It was unbearably hot, the way Bucharest gets in August, when people start discussing record heat waves, and temperatures of forty degrees in the shadow (Celsius, of course). After the religious ceremony, which took place in the house with the drapes drawn, the guests sat in the shade of the grape vine, drank home-made wine, and ate the food prepared at great cost by her mother and grandmother. In 1980, with the communist economy suffering shortages, it was already hard to find certain meats and produce. Store shelves screamed of emptiness, and people stood in line for hours to buy daily necessities. Those living in the country had more luck. Her grandmother, who raised chickens, slaughtered the last ones for the wedding. Victor’s friends were instrumental in securing rare treats. Though his connections, real butter, good quality Chinese powdered milk, Russian chocolate, Havana Club rum, and even large cartons of eggs materialized in her grandmother’s kitchen days before the wedding.
Somebody brought champagne. It was not French, of course. Even people with connections, who were occasionally able to shop at stores destined exclusively to foreign tourists, had difficulty obtaining French champagne. The champagne was Romanian, and it was very good.
“Champs Elysse. Produced for export,” one of Victor’s friends said with a wink. He had brought a whole case.
Another friend brought a few bottles of Johnnie Walker. In between that, the champagne, the Havana Club, and the chilled home made wine, there was plenty to drink.
Maria almost got tipsy, but her mother snatched away her last glass of champagne, whispering, so the guests wouldn’t hear, that there was nothing as disgraceful as a drunk woman. For a second, Maria feared she might drag her into the kitchen and smack her.
Of course, nobody objected to Victor having more than his share of Johnnie Walker. As a taxi took them to his apartment late at night, Maria was annoyed that he was drunk. But she smiled, and helped him to bed.
She sat on the balcony, unable to sleep, not willing yet to start unpacking. She had anticipated this for weeks, the day she would finally move in with Victor. He had an apartment in a gorgeous pre-war villa, which had survived the 1977 earthquake. The first time she visited, Victor explained to her what a sound construction this building was. He even showed her a book on the architect who designed it. She was appropriately impressed, but mostly she was excited at the prospect of moving away from her mother’s, of sharing her home with Victor and being his wife. She was only twenty, young enough to be mesmerized by the idea of having her own home. She couldn’t believe that she was now the lady of the house.
The night of her wedding, while her husband slept off his whisky, Maria walked through the apartment admiring the large rooms and the solid wood furniture. She loved the bedroom above all. He had bought it for her. He had promised it one hot and mellow summer afternoon, as they lay exhausted from passion on his old bed, the dark blinds pulled low to keep out the sun, and an ineffective communist fan struggling to blow cold air towards them. The whole world seemed to slumber in a heat-induced lethargy. The fan was buzzing at the same rhythm as an unfortunate fly hitting its head repeatedly against the windowpane. She stretched like a cat, yawned, and offered to go make coffee before heading back to university. Those were her days of sneaking behind her mother’s back to sleep with Victor, cutting classes, weaving herself into a web of lies.
He didn’t like her leaving. He wanted her all the time, he couldn’t have enough of her. He would have married her that very second just so she’d stay in bed with him all afternoon. Over coffee, two tiny cups of strong and fragrant Turkish brew, they engaged in their usual playful banter, where he would tease her, mercilessly, about taking other lovers, ones who didn’t have strict mothers and could stay in bed all day.
She laughed, stepping into her summer dress, the fabric cool and fresh against her skin. Although she hated leaving, she was almost looking forward to the summer heat outside. She was happy. The afternoon seemed perfect, glorious. She knew Victor wanted her, and only her. But she played along. She pouted and told him to make sure and change the sheets if he wanted her to ever come back. In fact, she said, adjusting her makeup and her hair, she’d like him to refurnish the whole bedroom, to get a bed just for her, and above all a new vanity with a bigger, better mirror.
To her surprise, shortly after that, he took her furniture shopping. Not in stores, mind you. In people’s houses, in grand magnificent villas and humble stooping cottages, in ugly standardized apartment blocks, and dusty attics, smelling sweet and faded, like the paper of old books. She picked a mahogany bedroom set, extravagant, dark, and solemn, fit for a queen. He bought it without hesitation.
And now here she was. She was married! This was her home. The grand mahogany bed, her own bed. She lived here now, in this wonderful apartment, together with the man she loved. Still, the night of her wedding, wandering through her new home alone, surrounded by luxury and beauty, she felt dissatisfied. The champagne buzz had worn off, leaving her with a slight headache.
In the morning she called her best friend and woke her. She needed to gush about the wedding. She mentioned casually that she was slightly annoyed that her husband was drunk, and how stupid it was for her mother to monitor her own champagne intake.
“She just doesn’t want you to look ridiculous, especially in front of Victor and his friends. She worked so hard for the party to turn out right. You didn’t even have to do anything, other than show up.”
This much was true. In general, Maria didn’t have to do much. Her only task in life so far had been to pursue her love for Romanian literature at the University. Basically, she just sat around and read plays, poems, and novels, while her mother and grandmother provided for her every need.
