Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  My new hosts are both architects and leave for work very early every morning. Marina has a wardrobe for shoes alone, an entire wall of shoes of all shapes and colours. She says shoes are a woman’s most important accessory, more important even than the clothes she wears, and she never wears the same pair of shoes two days in a row. I watch her with fascination as she tries on different pairs until she decides on one, and as Vittorio gets irritated and fidgets and pretends to leave without her. I think of my Bulgarian boots and my Hungarian loafers. I find it awkward that she has almost the same name as Mariana, the girl who died in a mountain accident before Mihai and I started our love story. I don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad omen, or whether I even believe in omens. But I cling to every coincidence and familiar detail.

  The first day that I go out on their balcony is the first day I feel something resembling awe. The hills surrounding the town where Marina, Vittorio and Roxana live are blue like the hills I had seen in the book about San Michele. The dark, pointed and velvety green pines project themselves against the rosy sky of the morning, and the roofs are red and glistening in the sun. The buildings around us are of many pastel colours: oranges, mauves, yellows. I hear voices singing little operettas, but they’re really just saying Move your car out of the way. Signora Rinaldi has gone to Rome to buy the pasta for the day. School is starting soon. I am enraptured by the sounds and the colours, and I try to understand and repeat in my mind every word I hear from people’s balconies or from the street. I wave at the woman across the road hanging her laundry on her balcony. Everything is intensely colourful. It’s like I lived in a black-and-white film before I came to Italy, with some bright spots of colour: the sparkling blue Black Sea, or the red raspberries, or the dark green fir trees in the Carpathians.

  I tell myself I have to take it in my stride, take things as they come, that all is well. I am after all in Italy, practically in Rome. My adventure hasn’t had a bad start at all, and I’m lucky to have found all these people ready to lodge me, feed me and help me out, as if I were the wandering princess from a story my mother once read to me. The princess would knock on some door, and the people would put her up and feed her and send her on her way again. She eventually gets to a magical kingdom where the prince of her dreams is waiting for her in a golden carriage surrounded by white doves. Only I’ve just left the love of my life, not knowing whether he’s a prince or an ogre.

  The days pass almost without notice as I take care of Roxana. She clings to me and constantly wants me to play with her dolls, wants me to draw, wants to comb my hair. Sometimes I just want to rest and think, or to take a stroll around the neighbourhood with Roxana, but her parents have told me I must never take her out by myself. They say I don’t know the city, we might get lost, something might happen.

  A month has already passed, and Rome is still summery in October. Vittorio tells me Tomorrow we go to the Italian authorities. He tells me first we must go to the police to declare my status, to declare I am not going back, and to assure them I am not planning on staying in Italy.

  “They don’t want any more immigrants in Italy,” says Vittorio, “but they’ll help you go to Australia or Canada or the United States.”

  The next morning, I ask him if we can please go to the Colosseum first, please, and then to the police and that other place with the political asylum. I want to see the Colosseum, which the Romans had built in their ferocious hunger for glory. The Romans who then invaded and colonized the Dacians, stole their words, and left them with only fourteen, and thus gave birth to my people! My tormented, violent, messed-up, poetic people, from whom I have run away for ever. I find it comforting that my origins are here, in this dizzying city. I am not so far away after all. Vittorio smiles his charming smile and tells me Certainly. He seems more relaxed and talkative than usual, which makes me feel quite hopeful. I’m wearing a bright red dress that Luciana bought for me in Trieste, my first red dress ever, and a pair of shoes that Marina bought for me. She took me from one shop to another until she chose this particular pair – white with black linen bows on top. They are the most beautiful shoes I’ve ever owned, but they hurt my feet.

  I stand in front of the Colosseum, feeling as if I could take off and glide and float above the city. I stare at the ancient walls curving around the gigantic piazza. The warm October breeze lifts my dress and caresses my hair.

