I see several cars with Italian licence plates passing us by. I smile at my sudden thought, and I feel fully awake. I have my bag in one hand and my suitcase with clothes for all kinds of weather in the other. I know I have to choose. I know my bag is more precious, but what will I do without any clothes other than what I am wearing?
I kick my suitcase farther down onto the pavement. I step off the pavement into the road. I take off my jacket and swing it carelessly on my shoulder as if I were going for a walk. In one quick move I take off the white taffeta ribbon holding my hair in a ponytail. I shake my hair loose. I feel the sensuous comfort of my hair coming down around my face, my neck, and onto my shoulders. I feel a jolt of wild energy in my body, as if I am the wild mare in my dream. I am rushing across borders, my wheat-coloured mane flying in the wind. The muscles in my back, my calves, my shoulders, tighten up and I feel all tingly like before sex. Cars are passing by me, and some are honking at me to get out of the road.
I see Biljana’s puzzled face. I love Biljana so much. She truly is my fairy godmother. I see a small yellow Fiat, with Italian licence plates, so yellow that it shines in the night. I am trying hard to distinguish who is at the wheel. It’s a middle-aged man, grey haired, glasses, suit and tie. I am not scared.
“Do it!” says Biljana, understanding my wicked thought right away.
I stand in the middle of the road and wave my white jacket like a flag. It all happens in a few seconds. Like a miracle, he stops. I have never hitchhiked before. I am bursting with excitement. I ask: “Trieste?” The car makes a full stop, and all he yells from the window is “Senza la valigia.” I know what he means; it sounds almost Romanian. I’m so happy I can understand Italian, senza la valigia, without the suitcase. His car is very small and already filled with luggage.
I embrace Biljana and see tears in her eyes. I look at the suitcase and ask her to take it, the suitcase that my mother had packed for me with so much care, even putting a volume of Romanian poetry in between the clothes for all weather. “Be careful,” Biljana says and squeezes my hand one last time.
I get in the car next to him, and I’m not afraid. I’m not tired. He accelerates through Belgrade towards the highway that will take us to Trieste. The thought that he may be taking me elsewhere crosses my mind once or twice in the first silent minutes of the ride. I don’t want to think about it, and when I see a wedding band on his hand I feel relieved. He is the first to start the conversation.
This is how I begin to learn Italian: I add o’s to Romanian words, then repeat his words when he corrects me. I put together words I remember from Italian men I heard at the seaside, on the beach. Italian feels delicious in my mouth, a crisp fruit, both tart and sweet. My heart is beating so fast. I am focused on this moment in the yellow Fiat next to the Italian middle-aged man who is going to take me across the border somehow. I don’t even worry about it, watching him shift gears and gun the engine to pull onto the highway. His name is Mario, he tells me. E Lei, come si chiama? Mona. Mona Maria. Ah, che bello!
I’ve heard about Italian men, that they are all gigolos and Don Juans, that they think of nothing else but seducing women. But Mario talks to me about his wife, mia moglie, and offers me a sandwich, which he says his wife made for him. She was supposed to come with him, he explains, but changed her mind at the last minute. Le donne, he shrugs. Women. He smiles at me. Little by little I understand he is a salesman, but I can’t figure out what he sells. He travels a lot, and he’s even been to Romania. He says my country is molto bello, molto molto bello, but Ceauşescu is pazzo, crazy, and also evil, cattivo.
I think of Biljana with sadness. I wouldn’t be on this road to Trieste if it hadn’t been for her. I think of her smooth, comforting voice, her silkiness, her smile. I settle into the worn seat of the Fiat and begin to doze to the buzz of its little engine. I picture the train to Trieste. It is a train I’ll never have to ride.
We ride into the night in the yellow Fiat, past forests and factories and more forests and more factories, and little villages and fields, and towns with names swollen up with consonants like Sremska and Bijeljina.
