Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  Soon I hear the Romanian customs police start their search. I have a US one-hundred-dollar bill that my father was able to buy for me from one of his Senegalese students at the Ploieşti Institute. My mother has sewn it inside the jacket I am wearing over the pink-and-white-striped dress. Romanians are not allowed to carry foreign money across the border. If the authorities find it, I will be put in prison. If I come out of prison alive, I will never be able to leave the country again, not even to Belgrade or Bulgaria, not even to the Soviet Union to exchange a kilo of horse salami for ten pairs of tights.

  They come into the compartment. Two Romanian customs officers and the Serbian conductor are checking tickets and passports. I note with surprise that the Romanian customs officers speak Serbian and the Serbian conductor speaks Romanian. The hard, unintelligible words of the Slavic language mixed with my own language make me feel lonely and worried again. The Romanian customs officers ask us to take down our suitcases and open them. Everyone in the compartment takes down suitcases, a confusion of luggage and packages. Biljana carries only a shoulder bag she has placed next to her on the seat. It is a large, elegant brown leather bag, and I am wondering what Biljana is carrying in it as I try to distract myself from the worries about my own luggage. I bring down my suitcase from the rack, and I feel sweat streaming down my neck.

  One of the Romanian customs officers tells me to hand him my coat and my bag. My father had told me to put everything in my bag. They search the least in the most obvious places, he said. But it seems to me now this was a mistake. When they find my university transcripts, my family pictures, and my little wooden Virgin Mary icon, they’ll certainly know I’m not planning to return. They’ll take me off the train, and it will be all over.

  I place the suitcase on the seat but hesitate handing them my jacket and my bag. Maybe they will forget about the jacket by looking at the suitcase first. I have to think which one to hand to them first: my coat, which contains the hundred-dollar bill I’ll need for bribes, or my bag with my photos, my grade book, and the icon. As one of them starts probing through my suitcase, his blunt fingers going through the things my mother had packed so carefully, my underwear and clothes, the other one asks again for the coat and the bag. I give him the bag but keep the coat in my hands, not withholding it, but not quite offering it to him.

  He opens my bag and starts rummaging through it. He takes out the envelope with the photographs. The grade book is just next to it, but he doesn’t seem to notice it. He focuses on the photographs, opens the envelope, and shuffles through them. He stops at one, looking puzzled. Mihai and me in Bucharest, near the train station, a black-and-white picture on a rainy November day. It’s our Just Escaped from Refugee Camp picture. Mihai with his Russian hat, me in my large brimmed hat, both of us angry and morose in the November rain. The customs man holds it out and laughs. He shows it to his fellow customs worker. They both laugh.

  “Your sweetheart, ha?” he asks, and they both laugh.

  “Yes, sort of, my . . . my friend . . .” I stutter, blushing.

  He hands me my bag. I experience a moment of relief.

  But no, now he turns serious and holds out his hand for my coat. He snaps his fingers. I hold it out as if I’d forgotten it was in my hands.

  He passes it to the other Romanian officer and shifts his attention to someone else’s luggage. This one is younger looking with a thin face and long nose. He runs his hand along the coat, squeezing it here and there. He is touching it just where my mother had sewn in the hundred-dollar bill. He is feeling it, and he asks his colleague for his pocketknife. I see myself in a cold basement, in a prison for political detainees and traitors of the country. A blackness sets inside my head, and I can’t see very well around me. I hear hard sounds spoken in a language I don’t understand, they seem to be hitting me in the head like hard pebbles, hard consonants that make no sense. Even the sounds of Romanian in the mouth of this customs worker sound like an unknown language full of clusters of mean consonants. I repeat oaie in my head, the word that’s all vowels like a clear mountain stream.

  He doesn’t find his knife with which to rip open the inside of my coat; the customs worker is irritated, and the departure whistle has just sounded. The other one is holding and feeling my coat. He looks at me straight in the eyes and asks:

  “What’s in here, what have you got in here?”

