Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  We walk hand in hand. The moon is full and the queen of the night is spreading its reckless fragrance throughout the neighbourhood. Then I thaw again, and waves of heat take over my body, and sorrow comes over me in floods, in flames, in earthquakes, in every possible form and element. I shake the way I saw the epileptic woman who lived downstairs from us when I was little shake and writhe on the floor. No human force could calm her once the seizures took her, until she fell into a deep sleep that lasted for days. I feel myself shake like that inside, and Mihai watches as I crouch down in the middle of the sidewalk and hold myself. He just stands there waiting, lighting another cigarette. I love the way he lights his cigarette, hurriedly, his hand cupping the flame, and then drags furiously two or three times in a row. How I will miss every one of these little gestures of his that I know by heart.

  In the middle of my own personal cataclysm I feel something like a fine, shiny string of reason and strength. It’s silky and smooth and strong, and I hold on to it and manage to calm myself.

  I tell him I have to leave earlier than we planned, because the Ministry of Education wants us to do the potato and onion practice before we start the academic year, and we have to do it in Bucharest, in the city where our university is. I am supposed to start my second year at the University of Bucharest. We have to sort out the good potatoes from the bad, the big onions from the small. It’s part of our civic education. We sing Beatles songs and tell obscene jokes while we sort the potatoes and onions. We sometimes speak in French or in English so the comrade who supervises us cannot understand. We comment in English on the stupidity and the ugliness and the small brain size of the comrade walking up and down the onion and potato aisles. Once my friend Ioana said, “It’s too bad the government doesn’t train these people in a foreign language or two,” after which we all laughed hysterically. Sometimes we have potato fights, and then we get written up in the special notebook of the comrade for delinquent potato-sorting behaviour. Sometimes he also writes us up for speaking in a foreign language. I stand in front of Mihai and tell him I have to get back earlier than planned, to do the potato sorting. I tell myself I am not really lying because if I were to start my regular year at the university, I would actually have to do just that. This is our night, our last night.

  I tell him, “Let’s go to our rock now. Please? Let’s see our rock in the moonlight.”

  He’s not surprised, almost as if he expected this. “But you’re not dressed for it,” he says.

  “Since when did that stop us?” I laugh.

  “I’ll carry you if I have to,” he says.

  Just like the first time, I think.

  We take the last bus to the end of the line below the mountain where the forest starts. We climb in the dark. His hand is firm and strong and doesn’t let go.

  Our rock is glistening, majestic in the moonlight. I recognize it, though everything else is different from the afternoon when we first kissed above the clouds. I shiver a little as he gently places my back against the white stone, he takes off his jacket and wraps it around me, then holds and kisses me under the moon above the city with the Black Church. He carries me to the little cave under the rock where we make love in slow motion, undulating like in a dream, in the resin-scented night air broken by owl calls and the yelps of foxes. My body is growing into a big, plump queen of the night flower, pulsating in the wild night of the Carpathians, where I have learned to love, where I will always want to return, for which I will always yearn.

  The next morning I go one last time to his house to say goodbye. Mihai isn’t home. I go behind the building, where I can see into his room through the window. I take a cement block lying next to the building and climb on it to see over the windowsill. His bed is made. His room looks suspiciously tidy, as if he had gone on a trip. His check knee breeches and his hiking boots that were always lying in the corner are nowhere to be seen. I gently push the window and discover it’s unlatched. I push it open all the way. I pull myself over the edge of the window and climb into his room, as I had during our first summer. I look for his trousers and boots everywhere, in his closet and under the bed, but cannot find them. Under the bed I find an old slip that I had lost long ago. It’s a red slip with lace that Mihai had given me for Christmas the year of our big New Year’s Eve party. It’s the only gift he has ever given me, other than flowers or pine cones or fruit from the forest. Our smells, our presence, echoes of our moans of love, seem to hover in the air.

