We make love until half an hour before the train pulls out. I can’t find my stockings. I have to wear my Bulgarian boots over bare legs and feet. My feet hurt and are cold as we walk to the station, the same road we’d taken when I arrived and he’d kissed me in the middle of the street, under the snowflakes, under the scornful looks of strangers. He does the same thing now, right in front of the station. He stops and kisses me in front of train conductors who have finished their shift, gypsies with heavy sacks on their backs, old people dragging huge suitcases tied with rope.
There’s an overwhelming confusion in my head. Pink fogs are mixed up with blue snows, toothless grins, huge suitcases, cars running over people on pavements. Huge red moons like stars are covering the sky, and queues for food are swirling around every building on every street, in every city, like ugly serpents. I am thinking that maybe I am losing my mind. Then I know I have to run for my train. I know I have to get on that train and leave Mihai there in the middle of the platform, morose and unshaven. I watch him stand alone on the train platform while my train is slowly moving away and I try to shape his image in my mind with utmost precision as I am waving at him and as he is getting smaller and smaller: his head leaning to one side, one hand in his pocket, one hand waving at me with a steady motion.
Secret Police and Symbolist Poets
WHEN I GET back to Bucharest filled with the sadness of having just separated from Mihai, my mother is in a strange mood, conspiratorial and unusually calm. Her head is covered in pink hair rollers. She says my father hasn’t come home for three days.
“What do you mean?” I ask, not really understanding my mother’s calm. The thought that my father might actually be among those taken away by the Securitate jolts me out of my love dreaminess.
As if to distract herself, she starts rambling about the women in her family, the Slavic side, passionate women who came through floods and famines and bombings. I feel them in my blood: Nadia and Vera, Ana and Nina, and the fierce Paraschiva. My great-grandmothers, grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts. These women who lived for love and died instantly, who saw their houses turned to dust by American or Russian bombs, women who weren’t afraid of Nazis or Soviets. Are we like them, I wonder. We need that same fierce courage all over again.
Mostly I think of Nadia, the glamorous, tragic great-aunt whose story always brings tears to my mother’s eyes. I am back in the terrifying fifties, with the notorious black vans of the secret police stopping in front of people’s houses and taking them away from the dinner table, from their beds, from the side of a sick child or a dying mother, and locking them up for unfathomable reasons: the job they held before the war, a sentence they uttered at a party, a joke they made to a friend, an attitude, a gesture, something that someone else reported about them, or nothing at all. This is how Matei Varnitski, Nadia’s dashing officer husband, is taken away one evening in the middle of one of their elegant parties in Bucharest, in the beautiful house with marble fireplaces on the street lined with chestnut trees.
Nadia is talking to one of the guests and drinking champagne. It is one or two in the morning. Suddenly she has a queasy feeling that something is happening. She sees Matei stand in the doorway and turn his head towards her right before he disappears, flanked by two unknown men. He is smiling at her. Don’t worry, he mouths to her. The last thing she sees is a little stout man with a face like a chimpanzee grinning at her, and the bald head of the other one, pushing him out of the house. Through the glass of the front door she sees the ugly van move away slowly. She wants to scream, but the scream gets stuck in her throat; she wants to move, but her feet are stuck to the shiny floors. Through the side bay windows, she sees the van turn the corner and move out of sight. Matei is gone, and she doesn’t understand why the party is still going on, as if nothing had happened. Everything becomes quiet and starts moving in slow motion: the drunken guests waltzing and stumbling, the guests bragging loudly about their war experiences, the more subdued guests talking softly about the latest trends in poetry. Then it all becomes still and completely quiet.
