In the summer, they get married in the little garden with the village accordionist playing his two tunes for them over and over again, a happy one and a melancholy one. They drink ţuică, the brandy made from fermented plums. They eat mămăligă, the cornmeal mush that peasants eat instead of bread and sometimes instead of everything else, and they dance till dawn to the same two tunes. That night she wants to turn the key in the music box and listen to “Für Elise” again in the same bed where Vania pulled her away from delirium and the edge of death with cool compresses and Russian herb teas.
The summer with many orange moons when I discover the greed of my own body, I am also my great-grandmother who listens to Beethoven in the music-box mirror she saved from the floods. I want to be Paraschiva as she bites Vania’s shoulder in ecstasy and sinks her nails into his back. I want to be her in the little squeaky bed in the white stone house on the side of town that was not touched by the great floods, as I smell and lick the body of this young man in this bed where I struggled for several days between life and death, soaked in fever from the infected river.
Paraschiva and Vania have two boys, Ivan and Victor. Ivan will get lost in the Second World War, and found through the Red Cross twenty-five years later, when his mother is already dead. Victor is going to be my grandfather, the one always gentle and sad from the loss of his brother. They say that as she got older, Paraschiva would put on her best clothes and her green felt hat on some cool and sunny afternoons, would say she was going into town, and instead would go inside the large brown wardrobe the family brought with them when they moved into the apartment next to the railway station. She would come out after a few hours and say everything had got so expensive in town. One day they found her dead inside the brown wardrobe, amid old coats, party dresses and mothballs, holding to her chest one of Ivan’s jackets from when he was a boy. This is how the stories are kept in our family: a few big events, major catastrophes and one or two scenes, some invented from saved sepia photographs, others handed down and retold many times over the years, to the point where they have become vague and misty like fairy tales.
Mona Maria Manoliu Growing Up in Bucharest
I WAS BORN in the summer, in old Bucharest, when the streets were filled with linden smells so heavy and so sweet that one would keep wanting to be born again and again on a summer night such as this one.
It is three o’clock in the morning, the eerie hour of births, deaths, accidents and metamorphoses. My mother is sitting at the edge of the bed in the rented room, after her water has just broken, in her one black dress, with a little bag on her knees that she has prepared for the hospital. She is silent. She’s in mourning for her mother, Vera, who died only a month ago, falling in the street from a stroke, and for her aunt Nadia, who had died the previous year, falling dead in the old house on the street lined with chestnut trees, holding a postcard that her husband, Matei, had written her from political prison.
My father has just gone to the public phone in the street to call the ambulance, the hospital, or a taxi. Their apartment is right in the piazza with the statue of the famous Romanian king Michael the Brave, who withstood the Turks and united the three principalities Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania into one country for the first time, four hundred years ago. He is on his horse with his formidable sword pulled out for battle. My father is staring at the statue from the telephone booth, which is right next to the majestic grey stone government building with the faces of the Communist leaders hanging larger than life at its entrance. The streets are deserted, except for a drunken man who never made it home after work and ended up drinking plum brandy in the corner tavern for hours. My father is flustered and trying to light a cigarette while calling and while buttoning up the trousers that he has pulled over his pyjamas. His lighter doesn’t work, so he asks the drunken passer-by for a light as he is still holding the phone and his trousers are falling down. He manages to make the phone call and an ambulance comes to pick up my mother one hour later.
I was born in the morning to the smell of linden trees, to the sound of my mother’s sobs. I was born in the wild disorder of pain and mourning in my family, greedy for life and for my mother’s breast.
My mother is still crying in the ward immediately after my birth. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong, and she doesn’t stop for hours. The linden smells rush through the open windows. They say I was red and scrunched up and had a lot of light hair stuck to my head. They let my father inside the ward a few hours after the birth. My father, Miron Manoliu, who had never seen a newborn baby in his life, says I am an ugly baby. Then at last, my mother, Dorina Golubof, laughs in the middle of her crying.
