The next day, while Gladys is out on her church work, I pack the few things I accumulated in Italy from the two families I lived with: the red flowing dress, the white shoes with black bows, two sweaters, and a blue skirt. I write a note for Gladys and Ron thanking them for their hospitality, telling them not to worry about me. I tell them I’ve found a job and an apartment in Chicago, so farewell. I linger for a moment to look at the living room with the baby-blue upholstery one more time. I expect to feel some kind of sadness or regret, but there’s nothing. At the last minute before going out the door, I turn back and add to the note that I am grateful for what they have done for me, for sponsoring me to come to America. I plan to write to the refugee organization in Rome and tell them that I am making it all right and to warn them about my sponsors Ron and Gladys.
I move in with Marta and her six-year-old daughter, Daniela, until I can get into a studio apartment in her building at the end of the month when someone’s moving out. Pungent, spicy smells of Mexican cooking rise from her kitchen and from other kitchens in the building. The hallways echo to the sound of people laughing and arguing in Spanish. Sometimes in the evening there is music somewhere in the building, music about love and death, amor y muerte, that makes me ache with nostalgia. It reminds me of the Italian musicians in piazzas singing about love and death in a different language.
I help Marta stir refried beans. I chop up tomatoes and onions to the sound of Mexican music. I make a green paste from the fruit avocado, dark green and shaped like an egg. I delight in the smell of Marta’s kitchen and the taste of the green paste.
Sometimes Marta takes a few swigs of tequila right out of the bottle. I taste the liquor too, and it reminds me of the plum drink ţuică. They both send an electric shock through your body like you’ve been struck by lightning. Sometimes Marta and I dance in the kitchen to the music of amor y muerte, and Daniela joins us, holding her mother’s skirt. Marta picks her up and kisses her all over her face and dances with her, round and round, in the little kitchen smelling like onions and refried beans.
I sleep on the cot next to the bed where Marta and Daniela sleep together. At night, as I drift into the deepest sleep I’ve had since I was a child, after a day at the drugstore and after walking in the sharp Chicago wind and taking two trains, after cooking with Marta and drinking tequila and dancing, I hear the two of them speak softly to each other. Melodious chirping in the silence of the Chicago apartment, mysterious and comforting: Buena noche, mi amor. In the morning, Marta and I take the train to work together. Soon the Chicago winter starts.
Chicago Winter in Sepia
DURING MY FIRST winter in Chicago my feet get frostbite. I have a tooth abscess. My face swells and I look like a fish again. I writhe in pain for three days until the abscess bursts open and the pain goes away, then I have a dead tooth in my mouth. I’m still working at the drugstore as a cashier. I register for courses to complete my university degree, and I switch to the evening shift so I can attend classes all day. I take two trains and a bus to get to the university. There’s graffiti on the trains that says things like Life’s a bitch and then you die. The word fuck is written everywhere. You find out from the walls of these trains that José is fucking Maria. I am entertained every morning on the train as I try to picture these people who are having such an intense love life that they have to share it with the Chicago Transit Authority community. I earn money and learn the different stores on State Street and Michigan Avenue. I miss Italy. I miss the wide avenues of Rome, its special light, the pine trees, and the espresso coffee in narrow bars. I don’t miss my country at all, only Italy. But it’s not a painful kind of missing, it’s substitute missing, because it’s so much easier to miss Italy than my own country with everyone and everything in it that I love.
It’s grey and cold in Chicago, so cold you think life will just stop and everybody in the street will simply freeze like mannequins for ever. The businesswoman in a black fur coat and sneakers will freeze as she searches in her bag for her car keys. The man playing a saxophone behind an empty hat will freeze just as he lifts his saxophone towards the dark Chicago sky. The homeless woman will freeze just as she is about to stick her hand into the trash can; the policeman guiding traffic with his hand raised will stay just like that. Everything – the taxis, the limos, the buses, the child running behind his mother who carries a grocery bag from Dominick’s in each hand, will freeze just as he’s about to catch up with her. This is how I see Chicago this cold winter: in black-and-white stills. I know there is something I should be feeling but am not. I don’t let in any feelings that could distract me from making it through this winter.
