Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  Autumn is slowly settling in over Bucharest, and the poplars in front of our windows are shaking their pointy heads, sending droves of swirling yellow leaves into the wind. I shiver at the idea of the impending cold weather and the growing dangers every time I get into bed. My father is absent from home more often and looks more fierce and distraught than ever. At the dinner table he stares into his plate as if he were searching for something. After dinner he spends a lot of time with his head glued to his Grundig trying to get clear reception of Radio Free Europe. Usually the static is overpowering, and my mother screams at him to turn it the hell off. But once in a while, the voices come in clearly, with an echo as if from a different universe: deep, conspiratorial, mentioning dissenting authors and their actions of resistance or interviewing émigré writers about the abuses of the Romanian Party and leadership. My father’s face brightens up as if in some kind of ecstasy. My mother’s poems go on about death and imaginary places covered with snow.

  One afternoon, soon after I come home from school, I hear my father tell my mother in a hushed voice that his old friend, an electrician by the name of Dumitru Iordache, was arrested according to Article 166 for throwing manifestos from scaffolding in the Lipscani neighbourhood with the Turkish bazaars, where the gypsies sell their tin pots, wooden spoons and roasted pumpkin seeds. The manifestos are calling for the people to replace Ceauşescu as Party and state leader. “They will probably kill Iordache,” says my father in a resigned tone.

  My mother is silent, and I hear the anger in her silence, in her quick breathing and her sighs. Then she blurts out: “You are all idiots. Don’t you realize the danger for Mona?”

  My mother is crying, and my father lights up another cigarette. The windows are slammed shut by a gust of wind, and I am so startled that I fall off the chair where I’m perched secretly listening to my parents’ shushed conversation. My father pushes open the door to our improvised living room and sees me struggling to get up and act as if nothing has happened. He holds me to his chest for a few long seconds, tells me I shouldn’t be spying on my parents, and we start laughing about how I looked falling off the chair.

  I want to forget about Iordache throwing manifestos on top of the Turkish bazaars in Lipscani, and I go to the library of the American embassy to borrow books in English. I devour everything with an indiscriminate appetite: John Steinbeck, Emily Dickinson, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce. I am intrigued by how Stephen Dedalus leaves everything behind in one moment of folly, in one grand gesture: country, family, religion, love. He wants to be free, to find himself.

  I want to turn into a bird like the girl he sees on the beach. I want to become the bird in James Joyce’s metaphor. To fly to my love in the Carpathians, surprise him at dawn, flee away across the mountains and across the wide seas. I want to cross the skies side by side with my love.

  The Romanian soldiers standing in front of the American embassy watch me with blank eyes. I stare at them boldly, as if I could make them ashamed of what they have to do: inform on every citizen who enters the embassy. I even go to a movie showing at the American library, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I strike up a conversation with the American librarian about the movie and about Jack Nicholson’s acting, although we are not supposed to talk to foreigners. A man who is not a soldier but certainly must be the library’s informer is staring at me with his right hand tucked inside his blazer, as if ready to pull out a gun. The librarian, a tall man with a grey moustache, compliments me on my excellent English and I blush and thank him. I leave the library feeling elated by the conversation in English and threatened by the man with the hand tucked inside his blazer.

  They put politically dangerous people in asylums that are worse than that in the film. People disappear inside asylums all the time when they aren’t run over on the pavement. They are medicated until they don’t know who they are any more and they’ll say anything they’re asked to say. Usually they are never seen or heard of again.

  My father’s psychiatrist friend Mihnea resists the internment of people suspected of political treason and is arrested, then released after a month with threats that he will be imprisoned for much longer if he continues to resist. He is supposed to inject his patients with tranquillizers, but he sometimes uses water. He tells the patients to pretend they’re numb and tranquillized and not say anything compromising. Some eventually disappear anyway. There is little he can do in the end, he tells my father.

