“You should take your roll in case you get hungry on the road,” Clarice said.
Joannah picked it up and knocked it against the wooden table to show her sister just what she thought of that roll. As they were leaving, she saw Bogdan pocket the rolls left on the table. He went outside and handed them to some children sitting on the steps, just out of sight of the hotel guard.
A half hour later, Joannah’s two sisters were in front of the Hotel Dr. Petru Groza loading their bike saddlebags and pumping up their tires, while Bogdan was staring off southward toward Deva, toward green hills. Joannah was packed and ready, standing beside Bogdan, squinting against the early morning sun.
“They say these hills is only place in our country with rattlesnakes,” he said.
Joannah smiled and waited for him to explain how rattlesnakes would have ended up in Europe, but then Bogdan blinked as if coming out of a daydream. Though they were outside, well away from the ubiquitous listening devices or spies, Bogdan glanced around as if he’d let slip a state secret, and then he announced that the group members might find for sale in Deva a three-volume set of the political writings of the Great Leader. “One of few places such volumes are available outside of Bucharest.”
“Bogdan, you know we don’t care about your so-called Great Leader. And why don’t you ever say the guy’s name?” Joannah said. “Why don’t you just say Ceausescu?” Joannah pronounced the name loudly and distinctly, “Chow-chess-koo.” A silence settled on them like dust thrown up by a passing car. Joannah’s sisters had told her she must not talk about the government or even say the president’s name aloud, but the political nonsense was annoying her.
Clarice broke the silence. “Never mind her, Bogdan. It’s going to be a beautiful biking day.”
“Also, a remarkable statue of Dr. Petru Groza lives in Deva.” Bogdan adjusted his heavy black glasses. Clarice had rigged up an elastic strap for him to keep them tight to his head as he rode.
“Tell about the snakes,” Joannah said. “You don’t want us to get bit, do you?” Though she’d only known Bogdan a few days, his Boy Scout demeanor wearied her, the way Clarice’s Girl Scout goodness always had. Signs of deep poverty were all around them, yet Bogdan kept saying how well Romania and its people were doing. Kids were malnourished—yesterday they’d seen a boy bowlegged with rickets, for chrissakes—typewriters were contraband, their possession punishable by death, if you could believe what Clarice said. Clarice was a social worker and provided no end of facts: the rate of death during childbirth in Romania was the highest in Europe, as was the child mortality rate. Margie and the four men were all medical doctors and part-time advisors to an aid agency, and upon returning they would make a report about the health conditions they had observed, but they were posing as ordinary tourists. On Clarice’s visa, her occupation was listed as teacher.
“I am mistake about snakes. It is a not-true story some people tell.”
“What about vampires, then?” Joannah asked.
“These are folktales of foolish.”
“Dracula is real, though. We’re going to his castle.”
“Dracula,” Bogdan said, pronouncing it Dra-cool-ya, “was this prince who was defeat of Turks.”
“You know our great-grandfather was from there. From here, I mean,” Joannah said and fingered the little beaten cross she wore on a chain. When she was ten, her mother had given it to her, said it was from a secret gold mine in the Carpathian Mountains, and Joannah had worn it every day for fifteen years.
Margie and Clarice looked at one another and sighed. Her sisters were taller, stronger, and blonder than she was, and they’d always had each other in a way that made her wonder sometimes why they even needed husbands.
“I am surprised,” Bogdan said. “Also my grandfather is from such places.”
“Is that why you were chosen to be our guide?” Clarice asked gently, trying to defuse the conversation.
“I am chosen because I have bicycle.”
“You’re all ready?” Clarice said to Joannah. “No lollygagging today?”
“I want to try to catch up with the guys,” Joannah said. The four men, her brothers-in-law and two other doctors, had left a few minutes earlier.
“That’s a change. Are you sure you know the route?”
