Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  “Is Radu home?” I ask.

  “Radu!” he shouts behind him. “You have a visitor!” He kisses my hand, as many Romanian men still do, and tells me he is Dan, Radu’s cousin. I smile and feel slightly more at ease.

  It was in this yard that Mihai and I danced and argued about whether or not we would leave the country. It was in Radu’s house that we danced all the dances in the world that crazy New Year’s Day after which Mihai made love to me in the snow on the hill behind the house and after which Anca Serban scared me out of my wits by stopping me in the middle of the cold wintry night and telling me that Mihai was with the secret police.

  “Who is it?” says a familiar voice, though it is rougher now. Radu appears from the darkness, also smoking an American cigarette. It seems that Romanians are now making up for all the years of cigarette shortages. He is holding a glass of what looks like whisky in one hand, and his other arm is around the waist of a woman in a black dress so tight and so low cut that I feel like tucking in her breasts so they won’t pop out. I have seen women dressed like that everywhere on this trip. Freedom, it turns out, comes with popping breasts and glue sniffing and many, many American cigarettes.

  Radu doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see me.

  “Do you remember me?” I ask.

  “How could I not remember you?” he answers. “Mona Maria Manoliu. How lovely to see you again. Do you want something to drink?” he asks.

  My need to talk about Mihai prevails over the unease I feel in the dark living room. I take a drink. Whisky, why not? Radu looks me up and down, and I remember how, two decades ago, he watched Mihai and me argue for a long time, smiling cunningly. We probably drank ţuică that night. The liquor spreads its warmth through my veins.

  The night is sweet and fragrant. Music is playing in the garden, Are you lonesome tonight? We have moved into the garden from the dark living room, where it’s cooler and we can see the stars. The woman with the tight dress stays inside.

  Gradually, I ask Radu to tell me about Mihai. I want to know about the Mihai I never saw, Mihai when I wasn’t with him. What did he do the other months of the year, when I was back in school in the capital? Who were his friends? And the rest: the years after my departure, the Revolution. How exactly did he die?

  Radu’s head snaps up. “Who told you Mihai is dead?” he asks.

  “My cousin Miruna, when she came over to America soon after the Revolution. And my aunt and uncle, here, now, they both confirmed it. You mean you didn’t know?”

  Radu shakes his head and reaches for another cigarette. “He’s not dead,” he says. “He is very much alive. With a son, too.”

  A breeze passes by and cools my forehead. There are steps on the cobblestone outside the stone fence, in the street. The glass of whisky is shaking in my hand and the ice in it is jiggling. I am about to drop the glass. Radu leans over and places it on the little iron table between us. I stare at him in disbelief, look up at the orange, indifferent moon. Tears are flowing down my face. Radu leans over again and takes my hand. I try very hard to find my voice.

  “Is this a joke?” I ask Radu. “This sounds like some bad American film where the hero is supposed to be dead and then he shows up with amnesia. If you’re making this up, you’re very cruel.”

  “Sometimes life has more clichés than the films,” he tells me with a shrug. He puts out his cigarette in the copper ashtray.

  “Why does everybody say he’s dead?” I ask, irritated.

  “Who’s everybody? Your relatives, right? What do they know? They’ve always lived sort of isolated. It’s true Mihai was wounded on Christmas Day, the day they shot the Ceauşescu. That much is true. He was shot in the leg. Ah, Mihai took to the streets on that day like a fiend.

  “You know how gossip flies around here. There was such confusion, such madness. There were so many false rumours during those days . . . We didn’t know who was who and what was what. We didn’t even know who was shooting whom.

  “Somebody must have seen him fall down and assumed he was dead.” A shadow of sadness and fatigue crosses Radu’s face. “I’m really sorry, Mona, but I haven’t seen him in ages,” he concludes.

