The Girl They Left Behind

by Roxanne Veletzos

  Then, as now, there had been a sacrifice.

  Immediately, her thoughts shot back to the night before, to those last moments with Anton and Despina, the only parents she’d really known. It wasn’t exactly their words that were reassembling now in a different light but the silence between them. She understood now what had been in her father’s eyes when he held her in his arms before turning in for the night. All that they had been to each other, all that he had wanted to give her and had not been able to, all that he wished for her still, was there in his misty gaze as he kissed her forehead for the very last time.

  And her mother. Not for a moment had there been a crack in her armor, a tremor that might have given away what was to come. She had played her part perfectly. No doubt, days before, when Victor had shown Despina the letter that had inexplicably landed on his desk, she had silenced her heart and said, Do it. Do it, Victor. Get her out of here. Get her to a place where she can have a better life. Return her to them. It is just.

  Be strong, Talia, she would whisper now if she could. Be strong and don’t look back.

  I will try, Mama, Natalia thought, tears flooding her anew. I will try even though I do not know how I will get by without you, without my papa, my savior, my knight in shining armor.

  You have made my life truly beautiful, her mother had said, and Natalia realized now that perhaps it had not been a good-bye after all, but an affirmation, something she could keep locked inside her heart forever, like a pearl.

  Inside the aircraft, flight attendants began ambling up and down the aisles, asking passengers if they would like some water or coffee or tea, if there was anything they needed on this last stretch of the flight. Rustling in their seats, stretching their arms, men and women rubbed their bleary eyes and looked out at the sky, where a softness had at last seeped into its persistent azure, tingeing it gold.

  Natalia sat silently and waited, although for what she wasn’t sure. Perhaps she expected a conclusion of sorts, the words The End to flash before her like at the close of a movie, although she knew one would not come, for this was not an end but a beginning. Perhaps she expected a physical sign of some kind, a bolt of lightning or the sound of thunder, something to mark the slow descent into her new life, but all that stretched before her was a void, and all she heard was the wild hammering of her own heart.

  Then suddenly, down below, she spotted something that she had only read about in papers. She had never seen a picture of it, but she knew what it was. A statue, dark green and proud, welcomed her, and the torch in the statue’s hand beckoned her to her new life, to her new existence, which she now knew was a gift. So much awaited her down there in the land of light and promise, so much that she embraced with a feeling of grace and, above all, with love.

  47

  ON A STOOP ON A sycamore-lined street, she sat clutching her purse, the leather strap moist in her clenched fists. In the hours just after sunrise, she watched children brushing past her in a swirl of laughter, the corner fruit vendor hauling out a variety of produce in crates under the bright awning—an explosion of orange and red and green, a Cézanne painting. She watched the sun rise higher still in the sky, the pavement shimmering with heat in the noon hour, people wearing baseball caps and construction gear lining up along the length of the block in front of a restaurant called a pizzeria which was yet to open. And she watched one building in particular, a prewar brownstone with noisy air-conditioning units and a rusty old fire escape zigzagging the length of its five stories, people coming and going through a door that was poorly painted.

  Three mornings in a row, she’d walked here from the tiny apartment she’d rented just off the waterfront, in this lively borough of Brooklyn. It seemed impossible that in the ten minutes it took to get here, she could so utterly lose her nerve, yet there she was, running off each time, feeling defeated, paralyzed by anxiety, cowardly. On this morning, however, Williamsburg burst into a new energy of sorts, signaled at first by little flags appearing in the windows. By ten o’clock, people were streaming out into the street by the dozens, children bearing more little red-white-and-blue flags, an outpouring that reminded her of the marches she’d had to participate in back home, although there were no somber faces here, and only cheerful voices engulfed her. Whatever this was, she was caught up in it, emboldened, restored in her courage, enough that she sprinted quite suddenly across the street. Nonchalantly, she hovered near the entrance, and when the door swung open, she caught it in time.

  “Thank you, sir,” she offered in her best English with a smile. So little she remembered from school, and although she’d been poring over her instructional books, she still felt unsure of even the most basic phrases. “I lost my key, and I can’t find it.” The man, however, did not seem to care about an explanation; he was already off, his mind on other things.

  Ten, fifteen minutes had passed since she’d reached the third landing, and still she hadn’t been able to take one step toward the apartment door. It was hot in here, hotter than outside, and she leaned against a wall, unbuttoned her blouse at the top, and blew air into the crevice between her breasts. Through a narrow window, a beam of light pierced the darkness, landing right at her feet. She ran her fingers through the dancing dust particles, scattering them momentarily. She wondered if she’d come too late to mend what had long been broken. As she was turning to leave, she heard sounds on the other side of the door, and she became still.

  The door pushed open. Again, there was some clatter, voices, an object hitting the floor. Then a figure emerged. A pair of pale, moonlike eyes met hers, and she had to grab on to the railing.

  “I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”

  But she couldn’t quite move because of the way the boy was staring at her. At first, she thought it was because of the unbuttoned blouse, and she clasped it shut, but the eyes only darkened, and he retreated inside, crushing a paper cone hat into his fist. He was about to slam the door when Natalia raised her hand.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait a moment.”

  “I’m not going with you!” the boy shouted, red-faced now, ferocious. “I’m not going anywhere. You can’t make me! You can’t make me, you hear?”

  Another child appeared behind him. Then another. All aged between five and ten, two boys and a girl. They stood together with the first boy as a group, a unified front, an army ready for battle.

  “I’m sorry,” Natalia repeated. “I must have gotten the wrong apartment . . .” She dug in her purse for the piece of paper bearing the address, but she couldn’t find it. “I’m looking for a couple,” she began again bravely. “Maybe you can help me?” she said to the children, who hadn’t budged an inch.

  “Our father isn’t here,” the littlest one said, as if she’d rehearsed this line beforehand without fully understanding it, holding her chin high. She had a slight lisp, and her hair, in pigtails, was as light as spun gold. “He’s on a construction job in Rhode Island. He’s bringing us presents.”

  “Be quiet, silly,” the elder boy said, nudging her a little. “Didn’t I tell you not to talk to strangers?”

  He put an arm protectively around the girl’s shoulder, and she leaned toward him, biting a plump, rosy lip. All eyes returned to Natalia, piercing, expectant. Then another silhouette appeared behind them, and they all turned slightly and moved out of the way, making room.

  “Kids,” the woman said. “Kids,” and then she stopped.

  She wasn’t much taller than them. A lithe figure in a green, flowy dress, her abundant hair piled high in a bun, a few reddish highlights framing her face. In the bleak light of the hallway, she looked younger than she probably was—with high cheekbones and luminous, flawless skin—though when she stepped forward, Natalia could see the tiny lines curving around her mouth. In her hands, she carried a bouquet of daisies that had been tied together with a red, white, and blue ribbon.

  “Can I help you, miss?” she said with a warm, friendly smile.

  “Ye
s. Yes, I’m here because . . . I’m looking for . . .” Natalia swallowed hard against the knot in her throat. All the words she’d carefully rehearsed beforehand had left her, flown from her memory. She only knew a handful of them anyway, hardly enough to cobble together something this complex, but then she realized that she didn’t have to. If she’d indeed come to the right place, there was another way.

  In Romanian, so softly that she could hardly hear her own voice, she said, “I’ve been sent here by a mutual friend. A man by the name of John Fowley.”

  The bouquet slipped from the woman’s hands.

  She had sent the kids away. She’d given them money to go buy lunch, pizza and lemonade, and ice cream afterward from the street vendor. Then they would go to the park. Enough for a feast, fit for a holiday, and they left in a cloak of excitement, no longer paying attention to the unexpected visitor.

  “Some wine?” she said after she’d locked the door and come back into the kitchen timidly, a stranger under her own roof. She looked extremely pale.

  Natalia felt quite light-headed herself and wanted to suggest sitting down, but she said nothing.

  From a cupboard in the kitchen, the woman extracted two glasses, filled them high from the ruby-colored jug she brought out of the fridge. She placed them on the table, where a pair of brass candleholders cast reflections on the slightly scarred wood which had been nevertheless polished to a high shine. There were flowers here and there set in old jam jars, and the sofa and chairs had been recovered in a thick brocade cloth, though the cushions had long lost their plumpness. It stirred her in an odd way. Her own flat back in Bucharest had been tended to with the same care, the same intent to disguise its modesty with a few lovely details.

  “They say Chianti should be served at room temperature, but I never quite got used to that, you know?” the woman said. “I guess for me, wine in the warm weather should be served cold, like the muscat we used to drink in the Moldavian countryside. I never grew to like the fancy ones here, you know, even though you wouldn’t believe how many there are . . .”

  When Natalia took the glass from her hand, their fingers brushed, and the woman stilled. She grew as stiff as a statue, including her face. Only a tiny gasp came from her lips.

  It wasn’t anything like Natalia had imagined since descending from that plane all of two weeks ago, counting the days, going over in her head how this would unfold, what she would say. No, this encounter was strewn with silence more than with words; it lacked the drama that she had envisioned. They were just two women, two strangers, with hair of almost the same hue, sharing a drink.

  “They seem very sweet,” Natalia said after a silence. “Your children seem very sweet.” But she could still feel the way their eyes had fastened on her as their mother counted up the money, digging inside her purse. Maybe they’d already sensed who she was, what she was—not just an afternoon visitor but a hand grenade tossed at the heart of their family. “You don’t have to tell them. About me.”

  The woman smiled as if she understood something quite suddenly. On the tabletop, she clasped her hands, but even so, Natalia could see they were trembling. Her lips were quivering, too, and Natalia realized that it wasn’t lack of emotion that she’d witnessed but a colossal effort to keep it in check.

  “They are not what you think. Yes, I love them dearly, I love each one of them, but . . .” She shook her head a little as if she couldn’t quite find the way to explain, a hand coming up to her temple, rubbing it a little. Then her gaze lifted. “I am their foster mother, you see.”

  It changed after that. Whatever barrier had been there before was broken down enough that they could talk to each other a little more freely. Natalia felt her resistance melting away, and she began opening up about the remarkable circumstances that had brought her here, how she’d left her home with no more than the clothes on her back and little idea of where she was going. She went farther back in time and described all that her family had been through in the years after the war, how much their lives changed, how much they’d lost yet still had in one another. How in her heart she hoped, she knew, they’d all be together again. About Victor and what he’d meant to her, she said nothing. She couldn’t speak or think of him yet without a hole opening up in the pit of her stomach. Thus, the rest of the afternoon passed in a blur, and it was only when daylight began to fade into a glowing dusk that she fell silent, realizing she’d done most of the talking.

  “What about you?” Natalia said. “Tell me something about you. About you and your . . .” She didn’t know what to call him, what word to use. “Your husband.”

  “What would you like to know?” the woman replied gently.

  “I’m not sure.” She paused. “Perhaps something about the children?”

  There was no answer. A long moment passed, and the woman rose from the table and walked away, disappearing into another room. When she returned, there was something in her hands. She did not sit back down but stood next to Natalia’s chair and placed the object on the table. It was a piece of cloth, something dusty rose, made of cotton.

  Even before touching it, Natalia’s heart leaped into a full gallop. She extended her hand, ran her fingers over the fine texture, over the ribbon of lace and silk piping adorning the edge. And then she picked it up.

  A child’s bonnet. Her hands quivered as she brought it close to her face. She placed it next to her cheek, inhaled, groping for a recognizable scent. There was nothing there, the scent was long gone, but she was overcome by something else, and she closed her eyes and crumpled the cloth in her hands, aware only of the pulse batting in her throat.

  A dark boiler room, too hot, too humid. A basement window. The flurry of snow looked like fireflies, and the three of them had been hiding for hours. Outside, streetlights, dim in the late hour, the sound of breaking glass. Be brave. Someone had said to be brave. But it was all right, she was safe, even if it was cold out on the street and she wanted to go home. She wanted to go home.

