by Dan Simmons
Kate Neuman loved her office at CDC Boulder, and her return from Bucharest made her appreciate the aesthetics of the place almost as if she had never seen it before. Her office was on the northwest corner of the modern structure—Pei had designed it as a series of vertical slabs and overhanging shale-and-sandstone boxes with large windows—and from her desk she could see the great wall of the first three Flatirons to the north, the undulating meadows and pine forests at the foot of the Flatirons, the hogback ridges of Fountain sandstone formations poking up through the thin soil of the meadows like a stegosaur’s plates, and even the plains themselves, starting at Boulder and stretching away to the north and east as far as the eye could see. Her ex-husband, Tom, had taught her that the Flatirons had once been layers of sediment beneath an ancient inland sea, upthrust some sixty million years ago by the ferocious mountain-building going on in the Rockies to the west. Now Kate could never look at the Flatirons without thinking of cement sidewalk slabs upended by roots.
A trail began immediately outside the back door of the CDC, the larger Mesa Trail was visible beyond the next ridge, deer came down to graze immediately below her window, and her co-workers had informed Kate that a mountain lion had been seen that summer in the trees not a hundred feet from the building.
Kate was thinking of none of this. She ignored the stacks of papers on her desk and the blinking cursor on her computer screen, and she thought about her son. She thought about Joshua.
Unable to sleep that last night in Bucharest, she had taken all her bags, found a cab in the dark and rainy streets, and gone to the hospital to sit by Joshua’s side until it was time to go to the airport. The elevator was out of order at the hospital and she had run up the stairs, suddenly sure that the crib in Isolation Ward Three would be empty.
Joshua was sleeping. The final unit of whole blood Kate had ordered for him the day before had brought him back to the appearance of rigorous health. Kate had sat on the cold radiator, her fist under her chin, and watched her adopted son sleep until the first light of dawn seeped through the dirty windows.
Lucian picked them up at the hospital. The last volley of paperwork there was less than Kate had feared. Father O’Rourke met them as promised. As she and the priest were shaking hands on the front steps, Kate surrendered to impulse and kissed him on the cheek. O’Rourke smiled, held her face in his hands for a long moment, and then—before Kate could think or protest—blessed Joshua with a gentle touch of his thumb to the baby’s forehead and a quick sign of the cross.
“I’ll be thinking about you,” O’Rourke said softly and held the front door of the Dacia open for Kate and the baby. The priest looked at Lucian. “You drive carefully, hear?” Lucian had only smiled.
The highway to the airport was almost empty. Joshua woke during the drive but did not cry, merely stared up from the cradle of Kate’s arms with his large, dark, questioning eyes. Lucian seemed to sense Kate’s uneasiness. “Would you like to hear another Ceauşescu joke I used to tell?”
Kate smiled wanly. The dilapidated wipers scraped tiredly at the rain. “Aren’t you afraid there are microphones in your car?” she asked.
Lucian grinned. “They wouldn’t work any better than the rest of this junkheap,” he said. “Besides, the National Salvation Front doesn’t mind Ceauşescu jokes. They just shit bricks when we tell NSF jokes.”
“Okay,” said Kate, tucking the baby deeper in his light blanket. “Let’s hear your old Ceauşescu joke.”
“Okay. Well, not long before the revolution, the Big C wakes one morning in a good mood and goes out on his balcony to greet the sun. ‘Good morning, sun,’ he says. Imagine his surprise when the sun says, ‘Good morning, Mr. President.’ Ceauşescu rushes back inside and wakes up Elena. ‘Wake up!’ he says. ‘Even the sun respects me now.’ That’s nice,’ says the wife of our Supreme Leader. And she goes back to sleep. Ceauşescu thinks maybe he’s going a little crazy, so at noon he goes out on the balcony again. ‘Good day, sun,’ he says. Again the sun answers in a respectful voice. ‘Good day, Mr. President…’”
“Does this have an ending?” asked Kate. She could see the exit for the airport less than a kilometer ahead of them. The rain was falling more heavily now. She wondered if the PanAm flight to Warsaw might be canceled.
“‘Good day, Mr. President,’ the sun said at noon,” continued Lucian. He tapped the turn signal but there was no click, no blinking light. He ignored it and took the exit into the long airport drive. “Ceauşescu is so excited, he tries to get Elena out on the balcony, but she is busy putting on her makeup. Finally, at sunset, he convinces her to come out on the balcony. ‘Watch. Listen,’ he says to his wife, who is also the Chairman of the National Science and Technology Council. ‘The sun respects me.’ He turns toward the beautiful sunset. ‘Good evening, sun,’ he says. ‘Fuck you, asshole,’ says the sun. Ceauşescu is upset. He demands an explanation. ‘This morning and at noon you addressed me with respect,’ he splutters. ‘Now you insult me. Why?’”
Kate saw a parking place along the row of cars and cabs lining the curved drive to the terminal, but before she could point to it, Lucian stopped and parallel parked with some skill. He did not break the rhythm of his story.
“‘Why do you insult me now?’ Our Leader demands. ‘You dumb shit,’ answers the sun, ‘I’m in the West now.’”
He came around to the passenger side and held an umbrella above them while she and the baby got out. Kate smiled her appreciation—more of his kindness than of the joke. They walked toward the terminal together, Lucian carrying one of her suitcases and holding the umbrella in place, Kate carrying her lighter carry-on bag and the baby.
“The Transylvanians have a proverb about jokes like mine,” said Lucian. “Rîdem noi rîdem, dar purceaua e moartă în coşar.”
“Which means?” Kate blinked in the dimness as they came in under the heavy concrete overhang of the terminal. Gray-uniformed guards with automatic weapons stared impassively at them.
“Which means…we are all laughing, but the pig is dead in the basket.” Lucian lowered the umbrella, shook it, folded it, and opened the door to the terminal with his shoulder.
The place was as dismal as Kate remembered it from her arrival in the country, a cavernous, concrete, echoing space, rimmed with dirt and debris, guarded by soldiers. To her left, the long, scarred tables and inoperable conveyer belts of incoming Customs lay empty. There were no incoming flights. Straight ahead, security checkpoints and curtained booths marked the beginning of the gauntlet she and Joshua would have to ran before boarding the PanAm plane.
Lucian set her bags on the first inspection table and turned toward her. Non-passengers were not allowed beyond this point.
“Well…” he began and stopped.
Kate had never seen her young friend and translator at a loss for words. She threw her free arm around his neck and kissed him. He blinked and then touched her back gently, tentatively. An official behind the counter marked CONTROLUL PASAPOARTERLOR snapped something and Lucian pulled away, still looking at her. Kate thought that there was a question in Lucian’s eyes and that those eyes looked strangely like Joshua’s for that moment.
The official said something more loudly. Lucian finally broke the gaze and snapped back at the man. “Lasă-ma in pace!”
For an instant the man behind the passport control counter stared as if in shock at Lucian’s insolence. Then he recovered and snapped his fingers; three uniformed thugs moved quickly across the concrete floor.
Kate thought she saw something like wildness in Lucian’s eyes. She hugged him again, putting her body and the baby’s body between Lucian and the guards. At the same time she had fumbled out her American passport and held it toward the guards as if it were a magic amulet.
The magic worked…at least temporarily. The guards hesitated. The passport control officer snarled something at Lucian and crossed his arms. The guards looked at him and then back at Lucian and Kate.
“I’m sorry,” Kate s
aid to the guards. “But my fiancé gets very emotional. We hate being separated. Lucian, tell the gentleman that we have something for him…”
Lucian was glaring at the passport control officer but he snapped out of it when Kate pinched his forearm. “What? Oh…aveţi dreptate, îmi pare rău… Avem ceva pentru dumnneavocestră.”
Kate heard Lucian’s apology and the phrase that meant “I’ve been thinking of you,” which was the polite precursor to bribery, baksheesh, the universal Romanian game of paying off those in authority. She fumbled three cartons of Kents out of her carry-on baggage and handed them to Lucian, who handed them to the passport control man.
