The Story That Cannot Be Told

by J. Kasper Kramer

  It began to feel as if our whole apartment had been placed on a cracking glass shelf. I tiptoed all over, sure that even one tiny misstep would be all it took to send the world crashing down—one meal where I forgot and started to complain about eggplant or liver, one night when I whined about not wanting to brush my teeth.

  It didn’t make things any better that, since school had let out for summer the previous week, I’d been stuck at home all alone. There’d been no other choice. My mother’s parents lived up in the mountains all the way across the country, and even if they’d been closer, she wouldn’t have called them. Mama had run away from her village as a teenager. She hadn’t even spoken on the phone to my grandparents since I was born. The summers before, when he was still frequently sober, Uncle Andrei had watched me when needed. My grandmother on my father’s side, my bunica, who’d outlived her husband, had often watched me as well. But now Bunica and Bunicu were both dead, and maybe Uncle Andrei, too—or hiding or dying or worse.

  There were no neighbors my parents trusted. No friends whose loyalty was not in question.

  “You’d leave her alone in our apartment?” my mother had asked my father of a gentle old woman they’d both known for years. “She’ll touch our things. She’ll look through my recipes.”

  “What are you afraid she’ll find?” my father laughed.

  “Everything. Anything. Nothing at all.”

  Of course, getting to stay home alone had at first felt like a great victory. I’d fussed about it for months, convinced that ten was old enough by far. My mother, always a champion for the independence of young women—especially when older men tried to question it—declared she trusted me with her life. But my father thought I was irresponsible and impulsive. He believed that if I was left to my own devices, something terrible would happen.

  Unfortunately for us all, he was right.

  The first of my sins involved the fan, which I’d promised not to use.

  It wasn’t my fault. Not really. With all those bad feelings whirling around—no one speaking at dinner or singing at the sink, no one saying silly things during the Bulgarian shows or telling me stories before bed—I was halfway to bursting already. By that third day, I understood that my father was frightened and angry, that Uncle Andrei was gone and in danger, but no one had actually sat me down and told me anything. My imagination was filling in the blank spaces. Alone in that apartment, I was on the edge of a breakdown.

  So when the electricity came on, I started up the fan.

  Sitting with the air blowing down my shirt at the kitchen table, I reveled in my rebellion. If my parents wanted to keep secrets from me, I could keep secrets from them, too. Disobeying one rule quickly led to disobeying another. I’d promised to start on my homework, but there was no way that was happening. I slid aside my book report and science worksheets to make room for the Great Tome.

  Its flimsy cardboard cover was decorated with pasted-on plastic gems and a whole cup of glitter. Its pages were torn from spiral notebooks and yellow notepads and colorful packets of construction paper. The tome was my life’s work—a massive collection of handwritten tales that rivaled anything I’d ever seen on a shelf. Some of the stories I’d copied from books, changing the parts that I didn’t like. Some were retellings of stories people had told me, though at times it was hard to know which ones were true. Of course, the best stories of all were completely made up in my head. I always kept the pages unbound so they could be rearranged or replaced with new versions, and over the years, the Great Tome had grown fatter and fatter, until eventually Tata had had to give me an old belt to hold it closed.

  Thinking hard about what I wanted to write, I took my colored pencils out of their dented blue tin and lined them up by height, cracking my knuckles just like Uncle Andrei. Without my father telling me stories at bedtime, it felt more important than ever that I keep writing them down.

  But nothing was coming to mind.

  For a long while I sat staring at a blank page, my hope for inspiration fading by the second. Just when I was about to give up and do math, someone knocked on the front door.

  I went rigid. No one had ever come by while my parents were away. My father had lectured me a half dozen times on this exact scenario, though, so I forced myself to stay calm.

  “Just don’t answer,” he’d said. “Try not to make any noise.”

  “Play dead, then,” I’d suggested with a smile.

  He’d rolled his eyes and replied, “Sure. Fine. Play dead. Just don’t answer.”

  So I stayed where I was, listening to the fan whir. There was a second knock, followed by an “Anybody home?”

  Still I was quiet. The person would go away. Certainly he would leave. My father hadn’t given me a lecture on what to do if the person didn’t leave. Clearly it wasn’t a possibility.

  The stranger started to fumble with the locks at our door.

  I rushed across the kitchen with a cry and grabbed the doorknob, grabbed the latch, tried to keep it all from moving.

  “Don’t come in!” I screamed.

  I heard the man in the hall back away. “You scared me half to death! I knocked two times!”

  “I’ll call the police on you, burglar!”

  “I’m not a burglar! I’m an electrician. The landlord gave me the key. I have to do some rewiring.”

  I hesitated. It sounded logical.

  “Listen, kid, I’ve got a lot of other units to cover. Are you gonna let me in or am I gonna have to call my manager?”

  “What kind of rewiring?” I asked. “I’ll know if you’re trying to trick me. I read a whole book on electrical code.”

  This was only half true. I’d mostly just looked at the pictures. My father had brought home the manual in a stack he’d saved from the library dumpster. Books were always being thrown away, sometimes for the strangest of reasons. Tata didn’t like sneaking them into our apartment, but he had such a hard time finding enough for me to read. I was always reading faster than he could keep up.

