Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  My father gives me little lectures when I ask a question and I always listen enraptured, trying to be the best student he has ever had.

  I hang onto that specific word that seems like the key to why I love my country. I write about all the things that would give me that special feeling of longing, of unquenched yearning, if I ever were to lose my country, just like what I would feel if I ever lost my mother. I write about the country I saw in my father’s eyes, full of cherry and apple orchards and with snow so big and so white that it was blue. I try very hard to avoid saying anything about the ripped-up dog and the electric sockets, though I want to very badly. Instead, I imagine the colour of the orchards and I describe the hills and valleys. But I do write just a little bit about the Turks and the Visigoths, and about how brave our ancestors were to fight and free our land and bring us freedom. I say that “our fearless ancestors freed our land from the invasions of the tribes and peoples who tried to steal our freedom and enslave us and take away our green pastures and our rolling hills. But our ancestors were braver and stronger because they loved their motherland more than anything.” And when I write freedom, I know I mean the freedom I saw in my father’s eyes, because I had never seen that freedom with my own eyes. I’ve just heard about it from my relatives and from my father, as if it were some kind of mythic creature with wild hair flying in the wind. All I write is the word freedom. Only the white page knows everything I’m thinking about when I write that word.

  I win the first prize with my composition about why I love my country. This is the happy time in our country, when you find even dates and bananas and red caviar in the shops without queuing, and when my mother wears her grey dress with fuchsia daisies that swells and swirls like a balloon every time she turns around.

  “Soon things will get bad again, mark my words,” my father says. “They’re just tricking us, and the West, too. They’re trying to make us think we’re free. They say it’s a period of liberalization, but in fact it’s all a scam to show the Western countries what a liberal president we have because he stands up to the Russians. But in reality,” he says, leaning close, “the Russians are in on it. Ceauşescu throws us just enough scraps to keep us from howling. This liberalization is a scam, mark my words.”

  I don’t know what scam and liberalization mean, but I’m afraid about the scam part. I think that maybe the scam is when the black van will come in front of our building and take my mother and father away, or when the Russians will start ripping up dogs and cutting off people’s hands in the street and will leave us without electricity again, with big holes in the walls in place of the sockets, like during the war. I’m so afraid of that scam that I don’t want any liberalization either. I tremble at night when I hear airplanes, in the summer night of Bucharest that smells like linden flowers and burnt asphalt. I’m only happy again when I hear people talk and laugh in the street. I think this is the happy time in my country as I fall asleep and I feel the yearning in the word dor.

  Aunt Matilda and the Earthquake

  I REMEMBER MOST vividly the Sunday mornings stretching like a long string of beads from my childhood to my adolescence. I measure time by the new dresses I get every couple of years when the old ones become so small that my arms stick out like thin tree limbs, and by the new textbooks I receive in school, in which there are no more pictures of Lina uttering simple sentences under the blue sky of the Party but real texts by Romanian writers and complicated literary analyses.

  On Sunday mornings I go to the Romanian Atheneum in the Palace Square of Bucharest to listen to concerts of classical music. We go with the high school as part of our musical education classes. We put on our best clothes and fall into long colourful dreams on the red velvet chairs as Chopin’s études trickle their melancholy notes into our souls, as Mozart’s symphonies race through our hearts, as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony gallops its mad swirls through our flesh.

  On such a Sunday afternoon, after the concert, I visit my aunt Matilda, who wanted me to be called Maria because she had prayed to the Holy Virgin the day I was born. She lives near the Atheneum on a little side street lined with chestnut trees. She writes plays and makes the most delicious walnut and rose-petal preserves in the world. My aunt Matilda has a white round face with velvety brown eyes and very dark hair that falls in waves down her back. She has graceful, slow gestures. When she laughs, she throws her head back like an actress. She isn’t married. She says I am her one big love, but I know she just wasn’t lucky in love. I know that there were men who lied to her and cheated on her. I know that deep down she is as sad as a weeping willow. She writes children’s stories and plays, which she has a hard time getting published or produced, because the editors and the directors think she’s not contemporary enough. “What exactly is there to be contemporary about?” she asks after every rejection. “Elena Ceauşescu?” She laughs at her own joke and throws her head back, showing her beautiful teeth.

