The Girl They Left Behind

by Roxanne Veletzos

  When it ended, Natalia remained motionless, her head buried between her knees, her hands covering her ears. It was Sofia who finally carried her up the steps into the chalky haze that enveloped the house. It was Sofia who soothed the girl in those first terrible moments, for Despina was already on the phone, dialing frantically, redialing, grasping with a shard of terror that the line was dead.

  Two hours passed, and there was still no sign of Anton.

  “Sweetheart, why don’t you go up and rest?” she kept urging Natalia, who wouldn’t let go of her hand. There was so much debris, so much broken glass in the cellar, it wasn’t safe, though it seemed pointless to ask. “I’m not going, Mama! Please stop asking. I want to stay right here with you!”

  “Miss Talia, I’ll stay with you for a while.” Sofia finally interceded, even though she didn’t much want to leave Despina’s side, either. “Your mother needs to be alone for a bit.”

  Reluctantly, she went up with Sofia in tow. Watching her small frame move up the staircase, Despina breathed out a small sigh of relief. Now that she was alone, she needed to move. She needed to keep her body moving so that she wouldn’t go mad.

  “He is all right, he is all right,” she muttered out loud, trying to calm the wild thrashing of her heart.

  But then she remembered the arguments she and Anton had had in recent weeks. How he would not, could not, promise her that he would go into a shelter if this moment came. He had begged her to understand that he could not go into a coffin, that even their own cellar felt like a wooden box to him. And now, with the phone lines down, there was no way to reach him. But surely he would walk in any minute. Any minute, she would hear his voice in the foyer calling her name, calling Talia. All she had to do was keep busy until then.

  At the threshold of the dining room, she paused, her fingers curling around the doorjamb. From the sight of it, it seemed impossible that their home had not been reduced to rubble. The Vanderbilt chandelier had fallen on the table with such force that not one of its crystal baubles remained intact. Everything in the room lay underneath a layer of glass so fine it looked like a sandstorm had blown through.

  Struggling not to breathe in the dust, she crossed the room to open the terrace doors. Something sharp stung her foot, and she bent down to pick it up. It took her a moment to realize it was one of the candleholders that she had inherited from her grandmother. It had been severed in half. Just this morning, she had placed the pair on the sideboard, alongside the good china for Easter lunch. There would be no Easter now, no lavish feasts, no colored eggs, no family celebration.

  Her sisters. Maria. Were they all right? She realized that she had not spoken with any of them in nearly a week, since the Sunday before, when they had all met at Café Capsa on Victoria Avenue. That afternoon, there hadn’t been a trace of suspicion of what was to come, as if war was some distant thing, something that had nothing to do with their lives. The five of them had squeezed in together at a table near the window, and, savoring an assortment of pastries and English tea, they had gone over details for Easter lunch. Ecaterina was to bring the champagne, Elena some hors d’oeuvres if there was enough time to pull it together. Her cousin Maria said she would do her best to be on time. Maria. There had been something strange about her that afternoon. She’d seemed out of sorts, troubled even, standing there in the hallway near the ladies’ room, waiting for Despina to come out.

  “Desi.” She’d called her name in a whisper.

  Startled, Despina had turned, and seeing Maria, she’d let out a breath. “God, you gave me a fright.” She’d chuckled, reaching for her cousin’s arm and squeezing it affectionately—but Maria had not smiled back.

  “Can we talk, after the girls leave? Just you and I alone?”

  “Of course! You and I always talk when they’re gone,” she recalled saying, expecting a laugh, but only a slight frown had passed over her cousin’s face.

  “There’s something I want to tell you. That I feel I need to tell you. In private, Despina, just you and I.”

  But the afternoon had passed much too fast, and they’d lost track of time. The waiter, so diligent at the beginning of the afternoon, had grown visibly impatient. Ecaterina was the first to notice his exasperated look as he peeled away the last of the tablecloths, after sweeping the bread crumbs with a silver brush.

