Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  Like never before, we make plans for the future. He will be an engineer soon. Next year he’ll get his diploma, and then he’ll try to get a job in Bucharest. I’m stunned with happiness. He wants to be with me, to have a life with me. I will finish my university studies and he will be an engineer in Bucharest. I will be a writer and an actress both, and a teacher, too. I want to be everything! Ideas open up in my head like water lilies floating on the water. Round, silky, luscious ideas like water lilies.

  We hear the sharp whistle of a train leaving the station. It’s past midnight, and it startles us. Judging by the hour and by the long, plaintive whistle, it must be the train to Trieste. I feel sadness mixed with joy. Mihai’s wide forehead is crossed by a long, deep furrow.

  “You’ll leave me one day, won’t you?” he says suddenly.

  I’m startled by his question. I shake my head vehemently. “Of course not. Are you crazy?”

  Marx, Engels, and Lenin watch us sternly from the other building. Only Nicolae Ceauşescu seems to be smiling.

  “No, I’ll never leave you,” I say firmly.

  We hold each other’s hands. We look into each other’s eyes like old people who have lived through everything. There’s that love curse song again in the other room. He who loves and leaves will crawl like a snake.

  “Let’s change the music,” I say, breaking away from him. “Let’s dance! Let’s dance, my love.”

  Say it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea . . .

  We dance more lightly than ever before, this crystalline New Year’s Eve. My satiny dress is clinging to my body. The sparkling snowy air drifting into the room cools our skin. We want so much to hope, to believe it will all become true.

  But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.

  In the Snow, a White Mare

  ON NEW YEAR’S Day we go to the house of Mihai’s best friend, Radu, whose thick, reddish beard scratches my face as he embraces me. He winks at me and slaps Mihai on the back and wishes us a happy new year. Radu lives in the neighbourhood at the foot of the mountain and near the cemetery where my great-grandmother Paraschiva is buried. The streets here are steep and narrow, and the houses have thick stone walls like fortresses and large iron gates. We dance, we argue, we swirl. We dance the tango, waltzes, rock and roll, the polka. Then we dance the Romanian hora, then rock and roll again. There are snowflakes pirouetting by the window. They make me dizzy and languorous as I look at them while I’m swirling through all the dances of the world. Maybe this decade will bring us something good, like no food rations, just food, and no secret police.

  I am slightly drunk and I say stupid, insulting things for no good reason other than it’s New Year’s Day. I feel like dancing without stopping and breaking everything.

  We go outside, and Mihai drags me up the hill behind the house. The fir trees are heavy with snow. The air smells like fresh, raw snow and wood-burning stoves. Veils of snow fall on me when I touch a branch and wrap me up like a gauzy shroud. He pulls me higher, then throws me to the ground. The steep snow-covered ground is hard, cold, frozen. Mihai makes love to me with the snow falling on us and sneaking up under my skirt along my thighs. I am looking at the grey winter sky above me, sliced by the bare branches of the oak trees and the dark green pointed firs. Veils, shrouds of snow, are wrapping us this first day of the year, in our rage and in our love. His eyelashes are fluttering on my cheeks. My thighs are cold and hot in the incomparable snow.

  In the evening, we make love again in his apartment. We’re all heated up and drunk. We roll in those white starched bedsheets of his where my flesh howls and whispers and bursts into bubbles of light.

  When I leave his apartment, gliding happily on the snow, a shadow comes after me in the dark and follows me. I don’t like shadows, and I don’t like steps behind me. I had always thought I was free from shadows following me here in the mountains, and that once I left Bucharest everything would be normal and clean. I run like mad to reach the street corner of the building where my aunt lives, but suddenly the steps rush behind me, and a hand grabs me before I can breathe again and whips me around.

  The shadow is a woman, a scrawny dark-haired woman with thin lips and a very long mouth. I discover I’m not afraid – I’m angry. I want to beat her up and scream at her, What the hell do you think you’re doing? I’ve dealt with stalkers throughout my adolescence. Male stalkers, following me after school. I always managed to scare them away, either by screaming at them in the middle of the street or hitting them over the head with my schoolbag.

