Train to Trieste

by Domnica Radulescu

  I remember Biljana’s brown, elegant leather bag that she casually placed next to her and how she’d asked the conductor something at the last minute, something in Serbian, and how the Serbian words had seemed to me then so melodious in her mouth. I also remember being irritated by the fact she lingered, delayed the departure of the train by talking to the conductor. I remember the woman’s scream with a sudden accuracy. That moment when I thought I was going to faint with fear, but then the scream came and the conductor let go of me and my coat. How I pulled down the window and saw the woman in the light summery dress running across the tracks. Could it all have been planned by these people who were somehow strangely connected to one another without my having the faintest idea about it: Mihai, Anca, Biljana, Petrescu, a mystery woman running across the tracks? Was Biljana’s brown bag holding my father’s manuscript right there in front of me? And why risk so much for something that was probably just an emotional report of our daily oppressions? But maybe Radu is right that it all mattered – it mattered that everything be known and recorded somewhere. All the years that my father was in Romania after my departure, he must have listened to his Radio Free Europe like a fiend, agonizing about his manuscript and hoping one night he would hear them read pages from it. No wonder the first thing he wanted when he got to America was to buy a short-wave radio.

  “Do you get it now? Why Mihai was not there for you the morning you left?” Radu asks, like a detective reaching the end of an investigation.

  I am back in Mihai’s room that morning in late summer. His room is unusually tidy, his hiking breeches and boots are nowhere to be found, and my red slip is under the bed. Mihai knows I am planning to leave and has disappeared. He knows that if we see each other again this morning I might become weak and tell him everything; he might become weak and tell me everything. I might revoke all my plans and refuse to leave. The Securitate might get him because he is actually helping me leave the country, and they will realize that he is tricking them. Because he is aiding with the writing of some manuscript and is helping my father. A man from the village of Vulcan near Braşov has just been put in prison indefinitely for helping a relative leave the country. Mihai knows all too well about every possible danger. People are being arrested left and right. We might spoil everything at the last minute. Because if we see each other this morning, we will just make love the way we did our first morning several years before. We might just say to hell with everything; we’ll both get ourselves caught right here in this bed, get caught and die together.

  “It’s almost two in the morning, you know,” Radu says and offers me another drink. “I could pull out the sofa in the front room if you want to stay here,” he offers kindly. I am more awake than I have been in a long time and beg Radu to tell me the rest: What is Mihai doing now, where is he, what happened to Anca, and why was Cristina killed?

  “He loved this country so much, you know that,” Radu says. “Though at times, when he needed to, he was better than anyone at pretending he didn’t. Now he’s helping sort out the truth from the lies in the secret files that are being opened,” Radu informs me. “They are going after all the former Securitate, have set up something called the National College for the Study of the Archives of the Secret Police.”

  Mihai goes for periods of time to Bucharest to study the files and to talk to the people from this “college”, then goes back and hides in his “den”, deep in the countryside. He has a bodyguard now. He travels under a false name, Mihai Munteanu. Always these alliterations of the letter m, I think. Like my own name, Mona Maria Manoliu.

  I find it funny that the organization is called a college. Maybe some people send their children there to study. Almost as funny as the family who buried their father with his cell phone next to his head.

  “As for Anca . . . what more do you want to know? I didn’t think you cared. You never tried, after you left Romania, to be in touch with us or with Mihai.”

  “I couldn’t, Radu. I had to survive, you know. I had to put it all behind me, so I could move forward. It was the only way. But I’ve come back, haven’t I? And of course I wanted to know, I never forgot anything.” I don’t tell him of my retroactive jealousy, or that I could sit here till dawn to talk about the past, about Mihai, about all of us the way we were twenty years ago.

