Those faces that looked down on us from every wall of every important building are now terrified and gaunt, begging for their lives. Some people – my countrymen – push them around, tie their hands. Nicolae and Elena, who watched us in our most intimate moments, whose secret police kept us terrorized and compliant, those two people who had us herded into squares and made us stand for hours in the sun, the rain, the snow, so they could listen to us cheering for them, are being dragged by angry Romanians out into what seems to be a wooded yard somewhere on the outskirts of Bucharest.
The children keep beating their drums, bud-um, bud-um. It’s cold and windy on State Street. I remember my hallucination in Biljana’s apartment, in my restless sleep that night in Belgrade, how all the people sitting and talking on my bed were saying that Ceauşescu’s days were numbered. And now, Elena and Nicolae are hunched over against a wall, terrified, two ordinary people begging for their lives. A group of soldiers points guns at them; there’s a bunch of shots following each other impatiently. Many silent shots, over and over again, as if the soldiers couldn’t get enough of shooting the Ceauşescus. In the window of Woolworth’s, the execution of the president of my country is replayed again and again. Now they are there on the ground, a small pile of twisted bodies and bloody clothes. There they are on CNN, lying in a pool of blood, their own blood at last.
How odd – instead of the bone-deep satisfaction, the limitless joy, I always thought I’d be feeling when this moment came, all I feel is pity and disgust. I hold on to my huge belly and feel the baby kick, a stubborn jolt of life.
Then I see images of tanks firing in the Palace Square in Bucharest and of people running in all directions. The CNN footage is edited so that one minute we see Ceauşescu’s last speech in the big square interrupted by the roars of the people saying things like Down with the tyrant, the next we see huge crowds in the streets screaming against the Party and Ceauşescu and walking arm in arm in a huge compact and fiery mass. The next moment we see again people running for cover while others are shooting. And then again – the execution of Nicolae and Elena and their lifeless bodies lying on the ground of a courtyard. A full-fledged bloody revolution played and replayed on the television set in the Woolworth’s window.
During the last couple of days, I have spent most of my time in my parents’ apartment, and almost as soon as I would get home to Tom, I’d call for them to come over so we could watch the news together. “Now Romania is in the news all over the world,” I’d tell my father proudly. But he didn’t seem to hear anything that was being said to him and would keep saying how he wanted to be back in Romania, could my mother get him a ticket, right now. He was sure all of his old friends from the group he had joined for several years while we all lived in Romania prepared for what was happening.
After another replay of the execution, as I stand in front of the television set on State Street, I hear the almost inaudible voices of the commentators mention in passing the city of Braşov as one of the cities where people have been fighting in the street. An image of the city centre flashes by quickly, with people running alongside the walls of the buildings I know so well. My heart feels as if it’s about to explode. I hold on to my pregnant belly, searching for balance. I can think only of Mihai. I imagine quick clips of him, as if in a slide show: Mihai in his room brooding and smoking Carpaţi cigarettes furiously. Mihai in the streets of Braşov, wearing his hiking boots, shooting at someone. Mihai in the streets of Braşov, again in his hiking boots, only he is the one being shot at. Mihai walking in the streets carelessly, recklessly, among bullets.
I walk farther down State Street, and stop in front of Marshall Field’s. I stare at Santa’s sleigh and the reindeer figurines moving in the store window. I’m wondering what’s wrong with me, why can’t I feel relief? All I feel is angry and exhausted. I stand motionless with my hand against the cold glass of the Marshall Field’s window as Santa’s elves and many reindeer rotate and turn towards a miniature golden sleigh, over and over again, and as drums are beating with a steady rhythm.