  “Goodness, we should be going,” Ecaterina said, checking her watch. “They are trying to close to prepare for dinner. It’s nearly three!”

  They’d collected their cardigans, exchanged hurried kisses, and flown out the door. Within moments, Despina and Maria found themselves standing alone on the sidewalk. It hardly seemed like the right time or place for a serious discussion.

  “Let’s talk next week,” Maria had said as they embraced. “I will come and see you in a few days.”

  Whatever it was that her cousin had planned on telling her, Despina hoped it was not to do with her health. Maria looked pale and exhausted these days. She was spreading herself too thin, barely taking the time for a proper meal before flying off to the Red Cross headquarters, where she spent entire days on the telephone collecting funds for the hospitals and war orphans and families of wounded soldiers. Strangely, she no longer worked at the orphanage. Despina had never asked her why she had quit her job there, but she figured that Stefan had put his foot down at last, for Maria knew no personal limits when it came to those children. Poor Stefan, Despina thought. How was he to know that his wife would only find a new cause, an all-consuming endeavor to dedicate herself to?

  Please, dear God, let her be all right. Please, let them all be all right, she prayed silently now as she made her way through the house, taking in the rest of the wreckage, thankful that at least Natalia’s piano remained unscathed. In front of the sole window that was intact, she paused, but she kept her eyes downcast, unable to look out. Where was the sound of the traffic, of children playing at the end of the block? Everything was so still that she could hear the ticking of the pendulum clock. She could hear the jagged inhalation of her own breath. And suddenly, something else. Somewhere below, she heard the shuffle of steps, the jangle of keys, and she tore madly through the house.

  Ten whole minutes had passed, and she couldn’t stop crying. She hated this uncontrollable display of emotion, but she couldn’t get hold of herself. Tears flowed, unstoppable, drenching his shirt as she buried her head in his chest.

  “I’m right here, I’m all right,” he whispered into her hair, kissing her head, her wet cheeks, as she slid down to the floor, pulling him along with her. On the tiled floor, he cradled her in his arms and rocked her back and forth until her sobs melted into long, deep sighs.

  They were dusty, his hands, when she took them in hers. A deep gash spanned the length of one palm, and when she pressed her lips on it, the metallic taste of dried blood made her shudder. He winced, too, but said nothing, and they remained like that for a while, not daring to move, not daring to let go of each other.

  “Where’s Talia?” he whispered after some time.

  “She’s upstairs in her room, resting. She was so frightened, Anton. So frightened it broke my heart. What’s this?” she said, gesturing to the briefcase he had dropped near the door.

  “Oh, that. I’ve been meaning to move the stamp collection to the house. No better time than today.”

  She did not laugh, as he’d hoped she would, and he pulled her away from him then, gazed down at her with tenderness and a slight amusement.

  “Despina. My strong, beautiful Despina. Don’t you know by now that you need not worry about me?”

  Her answer was barely a whisper. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Nothing will happen to me or to us. We will go through this together as we always have. We will fight, and we will live, and soon enough things will be just like they used to.”

  “You’re right,” she said, because she knew that he was.

  He was here now, safe wit
h her, wiping the tears that had pooled underneath her eyes with the thumb of his injured hand. They were together; they were alive. It felt good, his warm hand on her face. The curtain of dread had lifted a little.

  From the top of the stairs, Natalia watched them silently. Earlier, she had tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come, no matter how hard she tried. As the afternoon wore on, she, too, had become anxious about her father’s absence. Now that she had heard his voice in the foyer, she wanted to leap down the steps, fly into his arms, and be pulled into their embrace. But at the top of the steps, something held her back. Whatever was passing between her parents at that moment seemed to be for them alone. Instead, she retreated back to her room, slipping quietly down the hall, past the stand from which her mother’s porcelain figurines had fallen and smashed into a thousand pieces.

