The crowd drank. When Bogdan translated, everyone cheered and drank again. Joannah happened to be standing near the violinist, who put down his instrument, took her face in his hands, and kissed her mouth as though they were lovers. She was shocked by the taste of him—bitter like tobacco and sweetly poisonous like the wine. She found she was not eager to pull away from this man—the kiss felt like a kiss goodbye, and she had to blink back more tears. When he resumed playing, she saw his two front teeth were capped with gold.
A dozen people, adults and children, joined hands, and before Joannah could ask Bogdan if he’d found any food, a young woman pulled Joannah along. More dancers joined hands with them until nearly everyone at the party was racing around, bumping hips and shoulders, ducking beneath arms that were lifted for them. When the line joined its ends to form a circle, the bride and another girl jumped into the center and spun, hands locked, heads tipped back, sweat plastering hair to their foreheads. When they stopped spinning, the two girls collapsed into laughter in each other’s arms. Joannah fell away exhausted. She found her wine and finished it; before she even caught her breath, the straw-hatted boy filled her jar again. Joannah noticed the hat had a daisy stuck in its brim.
The pretty girl who had twirled with the bride pulled Joannah aside and said, “Anti-baby?” The rims of her eyes had been darkened a charcoal color.
Joannah shook her head and shrugged. She was breathing hard from the exertion; her belly was shrunken and aching from hunger. Where was the food? Where was the feast?
The girl held out both hands as if to receive holy waters and repeated the phrase more anxiously, “Anti-baby?” When it became clear that Joannah wasn’t going to comply, the girl spat at the ground and stomped away in her cracked plastic sandals.
Joannah didn’t mind not understanding the people who spoke to her, except the three other women who later repeated the phrase “anti-baby” with varying degrees of urgency. Apart from her hunger, she loved being here with all this energy coursing through her and around her. She found Bogdan chatting with the boy in the straw fedora, whom he introduced as the bride’s little brother. “There is most beauty in village,” he said in a heavy accent. He held out an arm expansively and slurred something like, “Rominadas arpen peel.”
“Are you drunk?” Joannah asked.
“Cerpingly not.”
“Then tell me, what is anti-baby?”
“Anti-baby is pills.”
“Why are these girls asking me for pills?”
“Our Great Leader forbids pills,” said Bogdan. “In order that womens can have childrens.”
“Birth control pills? But what if they don’t want to have childrens? Children.”
“Romanian women wants five childrens. These womens must to be gypsies and mud-jars.”
“Mud-jars?”
“Hungerish people.”
“Hungry people? I’m the hungriest, Bogdan. Where’s the food?” She glanced at her watch. Six-thirty. Her sisters and the men would be eating dinner now.
“From Hungary, this next country.” He gestured vaguely in a direction that may or may not have been west and adjusted his glasses. “Romanian womens today are wanting five childrens.” He spread out his big, square hand as if to prove the number five.
Joannah imagined giving birth in Romania; she would be lying on a metal table, arms restrained as though she were the mistress of Frankenstein, legs spread wide. Flies would perch around her lashes like ghoulish eyeliner, drinking from her corneas, sucking up her tears before she could weep them. Mr. and Mrs. Great Leader would stare down at her from portraits on the wall as she performed her duty for the state. Bogdan continued to hold up his hand signifying the five children, and Joannah resisted an urge to fold her own fingers between his.
Later, she saw the pregnant bride lean into the groom, pressing him against the ramshackle house. As the two began to kiss, the groom’s hands slid along the bride’s back, dragging the loose fabric of her blouse and skirt up and down. Joannah felt her own body grow languid, her own lips swell, and she wrapped her arms loosely around herself. The groom’s hat fell off, and he did not retrieve it. When the music started up again, the bride dragged the bare-headed groom back toward the violinist and began another circle dance with all those who remained standing, including Bogdan and Joannah. The female singer had gone. Most of the men were now propped against chunks of wood, as the groom’s father was, or were passed out flat at the edges of the courtyard, their bodies strewn about like scraps of fat cut from a steak.