“I have a map. And if I don’t know the way, I’ll wait for you guys.” Joannah didn’t wait for any more conversation. She wanted to bike behind the rest of the pack, but Bogdan had to make sure the Americans weren’t left strung out across the Romanian countryside. There was no hope in making her sisters understand that she wanted to be alone, just to be sad and thoughtful for a while. When she’d last seen her mother, her best friend in the world, the woman hadn’t recognized Joannah even after prompting, and most likely wouldn’t ever recognize her again.
Joannah stood up on her pedals to sprint away, but, as soon as she was out of sight, she detoured into a park and hid behind a monument of Nikolai Ceausescu orating. She waited about twenty minutes until she saw her sisters and Bogdan bicycle past, and then she followed them at a distance out of town. Once she was on the road to Deva, she slowed and let herself fall farther behind.
The first few hours of biking alone were heavenly, despite the heat, and Joannah found herself sighing a lot, releasing old breath she must’ve been holding inside for a long time. She found she could enjoy the scenery better without her sisters explaining and translating everything. She stopped and splashed her face, feet, and arms in cool streams. If she hadn’t accidentally left her camera behind in the hotel room in Oradea on their first day in the country, she’d have traveled even more slowly, trying to capture on film the melancholy of the mule-drawn carts, hobbled horses grazing, women dragging wooden-tined rakes across the hillsides. Though she couldn’t have much in common with them, she felt camaraderie with the raking women and those women minding the shops with empty shelves—she’d always preferred the company of people her mother’s age, preferred an evening at home with Mom to going out anywhere. Even though she couldn’t speak to the local women beyond the words for hello, water, and America, she liked their company. If the medical care here was as bad as her sisters said, when the women here got dementia, they likely died in the early stages. Maybe the daughters here never saw desperation in their mothers’ eyes as their memories and bodies failed them.
She kept passing chickens, poor harassed balls of feathers, pecking along the shoulder of the road for bugs and worms, scattering into ditches as she pedaled over potholes. In the hotel the previous night they had each been served a roasted half-chicken with hardly a mouthful of meat clinging to its bones. Joannah had made fun of the meal, but now it occurred to her that the chickens were offering up all they had.
By lunchtime, Joannah was starving, and she veered off the cracked and crumbling asphalt to stop at an open-air roadside café. To her relief, Margie and Clarice were nowhere to be seen. She could enjoy her sisters for a few hours a day, but over the years she’d grown accustomed to being left alone with her thoughts—for quite a while her mother had not really been present. Her sisters always wanted to talk about what Joannah would do with her life now that she wasn’t a caregiver.
The roadside café was set beneath an arbor covered with grapevines that afforded shade to the metal tables, painted, like the house to which the café was attached, a bright, chalky blue. Three skinny men hunched over three separate tables, drinking something brownish out of jelly jars. Joannah took off her helmet and gloves, tugged at her stretchy shorts to cover more of her thighs, and walked to the counter. She pointed at a box of biscuits on a shelf, but the proprietress picked up the box and shook it to show it was empty, for display only.
“Vin?” asked the woman. Joannah knew the word for wine.
Joannah shook her head. “Ceai,” she said. It rhymed with sigh. Tea. She didn’t try out any Romanian when she was with her sisters, who had taken a language course before the trip. Until now, she’d let them order for her.
/> The woman’s dark hair was arranged in a striking resemblance to Mrs. Ceausescu’s matronly ’do in the portrait hanging behind her, a sort of bouffant. On the other side of the door leading into the house hung a likeness of Mrs. Ceausescu’s husband, the dictator. As Joannah stood looking back and forth from one airbrushed rosy-cheeked wrinkle-free face to the other, a passing truck emitted a choking cloud of exhaust that swept through the café. The proprietress smiled apologetically. She attempted to write on a slip of paper the amount Joannah needed to pay, but even after she shook her pen, still there was no ink. Joannah felt the woman’s frustration in her bones. She held out a handful of change, steel lei coins and aluminum bani, and the proprietress selected about four cents’ worth.