  16

  July 1944

  THE LONG, HOT SUMMER STRETCHED on interminably in a predictable pattern, the sirens sounding at the same time each day, like clockwork. Despina and Natalia huddled in the cellar, waiting out the worst of it, lighting kerosene lamps and counting the rows of jars on the wooden shelves above them to make the time pass. Anton ran to the park across the street, where he and Natalia used to feed ducks in the pond before the war. There he sat on a bench, with his stamp collection in his lap and no more for cover than the thick branches of a sycamore tree. Heart pounding in his chest, he sat and watched the debris falling around him, obliterating parts of his neighborhood, praying that it wouldn’t be their home that would be hit this time, praying that his family would be spared.

  Despina had given up trying to persuade him to go underground. After begging, crying, shouting, and threatening, all her efforts had been in vain. Now she just made the sign of the cross when the sirens began. At last, she had come to accept the idea that God alone would keep him safe out there on that park bench, and her efforts, too, were best spent on prayer.

  But it wasn’t just Anton’s inability to go into a shelter that had been the cause of their recent arguments. For weeks now, Anton had been trying to convince Despina to join her sister Ecaterina on her family’s estate, just outside Bucharest in the village of Snagov, where the bombs had not yet reached. All her other sisters, he repeatedly pointed out, had long left the city. One by one, they had taped their windows, rolled up their rugs, covered their furniture with sheets, and boarded trains that took them to remote places that the Allies had no interest in bombing. It was no longer safe to remain in Bucharest, he kept telling her, not with all the unimaginable rumors about refugee camps across the border in Poland. Not with the Führer scorching the earth so close to home.

  “I cannot bear, Despina, to think of what I heard in line at the bakery this morning,” he said one night as the two of them were getting ready for bed. “Don’t ask. You wouldn’t believe it. The Germans are such civilized people, how can they do such things?”

  “Well, there’s been nothing about it in the papers, darling,” she replied, sitting at her vanity table and removing her pearl earrings. “And rumors have a way of proving themselves untrue.”

  “Perhaps, but it isn’t safe for you and Talia to be here. Hitler’s army is too close now. Too close. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Despina placed her hands on the vanity table and shot him a look in the mirror.

  “You know I’m not leaving without you. And since you are on call with the Army Reserves, I guess there is nowhere to go. Besides, we are not alone. Victor is still here. And what about Maria and Stefan? They haven’t run off like frightened deer. Why should we?”

  It was a pointless argument, Despina knew. True, Maria and Stefan were still just across town, but their existence—like everyone else’s—had shrunk around the few hours in the day when it was safe to leave the proximity of a shelter. There seemed to be less and less time for the smallest of necessities—replenishing the pantry, picking up mail at the post office, or simply going outside for a short walk before the sirens sounded—and they rarely saw one another now. She still did not know what Maria had intended to tell her that afternoon at Café Capsa, before the first bombing. The last time she had tried bringing up the subject on the telephone, the line had gone out in mid-conversation. Since then, they had spoken once, but Maria was rushing off to the Red Cross, and she had promised she would come by to visit soon. Despina hoped she wouldn’t let too much time pass. She could get by without the company of her sisters, but not having Maria around felt like some essential part of her existence had been amputated from her.

  “Please, Despina, I beg you,” Anton said now, coming up behind her and placing a soft kiss on her neck. “There is no telling what will happen next, what will happen tomorrow. I only know one thing,” he went on, taking her hand and pressing it to his lips. “You and Talia are not safe here.”

  She laughed and traced his cheek affectionately. “Is this how you plan to convince me? With kisses? Your charm won’t work this time!” She turned to him fully, then stood and draped her arms around him. “Aren’t you the one who told me not to be frightened? Things will turn soon, you will see.”

  Things did turn swiftly, overnight, but not in a way that anyone expected. The news came in over the BBC first, and Anton was one of the first to intercept it. When he burst out onto the terrace, where Despina sat reading a book, she knew instantly that something monumental had taken place.

  “Come, come inside now,” he said to her, motioning for her to follow.

  “Why, Anton? What’s happened?” she said, letting the book slip from her grasp.