I imagine Nadia through the long ordeal that follows. I have always thought she could have been the one member of our family escaping disasters and having an unscathed and happy life. I watch Nadia move through the lonely years that follow Matei’s arrest. I see her move slowly about the beautiful house, gliding as if in a dream, stroking the gleaming cherry and mahogany furniture, letting her dress and her slip glide off her body at night before getting into the lonely bed. Two, three, five years go by like that. Then my aunt Nina moves in with her to keep her company in the empty house with its sad ballroom. One day when she picks up the mail, Nadia sees Matei’s handwriting on a crumpled, yellow postcard. I picture Nadia feverishly looking at the piece of paper. Every time I hope for a different ending. I am hoping the words on the yellow postcard say: Coming home next week. Matei, instead of what they really say: Am fine. Will write more soon. M.
The postcard does nothing to comfort or reassure her. The ambiguity of those few words is unbearable to Nadia. And the incompleteness of his signature terrifies her. He had never signed a note or a letter with anything other than his full name. She had wanted them to grow old together. She is still young, but for her it is all over. She stares at the words on the postcard until dusk has enveloped her in the empty house. The linden smells are rushing into the house through all the open windows. She hates summer and she hates the odour of linden. Matei was taken away on a night like this, she thinks. My aunt Nina finds her later that evening dead on the floor, under the crystal chandelier, still holding the postcard from Matei, her Siamese cat mewing on her shoulder.
“This group your father is involved with,” my mother is saying the words slowly. “They’ve been trying to organize an uprising. And I suppose somebody must have turned your father in. They arrested him.” I look at my mother in disbelief, Nadia’s story throbbing inside my head like a crazed bird. The two women, my mother and her aunt, seem to merge into each other. Maybe my father will disappear for many years like Great-uncle Matei did and my mother will fall dead in the middle of our minuscule apartment.
“Your father is in trouble, Mona. He’s been doing things . . .”
“Things? What things?”
“I told you, aren’t you listening? An uprising, something like a coup, they are trying to make Ceauşescu resign.”
“What uprising? What coup?” I ask. “What are you talking about?” It all seems unreal. “Who in their right mind gets involved in a coup now,” I ask her, shrieking in disbelief, “when you can get thrown in prison just for having a typewriter?”
“Exactly,” says my mother. “The typewriters are crucial.” Her face looks strained, and for the first time I see two deep lines stretching across her forehead. But because of the crown of pink rollers circling her head, her serious frowning face looks almost pathetic. She is wringing her hands as she often does when she is nervous and playing with the heavy golden ring on her middle finger, which used to belong to Grandfather Victor. She stares one moment at the door, as if waiting for it to open and for my father to walk through it; the next moment she stares intently at me. I feel sorry for my mother. She looks so small and both funny and sad as she sits in the middle of the sofa slowly swinging her legs back and forth. Her eyes look bigger and rounder than usual.
She tells me there are antigovernment manifestos being copied by the thousands on typewriters. The police are matching the type on the manifestos with the typewriters registered with the government.
“The old Zinger,” my mother says. “Your father got it from the university. He thought no one wanted it. He didn’t realize,” she tells me. “It had been registered before he borrowed it.”
My head is spinning. It’s just a matter of days before we’ll be accidentally run over while standing in some stupid queue for butter or toilet paper. Or before a big ugly van will stop in front of our apartment building and take me and my mother away, too. I am sure my mother knows
more about my father’s arrest than she lets on. Maybe they will kill him or put him in prison for a long time the way they did to Great-uncle Matei. And to think we had imagined Ceauşescu was going to be better and was going to turn things around, away from the Russians, after his big courageous speech in the Palace Square in 1968. My father had been right then, to say it was all a scam to mislead the West into believing Romania was going towards some kind of liberalization and was breaking away from the Soviet Union. I have no idea why my father thinks this is the right time to start writing antigovernment manifestos. His words from so long ago, when I had no idea what they really meant, appear clearly, ominously, to me now, as my mother’s face seems strangely similar to Nadia’s face in the one sepia photograph we have of her. Dusk is slowly creeping in. The room is wrapped in shadows. I sigh, and the ashes from my father’s ashtray fly in all directions. I make an effort to open my mouth to speak, but I am choked. Finally, I decide to try to get her to tell me the whole truth.