  “As I told you, Anca was something of an unusual bird. She had been caught having an abortion. You know how it worked: first they found you doing something illegal, then they offered to let you go if you’d squeal on somebody else. But she outsmarted them for a while. It wasn’t the same for poor Cristina, though. She was cornered from all sides because of her relations with that Tunisian guy, because she was trying to leave the country, and because she had also tried to do some work for Mihai’s group. She was a friend of this young doctor from Vulcan who was resisting the internment of prisoners of conscience as mental patients. She was planning to marry the Tunisian student and leave. But she was too . . . too fragile to handle it all; there were too many things going on at the same time. She broke down. There was nothing Mihai could do to help her in the end. She had got herself too entangled. She either was pushed to the brink until she killed herself or they actually did it and staged it as a suicide. I tend to believe it was suicide. Ah, there were so many then – it happened more than you could have possibly imagined.

  “It was all a mess. Nobody knew what was what,” says Radu. “But one thing is sure,” he continues. “Mihai never sold out. And he was smart through and through. And,” he adds, lighting another cigarette, “he was faithful to you, although Anca was always after him, as were other women! Anca ended up badly,” Radu continues. “She married someone in the group who turned out to be an undercover secret police. He beat and mistreated her. I have no idea what’s become of her.”

  So I had been somewhat right in my delirious fantasies the summer when I had the hair-pulling fight with Anca in the middle of the street. Radu didn’t mention one other possibility, that of people becoming political in order to get closer to someone they loved. Love and politics always get mixed up with each other. And then love is usually the loser. My dear Cristina was the loser and the victim.

  I think of the sugary letter from Dumitriu that I have recently discovered among old letters. Thank God love didn’t win there. Maybe Dumitriu helped me, too, by being too much in love to act and denounce me in my attempt to escape. Maybe all he wanted was sex and marriage in a little Romanian village. It seems too easy, though. These were men who beat you senseless over a suspicion of a manifesto or ran you over in the street without a moment’s hesitation, without even slowing down the car.

  My fate depended on so little, a thin thread. An American bomb falling a few inches to the left. A yellow postcard with a few rushed words written in prison. A stone kicked out of its niche and rolling on a hill. A student studying Symbolist poetry. A woman’s scream on a train platform. The train slowly moving on. While I felt so adventurous and courageous that night, a whole network of forces that could have destroyed my life for ever was in place.

  Radu tells me that Mihai always kept a photograph of me laughing on a mountaintop. It drove his wife crazy, until one day when she ripped it up. Radu says Mihai was furious; he loved that picture. But he can’t blame the wife either.

  I know exactly the photograph Radu is talking about. Once, Mihai brought along his parents’ camera, an old Leica with a huge lens, when we hiked to our mountain. He took dozens of shots of me lying on a bed of wildflowers, hiding behind a tree, leaning against our white rock, climbing atop our rock. Mihai had loaded the film wrong, and all the shots were exposed onto the same frame – all except the final shot of me climbing atop our rock and laughing. I am laughing because I could barely keep my balance, and I thought I was going to fall crashing down through the treetops all the way to the foot of the mountain.

  Radu is still talking, saying how soon after he got married, Mihai started reading all the literature and philosophy he could get his hands on.<
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  “It was like he was trying to reach you,” says Radu, “to understand you.

  “And as for those Communist bastards, he beat them at their own game,” concludes Radu proudly.

  I wish I had known that side of Mihai. Why couldn’t the two of us have done dissident work together? We would have been two revolutionary lovers. We could have typed revolutionary manifestos together that said: Romanians wake up, Romanians the day of freedom is near, down with the tyrant! We could have walked into the People’s Palace with the old Romanian flag, me and Mihai at the front of a large group of angry revolutionaries, followed by riotous crowds yelling Down with the tyrant, freedom, freedom, no more Securitate! We would have been carried on the arms of the people, and then I could have stood right in front of the Father of the Nation in a purple shiny silk dress, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, and I would have pointed a gun from among the guns that our dissident organization has been collecting, right at the dark heart of this illiterate Nicolae Ceauşescu, Comrade, Son and Father of the People. Mihai and I would have lived in history as the saviours of the people.

