by Lisa Preston
“Alex and I talked about the children in this picture.”
The woman wobbled, waving her bottle at Gillian with one hand, grabbing at the picture with the other. Gillian held the photo closer. “You talk. Alexandru talks. Not to talk the bad.” The slurring nonsense mixed with spittle on several words made Gillian glad not to be closer to the woman, not to be sprayed.
The old woman swayed in a manner Gillian found first hypnotic, then nauseating. The constant motion induced Gillian to sway in response, matching the behavior even though she wanted to force herself and the old woman to be still.
Agnes called—too loudly—for Gillian to have a drink, then again. With the third push, Gillian took the clear, heavy bottle, nodded, and set it on the table beside her, far from Agnes.
“Can you talk to me?”
“Talk. Talk, talk, talk-talk.”
It would not work, Gillian warned herself, gritting her teeth. Still, she had to try. And whenever could this woman be found sober?
“Alex said some men—”
“Got me. They got me. Dirty men in uniforms.” Agnes cackled, tried to stop herself and ended with a snort that left her wiping two fingers across spittle at one corner of her mouth.
“Agnes, I’d like to talk to you,” Gillian said, feeling real sympathy for the old woman. She went on quietly until she found Agnes calming, leaning forward, then she repeated her last soft question. “Back then, what was it like?”
“Like. Like-like-like.” The words turned to a whimper.
Gillian nodded, a rend of sympathy threatening to split her. She felt for anyone who had lived or died in war. She felt for those who were persecuted. She felt for anyone who was assaulted.
“Please, Agnes, tell me.”
A huge sniffling breath. “Scared. Hungry. Alex-sh-sh. Big hero made us sleep in shit. In shit! You sleep in shit? Alexandru saw that boat and decided. We left in night. In the night. Again in the night.”
Alex opened the front door, lurching on his feet as he took in Gillian and Agnes talking, then called up the stairs, “John, you come and help.”
“He’s gone,” Gillian said. “He walked away.”
Glancing at the old woman, seeing her staring trancelike and mumbling, Gillian swallowed and turned to Alex. “I need to hear more about the children, who they were and what happened to them, what happened to you.”
Alex’s voice sounded robotic. “They sent us back after two years.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. Ask them why. Ask them why they deported us. And then,” he snarled, “then you tell me what they said.”
“So, you were back in Romania …”
“There was no food, no one we knew, no …” he waved a hand to indicate height, “grown-ups who knew us. No one. We had no money at all. Nothing. We found things, stole things, sold and traded things for food.”
Agnes brought both hands to one eye and pantomimed taking a photograph.
Gillian looked at Alex again. “Why is your name inside the camera if she found it?”
“I am older. And I am the man.”
Agnes’s right hand turned in a tiny motion, miming the act of rolling film.
Alex nodded. “She took a picture. We were nearly to Bulgaria then. Walking.”
Gillian knew Agnes shot one picture, then flubbed by rewinding the entire film roll into the canister. The waste had protected the one photo all of these decades.
“My sister wanted to take care of the little ones. But there was barely anything, barely anything to scavenge. Things were very, very bad.”
Gillian nodded. “You weren’t really a bow maker in the old country, were you? You were so young.”
Alex gave a half smile. “I was really the son of lautari. We were really deported for being Roma. We barely survived, and I never saw the rest of my family again, but I took care of my sister. And I really got those children out when we got out.”
“Tell me. You’ve got to tell me.” She turned the photograph toward him. “Why were you all together? What were their names?”
Alexandru Istok pointed to the smallest child in the photo, second in line, and told her again, “That one was called Igor.”
“The others?”
He kept pointing at Igor. “I do not know his family name. He did not remember it. He was about five years old when we escaped, so perhaps three when he was deported. Yes, I think around five when we left Romania for the last time.”
“What happened to him?”
Alex shook his head. Agnes spluttered a giant raspberry, flashing her fingers wide. Alex gave her a hard look then faced Gillian. “He died.”
“He died? How?”
