The Story That Cannot Be Told

by J. Kasper Kramer

  “Hello, there,” the lady said when I walked over. “Are you by yourself?”

  Her children, all younger than me, looked up with frog eyes and runny noses.

  “Yes. I always travel alone,” I said. “I’m going to my grandparents’ house.”

  “Well, so are we.” The lady smiled. “Are you having a good summer vacation?”

  “Oh, it’s been super great,” I replied. “I even finished my homework.”

  “Good for you,” she said with a wink, then gave her three children a did you hear that? kind of look. When they boarded the bus, I sat with them, and the driver didn’t even blink once.

  We rode through tall, swaying grass for some time, stopping every once in a while to let somebody off at a lonely old farm. The lady asked which village my grandparents were from, and I told her, but then I mentioned how tired I was, and that kept her from asking anything more. The sun hung low in the sky, warming my cheeks through the windows. We turned toward the mountains and the bus drove into the forest. Trees stood guard on both sides, their boughs scratching the roof. I pressed my face to the glass, tilting my head to see up to their tops. I squinted, peering into the undergrowth, thick with ferns. I had never seen so much green. The sound of the pavement beneath us was traded for the loud crunch of gravel. Up we went. Up, up, up, twisting and winding, bumping along like a ride at the fair.

  The setting sun flashed red between the trunks of the trees, growing weaker. The lady and her three children got off, and I saw her whisper something to the driver, who looked back in my direction. I ate my piece of bread with butter, then bunched up my backpack under my head, assuring myself I would not fall asleep. Unfortunately, the seats were soft in the way only used things can be, and it wasn’t long till my eyelids grew heavy. The last of the sunlight dipped below the forest floor. Shadows blanketed the narrow mountain road. Dark, unfamiliar shapes darted past my window.

  I woke to the honk of a horn.

  “Come on now, kid. I want to go home.”

  I sat up, blinking, and climbed out of the seat. Before waddling up to the front, though, I wiped my crumbs off the torn upholstery. The bus was stopped in the middle of the road, its taillights washing the gravel behind us in red. There was no one else left on board.

  “Lucky that lady told me where you were going. Would have driven right past it,” the driver said. “You should pay better attention.”

  Flushing, I muttered an apology and stumbled down the steps with sleepy feet. The cool air was a shock. I’d never been so high up, so far north. When I reached the ground, I stepped into the orange glow of a blinking streetlight. Inside the glass were dead moths. Outside were live ones, fluttering and frantic. I rubbed my bare arms, thinking the bus driver would hesitate, would make sure someone was coming to get me, but he just gave me an uncomfortable look, closed the door, and drove off.

  All alone in the near dark, I tightened the straps on my backpack. Night birds cried above. Branches cracked, echoing like gunshots. My eyes were wide as I listened, but I couldn’t see where the sounds came from. The world had shrunk to only what the humming orange light touched.

  For the last time, I checked my mother’s directions. She had warned this would be the hardest part, and I’d promised I would not be afraid.

  I stepped out of the lamplight and peered up a narrow dirt road through the forest. I took a deep breath and began walking. It was a minute before my eyes adjusted to the dimness, and even then the holes and roots in the earth were well hidden. I picked my way carefully along the steep path, mostly looking down, but when a strange prickle went up my spine, I lifted my head.

  There, through the trees, was a glimmer of light reflecting off yellow eyes.

  I froze, my fingers grasping at the straps of my bag. The creature was watching me—whatever it was. Something monstrous. Something hairy and fanged and half-starved. Any moment now it would leap out and gobble me up. I forced myself to look back down and keep walking, faster now. I considered taking out my chocolate and stuffing it into my mouth, so it wouldn’t go to waste if I died.

  And then, all at once, the trees receded, and I emerged into a huge moonlit valley nestled beneath a cluster of great mountain peaks. Stars speckled the darkening sky. Candles flickered in shuttered windows.

