The Story That Cannot Be Told

by J. Kasper Kramer

  With that I dropped to the ground and snuck across the front yard like Chuck Norris in one of the action movies I’d seen with my father. My mamaie gave me a worried look before going inside.

  Gabi and I were about to dash off into the woods, but at the back of the cottage we heard someone curse, so we went to investigate. Tataie was bent down in the goat pen, his arms up to the elbows in hay.

  “What’s wrong?” I called.

  “Ah, nothing.” He pulled an arm out to wave me off, but I exchanged a look with Gabi and we moved closer. The bale of hay was dark in large patches, white and fuzzy in others.

  “Mold,” Gabi said.

  My tataie shook his head. “No choice but to see if they’ll take it. Too much rain. This is the second bale gone bad.”

  “You could try salting them,” Gabi suggested, but then shrank away at his look. “I mean, you know, next time.”

  After a moment he just sighed. “Haven’t had enough salt to spare, anyhow.”

  On our way down the hill, nets bouncing on our shoulders, I asked Gabi, “What happens if the goats eat moldy hay?”

  “They probably just won’t eat it,” she said, her brace clacking as she walked.

  “But what if they do?”

  “I guess they could get sick.”

  When we reached the schoolhouse, we walked up to the windows and peered in. Someone had recently wiped them down. Inside the little building, the desks had been returned to the center of the room and were lined up in rows. The chalkboard was dark and shining, cleaned spotless with borş—a pale yellow liquid for cooking that made everything sour. Mamaie’s soup was made out of the same stuff. It had to ferment for days. Every time she’d pass by the pot, she’d pull on my hair.

  “Is it sour yet?” she would ask.

  “Yes!” I’d screech, ducking. The one time I’d said no, and it really hadn’t been sour, she’d told everyone it was my fault.

  I pointed at the wooden floor of the schoolhouse.

  “No more goat prints,” I said to Gabi, disappointed.

  Bookshelves along the walls had been revealed from beneath the protective cover of old bedsheets and tarps. I peered at the spines and pressed my nose against the glass as I tried to make out the titles.

  Outside, we searched for bees in the witch’s bells. The little violet flowers sprang up in patches, their thimble heads drooping down from their necks. I tipped them up and peeked inside to no avail. After a while, my attention was drawn down the row of pastel-colored houses to Old Constanta’s cottage across from the church. I squinted because I thought I saw movement at her curtains. A pale shape in the center of one window caught my eye.

  It took a moment to realize someone was standing there, staring back.

  I gasped and went still.

  Gabi glanced up from where she was bent in the grass, mistaking the direction of my gaze. “That’s where your uncle was, right? Where you brought him the eggs?”

  I pulled my eyes away from Constanta’s window and turned toward the abandoned church. The gnawing in my stomach—long forgotten—started up again without warning. I couldn’t help looking back at Mr. Bălan’s tavern, where a tall man was leaning near the door, cigarette trapped between his fat lips. The red tip glowed as he nodded to villagers passing by, everyone polite but not friendly.

  “Don’t worry,” whispered Gabi. “Once that guy realizes this place is just a bunch of pigs and vegetables, he’ll get bored and leave.”

  “Tataie said more people will come looking. Mamaie got mad and told him he was calling evil into the town.”

  “Your uncle’s way far away. No one will find him.”

  When the man with the cigarette glanced in our direction, though, we both decided it was time to hunt white-tailed bumblebees elsewhere. We steered clear of the fields where the adults were all working, wary that someone would give us a job. Harvest had already begun, and the chores seemed never-ending. Everyone—the butcher, the schoolteacher, even Sanda—was digging in the dirt and hauling crops. It was best to stay out of sight.

  As we walked along an unpaved road, balancing on the dried hump built up between tire tracks, Gabi slowed beside me, her gait becoming more burdened. Since I knew she wouldn’t be the first one to suggest it, I told her I thought we should take a rest and eat lunch.

