by John Degen
There was a final message in the photograph, the most insidious suggestion, and the favourite message Securitate deliver. Nicolae sat alone in that room, listening to the clickings and scrapings behind the walls, staring at the photograph, trying to read its code, trying to decipher what it is they wanted to tell him. And then, like a sudden blow from behind, he remembered who took the photo. Because of course the photographer had been in the room at the birthday, he was right there in front of Nicolae, smiling as well and telling Nicolae to get that stupid look off his face. He was wearing the cream from the cake on his nose and getting a little too drunk on the ţuică he brought for the occasion.
He was the one who always brought a camera, and the one who developed his own photographs in a small darkroom in the basement of his apartment block. He was the one who controlled so carefully the distribution of prints so they might never fall into the wrong hands. He was the trust Nicolae had in that small circle of friends he had known his entire life. And here he was, invisible but undeniably present in the police station in downtown Bucharest three days before Nicolae was to leave for Israel.
“On the plane to Tel Aviv, I tried not to think any more of the two fellows in the station back in Bucharest,” Nicolae says across the backgammon board, wiping sweat from the top of his head with a balled handkerchief. “I tried not to think of the people I was leaving behind and the painful doubts I had packed into our luggage. I tried not to think about photographs and my good friend Petre Dobrescu, the smiling photographer. I remember pointing out the window for Dragos to look at clouds—the boy had never seen clouds from above. I held my wife’s hand and smiled at the pretty Israeli stewardesses, hoping for a free drink. I tried to imagine what waited for us on the ground, and could not. I tried to watch the film they were showing, and again could not.”
Tony listens to the older man intently, and just as intently he rakes the board with his eyes, trying to discover some strategic advantage, some way for him to win, but it seems impossible.
“Then, I noticed two men sitting in the centre section of seats. They were a row ahead of us, and they passed a matchbox back and forth between them. One man would take the matchbox and shake it in his fingers, as though to shake up the matches, except whatever was being shaken did not sound like matches. That man would then slide open the box and both men would peer in. The one who had shaken the box would then say something in Hebrew, and both men would nod. Then the matchbox changed hands and the second man shook, peered, said something, et cetera, over and over again. I watched this strange procedure for a long time, and finally, overcome with curiosity, I left my seat and walked past them in order to see what mystery they were sharing. In the matchbox was a small pair of dice.
Late in the evening, the doors to the wedding hall are opened, sucking in gentle summer air and the scent of pines, a slow cleansing of cigar haze and the smudge of beeswax candles, the sweat steam of musicians and dancers. The celebration slows and calms, catching its breath and resting before beginning again. A lone violinist scratches a slow, romantic waltz. It is a time for touching hands and cheeks, for fixing hair and dresses. Old people sit down. Stories continue around the backgammon board. Tony and Nicolae play the fourth game of a match of five. Other men take notice and crowd around. A foreigner is holding his own in the national game. It’s an oddity.
Spectator chatter weaves through the games, interrupts the stories. There is a general willing of the dice for Nicolae. There is laughing and swearing. Plates of food are brought to the players from the never-empty side tables. Tony eats the blackened skin of a young pig, killed that very morning and roasted whole over a firepit dug into the earth outside the reception hall. The delicacy is salty and rich with burnt oils. He eats anchovy fillets mashed into soft butter on fresh crusty bread, pickled cucumbers and pickled hot peppers all from the local farms. Finally, he is handed a candied plum from the orchard of Irina’s father, one of few plums not used to make ţuică. Ţuica is in the air, the smell of it lifting from the forearm skin of all the men crowding the table.
Diana appears behind Nicolae, shy at first around so many men who knew her as a child, but with laughter and ţuică, heartened into joining the profane cheering. Her face is flushed from dancing, a greenish-tan dress open at the collar, a neck slick with perspiration. She looks away from Tony’s eyes, and smiles at everything. He remembers how he caught sight of her in the plum trees earlier in the day, picking the fruit that will become next year’s ţuică. She had been seated in the upper branches, as though in the balcony of a theatre, carefully twisting the ripened plums from the branches, rubbing each one in both hands to test the firmness. At that time as well she had looked away from his eyes, and smiled. She had brought each plum to her nose, closed her eyelids and inhaled deeply.
The men notice Tony noticing her. There is a roll of laughter and Diana’s face glows brighter in the candlelight. She yells back at the men, spitting fire, and they laugh even louder. Tony loses the game, stuck on the bar reading a newspaper while Nicolae quickly clears his perfectly blocked house. The match stands at two games apiece.
“My dear niece. She has been challenged to kiss you if you win. She has agreed, but I don’t think you want to know what she said about you.”
Nicolae smiles at Tony from across the board and scratches at his goatee. He lights another cigar and picks up the dice.
“Do not think she wants to. She’s just responding to a dare from the men. She cannot resist a dare. It is my job to make sure she does not have to kiss you. Please, nothing personal. For the honour of my niece, you understand.”
“I understand.” Tony says, but he has a physical memory of Diana’s lips and, caught in a fog of drink and borrowed joy, he feels a need for more.
