He scratches his face, holds his head in his hands, lifts his head, and stares at me. He tells me he really can’t take this city. He can’t take the factory, the ugly industrial district where he has to work.
“I am really trying, you know, I’m trying very hard . . . for your sake. But I don’t know how you can live in this city.”
He lights a cigarette and wraps himself in the blue smoke, staring at the ceiling. I find him handsome in a new way, with his beginnings of a beard, the sad, anguished expression. I hear people going up the staircase outside the room, and I know how much he hates hearing people go up and down those stairs all the time. I take his hand and hold it to my face as he looks deeply into my eyes. I grab the cigarette from his hand and take a couple of drags from it. It tastes bitter and sour, and the unpleasant taste goes well with the morose atmosphere in this room. Then he grabs my head almost with violence and kisses me on the lips the way he has done so many times in our most inebriating moments: slowly, deliberately, pressing his lips hard against mine.
“I wanted so much for us to be together always, Mona,” he says sadly, and the sound of my name in his mouth sends shivers of pleasure down my spine. I want to hear him say Mona for ever. I see tears in his eyes and am shocked at the sight. Mihai truly does love me like crazy.
“But I am suffocating. And then there are things, things I am worried about, things I have to do. And it’s better if I am away from this city,” he concludes vaguely.
It’s the first time I hear him talk this way, actually mentioning something that he is doing outside of his work and his mountain climbing. My heart starts pounding with anxiety. I don’t want to ask him what those things are that he has to do. I don’t want to know about them. Right now, I prefer to think Mihai is a friend of my father’s student, Colonel Petrescu, working with an inside movement of people in the Securitate who wish to undermine the very organization they are part of. He kisses me again, and I let myself get carried away.
We make love in a new way, slowly, deliberately, whispering words of love and promises of eternal faithfulness, oblivious to the squeaking of the bed and of the people going up and down the staircase outside our room. It is now dark; we can barely see each other’s face, and we cry in each other’s arms. By mid-February, Mihai has resigned from his job at the tractor factory and is back in his beloved mountains. We’ll see each other during vacations as before, and I’ll be back on trains to see him. But summer is so far away and this winter seems endless. Sometimes I take the bus to where he used to live. I walk around the sooty building with the tiny room and the creaking staircase. My feet are cold in my Bulgarian boots.
Spring and Brown Soup
ONE EVENING, AFTER I’ve circled the block where Mihai used to live in an agony of nostalgia as grey and opaque as this February dusk, I see a shadow across the street, hands in his pockets, sure of himself. I have the feeling this shadow is watching me. I want to run, but I don’t want him to run after me. I want to be in sunny Italy, Bermuda, Valparaíso, even Bulgaria – on another continent, on another planet.
Instead of getting on bus 99 that just stopped at the corner, I run inside the building with its creaky staircase. For a moment, I forget Mihai doesn’t live there any more. I rush to the room on the left that used to be his room. I try the doorknob: it’s unlocked. I open the door and walk in, as if I know he’ll be there waiting for me.
The room is dimly lit. Instead of Mihai sitting at the wooden table against the wall, working on some diagram of a tractor part, there’s an old man who stares at me with red-rimmed eyes. He holds a spoon. Juice from a brown liquid is dripping into his beard.
I let out a scream. It’s the scream I’ve wanted to produce for a long time, since the night of New Year’s Day, the crazy woman, the shadow. I scream and scream, and the old man knocks over his soup jumping up from the table. He looks terrified, holding his hands out, trembling, panicky. He begs me to not report him because he doesn’t have the key, somebody else does, please, please don’t have him arrested. He starts crying.
I have no idea what anybody wants from me any more. In this moment, as I sit on the chair in Mihai’s old room, with the ancient man with brown soup in his beard, I only know that I want to run away for ever. I want to be on the train to Trieste, to find myself in the exact moment where the train crosses the border into Italy where olive trees grow, where velvety, dark green pines cast their profiles against blue hills and Roman ruins, where people speak joyously in sentences that sound like opera arias and say things like mamma mia and mascalzone.