“Where is he?” I ask her. “Where is Father? How do you know he’s been arrested? How do you know he’s not dead by now? And have you heard from him? Tell me!” I yell.
“Stop asking so many questions,” my mother says icily. “His friend Darius from the university came over and told me he saw him get into a black car right in front of the university as he was leaving after his classes on Monday. There were two other men in the car. He said your father was calm and waved at him as he got in. Miron’s friend from the philosophy department, Tudor, is also part of the group . . . I trust him. He’s safe. He’s being released soon. I think,” she adds faintly. She gets up from the sofa and tidies the objects on my father’s little desk: his Pelikan fountain pen, a few books lying around, and some white sheets of paper. She moves on to tidy up the rest of the room, which doesn’t really need tidying.
I can’t quite process all these bits of information. This moment seems distant, in black and white on a screen. I am not involved in this. It does not concern me.
“There is nothing to do right now but wait,” my mother concludes in a strangely calm voice, placing her clasped hands gently in her lap. Then she changes her tone again and asks: “Did you tell anyone?”
“Tell anyone what? And who? What would I tell?”
“That friend of yours,” she says, fussing with the rollers in her hair. And then she meets my eyes. “Be careful. He might be one of them.”
“One of who?” I ask, furious. “Who, Mother? What are you talking about? Who’s he? Who’s them?”
Pronouns have lost their meaning. Nouns are too dangerous to pronounce, so we replace them with vague pronouns, until no one knows any more who is who, who is following whom. I am shouting again, and my mother looks at me with pursed lips, stubbornly.
“Your friend,” she says. “I have a feeling . . . I think . . . Mihai is . . . might be . . . are you sure about him?” But she calms herself down, sits back on the sofa, and takes a few breaths. Then she starts talking to me again, only this time in her sweeter voice. “You know, when your father and I met in the fifties, we were both sure of each other . . . we would have stuck our hands in the fire for each other. And those times were even worse than now. I knew your father would have died before doing anything – you know – selling out or betraying me.” Her eyes meet mine again and hold them. “All I’m asking you, Mona, is can you say the same about this Mihai of yours? And by the way,” she adds, taking a slightly harsher tone, “I hope you are not doing anything . . . you know, stupid or dangerous . . . it would make me so sad.”
It drives me crazy the way my parents always call him this Mihai of yours and the way my mother makes it sound so tragic that Mihai and I might be lovers. How can she be so naïve not to know already? But mostly it drives me crazy that I cannot really give a wholehearted yes to the question about whether I am sure of Mihai the way my mother was of my father. I hate my doubts, and I hate my mother for making them even worse. I conjure up Paraschiva and Nadia, who were sure of their loves until the second when they both died their sudden deaths. I beg them to help me through my gnawing uncertainties, to help me make sure Mihai is brave and honest and not a traitor. But then I realize I would still love him even if he were a traitor. My stomach knots up at this sickening thought.
That night, as I try to fall asleep, I strain myself to see it, and suddenly there we are, amid a sea of clouds, next to our white rock, the two of us, Mona Maria and Mihai, embracing above the city with the Black Church. We kiss as history, with all its bleak queues for food, its pavement accidents, and its typewriters, keeps rolling on and on.
Miraculously, my father returns the next day, grubby, dirty, and tired, and with a wild expression in his eyes. He has an ugly bruise on his cheek, directly under his right eye, and he is limping. My mother, who during the long nights of his absence had managed to write an entire volume of bleak poems, is revived at the sight of my father. She starts boiling potatoes and carrots, the only things in the pantry. My father recounts feverishly what happened: that one of the interrogators turned out to be a former student of his – Petrescu. “He’s a big shot now, a colonel.” My father smiles with disdain. So they ended up discussing the Romantic and the Symbolist poets. They roughed him up at first, made some threats, he tells us, but then let him go.
“You know, this Petrescu individual,” he starts as if recounting a funny story from work, “did a thesis with me on the influences of French Symbolism on Romanian poets. It was a pretty good thesis, actually. About symbols of emptiness in the poems of George Bacovia,” my father goes on, as if any of this mattered. “Emptiness.” My father laughs. “Can you imagine?”