Joannah indicated her water bottle and asked for ap and then followed the proprietress back to the entrance. The woman pointed at an open well with a roof over it. Most Romanian words seemed no more real in her mouth than the tissue-paper currency and worn-down coins for which she’d traded sturdy American dollars. The word for water was an exception—needing to drink eight or ten liters a day made it real. Joannah cranked a wooden handle to bring up a wooden bucket from the well. She filled her bottle and dumped the rest of the water onto the ground as their guide, Bogdan, had taught them—Joannah wondered if the air here was so polluted that it poisoned the water after only a minute of exposure. If so, what did it mean for the lungs of the children she saw along the road? Growing up, Joannah had always assumed she’d have children by the time she was twenty-five; she’d always assumed she’d end up with at least a half dozen kids one way or another, but since the only man she’d ever had sex with was a sixty-five-year-old who’d had a vasectomy, it wasn’t looking very promising. With some distance and time between herself and Mr. Masters, she was thinking she might not want to go to bed with him anymore—she wouldn’t say so to her sisters, though, didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of another goal accomplished.
Turned out that the café had no food, not even cornmeal mush, which she really should’ve eaten this morning. Joannah sat down and was shaking her water bottle to dissolve the iodine purification tablets when one of the men in the café moved from his table and sat in a chair beside her. From a distance he’d appeared ancient, but by the look of the small, bright eyes set in his ruined face, he probably wasn’t much over fifty. The man stank of sour wine and sweat. “Kent?” he asked and crossed his bony legs.
Joannah shook her head, and the man looked into her face as though searching there for a co-conspirator. He smiled to show his few remaining teeth, which were small and dark. “Kent?” he repeated in a raspy voice and raised two mangled fingers to his lips, making a stunted V. Joannah stared at the digits, both severed above the first knuckle, the skin pinched and bluish over the ends. For the first time she wished she’d brought along American cigarettes as her guidebook had suggested. When Joannah said nothing, he leaned back in his chair and shouted to the other men in the café in a tone of world-weary disgust, but neither man even looked over. Joannah waved flies from her face, wondering how the man wasn’t bothered that a half dozen or so had gathered near his eyes. He was dressed in a patched suit jacket over a threadbare undershirt and flare-legged pants cinched tight at the waist, the same clothes worn by the men she’d seen in other Transylvanian villages. He leaned toward Joannah and grabbed her upper arm with his bad hand.
The man repeated “Kent” a third time and tightened his grip. His droopy eyes seemed both stupid and intensely focused. He watched Joannah as though testing her. He couldn’t have been more than a few inches taller than she was, and she outweighed him, but she froze. She wanted to yell Stop! or Help! but she didn’t know either word in Romanian, and anyway her throat had closed up. She imagined the two fat-bellied police officers who patrolled her Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago—black Officer Washington, white Officer Kroll—driving up in a gleaming squad car, a three-dimensional vision of ordinary American privilege.
The other men in the café paid no attention. The proprietress remained inside, slow with the tea.
“Let me go,” Joannah said finally, through gritted teeth. She tried to peel away his stubbed fingers, but they were fastened machine-like around her arm. If her mother had been this strong, would she have kept herself out of the nursing home a little longer? Kept her marbles? Mr. Masters had kept Joannah in his apartment some evenings by telling her stories that went on and on and by begging her not to leave him.
With her foot, she pushed against the drunken man’s chair, tipping it, and then she pushed with a little more force, so his chair went out from under him. The two other men turned as he yelped and then tried but failed to catch himself. His chair clattered to the concrete, and as the man rolled over and moaned, Joannah hurried outside and climbed onto her bike. Never mind the tea. Her heart was beating hard, and she was scared, but she felt alive as she pedaled away, fueled by adrenaline. As the café fell farther behind, she slackened her pace. There was little hope of catching up with her sisters so that she could relate what had just happened. And the farther away she got from the café, the less she wanted to tell her sisters, who would know she’d tricked them.
