Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  The next day I get the news that the agency has found me a sponsor in Chicago, a nice older couple, and I have a week until my flight. I cry when I leave delicate, porcelain-faced Marina with her many shoes, and dreamy, fidgety Vittorio, who had shown me the Colosseum for the first time and helped me become a political refugee and watched me have my hair cut off. I know I can never repay all these people from Trieste and from Rome who happened to cross my path like magical beings, and who have helped me and put me up and fed me for the simple pleasure of doing it. I know they don’t expect me to repay them either, but that they are also sad I am leaving.

  For our farewell dinner, Vincenzo takes me to a restaurant with musicians on Via Veneto. We dance to the music of Adriano Celentano. I feel particularly nostalgic when the song “Azzurro” is sung by the Italian singer trying to imitate Adriano Celentano. Vincenzo makes his proposal of marriage one more time, and again I refuse him as we swirl on the marble floor of the restaurant.

  Roxana is crying at the airport and telling me she wants to come and visit me in Chicago. I hug Marina and Vittorio and hold Roxana in my arms one more time. Tutto sarà bene. In the distance, behind a group of American tourists, I see Vincenzo standing in his trench coat and smoking. He waves at me and sends kisses. I move on through the crowds to get to my airplane, my first airplane ever. A family with children passes in front of Marina, Vittorio and Roxana, and then I don’t see them any more. I panic and I want to run after them, to hug them one more time, to beg them to help me settle in Rome, Roma, amore mio. To let me stay just one more season. But I am already in the line for the security check and a woman in uniform who looks like airport police pushes me ahead and barks at me to hurry up, Dai, dai, presto. I hold on tight to the red bag, and I move quickly.

  PART TWO

  In a Suburb of Chicago: A Freedom Fighter

  THE COUPLE WHO has sponsored me to come to Chicago is a woman in her fifties named Gladys and a man also in his fifties named Ron. They are both silver haired. Gladys’s face has a strained expression like she is sorry for something, and Ron’s face is red and round. He works in an insurance company. She goes around in her car all day, not really working, not working for money, but meeting other women and doing volunteer work for the church, then preparing dinner for Ron. I discover they found out about me, and my need to be sponsored to come to America, through their church. This dumbfounds me. In the little Orthodox churches I used to venture into when I needed to calm my thoughts and get away from the images of the Father of the Nation and the three bearded Marxist gods, there were just old priests with long white beards and women dressed in black, kissing the icons and bowing to the altar. The saints on the frescoes and in the icons stared at you with puzzled, fixed eyes. I understand that I am a work of charity for Gladys and Ron. That’s why they take me with them everywhere they go, to parties and dinners and to church, and present me as the young lady from Romania.

  They live in a suburb of Chicago, not among high-rise buildings and roaring traffic as I had hoped, but in a little village near Chicago where there are enormous houses and empty streets. Every time I say I am going to go for a walk, Gladys and Ron look at each other amused. Nobody just strolls around out here. The pavements are narrow strips of paving at the very edge of the road. Sometimes I have to walk in the middle of the road, and people glare at me from their cars. Sometimes concerned drivers stop and ask me if I’m lost, if there’s something they can do to help.

  At their parties, everybody speaks about church things and then about pointless topics like the weather or the insurance business, about the dinner they are going to prepare for the special holiday called Thanksgiving, when everybody has to eat turkey and mashed potatoes, and then about the weather again.

  They all ask me polite questions about my country and my parents. They ask me what language people speak in Romania, and whether there are McDonald’s restaurants in my country. When I say there aren’t any, they say they’re sure Romania is a beautiful country, but they couldn’t live there without McDonald’s. Everybody laughs at the joke Ron makes about the lack of hamburgers in my country. I am not sure why this is funny, but in order to be polite I go along with the joke and say I can’t believe I’ve actually survived all these years without eating a hamburger. Everybody laughs at my joke, too.

