Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  My husband is angry all the time for no clear reason. I get angry because he gets angry. Then he says I get angry too easily. I tell him it’s because I lived under a totalitarian regime and now I’m an exile. Why shouldn’t I be messed up? I can’t understand what he wants from me. He tells me we need to learn how to communicate better, and I have no idea what is wrong with my way of communicating, and I don’t like talking about talking. Our arguments sound vacuous, and they remind me of the arguments of the people on Dallas, the one soap opera we used to get in Romania, between five and seven on Tuesdays. Although we used to watch the actors, their fabulous wardrobes and cars in fascination, we would always end up saying things like These people have nothing interesting to argue about, they need a month of Romanian communism, then they’ll have something to talk about. And the following Tuesday, we would all sit in front of the TV again waiting for Pamela and Sue Ellen to roll their eyes and argue with JR and Bobby.

  I start seeing someone else. I leave home on some pretence and drive the highway recklessly at night to see my lover. He is a Serbian man, a contractor I meet in the rain one evening. I’m walking in the rain past a historic building that’s being renovated for condos, when I stumble over a bunch of bricks. I curse in Romanian, the worst Romanian obscenity I know. He helps me get up and tells me in Romanian That’s a pretty bad word. Then he says: “You from Romania. I know a little Romanian. I am from Yugoslavia.”

  The word Yugoslavia gives me a little shock. I see Biljana and my two days in Belgrade, my hitchhiking escape that started at the train station. It all flashes through me as I stand in front of the Serbian man with a tanned, high-cheekboned face, a bit wrinkled and askew but somehow irresistible, and as I hear him tell me in a Serbian accent the few Romanian phrases he knows. He speaks English with an even thicker Serbian accent.

  “I take you home. You all right? You hurt leg. Sorry! I work here, but workers not do good job and leave materials in street.”

  I tell him, “I’m OK. It’s nothing. I have to go. Good night.”

  But he’s worried and offers to take me home. I say, “Thank you. I’m all right, OK? Please, my husband is waiting for me,” and I run home.

  Over the next few days, the image of the Serbian man keeps coming back to me. A yearning I’d forgotten has opened up in me, a weird and implausible longing for Belgrade. In the days to come, I keep passing by the building that is being renovated in the hope of meeting him. Which I do, several times. Many times. We have coffee he pours from his thermos, then one day coffee from a café. Then a snack, then one day lunch, then a glass of wine. I tell him my story. He is proud that his country had some role in my escape from Romania, and that I liked Belgrade, which I really never did. I just say that to be polite. Something in his manner makes me feel familiar and at ease. A current that passes between us when we sit in little cafés and laugh at memories of absurd events under Communist rule in our respective countries, and something in the way he flirts with me and kisses my hand over the cappuccino, makes me aware of what it is I am missing with Tom. We become lovers in his rented room at the other end of the city, past many highways and exits, on a little side street, and soon I become quite fond of Belgrade after all.

  I live in a fun-house hall of mirrors. As I sit on the yellow-and-green sofa of our living room and watch Tom read his Russian and German literature and psychology books, multiple halls of mirrors reflect my many lives in a watery shimmer. There are always two images of Mihai. One has his face turned away, and I know it is the morose, unpredictable Mihai, the Mata Hari Mihai who betrays me by having shady dealings with the secret police and who denounces us and uses information about my father that he passes on to his superiors among the Securitate. He sleeps with Anca Serban and is probably responsible for the death of my childhood friend Cristina. The other Mihai looks straight at me, and his eyes are sparkling in the setting sun like emeralds. He smiles his most alluring smile, and he is a noble dissident working for an underground organization reckless in his acts of courage.