  Radu lights up another cigarette, and his gesture reminds me of Mihai and the way he always lit up a cigarette in our tense moments or during a fight. I study his face closely in the moonlight. It took me about a decade to get used to the idea that Mihai was dead, through the years of my marriage to Tom, having a second child, my legal battles, planting gardens, teaching, directing plays. I was trying to understand the full enormity of the fact that Mihai was dead and that any possibility I would ever see or talk to him was non-existent. What if Radu is playing with me? What if it turns out he truly is dead, again?

  “He has a son, you say? Is he married?” I ask.

  “He’s a widower. His wife died of cancer a few years ago. They had moved farther north, in the Făgăraş area. Mihai was happy to live at the foot of the mountain. They had a good marriage. He was quite shaken by her death.”

  “Prove it!” I hear myself say to Radu, so loudly that I can almost hear the echo of my voice in the little garden at the foot of the mountains.

  “Prove it? Prove what? Are you crazy? Who do you think I am?” Radu answers, drinking up his whisky in an angry gulp after which he slams the glass on the iron table.

  “Yes, prove it, show me something to prove that he is indeed alive,” I insist and shove my whisky glass into his.

  He laughs and gets up from his chair.

  “You asked for it, Mona! Watch out, don’t play with stuff like that!”

  He goes into the house and brings out his cell phone together with a little notebook. He opens it and looks at it briefly, then dials a number and hands me the phone, saying with a winner’s smile:

  “Here you are, you’ve got your proof, Mona!”

  I don’t know what to do with the phone, and as he places it in my hand I try to get rid of it as if it were burning. I hear the ring twice, three times, and then it stops. I hear a voice, a man’s voice, saying: “Hello, who is it?” I drop the phone on the cobblestones of the garden, knock over the glass of whisky that spills all over my skirt. I lean over desperately trying to get to the phone and to hang up. The voice is still saying, “Hello, anybody there?” A faraway voice, deep, familiar, a little hoarse, a voice that I would recognize out of a million voices: its syncopated rhythm, elongated vowels, and then suddenly the rushed syllables at the end of the words, and that hoarse edge that used to drive me crazy with desire. I wait until he hangs up, and I hear the dial tone.

  Radu comes over and holds me while I let myself cry for a good ten minutes, the way I have wanted to do for so long. I never had the time or the strength to let myself do it. I had always thought that if I did, I would never stop, and for the rest of my days I would do nothing else, instead of working, raising children, living. When Radu asks if I want to call again, I just shake my head that No, I can’t, not now.

  “All right. Let’s start again. I believe you. You certainly produced your proof,” I say, laughing. I want to know everything about Mihai, who he was during those years. The sound of his voice is still resonating inside me like a deep echo in a wide valley, Hello, anybody there? . . .

  “What do you mean, who he was? It’s taken you two decades to ask that?” Radu snaps, as if reading my thoughts. “Mihai was a good man. Something of a hero, you might say. But . . . you knew this, didn’t you?” he adds, genuinely surprised. “You were the one in love with him. No?”

  There is sorrow in Radu’s voice. How could I not have felt it, sensed it, known it? Were my instincts so atrophied by fear and suspicion that I couldn’t truly understand what Mihai was all about? But I saw him again, the black leather jacket, the green piercing eyes, and his rushed gestures. His sudden fits of anger when we talked politics.

  I look Radu straight in the eyes. “I didn’t have a clue of what was going on then; all I knew was that I loved him; that my father was
doing all kinds of dangerous things, and . . . there was a night when a friend of Mihai’s, Anca, told me he was secret police. She sounded so real, and so frightening.”

  Radu is staring at me with an ironic look, as if challenging me to convince him of something. The moon is now above our heads and it looks cold and unromantic. A different moon. I remember with a shudder the moment on the cold winter night when Anca scared me to death with her words.

  “So you trusted some crazy woman in the street warning you about Mihai more than everything that you and Mihai lived together?” Radu says, crossing his arms.

