Bottled Goods Read online

  I remember Peter’s story, how he denied knowing Jesus when he was apprehended. God will forgive me, too.

  “No! No! I wasn’t praying! I was just tired.”

  The man grinds his teeth, then pushes me into the metal table. It screeches as I collide with it. There’s a sharp pain in my hip.

  “Body search,” he says.

  He turns me around, pushes me harder into the table with his knee. Its corner pierces my stomach. I wail. He catches the nape of my neck, squeezes hard. “Shut up!”

  His hands move up and down my body, tear my shirt open. The callused tips of his fingers are on my waist, on my breasts, on my legs. He rips my nylon pantyhose.

  “You’re tired, huh? I’ll show you tired!”

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. This is not happening. Not again. Hands tugging, grasping, pricking, smearing. His hands moving on my thighs, upward. I want to scream from the top of my lungs, until my vocal cords snap, but there’s no point: If I scream, nobody will hear. I bite my tongue until I draw blood, and then even harder. I bite the tongue of this body that doesn’t belong to me anymore.

  Then, the fingers withdraw, without forewarning.

  “Sit down,” he says.

  I wrap my cardigan around me. My skin is still prickling where he touched it.

  “Comrade Mungiu, where are you and your husband headed?”

  My tongue feels swollen and bruised. “To Aalen, in the Federal Republic of Germany,” I say.

  “Why would you seek West Germany? Are you attempting to betray your people and your country?”

  I shake my head. I’m trembling. “We’re not. My husband is writing this research paper on Roman fortifications.” I’m trembling. “It just happens that there are a few very well preserved—”

  “Are you cold or are you afraid? Are you lying to my face?”

  “I’m cold. I’m cold,” I say, wrapping the cardigan around me tighter. During the body search, he tugged at my shirt, opening a few buttons. Cold air rushes on my exposed skin.

  The man gets up and opens the obscured window. A freezing draft streams inside. I can see outside is pitch black. It was noon when we arrived at the border. My body convulses because of the cold. The man pulls his chair close to me. His moustache is in my face, almost touches my cheek as he speaks.

  “Aren’t there enough ruins in our beloved motherland, too? Am I mistaken, or weren’t the Romans here, too? What would you want in the West?”

  I lower my gaze, stare at my skirt. A thread has come loose, and I have an irresistible impulse to rip it. I wrap my hands around myself tighter. My foot jolts with the shivering.

  “Perhaps you’re meeting your brother-in-law there?”

  “No! No!” I screech.

  It goes on like this for hours. The same questions. Where are we going? Why? Where will we be lodged? How much currency do we have with us? Have we hidden objects of value we could swap for currency in the car? I can rest assured that it has been taken apart.

  I keep fidgeting, shivering, glancing out the window. I think about my mother, imagining how scared and cold and lonely she might be. I whimper a “Please, let me go” after each and every one of my answers. We’re going to Aalen. We’re on vacation. We’ll be sleeping at campsites. We have the prescribed amount of currency with us, and nothing more. We didn’t hide anything in the car.

  He doesn’t know, he can’t know that my most prized possessions are three coins: fifty Yugoslavsian dinara that jiggle in the pocket of my skirt. The money destined to be swallowed by the first pay phone we find after crossing the border.

  Late into the night, the man finally gives up.

  “Fine,” he says. “Fine, I believe you.”

  I find it hard to be relieved. I say, “Thank you,” though my words are barely audible because of the clattering of my teeth.

  The man jumps up and darts out of the room. Tears begin streaming down my cheeks. It’s over. I lay my head on the table, wondering if they’d mind if I doze a bit, until they finish the paperwork. Half-hidden, I finally close the buttons of my shirt. I didn’t dare as long as the man was here, questioning me. I didn’t dare irritate or provoke him.

