“What good has history got us? Look at how history is tearing us apart and tormenting us,” she tells me. In my black mood, I couldn’t agree with her more.
“Stop filling her head with your stories,” says my uncle. “Don’t you see how she gets melancholy? She’s young, just leave her alone.”
I cut myself another piece of watermelon. My aunt goes on about Romanian history and pretends to not pay attention to Ion.
My uncle stands up in the middle of her lecture and kisses her right on the mouth. My aunt says: “Stop it! Are you crazy?” But I know from her smile that she likes to be kissed just like that.
“Forget him,” she says while I’m eating watermelon and spitting out seeds. “He’s not worthy of you. Just forget him. Your uncle is right. You’re so young. You’ll find someone much better and more worthy of you when you start your classes at the university.”
I try to do just that: forget him, and pretend that the summer smells and the orange moon do not tear my insides with pain. I pretend that I don’t think of him and that I’m not waiting by the phone. I even dance with my cousins, to all the songs he and I danced to. I pretend I’m just as happy as I can be, and that the tears that soak my pillow every night are an existential malaise, like the metaphysical nausea of Sartre or, better yet, the Romanian dor. I pretend that I am finally coming into the full comprehension of that state of being by which we Romanians supposedly define ourselves.
I pretend I’m longing for something unknown, for someone unknown, like the girl in the poem by the Romanian Romantic poet Eminescu. She dreams every night about a black-haired man with wings. She dreams he descends into her room and flies away with her to his magical kingdom in the country beyond the sun, beyond the moon, where everything is golden and nobody ever dies. And this romantic winged man does come into her room one night and sees her sleeping. She is so rosy and beautiful asleep that two silver tears fall out of his eyes onto the girl’s face and wake her up. She’s immediately struck with love for him but realizes that he is too cold, too immortal, and that she doesn’t want to live with him in that golden kingdom of his, because gold is cold and life is warm. Then he gives up his immortality for her and comes to live with her on earth, where everyone has only one short life and lovers kiss under the fragrant linden trees on summer nights. I’m telling myself that I am experiencing that kind of longing, for that kind of a mythic creature.
After ten days of this poetic agony I meet Mihai as I’m going for a walk in the neighbourhood. Then my heart is just about ready to explode into more pieces than would cover the entire street. I walk towards him, trying to look calm. He’s the first one to give in, to hold me and to kiss my earlobe and push back my hair, and to tell me he will always love me, he will always feel this way, and please forgive him, please, can I forgive him for having been so mean? And that’s when I don’t pretend any more and when I start sobbing in his arms and shouting at him Why didn’t you call me? Would you have called me if we hadn’t met today? and Can we go somewhere to get away from everyone and be alone?
He takes me to a house at the outskirts of town, where an aunt of his lives. She’s on holiday for a couple of weeks and has left him the keys. There’s a vegetable and a flower garden and a tall fence separating us from the street. We make love among tomatoes and parsnips and basil in the shade of a cherry tree. We eat tomatoes and sour cherries warm from the sun.
“Can you forgive me? You know I would never be untruthful, never love anyone else! I was just teasing you, that’s all,” he says, more contrite than ever. “Sometimes I get desperate and don’t know what to do. All the months that go by without you . . .” He looks melancholy and lights up a Carpaţi cigarette. I feel relieved to see he is not smoking Kents any more.
“So you should die of shame!” I scream as loud as I can, slicing into the silence of the sunny garden.
“Forget it, Mona. Here, take this tomato. You’ve never had tomatoes like these before.”
I bite greedily into the ripe, juicy tomato, earthy and sunny. I fall asleep in his arms in the vegetable garden listening to the buses and the cars going by. As I am slowly emerging from my sleep, I imagine that I’m Tess of the D’Urbervilles and that I kill my lover and run away and live in the deep forest, in a place where instead of wild berries and wildflowers there are huge vines with tomatoes on them. The earth is covered in parsley, and I cry all day and all night until Mariana comes to me and tells me to forget him, to forget all about him. You did well to kill him, she says in my fantasy. Now we can live together in the forest and feed on tomatoes and parsnips.
