But then, as we go to gather my parents from their park bench, Miruna holds my hand and looks at me guiltily, as if she’s been hiding something from me. She whispers to me in a raspy voice, “You know, he died.”
I don’t get it. “Who?”
I almost don’t pay attention to her because I am looking at Andrei running to his grandparents. Tom runs after him through patches of brittle leaves that cover the pavement.
“Miruna, who are you talking about?”
“Mihai died,” she says in the same throaty whisper. “He died. He died in the Revolution.”
Why does she have to say the word died three times? Somehow it still doesn’t register with me. He died, he died, he died . . . three times, that verb in the past tense. What does it mean?
On the way to our apartment in the car, I look at the waves of Lake Michigan. I ask myself, Why am I riding in a Mercury Marquis along a green lake with this man beside me, with my child, my parents, my cousin? Then, suddenly, I get it. I will never be able to see Mihai again. Not ever again, as long as I live. I start sobbing in the car wanting him, aching for him. Why did everything have to be so twisted in my life, always a moment too late, a moment too soon? I sob in the car as we are rushing past the high-rise buildings on Lake Shore Drive. Tom looks at me as he drives. He has no idea what’s going on. He probably thinks it’s because of Miruna’s visit, that my joy and relief at having her with me finally have tipped over into something else.
“It’s over,” I say aloud to myself through my cries. “It’s finally over.”
Andrei starts crying, too, because I am and because he doesn’t know what’s over. He thinks Miruna is leaving already, or that we’ll never go back to the zoo again. He asks through his tears, “What, Mama?”
I don’t know what to say to him. I hold his hand and tell him not to worry, it’s nothing. I tell him we’ll be home soon. Later, I put Andrei to bed, and I watch the early sunset out of his bedroom window, with Miruna standing next to me. I am thinking that in classic plays, like the Iphigenia that I saw in Bucharest when Mihai used to work at the tractor parts factory, everything happens during one full rotation of the sun, from sunrise to sunset: arrivals and departures, bloody sacrifices, murders, suicides and deaths, political upheavals, love. Everything during one full rotation of the sun.
My Own Little Wars
IT’S DAWN, WINTER grey dawn in Chicago, a Month after Miruna’s arrival and the news of Mihai’s death. I slide in and out of sleep, restlessly rushing out of my usual nightmares and sliding back into more dreary fantasies. I find myself in the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia in Trieste. It turns out everyone has been waiting for me, because when I appear in the piazza all the noise and the cheering stops, and the hundreds of people gathered there are staring at me.
Two men approach me and take me by each arm and make me walk towards the very centre of the piazza right in front of the big sumptuous palace. I find out that I am to be publicly beheaded. I am seized with terror and try to escape, but their hold on me is strong, and they force me to climb up the five steps that lead to the scaffold that is laid in gold and has red velvet on the square where they are supposed to perform the beheading. I am shaking and thinking of Andrei, who will have no mother, and what they will tell him about me when he wakes up and asks for me; how will they tell him that his mother ended up beheaded in a piazza in Trieste?
The executioner is standing with his back to me, wearing a classic executioner’s hood, waiting for the moment. He turns slowly towards me and lifts up his hood, and I see it is Mihai, clean shaven and smiling. He stares at me both sweetly and frighteningly, the way he did in my dream in which he slit my throat. I know that I am being decapitated because I ruthlessly left my country and my love and my family and because I forgot about everyone, and that this is an act of vengeance. These are my people who are a vengeful and cruel people and who executed their president and his wife in an alley in Bucharest on Christmas Day. I ask Mihai if it was he who also killed Ceauşescu, and he nods with the same smile. This is what we do with enemies of the country, he says slowly, all traitors and enemies, we kill them all, but we have prepared this special feast for you, because you are special, my love.
