As we are standing up to leave, the man in the grey coat sitting at the table in the corner looks at us sideways. He is small and scrawny and looks like a rodent. I have a wicked impulse to do something childish, to show the rodent man I don’t give a damn. So I stick out my tongue at him as Cristina and I are leaving. He gives me an ugly look, and as I go out of the door I have the gnawing feeling I’ve seen him before.
I pull Cristina by the hand and start running in the snow-covered street, gliding in the snow, making her chase me like we used to do when we were small, throwing snowballs at her and sliding on patches of ice in the street. I am running and laughing and refusing to believe we live in this place. I am running like the white mare in my dream, wanting to believe there is a place for me to love and play in the snow. Cristina catches up with me and tries to sneak snow down my collar, like she used to. We stand in the middle of the street, wet from the snow, red faced, with tears in our eyes, holding on to our childhood for just a little bit longer.
My Mata Hari Lover
HARD AS I try, I cannot pretend the evening with the woman shrieking in the street and the shadow following me did not happen. Everything becomes twisted, broken, double. Every moment with Mihai is torn between the painful confusion of not knowing who he is and the impossible love I have for him.
Our lovemaking becomes even more furious. I close my eyes and bite hard into his flesh. Thoughts of Mata Hari cross my mind, thoughts that I am like the men she used to seduce for secrets. Every time he mentions my father, I try to guess from his eyes. He asks me about the courses my father teaches and the book he is working on. Is he still such an anti-Communist? he asks. Maybe he was asking me questions about my father before. I don’t remember. I don’t know what I do remember.
I adapt my memory either to fit my suspicions or to erase them completely. No, he never used to ask me about my father. He never cared about him. Or Yes, he often used to ask me about him, and always said he admired him so much, so what’s the big deal now? I don’t tell Mihai anything real about my father. I say he’s a dusty, crazy old man, lost in his books about dead old languages. Child, old man, stork, hoe. His fourteen Dacian words. How can anyone write so much shit, I ask Mihai as we share a cigarette, about fourteen words? I become cold and reticent, and almost shy. Sometimes I’m mean. He wonders what’s wrong with me.
I ask him what he thinks of Mata Hari. I ask him if he would ever become a spy like Mata Hari, seducing people for their secrets. If he would ever use me and make me believe he loves me, but really spy on me and betray me like Mata Hari.
He looks at me with big surprised eyes, asks if I’m drunk or hallucinating. He says, “Who do you think you are? You think you’re so important some Mata Hari would bother to seduce something out of you?” He looks at me like I’m a crazy person. “What kind of secrets would you have?”
“Very important information,” I tell him lazily. “I happen to have the world’s biggest secret about all the bombs in the world, and not even Mata Hari could get it out of me.”
He pretends to be a spy. He plays with me like he is a British spy, trying to seduce me. I laugh when he tickles my neck and fakes his awful British accent in my ear, and I fight him and beat him to make him stop. I start to cry, and then we’re laughing. I think I must be losing my mind in such a major way that I’ve finally become incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
Then something in his voice, in a small gesture, like the way he has of tucking my hair behind my ear or the sad look in his eyes when we talk about my leaving soon for home, jolts me, drives me mad with sadness. Lust and love drum through my heart and through my body. I bite and lick and kiss him to forget everything. I want to get drunk on the scent of his flesh. I want to beat and kill the suspicions and the fear, to keep our love in its glowing cocoon of mists and to spread over it veils of sparkling blue snow. I want to protect it from the mean woman shrieking in the night, to protect it from the menacing shadow of Mata Hari in her shiny, silky dress.
This is the winter in the first year of the new decade. I become more and more fascinated with Mihai. I think I’m just like the generals were with Mata Hari, spilling out their secrets for a touch, a kiss, a whisper, for the feel of her black hair with the white orchid. I find his white face whiter, and the black hair blacker, and the red, rounded lips redder and more fragrant. I find his touch sweeter and more repulsive at the same time. I sink into a deep, inescapable attraction, as if a strong liquor were flowing in my veins and numbing my conscience.