  I stare blankly at Radu as I am having my revolutionary fantasy. As if he once again guesses the gist of my thoughts, he says, “No, Mona, he did well. He was right to not involve you. Don’t you realize how worried he was for your life? You were a pretty clear target. You could have been killed . . . just like that,” Radu says and snaps his fingers.

  The music keeps playing, and I taste my own tears. I am soaked in tears, sweat, bad whisky, and the dew that’s settling on the grass. On this August night, so fragrant, so confusing, my love turned out to be real after all.

  I embrace Radu and thank him for everything. I feel warmth and gratitude towards Mihai’s old friend who has helped me get the last pieces of my story together. Before leaving, I decide to ask one last question.

  “By the way, whatever happened on that hiking trip, the year of the earthquake, when Mariana died? You were with them, weren’t you?”

  “By the way of what?” asks Radu, and his face suddenly changes from the relaxed, ironic expression he’s had all night to a look of intense pain. “How is this connected to anything, Mona? You’re driving me crazy,” he adds with a bitter smile.

  His change makes me even more curious. There seems to be a bottomless bag of secrets for me to open up tonight.

  Radu sips slowly from his drink. “I loved Mariana, you know. She was my great love, and Mihai found out on that trip, he overheard me telling her about my feelings and got really angry.” Radu’s eyes are shining in the night, and his face is crossed by grief.

  “You know how he could get mad, don’t you,” Radu goes on hesitantly. “We got into a fistfight on the slope. Mariana was running ahead of us and wanted to get away from both of us, she said we were crazy and was crying and going down the slope. We fell down as we were fighting . . . one of us must have kicked the damn rock that went down and hit her. I thought Mihai was going to either kill himself or kill me that day.”

  “And . . .” I start.

  “That’s all, Mona,” says Radu. “There is nothing left, nothing more. Let’s get together again if you are still in town. But it’s enough for tonight, please.”

  I pull back, realizing I’ve gone too far with all my questioning. Discovering Radu’s hidden love story was the last thing in the world I had expected before I came over. I had always thought him to be a cynic and a womanizer, but that was the cover he had used all along to hide his secret about Mariana. Mihai’s brooding moments whenever he remembered Mariana, particularly at the beginning of our love that summer, appear now in a new light as well. He did feel guilty and angry at himself for the fight on the mountain and probably could never forgive himself for it. Maybe it’s also what pushed him into all the reckless acts that came afterwards. I embrace Radu one last time and rush into the silent, deserted street.

  I am running on the cobblestone road going down the hill from Radu’s house. The new moon is setting, and my hair is flying wildly. I am seventeen and I am forty, both. My heart is pounding, my face is wet, and I’m not sure if they’re tears of sadness, fury, or happiness. It’s all of that. My love was not a hero, but he wasn’t a villain either. He had been a Marxist in a Marxist society gone bad, but more honourable than the corporate capitalists of the capitalist society I’m living in now. He had been indifferent to my intellectual passions, but then he set out to read all the literature in the world when it was too late for me to care. He taught me how to dance. He taught me the secrets of the Carpathians and of my own body. He always carried the picture of me laughing on a mountaintop. I carried the picture of us morose on the November day in Bucharest, in my bag when I crossed the border on the train to Trieste.

  There were serious reasons to love him. I hadn’t just been in love with love as so many people had told me. I had loved Mihai Simionu, from the town with the Black Church in the Carpathians, an engineer who played the guitar and wore black leather jackets like the secret police. Or like a daredevil biker. We had both been truthful to ourselves and to what we had wanted to be; we had both deserved that moment of complete beauty above the city, coming out of the stormy afternoon changed, with rain on our faces.