  One day Ron takes me to the McDonald’s near their house as if it were a great event. He gets me a Big Mac and hands it to me like a trophy. As I am eating the soggy bun and the dry patty of ground meat, which I eat with a fork and knife, not like a sandwich as Ron does, I am amazed. I tell Ron it’s great, but I am actually thinking that it’s funny how in America, everywhere you look, there are mountains of food that doesn’t taste very good, but in my country we almost starved, yet when we did get to eat something, whether it was my mother’s fried potatoes or a cucumber and tomato salad or a slice of bread with butter, it always tasted good. Or maybe it’s just me sentimentalizing everything because I am so far away from my country, and the old Romanian proverb about the bread always being better in your own country, no matter how tough things may be, is acquiring its true meaning now. Mihai used to tell me this proverb sometimes when there was a discussion about people leaving the country. A quick memory crosses my mind like a flash: Mihai and I eating bread and tomatoes, him kissing me warmly, the feel of his hands on my back as I dance in his arms in my peach satiny dress at the New Year’s Eve party when we started the new decade. I see his face smiling sadly and actually not saying the proverb or anything at all when the other guests told stories of escape. Then I am terrified that I will be overcome by memories and by missing everyone and everything as I was in the railway station in Trieste. I gulp down the hamburger furiously in a mad effort to close the door that has just dangerously opened in my mind. To keep away all memories for the time being. Ron takes my gesture as a sign that I really love the hamburger and offers to buy me another one.

  “No, thank you,” I say with a full mouth.

  I’m possessed by evil impulses at Ron and Gladys’s dinner parties and Sunday brunches. I say shocking things like People are dying of starvation in the streets of Bucharest and They even kill each other for food. I tell them I was a freedom fighter in an underground group. When they look amazed, I shrug and say I escaped from Romania wrapped up in a camouflage blanket in the back of a truck that was transporting beef to Turkey, because Romania is one of Europe’s biggest exporters of beef. That’s why the people are starving and killing for a little meat the size of those patties they serve at McDonald’s. But our beef patties are tastier, I tell them, when we do manage to get our hands on one. Then I say that I used to work in the biggest theatre of Bucharest as an actress and that I studied politics and economics at the University of Bucharest. Everybody is puzzled by the fact that universities and theatres are still operating while people are hunting pigeons and cats in the streets of Bucharest for meat.

  A heavy blanket of boredom spreads over me during these parties, and I feel unbearably sad. The worst are the Sunday mornings when everybody listens to a priest talk about not committing sins and about giving our lives and our souls to the Lord Jesus Christ. When I was waiting in Italy for my sponsor to materialize so I could go to Chicago, I had imagined a thousand possibilities for my life. This wasn’t one of them. I never pictured myself being dragged to church and lectured to about Jesus all the time and everybody being so polite that it made me scared. They’d give me pamphlets with photographs of foetuses mangled and covered in blood with big captions saying Abortion is murder. I have no idea what abortion has to do with anything. Why do people start talking about such a thing as abortion out of the blue? Why, of all the possibilities in the world, did I have to end up being housed and fed by people who keep using Jesus Christ and abortion in the same sentence all the time?

  I get really scared when Gladys and Ron ask me to convert to their religion and accept Jesus Christ in my life, and when they take me to their meetings in the church basement where the
y talk about the evils of abortion and about how black people and Jewish people are the Antichrist and are corrupting the country with drugs and abortion and homosexuality. They talk about some Jewish conspiracy. They say the Communists will take over, and the pornographers. They worship President Reagan. I don’t know anything about a Jewish conspiracy, but all this weird talk in the basement surely seems like some kind of Jesus conspiracy to me. On TV there is news about the bombing of an abortion clinic by what the newscaster calls pro-life activists. The explosion, says the heavily made-up newscaster with a smile, as if she were announcing the building of a new school or the arrival of the spring equinox, resulted in the death of a doctor and serious injuries of several nurses and personnel. As we watch the news in the living room Ron and Gladys look at each other with a strange look, almost a smile. The expression pro-life activists in combination with the news of blowing up a clinic, killing and injuring people, leaves me dumbfounded. I wonder what the people who are not pro-life activists get to do in America. I feel as terrified as when the secret police had asked me to become an informer, but it’s even worse now because I’m supposed to be starting a new life here, walking freely in the streets of Chicago, listening to jazz and studying to become a journalist. This is supposed to be my experience of freedom.