  Vittorio takes me to the most beautiful places in Rome. Piazzas where people raise their voices to argue and laugh over the splash of water spurting in powerful jets from jars held by satyrs and nymphs. Colourful tiny cars swirl in maddening circles around parks and piazzas, fountains and statues, and I’m spinning with them, around and around the city. The world is suddenly wide open to me, and I’m greedy to have it, all of it. I can do anything I set my mind to. I want to do everything. I am young and pretty in my flowing red dress, my white shoes with black bows.

  Vittorio treats me to a delicious lunch of little round pastas filled with cheese and mushrooms, and then I order the biggest ice cream I have ever had, an ice cream of many colours like the houses you see from Marina and Vittorio’s balcony: light green pistachio, mauve blueberry, pink raspberry. I am sinking in a river of coloured tastes and sights and sounds. I feel as light as spun sugar.

  The Italian police smile at me all the time, especially when they find out I’m not asking for asylum in Italy. They serve me coffee and cookies and tell me I am una bella ragazza. Vittorio translates for me whenever my own Italian fails me. He points to the places where I must sign the forms, a stack of forms, and with each signature I feel Rome, beautiful, grandiose, dizzying Rome, slipping away from me. I picture myself finishing my studies at the Università degli Studi di Roma and becoming a journalist or an actress or both, but the pictures become blurry and dissolve. Why is everybody trying to send me so far away, as if the stories of secret police and food rations and dissident activities I tell them have put a curse on me? I overcome my sadness like the rambling princess in the story and move on to the next station of my journey: the organization that helps political refugees from Eastern Europe.

  Everybody at this agency is serious and speaks in low tones. I hear English and French and Russian zigzag around the cluttered old office. Yet again there are forms to be filled out, explaining why I fled my country, what I did in Romania, how I got into Italy. Vittorio helps me write. I answer all the questions, trying not to linger too much in my mind on the faces and events behind each answer. Just the minimum, Vittorio says. These people understand.

  I start sweating, and I feel terribly tired. It all seems endless, tedious and indefinite. There are so many things that start worrying me: how am I going to live in America where I don’t know a soul, what am I going to do there, who is even going to give me a piece of bread over there, so far away, on a different continent?

  Then a woman with glasses on a chain around her neck takes me into a small tidy room and interviews me. She says she’s sorry she doesn’t speak Romanian; their translator is out today. We try a couple of other languages and quickly settle on English. It occurs to me this is a test, and that I must prove I speak English before they’ll agree to find me a home in America. She asks me about my father’s time in prison and about my plans for the future. I try to be brief and clear, but she switches from one topic to another so abruptly I become confused. I haven’t spoken this much English since my English literature classes at the university, and I wonder suddenly how much English my professor really knew and if I’m sounding like an ancient book. She asks me about the time the man pinned me in the doorway on the empty street at night and told me there are worse things than death, because it’s mentioned on the form, the story I never even told my parents.

  My English sputters out like a candle, and my lip begins to shake. She closes the folder on her lap and says, “That’s all right. I think we have enough.” She tells me that it works like this: They have to find a sponsor for me in America, because on the form that I have just fill
ed out, of the three boxes, one with Australia, one with Canada, and one with the United States, I ticked the one for the United States. Every refugee has to have a sponsor, a person who will be responsible for her until the refugee can get started and take care of herself. It all seems very well organized, but somehow lonely and frightening. Who knows what sponsor person I am going to end up with, and in what city? She tells me it’s best to name a specific city where I know someone or where people from my town have gone, so they can try to match me with a sponsor there. The whole process can take several months, so I must be patient. Then, when they find a sponsor and all the immigration papers are ready, this agency in Rome will pay for my plane ticket and send you on your way, the woman with glasses says.

  “I want to go to Chicago,” I say quickly, in one breath, as if afraid that someone will get ahead of me and take my place in an imaginary waiting line. It is the only American city I have a little bit of a connection with because of Ralph the librarian from the American embassy in Bucharest. I want to see the Chicago skyline and the Sears Tower.

  The woman writes that down. She says she’ll see what she can do.

  “Chicago is a good town,” she says.