I get up from the chair and say, “I’m terribly sorry, sir. Please excuse me for interrupting your dinner.” The old man looks at me with relief. I rush out of the building in a flash. I run without stopping. I don’t take the bus back home, but just run like the wild white mare of my dream, across the streets of Bucharest in the icy February drizzle that mixes with my warm tears.
Once in a while I see Sergeant Dumitriu in a crowd, on a bus, like before. Sometimes he actually says hello, as if he were an old acquaintance. He has been my most loyal follower. I run into him when I go to my university courses. I recognize him in the street at night when I get back from a play or from the library. He is always wearing a suit and a tie. You might as well look respectable when you are following and informing on people. I don’t feel like sharing any of this with my father. Why burden him with more worries or incite him to do something wild and violent to protect me, such as beat up Dumitriu in the middle of the street, the way he did once when a shady man was stalking me in Bucharest when I was fourteen.
Sometimes at night, in the menacing silence of the street, I hear footsteps very close behind me. I think I see shadows going around the corners of buildings. But since the night when the man pinned me against a wall and shouted at me, I glide through my life as if nothing can touch me.
One afternoon as I am walking home from my classes, a day in early March when gypsy women are selling the first timid sprigs of violets and hyacinths, when I’ve switched my ugly Bulgarian boots for my one pair of slightly less ugly Hungarian loafers, I see Anca Serban. I see her meet with Mihnea, my father’s psychiatrist friend, in front of the ruins of the building where they used to sell cream puffs, which collapsed during the earthquake of 1977. There is now scaffolding all around it for the reconstruction, and the pavement is always more crowded in front of it because it is narrower and filled with construction workers. It is probably why they are meeting there, to be less conspicuous. And who in God’s creation is this phantom woman who haunts my existence and who now is suddenly in Bucharest, giving a square package in brown paper to Mihnea, who works in the hospital where the secret police throw all those who are suspect for “political crimes”, to rot in madness and in straitjackets, numb and tranquillized?
I try to make myself unnoticed on the pavement across the street by turning towards the flower seller in the corner and buying a bouquet of hyacinths. I am watching Mihnea get the package and talk for a few short minutes with the woman who had attacked me in the night. Mihnea looks like a spectre, has bulging pale eyes, and is thin like he has been on a hunger strike. I buy the flowers, I smell them, and their spring fragrance penetrates my exhausted body as a gust lifts the pleats of my skirt.
I smile at the woman and thank her for the flowers as I place the money directly in her cold, wet palm. I run home knowing that not even there can I feel safe and unwatched. If my father is still involved in illegal activities and with his group of dissenting friends, then my life is seriously in danger. If Mihai has the slightest connection with the secret police, then my father’s life and my own life are even more in danger. This maths is very simple and I totally get it. My life is in danger one way or another, for things I’ve done or haven’t done. I never wanted my life to be in danger in this confusing, maddening way. Wasn’t it better with the bombs during the war and the famine? You just fought for survival. You survived the bomb or not. You floated on flooding rivers, scraped for a root in the g
round to not starve, lived, or died, all clean and harsh.
I wish I could say that my grandparents and great-aunts who survived every possible human and natural catastrophe had it worse. I wish I could feel lucky to live in peace and have bread and potatoes and soy coffee to eat and drink every day. I wish I could say it’s great I can buy hyacinths in the street on my way home from classes. But I find myself envying them. I think of my maternal grandparents in the sepia photograph taken before they went to a ball, a wartime grand ball, my grandmother Vera in a black shiny dress, a string of pearls around her statuesque neck, and a flower in her hair, and my grandfather Victor dashing, a flower in his buttonhole, ready to dance, hoping that after the war there will be peace and things will get better.
In the month of April, bursting with the yellows of forsythia bushes and the pale pinks of chestnut blooms, Rodica Ursu, the daughter of a friend of my father, gets run over by a car that didn’t stop at the stoplight. My father says she was working both sides. She had been careless.
