The question takes me so much by surprise. I say, “On whose side?”
The officer looks at me with mean eyes and wipes the sweat off his flat, shiny face before he answers.
I correct myself and ask him, “What weapon?”
“Excuse me? Could you repeat that, please?”
“What weapon would I be using?” I ask. “I know how to shoot a rifle. We shot a rifle every week in high school as part of our patriotic education, and I can do that. I can shoot a gun.”
He isn’t really following me. This is not the way naturalizing interviews are supposed to go.
“Does this mean yes? Is your answer to this question yes, that you would?”
To his utter horror I say, “Oh, I’m sorry! No, of course I wouldn’t go to war. I wouldn’t fight in a war, should America go to war.”
My answer really baffles him. It irritates me how I had to pronounce the word war three times. I think of the two brothers across the bloody field lost and searching for each other as the sun shone aslant over the corpses. I think of Ivan taken as a prisoner of war and lost for twenty-five years. I think of my Bessarabian aunt who held me to her bosom in the rain, of her son Petea who made her so worried that she had forgotten the way home.
I tell the officer again, “No, no. I wouldn’t fight in a war.”
He asks whether I would help in any way, in case of a war, “such as care for the wounded. Be a nurse, for example.”
When I answer yes to that part, he seems pleased that there’s some common ground between us.
This scene stops making sense: the square, windowless room, the neon lights, the man with a flat, shiny face filling out a form and asking me questions about wars and the wounded. I think of the stories my father used to tell me about when he was a nurse’s aide in the war, at fifteen. He saw the brains of soldiers with head wounds. He saw their brains pulsing through their crushed skulls.
I don’t want to be naturalized any more. The word makes no sense to me anyway, as if I were unnatural. I want to get out of here. I think about telling him I have relatives who went to the USSR and engaged in forms of barter with the Russian population, and others who did time in the harshest of political prisons in Romania, and yet others who fell dead on the floor at the mere sight of the handwriting of a beloved person, and that a gypsy with raspberries was my relative, too – if I said all that, then he’d end the interview, they’d deport me, and I would never have to be naturalized again. What my fate might be if I were deported back to Romania is something so bleak and so frightful that the mere thought of it makes me tremble as I fidget in front of the naturalizing officer, feeling overdressed and ridiculous.
I think of the last time we saw Ana’s son, Petea. It was many years ago, when he stopped by our house asking if we could put him up for the night. He looked haggard and haunted. The secret police were after him, but he couldn’t tell us why and didn’t want to get his mother in trouble. He told us not to tell Ana we saw him. Ana Koltzunov had tears in her eyes for the rest of her life. I think of Sergeant Dumitriu and of the shadows following me every night on my way back from school. I think of the scrawny man in the pastry shop, of the old man dripping brown soup into his beard, of my father’s arrests. To where would I be deported? Where would they send me? Mona Manoliu, I say to myself, it’s better to be naturalized than to be deported back to that nightmare you left six years ago.
The officer goes over to the next room and asks his colleague to join us. They whisper for a while in a corner of the office, and then they come over with strained smiles on their faces.
My officer says, “So, you’re a conscientious objector. That’s what you are.”
He writes this down as the answer to the last question. I am finally naturalized as a conscientious objector. The long line of my relatives, with their stories of wars and floods, partings and reunions in train stations, look at me sternly, a row of stern faces, blue-eyed women and dark-haired men, neatly reflected in my great-grandmother’s mirror.