  There was a long pause on the other side of the door. I often had that effect. Then, slowly, the burglar said, “Your unit’s been using a lot of energy. Your father wanted the landlord to get someone to figure out why. You understand all that? Your father asked me to come.”

  I glanced at the fan and cringed.

  If I called my father to make sure the man was telling the truth, there was a chance I’d have to admit I’d broken the rules. If I called my mother—who was generally much more understanding about these sorts of things—there was a chance her boss would catch her on the phone and get nasty.

  Either one of those things could be it. The final misstep that sent my world crashing down.

  I gritted my teeth and unlocked the door, pulling it open just a crack. The man outside had a gray jumpsuit, a cap, a utility belt, and a bag with lots of tools. He certainly looked like an electrician, not a burglar, though I knew that sometimes burglars came in disguise. I would watch him closely, and if it didn’t seem like he knew how to do electrician things, I would grab the Great Tome and dash to the neighbors’ to call the police.

  My collection of stories would likely slow me down. It was bulky and heavy and awkward. But I couldn’t leave it behind. I’d die to defend it.

  “Can I come in now?” the burglar asked.

  I narrowed my eyes and opened the door just enough to let him pass. I followed him through the kitchen, watching as he went into the living room. He looked behind the furniture. He tapped the walls. I hefted myself up onto the counter, dirty feet and everything. There were big knives next to the stove, by the chopping board and the empty bread box. I kept glancing at them. If he was a really evil kind of burglar, he might try to kill me. Then I would have to use the knives to stab him before I grabbed the Great Tome and escaped. Things were getting pretty exciting. Suddenly I had a great deal to write about.

  The burglar set down his tool bag and looked over his shoulder. “Does your mother want you on the counter?”
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  “Yes. She likes it when I sit here.”

  “Don’t you have something to do?”

  “I am doing something. I’m keeping you from stealing our stuff. We have a very nice TV.”

  “I told you, I’m an electrician. I know your TV is cheap.”

  He took off a metal panel on the wall and started messing with the parts inside. He got into the place where the phone was plugged and pulled out a bunch of wires, clipped them, twisted them, and utterly lost my attention. My eyes darted to the Great Tome at the table. I was already trying to decide what colors were best for a burglar’s tool bag and cap, already thinking about what sort of twist this story could have at the end.

  Would the burglar kill the girl and steal all her family’s precious things but then realize he’d broken into the wrong apartment?

  Would the girl get away at the last moment but then reveal that she’s really a bad guy as well?

  By the time the electrician went into my room, I didn’t even care anymore. I was convinced the man was what he said he was, which was no fun. The story in my head was much better. Before the electrician left, I was back at the table, scribbling away in my tome with wild eyes. He told me not to bother telling my father he’d come—that the landlord would be in touch—and since this meant I might be able to keep my secret about using the fan, I was deeply relieved.

  That night at dinner my father asked, “Did anything interesting happen while we were at work?”

  I crunched down on an onion, forced myself not to gag, and said with a pained smile, “No. Nothing. Super boring today.”

  My father nodded. He wasn’t even really paying attention, but my mother’s eyes grew suspicious, so I shoveled more gross soup into my face.

  That evening I worked on my new story. And by the following morning my head was so full of burglars in disguises, I’d forgotten the real electrician entirely.

  No one noticed anything strange till the weekend, when my mother, while talking on the phone, became frustrated with the bad connection. This was followed by my father complaining that something was wrong with the volume on the TV. Then I started getting weird calls when my parents were away at work. I’d answer and there would be nothing but creepy popping and hissing, obviously a ghost prank-calling the apartment. My parents didn’t believe in ghosts, so I didn’t bother to tell them, but I started to feel a bit anxious.

  If we’d stuck our ears up to the walls, we might have figured it out.

  We might have heard all the little bugs crawling around, tick-tick-ticking through our cables and telephone wires, their tiny, sticky feet stealing secrets. But I guess we still thought we were safe in our home. So by the time we realized what had happened, it was already too late.

  The Baker’s Boy

  It was evening and my parents were in the living room, talking in the quiet, short way I had grown accustomed to since the night my father had cried. My window was open and the gusty breeze pulled and pushed at my cracked bedroom door as my parents whispered on the couch.

  On the floor by my bed, the Great Tome was closed beside me. In my lap was one of my father’s books. I was supposed to be asleep, but no one had come in to check, just as no one had checked on my homework or on whether or not I was sad or angry or scared.

  My back was propped up with pillows, the prettiest of which was small and dark green, embroidered with a round-faced bird—one of the few relics from my mother’s childhood. The electricity hadn’t come on in two days, not even once, so I was reading by candlelight. Our city was conserving power, diverting energy to the factories. We should have been panicking about the food in our fridge, but there was nothing left to spoil.

  “We have to pay our debt,” my father used to tell me. “The austerity is for our benefit.”