  I now have my own personal secret-police agent, someone young and tall who always wears a suit and tie and who actually lives in my neighbourhood. The secret police are truly efficient. It must be because of my frequent visits to the American library and my conversations with Ralph, the American librarian. They must think I am trying to seduce him in order to escape to America, although he wears a wide wedding ring and has talked to me about his wife, Sally. I don’t want to go to America, and I certainly don’t want to marry an American man in order to leave the country. I just want to practise my English and hear Ralph talk about Chicago. He lives in Chicago, or really near Chicago, in what he calls a suburb. He tells me about the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan and the tallest building in the world, the Sears Tower. I am having a hard time imagining the city of Chicago next to a big lake. I have always imagined Chicago as a frightening city swarming with gangsters and with cars chasing each other at one hundred kilometres an hour. Ralph laughs wholeheartedly when he hears me talk about the Chicago gangsters and the car chases and says not all of Chicago is like that. The man with the hand hidden inside his blazer is always listening to our conversations in a corner of the reading room of the library. Sometimes he pretends to be reading a book.

  My personal secret-police agent lives in the building across from ours, so I have the good fortune to be under twenty-four-hour surveillance. When I leave the house, he’s waiting outside his building. Sometimes he follows me. Sometimes he nods and smiles at me.

  One evening, he pays a visit to our home. He brings a big bouquet of red carnations. He rings the bell and waits on the step with his flowers. My parents and I stand at the open door and stare at him.

  He clears his throat and grins. “Good evening. I’m Sergeant Dumitriu, a neighbour. I hope I’m not bothering you. May I come in for a minute?”

  “What for?” asks my father.

  “Just to chat a little. If this isn’t a good time, I can come again later. I brought these flowers for your lovely daughter.”

  And he peers over their heads at me, handing me the huge bouquet of red carnations.

  “This is a bad time,” my father says.

  My mother and I look at each other, panicked.

  “Come in, please. It’s no bother,” says my mother.

  I hold the carnations away from my body, as if they were poisonous. I take the crystal vase on the mahogany desk and place the flowers in it, without water.

  Sergeant Dumitriu walks in, and my mother motions to him to sit down. He settles himself in my mother’s chair. My father is standing in the middle of the living room. I sit opposite the sergeant.

  “Comrade Manoliu, forgive me, but I need to . . . to bother you with a few questions, if I may,” he says. He asks my father if he knows anything about the slanderous manifestos going around the university and in the Lipscani neighbourhood. Naïve, reactionary ramblings, he calls them. Hooliganism. He says that his colleagues were wondering, since my father is a professor, if he might know of anyone who might be involved. Students, or even –

  “And who are your colleagues?” my father asks.

  Sergeant Dumitriu laughs as if he has just heard a good joke.

  “My colleagues. You know . . . at work.”

  My mother says, “Mr Dumitriu, would you like some walnut preserve? Some cold water?”

  She goes to the kitchen to bring the preserve Aunt Matilda made for us.

  My father’s jaws are clenched. He lights a cigarette. Sergeant Dumitriu relaxes a bit in his chair, ha
ppy to change the subject. “Yes, please. Walnut preserve is my favourite. My grandmother used to make it.”

  I stare at my father and then at Sergeant Dumitriu, terrified he might ask some trick question I won’t know how to answer. Something about Ralph the librarian, for instance.

  There’s a moment of awkward silence, when the only sound is my father drawing fiercely on his cigarette. Then he looks at the sergeant through a cloud of smoke and says, “Do you have any of these manifestos you can show me?”

  “I don’t, sir. No, I don’t have any with me, but I’ve seen some. Trash, pure trash.”

  My mother comes back with the walnut preserve and a glass of water. Sergeant Dumitriu eats daintily and compliments my mother. Just like his grandmother’s, he says. My father crushes his cigarette in the ashtray on the mahogany desk and lights up another.

  “Maybe your daughter, Miss Mona,” he says, turning to me with his smile. “Maybe you’ve heard some talk about this, among your friends at school.”

  He looks at me with a strange smile. I get shivers down my spine. I hope the idiot isn’t in love with me or something. I stare back at him almost with fascination.

  My father’s eyes suddenly flicker with anger at the sound of my name in the man’s mouth. His familiarity disgusts me as well.

