Unfortunately we had run out of time.
The man in the brown suit discarded his pleasantries and his feigned patience. He came to everyone’s house one by one and explained—in no vague terms—that we needed to leave. The deadline had been moved up. We’d been given more than enough time already. The Securitate would begin picking apart the remaining buildings to use for firewood and supplies. The bulldozer would take care of the rest—whether the owners had vacated or not.
Sanda came up the next day with Gabi to tell us they’d decided to go.
“I’m so sorry,” the veterinarian said, rubbing her tired face. “We wanted to hold out, but they’ve knocked down the house two doors over. I don’t want to be there when they roll that machine through my yard and trample my kitchen to crumbs. I want to have time to save all our pictures of Petre, you know?”
Mamaie looked to my grandfather. He nodded—a curt, subtle gesture—then turned away.
“We understand,” my grandmother said, patting Sanda’s hand. “Let’s all go together. We’ll talk to Constanta in the morning.”
Gabi and I caught eyes and our expressions fell. All the training, the preparations and planning, gone to waste. No hope was left for the village. No hope was left for my uncle.
After packing my schoolbag, I helped my grandparents clean the cottage, sweeping out cobwebs and scraping ash from the stove. Even if they meant to bulldoze the house to the ground, my mamaie refused to let strangers see it a mess. Every time I walked over the loose floorboard, I glanced down, wondering how we’d hide the manifesto as we traveled. Would we sew it into our jackets? Would we cut it up into scraps to be pasted back together later? Never once did I think we’d leave it behind. My grandfather went down the hill to make arrangements with the man in the brown suit for us to leave the next day.
But the mountain had other ideas.
That afternoon, it started to snow. It did not stop all through the evening. It did not stop all through the night. It did not stop when the sun tried to rise, turning the whole world into a blinding white blur.
“A storm,” said my tataie, looking out at the window. “Big one, too. Trucks won’t be driving in that.”
He couldn’t hide the smirk at his mouth.
My grandfather and I went out to take care of the animals, but we couldn’t risk a trip down the hill. The stone steps were a cascade of ice. The wind whipped from the top of the mountain all the way to the valley, piling great drifts of snow against our cottage. In some places it was deep enough to cover the windows. Surely, everyone in town—Sanda and Gabi and the soldiers, too—was stuck just like us.
Days passed without sign of the storm letting up. At night Tataie kept the wood-burning stove hot and we all stayed close together, telling stories to ward off the cold. So cut off from the rest of the world, others might have starved right away, but Mamaie just dug into the cupboard for dusty glass jars of tomatoes and pickled cabbage and cucumbers. She emptied her pot of lard, where she stored sausages in the summer, then climbed the attic ladder for smoked pork. She scraped bits right off the bones and then used those, too. With all of that, plus our eggs and goat milk, we were doing just fine.
That is, until one night, after more than a week trapped inside, when we heard a strange cracking noise in the forest. The first time it happened, only I seemed to notice, but when it came once again—a rhythmic burst of percussion, followed by a thunderous boom—all three of us went still and quiet. My mamaie’s eyes lifted from her embroidery to the shuttered windows.
“The wind,” she whispered. “Falling branches.”
My tataie shook his head slowly.
“Gunshots,” he said. “An explosion.”
The next morning there was a knock at our door. When we opened it, we found a Securitate officer shaking and covered in snow. My grandparents let him inside, so I scurried into the back room and listened through the wall. The man had come to tell us our chickens and goats were illegal. We were stealing milk and eggs and meat from the state. The police would turn a blind eye only on the condition that we start helping feed the soldiers down in the valley.
Of course, there wasn’t really a choice.
After that, shots continued in the distance each night, and the officers and soldiers came to the door every morning, looking more and more haggard. Tataie would go out in the snow and come back with a bucket full of warm milk and what few eggs he could find. Sometimes the men left us the little wind eggs, which had no yolks. Mostly they left us with nothing.
Finally they showed up asking for the chickens themselves.
I put on my coat and slipped past my grandfather.
“They’re my responsibility,” I said, and he watched as I went behind the house to the coop. I pulled a hen out of her nest, stroked her speckled feathers, kissed her on top of the head. I held her out to the officer and looked him right in the eye. “This one’s Mirabela.”
A different man came the next time.
“This one’s Pongo,” I said.
A different man came the day after that.
“This one’s Wicket.”
“This one’s Jonesy.”
“This one’s Duchess.”
When the chickens were gone, they came for the goats, dragging them out of their pen down the hill. The soldiers told me to stop helping, so on those days I watched from the porch and glared. I remembered their faces. I made little notes in my book.
Once the animals were all gone, even with the resourcefulness of my grandmother we started to run out of food. It wasn’t hard for me to go back to old habits. I turned my nose up at plate after plate.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’m not hungry. Someone else can eat what’s left.”
Just like at home, someone always did.
When Sanda trudged up through the snow to check on us and found the animals gone—our food almost run out—she insisted we follow her back down the hill. She and Gabi had enough potatoes and cornmeal to share, and by some miracle they even still had electricity.
