Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  She sounds almost cruel. I realize that although she has stood by my father’s activities, she has actually hated them and the danger for himself and all of us. She has acted as if nothing has changed, teaching her classes at the conservatory, queuing after work for a bag of potatoes or to get our oil and sugar rations, and wishing my father hadn’t got involved in anything. Writing her poetry at night to forget about our daily worries.

  My father now leaves home every morning at four and travels on an unheated train with broken windows to get to his new assignment at the Ploieşti Institute. He teaches foreign students from Africa who are studying in our country because Ceauşescu has travelled there trying to get more foreign currency in the country. In order to soothe the pain caused by his demotion, my father reads all the Romanian poets over and over again, in no particular order: Eminescu, Minulescu, Bacovia, Arghezi, Blaga, Barbu, the Romantics, the metaphysical, the folklorists, the Symbolists, the modernists, all our greatest. Sometimes he recites poems by heart, pacing around the apartment. Melancholy poems about being buried alive in snow, playful poems about spring and about pink and violet tree buds and a waltz of the roses, and passionate love poems about waiting desperately under the lover’s window all night, under the cold, cold moon.

  When he is in a better mood, and excited about his new African students who are learning Romanian, my father tells us political jokes at the dinner table over our leek stew. I particularly like the one about the two men sitting in a train compartment and it starts to rain. One of them says, Look, it’s raining again. And the other one says, I know. To hell with them! My father laughs so hard he chokes on a leek, and then tears come into his eyes. We jump every time we hear steps in the hallway outside our apartment. We jump up from our chairs every time the phone rings. Sometimes my father says, “Don’t answer. Let it ring.”

  My father surprises me one day when he tells me I have to start thinking about leaving. “It’s getting dangerous for you here,” he whispers. “I am afraid for you,” he adds and strokes my hair sadly. I wonder if he knows anything about the chubby-faced man who threatened me that night, or if maybe he has received his own set of threats about something happening to me.

  I see my mother’s angry eyes. I know she’s angry because he’s done this to us, and now she’s losing her daughter. But she says nothing, and I know they’ve talked this over. Now it’s in the open: I have to think about leaving.

  There are so many ways of escaping; all you need is the energy to go ahead and try one of them. People escape all the time. I’ll have to find a way, too, by sea, by river, by train, by plane. Walking, swimming, riding, crawling across the border. Anything. At least in that respect the choices seem numerous.

  As we are sitting close to one another whispering about my escape, I feel the danger emanating from all directions. I am puzzled and at the same time detached from the huge irony of Mihai moving to Bucharest just about when I am thinking of leaving the country. I can’t quite process the two thoughts next to each other, so I get up from the sofa and go to the kitchen to try to find something to eat. There is nothing in the refrigerator except for a bowl of leftover lettuce and tomato salad from yesterday. I take it out and eat the soggy salad with the last slice of bread from our ration for this week.

  One evening when it’s cold and rainy in Bucharest, and all the umbrellas get turned inside out, and the dead leaves are swirling in the air like in the picture of autumn I used to have in my elementary school reading books, the wife of my father’s psychiatrist friend comes over wet and trembling. She says three generals in Ceauşescu’s government have been executed, and everybody who is suspected of any illegal activities is being hunted down. My mother goes pale because my father isn’t home yet; it’s already eight o’clock and he was supposed to be home three hours ago after his classes at the Ploieşti Institute. She lights a cigarette from the package my father left on the table next to his bed, next to the pile of index cards for the dictionary of neologisms he’s working on. She tells Liliana to take off her coat and sit down, does she want some coffee, it’s soy coffee, she found it yesterday at the grocery near the Russian church downtown. No, all Liliana wants is some water. My mother asks if she knows anything about my father.

  Liliana says they’re all hiding. There were meetings in the attic of her house sometimes, and she admits she helped by typing, keeping records of people who had disappeared, and watching for cars or people walking by the house during the meetings.