I am happy when I have to go back to the capital. I get on the train with glee, thinking I’ll be free from this torment of love and fear, from the fascination and suspicion. I’ll be the free mare running wild in a white field, without any fir trees blocking my way. Just the white field.
For the next few weeks, I drown all my torments, my love and my hatred, in reading for my university entrance exam. I read by the light and by the heat of the gas burners in the kitchen, because we only get two hours of heat a day and sometimes not at all. The state and the Party are economizing again in order to pay the national debt and to achieve that Socialist utopia where everybody will be equally and inescapably miserable. I’m shivering in my winter coat inside the apartment. I turn on the oven as well, hoping it will produce a little bit more heat. One evening in late February, I hear my father exclaim loudly: he has just managed to get past the rumbling static on his Grundig radio and hear the faraway voices of Radio Free Europe. We find out that the Munich headquarters of the station have just been blown up by a hit man sent by Ceauşescu to stop the broadcasting of news about General Pacepa. My father is beside himself and smokes one cigarette after another, cursing constantly.
“The bastards, the criminals, I wish they . . .” He doesn’t continue, but the wild look in his eyes is telling enough. He goes on listening to Radio Free Europe and the news of the attack. Despite the increased static over the next few days, somehow he always manages to get just the right wave and capture the resonant voices that ring differently, both bolder and more real than any of our radio and television broadcasters relating news of the latest accomplishments of the Party: a new quota in the production of bulldozer parts, or a new visit of Comrade Ceauşescu at a cooperative farm in the northern Maramureş area.
And then another grey winter afternoon, as I am immersed in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and my parents are having a conversation about our difficult financial situation, there’s a pounding at the door. Loud men shout for us to open the door. My father tells us to go to the bedroom and to stay there.
He opens the door, and I hear men going through our apartment and pushing around furniture, opening drawers, knocking over chairs. I freeze and think again of the stories of the black van that used to take people away in the fifties. I think our time has finally come. Everything is going backwards to the fifties, it seems. My mother and I are holding hands, and I think I hear the sound of fists pounding into flesh. My mother is pursing her lips and staring at the wall. I hear my father cursing, and then the sound of something crashing through a window.
I hear one of the men shouting, “Where are they? Where are the bloody manifestos? We know everything about you and your anarchist friends!”
I am crouched on the bed and rocking myself. The man’s words go through me with a thud: . . . you and your anarchist friends. I repeat them several times in my mind, trying to grasp them. I am afraid for all of us. I think of Cristina and her Tunisian boyfriend, of Ralph the librarian, of the leaflets asking for new Party leadership flying above the Turkish bazaars, the woman in the winter night warning me about Mihai. He might be working for people like the ones here, beating up my father.
The smell of burning paper fills the house. The men must have resorted to burning my father’s manuscripts and books to force him to reveal the secret of the manifestos. But then I remember the Zinger typewriter hidden in the oven, and that tonight I had turned on the oven without taking it out, th
e way I usually did. There seems to be a commotion in the other room, and then one of the men says, “Fire! There is a fire. Are you burning the works of Comrade Ceauşescu? Are you? We know what you people are doing.”
I remember in a spasm of fear the news that my father gave us at the dinner table a few nights ago: two brothers by the last name of Pavel had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for setting volumes of Ceauşescu’s speeches on fire in their backyard. My father and his friends were working to get that information somehow to Radio Free Europe. Maybe my father has gone totally insane and is burning Ceauşescu’s speeches in our oven. But the only volume of Ceauşescu’s speeches we have in the house is the one I have from my school. I rush to my shelf of schoolbooks looking for it and feel waves of relief when I spot it: the thick book with the red Party flag on the back cover and the picture of Ceauşescu beaming his fake smile on the front.