  Just then I see the crystals of her chandelier sway and tinkle. This chandelier comes from the same house from which my father inherited the black mahogany desk, where we keep the picture of Nora in an orange tree.

  Aunt Matilda also has a Greek icon of the Virgin Mary with drops of blood on her face. Matilda says it is real blood. She says the icon was found floating in the water by a Greek soldier, who stuck his knife in the face of the Virgin to rescue it, and it bled real blood. Suddenly the crystals are jingling louder, and the whole house is shaking like a boat. Something like an end-of-the-world howl fills the air. A roar of metal and earth and strange wild animals hurts our ears and dizzies us. We stand holding each other in the middle of the room. I bury my head in the fragrant softness of my aunt’s breasts while she prays frantically to the Virgin Mary who is bleeding in the Greek icon.

  I am waiting to die, to disappear, to feel the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Now the house is shaking so much that we can barely stand. My aunt is holding me, and she is praying. I squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I can, and a white emptiness fills my head, the bright light of the impossible noise. I’m thinking that the Russians have finally invaded us and are bombing all of Bucharest. In a few minutes, only piles of mortar will be left of my aunt’s house. We will be under the bricks, with everything we have and with everything we think, with the music and the dreams of music . . . It will all come down and crumble like the very end, the very end of the world.

  When it stops, we grab our coats and rush out onto the marble staircase. There are fallen bricks and cracks in the walls and hot water spurting from broken pipes. Hundreds of people, some dressed, others half dressed, are running in all directions. The building right across the street is an enormous pile of bricks and mortar. Screams and wails are coming from everywhere. The air is filled with white dust, and everything beyond looks unreal, grey and watery. A woman is running towards us tearing at her hair and screaming. As we walk towards University Boulevard, the crowds become so thick that we can hardly move at all. We have to push through; we use our elbows to make our way. There are crumbled buildings on both sides of the boulevard, and screams are coming from everywhere.

  There is the building where I used to eat the special cream puffs with my father – now a mound of white plaster. The grocery store where they sometimes have butter or cheese is half collapsed. The half that remains is gaping wide open. There is a toilet hanging from a pipe, a wardrobe ready to slide down a twisted floor. A mashed leg with a shoe on it sticks out from beneath a fallen wall of stone. Somewhere else, an arm is waving; someone is calling; someone stops moving and is silent. We are walking in the direction of my parents’ apartment. I don’t want to think of our building, of my father caught under a mound of bricks, of my mother lying in the street. Why would they have survived wars, the Russian and German and American bombs, just to die in an earthquake?

  “An earthquake is the last thing these people need” are my father’s first words as he sees us approach.

  “Neither of you is hurt? Thank God!” my mother says
, rushing to put her arms around me.

  “Thank God and the Virgin Mary!” adds my aunt. “God help us, and the Blessed Virgin help us!” she wails and crosses herself.

  Both my parents are standing at the street corner. Our building is still whole, but the one beside it has crumbled. My mother is sobbing as she hugs me, and though she squeezes me to her so hard it hurts, I don’t want her to let go.

  Here the streets are strangely quiet. Everyone has fled towards the big boulevards, and we stand alone at the corner of a street as silent as a cemetery. There is thick white dust swirling around us, and the smells of blood, mortar and hyacinths. It’s spring, the spring equinox, and the death around us is so huge there are no words for it. But we are alive.

  “We are so lucky,” says my father. He turns and takes a few steps towards our home, then stops and looks up at the hole in the sky where another building had stood.