They name me Mona Maria. Mona from a character in a Romanian novel my mother was reading while she was pregnant. A love story that takes place in a mountain resort during summer vacation between a young actress, Mona, and an aspiring writer, Ciprian. They are both trying to get away from the dust and bustle of Bucharest. She is working on a new part, and the writer is trying to write a new play. They sit and talk until late at night on the front porch of their villa and watch the galactic journey of the morning star. My mother thinks it will be a lucky name. Nobody in our family has ever been given such a whimsical name. I also have to be called Maria, because it is important to my aunt Nina. It was on 15 August 1959, on the holiday of Saint Mary of the Assumption, that Aunt Nina and my mother, Dorina, caught a glimpse of Uncle Matei as he was brought into the courthouse in Bucharest from the political prison in Jilava. I don’t know why I have to be named in memory of a family tragedy, but my aunt Nina insists. And then Aunt Matilda, on my father’s side, the religious aunt, says she prayed all day to the Virgin Mary during my mother’s labour, which lasted an ungodly twenty-seven hours. So I have to carry the name of the Blessed Virgin because, apparently, it was thanks to the prayers of my aunt that I was born healthy, though a little blue from having the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck.
I grow up in a minuscule apartment that faces the sunset and the little four-hundred-year-old church where my parents got married in secret, because you can’t have a religious wedding in the Communist state. There is a lilac bush behind my window, whose sweet fragrance in the spring fills our tiny apartment and makes me long to go out and play all the time.
My parents are always worried about something. They speak in whispers. My father wakes up at night cursing the secret police and coughing until I am afraid he will explode. When the doctor comes to our house one night and finds my father coughing and smoking his unfiltered cigarette at the same time, the doctor gets angry and leaves without even examining him. My father says he’s had too much suffering, with the war and the famine after the war, and with Stalinism after the famine. And on top of it all, now a man is following him everywhere and checking on how he teaches his classes.
After the doctor leaves, my father curses him. “It’s too much. They’re killing me. Isn’t it enough that my poor mother had to scramble in the ground for roots to feed us during the war, and that I saw soldiers’ skulls crushed by dynamite, and that I survived on ale and mouldy bread as a student, isn’t it enough, hm?” Exasperated from lack of sleep and the constant drama my father makes of his life, my mother tells him, “Yes, it’s enough. Calm down now, Miron, and go to sleep, for God’s sake!”
When my mother leaves me in school, I always feel like crying. I have to wear a white ribbon on my head as part of my school uniform, a blue shirt and blue-and-white jumper. I hate the big white bow on my head. I feel like a big egg as I’m walking to school in the morning.
I enjoy the reading book with the picture of a girl named Lina working in the field of wheat. She is wearing a pioneer’s red scarf and is cutting the stems of the wheat with a tool that resembles a new moon, and the sky is all blue with one white cloud in the corner. The writing says: Lina is happy because she lives under the blue sky of the Party. I want a tool like a new moon just like the one Lina holds in the picture.
There are always peopl
e in our house until late at night, poets and teachers and artists. One artist draws the Walt Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs figures that my aunt Matilda took me to see in the big cinema next to the pastry shop, where they have the best cream puffs and éclairs in the world. I had never seen a cartoon film in the cinema before. Aunt Matilda works at the cinematographic studios in Bucharest, and she got tickets for the film before any of my school friends were able to see it. My father’s friend draws each of the Seven Dwarfs and Snow White with what seems like one flick of the wrist. He teaches me how to do it, too. When all the people come to our house, they smoke a lot and drink wine, beer and then ţuică. They talk about Ceauşescu and the bad things he does, like censorship and following people so they can’t talk, sending their friends to the secret police, who are called Securitate, punishing people who are good and just want to talk a lot.
“They know everything: they know what you say and what you eat and what you shit. It’s going to get worse soon, you just wait!” my father tells everyone and drinks another shot of ţuică.