For a moment, my father looks as satisfied as if he had given a lecture to an amphitheatre full of eager students. But then his face changes again. I am staring at him in disbelief. What does he think he can achieve with his manifestos, I wonder. But how can I tell him to stop? His face is changed in a way that worries me. He keeps staring wildly in the distance as if fixed on some terrible memory. I think of Great-uncle Matei and how Aunt Nina and my mother always described his face that August 15 in 1959 when they saw him for a few minutes as he was being brought into the state courthouse in Bucharest for the trial of political treason: gaunt and with a wild look staring at something that only he could see. This was after Nadia had already fallen dead in the hallway of their elegant house, holding on to his postcard.
Even if my father does have some old student acquaintance among the secret police who helped him out this time, he cannot possibly trust or count on his protection for ever. It suddenly hits me: my father could be killed. In his great idealism, he thinks he can overturn the government by writing up some antigovernment manifestos and throwing them around University Square. He thinks he is going to keep being lucky because a student of his who happened to like the Symbolists showed him some pity after his men had already beaten him up. If others have disappeared or were run over on the pavement for less than this, he will certainly find a violent end before too long.
At the dinner table, my father starts sobbing over the boiled potatoes and carrots with the same little sobs as when he told us the story of his childhood orchards and the Russian soldiers who cut up his dog. My mother is undoing her rollers at the table instead of eating, and she piles them up neatly in her lap, staring at the wall. I choke on a potato and I don’t miss my country any longer the way I once did in my composition. As I watch my father’s tears and my mother’s hair fall down on her face, I want to get out of my country. I want us all to be somewhere else, where it’s safe and where we can have a better daily diet. I hate the manifestos.
Dangerous Carnations
THEY MEET IN basements and attics: workers, students, artists. They meet in places with rats and roaches where the wind howls through broken windows and doors won’t close, places that smell of urine and vomit. This is in the newly built apartment buildings near the Bucur Obor Market, which isn’t a market any longer because it is always out of everythi
ng. Sometimes the attic or the basement sections are left unfinished by the construction workers and become festering locales for vermin, drunkards and delinquents. Or meeting places for would-be revolutionaries. At other times the group meets at someone’s house in the old Turkish and Greek section of Bucharest, with the little consignment boutiques and the buildings in the eighteenth-century Brancovan architectural style: white stucco with lacy brown verandas and woodwork. I know about the meetings because I followed my father a couple of times to two different meeting places and waited in a corner, behind a glass door, or in the hallway of an old building with a squeaky staircase, listening to their meeting. It was late at night, and I walked a certain distance from my father, feeling like a detective from an Agatha Christie novel, my heart pounding crazily out of my chest. They get together a few times a week and change their meeting places often, sometimes from one day to the next. They all have one book of our classic writers like Sadoveanu or Arghezi with them, in case they get caught, to show they are just meeting to discuss our immortal classics.
Mostly they write manifestos, talk about censored poetry, and prepare for something. It’s not clear just what. They even talk about weapons, though no one seems to know how they work or where to get them. They talk about throwing the manifestos – they are just leaflets, really – from all the scaffolding in Bucharest. Since the earthquake, there’s a lot of scaffolding. They also mention trying to get information to Radio Free Europe about the human rights violations in Romania, “so the West can hear it, too, so the whole world can know what we are going through”. The big news is that Ceauşescu’s right-hand man, General Pacepa, defected to America, where he was given asylum. My father says this is a huge blow to the system and it’s the right time to do something. I hear my father’s resounding voice during the meeting in the new building near the Bucur Obor Market. Then I hear people shushing him to talk softer, what if someone is listening. Others also mention Pacepa and say that he will probably try to help dissident movements from abroad, wherever he may be. And communicate via Radio Free Europe with the ones inside. At that point I tiptoe back out quiet as a cat.
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