In truth, though, I am sure it was that I had finally admitted to myself that Tata was right. My uncle must be dead.
Feeling queasy and weak, I didn’t react fast enough when the wind gusted again into my room and flung the Great Tome open. My little flame flickered wildly as mismatched sheets of paper, different sizes and colors, were snatched up by the wind and went flying. I cried out, rising to chase them, and my father rushed into the room to see what was wrong. He dove across my bed, shutting the window, and then moved my candle to safety as the pages fluttered all around.
“You were supposed to be in bed.”
“I was just reading.”
“You were supposed to be asleep.”
My mother peeked in. She looked so tired, as if the exhaustion in my father’s long face were a disease that had spread.
“It’s fine,” he assured her, and she left.
I slumped to the floor and grimaced at all the mixed up pages. “I can’t leave it like this.”
Tata sighed and then knelt. In the quiet, side by side, we put the stories back together. Sometimes my father would pick up a sheet and pause, lingering. Sometimes, as I sorted and stacked, I would glance over because I realized he was reading. It made me flush. It made my heart shiver.
For as long as I’d had the Great Tome—which was basically all my life—I’d rarely let anyone read from it but me. I collected stories in class, at the store, off the TV. I changed them to suit how I felt, most often rewriting the endings. But when I decided to share what I’d created, I was careful in choosing which tale and how to tell it. There were things I wouldn’t read in front of a classmate but might read in front of my parents. There were words I would use during the day but not at night.
In fact I had whole stories, more than a few, that were meant only for me—that I never intended to let out into the world.
My father didn’t know I’d written about his time as a university student or about my mother running away from her village. He didn’t know I’d written about the boy in the Pioneer club who’d died during our city parade. We’d been marching in the hot sun for hours, singing and waving flags in front of the palace, and he’d just dropped without warning, skull thunking onto the pavement. I’d never told anyone about the girl in our class whose parents were arrested for whispering things that she whispered to me in the bathroom. I’d never told anyone about the history teacher I loved who’d said our textbook was wrong when we studied the Second World War—who’d repeatedly used the term “Holocaust” and insisted our people were not simply victims of fascism but responsible for the brutal murders of hundreds of thousands of Roma and Jews. Shortly after her lecture, she’d suddenly, inexplicably, vanished.
My father certainly didn’t know about Uncle Andrei’s poem—that I’d copied down all the best parts and told them in those smaller, simpler words I preferred. How could Tata have guessed I’d remember so much? He’d taken the poem from me the morning after I’d read it, when he’d found me sleeping with it clutched to my chest.
My father stopped helping. His eyes were trained on a pale blue piece of construction paper with shiny black ink.
“Tata,” I said, trying to pull him back to me. “I want to hear my story tonight. I want to hear about Cunning Ileana. If you promise to stay awake till the end, then I’ll promise too.”
But my father’s eyes were still on the paper.
“I need you to tell me a story first,” he said.
His voice was too calm, the timing of his request strange, but when someone asked me for a story, I almost never said no.
“Which one do you want?”
“Last week you mentioned a story at dinner,” he said. “One your teacher told you before summer break.”
For a moment I watched him uncertainly, but then I nodded and began. “Once upon a time, something happened. If it hadn’t happened, it would not be told. There once was a baker’s boy. He was a very good boy. He took his homework seriously and did his chores every day. He liked to play football and basketball and kept himself healthy and clean.” I hesitated, glancing down at my tome, still a mess. “I don’t—can I find it first? I don’t remember what he liked to study.”
“Trivial details. Just go on.”
“It develops the baker boy’s character,” I insisted.
“I very much doubt that. He liked physics and math, I’m sure.”
I paused. “Wow. I think that was it.”
“Please go on.”
“One day this boy, who was a very good boy, who liked football and basketball and physics and math, one day he was walking home and passed a dark, dirty alley, and down at the end he saw his father talking with a bad man.”
My own father’s eyes narrowed. His face danced with shadows as my voice changed.
“The baker’s boy and his family were very, very poor, Tata. Poorer than us. So poor they lived in just one little room behind the bakery, and even the mice wouldn’t sleep there in the winter because it was so cold. Every morning, before his parents woke up, the boy would knead all the dough and fire up all the ovens. He liked to work very much. And he loved his country very much. And the thing he wanted most in all the world was for the Leader to come to his bakery and taste his family’s bread. But if he couldn’t have that, he would be happy enough if his mother just gave him a baby brother or sister. She’d only had one child, and that made the Leader very sad. She was a disappointment.”
My father’s voice was low when he asked, “Would you tell this story to your mother?”
“I’m telling this story to you.”
“It’s rambling. And you’ve developed the characters quite enough for my taste.”
I licked my lips and tried to remember where I was. “The boy… the baker’s boy saw his father in an alley talking to a man who was bad. Very bad. He was selfish and lazy. He didn’t love his country. He didn’t want to work. And the baker’s boy almost started to cry, because while he was watching, his father gave papers to this bad man and got money in return.”
“And what were these papers?”