  “This looks just like after the war,” he says, talking to himself. “If a war ends, then there’s hunger. If we get enough bread to fill our bellies a little, then there’s terror. Just when we start to have a little hope, then this comes . . . comes down on us like a fist.”

  This is the spring before the summer when I discover my first love, sprouting from raw earth, raw flesh, misery and death. My love among the rocky, dark Carpathians grew like a stubborn plant, like a wild creature, like the colour pink in the middle of the rainbow, like the yellow hyacinth blossoming from the cracked, bleeding earth.

  Secret Activities and Typewriters

  THE YEAR WHEN I fall in love with Mihai, my father is involved in secret activities he talks about only in whispers with my mother. I’m not supposed to have a boyfriend because you never know. I tell myself Screw it all and cling to my green-eyed mountain boy. I tell Marx and Engels and Lenin and Ceauşescu to fuck off every time we make love in Mihai’s room and I catch a glimpse of their monstrous portraits spying on us from the building across the street.

  We can’t own typewriters any longer. They’re illegal. A policeman comes to our house one evening to ask us if we have one.

  “Good evening, Comrade Manoliu,” the policeman says ceremoniously. “We’re checking to see if you own a typewriter. It’s just a routine check.”

  I can see my father’s jaws clench with anger and his eyes flash. He waits a moment, drags on his cigarette, trying to contain his fury.

  “I’m curious,” my father says. “Why is it that you need to perform such routine checks?”

  The officer is taken aback. Romanian policemen are notorious for how dumb and illiterate they are. This one must be no exception, I think, as I watch his self-important pose, his scrunched-up small forehead.

  “Perform?” he repeats as if he were insulted.

  “Yes,” my father says. “Why do you need to perform such routine checks?”

  He purposely stresses the word perform.

  “We are not performing, sir, we are checking, just checking,” says the policeman proudly.

  My mother stares at my father, then blinks, then winks, as if wanting to say: Just say no and get it over with, stop all this useless talk.

  “We do not own a typewriter,” answers my father, as if having understood her silent admonishment. “But you are free to look,” he says. “Please, go and check, look under our mattresses, look under our beds, look inside our toilets. Go and see for yourself if we own a typewriter.”

  The policeman looks embarrassed and moves towards the door, as if trying to escape my father’s onslaught.

  “No, sir, there is no need to bother yourselves. But if you know someone who does, would you be so kind to inform us?” asks the policeman as if it were an afterthought.

  This time my father does not even make an effort to hide his disdain. He sends a swirl of Kent cigarette smoke right into the policeman’s face.

  The policeman takes some notes in a little notebook, probably the clandestine typewriter notebook. He turns on his heels and leaves muttering a “Yes, sir, goodbye, sir.” After the policeman leaves, my father is overjoyed by his own cunning and courage.

  I go to the oven where my mother hid our Zinger a few days ago, when the news went around that they were checking for typewriters. I take it out from among our pots and pans. I carry it to the mahogany desk with the picture of Nora smiling in that glorious orange tree in America, and I write a letter to the boyfriend I’m not supposed to have, on the typewriter we’re not allowed to own.

  Now that vacation is over and I’m back in Bucharest, Mihai and I pine for each other like Bedouins in the desert pining for water and an oasis. The daughter of a friend of ours has been run over accidentally on the pavement. I don’t get why all these people keep driving on the pavement.

  “It’s bad,” my father keeps saying. “And it’s going to get worse, mark my words,” he says, staring into the cigarette smoke.

  It must be bad, because you can’t be safe anywhere. You can’t even own a sorry old Zinger typewriter, and you get killed for walking on the pavement. You’re better off walking in the middle of the street. I wait for Christmas; I long for the white snow in my aunt’s town. I long to be with Mihai on the same paths where we were this summer, lying on the fresh, glistening snow.