Tom’s arm is stretched across my chest, and he is snoring loudly. I try to breathe deeply and calm the rapid beating of my heart. I push Tom’s arm away, and I rush into Andrei’s room. He is sleeping on his back, with his mouth slightly open and an angelic smile on his face. I stare at him and try to shake myself from the frightening dream. I touch him gently to assure myself he is there, real and safe. As I go to the bathroom of our new two-bedroom apartment on Irving Park, I feel a wave of nausea rising up in my throat and a recognizable dizziness. Like when I was pregnant the first time. I throw up last evening’s dinner and am crying at the same time because I hate vomiting and I didn’t want to be pregnant again.
I remember my dream and find myself missing Mihai even in his executioner’s cape and hood, his clean-shaven face beautifully framed by his black hair and his green eyes sparkling in the night as he looks at me next to the scaffold in Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia. Mihai is dead, Mihai is dead, I tell myself as I wash my face, as I have told myself every morning since Miruna gave me the news during our eventful visit to the zoo on the day of her arrival in America. I tell myself this sentence every day so that I can better get used to this news. A little bit more every day, but never fully, just like Zeno’s paradox, never fully getting there.
I get dressed in a hurry and go to the Walgreens in the neighbourhood to get a pregnancy test. The Chicago winter air feels unusually stale and stuffy for this time of year. I come back into the apartment slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible and not wake Tom or Andrei. Despite myself I feel a strange sense of contentment when the test is positive. Maybe with this new child, who is definitely and unmistakably Tom’s, our family will be strong and whole, a classic American family, our marriage will get better, Andrei will have a sister or a brother, and I will forget Mihai once and for all. He is dead, and I might as well get over the whole thing, live in the present, and be happy with Tom, Andrei, and our new baby.
But with each new month of my pregnancy I feel farther away from Tom. If only I could have seen Mihai one more time. Everything is so unfinished, and we never properly said good-bye. I drown myself in my work, trying hard to finish my doctoral thesis before the birth of the new baby, and I am focused like the other time on each new movement and the rising of fluids and the life inside my body. I go through the motions of our everyday life, which I pretend is a good and happy life and everything I had ever wished for. Miruna is now living with my parents; I even have extended Romanian family close by.
I defend my thesis on European avant-garde playwrights early in the new year, on a cold Chicago day, trying to control the heartburn mixed with nausea rising in my throat as the professors on my committee ask me complicated questions about performative choices.
Soon after I get my degree I manage to find a position in the theatre department of a small university in Indiana. Crossroads of America say the licence plates on Indiana cars. That’s good enough for me. I am made for crossroads, always choosing this direction or that one, greedy and ambitious, always running up against new obstacles or creating my own. This flat land of crossroads is soothing to my heart. Indiana is a stone’s throw away from Chicago, I console my family on a visit to campus. Andrei can see his grandparents every weekend. I have a teaching job, one chestnut-haired, blue-eyed boy, am expecting another child, and come autumn we will be renting a house on a residential street in a small college town in America.
And Mihai died in the Romanian Revolution, I suddenly think as we are driving back to Chicago. A random bullet hit him in the head during all the shooting on Christmas Day, Miruna said. A hero. But not quite a hero, since the bullet was random. Would he have had to be shot by a deliberate bullet to be a hero? It’s not true that I’ve put him to rest in my mind, because I didn’t see hi
m dead, I’ve never seen his grave. I have never felt his absence in the city at the foot of the Carpathians.
Mihai and Mariana were both killed by head wounds, freak accidents, I think as we get out of the car in front of our apartment building on Irving Park. I’m almost jealous. It’s as if the parallelism of their deaths makes their story compact and coherent, whereas my own story with Mihai hangs like a loose limb, across the years and oceans and foreign lands I’ve crossed. I touch my belly and stand in front of our car trying to be content. I kiss Tom and ask him what we should have for dinner and tell him I want my parents to eat with us tonight. Tom makes his broccoli-and-noodle casserole, and my mother prepares the Romanian meatballs that Andrei loves. I sit next to my father and tell him we should think of visiting our country soon, now that communism and Ceauşescu are dead. He agrees, but now only vaguely.