I like my little furnished studio apartment. I visit Marta and Daniela often, when I feel lonely, when she feels lonely. I help Marta make guacamole, and we take turns swigging tequila from the bottle.
I study until late at night: English literature, religion, philosophy. Plato, Leibniz, the Bible, William Butler Yeats. I go to school very early in the morning so I can stay in the library and take out any book I want and watch students and teachers walk into the library. My teachers are amazed I’ve read all of Shakespeare and can recite passages by heart. I’ve even read Tristram Shandy. I am not certain they would understand that back home it was a matter of survival, reading until you became numb or euphoric. They don’t know that people threw themselves from their apartment windows or hanged themselves in their living rooms when they couldn’t pass the entrance exam for the university. Sometimes I have little private conversations with my teachers in class. I’ve never felt so important. My heart races just having a conversation about Mrs Dalloway with my professor while the other students watch us enviously.
I visit the financial aid office every day to fill out applications for scholarships, forms about my income and the income of my parents. I fill in many zeros, round fat zeros everywhere they ask about income and earnings and tax returns. I don’t understand the concept of a tax return. I just tell the woman in the office that I’m a refugee and have no money – really, really no money – to pay for classes and that my parents are in Romania being persecuted. I even tell her about how I left Romania on the train to Trieste that wasn’t truly the train to Trieste, and how I hitchhiked across the border into Italy with just my bag.
“No money,” I tell her. “Just my bag and this book of my grades from the university and some pictures.”
She stares at me for a moment. “You have a book of grades?” she says. “You mean a transcript? You took courses at a university in Romania?”
I know all the women in that office will talk about me when I leave.
A few days later, I get to speak to the dean of the university, who is all kindness and admiration. It feels like a dream, everybody taking me so seriously, being so kind. They’ve translated all the grades in my little book from tens and nines and one grade of six in Marxist economy. The dean gives me an official paper with many A letters and one C letter.
“It’s very good,” the dean tells me. “We’re glad to have you.”
I know my father won’t believe me when I tell him about all of this. He’ll be so proud that all my Romanian grades mean so much in America. He’ll say, Look how good Romanian education is! What a pity these bastards have fucked up our country like this.
I don’t like my job in the drugstore any more. I like being with Rhonda and Marta. I like making fun of the customers as we have lunch together in the little supply room in the back of the store. But I’m restless; I want to move on, to do something extraordinary like write a play that becomes famous, get my doctorate and become a professor. I want to be and do something that would make all my travails in America worthwhile, something that would fully justify my having torn myself from my own country and family. Sometimes, right before going to sleep at night, I think, What if I called Mihai right now, it’s dawn in Romania. But what would I say, how could I explain everything, my leaving without saying a word to him? And what if he is cold and distant on the ph
one, that would be worse than not ever hearing his voice again. There is nothing we could tell each other over the void spreading across the Atlantic Ocean. I cut myself off from him the morning when I stood alone in his room staring at his bed and at the red slip spread on it and I made my final choice to climb back out the window and run to my train.
I don’t like it when people ask me about my accent and ask where I’m from and how I got out of there. I don’t understand why, when I say I’m from Romania, they always say, Oooh! That’s so interesting or Wow! That’s great! There’s nothing intrinsically great about being from any particular country, I think. I never say it, though. Maybe when I’m forty, I’ll just say, What’s so great about being from Romania or Albania or Patagonia, or anyplace? Where I’m from is none of your business! Just to see how people react. But now I just smile and say thank you whenever someone tells me my accent is so cute. If I told them I’d been in the secret police in Romania, people would say, Wow, that’s great. I love your accent.