A New Destiny
I AM BACK in Bucharest, lost in a district of factories on a grey November afternoon. There are no people in the streets. In my dream, I have the memory of America, of Chicago by the lake in the summer, and of my university classes, of me listening to the professor lecture about avant-garde theatre. I can see the lake through the window, and I’m feeling free and elated as a breeze passes through the classroom and touches my hair. But this is only a memory, and I know I will never be able to get out again. That’s it, it’s all over. They’re going to get me now. I won’t be able to leave again, not ever, ever again. Why, my God, did I ever come back? I don’t even know why I’m back in Bucharest. Maybe to get my grade book from the university, or maybe to see Mihai. But Mihai doesn’t exist any longer. He was crushed in the earthquake, under the building where they make cream puffs. I am sinking into a grey gelatin, and I scream so loud that I wake myself up. Tom is sitting up in bed. I am soaked in fluid.
My water has broken, and I realize I’m starting to give birth. But I feel so sleepy, so lazy. I don’t feel like giving birth to anyone right now. Who can have a baby at one o’clock in the morning when they’re waking up from a nightmare? I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ll just go back to sleep. I’ll feel better in the morning.
Tom is getting dressed already and telling me to get dressed. I tell him that I don’t want to, I just want to sleep. But Tom insists. I curse at him. Then a sharp cramp cuts through my groin. I roll out of bed and get dressed.
When the contractions start in earnest, I’m out of breath. I fall asleep for ten seconds between the pains. There’s nothing to say, nothing to think about or to want except for it to be over. Tom is holding my hand. The nurse asks me if I want a Popsicle, I tell her Fuck the Popsicle! My back, my groin, my belly are all erupting. I’m not screaming, just sighing, and I tell everybody to fuck off. Tom laughs.
The nurse says Now you can push. Just one more half hour to go. I feel my eyes bulging from the effort. Surely they’re going to pop out. My eyes, my veins, my neck – everything is bursting open. Something is cutting me in half, and then that same something comes out, gliding. In less than a few seconds, all the pain stops. I have a boy. I have a plump, perfect boy, greedy for life and for my milk. A whole new destiny bursting into the world!
I am giddy and excited, grateful the pain is over. My parents come in trembling with emotion. My father, who was hoping for a girl, is surprised it’s a boy. He thinks the baby is beautiful, like a bundle of light, and that he’s never seen a baby like this. And is he normal? he asks. Tom is holding the baby.
We call him Andrei, because this name sounds nice in all the languages. After the worry of the last nine months, I am hoping so hard that Tom is the father. The baby’s dark hair reassures me. But somehow it doesn’t matter because I’m swelling up like a balloon in my contentment. I am fat and hard, and this is my baby boy, born in America on a spring day in the year 1990. A new decade, a new child. I hold Andrei all night long so that when he’s hungry, he only has to open his mouth. The avid tug of his mouth on my nipple in the night fixates me in the fleshiest and sweetest corner of reality.
Pink Flamingos
WHEN MY COUSIN Miruna arrives from Romania a few years after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Tom, my parents, our little son Andrei, and I drive to meet her at O’Hare on a bright November morning. My parents lag behind as we walk the long concourses to the international terminal. Andrei is in the Terrible Twos, and keeping him under control becomes a battle while we wait for the plane that finally pulls up to the gate three hours late. I am startled to see Miruna coming out of the gate at a brisk pace and with a confused look after more years than I care to remember. She smiles her unique smile, her chicory eyes are watery, and she seems smaller than when I knew her.
As soon as we’re in the car, Miruna squeezed between my parents, with Andrei in his car seat in the back while Tom drives, I pr
opose we go to the zoo. For some reason even I don’t understand, this is suddenly very important to me. We must go to the zoo. I want Miruna and Andrei to see polar bears, chimpanzees, flamingos. I have a million questions I’m dying to ask her. How was her first sexual experience? Who was he? Is she in love with anyone? What was the Revolution really like? Is it true people were just shooting wildly in the streets? Most important, I want to ask her if she’s seen Mihai. But somehow I don’t know how to begin after so many years. Besides, I’m so proud of my brown-haired, plump little son that I want to take Miruna somewhere that’s more his world than ours, where he can show off and laugh and use his new words like giraffe and pumpkin and snow.
