Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  I walk back and forth on his street, spying on his house. A woman passing by stops and asks if she can help me, if I am lost. I say, “No, thank you. I’m just waiting for someone.” Then, as if it were true, the heavy glass door to his building opens, and Mihai comes out, wearing the same wrinkled shirt and check trousers he was wearing a week ago, but now he is shaven. He is walking with his little sway on one side, as if he were limping. I walk to meet him. We stop and stare at each other.

  “Come, I’ll show you a place in the mountains,” he says as if he has been expecting me. “Somewhere you’ve never been.”

  “I’m not dressed for mountain climbing,” I say. I am wearing a gauzy blue dress and the same flimsy, worn-out sandals.

  We take a bus to the end of the line, the foot of the mountain, then a lift takes us midway up the mountain. He leads me to a trail through the forest. There are bright green ferns and blue bellflowers on the forest floor, and the afternoon light is filtered through the branches of the birch trees and the heavy oaks. Our steps reverberate in the silence of the forest, broken only by nervous woodpecker sounds or by a plaintive bird. The air is sparkling with specks of light. Then the path becomes steeper.

  I stumble up the road. Pebbles collect in my sandals. The blue dress my mother had sewn from the material of an old curtain is wet with mud. It catches in the bushes that close in on the trail, hiding where it goes. I am red and sweaty as he pulls me by the hand, up and up.

  We see wild raspberries, and he leans over to gather them. He feeds me the wild berries, one by one. I taste the tart fruit together with the pine resin on his hand. I know my lips are redder from the raspberries and that he wants to kiss them.

  We hear thunder. The rain starts with such fury that I see water rushing down and spurting upward. He makes a sharp turn onto another path, and suddenly we’re under a wooden shelter. We’re soaked. My blue dress clings to my body, and I can see my nipples through it. Every part of my body is outlined clearly under the gauzy soaked dress. From the pocket of his knee breeches, he produces a piece of thick white cloth. Winking at me, he says: “You’ve got to be prepared for everything in the mountains.”

  He starts wiping my face, my hair, and my neck with the white cloth that miraculously absorbs the water. He is meticulous and precise. The cloth moves to my shoulders, my breasts, my stomach, lingering an equal amount of time on each body part. I feel a strange heat radiating from my body. I am hypnotized. I don’t want him to ever stop drying me off with the white cloth.

  “There you are. Much better. You can’t stay wet for long in the mountains. You can get pneumonia.”

  I know that when I am old and decrepit and ill, and even on my deathbed, I will remember this moment in the summer rain as I am staring at the lips of this man who knows the mountains and has dried my body with a white cloth.

  We stare at each other, but we don’t kiss. I can feel his breath on my neck. He pulls me close to his chest and holds me, stroking my hair. I am breathing into his chest, sheltered from the rain.

  “It’s stopped. We can go now,” he says and takes my hand again.

  As we get back to the path that climbs the mountain to some mythic rock he knows, we see pink and blue and violet clouds rising from the valleys and surrounding us. The valleys below hang in dazzling, multicoloured mists; the dark green chains of the Carpathians surround us like a magic ring. Through one opening in the clouds, we can see part of the city, as if through an enchanted keyhole.

  “It’s a rare phenomenon,” he says. “The clouds are moving on, as the sun is trying to come out. It’s reflecting itself in the clouds.”

  We finally reach the big rock. It is a white, sharp rock with a cave at the bottom. The dogs are barking in the valley, and we hear the bells from the Black Church, the Saxon church, which was saved from a big fire centuries ago. We can almost make out the outlines of the church through the violet clouds as well, its straight, dark, burnt Gothic walls and towers shooting upward. The bells echo all the way to where we are, and as we lean against the white rock looking down at the pink clouds in the valley and at the sunset over the city, he tells me I have little stars in my eyes. The church bells sound on and on and on.