Disintegration, Reintegration
A VOID SETTLES in our marriage. Tom becomes more distant and irritable, as if now that we’ve been married for a couple of years, we can finally withdraw inside our own worlds and wait for old age like two strangers. I can’t really point to the exact moment when Tom started treating me as a roommate instead of as his wife. Maybe it was the night when I went over to kiss him as he was reading Carl Jung’s book on the collective subconscious and he pushed me away, saying he had a lot of work to do. His PhD orals were coming up, didn’t I know that? Then it all escalated into a quarrel. I mentioned to him that, if anything, reading Jung and all that stuff about dreams and sexuality and the feminine and the masculine should make him want to kiss me more; then I blurted out that I had a great love in Romania, when I was young. He blurted back that I should just go back to that love in Romania. It was then that I felt the snap, a sudden rift. I was lonely, intolerably lonely, in our Chicago apartment. I wanted to pick up a suitcase and go. But I didn’t really have anywhere or anyone to go to. So I didn’t move from the armchair and thought, instead, to just give Tom some time; it will all get better.
Little quarrels that used to make us laugh and gave us an excuse to hold each other tight – I’m sorry. No, it’s my fault, forget it – now stretch into hours, sometimes days, of debate and resentment, hostile glances, shouts and silences. Always silence. I feel that there is something I’m missing, as if I were doing something wrong all the time or as if something were always in its wrong place. Words get worn out, lose their meaning, and become empty sounds. Light switch. Checking account. Toilet seat. That tone of voice. You clean up. No, you. Clean up, clean up, clean up, up, up.
I think I’ve made a mistake. Nothing fits any more. Everything is a reason for a quarrel. When did this happen, how did it start? I’m all confused, because I don’t see how I can get out of this. This is my marriage, and I wonder how I can survive for another forty years, fifty years . . . or just another year. Somehow this seems harder to escape than Romania or Gladys and Ron’s house. Fate, some kind of cosmic randomness, dropped me into those situations. But this is what I have created and planned and promised myself with a clear mind and a pure heart.
I miss those first months with Tom, when we just laughed, listened to blues and squeaky Irish songs, chopped up vegetables, and talked about the glories of Russian literature and avant-garde theatre. I don’t understand this new puzzle in my life or how to solve it. Sometimes I used to think that everything follows some kind of classic plan, that after overcoming many obstacles, the princess finally reaches her destination; there’s a prince in a golden carriage surrounded by white doves who takes her to his calm, peaceful kingdom. A kingdom where she can rest after all her rambling and finish her theatre degree and delight in little domestic pleasures. I don’t understand all this emptiness.
Mihai occasionally appears in my dreams, usually with his back towards me, sitting on the bench in front of my aunt’s house or turned only halfway so I can see his profile as he is staring at something in the distance, on the other side of the street. Some mornings when I wake up not knowing where I am and I look at the back of the man sleeping next to me, I have the illusion, for maybe a fraction of a second just before coming to full consciousness, that it is Mihai’s back moving slowly up and down in the rhythm of his breathing. We are finally together, it is not clear in what country and in what city, we are just suspended somewhere in the world, finally living our love freely, what I had once dreamed of.
When Tom rolls over and says Good morning, honey, I experience something like a sudden fall, a dull thump in my consciousness that brings with it a dull sadness, a dull sense of foreignness, everything dull, dull, dull, like a wedding without dancing.
It is around this time that my mother calls to tell me that the red shoes have arrived. My parents’ immigration papers came through; they got their passports. They are arriving next month. It seems like my salvation. My parents will come
and make it all better, solve all the problems in my marriage, and get Tom to straighten out.
I drive to the airport by myself. I don’t want Tom to come with me. I want this reunion to take place just among the three of us, the way the disintegration of the family had taken place among just the three of us in the cruel April of hyacinths and daffodils in our Bucharest apartment when we decided I was going to try leaving that summer. It is May in Chicago, with warm gusts from Lake Michigan shaking the freshly exhibited yachts on Lake Shore Drive.
I’m sweating and having little earthquakes in my body, like the aftershocks that follow an enormous earthquake. It’s the earth settling, people said after the ’77 quake in Bucharest, whenever we felt more little shakes and were ready to rush down the stairs or jump out of the window.