  But this woman doesn’t seem to be a stalker. She is standing very close to me and I can feel her breath on my face. She smells of the nasty Carpaţi cigarettes. She grabs my arm with a tight grip. She looks straight into my eyes and tells me through her teeth, with rage and yet with a tone of pity, “He’s secret police, you stupid girl! Stay away from him, you stupid, stupid girl. Stay away from him!”

  Then she lets go of me and walks away hurriedly through the snow in the direction of the railway station.

  I am biting my lip and scratching my palms to make sure I’m awake. I feel that I’m in a nightmare, struggling to be awake and screaming in the frozen New Year’s night. But my lips feel the biting and my palms feel the scratching and my feet are cold. Black nausea, fear and sadness spill into my heart, my boom-boom mad, breaking heart.

  As I hurry to my aunt Nina’s house, I rerun the whole scene in my mind, this delirium in the glittering snow. The woman was real. I know it happened, because my arm is burning from her grasp on me, and there are her footprints in the snow. Maybe she was a madwoman who mistook me for someone else. Did she say his name, did she say “Mihai” or “he”? I don’t remember now. But something in her tone demanded that I pay attention and take her warning seriously. I see her face, her look of rage – or was she also afraid, was she maybe trying to get away from someone? Why would she have grabbed me like that and then run away so suddenly? Now my memory insists she was also being followed. I convince myself I heard other unmistakable, blunt footsteps echoing in the cold air, echoing in the white snow like inside a huge white bell.

  As I finally turn the corner and enter my aunt’s building, I sense another shadow gliding past me and disappearing. It’s a shadow with hands in its pockets, sure of itself, sure of the fear it causes, gloating in the snow. I run up the stairs to my aunt’s apartment faster than I’ve ever run before, thinking of nothing else but locking the door, getting into bed, forgetting the shadows. I think of the stories of my family, the bloody stories of whole fields covered with the corpses of dead soldiers and two brothers looking for each other and calling out each other’s names in the dusk that rushes mercifully onto the bodies lying in the mud. These terrifying scenes from my family’s history are perversely comforting to me as I tremble under the bedsheets, next to my cousins, thinking of the shadows and the woman with the long, thin mouth calling me stupid, stupid girl.

  I rush to my sleep imagining that Mihai slits my throat just after we’ve made love. My fantasy melts into a nightmare. He makes tender, undulating love to me, and we’re surrounded by sparkling snow in the metallic dusk of winter. Then Mihai takes a beautifully crafted knife, with a long, sparkling blade, dips it in snow once, and says, I have to do this, my love, for your own good. I have to, so you can be free. He carefully, artfully slits my throbbing throat. I turn into a white mare, a wild white mare running with its mane in the wind like wings. But not even as a wild mare am I really free. I’m trapped in a clearing. It’s a small, beautiful clearing covered in snow and surrounded by dark fir trees, black trees like prison bars. I run in circles like mad with my white mane flying in all directions and my throat burning and my heart aching and breaking into a million pieces with the sound of glass, because my heart inside the mare’s body has turned into a block of ice that breaks with a loud crack.

  The morning is greyer than any of my mother’s grey dresses, and I prefer my dream of white mares and throat slitt
ing on the snow to this grey morning, waking with a feeling of something twisted and wrong in my head and in the world, both. It takes me a while to remember why, then the image of the woman grabbing me in the night jumps up clear and sharp in my memory. I have a nagging feeling like a bad cough stuck in my throat that I’m not comprehending something important. Mihai is secret police? It can’t be that. And yet I can’t ignore that sentence scratching at me through the night like a bad conscience. Why can’t I ignore it? Why can’t I just go to Mihai now and make love to him again and dance again and go for a walk in the snow again and make love over and over again?