Another loud roll of laughter from the circle of men, and finally, Diana looks directly at Tony. She is defiant, proud. She sticks out her tongue and places both hands on her uncle’s shoulders. Everyone slaps Tony’s back at once. The bone dice clatter on the board.
“Six and six, the emperor’s opening.” Nicolae winks and sets up two solid blocks at the bar. Diana cheers and claps her hands, spins on her toes. A full glass of ţuică slides across the table to Tony.
“You will need it, for the disappointment.”
Unable to catch up in the race, Tony satisfies himself with blocking his house and holding two men back in the desperate belief they’ll have a chance at a capture. A strategy of last hope, a prayer to the dice. When the roll comes, it feels as nothing other than a gift of fate. Nicolae is on the bar and trapped. Diana shrieks and tries to run away, but several men catch at her flailing arms and hold her in place, cursing. The match ends, three wins to two for Tony. Tony drinks his glass of ţuică at once and sits back in his chair. In the crowd of men he recognizes Dragos smiling at him. Dragos raises a glass to him and drinks as well.
“Let her go if she wants to go,” Tony offers. “Winning is enough.”
Nicolae stands and holds his niece’s hand.
“I’m sorry Diana. There are worse bets to lose, believe me.”
“She’s just embarrassed,” Dragos laughs, “because she knows she can’t do it without liking it.”
His arm suffers for the joke. Diana’s fist flies through the crowd, bruising him.
“Tony, you’d better hope she doesn’t kiss like she punches. Not this time at least.”
And his other arm suffers.
Tony feels his chair being lifted beneath him. He is turned from the table into the spreading crowd. Diana walks from the edge of her friends and relatives, suddenly onstage. She turns her back to Tony and curses the laughing crowd. When she turns back, she is smiling. She slips off a long silk scarf she has tied around her waist, and twirls it into rope between her hands. It feels cool on the back of Tony’s neck, then suddenly tight and hot. Diana lands on his knees and draws him into her lips with the scarf.
The kiss is violent and contemptful. The heat of her forehead crushes into his ear.
As she begins to pull away, Tony tastes her tongue on his, a final flash of anger, delicious and warm. To Tony, his reward seems to last much longer than the couple of seconds Diana gives him. The scarf slides from his neck and trails along the floor as she walks away lashing out with her fists at the drunken, hysterical crowd. They part to let her pass and Tony, confused and humiliated, watches her walk past the small podium where the Cup has stood since the party began. The podium is empty.
Fourteen
“It is an interesting feeling is it not?”
Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae follows Tony from room to room in the wedding hall, up great wooden staircases and through narrow back corridors, checking behind pieces of furniture and inside darkened doorways.
“This feeling of suddenly not understanding anything. Language is always a difficulty in these situations. Not knowing the words. But worse I think is that sudden shock, that instance of ultimate strangeness. An experience all travellers have, even the bravest of us, I think, and certainly something all immigrants must eventually face. Whether it comes on the first day or the fifteenth or the five hundredth, there will come this moment when everything that once seemed normal and familiar and correct is whisked away like the tablecloth in a magician’s trick. It is unsettling, isn’t it?”
Tony walks with purpose ahead of the older man, vaulting stairs two at a time despite a head filled with homemade liquor. He calculates the time between his last seeing the Cup and the empty podium to be mere seconds. It is simply not possible that whoever took the trophy was able to get it very far. He knows his best chance of recovery will be if the Cup has been kept in the building. A quick look out the front door showed quiet empty streets and no signs of recent activity. He’d scanned the faces in the crowd to see if their eyes led him anywhere obvious, but the other guests, amused by his desperation, simply smiled back at him and laughed privately among themselves. Now it is simply a matter of checking every room in the building. The Cup will be found.
“It is my burden,” Nicolae continues, undisturbed by the speed of their search and the fact that Tony is not listening to him, “that I brought this moment not only upon myself and my wife, but upon a young child. We are told children are very resilient, that they recover from trauma. What we are not told is that whether they recover or not is immaterial. Trauma is trauma. It is my burden, and I accept it.”
The entire time they lived in Israel, Nicolae and his young family tried to leave their new and foreign homeland, tried to escape again to one of three places. Their preferred choice, of course, was the United States. Everyone wanted to go to the United States.
“To fly in an airplane over New York City,” Nicolae says with a dismissive wave of his hand in the smoky air above his head, “to look down upon the Statue of Liberty and et cetera. You know the whole story. You don’t think you are going to fall for this story, but when you have left the only world you know, and you must choose a new world, all of a sudden this story is very convincing. Next there was Canada, which was also attractive if only because it is so close to the United States. The third and least attractive option was Australia, a great country to be sure, but so lost and alone there in the middle of the ocean. So far from anything we might understand, and with no accompanying story of its own.
“Naturally, it was Australia who made us the first offer. Australia opened her arms and welcomed us, and to this day I cannot say if we didn’t make a terrible mistake by not opening our own arms in turn and running to Australia. In Montreal, on a morning in February when I am waiting for the bus on Sherbrooke, I am certain that Australia is laughing at me for my foolish decision. But, at the time we decided to wait.”