  One day Gladys tells me to come with her to spread the good news. I wonder if someone in her family has just got married or had a baby or been given a job in the White House. I’m glad for the chance to go out for a walk, even if it’s just around the little town with empty streets. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to meet new people. But Gladys picks up her Holy Bible and a stack of her pamphlets. She starts knocking on people’s doors to tell them about Jesus and accepting him in your heart and abortion is murder. People just close their doors in Gladys’s face. Pretty soon she has a forlorn look like the whole world has turned against her. She walks down the road holding her Bible and pamphlets tight to her chest. For a brief moment I almost feel sorry for Gladys. I wonder what could have made her so misguided that she’d want to spend her life in this humiliation. But my pity for her disappears quickly when I think of my own embarrassment at being with her. I want to melt into the black asphalt of the streets just to be anywhere but here. I’d even rather be back in Bucharest with all the secret police.

  At least there I felt some excitement hearing footsteps behind me and then a rush of victory when I reached the apartment, locked the door behind me, and sat down with my mother and father around our little table in the kitchen over some leek stew or boiled potatoes talking about metaphysical poetry. Everything here seems so dull and embarrassing. I experience a moment of hopelessness and think of Hamlet: the whole world is a prison. Chicago is even worse than Hamlet’s Denmark, where at least there were murders, suicides, passions and dark, haunted castles. The America of this suburb seems submerged in a thick gooey substance with something poisonous mixed up in it, spreading like a pool. No grandeur, no beauty, no throbbing life.

  I’m filled with hatred for Gladys. Why did she and Ron have to make me their charity case? I wonder if the organization in Rome has any idea what kind of sponsors they’re finding for people. I can’t believe they do, remembering the woman with glasses on a chain around her neck, the sound of so many languages, and the colours of the weavings and artefacts from different countries on the walls. I want to write to them to watch out for the nice couples, to make sure refugees don’t end up in scary religious groups instead of being properly sponsored, just being given a bowl of soup and a bed to sleep in.

  Gladys furiously grabs my arm and starts back home, muttering about moral decay. I have to run away, I have to be free. I have to take the train to Chicago, which I haven’t really seen yet. I have to find work, see the people walk in the streets, see the tall buildings, and cleanse myself of the sermons about blacks and Jews and abortions.

  One night at the dinner table, I tell Gladys and Ron that I’m Jewish and that I’ve had sex with the black postman while they were out, and now I think I’m pregnant. I ask them where I can get an abortion. Just so they’ll throw me out of their house with flowery wallpaper and baby-blue upholstery on the sofa. But they’re nice and charitable. They believe what I said about being pregnant, and they tell me Jesus Christ will forgive me, that I should give up the baby for adoption. They say Jesus Christ will accept a Jew, too, if I repent.

  I know I should feel at least some gratitude toward Gladys and Ron for having helped me come to Chicago, but I really can’t bring myself to feel anything but nausea and boredom and fear, sensations I’d never experienced in this particular combination before.

  One day when Gladys is out in her car doing her volunteer work, I leave the house and walk to the station where the Chicago train stops. I have a few dollars from the allowance Gladys gives me. I buy a round-trip ticket to Chicago good for one day.

  The train leaves me somewhere that everybody calls the Loop, among gigantic buildings and a maze of overhead tracks. Everything whizzes by, roaring, hungry to get somewhere, climbing up towards the squares of grey November sky between the high-rise buildings. I’ve never seen people of so many different colours in one place, except for in a geography book in my school in Romania. It had a page with a big circle of people dancing around the globe, all dressed differently and with different skin colours, to show all the races living in harmony. I suppose it represented a Communist utopia where everyone lives together in harmony and peace under the red flag of the Communist Party. In Romania, the only people of a slightly different skin colour I saw were the gypsies who lived in camps in the country or in ugly buildings at the edge of the city. Everyone cursed them. Sometimes there were students from African countries, like my father’s Senegalese student who exchanged Romanian money for the hundred-dollar bill I carried on the train to Trieste. Most people cursed the black students, too, because they were even darker than the gypsies.