My mother and I come out of the bedroom and see my father holding on to the door of the drawing room swaying, a thick line of blood trickling from his nose and mouth. There is smoke coming from the oven. I must have left the letter I was writing to Mihai inside the typewriter and then forgotten about it. My mother yells to call the firemen. My father says not to call them, to throw water on the oven. I realize he is worried he must have also left an unfinished letter or manifesto in the typewriter. I am holding the volume of Ceauşescu’s speeches like a trophy in my right hand. The two men who were beating up my father a minute ago are flanking him and looking fierce. I hold up the book and hear myself say in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own: “Here are the speeches of Comrade Ceauşescu! Here they are, I was just studying them!”
My father’s eyes have a sparkle of something like pride or gratitude as he looks at me, blood trickling from his nose. I know he is proud of my presence of mind.
A neighbour must have called the fire station, because two young firemen burst into our apartment and start spraying water all over our kitchen. One of them asks, “What were you cooking, paper or something?”
“Yes,” says my father, “we’re eating paper. That’s how desperate we are. This way we shit less and don’t have to queue for toilet paper.”
One of the firemen laughs at my father’s joke. My mother’s face turns a dark red. The two Securitate thugs are easing up on my father. They look conspicuously alike, as if they were twins: short and stout, with small foreheads, and both are wearing black suits that pull too tight over their bellies. One wears dark-rimmed glasses, the other a fedora. Where does the Party find people like these, I am wondering as I stare at them in fascination.
My father is standing in front of the stove, not allowing either of the firemen to get close to it, worried they will want to open it and will see the typewriter and then denounce him. Indeed, one of them wants to get past my father, to look inside the oven.
My father says, “Thank you, we’re fine. The fire is out. Now we’ll just have to starve. No more paper casserole for us tonight! Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Then my father goes on, as he gets a second wind and now tries himself to intimidate the Securitate men.
“How dare you accuse me of such a thing as burning the speeches of Comrade Ceauşescu? I am a university professor and have taught these very speeches,” he yells, taking the volume from my hand and waving it in their faces.
The two men look at my father, then at the two firemen with their big red extinguishers, then at me and at my mother again, evaluating the situation.
Then the one with the fedora says with a wicked grin, “We’ll get you, Professor, one of these days.” He pauses, smiles again. “I would watch out if I were you.” He makes a sign to his colleague, and they both leave with an efficient step that conveys that they are no-nonsense guys.
The fireman tries to push my father out of the way to make sure all the flames are extinguished inside the oven. But then he sees my father’s wild eyes, the blood from his nose and mouth, and backs off. They suddenly look like they don’t want to have anything to do with us, as if all this was too much for them. They are moving backwards towards the door, trying to get out as quickly as possible.
“Good evening, sir, call us if you have a problem again, sir.”
They both leave and slam the door behind them. The three of us are left standing in the kitchen, staring at the oven. My mother opens the oven to see if the typewriter has been destroyed. There are ashes all over the inside of the oven, but the old Zinger is still standing, a little blackened from the fire, but whole.
“These German products, they’re immortal,” says my mother.
The house has got warmer from the fire, but the smoke is making us choke. The living room looks the same as it did after the big earthquake: books, chairs, papers thrown everywhere across the floor in an offensive disorder. A ravenous desire to hold and kiss Mihai possesses me. I go back to reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, trying to quiet the throb of my flesh and to soothe my heart in the story of a tragic heroine.
Winged Man, Ripe Tomatoes
I’VE JUST TAKEN my entrance exams for the University of Bucharest, four days of gruelling oral and written tests in the city’s oppressive summer heat. For my written exam, I get two of my favourite subjects, Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple and Thomas Hardy’s Tess. I am menstruating and writing feverishly, page after page, about the paradoxes in Shaw’s main character and the bigoted society around him, and about Tess as a sacrificial victim, about the scene at Stonehenge when she falls asleep on one of the stones of the prehistoric temple, a foreshadowing of her death. Blood and words pour out of me at the same time, in a continuous flood. I’m pale and shaky, and I’ve lost ten kilos in the last month. I cough all the time. I’m like a tuberculosis patient, and I feel beautiful.