We reach the Italian border at dawn. I’ve fallen asleep in the car and open my eyes to see the first rays of the sun pierce the clouds. I hear Italian voices, and turn to watch Mario take out two passports and hand them to the border officer. In my semiconscious state I remember Mario telling me that his wife had changed her mind at the last minute; he must still have both passports; I have to pass as his wife. The border guard looks at the first passport while he and Mario exchange a tangle of Italian words, and then he hands back both. I am holding my bag, everything I own, pressed against my chest. My university records, the icon, the packet of photographs.
Then suddenly I hear and feel something new, something I don’t remember ever having heard or felt before. An ease, a breeze of freshness, in the way the border guard says grazie, in the carefree voices of people laughing and talking, in Mario’s confident smile as he slips the two passports into his front pocket. I keep my head turned away from the border officer, but he shows no sign of doubting that I am Mario’s wife.
Siamo in Italia, Mario says. We are in Italy.
This must be what freedom feels like, this is its smell, its sound. It is raw and unexpected. It chuckles, and it flutters. I have no comparisons, no metaphors that describe this freedom. I’ve never experienced this before, only heard about it. I had imagined it: a wild creature with dishevelled hair. But it’s not like that. It’s the sound of laughter, an inflection in the voice. The way Mario said grazie.
Tutto Sarà Bene
I SPEND THE next two weeks in Mario’s house. He puts me in the care of his wife, Luciana, and his sister-in-law, Letizia, as if I were a convalescent, a cancer patient in remission. The first day both women greet me with open arms, as if they had been expecting exactly this, some refugee from Romania with all her belongings in one bag and smelling of sweat, suddenly appearing at their doorstep. They feed me minestrone soup. I am so tired and disoriented that I start crying. My tears fall into the minestrone together with my hair, when my head droops over the bowl as I sob. I haven’t eaten soup in more than a year, since my aunt made me her delicious cabbage and potato soup. I cry even more ardently because it’s so ridiculous to cry over a bowl of soup. It’s not as if I’ve been starving. But in a way, I have been. It’s too hard to admit that I’ve been craving soup.
I remember foods, fruit, so delicious that the memory brings on a new wave of tears. Berries of every colour, the berries that Mihai had fed me in the forests. Tomatoes ripened in the sun of the mountains, and the television cake I used to hide in the wardrobe when I was little. The special sheep’s milk cheese made by shepherds in the mountains where the alpine pastures stretch endlessly and the grass is a light, velvety green among white rocks and blue bellflowers. But I haven’t tasted these in so long . . . I cry because I am hungry and I don’t want to admit it to myself or to the Italian women, who talk in their operatic trills, worrying about me.
For two weeks in Trieste, in the house of Luciana, Letizia, and Mario, I eat and sleep in a regular rhythm, trying to convince myself I’m on a vacation and trying not to think about whatever I have to do next. Strangely, I don’t want to see the city, except for the Berlitz building where James Joyce used to teach when he lived here. Mario and Luciana set about locating that building for me, wondering why I don’t want to see the rest of their beautiful Trieste.
I saw Trieste at dawn, the morning I first entered it in the yellow Fiat, my mind somewhere on the cusp between unspeakable fatigue and dizzying excitement. I wasn’t expecting a beautiful city with canals, with pink and orange Renaissance buildings and piazzas where people stand around and talk joyously. Reflections of the old, ornate buildings swayed lazily on the mirror-like surface of the canals sparkling in the morning sun. I had thought Trieste was going to be an improvised city, small buildings built in a rush at the frontier with Yugoslavia to welcome refugees who had c
rossed the border. Somehow I saw the city in my mind as a transitional place where the train to Trieste stopped, then passed through to real cities like Venice and Rome. But it isn’t like that at all.
It hurt me to discover it was a beautiful city, because I knew my journey couldn’t end here. I had to get to Rome, at least. So Mario said. I had to restart my life, live somewhere, go to school, find work, meet people, make money, make friends, get an identity card, start fresh on the virgin shore after being tossed about on the crest of a wave and rescued by a man in a yellow Fiat. When I asked Mario that first morning in the car if he thought I could stay and settle in Trieste, in the first town where I’d felt freedom in the air, in my ears, he laughed and said, Non è possibile, shaking his head. It’s hard for refugees in Italy, Luciana explained later. They’re not welcome, understand? The government is tired of refugees. You must go to Rome, she tells me. You must ask for political asylum and then go to America.