  I feel that this has been the longest day in my life. I am now a political refugee, on my way to America. This will be me for the rest of my life.

  This is the day when people are going to start looking all over the gigantic United States to find the right person who will put me up and see that I have food and help me to get on my own two feet.

  This is the day when I see the Colosseum and the Fontana di Trevi. When I eat ice cream like a rainbow, wearing my red dress and white shoes.

  Vittorio is waiting outside the interview room. He looks tired, and I think he’s been asleep. He asks me what I want to do for the rest of the afternoon. We can walk some more, or am I tired and want to go home? “Marina will be waiting for us with dinner,” he says.

  He’s surprised when I say I want to go to a hairdresser and have my hair cut. He looks pained. “Why cut it?” he asks. I tell him I’m a new person now. I say that my long hair is useless and ridiculous, and I don’t want it any more.

  He watches with a look of pity and amusement as the waves of hair fall to the floor of the salon he found for me. I watch in the mirror as my hair disappears, the blond waves like those of my great-aunt Nadia who died of love with a faded postcard in her hand and her cat mewing on her shoulder, like those of Great-grandmother Paraschiva floating on the river Nistru in 1918. This is the hair in which Mihai buried his face so often during our moments of passion, and that he tucked behind my ear with a tender gesture. I watch with satisfaction as it falls on the shiny pink marble floor. When the hairdresser stops and holds up a mirror so I can see the back of my head, I tell him, More. I remember the dream I had of Mihai slowly slitting my throat and then my turning into a wild white mare. Better to have your hair cut than your throat cut.

  I see my Romanian past in my mind, all its passions and fears, all the people and sounds and smells and tastes, being wrapped up in cellophane like a package for me to carry as I move on towards my future. I see my Romanian past as I saw Trieste that first morning, wavering upside down in the shimmering mirror of the canals.

  As I wait for the refugee organization to find me a sponsor and to tell me when my immigration papers are ready, I become attached to my daily routine with Roxana, Vittorio and Marina, as if I were one of their family. I love waking up to the sight of pastel-coloured houses and blue mountains in the early light, drinking Marina’s coffee, then watching her try on a dozen pairs of shoes and eventually choose one: the beige ones with a metal clasp, or the red pumps, or the grey soft ones. Once they leave I start straightening up the house, removing the coffee cups that Marina and Vittorio drank from, rearranging the shoes that Marina had tried on before deciding on one pair back in the rack, and then I have to take Roxana to school. I like to feel useful and busy while living among so many pastel colours.

  At a dinner party Marina and Vittorio give at the apartment, I meet one of their clients, an Italian man whose wife had died the year before. He sits across from me, and I feel his insistent eyes on me. I look back at him across the table as he puts meat into his mouth. I look at him as he lifts his wineglass to his lips and swallows, as he bites into a piece of bread, as he spits an olive pit onto his fork. I focus on the grey hair at his temples, a spot of dried blood on his chin where he must have cut himself shaving.

  He starts complimenting me about everything: the way I speak Italian, the colour of my hair and of my eyes, until Marina says to him, “Vincenzo, you beast! Stop pestering the girl. Can’t you see you’re making her uncomfortable?”

  “She doesn’t look uncomfortable to me,” he says.

  During dinner I have two glasses of Chianti, and my tongue gets loose. I speak in little rivulets of Italian words and am amazed at my own ability. I even make a joke, playing on two words that sound alike. I feel at home, as if I’ve lived in Italy for ever.

  As the other guests are leaving, the Italian widower stops me in the hall and asks if he can take me out and show me Rome tomorrow. I tell him, Sì, certo. What else have I got to do but wait for someone among the millions of people in the city of Chicago to decide whether they’re going to sponsor a refugee?