  I jingle the coins in my pocket. They’re warm to the touch, smooth and irregular. They soothe me. I close my eyes. We have to hurry if we want to save my mother, hurry into the car, and into Yugoslavia. Hurry to the first roadside motel, or restaurant that is open, or hurry into the first village, or the first post office, and I’ll call my aunt. I reach again into the pocket, seeking the familiar feeling of the fifty dinara, and they rattle, rattle, rattle their song, and I hope it’s not a requiem.

  Weeds of Truth

  The door creaks. A tall, blond man with short-cropped hair comes in. He holds a passport in his hands and a few sheets of paper. I leap up to meet him.

  “Thank you,” I say, reaching for my passport.

  He snatches it back. “What are you doing?”

  The ground is spinning. I fall back onto my chair, unable to keep my balance.

  He throws the papers on the table, leafs through my documents. “You have a visa for the Federal Republic of Germany,” he says, pointing at it. “It’s almost expired.”

  I try to focus, but I fail.

  “Why the hurry to leave now?”

  My mind rushes through the weeds of truth. I can’t tear them out of my head and hand them to the man. I can’t tell him that we had applied for different visas, that we had made different escape plans, but the fact that I was more or less raped changed everything. I can’t remember what I was supposed to tell him. The relief wiped my head clean of the practiced answers. I should have made a list, recited it like a poem.

  The man pounds his fist on the table. I recoil. The reverberations are transmitted to the foot of the table and into my body. I tremble again.

  “Hey!” he says. “Answer me!”

  “I . . . We . . . It’s hard to obtain a visa, you know that,” I say. My teeth clatter so hard that I can barely speak.

  “So?” he says. His eyes, watery gray, stare me down, immovable. This is the kind of man who could drive a glowing-red pair of tongs through my entrails and not even blink.

  “It’s hard, it’s hard,” I say. “We wanted to go. To go. My husband’s paper.”

  “Why didn’t you leave in April, when your visa first came?”

  I grip the corner of the table to steady myself. I’m so tired, and so hungry. The contours of the man become fuzzy, then clear again. I stare at the cement floor. I’d like nothing more than to lie down on it. Lie down. Just for a moment.

  And the Earth Shudders

  And I tell the Customs man, “We didn’t leave straight away because of my mother. She disappeared earlier this year.” I break into tears again when I think about her, and I bang my head against the table, and the man places a hand on my head, and his fingers brush my nape, and he says, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Because he’s the nicest interrogator we’ve had so far, and he’s nothing like the one before him, the one who did the afternoon shift, the tall one with his bitten nails and hanging belly, who threw a bucket of cold water on me when I rested my head on my chest after he left the room for a moment, saying, “I thought that you were thirsty,” but I was so tired, so tired, I haven’t slept in two days, not since they’ve been keeping us here, at the border.

  And even if this nice man asks the same questions, he always waits until I stop whimpering to continue, and now he asks, “Well, but what if she returns while you’re away and she can’t find you?” I sob so hard that the air catches in my lungs and I can’t breathe, because my mother may never return, because only I know where she is, because it’s been too long, too long, and I jingle the dinara in my pocket, the ones meant to save her, and I wonder if there’s anything in the perfume bottle in the ground worth saving, did she burrow her way through the lid, did her eyes begin to glow in the dark, does she see the wooden box where we buried her father, all tho
se years ago?

  I want to tell this kind Customs man that they’ve killed her with the questioning, that I killed her, and then it strikes me, that it never had to be this way.

  “Yes. You’re right,” I say. “I need to go back.”

  I jump up, and the man startles, and I already have a list of things to do in my head: 1. go back to the first town, 2. find the first pay phone, 3. call Aunt Theresa and tell her where my mother is, perhaps she can still be saved, but I wobble, I must have leapt up too quickly, the room turns black, and I dig my hands into the table. I’m so tired, and I haven’t eaten in two days, and the man asks, “What are you doing?”

  By then I’ve steadied myself and I tell him, “You’re right, I’ll go back. Liviu will go alone to the FRG, and finish his paper. You’re right, he doesn’t need me, he can write it by himself. I must go back, go back to my mother, back to the first town, and never mind, I don’t care if you let him go or not, but I have to go back.”