  It bothers me that she’s telling us this. Why now? Why not just pretend she was never there? I don’t want to hear her, and I don’t want her to say another word.

  “It’s got huge,” Liliana tells us. “They say there are men and women of all ages, lots of students. But in the end, who knows? Half of them could be informers. Then one day they round everyone up, and everyone’s pointing at someone else, because this is how we are, we Romanians. And since the defection of Pacepa, things have got even more confused.”

  She fidgets and wrings her hands. Liliana is so small and plump that her feet barely touch the ground when she sits down. She has a whining, weepy voice that pierces like the point of a needle. Her husband, Mihnea, already spent seven years in political prison in the fifties. He happened to be at a party where someone recited a metaphysical poem of some sort, and one night he disappeared in a black van. He reappeared seven years later, barely recognizable even to his own wife and son.

  Liliana is wringing her hands over and over. Her annoying voice and the rain tapping at the windowpanes sound like omens of catastrophe and misery. I am thinking that maybe I can get to Italy somehow. Maybe I can get to sunny Italy just by taking the train to Trieste, simply buying a ticket and swinging across the border.

  My father appears at the door, soaking wet and looking like a fugitive. He tells my mother to pack a bag of clothes for him. My uncle Ion is coming to drive him to his relatives in the countryside. That’s all the way to northern Moldavia, deep in the country where people still get their water from the village well and they light their houses with candles, because there’s one electrical socket used only in emergencies. It’s not like the Securitate couldn’t find them even in a snake pit, as my father says sometimes. But they will gain time, allowing things to blow over, and maybe they can even mislead the Securitate for a while. Now my father thinks the Securitate aren’t all that smart anyway and the whole system of terror is based on making people believe they are cunning and omniscient so that everybody stays intimidated and paralysed.

  “If everyone resisted and did something, we wouldn’t all be in the huge pile of shit we are in right now. There’s the Romanians for you,” he often says angrily, crushing his cigarette with an abrupt gesture.

  Liliana asks feverishly if my father has heard from Mihnea, and he tells her, “Yes, he’s safe.” She doesn’t ask for more; she knows it’s all he can say, all he knows. My father gives my mother the phone number of the former student who’s a colonel in the secret police and helped him out before. She needs to meet with him. Maybe he can tell her what to do to get his name off the wanted list.

  I don’t understand why some Securitate are helping them out. Why does my father trust people like that? He’s said he knows; he has his instincts. Colonel Petrescu won’t betray him. I’m glad the world is full of my father’s former students. Then I think of Mihai, and now I want to believe that Mihai really is in the secret police, but he’s like Petrescu’s good secret police. I want to trust him, even if he’s one of them. I want to call him and hear his voice telling me there’s nothing to worry about. I want to tell him everything.

  While my father helps my mother collect his clothes and food, he tells us a joke. There is this man running in the street, and he meets a friend who asks him, Why are you running? So he says, Didn’t you hear? They’re shooting camels everywhere! And the first man says, But you’re not a camel! Why are you running? And the man says, I know I’m not a camel, but these guys shoot first and check later. />
  I laugh at my father’s joke, though no one else does. He embraces me and tells me to be good, not to stay out late at night, because you never know. I am so sick of that expression that I want to explode. I thought my father was always the one who knew everything. Instead, he seems more confused now than ever before, and even his running away to the mountains seems naïve and senseless. It was he who always told me that when they want to find you, they will find you anywhere, even in a bear’s den, even in the darkest hole in the earth. Maybe he was exaggerating, as my father often does. Maybe he is just playing hide-and-seek with the secret police. Or maybe he is right when he says that not even the Securitate are as invulnerable and cunning as they try to seem.

  Uncle Ion arrives late that night, ready to take my father to the northern Carpathians where his relatives will hide him in a basement or in a stable with the cows and the pigs and the hens laying eggs. They drink black tea without sugar or lemon and tell political jokes. They laugh out loud as if, for once, it doesn’t matter. Tonight I am envious of my father and uncle, and of Liliana’s husband. They seem to be playing in an adventure film, and suddenly I feel like I want to be in this film, too.