I hadn’t thought about going as far as America. All I wanted when I left my country was to escape the secret police and make sure I had at least two borders between me and all that madness so I wouldn’t be run over accidentally on purpose in University Square. Italy was good enough for me. Before leaving Romania, for hours I studied a book about a boy growing up in a magical Italian place called San Michele. It was a tiny village with narrow, steep streets lined with beautiful white houses, and there was a villa on top of a mountain, with a balcony filled with white and pink climbing roses. There were misty blue hills in the background. Yes, Italy was good enough for me. I wasn’t thinking that my wave was going to take me overseas. I hadn’t known that refugees were like a plague that Europeans were trying to keep outside their borders.
Suddenly, I don’t want to see any more of Trieste. What’s the point, why get attached to another beautiful place when I’ve just torn myself away from my own country and family, from all of the places and people I’ve known? There is only so much tearing away I can manage.
But Letizia insists that I simply must see Trieste, even if briefly. Luciana agrees and adds that it will make them very sad if I don’t want to take a tour of their beloved native city. I don’t want to make my hosts sad so I tell them Sure, I would love to see Trieste. One bright morning with a sky so blue that it is violet in a way I have never seen sky in my life before, we set out to see the port, the churches, the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia, the Castello di Miramare, and just to stroll on the quay along the Adriatic Sea. Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia is as majestic as its name: marble Baroque buildings, a group statue suggesting unity right in the centre, orangey and rose-coloured palaces. It all opens up towards the Adriatic. Only I don’t want to see it. I don’t care to feel any of this. I don’t care to stroll along the walk that stretches out into the silver and mauve sea. But for a moment I imagine myself on the sea, gazing at the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia from a moving ship, until the shore looks dreamy and hazy – a memory. I have a foreboding of sadness to come. Trieste could have been my final destination, not just a point of passage. I am in the heart of Trieste, and I can’t feel it, I can’t hear it: a heart pumping with a silent beat, for I am already far away on the sea. E la nave va, and the ship goes on. I am my own ship of estrangement and uprooting.
I tell Luciana, Letizia and Mario that I’ve changed my mind about Berlitz and James Joyce and that the next thing I wish to see is the railway station. Luciana shakes her dark curls and laughs at the idea, Letizia claps her hands in disbelief, but they all go along with my request, and we take a bus to the railway station. I want to see where I would have arrived, had I taken the train to Trieste. The real train to Trieste, coming from Belgrade, as Biljana had wanted me to do.
I am shot with a mixture of sadness and surprise when I see the elegant peach and white stone construction that looks almost like a castle. I could have descended here on this platform and walked into the shiny marble hallway. I could have glided under the Corinthian-looking columns and the rosy ceiling of this station, with my bag containing all my belongings, at dawn. I would have looked at the big clock on my left, and I would have noted it was already the next day, seven o’clock in the morning, starting everything all over in the free world. In Trieste. And what then? What would I have done then, where would I have gone then, not knowing one single soul in this border city that painfully surprises me with its melancholy beauty and languorous canals on the Adriatic? Maybe everything turned out as it should have.
There is a shabbily dressed older man with white hair leaning against one of the thick marble columns in the middle of the main hall of the station, holding a transistor radio. He reminds me of my father, only he is older and shabbier, maybe a poor person from Trieste. Suddenly a most heavenly music fills the station from his little radio: a soprano voice singing in Italian with such longing that my heart almost stops beating. A faint memory sneaks upon me. I remember one Sunday afternoon in the Atheneum where I used to go to classical music concerts with my high school, and a student of my mother’s from the conservatory sang Susanna’s aria in the garden from Le Nozze di Figaro. It is now only that it touches me, that I get it in its fully dishevelled beauty. Susanna is anxious and mad and longing for her Figaro. She wants to trick him. She is disguised as the Countess and pretends to be waiting and singing for the Count, but secretly she is calling out to Figaro. She talks about the pleasures of love in the fresh air. I stand transfixed in the middle of the station and cannot move. Everything that I have left behind and will never see or touch again glows painfully in my mind: the blood-red poppies and the orange marigolds in front of Aunt Nina’s house, the pine and fir trees of the Carpathians and their endless blue chains, the green and violet waters of the Black Sea with its pearly shells. My mother with her delicate gestures always worried about something, my father’s tall forehead and piercing blue eyes and his tender way of stroking my hair.