“They just want to intimidate us all into silence, they want us to believe they are listening to us all the time, but I don’t think they actually are. Some of these Securitate are imbeciles. Let’s not give them the credit,” says the artist man with a beard who can draw Snow White so well. He’s drunk quite a lot of ţuică by this time in the night.
His paintings are exhibited in the big gallery in the centre of the city near the cinema, but they are all coloured circles and squares that my parents call abstract. I don’t know why he doesn’t exhibit the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs drawings. He says that the Party asked him to stop painting abstract and told him to take inspiration from the people working in the textile factory.
“Nonsense,” says my father and lights up another cigarette, and my mother is angry and tells him to stop smoking and drinking so late at night. “This child has to go to sleep and she has school tomorrow.”
I am waiting for everybody to leave so my mother can come to sleep next to me the way she always does, except when she leaves in the middle of the night because she has a headache and she has to sleep with my father.
“Pure nonsense!” my father says again. “Who says that the Securitate are intellectuals? Stalin didn’t build his regime of terror with philosophers and artists, did he? It’s the proletariat, remember? But they are just cunning enough to find out everything about everyone. Rest assured that they have a nice little file they are keeping for each and every single one of us. Particularly if you are an intellectual.”
“You know, they are not treating their own proletariat too well either, are they? In any case, they can all fuck themselves,” says the artist. My father agrees and says an even worse expression about body parts, and my mother scolds him for being vulgar and vile.
It’s the August when I am eight years old. We just came back from our vacation in the mountains, after our vacation at the seaside. Everybody is worried: the Russians have just driven their tanks right into the middle of Prague. People were shot in the middle of the street, and one student set himself on fire in the main square in Prague as a form of protest. Everybody says in whispers they will come to Bucharest, too. I’m frozen with fear about the tanks that will surely invade us. I draw many, many Seven Dwarfs and Snow Whites and stick them all on the wall to make myself a little less afraid. I can’t stop thinking about the student, a boy all ablaze like a human torch in the middle of the enormous square in Prague.
My mother takes me to the park with the lake and the swans in Bucharest, and she buys me corn on the cob from the woman sitting on the ground with her legs crossed. Then she buys me candyfloss from the man in the candyfloss booth. I stare at the white sugary fluff moving in circles, and I hope it won’t all be gone by the time our turn comes. I ask my mother about the Russian tanks, and she scrunches up her face the way she does when my father makes her nervous or upset with his cigarette smoking and his swearing, and she says the tanks won’t come to Bucharest, Prague is far away, and our president won’t let the tanks come to our country. I am all sweaty because it’s so hot in August in Bucharest, and my feet hurt from the tight patent-leather shoes I am wearing. The candyfloss tastes funny after the corn on the cob, and I feel sick. My mother says, “I told you so,” but she’s not really paying attention to me. Her mind is on something else. I ask her to please get me a bottle of Coca-Cola from the little restaurant on the lake, but she says that she doesn’t have any more money, and that I shouldn’t have got the candyfloss if I wanted Coca-Cola. I just drink water from the stone water fountain in the park, and my dress with blue circles and ruffles gets all wet from the jet of water. I want to cry because my mother is angry and everything seems so wrong today when the Russians drove their tanks into Prague. Then my mother takes me on the big Ferris wheel from where you can see the whole city of Bucharest, or almost, not all the way to where we live, but up to the statue of Michael the Brave. I hold my mother’s hand on the Ferris wheel ride, and when we’re at the very top of the wheel my mother kisses me and tells me we’ll be all right, not to worry about the tanks, and she’ll get me Coca-Cola when the ride is over. I don’t want this ride to be over; I hold on tight to my mother’s hand and admire her pretty profile and her taffeta grey dress with its pink daisies.