“We are too late. The food is all gone,” Bogdan reported, when the sun was starting to set. “This boy says that persons from the village are eating all the lamb kebabs for lunch.”
“There’s got to be something,” Joannah said.
Bogdan conferred with the boy, whose eyes suddenly lit up.
“Maybe this boy can find you something. He says he is trying.”
The boy returned twenty minutes later, and he was holding out a small cast-iron frying pan, and in it were three miniature fried eggs with shiny yolks the size of marbles.
“Why are they so small?” she asked and blinked, wondering if the problem was in her perception. How drunk was she?
“I’m telling this boy you like eggs. These are eggs from this bird, graur. This boy knows where is a nest. I don’t know in English. In Russian is skvorets.”
Any other time Joannah might have questioned eating the eggs, but she scooped the shining fried triplet from the pan and ate it with her hands. The buttery eggs slid into her mouth and down her throat almost without her tasting them, and yet her impression was that they were the best thing she’d ever eaten.
“Delicious!” she declared. “Thank you. I mean, mulumesc.”
“This boy says you speak Romanian very well,” Bogdan said.
Joannah lifted the boy’s hat and stroked his bristly head. She smiled at Bogdan, wondered if together they could have a child like this. When Bogdan’s eyes registered alarm, she wondered if he could read her mind. The boy grabbed his hat and ran away, still carrying the empty pan. Afterward Joannah kept feeling the eggs inside her as though they had sprouted feathers.
Her eyes adjusted to the growing darkness, and when the clouds blew past to reveal the bright moon, the foreheads and eyes of the people around her shone. The groom appeared from nowhere and grabbed Joannah and spun her, handling her shoulders and arms and hips, pulling her to him and pushing her away. Her feet moved in synchrony with his, as though they’d danced together a thousand times, as though Joannah had been the one kissing him against the house. When the music sped up, the bride pushed the groom aside and locked hands with Joannah. They spun in the center of the circle until their grip broke and they flew apart. The bride stumbled back, laughing, and reached to pull Joannah up from the ground, but just as Joannah smelled the girl’s sweet breath, the groom tugged the bride away with his arms around her swollen middle.
“How you are enjoying Romania?” Bogdan asked when he appeared beside her.
“I am loving Ro-man-yah,” Joannah said, imitating his pronunciation, and mopped sweat from her face with the bottom of her pink tank top. “But I’m so hungry. I need a dozen more bird eggs to fill me up. Can we still get dinner at the hotel?”
“I will tell you my grandfather is from these places,” Bogdan said.
“Tell me about your grandfather, Bogdan. Was he a vampire?”
“My grandfather is miner of gold from the mountains,” he said, pointing up into the air, perhaps toward a mountain. Then he let the finger fall.
When the music started again Joannah turned to look and fell against Bogdan, almost knocking them both to the ground. Bogdan caught her and held her there, letting her weight rest against his hips.
Joannah looked up into Bogdan’s face and saw something new. She felt as though he had just produced for her a platter of prime rib, as though a black-and-white scene had suddenly gone to blood-soaked color. She wrapped her arms around him. She had
been unfair in thinking him foolish this morning, for he was clearly wise in his knowledge of English and Romanian, wise in knowing the secrets of this place. His grandfather might have mined the gold for her necklace. She remained pressed against him, but instead of wrapping his arms around her, he just looked at her, astonished, and breathed the three syllables of her name, “Jo-ann-ah.” The moon appeared from behind a cloud and revealed that his eyes, through his glasses, were gray-green and out of focus.
The heat of his body made Joannah realize she should not merely have dipped her hands and feet into those Romanian streams—she should have submerged herself and let the cool currents wash over her. She imagined food she’d never ordered in Chicago restaurants: rare rib-eye steaks, a filet mignon wet with juice. She wanted to tell Bogdan about how she loved the women on the hillsides, but when she opened her mouth to speak, she couldn’t find words in English any more than she’d been able to yell for help in Romanian at the café. At critical moments there was never anything to say. She’d had nothing to say to her mother in that moment of lucidity when her mother gripped her hand and begged with her eyes to not be sent to a nursing home.