  I sit on the bed and look around the room where I have spent hundreds of hours of delight and torment. The room where we had built our own universe. I have a queasy feeling like a big hole in my stomach. The thought of never seeing Mihai again is unbearable, and it translates into a splitting ache through my stomach, my groin, and my diaphragm.

  I don’t understand why he’s not here. He had told me to stop by in the morning before leaving for Bucharest, to say goodbye. But I feel something happened and he won’t be back for a while. I have to catch my train to Bucharest in an hour. Then, if things go according to plan, I am supposed to board the train to Trieste in a few days and start my journey.

  I could sit here and wait to find out what has happened to Mihai. I could miss this train and all the other trains and forget about escaping the country. How can I leave without saying goodbye to Mihai, without seeing him one last time? I will tell him everything about my plan to escape. He will reveal all his secrets to me: why there are people following me everywhere, why Anca warned me he was secret police, why he himself sometimes acts so weird, as if he were hiding things from me . . . I will ask him for the truth, and this time he will have to tell me the whole truth. I am clutching the red slip in my hand. I remember how I tried it on as soon as he gave it to me, so he could take it off immediately.

  I put the red slip on the bed. I spread it out very carefully and stare at it as if it were my body lying on the bed. I climb back out of the room, leaving the windows open. The room needs to breathe.

  I board the train and watch the dark forests roll past. This is my last train ride towards Bucharest; the next train will take me away from it, for ever. The train to Trieste that doesn’t really go to Trieste.

  On the train, I write Mihai a letter, my parting letter. I want him to know all that he has meant to me, and all that he will always mean to me. I remind him of our secret paths through the mountains and of the nest he once made for me in the shade of an old oak tree at the edge of the tiniest path covered with berries and mountain flowers. I tell him I will always remember his low raspy voice in my ear, his dark hair in disarray. I tell him how I had loved and desired him with an impossible love like a hungry she-wolf, like a peasant woman lying on the earth, on the hard earth covered with berries and wildflowers. I write to him that we could just as well have been somewhere at the end of the earth, in Patagonia or Valparaíso, does he remember how he used to joke that one day we’d go to Patagonia and to Valparaíso to see the jaguars, does he? I sign with my full redundant name, Mona Maria.

  As soon as I get off the train in Bucharest, I rush to the first postbox in the station to drop off the letter. I stand for a few seconds in front of the box, staring at people parting and reuniting on the many platforms. At the last second I change my mind and don’t drop it in the box. Nobody should know of my leaving. Not even Mihai, or especially not Mihai. I tear the letter into many little pieces that fall on to the station floor, and I run out into the street.

  The Train to Trieste

  THE FINAL TWO days, I move into a state of unreality. I am trying both to tear myself from everything and to absorb everything. My mother and I pack my suitcase at night in the dark, with the curtains tightly pulled, so Dumitriu the secret-police officer from across the street cannot see what we are doing and what we are putting in that suitcase. We speak in whispers in case we are being bugged. Packing my suitcase makes me sick with sadness.

  I want everything to be imprinted for ever in my blood, on my retina, in my flesh.

&nbs
p; When I board the train to Trieste from Bucharest one afternoon in September – my last train, my last passage through the Carpathians – the only memory I can conjure of Mihai is of his unshaven, morose face at the station before I would return to Bucharest at the end of vacation.

  I watch the mountains, and memories rush at me in disconnected bursts: the Carpathians, with their steep valleys and peaks, their plateaux covered with velvety green pastures where sheep graze, where waterfalls and rivers rustle and rush wildly through forests of pines, oaks and beeches, producing haunting echoes. We are adolescents. We play with echoes on every one of our hiking trips. Miruna, runa, na, aaa . . . Cristina, tina, ina, aaa . . . Radu, adu, du, uuu . . . Mihai, hai, ai, ai, iii . . . Mona ona, ona aaaa . . .! Our names shoot out into the wide valleys and come back to us multiplied into many clear sounds, round and distinct like the drops of water from the foaming waterfalls. We throw echoes at one another, and the sounds of our names entangle and chase one another.