I don’t wait for the results of the exam, but get on the train to the mountains the very next day. I find Mihai in a strange mood, distant and malicious, as he settles himself in his worn-out chair and I throw myself onto his bed.
“What’s all this studying like a maniac and getting yourself into this state?” he asks.
“What state?” I ask.
“Just look at yourself,” he says. “You look like a famine survivor. What’s the point?”
I’m raw, bloody and sweaty after the exams and the three-hour-long train ride from Bucharest in a hot compartment. I throw all the swear words that come into my head into his face, an endless stream of obscenities, with enormous satisfaction and relief. He smiles, and I feel like slapping him. I get up to leave, but he holds me and kisses me. He changes into his tender, loving mood just like that, in a flash.
After we make love, he comments again on my skinny body. And then he tells me it’s too difficult, all this waiting for me, and the damn distance between us, what if he meets another girl, there are other women in the world, you know! I don’t really get what he is trying to say. Maybe he has cheated on me, and this is his way of breaking the news. He looks dark and impenetrable like when he would think of Mariana and the accident on the mountain during our first summer together. He is wearing his check knee breeches and a clean pressed white shirt. I’ve never seen him in an ironed shirt before. His shirts always used to be wrinkled. He is more handsome yet more foreign than usual. Almost like a stranger. I ask him to explain himself about the distance and other women. He stares at me with an ironic look and lights up a cigarette, this time a Kent, not the odious Carpaţi. I am wondering why he’s now smoking Kent cigarettes. Maybe it’s one of the favours he gets for working for the secret police. Maybe he is a total stranger and turns into someone completely different the minute I leave the town of Braşov. A dangerous man that I don’t know any longer. Or that I have never really known very well.
“Mona, I don’t know,” he says, dragging on his cigarette. “We are hundreds of kilometres away from each other, and we live in such different worlds. Maybe you should just get yourself one of those artistic Bucharest boys, now that you are a university student.” He crushes
the cigarette in the already full ashtray.
Why is he saying this? I turn over the ashtray, and ashes get all over the bed and the carpet and on our clothes. He stands up trying to protect himself from my fury. I stand up, too, and I kick and punch him. I kick him in the balls, and he falls to his knees, gasping. I spit in his face.
He disgusts me. I don’t want him to touch me. I tell him he’s a cheat, and a fucking informer and a traitor and a rat. He tells me to leave the house, which I do, slamming the door as hard as I can.
I go back to my aunt’s house and cry in my aunt’s arms, and she makes cabbage and potato soup for me. My uncle gets a huge watermelon, and my cousins play gin rummy with me. My aunt Nina has the sweetest, most comforting face in the world. Her round brown eyes and her smile always make me feel safe and cosy. I like watching her prepare her mythic cabbage soups, as her brown curls fall all over her face and as she attentively takes little sips from the soup to check it for salt. She’s my second mother, I tell her. She’s a forestry engineer and is out on various sites every day. She curses at the big trucks and tractors that she works with.
She knows everything about European history and, even better, she knows about the big void of many centuries in Romanian history. She says that between the third and the twelfth centuries almost nothing is known about our people. It’s her opinion that during that period we were just a bunch of barbarians fighting with other barbarians, and there’s nothing worth mentioning about Romanians during that period.
When she talks about the black void in our history, I feel a wild curiosity. I’d like to be a barbarian like the Romanians during our mysterious medieval period and ride a horse across the landscape, hunt and slaughter animals for food, and be too tired at night to do anything but sleep on the hard earth under the stars of fifteen hundred years ago. I want to run inside the black void of Romanian history where there is no Romania, just barbarians hunting, fucking and sleeping on the earth and writing nothing in history books.
Train to Trieste Page 9