The summer when we are supposed to move to Indiana before I start teaching in the autumn, there are record floods in the Midwest. They will continue the next summer, too. Flood after flood, until the earth turns mushy and reddish, and crops and houses and vegetable gardens are floating everywhere. It seems I have brought with me the disasters my Romanian ancestors faced at the beginning of the century.
One evening when I feel so estranged from Tom that I might as well be living with one of the neighbours on Irving Park, I tell myself I have to absolutely free myself from this marriage or I will slowly suffocate and die. As I am reading a Brothers Grimm fairy tale with Andrei, Tom starts nagging me about a new credit card bill with purchases I made when shopping with my father on Devon. Andrei starts crying as he hears us fight again, and it is then that I tell Tom I want us to get a divorce, I want us to separate, there is no need for him to move with us to Indiana, I want to be free, free, free. I don’t care about being pregnant with his child, I feel I have to do it now, not wait another moment, that if I wait until the baby comes, I might never have the courage to do it. It’s now. I want my freedom now. Tom stares at me and says, both angry and resigned, “Fine, you’ll have your freedom, if that’s what you want.”
Everything seems to be disintegrating, turning muddy and mushy. I have never achieved that clarity of thought I dreamed of on my train ride through the Carpathians so many years ago. Just more confusion. Giving birth, getting a divorce – they’re all harsher when you’re not on your native soil. You give birth and grieve and divorce, all in a foreign language.
I cry in big sobs when Tom finally leaves. We all have to leave our apartment before the end of the month, when I move to Indiana with Andrei. Tom has to stay in Chicago for another year to finish his graduate degree and his year as a counsellor at the high school. Then he might try to move closer to us and start a practice as a therapist, he says as he takes Andrei in his arms and kisses him on both cheeks. We both cry, despite all the fights and the recriminations through the years. I have a bad, sour taste in my mouth. He says he will come to Indiana to be at the birth, around the time when the baby is due. I realize this must be the single craziest moment in my whole entire life. How many women actually start a divorce when they are pregnant with their husband’s child, I ask myself as I watch Tom ramble aimlessly around our apartment. And not a bad husband either, as Marta always said.
As we stand in the middle of the living room and Tom says goodbye to Andrei and I see our family break in the midst of packages and suitcases, I can’t help questioning what my life is all about. I cry all night, feeling I’ve failed miserably. When you’re a refugee and you fail, it’s even worse. The whole point of becoming a refugee is to start afresh and succeed, to build a new life that’s better than anything your ancestors imagined, better than anything you could achieve in your pathetic homeland burdened with communism and hunger and disasters. Your relatives in Romania have pictures of you at your graduation and your wedding sitting on their mahogany cupboard. They think you’re happy and your life is perfect, and you can’t find a way to tell them the truth.
As Tom is loading the U-Haul, I realize that no one in my family, no one for a hundred years, has got a divorce. And here I am in the middle of the flat, muddy, flooded Midwest, alone with a small child in my arms, with no idea of what to do next.
I wonder what my grandmother would have said in such a situation, the one who found her house ruined by the Russians, with big holes where the electric sockets had been and a couple of ripped-up dogs in the front room, the grandmother who scraped the ground for roots during the famine after the war to feed her children. She would have said, Thank God we’re alive. That’s what women in my family always said.
And I wonder what my maternal great-grandmother would have said, the one who saw her house torn apart by American bombs during the Second World War and dug through the rubble for her music-box mirror. She would have said, Don’t worry. We’re safe. And look at this beautiful baby.
My father regrets every day he wasn’t there to work for the Romanian Revolution. He feels like a coward to have left everything for a country he doesn’t even like. My mother suspects his dissident friends abandoned their secret activities more than a decade ago, after the execution of the generals who attempted a coup. They just faded away or were probably killed.
After dinner, whenever I visit my parents, my father goes back to the bedroom to write poems. He has an electric typewriter all to himself. He writes poems about an exile’s suffering. He was happier when he typed manifestos on a forbidden typewriter. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he gives private lessons in Romanian to a woman named Molly who is preparing to go to Romania; he doesn’t know why. My father thinks she must work for the CIA, that she is secretly working to bring a new and better government to Romania. “Because this new government,” he says, “is made up of just a bunch of recycled old Communists.”