Once in a while someone has heard of Nadia Comaneci or Dracula, or someone says they know another Romanian, and maybe I should meet him. I understand that my country is known for its gymnasts and vampires. I don’t want to meet another Romanian. The few I’ve met just talk about making money and buying apartment buildings. They mix three words of Romanian with five words of English, pretending they’ve forgotten their native language. So far, I haven’t met any of the sentimental exiles who weep in the middle of the street when they hear Romanian being spoken. Maybe I will someday, but I really don’t care.
I like to wander in downtown Chicago and observe people and look at the store windows. Once in a while I go into a store and buy a really useless thing with the money I earn in the drugstore – a black patent leather belt or a little box with roses painted on it that opens when you push a button and inside is face powder on one side and a mirror on the other. Or I go into a restaurant and order myself a meal with a long name like chicken cordon bleu and eat it while I read a book. Every day is a thrill, even with the drugstore work and the cold wind, and the fear that I won’t have enough money until my next pay cheque.
Sometimes there is sweet music in the street, flowing and undulating like a moan of love, like a tear falling on a lover’s face. The man with a saxophone plays on State Street even when it’s inhumanly cold, and his music is like the yearning and the sadness in that Romanian word dor. That’s when it clicks for me, when I understand exactly what that untranslatable word means. It’s what he’s saying with his saxophone. I stand and listen to him after my classes, if I don’t have to rush to work. One day I tell him he plays so beautifully he should play in a concert hall. He laughs so hard and says he won’t never be playing in no fucking concert hall, he’ll just be playing on fucking State Street. I say that’s not so bad, because everybody can hear him there, and he says, Yeaah!
Slowly, in the Chicago cold, I learn how to live within freedom. I make a little place for myself within its wild vastness. And there is me, the little piece of me in the mosaic of America. Do you see me there? I’m the one with the maroon down coat from a secondhand store and grey boots that are too tight for my frostbitten feet. I’m right there, standing on State Street between the Russian woman selling apples and bananas and the Mexican man with the hot-dog stand. Do you see me now? I’m so excited I could just scream right here in the middle of State Street, so loud they can hear me all the way to Romania, to my aunt’s kitchen where they’re eating pickled tomatoes and wondering where that Mona could be right now.
All I need is to just make it through the winter. Some mornings, in the seconds between sleep and full consciousness, scrambled images of my past rush violently in my head: my parents whispering over a bowl of leek stew, Mihai in the rented room in Bucharest staring at me with tearful eyes, Cristina’s dead body in the cemetery at the foot of the mountain. I have the distinct sensation both of being conscious and of dreaming.
In those eerie moments, an overpowering feeling of loss liquefies me. I still have another hour before I have to get up and start another Chicago day, so I will myself back to sleep. When the alarm clock rings its grating sound through my light morning sleep, I get up instantaneously and impose an unforgiving programme of forgetfulness upon my psyche. Just like a diet: no fried foods, no thinking of my parents, no sweets, no fantasizing about Mihai and what he might be doing at this very moment, no processed meats and no remembering the dream of only an hour earlier. I enjoy my morning hot shower, and I don’t allow myself to think that my parents probably don’t have any hot water, or that my mother would say not to leave the house with wet hair in the cold weather. I just tell myself I am lucky I can take a hot shower every day. I stuff all my schoolbooks in the worn-out backpack that Marta gave me and rush out of the building into the Chicago wind blasting in my face. I am making it through this winter. Yet somehow I am losing myself, too. The days when I’m not thinking of my past, I feel my heart is as frozen as my feet in the cheap boots I am wearing.
I have to think my way back; I have to hang on and try hard not to lose myself in the cold and in the Chicago crowds. I have to both hang on to something and survive.
I think of my birth. Summer in Bucharest, when the streets were filled with a scent of linden so heavy and so sweet that you’d want to be born again and again on a summer night filled with such smells. In the Chicago cold, I try to relive a moment that summer in Bucharest when I am inside my mother’s womb, greedy for light, ready, frightened, eager for the world. I try to imagine my mother soaked in amniotic fluid, sitting quietly on the edge of the bed in her one and only black mourning dress that she wore to her mother’s funeral a month before. Waiting for the morning. Waiting for my birth.