  “Go to hell, Radu, just go to fucking hell,” I tell him. “Tell me the damn story, tell me what exactly happened then.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you, although you are mean and you curse at me like a peasant,” Radu says, laughing. “Mihai worked in the same group as your father did. I’m not quite sure whether they knew of each other before you two fell in love, or whether Mihai got in on it later. It doesn’t matter. And yes, unlike you and your family and the Bucharest circles you moved in, Mihai was something of a Marxist, though I guess he questioned that often enough. He actually didn’t think socialism was bad in itself. He just thought, well, that all the terror and censorship and secret police stuff were bad and that he had to do something about it. In that way he was sort of like the early Communists, who were the true believers. But he knew how you felt about all that, so he never dared to reveal to you that side of himself. That’s why he could have given you the impression he was secretly working for the Party.

  “They all wanted to protect you: your father, Mihai, even Cristina. And even Anca – in her roundabout way she inadvertently ended up protecting you.”

  “Why the hell did I need all of this protection?” I shout. “What was I, an eggshell or something?”

  “You say that now,” says Radu and he pours himself another drink. “But you seem to have forgotten how things were then. How we all felt under siege. That we had to be suspicious and hide things from each other all the time.

  “It’s true they wrote manifestos,” Radu goes on. “They did try to send as much information and news about human rights violations to the people they knew at Radio Free Europe as they could. Once Mihai understood how the Party betrayed even the proletariat, the very class in whose name they were supposed to rule, he took on the dissident cause with a vengeance. Did you know about your father’s manuscript? It was something like a report, a memoir of everything that he and others he knew had been going through. Like a testimonial. He wanted to be . . . well, sort of like the Solzhenitsyn of Romania. And Mihai tried to get that manuscript out into Germany through one of his German friends here in Braşov who had got a passport to reintegrate his family in Munich.”

  Radu seems genuinely saddened by the news of my father’s death, though he had never met him in person.

  “I have heard of him quite a bit from Mihai, I feel I almost know him,” Radu says. I am moved that Mihai actually spoke about my father to his friends, as if he were a close relative.

  “Yes, I heard my father once say something about a book, a memoir of sorts . . . very soon before he died,” I say, remembering that moment in his room in Chicago when he was coughing and smoking himself to death. I ask Radu to please go on, tell me more, tell me everything he knows.

  He is heated up by the story, and he seems to enjoy telling it. His face is flushed, his eyes are shiny, and his receding hairline gives him an almost patrician air.

  I feel unusually calm as I am processing this. The dew starts setting in, and my arms feel moist.

  “Well, you get the idea. The guy changed his mind at the last minute, and had to return this piece of writing to Mihai. The Securitate knew there was a compromising book of some sort floating around but couldn’t quite figure out what exactly it was. After Pacepa’s defection they had all got somehow disoriented. And then at other times they would get violent and diabolic, to compensate for it. That’s why they barged into your house that time and vandalized your apartment. We all heard about that night, Mona. But they were somehow without a clear direction.” I am amazed that Radu knew so much about my life and our daily torments. Clearly, what I had thought my life to be then was a very different thing.

  “Mihai left Bucharest because he wanted to protect you, not because he couldn’t hack Bucharest. Well, it wasn’t his favourite city in the world, it’s true, and he did miss the mountains. But the real reason he left is because he wanted to distance himself from you and your father so you wouldn’t be in any more danger than you already were. And for a while, around the time you left the country, he pretended to work for the Securitate, he would just meet up with some of them and tell them things they already knew, but with the air of it being something new. In any case, what mattered is that he tried to create the illusion they could count on him and this way sort of get them off his back. And yours. I believe he was in touch with Petrescu, your dad’s former student, quite often. Mihai could be such a good actor sometimes.”

  “What happened to the manuscript?” I ask, stretching out my skirt to cover my legs, as I am getting chilly from the night air. I can’t imagine it was anything that was going to produce a government coup. But I know it was important to my father; I am pretty sure it must have recorded the story of our sufferings during that time, the fear, the starvation, the cold in the winter, the overall despair. I know it from the wild look in my father’s eyes that time when he mentioned it in between fits of coughing.