  It was the village from my mother’s stories—the village where she was born, which she hadn’t seen since she was seventeen.

  The dirt road led past an abandoned, crumbling church, through a series of outlying houses, and then straight into the center of town. It dead-ended at a stone well, and that was where I finally paused, turning in a circle. I had drawn pictures of this place for much of my life, copying from the handful of photographs my mother had taken with her when she left. Not much seemed to have changed, so I quickly spotted a trail between houses, pointing into the fields. I took it, the grass waist-high on either side, and it brought me to a steep, wooded hill with uneven stone steps going up a shadowed path through the trees. My pulse pounded, but I went up the steps two at a time and kept my eyes straight ahead.

  I was close. I knew I was close.

  When the ground flattened again, I ran till I was free from the shadows and standing in a grassy yard. There, in the moonlight, was the tiny old cottage. It was built on a tall stone foundation with a pair of lattice doors that opened into cool, dark storage beneath. A stone walkway led to a little set of stone stairs, which led to a porch. This I followed.

  And then I was standing in front of the big wooden door.

  And then I was knocking.

  When she opened it, I was already holding out the letter for her to take. I was already shaking.

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice, thick with a rural accent, called from somewhere inside.

  She didn’t answer. Instead she stared at me, and I stared at her. I didn’t think I would know her, but I did. I knew her wispy white hair, struggling to free itself from the bright scarf tied under her chin. I knew her blue, diamond-patterned apron, wrapped around her wide waist, and her yellow cotton skirt. I knew her hands when they took the letter. I knew her hazel eyes when she read it, when she looked straight into mine.

  But she did not know me.

  The man hobbled to the door behind her, trying to see around.

  “A girl from the village?” he asked.

  She passed him the letter, still silent.

  But I knew what to do—something not noted in any directions, something neither my mother nor father had thought of. I opened my bag and dug deep inside. From the bottom I pulled out a small embroidered pillow. It was dark green with a black border and a big, round-faced bird. I hugged it to my chest, then held it out for her to see.

  “I keep it on my bed beside the little red one you helped my mother make, the one with the tiny bird flying off.” I tried to keep my voice steady. If she turned me away, I wouldn’t know what to do. No one had written directions for how to go back.

  Her hand rose to her mouth and she dropped to her knees, pulling me to her and kissing my cheeks over and over.

  “Ileana,” she said, starting to cry. “It’s Ileana!”

  And with that, Mamaie led me into her home.

  The Words You Hide

  After I was swept into the cottage with kisses and embraces and long looks at my face, my mamaie sat me on the bench by the long wooden table and immediately started cooking.

  “I knew someone was coming,” she said. “I set three plates out at lunch by accident and then a bee got trapped in the house!”

  Tataie was reading the letter, his bushy eyebrows raised high. He kept looking up at me, as if surprised all over again that I was there. Mamaie took out leftovers from supper and blew on coals in a clay stove. I tried to explain that I wasn’t hungry, that I’d eaten a whole piece of bread on the bus, but my grandmother still put down dish after dish, only stopping when I started to fall asleep at the table.

  In the morning, I squinted awake to shutters flung open and strange, foreign sm
ells—cut grass, fresh air, and sausages. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, and when I remembered the journey to the mountains, it was like recalling a dream.

  “These are real eggs,” said Mamaie. “And this is real milk. Have you ever tried pork? Does your mother serve cheese with her mămăligă?”

  Again I sat at the table. Again my grandmother offered plate after plate. Slices of ham. Raw tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers. I’d never seen so much food. I took one bite of egg and nearly gagged, it was so rich. I took one sip of milk and went pale. I didn’t even touch Mamaie’s mămăligă—the cornmeal porridge piled high with sheep’s-milk cheese.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, and my grandmother looked at me like I was dying.

  “Let her be,” said Tataie.