  I know why I can’t ignore it. If there is the smallest chance that the woman’s warning was meant for me, that she wasn’t just another schizophrenic wandering the streets at night, then Mihai would want information from me about my father. Mihai would try to find out where he goes, what he does, what he writes, who he sees. And Does he have any Kent cigarettes? I think, laughing to myself. What have I told Mihai already, in moments of the sharpest intimacy?

  Mihai. Mihai. I want to cry his name, already sounding alien to me. The sound of it twists in my mind until I think of Mata Hari. I saw a photograph of her once in an old magazine of my father’s, the legendary spy of the First World War, wearing a long, silky dress, her eyes dark with kohl, a white flower in her jet-black hair. I have fallen inescapably in love with a male Mata Hari who will send my father to prison. Stupid, stupid girl.

  On this grey morning, I go out for a walk around the neighbourhood, thinking that the cold winter air will help me clear my thoughts. I run into Cristina, who is bundled up in shawls and seems frazzled. Her hazel eyes are shinier than usual, and she is biting her fleshy lips. At the sight of me, she smiles her warm, innocent smile that she has kept intact since she was a little girl. But her slightly unkempt appearance and her rushed manner make me think there is something wrong. She grabs my arm and begs me to go into town with her.

  “Come on, girl, let’s go! Since you have your lover boy, you never spend time with me any more,” she says playfully, pouting.

  Her cheeks are flushed from the cold, and her chestnut plaits, usually neatly wrapped around her head, are hanging down her shoulders loose from under her many shawls. I am tempted to go. Now that I’m with her I realize how much I’ve missed our long strolls to the centre of town, our whispers about boys and sex and menstruation, our stealing the special sour cherry brandy from her parents and getting loud, laughing drunk. My vacation days with Mihai are precious, and I’m greedy for him. I’ve neglected all my childhood friends rather than sacrifice a morning or an afternoon beside him in his white sheets.

  But last night’s strange occurrence and the troubling dreams about Mihai have soured the sound of his name in my thoughts. It will be comforting to my disoriented mind to hear Cristina’s voice, her laugh ringing in the clear air, and not have to think about Mihai for a few hours.

  We spend the morning walking through the centre of town to the plaza near the Black Church, talking and laughing like we used to. We go to the pastry shop where we went as children, after we had saved enough money to buy one cake and share it between us. The cake and pastry shelves are half empty, and the cashier standing at the counter looks sleepy and depressed. We buy our favourite cake, the cataif, a Turkish cake with little sweet sticks made of fried noodles and lots of fluffy cream. There is one man in a grey coat in the corner of the pastry shop, with his back turned towards us. A young couple with a little girl stuffing herself with the last éclair on the shelf is sitting at the table next to ours. Suddenly, Cristina starts talking about Mihai.

  “So, how is it?” she asks.

  “How is what?” I pretend to not understand.

  “You know, in bed,” she says quickly, blushing.

  Before I had fallen for Mihai and experienced in bed, I used to love our discussions about romance and sex, since it was all hearsay and imagination. Now I feel a strange shyness talking about it, even to Cristina. But I don’t want to disappoint her.

  “It’s like” – I laugh – “it’s like you forget yourself and . . . it’s really, really good.” I feel my face burning as red and hot as a boiling lobster.

  Cristina, for once, doesn’t press me for more. Suddenly she becomes very serious.

  “Be careful,” she says, looking down at her pastry. “Just . . . be very careful, OK?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’re not fools. I always wash with vinegar afterwards, you know. You can’t get pregnant that way.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” she says, though now she is the one who blushes. “I mean . . . you . . . you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. In fact, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, raising my voice.

  “Be careful what you say,” she says and stuffs her mouth with the sugary cataif.

  My mouth is hanging open with bits of fried sweet noodles from the cake falling out, like a child who’s had enough and can’t eat any more. The woman, the shadow, the dream about Mihai slitting my throat, all rush back to me, and I feel faint. I don’t understand anything any more.

