me.” Her voice would wind down in a melodic way, her face acquiring again that lunar sadness that transfixed me like a supernatural force. “I can’t go on with my life until I have that boy. It’s just how it is. He must be lonely and scared in the care of that woman, with no children to play with, stigmatized because of his origins.”

  Diana Coman told us we had to go about it via the regular adoption route, and not try to claim the child on the basis of Marija’s biological maternity. First, she needed proof that she was the biological mother. Who was going to believe her? And to start the process of showing biological parentage based on DNA testing across two continents would have been too daunting and most likely not successful. When Diana said that, Marija became fidgety like I hadn’t seen her yet since our meeting in LA; she wrung her hands and cracked her knuckles. When I looked at her, I saw the full horror of that day in July 1995 displayed glaringly on her face. The gushing of blood, the obscene panting, the muffled screams, flesh, organs, guns, screams, begging for death, sighing for death, screaming the sharpest scream across the black earth. It all passed for one second on Marija’s face like an apocalyptic cloud. The next second it was gone and a strange light, a blueness and rosiness, spread over her like the sky becoming uncannily clear after a devastating tornado. Red azaleas flooded the world in a fierce desire to make it bearable, livable, and possible again. Both Diana and I were heaving from what we had just witnessed and couldn’t say a word. It was the first time I had seen Diana Coman undone. Tears flowed down my face. Tears flowed down Diana’s face, the air in the room felt damp with sadness. And then Marija spoke: “All right, tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it. That’s all.”

  Diana devised a plan. She knew people who knew people in Sarajevo at one of the adoption agencies. She also knew a couple of Bosnians in Washington who worked at the Bosnian rehabilitation center and who could give her invaluable information about the adoption of children who were born during and after the war. Apparently they were a special category, the “war children.” She was going to do all the paperwork as if it were all a regular adoption. But the woman who had raised the child needed to get involved, too, and to go along with the plan. Over the next few days Diana drafted papers and made phone calls while Marija was on the phone with people from Sarajevo, sometimes hiding in my study or in the bathroom to talk, not even letting me overhear the conversations. Sometimes her voice was shrill, sometimes plaintive and defeated. But always she kept on moving forward. There was no stopping Marija from getting what she wanted. Once I heard her talking to the woman who had the child, something about compensation. One evening I heard Marija cry on the phone, begging the woman to let her son talk to her. And then I heard her say in the sweetest Serbian, “I will see you soon, my love.” Still, she needed a location, so she could find the mystery woman.

  Mark happened to be home from work the day the three of us were leaving on our Balkan adventure and he offered to take us to the airport. Despite all my expectations, Mark and Marija had developed a warm friendship during the weeks in our house starting with the evening of our mythic dinner. Brief and achy waves of jealousy went through my body occasionally. Mark’s idiosyncrasies started irritating me all over again like in the period preceding our divorce, while they didn’t seem to bother Marija a bit. I didn’t want to share Marija with Mark, or really with anyone other than Natalia. It seemed that love hardships and breakups had made me brittle instead of stronger. At the airport, Mark embraced and kissed Natalia tenderly and asked her to send him a postcard. He hugged Marija and wished her good luck with her search and then he turned to me and said “Good-bye, Lara,” as if it was adieu and forever. It melted all jealousy and revealed to me the puzzling paradox that I had been right both to marry Mark in the fall of 1992 and to divorce Mark twelve years later. I leaned over and hugged him with no regrets.

  When Marija, Natalia, and I landed at the Sarajevo airport, Marija turned pure white and I thought she was going to drop dead the next second. She stood in the middle of the airport, her eyes closed and breathing very slowly. It wasn’t the shock of being on native land—she had visited Sarajevo a couple of times since the war. It was the weight of what was ahead of us. I observed as she breathed deeply, opened her eyes, and regained her color and her fo
rce.

  Natalia seemed to be as much Marija’s daughter as she was mine. She understood Marija’s brief journeys to the edge of life and death, and would take her hand and hold it tight. Ferida waited for us at the airport with Mira. Ferida cried and hugged both of us effusively, a different Ferida from the controlled and almost aloof woman Natalia and I had met on our last trip. After I’d traveled back and forth out of American and French airports, the Sarajevo airport now seemed like a little toy version of one. The customs police were tired and old-fashioned, the security machines and checkpoints obsolete, the whole place unusually drab and nearly deserted.

  We discovered that the woman had left her Sarajevo apartment right before we’d arrived and left no trace. She was supposed to call Marija as soon as she knew we were there, but this never happened, nor did she answer her phone in Sarajevo. Marija was growing more agitated, holding her nervousness under layers of maternal anticipation. Sarajevo shone and hummed that summer of our return with the enthusiasm of reconstruction and the pride of hosting international tourists. We moved through the city of our childhood like a colorful caravan of reckless refugees. To Marija and me, who hadn’t witnessed the processes of its reconstruction over the years, it seemed almost fake, a movie set, a bit too glossy, a bit too colorful. Tarik the copper vendor was still selling his shiny coffee- and teapots at the same corner, only his face was wrinkled and his hair white. We drank little cups of dark, grimy coffee at the café next door while talking with Tarik about the business and the reconstruction, and avoiding the topic of the war, which Marija refused to discuss. We drank our coffee, ordered a baklava, we smiled at each other and just said nothing. Somewhere in another life, two adventurous girls chased each other and a wild ray of magic all through those streets and sloping alleys, up and down cobblestone steps, in and out of hidden courtyards. They stopped at a street corner, ate their fruit spoils for the day, ran some more, brushed by rows of stone houses with red flowers hanging from their windows, and ended up in an enchanted courtyard crossed by a tiny gurgling stream and surrounded by fruit trees and pines.