“Papers that said mean things about the Leader. Papers that would hurt the country. But the baker’s boy knew what was right to do.” I began speaking faster. “So that night, when his parents were sleeping, he ran to the police and told them the truth. They came at once. They took his father, the baker, to jail, and everything seemed perfect and happy.”
I scrunched up my face. “But secretly, the boy’s mother was furious. His relatives were furious too. Because they loved the baker, and who cared what stupid things he said about the stupid Leader anyhow?”
My father’s eyes widened, but before he could speak, my voice dropped to a whisper, coming faster still, and when I leaned forward, my shadow grew like a monster. “The next night, the boy’s family came into his room and they took his limbs, one for each person, and they ripped him right to pieces! They ground him up and baked him with the dough, and when the Leader came to visit the shop of the brave young man who’d told on his father, they gave him a loaf of Baker’s Boy. He ate every last bite, saying it was the best bread he’d ever had. So, in the end, the boy got his wish after all.”
There was silence for a long time before I started to cry.
“It’s Uncle Andrei who’s been killed, isn’t it? You think the Securitate will come after us next!”
My father’s face flushed. “You cannot tell such stories.”
“They told it to us at school!”
“You’ve changed it. That’s not your teacher’s ending.”
“The teacher’s ending was boring. And the baker’s boy was a snitch.”
Tata grabbed a fistful of papers from the Great Tome, and I pulled back in surprise as he shook my stories and hissed, “Can you not understand what is happening? Don’t you realize that I’m praying, for all our sakes, that my brother is dead—that he hasn’t given our names out of desperation? Haven’t you figured it out? Your mother helped him publish his poems. She
typed the copies herself! If he’s even alive, do you know what they’ll do? Do you know what happens to people who make stories like yours? They’ll beat him bloody and chain him to the wall. He won’t eat for days or bathe for months. Do you know how many die in those jails? How many wish they were dead?”
I shrank away till I bumped the little table beside my bed. The candle rattled, nearly tipped, and my father’s eyes fell to the paper in his hands, to the rest of the Great Tome spread out on the carpet before him. It took me a moment to realize what was happening, to realize what he meant to do as he started snatching everything up, stuffing and crumpling the stories in the kind of reckless way that let me know he never meant to put them back together.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Ileana,” he said, and his voice broke.
Then I was screaming, my hands grasping for any part of him I could reach. “Tata! Tata, no! Please, Tata! No!”
My fingers caught the edge of my tome as he rose, glitter raining down, paper ripping in my hands. He shook himself free of me. Then he was striding through the door. Then he was out of the apartment. I stumbled into the living room, my mother already ahead of me, shouting and running after him down the hall. I meant to follow too, but my legs went weak and I fell to my knees.
When my mother returned, I was sobbing, curled up on the floor and clutching bits of torn paper. Surely, all the neighbors had woken by then. Surely, they’d all made little notes in their books. But my mother just lay down beside me. She held my body with hers, stroking the knots from my hair.
“I’ll hate him forever,” I cried.
“He’s just afraid,” she said. “He doesn’t realize what he’s done.”
For the rest of my family, the world had not yet come crashing down.
That would happen the next day, after my father returned home from work. The cuffs of his sleeves would still be stained with ash when I showed him what I found in my bedroom.
For the rest of my family, the world had not yet come crashing down, but for me, all that really mattered was gone. Because my stories made up who I was, and that night my father—whom I loved best of all—had destroyed them.
Somewhere Safe
I was alone when I found the first bug, nestled tight with tape in my very own room. No one else would have noticed it, no one but a distraught girl searching more desperately than ever for an escape—for hidden passageways inside closets or doll-size families that might become friends, might just live anywhere in her apartment that normal people wouldn’t look, like deep, deep inside a child’s beside table.
When my fingers fumbled across its cold metal casing, I snapped my hand back as if I’d been bitten. I hesitated, then pulled out the small drawer.
In the corner, tiny wires squirmed from a gray, segmented shell.
I stepped away slowly, my breath coming shallow and quick. In the kitchen I climbed onto the counter and hugged my knees to my chest, thinking of everything my father and I had said the previous night. About my uncle. About my mother. I pictured the cell they would put me in because of the story I’d told. I wanted to cry, but all I could do was stare into my room at the open drawer.
When my parents finally arrived home from work, I jumped down and ran over, grabbing my mother by the wrist.
“What? What? Ileana, wait! Let me put down my bag.”
But I must have looked so frightened. I must have struck something ingrained so deep—she’d lived this way her whole life, just like me—that when she saw my finger over my mouth, my wide eyes, she went silent. She followed me. My father followed her. And I showed them. I showed them, still hoping I was wrong.
My mother’s hand trembled up to her mouth. My father went white.
In silence, my parents and I gutted our apartment. Every piece of furniture we owned was flipped upside down. The cushions and pillows of every sitting or sleeping place were torn open and scattered. Every electronic was unplugged, every light switch and outlet unscrewed. We didn’t speak as we searched. We didn’t need words to share what we knew.
