I feel defeated and exhausted. I want to lie on a fresh grave covered with petunias and marigolds and go to sleep for ever. I want to run away. I do not belong in this universe. I don’t understand it and I don’t like it. Mihai seems like a stranger to me again. The skinny man in the leather jacket staring at us doesn’t even scare me any more. Why do the Securitate wear leather jackets even in the hot summer, I wonder. I’ve got used to the absurdity of it all. But I don’t want to get used to it. It’s like freezing to death, being lulled to death, and yet having enough stubbornness in you to resist. I want to run away, I want to run away, I want to run away. That’s what I keep repeating to myself as I watch the crowd leaving Cristina’s grave.
The day after the funeral, I decide not to go to Mihai’s and stay home to spend time with my cousins. Miruna and Riri bring out their card games. For the first time in a while I notice how both of them have grown up. Miruna’s face is pale and has got longer, and her blue eyes have an even deeper hue. She is a quieter child now, whereas Riri is getting taller and looks more mischievous than ever. They both want to know about the funeral. They say how sad it is that Cristina died like that, so young. She’ll meet her mother in the other life, says Miruna, her chicory-blue eyes wide and watery.
“There is no afterlife,” I tell her.
“Yes, there is!” says Riri.
“No, there isn’t. It’s just a bunch of silly tales, about how you go to heaven and all that crap,” I say.
Miruna starts crying, and Riri throws one of the porcelain gin-rummy stones at me.
“Are you a Marxist or something?” Riri yells, her face all red and her dark eyes glittering with anger.
I turn over the gin-rummy game and kick the pieces.
“I am not anything!” I say and start crying. “I’m not a Marxist. I’m not a Christian. I hate everything!”
I’m breaking down in front of my cousins who have never seen me this way. They wrap their arms around me and try to console me. They tell me they’re sorry about Cristina and it’s all right if I don’t believe in the afterlife. Miruna gives me a piece of her chewing gum, and Riri picks up the gin-rummy pieces.
That evening, Mihai calls to ask me if I want to go out for a walk. I don’t really feel like it. I’m enjoying the time with my cousins and my aunt Nina and uncle Ion. My aunt has boiled a pot of corn, and Ion has cracked open a huge watermelon. They’re laughing and teasing each other.
“Yes, I want to go for a walk,” I hear myself telling Mihai. “Where should I meet you?”
“Downstairs in ten minutes,” he says.
It’s rare that Mihai comes to pick me up at my aunt’s building. We usually meet somewhere halfway, or in the park at the end of the street. He’s freshly shaven, wearing a clean shirt that matches his eyes.
“I got a job in Bucharest,” he announces. “At the tractor parts factory. I start in a month. See? I kept my promise, didn’t I?” he says proudly.
I’m speechless, I’m in awe and I’ve been wrong. Mihai would never betray me. I have just been paranoid about him cheating on me and being secret police because of the overall atmosphere of mistrust. And because I’ve been reading too many English and French novels. After all, Mihai often talks about my father with great admiration. It’s just that he comes from a different world than mine. His parents are workers, and he lives in a provincial town, but that makes him more interesting than the pretentious spoiled Bucharest boys. He loves his country and simply doesn’t want all the smart Romanians to leave. It was he who only the other day told me the joke about how the last Romanian to leave the country would turn off the lights, to save the electricity. Then he said sadly that only the dumb ones and those too lazy to leave will remain. I build up Mihai again into the hero I’ve always wanted him to be as I’m standing in front of my aunt’s building this August afternoon. My heart is beating so fast that I feel dizzy in the hot sun. All the fragrances of our first summer are filling the air, and I just want to look at the piercing blue sky and admire the whimsical yellow roses that the neighbour on the first floor has planted and the red poppies spreading all over the park. Mihai will move to Bucharest. I’ll start my university classes, and we’ll get married, and maybe if things get really bad, one day I’ll even be able to convince Mihai to run away with me somewhere in the world. We’ll escape to Switzerland or Canada or somewhere like that, where there will be lots of beautiful mountains and glacier lakes, where we can finally live our love freely.
Bad Cologne
I ARRIVE IN bucharest the last week of August, elated. Mihai will join me soon to start his new job, and I am about to start my first year at the University of Bucharest, as an English literature major. But my happiness is soon tinged with fear and nausea again. Sergeant Dumitriu, the secret-police officer who brought me the red carnations, is on my trail. He calls repeatedly, wants to meet me alone, and asks me to help him with some information about student colleagues at the university.