The offer from Australia was open for three months, and Nicolae and his wife decided to wait the three months to see if they would also get an offer from the US. Very near the end of their wait they heard from Canada, or at least from Quebec. They decided not to stretch their luck any further, accepted the chance to become Quebecers and signed their names. They flew to Montreal with a map of North America spread between them across their knees, studying the terrain. They took note how, on their map, Montreal was not very far at all from New York City. They consoled themselves in their decision by measuring the distance between Montreal and Manhattan with their fingers.
The sky was clear and they could see everything as the plane came in over the country. They crossed Newfoundland and followed the Saint Lawrence River west into the land. It was all so big and empty, and they could imagine, looking to the south past the Berkshire Mountains, that it was also almost all New York City. It was early in October and the land was knit through with fantastic colours. They strained their eyes across the brilliant carpet, peering south, imagining they might see the tip of the Empire State Building peeking out above the horizon. And then the plane was on the ground and they were moving through the airport with everything they owned, never knowing to whom they should speak French and to whom English. They guessed at this speaking game, and guessed wrong almost every time.
That first night, in all the exhaustion of a day of travel, the luggage and the jet lag and the emotions of his wife and little Dragos, Nicolae was unable to keep his eyes closed in their tiny YMCA room. He would lie down and listen to his wife and child breathe, but then he would have to stand up and go to the window. At that time in Montreal, the YMCA sat directly above Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The traffic of the thoroughfare flowed through the building, cars and taxis on their way across the city, beautiful young people walking through on their way to Crescent Street clubs or going east for food at Ben’s or to the jazz clubs of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis. And Nicolae was at the window, not knowing any of these places, but knowing at least that the blood was flowing, seeing it below him and feeling it hum up into his feet. There was so much kissing. So many arms clutching other arms. It was a fine show, too inviting, but he couldn’t bring himself to go for a walk because the thought of his wife and child waking to find him not there was painful to him. After everything they’d just been through, he could not risk them waking up alone, without their only reason for being in such a strange place.
As morning grew in the window, Nicolae was surprised by a knock on the door of the room. It was a quiet knock at first, respectful of the hour, and Nicolae was initially unsure if he was hearing it correctly. Their small room was one of many in a long hallway of identical drab grey doors. He was still standing at the window, watching the streets fill with daylight, and he looked over at his wife, still in bed but staring back at him now. They questioned each other with their eyes for many seconds before whoever it was knocked again, this time with more force.
A man was laughing now behind the door. Nicolae imagined the visitor had mistaken their room for that of a friend. He opened the door, again uncertain of which language to try, and looked at a small man dressed for cold weather shuffling slowly from foot to foot at the threshold. The unexpected visitor greeted Nicolae in his own language, by his own name, smiling broadly.
“I saw your name on the list of new arrivals downstairs,” the laughing man said. “I knew you would be awake. I must tell you, to have you here in this city with me is the most beautiful gift. The most beautiful gift.”
Without introduction, he handed Nicolae a small rectangular package, something Nicolae did not fully understand at the time but which he came to know as Canadian-style cookies, dry and too sweet with chocolate like wax, crumbling to the table every time he took a bite. The man waved to the small table and he and Nicolae sat.
“To begin,” the man said, “please do not be afraid or concerned in any way. I am here as a friend. I hope to prove this to you.”
Nicolae glanced again at Veronica in the bed. Dragos lay beside her, his eyes still closed, but his breathing betraying the fact that he was awake and listening carefully. The past year had prepared them all for almost any experience but this one. This one was new.
“You were mine,” the man continued. “My very first, and my favourite.�
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Having said this, the man fell silent, and his laughing mood turned sombre. Nicolae sat across the table from him, munching cookies expectantly, wishing he had some coffee. He was aware of a growing tension between himself and the stranger as though already they had run out of things to say to each other, as though there was little more about the man that he cared to know and little more about himself that he cared to have known. It was a feeling he recognized, but vaguely, like the recollection of pain from far in the past.
It was Veronica, dressing herself behind a makeshift curtain wall, who first made the connection. She stuck her head out into the room and stared suspiciously at the interloper.
“We know nothing anymore,” she said, her voice shaking with anger and fear. “We don’t want any trouble. Why have you found us out like this?”
Recognizing severity in his mother’s voice, Dragos ceased feigning sleep and raised his head to observe the growing drama of an unwanted stranger in a strange room in a strange country. The man suffered Veronica’s questions like they were aimed at his face. His eyes filled with water and he could only look down at his hands shifting uncomfortably on the tabletop.
“I understand what I have done here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought maybe the cookies, somehow... if you will please allow me a few minutes to explain myself. I assure you, I bring no trouble to your door.”
The stranger’s name was Alexandru Ionescu and, as Veronica had guessed, he was a member, a former member, of those very same secret police, the Securitate who haunted Nicolae’s final years in his homeland. So it was, Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae had left Bucharest, lived for over a year in Israel, travelled all the way to Montreal and on his very first full day there, he would have yet another talk with the secret police.