I am standing in front of the large metal automatic gates at the international arrivals terminal, next to hundreds of other people who are waiting for relatives from all over the world and staring intently in the direction of the gates. Relatives from Poland and Senegal, from Vietnam and Burkina Faso, from Italy and Algeria, the whole world gathered at the gates for international arrivals. My head is buzzing from all the languages spoken around me, and I am counting in my head in Romanian, unu, doi, trei, patru, cinci, saşe, counting seconds until I see my parents, not wanting to take my eyes off the gates, not even to blink, until my eyes are tearing from the effort of not blinking.
I see them before they recognize me. Then my father sees me, and his face beams. His hair is whiter, his figure more bent over. He’s thin and old. My mother looks almost unchanged, though her round blue eyes shine bluer than ever. I let out a little scream, and my father starts to weep with jerking sobs.
The first thing my father says is “Our airplane almost crashed and fell into the ocean. I’ll never take the airplane again, never again in my life.”
“You’re crazy. Don’t listen to him, he’s exaggerating,” my mother tells me. “We just had a little turbulence.”
“Turbulence?” says my father. “We were almost turned over and thrown into the ocean. That’s all we needed, after all we’ve been through.”
I laugh through my tears. It’s like we’ve been separated for only a day, a long, long day during which I’ve moved about a dozen times, got married, finished one degree and started working on another, got a job and then another, and started having marital problems. And on that same long day, my parents had to apply to reunite the family according to the law for people who have first-degree blood relatives abroad. My father was dismissed from his job at the Ploieşti Institute, thrown out in a big humiliating scene in front of the whole university, and treated like a traitor to the country and the Party because he was leaving to reunite with his daughter in America. My parents had to survive without work until their emigration papers came through two years later. Aunt Nina, Uncle Ion, and Aunt Matilda helped them survive and get through the ordeal of waiting without jobs, without money. My father is dragging the enormous old leather suitcase that we always took with us to the seaside, and my mother is carrying a newer black suitcase that I don’t know.
We talk nonstop on the way home in the car, our stories swirling together as we try to tell everything at once. “The secret police are meaner and stupider than ever. There’s barely anything to eat. We practically starved for two years, survived on bread and potatoes, and even those were hard to find. Ceauşescu is building this monstrosity, the Palace of the People. Even the taps in it are golden and studded with diamonds. While the people are starving, can you imagine? He is in the last stages of his madness,” my father says, squeezing shut his steel-blue eyes.
“The Securitate are swarming and squirming around like rats on a sinking ship,” he goes on. Then he laughs and says as if he were telling the world’s greatest joke: “They finally took their claws off me, the morons, once it was known I was emigrating, I was of no more interest to them. It’s all over,” he adds gloomily. “But something is going to happen soon,” he says in his old prophetic way, “mark my words, something is in the air.”
He asks what news of Romania we get here in America and is stunned to hear we don’t hear much about Romania at all.
“Don’t you listen to Radio Free Europe?” he asks.
“We don’t get Radio Free Europe here,” I say, almost embarrassed. “We get hundreds of stations and channels, though.”
“What good are they if you can’t get Radio Free Europe?” says my father, and I am glad to see that the humiliating years in Romania on the edge of starvation have not killed his spark, or his anger.
“Look, Mama! There’s the Sears Tower, see? And look, Papa, there’s the Chicago skyline, the Loop, see that?” I say proudly, as if the city belonged to me.
“Oh, so big, so modern,” says my father. “Is that what all of Chicago is like?”
“Not all of it. It’s a big, big city,” I say. “You can find everything.”
“Can I find work? Work in my field?” my father asks.
“We’ll talk about that later, Miron, let the girl catch her breath,” my mother says.
I am stunned by my father’s question and by my own inability to give a reassuring or informed answer. What will my father do in Chicago at his age, with his background in Latin, Romanian linguistics and literature and with no knowledge of English whatsoever?