  He looks as if he’s ready to tear it open with his hands. No words come out of my mouth. Nothing comes out. And suddenly, there it is, my bit of luck: the scream, the sharp, piercing scream. It’s not mine, though it feels as if it were mine. A woman’s scream crosses the train and the platform, enters through the open windows, and goes back out like a flash. Another Serbian conductor comes in and says something to the two customs workers, and just as they are about to rush out of the compartment, Biljana asks the Yugoslav conductor something in Serbian. In her mouth, rolling off her shiny red lips, even those hard clusters of consonants sound melodious. I’m exasperated that she has to get the men’s attention and keep them there any longer. The man answers something back in a hurry and they all go away, dropping my coat on the bench next to me.

  The train leaves slowly. I wish it would take off like a flash, like the blood-curdling scream crossing the night. The scream that saves my life! Like a miracle, almost unreal. I can’t resist my own curiosity, so I stand up and pull down the window. I see a woman in a light-coloured summer dress running across the tracks. Then another train flashes by, and when it’s gone, so is the woman in the summery dress. The night is silent and moonless. I have an acute feeling that the woman crossing the tracks was the one who has just screamed; the scream was intentional, it was meant for me. I have an even stranger feeling that I know that woman, something in her figure and in the way she has run across the tracks, with large quick steps. But I can’t be sure of anything any longer. Only this train I am riding in the night is real. I and my heartbeat are real.

  As the train speeds up, large tears are falling down my face in unstoppable rivers. They don’t stop for hours. I think of the composition about why I love my country that I wrote when I was ten years old; in order to write it I imagined so hard how it would be to lose my country and my mother, both at the same time, that it felt like I had lost them. That’s how I was able to write the composition that won me the first prize in a national competition: I got myself into a state where I felt the bleeding, the burning, cut right through the middle of my heart, the pain of losing both your mother and your country all in one second.

  Now on this train taking me away from everything familiar, it feels just like it felt when I imagined it then. Only it’s worse because it happens in the sound of someone else’s scream, in the night, on the train to Trieste that doesn’t even really go to Trieste, and I have no words for it inside me.

  Belgrade

  BELGRADE SEEMS LIKE an ugly city, with its factories and grey buildings resembling the Socialist constructions at the faraway margins of Bucharest. I think of the beautiful parts of Bucharest, the “Little Paris of the Balkans”, with its large boulevards and parks, with its rows of chestnuts and linden trees on the wide avenues. And although I often had been weary of my native town because I yearned to be with Mihai in the Carpathians, now, as I cross Belgrade in the taxi next to the woman who is helping me escape it for ever, I realize that Bucharest is a magnificent city. In a flash, I even remember the woman selling chrysanthemums and roses at the corner of my street the afternoon I left for the railway station. I remember her radiant face, her sparkling brown eyes looking straight into mine.

  I’m exhausted. My pink-and-white cotton dress stinks of perspiration. It seems I’ve been on trains for days and days. My body is shaky with weariness. I imagine going to Biljana’s house and sleeping, and then when I wake up I’ll find myself back in my own bed in our Bucharest apartment. I’ll hear the sound of my mother’s typing on the forbidden typewriter, typing her poems about swans and snows and death that flutter like rose pe
tals and birds’ wings. And when I wake up, I’ll find in my hand a stick of Biljana’s lipstick. I will think it has all been a dream, but how do I have the lipstick in my hand? Then my father will come in and tell me about the article he’s working on, about the use of relative pronouns in the poetry of the great Romanian Romantic poet Eminescu, and he will tell me that even the secret police were just a bad dream, that there are no secret organizations meeting in attics and basements, they’re all just bad dreams.

  He will stroke my head like he always does when he is proud of me. There will be red carnations everywhere in our apartment, with no hidden microphones, and we will look at them and laugh, remembering how foolish we were to have torn those poor flowers apart petal by petal. It’s not that bad, things are not that bad, after all. We will laugh and laugh, and a ray of light will come in through the gauzy curtain and catch little specks of dust in the air.