“We’ll be safer if we all stick together,” Sanda said, and I knew she wasn’t just talking about the storm.
I put on my backpack and took a pile of blankets, but my eyes fell to the floorboards. Tataie followed my gaze, then shook his head.
“No one will bother the cottage till the weather lets up,” he said.
I hesitated, but then took my mamaie’s hand to help her down the porch. The snow was coming so heavy it was hard to see past my arms. With great care, the four of us made it down the steep stone steps to the valley, and, in a line just like schoolchildren, we turned our faces from the wind and walked toward town. When the street between the houses was in sight, I halted with a gasp.
Many of the buildings were gone—little more than piles of rubble.
And there, right in front of the veterinarian’s house, was a massive black beast, half buried in snow. I squinted, trying to make out the dark shape, certain I could see fangs as long as daggers and at least four or five heads. It wasn’t till Mamaie pulled me closer that I realized it was the bulldozer, abandoned and covered in icicles and debris. The machine had stalled right in front of Sanda’s garden.
Once inside the house, I ran straight to Gabi’s room, where I found her on the floor, drawing maps.
“Ileana!” my friend gasped, jumping up. “I was just making plans to come save you!”
“It’s okay. We made it,” I said. “Did you know there’s a balaur outside your house?”
“You mean the bulldozer?” She smirked, but then her face fell. “It was headed straight for us.”
I hugged her. “I promise it won’t tear your home down.”
Gabi still looked worried, though. “It’s not just that. It’s the soldiers. They’re everywhere now. Always watching us. They’re up to something. I know it.”
That night Sanda took out the radio, and we all sat around it, bunched up under blankets and eating mămăligă. The volume was low, so the five of us h
ad to lean in. Through the static came news.
Three days ago, in a city called Timişoara, far away, the Securitate had tried to arrest a pastor who’d spoken out against the Leader. Thousands had gone marching. Soldiers had arrived to suppress them. Armored cars after that. Helicopters circling overhead. Shots were fired into the crowds. Cars went up in flames. The bodies piled and piled. People broke into government buildings and bashed out all the windows, throwing documents into the streets to burn. And now the factory workers were striking, swarming the town square and singing as they began to push back the soldiers.
As the rest of us bent close, holding our breath, Gabi leaned back.
“We have to get rid of it,” she said.
“What’s that?” her mother asked, surprised.
“The radio. They’re going to find it. We’re going to all get in trouble.”
Sanda just patted her hand and adjusted the frequency.
By midnight the snowfall was so heavy again that we could barely see out the door. The storm surged and swelled, howling as we cuddled together, trying to sleep. By noon the next day, though, for the first time in forever, the sky finally seemed to run out of breath.
We all stepped outside, blinking in a world frozen and glistening, the sun bright behind a layer of clouds. Tataie shoveled the walkway while Mamaie and Sanda started cooking. Gabi and I dug tunnels in the yard to reach our stashes of weapons, just in case we still needed them. Down the street, soldiers and Securitate officers peeped out from the inn windows, surveying the unfamiliar new landscape.
“Once the snow’s clear, it’s all over,” my friend said, her eyes full of worry.
I yanked our best sharpened stick free from the ice and propped it back up against the fence.
“I won’t stop fighting if you don’t,” I said.
Gabi bit her lip, but she nodded.
That afternoon, while my grandparents and Sanda carried fried peasant potatoes to Old Constanta and the remaining neighbors, we crawled around in our tunnels and stuffed rocks into the bulldozer’s exhaust pipes. Then we practiced with the slingshot in the front yard. I wasn’t much better than I’d ever been, but my friend hit her mark every time. When I started to get frustrated, I suggested we go in for a while. I much preferred preparation for battle that involved books.
“Just a little longer,” Gabi said.
I told her I’d meet her inside. Alone in the house, I took off my mittens and jacket, rubbing my fingers to get warm.
That was when the knock came at the back door.
“Ileana,” a voice called in a whisper. “Ileana, open up.”
For a long time, I stood staring. For a long time, I didn’t do so much as breathe.
It had been almost half a year, but that didn’t matter at all. A thousand years could have passed and I’d still know his voice. Somehow, I made my way down the hall. Somehow, I undid the lock.
There, standing in the snow, was my father.
The End of Adventures
On my eighth birthday, my tata promised to show me something spectacular. He made me swear on my life to keep it secret. We kissed my mother good-bye and said we wouldn’t be too long, just a couple of hours for stories by the light of the construction cranes at the palace, forever still being built. This was only mostly a lie.
To the boulevard we walked, its great, empty cobbled streets lined with lampposts taller than trees. I paused and tugged on my father’s sleeve. He pointed and whispered, “There—it was just over there,” and I pictured our old apartment building with the frothy cream walls, with the double doors and round awning and pantry. I heard the explosion, saw the rust-red roof crumbling down, and imagined my mother’s piano turning to dust.
“You had a little window in the room with your crib,” my father said of the home I didn’t remember. “It had a little seat with the pillows your mamaie embroidered. That’s where I would rock you.”