  “My daughter knows nothing of manifestos, apart from that of Comrades Marx and Engels, of course,” my father says. “She studies poetry. Ah! She has just read the Symbolist Manifesto of 1886. Tell me, Sergeant,” he continues, “are you familiar with the French Symbolists?”

  “Hardly, Professor. I’m a police officer. I’m afraid we have no time for these symbolist people, as you call them.”

  “Ah yes, of course. And yet I have a former student who’s now a police officer, a colonel, I believe, and he’s a great lover of the Symbolists. I was enjoying quite a spirited discussion with him on that very subject not long ago. Perhaps you know him: Comrade Petrescu?”

  The sergeant’s smile fades suddenly. “Thank you, Mrs Manoliu, for the excellent walnut preserve. Perhaps I’ll have the pleasure of visiting you again soon, but for now I must be going.”

  Sergeant Dumitriu gets up to leave, kisses my mother’s hand, and thanks her again for the preserve. He holds out his hand towards my father, but my father stands smoking, smiling with the same look of defiance. The sergeant pretends not to notice my father’s refusal to shake his hand, then nods to me and bids me good night. Again his eyes linger on my face and his mouth stretches into a grin.

  “They do interrogations in style these days,” says my father, as soon as Dumitriu is out of the door. “Now they bring flowers!” He collapses into his worn chair, knocking his reading lamp’s shade askew. His hand trembles so violently he struggles to stub out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray beside his stack of books. He gazes at the spray of carnations glowing obscenely red before the desk lamp. He looks at it, fascinated, as if it were a fire. I sit down at the mahogany desk with the glass top and stare at the painting of the old man walking through a field covered with snow on the wall facing me. It has been there for as long as I can remember, and it has always made me feel calmer with its bluish expanse of snow and a tired old man in a black coat and a cane, crossing the field for what seems like an eternity. The glass top is refreshing against my arms, and the snow in the painting seems deliciously cool. I am flushed and sweaty after Dumitriu’s visit.

  “Why flowers?” my father whispers.

  Suddenly, the idea that the flowers might be bugged with a listening device possesses us like a shared madness. We start tearing apart the bouquet petal by petal, stems, and leaves, until there’s a pool of red petals and broken stems on the floor. We haven’t found a microphone, yet my father is sure it’s there somewhere, we just can’t recognize it.

  “They’re capable of anything these days . . .” my father whispers.

  We talk in sign language and whispers. We even rip the paper in which the flowers were wrapped into many little pieces. We sift the pile of torn petals and paper scraps through our fingers and let them flutter to the floor. As the fall of red snow collects at our feet, we hear a little metal sound. We stare at one another and then dive at the pile of petals, leaves and paper, scattering them with our hands.

  “Aha! Here it is. I knew it!” announces my father.

  He picks up a tiny metal object that looks like a needle, but finer, like a strand of silver wire. We look at it in wonder. My father tries to crush it under his foot, then he twists it with his fingers, trying to break it. My mother tells him he’s gone crazy, it’s probably just a staple, or something that could have fallen out of something, a piece of jewellery, his lighter, anything.

  My father’s face is red. “You’re the crazy one,” he hisses. “You don’t know how far they’ll go. I do.”

  My father carries the object cupped in his hand into the bathroom and flushes it down the toilet.

  “Let them listen now!” he says, satisfied.

  We stare at the mess on the floor. My mother goes to the window and makes certain the curtains are pulled tight. We continue to speak in whispers and signs, unable to shake the feeling that someone is listening.

  My father watches as my mother kneels and sweeps the broken petals into her dustpan with a hand brush. A look of exhaustion settles over his face.

  “They were such pretty flowers,” she says.

  Then we look at one another and start laughing. My mother is so lovely as she is shaking with laughter. It’s so rare to see her like this, her dark blond hair with reddish tints down around her shoulders, her blue eyes sparkling. My father, as he shakes with laughter, hugs her shoulders, and they rock together on the floor. Each of us knows we’re laughing because we hope they can hear us somewhere, those secret police with their tweezers, inserting secret microphones into flower petals. I laugh and close my eyes and imagine the violet clouds above the city with the Black Church, imagine hovering above it all in the shape of a large white plumed creature.

