Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  In the summer when I visit my aunt in the Carpathians again, the gypsy girl with her basket of fresh berries wanders through our backyard. My cousins and I beg our mothers to please let us get a cup of the juicy, tart fruit from the gypsy girl with the string of coins sewn onto a black velvet collar around her neck. We wait for her to fill the tin cup with the dark red raspberries or blue berries, and we watch the strands of her hair that slip out from the red scarf tied around her head. I want to be the gypsy girl who wanders through people’s backyards carrying a basket of dark berries. In secret, I make myself a black velvet collar that I tie around my neck whenever I go out to play with the neighbourhood children.

  One summer when we’re visiting my aunt and uncle in the house in the Carpathians, I hear that Great-uncle Ivan, who got lost during the war and was believed dead for twenty-five years, has now been found and is coming to visit us. As a child, I never fully understood the disappearance of Great-uncle Ivan inside the gigantic Soviet Union, but I have always imagined it like this: The sun is aslant on a field covered with corpses sunk into the mud. One brother is looking for the other. The mother is looking for both her sons and is tearing at her hair. She finds her son Victor, but not the other. Her heart breaks in two in the dusk that smells of raw blood and flesh. Ivan is gone. He will be dead for twenty-five years.

  My grandfather Victor tells me that he has found his long-lost brother. When he tells me that he found him through the Red Cross, I imagine that a nurse in the Red Cross uniform has been looking for my grandfather everywhere, and when she found him, she ran back to his brother Ivan in Russia and told him she had found Victor. My grandfather is nervous and pale before going to the train station to meet his brother. We all go with him. The train rushes in with a swirl of white smoke. I miss the moment when Great-uncle Ivan gets off the train, but suddenly I see everybody rushing towards a man with a long white beard, and crying and laughing at the same time.

  Then Uncle Ivan sees me and tells me, “You are krasivaia devochka. You are a beautiful little girl. Come to Uncle Ivan!”

  He swings me with one arm and kisses my face. I am terrified when I notice that Great-uncle Ivan is missing one arm, that his right sleeve is empty, just hanging there without an arm in it.

  This special night, my uncle Ion opens a bottle of ţuică, and a different bottle of another plum drink that is stronger than the first one and is called pălincă. My grandfather Victor and my great-uncle Ivan cry and laugh and hug each other the whole time. Then they look at the silver mirror, the one their mother had saved from the floods of 1918, and they both cry again. The queen of the night flowers are in bloom, and the smell is floating into the house through the open windows with the fresh night breeze. I hear the whistling of the trains coming and going. The talking, the laughing, the cigarette smoke and the smell of the queen of the night envelop me, and the empty sleeve of Great-uncle Ivan does not scare me any more.

  Ivan spends two weeks at my aunt Nina’s house. Nina keeps making huge pots of cabbage soup and is cheerful and talks more than ever, happy to have her whole family around her. The apartment is full of noise and so crowded that everybody sleeps in all the beds and on all the sofas, even the sofa in the kitchen. My father, who has arrived from Bucharest, drinks a lot of pălincă with Ivan and Grandfather Victor and Uncle Ion. They stay in my aunt’s kitchen till late at night swearing at the Communists, at the Soviet Union, at the Romanian president, at the Russian president, at the Americans who split and divided zones of influence with the Russians after the war; they smoke Carpaţi cigarettes and eat pickled tomatoes from my aunt’s jars in the pantry. Ivan tells everybody that life in the Soviet Union is so hard that four families would live in an apartment the size of this one here. And that all they ever eat is cartofeli, potatoes. But now Russia is his home, bad as it may be.

  When Great-uncle Ivan leaves to go back to Moscow, my grandfather Victor cries at the train station, and he embraces his brother for a very long time. Great-uncle Ivan picks me up and kisses me on both cheeks the way he did when he first came. After that we never hear from Uncle Ivan ever again. Grandfather Victor says he is happy they got to see each other one more time, that Ivan must have just gone back to his life in Moscow, which is different from life in Romania, and he isn’t at home here any longer, after twenty-five years.