I wake up hot, burning from the afternoon sun. He’s watching me wake up. He holds me until I calm down from my dream. He brings me cold water in a tin cup.
“Here, drink this. It’s from the spring behind the house. The cleanest water in the world.”
My insides cool down, and my mind is clearer and – how I love him as he gives me water from this tin cup and strokes my hair. I’m quivering with love for him, for his beautiful arms, his velvety eyes. He holds me for a long, long time, until dusk falls and envelops us. We have only one little, bitty life, not an endless one like the winged man in the story. To hell with the winged man! This moment is plump and juicy like a ripe tomato in the sun.
No Afterlife
ON OUR WAY home from his aunt’s house and her tomato garden, we run into Cristina and another woman whom I don’t know. I see them from a distance, walking and talking heatedly. I’m tired and flushed from the hot afternoon, our arguing and lovemaking, and I’m not really in the mood to talk to anyone, not even Cristina.
When she sees me, she waves with great excitement and hurries in our direction. As the two women get closer to us, an unpleasant feeling creeps up inside me. When the woman accompanying Cristina lifts her head and looks straight at me, I recognize her. She’s skinny with thin lips and dark, lanky hair.
The steps pursuing me in the snow, the feeling of unreality, the fear and confusion. What is Cristina doing with this woman? How does she know her? My conversation with Cristina in the pastry shop, on that cold, grey January morning, shapes itself quickly in my memory. So the two of them know each other, and they both know something I don’t. Cristina gets close to me and opens her arms to embrace me. She kisses me on both cheeks, then she introduces me to the other woman.
“This is Anca,” she says. “Anca Serban. She just moved here. She’s going to the Polytechnic. You know, on the hill, like all of us.”
Indeed, it seems that everyone in Romania is going to the Polytechnic Institute on a hill at the outskirts of the city to become engineers. I know Cristina is elated because her Tunisian love is going to the same school, but what’s with this Anca character again appearing in my life out of nowhere?
“Where did she come from?” I ask Cristina, as if the woman were invisible.
“From Bucharest,” Anca answers. “I’m a city girl, like you,” she says with a smile.
Her voice is low and very soft, nothing like the piercing high notes on that cold January night. I’m thinking that I must be mistaken; my memory is playing tricks on me. Yet the lips are unmistakable, and the hair, and the fierce look in her eyes.
“I think we’ve met before,” I say, smiling.
“Really! Where would you have met?” asks Mihai. “Bucharest is a big city.”
“I don’t think so,” Anca says, firmly.
The moment she says it, I know she’s lying, know that each one of these three people standing around me in the street on this oppressively hot July afternoon is hiding something from me. Each is hiding something different.
“Do you two know each other?” I ask Mihai, a knot of anger swelling in my throat.
He turns his body towards her. “I think I’ve seen you on the hill once or twice after the exams this summer,” Mihai says. I go over the last weeks in my mind, his meanness when he first saw me, my jealousy, his excuses, our afternoon today in the tomato garden. The knot in my throat is cho
king me and feels ready to explode.
“Anca is going to be in my class this autumn,” Cristina says happily.
I don’t understand Cristina’s excitement at all. But of course a whole life goes on here in my absence. Suddenly I feel like a stranger to these people and these places. Who knows what they all do here in February and March and May? Who knows what happens between all these people while I am in Bucharest studying like a maniac and worrying about my family being accused of setting Ceauşescu’s speeches on fire or about prisoners of conscience locked up in mental asylums or compromising leaflets flying from scaffoldings in the centre of Bucharest? Maybe Cristina has plans to leave the country and marry her Tunisian student. Maybe Mihai and Anca are lovers. Or maybe they are both secret police, comrades, and Anca was just trying to get me away from Mihai last winter. Maybe Cristina is turning into secret police because she got caught with her Tunisian boy.
Mihai must be having an affair with both of them. I don’t know whether this is about politics or about love, or both. Just a huge political mess with sentimental entanglements the way it can happen only in our stupid and confused country. Because not even love can be love any longer. Everything is murky and rotten. As the late afternoon sun is hitting me in the back of my head, I fantasize about Mihai sleeping one day with Cristina, one day with Anca, or maybe both of them at the same time. I hate all of them. I want to slit their throats, the way Mihai slit my throat in my dream. I want to see the three of them lying dead on the hot asphalt. So this is why Cristina was warning me away from Mihai when we were sharing our Turkish cakes, so she could have Mihai all to herself. Ah, not really all to herself, to herself and her new friend Anca.