Our apartment was infested.
When the place was fully wrecked and my father had finally sat down on the overturned couch, his brow damp, my mother took a pad of paper from her work bag and began writing. She passed it to my father. He read and wrote and passed it back. When they were through, they passed the notepad to me. The ink was black, the paper muted yellow with faint blue lines. For the first time in a life of secrets and half sentences, I was allowed to know every last word. I read quickly.
Last night. This was underlined by my mother.
Below was my father’s handwriting. We can’t stay here.
Leaving is as good as a confession.
They already have one. And then, underlined not once, but three times, Ileana.
My mother had looked at me before she’d written, There’s nowhere safe.
Yes, there is.
They don’t even know what she looks like.
We don’t have a choice.
We could go with her. Together. My mother’s cursive tore holes with its loops.
She’ll be safer going alone.
Below this, Mama had scribbled something out, then written a few lines about where I was going and what I needed to pack. When I finished reading, my stomach flooded with fear.
No, I wrote back, and looked up, the pen trembling in my hand. I want to stay here with you.
My mother pursed her lips and pulled me close, pressing my forehead to hers. My father turned his face away.
That night I chose clothes from the floor by my closet. We put them in my schoolbag with my toothbrush and comb. My mother picked up the kitchen table and set it straight. She picked up a chair. She sat down to write—first the directions, next the letter. We could not call ahead. Not from our house. Not from a public phone. Everywhere, the Securitate were listening.
For a few hours Mama held me while I dozed, but before the sun rose the next morning, we were all at the front door, dressed and ready to leave. I strapped on my schoolbag, trying to be brave. But when my mother handed me the white envelope with her letter, she started to cry, so I started to cry too.
“Don’t give it to anyone but her,” she whispered, her lips close to my ears, her cheeks wet.
No one had spoken in hours. She was risking everything just to feel the words in her throat. My father glanced out into the hallway, checking for eavesdropping neighbors. He looked at his watch, then into the hallway again. I stood up straight as a soldier, trying to catch my breath. I wiped my eyes and walked out the door.
In the street on the way to the North Railway Station, Tata, Mama, and I passed the queue at the grocer. Already, people were lining up for their rations—two hundred fifty grams of bread per person per day, one kilogram of sugar per month, seventy-eight liters of milk per year. The tickets for each trimester were printed on off-white paper. The official stamp was red. The little boxes with numbers, the ones the man with the uniform would X off so you couldn’t get in line twice, those were light blue. There were tickets for flour, tickets for eggs, tickets for meat. They had our name and our address and said that we were three people.
But when I got onto the train all alone, my family would be only two.
I wondered if my parents would still buy my rations when I was gone. I wondered how, without a ticket, I would eat.
The sun, just beginning to rise, peeked above the tops of the gray public-housing complex, but on its heels were dark, angry clouds. The streetlights flickered. Only one in five worked. My mother held my hand, humidity sticking our fingers together. The palace was behind us, the boulevard, too—my school and my bakery and my butcher. The turn to the university came and went on our right. It was a long walk to the North Railway Station, but my parents didn’t risk hailing a cab. We passed Romarta, where my mother bought all our clothes—where everyone’s mother bought everyone’s clothes. Through the storefront’s glass panes, I could see the same plain T-shirt and shorts I was wearing. In my o
nce-white tennis shoes, with my school-sanctioned bag bumping along on my back, I blended into my city so well, it would have taken almost nothing to make me disappear.
We had nearly reached the train station when clouds filled in the sky overhead, hiding the sun so that the dawn couldn’t arrive. What little color remained of the world became dark and muddled. I pressed close to my mother and tugged on her hand.
“I’ll be out past curfew,” I whispered when she bent down her head.
“You won’t be in the city by then.”
A block later I tugged again. “Someone might ask me where I’m going, and if I can’t think of a lie, I’ll get found out.”
“Tell them the truth, then—just not all of it.”
Another block, another tug. “I’ll hate the village. I know I will. I’ll want to run away.”
This time my mother only glanced down, frowning.
The North Railway Station was just ahead, its clock tower in sight. The Romanian flag was flying from a pole at its top, and when we neared, it snapped to attention in the wind, lightning flashing behind it. Inside the building, we joined the queue. A few people grumbled and pushed, but my father, as always, stood stoic, pretending he didn’t see. Along the wall were identical posters: red, yellow, and blue with a painted picture of the Leader and his wife—the People’s Genius and his Scientist Spouse. One of the posters was torn, ripping the Leader’s smiling face right down between his eyes.
At the ticket counter, the woman pulled out a map and charts, pointing. My father made notes while she talked. I didn’t start feeling truly frightened till we walked to the platform and he knelt down beside me, handing over a paper with the times and stations and names of lines. He showed me the tickets one by one.
“You’ll have to change trains twice,” he said, his voice almost lost in the ringing bells and crackling announcements from the loudspeakers above. “Ask for help if you’re lost, but try not to draw any attention.”
The Story That Cannot Be Told Page 3