“She can say the others’ names.”
Gillian jerked for pen and paper as Agnes pointed a finger at the faces, naming the boys while Alex paired the names with their stories. Next to Alex was Igor, whom they found at the side of the road and recognized from the camps in Transnistria. The two they found huddled in a bombed-out building were cousins, Yakov and Avraham Tulchinskaya. The next boy was the one who just started following them one day, Garik Reiner, and then there was the other teen boy, Stefan David.
Agnes’s spluttering and gestures fomented to hysterics. Gillian and Alex stepped away from her together.
“Stefff—ann! Stefff—ann!”
“You see?” Alex said with a wave at his sister as he and Gillian talked on the far side of the room from Agnes, in the spot where he could see the sea. “We ended up with one more and then one more. Another little one followed us, with the same story. No parents, no one for them. Like us.”
“Stefan …” Agnes sounded exhausted.
Alex gave a single thrust of his head back over his shoulder, toward his sister. “But not like us, you see? Jews.”
Agnes stared into the middle space, beyond her bottle, not meeting Gillian’s questioning eyes. Pressing her thumb and index finger to her temples, Gillian consciously smoothed her brow and took a breath. Her eyes closed while Agnes muttered and spluttered. Begin again, she told herself. Do it, try.
“Alex, how did Igor die? What happened to the rest of the children?”
“The others went to Palestine. Bah! Jews were paid after the war. Paid.” He finished this with a challenging look and a roar. “The world did not make restitution to the Roma.”
“I, I didn’t know that.” And, she told herself, I’ll have to check. Verify, verify, Kevin told her. Know it, get it right. Gillian quailed at the undercurrent of hatred and hostility in the Istoks’ bitter story. It was something she’d have discussed with Paul only weeks ago, but now she wanted to discuss it with Kevin.
Alexandru made a fist, swinging it near his waist in a subdued way. “And before the war, when the Jews were thrown out of the schools in the village, we were not thrown out. You know why? We had never even been allowed in. But it was bad when Jews were thrown out? Bah.” He finished with a dismissive wave.
“Please, how did Igor die? Just tell me what happened.”
“There were traps in the roads,” Alex said.
“Mines? Land mines?”
Agnes waved impatiently for an audience. “Mines! Mines!”
“Mines in the roads for walking on,” Alex explained.
Gillian tried to imagine hidden ordnance on the Seattle streets she walked and bussed and drove to get to the Istok home. She thought of Paul riding his bicycle to work, of Becky pushing a stroller or walking down a sidewalk with little Phil’s hand in hers. Safe streets. She looked at the children in Romania and thought of a teenaged Alex as their patriarch, the hero.
Agnes whimpered, “Mine, mine. Mine.”
Gillian egged her with a whisper. “What happened?”
“His leg. Pieces gone.” Agnes retched suddenly, producing nothing more than violent noise she followed with belches and coughs, wiping around her mouth with both hands. The rank smell of alcohol and bile sent Gillian recoiling. Agnes’s stained, sticky fingers reached for her. The old d
runk wanting to touch her, it was too much. Gillian yelped without meaning to, flinching as Agnes leaned forward.
“Whose leg?” Gillian asked her quickly, trying to keep the rising discomfort down, making herself not shriek. “Alexandru’s?”
“Horrible …” The words were slurred. “Mine … Stefan.”
“Please, tell me about it.”
Agnes reached for her bottle and Gillian leaped to stop her, to keep the words flowing and the alcohol capped. “No, please, talk to me. Tell me.”
“Sh-ht. Give my bottle.”
With Gillian whimpering—please, no—and Agnes moaning, bleating like a lost child as she tugged on the gin bottle with both hands, the bottle slipped between the two of them and crashed to the stone floor, shattering and stinking.
“I’ll clean that up,” Gillian said, swallowing, choosing her efforts as Alex rose and came back with a towel. “What did you do? What happened?”
“I wanted to go to America. I had to take care of my sister. We had to leave.”