  Janusz is walking towards me in this hall of mirrors and asks me to dance with him in a dimly lit Russian restaurant. We swirl among the tables in the fluid rhythms of a pop song about a lady in red, and his bony irregular face resembles that of a Hollywood actor. A Serbian Clint Eastwood. I let myself swirl on the little black and white squares of the dance floor. I get pleasantly dizzy and infatuated as my pink silk chiffon dress from a secondhand store on Halsted Street whirls in wide circles revealing my thighs. Afterwards we go to his rented room on the West Side of Chicago and make love until two in the morning. The highways are raw as I head back to my and Tom’s apartment, the moon has a metallic glow, and the cars’ headlights whizz by me like enormous fireflies. I am chipped like my great-grandmother’s mirror, and my music box isn’t playing “Für Elise” any longer.

  Orange Moon over the Highway

  THIS IS THE summer when my son Andrei is conceived. A merciless drought sets in across the American Midwest. The temperatures rise to one hundred and ten, and the sky is like white glue every day, with no forecast of rain. It’s illegal to water your grass or wash your car, the radio says. Parks are as yellow as wheat as I speed by them on the highway to the house of Janusz, my Serbian lover, a refugee like me. It’s comforting to love someone who isn’t American, someone whose English is filled with awkward expressions that he translates directly from his own Slavic language. He says things like I give you eat now food like in my country.

  The sweltering summer nights smell like scorched grass, overheated pavement, and petrol. The moon has an uncanny yellow tint to it as it hangs low and huge over the midwestern highway. My son is conceived in the worst drought of the century, when acres of parched cornfields, brown and brittle shoots, surround the city like a desert and nothing wants to grow. Except the round, pink nut in my uterus. A stubborn seed.

  One evening I get into a huge argument with Tom, another psychological knot I can’t untangle. It has something to do with the light not being turned off, which somehow triggers painful emotions from his childhood. I complain about always cleaning up, about the mess in the house.

  “You goddamn husband you!”

  English swear words still don’t come to me easily, so I start breaking china. I compensate for my lack of English obscenities with the smashing of unwashed china from the sink. The dishes go flying all over the kitchen and one just barely misses Tom’s head.

  “Get the hell out of the house! Go get a lover or something!” yells Tom.

  “I already have one – thank you for the suggestion – and am pregnant, too!” I yell.

  The very second I pronounce the words, I know this is a big, big mistake. I instantly remember what Vincenzo, the Italian widower who wanted to marry me, always told me: Remember this for ever, Mona: Even if your husband finds you naked and making love with another man, do not ever, but ever, ever admit it. Don’t ever admit you’ve cheated on him. This is my advice to you for your future.

  He also told me, Even if you don’t want to marry me, I’ll still watch out for you. I thought it was funny at the time, as we listened to Italian minstrels play heart-wrenching love songs on their mandolins, but now Vincenzo’s advice echoes in my head like the wisdom of Solomon, and my own spiteful slip echoes in its full, complete, unforgivable stupidity.

  I’m a huge red lump of fury and surprise. Tom’s mouth hangs open, and there’s an endless, heavy silence. I wish there were some way I could take it all back, a convincing way to say What did I just say? Forget it. I just said that to get back at you. But my mouth stays shut, and I realize that since I really am pregnant, I can’t take back that part. The suspicion is already there, the poison spilled out between us, over the mound of broken dishes at our feet. What’s the point of saying anything any more?

  I feel sorry for Tom as I watch him pacing around the room like a tiger in a cage. His face is red, and now he’s yelling the angriest words he can think of. I am thinking maybe I should have just
stayed in my stupid Communist country where I belonged. I never should have come into this man’s life to mess it up.

  He calls my parents, who have recently moved into their own apartment, and asks them to come over right away. He tells them on the phone that I’m a whore and he wants to divorce me. Before he finishes talking, I leave the house to clear my thoughts and try to decide what I am going to do. I find myself driving in the direction of Marta’s apartment, near Ashland Avenue. Marta is reading with Daniela from a book of Mexican stories. As always, she is happy to see me and asks me if I want anything to eat. The smells of refried beans, guacamole, and fried tortillas welcome me and trigger memories of my first winter in Chicago. She makes me a margarita and heats up a burrito, and Daniela hugs me and tells me You look sad, Tía Mona. Marta listens to me tell her what happened: “Chica,” she says, “you’ve gotten yourself in some pickle. But a child is a child, if you want to have it, just be happy. It doesn’t matter about the father. Things will sort themselves out. And Tom is not a bad man, you know. He will make a good father.”

