We go back to Chicago for the funeral. Andrei and Ionica are puzzled by this death, the first they’ve experienced. They burst into tears at odd moments, and at others they laugh. They cling to me. They understand their grandfather died and won’t be telling them funny stories any more, stories he made up for them at bedtime, stories about his childhood in the town in northern Moldavia. He won’t be giving them more geography and history lessons about the countries of Europe, but really mostly about his own country, the crossroads of all the invasions and calamities in the world.
It’s all raw and harsh and unforgiving. The Chicago cold, my father’s stonelike, lifeless body in the coffin at the funeral home, in his best navy-blue suit. His room in the Chicago apartment, with all his possessions neatly arranged: the Pelikan fountain pen, the poems he wrote with it, the miniature English–Romanian dictionary, the books of Romanian poetry, the gold cigarette lighter. On the wall, the icon of the Virgin Mary that used to hang in his sister’s Bucharest apartment, the one with the blood on her face from the Greek sailor who stuck his knife in it more than a hundred years ago.
There is no comforting my mother. She is dishevelled in her grief. Somebody calls from the hospital about grief counselling. It’s the only thing she finds slightly funny. She doesn’t even get it, it’s so alien to her, these American words. My mother hangs up without a word.
We arrange for the funeral ceremony, pretending it’s all correct and traditional, at the Romanian church in Chicago. There’s nothing I can think to say to my mother to comfort her, except that it’s a blessing he died in his sleep. People always want to die in their sleep.
We even have the special meal for the dead made of barley and powdered sugar. Miruna is with us, too, crying and holding my hand. She sits and reads with the children while my mother and I make some last arrangements for the funeral. We’ve never gathered this way in Chicago, family and friends, and now we’re all sobbing. I am glad to have Miruna here like a sister, to not feel so alien and cut off. I tell her about the time when I was little and so many people in our family were dying, how she was a rosy plump baby eating the lipstick from her mother’s bag and the lost kitten was mewing at the door. Her chicory-blue eyes give me courage.
Andrei and Ionica look sad and beautiful in their little men’s suits. I feel proud of them as I see them through a blur of tears. They are alive and here next to me. They’re shocked to see their grandfather’s still body in the casket. Ionica hides behind me, and Andrei looks troubled. I tell them to say goodbye to their grandfather one last time. I embrace my father and don’t want to let him go. For my children, I should be mature and grown up about this, but I’m not sure what that means. I hold on to him; my mother holds on to him. I want to crawl inside a wardrobe. Death is always ugly, but even uglier when you’re so far from home.
I see my parents dancing at a New Year’s Eve party with coloured streamers and confetti, one of the most beautiful couples in all of Bucharest, people used to say. I see them dancing at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the year before I left. They are both radiant despite the shortages and the secret typewriter and my father’s arrests. They are dancing in our little living room to music so luscious and old-fashioned that it gives the illusion of some luxurious, careless, happy time.
The coffin is being lowered into the ground. The January wind is blowing with a vengeance through our coats and into our faces covered with tears. My children are holding on to me and shivering. We throw the first handfuls of earth. We throw the last handfuls of earth as well. We are standing in the wind torn by our grief.
Both my father and Mihai are dead. The two men who most shaped my life. Now it is time to go back and deal with the ghosts.
Taking the Road Back Home
I RETURNED TO my homeland on the real train to Trieste, only in the opposite direction. I flew with my sons Andrei and Ionica to Italy, from where we followed the trajectory of my departure of twenty years ago, only backward. We strolled around the streets of Rome, and I showed them the Colosseum in front of which I had once stood in a red dress and white shoes with black bows feeling unattached and light like a red balloon. We ate colourful ice cream and pizza margherita, and I drank espresso while my boys drank blackberry Italian sodas in a café on a side street near the Fontana di Trevi.
Then we took the train for many hours during which Andrei and Ionica played cards and word games, tickled and spat at each other, while an older Italian woman stared at them sternly and while I greedily watched the landscapes rolling by, trying to recapture the feelings of twenty years ago. Trying to turn back time. When we arrived in the Trieste railway station I took my two sons by the hand and glided on the shiny marble floors of the elegant hall trying to relive the afternoon when I was in this same spot with Luciana, Letizia and Mario and melted with sadness at the sound of Susanna’s aria from Le Nozze di Figaro that was playing on the transistor of an old man who reminded me of my father. Now there were several groups of Italian students listening to hip-hop and filling the resonant hallway with their loud, cheerful voices.
We strolled around the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia, where Andrei and Ionica climbed on the group statue in the centre. We ate green olives and scampi in the Café degli Specchi, Café of the Mirrors, and I couldn’t help smiling at the irony: seeing myself reflected in the mirrors of a café in Trieste, twenty summers after my rushed and anxious passage through the city in the opposite direction. This time, I listened to the heart of Trieste, a steady and low-sounding beat, the regular steps of the poised Triestines and the nervous steps of new waves of refugees, from Albania, Turkey and Romania.
The morning our train crossed into Romania, dawn was sneaking through the humid pine forests of the Carpathians and jolted my body awake with a shock of recognition. Although there were no signs along the tracks, no announcements of stops with Romanian names, I knew I was on my native soil. I felt it in the way dawn filtered through the tall, symmetrical fir trees. In the way sunflowers swayed in the warm-cool summer air that caressed my face through the open window. I knew it from the smell of wet tree bark, pine resin, and the unique scent of the flower called queen of the night that opened up at dusk and filled the air with its dizzying fragrance until dawn all summer long. I knew it because all my limbs felt the right size, and because I could hear the echoes of my name, my laughter and moans stuck for ever in the valleys.
I came back avid for the smells and tastes of my childhood. Romanians had overthrown the Communist government and killed its leader. The customs officers were polite and didn’t paw through our luggage. Bread and butter were available in the shops with no queuing, no ration coupons. Mămăligă was now served in restaurants where you could pay with a credit card and where people spoke on cellular phones about shady businesses. August 23 no longer meant anything to young people the age I’d been more than two decades earlier, when I fell in love with the boy whose girlfriend had died in a hiking accident, the boy with red fragrant lips, green eyes and black hair.
The files of the secret police were now being officially released and studied, and people were divided between those eager for revelations, vengeance and justice, and those fearful that the meticulous work they’d done during the Ceauşescu years – informing, threatening, intimidating, destroying enemies of the people – was going to be exposed, and they’d lose their positions in the new government.
More than the opening of secret-police files, more than the rocketing rate of inflation, Romanians were excited about their cell phones. So excited, in fact, that a family buried their dead father with a cell phone next to his head – just in case he wasn’t completely dead and might want to call them. The cell phone started ringing in the night, in the grave. The ringing went on every night for a week, and the cemetery guard thought there were ghosts in the cemetery. He contacted the family. They had to unearth the tomb, open the coffin, and take out the cell phone. People who didn’t know the old man had died were still calling his number. After the in
cident, a government statement reported on TV asked people to please refrain from burying cell phones with their loved ones. “Cell phones are for the living,” concluded the newscaster.
I stopped in Braşov at my aunt’s house directly from Italy, without bothering to go to Bucharest. With Aunt Matilda now dead, all of my parents’ friends gone or disappeared, I had no one to see and was apprehensive to visit the city by myself.
After a few days in Braşov, which now looked to me even more beautiful and colourful than I had remembered it, I visited our white rock high above the city. The bells of the Black Church tolled as hauntingly as ever, and I saw us embracing in the purple twilight shrouding the red tile roofs of the city below us, as we had that August 23 so long ago. We had stayed here through the decades, enchanted, faithful. I called our names, Mona, Mihai, across the wide valleys and forests. They burst out in all directions into wild echoes, as sharp as the rocks, spreading over the valley and town. This time I waited. I stood and waited for them to withdraw into the huge bell of silence enclosed by the mountains. So the sleep of infants will be peaceful, and lovers will no longer be cursed.