  The field we picked to stop at had recently been cut. Much of the hay was stacked up in great, loose heaps held together by sticks. The piles formed rounded golden towers almost as tall as the cottage. We wandered till we found a shaded spot and plopped down to eat bread and fruit. When we were full, we danced between the haystacks, pretending the golden towers were under siege. Before, when I hadn’t had any friends, I’d run through the wheat fields alone, beating down sections of stalks to square off into houses and shops and factories that I’d have to people all by myself. Spending time with Gabi was much better. I made up a story and we took turns playing parts—the evil prince, the witless monarch, the wolf-dragon that helped the cunning princess escape.

  “Let free the Lady Ileana or prepare to meet your doom!” Gabi roared, breathing fire into the crumbling ramparts as she spread her scaled wings.

  Since I was very clever and brave, I wanted to leap from the tallest tower onto her back and have her fly us both away. I lugged around small rectangular bales to make stairs and climbed the nearest stack, then slid down, drenching us both in a shower of hay. When I got to my feet and tried to wrap my arms around Gabi’s neck, though, I realized she wouldn’t really be able to carry me, so I changed the story. The wolf-dragon, drained from the battle with the evil prince, used the last of her magic to give the princess enormous butterfly wings. Gabi latched on to my back and I ran between the haystacks till I was exhausted.

  Finally, we collapsed to the ground, fits of giggles coming in waves as we both caught our breath.

  “I love your stories,” Gabi said. “I hope you’ll always be here to tell them.”

  I made a face. As much as I didn’t want to leave my new friend, the thought of staying in the village forever could only mean bad things.

  “My parents are probably gonna come get me soon,” I said. “But maybe, when I go home, you can come visit me in Bucharest.”

  “Maybe,” said Gabi. “I don’t really like cities, though. The last time I went to a city, it was for surgery.”

  I sat up slowly, biting my lip. “For your leg?” After she nodded, I asked, “Does it hurt when you walk?”

  We’d never talked about Gabi’s leg or her brace before, and a pang of shame stirred in my chest. I was worried she’d be upset, but she just shrugged.

  “Sometimes, yeah. Mama says it’s good for me to get exercise, though.” When she caught me looking at her brace, she asked, “Do you wanna see?”

  I nodded, and Gabi pushed up her red skirt to the thigh, then undid the metal brace. Her left leg didn’t look very much different from mine, except for a big birthmark shaped like the moon. Her right leg, however, was thin and short with tight skin and scars. Her foot, which curled strangely, fit into the special tall shoe.

  “It’s always been like this,” Gabi said. “It’s just how I was born. When I was little, it was worse and I used crutches. But then I turned six and got my first surgery, so I’d only have to wear a brace.”

  “Surgery sounds really scary,” I said.

  “Yeah. And that was the year Tata died, so it was just me and Mama when I got home. She had to take care of all the animals by herself. Plus, the other kids made fun of the metal pins in my leg, and I had trouble walking.”

  My calves prickled, and my hands found them unconsciously. “Will your leg get longer when you grow up?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabi said. “The doctors told Mama I should do surgery again. Maybe next year. But I don’t want the pins and stuff like before. Besides, I’m the fastest kid in the whole village already.”

  “I know,” I said. “You’re really great.”

  “You’re really great too,”
Gabi said. Then her eyes lit up and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I forgot I drew this for you. It’s no big deal or anything.”

  The picture was of the two of us holding hands in front of the cottage.

  “You wanna hear something weird?” she asked with a smirk.

  I nodded. “Uh, duh.”

  “A long time ago, like a really long time ago, your mama was supposed to marry my tata.”

  I smiled. “But then my mama ran away.”

  “You always know the stories,” Gabi said, rolling her eyes. After a moment she added in a sad kind of way, “It’s sort of funny, ’cause even though it’s been a long time, I still miss my tata like every day.”

  “I don’t miss my father,” I said, and the gnawing started up again.

  The sun had fallen far in the sky, and the clouds were painted orange and yellow, so Gabi put her brace back on, and we headed toward the road.

  “You know what?” I said before we got too far. “A lot of hay here is dry. Could we bring one of the bales to the goats? That way they won’t have to eat mold.”