Things wouldn’t change much now, although she was a married woman, with her own household to run, a situation she considered very dignified and glamorous (she doodled ‘doamna Pop’ on all her lecture notes, and was so afraid Victor would find them, that she actually ripped some of them up, then did poorly on the respective exams). Her mother helped her find a suitable cleaning lady, who would cook occasionally, as well as, of course, iron all of Victor’s shirts, Maria’s clothes, the bed linens, table cloths, and everything else necessary.
On Sundays they had long, elaborate lunches at her mother’s house, sometimes at her grandmother’s. They left loaded with enough food to last a week. Always Victor’s favorites, the delicacies his mother in law liked to spoil him with. Maria didn’t mind. Her fridge and pantry were always full, her husband was happy, and she herself never had to move a finger. Sometimes she considered learning how to cook, just so the food he loved so much could come from her own kitchen. Repeatedly, she asked her grandmother to teach her, but the old woman laughed and shooed her away.
The first years of her married life were happy ones. She enjoyed her new home, loved the spacious rooms, the mahogany furniture, the shade of the walnut tree underneath her bedroom window. Oh, how she loved that tree! And how deeply, how painfully she would miss its round leaves in the years to come! A symbol of death, that’s what they are, walnut trees. Old stories and poems in Romanian folklore are punctuated with them. They’re always a bad omen. One shouldn’t be fooled by the promise of cool, deep shade underneath their green leaves. There’s nothing but death lurking in its depth. As a literature student she should have known that. Could she have changed things, maybe, if she had paid attention to this somber warning? Could she have averted the end of her marriage? Could she have kept the love of her husband, or at least, that of her children?
But she was blind back in those days. Blind, naïve, totally unaware of how quick her luck could turn. She had no feeling of impending doom. Her life was full happiness and sunshine. And she was foolish enough to think it’d last. She loved her life. She loved everything about it. She loved her home, the new seamstress who made her fancy dresses, with Victor’s encouragement, and away from the scrutinizing eye of her mother. She loved her courses at the university, the few girl friends she gossiped wi
th in frequent coffee breaks, the books she read on quiet afternoons in her big mahogany bed, light filtering in through the leaves of the walnut tree. She loved having dinner with her husband when he got home, loved their walks together in the park on Sundays, their frequent escapes to the mountains or the sea… Above all, she loved living with Victor and being his wife.
He seemed constantly pleased with her, his appetite for her insatiable, and she was flattered and overjoyed by the ravenous hunger he devoured her with. She loved that he was proud of her beauty and of her sense of style, that he liked to show her off at social events. She still was not able to say much whenever she was in a group, but now her shyness was disguised as smugness at being the wife of such an attractive and successful man. Most people thought she was aloof. Her mother warned her that it was not good for a young woman to be so conceited. But Maria couldn’t help it. Whenever she was in a group, her tongue was tied, and all she could do was stand by her husband’s side, surveying the world from underneath her long eyelashes, drifting away from conversation into her own inner world. In truth, she didn’t care how she came across. She was happy to be with Victor, to feel his strong arm around her waist, and see that sparkle in his eye whenever he looked at her. Her world revolved around the two of them.
Both her pregnancies came as surprises. Lili, in her first year of marriage, was welcomed, cheered, and applauded. Alex was a happy occasion too, but Maria found herself faking the big smiles that went along with the announcement.
Accidental pregnancies were common, as Ceausescu had outlawed all means of birth control in an effort to increase population. When she got married, one of her more savvy friends advised her to secure some kind of pill, off the black market. But Maria was shy about broaching the subject with Victor. Female issues were not sexy, and she was embarrassed to ask him to use his connections to get such a pill. Innocently, she trusted her body to fate. In a way she almost hoped to get pregnant with Lili. It seemed like the natural thing to do. That was what people did. They fell in love, got married, had kids. Everybody wanted babies. It was a core value of all Romanian families, and women especially cherished it.
Maria knows now, much too late, that she never really wanted a baby. What she wanted was the elated feeling of being pregnant. She wanted the happy look on her husband’s face. She wanted her mother’s and grandmother’s display of joy at receiving the news. She was just twenty and only recently married, but they were as happy as if she had been barren and waited decades hoping to conceive. She even wanted the little belly, and the cute pregnancy clothes her seamstress soon began fitting her for. Having people give up their seat on the bus was an extra perk. They had of course, done so before, for such a beautiful young woman, but they seemed more enthusiastic now.
In some ways, despite the physical discomfort and her growing fear of childbirth, pregnancy was enjoyable. Having the baby, on the other hand, was completely anticlimactic. All attention shifted away from her. But Lili was adorable, and Maria found motherhood easy. Having a full-time nanny helped. She herself never had to change a diaper. She did have to get up in the middle of the night for feedings, but since her course schedule at the university was not demanding, she didn’t really mind. Her major concern was the possibility of the baby waking Victor. But he slept soundly, even when Lili cried.
When she didn’t have class, Maria would take Lili to the park in a stroller. Sometimes her grandmother came along. They’d sit on a park bench, rock Lili back and forth, and talk about babies. Maria loved it. She finally felt like she’d been admitted into a very exclusive club. Though, to be honest, it seemed like her membership still needed confirmation.