  The summer after Grandfather Victor and his brother Ivan are reunited I go to the seaside with my parents and with my aunt Ana Koltzunov. She is my aunt twice removed – the fat sister of Matei, Nadia’s husband. I love my aunt Ana and I think she is twice removed because she lives two cities away from the city with the Black Church. She speaks a lot but very slowly with a strong Russian accent, so all the stories she tells last for a very long time. My parents took her along to make her feel better after the death of Matei from pancreatic cancer. I think Matei was so sad because of the death of his wife, Nadia.

  I love the Black Sea in all kinds of weather. My aunt Ana takes me one afternoon to meet a Russian friend of hers who lives in a white stucco house with an apricot tree in her backyard. The two women talk and whisper in Russian for a long time on the front porch. All the women in my family except for Aunt Matilda on my father’s side can speak Russian from the times when Great-grandmother Paraschiva and Great-grandfather Vania lived in the former Bessarabia, before it was taken away by the Russians a second time because of what everybody in my family calls the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They speak Russian when they don’t want me to understand something. I sometimes repeat the words Molotov-Ribbentrop like a chant whenever my relatives speak Russian, and then they stop and look at me with a fearful look and tell me to not mention that again. It must be something bad like Stalin.

  My aunt Ana is very upset and cries because her son Petea has trouble with the secret police. People are always made to disappear when they get in trouble with the secret police, like if they say something bad about the president or if they don’t go to the demonstrations in the big squares to cheer and shout about the Party and the Father of the Nation. Ana’s son Petea made fun of the president at a demonstration; he imitated how he talks and how he always moves his hand up and down. A man took him away, and Ana didn’t see him for a week, then he came home beaten up and with a broken arm. I heard my parents talk about Petea, but Aunt Ana doesn’t know that I know about how they beat up Petea and broke his arm. She cries so hard that her friend holds and rocks her and says many Russian words that sound like calming words because they have a lot of sh and ch sounds.

  I eat so many of the golden juicy apricots while my aunt and her friend are wringing their hands and crying over Petea that I get sick. A wind starts, and the apricot tree is shaken by the wind. The heavy fruit drops to the ground and breaks open.

  My aunt grabs me by the hand and leaves in a rush and gets lost in the town by the Black Sea. I’m scared of the wind and thunder. The storm comes suddenly, and I’m soaked in rain and my own tears. Then, in the middle of the street, my aunt holds me and tells me I am her little krasivaia devochka. She uses the same words that Great-uncle Ivan had said to me when he got off the train after twenty-five years of being dead. She says she wishes she could find her son Petea.

  I feel that something very important is happening, and that it’s an awful thing to be a mother and to love your son so much that you forget something as simple as the way home from a friend’s house.

  At every corner, the sea appears at the end of the street, greenish black and wild. I love the sea like a sister. I want to go and watch the storm by the sea, but my aunt pulls my hand and crosses herself. Ana keeps saying, “Don’t worry, Monichka, we’ll find our street.” But every time she thinks she has found it, it turns out it’s a different street that only looked like our street for a second, in the rain and the dark. After two hours of going in circles in the storm, all soaked and trembling, we finally find our way home.

  My aunt Ana Koltzunov says to me, “Monichka, my Monichka, how could you think we were going to get lost in
a little town like this? Didn’t you know your aunt Ana went all the way to the Soviet Union and back, all by herself?”

  She is soaked in rain and tears. I jump into her arms and tell her I know that she is brave and of course I never thought she was lost. I tell her Petea will be all right, and she holds me and cries some more.

  Before we had our trip to the seaside when we got lost in the storm, my aunt Ana brought me a big doll with long blond plaits from the USSR. I named her Tania. She brought my mother an amber necklace that she had traded for a roll of Romanian horse salami and a pair of Romanian tights. I think that my aunt is intrepid and courageous to have made such a long trip to a country so big that it could hold the entire Black Sea in it, and there would still be room left for a city or two.