  Marta’s vague but positive advice helps me to calm down, and as I sit on the bed in her main room I suddenly feel a wave of something new, a different kind of joy and anticipation. As if that vague longing to have a child that I’d experienced on the train to Trieste as I was leaving my country and listening to the crying of the baby and watching her suckle at her mother’s breast has suddenly awakened in full bloom. A child is a child, I repeat Marta’s words in my mind, this is not a worse time than any other, my parents are here with me, and my marriage with Tom can still be salvaged. I am forging ahead in my studies and will soon have a teaching job. I am no longer the rambling, aimless thistle I had once thought I was. I rush back home feeling better and ready to tackle my problems with Tom and to plan for the new baby.

  But when I get home, my parents and Tom are lined up on the sofa in the living room as if at a wake. My father’s uncombed hair sticks up absurdly. I don’t dare to break the heavy silence. I am staring at my swollen ankles. Then Tom starts calling me whore, whore.

  My father asks, “What is whore?”

  “Leave her alone,” my mother snaps at him, then turns to Tom. “Calm down, we’ll find a solution,” she says, her voice low and conspiratorial.

  “A solution?” yells Tom. “I don’t want any solution with this whore!”

  Then Tom starts crying. I bite my nails. Both of my parents light cigarettes. Tom is crying in big sobs and saying to me, “How could you? All the trust I had in you, all the love – it’s all over now.”

  I start crying, too, and my mother tells me in Romanian that whatever happens, she’ll help me raise the child. My father looks at me with deep sadness in his eyes, but in a flash so quick I almost miss it, he winks at me and smiles, as if to say Don’t worry, it’s going to be all right, we’ll stick by you no matter what.

  “Let’s go to a marriage counsellor. I am so, so sorry I hurt you,” I tell Tom.

  I’m so proud of myself. I’ve learned all the important vocabulary for situations like this. I’m a real American.

  He wipes his eyes and asks, “Why? Why did you do it? Aren’t you happy with me?”

  “Yes, I am happy. But . . . but I felt lonely, without love.”

  He cries some more and says maybe he deserved it.

  “No, you didn’t deserve it,” I tell him. “I’m just confused. But I want to be with you.”

  “What about the baby?” he asks.

  “We’ll just have the child and raise it, that’s all,” I say, aiming to sound full of self-assurance.

  My father goes over to Tom and slaps him jokingly on the back and says to him, “Whore.” Then he laughs. Every time my father learns a new word, he has to repeat it several times. My mother tells him to stop saying stupid things, so my father asks her to tell him again what exactly whore means. My mother blushes and looks away, and then tells him the Romanian word for it.

  My father lights up another cigarette, because he doesn’t like anyone calling his daughter this. But he also understands Tom and is sorry for him, and that’s why he chooses to smoke rather than to punch him, for example. We’re all flushed. The Chicago heat is unbearable. This is the longest drought of the century. We’re all trying to fan ourselves, and my body feels swollen with fluid.

  Tom decides to stay. He says he’ll try to forget what has happened. I know he’ll never forget. But we go on with our daily routines as if everything were back to normal, whatever that line of normality might have meant so far. I am more and more drawn into the movements and rhythms of my own body. I take special pleasure in my new heaviness and in feeling my weighty steps on the ground, as if I can be sure no gust of wind or fate can push me away any longer.

  As weeks go by I see that my father is not happy in America. The fact that I am not sure who the father of my first child is gnaws at my brain at night as I am trying to sleep. My father is not proud of me. He doesn’t scold me. He stands by me because he would stand by me even if I had committed murder. But I can see he isn’t proud as he’d been when I wrote beautiful compositions in school or when I passed my entrance exams at the university among the top ten. Of all the things he expected me to accomplish in America, having a child without knowing who the father is was not one of them.

