The Girl They Left Behind

by Roxanne Veletzos

  At last, he fished out a silver pen and a small pad, in which he began to scribble furiously, frowning in contemplation every few moments, pushing his glasses higher. When he was done, he stood up, and with the pen and paper still in hand, he circled around the back of the sofa, letting his short fingers brush over the velvet upholstery. A moment later, he was standing in front of the china cabinet, tilting his head this way and that, studying the objects inside. The whole time, he kept scribbling in his pad.

  “Excuse me, is there anything I can help you with?” Natalia blurted, unable to contain herself any longer. “Something to satisfy your curiosity?”

  The man did not answer. He did not look at her. Only his fingers kept moving, tracing invisible lines over the hand-carved surface of the cabinet, the white-and-gray marbled fireplace, the leather-bound books on the shelves.

  “Do you play? Your mother?” he asked, turning to her abruptly as if he was just now noticing that she was in the room. He picked up a stack of sheet music from the sideboard and began leafing through it. “Is there a piano in the house?”

  Something rose in her throat, bitter, like old coffee. She looked down at her hands, praying that her father would come down at once and kick this ill-mannered man out of their house. She hated his florid, sweaty face, his shameless eyes which kept roaming greedily over her mother’s possessions, things that had been in her family for generations, as if they were on some cheap sales display.

  “Oh, that,” she said coldly. “Yes, there is a piano upstairs. It hasn’t been tuned in years. It’s just furniture, really.”

  He regarded her flatly, as if he’d paid no attention, and then his face spilled into a coarse grin, displaying a full range of tobacco-stained teeth. “Your father’s store, is it near here?”

  It was too much to take, so she turned and stormed out of the room, whirling right past her father, who had appeared in the doorway in a pair of khaki trousers and a white linen shirt. The look she shot him was supposed to convey her outrage, but his eyes did not take hers in; they were somewhere else altogether.

  At the top of the stairs, she slumped on the last step and strained to hear the conversation that ensued. Her father had not closed the door, and she could make out nearly every word. The man was asking endless questions, about the properties her father had owned before the war, the store, the horses that had been taken away when the stables were nationalized two years ago. He was asking how many bedrooms they had, how many baths, whether the maid’s room was occupied. What was in the attic?

  After a while, Natalia got up and ran to her room. She threw herself on her bed and turned on the radio. Not a moment longer could she listen to this man who was interrogating her father, scribbling furiously in his notepad, cataloging their entire lives. Not a moment longer could she listen to her father’s tone, so resigned and expressionless, as if the battle had already been lost.

  36

  January 1955

  SHE WOKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night, trembling, and had to focus on taking deep breaths, in and out, steady and slow, to unknot the dread in the pit of her stomach. She had dreamed of a family gathering, her cousins and aunts all clustered together around their oval dining table. The sun trickled innocently through the lace curtains, shards of light reflecting in the crystal wineglasses, the perfectly set silverware. There was a fragrant lamb stew in one of her mother’s china bowls, ensconced in its dark, thick juices. At the other end of the table, delicate pastries no larger than her thumb made her mouth water. There was fresh lemonade that her mother made from her own lemons in the garden and bottles of wine just corked, their foil labels shimmering in the afternoon light. Across the table, her father was laughing. What is so funny, Papa? she’d asked, laughing along with him, and then abruptly she woke up. His eyes were the last thing she remembered. In her dream, they twinkled and danced like when she was young.

  Night after night Natalia dreamed of her old life. Fractured, hazy recollections tortured her endlessly; they would not give her peace. Well, she did not want to remember. She did not want to remember her childhood home, the veranda with its scent of lilac, the hum of traffic, her room with huge windows looking out over the sycamore trees. Her piano, above all. She hated all the nostalgia that came along with it, all the pointless regret, the heartache. She would have given anything to wipe out those memories, burn them to ashes. At least then she could live in the present, in the here and now, which she with her own hands had brought into being. For had she not been the one to let that man into their home? Had she not been to blame for all that followed?