  In December, Mihai is waiting for me at the train station, morose and unshaven, leaning against a wall with a cigarette and wearing a black leather jacket. I’m startled, and for a moment I want to run away when he takes me by the arm and ushers me through the crowd on the platform. There’s a new confidence, even an arrogance, in the way he moves, the way he takes charge of me, and his black leather jacket annoys me. I try to push back my instincts. Not all secret police wear black leather jackets, I tell myself, and not all men who wear black leather jackets are secret police. That would be too obvious even for a stupid little dictatorship like ours.

  When we escape from the crowded station and find ourselves in the street under the winter sky and the light snowflakes, he holds me in a tight embrace and kisses me in the middle of the pavement. I kiss him back, heedless of the people edging by and staring at us. I don’t care about Zinger typewriters and my father’s secret dissident activities any more. The streets become dark and empty as we walk. They remind me of the night of many moons, my dream of a toothless Mariana grinning at us. I push all the bad dreams and troubling thoughts far down where I can’t hear them calling me. I concentrate on his profile, on the way that the snowflakes get caught in his dark eyelashes and melt on his red lips.

  I start my shuttle up and down the stairs, back and forth between Mihai’s and my aunt’s house. His body seems warmer and more delicious than ever between the starched bedsheets. Soon I don’t give a damn about his black leather jacket. He plays Grieg for me again, and sometimes we dance in his room to Western music, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. He teaches me dance steps. We swirl and bump into his furniture, fall onto his bed laughing, sweaty with desire. American jazz is seeping into my Romanian veins. Thank God it’s winter and the windows are closed so I don’t have to see the three bearded Communist gods and the Father of the Nation grotesquely watching us from the building across the street.

  One evening we talk politics, and I make so much fun of the Beloved Leader, imitating his ignorant drawl, that my eyes water with laughter.

  Mihai gets mad and says, “You really shouldn’t talk like that, Mona.”

  His tone is harsh, reprimanding. He startles me, and the moons and toothless Mariana rush into my head.

  We go out for a walk in silence. I sit in the snow in the middle of the street. I lie down in the middle of the street as a form of protest. He looks at me and starts laughing.

  “I don’t think it’s a bit funny to speak in defence of a tyrant and an illiterate criminal,” I yell in the middle of the street.

  I think of my father’s worried face, of the spiteful look he gave the cop who asked about the typewriter. Nausea rises in my throat as I lie on my back in the snow, under the winte
r stars. Then suddenly Mihai lies down next to me and takes my hand.

  “No, it’s not funny,” he says. “I was just teasing you.”

  Now I’m all confused and don’t know whether to kiss him or slap him. He’s just teasing, I think. He listens to Ella Fitzgerald and the Beatles. I can trust him. I can love him. I hear a train whistle. Something like the approach of death flutters through me as I lie on my back in the snow.

  I stand up and drag him up as well. As he stands in front of me, I see him again as I saw him that afternoon at the white rock, above the phenomenon of pink and violet clouds: wild, dark, proud and with luscious red lips.

  The next morning my father calls from Bucharest and says I have to return home immediately, it’s urgent. But I don’t listen. There’s no urgency in my life beyond Mihai. I spend my days going up and down the stairs. I hold his warm body at dawn and in the afternoon. I walk through the snow on his arm, my head wrapped in a silky blue babushka shawl, like Katharine Hepburn in a film where she rides teary-eyed in what looks like a carriage or a horse-drawn sleigh next to Spencer Tracy. From five to seven in the evening we sometimes get foreign films on Romanian national television, sandwiched between news about the latest achievements of our beloved leader and his wife. Those same hours there are queues in the street for beef, cooking oil, bananas, menstrual cotton. It’s a rich country after all. We pass by the queues and smile disdainfully. We don’t need any of that. We make do without just about anything. We make love; we walk in the snow. Sometimes we drink vodka straight from the bottle and eat a lot of bread. We avoid politics. I forget my bad dreams for a while.

  Until one afternoon a week later when my mother calls with a weird shake in her voice, telling me to come home right away. This time I’m scared. I buy my train ticket back to the capital.