The guard blinked and scowled, but whisked the cartons out of sight, dismissed the three security men, gave Kate’s luggage a cursory inspection while he snapped questions at her, and then tossed her bags on a battered luggage cart and waved her through. She automatically took a step forward and was startled when a barrier slammed shut behind her.
Kate turned toward Lucian and found herself suddenly too filled with emotion to speak. Joshua stirred and fretted in her arms, his face reddening in preparation for tears. “I…” she began and had to stop. She felt like an idiot but did not try to hide the tears. Kate could not remember the last time she had cried in public.
“Hey, it’s all right, babe,” said Lucian in his best imitation of Southern California surfer-speak. “I’ll catch you and Josh when I come to the States to do my residency. ’Later, dudes…” He reached across the barrier and touched his fingertips to hers.
The passport control officer snapped something and Lucian nodded without taking his eyes off Kate and the baby. Then Lucian turned and walked across the empty terminal space without looking back.
Kate carried Joshua through the security aisles, down a narrow corridor, and into the arrival and departure area. Hidden speakers carried recordings of what may have been children singing traditional Romanian folk songs, but the voices were so shrill, the recording so scratched and distorted, that the effect was far from quaint or pleasant; Kate thought of choruses of torture victims screeching. There were a dozen other passengers waiting for the boarding call, and Kate could tell from their ill-fitting clothes that they were either Romanian officials traveling to Warsaw or Poles returning home. She saw no Americans, no Germans, no Brits—no tourists other than herself.
She stood a little apart from the group and glanced nervously around the terminal. The space was huge, designed for hundreds of people, the arched ceiling rising sixty feet or more overhead, and every squeak of shoes or cough echoed mercilessly. There were a few booths against the north wall—a counter to change money at the official rate, a dusty sign for the National Tourist Office—but they were empty. Most of the waiting passengers were smoking and glancing furtively at the armed guards who stood by the stairway to the lower level, by the security gates, and by the Customs counters. More guards wandered across the cavernous space in teams of two, their automatic weapons slung under their arms.
Joshua was still fretting but Kate rocked him rapidly, cooed to him, and offered him a pacifier. He sucked on the plastic and held off the tears. Kate wished that she had a pacifier herself to calm her nerves, and in that second of silliness she had a very real insight into why so many people in East European police states were chain-smokers.
She wandered over to one of the tall strips of window. There were two aircraft on the tarmac near the terminal: the smaller one obviously an official government jet of some sort; the other plane, the one resembling a DC-9, waiting to take Joshua and her to Warsaw, where they would continue on to Frankfurt. Several armored personnel carriers lumbered between the jets, their thick exhaust rising in the steaming air. Kate could see tanks parked along the edge of the runway and made out artillery pieces under camouflage netting near a line of trees. Gray-uniformed soldiers huddled by their trucks or around a fire in a barrel.
Much farther away, a line of Tarom airline jets sat along a weed-infested taxi strip. These jets looked like crude Boeing 727s that had seen better days before being abandoned: they were rusted, there were patches on the wings and fuselage, and one had two flat tires. Kate suddenly noticed the armed guards pacing beneath the planes—the bored men trying to keep out of the heavy rain—and she realized with a start that these aircraft were almost certainly still in service.
She was very glad that she had paid almost twice as much to fly PanAm to Warsaw and Frankfurt rather than take the Romanian national airline.
“Mrs. Neuman?”
She whirled to find two security men in black leather coats standing behind her. Three soldiers with automatic weapons stood nearby. “Mrs. Neuman?” the taller of the two security men said again.
Kate nodded. She found it impossible not to think of old war movies where the Gestapo interdicted travelers. She shivered inwardly as she thought of traveling in such a society with a yellow Star of David on one’s coat, the word Juden stamped in one’s passport. She expected these latter-day Gestapo types to ask for her papers.
“Your passport,” snapped the tall man. His face showed the cratered terrain of a smallpox survivor. His teeth were brown.
She handed him her passport and tried not to flinch with anxiety when he put it in his jacket pocket without glancing at it.
“This way,” he said, and gestured her toward a curtained alcove in the security area she had just passed through.