  “Say It’s Only a Paper Moon . . .”

  THE MUSIC HAS started, we are in our best clothes, a slow dance. I feel his hand firmly on my back. Every muscle is tight and strong. I am happy. I’m wearing a peach satiny dress; it’s New Year’s Eve. A new decade will start after tonight, the eighties. We are hopeful. We have coloured confetti. Maybe our president will die and the world will change. There is food that everybody’s parents have prepared for our party, which they spent whole days queuing to collect. There’s the famous piftie, frozen gelatin filled with garlic and pork. Sarmale, cabbage leaves and grape leaves stuffed with rice and meat. Pickled apples and pickled tomatoes. Whoever said Romanians are starving? Mostly, I care about the music. Do we have enough dance music? I hate that greasy trembling gelatin anyway. All I care about is dancing and do we have enough wine? The party has hardly begun and we’re already tipsy from the Murfatlar, red wine that is exported everywhere in the world but hard to find in Romania, because the state trades our wine, our leather and our tractors for hard currency.

  The windows are wide open, and Ella Fitzgerald is singing our special song. Say it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me. The three giant pictures of the bearded Marxists and the fourth one, the Father of the Nation – even they look sort of human tonight, because we’re drunk from the precious Romanian wine that somehow escaped a cargo ship to America. The four gigantic faces looming high on the building across the street look a little melancholy as they stare down at us, dancing in our depravity to the sound of capitalist music.

  Everybody is kissing, touching, dancing. Now we dance to Romanian music, the famous folksinger Maria Tănase. She is singing her song about all the gifts her lover gives her: earrings and a scarf and a string of pearls. Then her lover discovers her without the gifts, and he curses whoever buys them to hang himself with the scarf and the pearls. This is a weird curse, I think, because the man curses himself instead of cur
sing the woman who betrayed him. I’m hopping to the fast songs and swirling to the lazy songs and bumping into chairs and tables. Then comes another song about another big love curse, that a man who abandons his lover should have to crawl like a snake and bear the burden of the ant, and then crawl like a snake again. All Romanian love songs are about curses; no wonder we’re so angry all the time.

  Everybody is swaying and singing with the music in drunken voices. The cool winter air is sneaking into the room through the open windows and is cooling off our sweaty, throbbing bodies. It’s midnight and we throw confetti. Mihai and I kiss and kiss, standing in the middle of the room. Thank God the curse song ended! A drinking song now, about how good it is to drink with a beautiful person. Red gurgling wine, and drinking with a beautiful person. We are still kissing, and we tell each other we will always, always love each other. There are even coloured fireworks! We’re so young – I feel our youth, our hopes, and our bodies so sweaty and full of desire. We will always love each other, won’t we? Yes, always.

  We tell jokes, all kinds of jokes. We tell political jokes about how stupid Ceauşescu is. He goes hunting and catches a rabbit and holds the rabbit down and says, Admit it! You’re a boar! We tell obscene jokes about the national folk hero, Bulă, who gets married and doesn’t know how to do his wife, so his father tells him to put the longest part of his body into the hole. Two hours later, they find Bulă in the bathroom with his leg stuck in the toilet. Then someone tells one about Bulă’s grandmother after the earthquake still holding on so well for her age, hanging from a beam all stiff.

  I dance on the table. I dance the Charleston on the kitchen table next to the jellied pork and the pickled apples and tomatoes. We have so much hope this New Year’s Eve that somehow things will get better, that everything will be beautiful and fragrant like the crystalline winter air smelling of snow and sprinkled with stars, and that Mihai and Mona will be happy despite everything. Our friends talk about people leaving the country and about people who have left, people we know, people Mihai knows. They’re escaping to Turkey or to Yugoslavia, swimming across the Danube, crossing borders at night or hiding on freight trains. I wait for Mihai to become angry. He always gets angry when he hears such stories. He says, “Who the hell is going to live here if everybody’s leaving?” He shakes his head in frustration. We move away from everybody and go to his room.