  The man grips my arm and frowns, and I can see he thinks that I’m mad, but who wouldn’t be in my place? The fear, the hunger, the exhaustion, and then, what I have done, oh, why didn’t I go back the first day, it would have been so easy. I wouldn’t have killed my mother, I hope I didn’t, and if I didn’t, two days buried in the ground, she’ll hate me forever.

  The man leans in, whispers in my ear, “Do you know what will happen to you if your husband never returns? If he defects?”

  And I throw my head back and giggle, and then hear myself laughing like a witch on the records with fairy tales I sometimes played for my pupils in school. “There’s nothing left they can take from me.”

  The man steps back, and I hold the table tight so I won’t fall, and he pushes my passport toward me. “Wait here,” he says, and he leaves, and I don’t move, and he’s gone for a long time, but when he returns, I’m still here, gripping the table, and he motions me to follow him, and I put one foot in front of the other, fighting to keep my balance, like a baby who’s trying to walk, but I’m so happy I could kiss him. I’ll 1. go back, go back to the first town, 2. find the first pay phone, 3. call Aunt Theresa, and so I’ll save my mother, I should have done this long ago, when they first started questioning us, and then I’m in the hallway for the first time in two days, and then Liviu is coming toward me, escorted by the man with the oily moustache who questioned me yesterday, and the Customs men, they bring us out, and take us to our car. And there we stand, both, watching them, and the nice man says, “Go, you’re free to go.”

  “Where to?” says Liviu. He has blue circles around his eyes, and I don’t know if they’re bruises or if he’s tired.

  And the nice man says, “You’re free to go to the Federal Republic of Germany.” He points toward Yugoslavia, and Liviu turns and jumps in the car, and I take my seat in the car though I don’t believe them, this must be a trap, and the nice man leans toward me and says, “If I were you, I’d never come back. Don’t come back.” But I’m already gone, and Liviu revs the engine before starting it, and we’re off, and there are no shouts, no shots, no second thoughts, just a white Dacia rushing into the night, swallowing the road beneath it, swallowing the road to freedom.

  Epicenter

  Alina spends the second day of Christmas, 1989, alone, in front of the television. Liviu has taken a job today. Someone’s desperate to move into their new home by the New Year and wants the place painted. That’s what Liviu does, nowadays—he paints walls in houses. His hands are raw with the lime. Weeping cracks that never heal cross the back of his hands. Sometimes, after dinner, Liviu looks at them, and wonders. He says his hands are foreign to him, that looking at them is like playing in a movie where he doesn’t know the lines. And yet, of the two, Liviu is the one who grumbles least. It must be the two afternoons per week he spends presiding over his club of amateur archaeologists.

  Of the two, Alina is the loneliest. It’s afternoon, and she has nowhere else to be. It’s dark as a pit in their two-bedroom flat. Alina browses the TV channels, stops to watch the news. Panama’s dictator seeks asylum at the Vatican embassy. And there’s a revolution taking place in Romania. Alina’s heart pauses for a moment. Images unwind: muddy corpses, lying on white linen sheets in a field, lit candles at their heads, surrounded by weeping relatives. Ceaușescu speaks from his balcony in Bucharest—the crowd jeers. Ceaușescu escapes in a helicopter, the crowd takes over the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

  The commentator says that Romania is now a free country. As images of the apprehension, trial, and execution of the dictator and his wife unravel, Alina jumps to the telephone. There’s nothing preventing her from calling her aunt, from speaking to her mother. They’ve corresponded through rare letters sent through four different third parties, to make their source untraceable. She hasn’t called in thirteen years, careful not to cause trouble for Aunt Theresa—if they notice that she’s receiving calls from the West, the Secret Services would tap her line. Alina hasn’t talked to her family since the day after they crossed the border. In Austria, Alina telephoned for one last time, and Aunt Theresa calmed her: she’d found her mother; she’s shaken, but otherwise fine; she’s housed in the cage that once belonged to Alina’s grandfather, as a measure of precaution, just to avoid any conflict with the cat.