  I taste the raspberries on his lips. I want to melt into the pink clouds and this kiss that tastes like the wildest fruit of the earth. The church bells toll, and my body is taking the shape of the full moon and the fragrance of the wild raspberries.

  The rain has pulled down the banners for the August 23 celebration. When we return from the mountain, we find the streets filled with thousands of torn, wet red paper flags. People are moving hunched and soaked through the puddles and stepping on the red flags. I don’t really care. I suddenly feel like I don’t live in this country any more. His hand is squeezing mine as we approach my aunt’s apartment building. He asks me to come over to his apartment tomorrow, early in the morning.

  It’s from this day forward that I start sneaking down the stairs early before everybody is up. I wash my hair in icy water, because we get hot water for only one hour a day, or for two hours every other day, and are not supposed to use it up frivolously. Sometimes we don’t get water at all early in the morning or late at night. The Party is always trying to make us economize for something, heat or energy, frantically pushing us towards the Socialist utopia that will be here any day now. I wash my hair with laundry soap in the bathroom sink, as quickly and quietly as I can, hoping the anaemic stream of tap water won’t stop and leave me with my hair all gooey and whitish with suds. The mornings are always chilly; I shiver as I shoot down the marble stairs, wet strands of hair falling down my neck and shoulders.

  He plays Grieg for me. He first blows the specks of dust off the record, then he places it gently on the turntable and lets the needle drop with one swift, delicate gesture. He stands unmoved for a few seconds, listening to the music with a contented smile.

  “Listen, it’s like the rain. Peer Gynt. I love it, don’t you?” he says proudly, as if it were his own music.

  “Yes, it’s beautiful. I’ve never heard this before.”

  “You’re trembling,” he says. He puts his hands on my shoulders.

  Drops of sound enter every pore of my body. His bedsheets are starchy and cool. As I take off my blue dress, the same dress I wore on the mountain in the rain, I see through the open window the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Father of the Nation, hanging on the building across the street. They are ugly and they scare me.

  I seem to know it all, to understand with precision every detail of every little caress on my body. I am not shy. Waves of heat and sound rise in my body. Limbs, whispers. He bites into my shoulder, I bite into his. I am dazed, curious at what’s happening. I hear children playing outside right below our window, a ball hitting the pavement stubbornly, monotonously.

  The bearded faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the unbearded face of Nicolae Ceauşescu watch us from the building across the street. I can see them right from where I lie, through the window. I close my eyes and don’t think of anything. Grieg is playing. Clear notes dripping like rain. Mihai’s body is wiry and taut and it smells of pine resin, as if he’s sucked all the smells of the mountains into his olive-coloured flesh. I lose myself in this tangle of limbs, in this melting of flesh into flesh. Every part of my body wants to scream and moan as he holds me. Purples and reds burst in my head behind my closed lids and shoot through the veins and muscles in my body. I hold his hand, as he lies next to me, sweaty and trembling.

  The lacy curtains are moving in the breeze. Through them, above our heads, the three Marxist leaders and the fourth one, our own Father of the Nation, are staring at us. We laugh and make faces at them; we tell them to go way deep into hell. He draws the curtains together and comes back next to me to whisper in my ear. He says I am his little wild raspberry and he will eat me all up. He says he’ll kidnap me and run away with me into the forest where nobody can find us, and we’ll live there for ever like two sa
vages, surviving on berries and roots. Then we roll among the cool sheets laughing.

  I swirl through the summer, oblivious to everything and to everyone around me, rushing up and down the stairs at dawn, my hair always wet, illicitly clean. We lie in the many forests he knows, under fir trees and in secret meadows by a secret stream, the smell of fir and of earth rubbing against me. At night the moon wakes me, and a golden string seems to tie my thoughts to his, my desire to his. I leave my aunt’s apartment in the middle of the night and climb like a thief through his window directly into his bed. I hold his warm, resin-smelling body. I bite the back of his neck, his shoulders, his lips. Always his lips.