  My mother teaches all the languages she knows in part-time chunks at colleges and universities in the area: Italian, Russian and French. She is irritated with me for having made such a mess of everything. I tell her glibly that in America people make a mess of their lives and then they go to therapists. But she gets mad at my frivolous attitude and says this is no joking matter; this is another human life I’m bringing into the world.

  My father tells her to shut up. He’s sad all day long because he doesn’t have the Communists to fight against, and because he doesn’t have the music of his native language around him, and because he doesn’t like the tomatoes in the supermarkets. They are tasteless, bad, bad tomatoes. I sometimes go shopping with my father in tiny grocery stores on Clark or on Devon, where women in brightly coloured saris and Russian men and women fill the streets in a constant flow. We buy a special kind of tomatoes called hydroponic that taste better and are juicier than the ones in regular stores like Dominick’s. On those occasions, my father lightens up and asks me to buy him unusual things that he’s never seen in his life, like hearts of palm and star fruit, or things that he has craved for years, like figs, dates, and Italian salami. He talks to me about their last years in Romania, how nightmarish everything was. “God knows what has become of all those people I used to work with, who knows,” he says. “Maybe now they are preparing something really big. But I wouldn’t know,” he says, shaking his head. He felt he had to cut all relations with them before leaving, to not risk having his passport revoked. “Because all I wanted was to come and see you, my Mona,” he says.

  One day as we are buying tomatoes in a Greek grocery on Devon, my father looks at me and tells me I look so beautiful in my pregnant state, and then he adds out of nowhere: “That boy, that Mihai of yours, he was a good boy.” I almost drop the double-headed weirdly shaped tomatoes that I am holding and the basket filled with jars of fish roe, dates and feta cheese. I stare at my father and ask him to explain himself, why is he saying this now, had he seen Mihai since I had left, does he know anything that I don’t know? My father refuses to answer. He just repeats, Mihai was a good boy, that’s all, and then he makes another unrelated comment: “I have one wish: I want to see my country one more time before I die.”

  The months go by. The rain comes, and the weather turns cold. I feel warm, pleasantly covered in fat. I dream of Eskimos cutting through the ice at the North Pole and eating the raw eyes of the seals they hunt, like I saw in a documentary on TV. I’ve stopped seeing Janusz. I told him it was over. Sometimes he still calls, but I tell him to leave me alone. Tom says he has forgiven me, that it was his fault, too, no woman goes to find her happiness elsewhere if she is happy at home
, he says. So he’ll do his best to make me happy, he says, stroking my belly. Then he kisses me on the mouth, and I enjoy the feel of his lips on mine the way I used to in the first years of our marriage.

  Execution on State Street

  I NEED SOME last-minute Christmas gifts so I go, as always, to State Street. It’s early on Christmas Day, and I am desperately hoping I may find a store that is open, a little electronics boutique, for instance. I’m immensely pregnant, and I feel like a huge ball walking down the pavement, but it feels good to be out in the stinging air. I like to see the windows at Carson’s and Marshall Field’s decorated with mechanical animated scenes.

  A group of children is playing African drums in the cold wind, bud-um, bud-um, bum, bum. It fills me with a feeling of warmth, familiarity and lightness. Why do African drums resonating on State Street on a cold winter morning make me feel so much at home? As if Romanian peasants carrying water from the well in the blue dusk are seamlessly connected to Africa, its heat and its unimaginable colours, carried halfway around the world by this group of children making music in the whipping wind.

  As I walk a little farther down State Street, I stop and stand unmoved in front of Woolworth’s. The president of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, is on one of the TVs on display in the window. It must be afternoon on Christmas Day in Romania. Ceauşescu and his wife are sitting sideways at a desk in a dimly lit office, and they keep denying everything that the interrogating party is asking them. Ceauşescu bangs his fist on the table. Elena stares blankly in front of her. Then they are being dragged outside into what looks like a macabre yard and made to stand in front of a firing squad.