I can see from her look she doesn’t understand my insistence on going to the zoo. Her eyes are covered with a film of weariness. She’s exhausted from the long flight and bewildered by the blur of traffic on the expressway, but I see something else in her face: she’s tired of everything. Gradually, after we get home, she starts talking. She tells me how for the last couple of years before the Revolution, when she was finishing her engineering degree in Bucharest, things had got so bad that people were just millimetres away from starvation. She managed to survive that period by eating pretzels and apples. There was almost nothing to eat, but she found a store in Bucharest – “You know, near where you guys used to live in your last apartment,” she says – where they still made good pretzels like we would get in our childhood. And her father could still get apples from his family’s orchards in northern Moldavia. She tells me about her first job as an engineer out in the country. She worked in a tiny unheated shack in the middle of a field so muddy that she had to wear rubber boots up to her knees just to get there every morning. I want her to tell me over and over again about the apples and the pretzels and the office in a sea of mud. She survived working in the bitter cold. She walked two miles of muddy country roads to get to an unheated office. She wore big rubber boots to get to her work. I am in awe of Miruna, remembering the little girl I used to play with, who has survived all this. My quarrels with Tom again seem so trivial.
I tell Miruna about how incredulous I had been on those December days about what was going on in Romania, and how our Revolution was the most violent in all of Eastern Europe, and how proud I was of my people. But then I add that I wasn’t so proud of the way they had dealt with Ceauşescu. “Why did they have to kill them like that without a proper trial?” I ask.
“You know, Mona, while I was living in Bucharest,” she says as I serve her some hot chocolate, remembering that it used to be her favourite drink in the world. Even in the summer on hot days, whenever we would go out into town with her sister, Riri, and her parents, and everybody got ice cream and cold sparkling water, she would always ask for hot chocolate. “Yes, while I was living in this apartment in the centre, next to the Military Circle, and I would sometimes stand on my little balcony and Ceauşescu would pass in the morning on his way to the National Assembly,” she says, sipping her chocolate, her eyes closing from pleasure at the taste, “I would have this very clear image in my head of myself slowly pouring petrol on top of Ceauşescu’s car and, immediately after that, throwing a burning torch over it and then watching his car explode and the two of them burn alive right under my balcony. And I would be the author of it,” she concludes, looking very satisfied.
I stare at Miruna with my mouth wide open. This is a Miruna I had never known before, much different from the sweet and gentle little girl of my childhood.
“Can you keep me here for a while?” she asks. “I mean, I don’t want to go back, I’d like to try to stay here, if you can help me. Things are moving very slowly back home. It’s going to take time,” she says. “And I don’t have the patience any longer. I’m tired.”
I am stunned but also ecstatic that Miruna has decided to stay with me in America; everything will be so much brighter and more cheerful with Miruna next to me.
“But how about Nina and Ion?” I ask. “Won’t they be devastated if you stay?”
“Well, they’ll get over it,” she says, and again I am surprised by this new Miruna who is so cool and tough. “They have Riri, you know. She is stronger, she can take it, and she can wait until things get better. Besides, she doesn’t want to leave anyway, she is happily married. Like you,” she says and smiles. I smile back and do not say anything.
As I show Miruna the bedroom that she is going to share with Andrei, I can see how tired she is and that she doesn’t want to go to the zoo; she just wants to be in bed. But the more I realize this, the more I make an issue of it, as if there’s nothing in the world more important right now than going to the zoo. I can tell Tom is exasperated, but since the baby, he’s been working hard to control his temper. Even my parents get into the argument, telling me I must be insane to want to drag poor Miruna to the zoo on such a cold day.
Miruna says nothing, but she looks more and more puzzled, trying to follow this argument in English and snatches of Romanian. She stares at me as if she’s trying to decide what’s wrong with me, if I’ve gone nuts or something from living in Chicago, but when my mother asks her what she wants to do, she’s polite and says it doesn’t matter, then meekly admits she’d prefer to stay at home. I tell her no, she can’t. If she wants to live in America she’s got to see what America is all about. So to the zoo we go, in our Mercury Marquis that Tom’s parents gave us because you have a family now. Andrei is ecstatic and climbs into the backseat to play with Miruna’s black hair. I point out the sights like a tour guide.