He asks me to meet him in the University Square, right in front of the four statues of Romania’s greatest literary and historic figures. We meet in front of the statue of Michael the Brave on his enormous horse with the fearsome sword pulled out for battle, in the neighbourhood where my parents used to live the night I was born. Michael the Brave must be my guardian angel, I think, and smile as I see Dumitriu approach me full of self-assurance. He takes my smile for a sign of gladness to see him and rushes to kiss my hand. He smells strongly of cheap cologne. I become stiff and edgy at his touch and secretly wipe off my hand on the side of my skirt. We start walking in the direction of the InterContinental Hotel, with its concave modern body of white stone looming above the city. I walk several steps away from Dumitriu, looking around me worried that someone I know might see me in the vicinity of this secret-police officer. I stumble, and he rushes to hold me. I jerk my arm in repulsion and he says with a grin: “Miss Mona, I don’t bite, you know, deep down I am quite a nice guy!”
I feel like laughing at the sound of the expression “deep down” but try to keep a serious, stern face. I am wondering how deep does one need to go to find anything nice in a person who is responsible for people losing jobs, being arrested, being shoved inside mental asylums, or even being killed.
He starts talking as we are about to cross the street. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Mona,” he says. “You would be doing us a great service and your country and Party, too. And most important, you’d be doing yourself a great favour. Just paying attention to what some of your colleagues might say, that’s all, paying attention. For instance, do you meet anyone you know at the American library, or do any of your colleagues have contacts with foreigners? Things like that, quite innocent, really.”
He wipes sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief he’s just produced from his trouser pocket. My heart jolts as I hear about the American library and I remember my conversations with Ralph the librarian, and the man in a black blazer always sitting at the faraway table pretending to read.
“In return,” he goes on without giving me a chance to respond, “we would make sure you land a nice position after graduation, something in your field, something here in the capital – for instance, at the American or at the British library. We know how much you love to read.”
We are now walking past the grandiose building of the National Theatre with its wide marble steps leading to the modern glass-and-brick façade. My heart is pounding so hard that I am almost having trouble breathing. I look back at the statue of Michael the Brave and am sorry to have left it, as if I cannot receive its protection any longer. I feel sweat dripping from my forehead along my nose, and my clothes feel heavy and bulky. My sandals scratch my feet, and my toes look all red and swollen. I stop in the middle of the pavement and tell him very calmly, very softly: “Thank you, Mr Dumitriu, for your kind offer. But I want to teach after I graduate. I don’t want to work at the American library. I want to teach English. Excuse me, I am late for my classes now.”
I let a young couple holding hands pass between us, and I take advantage of the distraction to start running. I run on the heated Bucharest pavement without looking back, on the side streets that I know so well, and find myself next to Aunt Matilda’s apartment building. I rush inside the cool hallway and close the heavy iron door with a thump. I sit on the marble steps leading to Matilda’s apartment to catch my breath. Cracks from the earthquake are still visible in the walls, and a great sense of relief overtakes me at the thought that only a floor away is Aunt Matilda with her sweet, smiling face, her rose-petal and walnut preserves in her pantry. I rush up the stairs and walk right in as I always do, for Matilda always keeps her door unlocked, except for when she leaves the house or goes to bed. “God always helps me,” she says, “God and the Virgin Mary.” She is sitting at the long polished wooden table under the crystal chandelier and is reading. I have never been so happy to see Aunt Matilda as I am now, running away from Dumitriu and his scabrous offers. I ask her to give me a large portion of rose-petal preserve.
I try to go about my daily business as if nothing has happened: my literature classes, meeting with a friend or two for coffee or a beer at the café next to the Architecture Institute. I sometimes notice Dumitriu in a crowded bus on my way to school, hiding behind someone and pretending to look in the opposite direction. Once I notice him at the other end of the bus I’m taking to get home, bus number 88. He is staring at me with fascination or maybe desire. The thought fills me with disgust. I would much rather he hated me and followed me for purely political reasons. I can’t stand the thought of being lusted after by a bona fide secret policeman, someone who actually calls himself officer. And it’s not because he is in the army.
One night, I am returning home after studying late at the library. I hear footsteps behind me, the kind that give you the creeps. You stop, they stop; you start walking, they start coming up behind you. Before I know it, I am being pushed into the entranceway of a shabby apartment building, my back against the wall, and a tall man smelling of sweat and bad cologne has me trapped. He’s whispering into my ear. He is wearing the same cologne as Dumitriu did the other day. There must be a special brand of Securitate cologne, I think. I’m surprised at myself for not being scared, although it’s past eleven at night and there is no one on the street. Maybe it’s the cologne that turns the whole thing into a joke. People should smell of tar or cigars when they attack people in the street at night. I kick him with my knee and spit at him. He recoils for a second, enough for me to try to break away, but he recovers and traps me against the wall again with one arm, wiping my saliva from his face with the other.
“Feisty, ha?” he says, grinning.
I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want to scream or talk. I just want this over. I know somehow this isn’t a sexual assault. I’m suddenly angry at everybody, including my own father and Mihai. Everybody has some stake in something that I’m not interested in, and I seem to be the one paying for everybody’s attempts at heroism and adventure. Our lives aren’t getting any better because of all the fuss with manifestos and Radio Free Europe and all the meetings about censorship taking place in grungy attics and damp basements. We are still standing in the same stupid queues for every bite we eat, and we can’t even talk in public. I feel no fear but only waves of hatred and anger at the whole world. Even at my dead relatives who are letting me down.