  In the autumn after we get back from the seaside with Aunt Ana, I hear my parents say that Petea has been made to work for the secret police so they’ll forgive him for making fun of the president in the middle of a demonstration. But then he disappears again. Aunt Ana always waits for him in the evening with dinner ready, and she becomes fatter and fatter until she dies of a heart attack from never seeing Petea again and from eating all the dinners that Petea didn’t get to eat. I put Tania, the big Russian doll that Aunt Ana brought me from the Soviet Union, in the corner of my bed where I can see her before I go to sleep every night.

  Three Deaths, an Animal Flower, and the Word Dor

  THE WINTER AFTER Petea disappears, there is the sad time when everybody in my family starts dying. My grandfather Victor, who holds me on his lap and tells me stories of Roman emperors and aqueducts, dies. My grandmother Virginia, my father’s mother, who tells me the story of the golden apples and the prince who cunningly picks them, also dies. And Uncle Matei, Nadia’s husband, who had been a political prisoner at the jail in Jilava where they lock up and torture all the people who don’t agree with the new government, died some months ago in the beautiful house on the street with chestnut and linden trees in Bucharest.

  I hide in my aunt’s wardrobe and tear my ugly blue tights with the scissors because I hate how they scratch my legs and because I am afraid about all the people dying. I think that if many more people die, our family will just disappear from the face of the earth and I will be alone. I hold on to my bare knees in my aunt’s wardrobe where Great-grandmother Paraschiva used to pretend to go to the city, and where they found her dead. I rock myself back and forth, hoping that nobody else in our family is going to die, at least for a long time.

  They will put the dead grandmother and the dead grandfather in the ground, in deep holes. Everyone dresses up, and we go to a party and there’s food but no laughing allowed. I get to see my baby cousin Miruna, who is the first baby in our family since I was born. She is two years old, and her blue eyes are so big that they seem to occupy half of her face. When she walks she looks like a wound-up toy that moves quickly, with small steps. Then she falls on her face, and she gets up again. She got into her mother’s bag and ate up all the lipstick. They shouldn’t leave lipstick near Miruna. I hold my big Russian doll, Tania. She won’t die. She has long yellow plaits.

  I watch my cousin Miruna who is a baby. She is not dying, she is screaming, and she’s all round and pretty like my doll. The little lost kitten mewing in front of the door is not dead. She wants to come in. But my mother and my aunt and everybody else chase her out and tell me I can’t let her in. I so much want to let the lost kitten in.

  For my grandfather’s funeral, the neighbours make the special chocolate cake called televizor, television. My aunt makes the special food for the dead, colivă, which has little balls of wheat inside and is creamy and has powdered sugar all over it. I like the cake televizor so much that I hide some in a corner of my aunt’s wardrobe for later. Men play a very sad song with their trumpets when they take the dead to the cemetery, and it’s so sad that I think everybody is going to melt and die and disappear. I am going to eat the cake all by myself.

  My body feels like it has ants in it all the time, and people don’t sleep at night. I don’t like it when everybody dies in our family, and I don’t like it when everybody talks about Stalin. Everybody is also talking about Nicolae Ceauşescu, our new president who talked back to the Russians all the way from the Palace Square in Bucharest and told the Russian president that he won’t allow any of their tanks to come over to Romania. A bad man is following my father, and other bad people are following everybody else, and we go to the cemetery a lot. My father says this man comes into the amphitheatre where he lectures at the university and takes notes during his classes. He says the bastard and the criminal wants to find out if he talks about any dangerous capitalistic influences and about metaphysical ideas or forbidden authors to his students. Then my father says the bad man can go to bloody hell, he is not going to stop him from doing his profession the right way. My mother scolds my father again for the bad language he uses in front of me.