I don’t understand any of this any more. Pick one side or another, but why live two secret lives? What’s the point, really? I feel sorry for the girl, for her crushed body and her devastated parents. Maybe this is what Mihai is doing as well, having two secret lives. Is it what he meant when he had said there were things he had to do? And his letters have been colder than usual, just brief reports of his new job at the big tractor factory in Braşov and a few brief lines about him missing me and waiting for the summer vacation. He doesn’t even say he is waiting for me, but for the vacation.
I’m terrified now. I walk close to the building walls and take long detours to avoid crossing the street. I take buses and move away from anyone who gets too close or who jostles and pushes their elbows in my side trying to move past me in the crowded bus. Once in a while on a bus, I find solace in watching some poor woman nursing a round baby with lips like coral, sucking at a perfectly round breast.
One evening, with smells of spring flowers and trees in bloom rushing through the open windows in our Bucharest apartment, the three of us sit talking about my leaving the country. My father is more explicit and more adamant about it than the other time he mentioned leaving.
“You see what happened to poor Rodica. Anything can happen, no matter where you stand,” my father says. My mother nods. They are whispering and looking over their shoulders into the fragrant night.
“Plus, you have no future here, Mona. Things will only get worse,” my father says.
I know this is the decision that will jerk everything off its hinges, the decision that, once taken, will change everything in more dramatic ways than anything else that my family has ever gone through. More than the wars, than Stalin, than Ceauşescu.
I know that hundreds, thousands, have already done it. I know that every day someone crosses the border and runs for her life. Every hour of every day, someone makes a plan. Many succeed. Trains, ships, airplanes, all hold some desperate Romanian trying to get to the other side, risking everything and rushing into that overpowering wave of total erasure, towards some freer shore. I know it, and I don’t care because this is not how I thought my life was going to turn out when I was writing my composition about why I love my country. I thought things were going to get better when I met a mysterious mountain man and discovered the love to end all loves in the fragrant depths of the Carpathians, on carpets of wild berries and magical snows.
I can’t stand how things have turned out. Now there’s no other way. Life has become a constant race. I’m running from shadows and jumping at every whisper, every footstep. I want to crash through it all and shoot all the secret police and then, finally, shoot the tyrant who invented such a network of fear. I want to shoot everyone who’s crushing everything beautiful and fine out of existence. I want to walk towards them slowly, wearing a purple silk dress that clings to my body and a pair of dark sunglasses, and I want to shoot them right in the centre of their dark hearts. Then, puff – a big coloured explosion will wipe out everything, and a new life will start.
My parents and I hold hands and wait in silence for a few minutes. We listen to the noises of the street. We let the seconds go. Maybe an angel has passed us in this moment of silence. Maybe an invisible presence, a messenger from our ancestors, is fluttering around the room, gently laying a blanket of golden light over our souls.
My father breaks the silence. We start making plans for my escape. I’ll be leaving on the train to Trieste soon, very soon. This summer.
One Last Time, Our Rock
IT WASN’T REALLY the train to Trieste. We just called it that, because it went to the last little Romanian town at the border with Yugoslavia called Jimbolia, from which you could get to Trieste – if you took the train to Belgrade and convinced the Serbian authorities you needed to get to Trieste because you would be killed if you were sent back to Romania. They would keep you in custody for a few days, and then they would let you go on, if you were lucky. You would be on your own, taking another train if you could smuggle out enough money to bribe the conductor and then bribe the police to let you into Italy. That’s what some people did. Or that’s what we heard that some people did, from their relatives or friends or someone who knew someone.
Some swam across the Danube into Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, Romania’s more moderate Communist neighbours. Others swam the Black Sea to Turkish waters. Others crawled under barbed wire across the Yugoslavian border at night, if they could bribe the border guards to look the other way. Or they just risked it and tried to trick the border guards, waiting for them to turn and crawling between two rounds. The border guards were known for their ruthlessness; they shot and killed whatever moved. Still, some people crawled out successfully.
