Bottled Goods

  Dedication

  To my father and to the heroes of the

  Romanian Revolution of 1989

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Low People in Our Family

  Glazed Apples

  Dear Father Frost

  Prima Noctis

  A Flower and Two Gardeners

  The Saturday When Everything Changed

  Alina’s Mother

  Crumbs

  Strigoi

  How to Attract (Unwanted) Attention from the Communist Authorities

  Quotes from My Mother (Commented)—Part I

  Homework

  The Hunt

  The Pinch

  Disenchantment

  Slip

  Of Gifts of Unknown Provenance

  The Skirt

  Quotes from My Mother (Commented)—Part II

  For Sale

  Reel

  The Pinch—Take Two

  A Comprehensive but Not Exhaustive List of Reasons for Asking for an Italian Visa

  What We Had to Give Away So That We Could Buy a Fourteen-Year-Old Dacia So That We Would Have an Independent Means of Transportation in Order to Flee the Country

  Like Music

  Paparudă

  Typewriter Money

  Cutting Short

  In Which Alina Comes Home Early from School on a Wednesday Afternoon and Finds Her Mother at Her House, Sitting in Front of the Desk Where Alina Normally Grades the Pupils’ Papers, Going Through a Bunch of Letters and a Notebook with a Red Leather Cover

  The Curse

  A Key on a Rope, a Shop, and a Beggar

  A Suitcase Full of Dreams

  The Trip

  Punish. Punish. Curse.

  What Even Aunt Theresa Fears

  Long Forgotten

  The Potion

  Now, Everything Has Changed

  Ripping

  What Alina Did Last Tuesday

  The White Line

  Bottled Goods

  Rattled

  Weeds of Truth

  And the Earth Shudders

  Epicenter

  The Flight

  Postcards to My Mother

  Harbinger

  Pink Fudge Frosting

  A Wooden Box

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Low People in Our Family

  When Aunt Theresa calls, I’m doing my homework on the History of Socialism.

  “Alina? Is your mother at home?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “She’s working the late shift this week. She won’t be home until eight.”

  “Good. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Wear something black and sturdy shoes.” And she hangs up before I have the chance to argue.

  Half an hour later, the deep horns of her black Volga, similar to a ship’s, summon me downstairs. The car has well-defined, voluptuous shapes. The fluffy blanket of snow on its roof makes me think of a curvy woman wearing a rabbit-fur hat. In 1967’s Socialist Republic of Romania, this car is the privilege of the Party notables, like my uncle Petru.

  Aunt Theresa’s hand peeps out of the driver’s window. Her wrist is laden with half a dozen gold bracelets that clink merrily when she waves to me. The tips of her fingers clasp a cigarette holder.

  My eldest cousin, Matei, is riding shotgun, so I clamber onto the back seat, where my youngest cousin, Adam, awaits. Between us, on the red upholstery, is a square box with a gliding lid, like the ones that hold the rummy tiles. I wrinkle my nose instantly. The aroma of my aunt’s rose perfume doesn’t cover the smell of putrefaction.

  “Are you wearing black?” asks Aunt Theresa.

  I show her the dark wool dress I’m wearing under my thick mantle.

  “Good,” she says. “Don’t open the box.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask. “And what’s that smell?”

  “We need to buy some flowers first,” she says and drives us to the vegetable market. “Don’t tell your mother about this. The low people in our family don’t deserve to know.”

  Matei returns with eight white roses and a small crown, like the ones received by pupils who finish top of the class at the end of the school year. It’s made of interwoven bush branches with little round, green leaves. Five plastic carnations are glued on it, like gemstones in a crown.

  “Alina, Adam, please open the windows in the back,” says Aunt Theresa.

  “Where are we going?” I ask again.

  “To the Saint George monastery,” she says.

  My teeth clatter all the way to the monastery, the better part of an hour. Religion is not quite forbidden, but it’s something that you don’t practice in public, nor speak of. Just like sex.