  Alina dials her aunt’s telephone number—she’s been repeating it to herself at least five times per day since they defected, to make sure she’ll never forget it.

  The dictator is lying on the ground, his face is as yellow as a wax candle, his eyes are open and staring into nothingness. Images of street fights in Bucharest begin to roll. Tanks parked in an alley shadowed by lime trees. Men in shirts and dark trousers—on the other side of the street a soldier, shooting. Alina wonders, how much courage do you need to charge into gunfire? The announcer talks about thousands of people killed. There are images from a hospital, the floor full of stretchers with wounded men and women, some of them naked, attached to all sorts of pipes. Some aren’t even stirring. Alina clutches the telephone receiver, her knuckles turning white. These are the people who never ran. These are the people who fought.

  Then, it’s over. The announcer speaks about a panda in a zoo birthing twins, but Alina doesn’t hear him. She wonders, why should she call at all? What is there to say to her mother? Her escape, the source of reciprocal accusations, apple of discord. And what does it matter whose fault it was, when people died, are dying, will die for freedom?

  Alina smolders in her armchair. If it weren’t for her mother ratting on them, maybe the authorities would have left her alone, even after Mihai defected. If her mother hadn’t been so selfish, Alina would never have left. She makes a list of all the things she could have done during the revolution:

  Been shot.

  At least wounded.

  Maybe dead.

  Been a hero, in any case.

  Done no less than clamber through a window of the building of the Central Committee, like a bug crawling out from the eye of a giant rotting predator, and she would have fluttered one of those flags all the revolutionaries were holding, the flags from which the emblem of the Socialist Republic had been cut, the ones with the hollowed middle, torn, not unlike Alina herself.

  The Flight

  I stop staring at my boarding pass (which says the same as it did two minutes ago: May 25th, 1995, From: Munich, To: Tenerife Sur, Boarding Time 11:15, Gate P30, Seat 22C) and then do as my husband does:

  Store the rucksack in the compartment above the seats.

  Fasten my seatbelt.

  Play with the foldable tray.

  Store my handbag under the seat in front of me (I stole this idea from the lady across the aisle).

  Damn, now I don’t remember if I ticked “check my lipstick” off the list I made at the gate. Looks good. Maybe I did, then. The announcement says Check that your seats are in an upright position, and Liviu has already done it while I was looking in the mirror. I don’t know how to, and I’m not going t
o degrade myself by asking. I’m not giving him the opportunity to boast that he has already flown (once). I’d rather seem recalcitrant and have the flight attendant admonish me. I deserve this because I messed up the other list.

  Lately, I need lists a lot. They keep me from forgetting. I asked my doctor if you can get dementia from old people, but he said you can’t. I’m still skeptical about that. Maybe I should have told him everything, but I was too ashamed. I’ll make a list for next time.

  Things to tell Dr. Braun:

  That I spoonfeed Mrs. Muller.

  That I also change her diapers.

  That Mrs. Muller is heavily demented.

  That by the time she was sixty-five, she couldn’t remember the names of her children, and now she is starting to forget how to swallow. Maybe this kind of dementia is contagious.

  That the smell of poop from the tips of my fingers never seems to go away.

  Strike the last one. Maybe it’s not important. But what if you can get it through the poop, like hepatitis? Or worms? My mother always told me to wash my hands. But somehow, I can never get them clean enough these days.

  Liviu leans across me. He says, If you would bend a bit forward? We’re taking off soon. I want to straighten your seatback. I hate it when he gloats like that. I hate it. When his face is close to mine, I make a list of the things we could have done with the money instead of going on this stupid vacation to Tenerife:

  Invested in Liviu’s teeth.

  Bought a used car.

  Moved out of the hellhole we live in.

  Traveled to Romania instead, so I could finally explain myself to my mother, slash talk to her for the first time in nineteen years.

  He says, I’m so happy we’re doing this. It will be just like the summer when we met.

  I dreaded as much.

  A list of things that have changed since the last time I saw the sea: