“I walked,” I replied.
“But how did you climb up the mountain in the snow? In the dark?”
“On two feet.”
When he gave me a look, I explained about Old Constanta.
“I hope she’s all right,” Tata said, worried. “That’s a hard journey for someone her age.”
I flushed, because until then I hadn’t thought about what might have happened to her. The whole way down, we looked for some sign of the old woman but found nothing.
“Maybe she made it back to her house,” I said, and then lowered my voice. “I’m pretty sure she’s a witch.”
The resisters in their white sheepskin coats made slow progress with the injured to care for, but eventually the valley below was in sight. Uncle Andrei, who’d been mostly unresponsive, suddenly seemed to realize where he was.
“Lucian?” he asked. “Did you come rescue me?”
“Sort of,” his brother replied, “but then Ileana had to rescue us both.”
“And you let her?”
My father just smiled.
At the bottom of my grandparents’ hill, on the side of the road, we met an old farmer holding a gun. That confirmed things had changed.
“I’m a lookout.” The man beamed. “Haven’t held one of these since 1945!”
The soldiers who hadn’t fled were now working with the villagers to clear snow from the streets. Most of them had turned on the Securitate when the resisters had arrived. As for the man in the brown suit, he’d disappeared in the chaos.
Uncle Andrei spat and cursed. “And here I thought I’d get to repay him for his hospitality,” he said, clenching and unclenching the fingers of his left hand.
When Mamaie spotted me coming down the road, she gathered her skirts and ran over, sobbing. She caught me, kissing my cheeks so many times my face hurt.
“We heard gunshots. Gabi wasn’t sure if you’d been hit,” she said into the neck of my coat. “But there was blood in the yard and I saw that cursed owl. Dogs started barking. I just knew something awful had happened!”
Tataie reached us and pulled me from her arms into his. “I never doubted you once.”
“Of course you say that now,” chided my grandmother. “He was in shambles, believe me.”
I tried to ask about Old Constanta, but behind us my father cleared his throat, and I turned around in surprise.
“Oh,” I said stepping back. “Tata, these are my grandparents. Mamaie, Tataie, this is my tata.”
My father nodded, smiling apologetically.
“Thank you so much,” he said. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you for taking care of her.”
“She took care of us, mostly,” said Tataie, winking at me.
Mamaie gasped at the sight of Uncle Andrei. “What’s happened now to your ankle? Can you even see out of those eyes? Sanda’s going to have a fit!”
I giggled, but the air was knocked out of me by a half-tackle hug.
“Ileana!” Gabi cried, squeezing my middle. “You’re alive!”
I hugged my friend back, grinning. “I knew that officer wouldn’t catch you,” I said. “I’ve never seen anyone run so fast!”
Gabi explained how she’d lost the officer and then used a shortcut to double back so she could shoot him with her slingshot. After she’d helped me escape, she’d hidden in one of the spots from our map till Ioan found her and said it was safe. While she was talking, Sanda came out of her house, where she was tending the injured, and, as Mamaie had predicted, made a huge fuss over my uncle.
“Why did I even bother fixing you?” Sanda scolded. “And I always thought poets were such calm, rational people.”
Beneath the dirt and the bruises Uncle Andrei smirked. “You haven’t been reading the right poets.”
When the adults left us to go help the wounded, Gabi gagged dramatically.
“I think my mom likes your uncle,” she groaned.
I blinked, taken aback, before we both started laughing.
And then I noticed the figure walking up the road through the village. I went still, stunned as I realized who it was. Her long dark hair tumbled out from under a wool shawl. Her hazel eyes locked on to mine, her smile igniting. She was as beautiful as if she’d stepped out of a story.
“Mama,” I breathed.
It took a moment more before I found my feet—before I ran to her. When she embraced me, it felt like the world was whole again. I shut my eyes, overwhelmed with relief.
“Oh, my sweet baby girl!” Mama cried into my hair. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay. Really. Tata too.”
My mother pulled back, wiping tears from her wide eyes. “You found him?”
I nodded. “And Uncle Andrei. They got beat up pretty bad, but the veterinarian says they’ll be fine. Everyone’s in her house now getting help.”
“The veterinarian?” asked my mother, confused.
“Sanda. Gabi’s mom.” I pointed at my friend, who did a little wave, her cheeks red in the cold. “She’s my best friend.”
“Hello, Gabi,” said my mother; then she turned back to me, her brow raised. “I guess we have a lot to catch up on.” She picked up my braid, shaking her head. “I think you’ve grown thirty centimeters. And look at this hair!”
A cheer rose up from inside Sanda’s house and we turned. My heart clenched in excitement as voices started to shout, “Victory! Victory!”
That afternoon my mother reunited with her parents, sobbing and hugging and apologizing for the years that they’d lost. My father took care of his brother, forgiving him for all the danger he’d caused us. Gabi and Ioan and I ransacked the Securitate’s abandoned rations and helped cook a feast for the whole village.
All the while, in other parts of our country, life as we knew it was changing forever.
The news coming in through the radio had been too much to believe, so when a soldier finally got our power working again, someone plugged in Sanda’s TV. Nothing should have been airing. The daily national broadcast wasn’t due to start for several more hours. But there it was—our one, state-run channel renamed Free Romanian Television. The studio in Bucharest had been taken over by resisters, and they were showing live coverage of what was now being called a revolution.
That morning, the Leader had tried to address his country one last time. He’d rained manifestos down into the crowds, telling the people to go home and enjoy feasts. Protestors, half-starved, had pelted him with stones, storming the building, and the People’s Genius and his Scientist Spouse had barely escaped. For a brief moment they were trapped in an elevator, just out of reach of the angry, grasping hands, but the couple made it to the rooftop and into a helicopter. It was hard finding somewhere to land, though—someone who still wanted to save them. Eventually the pilot claimed they’d been spotted on radar and would be blown out of the sky, so the Leader ordered him to set down in a field.
“Are you serving the cause?” he asked the pilot before hijacking a car.
“Which cause should I serve?” asked the man.
Not long after that, the Leader and his wife were arrested, and on TV I watched an actor and a poet announce victory for Romania. There was marching in the streets, gunfire lighting the sky. There were shells exploding into the ground. We celebrated even as our country still burned.
That evening, everyone gathered around Sanda’s stove. The adults talked and talked, laughing and drinking, but my heart still felt a bit heavy.
I dropped down beside Uncle Andrei, looking grim.
“What’s with the sad face, princess?” he asked. “This is a day to be smiling!”
“I failed you,” I said miserably. “I couldn’t protect the manifesto. We fought so hard to save it, and I let it fall in the fire.”
“That’s what this sulking’s about?” He laughed. “What fell in the fire was just words on paper. How those words made people feel is the thing that’s important. What’s happened today—here in the village and all over
Romania—this is what we have to protect. We don’t need the manifesto anymore.”
I felt myself starting to smile as the weight lifted from my chest.
“Okay, Ileana. It’s time,” Gabi said from a few paces away. I looked up, uncertain. “We’re ready to hear the whole thing. From the start.”
Beside her, Ioan took a seat, and the adults began to pay attention too.
“Yeah, Ileana,” said the innkeeper’s son. “Tell us what happened last night. The truth. All of it.”
And even though I was exhausted and aching, even though I just wanted to rest, I couldn’t resist someone asking me for a story, so I sat up, looking around at my family and friends. For the first time, I told “Ileana and the White Wolf.”
When I was through, I searched each person’s face. As I’d expected, most of them were shocked by the end of the tale.
“That’s the best one yet,” whispered Gabi in awe.
“You know what?” asked Ioan. “I think you are as tough as you act.”
“You do realize you could have been killed?” asked my father, aghast. My mother pursed her lips, staying quiet.
I shifted my eyes to my toes, then looked up, resolute. “It was a risk. But it was the right thing to do.”
“My niece the storyteller,” said Uncle Andrei. “It’s a good one. You should write it down somewhere. People don’t read enough folklore these days.”
My heart fluttered with pride, but then fell in despair as I realized what he meant. I sighed, shaking my head. “That’s the problem. It’s not folklore. It’s all true, but no one will believe me. I really did hear wolves in the forest. I swear it wasn’t just the resisters who saved us.”
“Some will believe,” said Tataie. “I certainly do.”
“There’s just one part, though,” said Mamaie, hesitant. “Are you sure it was Old Constanta who led you up the mountain?”
“Totally.” Then my eyes opened wide as I panicked, realizing that in all the commotion I’d forgotten about the widow again. “Where is she? Hasn’t anyone seen her? What if she’s still out there in the cold!”
My grandmother glanced at the others. She reached over to calm me, taking my good hand.
“Old Constanta died last night, child,” she said gently. “Before they even rounded us up.”
How the Story Ends
When I tell my story now, when I insist that it happened, people are forced to believe one of two unbelievable things: either a ghost led a child to an ancient monastery at the top of the world, or the child made her way there all alone through the dark and the snow.
To me, though, what remains the most unbelievable is not my journey up the mountain, but the country that I found down below it.
After helping with what we could in the village, my father secured us a ride with some soldiers back to the city. There was a great deal of crying during good-byes, especially from Mamaie, who made my mother promise there’d be no more silence between them.
“We’ll be back in the spring to help you rebuild,” said Mama, kissing my grandmother’s cheek. “I’ll call as soon as we get to the apartment.”
“You could come stay with us while things settle down,” offered my father, not for the first time. “We don’t have much to offer, but it’s the least we can do.”
Tataie politely declined. He still had no intention of ever leaving his home.
As we loaded into the soldiers’ truck, Gabi came to give me one last bear hug.
“Don’t forget to draw pictures when you send me letters,” I said. “And thanks again for saving my life.”
“That’s what best friends are for.” Gabi smiled.
We drove home through the countryside, fires still smoldering on the horizon, and listened to the radio the whole ride. On Christmas Day—a holiday that for so long had been banned—our new government offered us a grisly present: The Leader and his wife were executed by a firing squad, their deaths broadcast all over the world. Some say that, right before he died, our oppressor started to sing.
In Romania, the revolution had been written with blood. We didn’t really understand this till we saw for ourselves—till we came face-to-face with the devastation.
Bucharest looked like it had been at war.
Statues were toppled and crumbling. Government buildings were ransacked. The university library had burned to the ground. More than half a million books were destroyed. There was damage to radio and television stations. There was damage to our art museum and concert hall. No one was ever really sure who had kept shooting—“terrorists,” they said, whatever that word now meant—but the fighting had continued for days.
In our apartment that first night, we cleaned up what we could. It would be a long time before we again had electricity, before we replaced all the broken windows and swept all the dust and ash from our floors. It would be a long time before Uncle Andrei stopped crying in his sleep. For years, he would be afraid to be alone.
But on that first night home in Bucharest, we wanted to pretend things were just as they’d been. So we cooked dinner and ate at the table. We talked about nothing important. I did the dishes, humming off-key, while my parents made my uncle a bed on the couch.
Sometimes, though, things can’t go back to normal, no matter how much you wish that they could.
I closed the door to my room, feeling empty. For so long, I’d craved my home and my family, but it was as if on the day that I’d disappeared on the train, the home and family I’d known had disappeared too.
The truth is, sometimes it’s not just the world, but your eyes that have changed.
Late that night, while I lay awake, unable to sleep, there came a knock at my door. And in the ruins of what had once been my apartment, in the debris of what had once been my room, my father came and sat on the edge of what had once been my bed. From his pocket he took out folded papers, and for a moment I thought he was holding the manifesto. But then I recognized the childish handwriting, and my heart caught in my chest.
“I’m sorry, Ileana,” Tata said.
My mother had spent her whole life taking risks. As a girl she’d carried messages up to the rebels in the mountains. She’d run away from home at just seventeen. She’d listened to illegal cassette tapes and sung illegal songs in a pub. She’d married a professor, a man who’d never farmed for a day in his life. When she’d had me, she’d tried her best to be mild and sensible. But then they had torn down her apartment with the pantry and the frothy cream walls. She hadn’t had time to save her piano. So when my father and I had gone on our walks, my mother had copied dangerous poems. She’d organized. She’d collaborated. She’d helped get them published abroad.
Tata had taken risks too, though. They’d just been harder to see.
He’d risked his happiness when he stopped going to movies. He’d risked my love when he burned the Great Tome. He’d risked being called a coward and a traitor to make sure we stayed safe.
Every last risk that he’d taken had been for our family—for me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again.
In his hands was a retelling of “Cunning Ileana.” Long, long ago, when I was small, he’d helped me bind it into the Great Tome. My first entry. It didn’t have an ending, of course, but it was the story he’d most often asked me to read. Before he’d set my tome in the flames, he’d torn it out. And now he was giving it back.
I reached forward, eyes wide as my fingers brushed the old words. I folded the pages into his palm.
“Keep it,” I said. “I wrote it for you.”
“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked.
“I think so,” I whispered, pulling the covers up to my chin, “but only on one condition.”
A smile crept up to my father’s round glasses. “I’ll stay awake if you do,” he said.
“On my life, I swear that I will.”
And then he began.
“Once upon a time, something happened. If it hadn’t happened, it wouldn’t be told. There once
was an emperor with three beautiful daughters, the most clever of whom was named Ileana.…”
Author’s Note
As you know by now, this is a book about stories.
And the truth is, they aren’t all entirely mine.
Let me explain.
Not so very long ago, I lived in Japan, where I taught at a school for children from all over the world. My classroom had students from Sri Lanka and Egypt and Denmark, and some of my very best friends were teachers from Romania. I didn’t know much about Romania back then, so when we were together, I’d ask my friends about their home. If I was lucky, they’d tell me stories. And one day I got smart and started writing them down.
Recipes for sour soup were mixed in with notes about the Romanian Revolution. Fairy tales got swirled up with history. One friend had a grandfather who believed his life had been spared in World War II because he’d helped someone in need. She also had a grandmother who, with a Roma woman, found a buried curse box under her house. Another friend told me about listening to the Voice of America on a radio her family kept hidden beneath the floorboards—about being frightened they’d get caught. She told me about living through austerity, when resources such as food and heat became scarce.
It wasn’t long before I realized I was holding the pieces of a book. Sure, the book wasn’t written yet. And, admittedly, it was a big, jumbled-up mess. But I knew it was there. I could feel it. And when I told my friends my idea—to take bits of their stories and bits of my stories and bits of history and folklore and turn everything into a novel about a little girl named Ileana—they thought it was wonderful. That was all the encouragement I needed.
For almost a year, before ever writing a word of The Story That Cannot Be Told, I researched Romania—its fairy tales, its history, and its revolution in 1989. When my friends were children, Nicolae Ceauşescu was the leader of the Romanian Communist government. In a Communist country, the main philosophy is that everyone should be equal. Property and goods and wealth of any kind should be owned by the community as a whole. The trouble in Romania, though, was that Ceauşescu himself was materialistic and power-hungry. He didn’t care that while he was building his luxurious palace and holding celebrations in his own honor, families were starving and orphans were sleeping three to a bed with no heat.
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