In order not to lose myself in this city of strangers, I carry a country inside my head. My parents’ memories have become my own, as if I had lived their childhoods, their adolescences. I have collected the memories of my aunts and uncles, too, and my cousins, and the memories of characters in books I’ve read. In the role of my father, I laugh at myself as I run to the nearest phone booth on a summer night in linden-filled Bucharest, pulling on my trousers and trying to light a cigarette at the same time. In the role of my mother, Dorina, I am puzzled at my own serenity as I sit on the edge of a bed waiting for the morning when my child will be born. I cry, not from the contractions of labour, but because my mother, Vera, has just died a month ago, and I didn’t get to see her one last time. I am my grandmother, my mother, myself. We give birth to one another as we mourn for one another in the linden-scented night of old Bucharest.
America, America—My Country of Refugees
BY THE TIME summer comes, I’m no longer working in the drugstore. I’m taking summer classes, and I get a job in Uptown teaching English to refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. They call me teacher and they bring me strings of beads to wear around my neck and bowls of noodles and little embroideries of red and blue people and birds in the mountains that are embroidered by Hmong women from the mountains of Laos. Although the designs are quite different, the bright reds and blues remind me of the tablecloths and wall hangings sewn by the peasant women in rural Romania. I place the Hmong tapestries all around my bed so that they are the first thing I see in the morning when I wake up: embroidered colourful people and monkeys, exotic animals and birds among stylized mountains and trees.
The Chicago summer bursts in with its dizzying humid heat, music pounding in the streets, car alarms, and white yachts lined up along Lake Shore Drive. I work at night because all my students work in factories all day. Some are eighteen; others are fifty or sixty. Sometimes they come to class with their children. Sometimes they fall asleep in class, and everybody laughs, pointing at the person whose head is dangling and whose mouth is wide open. Past participles, ring rang rung, sing sang sung, possessive pronominal adjectives, this is my bag, that is your pencil. Words are soothing and funny in my mouth, and my students receive them like precious gifts, trusting my refugee En
glish.
I drive a big brown Oldsmobile that I bought for eight hundred dollars out of my first pay cheque as a teacher. My American friends tell me I should be careful walking in that neighbourhood at night. I feel so high after each class that I’m never afraid to walk to my car. I feel like the queen of Uptown, sweaty from my four hour class, with strings of cheap coloured beads dangling around my neck. Sometimes a few students walk with me to my car, and every word is a reason for laughter. We laugh in the Chicago night about our ugly old cars as police sirens slice through the thick summer air.
I had heard of Vietnam growing up, listening to the news, and hearing my parents and their friends talk about the Vietnam War. I knew of Cambodia as a place where people were much worse off than we were in Romania and where the famous French writer André Malraux did some kind of archaeological work and stole Khmer statues. I learned of Laos in my geography class – just another Asian country where people were also worse off than we were and about which my mother would say when I didn’t want to finish off my portion of bean soup: “There are children starving in Laos and in Cambodia who would give anything to have this bowl of soup here.” My father and all of his poet and artist friends always mourned the takeover by Communist regimes of these faraway countries and cheered America on to win the war in Vietnam.
I find out with great surprise from my graduate student friends that American soldiers performed what they all call atrocities in Vietnam, such as brutally killing innocent women and children and ravaging whole Vietnamese villages. Despite all of my knowledge of European literature, I feel so naïve and ignorant about so many other things, and I am almost embarrassed now to feel lucky that I have come to America, with its recent history of atrocities. I want to be able to juggle political concepts and jargon the way my friends do when they talk of the imperialist foreign politics of America. But it’s ironic that they all warn me about the dangers of going at night into the Uptown neighbourhood where so many poor people and refugees live. If they feel so sympathetic to all the poor people and the refugees from all the countries, how come they are afraid to walk around there and why don’t they also work in those neighbourhoods, I wonder.
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