  I try to compose myself and wipe my mouth with a napkin. “Why are you saying this, Cristina? What have you heard?”

  “I’m just worried, that’s all. I’m scared all the time. Look around you, Mona. Open your eyes.” She’s looking at me with an intensity I’ve never seen in her. She’s tired and very pale. She is biting her lips again. “You can’t trust anyone,” she says, picking up some cake crumbs off the table. Her face is very close to mine, and I can see the glow in her skin that I have always admired.

  “I trust you,” I say hurriedly.

  She blinks rapidly, holding back tears that suddenly well in her hazel eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says. “And you’ve known me since we were two,” she tells me. “Remember? You know my family. We’re practically like sisters. But, Mona, how long have you known Mihai? What do you even know about his family?”

  I know his parents both work in a factory, I tell myself. I know his mother is a good cook. She makes pickled tomatoes and cucumbers and apricot preserve. But most of the time when I visit Mihai, they’re both at work, and I’ve barely exchanged ten words with them.

  “So what?” I ask defiantly. “So what if I don’t know his parents or his grandparents or his great-granduncle on his cousin’s side? So what if you know of a girl who had a lover, and she got run over on the pavement? So what, so what, so what? Does that mean I can’t trust anyone, I can’t love anyone ever? Is that what you want?”

  My voice is high again, and my tears are getting mixed with bits of the cataif cake, and I know I must look like a total idiot. The man and woman at the table next to ours turn around and glance at us disapprovingly while the little girl is giggling in her éclair.

  “Forget it,” Cristina says. “You’re in love. I’m happy for you. When is the wedding?”

  I’ve never seen Cristina so bitter, and so old. Sitting there in the pastry shop with five tired cakes on the shelves, I just want to keep on loving Mihai. I want to be oblivious to the rest.

  Cristina pulls me closer to her by my jacket collar and whispers in my face:

  “I am seeing someone . . . a foreigner! I don’t know what to do. But I’m also terribly in love!”

  I understand now for the first time that Cristina is truly scared and she has serious reasons to be so. Her face is strained, and her eyes have a wild glitter. Why of all the things in the world did she have to get involved with a foreigner? That may also mean she is planning to leave the country.

  “Why?” is all I can ask, and I become self-conscious of the stupid ring of my question, as the sad-looking cashier lifts her eyes from the register and stares at us for a second. Maybe she is an informer, too; Cristina is right, you can’t trust anyone.

  Cristina produces a little giggle and says breathlessly, in quick whispers: “Why? How can you ask that? Because this is how one falls in love, you never know
where it’s going to come from! He is a Tunisian student at the Polytechnic. Mona, I’m crazy about him. But I know I am being followed everywhere. It’s awful, I can’t stand it.”

  She nods quickly in the direction of the door towards the man in the grey coat, and I get it. We are being followed. Now that she is seeing a foreign student, and I am her closest friend, of course I am among the suspect ones as well. Between my father’s Radio Free Europe and manifestos, Cristina’s love affair with a Tunisian student, and the idea that Mihai might actually work for the secret police, I feel I don’t stand a chance at happiness, at a normal life, that I’m trapped and running in circles in a tight clearing with no way of ever getting out. So if there is the slightest chance that Mihai is secret police, then that concerns Cristina as well. We were all once just children playing in the marigold- and poppy-filled park in front of my aunt’s building and listening to Mihai play his melancholy mountain songs on his old guitar.

  I look at Cristina and see two lines of tears streaking down her face. Her brown plaits are undone and she has white sugary cream on her lips, like a little girl. I want to hold and protect her. She is just like a sister. Except for her own older sister Simona, she has no one else in the world. Her mother died last year, only a year after her alcoholic father died of cirrhosis. She is the orphan on the block, and all the neighbours whisper words of pity about her whenever she passes by. I am overtaken by an impulse to be Cristina’s sister and mother, her family. I stroke her cheek and wipe the tears off her face.