  “I don’t know,” Natalia began. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.” Her heart felt like it might burst through her chest, and a sharp panic seized her. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she repeated, and began rising from her chair, gripping the side of the table, but a hand steadied her. It fell squarely on her shoulder, and she no longer had the strength.

  The hand traveled up to her cheek, along her temple, where her pulse throbbed like mad. And then she smelled it, the scent she’d been seeking. It was there, clear and stark like a bright light in a dark forest, a forest she’d been lost in and seeking her way out of for nearly twenty years.

  48

  IN THE MONTHS AFTER DESPINA and Anton adopted her, Natalia had been plagued with endless night terrors from which only her father could rescue her. Night after night, when she woke screaming, clutching her pillow for dear life, he would run into her room and gather her into his arms. “I’m here, darling,” he would whisper, holding her tightly against his chest. “I’m always here. Tell me what’s frightened you. Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

  She could never remember what the precise thing was. All she recalled was her father caressing her hair, listening intently as the words flowed out of her, rushed, tremulous. When she had calmed down, he would stand up and make a gesture with his arms, wide and upsweeping, as if he meant to catch those bad dreams in his grasp. Then, going to the window, wrenching it open, he would fling them out into the dark. Sometimes her mother would come into the room, and seeing him standing there beneath the billowing curtains, she would shout, “Are you out of your mind, Anton? You’ll both catch a chill!” But neither Natalia nor her father would utter a word. All that mattered was that whatever had disturbed her sleep would not be coming back—at least, not that night.

  Those old demons. They never released her entirely, even long after the nightmares had ended. So much of her life, she’d been evading their grip, dodging their shadows, only to find that here, of all places, as the evening wore on, they were
scattering off of their own accord, with no more resistance than dandelion seeds blown by the wind.

  The kids had come home long ago, and the woman had fed them dinner and put them to bed. Now it was just the two of them in the quietness of the living room, nervously speaking over each other and silent at times, with only a few candles for company, the contours of furniture barely visible beyond the flickering flames.

  The woman seemed suddenly wistful. Straightening herself up on the sofa, she let go of Natalia’s hand, which she’d been holding most of the night. There was something in her that seemed to go soft, a loosening of a shell that she had built around herself.

  “Oh, Natalia. If you only knew. It was a terrible time. A time . . .” She ran a hand over her hair, leaned forward onto her elbows. “It was a time when I thought that I would not live. There was so much pain in my heart—your father’s, too.” She paused, her voice breaking.

  “Tell me.”

  After lighting new candles, she settled back down, reached for a blanket thrown over the edge of the sofa, and pulled it over their laps. She remained quiet for a moment longer.

  “Whatever it is, whatever happened, tell me. I need to know.”

  So she began softly, going back to the beginning, to that fateful night that had dictated the course of all their lives, that night that had changed everything.

  There had been no dream of America in those days for Zora and Iosef. Back then, as the young couple muddled through the bleakness of their early life in Geneva, their only preoccupation had been how to get back into Romania, even though it had been only by a miracle that they’d escaped on that outbound train. It was early in the war, and neither of them had considered that returning might just be a fantasy, a feat less conquerable with each passing day.

  A kind man using a cane despite not being so old had met them at the railway station, a friend of Stefan’s from his law-school days whom he’d met as an exchange student and with whom he had continued to remain in touch. The Swiss government wasn’t allowing many non-POW refugees into the country by then, and although no longer in hiding, they soon found themselves, despite their host’s good nature and hospitality, in circumstances not a great deal different—living in a tiny room with an old-fashioned washbasin, directly above a defunct flower shop which the man owned. After his wife passed away unexpectedly, he’d explained to the couple that first night over a simple supper, it had saddened him too deeply to set foot inside it, and so he’d closed its doors. He couldn’t even begin to handle all the details that his wife had managed so superbly, and it was too much of a burden on his time, at any rate.