Up ahead, she saw a cluster of children, some sitting on the curb hugging their knees, others drifting into the road as lookouts. Their deeply tanned skin was dusty from the road and sooty from the grit coming from the low smokestacks. As Joannah approached, the seated children stood, and they all chanted, “Goo-me! Goo-me!” Her sisters had warned her about the national gum fetish, so she had brought five hundred pieces of Bazooka. In such situations, Margie and Clarice threw fistfuls of gum away from themselves and insisted they all hurry away, but this time Joannah stopped and let them cluster around. She loved the company of kids, their chatter and energy, but back home she hardly interacted with them, and whenever she’d seen them visiting the nursing home, they’d kept to their Barbies or the television screens. These barefoot Romanian children, half of them shirtless, the other half in threadbare dresses or T-shirts with the slogans worn off, pressed their bodies against her, nervous, excited, and muscular like forest creatures. These kids now were touching her bike and tugging at her clothes. One boy coughed raspily without covering his mouth. When a girl with a raised scar on her hand like fried egg white unzipped a saddlebag, Joannah shook her finger in exaggerated disapproval. “Nu, nu.” Another boy coughed that same ragged cough. She placed pieces of gum into outstretched hands until she was certain each child had gotten several, and then she stroked their warm, bristly heads, which were mostly shaved, boys and girls alike, probably against lice, according to her sister. She hadn’t chewed gum in years, but she was so hungry she unwrapped a soft, pink piece for herself before she set off again, waving to the children and shouting, “La revedere,” goodbye, feeling as joyful as she ever had in her life. After a pause, the herd of children set out to chase her, their bare feet slapping the asphalt, their hands grabbing her saddlebags, and she sped up, fueled by a fear that they would topple her. She imagined falling, imagined the beautiful faces and bodies swarming over her, devouring her. After a quarter mile, the last runner, a boy of about ten, fell behind her and panted with his hands on his thighs.
JOANNAH’S SISTERS WERE expert travelers, and if she’d listened to them, she’d have brought more to eat. They carried shatterproof jars of peanut butter and zip-lock bags of granola to supplement hotel breakfasts and dinners. They would share their food if she asked, but Joannah didn’t want to admit she’d failed to prepare. She’d packed a half dozen energy bars for emergencies, but she’d eaten three of them at the eight-hour Hungarian/Romanian border crossing. “Guns, drugs, Bibles?” the guard had asked. Joannah had smiled, thought he was kidding, until Clarice frowned at her.
By now, her sisters and their husbands might already be in the hotel in Deva, a town built around a steep hill with Dacian and Roman ruins at the top. In the guidebook photo the hill rose out of the center of the town like a lone breast whose companion ha
d shriveled away.
Soon, Joannah found the going difficult. She stopped several times to check her tires and brakes and once even kneeled to feel the road surface with her hand to assure herself it was solid, for it seemed she might be sinking in tar. Only then did she realize she was no longer wearing a helmet or gloves, both of which she’d left at the café. She would miss the cushioned leather-and-cotton gloves, but going back was out of the question—she’d gone back for the camera the day before and found no sign of it. In this country, as in plenty of places in Chicago, when a thing was gone, it was gone. She imagined the man who’d grabbed her pulling the smooth synthetic gloves over his hands. As for the helmet, she’d remind her sisters she’d survived biking without one when she was a kid. These poor Romanian kids didn’t even have bicycles let alone helmets. Joannah spit out her old gum and bit into a new sugary piece, which made her still hungrier. She reached down for her water bottle and found it wasn’t in its cage—she’d left it behind in the café.
She biked slowly for hours without passing a stream or roadside well. The heat and humidity pressed on her; sweat and dirt collected on the inside of her elbows, on the back of her neck, in the creases of her belly formed by her hunching over the handlebars. Plum trees lined the road, stripped of fruit except on the topmost branches. On the trunks were painted white skulls and crossbones.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 17