  Natalia closed her eyes tightly to stop the room from spinning. How would she ever forget the look on her mother’s face that day, when the inspector returned with a police escort and official papers to put them out on the street? How would she ever forget her expression, wild with disbelief, pleading silently for it not to be true? Her father staring in the middle distance, not speaking, not moving, as if someone had turned off a light switch?

  “You are being moved to a communal flat across town,” the inspector had told them. “A very nice one, indeed. You have two hours to pack your belongings.”

  What had been in his smile in that moment? Guilt? Satisfaction? Whatever it was, she’d been the only one to see it. Her father had disappeared by then. Only his physical form had remained at the foot of the steps—slumped, ashen, still. And her mother—her mother had been screaming.

  Natalia turned to the wall. Her eyelids were too heavy for her to keep them open, her head too heavy to lift off the pillow, her heart too heavy to face another day. She had begun drifting off again when she was startled awake by the sound of an object hitting the other side of the wall, just above the davenport in the family room that was also her bed. Then another. A door slammed so violently it made the windows rattle. She heard a man’s voice, hostile and thick, then a woman’s pleading, sobbing. “Please, Dima, please, Dima, please, Dima. Please, stop.”

  Natalia pulled a pillow over her head to drown out the noise. Heavy footsteps pounded the hallway, coming closer, but continued on to the front of the flat. A moment later, the front door slammed, then silence. She knew it would only last long enough for him to go down to the corner tabac for a fresh bottle of gin. She hoped she could sleep through the rest of it.

  A knock at the door awoke her sometime later. She looked at the pendulum clock and realized that it was morning. Groggily, she swung her legs off the sofa and went to the door that separated their two joint rooms from the rest of the apartment. A woman in a floor-length flannel gown leaning on crutches stood before her, looking at her suspiciously. Half of her face was a dark bruise, her hair still coiled in curlers.

  “Hello, I’m Ioana,” the woman said, not smiling, not extending her hand. “My husband and I occupy the rooms next to yours. I just wanted to make sure that you are aware of the house schedule. It is posted on every door.”

  “Yes,” Natalia muttered. “I know.”

  “Well, we haven’t seen much of your family, so I just wanted to make sure you know there are no exceptions. None at all. If you miss your scheduled time, you don’t get to use the bathroom. Or the kitchen.” She stared obstinately at Natalia.

  “All right,” Natalia said in a flat voice. “Thank you for letting us know.”

  Like Natalia and her parents, the couple was new to the flat. She had overheard her mother say that they had moved in just weeks before and that because the husband was a Party journalist, they had secured the largest of the six bedrooms, next to the kitchen and the bathroom. The remaining two bedrooms were occupied by a young nurse who worked the graveyard shift and never left her room during the day and a woman in her late forties who was employed at the oil refinery and spent all her free time warming up crowds in pro-Party rallies.

  That was all Natalia had been able to learn about her neighbors in the few days since their move. That was more than she ever wanted to know. These were the people she was forced to share a roof with, a man who
beat his wife every night and a Party informer who glared at her with open hatred when they crossed in the common area and who probably wanted nothing more than to see her family put on a train to a forced-labor camp. How would she learn to breathe, move, eat, sleep, exist among them? And for how long? Suddenly, the rest of her life seemed like a very long time. She curled herself around a pillow and closed her eyes.

  It was late evening when she opened them again. The flat was unusually quiet, save for the faint sound of the radio coming from the next room, her father no doubt turning the dial back and forth trying to tune into Radio Free Europe. In the near darkness, she glimpsed her mother arranging their salvaged silverware in a china cabinet with a broken glass front, removing them one by one from the sole trunk they’d been allowed to bring.