Watermelon After Twenty Years
I AM TWENTY years older, and as a French poet once said, “I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.” I am climbing the stairs to Nina’s apartment. My body is fuller from having carried my children, there is a powder of lines around the corners of my eyes, there is a fierce glitter in my look from my uprootings and the ambitions I’ve tried to fulfil; my limbs feel stronger and my muscles tighter, my hair is as unleashed as ever, only there are some fine strands of grey in it now. I hear Andrei and Ionica’s voices as they play outside where I used to play and where I listened to Mihai strum his guitar on summer nights so fragrant you wanted to lie on the earth and scream with joy. I trip on a step of the grey-and-white marble stairs I’ve climbed so many times like this, hurried and breathless. It’s them, my own children, I tell myself. Now I have a whole life in the American Midwest.
My children are playing outside with the children of those who were my playmates a few decades ago. Their screams in the summer afternoon resonate through the entire neighbourhood and through time. They blend with the smells of petunias and roasted peppers. A painful recognition flashes through me as I open the door. My uncle is just about to cut up a huge watermelon, the way he always used to when we were little.
“Take this piece here,” he urges me, handing me a piece of watermelon on his big kitchen knife. I eat the juicy watermelon with a piece of bread. The screams of my children and those of the neighbourhood children cross the afternoon. I see myself running like them, in the summer afternoon, swallowing the summer fragrances with an unquenchable thirst. Hide-and-seek – the thrill of holding your breath behind a door of the mean neighbour’s cellar, smelling of cabbage. Rushing like a dart to the nearest tree to be the first, to win, to not be caught, twilight slowly falling and our mothers calling us to dinner.
My uncle asks me about my love life with a wicked smile. My aunt scolds him for being so nosy.
“What business is it of yours?” she says.
“I’m having a conversation with my niece here,” he tells her, laughing.
I haven’t told them that I actually divorced Tom; they still have my wedding picture on their mahogany cupboard in the living room. I just tell them that Tom still has work in Chicago and for the time being he is commuting to Indiana to see the children and that I go to Chicago during vacations. I keep things vague and switch to a different topic of conversation, like the downstairs neighbours. My aunt smiles and she stirs the cabbage soup that my children think is the best soup in the world.
We used to eat watermelon before dinner just as we’re doing now. Meals have always been chaotic in my aunt’s house. We start with dessert, then have soup, then a child comes in and wants to eat just bread and butter, then another comes in and wants fried potatoes, so my aunt starts peeling potatoes.
A neighbour comes to the door, and my uncle invites her in and asks if she wants a shot of vişinata, the sour cherry brandy only Romanians know how to make.
“It could wake up the dead,” says my uncle. “But the dead are better dead,” he adds. “Why would they want to come back to this, this . . .?” My uncle Ion makes a wide sweep of his arm to indicate everything in the world.
The neighbour sits down, and my uncle pours some vişinata. Soon, my head is spinning. I count four different conversations going on at the same time: how it’s better to just see your husband at the weekend, because then you don’t argue about stupid stuff, how the prices of bread and petrol have gone up again, how my children are beautiful and speak Romanian so well, and how we should go to the cemetery to water the flowers on Vera’s and Victor’s and Paraschiva’s tombs.
The neighbour leaves with a bowl of soup my aunt insists she take home for later. And then, my head spinning from the vişinata, I muster up the courage to ask what I have been dying to ask since I have arrived at the station. To ask about Mihai.
“Is it really true he died? How? What was he doing before he died?”
“Yes, it’s true. What a senseless death,” my uncle says.