  I don’t know which path to choose. I feel I’m being forced to make a choice I never wanted to make. Maybe I should join the students meeting in basements and trying to change things. If my own life is in danger anyway, it might as well be in danger for something I’m doing myself, for an important cause, not because of what my father or lover does. And then what? I think of Cristina again and of how trapped and desperate she must have felt. I don’t want to feel like Cristina, I want to love, live, study, be something important. I want to run away, and I also want to be with Mihai. My heart is cracking again under the weight of such impossible choices.

  This rainy November night in my parents’ apartment, as my father is going off to hide in the heart of the mountains, as I start to fantasize about crossing the border into Italy, I find refuge again thinking of Mihai. Soon he’ll be here, living in Bucharest. But even that comforting thought seems poisoned by doubts and worry. There seems to be a worm gnawing at everything. There’s terror in everything, in what we do and in what we don’t do, in being with someone and being apart. At least my father and people like him, running and hiding tonight, are sharing the terror together.

  I’m dreaming about the black hole in Romanian history that my aunt always talks about. That place of nonhistory, dark and mysterious like a womb, where I could curl up like a foetus and forget everything and float in the warm gelatinous waters of oblivion, waiting.

  Sad Winter in Bulgarian Boots

  MIHAI HAS KEPT his promise. He’s moved to Bucharest. He works as an engineer at the dreary margins of the city, in a factory that produces parts for tractors that are exported for hard currency. He lives in a rented room in another part of the city, close to where my great-aunt Nadia, who fell dead on the floor with the yellowish postcard in her hand, used to live. The streets here are wide with rows of oak and chestnut trees and turn-of-the-century buildings and houses. The room where Mihai lives is tiny, with a creaky door and a creaky bed where we make love in the evening as people go up and down the creaky staircase outside our door. There is so much creaking everywhere that sometimes we sit and listen and laugh, because we both miss the starched bedsheets and the cool mountain air coming through the windows in Mihai’s room in his parents’ apartment. The creaking makes us think of old age and of time passing as we stare at the ugly cracks in the walls left by the big earthquake.

  Everything seems to get calmer for a while. I pack the events of the past year in a kind of mental wardrobe for memories I mustn’t remember. After returning from his hiding place deep in northern Moldavia, my father becomes quieter than usual and is often brooding. He seldom leaves the house, which makes me think that his group must have dissipated and everybody must have been scared off for a while. Maybe some have disappeared or are locked up in Mihnea’s hospital.

  Those thoughts I had of Mata Hari now seem silly to me as I spend my days moving between my university classes and making love with Mihai in the little room with creaky furniture. I am happy as we stroll down the long streets lined with oak trees and as we shuffle through the carpet of russet leaves like an old couple.

  I go to my university courses every day while Mihai works in the tractor factory. I read dozens of English and American plays, medieval plays, and Shakespeare and Restoration plays and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and I think about all the characters loving and disguising themselves and dying and killing and committing suicide and the glass figurines the woman in The Glass Menagerie collects and the Forest of Arden where love plays the wildest tricks.

  The grey trolleybuses dragging their giant snail bodies down the boulevards of Bucharest seem more bearable and even acquire a touch of colour. The sad, dusty-looking people with drawn faces, returning from work with bags of potatoes and their sugar and oil rations, take on a certain edge of nobility. I don’t particularly like the pathetic character in Death of a Salesman. It seems banal and uninteresting to kill yourself for life insurance. At least under Communism we have good pension plans. There are better reasons to kill yourself, like not being admitted to the university or being caught by the secret police or working every day in a tractor factory.

  Some evenings, I tell Mihai I have to study for my exams, and I go to the theatre in the centre of town. I feel happy walking along the marble corridors with crystal chandeliers, looking at the elegant theatregoing crowd, women in black velvet dresses and men with bow ties.