  As I am running on the cobblestone street, a sentence that Radu uttered earlier keeps rolling in my head: For a while, around the time you left the country, he pretended to work for the Securitate. I keep repeating it over and over again and the possibility that Mihai knew I was going to leave only now appears to me in its full magnitude. Something like an illumination comes over me. Mihai felt somehow that I was planning to leave. He was more sensitive to my hidden turmoil than I had given him credit for. I rewind everything back again to the night before my departure from Braşov, two days before I took the train from Bucharest.

  I am falling through a deep tunnel like Alice in Wonderland, everything passing by me in reverse order. Images of myself and of the people in my life moving backward flash at me from all directions, in the deep tunnel where I am sliding in a breathless free fall. It all moves faster and faster and I know that soon I will hit the ground with a thick thump and millions of pieces of myself will be scattered to the stars.

  Perhaps Mihai left the apartment that morning because he wanted to make it easier for me. Or he left the apartment because he didn’t want them to see we were still together. Did he want to create the illusion of a breakup, so that they trusted him more? Had he taken it upon himself to follow me, and let them believe he would stop me at the border, or that he would send someone to stop me? Perhaps he misled them all along, letting them believe he was getting information from me and telling them what they already knew about my father. He found out from them that I had asked for a passport and that they were planning to stop me. Or maybe my own father had told him and they were both doing their damnedest to create as many distractions as possible, so I could cross the border unharmed. That’s why Mihai had smiled sadly when I told him I had to go back to the capital to start the onion- and potato-picking work earlier. He knew I couldn’t live in confusion and fear any longer. Most important, he had feared for my life, and after Cristina’s death he wanted me away from all danger. Even if it meant parting with me for ever. He had read my mind before I had even articulated it to myself during that New Year’s Eve party when he said, You’ll leave me one day, won’t you? He was both reckless and meticulously careful. My Mata Hari lover had played it all up. He had tricked everyone without getting caught. If only he had given me a clue about it as well.

  Now that at least some of the fog surrounding Mihai has dissipated, my heart can rest from all the tumult of the last twenty years. Perhaps my own country will become the country I had once missed so deeply in the composition I had written more than thirty years ago. And maybe I will get used to having two countries, to having no country, to being my own country, and stretching across the Atlantic Ocean, one foot in the Indiana cornfields, the other in a berry-filled meadow in the Carpathians, like a huge baobab
tree.

  The Encounter

  THE NEXT DAY I call Radu again, and I ask him what I had so much wanted to ask the very minute I found out Mihai was alive: if he can arrange for me to meet with him.

  “A meeting between you and Mihai?” he asks, surprised. “What for?”

  “Don’t ask, just do it, please. If you can. It’s important. I have to.”

  I hear him sigh. “OK. But you know it’s not easy to get to his house in the boonies. You’ll have to put aside a whole day.”

  “As long as it takes,” I tell him.

  “I’ll try. But you owe me big time!”

  “I know. I’ll have to invite you to America and buy you all the whisky in the world.”

  “That will do. Wait for my phone call. What a pain in the ass you are, Mona!”

  Radu calls me three days later. My plans are to go back to America in another three days. But when he calls and says Mihai is waiting for us, I can think only of the next few hours.

  I change my clothes six times before I decide what to wear. If I wear pink it’s too cheerful and girly; if I wear red it’s too femme fatale; if I wear trousers, he won’t notice my ankles; if I wear something too elegant he might think I am flaunting my wardrobe; if I wear something too old and nondescript he will think I’m doing badly in America. I wear a white linen dress. Little blue earrings and a pearl necklace. A little makeup, but not too much. Fuchsia lipstick. Red sandals that don’t match my lipstick. A dab of French perfume.

  Andrei and Ionica are worried that I am leaving them for two days. They beg to come with me. I say we’ll do something grand together when I get back, like go to the big mountaintop they can see from the town. Ionica says he wants to climb on foot all the way to the peak of the highest mountain to see black goats. My aunt and uncle wave to me from the balcony and tell me not to worry as I get into Radu’s car, a battered dark blue Dacia, the classic Romanian car.