  We’ve been driving on a bumpy dirt road for a few miles. Adam places one hand on top of the wooden box, steadying it, so it won’t fall. I can now see the monastery on top of a hill. Aunt Theresa should park the car—we would then continue by foot. To my surprise, she doesn’t stop, but steers left, into the woods. We drive for about ten more minutes on a narrow path, halting in a clearing severed by a frozen creek. I recognize the place. In summer, it’s our favorite picnic spot. Behind it, a steep hill where red peonies grow.

  Matei fumbles in the trunk and draws out two shovels. He and Adam head for the foot of the hill, and begin to dig. My mouth opens and closes. Aunt Theresa begins to sob noiselessly. Tears are clotting the powder on her cheeks, her mink coat trembles. I hear a rustling of leaves, a creaking of branches and see a priest approaching us. Aunt Theresa walks toward him, kisses his hand. She whispers something to him and he nods.

  “Help me,” Aunt Theresa says, staring into the open trunk.

  I peer over her shoulder. A basket with red wine, a huge ring pretzel baked with honey, coliva.* I shudder.

  “I suspect your mother never told you about your grandfather,” she says. “He would have liked an open casket. But we rarely kept him in the bird cage, you see. He liked to walk around the house. He must have fallen. We searched desperately. We found him days after he disappeared, between the living room couch and the wall.” A sharp sound, like a banshee shriek, escapes between her sentences. “We found him because of the smell.”

  The priest and my cousins are standing next to the little hole in the ground, waiting. She gestures for me to grab the basket while she extracts the wooden box from the back seat.

  “We came to visit your mother once—and she promised that if we ever come to her house again, she’d tell the authorities where they can find him. The bitch!” She pauses, caressing the lid of the box like the fur of a beloved pet. “You know what—tell her. Tell her I didn’t invite her,” she says.

  * * *

  In the car, Aunt Theresa can’t stop speaking. If she stopped, she’d sob, and her eyes would become clouded by tears, and she must watch the road. Night has fallen.

  “It was right after the communists came to power,” she says. “They were after him—your grandfather had been an important member of the Liberal Party. His friends, they all died while digging the Canal. Killed, beaten, tortured. What was my mother to do? She did what she could, God bless her soul. She shrunk him. Your mother—she wanted to have nothing to do with him. Nothing.” Her voice rises in the cigarette smoke that’s clouding the interior of the Volga. “She never came to see him—not even once. And the fool, how he missed her!”

  The smell of putrefaction lingers in the overheated car. I mean to ask her how my grandmother shrunk him, but I don’t want to interrupt.

  Glazed Apples

  The beach is sun in Alina’s eyes, sand in her hair, salt tightening her skin like a dress she has
outgrown, smell of spoiled salted fish. The beach is a conglomerate of eyes glazing her as if she were an apple, making her feel constrained and sticky with their lust. The view from her room is a cement wall barely three feet from her window, but what did she expect when she is allowed to stay for free in a three-star hotel for an entire month, in one of Romania’s most luxurious resorts?

  Until this summer of 1969, the sea was a mystery, the “seaside”—a dreaded word. It spoke of her mother’s lament: I wish we had enough money to take you with us, uttered with a poorly hidden smile from the corner of her mouth. It spoke of a long drive to her grandmother’s, where she was forgotten until the leaves turned brown and school started. It spoke of dusty side streets, screaming children and their cruel games, knees covered in dried blood, bathing every other day in a plastic tub where her legs barely fit.

  This summer, Alina is a translator and a tour guide for the German tourists at her hotel. She is relieved whenever they decide to leave the beach and see some sights. The tourists, too loud, too cheerful, too inquisitive at the resort, become her adoring audience.

  To the right, she tells them with a smile as if she’s giving away state secrets, is the Museum of History and Archaeology, the former City Hall. The Germans gape at her and ask pointed questions, to show they have been listening. They are schoolchildren again, and she is their mistress. In the narrow corridor of the bus, she tells them about the wonders of communism.