“What is this…” began Kate and then broke off as the other security man touched her elbow. She pulled her arm away and followed the taller man across the littered floor. The other passengers watched passively, smoke rising from their cigarettes.
There was a woman security guard waiting in the curtained alcove. Kate thought that the woman looked like a humorless version of Martina Navratilova with a bad haircut. Then all flippant comparisons fled as Kate was overcome with the certainty that this butch monstrosity was going to strip-search her.
The pockmarked security man pulled her passport out, inspected it for a long moment—taking care to look at the seams where the document was stitched—and then snapped something in Romanian to the other two guards. He turned toward Kate. “You are adopted child, yes?”
Kate was puzzled for a moment, not certain if the man was making a bizarre joke or not. Then she said, “I have adopted this child, yes. He is my son now.”
Both men peered at the passport and the wad of papers and carbons that were tucked into it. Finally the tall, pockmarked one looked up and stared at her. “There is no parent sign.”
Parent signature, Kate realized he was saying. New Romanian laws demanded the signature of at least one of the biological parents whenever a Romanian child was adopted. Kate had wholeheartedly agreed with the law. “No, there is no signature,” she said, speaking slowly and enunciating carefully, “but that is only because no biological parents were ever found. He is a child of an orphanage. Abandoned.”
The pockmarked security man squinted at her. “For baby to adopt, you must have parent sign.”
Kate nodded and smiled, using all of her will to keep from screaming. “Yes, normally,” she said, “but it is believed that this child has no parents. No parents.” She reached out and touched the documents. “You see, there is a waiver here saying that no parent signature is required in this case. It is signed…here…by the Deputy Minister of the Interior. And here by the Minister of Health…you see, here.” She pointed to the pink form. “And here it is signed by both the administrator of the original orphanage where Joshua was found…and here by the Commissioner of District Hospital One.”
The security man scowled and riffled through the documents almost contemptuously. Kate sensed the dirt-deep stupidity under the thug’s arrogant demeanor. Oh, God, she thought, I wish Lucian were here. Or someone from the embassy…or Father O’Rourke. Now why did I think of O’Rourke? She shook her head and stared at the three security people, showing a calm defiance but no provocation. “Alles ist in Ordnung,” she said, not even realizing that s
he had slipped into German. Somehow it seemed appropriate to the moment.
The female guard held out her hands and said something.
“The baby,” said the pockmarked man. “Give her the baby.”
“No,” Kate said calmly but firmly. She felt anything but calm. Saying no to Securitate thugs was still an invitation to violence, even in post-Ceauşescu Romania!
The two male guards scowled and stared. The woman snapped her fingers with impatience and extended her arms again.
“No,” Kate said firmly. She had the image of the female guard carrying Joshua through the doorway while the other two restrained her. She realized how easy it would be for her never to see her son again. “No,” Kate said again. Her insides were quaking but her voice remained firm and calm. She smiled at the two men and nodded toward Joshua. “You see, he’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake him. Tell me what you need and I’ll do it, but I’ll keep holding him.”
The taller guard shook his head and said something to the female. She folded her arms and snapped something at him. The tall man responded harshly, tapped Kate’s passport, rustled her other documents, and said, “Take baby’s blanket and clothes off.”
Kate blinked, felt the anger hanging in the air like charged ions before a storm, and said nothing. She removed Joshua’s blanket and unsnapped his terrycloth jumper.
The baby awoke and began to cry.
“Shhhh,” whispered Kate. With her free hand she set the blanket and jumper on the filthy counter.
The woman guard said something. “Diapers off,” translated the security man.
Kate looked from face to face, trying to find a smile. There were none. Her fingers trembled ever so slightly as she undid the safety pins—even the embassy had not been able to provide her with disposable diapers—and lifted Joshua free. The baby looked even more frail without his clothes, his skin pale, ribs visible. There were bruises on his skinny arms where the i.v.-drip and transfusion needles had been. His tiny penis and scrotum were shrunken in the cold, and as Kate watched, goosebumps broke out on his arms and upper chest.