  A powerful feeling comes over me that this is the city in which I was meant to be born, that I am the victim of a cosmic mistake, not having grown up here amid all the roaring and colour. But then, on second thoughts, I think if I had lived here from the beginning I wouldn’t be carrying stories of my relatives surviving bombs and eating roots and floating on rivers with mirrored music boxes. I wouldn’t have known love in the Carpathians on carpets of wild berries or blue snow. In the whole messed-up, incomprehensible scheme of things, somehow this is just as it should be.

  I feel a strange familiarity with Chicago, as if I’ve been here before, as if I’d seen these crowded streets lined with gigantic buildings that look like Cubist paintings somewhere in a dream, as if the swirl of people moving with focused steps and stubborn determination to make the most of this grey day had passed through my subconscious life sometime long ago. I roam the streets with a fierce curiosity and joy. I’m awed by Lake Michigan. I stare at the people I pass, trying to burn each face into my memory. This is a city fit for my hunger.

  Buenas Noches, Mi Amor!

  AFTER MANY HOURS of walking in Chicago, I enter a drugstore with a sign that says help wanted. I assume it means they will pay for the help, but I’m not sure. If I’m going to run away from Gladys and Ron, the first thing I’ll need is money. See Manager Inside, the sign says. I go inside and tell a woman putting bottles of shampoo on a shelf that I want to talk to the manager because I want to help. She’s a black woman in a red sweater, and she says she is the manager. I ask her if they pay for the help.

  “Honey, you’d better believe it,” she says.

  For the first time in the several weeks I’ve been in America, I laugh. The way the words just roll off her tongue is enchanting. She takes me into a back room and interviews me for about ten minutes. Her name is Rhonda. She’s surprised when I tell her I’ve been in America for only a few weeks. She says my English is great, even though it’s taking me a long time to fill out the form she’s given me.

  “Just bring it back tomorrow, honey, and we’ll see what we can do for you,�
� she tells me.

  “Please, can you tell me now if I get the job? I can start right away. I want to work, because I need to get a place to live, and I need to start going to school. I am a political refugee, and I have permanent resident status, and all my documents are in order and, please, can I get the job? I would love to work in a drugstore.”

  It all pours out of me in one breath. She stares at me for a few moments with her arms crossed, and I can almost hear the thoughts rolling in her head. I think how I must look to her: a crazy woman from a strange country, wandering the streets of Chicago in some kind of desperation. She can’t know the murky substance that I’m slowly drowning in. She opens her mouth in a big smile, a smile as wide and as white as that of my mother’s friend Nora in the picture of her sitting in an orange tree somewhere in America, on the same continent where I’m standing at this very moment. She might as well be on the moon, because I have no address or phone number for Nora. I know I have to hang on to whoever shows me real kindness because I don’t know anyone in this United States of America.

  “Honey, you got it,” she says in a special velvety way.

  I’m so relieved, I become even bolder and ask her if she knows of a place where I can live, an apartment I could rent. She thinks about it, then takes me to the pharmacy counter and introduces me to Marta, who’s from Mexico. Marta’s round face reminds me of the beautiful woman I bought the bouquet of hyacinths from that cruel day in April. When Rhonda tells her I’ve just been hired and I’m looking for a place to live, Marta says, well, maybe she can help.

  Marta speaks a different English from Rhonda. She rolls her r’s sweetly, just like we roll them in Romanian, and she turns v’s into b’s. Her speech has a playful twist, a delicate edge. I think of the swirl of a woman’s skirt, of a nervous, graceful twist of one’s hand in the air in a moment of excitement, like this moment right here for me in the Chicago dusk, amid so many coloured shapes in a drugstore where I’ve got my first job and maybe even a place to live on my own. I feel myself starting to push out shoots into this hard earth of Chicago, the first fragile, stringy roots.