  I washed my face with water from a painted ceramic bowl and changed into a new set of clothes from my backpack. Then Tataie took me by the hand and the three of us went down the porch stairs and down the walkway and down the stone steps to the valley below.

  The village was a farming community, as it had been since the first settlers arrived—hundreds or thousands of years in the past, depending on who told the tale. Most of the people lived along the one stretch of dirt road that cut through the center of town. There was no other way to get in or get out, though that didn’t matter much, since only the old butcher had a truck. He used it to help carry livestock down the mountain.

  The fields where everyone grew crops and raised animals took up most of the valley, and the houses that sandwiched the road almost all served more than one purpose—the one-room shop to buy goods in was also the house of the shopkeeper, who was also the barber; the tavern was also the inn, though there were only two rooms for rent and they hardly ever got used.

  Dense forests of pine, ash, and fir climbed up the mountains, some so high their jagged tops touched the clouds. I tilted my head back as we made our way through the waist-high grass at the bottom of the hill, blinking in the light and the vastness. In the center of town, at the well, I surveyed the strange houses, avoiding loose animals wandering in the road. None of the buildings were more than one story, though I’d learn later that some had basements for keeping fresh food and attics for smoking meat. The roofs were made of red tile or thatched with hay topped in bright moss. The walls were unusual colors: pink and blue and pale green, white with dark yellow bands. Some houses were tall and thin and stuffed up against one another. Others were fat and low with lots of small windows. A few were cracking in disrepair, the foundations crumbling and sections of wooden skeletons showing beneath plaster, but most were quaint and well managed, with little fences penning in little yards, or pretty bunches of flowers painted on the walls by the doors. Almost every last one was decorated with some kind of wolf carving.

  As Mamaie and Tataie led me through the town, people stepped out of their houses. They poked their heads from windows. They looked up from work in the distant fields. We stopped at a slanted, peach-colored home with brown shutters and a wild, buzzing garden. There was a large tree out front, and on the low branches, near the open kitchen window, cups were hung up by their handles, clinking together as they dripped dry in the sun.

  At the door, Mamaie stuck her head inside, calling out before she let herself in. Neighbors peeked around hanging laundry and peered over from porch steps. My tataie stayed down at the street, where he’d been stopped by a man on a horse-drawn cart. I heard him say that I was his granddaughter, that I had come to stay for my summer holiday from school—the truth but not all of it.

  Mamaie and I walked down the hall inside the peach house. My grandparents’ cottage didn’t have electricity. They didn’t even have indoor plumbing. But this place was twice the size of the cottage and had both. I looked into the living room and spotted a TV and a sofa.

  “Is someone here?” a voice called, and a wisp of a woman appeared from the back door, hands dirty up to her elbows. Her hair was pulled back in a long braid, and she had a purple scarf around her head. When she saw my mamaie, she pattered down the hall, wiping her hands on her apron. “Oh! Doina! How are you, love? Are the goats feeling well?” Then she noticed me. “Who’s this?”

  “My granddaughter, Ileana. She’s just arrived from the city. I was hoping I might phone her mother.”

  “Granddaughter! Since when did you get one of those?” The woman took my hands and I could feel the bones in her joints. She was such a small thing she had only to bend a bit to kiss me on each cheek, but her fingers were strong and calloused. “Welcome to the village, dear girl! Look at those clothes! And that hair! Please call me Sanda, and come by when you’re settled. I have a daughter who’s about your age.” She turned and yelled through the cracked back door, “Gabriella! Gabi! Someone here for you to meet!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shaggy dark head peek over the sill of the living-room window, then vanish. I bristled but didn’t speak up.

  “Where could she have gotten to?” the small woman mused.

  “Sanda is the veterinarian,” my mamaie said, and at this I looked over, eyes widening.

  “The veterinarian?” I asked, a story surfacing in my memory. “What about Pig-Nosed Petre?”

  Mamaie’s mouth dropped open, but Sanda just burst out laughing.