  “Mihai kept it for a while. He took it back with him to Braşov after he left Bucharest. Then he gave it to Anca, who had promised him she was going to get it over the border into Yugoslavia. Anca was in contact with the woman who helped you escape – Bielna, Baljina, what was her name? I have no idea what happened with it from there. I should ask you, I guess, you were the one who met with this Serbian woman – did she ever tell you anything about it?”

  “Biljana?” I say as my mouth drops open in shock. “What do you mean, Anca and Biljana? How did all of this happen, how were all these people in contact with each other? How was that possible?”

  “Well, it was. We Romanians, we may be whores at times, but we aren’t stupid. Romanians weren’t nearly as organized as the Polish Solidarity with their Walesa, for example, but there was some action going on. Some got caught, it’s true, some disappeared or got killed, others got weak and informed on each other, but others didn’t. The really smart and tough ones didn’t, I guess. Mihai was one of them. He was lucky, too. Like in November 1987,” Radu says with an almost dreamy smile.

  “What in November 1987, what happened?” I ask.

  I find out from Radu that in November 1987 the workers from the largest factories in Braşov were told they weren’t going to get paid that month, so they started a mini-revolution of sorts. They took to the streets, barged into the city hall, broke the portraits of the leaders, threw chairs through the windows. And then the tanks came. Mihai was among the people inside the city hall, but he escaped from the overall chaos unharmed. Apparently in the late eighties, during the Gorbachev years, there were even Soviet delegations that would suddenly appear and stay in factories for periods of time, inciting the workers to revolt. Then they would disappear. The big Revolution was being slowly prepared from all sides, from the inside and the outside, it seems.

  “The two had to coincide,” says Radu, “the despair and the will of the people, the conglomeration of dissident movements and a certain revolutionary spirit, with the will of the bigger powers and the overall world climate. It all mattered, I think. Even your father’s work, everything . . .”

  “My father?” I ask.

  “Yes, your father, of course. Although your father was something of a danger to himself sometimes, being so fiery and impulsive. On the other hand, that’s what saved him, because they never fully took him seriously; they always thought he was just a loudmouthed literary poetic type who talked more than he acted. But he tried to do a lot, your fath
er did. In the end, every little bit mattered.”

  I sit for a while staring at Radu, letting all the news work its way through my mind. He stares back, takes another sip from his whisky, and smiles at me. Mihai’s voice with its hoarse edges is echoing in my head. If only I could turn it all back, relive everything but with the knowledge I have now. But what’s done is done. Twenty years ago, in the Trieste train station, I heard Susanna was singing of the pleasures of love in the garden, when there was so much ahead of me, so much hope, and so much to live for. Susanna was with her Figaro just a few steps away, waiting to trick her only to reveal his love for her. It all ends happily for Susanna. But what am I supposed to do now?

  What really happened to my father’s writings, what happened with all of these people and this confused movement of dissent during the eighties, with all of its tentacles and meandering roads? Maybe Biljana still has the damned manuscript in her apartment in Belgrade, or maybe she did send it to Radio Free Europe and they didn’t do anything with it. Maybe they did read parts of it, but it was all too late; the Revolution was already on its way.

  Radu seems to be reading my thoughts and goes on. “Yes, it’s possible that someone, maybe even Anca, met Biljana in the Belgrade train station and gave her the manuscript. By the way, Anca was madly in love with Mihai and would do anything for him. But mad as she seemed, she was a tough one. She was one of the few who actually played the double game for a while without getting caught. She had first infiltrated the Securitate and then gave the people in Mihai’s group information about their intentions. The scare she gave you that night about Mihai was both a political move and one of love and jealousy. She wanted you to get away from him for personal reasons. But also everybody else, including Mihai himself, sort of tried to make you distance yourself from him – for safety reasons. It just about killed him, you know. Knowing that you suspected him. He just let that happen, I guess, and never tried to fully dispel your suspicions; he was doing the best he could. Your father’s student, that Petrescu, he was his saving grace, you know. And yours, too. In all the madness you were sort of lucky. You had your lucky star, as they say,” Radu says philosophically and laughs.