  Sometimes the echoes get stuck in a valley and ramble and bounce on their own until dawn. That’s what the old women in black head scarves tell us. They tell us we mustn’t leave the mountain until all the echoes have come to rest, otherwise they get stuck and haunt the valley. Babies will cry at night and lovers are cursed, they tell us as they sit knitting on their front porches. The echoes of our names embrace one another breathlessly above the grazing sheep and rocky slopes. Mona, ona, onaaa . . . Mihai, ihai, ha, ina, ai, a, mi, mo, ha, na, aaa . . .

  I find myself alone on this train crossing the mountains toward distant borders and into the world. The echoes of a crying baby on a train ride in the night. The mother is sleeping. Her head is bouncing in the red scarf wrapped around it. When the baby doesn’t suckle, she cries, and the mother wakes up, giving her the nipple again. The cries of the baby are soothing. I absorb them through every pore.

  I would have liked to be with a baby of my own on this train ride, fruit of my first love. I am greedy, wishing the crying baby were mine, in the train smelling of sweat and garlic and weariness, with heads leaning against the fogged-up windows. But It wasn’t meant to be, the old women knitting endlessly on their porches in the mountain villages of Romania would say. Or who knows, I think suddenly, maybe on our last night I was careless, maybe I am carrying Mihai’s child right now on this ride, and I will take it with me into the wide world. I will have part of Mihai with me always. But in the same instant I become terrified of the possibility. How would I be able to do anything wherever I may find myself, among strangers, pregnant, and then with a newborn baby. The crying of the baby on the train loses its charm and becomes annoying. I count the days to my next cycle in my mind: only five days away, I shouldn’t get pregnant. I don’t want to have a baby, not now, maybe sometime in the future. The thought of a baby in the future makes me even more nervous, because I start thinking about whom will I ever have a baby with, since Mihai is now for ever out of my life. For ever out of my life, the thought persists, and I pick up my luggage and move to the next compartment, where there is no baby crying.

  I never got to say goodbye and see his face one last time. I also have the memory of great confusion, as if my head had been screwed on wrong, as if my head were a Dalí painting: disorderly limbs, earth and sky squished together, and a red ant climbing a huge clock. Everything in the wrong order, everything in a yellow haze. You want to scream and you can’t. The person chasing you is getting closer and closer, and you open your mouth as wide as you can, but nothing comes out, and you disappear in the blackness of fear into your own nightmare. And before you know it, you’re queuing on a street corner, hoping there will still be one more box of menstrual cotton left for you.

  I am wearing a pink-and-white-striped dress and I’m sitting by the window, absorbing every bit of landscape that rushes past me. I am listening to people’s conversations, paying attention to the sound of their words, the round vowels and the sweet or harsh consonants. My language, my first words, bouncy, playful, angry – not for much longer. Soon I will hear foreign languages, and I will look at foreign places and foreign faces. They say of all refugees, Romanians pine the most for their native land and their native language. That’s what people who have talked to people who have visited people who have left the country say. They say that when a Romanian abroad meets another Romanian by accident and they hear the sound of their native language, they break down and cry right there in public, in a square in Paris or Rome.

  Some people are eating bread and sausages. They talk about how they were able to find cheese and butter and tights in the capital. They bring all that back to their little towns like trophies. I see there are still six hours of travel through the night until I get to the border town where I am supposed to meet Biljana, who will take me to Belgrade and then help me get to Trieste. I have butter and cucumber sandwiches that my mother made for me, holding back her tears, thinking that by the time I eat these sandwiches I’ll be far away, and who knows when we will see each other again, if ever.