Tom is waiting for us at our window, waving from the first floor. I wave back at him, nudge my mother, who looks up through the car window, tries to smile and wave back. But my father is sitting in the front seat staring out of the windscreen without really seeing anything.
“We left everything just like that, a whole life . . . we just locked up and left with only a few things. The bastards must have already broken in, taken everything, and sealed off the apartment. To think of it, my mother’s desk, all of my books . . . everything.” His eyes are fierce with pain, anger, anxiety and every hard feeling on the face of the earth.
My mother tries to be light as she looks up at Tom, who is relentlessly moving his arms and smiling at the window. “Stop all this now,” she says. “What’s done is done, you wanted to leave more than anything else, remember?”
What’s done is done, just like Letizia had said in the Trieste railway station, our fate sealed, our roots cut off, our past left behind. I lean over and embrace my father. He tells me not to cry, We are all together now, what’s there to cry for, it is just furniture after all. Tom comes down to meet us and help us with the luggage.
But my parents’ arrival does not perform the magic I am hoping for in my marriage. Now, with my parents living in our apartment and sleeping on the pullout sofa in the living room until they can get their own apartment, Tom and I are forced to argue in whispers, in the bedroom. Tom is exceedingly kind to my parents and does his best to help them with English, drive them around, and explain to them the news on TV.
Eventually my father gives in and starts classes at the same college where I’ve been teaching English as a second language. He takes the train every day to and from the college, holding the train pass my mother got him like a precious belonging in the front pocket of his blazer. He dresses up in his best suit every time he goes to his classes, as if he were teaching school himself. Sometimes we take the train together, but most often I go to work directly after my university courses. One day I run some errands after my performance theory class and end up at Howard Street station, where everybody transfers between Chicago and the suburbs. Close to the ticket area, I see a crowd and hear a lot of loud talking. I see my father standing in the middle of the crowd, with one of the train conductors taking him by his arm roughly and other people staring at him while he shouts in Romanian at the conductor to leave him alone and for everybody to go to hell. His face is red, his jaws are shaking in anger or as if he were about to cry. He has taken the train in the wrong direction to get to his English classes, has used up his ticket, and is trying to get through the turnstile in the wrong direction. He looks so desperate and d
iminished; his white hair is dishevelled, and sweat is pouring down his face on this sweltering Chicago September day.
I push all the people around him away, go straight to my father, whose eyes light up at the sight of me as if he’d seen his personal saviour. I tell the train conductor to leave my father the hell alone and learn to be more polite with people in the future, and I take my father by the arm towards the correct train track. He is shaking with anger and humiliation and tells me he does not want to die on American earth. As we get on the train and find an empty seat, he tells me he wants to be buried next to his people. He looks at me calmly and places his train pass neatly back in the front pocket of his navy-blue blazer.
My Lover Janusz from Belgrade
THERE’S A SUMMER when my confusion strikes worse than ever. There are highways everywhere, and I’m riding on them, late at night, to my lover’s house, in some distant part of Chicago. I still love my husband despite all the quarrels. I feel safe and secure next to him, but something isn’t right.
I blame my estrangement on cultural differences. I blame it on my first love, who’s not letting me love again the way I should. He blames it on his childhood and adolescence. We blame it on each other; we blame it on ourselves, on our parents, on and on. We struggle, we argue, we cry, we make up. I’m like Emma Bovary: Oh my God, why have I got married? But I’m not like Emma, really. I grew up in a Marxist country, after all. My biggest fantasy wasn’t about falling in love; it was about killing our president. I think it’s funny that even people who didn’t grow up in a dictatorship still find ways to make each other miserable. I think it’s funny that Tom is studying psychology and yet has so many problems of his own. Marta tells me it’s classic, that many people who want to become therapists have plenty of problems, and that’s why they choose that line of work: to get away from their own stuff. I tell Marta that makes sense, but I don’t want to be the one dealing with Tom’s problems; he can be his own therapist.
Train to Trieste Page 21