  Her father came in. Struggling to keep his voice low, he said, “They say it is only a matter of time before the West will intervene. The atrocities going on here cannot continue much longer. Do you know what they call the border that stretches between us and the rest of Europe? The Iron Curtain, Despina. The Iron Curtain. Help will arrive soon, you will see.”

  Her father, like her, disbelieving. Then going back to his room and turning out the light.

  How much time passed like this? She wasn’t sure. Days, at least, as her mother reminded her constantly. Every morning, when she laid her cool hand on her forehead and whispered in her ear, “Talia, come, you have to eat something,” she knew that another one had passed. How could she explain that she never wanted to open her eyes again, she never wanted to eat, wash, move again? She could not, of course. For them, she had to find a way to set her body in motion. For them, she had to find a way.

  It wasn’t until her mother threatened to pour cold water on her that she actually did it. She rose reluctantly, even if in her heart the last thing she wanted was to upset her mother, to drive her mad with worry. Sliding her feet inside her house slippers, not bothering to throw a robe over her nightgown, she followed her mother into the common area, where a plate of toast and a mug of tea had been placed ceremoniously on a wooden table covered in plastic. Taking a bite, chewing listlessly, Natalia let her eyes wander about the room.

  The flat was not quite as dreadful as it had first seemed. It had been elegant once, she could tell, designed in a classic Edwardian style, with thick, beveled glass French doors, expansive windows, and an intricately designed parquet floor. But years of neglect had caused the windowsills to peel, the walls to become darkened with soot, the gleam and richness of the wooden floor to subside underneath the layers of grime. It certainly did not help that the living room had been dissected and barricaded, each family claiming its stake with wooden dividers and rugs hung from clotheslines. Yet something about this dilapidated flat moved her. It was an invalid, a cripple in need of acceptance, in need of embracing. Like her, it willed itself to remain upright, to maintain some semblance of its former splendor.

  After breakfast, Natalia helped her mother clear the dishes and bring them to the kitchen at the end of a poorly lit hallway. They were still rinsing the cups and setting them to dry on the counter when that woman Natalia feared the most burst through the swing door.

  “Time’s up,” she said, without as much as a greeting. “Didn’t you see the schedule?” She stood there in a greasy apron draped over a bright dress, pointing to the sheet of paper taped over the stove.

  “Yes, we are just about finished,” said Despina, not looking up from her dishes, which she continued to scrub vigorously.

  The woman’s eyes stretched as wide as one might imagine possible, and a new shade of pink rose to her already florid face. “Comrade, this cannot happen again!” she exclaimed, waving her chubby hand in the air. “There are demonstrations that I am required to attend every Saturday, do you understand? Every Saturday afternoon, and I cannot be a minute late!”

  They bundled the dishes haphazardly inside their drying towels and hurried out without saying a word. The woman’s voice chased them all the way to the end of the hallway.

  “That’s right! Who the hell do you think you are? Your days are over, madam! They are over! Soon you will be shining my boots at the front door!”

  The first thing her mother did back in their rooms was to go close the windows. Then she drew all the curtains shut.

  “Do not speak to that woman ever. Do not say a word,” she remarked to Anton, who was rustling through the pages of his newspaper, searching for news that did not exist. “Do not even let her hear you whisper. She means to cause trouble for us.”

  “Oh, let me be, Despina! I can say what I want in my own room. That Communist bitch can go to hell!”

  Her mother glared at him, horrified. Then she went into the other room and turned the radio on full blast.

  Weeks passed like this. Weeks before they were able to reemerge from their paralysis, their stunned inertia. By the time they began gravitating back toward a routine, Natalia had already gotten used to fitting her daily tasks into predetermined time slots. She learned how to bathe in tepid water, making the most of her allotted ten minutes, how to clear the table and wash the dishes before the other flatmates barged in with their pots and pans, their pig fat and wilted carrots, to cook on the stovetop that only her mother bothered to clean. She learned how to keep her voice at a whisper, to convert her face into a mask that betrayed nothing other than casual detachment, to shrug when an insult was hurled her way. Most important, she learned how to convince her mother that she wasn’t hungry, she was never hungry, for their savings were quickly dwindling.