  I wake up, realizing I’ve fallen asleep in the taxi, in front of a creamy white building with pots of red flowers on the windowsills in an elegant residential area of Belgrade. I see my face in the rear-view mirror as I step out of the taxi. I look like a fish; my eyes are swollen, my lips are swollen, everything about me is swollen, but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to look the way I did yesterday. I will never look the same. I climb the marble staircase of Biljana’s apartment building wearing my new face. I might as well look like a fish.

  That night in Biljana’s apartment, I pass in and out of sleep. There is a large party of people in my bedroom, talking politics and laughing. Some are even sitting on my bed. They are saying Ceauşescu will fall; his days are numbered. I can’t move, I can’t talk, and they all act as if I’m not there in the room, lying in bed with a big round fish face. Then all the people talking and laughing turn into jelly, and the room becomes watery. But before they disappear, they all stare at me and laugh and tell me, You didn’t have to leave, you know. If only you had been more patient!

  Then I see Mihai. He is holding me and whispering in my ear. He gently tucks my hair behind my ear and kisses it. He tells me he will always love me, always. Even when my hair is grey and I turn into an old woman, he will still love me. Suddenly he looks scared and tells me he has to go. Before he runs away, he asks me to meet him at our place, in an hour. But I can’t remember where our place is. I run in the streets for hours. I know I will never see him, but I keep running through the streets, and then it seems to me I see him at a street corner. He turns the corner. I run after him, but the street disappears. I get sucked into a vortex of black. I must have screamed, because Biljana is sitting at the edge of my bed trying to make me drink cold water.

  The realization of what I have done and of what I am about to do hits me with the light of dawn. So far, I’m still on a tourist trip to Belgrade. I could still just visit Belgrade, stay with Biljana until my visa expires, and go back. Nothing is irreversible. But it is. I know there is no going back. Today we have to go to the Serbian authorities, Biljana tells me. She has connections. We’ll have to bargain with them to give me a visa to Italy, and then we must buy the ticket. She hands me a pair of scissors and tells me to cut the money out of the coat, for the authorities for the visa. It sounds so simple. I almost wish it were more complicated, so I will have a more dramatic story to boast of.

  We go to a building with many offices that looks like the police building in Bucharest where I went to apply for my tourist visa. Biljana asks to speak with Mr Marish, and we are asked to wait in the waiting room. After more than half an hour, a man looking like a movie actor with silver hair at his temples, bony features, and piercing blue eyes strides over to us and gives Biljana a kiss on both cheeks. She talks with him in Serbian for a long time. Sometimes their voices get very low. As I watch them, I have the distinct feeling they are not talking about me and my visa to Italy, but about something much more personal. I think of my father’s student who is married to Biljana and feel sorry for him. He thinks he will move to Belgrade in a couple of years to live happily ever after with Biljana. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just a marriage of convenience between Biljana and my father’s student, so he can get out of Romania. The secretary in the office has slowed down her typing, trying to catch what they are saying. Then suddenly I hear Biljana pronounce my name. It’s so strange to hear my name, my full name, including the middle name, Maria, being spoken in a police office in Belgrade. The two names together, Mona Maria, seem like a joke. I laugh when I hear my own name. Biljana’s handsome friend signals to me to follow him. Biljana comes along.

  Marish speaks English beautifully, with a British accent. He asks me if I like Belgrade, and I say, Yes, very much. There’s a scrawny little man in the room who smells like garlic and doesn’t seem to speak English. He looks stern and angry. Biljana makes a sign to me to give the man the envelope with the one-hundred-dollar bill. He slips it into the inner pocket of his coat without a word.

  The three of them speak Serbian for what seems like a very long time. I keep waiting to be asked something, for someone to address me in some way, but they just keep talking in Serbian, and then they laugh. The scrawny man takes a seal out of his pocket and motions to Marish to ask me for my passport. He stamps my passport in several places and hands it back to me.

