The Girl They Left Behind
Page 14
“Do you know we are to be called a People’s Republic?” the stunned citizens of Bucharest whispered on street corners, at bus stops, near flower stands where they could talk in whispers. “Do you know our new prime minister was appointed by Stalin himself?”
The new reality had been shaped around them not with the slow progression of change but with the sharp precision of the guillotine, severing them from everything they knew to be true and familiar.
On her way to school, Natalia was mesmerized by the constant activity as she passed the old Palace of the Senate and the Military Headquarters. Slowing her pace, she gaped at the parade of men in dark leather coats and fur caps—sturdy, square-shouldered men with sober faces—coming in and out of government buildings that now bore new names. The guards planted at the gates saluted them at attention, dashing ahead to open their car doors, carrying their briefcases and boxes filled with documents, and loading them into the trunks of cars with black, impenetrable windows. On the streets, people stood aside and looked timidly to the ground as these men marched past them in long, purposeful strides. They kissed their hands when they entered beerhalls and demanded bottles of vodka and fine delicacies that no one had a taste for any longer.
A new silence had descended on their home.
“Do not speak to anyone at school, Talia, about what we have in our home,” her mother warned nearly every night. “Most of all, do not ever mention the piano, the leather-bound books. Do not talk to anyone at all. And remember, the walls have ears.”
“I know, Mama, you’ve told me. Please don’t worry,” she would reply each time, not wanting to point out that her father had told her the very same thing just the night before. That she had practically memorized those lines.
Perhaps it was because of her parents’ growing paranoia that she found herself eavesdropping on street corners as she pretended to tie her shoelaces or search through her backpack for something she could not find. The stories she heard terrified her, stories about homes being ransacked and looted, about Red Army soldiers breaking down doors in the middle of the night, waving machine guns, taking all they could carry—jewels, china, silverware, oil paintings, Turkish rugs. Stories about men dropping on their knees and kissing their boots, offering them their gold watches, their wedding bands. About civilians disappearing without explanation, by the hundreds, the thousands.
“They are drunk,” she’d heard some say. “They are drunk on tuica, they are drunk on power and life outside the muddy trenches. They haven’t forgiven the Romanian people for the siege of Leningrad, the bloodbath at Odessa. How many thousands died at our hands? How many thousands?” they uttered, shaking their heads. It was all true, Natalia knew. The Germans had starved the Soviet people, they had forced them to eat cats in winter, they had forced them to eat corpses. And all along, the Romanian people had lent a helping hand.
“Is it true, Mama, what they say about the Red Army soldiers?” she asked one evening, but her mother brushed her off with the usual reply.
“Go wash up, Natalia. If you hurry, maybe you could get in a few minutes of practice before dinner.”
Natalia sighed but did as she was told, knowing it was pointless to bring up the subject. Despite all the stories that circulated, despite the rumors that the Soviet soldiers surpassed even the Germans in their brutality, her mother never wanted to talk about them. Natalia suspected it had something to do with that time, during the last days of the war, when she had sat on the rail in Snagov with a sick child in her arms. It was a soldier then who had saved their lives. “War is war,” she had told Natalia once. “It transforms human beings in unimaginable ways. But they are still human beings.”
Four years had passed since that fateful day, four years that might have been a century, for that time had been eclipsed entirely by more pressing matters, things that weighed on their household like a gathering storm. For months now, her father had been coming home every night with news of businesses being confiscated, banks being nationalized, money being devalued. Of people like him, honest, hardworking businessmen, who had been marched into the street and shot for some careless, offhand comment against the new government. Of families much like theirs who were sent away on trains and were never heard from again.
“These are dangerous times, Despina,” he so often remarked. “You should try to go out less often. And put away those furs of yours. It will draw the kind of attention we don’t need.”
“All right, darling.” Her mother would try to appease him. “But please don’t speak of it in front of Talia. Don’t speak of it at all. I will do as you say.”
Like the rest of the dwindling bourgeois class, the Gozas found themselves more and more confined within the walls of their home. Having little to do, Natalia spent most of her waking hours much as she had during the days of the sirens, at her piano. Her father had insisted on moving it up to her room, at the farthest end of the house, where she was least likely to be overheard by the neighbors. He was not particularly fond of noise of any kind these days, particularly the kind that might be construed as an aristocratic pursuit and get him arrested.
He had also had to cut back on her piano lessons, but Natalia did not mind. She felt freer than ever practicing on her own, away from the overanalytical eye of Miss Eliade, from her shrill voice that would often interrupt Natalia’s playing to complain that she wasn’t sitting properly or that her elbows were too stiff or that she needed to lower her wrists and not attack the keyboard like a vulture. Now she was free to improvise, to make up her own melodies, variations on classical works she had long learned by heart, even some less conventional pieces that would have had the old woman burning with rage.