Right before Christmas, there are many students in the street holding burning candles, for a protest. I don’t know what a protest is, but I want to go with a burning candle into the street where all the students are. My parents are very excited and happy about the protest, and I want to start a protest, too, to make my parents happy. My father says the students are so courageous. After the protest, everybody has Christmas break, because the students stood in the streets with candles and asked for Christmas break. I get a huge ball and a Snow White doll for Christmas, and I am happy about the protests, too. Happy and relieved: no student set himself on fire like the man did in Prague.
My mother has just had a grey dress made for me, out of the special thin woollen material called tergal, by the same seamstress who makes her own dresses. It’s my autumn and winter dress, and the tergal makes me itch. I am too hot in it in September and too chilly in December. I will never wear tergal dresses when I grow up, I decide. My mother wears a white-and-grey dress also made out of tergal, and her hair is blond and combed up like a balloon. I’m wondering why did my mother have to ask the seamstress to put a white bow on my grey tergal dress. I want a dress with violet and lime circles all over it and with no white bows. I like violet and lime together. I saw these two colours together once in the special sweetshop next to the music conservatory where my mother teaches foreign languages to music students so they can sing operas in Italian or in French. These sweets were violet and lime both, and they made me feel not afraid. I want a dress that makes me feel brave.
Sometimes, when I wake up from my nap in the afternoon, my father talks to me about Romanian grammar and how there are more words that come from the Romans than from any other language, that’s why it’s called Romanian. But there are fourteen words from the people who lived on this land before the Romans, who were called Dacians. They were blond and had blue eyes. The Dacian words are copil, moşneag, barză, tîrnăcop. Child, old man, stork, hoe . . . and I can’t remember the rest. I like the Dacian words a lot, and I want to be Dacian from before the Romans came. I don’t like the Romans, how they invaded and killed the Dacians and how they stole all of their words and left them with only fourteen.
I want to write a poem with my new coloured pens that are called carioca. I want to write a poem in purple. I sit down at the big black wooden desk with sculptures that my father got from his father, from the times when they had the house with the orchards before the Russian soldiers stole their electric sockets and cut up my father’s dog to pieces. I sit down and I like to feel the cool glass that covers the wood of the desk against my elbows and my arms. I look at the picture of Nora that’s on the desk.
She is my
mother’s old schoolmate, her best friend from ever since she was my age. Nora ran away to America three years ago; she sent us a picture of herself sitting in an orange tree in America. She is wearing blue jeans and a white shirt and is holding an orange, and she’s smiling the biggest smile I have ever seen. I look at that picture and I think Nora is so beautiful, with her black hair and her green eyes. The way she’s just sitting there in the tree holding the orange makes me feel cheerful.
I try to write very fast the way I see my father write when he writes his articles about Romanian poets and the language they use. I make lots of circles and wavy lines with my purple pen on the white paper. Sometimes I write a word I learned how to spell, like copil, which is a Dacian word, and then the word pasăre, which is a Roman word, and I write a poem about how I ask this bird to come to me at the Danube River so I can feed him. I want to send my poem to Nora in America where she’s sitting in the orange tree and smiling the biggest smile I have ever seen. America is very, very far, my mother says, and I wonder how long it would take for my poem to reach Nora.
Uncle Ivan’s Return and My Aunt Ana Koltzunov Who Has Been to the USSR
AFTER THE STUDENTS’ protests everyone has Christmas break, and we get to go to the mountains twice a year now. When we go to my aunt Nina’s house in the mountains for the new Christmas break, the neighbours slaughter a pig, a whole live pig. I hate hearing the pig cry out so loud when they cut him up to make sausages. The next day the ice in the backyard is red with frozen blood, and we slide on the frozen bloody patches pretending we’re ice-skating. Sometimes in the afternoon the blind violinist wanders through our backyard in a worn-out tuxedo and plays the Kreutzer Sonata, with such wailing sounds that our hearts melt in an agony of sadness and joy as the winter sunset bleeds and we glide on bloody ice.
Train to Trieste Page 3