Nobody knows any details. Nobody wants to talk about Mihai. It’s as if he were a taboo subject. I hear my children scream and laugh outside in the garden, and for a second, giddy as I am from the sour cherry brandy, with the lacy curtains swelling in the afternoon breeze and everything almost unchanged in my aunt’s kitchen, I have the illusion it has all been a dream and I just woke up from a nap. I will soon prepare my afternoon lies to be able to leave the house for a few hours to see Mihai, and I will say I am going to see Cristina downtown or that a group of kids in the neighbourhood is having a volleyball match at another kid’s house. But the piercing sound of Ionica’s voice from outside shakes me back.
I want to ask more. But my jaws are clenched, and the thought of my first love dying in the street hit by a random bullet from the wild shooting in the Revolution paralyses me. As I sit at my aunt’s table, I remember my dream of the two moons. I have a sharp memory of Mariana. I see her toothless smile from my dream, though it was more than twenty years ago.
After we’ve eaten the watermelon, the French fries and the cabbage soup all in the wrong order, my uncle announces he has something to give me. He goes to the pantry where they keep the pickles, the sour cabbage, the preserves and the apples for winter. He comes back with a thick package of my letters and pictures that my mother had given him for safekeeping before they left for America. I take the package and hold it close to my heart, thanking him over and over and wiping tears from my eyes. I go into the bedroom and open it with trembling fingers.
The first letter is dated September 1979. Mihai is answering a letter of mine in which I must have confided to him that someone, a boy, was interested in me. He tells me not to be scared, that he trusts me, that no one can really understand what we want, the way we think and look at our future, that we have five more years to wait until I start and then finish my university studies, and he knows I’m young and I want to dance and go to parties, but what we have is so precious . . . Can I wait, will I be able to wait? Mihai asks in his letter. There is a drawing of me crying from the window of a train, big cartoon tears that fall on the platform. He is there, on the platform to catch them, they fall on his head like big balls, and there is a crack in his head. I laugh at the drawing.
I find a letter that has never been opened. It is yellow and has a few grease spots on the envelope. My name and address are written in small calligraphic letters. I open it curiously and start reading a strangely sappy love letter from a man who recounts all the things he would like to do with me and to me, and all the ways in which he loves my body and my face. The letter veers into the obscene. The ending promises a life of delights next to him in his native provincial town, with me as his wife and working as a schoolteacher. The signature on the back puzzles me: Stefan Dumitriu. My red carnation Securitate man! My shadow
. He was in love with me, in his own sleazy way.
My children rush into the apartment, sweaty and red, asking for food, looking curiously at the package in my hand. They ask what I’m reading. Old letters, I tell them. Old letters from old sweethearts, Andrei says and laughs. My aunt asks them if they want cabbage soup and French fries and watermelon. They want everything.
Encounters Under a Different Moon
I TRY TO follow traces of Mihai. Several of his friends had emigrated, but Radu, his closest friend, still lives in the same house. One fragrant, moonlit evening, I walk up the cobblestone street to his house – the house in whose walled-in garden we had danced and argued so many times. Time shrinks, and I become a seventeen-year-old girl. My hair is flying wildly in the summer night, my heart is pounding out of my chest, I’m running ahead of Mihai on the cobblestones, the sound of my sandals resounding like a little drum in the velvety air. I whistle a tune I make up, a love song, I tell him. I wait for him to get near, and then I run away up the street laughing. He can’t catch me, but then he does and we stop and kiss in the middle of the street, just as Radu opens the door.
And now, I knock on the thick wooden door, and a heavy man with a red face and the grey stubble of a beard opens the door, an American cigarette in his hand. I’d forgotten my American past as I was rushing up the cobblestone street. But when I see the heavy man smoking, the reality of my American life pours through me. Husband, lovers, lawyers, highways under the moon, social workers, parched cornfields, flooded cornfields, tar and whisky on hot humid summer nights, raw freedom . . . the moon is the same, but the smells are different, and I am different and the same. But who in the world is this bearded man puffing his American cigarette?
Train to Trieste Page 27