  At first my friend seemed delighted, but then her face fell. “I don’t think we’re supposed to take things from the fields.”

  “But everyone works on them, right? My tataie, too. The hay is for everyone.”

  The logic was sound, so Gabi helped me pick out the best bale, and together we pushed and pulled, hefted and dragged, till we were back through the valley. On the way up the hill, Gabi asked me about the white-wolf story we’d heard outside the tavern. She’d told her mom about it, and just like me she’d gotten in trouble. I admitted that, for all my snooping, I hadn’t learned anything new about this story that couldn’t be told.

  Once we’d made it to the yard, Gabi left for home, and when Tataie heard me calling good-bye, he appeared at the front door. The light from inside spilled down the porch stairs. Hay was everywhere. In my hair. Under my overalls. Deep inside my boots. Mamaie would cluck and cluck—and I was itching all over—but I couldn’t help grinning. I patted the bale with a hand.

  “For the goats,” I said, proud.

  At first it seemed Tataie didn’t know what he was looking at. He squinted. But then the blood drained from his face.

  “What have you done?” he whispered. “This doesn’t belong to us.”

  My smile vanished as panic set in. “I thought…”

  Tataie took the stairs two at a time and pushed me out of the way, then dragged the bale to the edge of the trees where the undergrowth was thick. The yard was fully dark now, and the whites of his eyes stood out as he turned back to me.

  “Don’t you realize? It’s all theirs, not ours,” he said, terrified. At the walkway he peered down the hill. “Did anyone see you take it?”

  “Just Gabi.”

  My grandfather squeezed his eyes shut, then urged me toward the door, his voice shaking. “Not a word to your mamaie. I’ve just gone to scare off a fox.”

  And before another thing could be said, he was back at the edge of the forest, dragging the hay down the hill in the dark.

  Tataie’s Three Coins

  When the bomb went off, my tataie had been stationed outside Romania, at the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea, for only two weeks. Sixty-seven men whom he’d not yet had time to meet were scattered in pieces along the sidewalks. He stared, gaping, as he was handed a broom.

  “I—I don’t think I can…”

  The German soldier beside him narrowed his eyes. He readied a trash bin. Tataie closed his mouth and started to work.

  My grandfather was eighteen. The son of a farmer who was the son of a farmer, he’d never before left his mountain village. He’d never been to the seaside. He’d never watched anyone die. In fact he’d spent his whole life trying to keep things alive—sheep and roosters, wheat and fruit trees, his little old mother. But like the rest of the men in his family, Tataie didn’t have a choice about going to war. Refusing to serve was deemed treason—its punishment death.

  So that morning by the water, my grandfather rolled up his sleeves and swept. He tried not to look so afraid. He did just as he was told. It was late October. Back home the harvest festival had already passed. The ground would be hard, first frost come and gone. But here the air was still almost warm, thick with the briny smell of the coast—seaweed and fish and damp wood. As Tataie struggled to coax a chunk of flesh into the rusted metal bin, he focused on the salty breeze.

  Months before my grandfather arrived in Odessa, our country’s army had set siege to the port. Textbooks and tavern storytellers alike would dub the coastal town a Hero City. It should have been an easy take, they all said. We’d shown up with sixty thousand soldiers—Odessa had barely half that. It should have been quick and clean. But instead, it lasted and lasted. Instead, it was a bloody mess.

  “Poor organization. Shoddy command. Unexpected reinforcements,” they said.

  “Pride,” Tataie whispered.

  Before he arrived in Odessa—before the bomb detonated inside our army’s headquarters—the “easy take” had cost us more than ninety thousand men, wounded or dead. It would be Romania’s second worst loss in all of the war.

  Tataie had come by train to the port on the Black Sea carrying just one bag, his state-issued gun, and three silver coins in his pocket. They weren’t magic coins. They weren’t even particularly large, but they twinkled like starlight and sang like chimes when he rolled them over his knuckles.

  “Use them wisely,” his old mother had warned. He was the youngest of seven boys. The last to leave home. “They’ll be worth a man’s life at the right place and time.”