  When the time comes to go back to Bucharest and start the new school year, there is drizzle and fog on the heads of the mountains and at our white rock. The summer usually ends abruptly in the mountains and turns to autumn over several days during which the nights grow chillier, the morning light has a deeper golden glow, and the air seems to be quivering like a sigh in anxious anticipation of the cold weather. I am starting my third year of high school, and the university entrance exams loom ominously at the end of next year. I feel like I have to grow up overnight, mature like the summer light moving into autumn. The future seems as unclear as the mountain peaks capped in white mist.

  The day before my departure, Mihai’s mood becomes dark, and he talks about Mariana, about how she used to have toothaches and put vodka on her aching teeth. He remembers how she was running down the rocky path that afternoon, careless and happy. He remembers how his foot accidentally hit a big rock and sent it down the path. He says accidentally with a special stress, as if stumbling over the word. It’s as if he were enveloped in a shadow. Suddenly he frightens me. He is sitting at the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. Maybe he killed Mariana. Maybe that rock wasn’t an accident at all? Maybe I’m in love with a murderer. I startle myself from my dark reverie. I find myself strangely enthralled by the idea. Crimes of passion fascinate me. I’ve never really thought anyone would actually kill someone else because they are too jealous or too in love, except in a novel. And yet I want to erase the memory of Mariana from his heart for ever. I hate how her absence sneaks in between us. I get up from the bed in a swirl of jealous anger and am ready to leave without saying goodbye. He is sorry for his own sadness. He takes my hand and licks my palm and the tip of every finger. He tells me he doesn’t want to lose me.

  “I’ll kill you if you die,” he says.

  Then he embraces me fiercely and holds me like that until I am gasping for breath.

  “I’m like the thistles in the field. We go on, and on, and we never die,” I say laughing, as I move away from his tight grip.

  I prick his arms and neck with my nails, to show how I am like a wild rambling thistle. He smiles. He has forgotten Mariana.

  I have a dream about the two of us alone at night in the middle of the street, carrying the old suitcase my great-uncle Ivan was carrying when he came back twenty-five years after everyone had given him up for dead and then disappeared in the Soviet Union again. We sit on the suitcase, there are two moons in the sky, and Mariana comes out of the fog. She comes over to us, smiling. We see she is toothless, that she grins a frightful toothless smile. I feel sadness as deep as death.

  Floods, Wars and Great-grandmother’s Mirror

  THE SUMMER WHEN I am seventeen and I fall in love with Mihai, I am drawn to Great-grandmother’s silver mirror. It has been sitting on the mahogany chest in my aunt Nina’s living room for as long as I can remember. I stare at its chipped corner, its thick wooden back that once held a music box. But mostly, I stare into the glass, observing my own face as if it were someone else’s: the oval-shaped blue eyes, the mane of hair, pointed chin, slender nose, and red lips swollen from Mihai’s kissing and biting. The red mark on my long neck.

  In this enchanted summer with the moon-studded sky and the taste of raw earth and fresh rain, I will my family stories into taking shape in the mysterious mirror. Just like the girl Lucille from a story my mother used to read to me from a miniature book of French fairy tales. Lucille got to see everything she wanted in a magic mirror that a fairy had given her: her dead relatives, the people she loved who were far away, and her future. But I am scared to see my future. I am not asking that of my great-grandmother’s mirror. As I observe my own face in this mirror I want to see the past, to imagine the people in my family floating through the silvery glass and stretching their longing arms towards me.

  I am afraid of Mihai’s brooding silence when he mentions Mariana. I am afraid of the dream I had about the two of us sitting on an old suitcase at night in the middle of the street, and Mariana grinning a toothless smile at us. I remember my mother talking about the great loves in our family and about the women who found the men of their lives and then stuck with them. For ever. The thought of a morning when Mihai may not be in my life makes me gasp, lose my breath. I simply stop breathing at the thought. I run to Mihai to make sure he is still there, on the first floor of the grey stone building with the red tile roof. I tell him I will always love him. I kiss him until he can’t breathe any more. I pray to my female relatives and beg them to protect my love with Mihai. Somehow my dead female relatives seem more reliable to me than the God or the Mother of God that my aunt Matilda always talks to me about. I want to be like the women in my family, the strong and lucky-in-love ones.