“What exactly is your daddy trying to do, hm . . . who are his best friends?” he asks. “If your daddy continues the way he is, you’ll end up like your little friend,” the man whispers in my ear. “Or worse.”
I find the thought of ending up worse than dead kind of funny, and I laugh. Then I shiver at the sound of little friend in his mouth. So maybe Cristina was murdered after all. In any case, even if she was made so desperate as to kill herself, it’s almost as if she were murdered. Her death was just another, more perverse way of being murdered.
“You think it’s funny, ha?” the man asks, squeezing both my wrists against the wall until they hurt. “But it’s true. There’s worse things than being dead,” he says.
“So why are you whispering, tough guy?” I ask him. Cristina’s death had made something snap inside me. I don’t really care any more.
“YOU WANT TO HEAR IT LOUDER?” he shouts, inches from my ear. “FINE. I CAN DO THAT.” His voice echoes down the empty street. I try to twist my head away, but he pinches my jaw with one hand and pulls my face up to his.
“You hear me now, right?” he shouts. It echoes down the street: Right, right, right.
“Yes,” I say meekly. It’s important to tell myself that I am only acting meek.
He grabs my chin and lifts my head up so I have to look at him.
“Good girl,” he says and lets go of my chin.
The sound of the words good girl makes me tremble, and I know I am not acting any more. Now I am scared for my life and for my father’s life. His words suddenly remind me of the girl who was mysteriously run over. Maybe she, too, was just a piece of the puzzle that they used in order to get to someone else: her parents or her lover, who knows. Or maybe it was her lover who was behind it. Who knows, who knows, I hear the words ringing in my head like a chant. Maybe Mihai is good secret police like my father’s former student, maybe there are a few noble ones among them who actually work to undermine the bad ones. I am sure Mihai wouldn’t let anyone hurt me this way and grab my chin and shove me against a wall in the middle of the night. But who knows, who knows. Trust your instincts, they always say. Maybe I should trust the suspicion I had for the first time when I came back to see Mihai the winter after the summer we fell in love, when suddenly he seemed a stranger, with his leather jacket and moralizing to me about my anti-Communist attitude. How can there even be good secret police?
The man with the chubby face eases off and moves a step away. Then he walks away, just like that, straightening his jacket collar. He looks up at the buildings as if he owned the street.
My legs give out, and I slip down the wall until I’m sitting on my heels. I’m shaking all over. I am exhausted from the strain of acting and also from not acting and from just being afraid. I close my eyes and I am floating on the river Nistru in 1918, rushing by floating bodies and chicken coops, and the music in my mirror music box keeps playing, a persistent string of notes carrying me through the demented waters. I climb into a tree and wait. I sing the tune of my music box, the “Für Elise” tune, over and over again. Then I am awake a week later in a strange man’s bed, drinking cold water from a tin cup he is holding for me. He has soft black hair neatly combed back, a thin nose, and an elegant, smiling face. I know we will get married. I am going to plant lavender in my garden to cover the smells of rotting bodies and shit from the river. My house will always smell of lavender. And bad cologne will be outlawed from my neighbourhood for ever.
Choices
MY MOTHER AND I are afraid every night when it gets to be past eight o’clock and my father hasn’t come home yet. We sit on the living room sofa with the storage box beneath it that holds all my childhood dolls. We hold hands and stare at the door. Sometimes I want to open up the box under the sofa bed and take out my dolls and place them all around me and talk to them. Daniela the blond one, Mihaela the brunette, and Tania, the Russian doll my aunt Ana brought me from the USSR: Tania’s long plaits and soulful glass eyes used to make me think people were so wrong to say bad things about the Russians.
I am waiting for something awful to happen to me any moment, to be run over, to be strangled in my sleep, to be served poisoned ice cream by the scrawny woman in a yellow dress in the corner ice-cream booth.
My mother makes leek stew every night. Now, even bread is rationed, and we run to all the shops in the neighbourhood looking for coffee. When we don’t find it, she makes very strong black tea. We drink it scrunching our faces, with no sugar because we’ve finished our ration of sugar for the month, with no lemon because we haven’t seen a lemon in two years.
One even
ing my father comes home looking defeated, his grey hair dishevelled and his blue-grey eyes almost teary, and announces to us he has been demoted from his position at the University of Bucharest to the Ploieşti Institute, a city that is sixty kilometres away. Another colleague of his from the comparative literature department was also demoted and made to teach high school. “I’m supposed to be lucky, actually,” he says with a bitter smile. My mother says he should have expected it, with his overt craziness about Radio Free Europe and the manifestos.
“Indeed, you are lucky,” my mother continues as she purses her lips with a stern expression. “They could have put you into an asylum, like they’ve done with others.”
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