  Over the next weeks, Vincenzo takes me everywhere. Sometimes he talks about his wife and about how much he loved her, but also how and with how many women he had cheated on her while she was alive. I begin to think he’s a collector of women the way Marina collects shoes, all carefully lined up according to their colour, shape, and the occasions when they’ll make him look his best. Marina and Vittorio tell me to be careful of Vincenzo. Roxana gets jealous when I go out in the evening instead of plaiting her hair or playing cards with her or playing with her mean doll, Ninetta. She tells me, “Vincenzo is a bad man. He killed his wife.” Marina and Vittorio scold her for speaking like that and tell her to go to bed.

  One night, Vincenzo asks me to marry him. He says I’ll never want for anything, he’ll treat me like a princess. We’ll go on cruises, travel everywhere I want. We’re at an outdoor restaurant on a hill overlooking the city. Italian music is drifting through the autumn air.

  I feel a shiver of romance that doesn’t feel like love, nostalgia for something, for someone. The image of Mihai and his green eyes shaded by dark eyelashes takes shape in my mind with more clarity than any time since we were last together, since the night we made love in the cave under our white rock. I stare at this man who has just proposed to me, whose face by now is so familiar that it doesn’t make me shy. I tell him I don’t want to be a princess. I want to be a journalist or an actress, or both. Can he arrange that for me? I say I’m going to America, to Chicago. I don’t want a cruise around the world.

  I tell him I already have a fidanzato, a great, great love living in Romania. We’ll be together again someday, when I’m living in a high-rise in Chicago. We’ll get married there, in the United States. I realize this is the first time I’ve ever had this thought.

  Besides, I ask him, how many other women would he have once we’ve been married for a year, or maybe just a month?

  He says that he would stop all that and be faithful to me and love me, only me. This strikes me as the biggest lie I’ve heard since the Father of the Nation told us we were living in a workers’ paradise.

  “Thank you, Vincenzo, for your proposal of marriage. And how nice of you to offer to become faithful for me,” I say in my most elegant Italian. “But I can’t accept.”

  “You are quite a woman, Mona. You’ll go far, I have no doubt of it. But maybe one day you’ll remember me and regret your decision.”

  For a while, Vincenzo continues to take me out and buy me expensive meals, hoping he can change my mind. One day he buys me a red bag. I empty out my old bag on the restaurant table, everything that I carried in the yellow Fiat to Italy and held tight to my chest as the Italian border guard checked Mario’s pas
sport and thought I was his wife. I put it all back neatly into my new red bag. Afterwards I toss my old bag into a rubbish bin near the Piazza di Spagna. I find myself at the bottom of marble steps leading to the magnificent cathedral, surrounded by late-autumn flowers and little cafés where you drink espresso that jolts through your veins and eat multicoloured ice cream and little pizzas with anchovies.

  Musicians with guitars and mandolins play old, heart-wrenching songs: a young man says he’ll die ten times over for his brunette love with a red rose in her hair, but then he’s angry and leaves her when she says she doesn’t love him.

  Very early one morning I call my parents from Marina’s apartment. My mother answers and her voice strangles with emotion and tears. I realize I’ve just awakened her. A new grey day is starting in the little Bucharest apartment: the making of soy coffee, taking crowded buses to go to work, looking over your shoulder to see if someone is following you. She asks me timidly if I am fine. I tell her, Yes, I am doing very well. My father gets on the phone, and I’m relieved he isn’t arrested or hiding somewhere. He is there next to my mother, who’s probably wearing rollers in her hair. I can hear him smoking as we talk, with short furious puffs. We can’t say much; we assume their phone is tapped. I can’t give any names, any addresses. I just say, It’s getting cold up here.

  I tell them, I miss you so much. We hang up. I sit on the little chair next to the phone in Marina’s apartment. I think of how much of me is gone for ever.

  It’s chilly, humid and rainy in Rome. I drink caffè latte or espresso every day in little bars and cafés to warm up. I stand one day in front of the Colosseum and stare at the noble, ancient curve of its stone walls. Vincenzo is next to me, shivering in his trench coat, hoping that maybe the cold and the rain will make me feel less confident about my future, that I’ll change my mind about his proposal. The wind blows through me and through the white wool coat that Marina gave me, one of her old coats.