  My great-grandmother saved herself from the big floods of 1918 by floating down the river Nistru on a big wooden door and holding to her chest a silver mirror with a music box that used to play Beethoven’s “Für Elise”. That was in the Moldovian city of Cetatea Albă, the White Citadel, in the region of Bessarabia, before it belonged to the Soviet Union.

  She is floating on the relentless river that is sweeping along wardrobes and vegetable gardens and chicken coops, with her long, blond hair flying in the wind, holding to her breast the square silver mirror as she listens to the music over and over again, turning the key in the music box every time it stops. After many hours, the door she is floating on bumps against a tree. Somehow she manages to climb the tree while still holding the mirror, and waits, barely conscious, in the nook of its thick branches, for someone to find her.

  At sunset, with the waters still rushing madly by her, the sky soaked in ominous violet-reds, a man in a rescue boat approaches the tree and hears a faint tune, like someone plucking a strange instrument. He finds my great-grandmother among the twisted branches, holding tight to the mirror and whispering notes like a lullaby.

  Vania Golubof lowers her into his boat. He wraps her in blankets and makes a nest for her, then pulls hard for the distant bank. He tries to find out who she is, what happened to her family, what part of the town she is from. All he can get from her is her name, which she keeps repeating: Paraschiva Dumitrescu. She whispers her own name like a song, like a lullaby, just like she did the tune of the music box.

  He carries her to the house where he lives with his mother and lays her in the main room, asking his mother to help him undress her and to get her some dry clothes. They live at the edge of the town where the waters don’t reach, in a small white stone house.

  He falls in love with the lost yellow-haired girl as she goes in and out of her delirium, talking about wild horses and soldiers floating on the river, as he makes her drink little sips of water to bring her fever down. One night, after three days of her rambling talk and fever, he thinks she is going to slip away from him. Her pulse slows down, and she burns so fiercely that the air around her is hot.

  His mother helps him wrap her in cool sheets at night and gives her cool teas made from Russian herbs. He talks to the girl continuously as if his words, which by dawn become as confused and meaningless as hers, could pull her out of her illness and away from death. And they do. One morning, with the first sunlight, when Vania’s mother finally goes to her own room to rest, Paraschiva suddenly stares at Vania. It is the first time in a week that she is calm. She looks at Vania as if she has known
him all her life. She is neither terrified nor surprised to find herself in a man’s house, in a man’s bed, after having floated for days on rampant waters. She asks for her mirror – did he find her mirror with a music box on the back? He shows it to her. It’s safe, see? Just a bit dirty, he says, wiping it with his sleeve. It still works, he tells her, and he begins to wind the key. She stops him, gently touching his hand.

  He silences the stray notes. He places it in her hands. “Keep it,” he says, “for good luck. It brought me to you.”

  She starts laughing. Then he laughs, too. They are shaking with laughter when Vania’s mother comes in. She watches them laugh and realizes that Paraschiva will live, and that she will be her daughter-in-law. She is happy for her son, who has finally found his bride.

  It is 1918, and the war has swallowed up thousands of young men in its fields; the floods have swallowed up muddy villages and more lives. Now famine sets in. If you are lucky, you find your mate in some depth of calamity such as this; you save someone and are saved yourself. It’s how people find mates, ravenously, recklessly, amid putrefying corpses, at the very edge of life and death. With her parents now dead in the flood, Paraschiva counts herself among the luckiest. She has been found by someone with a white stone house at the end of the town where the waters don’t reach, a house with a small vegetable garden, a patch of corn, and a few white hens.