  “Pig-Nosed Petre! I haven’t heard that in years. She’s certainly Liza’s daughter, isn’t she?” The veterinarian patted my hand once more before letting go and wiping her eyes. “Petre was my husband. He passed on some years ago, I’m afraid. The practice is mine. Has been since he died.”

  Sanda led us into the kitchen, where there was a refrigerator and a green phone on the wall. I felt bad about having called her dead husband pig-nosed, so I tried to smile back when she smiled at me.

  “You come by anytime, Ileana,” she said. “Gabi could use a new friend.”

  Mamaie picked up the phone and dialed, and Sanda left us to return to her backyard. When the veterinarian was out of sight, my grandmother’s expression turned serious. At first I thought she was mad about what I’d said, but then she checked down the hall to see that Tataie was still guarding the front door.

  The phone must have connected, because her eyes lit up.

  “Liza? Liza, hello.”

  My heart skipped a beat, but I couldn’t really hear my mother’s voice, just a tiny squeak through the speaker.

  “Yes, I’m doing well, dear. Yourself? Oh yes, the weather’s quite nice. Your father will be heading out to the fields soon, but it’s been a rather busy morning.”

  I didn’t understand. I stared, blinking.

  “The thing is, dear, I’ve called to tell you about Old Constanta. She’s not doing well. A doctor came by town and they’ve put her on bedrest. It’s unlikely she’ll ever get up again. Do you remember that walk you took with her through the forest?” A pause. “What do you mean, no! How could you forget? You nearly scared the life from your tata and me! We woke up and you were missing—followed her through the woods in your nightdress! You must at least remember the trouble you got into when you returned. You shoveled manure two weeks in a row!” A pause, then a laugh. “Yes, that’s right. See, you do recall.”

  Mamaie looked down at me and grinned. I opened my mouth to speak, but she put a finger to her lips.

  “Listen, dear, it’s been so good to chat. I’ve missed you so much. So much, Liza, really. But I’ve things to tend to this morning, so I’d best be off. I just wanted to let you know about Constanta. You give a call here at Sanda’s anytime. Anytime. She won’t mind at all. The number might have changed since she got the new line. Do you have some paper? Good.”

  Before I realized what was happening, the phone was back on the wall. Mamaie hadn’t let me speak to my mother. No one had even said my name. My eyes started to well up, but then Mamaie took my hand, and we were suddenly back in the sunlight with my grandfather. People were waiting to meet the little girl from the city, and there was no time for questions or tears.

  Later that day,
after lunch at the cottage, I found the letter on the table and slipped it from its envelope. I read what my mother had written:

  Mama,

  We’re in danger and it’s not safe here for Ileana. I don’t know when it will be safe again.

  I’m sorry that this is how you meet her. I’m sorry I’ve kept her from you. I’m sorry for all the things that I said on the day that I left, and I’m sorry for all the things I didn’t say but I should have. Perhaps when this is through, when her father and I come to bring her back home, we can sit together and have a long talk.

  But for now, Mama, keep my baby safe. Please don’t let them find her.

  After you read this letter, call me, but don’t mention Ileana over the phone. Our lines are tapped—our whole apartment. They listen to every word. So instead, tell me something only you and Tata would know. Then I’ll rest assured that she’s safe.

  Liza

  I read the letter again, then once more to be sure. I repeated in my head the pleasantries exchanged, the bits of story about Old Constanta. And I realized that my mother and grandmother were doing the same thing my uncle had been doing all these years with his poetry.

  Sometimes, the words that you say aren’t what’s important. Sometimes what’s important are the words that you hide.

  The True Story

  My mother’s first phone call home after running away was to tell my grandparents I’d been born. In my memory of a memory that is not mine, the story changes with my mood. If I’m angry, my mother sounds angry, and her parents sound angry too.

  “I have a girl of my own now, and you’ll never get to meet her!” she yells into the phone.