  But in late March, the Leader had given a speech, announcing that all of Romania’s debts had been paid. More than three months had passed, yet the power kept going out. The queues at the stores kept getting longer. More and more often, we’d make it all the way to the front and there would be no food to buy.

  “We just have to be patient,” my father told me. “Things will get better if we wait.”

  My father told me lots of things, but it was hard to know which ones he believed. Like his father before him, who’d survived both the purges and the Second World War, my tata was an expert at speaking softly, especially when it came time to express his opinion.

  I leaned closer to the page, eyes straining in the orange light. The words in my father’s book were long and unfamiliar, so I had to fill in the blanks with my own definitions. Growing frustrated, I read the sentences again and again to try to make everything fit.

  Writing was better if it was simple and easy to read. When my uncle Andrei had worked for the city newspaper, for instance, he used small words and wrote about things that lots of people liked—football, theater, local stories with happy endings. My favorite was the article where the little girl found her kitten after it had run away. REUNITED! the title proclaimed.

  I’d talked to Uncle Andrei about his stories all the time back then. I’d grilled him for advice. I’d blindly praised each thing he wrote, even when I could sense that something was off. His poetry was colorful, full of movement and emotion, but his stories for the paper often felt empty and lifeless. Once, over dinner, he admitted to us that most of them weren’t even true. Often his interviews were pretend, or he’d change people’s words to make them say nicer things.

  “I’m just writing what everyone wants to read,” he told us, looking ashamed.

  I couldn’t figure out why this was a problem. Shouldn’t writers try to make people happy? Besides, who cared what he wrote? Uncle Andrei’s words were in print. They had been given the blessing of publication. He was a real writer.

  I pinned the article about the kitten on my wall next to an essay of my own about how much I loved Romania. I’d just written what I knew the teacher wanted to read, and it had won me first place in my school’s competition, then made it all the way to the national judges before someone else’s essay—about the Leader’s fantastic teeth—knocked it out of the finals. Standing in front of my class, a wreath of bright flowers on top of my head, I’d thought, This is writing. This is what writers do.

  When I pestered Uncle Andrei about his stories in the paper, though, he never shared in my enthusiasm. He didn’t like to talk about the pieces he wrote for work and was confused by my reading them.

  Often he asked my father, “Why that? Why has she latched on to that?”

  “She reads everything.” My father would shrug.

  “And you let her?”

  My uncle didn’t like to talk about his writing until he was fired—until his editor friend helped him publish a story that would nearly get the paper shut down. After that, writing was the only thing Uncle Andrei talked about. He would come knocking on our door at the craziest hours, smelling of palinca and slurring his words.

  The last time I saw my uncle before the night my father cried, it was past midnight, and instead of knocking, Andrei called our names through the front door.

  “Liza! Lucian! Ileana!”

  I was the one to answer, rubbing my eyes as I let him into our kitchen. My parents were still in their bedroom, fussing about the time and putting on robes. My uncle knelt with a dangerous smile and pushed a crisp manila envelope into my hands.

  “You want to read? Read this.”

  I scurried into my room before my parents could see. I closed the door and listened, still as stone. My father was furious. My mother, who had always been close to her brother-in-law—who had always sided with him even when my father had not—hissed that if Uncle Andrei didn’t take a bath and wash his clothes, that if he came stumbling to her door with glassy eyes one more time, she would never allow him to see his niece again.

  My hands trembled as I pulled the papers from the envelope. It was a poem, a long one. There was a stamp that showed it had been published in a different country.
The name under the title was not my uncle’s, which I didn’t at first understand because I hadn’t yet learned about pen names—because I couldn’t imagine a writer not wanting to take credit for the thing that she wrote. I was jittery as I huddled in bed, trying to read by moonlight, trying to block out the raised voices in the kitchen. The poem told a story about students at the University of Bucharest. It took place long before I was born. The whole thing was hard to figure out, with strange, lyrical words, abrupt spacing, and references to philosophers and authors and politicians I didn’t know.

  But it was clear the students were listening to the radio a lot. It was clear they were not supposed to.

  Radio Budapest. Radio Free Europe. They heard jazz for the first time on the Voice of America.

  It was clear this was an act of resistance.

  Even with all the pieces laid out before me, though, I didn’t realize what my uncle had written till the poem described special security troops arriving at the University Square, carrying guns. The students were arrested for a protest they hadn’t even had the chance to perform. Terrible things happened to them in the jails—things that shouldn’t have happened to anyone anywhere, no matter what they did or didn’t think or do or say.

  I sat up in bed, my pulse racing, my eyes scanning the pages feverishly. In a panic, I realized just what it was I was reading.

  A poem that did not say good things about our country.

  A poem that, if discovered, could make my uncle disappear.

  It had been a month since the poem’s publication, since Uncle Andrei had stumbled into our apartment that night. But for some reason, sitting on my bedroom floor and reading by candlelight from my father’s book, the poem came back to my mind. Perhaps this was because on both occasions there was something being said outside my door that the adults did not want me to hear. Perhaps this was because I was again awake when I shouldn’t have been, reading in dim light with the pages so close.