“How did you leave? What did you do?” She sopped up the mess, placing the shards in the towel, bundling.
“We walked south, following the sea. Mostly at night, in the evenings. Sometimes, we traveled very early in the mornings.”
“And the children?”
“The children. The children.” He shrugged. “Agnes clucked to them and they followed like little chicks. I saw her mothering and knew that was not bad. Bad was when the soldiers took interest in you. Saw you being what you were born to be, being Roma. Bad was them seeing you help Jews.”
“What would they do?”
He shrugged again and gave one quick grin. “Without it happening, you know it is a bad day when soldiers catch you doing something they don’t like.”
“These children …” Gillian began again.
“In Bulgaria, I turned them over to a group sending them to Turkey and then to Palestine. They paid me very little.”
“Getting to Bulgaria,” she pressed. “You didn’t walk all that way.”
“The boat!” Agnes shrieked.
Alex nodded. “I told you. I stole a wooden boat and rowed the Black Sea with bloody hands.”
“Tell me about the boat,” Gillian asked, framing a picture in her mind of a worn wherry, knowing she would love a picture of the Black Sea coastland. She’d already looked up Constanţa and the land to the south.
At last, Alex’s story came faster. “The boat was tied out in the water, far out, in a place where the beach was muck and rocky. The tide was out, but we could not wait. We were hungry and very tired and the children were getting slower and quieter. It is good for them to be quiet with their voices, but you see, children should not really be quiet. It is a bad sign. And they got quiet after Igor stepped on the mine and died. They were a little sick, I think. So thin. And one was hurt.”
“Stefan!” Agnes said.
“They could not get out to the boat, not in that muck. Hundreds of meters. The boat was tied, and I had to take them out to it two at a time.”
“No!” Agnes snapped, holding up one finger.
Alex acknowledged her with a wry half smile at the rebuke. “I helped my sister first, of course, carrying one little one.” He pointed again to the photo, to Garik Reiner, beside Stefan David. “He was good, like Igor. Igor was a good boy.”
Agnes’s voice blared, stiffening both Alex and Gillian. “Good God. Good. G-good boy. Eeh. Garik … was brave. Eeh did not cry. I cried, some little. Alexandru said to quiet. Voices. Lights.”
Alex nodded, relaxing a little as the outburst died down. Gillian looked at him and also thought they might be okay to continue. She prodded, “So you helped them all out to the boat and …”
“No, no, no-no-no,” Agnes spluttered with a rising voice.
“Silence!” He turned to Gillian. “Come. We will talk in the garden.”
Gillian looked from one to the other, then tried to do what Alex resorted to, ignoring Agnes. But the woman was fuming, shaking her finger at him, then at Gillian, spluttering with indignation. She rose to her feet, pointing at them, at the photo. “Alexandru left him.”
Alex cut a hand across the air in front of his sister then turned his back, facing Gillian, saying over his shoulder, “Be quiet. Be quiet now.”
The old woman bleated, reaching for Gillian. “He left Stefan.”
Looking from one to the other, Gillian asked quickly, “He left Stefan? Tell me what happened.”
“He left Stefan!” Agnes looked rabid, throwing her hands high and howling at the ceiling.
Oh no, Gillian thought, a rush of long-stymied comprehension flooding her. She nodded grimly, understanding. Yes, I get it now.
“Not all of the children got to the boat,” Gillian said, less as a question, more a sorrowful acknowledgment and a request for an explanation she needed to hear.
Alex shook his head at Gillian. “I could not do it. You see?”
She nodded and spoke to Agnes while looking at Alex. “He couldn’t go back. Not even for one more. There were soldiers. With guns, of course. Germans? Russians? Nearby?”
Alex shook his head. “They were locals, what do you say … militia?”
“Militia,” Gillian agreed.
“Garda.” Agnes’s voice held a hardness that seemed sober, as though anger could temporarily erase the toxic alcohol from her mind and body.
“Like the ones who had her.” Alex’s voice crackled bitterness at everyone and everything. He spoke as though soiling his sister before his houseguest. Still, he could hardly look at Agnes, Gillian saw.