Her mother and grandmother both mocked her lack of competence. She had a baby, yes, but that didn’t mean she knew anything about them. In fact, she started off on the wrong foot, by making a big fuss about giving birth. It was as if there was an acceptable level of complaining, and she had unwittingly surpassed it. The nurses in the maternity ward made mean jokes at her expense, and Victor had to pacify them with gifts of cigarette cartons, nylons, and coffee. He assured Maria that they were jealous because she was so young, so beautiful, and had such a perfect little baby.
Indeed, Lili was nothing short of a miracle. Maria would stare at her for hours, not being able to believe that this was her child, hers and Victor’s, born of their love. Still, she considered not having another baby. Pregnancy had been easy on her young, healthy body. But childbirth was too traumatic, physically and emotionally—she just couldn’t get those awful nurses out of her mind, no matter what her husband said. She never wanted to go through that again. Also, she noticed that after nursing Lili, her breasts shrunk, a development that made her question her attractiveness to Victor.
She finally got up the courage to ask him to get her the pill off the black market. Her friend assured her that it made her breasts fuller, and her skin beautiful. But even with Victor’s connections, obtaining birth control was complicated. She waited. In the meantime she used the calendar method. She’ll never know if it was her lack of mathematical precision, or the fact that she could never say no to Victor, but she found herself pregnant again. The same joy overcame her friends and relatives. Victor too was happy. Still, he asked her an unexpected question:
“How do you really feel about it?”
She faked a big smile.
“I’m happy, of course.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am.”
They didn’t talk about it again. She knew, of course, that there was an alternative. Abortions were illegal, and highly dangerous. But some doctors still performed them. And au lieu of birth control, she knew that lots of women had them, almost routinely, like pulling out a tooth. Her own mother confessed to this, in private, years ago. But Maria didn’t want to even consider it. She was not so dead set against having another child, plus she was getting that euphoric feeling again, the delight of knowing she was carrying Victor’s baby.
The pregnancy turned out to be an easy one. She was even spared the delivery experience. She had a C-section. She ended up with a painfully healing scar, which she’d have for the rest of her life, but overall that was nothing compared to the agonizing pain of pushing Lili into this world. And Alex was a baby she simply adored.
Something strange happened to her this time, though. Her breasts shrunk again, but her feet grew larger. She could no longer comfortably fit into her shoes. This was a bigger problem than she initially suspected. For all of Victor’s connections, purchasing new shoes that met his young wife’s standards for quality was impossible. She tortured her poor feet for years, out of vanity, trying to walk around in her old ones.
And it was in the era of sore feet that Victor started feeling unhappy. His discontent was not with her, thank God! She thought back then that if he stopped loving her she would die. Though she knows now she underestimated her own resilience.
His discontent was with his career, and with some aspects of life under communism. She hated herself for not being able to do anything about it. But try as she might, those were two things she simply couldn’t fix. Victor was successful as an architect, but the repressiveness of the communist regime was at its height, and it led his career on paths he never envisioned or desired. More and more he was asked to design industrial complexes that went along with the socialist dream. He hated those projects, but conformed. At night he’d tell her how dull his work was these days, how uninspiring. He wanted to build houses, not socialism.
And then, in 1985 he was assigned the worst project of all, the one he could hardly bring himself to work on. It was a set of apartment blocks in a village on the outskirts of Bucharest.
“Who will live there?” Maria asked. She always listened when he talked about his work. She was happy that he included her, that he took her questions, and even her opinions, seriously.
“The farmers,” Victor declared, covering his face with his hands.
It was a tragedy, according to him, t
hat the nationalization of agriculture led small farmers to give up their land and their animals, forcing them to work collectively for state owned cooperatives.
Cooperative agricole de productie. Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften, German-speaking peasants called them in the small village where his grandparents lived, in Transylvania. The last time they visited that village, for his grandmother’s funeral, Maria found that talking to the peasants depressed Victor more than the old woman’s death itself. He told her that they were witnessing the destruction of a lifestyle, the destruction of an entire culture.
After returning from his grandmother’s funeral, the apartment blocks he had to work on bothered him even more. He knew that the farmers’ houses would be torn down, against their will, to be replaced by ‘the socialist dream’ of living in modern apartments. He told Maria that he had nightmares of farmers killing themselves. People who were used to having their own garden, growing tomatoes, peppers, raising a few chickens, maybe a cow, stuck in apartments, with sad little balconies overlooking the highway. People who for generations had cherished their connection to the soil and its life-giving powers, to the dirt and its fruits, would now be stuck in blocks of concrete.
It was in one of their late night conversations that he first mentioned America. The children and the nanny, Tanti Grosu, a robust woman from the country, were sound asleep. Maria and Victor were secretly listening to Radio Free Europe in their bedroom, with the sound turned so low they could barely hear it.
“I could get us there. But would you go?”
At first it was a distant dream, her husband’s dream, a dream that had the power to make him happy again. She enjoyed hearing him talk about America, because it made him feel good. She had no idea what a dangerous temptress America would turn out to be.
Dogs With Bagels Page 7