  She says, We will be visiting a special shop for tourists now. You can find Western products there, if you miss them. I am not allowed to come in with you.

  They ask, How is it to live in a land without freedom? To stay outside and stare at the windows?

  She says with a crooked smile, Nobody lacks anything in this country. Do your youngsters receive an apartment as soon as they are married? Is unemployment a problem in your country? Does your Leader have your best interests at heart?

  They say, Leader or not, how about Mars and Toblerone chocolates? Wolford stockings, Italian shoes?

  Alina laughs. I would readily give up my chocolate if that helps eradicate poverty.

  They don’t believe her. They rain chocolates and cigarettes on her when they return. She keeps the chocolates to herself and the cigarettes she gives to Liviu, the other German-speaking tour guide. In her newly gained confidence among the Germans’ rosy cheeks, beer bellies, and pale-blond hair, she feels like an older sister to this lanky boy with a wispy, thin moustache. He never stares at her bosom or at her legs, like the others do. He always looks her in the eyes when he is talking to her, in a hardly audible, serious tone.

  My mother died when I was a child, he says. I want to become an archaeologist. I hate being with so many people all day, but I need the money. When I get to my hotel room, my head is pounding. I would like to sell the cigarettes you give me, but I enjoy them too much.

  But the tourists have come for the beach, so Alina plays the fearless tour guide no more than two full days per week and sometimes a few hours in the morning. The rest of the time, she must do like all the others and brew on the hot sand, like a Turkish coffee.

  Liviu comes to the beach one day, and she chats with him and even takes a few puffs from his cigarette. He shields her from the unpleasant stares, and she wants him to come more often. In the evening, his skin is crayfish red and he has to brush cold yogurt on it for days, making the sensible German noses in the bus curl up at the smell of sour milk.

  On her last day as a tour guide, they are walking on the promenade at Constanţa, the Germans in front, she and Liviu lagging behind like two jaded shepherds.

  Alina is bored of saying, This is the statue of our greatest national poet. This was once a splendid casino. Instead, she leans against the lacy railings and peers at the sea breaking in millions of pearls of foam beneath her. The sea, only the sea, with its push and pull, its restlessness, its rustling sounds, she loves. Liviu lays his hand on top of hers.

  He says, I kept all the packs from the cigarettes you gave me and made a coffee table. I have no idea how I will carry it back home.

  Dear Father Frost

  I know that I am twenty and almost a married woman, but I’m very willing to believe in you again, if you would consider bringing me one single item from the list below. In return, I promise you eternal love and devotion. I would preach in your name on the streets, even though it’s forbidden and I might be picked up by the Police or the Secret Services to be beaten and administered electric shocks to banish all popular and religious beliefs from my head. I would use your real name, the one you had before 1948, when the Communist Party came to power: Father C. Just bring me one single item and I’m sure that we can reach an agreement regarding payment. Please. Even half an item. Anything.

  Wishlist:

  A pair of Levi’s blue jeans.

  A red lipstick, like the one the piano teacher is wearing, that elegant shade of burgundy.

  Better yet than the two items above, a pair of new boots. The soles of my black boots are so worn, that they’re very slippery when it rains—I fell two times last week. I don’t want to think what will happen when it snows.

  Even better, a portable electric stove I can use in my room. I’m sick of cooking all of my food by using the immersion heater.

  A raise, so I can buy all of the above and send a little something extra to Liviu. Why do teachers’ salaries have to be so low?

  My fiancé. Help him finish college this year, not the next. This month. Today.

  Please make my mother change her mind and support me through college so I can become a translator, instead of having to confront eight-year-olds every single day for the rest of my life.

  Please turn back time to that moment when I introduced her to Liviu. Please don’t let her throw me out of the house.

  Please make me a child again. A teenager. A student. A girl who hasn’t lost her father yet or her romantic views concerning the world, poverty, kindness, a parent’s love.

  Please unmake me a grown-up.

  Please don’t let me down.