  I also have a little envelope of photographs in my bag, which I hold in my lap for the entire train ride. I have the book of grades from my university so I can transfer my credits and finish my studies wherever I end up. I have a little wood and silver icon of the Virgin Mary that my father gave me the evening before my departure. It had belonged to his father, and it always brought him luck, he said, as he passed his fingers through his white hair, just above the scar he still has from the last time he was interrogated by the secret police. I don’t like the Virgin Mary, although I carry her name. She is so impossibly pure. I hold the little wooden icon nevertheless. I stick my hand inside my bag and touch it and then pass my fingers through the photographs and take a peek at them.

  I try not to think of Mihai. I think of everything ugly and painful so that my being among people eating garlic sausages and talking about queues for chicken gizzards, on this train rushing towards the Yugoslavian border, will make some sense.

  The train stops at a rural station. I see the moon above the Carpathians, and I smell the evening air. The mountain air, thick with the smell of pine resin, cools my face. I can’t think of anything ugly any more. The entire inventory of ugly things – the food queues, the dingy buildings, the posters of the Father of the Nation, the dead people beneath rubble or run over by cars on the pavement – is still not enough to make leaving less painful. I am leaving behind everything except . . . myself. I remember the book from the American library, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I think of how Stephen wants to leave everything so he can write in freedom, so he can find himself. To calm my thoughts, to make the chaos in my head go away, I pretend I’m Stephen Dedalus fleeing his country.

  In a few minutes the train will arrive at its final destination. There is a commotion of luggage collection and conductors giving orders. A few more minutes, and the train slows down. I take down my suitcase with the clothes my mother has packed for me in the dark, clothes for cold weather, for hot weather, and for in-between weather. I clutch my bag tight. My heart is beating faster. I feel the mountain air coming through the window and touch my own face as if wanting to make sure that all this is real, that I am real.

  I get off the train and look for Biljana. It’s past midnight and I find myself in Jimbolia, the border city with Yugoslavia. I’ve never been to this part of the country. People waiting on the platform have a different accent; their words sound more elastic and round. There are peasants and gypsies in colourful long skirts. I don’t see Biljana, and a rush of fear crosses my heart. My whole adventure is over, I tell myself. I’ll just have to turn back.

  I realize then that I don’t want to turn back. I want to keep going and going. I want to ride on the crest of this storm all night and wake up tomorrow on the sand, like a Shakespearean character, rising from a slumber to find myself on a glowing, completely unknown shore, just when the dawn starts sparkling on the sea that has sucked the past back into its roaring, green belly. Forget the calm and clarity, for
get Stephen Dedalus and his bird woman. I want my big adventure.

  The fragrance of French perfume envelops me, and she touches me gently on the shoulder. Her lipstick is so red it almost glows in the dark. Biljana is wearing silk trousers as usual and a red silk blouse with tiny white dots, which flows elegantly over her small breasts and thin waist. I feel a rush of gratitude and joy at the sight of her. She looks like a fairy godmother. I embrace her and wait for her to tell me what I have to do. I’m ready to follow her every step. I am thinking of nothing but crossing the border, getting to the other side.

  She hands me my ticket to Belgrade.

  “Do you have your passport?” she asks.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” I whisper breathlessly, eagerly.

  We whisper on the train platform. She takes my hand in hers as if I were a little girl and leads me through the crowd of travellers and the families meeting them, towards another platform, for the train to Belgrade. We board the train half an hour later, and I start hearing another language: a Slavic language with so many consonants that I don’t know how these people can fit them all inside their mouths. I keep close to Biljana as we walk the corridor to our compartment. The clusters of foreign consonants make me feel lonely and cold. My language is full of long, curved, melodious vowels, diphthongs and even triphthongs. We even have one word that has no consonants, just a cluster of four vowels, that means sheep, oaie. I repeat the word oaie in my head to protect myself from the avalanche of hard consonants around me.

  The compartments in the Yugoslav train are more elegant than those in the Romanian train. We sit down by the window, facing each other, and Biljana tells me not to worry, that everything will come out all right. I feel breathless, as I did the time I rode the roller coaster in the amusement park by the Black Sea and a big rush of fear and pleasure stormed through my insides.