The Trieste route was my plan. I was going to try to get to Belgrade posing as a tourist. This wouldn’t be conspicuous; many Romanians went to Belgrade on tourist visas, since it was easier to travel to other Communist countries. Romanians were so desperate to get out, to see anything beyond their border, that they took one-day trips to Bulgaria or one-week trips to Russia, just to be able to say, Russians are much worse off than we are. You can find tights without a problem, and lots of amber necklaces. But people there are practically starving. If you couldn’t go to Paris or to Rome, you might as well go to Belgrade.
One of my father’s former students was married to a Yugoslav woman called Biljana who always wore dark red lipstick and silk pants. She crossed the border to visit her husband once a month while he worked towards his comparative literature degree at the University of Bucharest.
My mother informs me that she had already tried to contact Nora, her friend who had escaped to America long ago and whose picture, smiling in an orange tree, is still standing on our mahogany desk. But Nora is nowhere to be found; she hasn’t answered any of my mother’s letters; she probably moved somewhere else, to Canada or Australia. Or maybe my mother’s letters have just been censored and kept at the border; it’s what happens all the time. So Biljana is my only ticket to freedom, it seems.
She was going to wait for me in the little Romanian town at the border, and then we would both get on the train to Belgrade. And then . . . from there on, it all seemed blurry: somehow we would just talk the Serbian authorities into letting me across the border, and then somehow I would miraculously get across another border to the West and settle somehow in Italy.
There were also those cases where the Yugoslav authorities would simply turn you over to the Romanian authorities, who would probably send you to prison. So the presence of the Serbian woman made the plan more credible to the Romanian and Serbian authorities: I would just be visiting Belgrade and staying with Biljana.
“That’s all, that’s all you have to tell them when they ask for your papers,” says my mother, trying to hide her anxiety and anguish at the thought of possibly never seeing me again.
I spend most of this last summer in the Carpathians. My passport hasn’t arrived, and August is here already. There’s a good ch
ance it will never come, and part of me doesn’t want it to come. I am in Mihai’s arms, on a bed of leaves he has made for me in the shade of dark fir trees, and he is feeding me wild blueberries and telling me the names of wildflowers. What more could I ask from life? But I do want more, and the other part of me waits in agony for that passport. I could be run over in the street, or Mihai could turn out to be on the other side of the political spectrum. He is more stern than usual this summer and often distracted. Once when I say, “Fuck Ceauşescu, I hope he dies a painful death,” just to see how he reacts, he looks straight at me and surprises me by saying, “I agree, he is a fucking idiot.” Something in his tone sounds strange and phony. It’s what the Securitate would often do, I think, go along with a joke or a curse, or a criticism of the president and the Party that someone has uttered, just to try to get more from them, to push them and see how deep their antigovernment attitudes go.
I feel now even more suspicious than when Mihai was protecting the name of the president from my curses. I have a sense of imminent danger. I have to get out of here, I tell myself as I watch Mihai tune the strings of his old guitar in his room. I must get out of here, the sooner the better. Then he plays an old tune for me, and I am not so sure any more.
My heart still bleeds every time he looks into my eyes with his old adoring expression. It doesn’t matter any more whether he likes our illiterate criminal of a president or despises him. Every second is taking us closer to that last second when I will hold and kiss him and look at him for the last time. One evening when I hear the train to Trieste whistle as it leaves the station near my aunt’s house, I break into sobs. He holds me, as if I were ill or dying.
The very last day in August, when I’m packing for the trip back to the capital, my mother calls to tell me she got the red shoes. That’s our code, to let me know my passport has arrived. I feel frozen, as if I’d been put in a refrigerator and turned to ice. I have to get back the next day. I cannot tell Mihai the reason that I am leaving Braşov two weeks earlier than usual. My parents made me promise that I would not say a word to anyone. “But really, not a soul,” my father said, and I knew he meant not even to Mihai.
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