“Isn’t that nice, that you all go to the same school,” I say, feeling my mouth curling into a smile and that my last bit of self-control is about to snap. “I hope you all fuck each other up on that hill at the Polytechnic.”
The words don’t seem to be coming from my own mouth.
There’s an awkward silence. The two women look at each other, and Mihai bursts out laughing.
Anca says with a glitter in her eyes, “Now that’s a good idea. We might want to try that sometime.”
I take Anca’s long, black, lanky hair and pull at it with all my might. I see myself from a distance, not believing what I’m doing, getting into a hair-pulling fight with another woman. It feels like we’re moving in slow motion and my body isn’t my body, until Mihai gets between us and pulls us apart. He yanks me away from the scene and sends the two women off, telling them something I’m too angry to understand.
We walk back to his apartment, where he holds me for a long time, whispering to me, stroking my hair as the hot summer light spills through the windows. He talks to me sweetly as if I were a sick child.
Mihai tells me to calm down and just trust him. Don’t I trust him? I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand anything and don’t trust anyone. My head is hurting so badly I feel it will crack, and my heart will crack. I will soon be all cracks and bruises. I want to run away. He gives me cold water. I see my great-grandmother Paraschiva drinking cold water from a tin cup in Vania’s bed more than half a century ago, just after she has come out of her delirium, just after she almost died of fever from the river. I am her, in the flood and the fear, staring at a man who is a stranger and yet familiar, loving him and fearing him, giving myself to his care. Drinking cold water from a tin cup.
The summer goes by in a frenzy of heat, suspicions, arguments, interspersed with lovemaking in shaded meadows, in Mihai’s cool bed, in secret, dark, humid caves dripping with calcareous water. Sometimes I just follow his instructions obediently, trust him to know what he is doing, whatever that may be, that he cannot possibly be betraying me, that it’s all a bad dream, a mistake.
Some mornings I wake up in a swirl of rage and mistrust. When I see Mihai I yell at him and tell him he’s a traitor. I want us to break up. I want to run away. I want to kill Mihai right after lovemaking, like a praying mantis. I want revenge. I want Mihai to scream in pain. I want to go into the depths of Romanian history and be a barbarian killing animals and other humans, maybe with one or two moments of primitive poetry at night as I’m falling asleep on the hard earth, under the impenetrable dark vault studded with millions of stars.
How did I end up lucky enough to love a man who may be secret police and is cheating on me? I will end up marrying a kind but boring schoolteacher and spend my days like some sorry French heroine in a forsaken Romanian provincial town, looking out the window and wishing my life had turned out differently. My father will eventually be killed by the secret police or hidden in a mental asylum, my lover will soon reveal his true colours, and my university career will be turned to trash by the secret police following me because of my father’s work for Radio Free Europe. Why doesn’t Radio Free Europe help me out and make me free, what’s the point of all the foolish activities if we become less and less free every day?
I toss and turn in bed in my aunt’s apartment and sweat profusely next to my two sleeping cousins until it is time for me to wake up and lie to everybody again that I am going to see Cristina or am taking a hike in the mountains with a group of friends. It’s what I always tell them whenever I go over to Mihai’s. I am myself all wrapped up in a web of lies. I invent trips I never take and tremble at the thought that Aunt Nina might be running into Cristina and ask her about our latest hike in the mountains. We all live wrapped up in our own cocoons of lies. Why should I be so hard on Mihai after all, when everybody is lying and when everybody is putting up with the demonstrations in honour of Nicolae and the Party, when even my aunt and uncle had to give in to the pressures at work and become Party members for fear they would lose their jobs, when I will probably have to give in and become a Party member myself if I want to keep my place at the university? My father was right when he once said: “We are all collaborators, one way or another; just that some are more than others.”
