Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  The mystery of the difficult biking lasted until she passed a chalky blue marker, shaped like a rocket, which read 524 meters. The grade was so shallow and steady that she hadn’t realized she was climbing. She was on her first mountain pass, high above the flat land of Illinois and on the other side of the world from her poor lost mother. All her miles along the Chicago lakefront hadn’t prepared her for this.

  On a bench a quarter mile past the rocket marker sat an unsmiling round-eyed teenage girl in faded navy blue stretch pants who watched over two pint jars of cream on the seat beside her. A cardboard sign behind the jars read 1.25 lei, about thirteen cents at the official exchange rate, about a penny at the black market rate. Just outside Oradea, Bogdan had stopped and paid a girl for the contents of a thick glass jar like these and, after offering it around, drank down the whole thing. When he handed the jar back, yellowish cream coated his lips. Margie had pulled Joannah aside and instructed her to never drink such milk: it was unpasteurized, bacteria laden, and dangerous to adults who hadn’t grown up with those microbes. Joannah had licked her own lips after seeing Bogdan’s coated lips, and she licked her lips again now.

  “Bun ziua,” good day, Joannah said, pronouncing it boo-nah zeewah, waving to the girl. The girl mouthed, “Ziua,” without expression, and Joannah felt she’d been given permission to drop her own cheery pretense. Maybe people here let a person feel melancholy; maybe they didn’t say, You’d be pretty if you smiled. As Joannah struggled up the road, the girl’s eyes stayed fixed on her, as though Joannah were a dull-witted dancing bear lagging behind the rest of her troupe at a circus the girl had been forced to attend. Was this what Joannah had seemed like to her sisters while sitting home waiting for her mother to lose her mind and finally die? She wished she could stop and sit with the girl, but sensed she wouldn’t be welcome.

  Farther up the mountain, Joannah spotted another woman, maybe her own age, sitting on a log bench breast-feeding a child who looked four or five years old. She wore a red head scarf with a gold pattern on it, but most of her hair hung out the front and curled alongside her face. Her yellow blouse hung off her shoulder, as did another gold-patterned scarf, and she wore a red flowered skirt on top of other skirts—orange ruffles showed below the hem. Her feet were bare. The boy stopped nursing and turned to watch Joannah pass, revealing his round face and his mother’s bare breast. The mother tipped her head back, stretched her long neck toward the woods and the sky, lifted a cigarette over the boy’s head, and inhaled deeply. Could this black-eyed woman in bright skirts and scarves be of the same world as those gray raking women on the hillsides? The woman exhaled a long stream of smoke as she watched Joannah pass. She wouldn’t have dared impose on the pair without an invitation. The boy then slid off his mother’s lap, picked up a stone, and tossed it at Joannah—it fell way short. The woman languidly covered her breast and tugged the gold scarf over her shoulders.

  When the grade steepened dramatically, Joannah shifted into her granny gear. Though it was afternoon, the sky darkened, and over the course of the next hour, a storm as black as any horror movie backdrop unrolled across the heavens. Switchbacks sent her weaving over the mountainside, took her breath away at each turn. When thunder boomed over the next peak, she recalled a relief map depicting the ridge of Carpathians that lay before her, a terrifying obstacle she hadn’t let herself think about. Distant music drifted in and out as she wove upward—a fiddle, a tambourine maybe, echoes of voices. She focused on the intermittent sound as though it were meat smoke from a barbecue. A steak was what she wanted right now. Bloody rare, though her sisters would tell her well-done would be safer. At home she was practically a vegetarian, but her belly was telling her she needed meat.

  The top of the pass was indicated by a third blue marker—928 meters—this one stuck in the ground beside a wooden shelter, maybe a bus stop, which was occupied by an old woman and her cow. The sky was now the color of a gray cat, and stray raindrops pelted Joannah’s bare legs and arms. She pulled her bike under cover just before the deluge and took a seat on the cement bench beside the woman, who was perhaps her mother’s age. Joannah smiled, and the woman smiled back, closemouthed. “Bun ziua,” Joannah said, happy to meet someone who seemed happy to see her.