He talks about his childhood more than ever: the cherry and apple orchards, the war when he was a nurse’s aide and he saw wounded soldiers’ brains pulsing through their shattered skulls. Winters, sledding on the hills near his home. The time he jumped into a freezing lake to save a friend who’d fallen through the ice. Only his childhood stories seem to give him pleasure.
My father’s stories also comfort me as I sink into the legal proceedings that eat up all my money and push me into depression. Listening to stories about the Second World War helps me feel less intimidated by greedy lawyers in Ralph Lauren suits. I figure if my family survived Hitler and Stalin, earthquakes, floods and famine, I can survive a few American lawyers. On a sad, hot and humid summer day in Chicago, I get into the U-Haul to move to our new house in Indiana. It is my father who gives me courage to go on and helps me make some sense this time: “Go, Mona. It’s what you have worked for all these years, isn’t it?” Then he quotes from a Romanian play: “Zoe, Zoe, fii bărbată, Zoe, Zoe, be a man!” I kiss him, put Andrei in his seat, and head towards Interstate 90.
Late in the summer, as we are settling in our rented house, the divorce and custody trials move to the Indiana courts. It all becomes senselessly fierce. The lawyers feed on our fears and vulnerabilities, Tom’s and mine. Petitions and motions stuff our mailboxes. Just when Andrei is finally making full sentences in Romanian and English, I get a court motion made by Tom’s lawyer that would take him from me and give custody to Tom. I read it standing in my kitchen as I’m about to prepare supper. Andrei is smearing tomato paste on his face and telling me about a boy named Steen who is mean and spits at everybody at nursery school. The motion says I don’t care enough for my child because I take him to day care and use babysitters. I wonder how much lawyers and judges and the American government know about caring for a child at the same time you’re working a full-time job. I don’t see what’s wrong with day care, where Andrei plays with other children and learns English, where he draws funny pictures of sharks and of himself in the garden with me, with a big yellow sun in the corner of the page and red tulips that are as big as the two of us.
Now more than ever, I want to eat up all the evil capitalists and lawyers I raged again
st that night when I was high on pot and did a headstand in my blue satin skirt. I have a she-wolf’s hunger for blood, for lawyers’ blood.
I am falling through a hole in the ice. Eskimos save me. They feed me raw seal eyes. I can’t find Andrei anywhere. I go out of the igloo and in the distance I see Andrei in the blue down coat his grandmother gave him for Christmas. My steps are getting heavier and I am turning into a block of ice. I am freezing alive, yet I can feel everything and think clearly. I see the blue silhouette disappear in the distance with tiny, waddling steps.
I wake up screaming. Andrei is sleeping in the little bed in my room. I crawl in next to him and hold him against me. He wakes up and asks in Romanian, “Ce mama?” What, Mama?
“It’s nothing, it’s OK,” I tell him. “Go to sleep, I love you.”
He asks me if it’s tomorrow yet. I say, “No, it’s still today, but soon it will be tomorrow and we’ll have to get up.”
Midwestern Floods
THE SUMMER WHEN my son Ionica is born, it rains for an entire week in the midwestern town where I live and teach. An improbable omen, like something from a Latin American novel. Just like it did in 1918 in the Bessarabian town called the White Citadel. The rain taps day and night on the shingles until the roof gives in and starts to leak. We sit in the living room with a pail under the drip that comes from the middle of the ceiling, steadily, mercilessly.
For five days I sit in the living room nursing my new son Ionica and watching the drip, reading petitions and depositions and motions and court orders signed by esquires and honourable judges. Andrei tries to catch the drip on the tip of his tongue. It smells like wet plaster and rotting walls. The feeling of disaster lulls me into a state of indifference deeper than anything I’ve ever experienced before. Now that rain is coming into our house directly from the sky, my entire situation takes on a different light. Natural disasters along with the stack of petitions and court papers give me a strange sense of balance. I feel braver than ever, concentrated on the thought of pure survival.
Train to Trieste Page 24