A week later, on August 23, our national holiday, Cristina is found dead in her bed. Since she is practically an orphan, nobody in her family, not even her sister, Simona, asks to have an autopsy performed on her. If she’d been run over by a car, at least then I would have known for sure.
“How does one wake up dead from unknown causes at the age of twenty?” I ask Mihai. I want to ask Mihai if he knew anything about Cristina’s Tunisian lover, but I am worried about what I might discover. I am worried that Cristina may have been keeping this information away from Mihai. What will he think when he finds out? Not even on the edge of a beloved friend’s tomb can we trust each other.
“Maybe she had a bad heart and didn’t know it. Or maybe she poisoned herself,” he says gloomily.
Mihai smokes one cigarette after another and looks genuinely sad. We all used to play together as children, and Cristina was Mariana’s best friend. They plaited each other’s hair and learned how to smoke together. I see tears welling up in Mihai’s eyes. Again I am struck by the feeling of being alien to this world: so many things have escaped me while I have been carrying on with Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Devil’s Disciple in Bucharest and while my father was carrying on about Radio Free Europe and being busy getting arrested by the secret police.
“Are you crazy? Why would Cristina have wanted to poison herself?” I ask. I remember how happy she was that day in the pastry shop when she told me about having fallen in love.
Mihai says he’s sorry. That’s all he says. He’s very sorry, he says over and over, as he tries to embrace me. I push him away.
The day of Cristina’s funeral I find enough courage to ask Mihai, “Do you think she might have been killed?”
“I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully, and this time his answer seems genuine. Maybe I have been wrong all along about Mihai. Maybe it’s just the general atmosphere of suspicion and confusion that is to blame and that is getting to us all.
I look at him and try to read something in his green eyes shaded by the long curly eye
lashes that I’ve been so crazy about all these summers and winters. He’s inscrutable. The old Mata Hari feeling comes back.
I cry so hard and so loud at Cristina’s funeral in the cemetery spread out on the hill at the edge of the city that Mihai makes me move farther down the pathway, away from the grave. As I’m trying to calm down and look at the people standing around the grave, I see the scrawny man who was sitting in the pastry shop last winter when Cristina and I had our cataif cake. Anca Serban is standing in a corner, crying silently. Then, on the other side of the grave, I notice a handsome man with dark curly hair and a moustache looking straight at the grave, his eyes shiny with tears. This must be Cristina’s lover, I think, and I am not surprised that she was so crazy in love with him. I can just see the two of them next to each other, she with her brown glistening hair and he with his dark eyes, a perfect couple. Then I look and see at least three other men I don’t know, whom I suspect must be Securitate. With a foreign student present, the place must be swarming with them. I feel shivers down my spine, despite the blazing sun. I look again through the crowd around the grave in the direction of Cristina’s friend, and he is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if I was dreaming a few seconds ago, but the striking face with the delicate features and curly dark hair is well contoured in my memory. I wish I had met him, had talked to him about Cristina, but I seem to be living in a universe where people appear and disappear like magic. Some magic!
I remember Cristina, trying to push snow down my collar, her face flushed from the cold, framed by her chestnut plaits that were coming undone. How lonely and desperate, how cornered from all sides, she must have felt if indeed she decided to kill herself. I wish I had remained closer to Cristina. I wish I had kept alive the impulse I’d had this past winter, to be her family and protect her. It’s as if Mihai has changed my perception of time, my sense of the reality around me. As if I have been living within this love like in a hot-air balloon, floating above everything and everyone. I have no idea of Cristina’s life over the past two years, except for a couple of quick encounters and the conversation I had with her last winter. Then summer rushed in, and then she was dead. She was so confused, and so like a lost child without her parents, her lips smeared with sugary white cream and all excited about being in love with someone exotic, someone from Tunisia, old Carthage, where Dido had died of love for her beloved Aeneas. I wonder if she suffered much. If there is any possibility she might have poisoned herself, what would she have taken? An overdose of sleeping pills would have sufficed. Did she call for help at the very end, when it was too late? Was she scared? Mariana and Cristina, two childhood friends dead within three years, before we even had the time to fully grow up. Maybe this place is cursed and my great-grandmother’s magic mirror has used up all of its charms.
Train to Trieste Page 10