He squeezed my hand as the sun fell below the skeleton of the gargantuan palace, lights twinkling to life on the cranes. The machines were lifting enormous pale pillars of stone and magnificent slabs of marble for vast ballroom floors. The Leader’s greatest achievement. The largest building in all the world, so massive it could be seen from the moon.
“It’s haunted,” my father told me, and I begged him for more of the story. “They tore down ancient monasteries to build it. They laid the foundation right on a graveyard—sliced off the top of a hill and looked inside and saw that the dirt was packed with bodies, hundreds and hundreds of bodies, all killed by the Black Death. But they kept building.”
“Didn’t the Leader know it would be haunted?” I asked, full of fear and pleasure. I’d memorized this story already, but it tasted so much better when I said my lines just right.
“I suppose he didn’t care,” said my father.
Most nights on such walks, we would stop at a bench and read side by side, but tonight my father turned away from the boulevard and kept going. We wove between gray concrete buildings in identical rows down the street. The factories pumped smog into the air, clouding the sky as it darkened.
I realized what direction we were heading. On my last birthday Tata had taken me to the theater and we’d seen a Bollywood film. I’d liked all the dancing, but the ending hadn’t gone the way that I’d hoped.
But then we passed the turn that led to the theater. I twisted, looking over my shoulder. “We’re going the wrong way. Where are you taking us?”
My father cleared his throat as a couple walked by on the other side of the street. He nodded at them with a smile.
“Be patient,” he said. “And keep your voice down.”
My excitement swelled instantly. We were doing something we weren’t supposed to.
My father turned into an alley and led me to an apartment complex. We went up a flight of rusted stairs that swayed as we walked, then entered through a lonely back door. The light was orange in the hallway and the wallpaper was torn, the carpet worn through to the cement underneath. I gripped my father’s hand tighter. I tried not to make a face at the smell of mold. Door after door passed on both sides till we turned a corner and stopped. My tata knocked two times, then waited and knocked again.
“Who is it?” someone asked.
“Lucian,” he replied.
The door opened a crack, still with the chain on, and a person peeked out before pulling it wide. “Professor! Come in. So good to see you.”
We were hurried into the apartment, and the man began chattering about classes. I realized he was one of my father’s graduate students.
“We just started,” the man said. “Is this your daughter? Hello, there! She’s very cute. Would you like a drink, Professor? You can have my chair, if you want, or there’s some space on the floor.”
We passed through a small, dirty kitchen and emerged in a dark little living room. Somehow more than a dozen people had squeezed inside. They were seated on mismatched chairs, plastic and metal and wood. Some were pressed together on a plaid couch near the back wall. Not a single person turned his or her head to greet us. They were all fixated on the TV, the blue light tinting their skin and reflecting in their wide eyes.
“The floor is fine,” my father said.
He handed the student some money and it was slipped into a pocket, both gestures quick, practiced. Then we made our way to the front and sat down on a thin rug. I blinked in the light, squinting at the black, whirring box below the screen. A little red dot glowed on its face. I’d never seen a real VCR, though a couple of the kids from the Pioneer club said they had them. I’d always assumed their parents informed for the Securitate. VCRs were extremely expensive, but if you managed to get some of the big plastic tapes, the machines could play movies right on your TV. It seemed likely this student or his parents were informants, because not only did he have a Sharp VCR and tapes, but he had a color TV. I didn’t even have any friends who lied about one of those. It must have cost someone a fortune. It must have cost much more th
an money.
My eyes flitted up to the glass. Someone in a weird metal helmet was sneaking through a dark palace, trying to rescue a man made of stone. When the stranger took off the helmet, revealing a hidden face, I gasped.
“Tata, it’s a girl!”
He shushed me, smiling.
When I found out the girl was also a princess, I was totally hooked. It took a while to understand what was happening in the film, and even then it wasn’t always clear who was good and who was bad, but I figured out the main characters were fighting a dark lord who was trying to control the whole galaxy. I’d never seen anything like this. I was enraptured by the costumes and sets. I was swept away by the score. The colors alone were enough to leave my mouth hanging open.
The actors and actresses all spoke in English, a language I wouldn’t get to study in school till fifth grade. But it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand what they said, because as soon as they started talking, another voice spoke for them in Romanian, high-pitched and fast. When they got sad, she would get sad. When they were angry and screaming, she’d say, “Go to hell!” I pictured her with long legs and permed hair and shoulder pads in her jacket like my mother sometimes wore. It was as if she were sitting there with me, translating over my shoulder.
When the film finished, the lights came on in the room and people exchanged quiet good-byes. My father’s student thanked us for coming and asked me what I’d thought of the movie. I wasn’t able to speak, so I just stood there, as dazed as if I’d traveled through a portal from another dimension.
“Uh-oh! She’s a shy one,” the student laughed. He looked up at my father and spoke more softly. “I’ll let you know about the next showing.”
On the way back to our apartment, my father shook me by the arm. I frowned, still feeling strange.
“Are you getting sick? No one’s ever mistaken you for shy,” he said, suspicious.
“Tata,” I said, mind whirling. “What we just did, it could get us in trouble.”
The Story That Cannot Be Told Page 18