“See? This is Lake Shore Drive,” I say excitedly. “Look at the high-rises. Aren’t they beautiful? Down there is the college where I teach ESL. That’s English as a second language.
“This is Lincoln Park,” I tell her as we inch along behind taxis and buses, looking out at the leafless trees. “And here we are at the zoo!”
We put on our scarves and gloves and hats. We see the polar bears and the giraffes, so Andrei can say his new words over and over again, and the elephants and the penguins, whose walk Andrei imitates with amazing precision to the amusement of another family. We go to the flamingos last, as we always do. They’re Andrei’s favourite. The flamingos are in a huge glass cage in the winter, illuminated by yellow heat lamps, and their concentrated pink under the glass makes Miruna exclaim in wonder. She’s never seen a real flamingo before.
We stare at the statuesque pink birds standing on one leg and twisting their long necks to look at us. Andrei is running around and around the glass cage, pointing at the flamingos, when I hear the woman nearby telling her daughter in Romanian Uite mami ce frumoşi sunt – Look, Mummy, how beautiful they are! It makes me want to laugh. Romanian parents sometimes use the diminutive for mother or father when they address their children. A Romanian family, apparently, is made up of a big mummy and a little mummy, a big daddy and a little daddy. I could never understand the logic of this when I was the little mummy, and it strikes me now as absurd and sweet at the same time. Then I realize that the woman has just spoken Romanian. I turn to look at her. She has a happy look on her face. I smile and ask her if she is Romanian, and then we ask each other what cities we’re from. Amazingly, she’s from Braşov, Miruna’s town, Mihai’s town. Miruna tells her she just arrived from Romania that morning, and the woman is impressed, her eyes wide and sparkling. She’s been living in Chicago for five years. She is so happy that she’s found another Romanian family in Chicago. I feel Miruna quivering with excitement next to me, as she starts talking heatedly with the woman, whose name is Lucia Vlad, about their beloved city, the streets they each lived on, the schools they each went to.
Meanwhile I notice that Andrei is getting more excited than usual and is screaming, “Mummy, mingo pumpkin!” He calls flamingos mingos, but I have no idea what he’s trying to say. In the middle of the flock, two flamingos are copulating. Andrei keeps yelling louder and louder, “Mingo pumpkin! Mingo pumpkin!” Maybe he’s trying to explain that the two flamingos glued to each other are rou
nd like a pumpkin.
There are pink feathers flying around, drifting in the cold breeze. Miruna says that the flamingos are like pink storks, and the Romanian woman agrees. They start talking about the villages around Braşov, how there are so many storks perched on roofs, the way they stand on one leg on the tile or the thatched roofs of old houses. The woman says maybe they’re white flamingos. Miruna says she’s flown halfway around the world to look at pink storks, and they both laugh.
The woman’s little girl is also pointing at the two flamingos having sex. She jumps up and down. Andrei keeps saying, “Mingo pumpkin, mingo pumpkin!” over and over. Pink feathers are everywhere in the air, and we laugh so hard I have to crouch down so I don’t pee in my pants. Miruna is laughing and crouching, too, and Tom is shaking with laughter as he chases after Andrei, trying to catch him. Andrei wants to go to the pumpkin flamingos to touch them, but Tom catches him and holds him up on his shoulder.
I look at my son. His chestnut hair is shining in the afternoon sun streaming through the glass. A pink feather is stuck in his hair, and his blue eyes are glittering with joy. The Romanian woman is holding her daughter’s hand, laughing. After ten years, this has been my first contact with another Romanian exile. My cousin Miruna is right there next to me laughing about pink storks. I picture in my mind as clear as a photograph those white storks standing on one leg on the chimneys of peasant houses in a Romanian village as I’m looking and laughing at the pumpkin flamingos. I know Miruna is feeling joy and sadness together, just like me. She’s thinking of how she left everyone and everything behind just yesterday. Maybe this is a good omen for the beginning of her journey as an exile, these funny, ethereal flamingos. Tears of laughter are streaming down her cheeks. I know they are also tears of sadness on her first afternoon in America.
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