And in the centre of it all, Mihai is standing at our white rock. He is holding me on a cool summer night like the one Susanna is singing about. Our fiery embraces in meadows and on the side of streams at night amid the cricket song and the hypnotic flickering of the fireflies. Why did I have to tear myself from everything? It will never ever come back again. Susanna’s voice curls and rises and falls in luscious trills as she waits for her Figaro, but for me it is all over. If only I had known what it would all mean the night when I eagerly got onto the train to Trieste. I am standing and staring at the old man with the transistor. Luciana and Letizia and Mario are surrounding me, gently trying to make me move.
My face is wet and I hear Luciana say Poverina, poor girl. Mario pats my back gently and says Dai, dai, come on, but Letizia takes me roughly by both shoulders, looks straight into my eyes, and says sternly: Coraggio, ragazza, che è fatto, è fatto! Be brave, girl, what’s done is done! Then Luciana says she will make me minestrone when we get home, and minestrone takes care of all the heartaches in the world. I force myself to stop crying, and I try to think only of minestrone. I scrunch my eyes and promise myself I will never break down like this again, in the middle of a public place. What’s done is done. I turn my head and look at the old man with the transistor: Susanna’s aria is over and Figaro has come.
On the bus on the way back, Luciana points in the direction of the Castello di Miramare: Guarda, guarda che bello. Look how beautiful. I look at the majestic white castle rising in the distance above the Adriatic. I tell Luciana it is molto bello, in fact bellissimo, and patiently wait to pass by it, to pass by the canals and the churches and the narrow streets and get to Mario and Luciana’s house. I refuse to leave the house for the rest of my stay in Trieste. Luciana keeps crossing herself and saying Poverina and Madonna mia, Letizia is proud of me because I am strong, and Mario tells them both Lasciatela in pace per l’amor di Dio, leave her alone for the love of God.
Luciana and Mario have friends in Rome who are going to help me. They’ll take me to the authorities there and put me up in their house, in a suburb of Rome, until I ge
t an answer. Things will turn out all right, tutto sarà bene, Luciana and Mario assure me. They send me on my way with a little bag of new clothes and some sandwiches of prosciutto and mozzarella. They wave at me from the train platform as the train pulls out. I stick my head out of the train window and wave at them until they look like three coloured specks in the twilight enveloping the Trieste railway station.
Roma, Amore Mio!
MARIO AND LUCIANA’S Roman friends are a handsome couple with a six-year-old daughter, Roxana, who has black hair and green eyes. She shows me her doll Ninetta and tells me that she is cattiva, a mean doll, and that she bites. I pretend Ninetta has bitten my finger and Roxana laughs, showing her new teeth. Then Roxana speaks a few very fast sentences that I don’t understand, and I feel lost and embarrassed not to understand a six-year-old. Her mother, Marina, translates, telling me that Roxana wants me to help her give Ninetta a bath that evening and then put her to bed later.
I find out that I’m supposed to take care of Roxana while Marina and her husband, Vittorio, are at work. When school starts in a couple of weeks, it’s my job to pick her up from school and look after her until her parents come home. It looks like I will be here in Rome for a while before I can move on. During the day, I am supposed to straighten out the house and sometimes shop for groceries.
I wonder what they’d planned to do about Roxana and their groceries before a refugee from Romania happened to appear. I don’t ask; I haven’t acquired enough Italian to formulate such a complicated question. I say sì, sì to almost everything and grazie before I eat their spaghetti alle vongole. I try very hard to swallow the spaghetti, feeling choked with loneliness and confusion every time I sit down to dinner with them in their little apartment in a building with huge balconies, in a suburb of Rome amid blue hills and pine trees.
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