“We must to go,” he said. “And I must to do one thing.”
She watched Bogdan walk to his bicycle and take something out of his pack. He then embraced the groom and gave him the disposable razor that one of the American men had given him. Bogdan called it “Zhillette,” the first consonant unbearably soft. Joannah gave the bride a twenty-dollar bill and watched her secrete it in her stretched-out bra. Then Joannah knew she could not let the girl enter married life with such a poor bra to hold her beautiful swollen breasts. Joannah slipped the sweaty pink thing out through the armhole of her tank top. The bride clutched the fabric and kissed Joannah’s cheek.
“We must to go,” Bogdan said. “These people are waiting for us in Deva.”
“Is the kitchen still open?”
“Much food is in Deva. Eggs for breakfast. From chickens.”
“And tomorrow we’ll go to Dra-cool-ya’s castle.”
“Is three days by bicycle,” Bogdan said.
She swallowed the last of her wine, rubbed her finger along the bottom of the glass to get the dregs—solid food, she told herself, delicious.
“I have to give her something else,” Joannah said. She was fumbling to unclasp her gold chain when Bogdan grabbed her hand and pulled her toward their bicycles leaning against the house. As she followed him out the gate and toward the road, the fiddle started up behind them again, sadder and slower than before.
In the daylight, the woods on the other side of the road had looked fresh and lush, inviting. Now the densely leafed branches seemed to forbid entry, and the whole forest was inhaling and exhaling like some root-bound leviathan regaining its strength after a fierce battle. Wood smoke from a cookstove chimney swept through the air on the wake of the great creature’s breath, and the smoke mingled with the smell of Joannah’s sweat. She leaned against the skull and crossbones on a plum tree and watched the clouds. She searched for a plum, but there were none.
“Will we die from drinking wine made of poison plums?”
“Our grandfathers are of this place. We are strong.”
“It was the best wine I ever tasted.”
“Jo-ann-ah, sleepink hotel-um,” Bogdan announced just before he toppled onto the roadside. Joannah pushed her bike toward him along the shoulder, pressing a wiggly tire print into the dirt until the bike slipped sideways to the ground.
She let her bike fall into the ditch, rousing a black-and-white chicken that fluttered, clucking, beneath a wooden fence and into the adjacent courtyard.
Gravel dug into her forearms as she lay on her stomach beside Bogdan a few inches from the road. In the dim strobe of light and dark, as the moon was revealed and then covered again by clouds, she noticed one of Bogdan’s buttonholes had been carefully enlarged and re-sewn with coarse dark thread. She thought of the dozens of shirts at home in her dresser, a waste when she only needed the shirt on her back. What would it matter if she had to wash it every night? Her arms were covered with goose bumps from the cooling night air.
Running her hand across Bogdan’s chest was like biking uphill, each rib a switchback, and she found herself breathing hard at the effort of moving from one to the next. In the distance, she made out the rumbling of trucks.
Bogdan began whispering. Long sentences in Romanian, sentences that grew louder to cover the sounds of the approaching convoy. He was whispering a story she would understand if she listened carefully enough. His arms eased to life and wrapped around her. He rolled his body over hers, over again into the drainage ditch so that she lay on her back beneath him, her bike at their feet. His glasses fell beside her head onto the warm muddy grass, but in the shadow of his face she couldn’t make out his eyes at all.
“Tell me in English, Bogdan,” she whispered.