  The woman opened her mouth to reveal a toothless cavern and laughed, maybe at Joannah’s pronunciation, maybe at the absurdity of an American showing up on top of her mountain. The old woman’s laughter degenerated into coughing. “Kent?” she asked. Joannah shook her head, but if the woman was truly disappointed about not getting cigarettes, she didn’t show it. The cow switched its tail at some flies that were also taking cover from the storm. The old woman picked up Joannah’s arm and squinted at her blue sport wristwatch, waterproof, for whatever that was worth. She then reached across Joannah’s chest and with her knob-jointed fingers handled the gold cross hanging from Joanna’s chain. There were no other souvenirs of Transylvania, her mother had said—her grandfather had fled the country with nothing and never went back. Joannah had copied and framed a photo of Dracula’s real-life castle from a library book to supplement the family history and put it above the couch where she slept. The rest of her family’s blood was Irish.

  The boniness of the old woman’s hands made Joannah’s breasts look absurdly round and swollen by comparison, pornographic, as though they might burst out of her pink sports bra and matching tank top. Joannah dug some gum from her pack and gave it to the woman before reflecting that, without teeth, she couldn’t chew it. Then Joannah gave her a toothpick that had a tiny American flag stuck to it. “Ooo-ess-ahh,” Joannah said, imitating Bogdan’s pronunciation of USA. The woman slipped the gifts into a pocket. Her housedress was pale, its pattern worn away, and the bottom of the pockets had been mended with coarse black thread in a way that reminded Joannah of surgical stitches. In response to the gifts, the woman leaned forward, nearly off the bench, and grabbed the cow’s udder and jostled it, as if to show Joannah how full it was. Joannah imagined leaning down, closing her mouth around a teat the size of a finger, swallowing mouthfuls of frothy whole milk. Joannah thought that if she hadn’t lost her water bottle, she might’ve asked the woman to fill it up, whatever dangers the fresh milk might pose. Would the woman have some eggs if Joannah followed her home? She’d asked for eggs for breakfast, and Bogdan had made a show of going into the kitchen, but there had been none.

  The two women sat silently, the cow’s head bobbing between them, rain banging a wild message on the tin roof. When the storm finally began to peter out, Joannah thought she heard a fiddle again. She trained her ears on the sound, and so was startled when she felt the woman’s callused hand on her leg. The woman took hold of Joannah’s exposed thigh the way she might have inspected a salted ham in a market, and then she slapped Joannah’s leg hard enough to raise a handprint. Joannah covered the red mark on her leg with her own hand, unsure what had just happened, unsure if she should be offended. The woman laughed and elbowed Joannah, and then pulled up her threadbare dress to reveal, as though it were the punch line to a joke, a thin, scarred leg, striped with varicose veins. The woman slapped the withered thing and tossed her dress back over it. Beside the old woman’s leg, Joannah’s plump, muscled thigh looked almost edible.

  Joannah was trying to conceal embarrassment when she heard rumbling in the distance. The noise grew louder until it was deafening. Had the old woman not been sitting so calmly, Joannah would have pushed her bicycle into the woods and flattened herself on the ground for the onslaught. Arching up and over the mountain pass, a military convoy of drab green trucks and tank-like personnel carriers appeared. Long-barreled guns stuck out the fronts of the trucks. As the vehicles, probably fifty altogether, passed and turned the corner toward Deva, Joannah saw young men sitting on benches in the backs of the trucks. Despite their deep-set eyes and bulging Adam’s apples, these skinny, bristle-headed soldiers reminded her of the children who begged for gum along the road, and Joannah would have liked to touch their bristly
heads. The trucks rolled slowly, straining toward the crest of the hill, then, one by one, cut their engines and coasted down, perhaps to save fuel. The old woman’s face did not register anything during these five or six minutes, and even after the convoy passed, she only blinked in Joannah’s direction. The cow, however, tossed her bony head and pulled against her neck rope.

  Dark clouds still loomed overhead, but light had broken through in the west. The woman elbowed Joannah again and pointed at a lone cyclist in a bright orange poncho who was pedaling from the direction of Deva. The cyclist weaved back and forth up the steep grade in an S pattern as he approached. Joannah recognized the green bike with worn tires.

  “Bogdan!” she stood to greet him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Joannah, you are disappeared,” he said, panting. He turned down the hood of the poncho, something he must’ve borrowed from one of the other men in the group. Sweat and rain had soaked his hair. “You must not to be lost,” he said. “I went to this hotel in Deva, but you are not arriving.” His canvas sneakers looked waterlogged; the thin, dark dress laces were too short, so he’d skipped half of the eyelets.