  Ever since the day her father had been forced to relinquish ownership of the store along with the home he had built with his own hands, he’d been looking for work. He had looked anywhere and everywhere, but no one would hire him. He applied for jobs as a store clerk, then waiting tables and driving cabs, even working a pretzel cart on the street corner.

  “I am still young, I can perform any job,” he told shopkeepers and restaurant managers and store clerks.

  “Do you have working papers?” they all asked him. “Are you a card-carrying Party member?”

  “No,” he’d admit. “My right to work has been revoked, but I am willing to do anything. Whatever you need, just ask me. I used to own a chain of stores once. I can be quite resourceful, you know. Just try me out. You can pay me whatever you are able to.”

  Each time, the conversation ended more or less the same way. “Not worth the trouble, I’m afraid. I’d be in an awful mess myself if I hired you. Good luck. I hope you find something, somewhere. Not here, though.”

  He did find something once in a while, day jobs that no one wanted which barely paid enough for a day’s meal and a trolley ride home. He sold lottery tickets at the corner kiosk next to the sports stadium, swept sidewalks, helped unload delivery trucks at the few restaurants still open in town. The only people who hired him now were old friends, people from his past, from the old days.

  And still, those jobs were a blessing. When he was able to come home with a little cash in his pocket, Despina took the bills and counted them carefully. Then she hurried to the outdoor market to buy a few vegetables, some fresh eggs before they ran out, trying her best to put together a meal that would revive her husband’s dwindling energy, his splintered spirit. For there was only one thing Natalia’s mother was determined to do, and that was to maintain some measure of normalcy in their home, even though nothing about their new life was normal. For that, however, her mother was prepared to fight with her last breath. She would fight as she had since that day during the war, when they rode in darkness on a train full of wounded soldiers, looking ahead, only ahead, for anything that was still possible.

  For Anton’s fiftieth birthday, Despina figured out a way to bake his favorite tart, even though no one had seen any fresh fruit in Bucharest in more than five years.

  “I have an idea,” she whispered to Natalia that afternoon in early June. “Come with me.” Handing her a straw shopping bag, she grabbed the house
keys and headed for the door.

  “Are we going to the open market?” Natalia asked, perplexed, knowing that their weekly budget had run out days ago.

  “Not really. We are just going for a walk. Just a stroll around the neighborhood. You and me, alone.”

  Natalia eyed her suspiciously but followed anyway. It was, indeed, a perfect summer day, and she didn’t mind the walk, even though her mother seemed not to welcome much conversation. Walking slightly ahead of her, she stopped at the corner and waved for her to hurry. A moment later, they found themselves on a remote cobblestone street where a multitude of trees cast long shadows in the afternoon sun.

  “So here we are,” Despina said.

  “Where?” Natalia asked, still confused.

  “Look around, darling.” She swept her arm out toward the street, and some mischievousness played in her eyes.

  Then, all of a sudden, she saw it. Branches of cherry trees heavy with fruit hung over the gated fences on both sides of the sidewalk. The street was littered with fallen cherries. A small, astonished cry came from her lips. She watched her mother begin to collect the fallen fruit, bending and straightening as she moved about, tossing the cherries into her burlap bag as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “That bag of yours is mighty full,” she joked, glancing back at Natalia, who stood there clutching the bag to her chest.

  In an instant, Natalia caught up and looped her arm tightly through her mother’s. She rested her head on her shoulder, and they walked like that for a while, lost in their thoughts, passing the dancing shadows on the sidewalk to the next street, where more cherries lay scattered on the ground, ready for the picking. The summer sky embraced them, so blue, the color of hope. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make her feel thankful. Thankful, indeed, that she still had her family and that at the very least, her family would enjoy some splendid pastries.