  Marish kisses Biljana on the cheek again as we leave. Outside, Biljana holds me and tells me I am fine, now, as far as the Serbian authorities are concerned. I have my exit visa from Yugoslavia, allowing me to cross the border to Italy.

  But I still don’t understand how I get into Italy – don’t I need an Italian visa? I picture the border as a crack in the earth, like the cracks in the street after the earthquake. My brain feels like there are hundreds of threads tangled up inside it. Whatever happened to my search for clarity? I try to hang on to one simple thought at a time. I can leave Yugoslavia; I can leave this city and never have to return.

  As we walk, I ask Biljana if we’re going next to the Italian embassy.

  “With a Romanian passport?” She laughs. “No. There’s no use. The Italians will take one look and know what you’re up to. They don’t want any more immigrants in their country. Everyone’s sick of immigrants.

  “It’s different once you get there,” she says. “Once you find a way to get into Italy, then they help you. What are they going to do, send you back to the Communists in chains? They have no choice but to give you asylum; they are a democratic country, after all.”

  We go back in a taxi to Biljana’s. Belgrade looks more beautiful this morning than when I first came. The Danube is shining in the morning sun, and the grand Gothic cathedrals and medieval buildings are reflected in it. There is an air of prosperity on the streets, which is new to me: foreign cars, elegant women. Some of the boulevards remind me of Bucharest, but the buildings are creamier, the streets less dusty, and there are flowerpots on most of the windowsills. When we pass the busy port, I realize with a start that I’m looking at the same Danube that flows into Romania and ends in the pelican- and cormorant-filled delta at the Black Sea. I’m tempted to beg Biljana to let me stay one more day with her, just to see more of the city, to look at the Danube, to walk free in the streets.

  But as soon as we find ourselves in her apartment, she tells me to get ready, that there’s a train to Trieste that same night. “I am ready,” I say. We still have to buy my ticket for the train to Trieste. For the real train to Trieste.

  “But I have no visa,” I say stubbornly, glaring at Biljana. “What do I do when they ask for my papers?”

  She laughs. “How do you think all the others do it?”

  “I don’t know. How?”

  She sighs, exasperated. “They get on the train and wait. When they get to Trieste, when the Italian customs come to check the passports, they catch them in the corridor, ask them to let them in without a visa, say that they’re trying to escape. Or they don’t say anything, and they just wait and hope the customs workers are busy and don’t check every last paper. I know lots of people who escap
ed this way.”

  I feel too tired and afraid to beg customs workers to let me in without a visa. What if I can’t convince them? What if they send me rolling right back to Belgrade on the same train, and then back to Romania, flanked by police?

  “There are two passport checkpoints, one on the Yugoslav side for the exit, the other for entering Italy. You’re already through the first. Maybe the Italians will assume you’re OK.” Biljana shrugs.

  “You just have to find a way,” she insists. “Lots of people do it. You can try hiding in the toilet, or you can jump off the train when it stops, or . . .”

  I’m not listening to Biljana any more. Fatigue spreads through me like a slow poison. I feel like sleeping. I don’t understand why I decided to leave. I know that now that I’ve started, I have to somehow see it through, to keep going until I reach my destination. But what is my destination? There are still so many kilometres, so many checkpoints and chasms ahead of me, until I can start over, until I can begin my new journey.

  The Yellow Fiat

  THE BELGRADE TRAIN station waits for us like a monument with its ornate sculpted walls, its forged iron gate, and the impatient clock. It had rained overnight, and parts of the façade are reflected in the puddles and shimmering in the afternoon sun, like mysterious pieces of a puzzle. There are massive crowds going in and out of the station in a steady rhythm. Just as we are about to cross the street, a Serbian police car pulls up in front of the station. We watch as two officers in uniforms lead a man and a woman down the steps and into the car. They keep their heads down. I wish I could know if they are Romanian, but I know it doesn’t make a difference. I turn to Biljana. Her face is pale, her red lips tight.