  “I can’t believe you came back,” Joannah said, dragging her eyes away from his shoes. “Uphill.”

  Bogdan’s hands, large and square, rested lightly on the handlebars. Those hands would be the envy of the man back in the café. Joannah realized she hadn’t looked at Bogdan until now, hadn’t realized how big and solid he was. His formidable height and the solid ledge of his shoulders could be an affront to the Great Leader, who, despite his supposed greatness, was a flaccid-looking man with narrow, sloping shoulders. Transylvanian vampires in the books were irresistibly handsome and suave as they drew away your life force, but Ceausescu looked smug in the official photos that hung in every dining room and lobby as he sucked away the freedom of his people and the livelihood of the land. If the Great Leader wanted, he could probably throw Bogdan in jail or have him shot for his fine figure, the same way stepmothers in fairy tales disposed of beautiful daughters. Over the last few days, Bogdan had talked about his university in Bucharest, where he was studying engineering, and about his country’s exports—shoes and pesticides—but now Joannah wondered if he had a girlfriend, or maybe a sweet doting mother.

  “It is my job for to take care for you,” Bogdan said. “In future, you must to stay with the group.”

  “All right,” Joannah said, but she knew she could always find a way to escape the group. “Bogdan, will you tell this lady you can translate? Maybe she wants to say something to me.”

  When Bogdan spoke to her, the old woman just swatted the air, dismissing the whole prospect of verbal communication. “We must to go,” Bogdan said, “and to meet the others of your group.” He took off the poncho to reveal his checked button-up shirt, which was too short for his torso and made of a synthetic material that was all wrong for biking. He’d worn the shirt every day so far, and at breakfast it had been wet and clean. Rather than wadding up the poncho, he folded it carefully and tucked it into his improvised front pack, a canvas shoulder bag tied to the handlebars.

  “Do you have any food?”

  “There is food for dinner at this hotel in Deva at eighteen o’clock.”

  According to her watch it was four o’clock now. “All right, then. Onward toward a tiny chicken and a dirty bun,” said Joannah.

  Joannah mounted her bike, waved to the lady with the cow, and coasted down the mountain beside her guide. For the first half mile of curving road, plum trees with skulls and crossbones blurred past them, but then the grade became gentle, which meant Joannah and Bogdan had to brake only occasionally. Steam rose off the road as the rain evaporated, and Joannah heard a fiddle again, heard it start, stop, and start again.

  “I’m fine, you know,” said Joannah. “You don’t have to worry.”

  “Yes, I must to worry. These peoples of this region are half-of-gypsies.”

  “What are half of gypsies?”

  “They are nothing.” As with the rattlesnakes, Bogdan seemed to regret what he had said.

  “Will you have to go into the army after college?” Joannah wanted to know about the military convoy, wondered if there was a base near here, but she wanted something other than an official response from Bogdan.

  He smoothed his canvas bag against his handlebars with one hand as he steered with the other. “All Romanian mens must to go in this army.”

  “What about the women?”

  “Womens must have five children.”

  “What?” she asked, thinking she must’ve misheard, but further conversation was aborted when two boys ran in front of them, waving their hands. They’d come out from behind a patched and unpainted privacy fence, the gate of which now hung open on one hinge.

  “You must not to stop,” said Bogdan, even as they were both slowing. “Deva is seven kilometers.”

  “You want to deny these poor kids their gum?”

  Bogdan braked precisely beside her and reached over and held her handlebars steady as she dug in her saddlebags. The boys each accepted two pieces of Bazooka and then clutched her front and back wheels and yelled to someone in the distance. Out through the open gate dashed a pair of young women, one in a white blouse and skirt, her dark hair tumbling around a white sash, her belly swollen in what was probably the seventh month of pregnancy. She grabbed Joannah’s wrist and started pulling her toward the house. Joannah resisted, managed somehow to not fall forward over her bicycle. She had seen such young women in every town, but they had seemed sad and quiet. This pair was full of life.

  “What do they want?” Joannah asked Bogdan.

  He inquired in Romanian, and the girl in white blabbed anxiously, gesturing with one hand, still tugging at Joannah’s wrist with the other. “She invites us to this party for her wedding,” he said.

  “A wedding?”