  All the love in the world,

  Alina

  Prima Noctis

  This woman in the stained wedding dress is not really Alina, bending over Liviu as he searches for blankets in a huge wooden trunk at the foot of his parents’ bed. Her ankle-long tulle veil should not have been covered with dust, after being trampled under so many rubber-soled boots, hardened bare feet. Her head should not have been spinning from all the whirling on the dance floor, or from the homemade plum schnapps, or from struggling to understand what was being said to her in the strange mountain dialect. It was not a wedding, but a documentary about customs and traditions that she had been watching, trapped inside the bride’s body. Not only had the guests at the ceremony been so queer and unfamiliar, even her Liviu looked foreign in the traditional costume he changed into shortly before midnight.

  “Are you even listening?” asks her husband.

  “Huh?”

  “The carpets hanging on the walls. My grandmother made them,” he says. “She had an Austrian weaving loom. It was a huge, beautiful thing. When the communists came to power, they took her weaving loom, her lands, and her husband.”

  “Liviu, I don’t need a history lesson right now,” says Alina. “Keep it for your class.”

  She doesn’t want to remember that their family histories grew in parallel realities. When the communists came, two years before Alina was born, her mother and her aunt Theresa lived in a mansion in Bucharest, complete with a team of eight servants and their former governess. Alina is glad that her mother refused to accept the convergence of histories and come to the wedding. It was enough that Aunt Theresa had come, the golden bracelets at her wrist jingling to the rhythm of the traditional wedding songs as Liviu’s brother spun her on the dance floor. Her aunt, in spite of her benign, well-humored look, made Alina feel ashamed of the heavy, bug-eaten furniture in her father-in-law’s house, of its floors made of compacted earth, of the dust cov
ering the streets like an ill-willed layer of snow, of the men’s queer accents and their bawdy jokes, of their fingers stained with grease from the liquid oozed by the cabbage rolls, of their onion-and-cheap-alcohol breaths that came too close, too close to her face as they danced with her, kissed her on the cheeks, hugged her.

  Liviu is done raising his eyebrows and takes another blanket out of the trunk, tossing it on the bed, on top of the others.

  “Don’t we have enough? You already pulled out three.”

  “It can get really cold at night,” he says. “Besides, I was looking for some clean sheets.”

  The soft inflections of his dialect forgotten, Liviu talks again like the history student he was when they met. Back then, his eyes became glassy and began dancing in their sockets when he told her about Dacian excavation sites discovered in the heart of Transylvania.

  Alina sweeps her hand over the rugs on the walls. They’re rectangular, with a geometrical pattern in red, white, and black, a form of controlled chaos. A thick layer of dust, like talc, has seeped through the fabric, and it now glues to the skin of her palm, where so many layers of sweat have dried. Her dress is just as sticky as the rest of her, and makes her think of Hercules’s poisoned shirt.

  “Can you please help me get out of this dress?” she asks, turning, but he is no longer in the room. “Liviu?”

  “In here,” he calls from the main chamber.

  Alina follows him and sees the blankets and sheets tossed on the narrow, plain bed across from the hearth. She points toward the pile.

  “What’s this?”

  “We’re sleeping in here,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t spend my wedding night in my parents’ bed,” he says, recoiling and pursing his lips. “It’s disgusting.”

  Alina is too tired to argue. She turns, pointing at the hidden zipper that runs across her back. As Liviu’s greasy fingers, clumsied by wine, stray along her spine, she closes her eyes. He could be any of the men who had been at the wedding feast, with their blackened feet, coarse beards, rough hands, but now she is as dirty as any of them, a princess dragged through the mud. The day lingers on her skin, in the sweat mixed with dust and frankincense smoke, cabbage and garlic vapors from the kitchen, and she is not Alina. Maybe she is one of her noble ancestors, a spoiled girl held hostage by a peasant, and his callused hands are tearing the dress off her, throwing her on his humble bed, and there she lies, trembling, eyes half closed, waiting for the prick.