Had jazz ever affected her so? In the years before the war, it seemed it was always there, trickling in the background of her everyday life as peacefully and uneventfully as a creek. Yet something had happened when she’d brought the turntable and records no one played anymore up to her room and sat at her own piano. Ever since, she’d felt guilty, as if she was somehow betraying the great composers, yet as she muddled along with those melodies, she felt as if she was somewhere else altogether, those chords and movements filling her up with a bubbling energy, like a fever. Sometimes she imagined herself to be that girl on the album cover, wearing a sequined gown in the dimmed lights of a stage, a handsome trumpeter in a white coat playing right at her side, their sounds twisting and entwining in a caress. It was a challenge at first to learn the unique syncopations, but after a while, Natalia found that it became less difficult, and she began being able to emulate those pieces quite well.
It saddened her, though, that she couldn’t share them with her father, for so often now he was in his study with the door closed, and he no longer asked her to play for him before bedtime. He was preoccupied these days, sullen, quiet. He no longer ranted about the deteriorating living conditions or how it was a matter of time before all they had would be taken from them.
And something else. For the past few weeks, he had come home every night with a heavy suitcase in his hand. Muttering a quick hello, still in his coat and hat, he would drag the case breathlessly across the parquet floor and through the kitchen, all the way to the back stairs leading up to the attic. The old wooden door would creak open, and she would stand there and listen to the case slamming against the cement stairs, echoing in the stairwell, and wonder what was inside it. She wondered still when he came back downstairs with the empty case and tossed it near the front door, where he would pick it up again the next morning.
Whatever it was he was depositing up there, she knew better than to ask questions. It would only force him to make up some false reason, some half-baked answer that they both knew she was too old to believe. Then, once again, a discussion would follow, a long-winded discourse about their family’s circumstances, how she was not to trust anyone, not to talk to anyone. How their very lives would hang in the balance if she divulged what went on in their home. No, it was best if she did not bring it up at all.
One night at the end of the winter, her father handed her mother a handgun. He held it out to her over the dinner table, over the potato casserole and meat stew, as if he was passing the salt. Her mother stared at it for a moment but did not reach for it. He placed it on the white linen cloth, and it sat there between them, its delicate ivory handle gleaming in the overhead lights like an enchanting porcelain yet with all the gravity of an undetonated grenade. It was a small, elegant pistol, a lady’s model, small enough to fit into an evening clutch.
“I want you to carry this with you at all times,” he said almost matter-of-factly, digging into his food. “Just for the time being. And Talia”—he raised his eyes to her sternly—“in case you should stumble upon it, I thought you should know what it is, so that you’ll never touch it.”
Natalia felt her mother shift slightly beside her. The fork clinked against the side of her plate as she set it down. She patted her mouth, which had stretched into a thin line, and took a small sip of water but said nothing.
A gun? Natalia almost blurted in astonishment, knowing how much her mother hated them, how she wouldn’t even let him keep one locked in the safe. So many times she heard her say how they filled her with terror, but now, with one displayed on the dinner table as casually as a butter dish, her mother wasn’t forming a single objection.
“We’ll discuss it in the morning, Anton,” was all she said quietly, and Natalia knew it was only for her benefit.
“All right, darling,” her father replied, and they held each other’s eyes with an understanding needless of words. “As you wish.”
But the next morning, when he came down for breakfast, the first thing he did was to look inside her purse. Humming a tune under his breath, he clamped it shut, and with a satisfied look, he went to the sideboard to pour himself a cup of coffee.
All that afternoon and most of the evening Natalia spent in her room. She played and played along with that merry jazz music, riding on the wings of a fairy tale. She played until her back ached and her fingers cramped—until all that angst had washed away from her, drained clean like a streak of mud in a downpour of rain.
26
April 1950
ELENA’S HOUSE, IT TURNED OUT, was the only one on its block that still bore its prewar facade. If the property showed any signs of the tumult of years past, it was barely visible in the fissured stone walkway, the slightly rusted iron fence, the wooden shutters that needed a fresh coat of paint. Overall, it still resembled a Greek villa at the edge of the Mediterranean, even on a gloomy street such as this, amid melting, mud-splattered snow.
On the light-filtered porch, Despina drew off her gloves. She shook the droplets of water from her coat and removed her rain boots which were such a stark contrast to the rest of her elegant attire. Natalia followed suit, doing the same.
“Remember what we talked about,” she reminded Natalia. “I know they are family, but we are not to delve into anything but polite conversation, right?”
Natalia nodded enthusiastically, half listening. She had no intention at all, in fact, of delving into grown-up subjects of any kind. All she wanted was to see her eldest cousin, Lidia, whom she’d been missing so terribly. The entire winter, they’d been barricaded inside their house as if they were still in a war zone, and it was only because she’d begged and pleaded, and because the sun had decided to make an appearance, that her mother had agreed to go there. Just for an hour or two, no more. At least they were getting out of the house again.
At the side window, there was a flurry of curtain, and then the front door opened promptly. A sturdy pair of arms came up to envelope her, as did a powerful scent of a musky perfume, which must have just been applied moments earlier.