  “She says is good luck to have foreign peoples at this party. You won’t believe,” he continued, “but she is thinking I am foreign man.” Bogdan probably did look foreign, a strong young fellow on a Czechoslovakian ten-speed, wearing shorts with cargo pockets.

  When Joannah began to get off her bike, Bogdan said, “Joannah, you know we must to meet the group in Deva.”

  “The group is fine. You go ahead, and I’ll catch up with you.” Joannah didn’t want Bogdan to leave without her, but a wedding party would be worth seeing, even if just to have a bite of food.

  “You think nothing bad can happen in Romania?” Bogdan asked. “This is not America.”

  Well, it certainly wasn’t Chicago. Behind and above them lay the ridge they’d crossed. Steaming dark green forest clung to the side of the mountain and continued across the road, and thick gray clouds swirled above, carried by a wind so high they couldn’t feel it here. Maybe the pregnant bride, mist rising around her feet, was some kind of half-human, a half-gypsy, but Joannah reflected, as a joke to herself, that she had her gold cross to protect her. Having a foreigner in one’s home was illegal, Clarice had said, as bad as having a typewriter, but maybe Ceausescu’s policy made exceptions for weddings.

  “I’m going through that gate to see what’s happening,” she said. “Don’t worry so much.”

  Bogdan gripped her handlebars again. “I must to worry. You don’t know these places of Romania. In old times peoples went into these hills and didn’t come out.”

  “But our grandfathers were from here,” Joannah said. “This is our homeland.”

  Bogdan sighed and swung a leg off his bike.

  The young women led them through the gate, and Joannah saw the one-story house built of mismatched planks and plywood stuck together like puzzle pieces beneath a corrugated tin roof. They continued around to the back of the house, into a courtyard of hard dirt and chewed-down grass under a grape arbor covered with a sheet of graying plastic. Here and there water leaked through, though it had stopped raining. She hadn’t seen private homes along the route, because they were all hidden behind various walls an
d fences.

  “Do you have something for giving them?” Bogdan asked.

  “I have gum and perfume samples.”

  “Cigarettes or dollars is better, I think.”

  “I hope there’s some food.”

  “My grandfather has told me of his wedding in these places. He was for three days of feast,” Bogdan said. They leaned their bikes against the side of the house. Grape leaves, bunches of pea-size grapes, and colored ribbons hung from the arbor, beneath which forty or so people stood or sat on rounds of firewood. The women here resembled those in the fields, but they wore pleated skirts and colored scarves patterned like Oriental rugs, and they were smiling. Many of the men wore their ragged fedoras at rakish angles. She wondered if everywhere behind the walls and fences, the sad-eyed Romanians became lively and joyful. As Joannah and Bogdan entered the arbor, a violinist and a singer took up. The violinist’s shirt was unbuttoned to reveal a crop of chest hair tinged with gray, and it made Joannah think of poor, lonely Mr. Masters—she knew she would never sleep with him again. The skinny singer in red and purple skirts rattled her tambourine. As the music resumed, Joannah felt a surge of sadness so forceful she had to look hard down at the wet grass to avoid crying. She looked at Bogdan’s shoes with their dark laces, at the bride’s bare feet. The music was fast and bright, and yet it felt melancholy, too, so much so that by the end of the song she really was crying. When Bogdan asked what was the matter, she told him she had something in her eye.

  A boy in a straw hat brought them each a jar of brownish wine that tasted sweet and strong—wine from plums, Bogdan said. Joannah was thirsty, so she drank hers down and then shook away the shiver traveling up her spine.

  “Why do the trees have skulls and crossbones painted on them?”

  “You must not to eat fruits with these paintings.”

  Before Joannah could ask any more, a shrunken woman, the mother of the bride, according to Bogdan, called out to the group and spoke in a nasal singsong. Then an uncle put his arm around the groom and spoke. The groom wore a gray suit of the same bell-bottom, wide-lapel cut as every other suit Joannah had seen in Romania, but this one looked almost new. Only the groom’s right eye moved, while the left was tiny and motionless in its socket. The party was instructed to drink their wine, and Joannah found the little boy had refilled her glass. She swallowed, and the alcohol sent poisonous shivers down into her legs. Unlabeled bottles of the cloudy brown stuff were passed around for refills, and then everybody was looking at Joannah. Bogdan suggested she toast the couple and wish them luck, so she held up her wine and shouted, “May you make beautiful children!”