  “Antonescu has been arrested!” he shouted, already halfway to the parlor, where the radio rested on the credenza. “There’s been a coup!”

  He flicked the dial back and forth, trying to find a reliable wavelength. Just as Despina entered the room, a voice came on, one that she recognized instantly. It was that of young King Michael in an address to the nation.

  “General Antonescu has been arrested and detained by the Romanian army. Today, Romania has declared its loyalty to the Allied Forces . . . and I have accepted the armistice put before me by Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR. We are at war with Germany.”

  “My God,” Anton said. “My God.” And he crumpled onto the sofa, taking a handkerchief from his breast pocket.

  This was a complete reversal of allegiance, a colossal blow to German forces. Who would have ever imagined that young King Michael, a boy of merely twenty, would manage to pull off a coup against the man who had ruled Romania with an iron fist? That he would not only take back his birthright but deal a lethal blow to the crumbling Nazi power?

  Anton recalled vividly all that had taken place in the months before they adopted Natalia. How after King Carol had abdicated and fled to Spain, young Michael—his only son—had been sworn in as king, even though the real power had transitioned into the hands of Marshall Antonescu. It had not been difficult for Antonescu to take over Romania as a military dictator, for in that he had Hitler’s full support. It was understood, of course, that it wasn’t so much a personal connection between the men as the fact that Antonescu had delivered Romania’s natural riches for Hitler’s war effort on a silver platter. Oil in particular was of utmost importance to Hitler as he planned the invasion of Russia. Oil and the fact that Romania had opened the gates wide for his advancing army sweeping east.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Anton remarked. “There will be hell to pay for Romania’s change of heart.”

  This time, Despina could think of nothing to say, no way to disagree with her husband. What neither of them realized as they sat together in silence, sipping a brandy to calm their nerves, was that retribution would come sooner than they even thought possible.

  Two days later, as Paris was liberated by American tanks, as Russian bombers raided Berlin, the attacks over Bucharest became more frequent, day and night and all hours in between. Only this time, it was the German bombs that were blasting the already crumbling city.


  17

  IT TOOK PRECISELY ONE HOUR and twenty minutes to reach Lake Baneasa by trolley. One hour and twenty minutes that Despina welcomed, for it gave her time to think. Riding at dawn with a sleepy Natalia at her side, watching people awaken to another dismal day, another day of dust and debris and diminishing food supplies, gave her a chance to collect her thoughts, to tally up her own life.

  So much had happened in the weeks past, and yet it seemed that not much was different at all. The bombings had continued with no end in sight, and schools had shut down indefinitely. Despite the droning of the sirens, most afternoons stretched on with nothing to fill them save for Natalia’s constant piano playing. Every moment when they were not in the cellar she spent at her keyboard, repeating the same pieces, going back to the beginning and starting over again, as if those sounds could sweep over everything like a giant swell, wiping the world clean. Sometimes Despina couldn’t even coax her away with her favorite sweets, and soon she began fearing that those sirens had reawakened something in her daughter, some buried anxiety that she couldn’t assuage.

  So when Anton had insisted that if she wouldn’t join her sister, she and Natalia spend their days at the lake house—at least away from imminent danger—she had agreed, not so much to appease him but because Natalia desperately needed a change.

  Anton, too, had begun going to the store again, even though his daily treks through the scarred and broken city had more to do with his new friend living above the shop than with keeping business open. She knew that was the reason he insisted on going every day, even though no more than a handful of customers wandered in all week long.

  What was it about the young man that fascinated her husband so? They were more than fifteen years apart in age and seemingly had little in common. More than that, on several occasions, Anton had hinted that Victor’s political views were of a modern leaning, and that, she knew, could only mean one thing. Still, in Victor’s presence, there was a side of Anton that she had rarely seen. When Victor came to visit—as he did every Sunday since the bombings had started—the bright gaiety with which Anton received his other guests was replaced by an introspective calmness of sorts, an ease of being that was foreign even to her.