“I’m saying to you, Jo-ann-ah, these childrens from this forest are living with wolves. My grandfather is telling me this before he dies, and I am forgetting this story until I’m seeing this boy with his flower in his hat. Once I was such a boy, and I came to these woods to visit my grandfather, and I am learning about these wolves. I’m saying to you, Jo-ann-ah, this milk from these wolves is strongest milk, so these childrens are strong, and they protect these places. You see, Jo-ann-ah, even the Great Leader fears if these childrens of wolves comes to Bucharest.” Bogdan reverted to Romanian, but inserted her name more frequently into the sentences, “Jo-ann-ah,” as if those were the sounds that could invoke a spell that could drown out the trucks.
Her gold chain slithered away under her armpit. She wished for a bottle of plum wine so she could tip it to her mouth and let it slosh down her throat and onto her cheeks and neck. She hummed along to the violin tune in order not to hear the wheels approaching on asphalt, but the rumbling grew so loud that their voices and the violin were drowned out. Joannah stretched up and her teeth clacked against Bogdan’s, smooth as hard candies, smooth as polished bones. Vehicles without headlights approached and passed like phantoms. As the convoy rolled past them, vehicle by massive vehicle, Bogdan’s hands moved over her breasts, around her back, along her thighs. The earth swelled around her. Just as she was about to howl, Bogdan covered her body like the lid to a box, and she reached up and covered his ears with her hands.
His hands moved over her like dozens of grasping hands, and then his skin was many bodies of hungry skin against hers. From now on she knew she would eat anything he put in front of her—sour sheep cheese, pork fat, warm raw cream. She would no longer kill the life in the water with iodine pills, but would drink ap however it arose from the earth. The heat and pressure of his mouth on her neck told her about the children conceived in such moments, children of drunkenness and raucous joy, survivors of the regime. As trucks and personnel carriers strained up the mountain past them, Joannah knew she wanted to give birth to such children, wild creatures who drank wolves’ milk and grew stronger than dictators. Children who could run like deer and hide deep in the woods, until it would be safe and wise to emerge.
Natural Disasters
We have already donned our blindfolds to grope in drawstring bags, to have our fingers stuck into the ick of Nutella spread on a disposable diaper. We have sucked lukewarm hot chocolate from baby bottles and have tasted mashed food from little jars without labels. We have picked tiny gold safety pins out of rice and lifted cotton balls from a bowl with a spoon. Some have played “tinkle in the pot,” in which a woman squeezes a quarter between her knees as she walks to the center of the room and tries to drop it into a jar. Two of the women created a three-foot-high cake out of disposable diapers, and this structure presides over us like a creepy-puffy baby-powder grandmother, and finally it is almost the time in my baby shower when everyone gathers around and watches me open gifts. And then we will eat, and then, only then, will these people go home. My cousin Nancy and her best friend have brought their infant boys, and I am mesmeri
zed and horrified at how casually they handle their darlings.
Yesterday my summer vacation from teaching high school English began, and I’ve been looking forward to focusing more on Baby, but a shower was not my idea. My sister Gail, who is a dear pest, and my husband, who is conveniently out of town, have been colluding against my having any time to myself. Both of them have expressed concern at the grim mind-set I sometimes slip into. I’m keeping as physically fit as possible, but still I keep falling into a funk and brooding about the future. I can happily contemplate my baby daughter as a toddling toddler with a silky fountain of hair spraying up from her sweet head; I can imagine her warm little body on my lap as she follows along with her pointer finger when we read the lines of Green Eggs and Ham; I see her as a kindergartner pulling on shiny rain boots (maybe polka-dotted ones) and then running away from me toward her teacher. What I’m having a rough time with is seeing myself with a tiny, helpless baby.
“If you weren’t pregnant, Barb, I’d get you back on your antidepressants lickity-split,” Gail said this morning. When she got here and found me wearing black, she marched me into my room and found a purple sweater for me to put on with my jeans.
Ever since the tinkle-in-a-jar game, I’ve had to pee, and so I struggle up from my seat and down the hall. I strained my Achilles tendon last time I did prenatal yoga—the teacher keeps reminding me a yoga class is not a competition—but I don’t want to let on to my sister. When I get back, the women are telling stories.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 19