After all this time, decades of living in the West, did he think less of her for the victimization? Gillian swallowed, deciding how to acknowledge the revelations. She looked at Agnes, who looked right back with such intensity that Gillian leaned away from the woman.
“He left him!” Agnes’s stale alcoholic’s breath poured out.
Alex waved one hand to Gillian, giving his side of the story in a reasonable voice laced with a plaintive tone. “I told him to wait. I took the last two little ones out to the boat—”
“You left him!” Agnes screamed on top of Alex’s explanation.
“I had to get the little ones first.”
“You left him alone!”
Alexandru looked out the window, to the garden. “He was oldest.”
“He was hurt.”
Gillian looked back and forth between them. “Hurt?”
“His leg,” Agnes slurred, foggier sounding as she drank in the memory. “Could hardly walk. Hands bloody from the stick he used as a crutch.”
“The land mine,” Alexandru said, looking now at the stained rug. “When it killed the youngest one, Igor. Blew him to nothing.”
Was it not the stink of urine and alcohol, Gillian wondered, staring at the floor with Agnes, or the air of this old house? Was it the past that reeked here?
His jaw thrust forward, Alex looked away from the tense women. “It would not have worked. I could not go back for him.”
Agnes’s accusations came immediately, her voice piercing. “We could have—”
“It would not have worked!”
“He was—”
“The men were coming.”
Agnes sobbed, gasping to say, “You should have gone back.”
Alex roared, “Bah! It could not have worked!”
As Alex went on, Gillian reeled with a bare understanding of why Agnes was a wretched drunk, and why her brother had been silent for decades about having fed and guided those children out of war-torn Romania. Alexandru Istok had never taken credit for rescuing orphans because he had left one behind.
He’d have left them all if he had to.
She understood, too, why she would not cover this story, why it was too painful to expose.
She called Kevin and told him she was done.
“Let’s talk,” he said. “My place?”
He gave her the address, and she went to his rented condo.
> “This story is not working out at all,” she told him when he ushered her in.
Discovering she had finite patience, finite compassion had sickened Gillian, and it was sickening to encounter like limits in Alexandru Istok. He’d shepherded children along for money, ready to ditch them any moment, taking a dim view of the other orphans. Persecuted and stripped of all he had known, he somehow failed to fully empathize. Was he damaged by his past, as Gillian had been broken down by hers? Or because they never experienced being properly built up, could they not grow into decent people?
“He’s not righteous.” She drew in a double breath and threw Kevin a defiant glance. “Alex helped those children as long as he could, and as it turns out, he did get some of them out, but he left one behind and he’d have left them all anytime if things got worse. Besides, he did it for money. He said a guy in Bulgaria gave him money for helping the kids out.”
Kevin gave her a considered expression. “Maybe anyone in that situation would have. Or maybe a lot of people would have. At any rate, it’s true that not many people have been in such a situation.” When Gillian only glared at him, he added, “Not every hero has to be sympathetic.”
“It’s pathetic, the farthest thing from sympathetic.”
“Not the farthest thing. You’ve still got a guy who was orphaned by Axis actions, deported, returned with trainloads of other orphans. A guy who took care of and guided other children. It’s human, very human. And now it’s here. It’s actually exactly what you would have hoped for in the project. Cross the river, Gillian.” Kevin said it while beckoning for her to release the keys and coat she clutched, to sit in his condo’s living room of glass, leather, and steel. His eyes and eagerness gleamed. “Don’t back off, not now.”
“No, I’m not going to …” She put her head in her hands.
“Good.”
“… do the story.” She finished without looking at him, shunning his emphatic tone.
Kevin grabbed her wrists. “Are you crazy?”
“The story. It’s too …”
“It’s gold,” he insisted. “You’ve got to go for it, get it done. This is it.”
Gillian’s voice was dull. “No.”
“Come on, is your ponytail too tight? You’re not thinking about the story, your career, your future.”