  I see Iphigenia, a sad play about a virgin being sacrificed by her own father to ensure the glory of his army in the Trojan War. She seems noble and melancholy, in a shimmering long white dress. She has a soliloquy about going alone to be sacrificed. I rage inwardly against the men around her, so greedy for glory at her expense. I am furious at how men use women to obtain glory for themselves. And then how they write it up so it’s as if it were their sacrifice of their most precious possessions – their women, their daughters, sisters, mothers. How Clytemnestra tears at her gown and her long hair in despair, trying uselessly to save her daughter from being sacrificed. I will not be Iphigenia walking towards the sacrificial altar in a white gown, I tell myself almost out loud in the dark theatre. I will run for my life.

  Most of all I like The Master and Margarita. Valeria Seciu, the best Romanian actress, is playing the role of Margarita. She appears half naked at a window, chanting her passion and her revolt. The devils plotting to take the artist’s soul away are both funny and frightful. They make me think of the secret police buying people’s souls, only these devils are colourful and have funny red tails.

  There’s nothing I would want to do more in my life than make plays like this one, with crushing passions and poetry flowing in sensuous chants onstage, with men and women moving as in a dream, faces with grotesque makeup, under red and mauve and yellow lights.

  When I leave the theatre, the streets are glistening in the November drizzle. I feel sad for Mihai, sitting alone in his rented room where everything creaks and smells like it’s a hundred years old.

  Mihai seems smaller without his dark mountains and the hidden paths among the pine trees. He seems out of place here; he takes on the greyness of the Bucharest autumn like a hand-me-down coat with sleeves that are too short.

  It’s on a Sunday afternoon, this November, that we take a funny photograph we call Just Escaped from Refugee Camp, in the rain near the railway station. Me in my detestable Bulgarian boots and a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat, Mihai with a green coat and a big Russian hat. We’re looking straight at the camera. Mihai has the beginning of a crooked smile; I have no smile whatsoever. I am stern and angry, holding his arm. You see silhouettes behind us, people with umbrellas, and the street has a slight glimmer in the rain.

  My feet freeze in my Bulgarian boots. It’s snowing ruthlessly, and Bucharest seems almost festive under a dusting of snow. I wear a white moh
air shawl over my head.

  One evening I take two streetcars and two buses to find the tractor factory where Mihai works. I wait for him at the tall metal gate of the entrance as his shift pours out. I see him in the distance, walking slowly, almost with a limp, crouched under the falling snow. I am seized with fear that the Mihai I know, the man who took me along the hidden paths of the Carpathians, knowing every secret turn, naming every flower and tree, will slowly disappear under his ridiculous Russian hat among the workers at the edge of Bucharest where heavy machinery is being built.

  I know it’s hopeless. He won’t make it. We won’t make it. This is a sad, sad winter. He hates everything, and I hate him for hating everything.

  He finally sees me through the shimmering lace of snowflakes. He’s angry to see me there. He grins at the security guard at the gate who greets him, Good evening, Comrade Simionu, and then he’s sullen again. But when he grudgingly kisses me in the swirl of snow outside the metal gate, I suddenly have the feeling I’m growing, becoming immense in my white shawl. I feel like the queen of the North Pole. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t going to work out. I feel white and huge like a polar bear, and I can’t help swelling and flying upward just like the old man in Mary Poppins who can’t help floating to the ceiling as he fills up with laughter. I think of the theatres at night and the yellow and mauve lights with actors reciting poetic words in melancholy rhythms. I walk next to him without touching the ground, ballooning into white fluff.

  We go back to his room and sit on the squeaky chairs at his work desk staring at each other for a while. He is unshaven and I ask him if he plans to grow a beard.

  “Maybe. Don’t you want me to blend in with the Bucharest hippies, with your college friends, don’t they all have beards and long hair?”

  “I don’t have any hippie friends. I like you with or without a beard,” I say.