  After the bomb’s detonation, Odessa was ordered to pay for our losses: one hundred Jews for every soldier, two hundred for every officer. Five thousand civilians were marched from their seaside homes, lined up in long, straight rows, and shot. Hundreds were hanged in the streets. Tataie hefted the dead who’d been shot into trucks. He was told to leave the hanged where they were. At night he cried himself to sleep.

  The remaining Jews in the city were woken by banging at their doors—a violent, dreadful sound that made mothers sit up with a start. Fathers fumbled into slippers and robes, searching for their glasses as they called down the stairs. Children peeked into the hallways and were told to keep quiet. Some were rushed into secret compartments under the floor or into the false backs of wardrobes. Almost all were found.

  They were not told where they were going. They had no time to pack. The ones who thought to grab provisions or possessions on their way out the door had their belongings confiscated, though a handful of items slipped through.

  A portrait of a great-great grandmother, held under the arm.

  A porcelain doll with crystal-blue eyes, gripped by the hair.

  The people were herded through the streets. Thousands, mostly women and children, were forced into ditches and warehouses outside the city, where indescribable horrors took place. Others were led to a public square by the harbor. Five. Ten. Fifteen thousand. More still. Tataie blinked in the sunlight, his heart racing. One very old man, separated from his family, squeezed a small, yipping dog to his breast. He was shoved left, then right, then back again, people packing in tighter and tighter.

  “I can’t do this,” Tataie whispered.

  But he did.

  My grandfather’s job was to hold a hose and aim a nozzle with a bronze tip. The German soldier behind him, the same one as before, had a large red canister and was pumping away. The smell of gasoline filled the air as it soaked clothing and skin. The scent would linger on Tataie’s hands for days after, for weeks, for the rest of his life.

  His task that morning should have been simple.

  It should have been easy to do.

  But my grandfather couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t hold the nozzle straight. And when full panic broke out in the square, people sprinting in every direction, bullets singing past Tataie’s head, he dropped the hose and stumbled away,
vomiting.

  Only a thousand, maybe two thousand, died before the flamethrowers ignited.

  My grandfather got to his feet, the fires of hell at his back. He might have run then. He might have made for the docks and dived into the sea, though he’d never learned how to swim. But at the last moment his comrade, the German, caught him by the shoulders and forced him to stand still. The man didn’t make a scene of it. He kept his eyes pointed forward.

  Facing away, Tataie went numb—first from inside, then out. He didn’t know that the other soldier spoke his language. In two days together, there hadn’t been a word. So he was surprised when the man scowled and said through a thick accent, “You think we’d be better at killing by now.”

  A small group of Soviet resisters, no more than three hundred strong, was holding out in the port. They had infested the catacombs beneath the cobblestone streets. They were spreading like roaches, scurrying past at the edge of one’s sight, creeping from cracks in the wall after dark. They could not be flushed out. The catacombs were too complicated, too large—bigger than those even in Paris or Rome. The resisters were in communication with a similar movement in Moscow, using radios to organize their attacks, but surely, they had help from someone nearby. Surely, a homestead or village was supplying food, water, and ammunition.

  Tataie and a few other men were sent to scour the surrounding forests. A week of searching brought nothing. Everything was already in ruins. Villages smoldered. The soldiers passed through an abandoned vineyard, sour and reeking. White muscat grapes hung in sagging, dripping bunches as far as the men could see. The ground was littered with decay—great rotting heaps, a whole crop never harvested.

  As Tataie walked through aisles of dead vines, the fumes in the air became so overwhelming, he didn’t even notice a bloated corpse till it was right under his feet. He cried out, and all around, men readied their guns. They cursed at him when they realized what was wrong. Tataie swallowed hard. He muttered a prayer for the farmer before stepping over his body.

  Almost a month passed with still no sign of the resisters. The world changed to chilly, then frigid. The first snow came without warning. It didn’t stick to the ground but hung in the air, freezing breath and bone alike. It would be the coldest November in sixty-nine years. Luckily, the handful of German soldiers mixed in with Tataie’s unit were good at building fires.