  I like the cemetery. There are always flowers. I sometimes get to eat the food left for the dead, the sugary colivă, from other people’s funerals. There is a special flower on my grandmother’s grave that is called the eight o’clock flower because it opens up at eight o’clock every evening and makes a little sound like pop when it opens up. My father and I always wait until eight to see the flower open up. I watch it very closely. Slowly the petals move, and by eight-fifteen on my father’s watch the whole flower is open, so yellow with a little black soft stick in the middle.

  The yellow of the eight o’clock flower makes me not itch all over my body and makes me laugh. I like to go to my grandmother’s grave in the cemetery. My father always makes me remember Grandmother Virginia, who wore round glasses and who used to scramble in the earth for roots to feed him and his sister Matilda during the war so they wouldn’t starve. And we remember the game Virginia used to play with me about us having guests and serving them walnut preserve and the time I told all the imaginary guests to go away because Grandmother was tired and wanted to go to sleep and I ate all the pretend preserve by myself. And then I ate half a jar of the real preserve and became sick. I think she is the one who makes the flower open up every evening, because she wants to talk to me and she can’t. But she can talk to me through the yellow flower, which I believe is an animal flower because it moves and pops. I want to have an animal flower of my own.

  When I am ten years old, I have to write a composition about why I love my country. I stare and stare at the white page and cannot bring myself to say why I love my country. I know I love my country: the beautiful mountains, and the sea, and the old buildings, and the universities, and the wheat fields, but everybody will say that. It’s what all the literature books tell us: they tell us why we love our country, and they tell us how beautiful and rich our country is, and that we all love it.

  Then suddenly it comes to me. I love my country because I miss my country, like I miss my mother when she is not with me. But I live in my country. Why would I miss it, if I am in it all the time? But I know what I know. I miss the country I once saw in my father’s eyes as he was telling my mother and me about his childhood before the war, about the cherry orchard where he used to run with his dog that was cut to pieces by the Russians and was left to rot in the front room for them to find when they came back from their hiding place during the war. This was my father’s favourite dog: a female wolf dog called Nera that followed my father everywhere and slept next to his bed every night. The Russians even took the electric sockets out of the walls, and they killed the dogs, and they would cut people’s hands off to get the watches from their wrists. And Grandmother Virginia had to spend two full days cleaning up after the Russians, and the house still looked devastated. “Our house never looked the same after that,” my father would say, “the Soviet sons of bitches.”

  “I saw them cut off people’s hands on the train platform once as they got off the train, I swear. They cut off people’s hands,” my father repeated.

  Then he talked about how beautiful it all was
, before the war. There was nothing like the orchards in the spring, with all the apple and cherry trees in bloom, just like paradise.

  “And there was freedom,” my father said, hitting the table with his fist.

  His eyes filled with tears, and he started crying with little choking sobs. I felt embarrassed for him and confused and full of pity to see my father cry like that. I envied him that childhood in his cherry orchards.

  All I have is the dusty Bucharest pavement in front of our apartment building where I play hopscotch for hours or hide-and-seek, hiding behind the parked cars. My mother always calls me from the balcony and tells me to stop hiding behind the parked cars because it’s dangerous and a child in the neighbourhood had been run over like that. My favourite game is the skipping-rope competitions, when we see who can do the most tricks and who lasts the longest without stumbling or getting the rope entangled.

  I cannot say all of that in my composition. But I know I can somehow say it without saying it. I know I can describe that country and describe how I love my country because I miss my country, without mentioning the Russians who cut off people’s hands and who ripped up my father’s dog. I hang onto a word, the one word that Romanians are so proud of because they say it can’t be translated into any other language. The word dor.

  My father explains this word to me often. “It means something like a longing, like a yearning that you can’t explain and you don’t know why you have it. It hits you when you look at certain landscapes and listen to certain music, such as music played on special Romanian instruments whose names are untranslatable, flutes with many tubes and instruments like huge horns. Then you see the mountains where your ancestors lived and fought the Turks and the Huns and the Visigoths, and where they looked at the sky and dreamed the way you look at the sky and dream now. You look at all that, and you become melancholy and you yearn for something. That’s what dor means.”