“My goodness, how long has it been?” Despina’s eldest sister exclaimed, looking decidedly overdressed in a deep burgundy dress and lips painted to match.
There was something a bit desperate, almost hysterical, in her voice, as if she was faking her jubilance for their benefit. Even the way she hugged them seemed a little too forceful, a little too enthusiastic. Then again, everyone was acting strangely these days, and at least Elena had a reason. Her husband, who’d been stationed in Istanbul as part of a diplomatic corps for the past year, had refused to return when summoned, and there was no telling if they would see him again, much less be able to join him. Things between the families had come to a head long before that, their differences widening at each visit, each ghastly encounter. And the last time, Natalia would never forget the words spat from her uncle’s lips, moist still with her father’s wine, as he shot upright from the dinner table and motioned for his wife and daughter to gather their things, that they were leaving. “I’ll see you hang from a pole!” he’d fumed, leaning over the dinner table with his eyes fixed ferociously on her father, yanking the napkin from his lap and throwing it into his half-eaten soup, splattering bits of finely minced vegetables over her mother’s perfectly starched tablecloth.
But that was months ago, and in the time since, there seemed to be a truce at least between the sisters, even though the whole thing still hung between them like a dark cloud.
“Talia, darling, you’re taller and prettier every time I see you!” her aunt was exclaiming now with an affection she’d never seen from her before. “Why, you are nearly as tall as your mother! Come!”
She pulled the two inside and locked the door behind them twice with those same quick, nearly jerky movements. In stark contrast, the sitting room greeted them serenely with a roaring fire that instantly seemed to soothe Natalia’s nerves. On a large silver tray in the center, a Turkish coffee kettle and a soda siphon had been set out, like old times. As they settled amid the multitude of cushions on the velvet sofa, Lidia bounded into the room, all blond waves and peach lips and smelling too strongly of her mother’s perfume.
“Hi, doll,” she said, gliding up to Natalia with a brilliant smile and fondly pinching both of her cheeks. She dropped down onto the sofa next to Despina and reached for one of the compote-filled bowls, cocking an eyebrow at Natalia, making a face that nearly made her burst out in laughter.
Oh, but how she adored her cousin! Five years her senior, Lidia was not only charming and funny but also one of the prettiest girls Natalia knew, with her enormous blue eyes and golden hair that she wore tied back in a red ribbon. Natalia realized she wasn’t the only one who thought so. She had seen the way boys fluttered around Lidia, the way other girls followed her around, asking her to go to the movies or if she could come to their house after school. It was Lidia who had schooled Natalia in the art of personal transformation, who had shown her how to comb her hair to bring out its shine, to glide about a room with the grace of a movie star. Before the war, they had spent many afternoons together, but now that there had been such a rift between their families, they did not get to see much of each other at all.
“Lidia, you look très chic,” Natalia said casually, catching an amused, sideways glance from her mother.
“And you, Talia, how is your piano coming along?” Lidia asked, pouring coffee into a small china cup and handing it to Natalia with that same playful naughtiness. “What are you playing these days?”
Natalia let out an exaggerated breath. “My tutor’s a monster, chérie. She expects too much. I try my hardest, but the ‘Moonlight Sonata’?” She rolled her eyes a little in a way that she hoped was dramatic. “I mean, I’m not even fourteen yet,” she said, hoping that her mother’s attention had shifted back to her own conversation, for surely she would point out that Natalia, in fact, had just turned thirteen the month before and that lately she was just clattering away at God knows what�
��not Beethoven, to be sure.
“Oh, Talia, you’re really getting better. The key is to stick with it and try to improve a little each time—”
A hammering at the front door stopped Lidia in mid-sentence, and the two of them exchanged a look.
“Are you expecting anyone else?” her mother inquired of her aunt, her eyebrows going up in surprise.
“No.” Elena shrugged. She took a sip from her cup, and when she placed it back on its saucer, it rattled a little. “Though we have had”—she paused, swallowed hard as a hand traveled up to the base of her throat—“visits. Ever since Radu . . . well, you know.”
Her mother lowered her eyes, and they said nothing for a moment. The knocks wouldn’t stop; they were stronger, more determined, with every passing moment. Even Lidia seemed to have sobered suddenly and sat rigidly in her chair, biting her lip.
Natalia looked from her aunt to her mother, puzzled. “Well, isn’t someone going to answer?”
“Yes, I suppose I should,” Elena said, straightening up, rising to her feet ever so slowly. She smoothed out her dress with precise, measured gestures and ambled toward the door, leaning to the left a little as if she was in no rush to get there at all.
From the other end of the house, Natalia heard the dead bolt turning, once, twice. She listened, her heart suddenly in a leap, to the brief exchange of words, of voices she did not recognize, male voices, followed by boots clomping on the wooden floor, the jangle of some metal object. In the glare of the open French door, two darkish tall silhouettes approached. It wasn’t until they paused in the doorway that she felt all her blood drain to her feet.